Sheltering in place

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I'm going to close the clamshell in a few minutes. I should probably stay offline until tomorrow, but I may check before I retire for the evening.

About the only thing I feel like saying right now is about what Gurlitzer said in a comment about the Mingus song posted below. So I'm delegating the bulk of tonight's writing chore to her (i.e., I'm plagiarizing her work):

Fuck the GOP and their just plain criminal behavior. And fuck the justice dept. for not doing anything about it. And fuck the corporate media who say no tax returns, Mitt? Well shucks, that's just fine with us. And while we know you are lying about everything, it's not our place to call you on it.

And Husted in Ohio now changes the rules on provisional ballots as just the latest in a string of attempts to curtail the vote. And no one will call it for what it is, blatant cheating. AND WE LET THEM ALL GET AWAY WITH IT.

And by the way, Watergate never really ended. These bastards will still do anything to win. 

Before I turned off the radio half an hour ago I heard an NPR news reader announce that his network projects a win for Bernie Sanders, an "independent" senator representing New Hampshire (he's a Socialist). I also heard two NPR newsgirls --- honestly, that's how they were behaving --- all giddy about the silly Republican county Supervisor of Elections in Florida who "accidentally" activated a voter turnout robocall a day late, possibly misleading some people to think they could vote on Wednesday. "Even ex-governor Charlie Crist's wife got a call!" one of them tittered. They were just tickled pink.

None of the accounts of election ratfucking in Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania (especially Philadelphia) seemed to be making it in any detail to NPR --- the general impression given by them is that other than a few hiccups everything is going fairly well, or something. So all the news about this I'm seeing comes from new media, basically, and Esquire online. All of those sources are well known to be skewed by liberal bias, so their reports can't be true. Phew! (Sorry about the lazy sourcing for the above; I want to get offline asap.)

I fear that there's a nontrivial probability that unsubtle attempts to steal the election have now moved from the planning to the execution stage, and that I will wake up tomorrow morning to a spectacle of drama where there should be a clear winner... and in which the corporate media give an Oscar performance of dumb-all-over. If that happens, it is feasible that we might not be looking merely at another 2000 in Florida or 2004 in Ohio (yes, it happened): a constitutional crisis could loom... one much bigger than the Sandra Day O'Connor Y2K junta.

Saturday Evening Prayer Meeting

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First, read this. Read it all, including this.

Then, listen to this:



...while reading the following (provided by YouTube uploader Charles Van Driel, whomever he may be):

"Original Faubus Fables" performed by Charles Mingus. Taken from the 1960 "Charles Mingus presents Charles Mingus" record. Composed by Charles Mingus.

It was written as a direct protest against Arkansas governor Orval E. Faubus, who in 1957 sent out the National Guard to prevent the integration of Little Rock Central High School by nine African American teenagers. This composition was also released a year earlier on the "Mingus Ah Um" record as "Fables Of Faubus" but only instrumental as record company Columbia refused the lyrics.

Lyrics:
Oh, Lord, don't let 'em shoot us!
Oh, Lord, don't let 'em stab us!
Oh, Lord, don't let 'em tar and feather us!
Oh, Lord, no more swastikas!
Oh, Lord, no more Ku Klux Klan!

Name me someone who's ridiculous, Dannie.
Governor Faubus!
Why is he so sick and ridiculous?
He won't permit integrated schools.

Then he's a fool! Boo! Nazi Fascist supremists!
Boo! Ku Klux Klan (with your Jim Crow plan)

Name me a handful that's ridiculous, Dannie Richmond.
Faubus, Rockefeller, Eisenhower
Why are they so sick and ridiculous?

Two, four, six, eight:
They brainwash and teach you hate.
H-E-L-L-O, Hello.

Charity toward all and malice toward none, my foot. In 5 years all we will have on the national political stage is Republicans and dissidents.

Original Faubus Fables, Charles Mingus (1960, from "Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus," Candid CCD 79005), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Miscellany [updated]

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I've been "falling back" all day---what have you slugs been doing?

I'm listening to Lenny Bernstein conduct "The Firebird" (1919 version) while preparing to announce the identity of Rodan, the avian raptor who visited final hell on a squirrel in my back yard the other morning. Bernstein's interpretation of the final triumphal theme (not sure what it's called, but it's what most of us rubes think of as the "famous firebird theme") is really kind of tacky, in my opinion---weird melodramatic "stutter steps" thrown in during the first woodwind leg of the lyrical melody, presumably so Bernstein could majestically profile for the society ladies and gentlemen. Then, as the brass join for the thrilling climax, he turns the thing into some kind of stilted, wooden march with approximately zero excitement or soul. It's the only version I have at this point, so I guess I'll shop for another.

Anyway, after poking around on Cornell University's bird site (home page here) I found a specimen of juvenile red-tail hawk that resembles my local guy. The juveniles have little or no red in the tail. What did surprise me, though, is how many "morphs" of this species there are---not only white-breasted ones, but some that are almost entirely a graphite color. Even though they are present around the year, the do migrate as Gurlitzer pointed out, so new individuals pass through.

Update: I just discovered that I've been wearing one brown and one black shoe most of the night. I suppose this phenomenon closely complements the increasing amount of drool that I'm finding on my pillow case these days.

The dawn of Rodan

*

Look at this monster. This is what greeted me when I raised the honeycomb-type window shade in my bedchamber this morning.

I see hawks in the yard fairly often owing to all the hawk feeding stations (i.e., songbird feeders) I have deployed throughout Moronica International State Park, the confines within which I live. But when I raised the shade, this juggernaut startled me all the way from the back of the property, at least 50 ft away from the window. My best guess is that his body alone, excluding his head and tail, was the size of a football.

Naturally, the battery was dead in the Nikon D-80 I've hung by the windows for such occasions. But Rodan seemed to be taking his time, so I was able to load a fresh cell, open the special non-screened shooting gallery window in the so-called breakfast nook adjoining the master suite, and began firing off snapshots. The zoom lens, extending only to a maximum of 200 mm, is barely adequate for capturing detail at such a distance.

After spazzing out just to make sure I captured something, I slowed down to start watching in order to select shots. The raptor's head was pretty mobile while eviscerating his breakfast, so timing matters. (I've never used a motor drive to capture "the decisive moment" through an accident of statistical probability since I consider it to be lazy.) While watching more closely I noticed some interesting detail accompanying nature's majestic pageant of evisceration. Pictured is an example.

After capturing about a dozen shots I put the camera away. And then, a minute later it occurred to me that I was stupid for not trying to sneak up on him for a closer view. So I got out the D-80 once more and sneaked out the quiet way---out the front door and around the west side. I couldn't get any closer, but I was able to shoot from a different angle. Obligingly, Rodan pivoted clockwise to show me a couple of profiles. Here is the best:

After this shot, I moved closer and Rodan effortlessly hopped over a 5 ft. fence with a partial squirrel carcass in its talon. Neither a Cooper's hawk nor the sharp-shinned hawk is large or strong enough to own a squirrel like this; I've watched and photographed one (either/or) be thwarted by your typical, everyday d-bag squirrel for several minutes. I have never seen this species before at close range, and my quick effort to identify it using my phone app turned up nothing. I think this is the same bird I pointed out to Beer-D recently, looking every bit the monster soaring lazily at 200 or 300 feet aloft. Apart from his size, I can't find any hawk species native to this area that has a clear, white breast. Also distinct from the local populations is the eye color---almost a light green-gold---and the rufous-brown shading behind the eye and around the beak. (However, the color around the beak might also be a swab of squirrel blood.) Judging from the tail so nicely displayed in this photo, he's (she's?) obviously not a red-tail. But then, there are differences in species based on gender, age, and even subspecies variants.

It will be a day or two before I can identify this beast. Maybe there's a bird watcher reading who knows what it is. If you click on either photo, it should display itself much larger.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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Not necessarily apropos to the nth degree, but, nevertheless, I am embedding this video in honor of the memory of Vaclav Havel, whose nonfiction writings I have just discovered and about whom I will have more to say later. For now let it suffice to say that the essay I am examining these days like an MRI scanner appears in a cheap edition printed on thirsty pulp paper that begs for marginalia to be inscribed by my genuine Fisher bullet Space Pen.



Now, as to the featured tune, and this particular performance of it, the following:

I've always loved it. My brain originally perceived it as being off-kilter in a way I couldn't explain. First, there's that George rhythm guitar riff that filled the radio like an anthem, but more closely resembled the random tones and percussive, lurching rhythms of a pinball machine to my delicate ears. Then, there's that part---repeatedly---that sounds like a ritardando-slash-meltdown, which is in all cases slapped aside by an abrupt return to the Harrison riff with Ringo bashing his tubs. And finally, there are the words: a song that has nothing to do with girls or whatever that other mysterious stuff was that they were singing about when I was in 7th grade (such as "Eleanor Rigby" and "Yellow Submarine"). This was just a song about a guy who wanted to write paperback books like the ones I used to like to smell at the drugstore news stand next to the comic book racks. (Like Dr No From Russia With Love, of which I could never get past the third page because it was too sexy---just kept reading the first three pages over and over.) So even then, in the back of my unsophisticated brain (infused with anti-knock leaded gas, as it was) I still found myself thinking, "huh?!?" It worked on me sort of like a zen koan.

About 25 years ago the concert from which this clip was extracted was issued by some obscure Italian label which, if memory serves, could get away with selling this bootleg recording at that time due to European copyright laws pertaining to live performances. I enjoyed the rawness of it, and for the first time I heard that the little "meltdown" segments were actually an ear-ptical illusion: when played live, Ringo kept the rhythm audible in the background to keep the lads together. In the studio recording, though, it just seems as if the band holds together via ESP.

Unlike some people, I'm not fazed by all the technical flaws of this recording. It is a document from early days, when the stars set up their own equipment on tour and they probably had no way of hearing themselves in their puny stage monitors over the screeching crowd and arena reverberations. But it does present Paul (fighting with his wobbly mic much of the time) phrasing the melody less "up-and-down" than on the single. It's too bad we don't have some high-quality relaxed, live performances from this era of their careers.

Paperback Writer, The Beatles (live, 2 July 1966, Budokan Hall, Tokyo, provenance of recording unknown), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Saturday Night Fish Fry (After Hours)

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Here's an unpublished (so to speak) set of Beatles tunes performed live by Frank Zappa and his ill-fated "best band you never heard in your life," from a 1988 concert in Helsinki.



I reckon Sir Paul will authorize commercial release of these recordings by the Zappa Family Trust about the time he officially designates Heather Mills as the Fifth Beatle.

Two things stand out to me in this clip: the quaint topicality of the lyrics and the technical acumen of both the musicians and the engineers in echoing the studio-type feel of the original Beatles recordings.

At this point in Frank's life, he was preoccupied by (among many other things) how TV evangelism had infused US politics with a sinister overtone, and so he was delighted when preachers like Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart were publicly exposed as sexual "perverts" and moral hypocrites, and he gleefully used it as "material." Most of the lyrics here focus on Swaggart, whose sex scandal broke into the news during the band's 1988 tour. But these were the waning days of the second Reagan administration, with the Iran-Contra affair and other Republican outrages having broken the windshield of our little democracy flivver and flattened three of its tires while the President drifted into senility. So we hear Zappa's mocking references to such one-hit wonders as National Security Advisor Admiral Poindexter and Attorney General Ed Meese. I think Zappa's parody lyrics are at their best when they remain vulgar and playful, as opposed to the more coarsely obscene texts for which he became infamous (in the Clean World, at least). In these pieces he veers over into the "obscene" lane, but arguably expresses no greater magnitude of depravity than Swaggart guiltily preached on any given day in his ministry. And all these lyrics are based on True Facts---set to the music of the Fab Four!

As one commenter on this video said (but for a different implied reason than I would give, and with which I disagree), the Beatles could not have performed most of these songs live with anywhere near the fidelity that FZ and his band accomplish in this performance. That's partially explained by the level of sophistication that synthesizer technology had reached by the end of his career, but much more so by Zappa's almost-supernatural ears and almost-peerless skills as an arranger. The musicians must also be credited for their technical skills, but as herded and over-rehearsed by FZ and---worse---a junior musician whom he put in charge of drilling the band on a daily basis as his own health began to emerge as a debilitating problem. Because of his stature, Zappa could get away with rehearsal schedules that could fairly be called abusive, but his second-tier foreman couldn't command the same obedience. So Zappa's musicians revolted and the band fell apart halfway through the world tour. (Strangely, Wikipedia doesn't have any account of this major milestone in Zappa's career---the end of it as a performing musician, to be exact---so I can't link to it.)

This video presents the same 12-piece band documented live on Broadway the Hard Way, The Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life, and Make A Jazz Noise Here, which Zappa issued to help him recover from a financial loss of about half a million dollars (in an era when that probably meant twice as much as it does today). Broadway is the most broadly (hurhurhurrrr) appealing, but bristles with Reagan-era political topicality that isn't universal enough to have aged well. The others have a few high points, but come across as thrown-together filler tour tapes. The Beatles suite played here is much more entertaining and respectful of the source material than the pointlessly condescending covers of "Purple Haze" and "Stairway To Heaven" that show up on Best Band.

I think FZ really believed that this lineup was in fact his best band ever. From a technical standpoint, that would be his call to make. But as a fan, I've never gotten much enjoyment from his '80s ensembles. They achieved their precision and impressive responsiveness to Zappa's extemporaneous direction through the maestro's extreme exercise of control and, as I say, over-rehearsal to the point of sounding brittle underneath it all. Nevertheless, this particular segment sounds more relaxed and human than I've come to expect from Zappa's latter-day aggregations.

What do you think? Does this music do anything for you?

Beatles Suite, Frank Zappa and band (1988, live in Helsinki, Finland, provenance of recording unknown), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Editor's note: as Fifty50 readers who have taken Music Appreciation will observe, this music isn't actually a medley, but a regular sequence of songs with each having a segue into the next.

Saturday Evening Prayer Meeting

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I wish that whomever posted this clip on YouTube had obscured the identity of the musicmakers. It's an epic bit of fucking around by Brian Wilson that hints at what he might have accomplished in the studio armed with better mental hygiene.



Starting at about 0:12 and repeating through the track you can hear the Woody Woodpecker motif in the high register of the accordion, which accounts for the subtitle of the composition. There's also a bonus cartoon theme that's even more prominent, arrangementwise, though to my embarrassment I can't identify the source material by its proper title. (Maybe one of you can.) It's featured in at least one Bugs Bunny episode---the one where he has invaded Elmer Fudd's surrealistic dreams (the one with the Salvatore Dali landscapes) for the express purpose of driving Mr. Fudd insane. Bugs gives lyrics to some old saw of a classical theme, thusly: "The rabbits are coming, hurrah, hurrah...!" Wilson uses a slight variation of it. What a nut!

I really enjoy, and am still taken aback by, the psychological tone of this piece. It certainly conveys something foreboding along the lines of a return to winter... at least the winters of yesteryear when all the leaves dropped from the trees, the insects died, the birds flew south, and the landscape was blanketed in frozen gray water crystals for 3 or 4 months.

Fall Breaks and Back to Winter (Woody Woodpecker Symphony), The Beach Boys (reissue 1990, "Smiley Smile & Wild Honey," Capitol C2 93696), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Coulda been a contender

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Well, whatever, I guess. Liberal bloggers everywhere all pumped by the "open letter" that Vikings punter Chris Kluwe wrote to a bullying, homophobic Maryland state legislator on Friday. You can read here, in addition to the letter, the circumstances prompting Kluwe to write it. I don't have any reason to doubt the authenticity of his motives for writing it, and he falls on the same side of both issues he addresses---freedom of speech and equal rights for gays---that I do. Hooray for both of us and all our fellow travelers! But after reading the piece line by line I ended up feeling like I had wasted my time.

I have a classical view of public communication: in order to have impact, it should have a clear purpose and a target audience. In a case like this, I'd expect Kluwe's purpose to be persuasion, and the target audience---beyond the purported addressee, Maryland state delegate Emmett C. Burns Jr.---to be the mainstream media for maximum reach. If not, then why not... and what instead? The only two answers I can think of are (1) self promotion and (2) stirring up the pot for laughs.

Kluwe is obviously articulate and thoughtful, so I thought it was too bad that he squandered his shot at the public ear with pointless obscenities and stock badboy smack talk. An articulate and thoughtful person can cut any stupid asshole to ribbons with a simple, logical rebuttal and festoon it with plenty of invective that could still feasibly be discussed on Sunday morning networks or even NFL pregame shows (assuming the purpose of saying anything in the first place is impact and reach). Even assuming that probably wouldn't happen, because they are the corporate media, after all, there would still be no room for anyone to dismiss what Kluwe wrote with prejudice simply because he couldn't restrain himself from using the swear words.

Yet check out the second-to-last paragraph in his letter, where he buries the serious, well-thought-out point of his piece:

I can assure you that gay people getting married will have zero effect on your life. They won't come into your house and steal your children. They won't magically turn you into a lustful cockmonster. They won't even overthrow the government in an orgy of hedonistic debauchery because all of a sudden they have the same legal rights as the other 90 percent of our population—rights like Social Security benefits, child care tax credits, Family and Medical Leave to take care of loved ones, and COBRA healthcare for spouses and children. You know what having these rights will make gays? Full-fledged American citizens just like everyone else, with the freedom to pursue happiness and all that entails. Do the civil-rights struggles of the past 200 years mean absolutely nothing to you?

I don't object to Kluwe's deft deployment of the term "cockmonster" here, because it forcefully and justifiably ridicules the consciously rationalized premise of homophobes. (Myself, I would have framed the word in quotation marks since it is a term of art, so to speak.) It's too bad that this---Kluwe's actual point---is virtually invisible, and it's one purposeful obscenity neutered by the three gratuitous paragraphs that precede it.

The story could have been "NFL player treats politician, club owner to lesson in rights". Instead we have a patronizing story line, relegated to the liberal blog ghetto, about a pro athlete playing against the widely held public stereotypes of ignorance, homophobia, and conservatism. In other words, the story is mostly about Kluwe the celebrity and the novelty of his letter, and hardly at all about the thuggish and chilling machinations of whistledick state lawmaker Emmett C. Burns Jr. That's too bad: Kluwe coulda been a contender.

Enough of the "Big Dog" crap already!

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I wish another member of the Bush-Cheney administration would get explosive diarrhea for each time I see a variation on this particular idea:

Move over little dog, the big dog's moving in.

I'm truly and eternally mystified why every card-carrying liberal seems to worship Hillary Clinton's peckerwood husband, who signed a law to end the Glass-Steagal Act for banking system integrity; signed the homophobic Defense of Marriage Act; established the humiliating Don't Ask/Don't Tell military personnel policy; beat up on poverty-stricken Americans by adopting a Republican plan to add to the misery of public aid recipients; signed the authoritarian Digital Millennium Copyright Act and Sonny Bono Copyright Act, and pranced around as one of the nation's biggest cheerleaders for a tidal wave of economic globalization initiatives that give us (and citizens of all other nations) much less leeway to run our own affairs, delegating sovereignty upwards to trans-national corporations.

Bill Clinton "beat" the Republicans simply by adopting much of their program and tongue-washing it in expertly-delivered feel-your-pain rhetoric that might either have issued from the mouth of a man with a conscience or a man without one. This is the real reason why he drove Republicans crazy: he was in a position to make them obsolete. They simply had to neutralize him, if not destroy him. And Clinton obligingly gave them a prong they could hang an impeachment trial on.

Too, I'd be surprised if there aren't many liberal Democratic women who are, secretly, at least a little uneasy about all this Big-Dog adulation, considering that the one accomplishment Clinton will always be remembered for is seducing a White House intern into a grossly uneven power relationship that involved having his lumpy pecker (possibly the veteran of a dozen chancres). At very least, it seems that the Big Dog may not have much more respect for women and their feelings than any off-the-shelf rock star.

Can anyone point to a single constructive, progressive piece of legislation promoted and signed into law by Hillary Clinton's peckerwood husband that every made anyone's life better outside of a corporate shareholder's meeting or a beltway political consultancy? Truly, I can't think of a single Bill Clinton accomplishment that matters today in any positive way.

You're welcome

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Starting tonight in Tampa, Fla., and continuing for the next several days, the national Republican Party will transform a cavernous ice hockey rink into a cavernous horse hockey rink.

Slice of life

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I decided to mow the lawn for the first time today since Memorial Day weekend. So as I crouched over the lawn mower carefully pouring gasoline from a 2 gallon can, directly from the neck without the spout, I noticed that the ember of my lit cigar was about 15 in. from the tank. "Hmm," I said to myself, "I need to go park this cigar somewhere else." So I did.

Mitt Romney, telepath?

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It seems that Dubya-II either anticipated this morning's rumination on this blog or, perhaps more likely, had himself a Freudian slip about something that may be gnawing at him underneath it all:

Mitt Romney accidentally introduced Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) — his Vice Presidential running mate — as the “next President of the United States,” on Saturday.

I was listening while I was typing my first "patsy" post, and didn't catch the remark. In all seriousness and humility, I am certain Dubya-II has never read this blog. See what he's missing? Validation!

For whatever it's worth, I got the link from Krugman's blog.

Ryan and Dubya-II

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I'll be interested to see how many years of tax returns Paul Ryan makes public now that he's VP stock. His nominal mentor now, Dubya-II, may stand to lose no matter what Ryan does. If Ryan releases more than 2 years of returns, he makes Romney look bad and at least temporarily refocuses the "national dialog" on what Dubya-II might be hiding, financewise. And if Ryan releases 2 years or less, then he redoubles Romney's vulnerability on tax secretiveness and helps to keep the issue alive "with a bullet," as they used to say in Variety Billboard.

If Romney really has demoted himself to the role of patsy for a cabal of evil men, as at least one observer suggests, then Ryan could shiv him and twist it a few times by releasing 10 full years of returns. Anything that makes Romney a more untenable candidate than he already is now helps Ryan and that highly hypothetical, almost completely improbable cabal.

Creepy hypocrite

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Here's another kernel from Charlie Pierce on Paul Ryan, the right-wing congressman

who lies awake at night worrying that The Deficit will come and eat our grandchildren, lives in a house overseen by the National Park Service, which means that he qualifies for a 20 percent investment tax credit for the house he lives in. Of course, his "budget" would largely decimate the NPS, but that would be only those parts of it enjoyed by other people.

Pierce also reminds us that Ryan, who told the Virginia crowd this morning how he lost his father at an early age, was supported throughout his youth by Social Security survivor benefits that kept a roof over his family's head and food in their stomachs. For Ryan, Social Security benefits are an entitlement; for our kids and their offspring, it's a handout reeking of moral hazard that must be eliminated.

Bullied

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I think Charlie Pierce at the Esquire Politics Blog makes the two most important points you'll hear in the coming week about Mitt Romney's VP candidate:

Paul Ryan is an authentically dangerous zealot. He does not want to reform entitlements. He wants to eliminate them. He wants to eliminate them because he doesn't believe they are a legitimate function of government. He is a smiling, aw-shucks murderer of opportunity, a creator of dystopias in which he never will have to live. This now is an argument not over what kind of political commonwealth we will have, but rather whether or not we will have one at all, because Paul Ryan does not believe in the most primary institution of that commonwealth -- our government. The first three words of the Preamble to the Constitution make a lie out of every speech he's ever given. He looks at the country and sees its government as an something alien that is holding down the individual entrepreneurial genius of 200 million people, and not as their creation, and the vehicle through which that genius can be channelled for the general welfare.

Pierce, like Paul Krugman specifically on economics, has been way out in front of the pack in their fingering Ryan as a phony and a troglodyte. They've made it clear, with argumentation and documentation, that his reputation for both intellectualism and decency are thinly sliced baloney served to us corporate celebrity pundits.

But I think Pierce makes an even more salient point as a throwaway line:

Leave it to Willard Romney, international man of principle, to get himself bullied into being bold and independent.

I agree. Think about what what Romney personally has to gain by selecting a clone of himself. A clone who is actually popular with the Republican base and may be popular with many so-called swing voters. Answer: nothing.

I think there is a nontrivial probability that Romney has been bullied into demoting himself to the role of patsy, so to speak, in a scheme by a cabal of evil men.

Wise sayings

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Since Willard Romney wants to continue and expand the Bush tax cuts so people like him pay less tax than nail ladies, I think we should just start referring to him as Dubya-II.

Tomorrow's matinee tonight

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This looks like a job... for Superman!



Kee-reist, Clark---why don't you just announce it to all of Metropolis on the electric radio?

This is the third Superman feature released by Fleischer Studios, and it's some pretty weak sauce compared with most in the series. One thing that's odd is that it's really light on dialog; odd because the Fleischers usually give us a heaping helping of unhinged villains chewing up the scenery with their turgid threats and declamations. Here, after seeing a headline about the "largest single shipment of gold ever attempted" on a flashy, coal-fired streamline deco passenger train (?!), we are on our own for most of the feature. Not that it's very challenging to decode, but these cartoons generally spell things out very explicitly for the juvenile target audience. Why has it become a runaway train, for example, instead of just rolling to a stop or---more plausibly---Lois taking over the controls? She's a skilled pilot, after all, as we learned in episode 1. (She also has no problem handling a Tommy gun here.)

The scenery and action are beautifully rendered, as we would expect from the Fleischers. But the physics are mostly awful, especially where Superman is manhandling the train to keep it off the floor of the gorge. Usually, one of the best things about this series is the way the animators convey a sense of mass and kinetic energy through The Man Of Steel's interaction with objects. So even in this weak episode, they do come through for us in the scenes where Superman struggles to pull the train uphill. The sound effects of the train axles help to sell the illusion.

It's fortunate for this gang of gold rustlers that railroad rights-of-way were so wide and drivable in the early 1940s and were so accessible from any stretch of highway. I love the scene where, although the teargas seems to be getting the best of our hero, one of the bad guys panics and just chucks the whole crate of grenades at once. Something else the kids and I used to laugh at: the scenes where Superman pulls the train toward the camera and gets his crotch all up in the viewer's grille. This is not the only episode in which Fleischer animators used that visual point of reference, either.

One throwaway animation effect that looks quite difficult to have rendered is the guard's shadow moving on the newspaper front page starting at about 1:39. Also, at about 7:55 we get a nice architectural view of the Depression-era "government mint" complex, but I wonder why the monumental inscription on the arch faces the building interior.

Billion Dollar Limited (1942, "Superman" cartoon by Fleischer Studios for Paramount Pictures; Myron Waldman and Frank Endres, animators; Dave Fleischer, director), via YouTube, a work in the public domain embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Purfuit of Happineff

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There's a reason behind the neglect of my personal writing here over the past month or two: I've been absorbed in the "endgame" of editing (and designing and laying out) a book on the topic of construction management for a professional associate. Just between us girls, this work has taken over twice the amount of hours I'd expected based on the author's original proposal, and I'd estimate that the task has probably been three or more times the original anticipated difficulty.

I've stuck with this forlorn task for reasons that I need not go into here except to say that I may see more financial potential in the project than the author actually does.

A few weeks ago I encountered an event horizon, so to speak, marking the beginning of this publishing endgame. Specifically, it was a more or less final definition of the project scope (which is ordinarily the first order of business on a publishing job). So now I'm pushing the issue pretty hard and have declared myself to be in control of the final schedule. At the moment I'm dealing with a few last-minute efforts by the author to "creep the scope" of the editing task too far for my energy to endure. So while there is still some uncertainty remaining with the closeout, I am within no more than a few weeks of being done.

At that time, I will be free to indulge in my own personal Purfoot of Happineff to the full extent I wish. That, of course, includes tending to that garden of earthly delights you know as Fifty50.



Click here for provenance of the audio recording. The clip embedded here also includes a candid recording of the true story of General George Washington's crossing of the Delaware River, which addresses another seminal event in the colonies' struggle for independence from those British Imperialists!

Stars and stripes

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A few years ago while drifting into sleep on a Sunday night, I had an aesthetic experience with a John Philip Sousa march. Our FM public radio station used to run a show called Pipe Dreams, which featured a fairly wide range of music as performed on genuine pipe organs. (In its effort to make WILL-FM "even better," the program was eliminated 2 years ago and replaced with the same syndicated (i.e., simulated) classical music programming that fills about 18 hours of their 24-hour daily schedule.)

Anyway, that evening on Pipe Dreams was presented a rendition of Sousa's iconic "Stars and Stripes Forever," zestily pounded out on a major league, one-off concert pipe organ. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to retain either the organist's name or any information about his mighty instrument into the next day's waking world. But my mind was in a peculiarly receptive state between waking and sleeping, and the performance enthralled me.

I had enjoyed playing alto and tenor saxophone parts, both first and second, on this ditty in high school because most of the other instruments (especially the piccolo) were doing all the hard work. Yet the arranger---Hal Leonard, no doubt---was generous enough to let all the saxes play soli on one of the several famous melodies penned for the march... the one that goes "Dah Dah Dah-duh-duh duh-Duh-Duh" and so on. As with my K-12 concert band experience (starting in 5th grade, actually), my marching and pep band experience helped to plow a larger field for my musical tastes than I'd have tended otherwise.

But hearing "Stars and Stripes Forever" in my mentally, and I'd even say psychically, receptive state, made a memorable impression on me even on the verge of slumber. First, I was able to hear that the organist was hitting every essential note in the score outside of the percussion parts. That was plenty of a mind-blower to me, physical-coordinationwise, who admittedly is not familiar with the level of virtuosity needed for, say, Bach's baroque organ works. But more important was the clarity with which I grasped Sousa's composition. It was the first time I had ever experienced Stars and Stripes as a masterpiece of form, coherence, and even arithmetic.

I tried earlier today to find the specific performance of my memory on YouTube, but I couldn't (not on the first page, at least). The versions posted there are flawed, soundwise and performance-wise. The main problems are excessive echo or audience noise, which obscures an organist's precision; or, more typically, an organist's actual lack of precision and expressiveness. The version I heard that night was a well-engineered studio recording with all requisite reverb, but not too much. And the performer, whomever he was, sounded like he really got the piece. At the time of its composition, Stars and Stripes was not a mere patriotic chestnut written to be pried out of its shell once a year, but was actually a huge pop music genre of the period. I have no serious knowledge about American music before the emergence of jazz, but I suspect that Sousa marches were about the equivalent of rock and roll at the turn of the 20th century.

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.