February 2014
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Someone has created a fascinating visual depiction of the changes in the language of pop music since 1960 by graphing the occurrence of various words in the Billboard Top 100 songs from 1960 until the present. It's a slide show, including twenty or so words. Each rectangle represents a song, and darker colors represent greater…
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Are noodles pasta? This arose in connection with an incident related on Facebook in which a British-born wife requested that her American-born husband bring her some noodles, and was displeased when he brought her a species of pasta. It turns out there are some significant variations in usage of the term "noodle." As Wikipedia says:…
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This is a followup to that post of a few weeks ago, What's Wrong, about the exclusion of the workers in a corporation from a share in its prosperity. Having such a share would imply a share in its un-prosperity as well, but in too many cases workers get the latter without the former. I…
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And speaking of the role of McCartney's bass playing in their music: in the course of reviewing all my old Sunday Night Journal pieces, I came across this review of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, in which I made the following remark: The single most striking thing in my revisiting of the album was the…
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Week 8? Already? Yes, unless I missed a week. The obvious next person to feature is Jimmy Page. (For the less pop-music-obsessed: Clapton, Beck, and Page were all members of the Yardbirds, in succession except for a brief overlap of Beck and Page.) But I half-intended to skip him. Why? Because most of his best-known…
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Ok, what I really mean is what I'm saying; I just wanted to tie this post to the one about the contemporary reaction to Meet the Beatles. I don't think I had ever, until now, sat down and actually listened to this album. I'm not even sure I ever heard it all the way through as an…
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Every reader feels a sense of achievement on completing a book, which is why short books please. –Anthony Daniels, reviewing a book about W.H. Auden in The New Criterion I understand this very well. The other side of it is the intimidating quality of long books. I was halfway through The Brothers Karamazov (800 pages) over a…
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Neo-neocon again, on the Obama administration's use of the IRS against its opponents: So Nixon is convicted in the eyes of the public for what appears to have been largely thoughtcrime, whereas the Obama administration and its handmaidens such as Lois Lerner get off seemingly free (so far) for the actual crime. Obama’s much greater…
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AllMusic.com sums up Jeff Beck's relative obscurity nicely: While he was as innovative as Jimmy Page, as tasteful as Eric Clapton, and nearly as visionary as Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck never achieved the same commercial success as any of those contemporaries, primarily because of the haphazard way he approached his career. After Rod Stewart left…
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Neo-neocon has come to a sobering realization: And so if you are audacious enough (and your name is Barack Obama) you can fool most of the people most of the time. And your supporters will defend you for it, as long as you’re not lying to them about some pet issue of theirs. This is not a discovery…
Light On Dark Water 