Posted on December 17th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Musicians, Quotes.
As unfathomable as it seems from the distance of over 30 years, for a few months, Gerry and the Pacemakers were the Beatles' nearest competitors in Britain. --Richie Unterberger, Allmusic
For a very brief time in 1964, it seemed that the biggest challenger to the Beatles' phenomenon was the Dave Clark Five. --Rick Clark and Richie Unterberger, Allmusic
Posted on December 14th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Badness, Comedy.
"I, for one, welcome our new [variable] overlords."
Posted on November 29th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Badness, Lyrics.
"Thanks for taking me on a one-way trip to the sun."
--Englebert Humperdinck, "After the Lovin'" (written by Richie Adams and Alan Bernstein)
Posted on November 17th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Badness, Editing.
I proofread ad copy yesterday -- copy I was not allowed to edit -- that said their product supplied "one of the most sought-after needs".
I think one of the dangers of ad copy writing -- apart from the fact that this copy appeared to have been written by a tech person without assistance from someone learned in grammar and punctuation -- is that it is so full of exaggeration and stock phrasery that it's easy, when in a hurry, to overlook that you have said nothing at all, or, worse, said something ludicrous.
Posted on October 11th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Badness.
A reviewer at rateyourmusic.com:
i confess ... I just can't love something just 'cause I'm supposed to ... the most overrated album on RYM.
This isn't confessing, of course, it's bragging. "Oh, I know I'm terribly picky. It's one of my worst character flaws." And what a lame brag. "I think for myself! You can't make me like it! You herd-following hype-slaves!" It's condescension preemption, a transparent bid for the Cool High Ground. It's a dumb game, even when it's played better than this, but there sure are a lot of people who never outgrow it.
Posted on October 4th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, Lyrics.
I've listened to the new Andrew Bird four times today, and some of it's sticking, while some of it sounds like ordinary indie singer-songwriter fare to me; I'll definitely be giving it more attention in the next week.
The only thing I have to note right now is that when he sings "We'll fight, we'll fight", it sounds to me like he's declaring "Whale fight! Whale fight!" It doesn't help that he goes on to sing "they'll fight, they'll fight", which rhymes with "whale fight".
Posted on October 3rd, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Oracles.
Here we go. Low fat, whole wheat green tea.
Posted on September 19th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Oracles, Boring Posts.
The fictional names of spam senders are mostly amusing to the recipient and no one else, inasmuch as everyone has the opportunity to be (briefly) amused by these absurdities in their own overflowing inboxes. So I note almost entirely for my own amusement the email I received today from Grackle L. Pigging.
Posted on September 17th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Lists, Comedy.
Abba: The vowels in their name stood for vowels in the group members' names as well.
The Velvet Underground: Introduced zeugma into rock lyrics.
The Monkees: I think the "y" in monkey is voiced like a consonant, don't you? Yuh. Monkey-yuh. Right? So they picked up a vowel here.
The The: Still cracks me up! The The. The The The The The. The.
Van Der Graaf Generator: The doubled "a" is surprisingly common among Dutch bands, but is eschewed by Frisians.
Van Morrison: Not actually a band, but a person. His real name is Van.
Ebn-Ozn: Lost two of their vowels in a lawsuit, sparking their satiric masterpiece "AEIOU and Sometimes Y".
Styx. Name doesn't look like it has any vowels, yet it does. Look closely.
AEIOU: The only band name to have all the standard vowels of the alphabet, in alphabetical order!
XTC. Technically not qualified for the list, but I didn't think I could leave them off.
Posted on September 15th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Quotes.
Now, to this declared fact that there are no more than thirty-six dramatic situations, is attached a singular corollary, the discovery that there are in life but thirty-six emotions. A maximum of thirty-six emotions -- and therein we have all the savor of existence; there we have the unceasing ebb and flow which fills human history like tides of the sea; which is, indeed, the very substance of history, since it is the substance of humanity itself, in the shades of African forests as Unter den Linden or beneath the electric lights of the Boulevards; as it was in the ages of man's hand-to-hand struggle with the wild beasts of wood and mountain, and as it will be, indubitably, in the most infinitely distant future, since it is with these thirty-six emotions -- no more -- that we color, nay, we comprehend, cosmic mechanism, and since it is from them that our theogonies and our metaphysics are, and ever will be, constructed; all our dear and fanciful "beyonds" -- thirty-six situations, thirty-six emotions, and no more.--Georges Polti, The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations
Posted on September 1st, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Comedy.
(archiving another old piece.)
Personal to roadnotes: You were in my dream last night, telling me about how you could predict the future by the patterns you saw in the stubble in your hair as it grew back between shaves. Is this true? --Misia
(Scene: Casa deSelby Bowen. Velma standing, head up, eyes closed, back straight, razor held aloft. Scraps as supplicant, bearing can of shaving cream.)
Acolyte: What news, Lady?
Seeress: I see.... righteousness and recrimination.... petulance.... a stagnant pool of blather.... a sea of ellipses.... drama.... drama.... (clutching head) Oh! the spelling.... my eyes....
Acolyte: Lady, do not go there.
Seeress: You overstep, impertinent one. We cannot deny that which is velcroed to our very souls. Bring me the leering drunken stoat.
Acolyte: (troubled) Lady....
Seeress: The stoat!
Acolyte: As you will. (proffers stoat)
Seeress: (rubbing stoat vigorously upon scalp) Ach! It is worse than I feared. Asshats are on the march, partying unashamedly in the sacred soup of the discourse. Fenderheads menace all that is barely tolerable. Infelicity abounds. Correction must be dispensed.
Acolyte: (gazing in wonder) Are the Cranky Times upon us, Lady?
Seeress: Yea, it is so. But heads will adorn pikes ere morning. Come. (sweeps imperiously from room. muttering:) "Just your opinion" my fuzzy brown butt.
.
Posted on August 28th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Musicians, Comedy.
A music reference book credited Ezra Sims with a non-existent work, String Quartet #2, supposedly written in 1962. So he wrote a piece called "String Quartet #2 (1962)". It's for flute, clarinet, violin, viola, and cello. And was written in 1974.
Posted on August 26th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Stuff, Comedy, Movies.
Following this week's release of our new Kevin Kline/Busta Rhymes musical starring the great Ed Asner, SKIP TO MY LOU, Cinema Virtuel studios is proud to announce our exciting schedule of releases for the next few weeks. Hold on to your popcorn! (But not too tight or a clump will pop out the top and get grease all over you.)
FRUITING BODIES (October 2007)
A gay ghost story based lightly upon the true events in Banff last winter. Directed by Cameron Crowe, written by Roger S.H. Schulman in his live-action debut, starring Martin Henderson and Bruce Willis, and featuring William Shatner in a career-capping performance as a rhombus.
THIS TIME FOR SURE (October 2007)
Don Roos writes and directs this wacky mistaken-identity time-travel romance. Kelly Macdonald can't tell rival scientists Tom Hanks and Brad Pitt apart, and neither can Christopher Walken and Jeff Goldblum (co-starring as the scientists' older selves)! Featuring Jude Law as the guy who can tell everybody apart.
LESTAT, C'EST MOI (November 2007)
Outcast French vampire of royal lineage with paranoid delusions imagines he has returned in the form of a giant centrifuge to avenge the reign of terror. A satiric farce masterpiece from Jeff Stockwell and Peter Farrelly, starring Mike Myers as the vampire and Catherine Keener, in a tour de force reminiscent of Alec Guiness, as Robespierre, Danton, and Maurice Chevalier.
Later in November we also have a football mystery, DEEP COVER; a western historical epic romance, STETSON'S STEPSONS; and a courtroom hostage drama, JUDICIAL RESTRAINTS.
Please address all queries to publicity director Mindy the Amazing Solar-Powered Skinner Box.
Posted on August 24th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Words, Badness.
Cutesy citing of example is played out. Or at least come up with your own clever phrase and let last years' threadbare favorites die. ("I'm looking at you" says hi!)
Posted on August 23rd, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Stock Phrases, Pedantry.
I'm impatient with most online pedantry, for two reasons. First, I view most online discourse as conversation, and it's rude to interrupt conversation to correct people on the fine points of usage. Second, most online pedantry is wrong, in my goddamned opinion; people are constantly making "corrections" that are based on things they were told or read and have never themselves thought about, and many of those corrections are nothing more than prescriptivists insisting on how things ought to be versus how they are, and often enough have no firm grounding either in logic or in the history of the language.
I enjoy the mutability and diversity of the English language. I like jargon and slang, and figure that history will take care of which ones belong and which are transient, and I don't have much interest in disdaining those I don't care for, or in looking down my nose at other folks' language. I use what I like, and read what I like. I'm sorry about the loss of distinction between "imply" and "infer," or "compose" and "comprise," or "eager" and "anxious"; I strive to maintain those useful distinctions on my own writing, but I don't get exercised at people who don't. I have a few eccentricities along these lines -- I'll use "ravel" in preference to "unravel," for instance, because they mean the same thing and "ravel" is a pretty word, and I'm probably a little too eager to explain that "till" is a perfectly legitimate spelling and isn't a truncated form of "until."
And there is nothing, nothing at all, wrong with using "hopefully" to modify a clause, and hopefully you won't let anyone tell you otherwise.
However. Mangling of idiom and stock phrases bugs me, for some reason, more than the misuse or misspelling of individual words. Maybe because idiom is such an elegant development, the grace notes that give language its style, and hearing idiom misused makes my ears hurt and my nerves cringe. The big three misused phrases that bug me this minute:
If you say "This begs the question," followed by a question, you're probably misusing the phrase.
Sour Grapes means to devalue the thing you want but can't have. When you say, after not getting a job, "It probably sucked anyway," that's sour grapes.
Posted on August 13th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Performance.
[I'm archiving some old weblog writing, and a few bits seem to fit here. This is from 7 november 2000]
Every couple of weeks, friends of mine from the Well meet at a bar called Revival. Monday nights there are poets performing upstairs. Though we never left the main bar area, performance poetry could not be escaped last night; we were treated to a special Ambient Lunatic show from a caved-face anger merchant who would be kicked out of your local Tourette's Society for inappropriate behavior.
I missed her opening salvo, in which she apparently overheard Betsy describing a Bush supporter in her office, and loudly asked why they didn't just throw her out the fiftieth floor window? I assume an uncomfortable silence followed.
When I arrived she was scribbling and grunting at the table behind us. I had put on some tunes on the jukebox. The Clash's "Lose This Skin" came on, and she was apparently quite taken with Ellen Foley's long growly vocal lines, and started chiming in with her own loud humming whine, not exactly on pitch but clearly attempting to follow what Foley was doing, or maybe drown it out as a toddler might. I couldn't see her, but I'm told she was also recording herself doing this.
Very well; I like Ellen Foley myself, and it's possible I express some of my enthusiasms in socially questionable ways. But when "Lose This Skin" ended and Blur's "Charmless Man" came on and her Foleyesque wail continued unabated - if anything, her keening got louder and more abrasive -- it began to be a little alarming.
In time she subsided to muttering, with occasional exclamations of a politically confrontational nature, most of them crude and childish enough to make even an east village politico squirm with embarrassment. They weren't especially coherent, though, till eight o'clock performance time neared; suddenly she declaimed in a carrying voice, "Goddess in a world of fucking assholes!"
While we were attempting to recover from this declaration, she added, muttering, "Should have seceded from the union in nineteen-fifty-fucking-five," and, "Morons with no political sense whatsoever," possible referring to us, possibly referring to her fellow poets, possibly referring to voices having a party in her head.
This was nearly the end of the show, but as it happened a couple of our party needed to use the bathrooms at the same time she did. Poor Michael was next in line and when the door opened she poetry-slammed him out of the way, explaining that she needed to fucking piss.
She emerged twenty minutes later.
Posted on August 12th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Comedy.
When I die, I want to reserve a large field -- Kansas, say -- and I want it roofed over, because I don't want a wet funeral. I want an honor guard from all five military branches, and a new branch created for the occasion and disbanded immediately thereafter. My casket should be made from the material of the Fortress of Solitude, filled with all my possessions and those of my neighbors, and it should be shot into space at the end of the ceremony. All living Nobel laureates should be present to pay their respects. The eulogy will be wriiten and scored for five-part harmony by Sufjan Stevens and sung by the Persuasions. The St Louis Symphony, conducted by Leonard Slatkin, will play a funeral mass specially discovered among the unpublished papers of Duke Ellington. A bountiful feast of my favorite foods will be prepared and ceremonially burnt. All attendant mourners will not cease from the business of mourning, which will include (but not be limited to) wailing, gnashing of teeth, and rending of garments. The leaders of all major nations will attend and declare everlasting peace; nations whose leaders shall be present will include Russia, China, India, Brazil, Germany, Great Britain, Canada, and Burkina Faso, because I like the name. A national holiday will be declared. No business will be conducted for two weeks following. Mass suicide in the face of the hopelessness of continuing without me will be discouraged but tolerated. Toads will rain. Ice will cover the earth.
Above all, it should be dignified. I hate ostentation.
Posted on July 6th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Comedy.
from The Gospel According to Nathaniel, Chapter 4, Versus 1 through 12
--possibly apocryphal dedication, frequently cited by partisans in the Serial Comma Wars
And he condescended to come down among them, and stood disdainfully in the plain, and in the company of his technical assistants and financial advisors, and a great rabble of common people out of Flint and Akron and all the Midwest, which came to hear him, seeking handouts. And they were vexed with unclear thoughts and low aspirations, and were asking to be slapped around a bit. And the whole multitude sought to touch him, for they felt his superiority and wished to suck it out of him.
And smelling the rabble, he went back up the mountain the better to look down upon them, turned his back, gathered his hangers-on about him, and said unto them:
Blessed be you rich, for it is but a manifestation of your worldly virtue.
Blessed are you that eat well, for if you don't someone else will.
Blessed are you that laugh, for enjoyment at the expense of others is good clean fun.
Blessed are the arrogant, for the earth is theirs and they shall hold on to it most likely.
Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after power, for they keep the arrogant on their toes.
Blessed are the merciless, for who said life was fair?
Blessed are the clear in thought, for they don't waste my valuable time.
Blessed are they who sow conflict, for they will reap the profits thereof.
Blessed are they who are persecuted for their greatness, for it is lonely at the top.
Blessed are you when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate themselves from your company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for they only envy you and your freedoms. Rejoice, and be excessively glad, and party hard. Now get me out of here; I hate crowds.
Posted on June 20th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Science Fiction.
Every time I proofread the computer security brochure that features large pictures of machines and the prominent headline "Serve and Protect", I shudder.
Posted on June 12th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Badness.
Today's wretched neologism in my work email: webinar.