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Another exciting week with me. The following topics are included in today's newsletter: Music Spotlight, Musings, Book Spotlight, Rantings, and Something Someone Else Said.
I caught this on the Dennis Miller Live show on HBO. He always kills me, there's some joke he did years ago about Bibles in every hotel room, I wish I could remember that one. But here's one he said while he was talking about families:
Families are the ones that cut you the most slack. When Richard Dawson says 'name something you find in the refrigerator,' and you say a dictionary; while everyone else in America is screaming 'You fucking moron' at the tv set, who are the ones that are clapping and saying 'Good answer, good answer.' Your family.
He also included this insight:
Families always keep things in perspective. No matter how big you get or how much you're worth, when you go home you're just the kid who your brothers tricked into drinking a cup of pee.
Music Spotlight: The Spotlight's On............Tape Trading
When I got on the Internet, one of the first things I discovered was tape trading. This mostly involves what people call 'bootleg' tapes. In other words, tapes that people have recorded at concerts they attended. And it's big. There are tapes of every band imaginable, and in some cases of every show played.
I don't use the term bootleg, because I make a distinction between tape trading and bottlegging. Bootleggers record shows, and then have them made into cd's and sell them. Tape traders make tapes of shows, and then trade them with other tapers in order to get more shows. There is no money being made between traders. Legally they are both distributing the artist's material without permission, but morally I see a difference between pirating someone else's work to make money, and trading a muscian's work with other fans.
Tape trading doesn't require that you even tape shows yourself. If you can find someone who will copy some of their shows when you send them a blank and postage then you can start your own collection. That's how I got involved in tape trading. Now, about five months later, I have a collection of 60 concerts. I repay those who started me out by doing the same for others. I try to always make myself available to make copies for a blank and return postage.
Of course there is a less-sharing side of tape trading. There are lots of spots on the Internet full of people who charge for their tapes, have you send extra tapes for themselves, or just have bad attitudes. But even if they are the majority they are not the true spirit behind tape trading. I believe it was ll kicked off by the Deadheads, whose spirit pervades much of the Net. Their creed is to share the music with everyone. Chances are, if you find a Deadhead they will be willing to make you tapes, no matter what. I don't actually have any Dead tapes, but I've gotten other tapes from a lot of them. To me they epitomize the potential of the Internet. They are unified by a love of the music that they share, and that love causes them to reach out and connect to others, in order to share what they love. They allow their actions to move from their spirit, rather than from greed.
Live music is a whole other entity from the music that so many of us collect on cd or tape or lp. We have become accustomed to the idea that music should be encountered in a prerecorded, remastered form. That's something which didn't actually come into existence until late into this century. Music has always been about being live, and even the early records were one take deals. Nowadays the sound you hear on an album doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the music you would hear from a band live.
There are some bands that demand to be heard live, because they play at a whole other level, or because of the songs that you'll never find on cd. Others may not sound much different, but have enough songs to make it entertaining to hear what setlist they will play, it's like making a mix tape. And then there are some groups that sound just like the record, and only have two records anyway. You don't need to hear them live. But the majority of groups fit in the other categories.
I've benefitted a lot from collecting tapes. I've learned a lot about some of my favorite artists. I can't afford to go to concerts a lot, plus we don't exactly get them all up here in New Hampshire. And I don't have a good memory for shows that I've seen. So listening to live tapes is the best way for me to hear live music. I've been able to listen to concerts that happened long before I became a fan, or before I was born! I just got three 90 minute tapes full of songs that Neil Young has never released, compiled from live recordings by some people on the Neil mailing list. Similarly, I have about sixty songs written by Jewel, a musician who only has one album out. I've been able to go back and listen to all the different phases Bob Dylan's music has gone through, and listen to some of his shows that have become legendary. I've found new bands through concert tapes too. I never paid any attention to Dave Matthews Band on the radio. But I tried out a live tape by them, just for the heck of it, and found out that they were an amazing live band, and now I have about six of their concerts.
If you are interested in tape trading, I'd reccomend finding a newsgroup or mailing list about your favorite artist. Keep your eyes open and you might see a tape tree starting. Or do like I do and post a message asking for tapes for a newbie. I had tons of people volunteer to make tapes for me. If you want to see my list, just email me. Or try out my web pages at http://www.nh.ultranet.com/~wink/
I'm sure I kept you up nights pondering the ice cream question from last week. This is the anomaly: ice cream, a cold dessert, sells better in the North (where it's cold), than the South (where it's hot). And better in the winter (when it's cold), than the summer (when it's hot). These things seemed strange to me, when pointed out by a magazine or something. I like ice cream when I'm hot, and so would most people I think.
What my Dad and I concluded was that these buying trends were a vestige of the days when my dad was a kid. What you have to remember is that once, ice cream didn't come from a store, you had to make it. And in order to make ice cream you needed ice, or snow. And guess what, there's more ice in the North than the South, and more in the winter than in the summer. As my dad said, when he was a kid, ice cream was a wintertime treat. So our hypothesis is that the idea of ice cream being a wintertime food lives on in the minds of Northerners, and Southerners never had ice cream before supermarkets came around, so they're not habitutated to eating it. According to this hypothesis, as those who were raised eating ice cream anytime and anywhere become the majority of consumers this ice cream trend will dissapear. We'll have to wait and see.
This musing was edited out of a set of essays on education I wrote:
The poor state of our educational system is often demonstrated by the fact that most students cannot find the U.S.A. on a world map. I can picture the teachers around the country deciding that they will correct this problem, by having their students memorize all the countries on the map, and their chief exports, thinking that this will give them an understanding of the world. However, the problem is not that the students have not been presented with enough facts. These students have been shown many times the location of the U.S., and have promptly forgotten. The problem is that the students don't know why the country's location is important, of how geography and political boundaries affect our lives. So the location of our country is not important to them. The key is to make knowledge important to our students, not to stuff them with it.
I call it the aliens book. But don't let that put you off, it's not really about aliens. But there are plenty of other things in it to put you off, don't worry. The book is called Colony: Earth, and it can probably be safely classified among those other pseudoscience books, like Chariots Of The Gods, or that Collisions With Earth book. Especially since the author's last name is Mooney!
I dug this book out of my bookshelves once to interest a student because it was apparentally about aliens. I had never read it, like about half of the million books in my room. I read it after he did, and another of my students just read it, and has moved on to Chariots of the Gods. And although it's full of shaky hypotheses, I find it interesting.
The aliens parts of the book can be ignored. The meat of this tome is the idea that before our recorded history humans actually had civilizations more advanced than now, which were felled during some sort of great catastrophe. This catastrophe is remembered by many cultures as a Great Flood or what have you. And it's true that many cultures have a story similar to the Bible's story of Noah and the Ark.
The basis of Mooney's arguments are mythological stories common among many cultures, like the one above. Another major source of evidence are ancient artifacts, including the Great Pyramids, Stonehenge and others. He uses sites like these to demonstrate that the creators of these items must have had technology equal to, or superior to, our own. According to his calculations it would have taken the entire population of prehistoric England years to build Stonehenge with primitive technology. He feels the pyramids would be impossible to build even now with such precision and size. Other evidence that I can remember off the top of my head are the cave paintings of primitive men, done in deep lightless caves. He can't understand how these men could have lit the caves, since anything burning would have quickly poisoned the air inside. And there are artifacts discovered around the world that seem to imply technology, such as primitive calendars amazingly accurate, or cloth woven finer than even our machines could do.
I can't attest to the accuracy of any of Mooney's information, so I can't make any real conclusions. His evidence however brings up interesting questions. And his postulates are not too outrageous. He suggests that an advanced civilization existed that was devastated by a disaster, and that only remnants of their knowledge survived, eventually becoming myth. I don't find this to be an impossible idea. Our known history and rise to civilization only took a few thousand years. I believe that our prehistory was much longer than that, perhaps we have risen and fallen before. I don't know that a culture that old would have left many traces. Of course this is all speculation, I don't have the facts that I would need to decide on any of this.
You can read the book if you want all the other details. It suggests some interesting ideas: that the pyramids and other similar structures around the world actually were built as shelters rather than burial grounds; that many of the stories in the Bible and other ancient texts actually describe technological events. It certainly lends a new perspective to human history. Whether it casts any real doubts on our beliefs is for someone other than me to find out.
I was rather amazed to see Babe listed among the Best Picture nominees. In fact, the word is incredulous. I have seen that movie about the talking pig, and seven Academy Award nominations is not what I saw in its future. More like the bargain bin. For god's sake, it's about A TALKING PIG! It's full of country music fans. That doesn't spell Oscar to me. Well maybe Oscar Mayer (sorry). I have fumed and puzzled over this for a night and a day, it just makes me wonder about the world. But then this morning I had a startling realization. I didn't see Babe. I saw Gordie. The other talking pig movie that came out last year. I don't know anything about Babe, so I can't fume about it. True, it's about a talking pig and therefore suspect, but I've already made an ass out of myself so I'm not going to make any judgments about it without seeing it. I thought I had a topic to harp on for at least a year. I'll have to go see Babe so I can be incredulous again.
Some of you may have come away from that last section with the wrong thoughts. Thoughts like: 'what the hell did he go see Gordie for?' I'd just like to state for the record that I saw it with my niece and nephew at their home. It's the kind of thing you do when you become an Uncle Hairball. And may I also state for the record that I thought it stunk. The stupid pig races to save his family from the slaughterhouse. And of course he does. But what drives me crazy is that he leaves all the OTHER pigs there to be slaughtered! I guess it's alright for thousands of animals to be slaughtered as long as it's not your family. I don't know what sort of twisted message that sends to our kids. The worst part is that the pig actually owns the slaughterhouse (don't ask how that happens). And he still doesn't shut it down. Oh well, probably the kids miss the whole thing, they're too enthralled with the talking pig to notice.
The End