Brigham's Blog: July 2009

31 Jul 2009

I woke up this morning with a German word in my head which I think I made up: herzgewissen. My pard Chris, who speaks German, says it might mean heart-knowledge, or perhaps intuition. What am I trying to tell myself?

But then, last night I also dreamed that I was stuck judging a beauty pageant for fundamentalist Christian teenagers, all puffy taffeta, polig bangs, spray glitter and blue eyeliner. So much for profundity.

("Polig bangs": My wife says these are called "wave bangs," but for the life of me I can't find a good visual example on google. You know, NASCAR bangs. Usually blonde. Thin hair is ratted straight up and then curled down upon the forehead. Often seen on waitresses at Denny's. Julie: You smell what I'm stepping in, right?)

(And by the way, trying to find it on google led me here. That's when I quit.)

The Beatles Rockband game intro: 45 years later and they're STILL cool. I like the way the elephant thumps in time to the "I Am The Walrus" beat... I also like the way the "Paperback Writer" sequence begins with a shot of Paul's Hofer Bass neck. Nice animation. Why not make a full length feature about the Beatles in this style?

I hear that the "Cash for Clunkers" federal program is running out of money because it's so popular. You could have fooled me. I entered my 2002 Dodge Caravan (we are DONE with minivans) into it but the only cars I can get vouchers for are for cars I don't want. So... we keep the Caravan for another two years until we pay off the VW. Some stimulus. I am unimpressed.

Also unimpressive: We watched about ten minutes of "30 Rock" and "the Office" last night - not a laugh anywhere on the horizon. I suspect the last truly funny American sitcom was "Seinfeld." I'll take British humor anyday. Far superior. Why watch NBC dreariness when you can watch Clarkson, Hammond and Mays mess about on Top Gear?

I'm now watching another Bob Greenberg "Great Lectures" series about classical symphonies; last night's edition was about Anton Bruckner. I am familiar with his 4th ("Romantic") and 9th symphonies. Greenburg pointed out that critics cite Bruckner's music as being dull and ponderous, and that he didn't write nine symphones - he wrote one symphony nine times. Frankly, I have to agree. I listened to enough of his works to appreciate that I didn't appreciate him (if that makes any sense).

I do like the fast movement of his 9th, however.

Professor Greenberg told a funny story. He said that Bruckner's strong Bavarian peasant religious convictions prevented him from ever having sex outside of marriage, and that he never got married. "You do the math," said Greenberg.

Greenberg also pointed out the strange and mystical significance the number nine had for symphonists during the nineteenth century. Beethoven's Ninth was considered such a landmark work - the ideal symphony to which all others must aspire - that composers approached that number with considerable misgivings. Schubert wrote nine symphonies - and died. Mahler died while working on his Tenth - so did Bruckner.

Brahms, ever pragmatic, wrote four and announced that no composer need bother with more than that. I suppose it helps that Brahms' First was often called Beethoven's Tenth... (the meaning being that Brahms' First was considered the appropriate way forward into late 19th C. romanticism while retaining respect for Beethoven's achievements). With people saying that, the pressure's off.

Ahhhh... the weekend. Cari's on a road trip with a friend and so I'm a bachelor. Tonight me and a friend (also a temporary bachelor) are going to the Kennedy Center to see a free concert, the U.S. Naval Academy Chamber Winds playing a Mozart piece. Yes, that sounds somewhat gay but less gay than the alternative... the Air Force band playing Broadway hits.

Tomorrow, after yard sales, my pard Don and I ride a steam train somewhere in Maryland.

Have a great weekend!

30 Jul 2009

I woke up this morning thinking it was a Friday. So I put on a pair of jeans - casual dress - and got down to breakfast before I realized it was only a Thursday. Then it was too late to change. What a cruel joke.

I thought it was Friday because I went to a band concert last night, an activity I normally associate with Thursday nights. It was the U.S. Air Force Band at the Air Force Memorial - except the full concert band was rained out. (They need a P.A. system and lights, etc. Bad idea to run power cables on wet ground.) So, not wanting to ever disappoint the public, the U.S. Air Force staged a little brass ensemble - like the Canadian Brass - and did a concert with them. It was quite good.

I recently ran an article entitled "What Plane?" on my Burbankia page, here. It's about the development and construction of the famous Lockheed SR-71, the "Blackbird," arguably the best thing to come out of Burbank. I got a model of one in 1968, when I was twelve, and used to see one parked at the Burbank airport occasionally.

While most people living in Burbank in the Sixties and Seventies weren't really aware of the now-famous "Skunk Works" (Lockheed's secret facility), I knew about it because my father was authorized to work there. In fact, he had a little skunk pin he would wear every now and then.

The SR-71 was and is an incredible machine. It's declassified peak speed was Mach 3.2, and the Air Force pilots affectionately referred to it as a "sled." One of my favorite pages on Burbankia is a funny little short story written by a sled driver called "The Fastest Guys Out There." Read it!

More than three times the speed of sound... that's fast. But it caused me to wonder: What is the fastest speed man has ever travelled? I'm guessing it was on a trip to the Moon.

The fastest man on earth was John Paul Stapp, an Air Force colonel, who reached 1,018 km/hr (632.18 mph) on a rocket sled in 1954. That tale is here.

The fastest man in space is the fastest man ever. But according to the 2001 Guinness World Records, there are three fastest men, plural. Apollo 10 set the record for the highest speed attained by a manned vehicle at 39,897 km/h (24,791 mph) on May 26th, 1969. That's nearly seven miles a second! The three men who travelled at this blazing rate are astronauts Thomas Stafford, Gene Cernan and John Young. All three are still alive.

29 Jul 2009

I did one of the classic D.C. commuting things this morning with my friend Chris: we sat in traffic, which was halted by an accident on the Beltway. (A truck, of course. Trucks account for a small part of the total traffic on the Beltway but about 80% of all the accidents.)

It reminded me of the days when I used to have to commute from Springfield, VA to Pax River, MD and back in an unreliable car - a guaranteed 90 minute drive if nothing went wrong (but it frequently did). These days I take public transportation to and from work; my employer pays for it. What a blessing! The lowered stress levels will perhaps result in another year or two of life.

Summer drags on. I am really, really looking forward to some time off from work - even if it's going to Utah, which we're doing in August. (Utah is NOT my #1 pick for a vacation destination, but we have family there.) What's really wearisome is having to deal with all the work associates going on vacation in June and July, and then coming back recharged and telling you all about the fun they had on the cruise, etc.

I'm now reading a book about the Petersburg Campaign between Grant's Army of the Potomac and Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. So far, I haven't learned anything I didn't know about and later forgot! (This may be an indication that it's time to quit reading books about the Civil War.)

The last couple of evenings my wife and I have been rewatching favorite Powell and Pressburger films. One of our very favorites is "A Canterbury Tale" (1944), which is either a spiritual film told in a secular vernacular or a secular film told with a strong underpinning of spirituality - I'm not sure which. At any rate, it's a unique work. More than anything else it's an homage to the English countryside. The black and white photography is stunning... it's luminous in the many outdoor scenes and mysterious (even film noirish) in the night scenes.

One of the themes in this work is the notion of blessings and pilgrimages. Canterbury, of course, was the site of the shrine of St. Thomas a Becket. In the Middle Ages this was a favorite destination for pilgrimages - and indeed, the film starts with a scene of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tale-tellers making their way down the famous road. One of them releases a falcon, which is shown flying in the sky. The shot of the falcon is quickly cut to a shot of a Spitfire on a training flight, with the same actor portraying a British soldier gazing up at it - now it's 1944. A really clever and memorable scene which proves yet again that filmmakers really don't need millions of dollars for special effects in order to engage an audience.

Without giving away the plot, there is a storyline involving a man who throws glue on girls' hair and a mild subsequent whodunnit. But the main idea of the film is that four individuals make their way to Canterbury and all receive blessings without expecting to. There are no real thrills in this movie per se, just a gentle, engrossing story told well - something Powell and Pressburger could do better than anyone.

I wonder if the general movie going public is suited for a film like this anymore, however. Broad humor, exorbitant special effects, wisecracking children, bombastic film scores and politicized, over-stated themes now rules Hollywood. A lyrical work of complexity, subtlety and even mysticism, A Canterbury Tale was regarded as a box office failure when it was released. Perhaps it took decades of greatly inferior films for the critics to see how good it really was and is.

A perceptive review is here.

28 Jul 2009

No update today.

27 Jul 2009

On Friday and Saturday night I took the camera and tripod out again to fool around with long exposure photography - gallery here. This is fun!

Also on Friday night, I was sitting in my hammock watching an episode of Top Gear on my laptop when my wife came out and said, "Hey, Wes! That newsman is on Dateline... the one Saturday Night Live makes fun of!" The newsman in question in Keith Morrison (at left), who has the creepiest delivery and facial expressions I've ever seen on a newsguy. At any rate, the SNL impression was so accurate I was nearly in tears laughing at the real thing! Here's the skit.

I thought melodramatic local newsguy Pat Collins was the worst... but Morrison tops him for sheet weirdness. Actually, Morrison reminds me of a guy I used to work with named Roy, who infused every conversation with an odd, out of place conspiratorial tone of voice, as if there were deep, dark secrets lurking behind every status report and schedule. He was so creepy and loathsome that nobody wanted to sit next to him in meetings.

Yard sales were pretty good on Saturday morning; I got 13 CDs for $10. Mostly "Greatest Hits" collections by Queen, the Doors, Pat Benatar, etc. All have been loaded onto my iPod.

On Saturday, on a whim based on the viewing of the Top Gear feature on the Peel microcar last week, my wife and I drove to a Smart Car dealership in Alexandria and looked at one. I am happy to report that all 6' 3" of me can fit into it comfortably. In fact, it looks like a pretty well-made car. It's built by Mercedes-Benz, which explains that. I wouldn't have one - it's just too small - but it makes sense for exclusively city use.

I got to page 250 (not quite halfway) in Jay Winik's book "The Great Upheaval" and gave up. I tossed the book. As I mentioned, it badly needs editing. For example, this on page 238: "A bodyguard, a mere boy, was ruthlessly murdered and dragged into the courtyard half dead, becoming little more than a bleeding trophy." If you're murdered you can't be dragged anywhere "half dead." And this one got by the editors at Harper-Collins! (Assuming, of course, that this book was edited at all.)

Also annoying was a mention of William Tecumpseh Sherman as "Bill Sherman." In my 35+ years of reading Civil War non-fiction, I have never seen him referred to in this way. "Cump," yes. "Billy" Sherman or "Uncle Billy" Sherman, yes. But Bill Sherman? What, were he and Winik pals?

What tipped me over the edge, however, was his formulaic, "But - and it was a big but -" or "If - and it was a big if -" etc. Good grief. Real historians don't write like that.

I am now reading another amateur history book I found in a For Free box at church, "Mormon Gold - The Story of California's Mormon Argonauts" by J. Kenneth Davies. When I visited Coloma, California in 1988 while on a business trip I was surprised to learn about the Mormon involvement in the great Gold Rush. (The man who first discovered gold at Sutter's Mill had a crew made up of former Mormon Battalion soldiers.)

Monday. Sigh. I am really looking forward to some time off in August...

24 Jul 2009

I forgot to include these from that last book I read about American history. The Churchill one was a stunner. So, that was not Winston Churchill's voice on the radio, threatening to fight from the beaches, etc.? Interesting articles here and here - the matter seems to tilt toward the opinion that it was his voice after all.

A line of severe thunderstorms moved through the area last night and produced some truly stunning lightning. Towards the tail end of the show I got the idea to mount my camera on my new solid tripod to try to capture some lightning images. I hadn't figured out what aperture and shutter to use, the bolts were few and far between by the time I got set up and the trees were mostly in the way, but the best one is here. Those flecks you see are digital noise as a result of the long exposure time. My D100 has an anti-noise filter for such shots, but I didn't use it. I could have removed them with Photoshop, but I'll reserve that effort for when I get a better image of a bolt.

I also played around with some long exposure shots of my street in nighttime. I'll have to do this again and refine my technique... I have only rarely taken long exposure images. (Mainly because my old tripods all sucked and I resented using them.)

My pard Chris called my attention to this collection of clever and artful book covers, all novelizations of movies ("I Can Read Movies"). The game is to guess what movie it is by looking at the artwork. I like the one for Bladerunner. Get it?

After reading yesterday's blog about microcars, my friend Greg called my attention to the Bruce Weiner Microcar Museum - the virtual tour is fun! I kind of like the 1958 Goggomobil Dart. The utter simplicity appeals to me. It looks like a cartoon car, like one Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck would drive.

I watched an episode of Top Gear last night which featured a drive across (most of) central Africa - way cool and, of course, hilarious. Those three presenters have the best job in television. Also great was their race across London... I recognize many of the sights as being places I've wandered. Very neat.

Why is Top Gear so great? It's all explained in this perceptive article by Rick McGinnis.

My friend Mike discovered an 1889 Burbank Times newspaper. (Click here - image links at bottom.) The opening sentence in a promotional ad was funny: "Southern California seems to be designed for one vast Sanitarium." I couldn't agree more.

Finally, I grouped all those youtube rugby videos on a page for my rugby website, here. Be careful watching these if you don't want to play rugby. They're persuasive... you could find yourself thinking, "Hey... I could try that."

Have a great weekend!

23 Jul 2009

I first saw a Smart Car last year when my wife and I were in London. I thought it was so odd and notable that I took a photo of it. "Surely they won't catch on in the U.S.," I thought. But then, shortly after arriving home I saw one in Springfield; as it turned out, the owner lives somewhere near me - I see the car frequently. Anyway, I figured this had to be one of the smallest cars, ever. But as it turns out, I was wrong.

I was watching a Top Gear episode last night and caught their hilarious segment on the Peel P50, a tiny little thing manufactured on the Isle of Man during the Sixties. In fact, it is the smallest production car ever built. In this video, Jeremy Clarkson - all 6' 5" of him - takes it for a spin. He gets it into some truly interesting places - another example of why Top Gear is the greatest show on television.

At the end of the Top Gear segment they show the sports version, the Trident, which is also illustrated in this funny youtube clip. I like the shot of the Peels moving out of the factory crossing the bridge. They look like a line of tiny Daleks.

Last night my wife and I saw a great local service band performance, this time it was the U.S. Air Force Band at the base of the Air Force Memorial (what I call the "crown roast"). They still have a lot of performances left in their summer schedule; I shall see them play again there soon.

Last night it occurred to me that the quality of my life is proportional to the amount of good live music I hear!

On the way home we listened to an oldies station that had a segment, "Your first 45." (That's a 45 rpm single vinyl record, in case you're young.) Callers described their very first 45, after which the station played the song. I remember mine very well; it was "I Want to Hold Your Hand" by the Beatles, 1964. A Capitol Records pressing, it had a swirly orange and yellow vortex label that looked hypnotic spinning on the turntable. Naturally, I wrote my name on it - we all did back then. I was an enormously proud eight year-old when I got it, and I felt cool because I owned it.

The other 45 I owned was "Theme from 'A Summer Place,'" a hit in 1959 - but I inherited this one from my parents.

I still own a small stack of 45s - mostly of 1970's and 1980's vintage. I see collections for sale occasionally at yard sales, but I'm not interested.

I am on page 88 of 582 of my Jay Winik book, "The Great Upheaval." As I wrote yesterday, his sentence construction is often odd. For instance, take this example on page 69: "Not long after the ink was dry, the English delegate Caleb Whitfood (sic) was asked by a Frenchman what he thought of the new thirteen United States; his reply is unforgettable. "Yes," he hissed through clinched teeth, "and they will all speak English."

Who is speaking? The English delegate Caleb Whitford (note misspelling) or the Frenchman? If the Englishman, why the hissing? Doesn't he like English? The odd thing is that Winik mentioned this very same exchange in his other book, but it made much more sense there. And the other book came out before this one. You'd at least think that if Winik was going to repeat historical anecdotes he would at least be consistent with their meaning!

By the way, try clenching your teeth, hissing and talking. It can't be done.

On page 78 I encountered an odd phrase I have never before seen, "filthy weather." What's that? Offal falling from thunderclouds?

And so on... how Winik gets published is beyond me. How he gets published with such a need for a good editor and then gets praised by known authors is imponderable.

22 Jul 2009

I am now reading "The Great Upheaval" by my favorite cheeseball semi-demi-historian, Jay Winik. (You may recall last year I read Winik's "April 1865" and called him out for describing Ulysses S. Grant as uncharacteristically "thundering." Grant was the least thunderous man who ever lived.) I like to read Winik's stuff to exercise my proofreading ability and historical B.S. alarm.

Winik is given to hyperbolic statements. For instance, here's one in the introduction: "Here also are the historic military battles that more often than not dwarfed the savagery of the American Civil War and World War I, battles like Valmy, Ishmail, Ochakov, Praga, the Pyramids." Hmmmm. I've never heard of any of these. If they dwarved the savagery of WWI or the Civil War I should look these up!

Valmy: A French army of 47,000 took 300 casualties fighting a Prussian army of 35,000, who took 184 casualties. I'm not impressed.

Ishmail: This one I can't even find easily with a google search! But Winik wrote "more often than not," so perhaps this is one of the "nots."

(Siege of) Ochakov: Described as a street fight and massacre. But from what I read, its savagery didn't dwarf any of the horrors of World War I.

Battle of Praga: 17,200 Poles vs. 17,000 Russians. "The exact death toll of that day remains unknown, yet it is estimated up to 20,000 men, women and children were killed." Okay, that's fairly major as battles and sieges go - IF the estimates are accurate.

The Pyramids: 20,000 French vs. 21,000 Ottoman Mamelukes. About 2,000 Mamelukes and a few thousand others died - and about 500 French.

World War I: Almost 39 million total casualties. Isn't machine gun fire "savage?" Or does that not count?

The American Civil War: about 620,000 deaths - some battles of which included unbelievable accounts of men clubbing each other in the heads with muskets. By any reasonable standard, it was not dwarfed by anything save the two world wars.

See what I mean? Winik makes statements for the sake of a bombastic writing style that are, at the very least, arguable.

My friend Don, who gave me this book, had to quit because he got tired of the weird sentence construction and poor editing. (Here's an enlightening amazon.com review describing this. But my favorite review - and he gave it three stars! - is here.)

We'll see how long I last.

"Top Gear" is, I think, the best show on television! Last night I watched an episode where our three intrepid automotive presenters - I love those guys - crossed the English Channel in a Nissan mini-truck that was waterproofed (mostly, it appears, with that foam stuff in a can you get from Home Depot). Motive power was supplied by a Honda outboard engine. As the English say, brilliant. Youtube video here.

Finally, my pal Mike found some photos of a 1930 Elks Club rodeo held on a patch of ground in Burbank called Jeffries Ranch. By the time I got to Burbank in 1965, the ranch was gone, replaced by an enormous grocery store parking lot. I thought it was a featureless waste good only for pushing my friend around in broken up shopping carts (we took turns riding the cart).

I should mention that Burbank resident James J. Jeffries was one of the greatest heavyweight boxers of all time... I lived a few blocks from where his ranch and barn used to sit. It was one of my many play areas...

21 Jul 2009

I hate the part of summer where it seems everybody but me is on vacation.

I read about "the Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo" - Charles Wells - in the book I'm reading (title too long to type). His story is here. I was familiar with the song, but didn't know there was an actual person who inspired it.

Also, two more little excerpts. Do you know who originated the idea of running the Olympic flame from Greece to wherever it's held that year? I was surprised.

I spent some time rebuilding rugbyfootball.com back to the way it was before a well-intentioned upgrade. Problem was, the upgrade didn't work with some browser/version variations, making the links on submenus invisible. For instance, with the newest version of Firefox you couldn't see the submenus (meaning that you couldn't navigate through the site). With an older version of Firefox one you could see the submenus - but you could also see an additional menubar at the left. Internet Explorer was all over the place, depending upon version and screen resolution.

HTML is a pain, and so is javascript. I know enough to reverse engineer existing code to do more or less what it is I want to do, but that's it.

Anyway, rugbyfootball.com now works and the links are visible - but it looks outdated. I need to find a toolkit or some software package to give it a face lift (that works) in my copious spare time. Perhaps - sigh - it's finally time to learn Microsoft Front Page. I've been creating and updating websites since 1995 and have managed to avoid learning it.

So far in my classical literature readings I haven’t encountered anything to equal Sophocles’ play “Oedipus Rex.” I was thumbing through my copy last night. You know Oedipus: he’s the fellow who killed his father and married his mother - and had four children by her. How this could have happened without his knowledge is what drives the play. At the end, when he discovers his primal crimes he gouges out his eyes. Really powerful stuff; I can see why it has been continuously read for the last 2,500 years.

Oedipus' name is worthy of comment: “oedipus” is like a Greek phrase meaning “I know.” The irony here, of course, is that Oedipus does not know who he really is or what he has done. He is, in a sense, blind. And when he learns the truth he makes himself literally blind.

The Latin title of the play, “Oedipus Rex” ("Oedipus the King") is something translators are responsible for – the actual Greek title is more like “Oedipus the Tyrant.”

But, to me, the creepiest thing about this play is a certain passage of text rendered into English something like this (I am paraphrasing) – the speaker is Oedipus:

I have plowed the furrow my father has plowed,
I have sown seed my father has sown,
I have entered into the tunnel from whence I emerged as a screaming infant.

Ewwwwww.

What happens to Oedipus’ dysfunctional family? His wife/mother kills herself. His two boys kill one another, and one daughter is put to death by Oedipus’ brother-in-law. One daughter survives.

Most people aren't aware of what happens to Oedipus later on and think the story ends with the gouging out of his eyes. No! Oedipus wanders Greece blind until he comes to Athens, and then becomes a prophet and finally a demi-god who is whisked away to Mount Olympus. So it has a happy ending!

Have you ever heard Tom Lehrer's song "Oedipus Rex?" It's hilarious. (Fun fact: Speaking in 1959, Lehrer mentions a "recent movie adaptation" of Oedipus Rex, from 1957. William Shatner was in it! And yes, I have seen it. Quite good.)

Tomorrow I'll mention another character from antiquity whose story people think they know, but don't.

20 Jul 2009

John Belushi's tombstone is cool!

From the book I'm currently reading (I'm in the year 1926): Ronald Reagan and the number 7. Also, Ban the Bra! (Not quite what you think.)

Yard sales were disappointing. I went to about eight of them, but there was nothing I wanted. One woman had an add-on device for an iPod that looked mildly promising, but I balked at the $40 asking price. That's not a yard sale price. The micro-economics of getting a book, CD or VHS tape for fifty cents to a dollar is one of the fun things about yard sales. If I'm going to pay more than, say, $20 for any one thing I'll go to a store!

One of the curious things about yard sales is that every now and then you find somebody who thinks that he or she has a valuable collection of goods that demands premium prices. Ha! Wrong! Yard salers expect yard sale prices.

It's funny. Buying goods frequently at yard sales changes one's sense of value and cost. For instance, in May I attended what I thought was a yard sale at my church but was, in fact, a give-away. I got a fairly tall stack of perfectly good and listenable classical and semi classical CDs for free. Am I then to turn around and buy one for $18 retail? Not very likely. Or I can get great hard cover books for $5 and under. Will I buy one, then, for $30 retail (when I can check it out of a library for free)? Probably not.

I saw the latest Harry Potter film Saturday night ($10.50 each!); I thought it was pretty good. Thank goodness they put some humor back into it. That last movie ("Order of the Phoenix") was grim and just workmanlike, and, so far, my least favorite in the series. Yes, this latest installment is pretty hormonal, as described in the reviews. The various teenage love interests are given equal weight with the Voldemort story line. And I got a kick out of Ron Weasley's Quiddich cap... it looks exactly like a modern day scrum cap, except made of leather. Anyway, this installment sparkles again - which the franchise was in need of.

When I get the DVD I'm going to have to do a screen capture of one overhead shot of the Thames River - the sequence when the Millennium walkway bridge is getting busted up. I want to see if it's in enough detail to show a bus stop that Meredith and I waited at one evening earlier this year, near the OXO Tower... It appeared to be pretty detailed.

I visited my friends Don and Rodger yesterday; both are mild (not fanatical) model train enthusiasts. Rodger gets a couple of train magazines, and I was thumbing through one, glancing at the articles. (Bear in mind that I have little knowledge of model railroading.) I see an article, "Build your own plastic waybill holder." I ask, "What's a 'waybill holder?'" "A thing to hold waybills," comes the reply. I ask, "What's a 'waybill?'" "It tells the schedule for what's getting transported," is the reply. I am stunned. "Model railroaders actually write on little paper forms what small bits of plastic and wood are getting transferred from one part of the layout to another?!?" I ask. Indulgent smiles follow.

They try to point out that's it's akin to the level of obsession in reenacting that attends being concerned about what color of thread to use on seams on, say, frock coats in Civil War reenacting, but I'm not having it. This is a level of nerdliness that surpasses reenacting, I think.

So I turn to another article, "Build your own 1932 CNS Boxcar." I ask, "Do you mean to tell me that model railroaders would, say, reproduce tiny hobo graffiti in chalk on the boxcar and then quibble about whether or not said hobo was riding the rails in 1932?" Oh, yes, I am assured. Arguments get generated about more minor bits of trivia than that.

Can you imagine one middle aged guy creating a likeness of North Bank Fred - bottle of wine in hand - lying in a scale model ditch next to a scale model rail yard and another guy quibbling that Fred never drank Ripple wine, that he prefers Thunderbird? Whew.

Rodger's other magazine was certainly for railroad professionals, as it had a little advertisement box describing "Ten Tips for Using Derailers." Now, I would have thought that something called a derailer would have been a major no-no on a real railroad, but apparently not, and there are ten tips for their use.

The world of human endeavor... so many things to know...

17 Jul 2009

I watched an episode of Top Gear last night that featured an Alfa Romeo 8C Competizione. Host Jeremy Clarkson opined that this may be the best-looking car ever made. Could be; it's beautiful. If GM had produced cars this nice-looking perhaps they wouldn't need to beg money from the tax-payers via the government. They could get it directly by selling cars that looked like the Alfa.

Clarkson wasn't too impressed with the handling of the 8C, however, and criticized it as being too loud. Here's the youtube clip.

I posted links to more rugby videos.

I also saw a charming little diversion last night called "Cold Comfort Farm" (1995). It was light and fluffy, like one of those Jeeves and Wooster episodes. A comedy of manners, or a very mannered comedy.

I'm at 1926 in that book I'm reading (title too long to type), and was amused at the account of Sister Aimee Semple McPherson (shown above), self-billed as the "World's Most Pulchritudinous Evangelist." Excerpt here. The account of her bogus kidnapping was pretty interesting. I guess when all was said and done she succumbed to the temptations of the flesh, as many do. The Gates of Hell pivot upon soft pillows and silken sheets.

Mom and I used to drive past her Angelus Temple in Los Angeles on the way to visit Dad in the hospital; I recall asking Mom what the building was and she repled, "Oh, that's the Angelus Temple, where the four-squares go." She had more than a hint of contempt in her voice as she said this. Whenever Mom wanted to describe wild-eyed, over-the-top Christians she used the phrase "four-squares." I guess she got it from McPherson's church.

Mom was a Roman Catholic, as befits her French-Canadian heritage, but in all the years I spent with her as I was growing up I never knew her to darken the entrance of a church. During the brief time that I attended Mass as a twelve year-old she'd drive me to the church doors and drop me off, and pick me up later on. This non-example, combined with the fact that I found mass pretty unnecessary (I didn't understand what was going on), predictably led to my total disinterest in church attendance.

It also didn't help that I, a twelve year-old, was stuck in a catechism class with a bunch of eight and nine year-olds. I felt slighted.

When it comes to Catholicism I was also somewhat poisoned by something my Catholic babysitter once said to me as a small child, when I attended mass with her. At one point in the service Kitty - that was her name, Kitty (Katherine) - leaned over to me and whispered, "This is the point in the mass where Jesus comes down from the cross." Needless to say, He didn't, and I was disappointed. What kind of religion was this? The mass didn't work. He stayed hung upon the cross!

I was impressed with the trappings of the mass, however: the ornate vestments, the golden chalice, the Latin, the curious words "PAX" and "INRI" carved into the church walls, etc. This mystified me and I was determined to learn what they meant. I did, of course... mysteries like that don't thwart me for long.

It's funny. I was once among a bunch of Catholics socially, and the subject of what "INRI" meant came up. None of them knew. Wow.

But then, I shouldn't throw stones. I've been a church-attending Christian for almost thirty years, now, and have no idea what "agape" means. (It's a condition your mouth goes into when you see something surprising, right?) Perhaps I should look it up now.

Ah, I thought so - it's Greek.

Anyway, have a great weekend!

16 Jul 2009

For those so inclined, I posted more rugby videos on my club's website.

One advantage to giving up caffeine: My blood pressure is lower. My usual blood pressure - even with medication - was around 132 over 90. Now it's around 120 over 80.

My son tells me that a co-worker of his got a Voldemort Death Eater "dark mark" tattoo on his arm in time for the new movie. I predict that in about ten or twenty years time there's going to be a growth industry in tattoo removal. If I were a biomedical engineering student I'd be working on perfecting a process right now.

I watched the last Robert Greenberg modern symphony lecture last night, he concentrated on Dmitri Shostakovich's 10th. I am familiar with Shostakovich's 5th, 8th, 14th and 15th symphonies... but I have never heard the 10th.

For the record, I am not a big fan of the music of Shostakovich. I know enough of it to realize that I don't like it much. English composer and musicologist Robin Holloway described his music as, "battleship-grey in melody and harmony, factory-functional in structure; in content all rhetoric and coercion." This is not far from my own opinion. But his music has interest due to its political connotations.

At the time of its release in 1953, just after Stalin died, opinion was divided and unsure over what the symphony was about. (And composers themselves are famously reluctant to attach programmatic meanings to abstract music.) According to Greenberg and others, it is about Stalin, and says in musical terms, "Thank God the bastard is dead!" This is confirmed in a book of interviews with Shostakovich - "Testimony" - which was smuggled out of Russia by friends and published (as he requested) after his death.

Shostakovich was frequently an unhappy victim of a brutal Soviet regime; whether he was officially in favor or not was up to the whims of whatever tyrant or state artistic committee happened to be in charge.

Greenberg points out an interesting key to understanding Shostakovich's music - and, indeed, understanding Soviet Russia. A Washington Post journalist was in the Worker's Paradise in the last days, and wrote that in order to survive, irony became the unofficial prevailing attitude. Certainly, much of Shostakovich's music sounds ironic. His light-hearted orchestrations sound like the musical equivalent of forced smiles, and there is much bitterness.

His final two symphonies, the 14th and 15th, were preoccupied with death. In fact, his final symphonic word, the last movement of the 15th symphony, features an eerie coda using percussive instruments commentators have likened to a clacking skeleton! The wikipedia article on the 15th is interesting.

I am now reading a yard sale book with a long title: "Flappers, Bootleggers, 'Typhoid Mary' and the Bomb - An Anecdotal History of the United States from 1923 to 1945" by Barrington Boardman. It's light and readable. Here's an amusing excerpt about Warren G. Harding.

15 July 2009

"Upcoming Military Robot Could Feed on Dead Bodies" - Okay, am I the only person here who finds this just plain wrong? Sure, dead bodies on a battlefield tend to bloat and smell after awhile - as was learned many times during our Civil War - but developing robots that can feed off of them is horrific and, I would think, way out of bounds for use by a high-minded democracy like the United States of America.

King Charles IX of France once famously said, "The body of a dead enemy always smells good," but I'm certain he never foresaw a robot's opinion of its taste. They didn't even script this kind of ghoulishness into the Terminator movies. Sheesh.

I'm posting a bunch of links to clever rugby videos over on rugbyfootball.com (which I once again maintain). Look here. The key to successful website maintenance is that you always provide a payoff for visitors - a funny turn of phrase, a joke, an interesting link, whatever. That way the Internet surfer will be more likely to return and your readership increases.

Websites, like produce, should be kept fresh.

Over on Burbankia my dedicated homie researcher Mike found this amusing bottle of rot gut, distilled in Burbank. Who knew?

I watched another one of Professor Greenberg's lectures on modern symphonies last night; it appears that I'll have to also give a listen to Olivier Messiaen's Turangalila Symphony. It incorporates an electronic musical instrument that was a favorite of Messiaen's, the Ondes Martenot. Prior to this lecture I had never heard of one, but as it turned out, I have heard one played before. The wikipedia article mentions that composer David Fanshawe used one for the score of the 1980 British TV production of "Flambards," which I saw and enjoyed. I figured that odd sound was a synthesizer of some kind.

The Song of Christina (the theme from Flambards) is memorable... in the video she flies across the British Channel with her future husband in a Bleriot. I recall once at college I was whistling this song (it buzzed about in my head for weeks) and another student said, "Hey! Are you watching that show, too? I can't get that tune out of my head, either!"

I am now reading a book about black women at church who wear hats entitled "Crowns." I found it at a yard sale. It looked interesting, but I initially passed it by. I got halfway across the street to my car when I thought, "Cari might like this." She did and so do I. Excerpt here. The perfect example of a yard sale purchase of the unexpected and interesting.

It reminds me of our very first trip to D.C., when we first arrived here in the East in 1984. It was a Sunday; we were driving through some neighborhood to get to the usual tourist attractions when we passed by a long line of black women attending or leaving church, all of whom were wearing wonderful, big hats. They looked incredible, all dressed up. They looked like they could teach the Queen of England a thing or two about wearing hats.

14 Jul 2009

I found a cool U.K. rugby advert from the RFU, "Go Play." It's been three years since I've played. Hmmm.

I finished watching the twelfth season of Top Gear last night - what a great show! It concluded with a piece on the Honda Clarity, a hydrogen-powered car available to lease only in California. What makes it different is the fuel cell, which mixes hydrogen with oxygen and produces electricity, which then drives a motor. So it has only one moving part, the armature. The wikipedia article is here. $600/month - no, thanks.

Over the weekend I read a book entitled "London - Then and Now." It compares old photos with new ones. I'd visit again in a heartbeat.

I watched another segment of the Robert Greenberg symphony lectures; clearly, I have to give William Schuman and Roy Harris a listening as well. Back in the 30's, 40's and 50's they were regarded as being the great American symphonists. Why their names are now unfamiliar is a mystery. I have added their third symphonies - according to Greenberg, their best - to my amazon.com wish list.

(And, no, this isn't a request for somebody to buy them from me! It's merely an illustration of the fact that amazon.com has such a thing as a wish list. I find it very convenient to remember what it was that caught my attention while browsing.)

Apparently the Big Trilogy of American symphonies are Copland's Third, Schuman's Third and Harris' Third. The numerology appeals to me.
Copland's I know; I bought that Lp when I was seventeen.

I am now reading a brief little book about walking trails in Harper's Ferry, West Virginia - a place I have always enjoyed visiting. I last was there with my son in May and had an over-priced turkey burger at the Coffee Mill on Hog Alley. You can't miss the place - it has a coffee grinder on a pole. I'm pretty sure I saw it in the background of some street scenes in "Gods and Generals" (2003 - which I know was partially shot in Harper's Ferry). It's good for ice cream but give it a pass for food.

Burbank's "Rosie the Riveter" died recently.

13 Jul 2009

The weekend was great! I bought a $2 like-new VHS player at a yard sale... I've got to keep that format usable since I have so many family VHS camcorder tapes. I also got a couple of small cans of propane for fifty cents each.

Fail blog casino sign - I saw this and had to laugh.

My Dad used to say, "Fool's names and fool's faces are often seen in public places." Or not so public! My daughter got my name put onto this.

I'm still dorking around with my iPod, loading music on to it and configuring it. Once again, making it just so, like my record collection. Actually, listening to music on an iPod is slightly different than the way I normally listen. It's making me more efficient. My previous mp3 players had tiny screens which I could barely read, and poor support for folder (artist/album) organization. An iPod is much better with this. The result is that I can now zero in and rapidly find the music I haven't listened to on a classical CD (which might have a lot of different material on it).

For instance, there are a couple of short works on a Bela Bartok CD I had that, for various reasons, I never heard. I guess I was always listening to it from the beginning and not getting all the way through. Now I can pull the selections up right away and ignore the rest of the CD, which I'm familiar with.

Over the weekend I was watching one of those Learning Company lecture tapes; these happened to feature Professor Robert Greenberg talking about the modern symphony. (I completed his series on Classical music late last year.) I guess I'm going to have to seek out some more music of the American composer Samuel Barber; Greenberg talks him up and I've liked what I've heard (a cello concerto, the Second Symphony, the Medea ballet suite and some other short works) thus far.

Samuel Barber (shown above) is best known for his "Adagio for Strings," which was used in the 1986 film "Platoon." As I recall, it was playing on the soundtrack as a soldier got off a helicopter and got a look at the body bags making their way back to the States. Not sure if Barber would have approved that connection...

I finished that book about railroad folklore I was reading. Some interesting bits:

The origin of track torpedoes - I might have known there was a Civil War angle somehow.

Lincoln's Funeral Train - Goes on my Lincolnia page.

Disaster Made to Order

That last one must have been a field day for the lawyers...

10 Jul 2009

My friend Don found this poignant quote about work: "Our sense of obligation or necessity or simple inertia keeps us there long after all the joy has been squeezed out of the work."

Have you seen the Fail Blog? This one made me laugh out loud.

I was watching the extras on the "Forever Strong" DVD last night, which reminded me of another nit that I forgot to mention yesterday. At one point a player teaches the protagonist the New Zealand haka - the Maori war chant the team performs on special occasions - and describes the words as being about being prepared for the contest, calling up one's ancestors to spiritually assist int he fray, etc. High falutin' stuff, in other words.

In reality, the Ka Mate haka (video here) used by the All Blacks and Highland rugby is, historically, an odd affair. It involves a tribal chieftain in the 1820's named Te Rauparaha being assisted by his wife to take refuge from his enemies beneath her in a kumara (sweet potato) pit! That is partially described here, in wikipedia. But the full social implications of the haka poem - a man seating himself in the demeaning position beneath a woman's genitals while hiding out (the Western comparison might be hiding behind a woman's skirts) - are described here.

So the next time you see the hard men of New Zealand (and Utah!) performing the haka - tongues out, veins standing out on their necks, eyes bulging - you may want to reflect on the curious social humiliation behind the lyrics!

(Now I've probably pissed off the entire male population of New Zealand and everyone associated with Highland rugby. Sorry. Anyone who knows me knows I'm no fan of revisionist feminism, but I do appreciate historical fact.)

The U.S. Army Band performance last night started off very well, with a piece by Rimsky-Korsakov I've never heard: the overture to the opera "A Bride for the Tsar." This doesn't happen very often as R-K is one of my favorite composers, and when I was a teen I made a practice of buying every album I could find with a work of his on it. It highlights what a wide repertoire the band has.

However, they also performed a medley of Beatles songs that didn't sound right at all to me - the only time I've ever heard a service band play something I just didn't like. The soloist - a trombone player - was excellent, but who wants to hear "Eleanor Rigby" played by a brass band and solo trombone? It was just wrong.

A novel piece was a number called "Cartoon," which featured all sorts of musical cues and cliches one hears as background music for Saturday morning cartoons - it was great! The audience liked the wolf whistle and the slinky saxophone part, obviously depicting some animated femme fatale.

I think I mentioned before that I am a master at mishearing and misunderstanding lyrics in pop songs. (I even wrote an article about it.) It drives my poor wife to distraction. Well. There's a Herman's Hermits song entitled "Dandy"; Peter Noone performed it at his concert last week. I recall hearing it a couple of times when it first came out in 1966 or 1967. It's one of Dave Davies' (of the Kinks) social satire songs about an Alfie-style guy who is shallow and self-absorbed. I've been enjoying listening to a recording of it on my iPod. However, when I was a kid I thought Noone was singing "Dondi," and that the song was about the comic strip character!

In my own defense, I was only eleven at the time and had no idea what a "dandy" was. So I merely translated it into a context that I could understand. I will no doubt again be ritually humiliated by my wife - the haka! - when she reads this...

I am still enjoying making my new iPod just so, and adding scads and scads of mp3 files. Every now and then I come across one I got via Napster in the glory days of piracy - circa 2001 - that has curious things embedded in the ID3 tags along with the composer name, year, genre, etc. In one, I found "I was nude when I ripped this" in the comments section. In a Glen Miller mp3, appropriately enough, was "Kilroy was here." A Civil War tune had, "The South will rise again!" and in a track from a David Lynch film I found, "I learned how to spell "Badalamenti.'" (Angelo Badalamenti being his favorite background music composer, you see.)

I came across a great little hobo life story in that railroad book I'm reading: "The Million Dollar Mulligan." Reprinted from a 1946 Railroad Magazine.

And that wraps it up for this week. Band practice and yard sales tomorrow morning. Have a great weekend!

9 July 2009

Thanks to Bob, my Old Boy friend with a DVD, I finally saw "Forever Strong" (2008), the American rugby film about the famous Highland High School program. It was excellent. Oh, it had a lot of the usual sports film tropes, but at least this time it was about rugby, which was novel.

A nit: At one point, just before the match, the coach puts a kid who usually plays winger into the hooker position. No responsible high school rugby coach would do this. Front row positions require training and practice, and hooker, as it happens, is the position where one is most likely to receive a grievous spine injury. (At least in the U.S.) As one hooker friend described it to me, "the scrum position feels a lot like being crucified." The coach who is highlighted in this production, Larry Gelwix, wouldn't do that.

Another nit: At one point Highland High is shown playing during a thunder and lightning storm. Any USA Rugby certified referee would end the match. (In fact, a few years ago a rugby spectator was killed by lightning during a match in Virginia.)

But this is still a wonderful film - it doesn't overstay its welcome, moves right along, has a compelling plot and cast and, best of all, promotes rugby. Well done.

I once interviewed Coach Gelwix for my Rugby Reader's Review page; that page is here. What wasn't depicted in the film - because it's a sports movie, not a religious one - is the strong connection between the Highland High program and the Mormon Church. That aspect of the program is described in a 1998 (LDS) Church News article, here.

By the way, 2009 was a good year for Utah rugby. BYU became the collegiate national champions for the first time ever, and Highland High became the U-19's champs for the second time in a row. (They previously dominated the high school competitions.)

Meanwhile, in Burbank, California, my pal Mike finally describes the connection between California State Highway 99 (running through Burbank) and I-5. It's the answer to a little mystery: Why does the I-5 always back up in Burbank? Because there's a curve. Why is there a curve?

Tonight I'm seeing another U.S. Army Band performance in the Kenwood Middle School in Arlington. I have no doubt that it will be top notch. One of the great things about living in the Washington D.C. suburbs is the number of high quality musical ensembles, seen for free - there are so many excellent musicians working in this area.

I once discussed this with a trumpet player in, I think it was, the Fairfax Symphony Orchestra. We met at a yard sale. He said it was tough, tough, tough to get into the FSO due to the number of quality musicians here. It's funny... many of us regard our jobs are boring. (I do.) He was grousing about having to play some orchestral pieces with dull trumpet parts. Can you imagine? Being a member of a symphony orchestra would be my dream job...

Speaking of my middling musicianship, my band didn't get together last night to practice, as it turned out. Two of us had illnesses. This is bad, we need the practice. In the last practice some of the numbers we used to play relatively well with little work sounded very bumpy.

I am now at the part in my railroads book dealing with hoboes. No surprise, I've read a lot of the excerpts already. In fact, I am so familiar with this admittedly obscure subject that when I was watching the documentary "Who is Bozo Texino?" (see 30 June entry) I saw a fleeting shot of one fellow slugging down some wine and wondered, "Is that North Bank Fred?" Sure enough, it was, as described in the credits.

That's right - I have arrived at the point where I can recognize and name hoboes in documentaries. There are times I surprise even myself.

8 Jul 2009

A friend of mine sent me this very nerdy news regarding a rare alignment of the time, day and year. Whoopie!

I stumbled across this website, describing what job you should have based on your Myers-Briggs score. In 1998 I took the M-B test; it indicated I'm a ESTJ ("the Guardians"). So according to this I should have been a cop or a teacher - both occupations which I have considered. (When I got out of the Marines I toyed with the idea of becoming a California Highway Patrolman, and when I was in high school I wanted to be a high school history teacher.)

Here's an account of the last spike being driven in linking the East and West by rail at Promontory, Utah, in 1869 - it's in the book I'm reading. The stately and dignified Thomas Hill painting described in the excerpt ("as it wasn't") is here. I can see Brigham Young with his long white beard... at least I think that's Brigham Young. (I don't think he was that gray in 1869.) I like the Indian woman in the foreground, holding the red and white commemorative CD.

I did a reenactment of this famous affair in 1983. Were Civil War soldiers present at the proceedings? No, of course not. But who cares? We looked olde-tymey. Promontory, Utah, by the way, is in the middle of nowhere.

I've been watching episodes from Season 12 of "Top Gear," the British car show. It is truly entertaining... quite good. Google some episodes; you won't be disappointed.

My band gets back together tonight for another practice. I've been hearing Sara Bareilles' "Love Song" in my head for days. It has a growly bass line I've been trying to replicate; I'm about 90% there, I think. Of course, playing along with the original recording and with my band are two different things. We may be doing it in a different key, depending upon the singer. Sometimes, playing it with others is almost like relearning it.

7 Jul 2009

My Burbank friend Mike sent me an e-Bay notice of a postcard for auction; this one features a Burbank hotel, then (1960's or 1970's) called the "Golden State Motel." It is now a Ramada Inn (although I can't imagine the chain would want to really claim the place). The absolute worst night I have ever spent in a hotel was here.

The bathrooms have thick metal doorstops bolted onto the floors. I had to get up late one night and slammed a toe against one in the dark, breaking it. I literally saw stars. The service was sluggish, as if the staff were doing you favors. The place smelled. And you could hear the traffic along I-5 from your room, as well as jets landing at the Burbank airport.

Mike told me that the only Burbank policeman ever gunned down in the line of duty was at a gang incident at this hotel, which makes sense because it looks like the local Trece Rifa chapter might hold their annual conventions there.

In short, it's a real dump. But there was one advantage to staying there: Having learned our lesson when travelling we no longer make simple cost the main factor in securing a hotel room!

I am enjoying B.A. Botkin's railroad folklore treasury; here are a couple of excerpts.

I finished digitizing my last full family video this morning, so that's 80 hours of family DVDs (1959-2009) converted into .mp4 video files. Each two hour DVD took about twelve hours of processing time on a laptop to convert; the whole collection took me over a month to do thus far. I still have about fifteen DVDs worth of video segments to convert, but the main stuff is now done.

My idea is to put all the video files in a directory with a web page. The page has descriptions of what's on each DVD and links to them all. That way I can take two boxes of VHS and Hi-8mm videotapes and store them on a 100 GB USB drive that fits into a shirt pocket. I can then take the drive to my kids and load the data onto their PCs. Cool! Easy to access and the video data is thus preserved in another format.

As I wrote before, I missed my true calling in life - I should have been a librarian/archivist.

6 Jul 2009

It was a great three day weekend, but, sadly, it's over and the work week begins again.

My wife and I gathered with the Five Families (well, three fifths of 'em) and watched the Capitol Fourth rehearsal show on the 3rd. Aretha Franklin really butchered the National Anthem - I hope she did better for the live broadcast. Yes, it's difficult to sing, but she's a professional. And for the record, I'm not a fan of what might be called contemporary renditions of "The Star Spangled Banner." I think it's best sung semi-operatically without bells, whistles and melisma. By far and away the best renditions of it I hear are by the various armed forces musical ensembles, who give the piece some R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

Barry Manilow, whom my father (the original Kid from Brooklyn) used to call "Salamander Face," performed there as well. His plastic surgery is weird; he now looks uncannily like Barbara Walters. I see I'm not the only person who thinks so. He looks like a Persian Cat, or as if he's staring into a wind tunnel.

However, now that Michael Jackson is gone, I think the title for "Worst Plastic Surgery on a Man" is Burt Reynolds.

My final word on "The Quincunx" is here. Perhaps by reading this other amazon.com readers will be better warned.

Over the weekend I read the Encyclopedia Shatnerica. I am now convinced that the man - that is, William Shatner - must be the most colossal egotist, ever. All of his fellow cast members on Star Trek disliked and resented him, and the book is replete with bizarre, oddly-worded quotes. Some examples?

"Life is full of surprises, both uplifting and degrading. The Walk of Fame, with is bubble gum and doggy doo and its steps of admiration, is also the way of life." - At his induction ceremony for the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

"Who am I to tell a lady that she's a liar? I have no recollection. I'm sure it was memorable for her, though." - On actress Claudia Christian's allegation that he groped her on the set of T.J. Hooker.

"I'm a Jew. But I do not believe in your God... I do know that we are all afraid of dying... we are all afraid of loniness. Those are universal truths. Are you scared? I'm scared... I love you... I need you." - To the National Conference of Christians and Jews convention in 1968.

"I sometimes think of myself as an acting machine." - in 1967

...and so on. Frankly, I think the guy is a little deranged.

And then there are his video clips. Perhaps the oddest is his fabled 1978 rendition of Elton John's "Rocket Man." Or his freakout on an episode of the $20,000 Pyramid. What can we make of these?

I am now reading one of those 1950's B.A. Botkin folklore collections, this one is "A Treasury of Railroad Folklore," given to me by my friend Don - a railroad buff. Just finished the tale of Casey Jones, the legendary and heroic engineer. He actually lived, and here's his wikipedia entry. Reading it, I discovered that a torpedo, in railroad terminology, was a device that was placed on a rail that exploded when run over, giving an audible warning to the engineer.

2 Jul 2009

Geez, what it is with all the expiring celebrities?

My Mom used to think that a Rule of Three was in play with celebrity deaths; here's an article about it. Apparently she wasn't alone.

Sky Saxon is mentioned in the article - I'm the only person I know who remembers Sky Saxon. Why? When I was in fifth grade my parents, alarmed over my poor grades in math, obtained a math tutor for me. She was a teenaged girl. We only had two tutoring sessions, I think. She was much more involved with describing how cool The Seeds were and how cute their lead singer, Sky Saxon, was than teaching me math. Since I didn't care what grades I got I indulged her, asking leading questions. My parents abandoned the tutoring idea and I was allowed to get D's and F's in math.

So that's how I know.

Sky Saxon's wikipedia entry makes for amusing reading. "In the 1970s, Saxon became a member of the Source Family religious group, a Hollywood Hills commune led by YaHoWha who gave Saxon the names Sunlight and Arlick. In 1998, Saxon orchestrated the release of a 13-CD set of the psychedelic tribal music recorded by the commune's band Ya Ho Wa 13 during the 1970s." I think I can be forgiven for not knowing who Ya Ho Wa were...

By the way, when I was a kid I hated, hated, hated math. It was my worst subject. I was so totally at sea with it that I recall an assignment in second grade where I added uprights to the negative signs on the subtraction problems and made them addition problems - those I could do. I recall that my teacher expressed astonishment at this, "Never in all my years of teaching have I seen..." you get the idea. (It wouldn't be the last time a teacher would express surprise at my behavior.)

Anyway, this, in turn, led to parent-teacher conferences and my mother "helping" me with my math homework at night. Since she was the world's angriest and most impatient tutor I quickly developed a even greater hatred for the subject than I had previously.

When I decided to attend college and get a degree in something I chose electrical engineering. No math needed there, right? Well, of course there is - lots of it. But I knew this. Newly fortified with the U.S. Marine Corps knowledge that I Could Conquer Anything, I took about a year's worth of remedial math classes before I could take calculus and differential equations. But take them I did. I even had to repeat a couple of classes, but I eventually completed the math requirements.

Nowadays I have an admiration for mathematics, and something approaching a grudging love for the subject. And once, I was gratified when I was able to explain to a gal at work (who was struggling with her first calculus course) how the concept of series and limits led to integrals. It was really, really cool that I remembered.

I have come to observe that math, which is really just the language of quantity with a grammar and syntax of its own, isn't a difficult subject per se. It's just that it's usually taught - poorly - by math majors who struggle with communication.

A guy at work yesterday called my attention to this, Big Mama Thornton singing "Hound Dog," a song made famous by Elvis Presley. Hearing it sung by a woman makes perfect sense of the song... and she does a great job with it! In fact, I like it better than Elvis' rendition. And her guitarist is no slouch, either.

My band got together last night for practice. It just wasn't happening; I don't know why. At one point in the middle of a song I totally blanked out and forgot my bass lines, which caused the singer to get lost tonally. The whole thing just sort of collapsed from there. But that's okay... we have plenty of time until the gig at the Burke Centre Festival in September.

I am page 758 of 781 in the dreadful, plodding, tedious novel "The Quincunx." Why did I waste the time?

Like all Federal employees, I have tomorrow off. So there won't be a blog entry, most likely. Have a great star-spangled three day weekend!

1 Jul 2009

The theme today is British.

I watched a ripper of a film last night, "The Hill" (1965), starring Sean Connery and a host of other British actors. It's an engrossing British Army prison drama set in a North African desert. That is, a sweltering North African desert. This film contains lots of yelling in that British Army parade field fashion - like somebody's about to burst a blood vessel. The troops (inmates) seem to be in continual motion during the entire film, constantly double-timing. It seems that much of the action is set against a background of companies of men doing calisthenics. Geez, I was getting tired and dehydrated just watching it.

The film takes its name from the prison camp's most distinctive physical feature - a hill located squarely in the middle. Needless to say, guys are forever made to run up and down it by sadistic commanders.

Funny trivia from IMDb: "...the director recalled suffering through the horrendous heat of the location and asking Sean Connery if he was urinating at all, to which Connery's reply was 'Only in the morning.'"

If I needed a one sentence description of this film it would be, "British Army testosterone run amok." Thematically it's a nice companion piece to another good film about the British Army, "Tunes of Glory" (1960), in which Alec Guinness once again displays his acting prowess as the Scottish nutjob colonel "Jock" Sinclair. My friend Don once described this one as being about nothing much - life in the regimental barracks - but sustaining interest due to suspence and setting. There's a death in it, but the main interest seems to be the Regimental Dinner!

Or we can make it a trio: these two films plus the reenactor favorite "Zulu" (1964). They're all you need to know about the old school British Army - or, more accurately, what filmmakers thought about the old school British Army during the Sixties.

Inspired by last Friday's concert performance, I bought a collection of Herman's Hermits songs on iTunes - that is to say, I purchased a bunch of files (mp3s) for my iPod. I'm having an annoying problem buring these onto a CD, so I don't really consider that I've purchased anything until I can hold it in my hand. Anyway, I found yet another song I liked: "It's Nice to be Out in the Morning." It was well used as the introductory song in their 1968 film "Mrs. Brown You've Got a Lovely Daughter."

When the Beatles blew onto the scene in 1964 they created a market for uptempo British Invasion songs that was filled in part by bands like the Monkees (in America) and Herman's Hermits - both of whom, I have concluded, benefitted by exposure to an excellent group of songwriters. Neither the Monkees nor Herman's Hermits had the credibility or later following that the Beatles attained, but forty plus years on it's nice to rediscover their music and coming across little gems. In other words, I have come to find that the Hermits and the Monkees are much better musical ensembles than I took them for back in the day.

Finally, Quincunx. I'm on page 592 of 781. I'm waiting for the protagonist's situation to improve, but so far it hasn't. His mother has died. He rediscovers his father - only to quickly see him expire in prison. After 500+ pages of horrendous Dickinsian abuse, beatings, starvation and exposure to the elements, he is now forced to trudge along in the London sewage system picking up discarded coinage for a living. Good grief, how much more degrading of an occupation can this author devise?

This book had better have a whopper of a payoff and resolution or I'm going to be very disappointed. (But I already know from reading amazon.com reviews that it doesn't...)

Brigham's Blog