Lies, damned lies, and NRA commercials

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtGOQFf9VCE

This is the National Rifle Association's new ad. Unfortunately, it's worth watching. It doesn't quite urge viewers to use guns to kill liberals, but it's so close. "They" {accusing me and many of you} "use their media to assassinate truth. They use their schools to teach children that our president is another Hitler... they use their ex-president to endorse The Resistance, all to make them march... to scream 'racism' and 'sexism' and 'xenophobia' and 'homophobia', to smash windows, burn cars,

Flat and manipulable

Last night's dream: I was evaluating the new batch of presidential candidates, and realized, in a blandly puzzled way, that I was having a specific hard time evaluating the three candidates who were pizzas, because none of them had made any speeches or taken any positions.

First realization on waking: now that I'm awake, it's obvious the pizzas are superior.

Second realization on waking: never mind, I can only judge the pizzas when I know who's been handling them, just like with any candidate.

Offical league rules for armageddon, second edition

1. Players must move continuously in the same direction except when in a widening gyre.

2. Only players with human faces may wear audio communication equipment; falcons and desert birds may not.

3. Things fall apart; the center cannot hold, but must snap the ball to the quarterback within 30 seconds or be charged with delay of game.

#396: Michael Jackson, "They Don't Care About Us" (1996)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNJL6nfu__Q

1. My brain has decided, when I read science articles that mention dark matter, to picture protest banners that blare "Dark Matter Lives". Thanks, cortex, I can tell this will be endlessly cogent and helpful.

2. At an Amanda Palmer concert back in 2012, one of the opening acts was two of her bandmates as a saxophone duo called Ronald Reagan, who played instrumental covers of '80s pop hits. They played "Take on Me" by a-ha; the crowd sung the choruses for them. They played "Don't Stop Believing" by Journey; the crowd sang every single word. Then they announced that would play a true gem of the 1980s, a song from the best-selling album of all time. As they blew into the opening riff, I turned to my friends and said "Weird Al Yankovic was popular but not *that* popular", then shrugged and bellowed along to "Eat It". Great rock song.

#397: Atom & His Package, "If You Own the Washington Redskins, You're a Cock" (2001)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tgwx_hBqxzo

To avoid redundancy, I'll get this song's politics out of the way quickly. Adam (Atom) Goren doesn't think "Redskins" is an appropriate name for a sports team. I agree. In case you're not sure you do, I recently argued in detail that it matters how we represent people of different races in stories, even if there's no immediate and direct harm done. Sports is all about the stories that unfold. "Redskins" is widely perceived as a racist name, racism is bad, and there's no equally good competing reason to use the racist name. "Political Correctness" is only an attempt to rename "Trying Not to Be a Dickhead" so it sounds scary.

The above paragraph is not one of the 425 best songs of all time. Yes, yes, I also recently argued that there's no such thing as objective rankings of music. The above paragraph is still not one of the 425 best songs of all time. So let's talk about Atom, his synthesizer (or "package"), his guitar, and his songwriting.

Emergency readiness goes boink: on The Defense of Thaddeus A. Ledbetter, by John Gosselink

The Defense of Thaddeus A. Ledbetter, by John Gosselink, is an "epistolary novel". That is, it's told as a series of letters and emails and journals and paperwork and drawings, by or to or concerning 12-year-old Thaddeus, who has been placed in In-School Suspension for the entire second semester of the school year. Thaddeus is the Misunderstood Victim of a Massive Injustice, and he writes primarily to himself, his lawyer uncle Pete, and especially his school principal Frank Cooper, who has never encountered anything like him. He is of course concerned with his own vindication, but he is selfless about it: even in exile, he shares his school improvement (and church improvement) (and scout-troop improvement) schemes, plus his handy educational Thaddeus Fun Facts, and even the official rules of Slug Bug with his persecutors.

Cooper and Pete share their own perspectives, which for some reason aren't always in exact accord. They seem over-worried about discipline forms where the "cause for referral" is a scrawled "HE TRIED TO SET ME ON FIRE!", and too little interested in the perspectives of, say,

Can music be objectively good and/or bad?: a conversation

(The following Facebook conversation was likely not intended by its instigators to turn into a discussion of the nature of art, but I think it came out interesting, despite starting with music albums I don’t have opinions about. All participants like each other. No universal truth was proven, though you can tell what side I'm currently on, so you have my invitation to join.)


John: Really pleased to see Run Devil Run (easily the most underrated McCartney solo and maybe solo Beatles album) and Back to the Egg get some love - but come on, Venus and Mars over Band on the Run is pure trolling.

Miles: I enjoy Venus & Mars more than Band on the Run.

Aaron: You're not the only one, but do you really think it's a better record? I mean..I enjoy Wild Life more than I enjoy Imagine. I don't think it's better.

Jeff: The whole "best" vs. "enjoyable" thing is puzzling.

Prone to silly examples

(Daddy reads passage in novel in which the Doctor "lies prostrate")
E (lying on back): "Is prostrate like this?" (rolls onto front) "Or this?"

Me: "Prostrate is lying on your front. Good job, knowing it's one of those! It's also called 'prone', which you can remember because they start with the same letters".

E (rolls onto back again): "What's the word for this again?"

Me (putting book aside): "That's 'supine'. You can remember because normally (lies on front on floor) those little quilly mammals are porcuprone. If they're porcusupine they need your help."

E: "Is there a special word for lying on your side?"

Me: "Probably! I can't think of any though. At some point you need to leave those poor porcupines alone. Also, it's definitely no good if after a storm, you go outside and the woods are full of supine trees".

#398: Topher Florence, "Some of My Best Friends are Black" (2010)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUc0vbSlanM

I warned y'all up front that I, unlike a real rock critic, will periodically declare -- not just declare, defend -- the greatness I perceive in some goofy novelty song or other. I haven't done that to you until now, but we might as well dive in at the deep end. "Some of My Best Friends are Black" is a hip-hop song by nobody I've ever heard of; or as portrayed, a hip-hop song by an argumentative computer refuting the nobody-I've-ever-heard-of's offhand dismissal of a TV show. The computer briefly describes, in rhyme, each of the two dozen black characters to have a speaking part in the 10-season run of the sitcom Friends. For extra topicality, the song came out six years after Friends was canceled.

I will talk about the lyrics -- and, it turns out, about the entire culture of gender- and race-based criticism, the nature of human memory, and two of my favorite non-sitcom TV shows, whee! -- but the beginning of my case is simple. I think "Some of My Best Friends are Black" is ridiculously catchy.

#399: Die Warzau, "Shakespeare" (1995)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxU1ShItt9s

"Shakespeare" doesn't have lyrics that warrant the title; as far as I can deduce, the title was free-associated from the "funk it and you funk it til your monkey don't stop" chant (if infinite monkeys dance on infinite typewriters, they will eventually choreograph the entire works of etc). It seems, furthermore, like an easy kind of song to make. There's barely any melody; the time signature is 4/4. It's fast, it's relentless, and how hard can fast and relentless be when you've got the security of a recording studio to fake both in? True, there's a variety of different hooks: different drum layers playing different rhythms, dextrous bass patterns, mechanical whirring noises, free-jazz saxophone. There's several lyrical rabbit holes for rap-mode Jim Marcus to plunge down, dislodging varying showers of gravel. But no element is individually that advanced. You listen to "Shakespeare" and it moves you or it doesn't. I bounce around all over the place, personally, flapping different body parts to different percussive flurries. Still, maybe kinesis doesn't seem like such an achievement.

Indeed, "Shakespeare" isn't the most obviously impressive song on its own album (Engine).

Asteroids will pter us apart, again

E was asking me today if I'd rather have one trillion dactyls, or one teradactyl. D, naturally, corrected him: they're *terra*dactyls, so named because they dragged huge clumps of earth with them as they flew.

I had to step in and explain that they'd never understand how to breed monsters at that rate. Worrydactyls came first, and it was only as their prey became more resilient and daring that they upgraded into the terrordactyls we all recall today.

#400: Refused, "Old Friends, New War" (2015)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o14i_8XGoAs

My first countdown playlist has been assembled, so my second begins here. While I flagrantly ignore Rob Fleming's mixtape rules from High Fidelity -- I'm at least as fond of a slow buildup as of a "corker", even before we deal with his "you can't have white music and black music together" -- I'm not sure I've started many mixes more stylishly than with Refused's Dennis Lyxzen reciting ominous poetry at the bottom of his range, in two simultaneous vocal takes a small fraction of a second separated, over what beatboxing sounds like when steam pumps do the breathing and keep their mouths open. The tightly synchronized drum and bass that enter could be saboteurs breaking into the factory, but trying carefully not to miss a word while doing so. We're 40 seconds in when the guitar starts, a tightly coiled riff that momentarily tricks me into thinking it's tugged along a small brass section or a large platoon of insects; fittingly, it cuts the oration off right before Lyxzen's final word. He starts howling in the close vicinity of notes, and we have a song.

An elegant song, actually, for being so fierce and loud.

YouTube playlist 425-401

I mentioned my desire to arrange the songs I've been writing about so that they would flow well as a YouTube playlist. After all, it's one thing to hear them singly while some dude writes about them; here's a chance to let the songs speak for themselves.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyORAFEqu24SKDLO8oPDCuI7cpVGi5Tur

Ultimate superbowl

E: "If if the earth were the size and weight of a bowling ball, would it be a good bowling ball?"

Me: "No. There's no holes for the fingers to go in."

D: "And it would be too bumpy".

E: "There'd be little spikes all over it, from the mountains".

Me: "I don't think there would, oddly. The tallest mountain is 5 miles high.