No square Diamond

With a clean cut appearance and songs like "Sweet Caroline," "Beautiful Noise," and "Forever in Blue Jeans," Neil Diamond has presented a wholesome image since the late 60's. To many, his name belongs in the dullsville of pop crooners with the likes of Burt Bacharach and Johnny Mathis and other stuff old people listen to.

In addition to being overlooked for his coolness, his playful “Pot Smoker's Song" from the 1968 release Velvet Gloves and Spit is a song that is barely known, even among his fans. A bouncy tune, it's pretty much a repeating chorus interspersed with ridiculous testimonials of how pot can destroy your life in the most unimaginable ways. A subtle attack on some of the more laughable attempts at anti-pot propaganda, the song is so well done it's easy to believe that it could have actually been written for a backed by more money than brains government sponsored ad.

Neil himself was no stranger to pot. In 1976 his home was raided on suspicion of possession. Though he had less than an ounce, he still had to attend a six month drug aversion program to have his record expunged.



The fake testimonials in the song remind me of some of the more humorous anti-drug ads over the years. The first one makes drugs look more fun than they are (big mistake!), the second one a catch phrase classic, and the third one a terrible attempt to connect two marginally related issues.







And a couple of my favorite anti-drug ads, not-coincidentally featuring young beautiful women:

"Joanna"


Rachel Leigh Cook

Not feeling it

In the so yesterday's news item of the Black Eyed Peas and Perez Hilton dust-up, I came out heavily in favor of the Black Eyed Peas. A generally happy pop band confronting an insufferable sleaze monger for the vitriol he has published on his website. A murky area in criminal and civil law, common sense and public opinion suggest the snarky schoolyard gossip got exactly what he deserved. Perez Hilton's pitiful public relations attempt after the fact was sadder than Metallica on the therapist's couch in their Some Kind of Monster documentary. Only a passing fan of their music, I began to like the Black Eyed Peas more and more thanks to Perez Hilton.

If it wasn't shining bright enough on the band, Fergie does what every sensible Hollywood starlet is doing and declares her past bisexuality. An instant google bomb and a direct spike in sales of everything Fergie, Black Eyed Peas, and anything remotely attached to them. How the kids (Inc.) have grown! This revelation came about as a result of the latest Black Eyed Peas video "I Got a Feeling" which depicts some lesbian activity amidst the usual goings on of a typical Black Eyed Peas party (although without the tables of cocaine, pills, and booze, these ersatz video parties that bands can't resist depicting themselves in always smell fake).

But it probably wouldn't matter if the entire video was hardcore lesbian porn, the song is terrible. Everything about it, including the video, is not only phoned in, but poorly done so. It takes Cracked.com's Gladstone to explain how bad it really is:

You're two and one Black Eyed Peas.

Greater Robert Baden-Powell

'Being prepared' is a phrase that indicates a particular pragmatism where one should keep an eye on tomorrow when conducting today's affairs. 'Be prepared' conveys a more immediate tone as it suggests elements of danger and survival. The Boy Scout motto was always about more than camping preparedness; it was about the possibility of living off the land with nothing more than a handful of makeshift adaptable tools and your own guile. It's a perfectly concise phrase that evokes American frontiership.

The urban environment however carries a different series of challenges that wilderness survival doesn't necessarily equip you for. Via Instapundit I came across an article that describes a fascinating course called Urban Escape and Evade that teaches everything from lockpicking to abduction, confinement and escape. That courses like this exist is no surprise, but its recent spike in business in conjunction with stats and reports that are showing ammo purchases skyrocket, the term 'be prepared' is looking to take on a whole new meaning.

Politics and perception

Several months ago I came across this photo of Michelle Obama and Carla Bruni taken during Obama's visit to France:


The depiction of an angry and bitter Michelle Obama staring icily at her prettier, more accomplished, and popular 'friend' was obvious yet still irresistible. Ann Althouse invited a flurry of political and psychological speculation by hosting one of her more humorous caption contests. One commenter did a good job explaining the context of capturing such a quick moment in time:

I enjoy this sort of exercise as much as the next guy, but as a professional photographer I'd like to point out that a still photo like this should NEVER be taken seriously. A fraction of a second captured like that can seem to show something that just was not there. It looks to me like she's actually looking behind the other woman. Or, it could be that her face just looked like that for a fraction of a second between smiles because she was uncomortable in her seat. If you take enough pictures, there will be some that are flattering to the subject and some that are unflattering. That's just the way it is. A long time ago, I was actually hired to get some unflattering shots of a politician. I shot him at a press conference and it was really easy to get some shots of him looking sullen or angry, even though it was a generally happy occasion. I'm not proud of that, and I wouldn't take a job like that today, but back then I needed the work and I did what was required.

The Obama-Sarkozy 'ass-scandal' exemplified this point perfectly:



It would seem that while Obama is exonerated from this breach of social etiquette, Sarkozy tramples it with an obviousness that would embarrass Bill Clinton.

I asked a friend of mine who had recently been to Paris how it was the French so easily tolerated a ban on smoking in cafes. 'Smoking in a French cafe' - the phrase seems as true as saying 'water is wet.' Though in the Western world's sprint to the most bloated government France can nanny-state with the best of them, this one was far more of a cultural intrusion. Her reply was "the French simply ignore the petty laws they don't like." Revealing yet unsurprising. She said Montreal was very similar with their disregard of inconvenient by-laws. What was so blatant, and funny, about Sarkozy's stare was not that he made no attempt to hide what he was doing, but that he was smirking the entire time. A particular brazenness that oddly is nice to see from the French once in a while.

Cherokee

Unlike most other other musical genres, one of the wonderful idiosyncrasies of jazz is the sometimes radically different interpretations of the same song by different artists. A favorite traditional of mine is Ray Noble's 1938 piece 'Cherokee.' Written as the first of the five movement Indian Suite, it became a standard by the early '40's after treatments by Charlie Barnet and Charlie Parker. Here are two very different performances by two very different artists. The first is Sarah Vaughan from the late 50's, the second John McLaughlin from the mid '80's.

Blender's worst

Crazy house of music lists at Blender's, including a list of the 50 worst bands. Most picks are all too deserving of their entries, though a few are more hype let downs than truly awful or boring music acts. A few protestations:

#37 - The Doors

Hard to argue with this assessment:

While in college, many young men still choose to immerse themselves in such ill-advised subjects as Nietzsche, black magic and Native American folklore. Most get over it; Jim Morrison, unfortunately, inflicted his terminally adolescent views on the wider world. The consequences included overblown screeds of nonsense such as "The End" and "The Crystal Ship," plus, effectively, the invention of goth. Then he got fat and died.

However true, the Doors were a great band. They were unique instrumentalists and no one ever said rock lyrics always had to make perfect sense. No band with a stable of songs like "Break on Through," "Light My Fire," "Love Me Two Times," "People Are Strange," and "Riders on the Storm" should be anywhere near a worst 50 of all time list.

#21 The Alan Parsons Project

Ok, so "The Raven" was a little over the top.

Having conquered the Dark Side of the Moon, EMI Records’ beardy staff engineer Alan Parsons decided that what the universe really needed was a prog-rock concept album based on the work of nineteenth-century horror novelist Edgar Allan Poe, narrated by Orson Welles. It didn’t, of course, but an undeterred Parsons soldiered on, swapping prog-rock for vapid AOR in the ’80s.

Half the top ten of this list is comprised of arena and/or prog-rock, so it seems a given these guys were gonna get dumped on. Placing 21st is a little harsh as "Eye in the Sky," "Don't Answer Me," and "Time" were terrific pop songs.

#12 Tin Machine

(Tin Machine) found Bowie voluntarily subsuming his genius beneath chorus-free tunes and guitarist Reeves Gabrels’s habit of playing his instrument with a vibrator.

Another superband with too much talent coming on too strong. No pun intended on the name, but the band was too rigid and mechanical, in both image and sound. Though they were a letdown by Bowie standards, they weren't this bad. Their music was simply unnoticeable.

Incidentally, the worst band according to the list is Insane Clown Posse.




The 50 worst songs list is near perfect. Number one would probably be a more agreed upon pick than the worst band:

#1 Starship "We Built This City (1985)

The truly horrible sound of a band taking the corporate dollar while sneering at those who take the corporate dollar.

... who spend the song carrying on as if they invented rock & roll rebellion, while churning out music that encapsulates all that was wrong with rock in the ’80s: Sexless and corporate, it sounds less like a song than something built in a lab by a team of record-company executives.

More big media woes

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit and Robert McChesney of Free Press have an interesting back and forth in the L.A. Times on the state of big media. I tend to favor Reynolds' views on media as I have read about, as listened to, them for years on his site. He doesn't argue for the entire dissolution of big media, but he is quick to point out its current transformation into a more integrated and collective news delivery system. Money quote from Reynolds:

Hard-news reporting—actual facts, not opinion—remains the "killer app" for Big Media. But they're not making proper use of their structural advantages there, and those advantages are likely to weaken over time. Already, as I've mentioned, journalists like Michael Yon and Michael Totten are reporting from Iraq with interviews, photos, and video that in many ways surpass the work of virtually all big media reporters. Likewise, local-news websites are starting to challenge local newspapers, taking advantage of drastic cuts in hard-news reporting budgets there.

Right now, traditional media organizations are still in a much better position overall to cover actual news than citizen journalists. They've got the infrastructure, the training, and the experience. But those advantages are eroding daily as technology shifts in favor of smaller operations, and as citizen journalists gain experience and audience. Will Big Media change in time? They will if they're smart—which is to say, probably not.

Jazzy math

I came across an interesting experiment in sound art that I had once imagined, but never with this kind of clarity. Using different notes to represent numbers 0-9, artist Tom Dulkich sonifies mathematical constants with some incredible results. This one is a piano playing the first hundred digits of pi, complete with a display of the numerical sequence. By adding a bass and a flute to accompany the piano, a much more jazzy feeling is evoked. The piano plays all numbers (except the zero, which serves as the musical rest), the bass plays the low numbers, and the flute the high ones. It sounds like jazz fusion with highly chromatic melodies and almost discernible rhythms. It's a similar experience listening to river rapids. Listen long enough and the chorus of sounds will lead you to believe that a familiar rhythm is about to emerge just as it collapses back into the the noisy chaos. For a more samba feel, try Euler's five constants (1, 0, π, e, i) played simultaneously with a circus of instruments - bass, piano, trumpet, sax, mallets, whistle, and the cuica.

Wikipedia Timelapse - Virginia Tech Massacre

A fascinating video showing the first twelve hours of the Wikipedia entry on the Virginia Tech massacre.



More than simply a community encyclopedia, Wikipedia is emerging as an information databank. Whether or not the site's factual accuracy matches our traditional encyclopedias (from the studies I've read, it does), more important is the collectivist role it now plays in our society.

Save our chocolate

It appears that one of our most beloved foods has recently come under siege. The FDA is considering lowering the bar for what it classifies as 'chocolate.' All those crappy holiday knock-offs and cheap foreign candies that don that shiny, waxy coating (often referred to as chocolate flavored, chocolaty, or cocoalicious) may soon enjoy the same legal status as chocolate. No child reared in the Western world would ever confuse the two. One is chocolate, the other 'cheap-chocolate' - and we all know the difference.

Cybele May, who authors one of my favorite blogs in the Candy Blog, has been lobbying against this for some time. She has a terrific article in the LA Times explaining this gustatory affront:

It may be cocoa powder that gives chocolate its taste, but it is the cocoa butter that gives it that inimitable texture. It is one of the rare, naturally occurring vegetable fats that is solid at room temperature and melts as it hits body temperature — that is to say, it melts in your mouth. Cocoa butter also protects the antioxidant properties of the cocoa solids and gives well-made chocolate its excellent shelf life.

Because it's already perfectly legal to sell choco-products made with cheaper oils and fats, what the groups are asking the FDA for is permission to call these waxy impostors "chocolate." Because we "haven't formed any expectations."

I'd say we've already demonstrated our preference for true chocolate. That's why real chocolate outsells fake chocolate. Nine of the 10 bestselling U.S. chocolate candies are made with the real stuff. M&Ms, Hershey Bars, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups — all real chocolate. Butterfinger is the outlier.