Saw Regina Spektor live the other night here in Boston. She is frighteningly talented, with terrific vocal range and a soul that can’t be contained by the form. You get the sense she has too much talent for the kind of singing/songwriting/live performing she’s been doing.
For me, the concert was gripping from start to finish. Didn’t much care for Little Joy, the indie opening act from LA. Wondered why the female in Little Joy doesn’t front all of their songs. But Regina Spektor was terrific.
I find her challenging, the way you’d say an author with a dense style is challenging. Nothing easy-breezy about her material or the vocals. Where quirkiness can often be an affectation, I think it’s genuine in her case. Her songs hold catchy hooks and troubling minor-key or atonal or syncopated portions in the same composition. It’s poison for popular appeal but I think there’s true artistry there. She’s playing with a lot of genres and her songs have a stream-of-consciousness organic flow that’s revealing and jarring. Wonderful stuff, but not easy listening. She has my respect on a number of levels.
Standin’ at the crossroads, risin’ sun goin’ down
Standin’ at the crossroads baby, the risin’ sun goin’ down
I believe to my soul now, po’ Bob is sinkin’ down
A couple of fictions that drive our social infrastructure:
(1) Through an adversarial legal system Truth and Justice can emerge from the clash of competing lies.
(2) Greed can be harnessed to help drive the engine of Progress.
When I was a kid there were a lot of ancient stories about the hazards of making deals for wishes with the devil, genies, leprechauns, demons, tricksters, foxes, etc. Some creatures embody a preternatural ability to sniff out the loophole, the thing you didn’t think of, the dastardly unintended consequence. You play with those entities at your own peril.
Except for Johnny in “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” Johnny won.
If it weren’t for this great man and his works, it’s unlikely any of us would be communicating in cyberspace today.
The petition was created by computer scientist John Graham-Cumming, who said he grew “mad” at the country’s memory of a man he says should be considered one of its national heroes.
“I’m looking for an apology from the British government because that’s where I think the wrong was done. But Turing is clearly someone of international stature,” Graham-Cumming said.
Turing was best known for inventing the Bombe, a code-breaking machine that deciphered messages encoded by German Enigma machines during World War II.
The messages provided the Allies with crucial information from the British government’s code-breaking headquarters in Bletchley Park where Turing worked full-time during the war.
He was considered a mathematical genius and went on to develop the Turing machine, a theory that automatic computation cannot solve all mathematical problems, which is considered the basis of modern computing.
Regards,
Transor Z
(U.S. citizen and ineligible to sign the UK petition)
DE turned LB Tedy Bruschi retires after 13 seasons for the Patriots
Tedy Bruschi announced his retirement after 13 seasons playing for the New England Patriots, first as a defensive end and then converting to linebacker, the position he is best known for. Bruschi only had one Pro Bowl season in 2005, the year he came back after suffering a stroke and having heart surgery. He was somewhat undersized by NFL linebacker standards, listed at only 6′1″ 247 lbs, with only journeyman career statistics, and yet he was named defensive captain of the Patriots for five seasons, which gives a clue as to the regard in which he was held by teammates and coaches. Watch the video and observe the normally imperturbable Coach Bill Bilichick’s emotional reaction at today’s press conference.
Good luck, Tedy, and thanks for the great memories!
Acknowledging that Eclectica’s performance has not tracked the market’s performance since the March lows, Hendry says: “I would contend that playing ‘chicken’ with the market is not for us.”
Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky in morning, sailor’s warning.
-Old adage
Sometimes the poetry finds you. I was walking tonight around the “Sugar Bowl,” the man-made path circling a little lagoon near Castle Island in South Boston. A vee-shaped strip of clouds was illuminated in the sky, seeming to me to point to the JFK Library. The photo was taken with my Blackberry, so it’s not very good quality. But good enough to capture something of the moment.
Senator Kennedy was remembered today on all of the TV and radio stations. Personally, I am surprised at how little his passing has moved me. The Kennedy mystique was part of my youth; some in our family still to this day resist the scandals and criticisms of the family. It’s a Massachusetts thing. But not so much for me, I guess, suspicious as I am nowadays of anything remotely like iconography.
Suffice to say a nautical thought seemed apt. Kennedy will be waked at the JFK Library and then funeral mass will be said this Saturday at the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Mission Hill.
We weren’t bred for this life. Our organisms are programmed to eat food when it is available, because historically humans have had to work very hard for our calories. In fact, in recent years anthropologists have conducted studies linking the topography of established trails around human settlements with the efficient conservation of calories. We innately perform a calculus around the variables of time, safety, and caloric efficiency when we select footpaths — with caloric efficiency playing a prominent role.
So much rhetoric spews out of politicized debates around individual responsibility. It is as if the human organism is capable of taking full control of itself through mindfulness. Guess what — we aren’t bred for that level of micromanagement over daily activities. Quite the opposite. Historically, exercise was part of a balance that grew organically out of daily experience. Nearly everyone understands that in the not-all-that-distant past, leisure time was at a premium; completing a rigorous list of household chores was the order of the day: sewing, knitting, mending, cooking, tending crops, tending livestock, raising children, engaging in whatever trade one had.
Today, exercise must be scheduled around largely sedentary activities. Food intake must be closely monitored and impulses wrestled with and overcome. The bag of chocolate chip cookies or sour cream & onion potato chips must be rationed out to ourselves as if we were stranded in a life boat and must make these foodstuffs last until rescue. But this is a mind game we play to counter the plain fact that these foodstuffs are plentiful and cheap and stimulate our taste buds to want more and more. Talk about mixed messages!
An absurd side debate rages in the midst of the health care discourse in the United States. Why should doctors’ pay be linked to the personal choices of their patients around nutrition, smoking, drinking and exercise? Surely, the benevolent suggestive powers of doctors should take a back seat to personal responsibility, one line of “thought” goes. The “thought” — meme, really — is that there is already too much entitlement in this country; people need to take charge of their own damned lives!
The conservative meme incorporates a sense of degeneracy and ingratitude among the entitled persons in our midst: These welfare queens, spoiled children and generally weak and dependent characters must be held to account! To lift a political meme from anewleif’s comment on a recent post, it just isn’t fair to “hard-working” people who make “good decisions” to have to carry the lazy and unfit on their backs, as well. This reminds me of the Efficient Markets Theory of the Chicago School, and the construct Professor Thaler and other behavioral economists disparagingly call homo economicus — the perfectly rational individual unit of economic activity. Clearly, our real-life experience is much messier than that in terms of mistakes and binges and decisions based on incomplete information. Posner be damned.
The flip side of our democratic impulse is self-loathing of our collective identity. We perceive no inconsistency in anointing an idea as controlling because it is something “most people believe” on the one hand while at the same time castigating the “selfish and lazy American people” for slipping into obesity. The implication is that the current crop of Americans lack self-discipline and self-control. Well, the people have spoken and they like to eat. A lot. So let’s recognize the primacy of the Big Mac and Cool Ranch Doritos — by popular demand. The democratic consensus is that Americans love their empty calories and zesty seasonings. The people have spoken — with their mouths full of Milk Duds and smeared with milk-chocolatey goodness — and who dares think himself or herself superior to the will of the people?
The truth is staring us in the face. We weren’t bred for this life. We were bred for a world in which food is of the greatest value and hard to come by. I often joke that currencies should be backed by calories instead of precious metals or fiat. But alas, the calorie is a debased currency today in America and the inflation is readily visible in our midsections, thunder thighs and badonka-donk butts.
Elizabeth Warren (aka My Girlfriend aka Chair of the TARP COP), getting the word out about the Congressional Oversight Panel’s recently released August report, says whether you believe the world as we know it would have ended last fall without TARP depends on how you define the world as we know it. If your world is limited to a few behemoth banks on Wall Street . . .
