Mayakda: Actually, I was trying to be ironically ghoulish. I gotta work on voice. (Oddly enough, I am ghoulish, but it rarely comes across in my prose.)
My inner cynic compels me to point out that this ad may have been intended as a viral from the get-go. The ad may not be targeted at CNN viewers as much as blogreaders. The manufactured controversy targets the online viewership to those most likely to respond (that link again), like Electrolite readers.
That said, I'm having a hard time understanding what Randolph is talking about when he says the ad is political. I understand that there's a tactical argument to be made--that giving up landmines may make invasion and aggression more likely--but I'm not aware of any argument that, say, to blow up children is an extension of Lockean property rights, or that my right to self-defense trumps your freedom to walk about without fearing death or dismemberment.
Mayakda -- That would ruin the surprise, wouldn't it?
Here's a link to StopLandmines.org, which is hosting the video. I don't know why Boing Boing felt that a link to WorldNutDaily was appropriate, but a link to the people who sponsored the ad is not. I'm not overly fond of embedded .wmv files either, but it would be nice of them to link to the page where you have some context, more information, and an opportunity to donate.
(I won't link to The Brooklyn Brothers, the ad agency who created the spot, because they resize my browser window, and I hate that.)
Here's the official page for the sliced couple at the Museum of Science and Industry.
This seems to indicate we are born with the ability to process complex rhythms, but in North America we lose it, probably because the music that bombards us constantly mostly has simple meters.
Hmmm... that doesn't sound quite right. I'm not entirely sure, for example, that the regular duple and triple meters of western music are necessarily simple. I think they are extremely familiar to western people, but that's not the same as simple.
Western music, for example, takes the idea of rhythmic subdivisions much further than most musical traditions. A duration can be divided in two iteratively until -- well, until you run out of ink or room on the page. We take eight notes or 16th notes for granted, and call them simple. To a non-westerner, though, the durations in western music might be described as multiples of 1/2^3 or 1/2^4 beats(assuming a half note has the beat). Try representing the dotted-eight/sixteenth hemiolas underlying 70s funk music as multiples of inverted powers of two. Not so simple now, is it?
And anyone well-versed in either western or Bulgarian rhythms would be as perplexed as I was when I tried to transcribe some Native American pow-wow music. The base is a simple, unstressed beat, with a single-line melody over the top, but the relationship melody and the beat is non-hierarchical. A single melodic phrase might extend over hundreds of pulses, and the relationship between the melody and the pulses might not line up again for several iterations, if at all. And yet, children raised on the pow-wow circuit have no problem singing and drumming along.
So, I'd say that children are born with an innate capacity for human rhythm, but they favor the rhythms of their culture over time, and lose the ability to distinguish other rhythmic cultures. Of course, you can learn them with effort.
(It's a bit like phonetics, isn't it?)
John, I thought the museum had a sliced couple, husband and wife. And I vaguely recall learning their story--African-Americans who died penniless and without known relatives, whose bodies were claimed by the state and given to the museum, or something. Very tragic and dreadful, with overtones of the kind of casual racism endemic to the early 20th century. Wasn't the husband sliced laterally rather than longitudinally? Or I'm imagining it all--my memory is both vague and fanciful.
At any rate, I'm not imagining running into the sliced woman half-hidden in the stairwell. I believe this was in the early '80s. It felt as thought the museum were embarrassed to have her, but couldn't hide her completely because of the notoriety.
Xopher: You're not trying to turn this into a musician joke thread, are you? I mean, I'm usually fairly circumspect about posting comments at Chez Nielsen Hayden, but I could easily dominate a musician joke thread.
Here's a joke that was considered extremely funny about 60 years ago: A jazz musician walks into a diner and orders a cup of coffee and a slice of apple pie. After a few minutes, the waitress returns with the coffee and says, "Sir, the apple pie is gone." "Solid," he says. "I'll have two slices."
Here's a good joke, circa 1955: "Two musicians are on a break at the gig. They leave the nightclub and duck into a storefront doorway across the street, where they proceed to enjoy a marijuana cigarette. Suddenly, a cop car comes flying down the street, lights and sirens blaring, about 60 miles an hour. One musician takes a deep drag on the joint, and turns to other and says, "Man, I thought they'd never leave."
It appears that both sides are excluding the opposition during their campaign stops.
Really? I haven't heard any stories of Bush supporters being excluded from Kerry events. I've heard stories of Bush supporters making general asses of themselves at Kerry events (airhorns, etc.), and I've heard stories of Bush supporters being jeered and ridiculed and made to feel unwelcome at Kerry events, but if the Kerry campaign is asking people to sign a loyalty oath in order to attend rallies, I'd like to hear about it. If the Kerry campaign is having Bush supporters arrested at rallies, I'd like to hear about that, too.
Maybe it's so ubiquitous we don't notice it, but in real life most people go by several names. Full name, given name, title and surname, nickname, pet name, etc. Some people have more than one nickname, depending on who they're with. (An old friend once calculated that he had no less than eleven distinct nicknames, depending on who he was talking to.) Pet names (as with lovers) can be as ephemeral as an Internet nonce name, and change just as rapidly.
In real life, I've been known as Howard, Howie (urgh), Randy (feh), Ydnar (childhood reverse-spelling thing), HP, Mr. P, Mr. Peirce, Howard R. Peirce, Howard Randol Peirce, Dear, Sweetheart, Baby (ah, romance), and Perfessor. The difference between these names and Internet names is that I didn't choose any of these names, except to ignore a few failed nicknames that I refused to answer to.
Each of these names functions independently, even those that are variations on my birth name. It's not as great a faux pas to call me Howard when Mr. Peirce is expected as it might have been a generation ago. But I guarantee that calling me "Dear" without, in fact, loving me will get an indignant response.
I suspect that everyone posting here has at least as many real-life names as I do.
On preview: Xopher, in traditional vaudeville, circus, and carny communities, stage names were at least as much about anonymity as marquee value. It would not be uncommon for, say, Phroso the Clown to be called Phroso offstage and out of makeup, and to be paid with a check made out to cash.
I hereby nominate "ephemonym" as a term for a nonce handle.
(NB: "HP" is how I sign almost everything apart from legal documents, online and off. It would feel rather unnatural to me to sign a post with my full name. HP happens to be my "real" monogram, as well as a riff on an old, abandoned online handle; plus, it looks great as a ligature. However, in real life, no one actually calls me Aitch-Pee. Most folks call me Howard.)
The Smite link is an apostrophic minefield. I'd think that in addition to S.U.V.'s (which, while ugly, could be justified by referring to the stylebook), Lil' and Olympics' could probably be argued vigorously by any two randomly selected copyeditors. IMO, Olympics functions as a proper noun, not a plural; I'd prefer either Olympics's or Olympic Games'. Lil' should propably have the apostrophe internally, in place of the tt: Li'l. But as it's an adopted proper name, I defer to Ms. Kim.
The Gloria Swanson-Steinem story obliquely reminds me of the time, back in 1959 or '60, when The Ornette Coleman Quartet was scheduled to play at the Cincinnati Gardens. Posters all over town advertised "Free Jazz Concert." The show was cancelled after police had to turn away thousands of people who insisted on being admitted without paying for a ticket.
Jeremy, I confess that I've been thinking that several Republicans I know are completely disenchanted with Bush and the party leadership, and knowing that these Rs would never, ever vote for a Democrat, I think maybe they'll stay home. And that would be a "good" thing. And a message that would further disenchant Republicans would not be a "bad" message. Does that mean I want to keep the Republican vote down? Am I guilty of wanting to disenfranchise Republican voters? In the sense that a vote not cast is a vote for the other guy, I'd regard low Republican turnout as a Democratic victory.
However, I don't believe that that's what Pappageorge is talking about. I would stop short of disinformation or interference. I don't believe the local Republican organizations have any such qualms. But then, I'm a policy guy; I don't think democracy is a sport.
Patrick: Your Sidelight, "It's my fault, pleads Scottish sci-fi scrivener" goes straight to Ken's post about child rape at Abu Ghraib. Rather disconcerting, until I scrolled a bit.
I think you want the permalink at the top of the article, not the permalink at the end of the article.
Aha! I believe this must have something to do with Brill's context-free attack on Fred Clark yesterday.
I saw this earlier today (without knowing about the Kleinman business) and thought it was another one of those borderline-personality types you encounter online. Then I recognized the name....
Although in light of PNH's experience interacting with Brill, it might be one of those borderline-personality types after all.
I think what this institute needs is a chair of geodetic carpentry.
I think it's fair to assume then that Bush was in fact whistling show tunes following the accident. The smart money is on "Pick Yourself Up," by Dorothy Fields and Jerome Kern:
"Nothing's impossible I have found,
For when my chin is on the ground,
I pick myself up,
Dust myself off,
Start all over again."
You know, I hate to get all "P.C.," but zombie is such a horribly misused term. It should only refer to victims of Voudoun or Obeah rituals that use psychotropic drugs, isolation, and trauma to destoy an individual's will.
I prefer to be called a flesh-eating revenant.
Anyway, I like your writing...
Mary Kay--I was on to the irony by "Yet another member..." It was dead obvious. (Not to imply that it wasn't well-written or worth saying.)
I was reading a thread on MeFi (or maybe MoFi) yesterday, about Photoshop and doctored images. The question was, "How do we know which images to believe?" And I thought, "The same way we know which texts to believe."
There goes that theory.
Okay, I just want to say that Patrick's Gershwin analogy is really apt and illustrative of something I'm deeply interested in, and I was about to write a response about the futility of defining genre or style in terms of content analysis, and how we really should be looking at social identity groups and how audience identity contructs drive genre content expectations, and not the other way around (and what a great thread this is [and what about Michael Chrichton, then?]), by way of comparing the way various American music genre historians speciously claim some unique quality for their genre and arbitrarily exclude counterexamples (which are, generally, more typical when viewed contemporaneously), when I realized I was writing a book-length analysis and not a blog comment. So I'll stop.
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