Long ago I used to be a rock critic. Then I was downsized, expired for oldness and not having the same tastes and attitudes as the more mentally limber.
Conformity with the tastes of others is defined by “centricity” here.
DD ranks 706 out of 711. Readers will notice that contributors can share rankings, so the total in the list doesn’t equal the full number of music critics contributing to the music poll.
Long ago I used to be a rock critic. Then I was downsized, expired for oldness and not having the same tastes and attitudes as the more mentally limber.
However, I still get to vote in the annual Pazz & Jop Village Voice Critic’s Poll.
DD has posted previous Tea Party music ported to YouTube. However, this seems to take some kind of cake. Someone should immediately render an oil interpretation of the tableau, suitable for framing, postcards, and addition to the canon of American Gothic.
The comment at the top when I logged my view was fairly descriptive:
This is punk rock for old racists who have? been pissed off at the gov’t since they put an Irish catholic in the white house.
Sample lyric: “Sarah Palin, she won’t listen to their bunk/Sarah Palin’s coming south to hunt some skunk.”
But the real challenge is the rise of China’s education system and the passion for learning that underlies it. We’re not going to become Confucians, but we can elevate education on our list of priorities without relinquishing creativity and independent thought.
That’s what we did in 1957 after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. These latest test results should be our 21st-century Sputnik.
Kristof knows because he’s been there. Like Tom Friedman.
The fancy and fine class, very often the opinion makers, are always in China. All truth can be found there. That’s just a fact.
Here’s Friedman from late last year:
“Well, folks, Sputnik just went up again: China’s going clean tech.”
By making more melamine, exceptional coal burning and keeping the motor vehicles out of town when the world comes visiting.
I satirized it in this:
DD’s rule, perhaps a little like the ‘law’ about the appearance of ‘Hitler’ in any political argument:
The appearance of the word Sputnik or any reference to a Sputnik kind of moment in any argument signals the person who dropped it needs a pie in the face.
In other words, it means — at worst — the brain has stopped working. Or the person writing or saying it has run out time and needs to wind up with something hack and superficially gnomic-sounding.
The usage is intelligence insulting, among many things. It imagines the United States now is somehow, perhaps even only remotely, still the same place with the same powers the year after I was born.
That’s to laugh.
In 1957 the United States had much much stronger middle class. And it hadn’t deindustrialized. It was not an exhausted nation and not yet engaged in pointless and endless war in countries in which Americans have no interest or stake.
Yep, grade school education sure sucks in the US. So do many things in comparison to specifics taken from other locales.
Here’s a usage:
Watch out! The rocket has fired and the capsule separated! The Wall Street-engineered economic crash of 2008 was a Sputnik moment for the rest of the world.
File along with other great calls to resurgent achievement, gone until the next column runs:
DD watched The Green Hornet when young. Bafflingly, I remember liking it. Could it have been the saving grace of the theme music?
In advance of the new movie, SyFY rolled out old Green Hornet episodes last night. I tuned in. Couldn’t be any worse than Ghost Hunters, pro wrestling or Caprica, right? (Caprica’s only distinguishing characteristic seemed to be its creator’s stealthy desire to bring brown and black fedoras back into fashion.)
Reassessment.
The Green Hornet featured leaden pacing, intelligence-insulting dialog and lots more excellence like chase scenes shot in fake darkness, often flanked by unnecessarily dim lighting in others.
Even the theme music I had remembered fondly was a bit poverty-stricken.
Here’s an episode, excerpted on YouTube. It’s called “The Frog Is a Deadly Weapon” and it goes downhill from there.
It’s distinguished by the fact that nothing happens in the first ten minutes, except for somebody being pulled into water by two frogmen. And it was only a thirty minute show. (Wait for some absorbing office talk about going to get a ‘burger at the “Cotillion Room.”)
A businessman asks Britt Reid, the Green Hornet, if he knew a man who has been found dead.
Reid: “Yes.”
Most episodes weren’t worth waiting through for any Bruce Lee fight scenes.
Jump on the grenades, if you dare.
However, one thing jumps out. Despite the old Green Hornet’s threadbare and unintentionally comical nature it was played drop-dead serious.
No idea what this means for the new Seth Rogen feature.
It is hard, though, to imagine Seth Rogen, no matter how much weight he’s lost, pulling off a character like Britt Reid — no matter how poor the original was — after seeing the former as the hefty mall cop in Observe & Report, except as a joke. The guy can’t do even a poor man’s urbane.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke sketched a more optimistic outlook for the economy, but said a $600 billion bond-buying program is needed because it will take up to five more years to bring unemployment back to healthy levels.
Bernanke told the Senate Budget Committee that there’s increasing evidence that a “self-sustaining” recovery is taking hold. He said he expects stronger economic growth because consumers and businesses will boost spending this year.
Bernanke spoke one hour after the government released a disappointing employment report. Employers added only 103,000 jobs in December. The unemployment rate fell to 9.4 percent partly because people gave up looking for jobs.
And, from the same wire, with only a different title:
But the job growth fell short of expectations based on a strengthening economy. And the drop in unemployment was partly because people stopped looking for work.
Private employers added a net total of 113,000 jobs last month and the government shed 10,000 jobs, the Labor Department said Friday.
“The labor market ended last year with a bit of a thud,” [opined some fellow from Moody’s]. “But I think things will get much better this year.”
Why would people stop looking for work?
Roseanne Barr on CNN this week: “There are no jobs.”
But there are, apparently at Goldman and other financial institutions, if you’re the right god’s work-doing superman, one who can answer interview questions of dubious nature. Presumably chosen to winnow out only the best and brightest, according to a weekly Yahoo news feature on job-seeking and the best tactics in bowing and scraping:
If you were shrunk to the size of a pencil and trapped in a blender, how would you get out? — Goldman Sachs
Why do you think only a small portion of the population makes over $150,000? (Reportedly from New York Life)
How are M&Ms made? (Reportedly from USBank)
The article (no link) — which can be looked up in Google — avers that interview questions could just be troll bait from an Internet poll.
“A foreign substance is introduced into the precious bodily fluids, without the knowledge of the individual and certainly without any free choice. That’s the way the commies work…??? — Jack Ripper
Decades after Strangelove, the character of Jack D. Ripper is finally vindicated. Sort of and not quite.
There has been too much of a good thing, reports AP.
Fluoride levels in water have crept up causing fluoridosis — or spotting of teeth — in children.
Fluoride in drinking water — credited with dramatically cutting cavities and tooth decay — may now be too much of a good thing. Getting too much of it causes spots on some kids’ teeth.
A reported increase in the spotting problem is one reason the federal government will announce Friday it plans to lower the recommended levels for fluoride in water supplies — the first such change in nearly 50 years.
About 2 out of 5 adolescents have tooth streaking or spottiness because of too much fluoride …
“Fluoridation has been fought for decades by people who worried about its effects, including conspiracy theorists who feared it was a plot to make people submissive to government power,” adds the story.
“Jack, when did you first develop this, er, theory about fluoridation?” — Group Captain Lionel Mandrake
“Have you ever loved a woman, Mandrake? Physically loved her?
“There’s a feeling of loss, a profound sense of emptiness. Luckily, however, I was able to interpret the signs correctly. It was a loss of essence. But I can assure you it has not recurred, Group Captain. Women sense my power, and they seek me out. I do not avoid women, Group Captain. But I deny them my life essence.” — Jack Ripper
“Mandrake chewed thoughtfully on his mustache … He did not know what to say to the General,” reads Peter George’s novelization of the movie.
“Act Naturally” is the first time I’ve ever had advertising stuck on my music. There wasn’t much opportunity for that back in the days of The Four G’s Hotel in Bethlehem.
YouTube checks your videos with some type of scanner when uploaded.
It determines if some of the content is raided from other sources, which — of course — it is in the spirit of fair use. At which point you get a note telling you ads will run with it.
In this way YouTube monetizes things it thinks have a chance at being popular due to the way sheep 15-17 year-olds search the site. The joke is the unsophisticated viewer may not realize you’re not the one putting in the overlay advertising.
So “Act Naturally” now has lots of ads attached to it, some coincidentally amusing. Dick Destiny and Honey-Nut Cheerios. Or pastries and cupcakes made in a regional bakery/supermarket. Or Susan Boyle’s new album on iJobs. You haveta admit that’s really choice considering the nature of DD stuff.
Also common, ads for Rhapsody, the other on-line music store.
Everyone with any brains knows no one small is allowed to earn any money making music. In the age of the web it’s all for the famous.
Backed by a label, great publicity and a place like Nashville or LA, the known fancy and fine can get dispensations from Steve Jobs, the most powerful man in the world, and other barnacles and wanna-bes, to sell music and grant them a piece. Even the Beatles, half of them dead, serve iSteve.
Additionally, the famous can get more by having the intros to their vids as conveyors for television-style commercial advertising.
Of course, there was a brief period when stupid people believed the Internet was a liberalizing and leveling thing. But they’ve all been shown the door after helpfully lubricating the running off of all B, C and D list talent. Rightly so.
What’s important is that the wonderful people get all the spoil. And that’s how it should be. Anyone who doesn’t know that isn’t mentally fit.
The bleeding heart of innovation is in making stuff for the haves. If it’s too damn hard figuring out how to watch college football on Saturdays, they’ve got it covered. If there aren’t enough apps like Harmonica for your TV set, there will be. (Then you can put your kisser to your TV, sort of like James Woods in Videodrome.)
The app economy train, driven by the toil and sweat of Tom Friedman’s value-added “artisans,” is leaving now for the bright new future. Toot-toot! All aboard!
From today’s Wall Street Journal, the Personal Journal section:
“When Chuck Hermes wants to watch a good movie at home, he often shuns [his] 40-inch HDTV … It’s too much trouble for Mr. Hermes, a Minneapolis web designer, to use the cable box and remote … Instead he usually picks up his iPad, which lets him watch a TV show or movie from Netflix with just a few finger swipes on it’s 9.7-inch display.”
Just a few finger swipes.
“Change can’t happen soon enough for Thomas Hawk, an investment adviser in San Francisco … Finding programs to watch or record on [some cable service] is a tedious process, Mr. Hawk says … Mr. Hawk says he has a much better experience accessing television shows and movies … through his Xbox 360 game console. Titles are arranged by genres and represented by colorful artwork which is easy to scan quickly. And … recommendations of movies and television shows, based on his past viewing habits, help him discover interesting new videos to watch.”
From the lede graf on D6, by Katherine Boehret:
“Have you ever watched someone editing photos and videos on a Mac and wondered why they seem much more talented and tech savvy than you are with your Windows PC?”
Yes. Sadly, DD is given the opposite feeling. I want to leave as quickly as possible without seeming too rude.
Meanwhile, in another section of the paper, a news report notes steel production is off worldwide due to the Great Recession. There will be layoffs and profit loss.
And here’s an “innovation camp.” (You won’t be able to watch the link for more than forty seconds, I guarantee it.)
But first, here’s the “innovation camp” showing good ol’ lumpy white nerd “innovation” with iPhones. Jump on this grenade, fellows.
Because Steve Jobs is the most important man in the world, he was apparently consulted by President Obama on how to cure the nation’s ills.
My guess the best advice Jobs could have given would have been telling the President to forget all Americans who don’t have iPhones or iPods. They’re structural drags and don’t count when considering the shining future.
It’s the I-fart-sunshine-and-piss-champagne crowd that’s the fountainhead of innovation, progress and job creation.
Why, if you can’t make an app like Harmonica or Jerk In a Box or Pocket Guitar for the empowerment of tens of thousands of annoying and creepy nerds, what good are you?
The Register drew my attention to the tete a tetehere.
Quoth el Reg:
Barack Obama called on Steve Jobs yesterday to discuss the challenges facing the US economy.
As for restoring the competitiveness of the United States? Well, Apple already depends on Chinese workers to build most of its kit. Perhaps Obama can look at shifting key US government technology production over there as well – missiles, nukes, and the like. It’s entirely likely the Chinese already have a pretty good idea of the blueprints anyway, so the US taxpayer might as well get the full benefit by getting the stuff built there as well.
That just leaves energy independence. We’re sure there’s some kind of skunkworks project down Infinite Loop that can take care of this. Presumably the biggest challenge is how to squeeze a nuke plant into a white plastic box with a single button.
Good news, lads! Good news! Welcome to the future. The joke’s on us!
Right before posting an ad to the personals on Craig’s List.
Jump on this grenade if you dare, lads! Half a million views!
Some old dead guy playing real harmonica, not so popular lads!
Here’s a philosophical question for turning you inside out.
What’s better? Buying a Chinese-made 16G Apple iPhone for $299 and Harmonica for 99 cents or buying a Chinese-made real harmonica and a Chinese-made Fender guitar and amp kit in a box for $199?
