Month: April 2011

Beatles Island Songs, 13-4

I’ve long been of the opinion that this song, consciously or otherwise, evokes the Gospel of John 1:1.


JEOPARDY! answers (questions at the end)

BEATLES LYRICS $100: “Na na na na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na…”
BEATLES LYRICS $200: “All the lonely people, where do they all belong?”
BEATLES LYRICS $400: “Children at your feet, wonder how you manage to make ends meet”
BEATLES LYRICS $500: “There beneath the blue suburban skies”
BEATLES LYRICS $1,000 (Daily Double): “Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book”
SONGS BY THE NUMBER $200: This Beatles song begins “When I get older, losing my hair Many years from now…”
BEFORE & AFTER $600: Beatles song about a “Talented Mr. Ripley” co-star
JEOPARDY! BOOBY TRAPS $600: This “Beatles drummer” was born in India in 1941
NEW AGE STUFF $800: In the ’60s your parents might have imitated the Beatles & visited one of these Hindu religious retreats
NO. 3 SONGS $100: The Beatles sang that he “doesn’t have a point of view, knows not where he’s going to”
FOR RICHARD $200: The Beatles we are all familiar with were John, Paul, George & the man born with this name
***
Beatles named #1 top artist of the last fifty years, as though there was a question about it. And in another poll, Paul McCartney is named ‘the best bass guitar player of all time’. What group had the #1, the #2, the #3, the #4 AND the #5 song on the U.S. Billboard chart, this week in 1964?

The Making of the Most Famous Album Cover – take a wild guess.

George Harrison’s Favorite Gibson Guitars
***
The rules of engagement

13 For No One from Revolver. I find this McCartney absolutely beautiful. Simple yet devastating. Vocal, then horn solo, then vocal and horn. Stunningly effective.
12 The Word from Rubber Soul. I’ve long been of the opinion that this song, consciously or otherwise, evokes the Gospel of John 1:1. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” And in the song, the Word is Love. Ironic since it came out around the point when some people were burning Beatles albums because of a comment by primary composer Lennon about the Beatles being more popular than Jesus. Oh, and I LOVE the three-part harmony.
11 Day Tripper from a Double A-side single (UK), Yesterday and Today (US). You can tell that the intro is a solid hook by the number of times bands playing live will often finish it off with this familiar set of chords. Lennon, with McCartney.
10 Twist and Shout from Please Please Me (K), Introducing the Beatles/the Early Beatles (US). The song is the last song recorded for the album, done in one take, pretty much shredding Lennon’s voice. The harmony intro of ascending thirds is classic. Among the greatest cover songs EVER.
9 Good Morning Good Morning from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The rooster at the beginning was supposed to suggest the Kellogg’s corn flakes cereal rooster. Somehow, I “got” Lennon’s joke. My affection for this song stems from the Britishisms, the changing time signature, and the blistering, yet controlled guitar solos.
8 While My Guitar Gently Weeps from the white album. And speaking of guitars, Harrison and Eric Clapton trade riffs on this cut. Jaquandor describes it, so I don’t have to.
7 A Hard Day’s Night from A Hard Day’s Night (UK). A made-to-order song made for the movie intro, based on a Starr malaprop Lennon overheard. That jangly first chord. The whole soundtrack was quite an achievement.
6 You Won’t See Me from Rubber Soul. I always saw this as paired with I’m Looking Through You. I only recently realized that it is the Mal Evans sustained chord on the Hammond organ throughout the last verse, last chorus, and outro that gives this McCartney song a special buzz. At the same time, I have definitely related to the notion of feeling invisible.
5 Drive My Car from Rubber Soul (UK), Yesterday and Today (US). McCartney played this song first in his NYC concert in 2009. Extraordinary chord structure. I’ve noted before that it was John Sebastian of the Lovin’ Spoonful, saying in a magazine that this was on Rubber Soul, which eventually led me to the realization that the UK and US albums were not alike, even when they had the same name.
4 I Want You (She’s So Heavy) from Abbey Road. Lennon seems to steal its first line from the song I Want You, the first Bob Dylan song I ever owned. I’ve probably told this story before, but bears repeating: I was at a very low point in 1975. I was listening to the first side of the album with headphones at the Binghamton Public Library, cranking up the volume over time. Suddenly, the music, as it was designed, stopped. And I thought, for a brief moment, that I had died. But of course, I didn’t. So hearing it makes me remember that I’ve gotten through worse things.

JEOPARDY! questions:
What is “Hey Jude”?
What is “Eleanor Rigby”?
What is “Lady Madonna”?
What is “Penny Lane”?
What is “Paperback Writer”?
What is “When I’m Sixty-Four”?
What is “Hey Jude Law”?
Who was Pete Best?
What is an Ashram?
What is “Nowhere Man”?
Who was Richard Starkey?

 

The Supreme Court has firmed my resolve

But the Supreme Court, in a decision written by Clarence Thomas, “tossed out the verdict, finding that the district attorney can’t be responsible for the single act of a lone prosecutor.

In case you missed the story:

In 1985, John Thompson was convicted of murder in Louisiana. Having already been convicted in a separate armed robbery case, he opted not to testify on his own behalf in his murder trial. He was sentenced to death and spent 18 years in prison—14 of them isolated on death row—and watched as seven executions were planned for him. Several weeks before an execution scheduled for May 1999, Thompson’s private investigators learned that prosecutors had failed to turn over evidence that would have cleared him at his robbery trial. This evidence included the fact that the main informant against him had received a reward from the victim’s family, that the eyewitness identification done at the time described someone who looked nothing like him, and that a blood sample taken from the crime scene did not match Thompson’s blood type.

A jury awarded Thompson $14 million for this prosecutorial misconduct, this civil rights violation, “one for every year he spent wrongfully incarcerated.” Thompson…successfully sued the prosecutor’s office in New Orleans, arguing former District Attorney Harry Connick showed deliberate indifference by not providing adequate training for assistant district attorneys. Yes, it’s the singer’s father.

But the Supreme Court, in a decision written by Clarence Thomas, “tossed out the verdict, finding that the district attorney can’t be responsible for the single act of a lone prosecutor. The Thomas opinion is an extraordinary piece of workmanship, matched only by Justice Antonin Scalia’s concurring opinion…[They] have produced what can only be described as a master class in human apathy.”

This was not the first recent violation of the Brady ruling in Louisiana; it was at least the fifth. “In 1963, in Brady v. Maryland, the Supreme Court held that prosecutors must turn over to the defense any evidence that would tend to prove a defendant’s innocence.”

I find this all oddly comforting. I wrote here concerning a recent conversation I had discussing the death penalty with a work colleague. But I didn’t get much into WHY I oppose it. I admit that much of it is the fact that I am generally queasy about the state as an agent of death.

But even if that were not the case, it’s clear that the state gets it wrong sometimes, and this ruling, making prosecutors seemingly exempt from suffering any consequences of their malfeasance, makes me more resolute in my opposition to capital punishment. If people can literally die from such horrific prosecutorial sloppiness that receives no consequence, then it makes virtually all capital trials inherently suspect to my mind.

 

L is for Loopy Language

“Nobody really k-nows why or when it became silent but this change is believed to have transpired sometime around the 16th to 17th centuries.”


As my daughter is LEARNING the English LANGUAGE, I find it more difficult to explain to her WHY certain things happen. For instance, as this list shows, at least half the letters of the alphabet will appear in a word but will be silent. So my response to my daughter is “Don’t ask.”

To be fair, the real reason for these seeming discrepencies is that English is a LANGUAGE rooted in multiple LINGUISTIC traditions.

OK, so I’ve sussed out the logic of the silent E, which (usually) means the vowel is long.

But other letters I understand less well, particularly those silent letters that appear in the beginning of a word.

I have learned, however that:
Silent B is often after m.
Silent G is often before m or n, and that the Greek root in a word such as gnome did sound the G.
Silent H is …complicated, and appears sometimes sounded, sometimes not, in many languages.

Silent K before n once WAS sounded. The silent ‘k’ in words like ‘knight’, ‘knock’ and ‘knob’ is a remnant of Old English, and wasn’t silent at all but was pronounced along with the ‘n’. “Nobody really k-nows why or when it became silent but this change is believed to have transpired sometime around the 16th to 17th centuries. For some reason, the ‘kn’ consonant cluster became hard for English speakers to pronounce.”
Why is the letter -L- silent in words such as salmon and solder? “In those two cases, the English spelling originally did not have an L, so there was no such letter to pronounce.”
Silent P often appears before n, s, t.
And here’s some background on Silent T and Silent W.

Yet, I tend to oppose the movement to simplify English spelling. I would find it unreadable, as I do in this example. The LOOPINESS of the LANGUAGE is also its beauty, its charm, its LIVELINESS.
ABC Wednesday – Round 8

Pass the Paste, Please

I remember quite distinctly the first time I recall experiencing déjà vu.

A couple of links, first off.
Arthur and Jason’s 2political podcast makes mention of my article re the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.
Recent articles on my Times Union blog include the old YMCA becoming a church, the collective wisdom of the bus, and me asking if it is the job of a news organization to change behavior.

From Thursday Thunks, and this was the order of the questions; I don’t know why.

1. There is a song out there about you… it’s on the radio, the video is on tv (just not MTV) and everybody in the world knows this song is about you. Who sings it?

For some reason, I’ve had stuck in my head, for a couple of weeks, Whatcha See Is Whatcha Get by the Dramatics, which got to #9 on the pop charts and #3 on the soul charts in 1971. My daughter has been singing, “Some people are made of plastic; You know some people are made of wood”. Then instead of “Some people have hearts of stone; Some people are up to no good,” she makes up something else. It’s something basically honest, and therefore comforting, about WYSIWYG.

4. Have you ever sneaked..snuck…snucked…what is the right word? into a movie?

Actually no, and this proved to be a source of a rather heated discussion. My sister’s dopey then-boyfriend, who always had an angle, boasted how he’d pay for one movie but then see two or three. He was so proud of himself. “Everybody does it,” he proclaimed. “I never did,” I replied and my wife responded likewise. It was also the weekend he went on about what a superior Christian he was. Meh.

3. Déjà vu; meaning “already seen”, is the experience of feeling sure that one has already witnessed or experienced a current situation, even though the exact circumstances of the previous encounter are uncertain and were perhaps imagined. Thoughts on what it is? Have you experienced it?

I don’t know what it is, but I remember quite distinctly the first time I recall experiencing it. I was working at a summer camp when I was 17, mowing the acres of lawn on the boys’ side of the camp, then the girls’ side. I was walking down the dirt road that led from one side to the other, when I had the distinct impression that I had traveled that road before, though, at least in this lifetime, I had not.

2. Stick it to me, baby. What is the last bumper sticker you saw and why do you remember it?

There’s one I see all the time in my neighborhood: “Well-behaved women rarely make history”; seems to be true.

10. Ever wonder what fish think about?

Their school lessons, no doubt.

8. If you could paint President Obama’s fingernails any color, what would it be?

Yellow, for the cowardice he’s shown in a number of issues.

7. Do you have seat covers on your car seats? What do they look like?

No.

6. For the rest of your life you can eat one spice and one spice only (on whatever food you want, of course), what spice do you choose?

Allspice. If you’re going to be a spice, might as well be versatile

9. If you could slide down a rainbow, which side would you slide down?

The outside.

5. So a mom is suing her kids’ preschool because it failed to prepare the child for the kindergarten entrance exam… did you eat paste in preschool?

I’m fascinated by how much homework my daughter had in kindergarten and has in first grade. (I never went to preschool; not sure it’d been invented yet.)

Assuming Facts Not In Evidence

“What has been also interesting is how we have heard from several people how common it is for people to get better before they depart.”


One of the things that have puzzled, occasionally annoyed, but ultimately mystified me was that, when my sisters and I told people that my mother had died, and knowing that she hadn’t died in an accident or the like, not a small number of them, whether they got the news in person or by e-mail, said something along these lines of “I didn’t know she was sick.” Well, that’s just the thing; she wasn’t.

I’m stealing an e-mail my sister Leslie sent to one of those people. “She was not physically ill. In fact, she was feeling great, had just taken her shower and was getting dressed in anticipation of having the bus pick her up to take her to Adult Day Care. She complained about her head hurting but did not have any of the typical stroke symptoms.

[Our sister] “Marcia decided to call 911 to be safe, again, not because she had the typical symptoms. They determined that she had had a massive stroke and moved her to a facility that has a better neuro dept.” This was referred to as a brain bleed, a rarer, and apparently more problematic, type of stroke, which measured 9 cm, when the “average” stroke is 2 to 3 cm.

“She was in ICU for 2 days before they moved her to a regular room in the neuro. dept. They monitored her closely, taking her blood pressure, temp, etc. every few hours.

“On Tuesday, her eyes were opened a bit, so we were feeling very hopeful. When Marcia cleaned out her mouth with a swab, she grimaced, and when Marcia said ‘oh, you don’t like that’ she answered ‘no’.” She also raised her eyebrow in response to another comment. “So, we got all excited, thinking that perhaps she could have pulled out of it, as we know, nothing is impossible to God.

“We met with the Dr. and he said we needed to add the feeding tube or let her go peacefully, which could have been 1 or 2 weeks to live…We agreed to give her a fighting chance and elected for the feeding tube. The MD had agreed to make it so and was going to do so later on Wed. Guess Trudy and God had different plans.

“Roger had spent [Tuesday night in her room]. The nurses had been in and out that [Wednesday] AM, and he was staying out of their way. At 8:56 they told him to call us, which he did, and we went to the hospital immediately. She was already gone…went very peacefully, and looked as if she was just sleeping.

“Interesting that Marcia and I were with Dad when he passed and Roger was with Mom…

“What has been also interesting is how we have heard from several people how common it is for people to get better before they depart.”

BTW, the article title comes from dialogue from one of the countless law shows I grew up watching, from Perry Mason and Judd for the Defense to Owen Marshall and the lawyer section of The Bold Ones.

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