Remark of the Day: UK Division

Heroic Grump

I caught a wonderful line while watching BBC News America's report on the Blair testimony at the Chilcot Inquiry today. Part of the report focused on the protestors outside Parliament, showing video of crowds. The reporter intoned that tempers frayed. Then we see the man pictured above, in queue. He's in his late fifties or sixties I suppose, and proclaimed scornfully in a loud clear voice:

"If you're going to have a police state, at least organise it properly."

It's hard to imagine an American saying that, and it certainly wouldn't be aired as a soundbite on mainstream news. It's Ed Reardon-esque. Lovely.

EDIT: I found this on line. It's about 37 seconds into this video. And spelling corrected in the quote to UK standards.

UPDATE: A kind correspondent has identified the speaker as actor and activist Michael Culver. I can't independently confirm but it certainly does look and sound like him. Well done.

De-Ace What?

The other day I made passing reference to the ubiquity of the plainchant tune Dies Irae.

Ever helpful, the BBC has put together a program discussing the piece on the Radio 3 series Twenty Minutes. It's called Dies Irae: Day of Wrath and offers a decent 1/3 hour overview of a few ways the piece has been used over the centuries. (It also reminded me how thrilling Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique can be.)

The piece should be up on iPlayer soon at this page. The Wikipedia page about Dies Irae has a list of some uses of the tune, too.

Golden Age

Image by Cwluc.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cwluc/
CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

For years we've all watched more and more people texting while walking. But only today did it occur to me: this could make for a golden age of pickpockets.

Note: I am not encouraging anyone to pick pockets or otherwise steal. Especially from me.

Story of the Day

Overweight Woman Sentenced in Boyfriend's 'Sitting' Death:

"'So basically you can say that I can go sit on somebody and get probation?' said one of the victim's sister.

'I feel there wasn't no justice.'"

Indeed. There wasn't no justice.

Hootchy Kootchy Dance

When I was a kid, our neighborhood's lyric for that tune snippet was:

There's a place in France
Where the belly dancers dance.

Turns out that melody, with countless variant lyrics, has been recycled almost as much as Dies Irae. It's known by "Hootchy Kootchy Dance," "The Streets of Cairo," "The Girls in France" and many other titles, and has an unusual history. As Wikipedia puts it:

The song originally was purportedly written by Sol Bloom, a showman (and later, a U.S. Congressman) who was the entertainment director of the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893. It included an attraction called "A Street in Cairo" produced by Gaston Akoun, which featured snake charmers, camel rides and a scandalous dancer known as Little Egypt.

Bloom didn't (or couldn't?) copyright it and the phrase was repurposed for stage bits -- and later cartoon and silent movie scenes--with "Eastern" themes. Cecil Adams has written a typically informative and entertaining description of the tune's origins, but I read about the song in the book The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson, which largely concerns the bizarre and astounding murder spree by H. H. Holmes.

Interesting to see that the tune's author, Sol Bloom, later became a politician. The most famous song attributed to a politician has to be"You Are My Sunshine," by Louisiana Governor Jimmie Davis. However, for decades many have believed that Davis didn't write the song but basically paid a pittance for the rights. That appears to be the case, though Davis probably didn't even pay the correct author for those rights.

Bitter Flavor, Arabic Division

I'm exasperated at how cowardly the Democrats are now that they have only the second largest Senate majority in decades. Rather than fight fake populism with real populism, they apparently have chosen to fold.

November will be dire.

I've been drowning my sorrows in artificial bourbon flavoring and artificial tequila flavoring and artificial alcohol burn flavor (I can only imagine...), and other fake alcoholic beverage flavors available at the link -- without alcohol. Same acrid taste -- without intoxication!

I find it ironic that the word "alcohol" is derived from Arabic. It seems a lot of words that begin with "al-" (along with non al- words) have their origins in Arabic: algebra, alkali, alchemy, alcove, albatross, and many others. One of history's little quirks.

I'm fighting the political gloom. Soon I will be be happier, I think, after avoiding political coverage for a while by watching the TV series Friday Night Lights (which I was swayed to watch by a Brit). Good so far, amazingly.

For some reason, Mobile Phone by Kevin Eldon and the Cassettes has again cheered me up a bit. Must be that nearly eight-bit wall of sound. I hope these things elevate your mood, too.

More Flavoring

The Massachusetts Senate loss is still making me very unhappy. But my hard-hitting report yesterday about bourbon flavor set me to look for some other odd flavorings.

Cucumber flavored Pepsi.
Imitation Surimi Baby Eels
Dr. Brown's Celery Soda
Octopus Flavored Chips
Beef Tongue Ice Cream

The tongue-tasting-Tongue loop has been examined before, I'm sure. And this list reminds us that, as the story at the last link puts it when a Japanese person spoke about his countrymen: "'We like strange-tasting food,' said Keiko Hashiya." Strange food can always be found in Japan.

Also, here are miscellaneous flavors from this list at GBS Flavor Creators:
Natural Carrot Flavor
Cloudifier
Artificial Sour Cream Flavor
Artificial Crème Brulee Flavor
Artificial Ginseng Flavor
Natural Paw Paw Type Flavor
Natural Rocky Road Type Flavor
Natural & Artificial Fried Green Tomato Flavor

And finally, on that BGS Flavor Creators list, we wind up where we were yesterday:
Natural Bourbon Whiskey Type Flavor

Still a bad idea.

NOTE: In recent years, some companies -- especially smaller soda bottling companies -- have been putting out flavors just as gimmicks. The prime example is probably Turkey and Gravy soda from Jones Soda Co. Gimmicks qua gimmicks are sad.

Flavoring

That Massachusetts Senate race loss really sucks. What a terrible candidate Coakley was. She was like bourbon flavoring.

Why did that come to mind, you ask?

From an interview with Snuffy Walden, who has written music for countless TV shows and movies:

I used to play in a strip joint called "The Cellar", where they sold fake booze. If you ordered a bourbon and Coke, they would bring a Coke with bourbon flavoring.

I suppose the attractions at a strip club are not really the drinks, but it seems like even those customers would get wise eventually. Especially since the drinks were not cheap, I presume.

Seriously, bourbon flavoring? What an awful idea.

Cussing Objects

"Cuss" graffitti from Fantastic Mr. Fox,
ineptly highlighted by me.

2010 has made me think that the Y2K bug did indeed hit -- just a decade too late. In the past couple weeks computers have rebelled, devices have failed. Even Fire, The Lever, and The Wheel have forsaken me. Perhaps I'm reliving this Woody Allen monologue.

I couldn't make a proper "Best of" list of movies for 2009. But before we slip into February and the endeavor becomes even more ridiculous, I thought I'd record a few that made an impression:

• A Serious Man: God is Great-- a great big pain in the ass.
  
• Hunger: Well modulated misery.
  
• An Education: I feel pretty ... unsophisticated.
  
• The Hurt Locker: War pros.
  
• Inglorious Basterds: Movies killed the Nazis.
  
• Up: Elegiac and giddy.
  
• In the Loop: Mustelidocracy
• Fantastic Mr. Fox: Wes didn't screw it up, for once.
• Goodbye Solo: Drama is not dead.
  

Things should pick up around here. If my devices have ceased failing.

Crazy Country

The invaluable Dave Weigel at the Washington Independent spotted someone selling The Sarah Palin Embryo Ornament.

Ten dollars plus shipping. What a crazy country.

Entirely unrelated: What girlfriends and boyfriends search for on Google.

Old Dogs

Illustration from Historiae Animalium (1551-1558) by Conrad Gesner.

The National Library of Medicine has released, as part of a larger project, scans of scientific books from the 15th and 16th centuries. They display them in virtual book form so you can flip through them (with a docent providing audio on some pages), and major illustrations are offered up separately in large jpgs.

Classic books by Gesner (above), Paré, Vesalius, and the spectacular illustrations from Robert Hooke's Micrographia appear. Lovely.

Hard Talk

The Economist skillfully draws a fascinating article out of a dorm bull-session topic: What is the most difficult language? For instance, one paragraph:

For sound complexity, one language stands out. !Xóõ, spoken by just a few thousand, mostly in Botswana, has a blistering array of unusual sounds. Its vowels include plain, pharyngealised, strident and breathy, and they carry four tones. It has five basic clicks and 17 accompanying ones. The leading expert on the !Xóõ, Tony Traill, developed a lump on his larynx from learning to make their sounds. Further research showed that adult !Xóõ-speakers had the same lump (children had not developed it yet).

I guess all those diacritical marks bruise the larynx when they bump by.

That's not the end of the article -- while the sounds are difficult, the sentence structure of !Xóõ apparently isn't.

I propose we cross the sounds of !Xóõ with the grammar, lexicology, syntax, and semantics of Tuyuca and create a language that most humans could never hope to speak, even if inculcated from birth.

PS: This is not a new observation, but Mark Twain wrote something clever about nearly every topic that matters.

Slow into 2010. With bells on.

I'm slowly sliding into this year. Here's a tidbit from the (very enjoyable) 1998 BBC production of Vanity Fair. A busker, presumably Belgian, performing Rule Britannia on Almglocken (tuned alpine bells).



If you'd like a set of your own, you may purchase one for a few hundred dollars.

If you'd prefer something more substantial, here is a limestone xylophone.



Actually the "xylo" in xylophone means "wood," so this is a lithophone. You're on your own finding a vendor.

Correct Noun Please

No, no no. You're not in the way.

Telegraph.co.uk: Police hunt supermarket bottom sniffer. [Video available at link: it's creepy.]

The man was caught on CCTV creeping up on the unsuspecting worker at least 20 times as he stacked shelves at a Co-op store in Plymouth, Devon. The footage shows him casually pretending to chose items from shelves before suddenly crouching down behind the employee.

In general, his behavior is one of the class of paraphilias, a list of which is on Wikipedia. If he were rubbing non-consensually, that would be frotteurism--but he's not rubbing. Flatulophilia doesn''t seem right. Olfactophilia doesn't either.

What's a classically derived term for butt-sniffing?

Noun please!

Christmas

I realize that, as an American liberal, I'm supposed to hate Christmas and want to wage war on and defile it. But, of course, I don't hate Christmas Day.

I do feel that pseudo-celebrating it for a month and more is ridiculous.

I live near a lot of Buddhists, Jews, Muslims, Animists, Hindus, and non-believers as well as Christians. So I say "Happy Holidays" to people I meet unless I'm sure they celebrate Christmas. Except on December 25, when I will even wish those of other faiths a Merry Christmas, since on that day and that day only it actually is Christmas.

With that in mind, here a few tunes for the season. Joseph Spence is a Bahamian fingerstyle guitarist who inspired quite a few well known players, including Ry Cooder. Someone put up Spence's version of Santa Claus is Coming to Town with a hissy transfer, some misspellings in the video text, and a few other issues. But, c'mon, it's the kickiest version of this song you're ever going to hear.



This isn't a Christmas song, but for some reason I thought about it while gift shopping and it seems to fit the holiday. It's a catchy 1975 recording of postal workers at the University of Ghana post office cancelling stamps to a little melody they came up with. WFMU has a bit about it and there's more info about it here at Oddio Overplay.



Finally, a Tom Waits song from way back when. Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis.


Merry Christmas to you all.

A Serious Side to Nostalgia

Nowadays nostalgia is a paltry thing. TV, notoriously, builds itself on nostalgia for incidents that happened just a moment ago. In commerce, nostalgia moves product, while harkening back to a time when "product" referred mainly to the result of mathematical multiplication.

Oh, how I long for the days when nostalgia had force. During the American Civil War, "both physicians and laypeople viewed nostalgia ... as a deadly disease that might kill a man outright." Modern psychiatrists have contextualized it a bit:

In the official military medical history of that war, just one page is devoted to “homesickness,” a diagnosis that he said probably equates to major depression. Severe cases were termed“ nostalgia,” characterized by disturbed sleep, poor eating, and erratic behavior and that sometimes resulted in death. The only cure, said the doctors, was to send the unfortunate soldier home.

There are thousands of cases of nostalgia as a horribly debilitating physical condition recorded in the medical records of Union troops.

Nostalgia has a history that stretches back further, as the term was coined in Switzerland in the late 17th Century. Since there were so many Swiss mercenaries, there were lots of them to exhibit this "homesickness," as they thought it was then. "Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote in his 1768 Dictionnaire de la musique that it was forbidden to sing a ranz des vaches [a herdsman's song] near Swiss soldiers in foreign services, because they became homesick [nostalgic] and risked to die."

Then the concept of nostalgia splits into many war-borne shrapnel splinters (shell shock, battle fatigue, PTSD, depression, abjectness) and the name "nostalgia" into moods (Alpine tourism, Romanticism, longing for the detritus of youth, and enthusiasm among the aging for having "those damned kids endure the stultifying mores we grew up with") that evoke what we now consider nostalgia.

It's a fascinating topic and quite a serious one.

To make it all a bit less serious, I should point out that the Titan of misapplied nostalgia, Count Arthur Strong, begins a new series of his towering wireless program Count Arthur Strong's Radio Show! this Friday on BBC Radio 4. I generally don't exuberate over character comedy (a loose category, anyway), but Count Arthur always finds a way to make me laugh. I hope he has a few more good series in him, since the sitcom end of the writing has created a well-populated comic world for Arthur to ricochet around. I'll be listening.

Short to Long

A few things I've found funny recently (in one meaning of "funny" or another), from short to long.

• "Dexter" is Latin for right (as in right-handed). By a touch typist on a normal QWERTY keyboard, it's typed solely with left-hand keys.

• Humorous biography of Terry Gilliam written by Michael Palin, from the press kit for Brazil. Excerpt:

“Brazil,” as the result was eventually known, is the first film to have a country named after it. It’s bound to arouse strong feelings. But Gilliam is no stranger to controversy — he once took a melon back to a shop — and in his characteristic way he’s ready for anything.

• Andy Kindler, ace stand-up comedian, penned a piece about starting out in hack comedy for National Lampoon in 1991 which he reproduces on his website. It's called The Hack's Handbook: A Starter Kit. Funny 'cause it's true, and the dated references make it even truer.

• William Blades (1824-1890), publisher and book-lover, wrote an excellent book called The Enemies of Books, first published in 1881. It's available as an etext at the University of Virginia: The Enemies of Books. Enormously witty and informative, it includes chapters on water; gas and heat; ignorance and bigotry; vermin, and more. For example, from the "Fire" chapter:

  Books in those early times, whether orthodox or heterodox, appear to have had a precarious existence. The heathens at each fresh outbreak of persecution burnt all the Christian writings they could find, and the Christians, when they got the upper hand, retaliated with interest upon the pagan literature. The Mohammedan reason for destroying books -- ``If they contain what is in the Koran they are superfluous, and if they contain anything opposed to it they are immoral,'' seems, indeed, mutatis mutandis, to have been the general rule for all such devastators.

Vermin, a plate from The Enemies of Books.

Painting Pictures

Norman Rockwell, who is often close to kitsch but undoubtedly skilled (and appraisal of whom yo-yos quite a bit) painted from photographs of posed models. PDN Photo of the Day has collected a few of these and some of the consequent illustrations. It's a pleasure to see what Rockwell did with them.

Some commenters seem to think using photos is somehow cheating. Hrmph. Few would deny that Gerhard Richter makes high art, and many of his amazing paintings use photos as source material or even as substrate. I love much of his stuff and it can't even begin to be represented on the web. Get thee to a gallery!

An Interesting Life

There's one person who performed in-studio during the same TV program on which the Sex Pistols made their first TV appearance; appeared in the West End production of an early Andrew Lloyd Webber musical; had a role in one of the superior comedy movies of the 20th century; married a great UK comic writer/performer; and is now mayor of a town in the UK.

Who is it? Spoiler below.

It's Sue Jones-Davies. She was a member of the Bowles Rrothers Band, which performed on the same 1976 episode of Tony Wilson's So It Goes as the first Sex Pistols TV appearance. She appeared in Jesus Christ Superstar in London in the seventies. She played Judith Iscariot in Monty Python's Life of Brian. She married Chris Langham. She's mayor of Aberystwyth, in which The Life of Brian was presumed to have been banned (though it probably wasn't in actuality). She "lifted the ban" and had a special showing in 2009.

I bet there are a lot of good stories to be told by this person.

Don't Understand the Hype!

A correction at washingtonpost.com: "A Nov. 26 article in the District edition of Local Living incorrectly said a Public Enemy song declared 9/11 a joke. The song refers to 911, the emergency phone number."