Don sequiturs

hiatus

Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, so I'm not going to be posting for awhile.  My current plan is to take an extended break, then quit.

If history is a guide,

I'll see things in the baseball playoffs that inspire me to post and break out of the blogging doldrums; right now, though, I'm too busy with the work and the taking the kids to stuff, and I still have more DVDs than I can watch ever -- at the moment it's The Complete Season 1 of Saturday Night Live. And The Complete Season 2 comes out in December -- yay. I told my son if he watched them he'd be the coolest kid in junior high, but he didn't believe me.

Arizona beats the odds

Interesting article from some site called the Hardball Times (link via the Wall Street Journal website's "Daily Fix" column) positing a rational explanation for why this year's Arizona Diamondbacks are (at this writing) 71-56 despite baseball's version of the Pythagorean theorem saying they should be eleven games worse, 60-67, given that their opponents have outscored them 575 to 543. (Last year, Cleveland, unfortunately, deviated from the Pythagorean theorem in the opposite direction.) The explanation (basically, the D-Backs have great closers, but terrible middle relief) sounds reasonable to me, although it would seem sheer random variation can't be ruled out. The P-theorem in baseball is not perfect. For instance, the very best and very worst teams' P-wins usually under- and overstate, respectively, their actual wins: The P-theorem says that the 1954 Indians should have gone 104-50, but they actually went 111-43, while the '62 Mets were 10 games worse than their predicted record of 50-110.

Has the concept of the baseball Pythagorean theorem entered the mainstream? The article reminded me that I heard it mentioned on a Reds TV broadcast a week or so ago, in the same context as the article -- the incongruity of the D-Backs' won-lost record this year. The Reds weren't playing the Diamondbacks at the time, but the announcers mentioned the final score of that night's D-Backs game, at which point lead announcer Thom Don't Call Me Tom Brenneman commented on how odd Arizona's success was because "generally your won-lost record is determined by the margin by which you outscore your opponents" (as I recall), to which his sidekick responded (again, as best as I can recall) "yep, the Pythagorean theorem." I almost fell off the couch; baseball aficionados have known about the P-theorem for a long time, but it was shocking to hear members of the media acknowledge it.

The crooked pitch

Somehow in my searching for other stuff on the Interwebs I found a page on a relatively new bio of Hall of Fame pitcher Mordecai "Three Finger" Brown. I have no idea as to the quality of the book, but the cover is pretty awesome:

Some background on Brown here, and here's his stats. The bio page at the link notes that the Cubs teams of 1906-10 of which Brown was a key part won more games in a five year span than any other major league team. Bill James' Historical Abstract points out that the Cubs are also the winningest team over a 10 year period (1904-13); Brown was a member of the Cubs for each of those years, although his last good year was 1911.

"So long, and thanks for nothing"

With that Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy-inspired headline, I note this sad bit of news from livescience.com:

"The Yangtze River dolphin is now almost certainly extinct, making it the first dolphin that humans drove to extinction, scientists have now concluded after an intense search for the endangered species."

It's the time of the season, for blogging

Oh, don't worry, I'm still neglecting the blog; this is just a post so I can say I posted something in July. So what am I doing in my spare time? Reading? Not as much as I should. I've been into the science fiction a little bit, very unusual for me: the stories of H.P. Lovecraft, to be specific. I'm also reading a collection of Henry Kuttner's work -- I'm actually reading my son's copy of the book (he's already read it). I also went to look up something or other in the Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract last week and wound up re-reading the whole thing.

DVDs? I still have more DVDs than I can ever watch, ever. Right now, I'm working my way through The Val Lewton Collection, both the films themselves and the commentary tracks. The kids and I are about to start on Season Five of The Twilight Zone. Definitely the least of the seasons, but there's still some good moments; most of Rod Serling's literary pretensions had fallen by the wayside by that season, with the shows moving mechanically from plot point A to plot point B to set up surprise ending C, but that kind of approach can be more engaging to kids than that of the earlier episodes, which sometimes are too allegorical and ponderous.

Latest musical obsession? The hard-luck Brit Invasion group The Zombies. Summaries of their career here and here.

I've arrived late at the Zombies' admiration party. I had on my iPod their three big hits that everybody knows, "She's Not There," "Tell Her No," and "Time of the Season," but hadn't heard any of their other stuff. I was aware, however, that the entry on the Zombies in my dog-eared copy of Nicholas Schaffner's The British Invasion asserted that they were no ordinary three-hit wonder, and that it further opined that many of their other singles, which had done nothing on the charts at the time, were lost classics, as was their 1968 LP Odessey and Oracle, so when iTunes added Odessey and Oracle recently, I took a chance and bought it, and boy am I glad I did. It's not the exercise in pretentious, hippy-dippy mysticism I had expected from the title and the cover art. As many have noted, it could be considered a British Pet Sounds: melodic, melancholic, 60s pop -- in other words, pure catnip for me, with my fondness for that sound. I'd also compare it to the Kinks at their Something Else stage, or the Beatles, particularly Paul McCartney, at their Sgt. Pepper/ Revolver stages, although I'd hasten to add that the album is not overtly imitating any of those comparable works; it's just that someone who likes "God Only Knows," and "Eleanor Rigby" and "Waterloo Sunset" will probably like Odessey as much or better.

I also went on the eBays and bought a CD compilation of The Zombies' 45s, and again I was much impressed -- how they didn't have a ton of hits in the 60s is hard to understand. (The AllMusic article linked above says their jazzy arrangements were too challenging for mid-60s pop audiences.) They were even less respected in their own country than in the States: "Tell Her No" didn't make the Top 40 in the UK.

In addition to the great, flop, singles, the Zombies from 1964-67 put out an EP (also very good), an album that was merely OK (the original songs by The Zombies' resident tunesmiths, keyboardist Rod Argent and bassist Chris White, are good, but, like on many albums of the era, there are also some ill-conceived R&B covers -- in the Zombies' case, Bo Diddley's "Road Runner," and Muddy Waters' "I Got My Mojo Working" in particular, a point made in this irreverent review of the album here; scroll up and down for other comments on their works), and three songs (all of them excellent) for the film Bunny Lake is Missing. None of this truly excellent crop of material matched their early commercial success. By 1967, their first record company dropped them. They were picked up by CBS, at which point they recorded their aforementioned misspelled masterpiece Odessey. When that album tanked, the group broke up.

Then a funny thing happened: session man/ producer Al Kooper bought a copy of Odessey while visiting the UK, was suitably knocked out by it, and pestered CBS to release it in the States. They did, and the album flopped here, too. But then another strange thing happened: DJs started playing the last track on the album,"Time of the Season." It took off, and, fittingly, the Zombies had a posthumous hit (one which gets used ad infinitum in commercials, movies, and TV shows to evoke the era). Also, the reputation of Odessey and Oracle started out low, but then it started to grow: eventually, it was ranked #80 on Rolling Stones' list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time (for what that's worth).

A 4-volume box CD set called Zombie Heaven, released in 1997, and containing everything the Zombies ever released, plus more (much as the protagonist in one of Woody Allen's short stories boasted of having "more than total recall"), seems to have drawn further attention and confirmed their by now towering critical reputation. (Fittingly (again), one of their songs declares "this will be our year/ took a long time to come".) The sophisticated musical touches on their records and their introspective, if not self-absorbed, lyrics, fit in with current musical tastes better than the efforts of many of their contemporaries. In fact, based on what I've read on the internets, the Zombies may have already reached a point where so many of the cognoscenti agree that they're underrated that it's hard to find anyone left who actually underrates them.

Summertime blues

Looks like this little puppet show is going on hiatus, I've been too busy at work even to write post saying I'm too busy to post. Plus, I don't feel much like blogging on the burning issues of the day; Bush, by pushing his lllegal immigrant amnesty bill, has pretty much made his second term the disaster I predicted (and by "predicted" I mean "mentioned casually as a possibility"). Plus on top of that I foolishly agreed to help an organization of which I'm part with their website, which I found meant designing their website -- the time spent on that takes away any enthusiasm I have for tinkering with this site. Hasta luego.

Can a movie be too British?

Apparently it can.  I saw the original version of the caper movie The Italian Job recently, and it was mildly disappointing, although it does pick up at the end, where the thieves make their escape using three Mini Coopers, which seem to take on personalities of their own in a chase that plays somewhat like a live-action cartoon. 

The planning stage of the heist, though, the first hour of the film, is supposed to be amusing, and, while I like British humour -- Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, and all that -- the comedy in this film wasn't the least bit funny.  Benny Hill (as Professor Peach) probably has the best comedy bits in the film, and  even he isn't that funny in it.  It's kind of tasteless as well.  The Brits seem to find amusing the very concept of cheeky, lower-class crooks pulling off a major job (which was how much of the public reacted to the Great Train Robbers of 1963, come to think of it), and they also respond to the warped patriotism of the situation (the Brits in charge, outwitting the European authorities and the Italian mafia, using British-made motor cars), but without any actual, you know, jokes, it all falls flat if you're a Yank.   Until the Mini Coopers are unleashed, which is when, as I said, the movie takes off.  The remake did a better job of working in the comedy, but the action sequences in the last half hour of the old one hold up better than the action sequences in the new version.  It's probably worth sitting through the build-up to get to the heist sequence, but just barely.

Don't let Jimmy Carter scare you

Have a great Memorial Day, in honor of those who chose to defend this country's freedom.

From the "eBay: is there anything it can't do?" Department

So a couple weeks ago I was re-reading Peter Guralnick's two-volume biography of Elvis (actually, I skimmed it and re-read the more interesting parts) and I thought I recognized the title of one of the books he cited a few times in the first volume:  "The Rockin' 50s" by Arnold Shaw.  I went on eBay and immediately recognized from the picture of the cover that I had checked that book out from the Defiance public library and read it when I was in grade school, or maybe high school.  It's out of print, but I bought a copy on eBay from a lady in Pennsylvania (for $2.00! And shipping, of course), and now I'm starting to re-read that.  The reason the book stuck in my mind was that, despite its title, it actually pays more attention to the existing pop music milieu into which rock n' roll music erupted than to rock itself.  In fact, I don't recall any other book I've read that does a better job of describing the contrast between the music business and the music-buying (and -listening) habits of the public before and after the arrival of rock music (the author was himself in the business in the 50s, as a music publisher).  The first couple of chapters I've re-read show that the book is as interesting as I remembered it.  Good deal.

Speaking of the rockin' 50s, the recent ill health of Bo Diddley prompted me to look for videos of him on the internet for purposes of a blog post, since I'm a big Diddley fan.  I had a vinyl double album of his greatest hits put out by Chess Records in a cheap cover that fell apart about 20 minutes after I bought it (the album cover I mean, not the album, which I played a gazillion times and which I think I still have).  I replaced that with the CD The Chess Box, and then most recently replaced that with an album from iTunes that sounded like it was mixed better than The Box.   

A lot of writing on Bo emphasizes his role as "The Originator" and how much he influenced the British Invasion and early heavy metal, and how his songs have been covered by so many other artists ("I'm a Man" and "Roadrunner" by The Yardbirds, "Mona" by The Rolling Stones, "Before You Accuse Me" by Eric Clapton, "Who Do You Love" by Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, The Doors, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and about 800 others -- George Thorogood's version has been used recently in ads for Sam Adams beer), so much so that the quality of his music on its own terms gets overlooked (although not always -- that's what I liked about this Rolling Stone story on Bo from a couple years back).  Also, while he's most associated with the much-imitated "Bo Diddley" beat from his 1955 debut hit "Bo Diddley," a listen to a broader selection of his songs shows a great variety of styles. 

Anyways, on to the video -- unfortunately, YouTube's selection of vintage Bo videos isn't great.  There is a goofy version of "Roadrunner" where he sings the first verse then continues for a minute or so as an instrumental.   There's a slightly better clip of him from the mid-60s doing "Hey Bo Diddley" (not one of my favorites) segueing into "Bo Diddley" -- which provokes some rather lame hand-jiving amongst the live audience. 

YouTube didn't have his mid-50s appearance on Ed Sullivan performing "Bo Diddley";  luckily, though, it was posted elsewhere -- that's probably the best of the lot.  (Note to anyone reading this who is under 40 -- Ed isn't drunk in that clip; he always talked like that.)

As always, perusing the videos on YouTube led to some other finds.  For example, here's Jerry Lee Lewis doing a totally out of control, seven minute plus version of "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" on some English TV show during the 60s.  The Killer looks just awful, and it's a little disturbing to watch him as he whips the crowd into a frenzy.  Highly recommended.

This is really brilliant

I'm breaking radio silence to say merely that this video counting down from 100 to 1 with movie quotes is really brilliant. What makes it especially brilliant is that he uses great movies for the most part, Sunset Boulevard, Citizen Kane, The Wild Bunch, etc. etc. -- I recognized almost all of the clips (here's the list). Also, many of the numbers in the quotes are not mentioned in passing but are highly pertinent bits of dialogue in the film, for example 57 for The Manchurian Candidate, 50 for Cool Hand Luke, 39 for the The 39 Steps, 11 for This is Spinal Tap. Bravo, Vincent. Let's hope the suits don't order it taken down for a few days at least. (Via Ace.)

Odds and sods -- April '07

I've put a ton of items in my "for website" folder over the last month or so, but I haven't been moved to write about hardly any of them for some reason, especially The Big Important Issues in the news.  So here's some blathering over a few exceedingly unimportant things:

The book, it ain't worth a-rea-eadin': I recently read Bob Dylan's Chronicles, Vol. 1, and it wasn't bad, but it also it wasn't very good either, and nowhere near what I expected from the lavish praise given it by critics (the paperback edition I read starts with twelve and a half pages of ecstatic blurbs from reviewers).  As most reviewers noted, this isn't a comprehensive memoir; Dylan instead covers four vignettes, or perhaps a better word would be acts (in the sense of acts of a stage play) in his career, two of them before he was a star and two from later in his career, and he doesn't cover them in chronological order.  I'm fine with that approach conceptually; the trouble is that the two vignettes from later in his career are real "who cares" territory (the longest section of the book deals with the recording of his 1989 album No Mercy -- can you name a single song from that album?  me neither), and not much insight can be gained from the other two sections, in my view.  Certainly he doesn't answer those obvious questions about his career that everyone asks (like, "when are the Traveling Wilburys getting back together?"  and "So what's with all those adverbial / adjectival song titles in the 60s, like 'Queen Jane Approximately,' 'Absolutely Sweet Marie,' 'Obviously Five Believers,' 'Temporary Like Achilles,' 'Positively 4th Street'?" and "What kind of song can a tambourine man play, anyway? You are aware it's a percussion instrument, right?").  What it lacked in a coherent narrative, it also lacked in memorable anecdotes.  Not recommended.

It don't come easy:  The Tigers beat the Twins today, 4-3, in their 12th one-run game in their first twenty-four games (they're 7-5 in one run games, 6-6 in the rest).  That's a pace for 81 one-run games, which sounded like a lot to me. It's worrisome, too: it would seem like playing every other game with no margin for error would eventually wear players down psychologically.  Last year the Detroiters played 44 one run games (and were 24-20, worse on a percentage basis than their overall record of 95-67, which means last year's turnaround wasn't due at all to lucky bounces in close games); the major league leader last year in one run games was Pittsburgh with 55.  A little internet searching disclosed that the record for a season is 75 -- Houston in 1971.  The AL record is 74 -- the White Sox in 1968.   I found that record in The Sporting News Baseball Record Book, which I was astonished (and gratified) to learn is now a free electronic download on the Sporting News' website.  I'll definitely have to take advantage of that, since my hardcopy version of the book is the 1987 edition.

Down in the basement: Not to sound like Ron Burgundy ("I have many leather-bound books and my apartment smells of rich mahogany"), but I own a number of horror/ science fiction anthologies, most of them used 1960s paperbacks.  I hardly ever get rid of books, especially ones I might look at later, and especially ones that are not easily replaced, but apparently I got rid of one of my horror anthology books, the one with a story called "The Thing in the Cellar," because I could never find the book with that story in it.  I remembered it scaring the bejeebers out of me when I was a kid, and I tried to find it because I didn't want to deprive my son of that experience.  No luck, though, and I figured there was no way to to find it again.  I couldn't remember the title of the anthology or the author of the story and thought because of copyright (and the obscurity of the story) that the text wouldn't be posted on the internets, but I thought wrong.  A quick search of The Google for "The Thing in the Cellar" turned up the full text of the story (which was published much earlier (1932) than I had thought), along with some biographical details on the author, an English doctor named David Keller.  It doesn't seem much to read it now, but this short story made quite an impression on me as a kid (and I wasn't the only one; the fellow who posted it on the web says the creepy little tale gave him sleepless nights as a twelve year old).

Life imitates "Major League"

Due to the continuing bad weather in Cleveland, Major League Baseball this week took the unusual step of moving the Indians' home games against the Los Angeles Angels to the Milwaukee Brewers' Miller Field, which was interesting, since, in the 1989 movie Major League, Milwaukee's then-home field (County Stadium) for some reason played the role of Cleveland's Municipal Stadium.  I thought I would be the only one to make that connection, but to the surprise of this commentator the Milwaukee people really played up the Major League angle, playing "Wild Thing" over the PA system when a Cleveland reliever was brought in in the 9th, asking for Dorn to be used as a pitch hitter, and so on (details in the articles here and here).  Bill Veeck (one-time owner of the Indians, and, before that, the then-minor league Brewers) would have definitely approved of the showmanship and wackiness on display.

All the cancellations in Cleveland reminded me that I had never tried to figure out, back when I was something of an amateur baseball historian and noticed such things, why the Indians played so few games in the 1945 season (bear with me here, or not):  Cleveland finished that year with a record of 73-72, when the season was supposed to run 154 games.  Nine cancellations seems like a lot.  Actually, they had two ties, so they played 147 games total, but that was still the fewest in the league; the totals, counting ties, were: Boston -- 157; Washington (the Senators) -- 156; Detroit -- 155; St. Louis (the Browns) -- 154; Philadelphia (the A's) -- 153; New York -- 152;  Chicago -- 150; Cleveland -- 147. 

Since we now have this internet dealio, I thought I might actually try to solve the Mystery of the Missing Games. Baseball-reference showed that the Indians didn't play any games that year between May 13-19, but then, when I checked on the other AL teams, it turns out they didn't play during that week either.  Was it something to do with V-E Day occurring the previous week? Nope. Baseball Library's chronology showed that all of the AL games were rained out for four straight days (see the entry for May 18).  That, and having their end of the season doubleheader against the White Sox rained out (see entry for Sept. 30), probably accounts for most of the missing games.  The team vs. team stats for the year for the Sox and the As show that they played two and four (respectively) fewer games against the Indians than their other opponents -- it appears that, in a season with a lot of rainouts, the Indians were hit the worst.

In the course of this research, if you can call it that, some fascinating sidelights turned up, as always, like the fact that the A's in '45 had a road record of 13-63. Putrid.  The chronology for September 1945 is overflowing with interesting tidbits: a DiMaggio hit his 4th grand slam of the season, but it was Vince not Joe; the Yankees, due to the wartime player shortage, used a pitcher whose last major league appearance had been 22 years earlier; one home run was hit by the Senators in their home stadium all year, and it was an inside-the-parker; there was a no-hitter and Bob Feller's sixth career one-hitter (he would wind up with 12 for his career, along with 3 no-hitters); a contending AL team (the Senators) wrapped up their season a week before everyone else; a record was set for walks in a season; the Cubs set a record with 20 doubleheader sweeps in a season, and also wound up with 21 wins against the Reds for the season (against one loss); a batting title was won on the last day of the season; a pigeon figured in two plays; one-armed outfielder Pete Gray got his last major league hit; and Bobo Newsom and Johnny Dickshot are mentioned.

Anyways, what will the league do this year if the Indians are in contention and have played 3 or so fewer games than the other contenders?  Last year, St. Louis and San Francisco would have had to make up a game on the Monday between the end of the season on Sunday and the start of the playoffs on Tuesday if the game had been of consequence to the standings (it wasn't), but there isn't time to make up a whole lost series.  So there could be some weird wild stuff if the Indians are in the race for the playoffs (and the punditry says they will be).

It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times

Ohio State's loss last night in the NCAA basketball championship continues quite a dubious streak for me as a fan.  Last fall, my favorite baseball team, the Tigers, lost the World Series.  Then Ohio State lost the NCAA BCS championship in football. Then my favorite NFL team, the Bears, lost the Super Bowl.  And now the Buckeyes lose in basketball. Better to get there and lose than to not get there at all, I suppose (and the Bears and Tigers took a long time getting there).  Fortunately, it's baseball season again so I can put the Buckeyes' loss to one side.  At my house it's also softball season, since my daughter's playing softball. The last couple of days we've been playing catch in the backyard to practice.  As I tell her, if you can catch a wrench, you can catch a ball.

Movie rambling: Five

Years ago, the TNT Network (back when it ran the classic films now shown on TCM, which didn't exist then) showed the 1951 post-apocalypse movie Five, and I was impressed enough to include it on my list of top 100 films.  I hadn't seen it in years, it's never run on TV anymore, and I couldn't find it on DVD.  Recently, however, I picked up a DVD copy at a fairly reasonable price on the eBays.  It came in a suspiciously generic-looking case, but the print of the film used for the transfer to disc doesn't seem that bad, considering. 

A second viewing demonstrated that my top 100 ranking was maybe a little too generous, but it is better than most other atom war survivor movies.  The film starts in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear war that has seemingly killed nearly everyone on earth, although who was fighting who over what is never discussed -- a nice touch actually. Five survivors gradually converge on a remote house (conveniently, it's writer/ director Arch Oboler's own Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house).  The plot concentrates on the human element, rather than any possible science fiction aspects. The pace is slow at times, and it's a little on the talky side (Oboler's background was in radio) but the performances are superb, and some of the imagery stayed with me days after I watched it.  (I'm becoming more inclined to view "imagery staying with me" as one of the more important criteria for evaluating a movie.  I didn't think much, for instance, of the Japanese horror movies Ju-On and Dark Water when I first saw them a few months ago, but they both gave me nightmares afterwards, so as horror flicks they must've done something right.)  There's a grim, gritty tone about Five that is unusual in a 50s American film; someone on the internet speculated that the look and feel of Five might have inspired that of George Romero's original Night of the Living Dead, and I can also see the similarities.  I'd recommend this one to any movie buff if the opportunity to see it presents itself.

It's a confusing and pointless list, yet I can't look away

This list (here and here) of the "10 most dangerous flims" seems to change its criteria for "dangerous" for each item on the list (unlucky, cursed, financially unsuccessful, tragic -- it's all over the place, although I definitely expected The Conqueror to be on the list), but it still collects some interesting, if dark, tidbits of movie history.  Via Pop Candy.

Not warming to the idea

It's hard to keep up with all the anti-warming warning material;  while the global warming hysteria of Al Gore, Jupiter Pluvius, has the support of the Hollywood elite -- the stupidest rich people in the world, not counting certain members of the British royal family -- Gore has lost John Hinderaker of Powerline, who, like me, is old enough to remember the global colding threat of the 70s.  Iowahawk is also cool, so to speak, to the hot new idea of buying carbon indulgences.  Aussie Tim Blair meanwhile continues to document the bizarre phenomenon of the Gore coldening effect (which seems to have a better empirical basis than carbon emission-created global warming).  I'd rather be on Powerline's, and Blair, and Iowahawk's side than Hollywood's any day, so I have to say that's a pleasing development to me.  Anyway, Gore should concentrate on getting rid of the carbon emissions by the Martians, who have their own global warming issues.

Of course this is somehow George Bush's fault

Signs of the apocalypse: it was dogs and cats living together in Ghostbusters, now its cows eating chickens in real life (taking their own advice I suppose).

Message: they care

I liked this guy's comment (via Powerline) suggesting the Democrats switch to supporting the other side for a change, since, by throwing their, ahem, support to the other side, they actually might help our cause more. I especially liked it because a week or so ago I made a simllar comment to a friend who made a sarcastic comment about the French.  I said, "you must be a supporter of the French, under the Democrats' definition of support: you put them down to your friends, you oppose everything they stand for, and you're critical of their actions and motives. "

The sound of one ear listening

From the "iTunes -- is there anything it can't do?" Department:  a while back, I downloaded the Fats Domino song "I Want to Walk You Home" from the iTunes music store and was disappointed to discover that the track was presented as if it were stereo when in fact it was a two-track recording obviously never meant for stereo.  Allow me to explain.  Back in the 50s, it became customary in the recording studio to record songs intended to be released on 45 rpm records with two tracks: one for the vocal, one for the instruments (of course, nowadays, there can be many, many tracks), which were then mixed by the producer for the final mono version of the song for the 45. Until the late 60s, nearly all 45s were released in mono, not stereo; the idea of the two tracks was merely to improve the recording and mixing process:  to avoid re-doing everything if there was a mistake in either the vocal or the music, and to make sure the instruments didn't drown out the vocal, as could happen if it were all recorded through one microphone.  The intent of having two separate tracks was not to create a stereo recording. They could be mixed to create a stereo track.  Until the late 60s however, mono was a much more important medium than stereo in rock and pop, mainly due to the importance of the 45 rpm single relative to the more "adult" stereo LP.  Singles were carefully mixed in mono to make the maximum noisy impact from a single speaker (a "wall of sound," to coin a phrase) and then, as an afterthought, if at all, mixed for more sedate stereo.  For example, the Beatles and their producer George Martin, until the final triumph of stereo in '68-'69, lavished much more attention on the mono mixes, as did Berry Gordy at Motown, where the stereo mixes of songs were slapped together by engineers working the night shift.  (Much of the above factual background, when not based on general knowledge or the evidence of my own ears, is based on the book 45 RPM: the History, Heroes, and Villains of a Pop Music Revolution and, as to the Beatles, on Mark Lewisohn's excellent The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions. For more, much more, on the Beatles from the standpoint of stereo vs. mono recordings, this article just about covers it.)

In the vinyl record era, 45 RPM singles usually stayed in print where there was any demand for the song.  In the CD and mp3 era, however, vinyl went bye-bye and many 50s and 60s recordings became available only in their inferior stereo versions.  Apparently, the record companies must cater to the same type of taste that views all black & white movies as inferior to color. (Check out this compilation of 60s hits, where one of the supposed selling points is that it contains stereo rather than mono versions of the songs.)  The original, preferable, mono versions of 50s and 60s songs are tough to find.  Only rarely will iTunes specifically list a track as the "Mono Single Version." EMI has made the original mono versions of most of the Beatles' singles available only in a prohibitively expensive box set.  Think of that: the most popular rock act ever, and some of their most popular songs cannot be easily heard the way they were originally heard (and were intended by the group to be heard).

"I Want to Walk You Home," the track I downloaded, is an even worse situation, faux stereo, an abomination one encounters occasionally in the digital age.  Apparently this (typical) two-track recording was never mixed for stereo, but that didn't stop the record company: what you get in their "stereo" version is one track on each channel, totally separated, i.e., the instruments in the left speaker only, and Fats singing in the right speaker only -- very weird, and of course not at all how it's supposed to sound.

I wondered to myself, "what if there were a way to turn faux stereo back into mono?"  Turns out, I discovered after some internet searching, iTunes allows you to do just that. Once you burn the iTunes-purchased song to a CD (it can be a rewriteable CD), you set the "import" preferences of iTunes to "custom," which then allows you to import a CD track in mono -- essentially, converting stereo to mono.  In less than 2 minutes, I had the recording sounding the way it was supposed to, or close to it.   The traditionalist/ purist in me is still bothered, though, that in the switch to a new technology the record companies did not try harder to preserve records' original, superior, sound.

Fats, as he was meant to be.

After the warming: there's battle lines bein' drawn

Good piece by Wall Street Journal columnist Pete Du Pont critical of what passes for conventional wisdom on global warming; nothing new to me, but it's a useful summary.  I also just noticed this week that National Review Online has a new blog devoted to global enwarmering and they've named the blog Planet Gore, after Jupiter Pluvius himself.  (While I believe Jupiter Pluvius is the correct nickname for Gore, given his god-like powers over the weather, it is also not incorrect to refer to him as Jupiter Tonans, since Gore's sales pitch bears a striking resemblance to that of "Jupiter Tonans" in the Herman Melville short story "The Lightning-Rod Man" ("spite of my treatment, and spite of my dissuasive talk of him to my neighbors, the Lightning-rod man still dwells in the land; still travels in storm-time, and drives a brave trade with the fears of man. ").)   While I'm at it, I might as well link to this amusing take (via Tim Blair) on the sad plight of the poor beleaguered polar bears, since one simply cannot discuss global warming without mentioning those darn polar bears.

So it now look like on one side of the global warming discussion you have what I view as the sensible, rational people, whilst the other side attracts the usual suspects: those prone to conspiracy theories, intolerant of debate, shrill, alarmist, hypocritical, anti-American, and anti-free markets; in other words, where a person stands on the whole global warming/ climate change/ manbearpig menace is based on something other than a dispassionate analysis of climatological data.

I also noticed that Planet Jupiter Pluvius had a very interesting comment from a statistician on the shakiness of the inferential house of cards supporting global roasting.  A little statistical analysis is worth boatloads of words from the Al Gores of the world.  In fact, despite (or because of) not being educated in those fields, as I get older, more and more I think nothing would improve the level of public debate on so many issues more than if the majority of people had some basic understanding of statistics and economics. 

Along those lines, I thought it interesting that, after the widespread criticism (example here) of a recent NY Times article celebrating the "fact" that 51% of women now live without a spouse (a stat reached in part by counting all females 15 and older in the definition of "women"), the executive editor of the Times responded to the debacle by "decid[ing] to meet with staffers with expertise in statistics and demographics to create a 'vetting network to help with the editing of articles dealing with those subjects.'” (Source.)  Although that sounds encouraging, I doubt that the Times will follow through, due to a) the time and expense it will entail and b) the fact that the Timesmen will soon discover that, if all social science-related stories must first meet minimal standards of statistical rigor, then there will be very few of those types of stories left to publish.

"Spot the common problem"

Andrew Bolt presents us with a poser.  (Via Instapundit.)

On a related theme, David Thompson writes a lengthy, but excellent, essay entitled "Blunting the Senses in the Name of Fairness," on the mindset (anti-Western Civilization? Wishful thinking? Both?) that equates murderous Muslims with "fundamentalists" of other religions.  (Via LGF.) 

After the warming, part II

As a follow-up to my earlier post on the Gore effect, I noticed that the always sensible Donald Sensing has a recent post that makes more coherently the point I was trying to make, with my flip comment that global warming would be good because ice ages are a bitch for humanity.

The Washington Post flunks Journalism 101

Details here and here and here. Another example of what Rush Limbaugh calls the "drive-by media"; leaping to conclusions and misinterpreting documents and then correcting later, after the damage has already been done (a classic example here). The mistakes are always in the same direction, too; the papers should seriously think about hiring a conservative advocate of some sort, who reads these type of stories with the skepticism that liberal reporters and editors abandon when a story too good to be true (when I first read the "inappropriate" use of intelligence story on Yahoo last week I suspected something fishy, just from past experience) has the potential to make the Bush adminstration look bad. Of course, that would require the liberal media to be aware of their systemic ideological blindspots, which is probably too much ask (they're called blindspots for a reason, after all).

The mystery deepens

As a follow-up to an earlier post, in which I speculated as to why so many commercials feature songs -- some quite obscure -- recorded in the 60s by the British Invasion group the Kinks, I just heard another one in a commercial: "I Gotta Move," the B-side to the Kinks' 1964 hit "All Day and All of the Night." I don't know what the product was, so I don't know if it was inappropriate obscure commercial music wierdness. As for why this is happening, I'm leaning now toward the advertising industry's herd instinct as the most likely reason: the more the Kinks' music is used, the more the Kinks' music is used. Because advertisers are out of ideas (as the latest round of Super Bowl commercials demonstrated).

UPDATE (2/16): The commercial using "I Gotta Move" is for Volvo. I saw it again, during Ugly Betty.