Music to Die For

Serenade in Green has a "killer" list of Halloween music cuts.

"Witchcraft"-Sinatra (and Elvis), The Five Blobs-"The Blob", Miles Davis-"Round Midnight", and Jeff Alexander with Alfred Hitchcock(!)-"Music to be Murdered By" are featured, among others.

Listen if you dare.

John Kerry-Perhaps the Dumbest Man in America

Some of the guys in "Irak" respond to their intellectual superior, Sen. Kerry.


So John Kerry, in that warm, charming way he has, has once again insulted the military.

He says, in essence, that either you're stupid to serve in the military, or that only stupid people would serve.

He can point to himself as a case in point in the Viet Nam era. The need then, evidently, was to have anyone, no matter how lacking in smarts, judgment, and compassion, join up. John Forbes Kerry was the perfect fit. Or, at least, that's how it seems, considering that Kerry, with all his personality flaws, was made an officer...a self-serving, self-obsessed, misanthrope of an officer, to be sure.

Today's volunteer army, though, is a little more selective, and a good chunk of America's best young people are in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Kerry was trying to denigrate Bush's Iraq policy, but in saying that only losers serve there, he in fact weakened his point. He would've done better to stress the high quality of those who serve, and the boundless tragedy of the loss of each one.

Kerry has made himself an issue just one week before an election the Democrats have a shot at turning into a rout. Thanks for the help with the GOP Get Out the Vote drives, John-Boy!

Still convinced George Bush was the dummy in the Bush-Kerry contest?


**UPDATE**-Maj. John Tammes-"So should I end up in Iraq next time I deploy, I guess I can just go ahead and shred my BA, MA and J.D.?" (Via Instapundit.)

**FURTHER UPDATE** "John Kerry supports our stupid troops." How noble of him!

It's a grand old flag

In July 1942, seven months into World War II, many US magazines featured the flag on their covers. Here, the Saturday Evening Post, 7/4/42. This flag is particularly well-done...look at the "texture" of the flag material.

Today, many call display of the flag "jingoistic." They would've had a conniption in July of '42! (Link via Plep.)

Quote of the Day: "I have come to the conclusion that politics are too serious a matter to be left to the politicians."-Charles De Gaulle.

The Babes of Opera

The "babes of opera":
British soprano Lesley Garrett.

Second in a series.

Her CD, "I Will Wait for You", is a
nice mix of opera and pop material.

The Mexican Maginot Line?

The fence to keep out Mexicans may never get built.

But let's say the ground-breaking, fence-constructing, and tunnel-detecting equipment is eventually put in place, and the barrier does in fact arise. It should be noted that the thing will probably cost many times current estimates, especially since hiring illegals to build it (!) is probably verboten.

Is it a good idea? I'm on record as thinking massive immigration may be the only way the US won't become like Europe and Japan-the only likely way, absent a substantial rise in the birth rate here (which, now, is right at the replacement level of 2.1 per female) that demographic trends won't sink us.

That said, every country has the right to control its borders. And there are real costs to open borders, in terms of depressed wages, social welfare costs, and security risks in an age when all such risks are potentially disastrous. But these costs are presumably short-term, while the benefits of open borders are long-term.

On the whole, the fence is a mistake-and Bush didn't want to do it. This is election-year politics, pure and simple. But just as the short-term economic benefits of the fence are apt to be trumped by long run costs, any immediate political benefits to Republicans will be supplanted by a future catch phrase among Hispanic-Americans-"Oh yeah. Bush was the guy who built the fence to keep us out."

Erik at his eponomyous "Rants" site likens the fence to the Maginot Line. One can counter with the Israeli fence, which has been rather effective at blocking Palestinian terrorists, but never mind.

The more effective this fence is, the more of a problem it will be.

The NFL is not a sports league-it's a TV show.

I get a lot of hits on "the decline of baseball", mostly due to my discussion and refutation of the idea, here.

Football is an enormously successful TV show that in some superficial ways resembles a sport. TV made pro football, which was a minor sport until the 60's. Credit Pete Rozelle and his marketing geniuses. But football as currently offered to the public is as much about competition as reality shows are.

This lack of competition is due to the fact that every team divides the huge national TV money equally, and local revenue is relatively unimportant. There is little incentive to win-in fact you can go 0-16 and quite easily make enormous profits. In any other sport the loss of ticket and local TV money would ruin a franchise that abandoned any attempt at winning. In football they just say they're up against the salary cap, yet another barrier against competition, and who can object? The NFL players' association is toothless for this very reason-they have no leverage, since getting the best players and striving to winning has little positive effect on profits-and in fact may reduce them.

You can't claim that football is a sport if competition is deliberately thwarted by contrary financial incentives. Those incentives will always trump any public relations efforts to present football as a competitive enterprise.

These facts account for the lack of a team in one of the biggest media markets in the country, Los Angeles. And even if teams thought about actually competing with each other, a 16 game season is too small a sample to be a real test. Should a maverick owner consider winning, schedules are reconfigured each year to punish success, and reward failure. "Parity" is the byword. When parity is artificially engineered, any notion that teans are seriously trying to outdo each other should be dismissed.

World Series ratings were down this year, true, but FOX still had the highest ratings for each night it was on, in a Series lacking a New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles team to spur ratings. And all comparsions between NFL and MLB TV ratings need to consider both the vastly different number of games in each sport, and the importance of local TV revenue in baseball. Attendance for both major and minor league baseball continues to soar, with the minors again setting a record in 2006.

It's interesting that NFL teams play one tenth the games as MLB teams but don't get ten times the attendance-in fact, many teams don't even sell out, even though they only play eight regular season home games a year.

What kind of a "sport" is so unappealing in person?


**UPDATE**-On a legitimate sports note, Irish Elk has a ton of stuff on the death of Red Auerbach.

Fending off pesky aliens, ten rounds with Camille Paglia, and: Did you know fat people are using up all the oxygen?-Random Links

1) Stopping alien abductions-The author says use of these techniques has greatly reduced the number of alien abductions around his house. The key is fixing your Quantum Matrix, which I bet you didn't even know you had. I think it's right next to your solar plexus.

Generally when aliens come to my house to steal my soul or raid the fridge (they're often famished after their intergalactic journeys) I say politely but firmly that they'd better move on, or I'll shoot them with my matter/anti-matter ray gun (designed by Lt. Commander Montgomery Scott) . This works without fail. (Link via The Presurfer.)


2) The Ten Worst Movie Quotes of All-Time: How 'bout:

"I'm just a girl standing in front of a boy asking him to love her."-Julia Roberts to Hugh Grant in "Notting Hill".

"I love you."

"Ditto."-Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze in "Ghost".

"You're a godsend, a saviour."

"No, I'm a postman."-Blind woman and Kevin Costner's letter carrier in "The Postman".

3) Real-time San Franciscso Bay wind patterns (streaklines)-Very cool. (Link via Information Junk.)

4) A Salon interview with the always provocative Camille Paglia. The intellectual scene in the US has deteriorated to the point where Paglia's about the only important intellectual left. Norman Mailer? Don't make me (or Camille) laugh. Paglia eats has-beens like Mailer for lunch.

5) Fat people cause global warming. But you already knew that, since fat people are also responsible for sun spots, New Coke, and Paris Hilton (an over-reaction.) Includes a Rube Goldberg-styled "explanation". (Link via Arts and Letters Daily.)

6) Create Jackson Pollock-styled artwork with your mouse. Make millions, drink too much, die young in car crash, have bad movie made about you. (Link via Reality Carnival.)

Predictions in politics...

...are no better than those in sports. Consider this year's baseball playoffs, in which the "wrong" team (the underdog) won every series but one.

Still, at Predict06, you can see my calls on this year's election, and make your own picks.

Going race by race, I have the Democrats gaining four seats in the Senate and nine in the House-not enough to take either body. No question that things look better for the Republicans than a few weeks ago, but don't hold me to those House picks!

I do think the Dems have very little chance of taking the Senate.


**UPDATE**I was just kidding! (Right.)

Ann Coulter? She's been a lefty since kindergarten

"All so-called 'conservative' media—right-wing talk radio; conservative 'weblogs'; Fox News—are actually fountains of paleo-liberalism. Rush Limbaugh? He’s a Communist. Brit Hume? That sickening Trotskyite. Ann Coulter? Well, she’s a liberal and guilty of treason in our book. Q.E.D."

Countering the "Alterman Propostion" that the mainstream media-even NPR, the New York Times, and notorious southpaw Dan Rather-are a bunch of right-wingers, The Hatemonger's Quarterly proposes an alternative media myth.

May the sillier theory win!

Kandinsky in Africa

Wassily Kandinsky, "Untitled", 1941. Kandinsky was the first artist I was interested in as a kid...the more geometrical works. There's a lot of Picasso in this one. Click on the image to go to full-sized version.

For want of a letter...

There's nothing more fun than Blogger not allowing one to edit one's posts. Even at 9:30 on a Sunday morning things are screwed up.

There is one letter in the preceding post that needs to be added-a lettter that would turn it into a masterpiece. For want of a letter, the kingdom was lost.

Have you ever noticed, by the way, that the one/you dilemna is unresolvable? If you say, "not allowing one to edit one's posts", it sounds stilted. If one says, "not allow you to edit your posts", it may sound too informal.

Cultivating the Deadly Arts, Wikipedia accuracy, take a Roman holiday-Random links.

Photoshopped Celebrities as Star Wars characters. "May the farce be with you", as the Worth1000 person writes. I like the one with George Foreman and his Interstellar Grillin' Machine. (Link via The Presurfer.)

I just like the name of this site-Seven Deadly Arts. (What are the Seven Lively Arts, anyway? Dance, Acting, Music, Rhetoric, Painting, Sculpture, and Blogging???) The site features crisply written movie and music reviews, including looks at Brian Wilson's "Smile" project and Clint Eastwood's latest movie, "Flags of Our Fathers".

Then again, there's The Seven Deadly Sinners, a "seven-headed" blog featuring lots of good artwork in illustration/cartoon mode. (Link via Lynn S.)

Artist uses self-portraits to show his slide into Alzheimer's. "When he learned in 1995 that he had Alzheimer’s disease, William Utermohlen, an American artist in London, responded in characteristic fashion. 'From that moment on, he began to try to understand it by painting himself.'"

Professor puts false information on Wikipedia, finds it's removed quickly...and gets stern warning from Wikipedia editors. This surprises me, though I have noticed more review of, and disclaimer notes about, the info there. (Link via Arts and Letters Daily.)

Speaking of Wikipedia-here's their page on one of my favorite performers-Dick Van Dyke.

This isn't exactly new, but I hadn't heard about it-"To Kill a Mockingbird" author Harper Lee wrote a letter in Oprah Winfrey's magazine recently about her path to becoming a writer. Lee is now 80.

A "comprehensive history of the World Series." St. Louis' victory this year brings their total to 10, second only to the Yankees.

The World Series of Catholic Theologians. Great thinkers square off in intellectual tussle. Pope Benedict is a contender but his high rank doesn't assure victory. (Link via Hugh Hewitt.)

Let's stay in Rome...here's an Illustrated History of the Roman Empire. I always find the Roman ruins in places far from Rome, like Britain, to be the most fascinating. My Grandfather on my mother's side grew up a few miles from Rome, so I may have some relatives among those Roman soldiers. Or even the Emperors. (Link via Ursi.)



Quote of the Day: "I have always felt that a politician is to be judged by the animosities he excites among his opponents."- Winston Churchill.

The Man in Black

Johnny Cash, by Marc Burckhardt.

(Link via Neurastenia.)

George Allen, James Webb, and kiddie porn

If a Republican had written a book with passages like these in them (graphic depictions of adults having sex with children) you can be sure the Dems would use it...especially in the current political climate.

Do the passages mean Webb is a sick pup? No. But I can't agree that it doesn't matter because it's fiction. Fiction is about reality as much, maybe more so, than what we call non-fiction. The path to truth may be a little more oblique, though far more reliable, than The New York Times.

Webb was trying to make some kind of a point, perhaps about the typical relaxing of moral standards in wartime. Had he been planning to run for office, doubtless the scenes would've been less explicit.

Allen's in deep trouble, if I read the political tea leaves right. This in some ways is a good thing, win or lose, because it allows the GOP to eliminate a faux-contender for 2008.


**UPDATE**Allen's campaign manager notes that the Dems beat up Scooter Libby for the sex scenes in his book.

A commenter at Ann Althouse's site: "Republicans who write about sex and murder are depraved, f***-up sickos who write about grisly repressed fantasies. Democrats who write about sex and murder are artists, flowering the world with beauty and challenging our perceptions."

(Both items via Instapundit.)

Music Carnival # 1

Renee Fleming-No, all opera singers are not fat and unattractive.

The First Music Carnival is upon us. It's a chance to tell the world about your band, your latest composition, your practice routines, what's on your IPod, or simply why you hate Barry Manilow. (If you like Manilow, start your own Carnival!)

The Carnival is linked on Instapundit, one of the highest traffic sites on the Net. I plan to do this at least once a month. Click on the sidebar item to submit your post.


I got a healthy number of submissions-let's deal with those first.

Nehring reviews the movie "For Love or Money:The Arturo Sandoval Story". Sandoval is the Cuban trumpeter who defected to the US for the right to play the kind of music he preferred, and to give his family freedom. Andy Garcia played Sandoval, and both Nehring and I agree he gave a nice performance. As a fellow trumpet player Sandoval is one of my favorite musicians, and I have a review of his "Danzon" CD in the sidebar.

A "Rock show" in Philadelphia. I can't offer much comment because I don't get it.

Good advice on choosing a singing teacher: "Realize that singing is a craft like carpentry, architecture or anything else. This means that while you may have an aptitude and talent for singing, you still must learn the technique and profession." Michelle offers plenty of other good advice on choosing a teacher; these are certainly applicable to instrumentalists as well. I also like her response to the question-"Why are opera singers always so fat?" Michelle points out that quite a few are not fat at all, and of course Renee Fleming (above) among others is both not fat and very attractive. She also has an especially beautiful voice.

A cute spoof "musical contract" between 10 year old beginning sax player and her stressed-out parents. "1. In lieu of studying the sax or the flute, Child shall play the clarinet which is sort of like the sax but much less annoying. The parties further agree that if Child complies with this contract for a year, she may, if she deems it appropriate, switch to the sax. Parents feel safe in making this concession because Child has never complied with anything for longer than a nanosecond....

"3. Practice sessions shall take place in Child’s bedroom with the door tightly shut at all times. In the event a Parent is ill or had a bad day at the office, such session shall at Parents’ option be canceled or be conducted in the basement tool closet. Child hereby waives any right she may have to claim that closet clarinet practice constitutes child abuse."

Humorous music video by "corporate humorist" Brad Montgomery. To me a "corporate humorist" is sort of the equivalent of a "Communist scat singer", but you can judge for yourself.

"50 More Conservative Rock Songs" , by "Jon Swift". This is a followup to National Review's list of 50 conservative rock songs (New York Times registration required.) You'll either find it amusing or annoying that Jon ignores the author's intent on so many of these-obviously Springsteen didn't intend for "Born in the USA" to be a conservative song. (UPDATE: All right, I wasn't paying enough attention-I'd read the comments more than the posts. This is the lefty analog to BlameBush!)

And did Devo intend "Jocko Homo" to be a "powerful rebuke of Darwinism"?:

"They tell us that/We lost our tails/Evolving up/From little snails/I say its all/Just wind in sails/Are we not men?" They are not men, of course...they are Devo!


L. William Losapio gives us the Renaissance of Progressive Metal-with a libertarian twist. He even quotes libertarian icon Murray Rothbard-I remember reading Murray in high school. Losapio makes a good case for freeing the airwaves from federal control, which is what his post is mostly about.

The Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences have announced their nominees for their festival of the machinima film industry. Scott Buckley's been nominated for best original music.

The latest luxury gift item-Gibson guitars. Included is an L5CES like the one Wes Montgomery played.

This person aims to prove that the Weakerthans' "Left and Leaving" is the best song ever. I imagine Cole Porter might have something to say about that, but he's dead, and can't argue for himself.

A few other items:

Don't believe what you see on TV, on the Internet, in record stores, etc.: Paul McCartney really is dead, and has been since 1966. Conclusive photographic proof is offered. I wonder who that man is that Heather Mills is suing? (Link via The Presurfer.)

What to do if you get a nasty letter from your neighbor complaining about your trumpet practice? Several options are offered: Play even louder; go around the neighborhood to see if others feel the same; build a sound-proof room; or maybe call the cops yourself to see if the guy's got a legitimate beef.

Legendary jazz tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins gets his music and business life together after the death of his wife, who'd handled the business end of things for him.

The last notes played by trumpet giant Maynard Ferguson, who died in August. Besides being an absolute virtuoso of his instrument, Maynard was a warm, sweet human being, and this is a touching story.

Oboeist Patricia Mitchell has a great collection of music quotes.

The website of the world's greatest rock guitar player-Mark Knopfler.

Amy Welborn at Open Book wonders whether bad music is "destroying the Church", and talks about efforts to revive chant and other traditional forms.

On this date in 2000, an Israeli orchestra played Wagner for the first time.

As soon as we agree among ourselves, we'll start the theocracy

The local Catholic paper had a column in a recent edition blasting the Iraq war, capital punishment, globalization, and all the standard liberal shibboleths.

I didn't agree with the column, to be sure, but what's interesting about this is that while secularist types are so worried that religious people are bent on imposing their politics on everybody else, the truth is that we Christians don't agree among ourselves about politics.

The "coming theocracy" will be a confused mess-just like today's political scene!



Below is the letter I wrote in response to the column:


People of good will disagree about political issues. Political truth is by definition elusive.

But the absolute pacifist position Mr. Magliano advances in his Oct. 13 column simply isn't consistent with the Church's historical teaching. While abortion always claims an innocent victim, and the Church has always proclaimed this fact, it has never been the Church's position that capital punishment is wrong, nor that war is always wrong.

And while it's easy enough to say that in an age of weapons of mass destruction that just war theory needs to be revised, it's just as easy to argue that in such an era a war may need to be fought to prevent their use. In fact, it may be evil not to fight such a war, if the deaths of millions could be prevented.


**UPDATE** The word "shibboleth" has an interesting history, going back to the ancient Hebrews.


Quote of the Day: "It is currently said that hope goes with youth and lends to youth its wings of a butterfly; but I fancy that hope is the last gift given to man, and the only gift not given to youth. Youth is pre-eminently the period in which a man can be lyric, fanatical, poetic; but youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged. God has kept that good wine until now."- GK Chesterton.


**FURTHER UPDATE** The Catholic News and Herald (Charlotte) has told me they want to print my letter.

Like the Web on shuffle-Random links

The Saturday Evening Post in a Halloween mood-Oct. 28, 1922.

1) Abandoned US airfields-There are hundreds of them. Roosevelt Field, from which Lindbergh departed for his historic 1927 flight, is now (of course) a mall.

2) "The world of kitsch"-Tacky gone wild. (Link via Plep.)

3) Cold-temperature effects on October baseball- Strikeouts and walks go up, homers go down.

4) Some gorgeous pictures from one of the most beautiful places in the world-the West of Ireland.

5) What shows to see, on and off Broadway, from Terry Teachout. There are lots of revivals right now, such as "A Chorus Line" and "The Fantasticks".

6) Slang of the 1920's. A lot of it sounds dated but is pretty understandable to anyone but a Valley Girl. (Link via Bifurcated Rivets.)

7) Beautiful Romanesque Catholic church is being built-in Knoxville, TN, not heretofore known as a Catholic stronghold. Maybe the trend is finally turning towards beauty in church architecture.

Bound for Glory?

Faro and Doris Caudill, homesteaders in New Mexico, 1940.

From the Library of Congress' "Bound for Glory" color photography series covering 1939-1943.

Surface and true beauty

I was sitting in the bookstore today, reading the first few pages of Philip Yancey's "Prayer: Does it Make any Difference?", which has a moving, illustrative story about an event on a Paris subway some years ago, which story I'll sum up below. (Yancey is a best selling evangelical author.)

It seems a Russian Orthodox priest was on that Paris subway and saw an old, unpleasant-looking woman (who happened to be a Salvation Army worker) get on. Two (presumably young and attractive) lovers saw her, and one commented to the other, in Russian, about how ugly the woman was.

When the woman got up to leave the subway train, she said to the lovers, in perfect Russian, "I wasn't always ugly."



In this event the priest, who later led important reforms in his church, had his eyes opened to the need to see people as they are, not by their surface "reality."

Lord, may we all do the same, regarding ourselves as well as others.

A Tiger or a "Cheetah"?

Hall of Famer pitcher Bob Feller isn't buying Kenny Rogers' explanations of the "dirt" on his hand in Sunday's win over St. Louis.

"Of course he was cheating...he was using pine tar and rosin to get a better grip on the ball and was scuffing the ball while he was at it."

Feller seems to have little use for Rogers in any sense: "I don't like him personally, either. He's very emotional; he still acts like a 16 year old kid [note: Rogers is 41] . I know him. And trust me, he's no charmer." (From USA Today-the story seems to only be in the print edition.)


Now, Feller is the consumate Grumpy Old Man, but he's got a point here. Considering the steroid allegations swirling around the game, you'd think any hint of cheating would be dealt with severely.



It is curious, though, that given the probably larger steroid problem in football, all the way down to the high school level, that baseball is the sport with the public relations issue with performance enhancing drugs. Or that, with thuggishness and criminality being at least as big a problem in the NFL as the NBA, that football gets a free pass on this as well.

Two weeks away

Okay-ignore my last post-I can't entirely ignore politics-not two weeks before a "pivotal" election. (Aren't they all pivotal?)

Here are NRSC/NRCC lists of the most vulnerable Republicans in the Senate and House, obtained by means no one probably wants to talk about. Fascinating stuff.


(Link via My Election Analysis.)


My sense, for what it's worth, is that the Republicans will barely hold the Senate, but that Dems will take the House, by a small margin.

Sure, she's pretty, but does she know any Knopfler licks?

"I Love Eddie"-van Halen presumably-by Yumiko Kayukawa.

I keep wanting to have this site just be about music and art-really, illustration-but I keep getting sidetracked. Anyway, that's where I'm headed.

(Link via Neurastenia.)

Check your religion at the door?

Who said the following about religion and public life? (Nope, it wasn't George W. Bush. Or Ronald Reagan.)

"Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King – indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history – were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause."

Barack Obama, Democratic Senator from Illinois and possible 2008 Presidential nominee.

(Link via Evangelical Outpost.)

Mental meanderings on a beautiful autumn day.

Somehow it strikes me that not being happy you're alive is the greatest sin of all.

Not just that this smacks of unseemly ingratitude-which it does-but that so many other sins flow from this way of thinking.

And it is a way of thinking, a habit so deep in all of us, in one way or other, that it's damned hard to eradicate. We whine and moan and bristle at things large and small-as if we'e entitled to cheap gas, short lines at Wal-Mart, or feeling physically wonderful all the time.

Face it-your husband's not a saint. Neither are you. Or, it may be that your wife has her faults, but she tries hard to make you happy. Or it may be that your goofball son is lazy, but his warm personality makes people smile. That's not a small thing in a troubled world.

It's different in every home and every life, but the truth is we all have lives that are better than what we deserve.

Nobody's entitled to anything. Including life itself. Enjoy it while you've got it.