Music
drorzel | November 19, 2010Miscellaneous pop-culture items from the last couple of weeks:
-- I'm apparently a sucker for half-finished music, as I bought Dylan's Witmark Demos album a week or so ago, and Springsteen's The Promise, a collection of stuff recorded between Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town, last night. The Springsteen stuff is more polished, but I haven't listened to it as much (obviously).
-- Also in the recent-purchases shuffle play: Guster, Old 97's, the Thermals, Kings of Leon, and Cee Lo Green. This is, as you might imagine, not the most consistent listening experience.
-- I kind of hate…
drorzel | November 17, 2010So, if you look at this picture:
You might be asking yourself "Why does Debbie Harry rate Secret Service protection?" But no, this isn't a photo from some alternate universe where the lead singer of Blondie went on to become leader of the free world, it's part of the Rock Stars of Science campaign by the Geoffrey Beene Foundation. They've just rolled out a new campaign in GQ magazine, putting seventeen prominent biomedical researchers in fancy photo spreads with eight different musicians. It's part of an initiative to raise the profile of science by portraying scientists in a more glamorous…
drorzel | November 15, 2010The other night at dinner, SteelyKid kept demanding that we sing. As there's only so many times you can sing the alphabet in a row, I decided to mix it up a little, and sang her the first verse and the chorus of "The Wild Rover" (these lyrics are close to the ones I know, and here's a YouTube version).
After I finished, she smiled and started babbling, and it quickly became clear that she thought it was about Grover the Muppet. We've got a bunch of old Sesame Street clips that we play for her on the computer, in which Grover waits on an angry blue Muppet.
Thanks to that, I got this idea stuck…
drorzel | November 7, 2010I bought the Witmark Demos a week or so ago, because I could always use another 50 Bob Dylan songs, and listening to them on shuffle play has managed to earworm me with one song in particular, "I Shall Be Free", which it occurs to me has great current relevance:
Well, my telephone rang it would not stop
It's President Kennedy callin' me up
He said, "My friend, Bob, what do we need to make the country grow?"
I said, "My friend, John, Brigitte Bardot
Anita Ekberg
Sophia Loren"
You might think Dylan's plan for prosperity through importing attractive foreign women is a little fanciful, but it's…
drorzel | October 30, 2010This week's Short Story Club entry is "My Father's Singularity" by Brenda Cooper. Who I keep having to remind myself is not the Brenda-with-a-surname-starting-with-C that I remember posting to rec.arts.sf.written back in the day (that was Brenda Clough).
This is set in the not-too-distant future in the Pacific Northwest, and is the first-person tale of a boy who grew up on a farm with his father telling him he'd go through the Singularity someday:
In my first memory of my father, we are sitting on the porch, shaded from the burning sun's assault on our struggling orchards. My father is…
drorzel | October 22, 2010On the way in to work, I heard yet another example of the deplorable trend of taking the vocal tracks of slow songs-- in this case, "The Kids Don't Stand a Chance" by Vampire Weekend-- and replacing the musical backing with a 120 beats-per-minute dance beat that sounds like it was generated by a high-end Casio keyboard. These turn up over and over, and every time it happens, it annoys me to no end.
But why should pop music be the only genre to get this treatment? Thus, a poll suggesting some other slow songs that ought(?) to receive this treatment:
What slow song is most in need of a dance-…
drorzel | October 7, 2010I'm shamelessly stealing this question from James Nicoll, who asked it about science fiction. The question is a play on the famous comment that only of order a thousand people bought the first Velvet Underground record, but every one of them went on to start a band.
So, the question is, who is the Velvet Underground of science? That is, who is the best example of somebody whose work was only read by a tiny number of people, but ended up being incredibly influential on those people and subsequent generations?
The physics example that comes to mind immediately is Sadi Carnot. Carnot wrote a…
drorzel | September 6, 2010The AV Club offers a list of 28 gleeful breakup songs, a category that includes some great tunes. The comments contain some good additional suggestions, and they still missed one of my all-time favorites, "Bye, Bye" by the Subdudes (if that link won't play, you can get a cell-phone camera live version on YouTube-- skip the first 0:50 or so). I'm sure there are plenty of other good ones missing as well.
Of course, the real gem of the article is this charming little tune from Cee-Lo Green:
That's spectacular. Apparently this was a viral Internet smash-- the sort of thing that gets a song…
drorzel | September 1, 2010Rubber dino, you're the one,
You make bathtime lots of fun
Rubber dino, I'm awfully fond of you
Doo-doo doo-de-doo
Rubber dino, fearsome roar,
Good thing you're a herbivore
Rubber dino, I'm awfully fond of you
doo-doo doo-de-doo
Every day when I,
get undressed next to the sink,
I find a
Little fella who's,
cute and yellow and extinct
When I squeeze you, water squirts,
Then I giggle, 'til it hurts
Rubber dino, I'm awfully fond of you
Doo-doo doo-de-doo
You're my favorite bathtime toy,
Watch out for that asteroid!
Rubber dino, I'm awfully fond of
Rubber dino, I'm awfully fond of,
Rubber dino…
drorzel | September 1, 2010Prompted by an off-line conversation, a question about the magnum opus of Jim Steinman and Marvin Lee Aday:
Playing "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" at a wedding reception is:online surveys
I'm sure you can come up with lots of songs that would be even less appropriate. Feel free to leave them in the comments.
drorzel | August 29, 2010We're trying not to let SteelyKid watch a whole lot of tv, but we've taken to showing her YouTube videos of old Sesame Street and Muppet Show skits as a way to wind her down before bedtime. this, of course, has let to her demanding to watch videos any time one of us is anywhere near a computer.
One of her current favorites is this clip of Viking pigs from the Muppet Show:
I've been horribly earwormed with this for days, now, and since misery has bosonic character, I thought I'd share it with you all.
drorzel | August 26, 2010Same deal as the last game: Each of the following pairs of words is taken from a pop song, where they are set up to rhyme (many of the phrases don't really rhyme, but they're treated as if they do). Your job is to guess the song based on the rhyming pair.
1) Lion sleeps/ soul to keep
2) bartender/ medical center
3) health department/ glove compartment
4) backup plan/ foreign land
5) in the crotch/ Scottish loch
6) insanity/ and misery
7) fidgety-fidge/ Waterloo Bridge
8) a coma/ aroma
9) burden/ curtains
10) gets mentioned/ detention
11) write exams/ give a damn
12) Edison/ medicine
13)…
drorzel | August 15, 2010A slightly different twist on the occasional guess-the-lyrics game. The following list gives pairs of rhyming words from a song that I think can be used to identify a specific song. So, for example, the pair:
diplomat/ Siamese cat
identifies "Like a Rolling Stone" by Bob Dylan, thanks to the lines:
You used to ride on a chrome horse with your diplomat
Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to guess the songs from the rhymes below. Some are pretty easy, some are pretty obscure. If you don't choose to accept this mission, well, come back…
drorzel | August 13, 2010Over at the Whatever, one of Scalzi's guest bloggers has posted a ginormous list of upcoming live music shows in the DC area. This makes me sad, because when I used to live in the DC area, I was a grad student, and couldn't afford to go to any of the dozens of great concerts that came through there. Now that I have plenty of money I could spend on live music, I live in Schenectady, where we don't get anywhere near as many good shows, and I have a wife and child to boot, which makes it difficult to justify going out.
Anyway, whining aside, this seems like a good topic for a reader poll: What…
drorzel | July 18, 2010I bought a bunch of stuff recently, and as is my usual practice, iTunes has been shuffle playing the recent purchases for the last couple of weeks. The albums in question:
Janelle Monae, the Arch-Android. Not usually my sort of thing, but I saw a bunch of absolutely rapturous reviews calling it groundbreaking, etc, so I gave it a shot. Verdict: Enh. Not my thing. Some decent songs, but I suspect anything with the drum/bass line from "Tightrope" would sound pretty cool.
Gaslight Anthem, American Slang. A post-punk band from New Jersey with the inevitable Springsteen complex (at least they're…
drorzel | July 5, 2010SteelyKid has some molars coming in, which led to some intermittent generalized fussiness this weekend. When she gets that way, she can sometimes be calmed down using videos on the computer, such as the "Wheels on the Buss" DVD my mom has. In order to spare the sanity of the adults in her life, though, we supplemented this with kid-friendly YouTube clips, eventually running across this:
I have very distinct memories of this when I was a small child watching Sesame Street-- I hesitate to call them happy memories, because I think I recall being upset when the singers are carried off. But I…
drorzel | June 11, 2010I've got multiple home improvement projects that need work while SteelyKid is out of the house and the weather is reasonably nice, so no deep thoughts about science today. Instead, here's some silly pop culture: a selection of songs from my music collection starting with numbers from one to ten:
"One," U2
"Two," Ryan Adams
"Three Easy Pieces," Buffalo Tom
"Four-eyed Girl," Rhett Miller
"5 Mile (These Are the Days)," Turin Brakes
"Six O'Clock News," Kathleen Edwards
"Seven Nation Army," the White Stripes
(I don't actually own "Eight Days a Week" by the Beatles, but it would go here)
"Nine in…
drorzel | June 5, 2010Since I was going to be down here anyway to sign books at the World Science Festival Street Fair, Kate and I decided to catch one of the Saturday events at the Festival. It was hard to choose, but we opted for the program on Hidden Dimensions: Exploring Hyperspace (Live coverage was here, but the video is off), because it was a physics-based topic, and because I wrote a guest-blog post on the topic for them.
(No, we didn't go to the controversial "Science and Faith" panel, opting instead to have a very nice Caribbean dinner at Negril Village, just around the corner. I'll take excellent…
drorzel | May 14, 2010Blame Bryan O'Sullivan for this-- after his comment about misreading "Bohmian Mechanics" as "Bohemian Mechanics," I couldn't get this silly idea out of my head. And this is the result.
I like to think that this was Brian May's first draft (he does have a Ph.D. in astrophysics, after all), before Freddie Mercury got hold of it:
Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?
Do objects have real states
Or just probabilities?
Open your eyes
Look up to the skies and see
Studying quantum (poor boy), I need no sympathy
Because I'm easy come, easy go
A little psi, little rho
No interpretation ever…
drorzel | May 12, 2010No Links Dump today because a combination of work and a nasty cold kept me off the Internet most of yesterday. Here's the moral equivalent, though: a poll question brought to you by the letters "U" and "K" and the song "Gimme Sympathy" by Metric:
Who would you rather be?online surveys
The song is unclear on exactly what criteria you should be using to judge whether you'd rather be the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, so feel free to invent whatever criteria you like. Feel free to explain them in the comments, as well.
And I suppose there's no way I can stop you from complaining that Elvis/…