Saladosity, Part 17: Chef's

[This is the seventeenth post in a long series.  You may wish to start at the beginning.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

(If you need a refresher about my salad-making lingo, go back and review our first salad.)

A good chef’s salad is a thing of beauty.  It is both meat and veggies in a wonderfully balanced presentation, and also it’s delicious.  Now, most people will agree that a chef’s salad must have meat and cheese in addition to the eggs, but there’s a multitude of different opinions on which meat and cheese to use.  This is the recipe that I learned at my first non-fast-food-restaurant job, a college dive bar called the Mason Jar Pub (near my alma mater of George Mason University).  It wasn’t a very good restaurant overall, but the chef’s salad was pretty decent, and that’s where I learned to make it.  I still love eating it today.

The Protein

In my opinion, the absolute best meats to use are turkey and roast beef.  One of the tricks is to find lunch meat that is sliced perfectly: too thick and it’ll be hard to assemble, too thin and it’ll just rip into shreds.  Also, turkey that is sliced into a perfect, large circle is ideal; you can be a little more flexible on the shape of the roast beef.  Now, you can also cut it yourself, but for one thing it’s a pain in the ass, and for another it’s hard to get the slices just right.  Unless you have an industrial meat slicer.  But then you’re likely to cut your fingers off, so that’s not a great solution either.  Just buy good quality meats with no nitrites and you’ll be fine.

The Cheese

Now, you could use any cheese you like.  But I’m going to suggest two criteria to narrow it down:

• You need a cheese with good plasticity.  For this reason, I find that cheddar or Swiss are terrible choices.  When you try to put everything together, those types of cheese just crumble into a big mess

• I personally think that white cheeses just complement lunch meats better.  Sure, a decent Colby could work, but is it going to taste as good as some of your other options?

So the obvious choice is provolone, and it should definitely be your go-to if you have difficulty finding decent choices at your market, or you’re just not adventurous when it comes to cheese.  If you can find sliced mozzarella, that could also work, but I find it a bit bland for this particular application.  Monterey Jack is not bad, and if you wanted to be super fancy, Edam or Jarlsberg would be the way to go (I think Gouda is both not quite plastic enough and just a bit too strong).  But my absolute favorite is havarti.  It’s got a great flavor that is mild but not bland, you can often find it pre-sliced,¹ and it has the perfect amount of flexibility.  If you’ve not yet tried it, definitely give it a go.

The Eggs

The other protein you’ll need is hard-boiled eggs, of course.  There’s not much art to boiling an egg, but still some folks have difficulty getting them to that perfect consistency without the annoying green rings forming on them.²  So here’s how I do it.

Possibly you have an electric kettle for boiling water for tea.  They’re awesome: you fill it with water, push the button, and voilà: it boils, then turns itself off.  They don’t last forever though: after a bit, you’ll find yours starts to look a bit ragged ... maybe it has a few waterspots here and there ... maybe the lid doesn’t fit perfectly any more.  So you just buy a new one, right?  They’re not that expensive, after all.  So what do you do with the old one?  Just throw it away, I guess?

No.  You use it to hard-boil eggs in.

Two eggs is typically enough for a chef’s salad, but I often do 5 or 6 at a time and just keep them in the fridge.³  You lower the eggs gently into the empty kettle, hopefully not cracking any,⁴ just barely cover them with cold water, plug it in and hit that button.  Now walk away.  The water will come to a boil, the kettle turns itself off, then the eggs just sit there as the water slowly cools.  Bam! perfect hard-boiled eggs every time.  Come back once the water is cool, or whenever you like.  Hours later, even—that’s the beauty of this method.  No timers, you can’t possibly overcook them, it just ... works.

Dump the water out and either use the eggs right away or stick ’em in the fridge for later.  For chef’s salad purposes, peel a couple of eggs and crack out that handy dandy egg slicer I told you to buy when we talked about salad equipment.  Open, close, and you have perfect slices; just throw the top and bottom slices out, because they’re all white and no yolk.  Unless, you know, you’re into that sort of thing.  I usually just feed them to the dog.  Or my daughter.

The Dressing

Now, you can put any old sort of dressing on a chef’s salad that you like, but I’m a firm believer that this is the perfect place to break out a lovely Thousand Island dressing.  The problem is, most store-bought TI’s are going to be full of stuff that you may not be too thrilled with, like soybean oil, and preservatives, and unnecessary sugar.  But, you know what?  Thousand Island dressing is one of the simplest things in the world: it’s nothing but mayo, ketchup, and pickle relish.⁵  You could make that yourself.

So let’s do that.

Thousand Island Dressing

Now, first thing I have to warn you is, it’s practically impossible to make a good Thousand Island dressing without any added sugar, because it’s almost impossible to make ketchup without any added sugar.  So this will not be Whole30 compliant, unless you’re dedicated enough to go out and buy Primal ketchup.  But you certainly don’t need any sugar beyond what’s in the ketchup itself, so just get a good quality ketchup and don’t stress too much.  It won’t have very much sugar.

The second thing I’m going to warn you about is, this isn’t a particularly sweet TI.  It’s going to be a bit on the tangy side.  Personally, I consider that a feature, but your mileage may vary.

After a lot of fiddling, I’ve managed to come up with the following, easy-to-remember formula:

• 1 squirt of dijon mustard
• 2 heavy pinches of salt
• 3 big spoonfuls of mayo
• 4 generous squirts of ketchup
• 5 small spoonfuls of pickle relish, or 5 whole pickle slices
• 6 grinds of black pepper

For the mayo, just use the homemade mayo I taught you how to make when we did the autumnal salad.  For the pickles or relish, my preference is to use dill pickles, from which I make my own relish.  You can use sweet relish, or sweet (sometimes called “bread and butter”) pickles, but that’s more sugar, and it’s not necessary.⁶  You could also buy dill pickle relish, but I’ve never found that anywhere other than Whole Foods, and who can afford that?  So just make your own.

If you’re using whole pickles—and let me stress that I’m not talking about a whole pickle spear, but just a slice such as you might find on a hamburger—then you need a food processor, or perhaps a stick blender.  Personally, I just take a whole jar of pickles and dump it into the blender (don’t forget to add half the juice as well!) and make dill pickle relish in bulk.⁷  If you’re using relish, you can literally just put everything in a bowl and stir it with the spoon you used for the mayo.  (If you’re not sure what I mean by “big spoonful” of mayo, I’m talking about a tablespoon—the kind you eat out of, not necessarily the measuring kind.  But they’re probably pretty close to each other.)

You can also add some white vinegar, if you want it even more tangy, but I find that the relish will bring along enough vinegar on its own.  You can also add a small amount of garlic powder, if you want it to have a bit more sharpness.  Or substitute yellow mustard for the dijon if you find it a bit too sharp.  But basically it’s just the ketchup, the mayo, and the pickle relish, and everything thing else is just for flavor.⁸

If you have more than you need for your salad(s), put the rest in a jar and stick it in the fridge.  Use it on your burgers, if you like.

Chef’s salad

Once again, you’re ready, and it’s just assembly.

On your cutting board, put down a slice of turkey.  Put a slice of roast beef on top, or maybe two slices if they’re small, but don’t overlap them too much.  Now lay a slice of cheese over that.  Don’t center the roast beef and the cheese on the turkey; rather, make it closer to the edge that’s closest to you.  Now roll up the turkey, away from you.  The turkey is almost certainly the roundest, and probably the least likely to fall apart, so it’s the best choice for the outside layer.  The rolling up will naturally push the inner layers toward the other edge, but, because you placed them off-center, they won’t move enough to push out past the turkey.  The stiffness of the cheese will help keep it together too, unless you ignored me and used cheddar or Swiss, in which case it’ll just break into bits and make a big mess.  If you do the whole thing right, you get a meat-and-cheese roll-up which will naturally hold itself together.  Cut off the messy bits at either end of the roll-up, because they’re not uniform; either just eat them, or feed them to your dog (or, again: to your daughter).  Take what’s left and cut it into quarters and turn each on its side: you end up with beautifully marbled discs of awesomeness.

Now do that a few more times if you’re making chef’s salad for the whole family (and why wouldn’t you be?).  My general rule of thumb is one roll-up per person and one extra.  Two for an individual salad might be too much, but then again you can just eat the extra discs later.⁹

Put your base veggies in a shallow bowl.  Wikipedia will tell you that you need cucumbers and tomatoes at a minimum, but honestly I don’t care for tomatoes in my chef’s salad.  (Cucumbers, on the other hand, are always a good call.)  But, really, whatever veggies you’ve already got chopped up is fine.  Now put your little meat discs on top of the veggies; I like to put one at each compass point and one in the center, but arrange however seems best to you.  Put one slice of egg on each disc.  Now put a normal amount of the homemade Thousand Island dressing ... maybe even a light amount.  Lean toward the lighter side.  Personally, while I like to eat my salad veggies with a spoon (I despise chasing small veggie bits around my plate with the fork), you really need to eat the egg-topped discs with a fork in a single bite each ... this may be the only salad where a spork is appropriate.  I usually just end up using a fork and a spoon, but you do you.  Delicious, nutritious, and very filling.

Next time, we’ll stretch our definition of what “salad” actually means.

__________

1 For instance, I buy that way from—where else?—Trader Joe’s.

2 Don’t forget: the green rings are unsightly, but they won’t hurt you.  Kind of like when your avocadoes turn brown: you can still eat them safely, they’re just not as pretty.

3 Useful for healthy snacks, and also for other salads.  Natch.

4 If you do crack one, you’ll just get wisps of egg white in your water.  Which isn’t the end of the world, but it does make a big mess in your electric kettle, which is why you only use old ones for this.

5 Interestingly enough, this is also the exact recipe for the “special sauce” that many burger joints use.  Yes, that’s right: your Big Mac basically just has Thousand Island dressing on it.

6 Or, in my opinion, good.

7 If you’ve got an extra pickle jar laying around, you could also do half the jar and save the other half for eating, if you’re into that sort of thing.  I’m not, but my daughter would be irked at me if I didn’t leave her any pickles for snacking on.

8 Okay, the mustard can also help with keeping it from separating in the fridge.  But mostly for flavor.

9 Honestly, sometimes I just make these meat-and-cheese cylinders without the salad and just eat them without even bothering to cut them into discs.

Aye aye skipper ...

Well, I’m up in the game rotation again: time to get back to the Family Campaign.  My littlest one specifically requested it, so that’s a nice feeling.  Plus there’s some family medical issues flying around, and some work stuff ... anyhow, no time for a proper post this week.  So sorry not sorry.

Still: tune in next week.  There’ll probably be something to talk about.  Probably.

D&D and Me: Part 9 (All in the Family)

[This is the ninth post in a new series.  You may want to begin at the beginning.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

[Last time, I talked about fifth edition D&D (5e) and how its popularity surprised and delighted long-time D&D fans, myself among them.]

So now there was a new edition, a new attitude towards the game, and, most of all, a whole new type of content: streaming D&D games.  I tried a bunch before I found Relics and Rarities, which is what really got me excited about D&D again.  Once I found that, I started obsessively checking out all of them.  Well, except for the obvious one: Critical Role.

There are a number of reasons I waited so long to give CR a chance.  Their first campaign (referred to either by the group name of the characters—Vox Machina—or simply as “C1”) has 115 episodes ... that’s over 447 hours of video to watch (thank you CritRoleStats).  Even if you skip over all the announcements and the breaks and whatnot, it would be over 373 hours: if I did nothing but eat, sleep, go to the bathroom, and watch C1, it would still take me around 23 days to get through it all.  So that was one big reason.  But probably the bigger reason was just that it was the most popular (as I mentioned last time), and I have always resisted liking the most popular thing.  It’s a personal failing, I know.  But eventually I decided it was only fair to give it a chance, and I could start with their second campaign and not have nearly as much content to wade through.  After just a few episodes, I was hooked.  One thing I that I particularly loved was how Matt (CR’s DM) set up the story by running several “one-shot” adventures¹ for small groups of characters.  Though these happened off-screen, it was obvious what the ramifications were: each character got the chance to develop from their initial character sheet in a smaller, more controlled setting before joining together in a larger group.  It’s very common for a character to change somewhat, mostly personality-wise, from your initial concept once you start inhabiting them at the table, and it also generally takes a while before you become comfortable with all the features and powers on your sheet.  With these shorter, almost-solo adventures,²  all the awkward bits could be gotten out of the way.  The first episode of C2 shows this perfectly: a few relationships are established, all the players are comfortable in the skins of their characters, and rules-fumbling—the inevitable “wait, how does this work again?”—is kept to a minimum.  This was a big inspiration for what would eventually become the Family Campaign.

But the biggest (if most abstract) impact of CR on my home games were to remind me of the joy of D&D as long-form storytelling.  A lot of streaming D&D out there consists of one-shots (like Lost Odyssey) or limited series (like Relics and Rarities), and many of those are fantastic.  But what CR (and also the Balance arc of The Adventure Zone) reminded me was just how awesome it is to have that open-ended, anything-can-happen storyling going on, where every character’s backstory somehow ties into the overall plot, but there’s also some world-threatening evil to be addressed, and quests to resovle, and intermediate character goals (like needed items or researching new spells or just becoming more financially self-sufficient) to achieve, and the DM’s job is to weave all these disparate threads together to form some unexpected coherent whole.  Matt Mercer (of CR) and Griffin McElroy (of TAZ) are two of the best in the business at this, and it reminded me of the times that I had tried to achieve such things ... always with less success than these guys, of course.  But one of the benefits of getting old is that you can often look back and see where you went wrong in the past, and, between that and just learning from the examples that CR and TAZ were providing, I started to get excited to try it again—this time using my children as guinea pigs.

Now, as I talked about two installments ago, I had been mainly running pre-published adventures for my kids up to this point.  Premade adventures can be short, or they can be long, but either way they’re quite different than the long-form stories I’m talking about now.  They’re not customized to the characters of my players, and though the best DMs will certainly extend a published adventure to include such things, it’s never the same as a story that’s been built from the ground up to be about your characters.  For years, I had been thinking that all the prep work and the frustration wasn’t worth it; now, listening to The Adventure Zone and watching Critical Role, I was changing my mind.  I was seeing the benefits being reaped before my eyes (and ears), and I knew I couldn’t deprive my kids of that joy.  So it was that, while streaming D&D didn’t ignite my love of D&D, it did rekindle it.

I’ve already talked about my youngest bringing me her first idea for a D&D character, so I won’t rehash it here.  Corva Ravenstone was extremely animal focussed—a tiger for a guardian and a monkey as a constant companion—and my middle child always plays druids, because they think that shapeshifting is just the coolest thing ever.  When my eldest proposed a custom barbarian subclass whose “rage” was actually an uncontrolled transformation to a werewolf form,³ I knew that this campaign needed to be all about animals.  Always fascinated with the concept of a beastmaster-style character,⁴ I decided to dust off my attempts to create a class that could do this without breaking the action economy; my beastmaster class would end up being the basis for my eventual GMPC,⁵ and also provide the basis for Corva’s monkey companion.⁶  This echoes my very first experience playing D&D:⁷ making new rules so I didn’t have to say “no” to any part of a kid’s character concept ... it just happened to be my daughter instead of my brother in this case.

My middle child wanted to play a changeling, which is a race which can change its appearance at will.  (Yes, a changeling druid is basically doubling-down on the shapeshifting power—that’s what’s attractive for that particular kid.)  And, to up the transmutation factor even more, I gave them a custom magic item that allows them access to many of the coolest shapeshifting-related spells.  The problem was that changelings are from a world known as Eberron, and this campaign was definitely not going to take place on Eberron.  How did this changeling (whose name is Zyx) get from Eberron to the Forgotten Realms (the default setting for 5e)?  For that matter, my child decided to complicate my life even more when they saw and fell in love with the amazing dinosaurs of Ixalan, and decided that that was where Zyx learned druiding, so that they could turn into dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts.  Now I had a whole third world to work into the backstory.  But I took that on too.

My eldest, of course, has been playing D&D (and other TTRPGS, like Pathfinder) for years at this point, and is a GM in their own right.  I didn’t need to do much besides taking their custom barbarian subclass and making it a bit more polished.  But they also had an entirely new deity in their backstory, and I had to work that into the plot.  No problem.

Stealing Matt Mercer’s idea of one-shot adventures for the individual characters before the main story starts, I came up with the idea of “flashbackstories,” which were “flashbacks” (in the sense they took place 2 – 5 years before the main storyline starts) and also “backstories,” because they set up the plot.  See, instead of “you all meet in a pub,” I decided that there would be a mysterious benefactor (more of a “I suppose you’re wondering why I called all of you here today” situation).  Each character owed a big debt to this person.  But how did they become indebted to him?  Well, instead of just writing it out as a story, let’s play it out ... as a flashbackstory.  I wanted to give each character a guide: an NPC to help them out and introduce them to the man who would perform some valuable service for them in exchange for “a service to be provided at a later date.” I hit upon the idea of using my old characters for this purpose.  My old druid Sillarin would be an excellent guide for new druid Zyx.  Bowmaster and nature cleric Ellspeth was a natural fit for the young jungle girl (and archer) Corva.  As for burgeoning werewolf Isabella, who better to help her achieve calmness of mind and body than a monk?  So she ran into Jin.  Exactly as planned, each character had a chance to explore both personality and mechanics and feel things out.  The time gap also provided a perfect excuse for changing or evolving personality traits: your character just “grew up” a bit in the intervening years.

For the role of mysterious benefactor, I wanted someone colorful (both figuratively and literally), who seemed really out of place but also really in control.  I achieved this by inventing Hervé, a Vedalken rogue with the mastermind specialization.  Vedalken are an almost scifi race, originally from D&D’s sister game Magic: The Gathering.  They’ve been imported into D&D in two versions,⁸ and they have a feel almost like a cross between Spock and Data from Star Trek: obssessed with discovering new things, and for the most part coldly logical about everything else.  The mastermind is of course a fantastic subclass for a villain, but in this case it works well for someone who is basically a “finder” character: rich people hire him to find or obtain things for them, and he always know exactly the right combination of people (adventurers, specifically) to put together for a mission.  And he knows them because he’s “collected” them—basically, he wanders around bailing people with certain skills out of trouble so that they’ll owe him a favor when he finally runs across a job that could use their particular skills.  A character such as this is perfect for driving the “little” plot of a D&D campaign: he can be mysterious, and opaque with his motivations, or he can be open and offer lots of details to the characters, if he thinks it makes them more effective in doing jobs for him.  So he’s a mission generator and a font of information.  This is what you need to keep a campaign moving forward on a session-to-session basis.

For the bigger picture, though, you need a mystery to drive each character to search for something, and preferably a way to tie all the mysteries together into one big mystery.  Two of my characters (Corva and Zyx) gave me one of the best gifts you can give a DM: the gift of missing parents.  They might be dead ... or then again they might not.  Isabella’s story is more complicated: her father is the one who turned her into a werewolf in the first place, as part of some freaky cult thing.  Still, after reading a veritable shitload of old D&D lore, I came up with something that would satisfy all the backstories—even tying in the one for my own GMPC, Thurl—and also explain a bit of the world-hopping that Zyx apparently experienced at a young age into the bargain.  I won’t go into too much detail here (it’s rare that my kids read my blog, but better safe than sorry, I suppose), but it involves Planescape factions and secret societies (shades of both A Series of Unfortunate Events and Marvel’s Runaways) and, naturally, lots and lots of animals.  I call it the Family Campaign, both for the obvious reason, but also because there’s a deeper familial connection that will be revealed as time goes on.

And that brings us up to the present time.  Next time, in what may well be our last installment, I think I’ll talk about what D&D can mean in the context of learning, and of teaching.

__________

1 A one-shot is a very short adventure that’s designed to be run in a single session.  Although sometimes a one-shot might end up taking two sessions, in which case it’s really more of a two-shot.  But that’s more to do with the pace of the characters playing it than the adventure itself.

2 CR had 7 characters, so it was more practical to do them in groups of 2 or 3; for a more typical game of 3 or 4 characters, it would be perfectly fine to do proper solo adventures.

3 To be clear, this was before the Path of the Beast was a thing.  Although they’re quite similar, naturally.

4 You may remember that I went into some depth on that topic in part 4.

5 I still haven’t written my post on what this term means to me, but, for purposes of this discussion, let’s just say it’s a “full” member of the party—that is, not a henchman or a guide or a pet or a more experienced mentor type—who happens to be run by the GM instead of by a player.

6 If you remebered that Corva is a ranger, you may wonder why not just make her a beastmaster ranger and call it a day.  All I can tell you is, he’s not that sort of monkey.

7 Which we covered in part 2.

8 Specifically, in the Kaladesh Plane Shift supplement, and the official book Guildmaster’s Guide to Ravnica, which represent the two different Magic worlds that feature them.

Isolation Report, Week #45

[You could also read the most recent report, or even start at the beginning.]

Well, since our last isolation report, a lot has been going on, at least politically.  It’s difficult to know what to say about the events that have transpired here in the U.S. ... on the one hand, it seems completely predictable and expected.  On the other, that doesn’t keep it from being horrific.  Our only real saving grace here is that this attempted insurrection was being run by complete idiots.  Well-armed idiots, granted, but hardly brain giants.  Throughout the whole thing, I kept wondering to myself: what exactly do they think they’re going to accomplish?  Did they imagine that the entirety of the Congress was going to say “gee, people ran us out of the place we normally meet; I guess we can’t do anything now! may as well go home”?  Some Congressperson tweeted that we were lucky that one of the staffers got the official electoral college ballots before the rioters could destroy them ... but so what if they had?  Would that really have stopped the election from progressing?  Our entire government would have just thrown up their hands and said “oh, well, I suppose Trump will just have to be President forever now.” Sure, that makes sense.

So, they caused a lot of chaos, and, sadly, some people died (on both sides).  But I just can’t believe it was ever going to change anything in the long run, or accomplish any of their actual goals.  Assuming they had goals.  Aren’t these the same people who were sitting at home and laughing at the Occupy Wall Street movement for not knowing what they wanted?  But it seems to me that this was the same thing.  Except the Occupy-Wall-Street-ers never killed anyone.  I hope that wasn’t their goal.  That would be sad, and scary, and even more disturbing than it already is.  But somehow I don’t think that was ever the point.  They just listened to Trump, and Giuliani (“trial by comat!”), and the other morons, and they decided to go fuck some shit up, without any real goals or concrete ideas of how it was going to end up.  Certainly if they had planned a little better, they wouldn’t have managed to all end up on camera, faces exposed, and easily identifiable by the authorities.

But it happened, and we have to deal with it, and we’re still all locked down and not really able to go anywhere or do anything.  A friend told me that one of their relatives who works at a local hospital says they’re putting patients in the gift shop at this point.  Admittedly, you’re hearing this third-hand, so feel free to discount it as an unreliable source, but if you live in the U.S. I bet you’re awre of similar conditions where you live.  Things are getting worse, and we still have to wait another week or so before it can even start to get better.

Of course, the House has impeached Trump, again—no surprise there—and many people on television are expressing dismay that the Senate won’t vote to convict before Trump is already out of office.  I’m not stressed on that point.  Sure, he’ll no doubt do plenty more damage on the way out, but I think the important part is that he does get convicted, and that’s more likely to happen with the new Senate than the old one.  Why is it important to convict him after he’s already out of office?  Well, first of all, it’s important to send that message to any future idiots who find themselves in Trump’s position.  But I think it’s just as important that Trump not be allowed to run for office again (as some people in the media have pointed out), and that he not be allowed to reap the benefits normally afforded to ex-Presidents (as apparently no one has thought to mention yet).  A retired President continues to collect a stipend for life, plus the Secret Service protective detail, which we already know that Trump views as a money-making venture.  So I really don’t want my tax money going to support that sort of bullshit for however more years he manages to cling to life.  And, in my experience, only the good die young: true assholes can live for-fucking-ever.

I don’t know.  I guess we’ll have to see how it all shakes out.  Hopefully there won’t be any more violence, and hopefully the new administration will restore some sanity.  But I honestly don’t know.  I’m just waiting to find out like all the rest of you.

Salsatic Vibrato VII

"The Devil in Your Eye"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.  You may also want to check out the first volume in this multi-volume mix for more info on its theme.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

Last volume was the first of my mixes to debut a 6th volume, and Salsatic Vibrato stays in the lead by now being the first seventh volume.  It’s taken over three years for me to decide the volume was sufficiently complete and that I was ready to return to this brassy, upbeat territory, but I’ve been satisfied with it for a while now—I just didn’t want to skimp on my other musical tastes.  Which is not to say that there’s anything inferior about this volume: of the 14 artists (and one soundtrack) that have 4 or more tracks on a volume in this mix,¹ all but two are represented here, and for those who have 5 or more, the coverage is 100%.  So this one is representative of all that have come before, but there are plenty of returning favorites who have been MIA for a while, and, most excitingly, some brand new finds to spice up the mix.  Let’s dive in.

The volume bursts into being with 3 of the top 5 artists for this mix, which means they’re 3 of my favorites.  First, it’s back to the best offering from the Brian Setzer Orchestra, The Dirty Boogie, with the title track from that great album.  Then straight to Cherry Poppin’ Daddies’ swing compilation Zoot Suit Riot (which is probably their best) for “Dr. Bones.” Finally, it wouldn’t be Salsatic Vibrato without Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, so here they are.  I never thought This Beautiful Life, their second proper album,² was as good as the ultra-classic Americana Deluxe, but there are some gems, including the opener of that album, “Big and Bad,” which here not only provides a strong finish for the power trio opening, but also our volume title.³  A sublime start.

But where are those other two of the top 5 artists, you may ask?  Well, the Squirrel Nut Zippers are not far behind with a track from their next-album-after-their-best-album-which-is-not-quite-as-good-but-still-pretty-damned-rockin’, Perennial Favorites, “Fat Cat Keeps Getting Fatter.” Like the other tunes we’ve heard from that album,⁴ this one has a touch of surrealism mixed with an experimental take on retro-hot-jazz.  And Lou Bega is also back: I’m still milking his best album (A Little Bit of Mambo), because honestly his later ablums are not “still pretty rockin’.” Many people accuse Bega of only knowing one song, which is almost true ... he actually knows 3 or 4.  “Tricky Tricky” will never be mistaken for anyone but Bega, but on the other hand it has just a touch of hip-hop flair that sets it apart from most of his other offerings.

Other returning favorites include the Atomic Fireballs, who provide our closer for the third time in this mix, Royal Crown Revue, back for the third time with their ode to the long-gone LA streetcar line, “Watts Local,” and the Swing soundtrack, with another great Lisa Stansfield remake of an almost forgotten tune from the big band era: “Blitzkrieg Baby.”⁵  But I think the real news here is the long overdue return of Joe Jackson’s Jummpin’ Jive, which was so important to volumes I and II.  “How Long Must I Wait for You” is one of those tunes that you might dismiss on first listen, but it really grows on you over time, and I thought it was high time it earned its place here.  Contrariwise, the often-goofy-but-never-bland Lee Press-On and the Nails have only been missing for one volume, but I’m still happy to have them back; “Hat Back Boogie” is fairly silly lyrically, but its sound is exactly what this mix is all about.

We’ve got more ska too: Save Ferris also hasn’t been seen since volume II, and they too are way overdue.  “Spam” is a fun little ditty—not as goofy as LPN, but I felt that it flowed very naturally after that track, and of course sets up beautifully for our other dependable ska stars, Reel Big Fish, who made their return to the mix last volume.  This time around, RBF would like you to know that “it’s not so bad bein’ trendy,” because, you know: “everyone who looks like me is my friend.” A great ska “party”-style tune with some great lyrics to boot.

But the real musical style on display here is electro-swing, which I started experimenting with back on volume III.  And we do have a few returning artists in this area, like Caro Emerald, with her peppy “Stuck,” and Caravan Palace, with their practically frenetic “Suzy.” But this volume marks the point where I really went on an active musical search to see what was out there that I had just never found before.  And, boy, did I come up with some real winners.  Like most electro-swing, it’s mostly European in origin: Tape Five is German, and their “Bad Boy Good Man” is absolutely infectious, plus it has an amazing video, which you should go watch right now; Parvo Stelar (who, to be fair, appeared on one earlier volume) is an Austrian producer who likes to put together modern tunes that sound like they’re being played on a scratchy record player (and “Booty Swing” is the best of these, in my opinion); Shazalakazoo is from Serbia, and their style ranges from electro-swing to something called folk-step to something reminiscent of the Balkan trip-hop-rap-ragga of Poland’s Psio Crew⁶—but of course here I’m interested in the first of those, and “Sunny Side of the Street” is a highly electronic remix-remake of the old jazz standard “On the Sunny Side of the Street” (originally done by everyone from Louis Armstrong to Benny Goodman to Count Basie), barely recognizable here, but so addictively poppy that I defy you not to move your body when you hear it.

But the two finds that I’m most excited about are the Electric Swing Circus and Swing Republic.  The former is an amazing (and underrated, from what I can tell on the Internet) six-piece from Birminghan in the UK.  They have a number of amazing tracks (and, in fact we already saw one on Bleeding Salvador II), but probably the best is “Bella Belle,” who is, apparently, “soft and smooth like caramel.” This is just an amazing song, combining traditional swing brass with electronic beats and undercurrents, and vocals that trip and flow with dizzying proficiency.  Definitely check it out.  But I don’t want to sell short the other find here, Swing Republic, who I was so impressed with that they’re the only band who got 2 songs on the volume.  They meet my criteria for a moderately obscure band,⁷ and yet they’ve been around for nearly 10 years—that is to say, about as long as electro-swing itself.  They’re based in Denmark, but sing in English, with primarily female vocals, sprinkled with a few tracks which are essentially instrumental, although they often feature highly processed non-verbal voices.  Here I’ve given you one of each: “Mama” is an absolutely amazing tune which I use to introduce the electro-swing backbone of the volume, and “High Hat” is a more laid-back instrumental(ish) track which I used to close it out.  Following that there’s a short sax break from the Mighty Blue Kings, who we met last volume, then it’s back to the more traditional retro-swing for the closing block.

Salsatic Vibrato VII
[ The Devil in Your Eye ]

“The Dirty Boogie” by the Brian Setzer Orchestra, off The Dirty Boogie
“Dr. Bones” by Cherry Poppin' Daddies, off Zoot Suit Riot [Compilation]
“Big and Bad” by Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, off This Beautiful Life
“Warriors” by Too Many Zooz, off Subway Gawdz
“Watts Local” by Royal Crown Revue, off Walk on Fire
“Fat Cat Keeps Getting Fatter” by Squirrel Nut Zippers, off Perennial Favorites
“Hat Back Boogie” by Lee Press-On and the Nails, off Swing Is Dead
“Spam” by Save Ferris, off It Means Everything
“Trendy” by Reel Big Fish, off Turn the Radio Off
“Quarter to Three” by Gary "U.S." Bonds [Single]
“Tricky, Tricky” by Lou Bega, off A Little Bit of Mambo
“Mama” by Swing Republic, off Midnight Calling
“Wizard Wheezes” by Nicholas Hooper, off Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince [Soundtrack]
“Bad Boy Good Man” by Tape Five, off Tonight Josephine!
“Booty Swing” by Parov Stelar, off The Princess
“Suzy” by Caravan Palace, off Caravan Palace
“Bella Belle” by the Electric Swing Circus, off The Electric Swing Circus
“Sunny Side of the Street” by Shazalakazoo [Single]
“Stuck” by Caro Emerald, off Deleted Scenes from the Cutting Room Floor
“High Hat” by Swing Republic, off Midnight Calling
“Tenor Madness” by Mighty Blue Kings, off Meet Me in Uptown
“How Long Must I Wait for You” by Joe Jackson, off Jumpin' Jive
“Blitzkrieg Baby” by Lisa Stansfield, off Swing [Soundtrack]
“Mata Hari” by the Atomic Fireballs, off Torch This Place

Total:  24 tracks,  78:02

And that just leaves us with 3 tracks in the “possibly unexpected” category.  I’ve used music from the Harry Potter movies in some interesting (but mostly expected) places so far, like Mystical Memoriam, Phantasma Chorale, and even on Classical Plasma, but I bet you never expected any to show up here, eh?  Well, “Wizard Wheezes” is from one of the later movies (specifically, Half-Blood Prince), composed by Nicholas Hooper, and it’s bright, and brassy, and a journey, and I couldn’t resist using it as a bridge.  The other two need a bit more examination.

Too Many Zooz started out playing in the subways of New York, until some videos of them went viral on YouTube.  They’re a trio: a trumpeter, a saxophonist, and a drummer ... but that doesn’t really begin to describe these guys.  The trumpet can hit soaring high notes that will send shivers down your spine, the sax is a baritone, a seldom heard instrument that gives us some fantastic low notes, and the “drummer” is one of those amazing percussionists who seems capable of keeping a beat on practically anything.  If you watch their videos,⁸ you’ll see that they also provide a contrast in motion: Doe and his trumpet hardly move at all, Leo P, even with the heavy baritone sax, seems like he can’t stop himself from dancing while playing, and King of Sludge, with his complicated drum rig, just bobs and flows in place, undulating his body as he keeps the beat.  They used Kickstarter to fund their first album, Subway Godz, which contains several tracks with hip-hop vocals, none of which speak to me, but, true to their busking roots, is mostly composed of instrumental tracks, some of which are just stunning.  “Warriors” is, I think, the best of these, starting with 5 staccato notes on the trumpet and sax, punctuated by silence, repeated a couple of times, then snapping fingers provides the initial beat while the notes start to flow together into a melody, then the whole thing just explodes into a full-throated euphonious fanfare.  It’s an experience, I promise.

Finally, a throwback to my childhood.  My father was a record collector, you see, specializing in early rock-n-roll from the fifties and sixties.  Although not a favorite, my dad always liked Gary “U.S.” Bonds, because he grew up not far from where we lived: he was the closest thing to a “local boy made good” for my father’s musical generation and geographical location.  His biggest hit was “Quarter to Three,” #1 in 1961, and listed among the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s “Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll.” It was essentially Bonds slapping some vocals onto an instrumental by the Church Street Five, which was the backing band put together by sax player “Daddy G” Barge.  You can hear both Daddy G and the Church Street Five called out specifically in the song (another fun fact: the band is named after the street that ran behind the Safeway in my hometown; I rode my bike down Church Street many a time).  The song was intentionally recorded “rough,” meaning with low production values so that it sounded like a bootleg of some guys just jamming out back behind the studio.  This was part of its charm, and, as the ultimate “party” song, I felt it was a beautiful follow-up to “Trendy.”⁹  But mainly it’s here because Daddy G’s sax is so smooth, and this is one of the earliest songs I can remember that taught me what brass can bring to a rock song.

Next time, we’ll travel out West (musically speaking).

⇐ Salsatic Vibrato VI

Salsatic Vibrato VIII ⇒

__________

1 So far.  Natch.

2 By which I mean I don’t count their first (of many) Christmas albums.

3 The other really good songs from that ablum we’ve already seen here: “I Wanna Be Like You” from Salsatic Vibrato IV and “I’m Not Sleepin’” from Salsatic Vibrato V.

4 E.g. “Suits are Picking Up the Bill” from Salsatic Vibrato II, but most especially “Ghost of Stephen Foster” from Salsatic Vibrato IV.

5 It was originally done by Una Mae Carlisle, who is a person I did not know existed until I researched this post, in 1940.  Or 1941—Internet sources differ, as Internet sources often do.

6 We first met the Psio Crew on Apparently World.

7 AllMusic knows they exist, but not much more, and Wikipedia is completely stumped.

8 This one is one of the best, in my opinion.

9 For more details on the origin of the song, check out this article from what was once one of the only two newspapers you could get regularly in the town where I grew up.

Isolation Report, Week #43

[You could also read the most recent report, or even start at the beginning.]

Well, there’s been a little bit of $work (mostly catching up on some stuff I never seem to have time for under normal circumstances), and way too many videogames (primarily Portal Knights, except not on the PlayStation any more, because: fuck Sony), and there was a New Year’s Eve celebration in there somewhere.  We watched The Iron Giant, which I’ve always said is one of the greatest kids movies of all time, because a) it’s not a musical, b) it has some pretty great animation (being the first cinematic directorial effort from Brad Bird, who would go on to do The Incredibles), c) it proves, as fas as I’m concerned, that Vin Diesel (who voices the giant) is capable of complex characterization no matter what people think, d) plus a surprisingly great performance from Harry Connick Jr (as a beatnik-turned-scrap-dealer) and a dependably hateable villain from Christopher McDonald (whose Kent Mansley—“works for the government”—has an oily despicableness exceeded only by his Shooter McGavin), e) it has an equal number of very funny moments and very emotional moments (it makes nearly all of us in our family tear up at least once, and often more than once), and f) it has an amazing message, which I once used as the centerpiece of a blog post on individuality.  But mainly it’s not a muscial, a virtue I appreciate more and more as the years go on.  After that, the smallies and I played some Trine 4 until 11pm, when we gathered everyone up to celebrate the arrival of 2021 in Denver (because I didn’t really expect the Smaller Animal—who, to be fair, is now mere inches away from being the biggest person in the house—to make it to midnight), and then we played a bit more, and then it really was midnight, so we celebrated again, albeit on a smaller scale, and then everyone went to bed except for me, and I sat up and fucked around trying to finish the giant bottle of pink “champagne” I had bought at Trader Joe’s.  I did have both The Mother and the eldest helping me out this time, but no one really likes sparkling wine but me (and, honestly, I’m a bit “meh” on it myself), so I wasn’t able to polish it off.  But then the next night I did, on account of a giant bottle of sparkling wine always has less in it than you think, partially because a lot of it disappears into bubbles, and partially because most of the weight of the bottle is in the glass.  (Pro tip: sparkling wine will not survive until the next day unless you have some wine stoppers, which I finally bought some of this year.)

And that’s our New Year’s for 2021.  It’s only been a few days, but so far it’s seemed pleasant enough.  It certainly feels like 2020 was a low point, but I will not tempt fate by trying to claim that it couldn’t get worse.  Rather I shall just point out that we have a few early indicators that 2021 could be better—such as a new President and a couple of new corona vaccines—and, while neither of those things are going to be perfect, at least they’re positive signs, and I will choose to take them as such.  I wish a better 2021 to all of you, to all of us, and pretty much to all of the world.  I think we sort of kind of deserve it.

Pandemic Holiday Report

Well, no time for a full post this week, but I don’t want to blow you off entirely.  What can I talk about?  Hmmm ... how about some reports on how our holidays are going?

• For our weekly family gaming session, my eldest ran a Christmas one-shot: we all played elves (no, not those kinds of elves; those kinds of elves), and we had to rescue Santa, who had been captured by a demon and taken to Hell.  At first, Santa was under the demon’s spell, and we actually had to fight him, but we managed to break him out of his charmed state through a combination of non-lethal attacks and appealing to his better nature.  I played a mostly-monk (I took one level of fighter, mainly for the fighting style) who used a candy cane as a mace and also punched things.  My middle child played a warlock (whose patron, naturally, was Santa) with a celestial bent (so he could heal and flame strike), and my youngest child played a druid who turned into things like arctic hares (for speed) and polar bears (for sheer mauling power).  We were 10th level, and we all had complicated backstories of what toymaking department we used to work in before joining Santa’s personal guard, based on which artisan’s tools we were proficient in (for the record, I was leatherworking, the Smaller Animal was glassblowing—for ornaments, natch—and the sprite was a carpenter ... you know, for making blocks and Lincoln logs and whatnot).  Best line of the night: Santa pulls a holy avenger out of his sack (my eldest actually rolled that randomly on a magic item table) and runs the demon through; my youngest pronounces “damn ... Santa is gruesome.”

• The super-creepy surveillance elf is gone for another year, thank <insert deity of choice>.  We actually tried to avoid having that thing back this year, but our youngest actually started asking about her back in October or so.  So, you know ... Santa does what is necessary to please the children.  No matter how creepy, apparently.

• We watched one of those old Rankin-Bass Christmas specials on Christmas Eve.  We sort of wanted to watch “the one with Snow Miser and Heat Miser in it,” but that’s one of the few that isn’t in our DVD box set.  As a next best thing, we watched “the one that tells Santa Claus’ origin story,” because the Winter Warlock is sorta-kinda-the-same-as Snow Miser.  Besides: I had just said something about Burgermeister Meisterburger to the Smallies the other day and they both looked at me like I was crazy.  So, you know ... they needed the education.  I probably hadn’t seen it in a decade or so, but it holds up moderately well.

• My youngest got a stuffed narwhal which is actually a bit larger than she is, when measured from tip (of horn) to tail, and enough Littlest Pet Shop buildings to create her own LPS compound.  My middlest got a giant Nerf Fortnite dart (shot)gun and the new Spider-Man game for the PS/4 (the one with Miles Morales instead of Peter Parker).  My eldest got a new bedframe (as the old one is falling apart) and a promissory note for a new office chair (we didn’t want to buy one without them testing it out first), or, as they described it when talking to the grandparents: “nothing much, just a couple pairs of headphones and a toothbrush for my dogs.” Being an adult sucks, apparently.

Although the pandemic has meant fewer trips out to visit friends, we were never going to travel for the holidays, and it’s rare that anyone comes to stay with us.  Or even to join us for Christmas (Eve) dinner ... my brother has come over a couple of years in the past, and I think we hosted my best friend and his wife at $lastjob once, but that’s about it.  My brother has moved on from wife-with-family-in-LA to wife-number-three, and my friend moved back to Florida to be near his family, so we’re used to spending the holidays “alone.” I put “alone” in quotes, though, because there are 5 of us humans here—not to mention the two dogs, three cats, and various aquarium denizens, including Jeffo, the immortal dwarf African frog—so it can actually get rather crowded at times.  So “alone” is not really the proper term ... perhaps “isolated,” on occasion, but at least we have each other for the holidays, and a few new toys to play with, and plenty of videogames and movies to play and watch, and loud-ass cats who need to yowl around the house for a few hours before they snuggle up beside you in bed, and dogs with horribly stinky breath who love you unconditionally and often inconveniently, and people to do things with.  Christmas Eve I read The Velveteen Rabbit to my youngest; Christmas day the older two made Oreo truffles together.  The Mother and the youngest did all the tree decorating, and worked on several art projects to create cards or ornamants or other holiday frippery.  Last night I spent an hour playing a videogame with my middle child that no one else really likes to play but us.  So we can’t complain, and we know that many folks are having a worse time than we are right now.  We’re pretty lucky, overall, and we’re pretty happy about it.  We’ll be glad when we can go out again, when things return to some semblance of normal—or as close as we’ll get to that, I suppose—but, for now, this is good.

We hope you all had a very happy holiday, whichever holiday it happened to be, and we wish you all the promise of a better year to come.

Isolation Report, Week #41

[You could also read the most recent report, or even start at the beginning.]

Happy pandemic holidays!  And if you’re pissed off that I didn’t say “merry pandemic Christmas,” I will refer you to my (now classic) happy whatever post.  And, also: suck my left nut.  Not the right one—I’m not rude or anything.  Just the left.

Also, it’s worth noting that that very post contains my first volume of Christmas music that I ever shared with you guys.  Back in those days—nine years ago now—I considered trying to share my mixes via some sort of Internet playlist ... Pandora, Rhapsody, what-have-you.  But the only decent option that would be free for everyone was YouTube, and, while there was a lot of music on YouTube, there was also a lot of music not on YouTube.  And, especially given my eclectic tastes, there was just too much that wasn’t already out there.  But much has changed: YouTube handles licensing for songs you upload differently nowadays, resulting in way more songs being uploaded, and it’s also easy to upload them yourself.  So there really is no excuse any more.

Thus, here you go: my inaugural holidy mix, as a YouTube playlist:

Yuletidal Pools I [featuring Michael Buble]

You’ve still got 5 days or so to listen to it.  And it’s quite peppy, and it’ll put you in the holiday spirit.  You know, unless you’re all grinchy.  Actually, there’s a few songs in there for the grinches out there as well.  Fun for the whole family.

Actually, I don’t know why I said that: there are quite a number of F-bombs in those songs.  So, you know: share with children at your own risk.  In my house, I just listened to my 8-year-old tell a mother on television who had just said “Language!” to her daughter “oh, just let her say ‘fuck’ ...” But, hey: I’m not in charge of your kids.  Probably you should be happy about that.

But, speaking of my kids, they’re all getting ready for Christmas, as they do, and (mostly) not letting the pandemic put a crimp in their holiday spirit.  We’ve been buying our gifts nearly 100% online for years anyhow, and we never travel for Christmas ... when you’re trying to organize 5 humans, 2 dogs, and 3 cats (and even more various animals in years past), the idea of traveling is pretty insane.  We just figure, if our families want to see us, they can drag their asses to our house.  We’ve got more room, and all our furniture is pre-chewed.  So far, not too many takers.  But we don’t mind.  Sometimes just having each other is enough.  This year, of course, we’re mostly sick of each other ... but I think we’ll be okay.

Hopefully.

Anyhow, you’re very unlikely to get any sort of substantial post next week, as it’s that fallow time between Christmas and New Year’s.  So I’ll avail myself of this oppotrunity to wish you merry christmahannukwanzaakah,^* and here’s hoping next year will be better.  I think it probably will be, but I don’t want to be too confident.  Don’t want to jinx it.  But, for your sake as well as ours, I’m definitely wishing it.  For us, for you, and for everyone around the world.  Just a little bit better ... doesn’t have to be a lot.  I’m not greedy.

__________

* Again and as always, ™ previous co-worker Jon Sime.

Keep Your Hands Off My Power Supply

Our power company thoughtfully turned off our power this week for 30 hours because it was windy.  They claim this was to prevent fires, but of course every time they do it, they turn the power back on and something blows and it starts a fire.  (This year was no exception, although the fire wasn’t anywhere near us this time at least.)  Personally, I think they’re doing it because of the Camp Fire, which nearly destroyed the town of Paradise (there’s actually a new documentary about it on Netflix, although I haven’t watched it).  Anyway, a judge held the power company responsible for starting the fire and it cost them a bunch of money, so ever since then they turn off the power when it’s windy ... but only to the primarly residential areas, so as to piss off the consumers and have them complain to their local governments in the hopes that they’ll finally get sick of it and pass some law or other that the power company can’t be held responsible for keeping the power on.  Notably, most of the primarily business areas (where the power company presumably makes the most money) are not turned off at these times—this week, there was about a 10-block-square chunk right in the center of our city which had power the whole time, which was sort of like adding insult to injury, even though it did make it nice to be able to drive about 2 minutes to someplace that had power.  Still, annoying to have a corporation thumb their noses at us so blatantly.

Of course, I have no proof of any of this, so you could accuse me of peddling a conspiracy theory.  I would counter, though, that it doesn’t take much of a “conspiracy”: just 4 or 5 folks at the power company who care more about the bottom line than than whether all my frozen fish food is turning into disgusting goop in my freezer.  And, honestly, if you don’t believe there are way more than that number of people with that attitude running the power companies in our country, then I have nothing more to say to you.  Well, except for this lovely bridge I’ve got to sell you.

Anyhow, it’s sort of put a crimp into my whole week, and I never really caught up.  This should be a “long post” week for me, but as last week’s “short post” was, in fact, quite long, I think I’ll just skip this week, except for the obligatory ranting above.  Which you’ve already suffered through enough, I’m sure.

Back next week for another virus isolation report.

Isolation Report, Week #39

[You could also read the most recent report, or even start at the beginning.]

So, lately all the pandemic talk has been focussed on the vaccine(s).  I have to say, I’m a bit irked at the media’s coverage of the vaccines: we seem to have breezed past any discussion of safety and started arguing about who “gets to” get the vaccine first.  I mean, I’m pretty much always irked at the media’s coverage of vaccines, and in particular their attitude that anyone that dares to have any reservations about any vaccine is therefore a crazy person.  But this particular round of vaccine coverage has a whole ‘nother dimension to it that really saddens me.

You see, when Trump was promising a vaccine “very soon now,” the media was very quick to point out that you can’t really rush a vaccine.  The entire concept of vaccination is to infect you with something that will hopefully “fool” your body into thinking it’s sick without actually getting sick, so that it therefore produces antibodies that will protect against the infection before you ever even get infected.  This is actually a very clever idea, and, when it works, it’s pretty amazing.  Unfortunately, when it doesn’t work, it can be pretty devastating: early implementation of the polio managed to cause 40,000 new cases of polio.  That doesn’t mean there was anything wrong with the idea of vaccinating against polio, although I’m sure that some people interpret it that way.  No, the problem was simply a manufacturing error ... if we can describe a situation involving tens of thousands of infections of a paralytic and in some cases fatal disease as being “simply an error.” So taking time to study the vaccines carefully and make sure they’re being developed with all due rigor is pretty damned important.  Before the election, the media seemed to know that.  They considered it quite reasonable that some people—many people, even—would not want to take a vaccine which had been rushed to market to make Trump look good and was certified as “safe” by a government with a vested interest in doing just that.

But, somehow, now that the election is over and Trump has lost, now we’re back to statements like “some people may not want to take the vaccine, because of crazy conspiracy theories or whatever.” Look: I’m obviously no fan of Trump.  The fact that he even exists—that a person can be considered “rich” without demonstrating any actual monetary value, that a person can commit crime after crime without ever facing any consequences, that a person could demonstrate such a flagrant disregard for the truth and even for human life—the fact that there’s anyone like that on the planet, much less in the White House, that offends me on a fundamental level.  I’m also, contrary to the opinions of some, not opposed to vaccines in general.  There are many vaccines—including that for polio, despite the tragedies associated with its initial rollout—which I believe are medically essential for us humans to continue to endure.  But that doesn’t mean that I believe that anything that has the word “vaccine” printed on the side of it is therefore safe and necessary.

Concerns about these vaccines, which were very much rushed, are not crazy, and they’re not a result of believing in conspiracy theories.  Well, perhaps for some they are.  But the media made lots of good points before Trump was defeated, and those points are still valid.  There were very good reasons for rushing these vaccines—I’m not disputing that—but that doesn’t make them any less rushed.  Each one has had a single study done on them, and, despite the fact that those studies appear, by all reports, to be pretty damned thorough studies, a single study can’t conclusively prove anything.  Moreover, the studies were focussed on efficacy (which, again, is perfectly understandable and appopriate, given the circumstances), not on safety.  There simply hasn’t been enough time to figure out if the vaccine is fully safe.  Now, there could be situations where the threat of a disease was so dire, and the consequences so heinous, that the risk of not fully knowing the safety factor of a vaccine would be outweighed by the risk of contracting the disease.  But I believe that this disease doesn’t meet that standard.

Reasonable people can disagree.  After all, death rates are rising, people will point out, and for the first time in recent memory—possibly for the first time in living memory—we experienced a week where heart disease was not the number one cause of death in the United States: it was COVID.  But, let’s be realistic: our death rate isn’t so high because this disease is so dangerous.  Our death rate is so high because we’ve been remarkably stupid in handling it.  People refuse to wear masks.  People were explicitly told not to travel for the holidays, but they did it anyway.  This week we’ve heard about a rash of politicians telling their constituents to stay home and avoid gatherings while they themselves were doing the opposite, including the remarkable case of the mayor of Austin telling people to avoid travel from his hotel room in Mexico.  It’s silly to imagine that these things aren’t all connected.  And, anyway, the proof is simple: while the whole world may be experiencing a resurgence of the disease, only our country has numbers like this.

And I’m certainly not saying that staying home and wearing masks guarantees that you won’t get the disease.  Recently I received the unpleasant news that one of my coworkers, who by all descriptions was far more paranoid about being exposed to the disease than I or my family have been, contracted it.  It sounds like he and his girlfriend are going to recover, but it’s still a chilling reminder that nothing is 100%.  Of course, the vaccines are not 100% either.  If the initial efficacy numbers hold water, you’ve still got a 5% chance of catching COVID after you’ve been vaccinated with one of the current candidates, and we simply don’t know what the chances of any potential side-effects are yet.  Given that, and given how good our chances are for not catching the disease by simply continuing to observe the same best practices that we’ve all been doing for close to year now, it still makes sense to me to wait a bit and see how these vaccine fare in the real world before committing to anything.  Oh, I will be getting this vaccine eventually.  But I’m not in a hurry.

The thing that disturbs the most about the media coverage, though, is the hypocrisy.  When it was “Trump’s vaccine,” we shouldn’t trust it.  Now that Trump is on the way out, mistrusting a vaccine is a crazy conspiracy theory.  I’m sorry, but there’s no conspiracy theory, nor any sort of crazy, required.  The media made some great points about the dangers of a rushed vaccine, and Trump being defeated doesn’t change any of those points.  There are essentially two options here for what’s going on.  The first is that the media was just saying that we should be suspicious of a vaccine produced under Trump, for political expediency.  But that’s exactly what Trump was accusing them of: remember how he claimed that, once the election was over, we’d never hear about COVID again?  Obviously that was crazy, and also stupid.  But somewhow we immediately stopped hearing about the possibility that the vaccine might not be all rainbows and sunshine.  That means that Trump was essentially right—in the abstract, if not in the details—and that possibility makes me really sad.  Also the concept of Trump being right about anything upsets my grasp on reality.

But the other possible explanation isn’t any more comforting: that, rather than being insincere in their claims then, they’re insincere in their claims now.  That they know perfectly well that there could be consequences and ramifications to just shoving this vaccine into everyone’s veins ... and they just don’t care.  Or, to be more generous, that they believe that the number of people who will be hurt or maybe even killed will be low enough not to matter.  But, here again: that’s been the attitude of the Trump camp.  I don’t want to see that blossoming on the other side of the political divide as well.

One more particularly relevant analogy that I’ll give.  Last month, “Dr.” Scott Atlas, a “medical” advisor to Trump, was ridiculed extensively for talking about “herd immunity.” In one example story, ABC called herd immunity “a concept lambasted by public health experts as ‘dangerous’ and called ‘ridiculous’ by the federal government’s foremost infectious disease official, Dr. Anthony Fauci.” I specifically remember thinking at the time, “man, they better be careful how they disparage herd immunity, because that’s central precept of vaccination policy.” I was really curious to see how they’d handle it when it was time to actually push for herd immunity using the newly created vaccines.

And now the time has come, and, you know what?  They just all pretend like they never said that.  Now herd immunity is all good, and we all need to be concerned about whether we can achieve it, becauase of all those crazy conspiracy theory nutjobs, you know.  They’re essentially saying exactly the opposite of what they said before and not acknowledging that anything is different.  But, here’s the thing: that’s what Trump does. And, I’m sorry, but it doesn’t make it okay when it’s “my side” doing it.  It’s still wrong, and vaguely nauseating.  Have we had to turn into Trump in order to defeat him?

Let’s hope not.  Because that’s not okay.

Eldritch Ætherium II

"Welcome to the Lost Road across the Empire of the Daggers of the Dead"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.  You may also want to check out the first volume in this multi-volume mix for more info on its theme.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

One thing I mentioned back on volume I of this mix was that most of the music there came from just a few sources: those first albums I discovered which were specifically designed for D&D or other TTRPG gaming.  Another thing I mentioned was that gaming music is much easier to find these days, primarily due to the explosion of actual play D&D shows.  I still have a great fondness for the journey I put together on volume I, but in many ways volume II is the better set just because I had so much more variety to draw from.

Of course, many things are the same: Midnight Syndicate and the Shards of Eberron album are back, as are zero-project and Nox Arcana, and there’s a Renn-Faire-sounding bridge from Dead Can Dance.  Still nothing with any real vocals to speak of, so we’ve got another volume title cobbled together out of song titles, and once again I’ve tried to arrange the tracks so as to suggest an adventurous journey.  But there are differences as well: we stray from Midnight Syndicate’s Dungeons & Dragons album for the firs time, for instance, and Shards and zero-project give us one fewer track each.  And no V Shane this time around: oh, I’m sure we’ll see him again eventually, but there were just many better options this time around.

Part of that is because I discovered shows like The Adventure Zone and Critical Role.  The former mostly features music composed by Griffin McElroy, a lot of which is synthy and yet still works in a fantasy setting.  However, it is Australian musician (and also a fan of the show) Rachel Rose Mitchell who provides our TAZ track here: it’s the iconic “Voidfish (Plural),” where she takes a relatively simple tune from Griffin and elevates it to something ethereal and wondrous.  But it was really CR that gave me the biggest push musically: “Welcome to Wildemount,” an utterly amazing track by Irish PhD student (in music composition) Colm McGuinness is the song they play during their breaks, and “Elmshore” (from the videogame Pillars of Eternity) is one of Matt Mercer’s favorite tracks to play during quiet moments of the game.  And, once I started searching for music related to Critical Role, I found more tracks by Colm McGuinness, as well as some by Ian Peter Fisher.  McGuinness is one of those artists who plays all the instruments himself and then mixes them all together to form tracks that sound like they were produced by a full orchestra.  Fisher is a bit of a traditional electronic composer, and I suspect that he’s merely renamed some of his compositions to use Critial Role placenames,¹ which no doubt increased his visibility; still, that doesn’t mean the tracks aren’t fantastic.  The explosion of popularity for D&D also means that even more people are explicitly writing music to game to, such as Adrian von Ziegler, whose Bandcamp page contains hundreds of such tracks.  V Shane has a lot of competition these days.

I was also inspired to branch out into other cinematic music.  I’ve included here selections from The Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, and the televison show Grimm.  Howard Shore’s score for the first of these has a tendency to slide into the operatic,² but there are some good choices; the score for the last of these (by moderately well known composer Richard Marvin³) has just a very few gems among a plethora of decidedly average television background pieces.  On the other hand, the problem with Ramin Djawadi’s excellent Game of Thrones music is just that it’s too iconic: I’m taking a risk here with the main GoT theme (as I’m doing with the main Grimm theme, and the well-known-to-CR-fans “Welcome to Wildemount”) that listeners will be jarred out of this journey and into other worlds, if they’re at all familiar with the originating shows.  But I’m hoping that I’ve managed to recontextualize the tracks, at least partially; you, the listener, will have to be the judge.

For other cinematic choices, I’ve picked a track from Epic Soul Factory as well as another pick from the orchestral remix of Legend of Zelda songs.  We last saw ESF on Mystical Memoriam, where I discussed their cinematic music as possibly being a portfolio for soundtrack composing; this track (“The Lost World”) is an obvious nod to Jurassic Park.  As for the 25th anniversay Legend of Zelda CD, there’s something about giving the full orchestral treatment to a Ninentendo soundtrack that just gives it a depth that is nearly breathtaking.

The journey here is titled in a similarly whimsical fashion to our first volume; this title didn’t come out to be quite as long, but you can expect future volumes to get longer and longer to the point of silliness.  Or even more sillierness, as the case may be.  I’ve always loved the way “Welcome to Wildemount” just explodes into being, so it was the natural choice for an opener, unrolling the promise of fantastical vistas before our eyes.  From there, we begin traveling to “The Lost World,” perhaps camping overnight where friendly natives play us the local folk tune “Kecharitomene.” Then, early in the predawn light, we set off on “The Road to Zadash,” arriving finally on the quiet and mystical “Elmshore,” where something wondrous seems just around the corner.  After another fiddle-laced interlude (“Mephisto”), we cautiously enter into an expedition “Across the Talenta Plains,” a tense and exotic affair where danger seems imminent even as we marvel at outposts with many strange wares.

Then we get to our first real battle, providing us with some “Alternative Therapy.” Then a quiet, restful moment (“Kamimukae”) bridges the conflict with the arrival at “The Age of the Empire,” which seeks to impress us with its military might.  But we move on from there to “The Blooming Grove,” an enchanted place which is merely a “Prelude” to the barren, wintry “Structure.” But this is where we learn “How to Kill an Ogre,” which starts out soft and slow and eventually builds to a confrontation with the “Orc Hunters of the Shadow Marches.” Of course, that just leads to a stealthy flight and explosive encounter “At the Sign of the Prancing Pony.” But then, from the darkness, a light appears: the kaleidoscopic pulsing of “Voidfish (Plural)” that lead us “Aboard the Stormcrow,” where the dark, echoey strains signal an uncomfortable journey into more danger, which is brief but explosive (Grimm’s “Main Title”).

The cello-fueled calm “Before the Storm” is dramatic and uplifting, but then the celloes turn dark and take us across more sweeping vistas (Game of Throne’s “Main Title).  But it’s the martial march across “The Devil’s Daggers” to fight an “Army of the Dead” that is the true climax of our adventure.  After some quiet reflection on “The Final Battle,” the “Ballad of the Goddess” provides an uplifting and emotional release, until our next adventure.

Eldritch Ætherium II
[ Welcome to the Lost Road across the Empire of the Daggers of the Dead ]

“Welcome to Wildemount” by Colm McGuinness [Single]
“The Lost World” by Epic Soul Factory, off Xpansion Edition
“Kecharitomene” by Loreena McKennitt, off An Ancient Muse
“The Road to Zadash” by Ian Peter Fisher [Single]
“Elmshore” by Justin Bell, off Pillars of Eternity [Videogame Soundtrack]
“Mephisto” by Dead Can Dance, off Aion
“Across the Talenta Plains” by David P. Davidson, off Shards of Eberron [RPG Soundtrack]
“Alternative Therapy” by Midnight Syndicate, off Gates of Delirium
“Kamimukae” by Faith and the Muse, off :ankoku butoh:
“The Age of the Empire” by zero-project, off Fairytale 2
“The Blooming Grove” by Ian Peter Fisher [Single]
“Prelude” by Midnight Syndicate, off Dungeons & Dragons [RPG Soundtrack]
“Structure” by Love Is Colder Than Death, off Teignmouth
“Game Ogre: How to Kill an Ogre” by Richard Marvin, off Grimm: Seasons 1 & 2 [Soundtrack]
“Orc Hunters of the Shadow Marches” by David P. Davidson, off Shards of Eberron [RPG Soundtrack]
“At the Sign of the Prancing Pony” by Howard Shore, off The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring [Soundtrack]
“Voidfish (Plural)” by Rachel Rose Mitchell [Single]
“Aboard the Stormcrow” by Adrian von Ziegler, off Fable
“GRIMM: Main Title (Season 2)” by Richard Marvin, off Grimm: Seasons 1 & 2 [Soundtrack]
“Before the Storm” by Colm McGuinness [Single]
“Main Title” by Ramin Djawadi, off Game of Thrones: Music from the HBO Series [Soundtrack]
“The Devil's Daggers” by Nox Arcana, off Carnival of Lost Souls
“Army of the Dead” by Midnight Syndicate, off Dungeons & Dragons [RPG Soundtrack]
“The Final Battle” by Dark Sanctuary, off Royaume Mélancolique
“Ballad of the Goddess from Skyward Sword” by Koji Kondo [Single]

Total:  25 tracks,  79:31

(Note that there a number of links to YouTube videos this time around; there’s just several tracks here where that’s the only place you can find them.)

As far as the unlikely candidates go, I was very pleased to find quite a few tracks that, while not designed for use in gaming or as cinematic backdrops at all, they just seemed to work perfectly here.  The dark neoclassical songs of Dark Sanctuary⁴ are a natural fit, and “The Final Battle” provides just enough Renaissance feel to work well here.  Goth masters Faith and the Muse often provide useful little bridges, such as the one I used on Fulminant Cadenza I,⁵ and “Kamimukae” is no exception: it’s a contemplative, string-driven piece that abuts perfectly up against the more expansive selection from zero-project.  Love Is Colder Than Death is a German darkwave band (named after a German film) who, just as their name suggests, produce wintry, goth-infused ambient and ethereal; “Structure” is one of the tunes that most epitomizes their sound.

But the real find here was realizing that when Canadian dreampop virtuoso Loreena McKennitt produces an instrumental track, it inevitably sounds like it belongs on the soundtrack of a fantasy film.  My first pick of hers, “Kecharitomene” is a mostly string-based track (Discogs tells me that it’s actually not a fiddle, but rather a hurdy-gurdy), with some tablas for percussion, and some sort of piping.  The combination is half Romany, half Arabic, and half Celtic.  Best yet, it starts out very sedately, but each round gets a bit louder and more dramatic, until the penultimate one, which easily conjures images of frenzied dancing around a campfire, and then slides effortlessly back into the original slow burn, which are now the dying embers.  It’s a beautfiul track that fits gorgeously between the opening dramatics of “Welcome to Wildemount” and “The Lost World” and the mystical beauty of “The Road to Zadash” and “Elmshore.” I suspect we’ll see a selection from McKennitt on every volume of this mix from here on out.

Next time, it’s time to get to back that upbeat brass that kicks so much ass.

⇐ Eldritch Ætherium I

Eldritch Ætherium III ⇒

__________

1 For instance, you might find the same song of his with two different names, one of which contains the CR reference, and the other of which has a generic name such as “Fantasty Travel Theme.”

2 Specifically, that Carmina Burana/The Da Vinci Code territory that we talked about last time.

3 Marvin also scored Six Feet Under, one of the early triumphs of showrunner Alan Ball.

4 First encountered on Shadowfall Equinox II.

5 For a full-length demonstration of their prowess, see Penumbral Phosphorescence.