Posted on February 25th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Untruths, Cartoons.
Sent to me by Velma:
Posted on October 10th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Musicians, Untruths.
The New York Public Library has put a big "YA" sticker on Jens Lekman's album When I Said I Wanted To Be Your Dog.
By the way, I suppose it has been much mentioned how much he sometimes sounds like Stephin Merritt? e.g., on "Julie".
Posted on April 1st, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Untruths.
We recently got a DVD player that can play discs from any region. The main immediate reason I wanted one was to get the Complete Secret Policemen's Ball box. So I looked at a couple customer reviews. You guessed it: not complete.
In particular, it is missing the single piece I wanted most: Lenny Henry's monologue as Trevor Nettleford involving cat flaps, babies, and James Bond.
Looking a bit further, I find that the "complete" Mr. Bean is also shorn of a couple crucial sketches.
I don't understand why they are allowed to get away with saying "complete". It's one thing to be misleading, but there is no wiggle room with the word "complete". It is an absolute. How can it be legal to market these products this way?
Sigh.
Posted on December 29th, 2006 by Scraps.
Categories: Stuff, Untruths.
Today at my temporary reception gig, we received a junk fax that's apparently very common. It has no headers -- a federal violation in addition to the federal ban against unsolicited advertising faxes -- and pretends to be a memo from Human Resources, notifying employees of a "company vacation package". It's a scam, of course. What astonishes me is that anyone, anyone at all, falls for the transparent bogosity of the pitch. Who calls these alleged people and gives them a credit card number without, well, at least checking with Human Resources?
I amused myself for a little while tracking down information about these crooks, and discovered an excellent resource for dealing with junk faxing scum, where you can either learn how to spend a ridiculous amount of time trying to get these bastards to stop, or spend a little bit of time giving information to this guy who is apparently obsessed with stopping them (and thank god obsessives like him exist).
One of the more discouraging developments of the information age has been discovering just how many con-man wannabes there are out there. It used to be you needed at least a bit of charisma and a good line of patter. Now all you need is a computer.
Posted on December 15th, 2006 by Scraps.
Categories: Stuff, Untruths.
Cook offhandedly refers to Hitler's short stature in one of his loony pieces. Hitler being short is a widely accepted piece of casual knowledge that one sees references to from time to time. But it isn't so. Hitler is usually listed as 5'8", and people who knew him well estimated him from 5'7" to 5'9". He was certainly taller than Mussolini and Franco, for example. He was normal height, in other words; if anything a bit tall for the time.
So how did the idea that he was short get into circulation? Is it because of cartoons? Because it makes a better story? Because Napoleon was short? Us short folks got enough trouble without getting saddled with Hitler, damn it.
Posted on December 12th, 2006 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Untruths, Books.
We picked up Tragically I Was an Only Twin: The Complete Peter Cook from the library, a marvelous collection that deserves a better post than it's going to get right now. Right now I'm just going to complain about the subtitle. "Complete" is an unambiguous word. "Collected" often gets used with deliberate ambiguity by the publishing industry -- to my mind "Collected" ought to be a definitive edition, either complete or as close to complete as the author wanted it to be, and anything less ought to be called "Selected" -- but at least when a far-from-definitive collection is called "Collected", the publisher can say that there's no lie in the word. Not so with "Complete". To begin with, this collection doesn't include Bedazzled. Okay, a whole movie script would perhaps make the book unwieldy. It must at least be a complete collection of his shorter pieces, right?
No, not close. The introductions make it clear that this is a selection: "It's a collection of Cook's finest writing . . . Of course* it's not a compendium of everything he did . . . Cook produced far more comedy than you could fit into one book. But it is a pretty comprehensive summary..." That's fine, except for the word "Complete" on the cover and spine. I don't think a blatant lie should be excused with a shrug just because it's marketing and we all know what marketing's like.
* Feh.
Posted on May 29th, 2006 by Scraps.
Categories: Stuff, Untruths, Cartoons.
We received junk mail from the Post Office yesterday, a post card encouragement to use their "premium forwarding service" on those occasions when we're out of town.
There is a dumb Cathy Guisewite comic strip on one side, and on the other a single panel that might be Guisewite as well; it's "drawn" in her "style". The single panel is titled "Vacation Mail", and shows two in-boxes, labeled "Hers" and "His". "Hers" is stuffed full of items, mostly catalogs and magazines; they are labeled with words like "Sale", "Gossip", and "Shop". "His" is a few neat letter-sized envelopes, labeled "Bills".
Posted on May 20th, 2006 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Music Criticism, Untruths.
At the same EMP conference where Stephin Merritt got pilloried for liking "Zip-e-dee-doo-dah," David Thomas presented his latest expansion upon his theories of the incontrovertible Americanness of rocknroll and the falseness of anything claiming to be rock that is not American, and excited no controversy whatever. Thomas has been beating this cultural purity theory of rock for years, and appears to get a free pass because, well, Thomas is a lunatic anyway, right?
The Existence Machine has a fine and thoughtful roundup of Thomas's statements on these matters over the years. Some Thomas quotes:
Rock is electrified folk music. It is not catholic but parochial, not a wide tent but a narrow road. It is in the blood. [...] The answer to 'Can foreigners play rock music?' is no. No. Not under any circumstances. But sometimes they can sure sound good if they don't try.
[. . .]
Rock music is the native music at the heart of American culture. Artemy Troitsky said to me, "The most ordinary rock band playing in a garage in Nebraska has an authenticity and urgency that cannot be found in even the best bands from England because they are playing their own music." Rock music is in my blood. It's not in yours. You presume too much to think it is. I do not claim Tolstoy. You cannot claim Elvis. Your question also presumes that culture is something that can be frozen in time. It presumes that rock music was never anything other than a youth phenomenon designed to sell clothes and provide tight-jeaned boys to chicken-hawkers. It assumes that what is popularly believed must define the reality of any situation. The Beatles will be a footnote in 50 years and forgotten totally in 100. Don Van Vliet, Sky Saxon and Brian Wilson will still be honored.
[. . .]
[M]usic should be regional, it should speak directly of a specific place on the planet, of a specific geography, of a specific time, otherwise music is a function of merchandise and market. If it is not related to a specific geographical location, if it doesn't speak of a small community of people, then it isn't music. I have a real simple way of looking at things, so most of the stuff you hear on the radio by definition isn't music. I've got no problems, it's everybody else who has to deal with labels and confusion. I suggest to everybody that they adopt my model of thinking. It's easier this way.
Posted on February 4th, 2006 by Scraps.
Categories: Stuff, Sports, Untruths.
My hometown team is in the Super Bowl, for the first time in their thirty years of existence. I am reasonably excited about this, and may post about it.
But. Please, please do not send me that nonsense about Super Bowl Sunday being the number one wife-beating day of the year. It's not true, and someone sends it to me every damned year.
I think the urban myths that bug me the most are the ones that people want to be true. These are necessarily made up by someone mendacious, but the credulous lazy believers are at least as responsible for the spread of these lies. The worst ones recently have been the series of racist emails that have circulated in the wake of Katrina (you can find several of them here), each of which was of course started deliberately by some overtly racist scumbag, but were passed along, I would guess, mostly by people who would deny being racists but nonetheless found the lies easy to believe (probably because the stories generally match up well with the socially conservative political and cultural propaganda that's been spread by the right-wing media machine over the last couple decades -- propaganda that always avoids overt racism while playing shamelessly upon covert racism -- and because of the ease with which people can be made to believe that people worse off than them are basically responsible for it, even when they are victims of a natural disaster*).
That wasn't a tangent I was expecting to go off on. Welcome to my ADD rant generator.
* And, of course, victims of a corrupt, incompetent, indifferent, cynical, racist federal government and presidential administration.
Posted on January 9th, 2006 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Science Fiction, Untruths.
I just discovered that Merriam-Webster's Eleventh Collegiate Dictionary -- the publishing industry standard -- misspells Isaac Asimov as "Issac".
I am not kidding.
Posted on August 7th, 2005 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Untruths, Quotes.
I'm fascinated by misattributions, and I think I'd like to make a web page of them. There are a few particular names for whom quotes are always suspect, because clever lines will be attributed to them regardless of evidence: check twice before believing a given line was uttered by Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, or Dorothy Parker.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
Commonly attributed to Voltaire. But there's no evidence of the quote before the twentieth century; you can check Bartlett's 9th and 10th editions (from 1901 and 1919) online, for example, and not find the quote -- though of course there's plenty of Voltaire, including a quote ("God is always on the side of the big battalions") that is from a letter than Norbert Guterman said contained the "defend to the death" quote; Richard Shenkman says the quote is nowhere in the letter (and I don't read French).
It's a fact that Voltaire was never quoted on the "defend to the death" quote, at any rate, until years after it had been said by Beatrice Hall (under the pseudonym S.G. Tallentyre) in 1907. She did say that it was something Voltaire might have said; ever since then it's been credited to Voltaire.
Gregory Feeley adds:
I too collect misattributions. There are as many interesting-but-little-known ones as there are interesting-and-well-known ones, such as those discussed here. Briefly, two:
"Madame Bovary, c'est moi." Universally treated as a genuine Flaubert quote, it first appeared in a 1907 treatise written by someone who had never known Flaubert. He gave no citation, and the quote runs counter to everything Flaubert ever said, in letter or conversation, regarding his fictional character.
"Close your eyes and think of England." I noticed many years ago that no reference work of familiar quotations includes this, and that while the line is very widely quoted as something said by Victorian mothers to their soon-to-be-married daughters, I never saw it in any Victorian work. It sounded, in fact, less an authentic Victorian remark than a smug twentieth-century characterization of Victorianism (we still like to imagine that Victorian women had a horror of sexuality, even married, which is quite untrue.)
Eventually I came across what is probably its first appearance: an Edwardian (or slightly later) diary, written by a woman who was speaking about her own experience, and rather archly. It was never said by mothers to their daughters.