Let’s spend a few minutes with Elana and the boys.
Author: Don
Recent snapshots …
… mostly from the garden.
Balloon flowers are easy from seed and can bloom their first year, as can Silene regia.
Tune of the day #285
I’ve linked before to the wildly eccentric Jun Togawa’s “Mushi no Onna” as an antidote to Pachelbel’s inescapable, interminable canon, but that’s relatively mild for her. This creepy science-fiction tune is more representative of her art.
Tune of the day #284
William Henry Joseph Berthol Bonaparte Bertholf Smith, better known as Willie “The Lion” Smith, was, along with James P. Johnson and Fats Waller, one of the developers of the “stride” piano. He was part Jewish, and later in his life he was a Hebrew cantor for a Harlem Black Jewish congregation.
Tune of the day #283
Eccentric prog rock from Quebec in 1975. At various times in their music I can hear influences from fusion, Gentle Giant and the Canterbury school, but they don’t fit neatly into any single category.
Tune of the day #282
There’s no escape from “Smoke on the Water,” so we might as well get it over with. Here’s Red Foley’s take.
Tune of the day #281
From the Dennou Coil soundtrack, composed by Satou Tsuneyoshi.
Tune of the day #280
Symphony Sid Page gets to show off in this one.
Tune of the day #279
Video game music composed by Yasunori Mitsuda, arranged and performed by Alkan specialist Yui Morishita. This is the first in a playlist of Morishita’s arrangement of tunes from Square Enix games. They’re all worth listening to if you have the time.
Tune of the day #278
… and something not so sentimental from Stevie Coyle.
Tune of the day #277
A bit of gooey yet practical sentimentality from NRBQ for those who like that sort of thing….
Tune of the day #276
An approximation of surf music by the Japanese counterpart of Dick Dale.
Today’s quote
If you start feeling guilty about spending too much time reading and thinking, tell yourself that you are doing one of the most important things a human being can do. You’re creating culture.
Tune of the day #275
Rubinstein was my favorite pianist when I was first investigating classical music, particularly for Chopin, but also for Brahms.
Tune of the day #274
A tune about grungy hamsters, vengeful lobsters, spiders and sponges, if I am interpreting the English parts of the macaronic lyrics properly.
Just wondering
If June is “Pride Month,” then is July “Envy Month” and August the “Month of Wrath”?
Tune of the day #273
It’s surprisingly difficult to find videos of off-track music from 1980 to 2005, even when an album had a Roger Dean cover. That was before YouTube, but too recently for the recordings to be of antiquarian interest. Consequently there is very little available to represent such eccentric bands as Birdsongs of the Mesozoic, and few of their earlier recordings are available there. BotM is classified as “RIO/Avant-Prog” at Prog Archives. Unlike most artists in that classification, they are generally fairly pleasant and not difficult to listen to, though not remotely radio-friendly.
Today’s quote
Grim:
The good argument in favor of billionaires — trillionaires, now — is that one person can make a decision about how to deploy substantial capital in efficient ways that a government, a corporation, or a committee can never. Musk is building space rockets and tunneling equipment that could build a Mars colony because he wants to, not because of fiduciary duty or because spreadsheets suggest it is wise. We are lucky that the world’s richest man loves Buck Rogers rather than Karl Marx.
Tune of the day #272
Today’s chemistry lesson, courtesy of the McGarrigles.
Notes from the Department of Circular Communications
A query about “armchair paleontology” in the Halupedia led circuitously to an entry about Auguste Dubois-Lacroix (b. 1842, Paris; d. 1907, Pont-de-Chéruy), “an individual whose primary professional skill was the avoidance of notice.”
… a highly unremarkable civil servant whose posthumous notoriety arose from the ADLB, a complex and ultimately unsuccessful initiative he spearheaded during his tenure at the Ministry of Applied Obfuscation.1
… The stated objective of the ADLB was to enhance the clarity and efficacy of government communications by making them deliberately more difficult to understand. The underlying philosophy, according to contemporary documents attributed to Lacroix, was that true administrative efficiency lay in preventing unauthorized comprehension.
… Under Lacroix’s direction, the ADLB developed a series of groundbreaking techniques. These included the systematic introduction of non-sequiturs, the invention of new verb conjugations requiring three or more preceding subordinate clauses for correct interpretation, and the mandatory inclusion of obscure references to the Catalogues of Unnecessary Objects. The notorious Protocol of Ten Thousand Delays, a prime example of ADLB’s methodology, became legendary.
An inquiry about the flying armadillos of west Texas led quickly to the Archives of Misplaced Endeavors, the Project to Quantify the Weight of Apathy, and the Ministry of Futility Studies. Further research touched on the Treaty of the Fourth Dimensions Annexation, Viking Pineapple Relocations circa 975 CE, the Society for the Advancement of Spurious Mathematics, Chronometric Discontinuity, and many more remarkably obscure topics.
So it seems that not only can AI assemble listenable songs, realistic photographs and incalculable reams of prose of many kinds, it is capable of passable satire as well. (The entire prompt for the top illustration was “Ministry of Applied Obfuscation.” GPT added all the verbiage, not me.) I still prefer the scholarship of Will Cuppy, Alan Coren and Henry Beard, but as an occasional satirist myself, I find Halupedia disquietingly competent. Has AI developed a sense of humor?