Don sequiturs

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.

After the warming

Uggh.  Temperatures at Blutarsky levels this morning -- 0.0 (Dean Wormer: "Mis-ter Blu-tar-sky.  Zero. Point. Zero.").  The eastern part of the country must be getting the full effect of the climate change / global warming thingy just released by the UN (and appropriately mocked by Mark Steyn here).   Aussie blogger Tim Blair calls it the Gore effect: blather and propaganda about global warmening, often provided by Jupiter Pluvius himself, Al Gore, is inevitably followed by arctic or very below normal temperatures.   

In case you're still wondering, I'm a big skeptic of the global warminating.  It's of course partly because I think its proponents, like Al Gore, are so full of sh*t about everything else -- global warming seems to be the pet cause of pseudo-intellectuals who haven't had anything else to get enthused about since the fall of the Soviet Union.  I know prejudice isn't justification: one can be full of sh*t on most subjects yet occasionally right about others, and one can reach the correct conclusion for the wrong reasons; nevertheless.   

The main reason I'm skeptical, though, is that, as a student of history, I'd say warmer is better.  Ice ages are a bitch for humanity.  You can look it up.  And in the 70s we were all told that we were on the verge of a dreaded cold period.  So why is the current (19th century til now) enwarming bad?  The globe's temperature clearly fluctuates over time (or we wouldn't have the concept of recurrent "Ice Ages"), and apparently (according to the Steyn article and WSJ editorial linked above) the climate change politburo has abandoned the (in)famous "hockey stick" graph that purportedly showed that world temperature levels were flat as a board for a millennium or so and only recently took a dramatic upward turn. This guy certainly thinks we're in a completely natural cycle of warming. A certain type of person, though, seems to have a need to believe that industrialization is ruining the world: that sometime in the first half of the 19th century the world was at its ideal temperature and then man-made warming ruined it.   Sometimes it takes an idiot to crystallize and speak aloud the faulty assumptions of conventional wisdom -- so take it away, Matt Lauer: "Earth’s intricate web of ecosystems thrived for millions of years as natural paradises, until we came along, paved paradise, and put up a parking lot."

So, according to a noted TV personality, we need to get back to the garden (never mind that the garden was red in tooth claw, full of malaria and dysentery, starvation, and a life expectancy of less than 50 years) -- if you believe that you'll believe anything.  Or anyone.  Even Al Gore.  It all sounds very ahistorical to me, so, like I said, I'm skeptical.  Anyways, I wish Gore would just shut the f up (or go back to harassing Dee Snider) because I really dislike these single digit temperatures.  (Oh, and Al? The polar bears are just fine.)

Game Day

Crank up the Autumn Thunder, the Bears are in the Super Bowl!  The atmosphere in the Sequiturs household is electric:

Couldn't resist posing the ol' Electric Football guys after Mrs. Sequiturs this week by coincidence found one of the Colts in a drawer and I remembered the Colts and da Bears were two of the teams in our Electric Football set. It came with the Colts and Packers and we ordered the Bears, Vikings, and Lions to complete the NFC Central.  The details may be lost somewhat in the above tableaux (you can click on the images for a slighter larger image), but they show Peyton Manning (the really tall, really white guy -- just like in real life) going back to pass deep in his own territory, on 4th down, in the 4th quarter.  Oh, and the Bears' middle linebacker is, of course, no. 51.

UPDATE: So much for the predictive power of Electric Football tableaux.

UPDATE THE SECOND: My eight-year daughter was prophetic -- when Devin Hester ran the opening kickoff back and Mom Sequiturs and I were whooping it up she was the one who said "remember Ohio State?"  What was interesting was that the Bears were getting beat every which way, statistically: turnovers, time of possession, # of first downs, the Colts were giving them the business down there -- yet the Bears were still very much in the game until Grossman threw that "punt" in the fourth quarter.  Oh, well.  There's always next year (which, if the trend continues, will be the start of 20 straight championship-less years for the Bears).