Reference: Living Dolls: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life, Gaby Wood.
Like five cups left out where someone put a teabag in and then discovered the hotel’s complementary coffee and tea service didn’t include hot water, just two kinds of regular coffee. Also one full cup of coffee-tea hybrid abandoned after two sips.
Supertramp’s Breakfast In America in the five dollar bin.
Oh wow this is totally Paul McCartney’s most embarrassing 80s single.
The greatest hits of the Beatles, 1962 – 1964, rendered by early computer synthesizer.
The daily high temperatures for Schenectady, New York, from the International Geophysical Year of 1957-58, rendered as a waltz, as the first album my hand even touched and I wasn’t even trying to make something like this happen. How does this happen? How does this keep happening? $3 and the woman selling it marked it down to $2 before I even said anything and then suggested if I wanted all four copies I could have them for five bucks.
Supertramp’s Breakfast In America in the dollar bin.
Wait, how could Allan Sherman have done a riff on the theme to Saturday Night Fever? Is that even possible? Can someone check?
The greatest hits of the Beatles, 1962 – 1965, rendered on xylophones.
Two guys trying to walk back the “White Disco Sucks” label on a Bee Gees album when the customer admitted to liking it although of course not so much as their pre-disco stuff.
Supertramp’s Breakfast In America in the two dollar bin.
A disco cover of the themes to 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Trek, The Great Race, and Gone With The Wind.
The Belchertown (Massachusetts) Savings Bank 1968 gift to its listeners of select favorite memories from the golden age of radio … oh, I get it, they’re saving these precious memories, that makes thematic sense as a tie-in and oh that’s a lot of Amos and Andy to put on one record but at least they break it up with … good grief Life with Luigi? Was all the non-ethnic-humor stuff from old-time radio unavailable somehow?
The greatest hits of the Beatles, 1963 – 1965, rendered by a string quartet.
That table with all the concert video DVDs that couldn’t look more sketchy if he were underneath a giant flickering neon sign reading “SCAMMER” although hey, he’s got the whole Woodstock ’99 concert this says.
A box just labelled “prog rock” next to two boxes just labelled “Beatles”.
The great news events of 1944 as reported by Morse Code international transmission.
The Who’s Tommy sung by an all-twee children’s chorus for some reason.
An ever-growing bundle of people arguing over what was the best Kinks concept album, splitting off an argument about what was the best concept versus what was the best rendition of that concept, all united by the belief that more people ought to listen to Arthur.
Gene Pitney’s She’s a Heartbreaker, which on the cover explains it includes Gene Pitney’s hit She’s a Heartbreaker, which at least gets one thing clear and understandable in this confusing world.
No, no, this is totally Paul McCartney’s most embarrassing 80s single.
A read-along story cassette book for 3-2-1 Contact? I totally need this except by any reasonable definition of “Need” but look how much of the book is the Bloodhound Gang.
Kid whose family was at the hotel wandering in from the swimming pool to stare at the records and then leave without making eye contact with anyone.
Listen To History: John Cassavetes portrays John Cameron Swayze as the news reporter covering the Zimmerman Telegraph, the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, and Warren G Harding’s Death in a recreation of how network radio might have covered these events and what exactly is on sale for $6 here? What level of reality is in operation?
Supertramp’s Breakfast In America in the miscellaneous bin.
A disco cover of the themes to 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, The Gazebo, and A Face In The Crowd.
A bunch of interview clips the Beatles offered but stripped of all possible context.
The soundtrack to Midnight Cowpoke which turns out not to be the soundtrack to a porn film which would be bizarre enough but this leads to the discovery of “stag party records” that, okay, wait, they’re just music with women groaning? And this was a thing people were supposed to listen to in any context? Play this “sexciting” album in your car? Yes, we know car LP players were a thing but what? And they were still making these late enough in the day they could do an album riffing on aerobics? What the heck is the heck with this? What?
The cast of One Day At A Time sings the greatest hits of Motown.
A two-LP set of The Greatest Hits of Zager and Evans?
Haven’t got any idea what this is but it’s thick in a box of prog-rock covers so amazing I want to get a better look at it without making eye contact with the guy selling them because if I do he’s going to talk about them and I can’t have that much personal contact with someone can I?
A disco cover of the themes to 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Black Hole, 1941, and Klute.
Supertramp’s Breakfast In America in the Beatles bin.
The Fat Boys’ You Know, Only One Of Them Is Actually Kind Of Fat, The Most You Can Say About The Others Is They’re Slightly Chunky Or Maybe We’ve All Just Gotten Tubbier Since 1989.
Is it possible that Paul McCartney 80s singles are infinite and there is no most embarrassing one?
The Kinks debate approaching the conclusion that while it is impossible to define what exactly makes something a concept album, having a track subtitled “Part II”, “(Reprise)”, or “Entr’Acte” means you’ve got one.
How To Set Up Your Record Player, an instructional album that seems to present an impossible bootstrapping problem.
The index dropped ten points today but then thought better of it and figured that just the one was sufficient.
I’m just busy recording slightly stranger and more abstract covers of Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime” until people stop complaining about the original being the worst Christmas song ever. I’m not even sure it’s the worst 70s Beatle Solo Christmas Song. But it does get more exposure since you can turn on any holiday-tunes channel and hear it cycle around four times before John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” finishes its fadeout once. Ringo Starr probably has something that would be in contention too but I think these days we see how much fun he’s having on his Twitter account and nobody has the heart to tell him he had some bad song somewhere. He probably wouldn’t hear it anyway. I wonder if we could put “Wonderful Christmastime” to whatever beat it is you get from the Demo 4 button.
The index dropped eight points today, which nobody saw coming, setting off a good argument in the faculty lounge about the extent to which this trading is based on real market fundamentals and how much it’s just random noise. The consensus so far is that while everybody liked Community they’re kind of looking for reasons not to watch that thing Joel McHale is in now. Nobody knows how the conversation got to that point.
It’s easy to forget that comic strips that’ve been around since the Battle of Manzikert, puttering on without anyone really liking them, earned their spot by being funny in the ancient past. That’s why I’m glad that Comics Kingdom, particularly, has a rich page of vintage strips so that I can see that Mort Walker and Dik Browne’s Hi and Lois really was … well, hilarious is a bit strong, but at least it was reliably funny in that Mid-50s Sitcom Moderne fashion, back in the 1950s. And the vintage strips allow for the rediscovery of aspects that the strip has dropped, like the number of boardroom jokes at the company where Hi works, or the fear of the god-like computer making decisions for the company. Some recurring gags got dropped because you just don’t do jokes like that anymore, and I’m thinking here of the Chinese Laundry. Chinese Laundry gags were discontinued sometime about 1970, when Racist Joke Command discovered there were a number of people from non-white countries who drive taxis and ordered a switch to joking about that instead.
And then there’s something like this one rerun last Thursday (originally run the 12th of July, 1957), which delights me in many ways. There’s the faint 50s Whitebread Xenophobia, particularly, at the idea of those scary exotic weird moon-man foods like imported tea or bagels or pizza or eggs Benedictus. (Is there anything weirder than running across a late-50s or early-60s punchline that depends on the idea that “eating pizza” is inherently a funny thing to do? Yes: it’s people freaking out at the “long-haired” Beatles of 1964, when they had individual hair follicles reaching out as much as three-quarters of an inch from their scalps.) I should be sympathetic: the 1950s in America were a time when suitable nutrition was believed to be pasty white things boiled into uniform shapeless mush, as seen on the plates of comic strip characters ever since. But she’s scared of tea.
And then there’s also the idea of being dependent on the recipe for a tea. I concede it’s possible for there to be tea that requires special preparation. But I also insist that if you go with “put it in boiling water; after a couple minutes, remove, if that’s what you like. Then put in sugar and milk if you like that” you’re going to be able to make a fairly palatable tea regardless of how finely imported it is. It’s maybe not as safe as making macaroni and cheese from a box, but, it’s still not something risky like making powdered oatmeal.
I guess what I’m saying is, if there is a Peak Hi And Lois this might well be it.
Meanwhile, while I was busy last week, my mathematics blog had two comic strip roundup post: the First Of The Year Edition, first, and then the second one, in which I give my best guess about what Berkeley Breathed thought was Jon Bon Jovi’s shorts size in 1989. If you missed the comics roundup, but read Bloom County obsessively back when everybody did, then you already know which strips I’m talking about in there. Also, I fiddled with the WordPress theme over there, from one I was just a little bit dissatisfied with to a new one that I’m dissatisfied with in different ways, which is always exciting.
I should have written it down, but I was sure I’d remember it, and now I forgot one of the words of the pro-radio-station bumper sticker I saw in the supermarket’s parking lot. That’s forgivable, sure, except I wanted to have some fun based on the exact wording of the bumper sticker, and while I didn’t forget the words that go into the part I wanted to make fun of, the fact I can’t remember one of the other words exactly is just destroying my credibility in this.
Anyway, the bumper sticker gave the radio station — well, it gave a letter and a number, which is all radio stations use anymore to identify themselves, like “Q 26” or “112.3 the Aleph”. And then it read underneath, “Yesterday’s Hit. Today’s [ Something ].” I’m not sure what the something was. Today’s music would kind of make sense except for that yesterday’s-hit-today’s-something construction.
And you see the thing I wanted to make fun of, anyway: yesterday’s hit singular? Which hit could they mean? Al Stewart’s “The Year Of The Cat”, most likely, since that was playing in the supermarket, but it could really have been any hit: “Macarthur Park”? “In The Year 2525”? The Theme To Greatest American Hero? But look at the phrasing: it doesn’t have to be a one-hit wonder’s hit, it could be anything. “Let’s Get Physical”, perhaps, or “What A Wonderful World”, or maybe The Beatles’ stirring classic “Oh, Anything By The Beatles, Who Cares”? Maybe it’s a hit from even farther back, like the Romburg and Hammerstein standard “When I Grow Too Old To Dream”, on the theory that its listeners have had enough of this music that leaves them not feeling suicidally depressed. It could be anything.
Or it could have been, if I didn’t forget what the last word on the bumper sticker was, so you might believe me that I wasn’t making the whole thing up. I’m just sick about that. I’m sorry I mentioned it at all, really.
The days of the year you’re most likely to hear the various songs from The Beatles’ Revolver on NewsRadio 88 or your equivalent news station:
| Song | Most Popular Day |
|---|---|
| Taxman | November 15 (Tax Day for procrastinators) |
| Eleanor Rigby | September 24 (Eleanor Day) |
| I’m Only Sleeping | August 8 (Snoopy’s Birthday) |
| Love You To | First Monday after First Tuesday of February (Why Not?) |
| Here, There and Everywhere | October 8 (Dave Barry’s Son’s Birthday) |
| Yellow Submarine | Second Weekend of August (Manasquan, NJ, Big Sea Day) |
| She Said She Said | July 16 (Echo Eve) |
| Good Day Sunshine | Penultimate Tuesday in March (first sunny day of year) |
| And Your Bird Can Sing | May 5 (Bird Morning) |
| For No One | December 2 (Nothing going on) |
| Doctor Robert | October 28 (Robert defends his thesis) |
| I Want To Tell You | Last Sunday before Last Monday in June (Honesty Day) |
| Got To Get You Into My Life | January 14 (National Absorption Of Other Amoebas Day, Amoeba Orthodox calendar) |
| Tomorrow Never Knows | April 16 (better get ready!) |
Here is a quick reference guide to how long you can expect to go between references to something written by or featuring Sir Paul McCartney:
| Location | Time |
|---|---|
| The 60s ratio station | 18 minutes |
| The 70s radio station | 17 minutes |
| The 80s radio station | 34 minutes, but it’s going to be “Spies Like Us” distressingly often |
| NewsRadio 88 | 46 hours |
| Any given episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 | 54 minutes |
| The 50s radio station | There are no 50s radio stations anymore |
| Foreign currency exchange markets | 12 minutes (!) |
| Dave Davies’s house | Once per year, as in late March he figures to write an April Fool’s e-mail to Ray Davies saying Paul invited him on tour because nobody else can sing “Death Of A Clown” right, only he has to delete the unsent e-mail because once again this year he hasn’t got Ray Davies’s e-mail |
| As Wake-Up Music On The International Space Station | 4 days |
| Commercials Supporting The Existence Of Banks | Surprisingly short |
| Those tiny toy music boxes at the museum gift shop | Continuous until the cashiers go mad |
Here are some search terms which have not brought anybody to this blog:
[ Meanwhile, over-researching this has revealed to me that people have come to here after searching for, among other actual things I did not make up, “collared lemming ogilvie”, “iso 9000 humor”, “genius hamsters”, “you might also like:”, “do indianapolis 500 rules prohibit snails from racing”, and “change tagline in wordpress”, all of which brings me more delight than making this stuff up does. ]
There are a number of things that any of us should be grateful for. I estimate the number of things to be at least fourteen. But I think the biggest thing any of us can be grateful for is that I’m not singing for you right now. Very likely I’ll never sing for you. You probably won’t believe just how very good this is for you. Fundamentally, I’ve got a deep incompetence about music.
I used to play the violin in elementary school. They trained us in the classic sequence: “Jingle Bells”, and then “Memory” from Cats, and then the Theme to Masterpiece Theater, and I was all right on the notes where you don’t have to put your fingers on the strings, which are like one-eighth of the notes any song expects. For the rest, again, there’s this wondrous sequence of approximate notes that nobody even knew violins could produce, and certainly not that they’d produce on purpose. The violin teacher was nice, though, and often interrupted class to ask whether the song was “Memory” or “Memories”, which could take the whole day to not resolve, while she walked down to the far end of the hallway. I gave up the violin in middle school, where the hallways were shorter.
Heck, I’m even shaky at listening to music. Like, I’ve seen other people turn on the radio and they get all kinds of songs and musicians and musical styles and such. I try it and it’s pretty near always playing “Friday I’m In Love”. It’s a fine song, sure, but there must be something I’m getting wrong if that’s always on. If I try the Internet radio then they’ve got Dennis Day singing “Clancy Lowered The Boom”, which is a less fine song, the kind that makes me want to walk to the far end of the hallway.
I’m not talking about my voice just being untrained, although it is, because the last music teacher who listened to me singing looked sadly at me and walked to the far end of the hallway, and that was elementary school, when they had a good thing to say about your skills in coloring because you managed to stay mostly within the bounds of the school building.
There’s this part of singing, though, where your voice is expected to hit some note. Most songs are kind of fussy, you’re supposed to get this one particular note that the songwriter expected and was planning around. Maybe you can go into a different octave and find some compatible note, but, that’s not me. I have a hard enough time hitting any note, whether or not it’s in the song and whether or not it’s any note that any human agency has ever been capable of. The correct response to stop paying attention to me and hope I’ll stop, and since I’m not paying attention to me, I keep going. I know, but it makes sense in the middle of the tune.
Worse, most songs require whole dozens of notes, some of them not the same one you started with, and there’s just no hoping I’ll get to any of those either. My chance of getting back to the note I started on are pretty much nothing either. This is why I’m better off sticking to my skill in turning songs into Morse code and a string of humming. Nobody cares about what note you’re humming, because if you’re humming people either don’t pay attention or else they’re looking for things to complain about what you’re doing, and either way it doesn’t matter what you’re doing.
You’d think some practice could train me out of this, but, no. I’ve tried playing Beatles Rock Band, for example, and that gives this little indicator about whether the pitch is too low or too high, and I find, like, in the midst of “Mrs Brown You’ve Got A Lovely Daughter” that Ringo gets out from behind his drums and slugs my avatar and George just walks sadly down to the far end of the hallway. Paul and John just bury their heads in their hands.
Overall, I like music, and think it’s a fine concept. I’d like to be on better terms with it, but I just haven’t got the knack. I’ve got the Cure, but see where that’s gotten me.
I’ve learned through sources that some of my best-liked posts are the ones where I just state my statistics for the month, with the countries listed and all of that stuff. So, well, who am I to argue with what’s successful? Here are some countries and some associated statistics.
| Country | Statistic |
|---|---|
| United States (America) | 139,608 |
| Canada | 24,432 |
| Denmark | 1,305 |
| Belize | 139,608 |
| Ecuador | Quito |
| Carpatho-Ukrainian Republic | 139,608 |
| Free City of Krakow | 1,164 (449) |
| Silicon Dioxide | 42 J mol-1 K-1 standard molar entropy |
| Muonium | 2.2 microseconds |
| The Long And Winding Road | 3:38 (Lennon-McCartney) |
| United States (Reprise) | 139,608 |
I hope you’ve enjoyed this data.
So we got the band back together for our first rehearsal, and that went pretty smoothly. I’m really sure I’ve never met any of these guys. They looked at me with the sort of natural, easygoing acceptance you give to a deer that’s in your laundry room. I don’t think they know each other either.
Besides me on the training violin (it still has wheels) we have one guy with a pair of sticks (not drumsticks, just the kind of sticks you might find in the woods ready to poke people with), one guy with a sheaf of ISO 9000 documentation paperwork (according to the label), another with a long-running quarrel with lyrics web sites about how they’re the most awful web sites in the universe (they are), a bazooka (the other kind), and a bass guitar. The guitar isn’t any of ours. It just appeared there, staring, accusingly, possibly warning us that Terpsichore is not happy with us. This is unsettling since it’s so rare that an ancient Greek god would be offended by something humans were up to. Maybe we shouldn’t have mixed her up with Euterpe.
We tried optimistically to play The Beatles’ “Getting Better”, and soon found that we never actually noticed the lyrics before. We’ve had to consign that to the pile of Peppy Beatles Tunes With Lyrics That Actually Horrify You, alongside “Run For Your Life”, “A Day In The Life”, and every other song the Beatles ever recorded except “Twist and Shout” and the theme to “What’s Happening”. (It was a private session.) Actually most of the day was spent on paperwork. Should be a concert for the ages. Still no idea who I’m playing with.
Another Blog, Meanwhile 