Not for nothing do we call him Big Rock Head... with bonus technical report!

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The lad we sometimes call Big Rock Head (BRH), who has now adopted "Rock Head" as his Official Rock & Roll Stage Name, proved that he deserves this monicker late Friday during a nighttime game of Capture The Flag at a park in Urbana. It is reported that some drinking was involved, not that it's unusual for drinking to be involved in anything that grad students might do on a Friday evening. Much more unusual is the fact that the youth of today were out playing like kids of yesteryear on a weekend night, at a baseball diamond in meatspace, exerting themselves physically.

It seems that BRH, in defending his goal, was pursuing his quarry with a singlemindedness of purpose that led him to become unaware of a chain-link fence installed along the third-base line. The slanted fencepost with which BRH posed for this photo spread this morning brought his sprint to an abrupt halt, skullwise (upper right). The placement of the split could not have been executed any more purposefully by a Hollywood makeup artist. So if the 10 stitches shown above leave a scar as a legacy, then the graphical layout makes a fine style statement in addition to its reeking of masculine essence.

After getting his noggin rattled, and the contents probably lightly concussed, the poor baby was surprised in the dark by what a sweat he had worked up---it was even streaming into his eyes! As we now know, this was actually leakage from his circulatory system, which still dotted the dirt on the dugout floor Saturday morning (center right), along with a fat drop on the left Converse sneaker which he had discovered a bit earlier.

The fencepost is not one of the security-grade jobs you find at industrial and government installations, but it is a steel fencepost after all. Because I am not a trained incident-site investigator, my forensic analysis was necessarily informal. I judged the post to be well-anchored, with indications of some ductility when the cap was pushed back and forth. The slant of the post is significantly more pronounced than the corresponding post at the far end of the first-base line (not shown), and the direction of the lean corresponds well to the vector of the BRH sprint. At the base of the subject post I found well-defined buckling (bottom right). The discolorations above the buckling are ambiguous. They could have been made by a previous impact with the post, such as might occur when scuffed by the deck of a riding lawnmower. However, the marks do not make any obvious sense as an effect of the deformation of the post, either Friday night or at a previous time. Therefore, I judged the markings to be a red herring, forensics-wise.

Finally, if you click on the spread and look closely at the enlargement of the lower-right picture, you may see a few crisp cracks in the parched mud in the lower-right quadrant adjacent to the base of the post. These cracks show up better on the high-resolution images, so you may take my word that they are there. These cracks radiate out from the base of the post opposite of the direction from which BRH impacted it. This is a geological artifact I would expect to see as a result of such an impact.

Big Rock Head is somewhat over 6 ft tall and weighs approximately 200 lb. Having some knowledge of his physical capabilities and the joie de vivre with which he plays, I do not think it is farfetched that he might have struck the post at 15 mph---a sprint that could produce a 4 minute mile, but which need be sustained only for a few moments of alcohol-assisted galumphing to produce the documented effect on the pole.

Therefore, it is concluded that solely with the hardness of his cranium, body mass, and autolocomotion, BRH caused a ductile failure in a steel fence post during a nocturnal session of Capture The Flag. The young gentleman whom he was tracking at the time should feel thankful for the good offices provided by said fence post, bodily-harmwise.

What I saw south of town last evening

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Touring on the road bike, trying out a new pair of shoes:

1. A soaring red-tail hawk, landing atop a tall utility pole, then pacing me with slowly flapping wings about 100 ft to the east, heading south. I wasn't sure of my identification and I told it to show me his tail, not expecting to have my request acknowledged. After about 15 seconds he caught a draft and executed a soaring banked hairpin U-turn that gave me visibility of his back, including a fiery red tail that was emphasized by the late-afternoon sun.

2. Upon my approach, a sudden rustling in some short rows of drought-stressed corn at the edge of the field to my immediate west. An awkwardly galloping groundhog, bounding along the row opposite my direction, with a cartoon-like cloud of dust drifting on the wind from where he first bugged out.

3. During a water stop, a frantic group of killdeer trying to pester and lure me away from some nearby ground nests. Three or four flew around me in wide, interleaved circles, producing a din of racket that sounded like angry baritone seagulls (I've never heard these birds say "kill-deer" as the are reputed to do). At the same time, about 50 ft back toward town, one of them put on the famous broken-wing act, which I'd never seen before. Typically, when a cyclist rides through their territory, they will escort the rider about 30 to 50 ft in advance, flying low and alternating with a rapid walk until the bike closes in to about 20 ft. At that point, they resume low flight over the blacktop.

4. The red-tail again, or one of similar proportions, flapping lazily toward the south from where I was returning. Behind it, a small, fast black bird of some kind. This puzzled me as big hawks should be kind of scary to smaller birds, but this one closed on the raptor quickly, looking like it was trying to win a race. Then suddenly, from slightly above, the blackbird divebombed the hawk, pecking once at its back then swinging wide to the right and getting lost fast. I recognized the call as belonging to a redwing blackbird. They are very aggressive about protecting their nests, which they build in ditches using grasses and mud. The males will perch on telephone wires to watch over their territory, and will sometimes get aggressive with passing bicyclists, pecking at their heads or helmets. Evidently they don't take any crap from red-tailed hawks, either.

Voodoo economics

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In a dream last week I was granted an important revelation:

We now have more empirical evidence for the existence of real-world zombies than we do for the validity of supply-side economics.

First came Miami: the case of a naked man eating most of another man's face. Then Texas: a mother accused of killing her newborn, eating part of his brain and biting off three of his toes. Then Maryland, a college student telling police he killed a man, then ate his heart and part of his brain.

It was different in New Jersey, where a man stabbed himself 50 times and threw bits of his own intestines at police. They pepper-sprayed him, but he was not easily subdued.

Update: post title changed to the obvious, which I started to do several times during composition but forgot.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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This is neat!



For starters, I never get tired of listening to the radio version of this tune. There's so much to like. First, it's a delicately balanced rock ballad; the tempo is danceable and almost brisk while the chord progression includes lots of nifty chromaticism that carries an emotional tinge.

Second, the lyrics deal with the overworked topic of young heartbreak with precocious maturity and a heartening lack of melodrama. As an expression of support for a friend who has lost the "game," I always perceived that Gerry was singing to a female friend, but that's not actually "hard-coded" into the lyrics. Assuming my interpretation represents the band's intent, there is one big way this type of song can go wrong: the consoling party (that is, the singer) is using sympathy as a pretext to worm his way into a distraught lady's undergarments. There's no room for suspicion of that in these lyrics, though.

Third, the arrangement handles the orchestration perfectly. The small string section provides atmospherics, the brass instruments contribute dignity, and the oboe phrases evoke the moments before sunrise better than any other voicing I can think of. This part of the chart reminds us that some adults took part in the production, too---George Martin, maybe? Whomever: they did themselves and the band great credit through economy and understatement, avoiding both cloying sentimentality and over-formality.

But this performance, as I say, is particularly neat to my earbones. It's from a 1964 edition of The Ed Sullivan Show. The boys are playing live, for real, with a small orchestra stashed away somewhere behind the theatrical flats or on the sidelines. As you can hear, there were some problems keeping the orchestra in sync with the band in a few places, particularly a brass flourish at the end of the bridge (around 1:40). I find these production artifacts to be endearing, and don't hear them as errors. These are the fingerprints of a noteworthy pop music performance by talented musicians who at the same time sound like regular, approachable people.

Along those same lines, they Pacemakers sound like they're playing regular, everyday instruments. The rhythm guitar and piano don't sound cheap, but unprocessed and unaffected. Their tones are the same sounds that talented kids in the neighborhood could produce in Dad's garage if they had the same equipment and experimented with the knobs. And I enjoy hearing all the raw detail in those instrumental parts---especially the guitar---that were not conspicuous on the single.

Although I can't be certain, this sounds like the same performance included on a disc I own that collects Ed Sullivan Show recordings of five British Invasion bands from 1964 - 1966. A few months ago I dug it out after it laid dormant in my "stacks" for almost 20 years, and became enamored of it. As I've implied, the sound will not impress audiophiles, but the audio fidelity is perfectly good for a live recording of the period, and most of the tracks offer fine performances replete with previously unheard details and artifacts like those I've mentioned above. The Billy J. Kramer material is good (two Lennon-McCartney songs). The Searchers track, Needles and Pins, is also very nice and makes me wish a few more had been included. Peter and Gordon are alright, and even the four (!) Herman's Hermits tracks are decent---much better than I expected. Besides the Pacemakers' three tracks, the disc ends with a great "set" by The Animals, who exude a genuine and unprocessed character that you could imagine being played in a bar or college gym. The only stinker of the lot is I'm Telling You Now by Freddie and the Dreamers (sorry, lads, but even as a kid I didn't care for your sucky novelty music). A production note about the disc: each "set" is well engineered to sound like a single performance, but many of them are edited together from different locations in the space-time continuum.

Anyway, back to the libretto: below I'm providing the catalog information from the version I own, which will deviate from the YouTube particulars because mine is audio and theirs is video.

Don't Let The Sun Catch You Crying, Gerry and the Pacemakers (performance 10 May 1964, from "The Sullivan Years: The British Invasion" [1990], TVT Records TVT 9428-2), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Odd: gas prices have fallen

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I almost failed to notice that a gallon of gasoline costs about $0.50 less than it did here at the end of March. I guess this price decline didn't rise to my awareness because I haven't heard Republican congressmen and centrist pundits gabbing nonstop on NPR about how President Obama has done such an extraordinary job in this connection.

Out back

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Still have more days off than I've used so far this hiatus. Here are three snaps of a job I dreamed up 2 years ago. I think slow.

I started the project 2 years ago by buying the wrong kind of cedar for the frame, but only discovered that after assembling the frame last summer. Since worrying about that for a year didn't transform the cedar into below-grade quality, I decided to sink it into the ground just to avoid more delays. I assumed this would would be a crap job that I'd have to redo in a few years anyway.

As it turned out, the quality happens to be pretty high. The photo on the left shows the frame with a compacted bed of soil and brick rubble, with four sacks of patio-base gravel (also called roadpack) tamped down over it manually. (The brick rubble backfill was probably a stupid idea that I will regret later, along with the off-spec wood.) The three sacks pictured just about filled the frame to where it needed to be. Lots more tamping ensued with an 8 x 8 cast iron plate mounted at the end of a heavy garden-tool handle. My big innovation was discovering that the paver stones are the same thickness as a 2 x 4, so I screwed together a float-type device, center picture, to level the roadpack to the correct recess, pulling the device back and forth and merrily tamping it all until I was pretty flurking sick of it. The right-hand photo shows all the stones in place, with roadpack having been carefully poured, swept around, tamped, etc., to fill in all the cracks. I should have wetted the stone for this final photo so it would match the other two. The pavers aren't as pale as they appear in the final shot. If you want a closer look, by the way, clicking on the picture should load a larger version.

Note the clump of Shenandoah switchgrass near upper left. After construction I backfilled around the frame with soil excavated from elsewhere on the estate, then moved the switchgrass to the end of the path to prevent drunken visitors from falling over the ledge. This edifice constitutes the scenic overlook of the estate, which is known to myself and the lads as Moronica International State Park.

To the left of the path is the asparagus garden, which is not doing so hot this year. Now that I have this job in the Done column, I can begin thinking about extending the path 90 degrees to the left. Why? Because some moron laid a mess of these pavers on top of playground sand on the west side of my house about 20 years ago, creating a paradise for ant colonies and invasive weeds. Two years ago I dug them out and stacked them on a palette. So this is a recycling project. Also a weight-control project.

Editor's note: Please forgive rusty, mediocre text. I am on hiatus, and so is my brain.

Sixteen-day weekend

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Starting this evening. I will reacquaint myself with the enterprise soon.

I've gotten one rabid monkey completely off my back now---my ill-fated experiment in volunteerism. Any such future endeavors will be limited to monkey work only.

One more to go---the construction management text I've been working through a long developmental edit for about 18 months. I think the author and I both agree on the form and scope of the book, and the main text has finally been written in a coherent form. Some substantive editing remains (naturally).

After that I think I'll consider taking up opium smoking (medicinal applications only, of course).

Go Cubbies!

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Hey-Hey! Holy Mackerel!

As in: "Holy mackerel, Andy!" No doubt about it!

The Avengers movie: worth not sneaking into

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I think Marvel Entertainment has done a reasonably good job on the more recent releases I've seen, namely Thor, the first Iron Man, and (going back a way), the first Spider-Man. This pleases me, because my first two boyhood favorites---Fantastic Four and Daredevil---were so mishandled that, based on reviews alone, I refused to go near them. Not even worth sneaking in to see.

A contemporaneous reader of 1960s Marvel Comics should enjoy The Avengers. My standard of excellence for movies based on comics I read as a kid is not Art, but a port from pulp paper to cinema that is faithful to the original in tone and atmosphere while using digital effects to make the exercise of superpowers seem feasible and naturalistic. Avengers succeeds at both of these "metrics" through excellent casting of the principal characters (with one exception) and very good battle choreography.

Each of the main heroes captures what an adult reader of '60s superhero literature would expect of the characters. Captain America is not that far on the good-looking side of average, and his personality is pretty wooden. That is good; lesser directors would have made the mistake of infusing him with glamor and wit, the same formula used to cast every male protagonist in a film aimed at a teenage audience. What makes him Captain America is that he's an operational wizard, commander-wise. Tony Stark is, as you would expect, a brilliant, arrogant asshole. Thor is a little bit dumb. And Bruce Banner was both entirely original yet correct in original spirit as a somewhat distracted, slightly disheveled scientist who is terrified of and addicted to his own capacity for rage.

The Hulk, incidentally, is one of the most problematic characters in this genre to portray, and all previous attempts I've seen (both live action and animated cartoon) miss the mark either somewhat or by a very wide margin. This one succeeds. For more on the subject, I'll commend your attention to a recent analysis in The New Yorker by a newfangled reviewer who goes by the monicker of Film Crit Hulk. He (she, or it) nails the topic for the most part, except that I disagree with his assessment of Bill Bixby's Bruce Banner.

Unfortunately, I feel strongly that Sam Jackson was miscast as Nick Fury. This is both a '60s fanboy thing and a matter of comics history. Originally created by Jack Kirby as a WWII commando squad leader, Fury was one of Kirby's two self-ascribed alter-egos within the literal universes of characters he created in his career (which he spent largely as an exploited piecework artist by Marvel). Fury had no superpowers, either as a sergeant or as a secret agent for SHIELD. We kids knew him as the cigar-chompin' tough guy with a Bronx accent who was much smarter than he sounded. A very similar personality, but much more insecure and alienated (not to mention having an epidermis of orange rocks) was Ben Grimm, who mutated into The Thing in 1961. Kirby has identified both of those characters as versions of himself, with Thing reflecting how he felt about himself and Fury reflecting how he would like to have been seen by the world. (Kirby wrote their dialog, and much more, but was never given writer credits by Stan Lee.) So, out of respect both to the original creation and to Kirby, I think that the producers should have passed on Sam Jackson's star power (and anyone else's star power as well) and cast an actor who could portray Fury as being instantly recognizable to geezer fanboys. But since Kirby---co-creator of all the principal Avengers characters plus Fury---was almost passed over in the end credits, thanks in large measure to decades of bad faith by Stan Lee, maybe it's no wonder that Fury's authentic character is nowhere to be found in the movie. It's not that Jackson does a bad job; it's just that he's nothing like Agent Fury or his barking, hard-fisted homunculus.

About the combat choreography: a trouble I always have with CG battles in superhero movies is that they're very hard to parse, visually. Everything happens too close and too fast for my eyebones to sort out. In the Avengers, things happen as loud and fast as you would expect, but somehow it was much easier for me to perceive the action taking place in a fixed landscape. The raw power exchanged between Thor and Iron Man, trying to kick each other's ass due to a misunderstanding in the Mighty Marvel Tradition, feels plausible as they fling each other into heavy, unmovable objects without restraint. However, the one thing I think we're always going to have to suspend our disbelief about is the dynamics of mass, momentum, and inertia: we just can't escape many incidents where the low-power and no-power humans such as Fury, Hawkeye, Black Widow, and even Cap should be liquified, decapitated, amputated, or blunt-force-trauma-ed by a sudden acceleration from zero to, say, 100 g (or the converse). These things occur when being swatted by the Hulk, or thrown by an explosion, or grabbing ahold of an alien flying motorscooter moving at about Mach 1. Deal with it, ya yardbirds!

Big Rock Head criticized the movie's style of humor as being too Scrubs. My reaction was that he may be correct in making the connection, but that the humor used in The Avengers was very much in the spirit of the original Marvel scripts, and even Mad Comics---simultaneously witty and corny---and predates Scrubs by decades if not centuries. We can see similar formulations in The Three Stooges, for example. At the root of BRH's observation (I'm assuming, here, because I've never seen an episode of Scrubs) is that the modern sitcom form has become so dilute that it builds entire teleplays on a series of round-robin quips that try to serve as substance instead of periodic punctuation. So the humor in The Avengers is not high comedy, but that's because it doesn't have to be. It serves the same purpose in the movie that it did on the newsprint pages 45 years ago---to lighten the violent action and humanize the characters.

All things considered, the director and producers deserve lots of credit. The Avengers is a movie worth paying to see. But reflexive cynicism tells me that it's probably not too early to start worrying about how The Corporation will do its best to lower the common denominator for the next installment by 30 IQ points or so.

Apropos of nothing still

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I've decided that I swear too goddam much. It sounds slovenly to my ears, except on the occasion of a well-selected, well-timed interjection that provides or reinforces an aspect of the communication that can be provided in no other way.

So, while I am not promising to swear off the practice (nyuk nyuk nyuk BONK! D'OHHH!), I do commit to reducing this verbal litter in my beautiful walled garden that is Fifty50. Please do make a note of it, and thank you for your attention in this matter.

Apropos of almost nothing

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In reference to the comments thread in this post, here's what a real Cubs manager sounds like:



Thank you for your attention in this matter.

Saturday Night After Hours

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Here's an oddly glorious-sounding ditty from the soundtrack of Frank Zappa's out-of-print movie 200 Motels.



I just happened to listen to my CD version of this tonight whilst making a batch of Utility Research Muffins, Bluberry-Orange, and felt like sharing it with the rest of yez.

They lyrics represent a lament of the late-sixties rock star, who it would seem did not always necessarily have access to the highest-class of groupie after any given show (particularly in a place like "Centerville: A Real Nice Place To Raise Your Kids Up." The falsetto vocals are by Turtles singers Howard Kaylan and Mark Vollman, who formed the core of Zappa's "vaudeville band." (The bass player in this aggregation was Jim Pons, yet another Turtles alumnus.) The subject matter of this band was heavily skewed toward obscene, surreal vignettes from "life on the road," which also was the theme (such as it was) for the movie.

It's hard for me to put my finger on what I like about the timbre of the organ in this one. It's churchy and industrial and atmospheric all at once, with lots of colorful fat-fingered dissonances. The trombone is used in an unusual way in this cut, too, being the only wind instrument in evidence. Even more unusual: it's played by George Duke, known pretty much exclusively for keyboards in subsequent versions of the Mothers and, later, in the jazz world at large. The reverb of pretty much everything is both completely over the top and just right to my earbones.

Another oddity: the mix on this version sounds significantly different from my CD on Ryko. don't know if the poster took this from the vinyl or the VHS movie soundtrack, or if the CD was released more than once with different mixes. Zappa was notorious for doing ridiculous things with the mixes and edits on CD reissues... and not necessarily well loved for it by his fans. In this case, though, the mix on this version is fine by me---it just highlights sounds and nuances that aren't apparent on any version I've heard recently. One day I will pull out the vinyl, wipe it down, and give it a hear.

What Will This Evening Bring Me This Morning? Frank Zappa and The Mother Of Invention (1971, from the "original MGM motion picture soundtrack" of "Frank Zappa's 200 Motels," Rykodisc RCD 10513/14), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Go, you White Sox!

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Suck on this, you North Side yuppies, hipsters, and sorry hangers-on!

Saturday Evening Prayer Meeting

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Over the past 6 weeks or so I've been bemused by American right-wing Roman Catholic hierarchs and politicians who seem to think that this here is the Papal States of America we all live in. They're dangerous nuts who should stay the hell out of electoral politics and thank the Trinity that their secular activities aren't taxed into destitution, where they belong.



In the 1960s, Tom Lehrer (who Wikipedia tells me is still alive, by gum!) could perform this type of comedy music on a nationally broadcast TV variety show, and I think that most of the audience of the time would have understood the setup he provides here before the song. We had a Catholic president at the time who had pledged sincerely and truthfully that the executive branch under him would be taking no direction from Rome. At the same time, the Vatican II reforms Lehrer refers to were making the Catholic Church less foreign-seeming and scary to everyday Protestant types (not to mention many in the American Catholic congregation).

Can you imagine what the likes of failed presidential candidates Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich would have to say about this performance today were it to be given on, say Saturday Night Live? Demands for boycotts of the network, apologies, congressional hearings!

And I must say, as I listen to these lyrics through adult ears for the first time (I heard this song plenty of times as a kid from the old blond Olympia hi-fi console in the living room), I'm suddenly much less sure that this parody was fully intended in good nature. I really wish Lehrer were inspired out of retirement by the repugnance of RC current events (including the church's indifference toward its own multigeneration pastoral sex-crime rampage and systematic cover-up) to record an update.

The Vatican Rag, Tom Lehrer (11 September 1967, Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Saturday Evening Prayer Meeting

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Gorgeous song; music maybe not what one would expect by the title.



As I've mentioned before, song lyrics have almost always been a secondary consideration to me because I could rarely understand them, articulationwise. I tend to listen to the vocals first as another instrument in the arrangement. Then, if I can understand the words as coherent phrases in English, fine. But I'm a pretty literal-minded guy, so I feel real proud of myself if I can extract the composer's intended meaning from roundabout poetics.

E's lyrics are very personal, always. People who know something about the personal tragedies he endured as a younger man may have a clue about the enigmatic lyrics of this song. I happened to think of playing it for you tonight because as we approach the climax of the Christian Holy Week it comes to mind that (1) some traditions hold that Christ spent the Saturday after his crucifixion in Hell and (2) we never learned about this part of the religion in Sunday School or even confirmation as young teenagers in the Methodist denomination. At this point I will invite The Minister's Daughter to shed any light on this, as available. (Allegory and all.) Also, Beer-D and/or Big Rock Head should feel free to disambiguate the content of the lyrics to this haunting Eels composition.

Your Lucky Day In Hell, Eels (1996, from "Beautiful Freak," Dreamworks DRMD-50001), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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Here's Diana Krall's peckerwood husband.



Just kidding! (Peckerwood-wise.) Elvis Costello has been a favorite of mine for over 30 years, and this cut stands out to me among his long list of masterpieces.

The zippy pop arrangement, as exuberant as bubble gum, provides the happy "vector" for delivering an apocalyptic prophecy for Empire. I assume that Costello's lyrics were understood much more directly by his British audience, being children of an imperial twilight, than by Americans. But his imagery is so vivid that the thrust of the words were readily discerned even by a complacent twenty-something college slacker in 1979 who had little detailed knowledge of colonialism.

This song has not become any less relevant with the decline of the great Western colonial powers, because those empires have been supplanted by extractive transnational corporate enterprises that rival the power of  any in world history. And ultimately, I think the new ones are every bit as doomed as the ill-fated empires of Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal. This is still a prophetic, snappy little pop ditty that should haunt the brain stem of any plutocrat within hearing distance.

Oliver's Army, Elvis Costello and the Attractions (1979, from "Armed Forces," Columbia JC35709), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Bonus fun stuff: while scavenging my vinyl LP collection for the catalog information I rediscovered the bonus 33 rpm demo EP packaged with the original US release of Armed Forces. It contains "Watching The Detectives," "Accidents Will Happen," and "Allison." Also stashed away in the sleeve: my ticket stub for the 10 March 1979 Elvis & Attractions performance at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago. Bruce Pavitt's girlfriend smuggled my camera into that show under her greatcoat after a security goon tried to confiscate it from me. Don't try that today unless you're prepared to get beaten in the skull with a five-cell Maglite or else give some fat turd a blowjob.

DuckDuckGo[ogle]

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In addition to some suggestions I recently offered about making your computer and your privacy (possibly) less vulnerable to invasion when using the web, I stumbled across another goodie that seems positioned for breakout popularity soon. It's a search engine called DuckDuckGo.

First, it reminds me of Google 10-plus years ago: a simple site that searches for stuff you type in real fast and returns results rank-ordered in terms of raw relevance in relation to your keywords. Many of us with broadband access at work developed a reflexive Google habit sometime during the second term of Hillary Clinton's peckerwood husband. And probably just as many of us have retained the habit, uncritically. This has enabled Google to build a colossal technology concern, funded by advertising targeted to your web browser and its search history (and by cross-referencing lots of other stuff in the background). Good for them; I'm happy to see a (somewhat) progressive competitor in the tech business to challenge Apple, Microsoft, RIM, Sony, and whomever.

During the past decade, though, Google dove into an aggressively extractive business model that some people call corporatism. As it has happened everywhere else over the past 30 years, people on the internet have devolved from human beings into customers and then resources; from citizens into capital and then commodities. This isn't Google's fault, of course, but Google is evidently really good at delivering our eyeballs to merchants and marketing snoops who then use them to colonize our attention. (I say "apparently" because Firefox and its privacy plug-ins shield me from most of it, so I don't observe the full extent of the privacy invasion from where I sit.)

Anyway, I've found the Google search engine to be a lot less helpful to me in the past several years. Maybe you have, too. And you, like I, have probably read about why this is the case. For example, Google delivers search results keyed to our ZIP code, our search history, stuff reported back to the company by our browser cookies, and so on. At the DuckDuckGo site, they explain it. The term of art is bubbling, as in keeping you in a bubble of isolation, searchwise, based on what Google and its "partners" determine to be the best way to extract consumer-type attention from you. Check it out. It's the clearest and most concise explanation of bubbling I've seen. Likewise, read their explanation of how tracking works. Top-notch education in a dozen pictures and captions.

My initial results with DuckDuckGo seem to be a world away from the chaff that Google delivers these days. I've set a button on my Firefox bookmark bar and will install the DDG search plug-in as soon as Mozilla gets its act together and fixes the Firefox installation bug. (Dumbness that I won't get sidetracked on here.)

I haven't read anything about the company yet, and I hope their strat plan isn't to become "the next Google." If they were to set up as an open-source nonprofit like the Wikimedia Foundation, I'd donate some green stuff to them.

I don't have any animosity toward Google The Corporation, but extractive capitalism is just not compatible with respect for the individual and his or her privacy. So their having a real search competitor is just fine with me.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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This late-1940s public service announcement broadcast on the DuMont Television Network is, to me, a heartwarming artifact of an era in media history when at least some people may have been in the business for a constructive social purpose. Its target audience was kids, Video Rangers in particular---fans of Captain Video (such as Ed Norton). The PSA is earnest yet sincere, and the lesson is unassailable: fight discrimination by making friends. Prejudice gets in the way of making friends, and everyone wants lots of friends. Plus, prejudice is... un-American, of all things! Imagine someone saying that on TV today.



In fact, I cannot imagine a PSA of this caliber being created or broadcast in the current era. Even in the best case, I can hear in my mind's ear the condescension oozing through the glottis of some "cool" B-list celebrity paying lip service to some shallow feel-good message, as a vehicle for promoting someone's "brand." (Also: visibility and tax write-off!) The very idea of such a PSA would be considered "controversial," I'm sure, and thus focus-grouped to death before the project was orphaned to PBS where the message could be articulated by red, green, and blue Muppets.

Captain Video Anti-Discrimination PSA (late 1940s, DuMont Television Network), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Special bonus for all you Video Rangers:

I, Edward Norton, Ranger Third Class in the Captain Video Ranger Academy, do solemnly pledge to obey my mommy and daddy, to be kind to dumb animals and old ladies in and out of space, not to tease my little brothers and sisters and to brush my teeth twice a day and drink milk after every meal. 

Apropos of nothing

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I think that the most inherently funny word in the English language is "turd."

It is the perfect comic word. A person doesn't need to know what it means to find it funny; it just sounds funny independently of its meaning. And for that matter, I don't even think a person needs to speak English to find laughter in the word. Turd. It pretty much sounds like what it is.

Social science experiment: ask people of diverse linguistic heritage to repeat "turd" out loud five times and then guess what it means... and don't even tell them what language it is. I am confident that a landslide majority of the survey subjects would get it in one or two guesses.

Reluctantly acknowledging that opinions may differ from mine, tell me: what do you think is the funniest word in English? As always, thank you for your attention in this matter.

Don't mind them---they're morons

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Our correspondent in the Grampian Hills sends a riddle:

I saw [a] preview for the 3 stooges movie—I think it opens around mid April. They (whoever they are) seem to have the impersonations down OK but, why?

That is a bit of a noodle-scratcher, true. Beer-D has provided the most salient market-based analysis I've heard. (Yes, Stooge fans have been discussing this pending corporate profiteering atrocity for awhile.)

As Beer-D sees it, it's difficult to fathom what audience the movie producers are targeting. For kids who aren't familiar with the Stooges, none of the references or tributes to the original cast members will register. People of any age who did not like the original Stooges will have no interest in subjecting themselves to a impersonation of them. And, of course, it is hard to believe that any fans of the original Stooges will respond to the release with anything except contempt.

Some few charitable people might at least appreciate any craftsmanship and dedication that the actors may have applied to recreating the original characters and situations. But I don't think that will provide a sufficient basis for either a blockbuster box office or a career boost for the director. However, I may be wrong, and Beer-D may have missed something: maybe the target audiences are the Chinese and the French.