Sunday, March 16, 2008
Acting at its best
I used to joke with my sister about this, and now someone has actually put together a list of the top 20 most stupidest faces Patrick Swayze makes in Ghost. Thanks to the Sports Guy (or more likely his readers) for this one.
Sunday, March 09, 2008
Bad news about Barry, he's back on the tap water.
Hard drugs in our tap water? It can't be! Of course, alarmist reporting like that would never be found at Artful Science. For a measured, yet schocking report, read on.
Monday, March 03, 2008
Biscuits and cheese
Old Man: I have discovered the most marvellous mixture of foodstuffs, that one may indulge in on an afternoon. Biscuits and cheese.
Young Man: Yeah, that’s quite common.
OM: Well, I wouldn’t be so sure. I’ve only just discovered this combination, but I’ve walked this earth for 73 long years!
YM: You hate walking.
OM: Rather. But you see, the manner by which I discovered this delightful duo – biscuits and cheese – was most fortuitous. I was watching a program on the television, when an advert appeared. The advertisement portrayed a young couple eating biscuits and cheese in the park, nestled on a woollen blanket.
YM: Get to the point.
OM: Well, it wasn’t five minutes after the television commercial screened that I had to leave to catch my bus. Now where do you suppose I was going?
YM: The shops?
OM: You’ve got it in one! I made a note of the brand depicted in the advertisement and asked the young lady at the checkout counter whether they had any in stock. As I asked her, I showed her the piece of paper on which I had written down the product name. The lady pointed in the direction of one of the aisles and I searched for my desired item. To cut a long story short, I’m now utterly sold on the blend of Tim Tams and grated parmesan cheese – the aforementioned “biscuits and cheese.”
YM: You idiot.
Young Man: Yeah, that’s quite common.
OM: Well, I wouldn’t be so sure. I’ve only just discovered this combination, but I’ve walked this earth for 73 long years!
YM: You hate walking.
OM: Rather. But you see, the manner by which I discovered this delightful duo – biscuits and cheese – was most fortuitous. I was watching a program on the television, when an advert appeared. The advertisement portrayed a young couple eating biscuits and cheese in the park, nestled on a woollen blanket.
YM: Get to the point.
OM: Well, it wasn’t five minutes after the television commercial screened that I had to leave to catch my bus. Now where do you suppose I was going?
YM: The shops?
OM: You’ve got it in one! I made a note of the brand depicted in the advertisement and asked the young lady at the checkout counter whether they had any in stock. As I asked her, I showed her the piece of paper on which I had written down the product name. The lady pointed in the direction of one of the aisles and I searched for my desired item. To cut a long story short, I’m now utterly sold on the blend of Tim Tams and grated parmesan cheese – the aforementioned “biscuits and cheese.”
YM: You idiot.
Sorrow without bridles
There comes a time in every woman, man and old person's life when they must watch celebrity boxing. I could write a lot about this clip, but it ultimately speaks for itself. Suffice to say, I lost a little bit of humanity by watching Screech fight Horshack. And I encourage you to do the same. Deeply disturbing. Sorry Mr Belding! Post Scriptum: I forgot to add links to parts two and three.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
I stayed awake for four days in a row. I was delusional.
Alright kids, quit your yappin and come gather round ole uncle Hammertime. I’ve a story to tell, but I ain’t gonna tell it if you don’t shut yer traps! Alright, that’s better. Now you make yerself comfortable – wassat? Yeah, eating’s alright, just keep yer slobberin down to a minimum. This is a story about music, about life, about living and alrighty I might as well throw it in, about dying. I don’t want to hear any eatin!
Now I know you kids think you know about music. You got your ipods and your itunes and your ishuffles and it’s all about fuckin me, isn’t it? Have you even any idea what an “I” is? Course you don’t, and I doubt you have a mind to figure it out either. Go read some Hofstadter and come back and then we can talk. And don’t think that these two things are completely unrelated, either. As you’ll see, and I’ll try to spell it out for you in the fullness of our sacred and preciously limited time, digging music and understanding a self have quite a lot in common. Now as I was saying, you don’t know shit about music.
I know you think you do, and lest Uncle H-Time be caught with his pants down, allow me to explain. Don’t get you wrong - you like music. Some of the time some of you even love it. It’s the soundtrack to your favourite movies. You worship implicitly cool directors like Tarantino, even if you don’t know it, coz they tell you what’s hip so you don’t need to figure out for yaself. Never mind that he’s not interested in touching you, or getting inside you (don’t be crude) – he’s after the perfect pop movie moment, and he does what he does well. But the closest he gets to reality - to what’s real to you or me or anyone - is his craftily worn reels. That’s a pun right there. He’s havin a whale of a time, and we do too, but does anyone ever listen to his soundtracks after the movie? I said listen to, not buy.
What I mean to say is there’s a great many of you whippersnappers these days that get music incidentally. You bumped into the cinema and some music brushed off on you. You were takin the tv for a walk and you stepped in a song. TV shows, advertising, theme tunes, jingles, movies. Music is no more the focus of these things than it is the focus of video hits and a great many other shows of its plastic ilk. (I’d consider making an exception for Rage, which is a bit of a different story, and a topic for another day and in all likelihood another author. With a bit of luck, persistence and assistance, Rage delivers interesting musical experiences, but they’re of a different dimension to the one’s of which I’ll soon speak, real soon now my little ones.)
I can hear some of you in the back sniggering amongst yourselves, ol’ man Hammertime’s drunk again, he’s lost his wits, if he ever had ‘em in the first place. You’s the ones that listen to music all the time. Screw the soundtrack to a movie, this is the soundtrack of your lives. You were born with earphones in your little baby ears, and damned if they’re not still in there. Don’t worry, I know there’s no music comin out of em right now, you just leave em in there hoping people’ll leave you alone, or maybe realise how cool you are. You take those headphones on to the train, down the street, onto the bus. Sometimes you forge everlasting bonds with your contemporaries by wearing an earpiece each.
You’ve got a million songs in those miracles of modern design, and I’m deeply impressed by Apple’s marketing savvy, but there’s a few things that constrain your listening pleasure. For starters you barely listen to more than 10 seconds of each track. If we take modern day rampant short attention spanism to its logical conclusion - and yes, I’m afflicted too - then we’ll all be just constantly skipping songs, flipping channels – never stopping, ever. Sounds like fun. But I digress. Being out and about, you can’t really focus on the music. You got the friggin platform announcer competing for audiospace in yer head. You can’t give it the time and attention it needs, if you want to get out of it what’s in it, lurking in there, somewhere. Lurking inside the good stuff anyway. And then there’s the lovely shuffle mode, in which you get to listen to an utterly, utterly random selection of your own musical library. Which also prevents any buildup of mood, of atmosphere, and any unlocking of the precious fruits that some albums yield only to complete listening. Have you ever thought about how to create a really, truly random sequence? Is that even possible anyway? As I see it, there’s two kinds of randomness: the kind that’s miraculously built into the fabric of reality at the subatomic level, and the kind that’s for all purposes random, like a die. You gotta tap into one of these things if you want randomness. Either that or talk to someone under 25, who’ll pop it into conversation at quite predictable intervals.
High above and far beyond all this, you do listen, and you do enjoy, and f’crissakes your music means something to you. It speaks to you. It speaks, it raps, it adds useless and useful extra notes, it sings of life’s big themes – love, (much less often) hate, (more often) loathing (including self), pride. Pride is a big one. So many lucky people getting their pride taken for a ride in pimped out musical cars. And given today’s topic, we must add that it speaks in the voice and spirit of rock! There are beautiful voices, sweet melodies, driving guitars. Honest to goodness, down to earth, rockin’ out, heartfelt but ultimately really, really lame songs which tend to get played on Triple J a lot. Well please, ‘cause you’ve stuck around this long, do me the favour of noting all that, taking it in, and setting it aside. I’d like you to open your mind, and get ready to receive. Cause I’m going to talk about passion, about fury, about precision, about wince-inducing off notes, about strong and strange emotions.
I first heard about the Mars Volta when I was working in the old secondhandbookshop on City Rd. Run by the extreme left SRC, who invariably go on to become middle of the road Laborites. The future of Labor, even. Christ! Right above the footbridge, it was, until they moved it, not the bridge, but the shop, and then they moved the bridge too. I had Yoshimi Battles… on the stereo, and one of the custudents told me if I liked this I’d like the Mars Volta. Retrospectively viewing the comment, it was ridiculous. They’re two very different bands. But he was right, I do like them both, though not with the causality suggested by his remark. I soon fetched myself some Volta. I listened to the song Roulette Dares and was taken aback. It was a little chaotic and challenging at first, but I discovered a darn good rock song in there, complete with tension building intro, loud bits, quiet bits and noisy instrumentals. After a few listens, the song grew on me, and I was struck by just how heartfelt Cedric’s plaintive cry was. Though I had no idea what the hell he was talking about. Still don’t. Something about an exoskeleton and a delay. All the same, I gave it no thought for months. After these months, a conversation with a friend prompted me to invest in Frances the Mute. Now that’s a sentence in sore need of context. In this fashion, a hideously beautiful metamusical mushroom sprouted in my temporal lobes and I still can’t get the dang thing out.
Allow me to lay it out for you, my lovely ones, in big clear letters like George Bush on a battleship, my central thesis. Is that the Mars Volta are one of the top 5 rock bands ever, who have created a unique and good sound, that has an uncanny ability to embed itself into the fabric of your mind and no napisan or new age cleaning recipe could ever get it out, not that you’d want to. With the Mars Volta, there’s much in common with other musical experiences. You bop your head, you grin stupidly, you have your favourite bits. But there’s much in rare too. You try to sing along but it’s fuckin pointless. You realise that there’s no other band for which you can remember 10 discrete mind-numbingly powerful drum solos. There is no other band that quite illuminates the moody, murky, morbid, manic and maniacal backwaters of your mind like the Mars Volta.
Passion and Fury
TMV somehow remain sincere, ridiculously sincere given the lyrics and cd art work, yet it all makes sense. Like all good works of art, it has its internal logic. It sends you down a path of disgusting dissonant sounds and morbid, fifth grade lyrics, but after you’ve been down it a few times, it looks normal and everything else odd. Cedric has an amazing voice, there is no doubt of this. When I was passing through that ineffable first stage of listening to a band, I found it offputting. I was able to appreciate a bunch of other stuff they were doing, but his lyrics were silly, his voice nothing special. How wrong I was. His voice and words are still all those things, but he is flat out the best singer going round at the moment. It’s an implicitly understood fact that if you ever want to make a point in a song, you sing just a touch higher. You find that point of auditory contact that is somehow more meaningful, more sincere, more heartfelt, whatever the emotion involved. Cedric hits this note and then sings the rest of the song an octave higher. But he sings like he is possessed, and heck, maybe he is. After all, Bedlam is an album about a possession of sorts, a ride through the dead side with an ancient evil spirit named Goliath. To pre-empt a recurring theme, uncannily perfectly sense making.
Singing aside, the whole band plays with a passion rarely matched, in the studio or live. And when it is matched, the matching band probably doesn’t compete in areas like musical creativity or depth of emotion. A good example of this is when they were touring Frances at the Enmore theatre, and two band members were grabbing a bite to eat beforehand. Sage concertgoers recognised them (might have been Jon Theodore and the sax player) and said hello. Jon said that they’d try to play harder tonight than they ever have. I’m afraid I can’t back this up with statistics, but I was there and they played fucking hard. Over the two and a half hours straight they played, you became progressively more hypnotised, while retaining the ability to appreciate their excellent renditions. How many other bands can do that? Hell, they can’t even do it themselves all the time. When they toured Amputechture the show was good, but not great. Listening to it afterwards I realised it was great, which is useful but too late for people there on the night.
I’ve little idea what the band members are like. I’d like to interview them some day. Jon Theodore comes across as intelligent and thoughtful, someone who loves what he does. Hardly deserving of being thrown under the bus, but that’s what Cedric did when he said they had to fire him. Yes, Pridgen is a freak, but so is Jon. Maybe it’s a little in joke, but where are his fuckin manners? And I suspect it wasn’t, as it was said in an interview with some Italian kids that you wouldn’t think would be but of course was inevitably going to be translated and made available to everyone out there on the innernet. Bottom line: TMV operate on a plane of passion and force that few other bands match, let alone sustain, far from freakin exceed. They demand attention, and won’t tolerate being a background soundtrack to yer life.
Precision
Goddamn they are good musicians. This is what pushes them over the edge. It’s one thing to have ideas, to have attitude, to have energy, but to back it up with insanely advanced technical execution is just scary. It’s not that they play unplayable stuff, although it would be to the majority of weekend hacks out there. But when you combine the guitar, drums, singing and the rest of it, they’ve left the rest of the pack in their sick wake. You can switch off and listen, but you can also pay attention, and when you do you blow your mind cottoning on to what they’re doing. ‘Course when I say pay attention, I really mean pay attention. Too quick, too complex, too detailed to pick up all in one go. Maybe that’s the banal secret behind their genius, to add more and more layers, with sufficient precision and arranged with sufficient delicacy, until it takes three years of listening to the same song to finally hear everything on it. But I’d like to see someone else try. My ears aren’t sufficiently developed, sufficiently evolved in this lil ol lifetime I’ve got, to hear everything they’re doing. I speak mostly of drums, which I do hear most of, but I guarantee you right now in an ironclad fashion, serious musos will get even more out of a listen than I would. Of course, they don’t have the constellation of tastes, thought patterns and musical history that constitutes my distinct mental sphere, so their reaction will be different, quite different probably, but we’ll get to all that stuff later.
Off notes that’ll make ya wince
Dissonance is an explicit musical strategy of the Mars Volta. For some reason, it often works. Maybe it’s just the sweet, goddamned relief of finally hitting a sonorous note that makes it work, maybe it corrupts your senses into thinking this is normal. I found it hard to explain to my German friend Thomas that this five minutes of repetitive, dissonant noise was actually part of a good song. It’s just that there’s been too many times a horrible sounding song has suddenly wormed its way into my good books. They make you listen to their dissonance, cause you never know when something incredible’s about to happen. Who’s the fool, me or him?
When it comes to musical fineness, consistent high performance levels are hard to come by. It’s something I’ve come to accept, and for some reason relish in a Cedric-kinda way, that no matter which way you cut the steak of musical excellence, you’ll always hit some gristle. You can’t have one without the other. So it is with comedy, so it is with many other creative endeavours. To hit those moments of brilliance or insight or shocking hilarity, you gotta have plenty of misses too. Mars Volta is no exception, and there are some songs I just can’t listen to, and even a few that have gotten old. But that’s some fine gristle, because you’re eating it at the same time as a steak like no other.
Strong and strange emotions
TMV’s breakout album Deloused was accompanied by a booklet, with text. It is the story of Cerpin Taxt, the album’s protagonist, and inside it are found the lyrics amidst a much bigger story. But if you thought the lyrics were odd or hard to parse, you haven’t read the rest of the booklet! I’ve tried to read it three times and I still haven’t come close to finishing it. I think you have to be clinically insane to scan that whole thing, it’s crazy.
This music isn’t afraid of craziness. It looks insanity in the face and sees itself. And when we listen to it, we hear ourselves. Given sufficient lucidity, anyone will admit that the sanity of life and the world is a bit of a knife edge, off which we all fall at times. We could ignore it or forget about it. Or we could stop and take a closer look. Embrace it and see what happens. Deloused and Frances in particular show us a world where sanity is irrelevant, and we embrace it. They manage to make something strange and distant central and heart wrenching. Death is often present, not as a treated theme, but rather as wallpaper. Scratch that, as the air that we breathe, as we go about more germane tasks. The set, on which the real action happens. That which we take for granted.
You find yourself in a song, and they slip a line in, a riff, a sound, that wrenches your guts, that moves you, and not in a Bette Midler Beaches kinda way. No, there is no light, in the darkest of your furthest reaches. Trite, and brutal. One day this chalk outline will circle this city. And you believe it, you contemplate for a second a force so malevolent it’ll wipe out a whole fucking city. When they drag the lake, there’s nothing left at all. Love that line. An abortion that survived. Which makes complete sense when you know the story of the song.
Now I’m lost.
The utter lostness of inertiatic esp. (I hate referring to these songs by their titles.) Forlorn. Simple and forlorn. I’m lost, I’m lost right now, and there’s no friggin way out. You know how it’s a common parable in our society for someone to be lost? Utterly, hopelessly despairingly lost? Until they find a way out. Sweet redemption, sweet foundness. But this song’s protagonist never finds a way out. In fact if you stay tuned, the only way out is suicide. This song absolutely revels in the panic, fear and certitude of being lost, way, way out.
I’ve been lost before, many would say I’m lost now. But goddamned if I’m ever this lost, I’d probably go crazy. And listening to this song is a concession to craziness in a way. Jon Theodore’s drums that keep the beat and meld with the bass. The rhythms he keeps, the patterns he creates are so furious, so heavy, so precise and crisp and so perfectly in keeping with the flow of the song, that he really is irreplaceable.
Of course, they replaced him, and they’re not the same band any more. But Thomas “Theodore on coke” Pridgen somehow fits in, and we have a new Mars Volta, and they’re just as crazy as ever. Over time, I thought they lost something. They lost an edge, a fearfully crazy and soul piercingly emotional force, that was clearly present on Deloused and Frances, but that departed or turned into something else on Amputechture and Bedlam. Listening to Bedlam now, I’m not so sure. They’ve lost something, but they’re still there. They’re still massive, a presence, irritating, complex. In a word, intense. And as I keep listening, it’s building. Maybe Amputechture was an aberration. Freakin good album though.
At The Drive In was a darn good band, all things considered. Yet I doubt anyone who listened to their strange mix of anxious punk guessed it was harbouring the nascent mutant foetus of the Mars Volta. Or that Cedric Bixler Zavala would go on to sing like this. Or that Omar Rodriguez Lopez would go on to play guitar like this, or create music like this.
I won’t for a second argue the band’s perfection or incapacity to produce rubbish. But their music reaches such heights, so often, and they’re not the same heights. They somehow manage to keep finding new patterns, yet all somehow stamped with the same Mars Volta superpattern. If music were a balloon, and musicians the gas molecules inside it, then most artists would float about the centre and never glance the edges. Some pioneers make contact with the interior surface and push it in slightly different directions. Mars Volta pushes the surface so hard they pop out the umbilical cord onto the other side, and start twisting the balloon into different shapes like a clown. Okay, I may be exaggerating, but you’ll grant me that in my old age, won’t you?
If you want to understand the human mind, you can’t omit music. Every piece of music we hear succeeds to varying extents at impinging upon our constantly evolving selves. Multiple points of musical contact get sifted through the sieve of our senses. It’s like a little dance between you and the song, sometimes the dance works, sometimes it doesn’t. Some music never makes it within cooee of our beckoning arms, some gets there and steps on our toes, some fits so well with us that we never knew there was a separate dance partner. Good music fits so well that it changes the way you dance. And by that I mean it changes us, our selves, our souls. You couldn’t understand my soul without knowing something about the Mars Volta, Split Enz, Crash Test Dummies and Ween. Hey! Stop fuckin laughing! I’ll smack you for your impertinence. There is surprisingly little research out there about just what the fuck goes on when we have a song in our heads, when a song speaks to us emotionally, when we discover hidden aspects to it. But these are real, real phenomena, realer than a whole heap of bullshit which many professional government funded fully accredited paper publishin self respectin idiot cognitive scientists fritter away their hours on.
Let’s just take a little time out here, because you know what I’m talking about. Let’s suppose a sufficiently complex new song you hear. First few listens, you pick up on the chorus, overall flavour. Over time, you notice different things – bass line here, drum fill there, understood lyric over yonder way. All of a sudden, you’ve built up an expectation for a particular little bit – what the hell is a unit of music anyway? We’ll coin that another day – that is so sweetly satisfied when you hear it. A line, a note, a lick. Classic example “Hey now don’t dream it’s over.” Everyone knows that, right? When a song goes through your head when you’re not listening to it, you don’t hear the whole thing. You hear sections, especially these catchy bits I was talking about. And as you listen you accumulate these little patterns, and notice different levels of patterns and so on until your understanding of this song rivals your understanding of complex concepts and any other ideas you care to mention. The ideas we know make us, and songs are that integral to the way we think and who we are.
Back track to the dance. Some music you have to dance with a few, ungainly times, before you hit full swing. Like two clocks out of sync, it may take a while to line up, but when you do, the match is absolute. Some times you do five different dances with the same song, as you peel away the layers of a particularly fragrant aural onion. I’m going through that stage with Bedlam right now. And no, I do not associate onions in any way shape or figure or form with the Bedlam in Goliath.
Back track to the process of acclimatising to a song. As I said, and I saw you all nodding your wee heads, everyone who’s into music knows what I’m talking about. For music you grow to love, it’s quite a precious time, only you can’t appreciate it at the time cause the music doesn’t sound quite right. But you have faith that it will all come good. After a few listens, it starts to grow on you. Then you love it. I occasionally wonder what it’d be like to go back to that first listen. Not just of any Mars Volta song, but of what it was like to discover just what in god’s name they were doing, that Mars Volta thing they do. It’d be a bit like going back to the first beer, when it tasted wrong. We can still detect that first taste if we try, but it’s been so overridden by our accumulated knowledge and expectations about beer, it’s an afterthought, an aftertaste and not much more. It doesn’t change, we do. But it is nothing without us in the first place.
I’ve never had a band inhabit my mind and start shifting the furniture around like the Mars Volta. They take a seat, settle in and set to stabbing darkly coloured shards into your brain and into your mind. Jagged fragments left all over the fuckin place, and each time you pick one out you find another one lyin around in the vicinity. There’s even one shaped like Candy and a Currant Bun. I could write four'n'half thousand words about that song alone. Brilliant.
Well, I can see you all scratching yer itches so I’ll release you from my sweaty, greasy grip. But do check em out. If you’ve a mind a little like mine, or like mine was a couple of years ago, you may have a musical fit.
Now I know you kids think you know about music. You got your ipods and your itunes and your ishuffles and it’s all about fuckin me, isn’t it? Have you even any idea what an “I” is? Course you don’t, and I doubt you have a mind to figure it out either. Go read some Hofstadter and come back and then we can talk. And don’t think that these two things are completely unrelated, either. As you’ll see, and I’ll try to spell it out for you in the fullness of our sacred and preciously limited time, digging music and understanding a self have quite a lot in common. Now as I was saying, you don’t know shit about music.
I know you think you do, and lest Uncle H-Time be caught with his pants down, allow me to explain. Don’t get you wrong - you like music. Some of the time some of you even love it. It’s the soundtrack to your favourite movies. You worship implicitly cool directors like Tarantino, even if you don’t know it, coz they tell you what’s hip so you don’t need to figure out for yaself. Never mind that he’s not interested in touching you, or getting inside you (don’t be crude) – he’s after the perfect pop movie moment, and he does what he does well. But the closest he gets to reality - to what’s real to you or me or anyone - is his craftily worn reels. That’s a pun right there. He’s havin a whale of a time, and we do too, but does anyone ever listen to his soundtracks after the movie? I said listen to, not buy.
What I mean to say is there’s a great many of you whippersnappers these days that get music incidentally. You bumped into the cinema and some music brushed off on you. You were takin the tv for a walk and you stepped in a song. TV shows, advertising, theme tunes, jingles, movies. Music is no more the focus of these things than it is the focus of video hits and a great many other shows of its plastic ilk. (I’d consider making an exception for Rage, which is a bit of a different story, and a topic for another day and in all likelihood another author. With a bit of luck, persistence and assistance, Rage delivers interesting musical experiences, but they’re of a different dimension to the one’s of which I’ll soon speak, real soon now my little ones.)
I can hear some of you in the back sniggering amongst yourselves, ol’ man Hammertime’s drunk again, he’s lost his wits, if he ever had ‘em in the first place. You’s the ones that listen to music all the time. Screw the soundtrack to a movie, this is the soundtrack of your lives. You were born with earphones in your little baby ears, and damned if they’re not still in there. Don’t worry, I know there’s no music comin out of em right now, you just leave em in there hoping people’ll leave you alone, or maybe realise how cool you are. You take those headphones on to the train, down the street, onto the bus. Sometimes you forge everlasting bonds with your contemporaries by wearing an earpiece each.
You’ve got a million songs in those miracles of modern design, and I’m deeply impressed by Apple’s marketing savvy, but there’s a few things that constrain your listening pleasure. For starters you barely listen to more than 10 seconds of each track. If we take modern day rampant short attention spanism to its logical conclusion - and yes, I’m afflicted too - then we’ll all be just constantly skipping songs, flipping channels – never stopping, ever. Sounds like fun. But I digress. Being out and about, you can’t really focus on the music. You got the friggin platform announcer competing for audiospace in yer head. You can’t give it the time and attention it needs, if you want to get out of it what’s in it, lurking in there, somewhere. Lurking inside the good stuff anyway. And then there’s the lovely shuffle mode, in which you get to listen to an utterly, utterly random selection of your own musical library. Which also prevents any buildup of mood, of atmosphere, and any unlocking of the precious fruits that some albums yield only to complete listening. Have you ever thought about how to create a really, truly random sequence? Is that even possible anyway? As I see it, there’s two kinds of randomness: the kind that’s miraculously built into the fabric of reality at the subatomic level, and the kind that’s for all purposes random, like a die. You gotta tap into one of these things if you want randomness. Either that or talk to someone under 25, who’ll pop it into conversation at quite predictable intervals.
High above and far beyond all this, you do listen, and you do enjoy, and f’crissakes your music means something to you. It speaks to you. It speaks, it raps, it adds useless and useful extra notes, it sings of life’s big themes – love, (much less often) hate, (more often) loathing (including self), pride. Pride is a big one. So many lucky people getting their pride taken for a ride in pimped out musical cars. And given today’s topic, we must add that it speaks in the voice and spirit of rock! There are beautiful voices, sweet melodies, driving guitars. Honest to goodness, down to earth, rockin’ out, heartfelt but ultimately really, really lame songs which tend to get played on Triple J a lot. Well please, ‘cause you’ve stuck around this long, do me the favour of noting all that, taking it in, and setting it aside. I’d like you to open your mind, and get ready to receive. Cause I’m going to talk about passion, about fury, about precision, about wince-inducing off notes, about strong and strange emotions.
I first heard about the Mars Volta when I was working in the old secondhandbookshop on City Rd. Run by the extreme left SRC, who invariably go on to become middle of the road Laborites. The future of Labor, even. Christ! Right above the footbridge, it was, until they moved it, not the bridge, but the shop, and then they moved the bridge too. I had Yoshimi Battles… on the stereo, and one of the custudents told me if I liked this I’d like the Mars Volta. Retrospectively viewing the comment, it was ridiculous. They’re two very different bands. But he was right, I do like them both, though not with the causality suggested by his remark. I soon fetched myself some Volta. I listened to the song Roulette Dares and was taken aback. It was a little chaotic and challenging at first, but I discovered a darn good rock song in there, complete with tension building intro, loud bits, quiet bits and noisy instrumentals. After a few listens, the song grew on me, and I was struck by just how heartfelt Cedric’s plaintive cry was. Though I had no idea what the hell he was talking about. Still don’t. Something about an exoskeleton and a delay. All the same, I gave it no thought for months. After these months, a conversation with a friend prompted me to invest in Frances the Mute. Now that’s a sentence in sore need of context. In this fashion, a hideously beautiful metamusical mushroom sprouted in my temporal lobes and I still can’t get the dang thing out.
Allow me to lay it out for you, my lovely ones, in big clear letters like George Bush on a battleship, my central thesis. Is that the Mars Volta are one of the top 5 rock bands ever, who have created a unique and good sound, that has an uncanny ability to embed itself into the fabric of your mind and no napisan or new age cleaning recipe could ever get it out, not that you’d want to. With the Mars Volta, there’s much in common with other musical experiences. You bop your head, you grin stupidly, you have your favourite bits. But there’s much in rare too. You try to sing along but it’s fuckin pointless. You realise that there’s no other band for which you can remember 10 discrete mind-numbingly powerful drum solos. There is no other band that quite illuminates the moody, murky, morbid, manic and maniacal backwaters of your mind like the Mars Volta.
Passion and Fury
TMV somehow remain sincere, ridiculously sincere given the lyrics and cd art work, yet it all makes sense. Like all good works of art, it has its internal logic. It sends you down a path of disgusting dissonant sounds and morbid, fifth grade lyrics, but after you’ve been down it a few times, it looks normal and everything else odd. Cedric has an amazing voice, there is no doubt of this. When I was passing through that ineffable first stage of listening to a band, I found it offputting. I was able to appreciate a bunch of other stuff they were doing, but his lyrics were silly, his voice nothing special. How wrong I was. His voice and words are still all those things, but he is flat out the best singer going round at the moment. It’s an implicitly understood fact that if you ever want to make a point in a song, you sing just a touch higher. You find that point of auditory contact that is somehow more meaningful, more sincere, more heartfelt, whatever the emotion involved. Cedric hits this note and then sings the rest of the song an octave higher. But he sings like he is possessed, and heck, maybe he is. After all, Bedlam is an album about a possession of sorts, a ride through the dead side with an ancient evil spirit named Goliath. To pre-empt a recurring theme, uncannily perfectly sense making.
Singing aside, the whole band plays with a passion rarely matched, in the studio or live. And when it is matched, the matching band probably doesn’t compete in areas like musical creativity or depth of emotion. A good example of this is when they were touring Frances at the Enmore theatre, and two band members were grabbing a bite to eat beforehand. Sage concertgoers recognised them (might have been Jon Theodore and the sax player) and said hello. Jon said that they’d try to play harder tonight than they ever have. I’m afraid I can’t back this up with statistics, but I was there and they played fucking hard. Over the two and a half hours straight they played, you became progressively more hypnotised, while retaining the ability to appreciate their excellent renditions. How many other bands can do that? Hell, they can’t even do it themselves all the time. When they toured Amputechture the show was good, but not great. Listening to it afterwards I realised it was great, which is useful but too late for people there on the night.
I’ve little idea what the band members are like. I’d like to interview them some day. Jon Theodore comes across as intelligent and thoughtful, someone who loves what he does. Hardly deserving of being thrown under the bus, but that’s what Cedric did when he said they had to fire him. Yes, Pridgen is a freak, but so is Jon. Maybe it’s a little in joke, but where are his fuckin manners? And I suspect it wasn’t, as it was said in an interview with some Italian kids that you wouldn’t think would be but of course was inevitably going to be translated and made available to everyone out there on the innernet. Bottom line: TMV operate on a plane of passion and force that few other bands match, let alone sustain, far from freakin exceed. They demand attention, and won’t tolerate being a background soundtrack to yer life.
Precision
Goddamn they are good musicians. This is what pushes them over the edge. It’s one thing to have ideas, to have attitude, to have energy, but to back it up with insanely advanced technical execution is just scary. It’s not that they play unplayable stuff, although it would be to the majority of weekend hacks out there. But when you combine the guitar, drums, singing and the rest of it, they’ve left the rest of the pack in their sick wake. You can switch off and listen, but you can also pay attention, and when you do you blow your mind cottoning on to what they’re doing. ‘Course when I say pay attention, I really mean pay attention. Too quick, too complex, too detailed to pick up all in one go. Maybe that’s the banal secret behind their genius, to add more and more layers, with sufficient precision and arranged with sufficient delicacy, until it takes three years of listening to the same song to finally hear everything on it. But I’d like to see someone else try. My ears aren’t sufficiently developed, sufficiently evolved in this lil ol lifetime I’ve got, to hear everything they’re doing. I speak mostly of drums, which I do hear most of, but I guarantee you right now in an ironclad fashion, serious musos will get even more out of a listen than I would. Of course, they don’t have the constellation of tastes, thought patterns and musical history that constitutes my distinct mental sphere, so their reaction will be different, quite different probably, but we’ll get to all that stuff later.
Off notes that’ll make ya wince
Dissonance is an explicit musical strategy of the Mars Volta. For some reason, it often works. Maybe it’s just the sweet, goddamned relief of finally hitting a sonorous note that makes it work, maybe it corrupts your senses into thinking this is normal. I found it hard to explain to my German friend Thomas that this five minutes of repetitive, dissonant noise was actually part of a good song. It’s just that there’s been too many times a horrible sounding song has suddenly wormed its way into my good books. They make you listen to their dissonance, cause you never know when something incredible’s about to happen. Who’s the fool, me or him?
When it comes to musical fineness, consistent high performance levels are hard to come by. It’s something I’ve come to accept, and for some reason relish in a Cedric-kinda way, that no matter which way you cut the steak of musical excellence, you’ll always hit some gristle. You can’t have one without the other. So it is with comedy, so it is with many other creative endeavours. To hit those moments of brilliance or insight or shocking hilarity, you gotta have plenty of misses too. Mars Volta is no exception, and there are some songs I just can’t listen to, and even a few that have gotten old. But that’s some fine gristle, because you’re eating it at the same time as a steak like no other.
Strong and strange emotions
TMV’s breakout album Deloused was accompanied by a booklet, with text. It is the story of Cerpin Taxt, the album’s protagonist, and inside it are found the lyrics amidst a much bigger story. But if you thought the lyrics were odd or hard to parse, you haven’t read the rest of the booklet! I’ve tried to read it three times and I still haven’t come close to finishing it. I think you have to be clinically insane to scan that whole thing, it’s crazy.
This music isn’t afraid of craziness. It looks insanity in the face and sees itself. And when we listen to it, we hear ourselves. Given sufficient lucidity, anyone will admit that the sanity of life and the world is a bit of a knife edge, off which we all fall at times. We could ignore it or forget about it. Or we could stop and take a closer look. Embrace it and see what happens. Deloused and Frances in particular show us a world where sanity is irrelevant, and we embrace it. They manage to make something strange and distant central and heart wrenching. Death is often present, not as a treated theme, but rather as wallpaper. Scratch that, as the air that we breathe, as we go about more germane tasks. The set, on which the real action happens. That which we take for granted.
You find yourself in a song, and they slip a line in, a riff, a sound, that wrenches your guts, that moves you, and not in a Bette Midler Beaches kinda way. No, there is no light, in the darkest of your furthest reaches. Trite, and brutal. One day this chalk outline will circle this city. And you believe it, you contemplate for a second a force so malevolent it’ll wipe out a whole fucking city. When they drag the lake, there’s nothing left at all. Love that line. An abortion that survived. Which makes complete sense when you know the story of the song.
Now I’m lost.
The utter lostness of inertiatic esp. (I hate referring to these songs by their titles.) Forlorn. Simple and forlorn. I’m lost, I’m lost right now, and there’s no friggin way out. You know how it’s a common parable in our society for someone to be lost? Utterly, hopelessly despairingly lost? Until they find a way out. Sweet redemption, sweet foundness. But this song’s protagonist never finds a way out. In fact if you stay tuned, the only way out is suicide. This song absolutely revels in the panic, fear and certitude of being lost, way, way out.
I’ve been lost before, many would say I’m lost now. But goddamned if I’m ever this lost, I’d probably go crazy. And listening to this song is a concession to craziness in a way. Jon Theodore’s drums that keep the beat and meld with the bass. The rhythms he keeps, the patterns he creates are so furious, so heavy, so precise and crisp and so perfectly in keeping with the flow of the song, that he really is irreplaceable.
Of course, they replaced him, and they’re not the same band any more. But Thomas “Theodore on coke” Pridgen somehow fits in, and we have a new Mars Volta, and they’re just as crazy as ever. Over time, I thought they lost something. They lost an edge, a fearfully crazy and soul piercingly emotional force, that was clearly present on Deloused and Frances, but that departed or turned into something else on Amputechture and Bedlam. Listening to Bedlam now, I’m not so sure. They’ve lost something, but they’re still there. They’re still massive, a presence, irritating, complex. In a word, intense. And as I keep listening, it’s building. Maybe Amputechture was an aberration. Freakin good album though.
At The Drive In was a darn good band, all things considered. Yet I doubt anyone who listened to their strange mix of anxious punk guessed it was harbouring the nascent mutant foetus of the Mars Volta. Or that Cedric Bixler Zavala would go on to sing like this. Or that Omar Rodriguez Lopez would go on to play guitar like this, or create music like this.
I won’t for a second argue the band’s perfection or incapacity to produce rubbish. But their music reaches such heights, so often, and they’re not the same heights. They somehow manage to keep finding new patterns, yet all somehow stamped with the same Mars Volta superpattern. If music were a balloon, and musicians the gas molecules inside it, then most artists would float about the centre and never glance the edges. Some pioneers make contact with the interior surface and push it in slightly different directions. Mars Volta pushes the surface so hard they pop out the umbilical cord onto the other side, and start twisting the balloon into different shapes like a clown. Okay, I may be exaggerating, but you’ll grant me that in my old age, won’t you?
If you want to understand the human mind, you can’t omit music. Every piece of music we hear succeeds to varying extents at impinging upon our constantly evolving selves. Multiple points of musical contact get sifted through the sieve of our senses. It’s like a little dance between you and the song, sometimes the dance works, sometimes it doesn’t. Some music never makes it within cooee of our beckoning arms, some gets there and steps on our toes, some fits so well with us that we never knew there was a separate dance partner. Good music fits so well that it changes the way you dance. And by that I mean it changes us, our selves, our souls. You couldn’t understand my soul without knowing something about the Mars Volta, Split Enz, Crash Test Dummies and Ween. Hey! Stop fuckin laughing! I’ll smack you for your impertinence. There is surprisingly little research out there about just what the fuck goes on when we have a song in our heads, when a song speaks to us emotionally, when we discover hidden aspects to it. But these are real, real phenomena, realer than a whole heap of bullshit which many professional government funded fully accredited paper publishin self respectin idiot cognitive scientists fritter away their hours on.
Let’s just take a little time out here, because you know what I’m talking about. Let’s suppose a sufficiently complex new song you hear. First few listens, you pick up on the chorus, overall flavour. Over time, you notice different things – bass line here, drum fill there, understood lyric over yonder way. All of a sudden, you’ve built up an expectation for a particular little bit – what the hell is a unit of music anyway? We’ll coin that another day – that is so sweetly satisfied when you hear it. A line, a note, a lick. Classic example “Hey now don’t dream it’s over.” Everyone knows that, right? When a song goes through your head when you’re not listening to it, you don’t hear the whole thing. You hear sections, especially these catchy bits I was talking about. And as you listen you accumulate these little patterns, and notice different levels of patterns and so on until your understanding of this song rivals your understanding of complex concepts and any other ideas you care to mention. The ideas we know make us, and songs are that integral to the way we think and who we are.
Back track to the dance. Some music you have to dance with a few, ungainly times, before you hit full swing. Like two clocks out of sync, it may take a while to line up, but when you do, the match is absolute. Some times you do five different dances with the same song, as you peel away the layers of a particularly fragrant aural onion. I’m going through that stage with Bedlam right now. And no, I do not associate onions in any way shape or figure or form with the Bedlam in Goliath.
Back track to the process of acclimatising to a song. As I said, and I saw you all nodding your wee heads, everyone who’s into music knows what I’m talking about. For music you grow to love, it’s quite a precious time, only you can’t appreciate it at the time cause the music doesn’t sound quite right. But you have faith that it will all come good. After a few listens, it starts to grow on you. Then you love it. I occasionally wonder what it’d be like to go back to that first listen. Not just of any Mars Volta song, but of what it was like to discover just what in god’s name they were doing, that Mars Volta thing they do. It’d be a bit like going back to the first beer, when it tasted wrong. We can still detect that first taste if we try, but it’s been so overridden by our accumulated knowledge and expectations about beer, it’s an afterthought, an aftertaste and not much more. It doesn’t change, we do. But it is nothing without us in the first place.
I’ve never had a band inhabit my mind and start shifting the furniture around like the Mars Volta. They take a seat, settle in and set to stabbing darkly coloured shards into your brain and into your mind. Jagged fragments left all over the fuckin place, and each time you pick one out you find another one lyin around in the vicinity. There’s even one shaped like Candy and a Currant Bun. I could write four'n'half thousand words about that song alone. Brilliant.
Well, I can see you all scratching yer itches so I’ll release you from my sweaty, greasy grip. But do check em out. If you’ve a mind a little like mine, or like mine was a couple of years ago, you may have a musical fit.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Norm MacDonald
In case you haven't heard, Norm's been gathering some votes for most underrated comedian of the last 20 years. Here's an ooold stand up clip, and it's part hilarious, part unintentionally funny and part unfunny. Thing is, I think the unintentionally funny stuff might be funny on purpose.
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
Can you believe what those crazy scientists are up to?
Another round of the latest research headlines, delivered sizzling to your door. Ow, the sizzle landed on my arm!
Monday, February 04, 2008
Yes, I Am
A few days ago, I started writing a post under the title, "Am I a man of hate?" Sadly, I have come to the conclusion that I am. My post, which was scrapped for operational reasons, revolved just how irritating I found the two champions of the Australian Open tennis this year - let's call them Djokapova for short. So much shrieking, so much pre-serve ball bouncing, so little good will engendered.
I mention all of this only by way of introduction. For tonight I have once more discovered the ugly, fiery, hate-filled side of me. I had planned to watch the Superbowl tonight, for a few reasons - it is a spectacle, it is sport, it had a decent story line (one of the teams was undefeated heading into it), and perhaps most of all, I planned on winding down from a stressful day by becoming a zombie in front of the telly, as is the fashion in our society.
SBS screened the Superbowl live this morning, but they were replaying it at 10:30pm. I steadfastly avoided the media during the day so as not to hear the result. Aussie media doesn't give a rats about gridiron, but they're guaranteed to report on the Superbowl, it's just the way it is (Mike and the Mechanics).
I watched a bit of South Park (still paper-cut sharp) and Drawn Together (underrated, by me) and even saw ads promoting the replay during them. Then I turned the telly off, and returned to the Joy Luck Club, which I am reading as part of PBC committments. My TV and internet-warped attention span and inability to delay gratification saw me turn the telly on to check the news headlines on SBS. In the news today: carnage, carnage, carnage and Giants win.
What the?! They're about to show the game, which probably 95% of their viewers won't have seen yet owing to the fact that they don't, and will never in their life, watch SBS on a Monday morning at 10am, and they announce the result! No warning, no suggestion to look away or leave the room. Nothing. Just a few words, a picture, and in case you weren't sure, GIANTS WIN in caps. This never would have happened on Channel 10. Sports Tonight would have been all over this.
I make three obervations. Firstly, I hate myself for turning the telly on unnecessarily. Secondly, this hate is quickly and satisfyingly shifted to SBS, the most stupid and inept of sports broadcasters I have ever had the misfortune of viewing. Thirdly, I am ashamed at myself for my non-zero care factor in all of this.
Is this what my life has come to? Emotional slavery to professional sports? I need help. *help you* *help me*.
I mention all of this only by way of introduction. For tonight I have once more discovered the ugly, fiery, hate-filled side of me. I had planned to watch the Superbowl tonight, for a few reasons - it is a spectacle, it is sport, it had a decent story line (one of the teams was undefeated heading into it), and perhaps most of all, I planned on winding down from a stressful day by becoming a zombie in front of the telly, as is the fashion in our society.
SBS screened the Superbowl live this morning, but they were replaying it at 10:30pm. I steadfastly avoided the media during the day so as not to hear the result. Aussie media doesn't give a rats about gridiron, but they're guaranteed to report on the Superbowl, it's just the way it is (Mike and the Mechanics).
I watched a bit of South Park (still paper-cut sharp) and Drawn Together (underrated, by me) and even saw ads promoting the replay during them. Then I turned the telly off, and returned to the Joy Luck Club, which I am reading as part of PBC committments. My TV and internet-warped attention span and inability to delay gratification saw me turn the telly on to check the news headlines on SBS. In the news today: carnage, carnage, carnage and Giants win.
What the?! They're about to show the game, which probably 95% of their viewers won't have seen yet owing to the fact that they don't, and will never in their life, watch SBS on a Monday morning at 10am, and they announce the result! No warning, no suggestion to look away or leave the room. Nothing. Just a few words, a picture, and in case you weren't sure, GIANTS WIN in caps. This never would have happened on Channel 10. Sports Tonight would have been all over this.
I make three obervations. Firstly, I hate myself for turning the telly on unnecessarily. Secondly, this hate is quickly and satisfyingly shifted to SBS, the most stupid and inept of sports broadcasters I have ever had the misfortune of viewing. Thirdly, I am ashamed at myself for my non-zero care factor in all of this.
Is this what my life has come to? Emotional slavery to professional sports? I need help. *help you* *help me*.
Friday, February 01, 2008
Anyone interested in nanotechnology?
If so, check out artmus scientist's latest expose on the scandalous world of nanotech.
Monday, January 28, 2008
The many shades of... Darth Vader
Retrieved from ol' dependable (The) Sports Guy. It's a little long, and slow in parts, but it got me real good a few times.
"I quit on you when you ran outta Dee-troit with Willie The Pimp!" - Get This worthy.
"I quit on you when you ran outta Dee-troit with Willie The Pimp!" - Get This worthy.
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Spilling the beans on edge
There’s a bit in the Spectrum section of the Sydney Morning Herald on Saturdays called Big Questions. I really hate it, because it’s often used to ask where certain proverbs come from. Gee, I wonder who coined the term ‘to coin a term’? Talk about boring!
That’s why today I’m going to talk about where the phrase “to spill the beans” comes from.
Once upon a time Maria Bevilaqua was sitting by the local watering hole, cooling her heels. She had just been given a recipe by her grandfather, Louie, for bean lasagne. She should have had the recipe months ago. “I don’t care what it’s been, what is it now?”, she had said at the time. Louie spat on the ground in disgust and walked away, and it took him a full 7 months to invite her once more to receive the recipe.
This recipe had been in the family for 12 generations, and was a closely guarded secret. Once it was leaked to a neighbouring village, and Old Vinnie Bevilaqua was forced to doorknock the whole village, getting them to sign affidavits saying they would never use or pass on the recipe.
Maria, who’d always had a sharp tongue, was now just enjoying the moment. A carp swam past her foot. She pulled out a bb gun and shot it in the groin. Receiving the recipe was like being admitted into the family proper. She held her head high, her face a picture of serenity now. She’d already memorised the recipe, including the optional inclusion of a sprig of sparrowbane for when the moon was full – La Luna Spumante was what the old folk called it.
Slowly Maria picked up her things and headed off to market. She knew precisely which ingredients she needed, and picked them all up without a hitch, although the Spanish onions were a little dull. She shot the vendor in the groin with her bb gun and returned home with 6 full envirobags worth of fresh produce.
When Maria got home, Louie was waiting for her. “Maria, you little s.o.b., the family tradition is that the first time you learn the recipe, you gotta cook it for someone else. And not just anyone else. Us Bevilaquas is well connected. You gonna cook the recipe for the Countess of Guidonia and her family.”
“What?! That’s ridiculous.”
“The hell it is! You gonna cook for her, you gonna cook it well, and you gonna come back and tell us all about it. Off you go.”
With that he pushed her out the door before she could even put her bags down. He stuffed the address into her skirt pocket, and ignored her incredibly obscene protestations. When she finally turned around and started trudging off, he called out.
“Maria! You’ll pass the Sfaggis of Lago Maggiore on the way. Those pricks have been trying to get this recipe for 145 years. They don’t know you’re coming, but don’t raise any attention anyway. Keep your head down and your palms pointed outwards for good luck. Now do what I say and off you go.”
By now Maria was in a sour mood, but knew she’d better heed Louie’s instructions. Ingredients in hand, she hopped onto Angelo the family mule and headed off.
It was a beautiful road that she rode down, and her mood soon lightened. What was the countess’ family like?, she wondered. How many were there? Surely gramps wouldn’t send me away with insufficient ingredients? She was genuinely excited about the possibilities of the evening. She pulled out a hipflask and knocked back a fifth of vodka. Onward she rode.
Occasionally she passed villagers going about their daily business. Some said hello, others ignored her. She remembered Louie’s warning about the Sfaggis, but was unconcerned. She pulled up beside a massive baobab, and reckoned there was another 15 minutes of riding before she got there. She hopped off Angelo to stretch her legs. The shopping bags were secured tightly behind the saddle. Just as she was about to hop back on, someone spoke to her.
“Excuse me madam, where are you going?” said a friendly middle aged woman.
“I’m off to Guidonia. If you’ll excuse me, I have an appointment to keep.”
The woman smiled politely, and continued on her way. Maria rode off, but glanced back. The middle aged woman had broken into a sprint and was running in the direction of a homestead just off the road. Maria thought this unusual, but kept riding. A moment later she looked back again, and she could now see the lady talking to some other people, gesticulating frantically and pointing down the road towards… Maria!
Maria brought Angelo to a trot, and was beginning to feel very uneasy. She looked around again, and saw several people running towards her. There was a young man out in front, followed by some children.
Maria decided she would not look back again, and she rode Angelo as fast as he could go. The people didn’t seem to be catching up with her, and within a few minutes she saw Guidonia castle looming in front of her. She was confident now of making it, but still somewhat anxious. Sweat covered her entire body and she had saddle sores. Finally she reached the castle gates, and she hopped off Angelo and looked around. No one seemed to be following her, so she allowed herself a smile. She was here!
She was greeted at the gate by a portly doorman in fantastic garb. “You must be Maria. Let me help you with your bags.”
She unfastened the bags from Angelo and slapped the mule on the butt. With that Angelo rode away in the direction of home. She handed five of the six bags over to the doorman, but hesitated when it came to the all-important sixth – the home of the beans. There were green beans, red beans, white beans – you name it. She peeked inside to confirm the contents, and turned to the gate.
“Madam? There is a sixth bag. Please let me take it for you.”
“Umm, well – actually if it’s okay, I’ll hang onto it.”
“Madam, you don’t understand. Let me take it for you, it’s no problem.”
“Thank you, really, but I’d like to carry it. My wallet’s in here too.”
“Listen, I get paid by the bag. That bag is worth a lot of money to me. Please?”
“Alright! Crissakes.” She handed the bag to the doorman, but kept a watchful eye on him.
As the huge gate swung open, she stepped forward – and tripped over a cobble stone. She cried out: “Fatherf*cker!” An elderly couple standing nearby glared at her and shook their heads. Maria’s only thought was: thank God I wasn’t carrying the bag! It’s contents would have been revealed to all the world – although the Sfaggis were nowhere in sight.
As she pulled herself up the doorman rushed over to help. In doing so, he switched hands, moved the bags around and lost his grip. A single bag fell to the ground. Time seemed to slow down. The beans spilled everywhere. Maria cursed audibly and bent over to collect the beans. As she did so, she heard a high-pitched, whiny laugh. She turned around, and the laughter continued.
It was the man from the road, who had been chasing her.
“Ha ha ha! I’ve done it! I’ve discovered the secret ingredient to the Bevilaqua Lasagne. It’s beans! BEANS!!!”
He shouted it out, again and again, and walked away, still shouting.
“You idiot!,” she said to the doorman. “Do you realise what you’ve just done?”
“There there, Madam,” said the doorman. “It’s okay, we wash the beans.”
Maria felt sick. She had to act quick. She raced after the man, who was still laughing, and tapped him on the left shoulder. As he turned around, she produced an affidavit. “What’s this?” he said quizzically. Ah screw it, she thought to herself, and she pulled a knife out of her skirt pocket and stabbed the man in the chest. He dropped to the ground, and sputtered the word ‘Beans’ one last time before carking it.
Maria went on to cook the most wonderful bean lasagne for the Countess, and she lived to pass on the tale to her grandchildren, and later her children, about the fateful day she spilled the beans.
***
Of course, all of this is by the by. What I’m spilling the beans about is Edge. Edge is a science website (and notfer profit) created by literary agent John Brockman. I wouldn’t mind working for him. It contains articles, essays, videos and more, with an impressive range of regular contributors. Prominent are zoologist-cum-atheist flagbearer Richard Dawkins, maverick* molecular biologist Craig Venter, author Ian McEwan and astronomer Paul Davies. Sadly no Hofstadter there, but I like to think he just hasn’t sold out. I have to admit, there’s something a little wanky about being on the list of Edge contributors, but to be fair, if you have to be on a list it might as well be this one.
Anyway, there’s always something stimulating to read there, whether it’s about the definition of life, the end of the universe, or the vagaries of human nature. Even better, it’s meant for a lay audience but never dumbs down, there’s conflict a plenty but it’s usually respectful and with justification, and it celebrates life’s big questions.
Speaking of questions, what prompted me to make this post was the annual question and answer frenzy from Edge’s World Question Centre. Questions are posed and heaps and heaps of insightful, amusing or controversial answers are provided by the aforementioned range of contributors. This year’s question is: What have you changed your mind about? Why? Hey wait a minute, that’s two questions!
There’s always a few writers whose answers I look for – Judith Rich Harris, (she of the “peers are more influential than parents in determining our behaviour” theory), Simon Baron Cohen (similar name to Ali G’s creator), Susan Blackmore (author of the Meme Machine and a cool user’s guide to consciousness book. Am I present?), Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Daniel Goleman (of emotional intelligence fame), Jaron Lanier (who once proposed a more useful question like: What’s the single most effective thing we could do to make the world a better place, or something like that), John Allen Paulos (wrote Innumeracy and I Think Therefore I Laugh) and Robert Trivers.
But you never know who will write something that makes you think. So far this year I like Karl Sabbagh’s response, that he used to think experts knew better than he, but now realises they may be knowledgeable but that doesn’t make them wise. So except for their field of expertise (I would argue even in their field of expertise sometimes), you’re just as likely as them to be right about any given issue.
Here’s a list of all the questions, one per year starting in 2008 and working backwards. Sorry about the caps and underline - I abhor them. The last few have been turned into books – a great Christmas or Birthday gift for the whole family, nerds and idiots alike.
WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?
WHAT ARE YOU OPTIMISTIC ABOUT?
WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA?
"WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?"
"WHAT'S YOUR LAW?"
"WHAT ARE THE PRESSING SCIENTIFIC ISSUES FOR THE NATION AND THE WORLD, AND WHAT IS YOUR ADVICE ON HOW I CAN BEGIN TO DEAL WITH THEM?" —GWB
"WHAT'S YOUR QUESTION?"
"WHAT NOW?"
"WHAT QUESTIONS HAVE DISAPPEARED?"
"WHAT IS TODAY'S MOST IMPORTANT UNREPORTED STORY?"
"WHAT QUESTIONS ARE YOU ASKING YOURSELF?"
* this word is always used to describe him in the media. I prefer Word’s thesaurus alternatives: unconventional person, odd one out
That’s why today I’m going to talk about where the phrase “to spill the beans” comes from.
Once upon a time Maria Bevilaqua was sitting by the local watering hole, cooling her heels. She had just been given a recipe by her grandfather, Louie, for bean lasagne. She should have had the recipe months ago. “I don’t care what it’s been, what is it now?”, she had said at the time. Louie spat on the ground in disgust and walked away, and it took him a full 7 months to invite her once more to receive the recipe.
This recipe had been in the family for 12 generations, and was a closely guarded secret. Once it was leaked to a neighbouring village, and Old Vinnie Bevilaqua was forced to doorknock the whole village, getting them to sign affidavits saying they would never use or pass on the recipe.
Maria, who’d always had a sharp tongue, was now just enjoying the moment. A carp swam past her foot. She pulled out a bb gun and shot it in the groin. Receiving the recipe was like being admitted into the family proper. She held her head high, her face a picture of serenity now. She’d already memorised the recipe, including the optional inclusion of a sprig of sparrowbane for when the moon was full – La Luna Spumante was what the old folk called it.
Slowly Maria picked up her things and headed off to market. She knew precisely which ingredients she needed, and picked them all up without a hitch, although the Spanish onions were a little dull. She shot the vendor in the groin with her bb gun and returned home with 6 full envirobags worth of fresh produce.
When Maria got home, Louie was waiting for her. “Maria, you little s.o.b., the family tradition is that the first time you learn the recipe, you gotta cook it for someone else. And not just anyone else. Us Bevilaquas is well connected. You gonna cook the recipe for the Countess of Guidonia and her family.”
“What?! That’s ridiculous.”
“The hell it is! You gonna cook for her, you gonna cook it well, and you gonna come back and tell us all about it. Off you go.”
With that he pushed her out the door before she could even put her bags down. He stuffed the address into her skirt pocket, and ignored her incredibly obscene protestations. When she finally turned around and started trudging off, he called out.
“Maria! You’ll pass the Sfaggis of Lago Maggiore on the way. Those pricks have been trying to get this recipe for 145 years. They don’t know you’re coming, but don’t raise any attention anyway. Keep your head down and your palms pointed outwards for good luck. Now do what I say and off you go.”
By now Maria was in a sour mood, but knew she’d better heed Louie’s instructions. Ingredients in hand, she hopped onto Angelo the family mule and headed off.
It was a beautiful road that she rode down, and her mood soon lightened. What was the countess’ family like?, she wondered. How many were there? Surely gramps wouldn’t send me away with insufficient ingredients? She was genuinely excited about the possibilities of the evening. She pulled out a hipflask and knocked back a fifth of vodka. Onward she rode.
Occasionally she passed villagers going about their daily business. Some said hello, others ignored her. She remembered Louie’s warning about the Sfaggis, but was unconcerned. She pulled up beside a massive baobab, and reckoned there was another 15 minutes of riding before she got there. She hopped off Angelo to stretch her legs. The shopping bags were secured tightly behind the saddle. Just as she was about to hop back on, someone spoke to her.
“Excuse me madam, where are you going?” said a friendly middle aged woman.
“I’m off to Guidonia. If you’ll excuse me, I have an appointment to keep.”
The woman smiled politely, and continued on her way. Maria rode off, but glanced back. The middle aged woman had broken into a sprint and was running in the direction of a homestead just off the road. Maria thought this unusual, but kept riding. A moment later she looked back again, and she could now see the lady talking to some other people, gesticulating frantically and pointing down the road towards… Maria!
Maria brought Angelo to a trot, and was beginning to feel very uneasy. She looked around again, and saw several people running towards her. There was a young man out in front, followed by some children.
Maria decided she would not look back again, and she rode Angelo as fast as he could go. The people didn’t seem to be catching up with her, and within a few minutes she saw Guidonia castle looming in front of her. She was confident now of making it, but still somewhat anxious. Sweat covered her entire body and she had saddle sores. Finally she reached the castle gates, and she hopped off Angelo and looked around. No one seemed to be following her, so she allowed herself a smile. She was here!
She was greeted at the gate by a portly doorman in fantastic garb. “You must be Maria. Let me help you with your bags.”
She unfastened the bags from Angelo and slapped the mule on the butt. With that Angelo rode away in the direction of home. She handed five of the six bags over to the doorman, but hesitated when it came to the all-important sixth – the home of the beans. There were green beans, red beans, white beans – you name it. She peeked inside to confirm the contents, and turned to the gate.
“Madam? There is a sixth bag. Please let me take it for you.”
“Umm, well – actually if it’s okay, I’ll hang onto it.”
“Madam, you don’t understand. Let me take it for you, it’s no problem.”
“Thank you, really, but I’d like to carry it. My wallet’s in here too.”
“Listen, I get paid by the bag. That bag is worth a lot of money to me. Please?”
“Alright! Crissakes.” She handed the bag to the doorman, but kept a watchful eye on him.
As the huge gate swung open, she stepped forward – and tripped over a cobble stone. She cried out: “Fatherf*cker!” An elderly couple standing nearby glared at her and shook their heads. Maria’s only thought was: thank God I wasn’t carrying the bag! It’s contents would have been revealed to all the world – although the Sfaggis were nowhere in sight.
As she pulled herself up the doorman rushed over to help. In doing so, he switched hands, moved the bags around and lost his grip. A single bag fell to the ground. Time seemed to slow down. The beans spilled everywhere. Maria cursed audibly and bent over to collect the beans. As she did so, she heard a high-pitched, whiny laugh. She turned around, and the laughter continued.
It was the man from the road, who had been chasing her.
“Ha ha ha! I’ve done it! I’ve discovered the secret ingredient to the Bevilaqua Lasagne. It’s beans! BEANS!!!”
He shouted it out, again and again, and walked away, still shouting.
“You idiot!,” she said to the doorman. “Do you realise what you’ve just done?”
“There there, Madam,” said the doorman. “It’s okay, we wash the beans.”
Maria felt sick. She had to act quick. She raced after the man, who was still laughing, and tapped him on the left shoulder. As he turned around, she produced an affidavit. “What’s this?” he said quizzically. Ah screw it, she thought to herself, and she pulled a knife out of her skirt pocket and stabbed the man in the chest. He dropped to the ground, and sputtered the word ‘Beans’ one last time before carking it.
Maria went on to cook the most wonderful bean lasagne for the Countess, and she lived to pass on the tale to her grandchildren, and later her children, about the fateful day she spilled the beans.
***
Of course, all of this is by the by. What I’m spilling the beans about is Edge. Edge is a science website (and notfer profit) created by literary agent John Brockman. I wouldn’t mind working for him. It contains articles, essays, videos and more, with an impressive range of regular contributors. Prominent are zoologist-cum-atheist flagbearer Richard Dawkins, maverick* molecular biologist Craig Venter, author Ian McEwan and astronomer Paul Davies. Sadly no Hofstadter there, but I like to think he just hasn’t sold out. I have to admit, there’s something a little wanky about being on the list of Edge contributors, but to be fair, if you have to be on a list it might as well be this one.
Anyway, there’s always something stimulating to read there, whether it’s about the definition of life, the end of the universe, or the vagaries of human nature. Even better, it’s meant for a lay audience but never dumbs down, there’s conflict a plenty but it’s usually respectful and with justification, and it celebrates life’s big questions.
Speaking of questions, what prompted me to make this post was the annual question and answer frenzy from Edge’s World Question Centre. Questions are posed and heaps and heaps of insightful, amusing or controversial answers are provided by the aforementioned range of contributors. This year’s question is: What have you changed your mind about? Why? Hey wait a minute, that’s two questions!
There’s always a few writers whose answers I look for – Judith Rich Harris, (she of the “peers are more influential than parents in determining our behaviour” theory), Simon Baron Cohen (similar name to Ali G’s creator), Susan Blackmore (author of the Meme Machine and a cool user’s guide to consciousness book. Am I present?), Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Daniel Goleman (of emotional intelligence fame), Jaron Lanier (who once proposed a more useful question like: What’s the single most effective thing we could do to make the world a better place, or something like that), John Allen Paulos (wrote Innumeracy and I Think Therefore I Laugh) and Robert Trivers.
But you never know who will write something that makes you think. So far this year I like Karl Sabbagh’s response, that he used to think experts knew better than he, but now realises they may be knowledgeable but that doesn’t make them wise. So except for their field of expertise (I would argue even in their field of expertise sometimes), you’re just as likely as them to be right about any given issue.
Here’s a list of all the questions, one per year starting in 2008 and working backwards. Sorry about the caps and underline - I abhor them. The last few have been turned into books – a great Christmas or Birthday gift for the whole family, nerds and idiots alike.
WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?
WHAT ARE YOU OPTIMISTIC ABOUT?
WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA?
"WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?"
"WHAT'S YOUR LAW?"
"WHAT ARE THE PRESSING SCIENTIFIC ISSUES FOR THE NATION AND THE WORLD, AND WHAT IS YOUR ADVICE ON HOW I CAN BEGIN TO DEAL WITH THEM?" —GWB
"WHAT'S YOUR QUESTION?"
"WHAT NOW?"
"WHAT QUESTIONS HAVE DISAPPEARED?"
"WHAT IS TODAY'S MOST IMPORTANT UNREPORTED STORY?"
"WHAT QUESTIONS ARE YOU ASKING YOURSELF?"
* this word is always used to describe him in the media. I prefer Word’s thesaurus alternatives: unconventional person, odd one out
Monday, January 14, 2008
Free Will, research taken in vain, googly brains
Over at Ye Artful Science, there's
- chatter about free will. Insightful, yet humiliating.
- a ridiculous take on some research reported in the Herald today
- a superb analysis of the pitfalls of brain research
Surely it's just a matter of time before the Artful Sciencer is snapped up, by something.
- chatter about free will. Insightful, yet humiliating.
- a ridiculous take on some research reported in the Herald today
- a superb analysis of the pitfalls of brain research
Surely it's just a matter of time before the Artful Sciencer is snapped up, by something.
A Sports Guy - Monday, January 14
KISS AND MAKE UP
Australia and India are on the road to cordiality with the opposing captains engaging in a passionate kiss at a press conference today. The kiss was initiated by Australian captain Ricky Ponting, who said afterwards "Anil and I go way back. Way, way back. F*ck!"
FEDERER RECOVERS FROM ILLNESS
Ominously for the Australian Open field, Roger Federer is no longer feeling the effects of a flu that had him sidelined for the Kooyong Classic. At least one seed was reported to withdraw from the Open on hearing the news. "It's a tough call to make," said Dmitry Tursonov. "But it's not really worth playing if Roger is feeling well. I miss my home."
MOTHER LODE DRAWS DAVENPORT BACK AGAIN
New mother Lindsay Davenport has declared the reason behind returning from induced-pregnancy-induced retirement to play at this year's Australian Open: money. "I'm gonna get me some cash, my diggers," said Davenport. "That's what it's about now. I have a child to feed."
Australia and India are on the road to cordiality with the opposing captains engaging in a passionate kiss at a press conference today. The kiss was initiated by Australian captain Ricky Ponting, who said afterwards "Anil and I go way back. Way, way back. F*ck!"
FEDERER RECOVERS FROM ILLNESS
Ominously for the Australian Open field, Roger Federer is no longer feeling the effects of a flu that had him sidelined for the Kooyong Classic. At least one seed was reported to withdraw from the Open on hearing the news. "It's a tough call to make," said Dmitry Tursonov. "But it's not really worth playing if Roger is feeling well. I miss my home."
MOTHER LODE DRAWS DAVENPORT BACK AGAIN
New mother Lindsay Davenport has declared the reason behind returning from induced-pregnancy-induced retirement to play at this year's Australian Open: money. "I'm gonna get me some cash, my diggers," said Davenport. "That's what it's about now. I have a child to feed."
Above: Davenport was gracious in victory, allowing her opponent to share the spoils. (Photo: AP). Davenport was criticised for scheduling overmatched opponents in her return to competitive tennis.
Warwick Capper
I hate to build things up, but this really made me laugh a lot. Once again, credit goes to Tony Martin, although to be fair I think the sea lion's share of the credit actually goes to his accomplice Richard Marsland.
Wait on, let me build it down for a sec. This is an audio file, so the footage is at best distracting. Do yourself a favour and look away. Also, the sound quality could be better. Shop around at YouTube though, you might find a better one. The original file was located at Triple M's Get This page, but for some reason they've taken it down! You can still get it from the podcasts page, along with their final episode and others. While we're here, there's also some high quality ringtones up for grabs. My favourite: Brian Boyd and David Dickinson (tie). There's also a decent summary of capers at Wikipedia.
Wait on, let me build it down for a sec. This is an audio file, so the footage is at best distracting. Do yourself a favour and look away. Also, the sound quality could be better. Shop around at YouTube though, you might find a better one. The original file was located at Triple M's Get This page, but for some reason they've taken it down! You can still get it from the podcasts page, along with their final episode and others. While we're here, there's also some high quality ringtones up for grabs. My favourite: Brian Boyd and David Dickinson (tie). There's also a decent summary of capers at Wikipedia.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Diary of a Mad Man
Dear diary,
I am a sane woman. What you think about that? Pee pee.
Yours,
Sphagnum Bog
January 14, 2008
I am a sane woman. What you think about that? Pee pee.
Yours,
Sphagnum Bog
January 14, 2008
When you don’t understand why someone you like isn’t famous
I’m rereading I Am A Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter. I wouldn’t say it’s his best work, but it’s still damn good. It’s essentially a summary of his thoughts on how a self, an ‘I’, a ‘light on inside’, a mind’s eye can come from a lump of squishy grey stuff.
I’m only a couple chapters in, but I keep feeling compelled to write notes about what he’s written, on account of it triggers so many thoughts and ideas in mine head. In fact, if I go through with this audacious, yet bodacious plan, I’ll have a book by the end of it! It could be the first ever book written entirely in response to, and while reading, another book. At least I assume so. The working title is I Know You Are But What Am I: Reflections on DRH’s I Am A Strange Loop.
Look, what I’m trying to say is I get sick and sleepy with having to all the time explain who Douglas Hofstadter is. To my way of thinking, he’s one of the clearest, most perceptive, easy to read, riveting authors out there, and he’s written about many a topic that would interest many and many a person. Yet he just isn’t up there with the Richard Dawkinses, Carl Saganses and Tim Flanneryses of this world.
Likewise in music, there are phenomenal performers who go unheard of, unrewarded, and unsullied day in, day out. I must confess I make no claims to know and like any obscure but brilliant bands (but watch this space for Looking Glass). Though they are in an overall minority, I know there are thousands of others who, like me, really dig the Mars Volta, Crash Test Dummies, Split Enz and Ween (almost certainly not this combination though).
Anyhoo, I believe that each and every person that this sentence refers to could list several awesome authors, musicians and creative whoevers that have touched their lives, delicately and deeply, but that can’t seem to get no respect, or at least general public awareness. I challenge these people to make that list.
These days the situation isn’t so bad with the internet. F’cryin’ out loud, I can now find people with a mutual interest in my newly acquired, top 10 All Time Coolest book, Codex Seraphinianus. Without the internet, I challenge anyone, anywhere to have heard of this amazing book (yes, I know the challenge was issued using the internet, a’F’eh!).
I guess this is all about information – how we get it, who controls its flow, and what it smells like. It’s also about personal differences in the kinds of things that profoundly resonate with (in?) our minds and hearts.
One last thing, it’s interesting to note that there is no analogous situation in sports. The best basketballers, sprinters and football players aren’t competing in D-Leagues, mid-week suburban track meets and lower grade Auckland comps. Aside from the scouts’ mythical undiscovered sporting geniuses tending sheep in a field somewhere, this phenomena just doesn’t happen in sport.
I’m only a couple chapters in, but I keep feeling compelled to write notes about what he’s written, on account of it triggers so many thoughts and ideas in mine head. In fact, if I go through with this audacious, yet bodacious plan, I’ll have a book by the end of it! It could be the first ever book written entirely in response to, and while reading, another book. At least I assume so. The working title is I Know You Are But What Am I: Reflections on DRH’s I Am A Strange Loop.
Look, what I’m trying to say is I get sick and sleepy with having to all the time explain who Douglas Hofstadter is. To my way of thinking, he’s one of the clearest, most perceptive, easy to read, riveting authors out there, and he’s written about many a topic that would interest many and many a person. Yet he just isn’t up there with the Richard Dawkinses, Carl Saganses and Tim Flanneryses of this world.
Likewise in music, there are phenomenal performers who go unheard of, unrewarded, and unsullied day in, day out. I must confess I make no claims to know and like any obscure but brilliant bands (but watch this space for Looking Glass). Though they are in an overall minority, I know there are thousands of others who, like me, really dig the Mars Volta, Crash Test Dummies, Split Enz and Ween (almost certainly not this combination though).
Anyhoo, I believe that each and every person that this sentence refers to could list several awesome authors, musicians and creative whoevers that have touched their lives, delicately and deeply, but that can’t seem to get no respect, or at least general public awareness. I challenge these people to make that list.
These days the situation isn’t so bad with the internet. F’cryin’ out loud, I can now find people with a mutual interest in my newly acquired, top 10 All Time Coolest book, Codex Seraphinianus. Without the internet, I challenge anyone, anywhere to have heard of this amazing book (yes, I know the challenge was issued using the internet, a’F’eh!).
I guess this is all about information – how we get it, who controls its flow, and what it smells like. It’s also about personal differences in the kinds of things that profoundly resonate with (in?) our minds and hearts.
One last thing, it’s interesting to note that there is no analogous situation in sports. The best basketballers, sprinters and football players aren’t competing in D-Leagues, mid-week suburban track meets and lower grade Auckland comps. Aside from the scouts’ mythical undiscovered sporting geniuses tending sheep in a field somewhere, this phenomena just doesn’t happen in sport.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Alternative Lyrics - PJ Harvey's The Devil
As soon as I
turn left on a road
The Devil wanders
into my zone
And I pretend to myself...
Come, come, come here at one.
Come, come! On a day at 1pm
Because all of my being is now in Wyoming.
~~~
Welcome to lovesong dedications. This next song goes out to Jarryd in Bexley, and it's from his long time girlfriend Francene. Jarryd, Francene just wants to thank you for all the little things you do that make her life so special. This is for you Jarryd.
[ABBA's Money, Money, Money]
turn left on a road
The Devil wanders
into my zone
And I pretend to myself...
Come, come, come here at one.
Come, come! On a day at 1pm
Because all of my being is now in Wyoming.
~~~
Welcome to lovesong dedications. This next song goes out to Jarryd in Bexley, and it's from his long time girlfriend Francene. Jarryd, Francene just wants to thank you for all the little things you do that make her life so special. This is for you Jarryd.
[ABBA's Money, Money, Money]
Not starting, finishing
In the summer of 1982 I was sent to Thistlethwaite Finishing School for Tenn-aged Males. The postage cost over 350 dollars and I bruised my coccyx repeatedly in transit.
When I arrived I was quickly ushered into the ceremonial hall, where I witnessed the graduation rites of the class of '74. I personally considered 8 years of finishing school excessive, but my future employer insisted on it. Alas since that time standards have slipped at Chicken Wizard.
During the ceremony the graduands displayed an astonishing range of grooming, etiquette and posturing. More than one lecturer was brought to tears. It was two.
I never did complete my studies, my early withdrawal necessitated by the sudden release onto the market of an exciting and fresh new salted snack called Burger Rings. Still in my finishing school garb of flippers and old newspapers, I furtively thrust a twenty cent piece on the milkbar counter. For this I received a portion of 34 Burger Rings.
It was the best day of my life, even if the law courts saw it differently.
When I arrived I was quickly ushered into the ceremonial hall, where I witnessed the graduation rites of the class of '74. I personally considered 8 years of finishing school excessive, but my future employer insisted on it. Alas since that time standards have slipped at Chicken Wizard.
During the ceremony the graduands displayed an astonishing range of grooming, etiquette and posturing. More than one lecturer was brought to tears. It was two.
I never did complete my studies, my early withdrawal necessitated by the sudden release onto the market of an exciting and fresh new salted snack called Burger Rings. Still in my finishing school garb of flippers and old newspapers, I furtively thrust a twenty cent piece on the milkbar counter. For this I received a portion of 34 Burger Rings.
It was the best day of my life, even if the law courts saw it differently.
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