perfidy

Ted at Rocket Jones nearly made me aspirate my coffee with this:

Too bad the name eHarmony is already taken

Australia launches world's largest sheep database.

Nothing will ever (in my mind, for that is what we are discussing) match the majesty and towering crudity of this sentence, drawn from the sad but proud ranks of the runners-up of the never to be sufficiently praised and damned Bulwer-Lytton contest:

Andre, a simple peasant, had only one thing on his mind as he crept along the East wall: "Andre creep... Andre creep... Andre creep."

But some of these come pretty damn close:

"A few hours had passed since they had been pulled away from the moon. A few hours and millions of miles. The moon was no longer visible, not even as a star. The whole thing was so crazy, weird and far-out. It was as though they were floating in a giant vacuum." -- Sara Cavanaugh, A Woman in Space

Ya think?

"They shook hands, and Jason set about retrieving his balls." -- Peter Heath, The Mind Brothers

That's some kind of handshake.

"Wearing an aura of rugged-intellectual charm like a plastic raincoat ..." -- Sam Merwin Jr, The Time Shifters

He knows me! Except I would have said rain slicker...

"Her very existence made his forebrain swell until it threatened to leak out his sinuses." -- Nancy A. Collins, Sunglasses After Dark

Speaking of Hilary...

"He lifted her tee-shirt over her head. Her silk panties followed." -- Peter F. Hamilton, Mindstar Rising

That's gotta sting. Atomic wedgie from hell.

Thanks to Cassandra Villainous Company for finding this painful compendium of science-fictional excrescences. All of these (I think) are taken from the middle of books. On the whole, though, it strikes me that most sf novels generally have good first sentences.

Hold your finger right in front of your nose. Close one eye, then the other. See how your finger appears to jump back and forth? That's parallax. A few feet away, the effect is almost indetectable. Hold to needles in front of your eyes. (Pointy bits facing away, just to be safe.) Its easy at that distance to tell that there are in fact two needles. Hold the two needles at arm's length. Much harder. The further two objects are apart, the farther you have to move away before they appear indistinguishable again. This concept has been used to determine the distance to nearby stars - using the orbit of the Earth as a baseline rather than the couple inches between your eyeballs.

So how frickin far away do you have to get to be in a place where you can no longer distinguish Hillary Clinton from Rush Limbaugh? Well wherever the hell that is, Cindy Sheehan's found it. I always figured that if you went that far left, you'd fall off the planet. In fact, I secretly hoped that that was the case. But in a letter published on Fat Bastard's website, she does just that, and as an added bonus throws in a lot of other loopy shit.

I read somewhere (I cannot now recall where) that the next time she uses the word "sacrifice" she ought to be referring to her son. Somehow, I think that isn't gonna happen. She says:

Playing politics with our soldiers' lives is despicable.

Hello? What does that make playing politics with your own son's death? Sheesh.

I feel an untowardly grand sense of accomplishment this morning, having last night set up a wireless network in my home. It only took nine months to network two computers, which has to be some kind of low-end record for pathetic technical wimpery.*

[wik]* And no, both machines are modern-era Pentiums with plenty of RAM and so forth, running a recentish version of Windows. If I had managed to network Linux to Windoze, that'd be cause for laurels and champagne, but it was a simple matter of hooking up two machines running the same OS through a router**, and it took nine.... months. Yeesh. Don't let me near your car if it's broken.

[alsø wik]** And this after being the "network guy" in a small office in a past life. I know how to do this stuff. It's not hard and I have the skills. Nine months. Same time it takes to make a baby, a sentient being. And all I got was a laptop and a desktop to talk to each other***. Yeesh again.

[alsø alsø wik] Maybe I should rename the two machines "India" and "Pakistan." Haw!

Do you think the first culinary mavens to eat a dish prepared by a chef wielding a syringe and a foamer enjoyed it? Say it was duck breast injected with concentrated muskmelon nectar and then pan-seared and steamed over black tea and truffles and sauced with a foam consisting of lingonberry juice, lobster roe, bacon fat and lemongrass. Do you think the hardcore foodies who tasted this theoretical trainwreck of taste, texure, and cutting-edge technique really dug it for what it was, or just tripped out on the novelty?

I sort of suspect the latter. I am a big fan of "difficult" music (meaning everything from experimental noise rock to the mathematical compositions of Webern and Subotnick), but I do have to ask sometimes whether a particular example is more pretentious than good. Even leaving aside obvious rock-era eff-yous as Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music" and the famous lost Van Morrison Contractual Fulfillment album, how many owners of legitimately musical yet hard to listen to albums by the Boredoms, Big Black, Captain Beefheart and Cecil Taylor give them a spin very often?

Oh, I know, some people really really can't get enough of Steve Albini or skronky free jazz, but on the whole... how does one tell Shinola from the other stuff? How do you distinguish "weird but kinda good" from "weird for the sake of weird?" Sometimes, sophisticate that I am, I feel like the Original Rube standing on a tiled floor in an art gallery asking passers-by about that Duchamp piece, "am I supposed to admire this, or am I supposed to pee in it?"

I raise this question thanks to the Sleepytime Gorilla Museum. Consisting of five Bay Area musicians who, all veterans of various avant-garde projects, the Museum present themselves as the travelling roadshow for the fictitious institution in question (no humans allowed!), a group of musicians "unified in [their] various crafts by the simplicity of their opposition to rock music." Their presskit and general presentation is strongly reminiscent of the anarcho-dada absurdist smartassery of Semiotext[e], the Church of the Subgenius, and of the original Dada and Surrealist movements. This is a dangerous road to travel: Dada and Surrealism proved that absurdism and randomness are a neat tricks once and once only, and only a few individuals have the patience and mental fortitude to hang on through the mass of random fish and sludgehammers to find their own faces in the wallpaper. (What?)

...On Natural History, the new album by the Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, isn't simply random. That much I can tell. In fact, there are as many as five minutes at a stretch where the band play enjoyable freaky music without bizarre intrusions or unheralded switch-ups. There also seems to be some kind of overarching concept to the album, a story pitting humanity against the "Adversary" in a prog-rock pastiche of everything from Pilgrim's Progress to "Funkentelechy vs. The Placebo Syndrome." My best proof of this is from the song titles, the first few of which are: "A Hymn to the Morning Star," "The Donkey-Headed Adversary of Humanity Opens The Discussion," "Phthisis" (a gloss on Egyptian gods P'tah and Isis?), and "Bring Back The Apocalypse." I'm not sure from the lyrics either exactly what they're getting at, but I've read Naked Lunch about a dozen times too, and even though I figured out the plot after the third or fourth time I still have no idea what that scene where they autoerotically execute that beautiful young boy is supposed to do with, well, anything at all.

Although I can tell sort of what ...On Natural History is about, I'm much less certain whether it's any good. One saving grace of some avant-rock albums is that they retain song structures even as they jettison most other musical conventions. Structure helps the mind orient itself to the piece so that the listener has something to hang onto-- it does help to be able to say to oneself "oh, here's the trashcan and screaming lady part again... I get it!" The Boredoms are great at this trick, as was Captain Beefheart's Magic Band circa "Trout Mask Replica." Even that little morsel of order can help a bewildered listener make an aestheic and emotional judgement as to whether or not they like what they're hearing.

But other times this strategy falls down. There's a difference, for example, between the Frank Zappa of Weasels Ripped My Flesh and the Frank Zappa of 200 Motels, and that difference means the world to me. "Weasels" makes sense, more or less. The "ee-uuh! Eee-uuh!" part of "Toads of the Short Forest" works, in that it makes musical sense and in fact shows up elsewhere as what Romantic composers would call a leitmotiv. On the other hand, the entirety of 200 Motels sounds to me like a totally incomprehensible hermetic fever-dream. The result: despite the presence of some nominal structure, the listener (i.e., me) remains bewildered (by chance or design) and in the case of this listener, feels a bit like the nonplussed victim of some obscure and unfunny practical joke. Is it damn thing art or a urinal?

Sleepytime Gorilla Museum's music falls into a middle region between Naked Lunch and 200 Motels. Most of the album does away with traditional structures (with parts organized ABACA for example), instead putting parts one after another (ABCDEF) in a string. When Metallica used to do this, it was okay (they didn't use the opportunity to, say switch abruptly between guitar and flute choir), but The Museum's transitions tend to be more jarring than the scale of their compositions can support. I suppose I should have expected this kind of high weirdness from a Bay Area collective featuring one third of the excellent Tin Hat Trio (violinist etc. Carla Kihlstedt) and veterans of other arty-sounding acts like Skeleton Key, Idiot Flesh, and Vic Thrill. Still, the experimental structures of ...Of Natural History make it very much a land without a map, and it's up to you to decide whether that's your bag of candy.

The actual musical sounds that are hung on the structure are... interesting... too. Rocketing between mock-opera flourishes (like a baritone intoning "O loathesome crawling thing, be done / with your miniscule affairs" accompanied by autoharp) and arty soundscapes replete with scratchy violin, homemade instruments and the occasional headbanging metal guitar interlude, most of ...On Natural History feels pretty much like weird for weird's sake. Many of the melodies, such as they are, are reminiscent of French-opera recitative, the quasimusical talky bits that move matters along between big numbers. This isn't so bad in and of itself, and there is nothing inherently wrong with doing weird things. However, this can quickly turn into a stunt, a tightrope walk between thwarting listener expectations and making music so involuted and twisty that the listener just wants it to stop.

After a good dozen runs through ...On Natural History, I have come to admire the care that went into recording the album, complete with great layering and separation and wonderfully mastered agreement between soft and loud patches, but have found most of the actual music forbiddingly formless and inscrutably, even enthusiastically weird, like Alfred Jarre's absurdist theater piece Pere Ubu performed entirely in Pig Latin. And I don't dig it.

Understand: there are albums outside music that for whatever reason grab me as a listener and music enthusiast and shows me something I'd never thought of before. I dig the Boredoms and Mr. Bungle for that reason exactly. And then there are albums of outside music that aspire to do the same thing and fail as such high-risk endeavors do: awfully, publicly, and utterly. Zappa managed this unfortunate trick a good half dozen times throughout his career. And as much as it surprises me to say so, ... On Natural History does so too.

I know for a fact there is an audience out there for this kind of thing. You might find ...on Natural History entertainingly freaky. In fact, I with my recordings of Xenakis and Harry Parch and lifesize cardboard cutout of Anton Webern am shocked and appalled to find that I am not part of that audience.

It is probable that the Sleepytime Gorilla Museum really excel in a
live setting where the Felliniesque quality of their music can be matched by equally wacky visuals, sort of a carnival-apocalyptic live-action Un Chien Andalou, if you'll let me mix my art-movie metaphors. But as an album, as a piece of music in its own right, this reluctant rube is pretty sure ...On Natural History is just a urinal.

This post also appears at blogcritics.org

Reggae was born on island which has seen endless trouble, a tropical stone that often seems two meals away from total social breakdown. And yet, the protest music from Jamaica sounds so happy if you don't stop to listen to the words. Even the bouyant sounds of international icon Bob Marley are full of parables of social justice and frank calls for political revolution. Just what does "the stone that the builder refuse / will always be the head cornerstone" mean if not "the last will be first" or "the meek shall (conquer?) (inherit?) the earth (and right soon)?" Although largely diluted through repeated exposure, Marley sang revolution music.

And indeed for all the pot and talk of "one love" real Jamaican reggae is a revolutionary music, full of anger, fierce pride, and religious fervor. Sure, it sounds placid and groovy (presumably thanks to the weed and the humidity in Jamaica) but underneath that lopsided jerking throbs the heart of a million Marcus Garveys.

This goes triple for the true radicals. Burning Spear (born Winston Rodney) is one of the greatest and most influential roots reggae artists in the history of the genre. Since 1969 Rodney has been writing and producing reggae in his own trademark style, dubbier and less poppy than the Wailers, more concise and less trippy than dub masters like King Tubby. And although some of his albums from the 1980s and 1990s sound incongrously light and shiny, there has always been a lived-in funkiness to his sound. More importantly, throughout his career he has displayed a sharp, even militant, political consciousness, singing about Rastafarianism, poverty, and justice, and even naming one of his albums Marcus Garvey. The name 'Burning Spear' is itself a pointed reference to black nationalism, having originally belonged to the first president of Kenya, the former Mau Mau leader Jomo Kenyatta. In a way, Burning Spear is a gospel musician first and foremost - just for a gospel that most people outside Jamaica don't vibe with automatically.

If there is one rap against Burning Spear as a musician, it might be that sometimes his message has gotten in the way of his music. That is not to say that his political statements have been misguided (and I'm in no position to judge that), but that some of his song have not necessarily been songs as much as manifestos. When he is hitting his mark on both fronts, the results are exhilarating, funky, and deep. His greatest songs are like this - I am a huge fan of "Social Living," "Slavery Days," "Marcus Garvey," and "Marcus Say Jah No Dead" for that very reason. The first time I heard these songs, I remember being stunned and thinking to myself, damn: this isn't 'No Woman No Cry,' this is deep.

But too often I have felt the grim convictions in Burning Spear songs almost defeat themselves and come across as halfway to hopeless. A shining example of this is "African Woman" off 1990's album Mek We Dweet, an impassioned song about famine and poverty in Africa that looks at the pain of that continent, and despite an uptempo groove and bright (and dated) 1980s production, descends into despair.

The new Our Music completely manages to avoid these pitfalls of despair and datedness, sounding rootsier, skankier, and more focused than anything I've heard from Burning Spear in quite a while. Granted, I'm no expert to say the least, but gone is the overproduction that made much of his later Island-era output sound a bit slick. Back is a more analog vibe that recalls the sounds of the legendary Studio One, where the first Burning Spear music was recorded back when that name still referred to a trio.

The lyrics, though still as fervent as ever, are for the most part uplifting, complementing the negativity with positive ways to move forward. Yes, it's defiant, yes it's evangelical about Jah and Rastafarianism and the messianic black nationalism of Marcus Garvey, but I'm happy to be hearing again a Burning Spear record that contains more true hope than despair.

With the notable exception of "Together," which despite its title asks an anonymous traitor how many was he has betrayed Africa (an indictment of the kleptocracies that rule much of the continent?), nearly everything on Our Music is positive. On the title track Burning Spear sings about reclaiming reggae from the pretenders and fashionistas, and on "Walk" Spear visits people around the world. "Try Again" is a positively bubbly song about forgiveness, self-reliance, and the teachings of Marcus Garvey. "One Marcus" rides a laid-back organ-and-horn groove while teaching about... Marcus Garvey. All the while the bass throbs, the keyboards bounce, the horns writhe, and the rhythm section keeps things percolating beautifully.

It is good to see a mature musician moving forward without spiralling into irrelevance or forgetting their strengths. Our Music is a top-shelf addition to the already distinguished catalog of one of reggae's all-time greats. I suppose it's by now obligatory for reviewers to say this, so, uh... keep the spear burning.

This review also appears on blogcritics.org.

Again via the Onion, some so-wrong-it's-right non-reportage.

An important PSA from the Onion of all places, on the paramount importance of zombie preparedness.

PITTSBURGH—A zombie-preparedness study, commissioned by Pittsburgh Mayor Tom Murphy and released Monday, indicates that the city could easily succumb to a devastating zombie attack. Insufficient emergency-management-personnel training and poorly conceived undead-defense measures have left the city at great risk for all-out destruction at the hands of the living dead, according to the Zombie Preparedness Institute.

"When it comes to defending ourselves against an army of reanimated human corpses, the officials in charge have fallen asleep at the wheel," Murphy said. "Who's in charge of sweep-and-burn missions to clear out infected areas? Who's going to guard the cemeteries at night? If zombies were to arrive in the city tomorrow, we'd all be roaming the earth in search of human brains by Friday."

That does raise a good question - given the very particular nature of zombie attacks, is it fair to say that local and state officials are solely responsible for handling such a disaster? After all, it only takes one shambling brain-eater to slip by a police cordon to spread the infection beyond its point of origin. Not that I am calling for martial law, mind you, or anything like it. But the zombie threat is unlike any other (except aliens and space robots), so much that a local-state-national chain of command must be established before it's needed. If suits are still hammering out those details while carrion-bedangled fists pound on the doors of Pittsburgh, it's too late.

After all, your National Guard or (heaven forbid) Army man can better cap the monster who used to be your sister than you can. You'd be all like "Sis... sis... I know there's a spark of humanity in there YEOOOOOOWWWWWGGGGH!!!!" and die wondering if you made a mistake letting her get a grip on your eye sockets, where a pro would probably reflexively drop five rounds into the brainpan before zombie-sis ever got near. Indeed,

"Children need to be taught from preschool that they might have to put a bullet between the eyes of their own undead mother," Fulci said. "'Destroy The Brain' banners should be hung above the entrances of schools, churches, and town halls everywhere."

Unfortunately, the Onion's reporting falls disastrously short in one respect. They quote an official as recommending that citizens keep a "go-bag" handy containing a Glock and 50 rounds of ammunition.

Please. A Glock? The Ministry has begun extensive research into the optimal weaponage needed to beat back the zombie threat. Currently the concensus leans toward a 20-gauge shotgun loaded with buckshot, and a good pistol as a backup. 9mm is fine, but something with more stopping power is better. Zombies don't feel pain, so it's crucial to either actually destroy the brain or blow bits off the body. Hence, something that throws a .357 round is probably a good compromise between power and weight. Sure, use a Glock if you must, but if that's what you're reduced to you're probably just as well off using the aluminum bat you undoubtedly remembered to bring.

In tomorrow's Telegraph, there's a story entitled "Benefits cheat's high-flying life paid for by 'secret' inheritance".

Standard fare, really. The story's protagonist, while hardly evil, is not among the most sympathetic of characters:

Malcolm Bingley, a former gentleman's outfitter who had not worked for 17 years, was later discovered to have £75,000 in a bank account.

He was among the last passengers of the Concorde, which was a fine, fine ride in its day, but there's a catch:

Bingley, 60, was convicted of 10 counts of benefit fraud by Sunderland magistrates, fined £500 with £300 costs and given 14 days to pay back £5,456 he received for two years' Jobseekers' Allowance while failing to declare his true financial position.

Neil Snaith, for the Department of Work and Pensions, said Bingley was caught when a computer found anomalies between interest on his bank accounts and the fact that he was on means-tested benefit.

Questioned about transactions from his account, one of which he explained was for airline tickets, Bingley told officials: "It was expensive because it was Concorde. I can bring a picture of it in, and a certificate with my name on."

OK, so that explains why it was so expensive, but not the lack of recognition of the ironic juxtaposition between 17 years of unemployment benefits and his extravagance. Turns out he thought, and claims to have had confirmation, that this was all just ducky.

He was less effusive, however, when asked why he had ticked "no" on a benefits claims form asking about savings and accounts. He did not declare his inheritance, after his mother and aunt died, because he "didn't think it was relevant".

He claimed that Jobcentre staff had told him he could carry on claiming.

Not relevant? Of course not.

But while in an absolute sense, the bilked money we're talking about here is truly small beer, the more I read, the more I waited for a punchline, the better to assuage my bulging eyes, bulging caused by the fact this guy clearly has the balls of a brass monkey. And at the end, I got my punchline. Without hint of irony (which is often lost in print media, so perhaps we was being ironic), he said:

"The court's decision is very harsh. I have to pay back the full amount. I think everyone should be entitled to a holiday."

If he wasn't just joshing, I'd contend we've found a role model for the Howard Dean's self-styled Democrat Wing of the Democrat Party.

Some clever domeheads at DARPA have learned to get uavs of different feathers to flock together. DARPA's HURT program (damn, do I love their names) has developed a system that allows soldiers to control multiple, dissimilar uavs from a single handheld computer. In a test, four uavs of three separate types - both fixed and rotary winged - all fed imagery of an abandoned barracks area to the Humvee mounted HURT system.

...the soldier was able to view broad-area surveillance images from the low-flying UAVs on his handheld and request imagery using simple cursor commands.

The HURT system autonomously determined which UAV was most capable of providing the requested imagery based on each vehicle’s position and current tasking. Commands were then sent to the individual vehicles’ ground control stations. Imagery from the UAVs was fused by the HURT system then sent to the handheld computer. The soldier was able to request imagery of a building, surveillance of a moving truck, or a replay from several minutes earlier.

“HURT communicates only with the ground control system for each UAV. We do not change the UAV,” says Charlie Guthrie, director advanced capability development. “The operator launches the vehicle and sends it to a marshalling point where it is available for use. HURT looks at the systems assigned to it and programs them to give the best data it can, setting up reconnaissance patterns and scan areas.” The soldier can then make simple, high-level requests like “follow that car”, he says.

Future tests will attempt to integrate a larger and more diverse array of uavs, as well as ground sensors and other systems like red force- and blue force tracking. Part of the problem of surveillance and tactical intelligence on the modern battlefield is information overload. Rather than having many operators each trying to process imagery from one bird, here you have multiple birds providing one operator with just what he needs.

From here, I imagine the next step would be to get HURT to process multiple requests from its flock of airborne drones. Essentially, it would be a tactical network of sensors that works something like the internet does. Analysts would be able to - without having to bother with the details of individual drones - get what they need while the HURT system handles the the mechanics of maneuvering the drones around.

Sweet.