Got a famous Christmas number stuck in my head. I replace it with something else but it keeps coming back.
Is it a gorgeous hymn like "O Holy Night" or "Hark, the Herald Angeles Sing"? Is it a beautiful poem set to music like "O Little Town of Bethlehem"? Is it a hopping number like "Boogie Woogie Santa Claus" or "Little St. Nick" or even "Christmas in Killarney"?
Actually it's the Mellencamp version that I heard in the supermarket, so it could be worse. It wasn't the original or the Spike Jones version or anything with soggy child singers; it wasn't the Jackson 5 version either. Nor was it Kip Addotta's "I Saw Daddy Kissing Santa Claus," so I guess I ought to be grateful.
Still, Christmas time is about the only time you can hear music in public that isn't less than fifteen years old, so I kind of hate when a lousy song wheedles its way in.
Well, thanks to Dr. Stiiv, I know the cure for earworms. It may not be particularly festive, but the theme from Danger!! Death Ray (courtesy of MST3K) is known to drive other music out of active memory.
The thermometer says it is no degrees outside -- yes, friends, we are at Absolute Zero -- so it's winter! And that means Christmas is coming. It's practically here!
Today I offer a brief roundup of some memes and candy that have popped up on my radar lately. Sweetness abounds.
I thought this was hilarious, but I had to explain it to a couple of people. It took me a moment also, to be fair.
I love this one because I never liked the movie and I hated the book.
Chico had the Man's number, I think.
Next up, further proof that one day all the memes will join together into one Mega Meme.
Guess what I found in my local supermarket on Saturday, December 20? That's right -- Valentine's Day Candy!
TV listing from Sunday -- tell me you've never see the special without telling me.
I think AI is writing them now.
And that brings us to a visit with longtime friend of this blog: PEEPS
Yes, we've reviewed Peeps and Peep Accessories many times on this page -- even other Christmas-themed Peeps, a decade ago. But we've never seen Gingerbread (or, as the yellow box notes, "Gingerbread FLAVORED") Peeps before. I'm a fan of the plucky little Just Born company of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, but I am cautious. Can these possibly be any good?
Verdict: Yes, if you like marshmallow and you like the flavor of gingerbread and you think they'd work well together. Unbelievably sweet, of course, as the outer flavoring is also sugared, much as so many pumpkin spice treats in the fall include sugar. I think you need it; lightly melted sugar helps other flavorings stick, first of all, and second, sugar has a lovely and underrated texture all its own. But man, this is sweet.
You might drop one of these dudes in a cup of (mostly unsweetened) cocoa and let him melt; I think that would taste good, although you hate to see a friendly face get the Wicked Witch treatment.
So there's some hot and cold takes for this last Monday before Christmas. Hope to post tomorrow, but definitely on Christmas Day.
One of my best friends growing up had an unusual criterion that any album had to pass to be considered first-rate. It had to have "no bad songs." It was often the first thing he would tell you about an album -- not that it was terrific or featured this or that number, but that it had no weak links. And you know, he had something.
He amassed a large record collection, most of which had at least one song he considered unlistenable and required skipping. Such albums could be otherwise boffo music, but they could never be really top-tier records.
Still, even if a record had a stinkburger or two, you had to consider it to be doing well if it got radio play at all. Generally speaking, a record that had two songs on the radio was a big deal, three was a hit, and four or more? Absolute killer. When radio was king of music, you could tell which records were the killers, because (at least for young people) radio was just in the air, coming out of cars, from boom boxes, the kids in the backyard, the girls on the beach blankets. Off the top of my head, here are some records that were notable for multiple song radio play:
Van Halen: 1984
Guns 'n Roses: Appetite for Destruction
Fleetwood Mac: Rumors
The Who: Who's Next
Huey Lewis and the News: Sports
R.E.M.: Out of Time
B-52s: Cosmic Thing
You notice that the records I've listed all came out before the mid-90s, and that's not a coincidence. Almost as soon as the Internet was launched, radio started to weaken as the responder to and arbiter of taste. Popular music got split into smaller and smaller sub-genres, and music was not played aloud in public places as often when everyone his own lightweight device that held tons of music.
So it's unlikely that even Taylor Swift can ever top the biggest killer record of them all:
Look, I never even liked Michael or any of the other Jacksons. Not my kind of sound. But I could appreciate the skill that went into the songs on Thriller. I had to. It was everywhere. Youngsters today may think they know what it's like when a popular song is everywhere, but they only get a taste of what it is like. Songs from Thriller could be heard anywhere at any time. Since it spent more than a year (!) at or near #1, from February 26, 1983, to April 14, 1984 (and has remained on the charts ever since, getting close to 630 weeks as I write), it was unavoidable. The album had seven singles, which is to say, the whole album not only sold far better than any before or since, but millions bought slices and then bought the whole pie.
Reportedly Jackson challenged himself to better those numbers with his follow-up album, Bad, but he couldn't do it. Nobody could do it. And now that radio is less of a unifying force, it's doubtful anyone ever will. It's not a once-in-a-lifetime thing; it's a once-in-an-industry thing.
My question to you is: What albums would you count as absolute killers, records that had many hits and near-hits that didn't just make the charts but powered into them? I'm sure you all know a lot more than the few that occurred to me on brief reflection.
Or, what album is otherwise perfect but had that one crap song that you can't stand?
Sometimes I wonder how humanity survived the eighties and the nineties. Not because of nuclear war or novel diseases or alien invasion or even Madonna. Rather, because men reached an apogee of confusion with women.
A small sampling of pop songs of the era:
Michael Penn: "No Myth"
Stone Temple Pilots: "Sour Girl"
Marshall Crenshaw: "Mary Jean"
Mark Oliver Everett (A Man Called E): "Looking Out the Window with a Blue Hat On"
Deep Blue Something: "Breakfast at Tiffany's"
All these songs show a man in confusion about a woman, unable to understand what she wants, except she doesn't seem to want him. I'm sure you can add many more to this list, some by the same artists.
The more I thought about it, the more it appeared to be a running theme. These are not just breakup songs; those have been around forever. They aren't even angry songs; there are plenty of those. These are songs where the male is in love, but baffled about the disaster befalling him.
Traditionally popular love songs fell into the categories of Desire, Devotion, or Desolation: I want you, I love you, I lost you. The songs I'm thinking of are a subset of the last. Torch songs can be found anywhere, but usually the torch bearer knows what's happened: she fell for someone new, she had enough of my garbage, she decided to trade up, whatever. But beginning in the eighties, and especially in the coffee-shop nineties, men were getting utterly gobsmacked by these women. She's leaving and I have no idea why this is happening.
I think there are some reasons these kinds of cris de coeur arose when they did. For one thing, after women's lib (as it was called in the seventies), men started to wonder what women actually wanted from them. Kind and sensitive? Witty and adventurous? Gentle and loving? Or was the old strong and silent still what they liked the most? Confused men trying to be what their women wanted made for cases where no one could behave like themselves, so the guys couldn't grasp why nothing ever clicked and everything just fell apart one day.
Another possibility is that couples moved much faster into intimacy than they had in the past, giving the illusion of solidity without the actuality of it. Not surprising that one person in the relationship might be much more committed than the other, thinking that, having made it to home plate, the couple had achieved something solid.
Traditionally the subsequent broken heart in such situations would be the basis of female torch songs, but by the eighties we heard it from the boys, who had a sense they had screwed up but more of a fear that they were screwed up.
Anyway, that's my theory of this subset of the breakup song -- the What Did She Want? song -- that arose in the eighties. I know there are more than I listed above, and maybe examples that preceded the era mentioned. I'd be happy to hear your additions to or even rebuttals to this theory. It won't break my heart.
In November, as the Christmas season nears, the memes begin of Mariah Carey being unfrozen/reanimated/set loose among the populace to let the world know that "All [She Wants] for Christmas Is Yooooou." They poke fun at her like she never had any other hit songs.
But it is true that her pop music Christmas song is popular and played frequently in public places and at gatherings. One reason for this is that most modern Christmas songs are lousy, so with a few exceptions like this one we play the old favorites. It's really the only time we hear songs older than the Baby Boomers anywhere in public. When else are you going to have Dean Martin, Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney, or Andy Williams on the store PA system?
Plenty of people complain about Carey's song. I would hazard a guess that most of them work in retail. For the rest of us, we ought to remember that it really is a pretty good number, and for that I have no less an expert on the American Songbook than Mark Steyn to back me up.
I miss Steyn's Song of the Week feature from when he could devote more time to his site. About "All I Want for Christmas Is You," he is as always intelligent in his praise. In 2014 he called it "the biggest addition to the seasonal songbook in decades," and that hasn't changed.
The song, by Carey and Walter Afanasieff, expresses a Christmas wish more directly than other seasonal love songs like "Baby, It's Cold Outside" or "Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!" or the Carpenters' "Merry Christmas, Darling." It goes right to the heart of the matter: It's Christmas, I want one thing for a present, and that thing is you. Not a lot of beating about the bush. The melody is fun to listen to because it moves all up and down the scale. It starts with a slow, dramatic setup, then bursts into a galloping 150 beats per minute, the heartbeat of someone in the heat of passion. The words bang out on quarter notes in 4/4 as it goes, so you never lose the rhythm from the rhyme. It's no wonder that, as Steyn says, almost everyone who's covered the song has done it the same up-tempo way Carey did. It works.
So I will defend this song against the doubters, especially snobs who dismiss all pop music as being dumb and artless simply because it's popular.
My only problem with Carey is that she tried to parlay her fame into trademarking herself as the Queen of Christmas. It seems to have been kind of a jerk move against a relative unknown, but frankly, we all know who the real Christmas Queen is.
No, Lucy -- Mary, Mother of God, Queen of Heaven, the one who actually went to the trouble of giving birth on Christmas.
Anyway, while I'm not a fan of Ms. Carey, I can certainly say I respect her, and I enjoy her Christmas song. As I noted, most modern Christmas songs are pretty bad, and that's including County and Western ones -- maybe especially including those. The cheese factor is usually through the roof.
Wham!'s "Last Christmas," as I believe Steyn pointed out elsewhere, is a meh song, and barely has anything to do with Christmas; the lyrics could just as easily have been "Last Tuesday, I gave you my heart..."
I'm a passive player in Whamaggedon, in which one tries to go the 24 days leading up to Christmas without hearing that 1984 song. A guy I know crashes and burns out of Whamageddon early every year, but he goes to the gym a lot, and he's always out with his young kids. That's just asking for it. This year I made it all the way until December 18, when I walked into the post office. I wanted to tell the clerk "You ruined my Whamageddon!" But I'm sure he's had to listen to "Last Christmas" a thousand times since last Halloween, so why bother him about it?
One of the many ways the Internet has turned media on its head (or hed) is that it buries the lead (or lede).
We'll get back to that in a moment, but first this:
For those who have never worked in editing -- good thinking! But also -- terms like "head" and "lead" are traditionally misspelled in the biz, because when marking editorial changes on proofs, it was important that instructions not be mistaken for text to be inserted. For example, say I was editing a big fat important newspaper. I look at the first pass of the front page, put together by the compositor, and I see that the headline has an error. The story is about a murder at a rival paper, and the header should say PEN IS IDENTIFIED AS MURDER WEAPON, but the typesetter left out the space after PEN. Whoopsie! So I write "Headline should have no space after pen." When it comes back it now says HEADLINE SHOULD HAVE NO SPACE AFTER PENIS IDENTIFIED AS MURDER WEAPON, because my compositor is a moron. Had I written "# on hed" or the like indicating where the space goes, my misspelled and abbreviated writing would not have been mistaken for text to be added.
Okay, now: Burying the lede. We've all heard that news writing uses the so-called inverted pyramid, in which all the important information is put at the top, with less important info being filled in below, in rough order of importance. This was crucial in the heyday of newspapers, because stories were filed, edited, pasted, and ran within hours, and the news stories had to fit somewhere in the layout. If a story was running long, information of lesser importance could be snipped off without editing. So the lead paragraph (or lede) should have an outline of everything readers needed to know. In my hypothetical case it would be:
A follow-up on the murder of [victim]
Featuring our dirty loser rivals
Police announced the victim died after being perforated with an actual pen
Any suspects announced or arrests made
The "pen is mightier than the sword" joke can wait for the editorial page.
If possible the headline and sub-headline would themselves convey crucial information, because that would interest readers and entice them to buy the paper to get the whole story.
Now, though, it's all about the clicks. So the writers do their best not to give you any information in the header or even the first paragraph if they can avoid it. In fact, the longer they can keep you hunting for information, the longer you'll stay on the page and be exposed to the crappy ads from Temu et al. Take this one -- please:
The headline in the New York Post for this same news was "Jimmy Buffett, legendary ‘Margaritaville’ singer, dead at 76." Right there, you have the name, what happened, what he did, what he was best known for, and how old he was, in eight words. In the online story above you get no name except the news-magnet governor of Florida, "secret" to make it sound mysterious, and first of all "Billionaire," because flies love honey. But if you didn't know whom they were talking about, you'd have to dig around for a while in the story to find out.
Maybe there's nothing wrong with it -- we all know that the Internet is all clickbait, all the time. It's the only way to make money. If that means resisting reporting the news rather than rushing out to report the news, well, that's our brave new dumb world.
But it is yet another way the world has been turned upside down. News stories don't report, crazy people get the most attention, idiots are treated as geniuses, illegal immigrants get care while citizens get hosed, tobacco is bad but illicit drugs are A-OK, all official sources are liars, and nothing works well -- if it works at all.
My grandparents would have thought aliens had taken over or something. Maybe they have! You wouldn't find out from the news sites.
Just got back from observing the popular culture for another day!
I occasionally work on books for younger readers. Sometimes they are pretty good. Sometimes they even achieve that rare quality of being a good read for an adult. As C.S. Lewis wrote, “I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story.”
At least, that used to be the case. Nowadays every one of them has to have some kind of propaganda.
Nothing new there. Propaganda is the art of the emotional appeal, and it does not always make for bad art. The Nazis and the Soviets were terrific at film and poster art. Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove makes no attempt at reasoned appeal against nuclear weapons; it just wants to make us laugh and sick with fear at the same time so we can't think unemotionally about the subject. Cartoonish portrayals of political figures intend to make us ill when we see the real humans. And don't even get me started on pop music. A lot of craft can be put into the appeal that goes below the threshold of reason. Often it is meant to spur the good of the recipient, but mostly it is meant to support the cause of the artist.
I'm not seeing much craft these days, alas. It's definitely gotten worse in the last five years. The kids turned out from left-wing universities, their brains stamped like Oreo cookies with indoctrination, don't all come with creamy talent filling. They just toss off the usual canards with very little art, either hoping to make us two-minute-hate one target or accept something as normal that would have seemed preposterous yesterday. Adjust your Newthink dictionaries accordingly. These kids move up (no matter how many of their projects fail) and hire people just like them. The next thing you know, you're playing Candy Crush on your phone because there's nothing but crap on the bookshelves and in theaters and on TV.
Propaganda doesn't show the world as it is; it's either a picture of the world as the author thinks you should want it to be, or a kaleidoscope in which the only patterns that form are those of hate.
So yeah, everything is insane out there, and of course your only hope is to read my books!
Are they lousy? That's up to you. I don't think so. But at least they play with the rules of humanity as we know humans to be. They are not written with an eye on the scoreboard, making sure they check the boxes and win clapter. Even my fantasy books start with three-dimensional human characters you could recognize.
Give one a read! If you don't like it because you think it's written poorly, I will give you a personal apology. If you don't like it because it doesn't conform to your social ideals, well, we'll have to agree to disagree. But please know that, oxymoronic as it seems, I write honest fiction.
When I was looking up some information for the D.B. Cooper item I posted a couple of weeks ago, I came across the curious note that Cooper's skyjacking case and (apparent) escape had inspired a couple of instant records, quick 45s to cash in on the news of the day. This, kids, is what people used to do before throwing together music videos on YouTube for the same purpose.
While there have been many songs dedicated to the poor parachutist Cooper in the decades since, and even a band named for the felon, at the time one example of the D.B. Cooper genre that popped up on vinyl was by Judy Sword: "D.B. Cooper, Where Are You?" The B side was "Skyjack '71," which is the only one of the two songs I could find on YouTube.
I don't know what became of Ms. Sword, but I do know that her best remembered song was "Please Don't Squeeze My Jimmy" in a piano-hammering blues rock style. But I think the song that should have really put her on the map, the song with one of the best titles I've ever heard, was the B-side of that single, "Take My Love and Shuv It Up Your Heart."
The label left off the "It"
That song was written by one Danny Vest, who recorded it with the Simmons Family. Ms. Sword knew a classic when she heard it, obviously, and covered that sucker. I cannot find her recording, but here's the original, released in 1967, properly spelled:
This could be the love song that the world needs now, with everyone so angry all the time. What better way to say I Love You But Go Away than "Take My Love and Shuv It Up Your Heart"? None, my friends; there is none. Unlike the peculiar case of a lone hijacker, there is a timeless appeal to this poetic phrase. And I think we're all a little wiser now.
I know private jets are expensive, but at their age I hope Sir Paul and Sir Ringo are not so in need of money that they had to extrude a new Beatles song, using a Lennon demo tape and a failed Harrison guitar track.
McCartney recently had to defend the project against allegations that artificial intelligence was being used to re-create the talents of the deceased Beatles, saying that "nothing has been artificially or synthetically created". The story goes that the reason this song was not released in 1995, along with "Real Love" and "Free as a Bird," is that John's vocal track was messed up, but AI has now solved that problem.
A demo recording is a way for an artist to explore his ideas for a song, and/or to give to his backing musicians to learn a song’s riff or chord progression. On a demo, often he’s not singing with as much effort as he would give a polished recording designed for wide commercial release.
Ed also quotes Ian MacDonald on the 1995 project:
Unimpressed with the quality of these two ‘reunion’ tracks, Harrison declined to have anything to do with Lennon’s third demo, which consequently remains in its original state and was not included on Anthology 3, as originally planned.
But Harrison did try to noodle around with the cut and was unhappy with the results. Nevertheless, whatever he did is going to be on the new record.
As an application of artificial intelligence, making a badly recorded vocal performance “pure” is fairly benign — equivalent in some sense to cleaning dirty tapes, remixing a recording for stereo, or remastering it for new media. But AI does not — and it will not — end there. For both audio and video, AI can be used as a simulation tool, which an operator can use to sample a given voice or physical appearance and then create something entirely novel from the results. If we are not there already, we are getting close to the point at which a director could make a movie with a deceased actor in the lead role and at which a record producer could generate a full album’s worth of material “by” an artist who is now unable to record a note.
You may recall how in 1997 Fred Astaire's moving image was used in a series of Dirt Devil commercials, showing him dancing with the brand's vacuum cleaner. There was outcry against that at the time, and that's nothing compared to what's on the horizon.
For the Beatles project, Sir Paul says there's nothing fake about the AI used on Lennon's voice -- but he could say that honestly even if the AI used a pile of Lennon recordings, stealing a morpheme here and there and combining them to make Lennon sing the Malaysian National Anthem or whatever else you want. It's John's voice, just "remixed." Deepfakes are showing us how it's done, using existing images of famous people and merging them to make videos. A voice may be that much easier to fake with the actual sound of a person's voice, given a large enough dataset.
So, in effect, the upcoming song required unheard-of amounts of electronic fooling, was rejected the first time around by the now-deceased George, was something Lennon made three years before he was killed and apparently didn't think it met his own standards for publication, and will be mixed not as a Beatles song would have been done but as a McCartney (and I guess Starr) song.
I'm not terribly excited.
And look, if we're going to start screwing about with Beatles stuff using artificial intelligence, how about correcting some past problems? For example:
🎵 "Within You Without You" -- Did anyone not stoned ever enjoy this five-minute brick in the middle of Sgt. Pepper? I much preferred Big Daddy's take, doing it as a beatnik bongo number. It was still boring, but it was less than two minutes long.
🎵 "She's Leaving Home" -- Always wanted a more realistic take on the last verse, like:
Sheeeeee... is lying... in a diiiiiiiiiitch...
🎵 "Revolution 9" -- Could be replaced by something more interesting. Like, a blank soundtrack, or an apology.
🎵 "Sun King" -- Maybe we could speed it up a bunch? Might be a passable song played at 45.
🎵 "Boys" -- It has never been clear to me why Ringo sang this song by the Shirelles on the Please Please Me album. Maybe we could dub in the Shirelles singing. Or just dub in their whole song.
You laugh -- ha! ha! -- but it seems that AI is destined to be used to exploit the past -- and to "correct" errors of the past, the way censorship is being used to "correct" undesirable things in old movies and books nowadays. If our barbarous overloads are determined to destroy the past, maybe we could at least make it sound more pleasant first.
Continuing the theme of clarity in writing we began yesterday, I thought I would pass along some advice on business writing in the modern era. There are two key things you should bear in mind at all times whenever you are engaged in business communications. People are taught these in school, but we could always use a refresher.
The first is: Clarity is king. The e-mail, cover letter, formal request, summary report -- none of these is an appropriate place to go into a Song of Myself. You may use some style, a little razzle-dazzle if it highlights the message, but stick to the point and leave personalities out of it. If clarity is king, brevity is his viceroy. Don't give your audience time to get bored.
As an example, I would like to use the clear and brief instructions in the chorus of that seminal hit by Jim Stafford, "Don't Pet the Dog."
Don't pet the dog, don't pet him whatever you do
'Cause he ain't been fixed, he knows some tricks
That'll sure make a fool out of you
Don't pet the dog, he gets it confused with romance
Don't tickle his sides or look deep in his eyes
Or he'll be taking your leg to the dance
Six simple lines that convey clear, crucial information. The first line is a simple declarative statement, repeated and emphasized to impress its importance:
Don't pet the dog, don't pet him whatever you do
The next sentences outline the source of the issue, and hints at the consequences of ignoring same:
'Cause he ain't been fixed, he knows some tricks
That'll sure make a fool out of you
The fourth line explains the problem in a little more detail, explaining the current state of the problem:
Don't pet the dog, he gets it confused with romance
And finally, the last two lines add more detail of the range of the warning and the depth of trouble for those failing to heed it:
Don't tickle his sides or look deep in his eyes
Or he'll be taking your leg to the dance
You can see how effective this short message is. The verses go into greater detail, but you can think of that as the full report; the chorus is like the executive summary.
The second piece of advice is: Be careful.
Another reason to be brief, if not terse, in writing for work is that you probably would like to leave your job on your own terms rather than be defenestrated. Do not give in to the temptation to spice things up with a little levity or gossip. Companies are so terrified about being sued by their oversensitive and high-strung workers that they want us all to spy on one another like the Stasi and report the slightest infraction to human resources. Written communications can and will be presented at your drumming-out.
That e-mail you sent your best work buddy Bob, the one with the blonde joke? Someone looking over Bob's shoulder is going to report you for it, and maybe him as well for laughing at it. There is no freedom of speech. There will be no right to confront your accuser. The only question will be how big a box you will need for your desk tchotchkes, and whether you'll be escorted out by security. It really is like penny-ante East Berlin out there.
It's funny that companies are so terrified of the reputation risk that comes with these kinds of lawsuits, and yet are so often run by idiots who will send the company down in flames to follow DEI and other PC nonsense at the expense of their customers and shareholders. That kind of foolishness seems like a much bigger reputational risk to me. But this is the world in which we live now.
So, in brief: Be brief. Don't make eye contact with the crazy people. For job security, have no personality at work. And if the dog ain't been fixed, don't pet him. Whatever you do.
Yes, we had dueling deadlines here at the ranch Friday, plus a toner trip, so we're doing another meme Saturday at your daily dose! Trade them, sell them, NFT them for all I care!
And finally, in the Wish I’d Done That Department…
When I get up in the morning and I feel a little ancient, I remind myself -- well, no, I'm too busy schlepping to the bathroom and wondering what time it is to remind myself of anything. But if it is a morning where I feel the aches and pains that begin in middle age and end five hours after death, I remind myself that age is only a number. An enormous number, but a number.
Of course, when applied to various things, ancient is a relative term. Here's a little list I drew up to show how the word ancient, when commonly applied, changes depending on the subject:
Actors - Richard Burbage
Actors to Americans - Edwin Booth
Actors to Millennials - Robert Downey Jr.
Religions - Hinduism
Rocks - Bedrock, Hudson Bay, Canada (4.28 billion years old a week from Friday)
Colleges - Oxford
Buildings -
Duh.
Authors - Aristophanes
Novelists - Cervantes
Novelists to Millennials - Stephen King
Stars - Methuselah (age: 16 billion; looks not a day over 15 billion)
Music - “Seikilos Epitaph,” 1st century AD
Pop Music - Britney Spears
Medicine - Belladonna
Topical Medicine - Coal Tar
Medical Treatment - Leeches
Nations - Iceland
Automobiles - Model T
Bloggers - Instapundit
Websites - Amazon
Computer - ENIAC
Modern Computer - iMac
Telephone - Candlestick
Telephone to Millennials - Flip Phone
TV Sitcom - Father Knows Best
TV Sitcom to Millennials - Full House
👴👴👴
So you see, it's all relative. And speaking of relatives, I have some who are older than I am, so as long as they're still kicking I am not going to consider myself ancient.
It's hard for kids today to appreciate the disco menace. It came on suddenly, and when it had done its damage, it went away. But even though I was a kid, I can never forget.
The word disco was alien when I first heard it, and it seemed like a nonsense word. But it came from the French discotheque, which itself came from "disque disk, record + -o- + -thèque (as in bibliothèque library)" according to Merriam-Webster. In other words, disco is short for record library. A discotheque was a place where people would dance to music played on vinyl records rather than music played by a live band. Any little town could have a dance club even if they had no musicians. The word disco dates to 1957, but disco didn't conquer the world for a while after that.
Disco music was defined by a particular beat, as classic rock is, and as the waltz is. Whereas rock used the backbeat (the emphasis on every even beat -- one TWO three FOUR etc.) and the waltz's emphasis is on the second and third beats (one TWO THREE one TWO THREE), the disco bass drum is hit on all four beats of the measure. Thus the four-on-the-floor, thumpa thumpa thumpa thumpa. It's harder to play than you'd think, but it had the advantage of letting songs run one after another with the exact same rhythm and speed, so dancers never had to stop unless it was time to re-up the cocaine.
The thing is, during the height of the vogue, any music could be put through the discoizing machine and come out disco. Any. Music.
They dusted off a 1926 hit ("Baby Face"), put it through the discoizer, and it got to number two on the disco charts. They took the theme from the TV show I Love Lucy and discoized that, and "Disco Lucy" got to number 9 on the Easy Listening chart. The music from May 1977's unexpected smash film Star Wars managed to get a whole disco album out of it before the end of the year (Meco's Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk), which is not to be confused with the mashed-up film music set to a disco beat by a studio band called the Force, released as a single before the end of the year. (The B side was the timeless classic "Funky Hat.") Even Ludwig van Beethoven became discofied in 1975, his breathtaking Fifth Symphony shrunken and beat to "A Fifth of Beethoven" by Walter Murphy and the Big Apple Band. Disney discofied itself, doing a takeoff of the Village People's "Macho Man" ("Macho Duck"), certainly the most famous track on the immortal 1979 album Micky Mouse Disco. If you stood still long enough, you might get discoized, too -- finding yourself with a whitefro and a leisure suit, gold Italian horn chain, shirt open to the waist.
It seems to have seized the nation and the world like a kind of mania, but ebbed within a short period. "The Hustle" was a disco landmark, released in 1975, but by 1980, when Studio 54 closed, the whole thing seemed to be old (if still funky) hat. The Who had declared disco dead in 1978. The infamous Disco Demolition Night in Chicago took place the next year. But it took a while for the rest of the culture to catch up.
Say what you will about disco, at least it finally got out of the center ring. If only all our manias would have the good sense to ebb as quickly. I can name quite a few that I wish would go away already, or at least go on vacation.
The Daily Star, Britain's best newspaper for naughty news and using words like "boffin," reports that there may be a clue to the origin of baldy sours like myself, and thus a solution:
Baldness could soon be cured after boffins discover the 'caveman gene'
Scientists claim that humans are only largely hairless because through evolution we have disabled the 'caveman gene' which would otherwise leave us with a full coat of hair
Sounds promising!
Boffins reckon they can cure baldness following the discovery of a “caveman gene” which caused our ancestors to grow hair.
They found humans are largely hairless because although we have the genes for a full coat of hair, evolution has disabled them.
Scientists say the breakthrough could lead to ways to regrow hair in bald people, those undergoing chemotherapy or alopecia sufferers.
So now the situation becomes clear. We who suffer from male pattern baldness are not "freaks" or "losers" or "skinheads" or "cue balls" or "glabrous" or "chrome domes" or "chihuahuas" or "tile tops" or "balloon heads" or "necks blowing bubble gum." We're just farther along from the stinking hairy subhuman ancestors than you hairballs are.
A typical meeting of hairy guys
I understand that the hair attracts the ladies more than the lack of hair does. Some chicks have always dug the cavemen. As Joanie Sommers sang in 1962's immortal "Johnny Get Angry,"
Oh, Johnny get angry, Johnny get mad Give me the biggest lecture I ever had I want a brave man, I want a cave man Johnny, show me that you care, really care for me
At least she wasn't asking him to sock her in the nose.
As we of the lesser-hirsute variety must endure the mockery, out loud or silent, of our fuzzy friends, it's not surprising that we hope for a genuine cure for our polished position. The Star story says that it could be just around the corner, thanks to some other boffins, and links to a piece about Concert Pharmaceuticals' deuruxolitinib, a "selective inhibitor of Janus kinases JAK1 and JAK2." The company announced successful phase 3 trials last November. Apparently it really helped a lot of people, young and old, regrow hair. (No word on whether it made them grow hair on their backs or anything.)
I think it would be lovely to have a pill that would help regrow scalp hair, especially for women who suffer from baldness. For men it can be a trial, but for women it's a disaster.
I'd like it just because it would help me pass for one of you paleolithic types, which could be useful. But it's not a big deal either way. I have a lot of hats, and I know how to use them.
On Thanksgiving I took Izzy for a long walk around the neighborhood early in the morning. I was clearing off some room for calories, and I wanted to make sure he had enough exercise so he'd not be jumpy later. We didn't see a soul -- which can be good; at least no one threatened to sic the cops on us. But I was surprised to see that a lot of people had already started decorating for Christmas. And not just the Italians! (Sorry, people of Italian extraction, but you're always first up with the lights and you know it.)
I mean, sure, the stores have been full of lights.
Uh... not this kind. Think we'd be seeing these in Lowe's if New York hadn't caved to the cannabis lobby? (I call it Soma Lite.)
But why were Christmas lights coming out this early?
"We Need a Little Christmas" -- undoubtedly the most famous song from the 1966 Jerry Herman musical Mame, based on the 1958 film and before that the 1954 novel Auntie Mame -- is often heard as a Christmas song, and I guess it has to be. But the point of the song is that it is too early to actually have Christmas Day (complete with gift-giving), because it's just a week past Thanksgiving. And yet we must, because everything is wrong and we're in the dumps. The wealthy Mame Dennis has lost her fortune in the Wall Street Crash of '29 and has to go to work -- something she's not accustomed to, to say the least -- and gets sacked promptly. She goes home to her nephew, who will be taken from her if she can't support him, and her loyal household staff, whom she can't pay, and she herself is staring penury in the face. So they decide that whether it's too early or not, they're going to celebrate Christmas, because what better way to find joy in the depth of darkness? Mame was a YOLO / Live in the Day type before it was popular.
It's a great moment in the show. But behind it is the genuine threat of loss, pennilessness, and separation. (Everything turns out fine -- spoiler alert! -- because a wealthy customer from the store she got fired from shows up and marries her almost immediately after the number. Because it's a Broadway comedy, not Tolstoy.)
Anyway, my point is, maybe the people in my area feel the need to get that garland up. Our taxes and living expenses have skyrocketed; our salaries, not so much. Our part of New York mostly voted to change the political and economic direction in the state, but the places where they have tons of money or live off the government think things are just dandy and they outvoted us. The news talks about idiocy and corruption at all levels of society, about violence and killers running free, about social breakdown, even about war.
So, maybe we need a little Christmas.
Sounds good to me. I plan on getting some decorations up during the week, if I have time. I may even get the tree started today, which I never do before December. Christmas is all about light in the darkness, and I'm sick of darkness.
And . . . yeah. It's hard to argue with it, actually. For such a popular holiday as Thanksgiving we ought to have some popular songs to celebrate it. Instead, what do we have? What comes to mind for you?
"Over the River and Through the Woods" -- I think this old wheezer got its second legs by being sung at the end of A Charlie Brown Thanksgivingby the gang riding -- in what now would be ILLEGALLY! -- in the back of the Browns' station wagon. And what is that song all about? Going to Grandma's house for a celebration in a snowy season. Sounds more like Christmas than Thanksgiving to me, unless you live in Buffalo, God help you. But indeed the poem was published under the title "The New-England Boy's Song about Thanksgiving Day" in 1844, according to Dr. Wikipedia. No one knows who set it to music.
So that's one, but I guess it doesn't count as a "banger." Neither do a lot of our popular Christmas songs, though, and I'm not sure I'd like to see a lot of them done in a modern style, let alone as Thanksgiving songs. "All I Want Stuffed for Thanksgiving Is You" may seem to have a kind of charm, but -- nah.
It's easy to say that Thanksgiving's theme of gratitude is too solemn for ribaldry, but come on. It certainly can't top the night of the birth of Christ for solemnity, and we've been celebrating that in every degree from contemplation to drunken spree for two thousand years. So let's try digging a little harder in the hit holiday mine shall we?
I have to say, it doesn't get much easier. Even Mark Steyn, the radio deejay turned political commenter, wrestled with it in his book A Song for the Season. For Thanksgiving, he chose the utterly unexpected song "Jingle Bells" -- unexpected, that is, unless you'd read his essay about it when it originally appeared on his blog.
Just in time for Thanksgiving, here comes, er, "Jingle Bells" - which was written not for the Yuletide season but, allegedly, for Thanksgiving. In Boston, in the fall of 1857, the city's leading music publisher, Oliver Ditson, introduced the world to a new song called "The One-Horse Open Sleigh".
Steyn notes that racing about fast as possible in unprotected sleighs pulled by speedy nags -- and maybe with speedy nags, IFYKWIM(AITYD) -- was quite the pre-Civil War craze. New England certainly can get cold enough by Thanksgiving to let loose the horses. (It's 36 degrees in New York City as I write this, and you can usually subtract a few degrees and add a couple of inches of ice and snow to estimate the weather in Boston.) Steyn writes:
...what I find oddest are the claims of Christmas Songs Made In America and many similar books that the song was written for "his father's Sunday School class on Thanksgiving 1857". I'm willing to believe that at Thanksgiving a young man's fancy turns to snow, at least in those distant days before Al Gore's global warming project sent the mercury rising. But no Massachusetts Sunday School is going to teach its charges a song whose lyrical preoccupations are racing, gambling and courting:
A day or two ago I thought I'd take a ride And soon Miss Fannie Bright Was seated by my side... Now the ground is white Go it while you're young Take the girls tonight...
Hmm. He's got a point.
But it's no good; all songs about snow activities are eventually sucked into the Christmas oeuvre, and "Jingle Bells" got there a long time ago.
What are the other choices, then? "Turkey Lurkey Time" from the 1969 Broadway show Promises, Promises sounds promising, but it's A) all about Christmas and B) got a title that makes me want to Hurly Wurly. Adam Sandler did a comedy song on Thanksgiving almost 30 years ago, but we're not looking for parodies here, and if we were, we'd look for better ones. (It's no "Chanukah Song," is what I'm saying.) I applaud Ben Rector for giving it 100% on a country song:
It's fine -- it's got the usual country song lists -- goin' home, my town, families, football, love -- and maybe it's made it to the PA in your local supermarket, but it hasn't cut any ice here in the northeast as far as I can tell. It has some real heart, so thumbs-up on that, Ben.
A couple of years ago I noted that Irving Berlin took a crack at Thanksgiving for the film Holiday Inn, in which all the songs are pegged to different holidays with mixed results. The number "I've Got Plenty to Be Thankful For," is one of the better ones, but it's never become a standard -- maybe because Christmas does shove aside all Thanksgiving numbers, or maybe because it's a love song, and in the movie Bing does a rueful duet with his own recording, having a lonely Thanksgiving after his girlfriend has been stolen by Fred Astaire. As far as I can tell the song has never had a successful cover version.
Surely the old-timers 100+ years ago in Tin Pan Alley coughed up a Thanksgiving song or two, right? Well, probably -- God knows they churned out songs on all kinds of topics, all day, every day, hoping one or two would stick in the public consciousness. I note there was a number called "A Thanksgiving Song" in a book of Tin Pan Alley tunes, but I can't track down whose it was and who may have recorded it.
I admit I'm no musicologist, though.
A search through the AllMusic site brings us many songs with Thanksgiving in the title, and I hope you'll enlighten me if any others have really made it to the big time.
However, I do have a suggestion for an older number that really does suit the day. It's from a Broadway show, almost as old as Promises, Promises, but like that show also had a breakout hit (in the case of the former, "I'll Never Fall in Love Again"; in the latter, "Day By Day"). I'm referring to Godspell's "All Good Gifts," which hits every note in the purpose of the holiday of Thanksgiving. Yes, it's hippie music, but it's grateful hippie music.
And there it is -- we thank you, Lord, for all good gifts. Sounds like Thanksgiving to me.
Got my hands on one of these old beauties while collecting money for a cause last week. You certainly don't see a lot of $2 bills in circulation anymore.
The United States originally issued two-dollar bills along with the other paper currency after the Legal Tender Act in 1862, and continued to do so until 1966. They always featured Thomas Jefferson, so were sometimes called Toms. The bill never seemed to be as popular as ones, fives, and tens, though, and were thus not printed in as high quantities. In the time the $2 was first printed, it went from being a good deal of money (two days' pay for an unskilled laborer) to a lot less (two hours' pay for unskilled farm work), but neither time nor inflation raised the profile of ol' Tom.
In 1976 the bill was revived, but the ten-year hiatus had not made it more popular, and it went out of print in 1981. Now they're as seldom seen as the Ike or Susan B. Anthony dollar coins. The Sacagawea coin went out of mint in 2008, so you still see some of them around, but not a lot. I seldom see the newer presidential dollar coins and none of the new "innovation" series, so I think the casinos are hoarding them.
We just don't like dollar coins in America. I think all coins have an association with cheapness here. The Canadians loved their dollar coin so much they gave it a cute nickname (the Loonie, from the loon on the back). The same goes for their two-dollar coin, which also has a nickname (the Toonie). So even the money in Canada is looney toons. (rim shot)
But coins always got looked down on in the US. I'm not sure when the expression "folding money" (rather than the jingling kind) came into the lingo, as cash worthy of interest, but the oldest reference I know of came from a wartime Fats Waller song, "Cash for Your Trash." The listener is enticed to bring her household trash (old pots and pans and such) to the scrap drive for war use, and receive some money for it, and then canoodle with ol' Fats:
In between we'll do some lovin'
Wide handsome turtle dovin'
Will you listen to me honey
Get plenty of the foldin' money
Yeah, don't settle for that nickel-and-dime stuff; get some actual bills!
As for the two-dollar bill itself, I'd often heard that it was unlucky, but didn't know why. According to Mary Piles, CNB St. Louis Bank Historian (who knew that job existed?), the bad luck tag came from the two being called a deuce, which is also a nickname for the devil. But that's not all! She adds:
One of the reasons the $2 bill was never widely circulated is thought to be due to its negative reputation.
An urban legend claims that at one time, election rigging was common and the reward for a favorable vote was $2. There was a belief that politicians would purchase votes for $2 therefore, having a $2 bill could be seen as evidence that you had sold your vote. While most likely an urban legend, the myth still gave the bill a sinister reputation.
In the early 1920s, Prostitution was $2.00 a trick, leading some to refer to the bill as a “whore note.”
The gambling tracks have a $2.00 window, and if you won, many times you were paid in $2.00 bills. If you were caught with $2’s in your wallet it could lead people to assume you were a gambler.
The $2 bill was often thought to be bad luck, as “deuce” was a name for the devil. Recipients would tear off one corner, believing it would negate the bad luck of the bill. This caused many of the bills to be taken out of circulation as mutilated currency.
I worked as a teller for a while when I was in school, and I used to buy up $2 bills from other tellers when we cashed out on Friday. That way when I went out drinking with my buddies I would have weird money to draw attention to myself. And I can tell you for a fact that, whether the $2 was lucky or unlucky, I never was. And no, that was not so long ago that (even were I so inclined) I could hire a lady of the evening (ahem) for two bucks.
There is just one song I know of that mentions a two-dollar bill, by the way (I'd be interested if you know of others). That's Hank Williams's "Hey, Good Lookin'" from 1951. I suspect Hank liked the way it sounded, like money but not a lot of money -- the federal minimum wage in 1951 was 75 cents:
I got a hot rod Ford and a two-dollar bill
And I know a spot right over the hill
There's soda pop and the dancin's free
So if you wanna have fun, come along with me
Less than two years later, Hank was dead, dying on New Year's Day 1953. Was it the mention of the unlucky two that did him in? One has to wonder.
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