Music Discovery Story #2: Found Cassettes

[This is the second post in a sub-series of my music mix series.  It’s basically a story about some music discovery event in my life, so it’s a combo of music info and personal history info.  You can find a list of all the music stories in the mix series list.

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.]

You may recall that music story #1 started like so:

Once upon a time, sound was recorded on wax cylinders, and you had to crank the phonograph yourself.  That didn’t last too long, though, and we invented vinyl.

Well, after vinyl, we invented a bunch of other formats, primarily trying to get more and mor portable.  (Please note that, just like last time, I’m deliberately not looking any of this up, so don’t expect 100% factual accuracy.)  We had reel-to-reel tape recorders, which honestly weren’t any more portable than record players, so I dunno where that came from.  And then we had 8-track tapes, which were portable enough to put into your cars, so that was a win.  It was a plastic rectangle, roughly the size of a large smartphone (or a small tablet), and it had 4 “channels” that you could switch between (it was called an “8”-track because each channel had two tracks, so you’d get stereo sound).  It was a wide tape on a continuous loop, and once it got to the “end” the head would just drop down to the next lower channel, or pop back up to the top if it had finished channel 4.  But there was also a button where you could switch the channel manually.  There was no rewind, since it was one big tape loop, and, while I’m sure some 8-track players had fast-forward capabilities, most of the time you just listened to whatever happened to be on that spot on the tape at the time.

The next evolution was cassettes, which were smaller (and therefore more portable), but they only had two “channels,” and, instead of the tape head moving, you physically had to take the cassette out and flip it over to hear the other channel.  So the music on one channel went from the beginning of the tape to the end, and the music on the other channel went from the end to the beginning.  This made rewinding necessary, so fast-forwarding was more common (if you’re making the player do the one, may as well have it do both), and it also meant that you could correspond the tape more closely to the original (vinyl) album: each format had two “sides,” so the entirety of side A of the ablum would go on the first channel of the cassette, and side B on the reverse.  This meant there would be blank space at the end of either one side or the other (the tape was made as long as the longer side), which was wasted tape, but it was still better than the old 8-tracks, which would often switch channels right in the middle of a song (typically with an audible “thunk” sound).  So overall it was better.

My father had reel-to-reel tapes, and he had 8-tracks, but, by the time I started buying my own music, it was cassettes all the way, baby.  I owned a metric shit-ton of cassettes at one point, even after CDs came out: I was daunted by the expense of trying to replace a huge cassette collection.¹  So I had many, many years of cassettes, from high school all the way to my second stint in college.  And what I want to tell you about today is the two times that I actually found cassettes and adopted them into my collection.

The first story is very simple.  I was walking back to my grandmother’s house from somewhere, and I found a copy of Ice Cream Castle on the sidewalk in a very battered case.  Though the plastic case was essentially destroyed, and the paper insert was pretty torn up, the cassette itself was in surprisingly good shape, and I counted myself lucky to have found it.  I only recognized one of the songs (undoubtedly “Jungle Love”), but I knew that the Time were a band associated with Prince, and had a role in the movie Purple Rain (which I hadn’t seen, admittedly).  Honestly, the music reminded me a lot of Prince, whose 1999 I had owned for many years and nearly worn out.  A lot of it was very silly, but it was good, and it was exactly the sort of thing that I enjoyed enough to play since I’d gotten it for free, but not nearly enough to have ever paid for the full album out of my own pocket, so I considered it a great find.²

The second story is more complex.  I went to college in two stints: my first two years were spent at two different colleges in two different states, then I dropped out for a few years, and then went back to school at a third college.  At the first school, I lived in the dorms; by the time of the third, I was paying for it myself and considered living in the dorm an unjustifiable expense.  Even then, though, I had a lot of friends who did live in the dorms, so I spent a lot of time hanging out with them (and even lived on my best friend’s dorm room floor for a brief period between houses, much to his roommate’s annoyance).  And the dorms in these two colleges all had elevators.³  As a freshman, my own dorm was 3 stories, so we mostly just used the stairs.  But there were other dorms where elevators were necessary, and all of the dorms at the last college had them, and so we spent a bunch of time on them, so we invented dumb things to do on them to keep ourselves amused.  The absolute dumbest of these was “bumper people,” a “game” in which one person would randomly shout “bumper people!” and everyone else would just put their hands down by their sides and start bouncing off the walls—and each other, of course—like we were balls in a small, jumbled pinball machine.  Woe betide anyone who’d never heard of this when it spontaneously erupted; initiation into the society of bumper people was disorienting, to say the least.

But it’s the other thing we often did in the elevators that is relevant to this story.  Someone long ago had figured this out and apparently passed it on throughout the years, so that we all learned to do it eventually ... at both schools, even.⁴  It was simple, really: you could put your fingers in the crack of the eleveator doors and just push them open.  It required a bit of strength, but it was surprisingly easy, especially if you could manage to get the proper leverage.  And the best bit was, you could even do this while the elevator was in motion, and, if you did that, the elevator would stop.  Completely.  Between floors.  And stay that way until you allowed the doors to close again.

Now, I’m not entirely sure why this fascinated us so much.  Perhaps just because the inside of the elevator shaft is a thing that the vast majority of us never get to actually see in real life.  We see it in the movies, sometimes, but who can say how accurate that is?  Well, anyone who attended either of these two universities⁵ in the 80s and 90s can say, and, as one such person, I’ll tell you that the primary difference between actual elevator shafts and what you see in the movies is that the cinematic versions are very clean.  In real life, elevator shafts are filthy, disgusting things, full of rust and grease and all the gunk and debris that slovenly college kids accidentally (or purposefully) drop into the crack between the elevator car and the outside doors.  In fact, part of the fun of stopping the elevator by opening the doors (this only opened the inside doors, of course) was to see what you could find in the empty spaces.  The outer doors weren’t solid, so there was plenty of room inside them for papers or whatever to get trapped by the curled metal edges.  And of course there was a set of outer doors for each floor, so there were a bunch of them to explore.  If you opened the doors all the way, you could actually see into the parts of the elevator shaft beyond the edges of the doors, and they too had little recesses and cubbies where detritus would fetch up.  I shudder to think how many times we stuck our entire arms between the car and the shaft, reaching for something that looked interesting.  Sure, the elevator was fully stopped at the time, but there was no way for us to be sure that that would hold.  We were young and stupid, of course, and convinced of our own immortality, so I don’t believe it ever even occurred to any of us that something might go wrong and the elevator might start up suddenly and, if that were to happen at such a time, someone was absolutely going to lose an arm.  Certainly it never occurred to me.

So we often stopped the elevator just to look and see what “treasures” we could find.  I have to put “treasures” in quotes, of course, because it was always trash.  There was never anything actually cool or useful that we found in the elevator shafts of the dorms at either of these schools.  Except, one time ...

During my freshman year, I got a job at a local sub shop.  Which delivered, so I spent probably just as much time running deliveries to places as I did making sandwiches.  The really interesting thing about this local (non-chain) sub shop was that it had a huge ice cream maker, a giant metal monster of a machine that you fed ice cream mix and whatever bits of flavoring you could imagine into, and you ended up with ... whatever ice cream.  I used to make ice cream too: I would feed entire packages of Oreos into the hole, or cut up pieces of strawberry cheesecake, or actual pistachios.  And of course we delivered that too.  In fact, sometimes people would call up and order nothing but ice cream, although you had to order a decent amount of it to hit the minimum order.  But people in the dorms would just get together with their neighbors and order a round of ice cream for the whole floor in the same way that they might all go in on a pizza.  So I spent a lot of time taking people bags of freshly made ice cream, and a lot of that time was spent in elevators.

There was one dorm in particular that was taller than all the other dorms.  I can’t remember exactly how big it was, but it was definitely the tallest dorm that I’ve ever been in, though of course not nearly the tallest building.  It was probably somewhere between 7 and 15 floors, and it was mostly upper class students.  I had a delivery one day around exam time to one of the girls’ floors near the top, and I brought them their favorite study aid: Oreo ice cream.  They were very happy to see me, and they paid me, and then I got back in the elevator for the long ride down.  I was all alone in the elevator car, and I must have been bored, because I decided to open the doors to look for cool shit in the crannies of the shaft.  I did so once and found nothing (as expected, really).  Then I closed the doors and went down a little further and opened them again, and I just stared in shock, because there was an actual thing.  A useful, even exciting thing, stuck in the hollow of the outer elevator doors, that was not trash.  It was a cassette by a band I’d never heard of before.  It was, in fact, In a Roman Mood, by Human Sexual Response.

Now, I hope I’ve managed to convey how extremely unlikely it was for me to find this cassette.  This was a Boston band who was barely known outside their native state, but someone had bought the cassette of their sophomore (lesser known) album and brought it to South Carolina, where they somehow managed to drop it into the crack of the elevator, where it fell down the shaft, not all the way to the bottom, but rather getting caught neatly inside one of the outer doors, where it did not break, or even crack, but sat patiently waiting for who knows how long until someone else—me—just happened to ride the elevator and just happened to know the trick of opening the doors while the car was in motion and just happened to pick the exact right spot to do it so that they would see this cassette.  This set of coincidences is so very unlikely, in fact, that for many years I didn’t believe it: I assumed that someone had deliberately placed it there.  Obviously they too knew the trick of opening the doors, and they just stuck the cassette there one day.  But why?  There’s no rational reason I could ever think of for it ...  Somebody stuck it in there for safekeeping, meaning to come back and get it later?  Rubbish.  Somebody left it there hoping it would be found by someone else as a way to pass on the music?  Nonsense: almost any other place in the universe would have been more likely to be discovered than this one.  About the best I could come up with was that someone stole it from someone else that they were very pissed at and “disposed” of the thing in this way.  Except ... again, why in the elevator shaft, when a trash can would have been far simpler and far more effective?  I just couldn’t wrap my brain around it.  While I’m not much inclined to believe that everything happens for a reason, things like this that have happened in my life do make me occasionally ponder whether fate might be an actual thing.

Now, my musical tastes are wide-ranging and eclectic, and I often go back and revisit periods in my musical history.  So, while I had never heard of Human Sexual Response at that time, perhaps I would have stumbled across them later.  They do have something of a reputation in new wave circles.  Of course, the vast majority of that reputation centers around their debut album, and the later single “Butt Fuck,” which caused a stir for obvious reasons.  And, here’s the thing: by this point in my life, I’ve heard the early HSR stuff.  It doesn’t particularly impress me.  Had I heard that stuff first, would I have even bothered to check out their second, less critically acclaimed, album?  And, the thing is, In a Roman Mood contains the excellent, nearly-impossible-to-describe “Land of the Glass Pinecones,” which is the mix starter for Totally Different Head, so that feels like a pretty serious deviation in my personal musical trajectory had I never discovered it.  Not to mention that the research for TDH is what led me to discover the music of HSR’s only female member’s daughter, Glasser, whose music is now slotted to appear in many of mixes (although so far we’ve only seen her pop up on Fulminant Cadenza).  So that original discovery had a small but very significant impact in my musical development, and it’s all thanks to stupid college elevator games.

Next time ... well, actually, I don’t have anything planned for next time in this sub-series.  But so far I’ve covered vinyl and tape, so obviously the next topic must be: digital.

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1 Eventually what happened was that about half my cassettes got stolen, and at that point I figured, WTF: may as well start buying the replacements on CD.

2 I never did buy it on CD, but I have a digital copy now.

3 At the second school, I neither lived in nor knew anyone who lived in the dorms, so it doesn’t figure much into the story.

4 I’m pretty sure I didn’t carry the practice from one school to the other; I think I’d remember that.  But I can’t swear to it.

5 At least!  Probably folks at other schools knew this trick as well.

Staycation Again, Like We Did Last Summer

This week I began a bit of a staycation, which will extend into the middle of next week.  I’m trying to catch up on a bunch of computer stuff that has been stacking up, with mixed success.  Hopefully I make a bit more progress as it goes on.  But, either way, we should have a longer post next week.

Numeric Driftwood IV

"Hints of Lilac Light"

[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.]

At this point, Numeric Driftwood plays in my room nearly constantly: I turn it on shortly after dinner, and it plays until after I get out of the shower the next morning.  It soothes me to sleep at night, and greets me in the morning.  Given that I’m hearing it so often, I figured it only made sense to expand it a bit more.  So here’s a fourth volume of relaxing, sleepytime music.

This is a pretty decent volume in terms of returning artists, if I do say so myself.  Of the three artists who appeared on all three of the previous volumes, only two are back:¹ Angels of Venice and Kitaro.  AoV are here with their seventh appearance on this mix, another track off Forever After² called “Wildflowers.” While all AoV is harp-focussed (harpist Carol Tatum is the founder and only constant member, after all), this one is particularly so: the opening harp solo is about a minute-and-a-half long, backed only by subtle birdsong, and even when the other instruments come in, they’re very much in the background.  It’s a very pretty, soothing piece.  For Kitaro, for his fifth appearance here I finally stray from my favorite album of his, India, to the second album of his that I ever bought: Astral Voyage.  Well, technically, I bought them both at the same time, but it very quickly became apparent to me that India was the superior offering.  But Astral Voyage has a few gems, and “By the Seaside” is one.  As you might imagine from a song called “Seaside” on an album called Astral, this song is a strange hybrid of sitting by the ocean and flying through space, but somehow Kitaro makes it work, which is really just a testament to his fifty years’ experience.  Plus it makes a beautifully seamless transition into “Ocean and Tambura,” by second-time returning artist Anugama.  This song is just what it says on the tin: the calming sound of ocean waves, backed by the subtle strains of a tambura, which is a “drone” instrument.³  At over 8 minutes, this track isn’t as long as “Shaku Sunset” from last volume, but it’s pretty long; happily, that’s irrelevant when the point of the music is to help you drift off to sleep anyway.  

For other other returning artists, Enya and Skydance are back: we missed them last volume, but they now return to provide a welcome Celtic injection into the mainly Far Easter festivities thus far.  Both previous Enya tracks were instrumentals off my favorite album of hers, Shepherd Moons, so I thought I expand my scope a bit here as well.  “Watermark” is the title track off her sophomore album; while Watermark isn’t quite as good as Shepherd Moons, it does contain the amazing “Orinoco Flow,” as well as this pretty, slightly-longer-than-bridge-length instrumental, which flows nicely into “Wildflowers.” For Skyedance, I follow the exact same pattern: while Way Out to Hope Street will always be my favorite of theirs, their follow-up Labyrinth contains this beautiful gem “The Other Side of Sorrow,” which focusses more on Alasdair Fraser’s fiddle than Eric Rigler’s pipes.⁴

And everyone else here is fresh.  Kim Robertson is another harpist, and her music is often described as Celtic, though I find her amazing album Wood, Fire & Gold to be a bit more than that.  I can’t now remember how I discovered her, but “Anamchara” is just the most beautiful, soothing piece you can imagine, with harp backed by strings and some soft, wordless vocals.  Canadian Mychael Danna is perhaps best known as the composer for Life of Pi; with his brother Jeff (also a film and television composer), they produced a couple of albums for Hearts of Space records, and you may recall that’s the label of the show that inspired my modern mixes.⁵  To be sure, HoS is where I first heard excerpts from this album, titled A Celtic Tale: The Legend of Deirdre; “Loch Etive” is a peaceful Celtic instrumental that flows very nicely into Skyedance.

Most of the other new artists are invading from Shadowfall Equinox, most notably Black Tape for a Blue Girl (while uncharacteristically—and surprisingly, given the name—non-sombre track “With a Million Tears” is their first appearance here, they’ve appeared six times on five of the six SfE volumes) and Kevin Keller (one of the artists showcased in the Hearts of Space program Shadowfall II that directly inspired SfE, Keller’s spare piano track “The Lost Father” is just a touch melancholy, but still pretty relaxing).  Another pianist I’ve drawn from for Shadowfall Equinox⁶ is Ruben Garcia; he’s only appeared on SfE twice,⁷ but his mellow piano track “90 Degrees at 7 A.M.” works very nicely here, especially coming directly off the Keller track.  In fact, I seem to have inadvertently created a whole Shadowfall Equinox block:⁸ after the opening pair of ocean-inspired new age tracks, we go into the wind-and-birdsong backed darkwave of “With a Million Tears,” then to Rapoon,⁹ who is normally sort of ethno-ambient, but “Noord” is actually pretty darkwave itself, and thence to the pianists—the Keller is very spare, the Garcia is as well, if a bit synthy, and then on to Tim Story, with a perfect balance of piano and synth in “Scene and Artifact”¹⁰—and then circling back around to the darkwave with some Love Spirals Downwards and their very ambient “Waiting for the Sunrise,”¹¹ and finally fetching up at Julianna Barwick,¹² whose looped and overlaid wordless vocal tracks make something which is tough to categorize, but probably closest to ambient, and who here gives us “Offing,” an echoey track with some angelic voices, and that drops us right into the Celtic centerpiece of the Dannas, Skyedance, and Enya.  Quite a run!

Numeric Driftwood IV
[ Hints of Lilac Light ]

“By the Seaside” by Kitaro, off Astral Voyage
“Ocean and Tambura” by Anugama, off The Lightness of Being [Compilation]
“With a Million Tears” by Black Tape for a Blue Girl, off Mesmerized by the Sirens
“Noord” by Rapoon, off Cidar
“The Lost Father” by Kevin Keller, off Nocturnes
“90 Degrees at 7 A.M.” by Ruben Garcia, off I Can Feel the Heat Closing In
“Scene and Artifact” by Tim Story, off Threads
“Waiting for the Sunrise” by Love Spirals Downwards, off Idylls [Reissue]
“Offing” by Julianna Barwick, off Nepenthe
“Loch Etive” by Mychael Danna & Jeff Danna, off A Celtic Tale: The Legend of Deirdre
“The Other Side of Sorrow” by Skyedance, off Labyrinth
“Watermark” by Enya, off Watermark
“Wildflowers” by Angels of Venice, off Forever After
“A Gentle Dissolve” by Thievery Corporation, off The Cosmic Game
“Anamchara” by Kim Robertson, off Wood, Fire & Gold
“Stretch Out Your Arms” by Devics, off The Stars at Saint Andrea
“5 More Minutes” by Meaghan Smith, off The Cricket's Orchestra

Total:  17 tracks,  69:28

That only leaves us with the three moderately unexpected tracks.  Thievery Corporation have popped up all over these mixes, from Smokelit Flashback III to Zephyrous Aquamarine I with several stops in between, but you might not expect to hear their Caribbean-flavoured electroworld on a mix of sleepytime music.  And, indeed, “A Gentle Dissolve” almost didn’t make the cut here: it’s got a noticeable electronic beat and even some brass.  But, at the end of the day, the gentle, almost hypnotic synth trills and washes convinced me that it deserved its spot here, close to the closing.

And, speaking of the closing, that brings us to the two closing vocal tracks.  This is a tradition that started with Numeric Driftwood II, and I decided it worked here as well.  For the penultimate song, I chose a Devics track that was less dreampop and more slow and mellow.  (Whether you find it creepy or not probably depends on how closely you listen to the lyrics ...)  Devics of course we’ve seen on Smokelit Flashback,¹³ twice on Darkling Embrace, and once on Dreamscape Perturbation (and that ought to give some idea of where most of their music falls), but also on Shadowfall Equinox III and Porchwell Firetime I.  So “Stretch Out Your Arms” is a bit atypical, but they’re eclectic enough to make it work.

And we wrap up the festivities with normally quite upbeat Meaghan Smith, another artist who’s been all over these mixes: Salsatic Vibrato V, Moonside by Riverlight I and II, Slithy Toves I, and Sirenexiv Cola I.  The closer for her excellent album The Cricket’s Orchestra is “5 More Minutes,” a soft little ballad in which a child begs for a little more time to enjoy the evening.  It’s a beautiful closer, both on her album and on this volume, plus it provides the titles for both as well: “hints of lilac light” is one of the most poetic descriptions of a dusky, twilit sky that I think I’ve ever heard.  A really special closer for this one.

Next time, let’s return to the gaming table.

⇐ Numeric Driftwood III

Numeric Driftwood V ⇒

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1 Satori may show up again one day, but I used every track off his excellent For Relaxation, and I just haven’t gotten another of his albums yet.

2 The previous track from this album was “Starshine Lullabye” which appeared way back on volume I.

3 Other drone instruments include the bagpipes and the shawm.  Also the kazoo.

4 Honestly, if Eric is in there somewhere, I can’t really make him out.

5 And, in particular, Shadowfall Equinox.

6 And who also had a track on the aforementioned Shadowfall II.

7 Specifically, on volumes IV and V.

8 Or maybe I did it vertently and then forgot about it.

9 We first saw Rapoon, and discussed a bit about his origins, on Shadowfall Equinox IV.

10 We first met Tim on Shadowfall Equinox II and then saw him again on Shadowfall Equinox IV.

11 We first encountered LSD on Shadowfall Equinox I, but we’ve also seen them on Smokelit Flashback V, Rose-Coloured Brainpan II, and Candy Apple Shimmer.

12 We’ve actually only heard Julianna so far on Incanto Liturgica, though I’ve no doubt she’ll eventually show up on SfE.

13 Volumes IV, V, and VI.

A bit of a cliché, but true nonetheless

While I’m not in general fond of “man it sucks getting old” posts, I do have to say that, of late, I definitely have been feeling my age.  Nothing major in the health department, really ... just your standard quantity of aches and pains that inevitably come with the wearing out of joints and the brittleness of bones.  There’s nothing to be done about it, per se, but I’m not sure I really need to do anything about it.  Overall, I’m fairly lucky, so I feel a bit ungrateful whining about the advancing years.  As they say, it’s better than the alternative.  Still, ...

Getting old does kinda suck.  Sometimes.

Whither Animals?

I’ve spoken many times on this blog of my love of animals and my opinions on ”pets.” But lately I’ve started to think about a trend that is happening in our society.

When I was young, I went to countless zoos, and circuses, and animal parks, and aquariums, and marine mammal shows.  Much of what I knew and learned about animals, I learned from those experiences: sometimes directly, sometimes because I was inspired to seek out knowledge after seeing some animal or other in person.  I would never trade away those memories.

However, it’s completely fair to point out that many of the animals I took such pleasure in watching and learning about were miserable.  Today, the circuses are completely gone,^* thanks to numerous articles; marine mammal shows will soon disappear for good, thanks to documentaries such as Blackfish; and societal changes mean that even zoos are on the decline, according to many sources.  And I’m not saying any of these things are bad.  Certainly the terrible treatment of animals in circuses and marine mammals in parks such as SeaWorld makes me believe that such places do more harm than good.  I’m sure all those marshmallows we fed the hippo in Homosassa Springs weren’t very good for his digestion (although, miraculously, he appears to still be alive as I write this).  As for zoos ...

When I was young, there was a book at my grandparents’ house called How the Animals Get to the Zoo.  Published a few years before I was born, I assume it was bought for me, though I can’t remember specifically being given it as a gift.  I do remember that, even as a child, I was more horrified than fascinated at the examples given in this book, which ranged from throwing nets on zebras from a helicopter to taking ostriches down with bolas.  Also plenty of spring traps and tranquilizer darts and other very disturbing imagery.  So I am not insensitive to the idea that zoos are not always good for animals.

Still ...

My youngest child has never seen a circus, and she almost certainly never will.  She’s never seen a marine mammal show, and, while it’s possible that she might one day, it’s pretty unlikely (certainly it’s extremely unlikely that I’ll ever take her to one).  She’s been to a few zoos and aquariums, and maybe an animal park or two (or maybe not; I can’t think of a specific visit), but there’s no doubt that she has far less real-life experience of animals than I did.  Of course, there’s more instantly availble video of animals than I could have ever dreamed of as a child; YouTube alone allows me to show her any animal I happen to mention within minutes, if not seconds; if we ever idly wonder “what sounds does a <fill in animal here> make?” then it’s a simple Google search to turn up a soundfile or video that will settle the question.  But is it the same?  I can’t help but wonder.

PETA in particular is very much opposed to any sort of system where animals are kept for the entertainment of humans.  But, if humans never experience animals in any other context than as images on a screen, will they care about preserving them?  Sometimes I think that PETA is going to end up causing the eventual extinction of many species just because people won’t recognize them well enough to give a shit when they’re endangered.  There are always unintended consequences.

In fact, studying the Wikipedia page for “unintended consequnces” is quite instructive.  In China in the late 50s, sparrows were identified as pests who ate 4kg of rice grains per year—each.  So the government put sparrows in their “Four Pests” campaign, and millions of them were killed.  Of course, sparrows eat insects too.  By the 60s, “with no sparrows to eat them, locust populations ballooned” ... and guess what locusts eat?  “The Chinese government eventually resorted to importing 250,000 sparrows from the Soviet Union to replenish their population.” As for the “Four Pests,” sparrows were replaced with bedbugs: yet another insect that, as it turns out, the sparrows were keeping under control, until their near-extinction.

Then there’s the Great Plague of London.  “The means of transmission of the disease were not known but thinking they might be linked to the animals, the City Corporation ordered a cull of dogs and cats.  This decision may have affected the length of the epidemic since those animals could have helped keep in check the rat population carrying the fleas which transmitted the disease.” And then of course there are the classic biocontrol-gone-awry stories, such as the Australian cane toad, which was supposed to control the grey-backed cane beetle, and ended up killing countless pets and endangering anywhere from 70 to 100 other species.

I miss some of these methods of exhibiting animals, even as I feel glad that fewer animals are suffering because of their decline.  But those unintended consequences are always impossible to identify, except in hindsight.  Will my children even have the chance to fall in love with animals in the way I did?  I can’t say.  I do what I can—taking them to whatever places are left that I believe are treating their animals in an ethical manner, watching nature documentaries with them, introducing obscure animals into games of “20 Questions,” and never failing to stop what I’m doing to bring up a video on YouTube if I think it can add to a conversation—but I never know if it will be enough.  And I think it will be important for this next generation: important for them to think of animals as awe-inspiring, as fascinating, as worthy of preservation, just as I always have.  If they don’t, if animals are just “ho-hum” or “yeah, I guess they’re okay” or “I suppose they’re fine, but they don’t really impact me” ... if they don’t realize how interconnected everything is, and how those unintended consequences can start falling like dominoes, then it might be too late to change course by the time someone realizes things have gone too far.

So, maybe it’s better that we have fewer zoos, and circuses, and all that.  Maybe animals are better off.  But wouldn’t it be a strange twist of fate if animals ended up suffering more because we are systematically removing all the places where people who live in the city and the suburbs used to interact with them?  I hope that’s not what ends up happening.  But I don’t know.  And I think maybe I’m happy I wasn’t born 40 years later than I was.

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* Unless you count things like Cirque du Soleil.  Which, you know, I don’t.

Treading Water in the Cesspool

This really should be a long post week, but I’ve had a shit weekend.  Somtimes you just have to give yourself permission to take it easy, and not stress about arbitrary deadlines that you’ve set for yourself.  So I’m doing that thing I just said.

I can’t currently foresee any reason why there won’t be a longer post next week, but then again I’m kind of shit at predicting the future, so take that as you will.

Breezin' on through ...

Made some good progress on the $work project this week, so I’m going to take advantage of the short week this week to just blow you off entirely, dear reader.  Sorry about that!  Still, next week is only a week away, as per usual.  So, you got that going for you.

Dreamsea Lucidity I

"But You Dream About Islands and You Go to Them"

[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.

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.]

Like nearly all new(ish)—or newly popular—subgenres, “lofi” means different things to different people.  In point of fact, lofi is neither new, nor limited to only what you can hear on YouTube if you do a search for it.  Wikipedia tells us that it’s just “a music or production quality in which elements usually regarded as imperfections in the context of a recording or performance are present, sometimes as a deliberate choice.” And that’s why you usually hear static or “scratchy record” sounds in lofi music videos.  But, if you think about it, that tells us nothing about the music itself: theoretically, one could just put some imperfections into any song and call it lofi.  So what type of music is what you will inevitably find tons of if you search YouTube for “lofi”?  Well, it’s a form of chill (a.k.a. “downtempo”) that is sometimes called chillwave or chillhop.¹  It’s basically trip-hop crossed with chill, mostly instrumental, and set to anime loops and labeled “music to study by.”

Now, a lot of what you can find on YouTube as “lofi” these days is pretty formulaic: one gets the sense that there’s just a generic lofi factory somewhere, churning these out over and over.  But there are standouts.  I discovered Finland’s Kupla because I kept listening to those 2-hour-long mixes of various lofi songs, and it seemed like every single time I would actually stop and say “oh, I like this one; wonder who that is?” it was them.  I discovered New Jersey’s Autumn Orange because they share with me a love of Critical Role, and they make lofi mixes for CR characters.  In fact, it’s the one he did for Caduceus Clay, Destiny and Dead People Tea that gives us our mix starter, “Islands (You Dream Of).” (And it’s the volume namer, too.)  Once I heard that, I was so intrigued by AO’s weaving in of quotes from the Critical Role crew and recontextualizing them to music, and giving them perhaps a heft I hadn’t originally ascribed to them ... well, I started to wonder if I could put together a mix that was a little bit dreamy, a little bit psychedlic, and maybe just a little bit deep.  Music that’s perhaps not trippy enough for Smokelit Flashback nor poppy enough for Candy Apple Shimmer.  In naming it, I went back to Clive Barker’s notion of the “dream-sea”: a place of dreams that is more real than dreams (a characteristic it shares with Robert Jordan’s Tel’aran’rhiod), which he names Quiddity.  This is music that sails along the dreamsea, but perhaps it also provides some moments of clarity ...

Of course, I don’t like to restrict my mixes too much in terms of musical subgenres and styles, so we’re going to broaden our scope out beyond lofi chillhop ... but let’s start there.  Besides the aforementiond Autumn Orange track, which really is the core that this volume is built around, I of course had to throw in some Kupla.  While almost all lofi these days is set to Miyazaki-style animation, Kupla really does seem to capture the feeling of background music from a Studio Ghibli film.  I love many of their pieces, but “Lavender” is one of my faves.  I had to restrain myself from using multiple tracks of theirs, but I figured I’d save something for future volumes.  So I went to Sweden for a track from Theo Aabel—I guess these Scandinavians are pretty good at this whole chillhop thing.²  Unlike Kupla, I don’t necessarily like everything Aabel does, but “Constellation” is pretty awesome.

From there, I started by branching out into general trip-hop and the more psychedelic forms of dreampop.  Old favorites Naomi³ are of course a good pick: “Heavy Little Lights” is possibly too long, but a real classic of this type of music.  And of course former Enigma producer Jens Gad⁴ can provide a perfect fit in his more upbeat moments, such as “Navajo.” British DJ Jakatta’s track “It Will Be” is a lovely piece of upbeat trip-hop⁵ that manages to make a voice delivering the time over and over interesting.  Finally, Morcheeba is a British trip-hop artist built around the smoky vocals of Skye Edwards; while I don’t dig all their tracks, some of them are just transcendant, and I think “Slow Down” is one of the best.  Here, it signals the winding down of the volume, where everything—from the title itself to the synth noises that sound like lonely winds—does that job perfectly.

To keep going even further afield, we can bring in a little electroworld with Carmen Rizzo;⁶ “Through the Sunlight” is an almost ambient piece that works nicely to bring the mood to a more mellow point after the first third.  We can drift through ambient with tracks from Keven Keller and Amethystium: the former, so far featured only on Shadowfall Equinox,⁷ provides a contemplative piano piece called “Hawi Moon”; the latter, so far only seen on Incanto Liturgica, gives us “Avalon,” which has a more mystical feeling.  And that brings us right to dreampop, where of course we first must sample the masters: the Cocteau Twins, whose “Fluffy Tufts”⁸ is a multi-layered track that provides just the right amount of dreaminess.  The next most logical choice is probably This Mortal Coil: “D.D. and E.” is a short bridge that takes us from the proper trip-hop of Naomi to the much lighter touch of Anugama, but it’s an excellent 48 seconds that just felt perfect for this mix.  And Kendra Smith, who was Hope Sandoval before Mazzy Star,⁹ has a number of psychedelic-adjacent albums, including the one I draw from here, Five Ways of Disappearing.  The real draw is “Drunken Boat,” which is both dreamy and evocative, both lyrically and musically, but her little bridge “Dirigible” serves as the perfect bridge from the trippy Jakatta track to the more buzzy Tashaki Miyaki selection.

And, if you drive through dreampop long enough—especially if you cross back and forth into ambient a few times—you’ll eventually hit Enigma, and that’s the last stop before you’re truly into New Age.  I thought I’d give Enigma the last word on this volume: “The Dream of the Dolphin” is a short track from their sophomore album Cross of Changes, featuring Sandra Cretu’s breathy talksinging saying just a couple of lines, and it’s the perfect closer.  As for New Age, the vast majority of it is going to be way too mellow and downbeat for this mix, but I thought that Anugama’s “Tropical Morning” was an exception to that.  It’s entirely too long, really, but, as 8½ minute songs go, this one is pretty solid for not wearing out its welcome, so I basically made it the volume’s centerpiece.

Dreamsea Lucidity I
[ But You Dream About Islands and You Go to Them ]

“Serial Angels” by Miranda Sex Garden, off Fairytales of Slavery
“Ilomilo” by Billie Eilish, off When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?
“Islands (You Dream Of)” by Autumn Orange, off Destiny and Dead People Tea
“Navajo” by Jens Gad, off Le Spa Sonique
“Constellation” by Theo Aabel, off Endless Memories
“Lavender” by Kupla, off Melody Mountain
“It Will Be” by Jakatta, off Visions
“Interlude: Dirigible” by Kendra Smith, off Five Ways of Disappearing
“Keep Me in Mind” by Tashaki Miyaki, off Tashaki Miyaki [EP]
“Outside” by the Primitives, off Pure
“Through the Sunlight” by Carmen Rizzo, off Ornament of an Imposter
“Heavy Little Lights” by Naomi, off Everyone Loves You
“D.D. and E.” by This Mortal Coil, off Blood
“Tropical Morning” by Anugama, off Jungle of Joy
“Hawi Moon” by Kevin Keller, off Nocturnes
“Almanac” by Widowspeak, off Almanac
“Fluffy Tufts” by Cocteau Twins, off Victorialand
“Drunken Boat” by Kendra Smith, off Five Ways of Disappearing
“Avalon” by Amethystium, off Odonata
“Slow Down” by Morcheeba, off Charango
“Everything Is On” by Asobi Seksu, off Citrus
“The Beautiful” by P.M. Dawn, off Of the Heart, of the Soul and of the Cross: The Utopian Experience
“The Dream of the Dolphin” by Enigma, off The Cross of Changes

Total:  23 tracks,  82:32

With all this chillhop and dreampop and ambient and even New Age, you might think there’s no room for anything a bit harder ... but you’d be wrong.  I’ve often said that Mazzy Star should be its own genre—or at least that we should have a name for what you get when you take shoegaze (arguably derived from dreampop in the first place) and feed it back into dreampop and get something really interesting.  I didn’t pick any actual Mazzy Star here, but I found a couple of artists that I think are Mazzy-Star-adjacent.  First and foremost, the most amazing Tashaki Miyaki, who I discovered via LittleBigPlanet and therefore have featured mostly on Paradoxically Sized World.¹⁰  “Keep Me in Mind” is one of those tracks that seems deceptively like just a pop song with some buzzy guitars, but it really grows into something bigger and more expansive the more you listen to it.  I think TM is probably the best of the Mazzy-Star-adjacent bands, although I know many have a fondness for Beach House.  Honestly, though, my second choice isn’t them: it’s Widowspeak, whose excellent “In the Pines” I used on Smokelit Flashback V.¹¹  For a long time I tried to transition directly from Keller to the Cocteaus, but it just didn’t work.  Finally I remembered that Widowspeak has a brilliant little bridge called “Almanac” that has the perfect dreamlike quality to make the connection.  Finally, Asobi Seksu (which is apparently Japanese for “sportfuck,” which was the band’s original name before they wokred out that no one was ever going to give them airplay with that moniker) is a bit more experimental in this space, which means that I often don’t care for the results.  Still, they have a good one every now and again, and I really thought that their bridge “Everything Is On” made the perfect step-down from Morcheeba to P.M. Dawn.

And that brings us to the first of the really unlikely candidates.  P.M. Dawn was a band that I always thought of as merging rap and New Age, which is as unlikely a combination as you’re going to run across, and yet they not only make it work, they consistently make it work.  As I’ve noted with other such weird combinations (such as Dread Zeppelin or the Diablo Swing Orchestra), a lot of times such artists produce the occasional gem, but their output is very inconsistent.  Not so P.M. Dawn though: every song on their debut Of the Heart, Of the Soul and of the Cross: The Utopian Experience is a winner, and I fell in love with the album after receiving it as a Christmas gift from my brother.  I’m surprised it’s taken me this long to work it into a mix, frankly, but then P.M. Dawn is one of those bands that has a unique sound that often doesn’t really fit it with anything other than itself.  But as soon as I started this mix, I knew that they deserved a place here, and I went with “The Beautiful,” which works perfectly as the penultimate song on the volume.

For pure alternapop, though, I didn’t think there was much that would work here.  Still, I thought there might be a Primitives track that might work, and “Outside” proved me right.  It’s slinky (which is why I used them on Slithy Toves), but also shimmery (which is why I used them on Candy Apple Shimmer), and overall fits the mood here perfectly.  I was perhaps stretching a bit further by including a Billie Eilish track, but I think once you hear “Ilomilo” (especially in context) you may understand why I chose this tune, which is both atypical of her music and yet quintessentially Eilish.  Finally, our opener is Miranda Sex Garden, who has been called everything from neoclassical to folk to goth, which only goes to demonstrate how hard they are to pigeonhole.  This is another band I’ve not yet used, primarily because there are only a few tracks of theirs I really like, and also the whole “hard to slot in” factor.  But “Serial Angels” is an excellent example of their dynamic, starting with gentle, almost inaudible notes that have a toy piano feel, which then build, and build some more, and then burst into drums and guitars and wordless vocal screams, and then drop back down to fade into Billie Eilish.  I think it works pretty well.

Next time, let’s drift away again.

__________

1 Apparently there’s some sort of subtle distinction between what counts as chillwave and what counts as chillhop; inasmuch as I understand the difference—which ain’t much inasmuch—I would say that what this mix features is more chillhop than chillwave.

2 And, don’t forget: some of the best trip-hop acts are from there as well, like Ugress and Röyksopp (both from Norway), and Trentemøller (from Denmark).

3 Seen primarily on Smokelit Flashback (volumes I and II), but also a couple of tracks on Cantosphere Eversion I and Bleeding Salvador I, one on Shadowfall Equinox V, and even one each on Rose-Coloured Brainpan I and Wisty Mysteria II.

4 Seen previously only on Shadowfall Equinox (volumes V and VI).

5 For a more downtempo track, see Shadowfall Equinox IV.

6 Seen on Smokelit Flashback IV and Shadowfall Equinox IV, as well as Rose-Coloured Brainpan II and Moonside by Riverlight II.

7 Specifically, volumes II, III, IV, V, and VI.

8 From my all-time favorite album of theirs, Victorialand.  For more on that, see Smokelit Flashback II.

9 By which I mean that she recorded with Dave Roback as Opal, which then morphed into Mazzy Star when she departed.

10 Specifically, volumes III and IV, but also once on Darkling Embrace I.

11 As well as another track on Dreamscape Perturbation I.

A productive week

This week I’ve made some serious progress on my $work project, so I’m pretty happy about that.  And I also completed my company performance evaluation, and that went pretty well too.  So, work-wise, I’m pretty set.  And the kids and I have gotten back to playing D&D on a semi-regular basis, so that’s nice too.  Overall, things are progressing fairly well.

Longer post next week.

Isn't It Ironic? Why, yes: yes it is.

I’m not as big a fan of Seth Meyers as I am of Stephen Colbert, but I occasionally watch snippets of his monologues on YouTube.  And another thing that Late Night puts up on the web (as a web exclusive, actually) is “Corrections.” This is an absolutely hilarious segment where Seth reads YouTube comments in which people correct him—sometimes reasonably, sometimes pointlessly, sometimes even incorrectly ... but it’s always funny.  Seth has a pet name for people like this: he calls them “jackals.”

Now, here’s the thing: I empathize with the jackals.  Well, mostly: as I say, sometimes they’re are actually wrong in their corrections, and there ain’t no empathy for that bullshit.  But I understand the urge to correct people, because I have it too.  When I’m watching a show, or a video, or a movie, or a streamed D&D game (or listening to a podcast), and they say something totally wrong, I will definitely yell at the screen.  What I won’t do, however, is then post about it on the Internet.  Because then you’re just being a jackass.  Or, as Seth puts it, a jackal.

This post is, somewhat ironically, me posting on the Internet about things that people in streaming shows get wrong.  I’m justifying this to myself by pointing out that what I’m not doing is posting this anywhere where the poeple I’m correcting might read it—for that matter, I’m not even going to call out anyone by name.  These are things that I’ve seen lots of people get wrong, so I think they’re more general corrections.  Hopefully that makes me less of a jackal, though I can understand if you disagree.

Note that I use the word “ironically” somewhat cautiously, because the Alanis Morissette song taught me that people—meaning the jackals—can get pretty touchy about whether you’re using that word properly or not.  Oh, they eviscerated Alanis—positively crucified her.  And she let them beat her down: rather than stand up to them and tell them to go look at a fucking dictionary instead of being all superior, she “admitted” they were right.  Except, you know, they weren’t.

See, the thing about jackals is, they’re in such a hurry to prove their superiority by correcting you that they often get it wrong and “correct” something that was right in the first place.  People wrote articles and comedy sketches and even comic strips without, apparently, even bothering to check the dictionary.  (Well, some people did, obviously, but those were the pieces about how everyone else was wrong about Alanis being wrong.)  Merriam-Webster, for instance, defines “ironic” as “relating to, containing, or constituting irony” or “given to irony.” Fine, then: what’s irony?  Well, M-W offers a whopping 7 definitions for that, but we can throw a few out: both “an ironic expression or utterance” and “a usually humorous or sardonic literary style or form characterized by irony” are pretty useless due to circularity, while defining irony as either dramatic irony or Socratic irony is obviously just a case of people trying to make the whole concept mean just one specific type.  Thus leaving us with:

• the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning
• incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result
• an event or result marked by such incongruity

You know, like rain on your wedding day.  It’s a happy occasion, but rain is sad, thus: incongruity.  Now, granted, rain on your wedding day isn’t particularly ironic ... just a little bit.  10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife, though: that’s pretty ironic.  Finding out that the ride that you just paid for was supposed to be free: also a bit ironic.  And a person who spends their whole life afraid to fly, then finally convinces themself to try it out, and the first flight they get on crashes?  That’s some big, fat, juicy irony to the max right there.  Yeah, the ones in the chorus aren’t as much, but it’s a fucking chorus.  Songwriters take shortcuts to make shit fit: don’t act like Alanis was the first person to ever do that.

So I know perfectly well that I’m opening up myself both to being judged as a jackal and to being judged by the jackals.  So trust me when I tell you: these are things that I just can’t hold inside any longer.  Some of them are things I know because I’m a technogeek.  Some of them are things I know because I’m a D&D nerd.  Some of them I just know because I’m a would-be writer and I’ve studied a lot of grammar, and I even wrote a blog post once on it that was, in hindsight, taking a stand against the jackals before I’d ever even heard that term.  But all of them are things that I assure you are correct, and I invite you—nay, entreat you—to research them for yourself to verify that I’m right.  Just make sure you check multiple sources: it’s easy to find another jackal on the Internet to tell you’re right, no matter which side of any given debate you’re on.

Without further ado, then, here are the ...

Corrections

The word “dais” is pronounced “DAY-iss.” If you have a dictionary that tells you that “DIE-iss” is a valid alternative pronunciation, get a new dictionary.  (However, special dispensation for you if you’re from Australia: that’s just your accent.)

URLs never have backslashes in them.  Never.  They’re always forward slashes—also known as just plain slashes.  Especially if you have your own web site, you should probably know better than to use the word “backslash” in conjunction with its address.

You cannot “run the gambit.” Perhaps you were trying to “run the gamut”?

The singular of “dice” is “die.” There is no such thing as “one dice.” Especially if you roll dice for a living, you should probably know this.

The word “ogle,” meaning basically “to leer at,” rhymes with “mogul.” It does not rhyme with “Google,” because it only has one “o.” It also does not rhyme with “boggle,” beacuse it only has one “g.” Check your dictionary if you don’t believe me.

When speaking of computers, “memory” and “storage” are two different things.  When you’re out of space on your hard drive, you did not “run out of memory.” Because of things like swap space (which is a way to pretend that storage is memory), modern computers hardly ever run out of memory.  But you can run out of storage space (or just say you ran out of space: that should be sufficient).

The reason people fight over how to pronounce “GIF” is because of English’s dual nature.  While English is technically a Germanic language, it received a very strong Romance influence via French when the Normans conquered the Anglo-Saxons in 1066.  This is why we have two English words for many concepts, and one of them people may think of as “fancier” than the other: “work” is a good, solid Germanic word, while “labour” is a Romance word; “gift” is Germanic, while “present” is Romance.  And the rules for Gs are different in the Germanic vs the Romance.  In Germanic words, a “G” is always pronounced as the “hard” G: get, gift, gird, begin, lager, burger, target.  In Romance words, a “G” is pronounced hard before “A,” “O”, or “U,” but “soft” (that is, like “J”) before “E” or “I”: gem, giant, giraffe, genius, gesture, germ, ginger, angel, emergency, fugitive.  (Note that this also applies before “Y,” as in gymnastic or energy.)  But of course “GIF” isn’t either a Germanic word or a Romance word ... it isn’t even a word at all, properly speaking.  It’s an acronym, and a pretty new one, as such things go.  So we lack any concept of what the “right” way to pronounce that initial G is, so everyone makes up their own.  Some people claim to believe that it should be a hard G because the G in this case stands for “graphics,” which uses a hard G, but this is nonsense.  Would you pronounce ICE as “eye-kee” because the “C” stands for “customs”? or ACID as “a-kid” because the “C” stands for consistency?  Obviously when the letters become a new word, the old pronounciation is left behind.  So what you’re really left with is, how fancy a word do you think it is?  If you believe it’s a solid working-class word, then you likely think it should be a hard G.  If you think it’s a fancier, technical term, then you probably think it should be a soft G.  But, in the end, the whole debate is silly: stop using GIFs.  Use JPGs (pronounced “jay-pegs”), or PNGs (“pee-en-geez”): they’re better formats, with fewer moronic legal restrictions, and they don’t have this whole stupid pronounciation problem.  And, if you just call any computer image a GIF, then seek professional help.

If you are playing with D&D-style polyhedral dice, and you can’t read the number, just flip it over and read the number on the other side.  The opposite sides of a polyhedral die always add up to the number of sides plus one.  So, on a 20-sided die, the 1 and the 20 are opposite each other, as are the 2 and the 19, the 3 and the 18, and so forth.  They always sum to 21.  So, if you can’t read one side, just flip it over, subtract it from 21, and Bob’s yer uncle.  Also works with 12-sided (subtract from 13), 10-sided (subtract from 11), and so on ... well, okay, not with 4-sided’s (because they’re shaped like pyramids, so they don’t really have an “opposite side”), but with everything else.  Unless your dice are manufactured by people who don’t do things the standard way, at which point I’m not sure I’d trust that die anyhow.  I’m constantly amazed at how often people who throw dice for a living don’t understand this very basic principle.

I am sick and tired of people claiming that “people can’t multitask.” Because, you know, you can’t literally do multiple things at once: what you’re really doing is switching back and forth between them.  Exactly.  That’s what multitasking means.  People (mostly jackals) seem to think that computers are literally doing multiple things at once.  With a few exceptions, that’s not what they do at all.  In fact, when multitasking was first invented, it wasn’t even an option: multi-processor machines doing distrubuted computing would have been decades away.  Wikipedia even explicitly states that “a computer executes segments of multiple tasks in an interleaved manner, while the tasks share common processing resources” (in the case of a person who’s multitasking, that “common processing resource” is their brain, and “interleaved” is just a fancy way to say “switching back and forth”).  Now, I’m not saying that multitasking is a good thing to do—many studies have shown that you’re typically more efficient if you just do things one at a time vs trying to do several things at once.  But that also doesn’t take into account that sometimes a thing won’t get done faster whether or not you devote your full attention to it: that hour-long TV show is going to take you an hour to finish, whether you’re multitasking or not.  But, again, I’m not trying to say whether it’s good, bad, or indifferent.  I’m just telling you to stop claiming it’s not possible.

That’s enough corrections for today.  I hope the jackals are suitably chastened.  Probably not, but one can dream.

I’ll probably think of more corrections later.  Perhaps this can become a recurring series.  Certainly Seth manages to do around 20 minutes every single week, so I don’t see why I couldn’t manage 1500 words every six months or so.  But we’ll just have to see which egregious mistakes start irking me next.  Until then, don’t let the jackals get you down.

Cursed of the Gods

This week was another of those “the computer gods hate me” weeks.  I found a corrupted file, so I went to look at my backups, only to find that things aren’t really set up the way I thought they were.  So I have three recent versions (all of which were corrupted), and a version from January, and another from March.  So I restored it as best I could, sort of merging the newer parts that weren’t corrupted with the older parts that were outdated, but at least it gave me a full set of data.  Then I went trolling through scrollback buffers looking for any bits that I could use to update the old data to get it as close to what I had before as possible.

And, of course, after all that, I’m still going to have to fix my backups so they make this easier next time it happens.  I’m still not entirely sure how I’m going to do that, but I can’t even deal with it right now.  You ever have one of those weeks where everything you try to do just leads you to another thing you have to do first?  Yeah, that.

Anyway, enough bitching.  Next week there should be a longer post.  Tune in then!

To Know Them Is to Distrust Them

Recently I was listening to Mayim Bialiks’ Breakdown and I had a thought.  Now, if you’re not familiar with the podcast (also available in video form on YouTube), it’s generally speaking a mental health podcast, but it ranges around from interviews with celebrities about their mental health struggles, to very hard science guests to talk about it from a neurological or psychological perspective, to talking to people who approach it from a more spiritual or even New Age perspective.  The interesting thing about that is that Mayim, known originally for Blossom and more recently for The Big Bang Theory, is often criticized for “pushing pseudoscience” and for being a “vaccine denier,” and yet, if you actually listen to the podcast, it’s her partner Jonathan Cohen who most embraces the New-Age-y stuff, while Mayim demands more rigorous evidence.  (I actually find it fascinating how Mayim’s statement that she chose not to vaccinate her children as babies gets twisted into her not believing in vaccines—she’s actually gone on record saying that she and her children got vaccinated for COVID as soon as possible, which absolutely makes sense, because they’re not babies any more.  But it just goes to show you that pigeonholing someone’s beliefs is so much easier—and gets more clicks, I suppose—than taking a nuanced view of them.  Or maybe it just goes to do show that people require absolute statements to live by ... I’ve often said that “vaccines are good” is just as idiotic a statement as “drugs are bad,” and for exactly the same reasons.^*)

In any event, that’s a bit of a tangent.  The point that struck me was while listening to Mayim and Jonathan’s interview with Michael Singer.  Now, you may not know who Singer is (I certainly didn’t, before listening to the show), and really you don’t need to for this discussion.  Suffice it to say that he had a spiritual awakening and then wrote a bunch of books about it and many folks consider him to be a sort of guru.  Personally, I felt the same way about his thoughts that I do about nearly all New-Age-y type folks: some of what he had to say was interesting, and actually made sense if you can reframe it from the touchy-feely / airy-fairy language that these types of folks tend to use;^** and a lot of what he had to say was just crap.  I do think it’s important to note that it’s perfectly fine to believe some of the things people have to say, even when other things they say are ridiculous.  But, again, that isn’t the interesting part.

Jonathan, of course, was a big fan of Singer: at several points, he jumped in and said the exact same things that Singer was saying, using slightly different words, and Singer would give him some approval in that “yeah, you get it” sort of way.  It was obvious that Jonathan was a student of Singer’s philosophy and really did get it.  It was even more obvious, from the back-and-forth between Jonathan and Mayim, that he had been trying to convince her of all these things for a while now—maybe even for years.  And she wasn’t having it.  From him.

But—and this is the fascinating part—she was convinced by Singer.  At the end of the interview, she said this:

There’s so many things about the way—not just that you think and the things you’ve experienced—but, again, the way that you communicate them, that just really ... it pierced something, it really broke something open for me ...

Now, should she have been so receptive?  I don’t know, maybe not—I did feel that she wasn’t as critical as she often is, and I think that Singer may have used some language that really snuck past her skeptic’s defenses—but that’s not the point.  It wasn’t fascinating at all that Singer convinced her of something ... what was fascinating, truly thought-provoking to me, was that Singer only said the exact same things as Jonathan—who is, remember, not just her podcast hosting partner, but her life partner—things that this man who she loves has been saying to hear for years.  When he said it, nothing.  Some “expert” comes along, and bam! enlightenment.  And, again, I really want to stress that Singer absolutely did not, in my opinion, say it better.  I honestly thought Jonathan stated it more clearly and logically, although I do give Singer the edge in having a lot of real-life stories that illuminated the philosophy.  So this is the part that caught my attention: why do we discount the words of the people we love the most, and then happily accept those same words when they come from strangers?

Now, I am not a psychologist, so I don’t know for sure, but I found it a very interesting thought experiment to ponder, and I eventually came up with a theory.  Bear with me as I follow this thread logically and try to bring you along.

We are all human ... I think we can agree on that.  And no human is perfect: again, hopefully not too controversial.  Sometimes we have moments of brilliance, but we also all have moments of sheer stupidity.  And who is around to see all the dumb things we do?  Well, us, first and foremost, which is why so many of us struggle with self-esteem—it’s a bit hard to think of yourself as smart and good when you know perfectly well how dumb and bad you can be sometimes.  But hopefully we struggle through that.

But you know who else is there to see all our dumbest moments?  Our family.  Our partner.  Our best friends.  And I think they may also have a bit of trouble seeing us for the intelligent, articulate people that we are (or want to be, at any rate), when they know perfectly well that we’re too forgetful to remember where we left our keys, or that we make the worst puns, or that we’ve proven that we can’t understand what’s going on half the times by asking them really moronic questions that demonstrate our complete lack of understanding.  And, sadly, we think the same things about them.  It is perhaps inevitable—some fundamental trait of humanity—but I think we would all benefit from recognizing it, and maybe even working towards overcoming it.

Because, to circle back to something I said earlier, a person can say a dumb thing without being incapable of saying a smart thing.  This Michael Singer fellow said some things that absolutely made me roll my eyes and say to myself, oh, come on.  But that doesn’t mean that everything he says is silly.  It’s possible for him to say some things which are profound and to say some things which are just pretentious twaddle.  Likewise, it’s possible for Jonathan to say some stupid things, and for Mayim to recognize that and know that he’s not as smart as he likes to think he is, and yet still be right sometimes.  And Mayim probably ought to think about that whenever she’s dismissing what he says out of hand.

And your partner, or your parent, or your child, or your BFF, they ought to think about that when they’re dismissing what you have to say out of hand.  But you can’t really control that.  What you can control, though, is that you need to think about it when you’re dismissing what your loved ones are saying.  Sure, your immediate reaction may be to snort and say “dude, you’re not even smart enough to remember to zip up your pants before you leave the house!” But, if you consider it logically, this is a form of ad hominem fallacy: you can’t prove someone’s statement is false by proving that they’re a horrible person, and you can’t prove that someone’s current statement is not smart just because you know they’ve said dumb things in the past.  Statements have to be evaluated on their own merits, and our emotional reaction to the people we love mustn’t lead us to discount what they have to say.

Of course, the opposite is true as well: we can’t let our love for someone blind us to the fact that they might be saying something spectacularly stupid right now.  But I think that becomes less and less likely the more maturity we achieve.  I think we’re more likely to be critical than to blindly trust.  Which is kind of depressing, if you think about it.  Think of how you feel when your partner or friend dismisses what you have to say on the grounds that “that’s just so you!” or “you’re just being you again.” I’m sure you find it frustrating.  Now, if you can manage to remember that when they’re saying something that is just so them ... then maybe we’re making progress.

__________

* This also ties in to my discussion of grammar proscriptions; while the topic is different, the principles are the same.

** And which is the actual cause of many people’s dismissal, I think.  I have a blog post brewing about how often we as humans just reject ideas which actually have a lot of merit strictly based on the words used to present them.  Hopefully I’ll post that soon.

Home Alone (except not)

This week The Mother is off in Colorado along with our youngest, so I’m home alone with our middle child.  And the dogs.  And the cats.  And the plants, and the fish, and ... it’s a lot.  I won’t even get into the dogs’ recent digestive issues: trust me, you don’t want to know.  Suffice it to say it’s been a lot of work.  Hopefully I survive until we’re all back together again.

Next week ... actually, I’ll still be in the same situation, so I can’t guarantee you’ll get anything more then either.  We’ll just have to see how it goes.