Interchangeable

I'm not an unconditional lover of new technology and how fast it supplants older ways of doing things without offering us time to reflect on what we might want to keep about those older ways. But when it works, it works.

Today, I used the same piece of equipment to surf the internet for my morning news, catch up on what my friends were doing, write a funeral service, read the funeral service, prepare my mileage reimbursement, watch a movie while on the elliptical machine at the gym and write a blog post.

You were a frickin' genius, Mr. Steve Jobs.

Heavy Darkness

Astronomers have found large black holes at the center of most galaxies and believe them to be a feature of galaxy construction. These are usually bigger than ordinary black holes and are thought to be so because they are located in an area which has so much stuff to fall into them.

But the black hole at the center of NGC 1277, a small galaxy visible in the constellation Perseus, is outsized way beyond what it should be. Astronomers studying it believe it has the mass of 17 billion suns. If you had a dollar for every sun whose mass this black hole contained, you could finance the next 80 or so James Bond movies. Or fund the U.S. government for about 41 hours. You could erase the U.S. deficit -- if you had around 940 friends who all had a dollar for every sun whose mass the NGC 1277 black hole contains. You may tut and say that may be less of a comparison than a dig at the reckless spending done by the federal government, but I would wonder what deserves it more?

Black holes, of course, are the remains of stars which have collapsed so thoroughly and concentrated their mass to a density that creates gravity not even light can escape. I'll let you make your own dig at government spending here.

But anyway, this black hole all by itself has almost 14 percent of NGC 1277's total mass. This would be like a 150-pound person having a 21-pound appendix. That's unusual because of the gigantic size of the black hole, especially in such a small galaxy. It gets weirder because astronomers can see five galaxies near NGC 1277 that resemble it in size -- they could also have outsized black holes at their centers and that would prompt a re-thinking of how galaxies form.

From the Rental Vault (1969): The Bridge at Remagen

By March of 1945, the German army was headed for home any way it could get there, with units all over trying to get back across the Rhine River, one of the Third Reich's last natural lines of defense. As Allied troops neared bridge after bridge, they were blown up to prevent enemy crossings until only one major bridge remained, at the town of Remagen. Producer David Wolper and director John Guillermin teamed up to create a fictionalized version of the actual battle in 1969 with The Bridge at Remagen, starring George Segal, Robert Vaughn and Ben Gazzara.

Wolper and Guillermin apparently wanted to model their movie somewhat along the lines of 1962's The Longest Day, the story of the D-Day invasion of June 1944. Segal is Lt. Phil Hartman, commanding an armored patrol trying to reach the bridge before the Germans destroy it, and Gazzara is Sgt. Angelo, one of the noncoms in his unit. But we also see some of the German side of the story, with Vaughn playing Major Paul Krueger, the German officer in command of the forces defending the bridge until it can be wired to explode.

They also seem to be much more conscious of anti-war sentiment in general, as Bridge shows us flawed soldiers and officers, operating for their own agendas and little else. No Greatest Generation legend-making here: Hartman is bitter and disillusioned with his chain of command, Angelo robs German corpses and cons his fellow GIs out of their money and Bradford Dillman as U.S. Major Barnes is a rah-rah fool who commands no respect from his men.

A movie that shows the GIs who helped save the world in the 1940s as real human beings with flaws has its place -- Steven Spielberg showed that in Saving Private Ryan. But Bridge has such a sketchy story and such clumsy casting that it can't do anything but be a series of high-energy action scenes stitched together around entire sequences of false note characterization. The characters are stereotypes but offer us nothing beyond the stereotype to dig into; they just cipher across the screen performing as needed in order to move us to the next action scene. We don't know what keeps Major Barnes from being able to win his men's respect; Dillman is nowhere near a good enough actor to pull that off using the story he has in front of him. But he doesn't, so any scenes that are supposed to show Dramatic Conflict between him and Hartman actually show Vague Staring instead.

Segal is miscast; his strength was always in roles that matched his natural urbanity and borderline smarminess and he can't give Hartman the war-weariness he's supposed to have. Vaughn's Krueger should be a complex man driven by loyalty to his nation and a realization that he is fighting a losing cause, but the script does so little to show that that he can never really bring it out. And Gazzara's Angelo is just a thug -- not too bright a one at that, as he never wears a helmet in the middle of a war zone firefight. He's too much of a creep to care about what he's doing.

In the end, The Bridge at Remagen can't decide if it wants to be a good ol' WWII rouser of an action picture or a meditation on the ugliness of war, even for the side that's in the right. And so it tries to do both. The action part comes off better than the meditation, but the marriage doesn't work and neither does the movie.

Old World in Color

Here are some color pictures from almost 100 years ago, during the 1910s and early 1920s.

The post author makes an interesting point -- that since most of the pictures we see from that era are in black and white, we have a sort of default mode in our minds that everything during that time from really was in black and white. We know it really wasn't, but there's still a little surprise to see color pictures from the era, and a nagging sense that they're not really from a hundred years ago but are people dressed up like 100 years ago.

The process, which is explained in the blog entry, was called Actachrome and involved, of all things, potato starch. Were it to be in use today, you could expect New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg to ban it as unhealthy based on that ingredient. Sure, neither the photographers nor the subjects actually eat the potato starch, but common sense has yet to stop Mayor Bloomberg on his quest to tell everyone what they can and can't eat and there's not much reason to expect it to start now.

Seventy Years of the Usual Suspects

On this day 70 years ago, one of our greatest movies premiered: Casablanca. The item at the link notes several quotes (and at least one famous misquote) from the movie, but neglects my favorite:

Captain Renault: What in heaven's name brought you to Casablanca?
Rick: My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.
Captain Renault: The waters? What waters? We're in the desert.
Rick: I was misinformed. 

The movie was based on an unproduced stage play called "Everybody Comes to Rick's," a name which proves that some playwrights create dumb titles. The play remained unproduced until 1991, when the Whitehall Theatre in London staged it. The movie version toned up the characters from the far-less-noble folks onstage and gave Sam's character quite a bit more depth.

Apparently, someone shopped the play around to studios under its original title sometime in the mid-1980s. Several studio officials balked because they thought the story didn't work or the romance angle didn't feature enough sex. That's not really any reason to knock them; we know that studio folks  are clueless in soooo many ways but they often have something of a sense of what kinds of things audiences are watching in movies. The reason to knock them is they didn't recognize the story.

How can you want to make movies for people and not know the story of Casablanca? Yes, the play's female lead has a different name than the character Ingrid Bergman plays, but Victor Lazlo, her husband, is still the same, as is Rick himself. And the play prominently features the song "As Time Goes By," which has a pivotal role in the movie as well.

So I've expanded some of my usual caveats. One of them is to never trust a rock guitarist who can't play Chuck Berry music, and I will now add that you should never trust a movie studio person who can't recognize when he or she is reading Casablanca.

Flawed Vision

So it turns out that the whiz-bang gadgetry of the modern television set may not be the best way to watch a movie.

The fellow at the link goes into some great detail, but the upshot is that TV sets in the store are set to grab your eyeballs. The settings which grab your eyeballs are not the settings which are best for watching a movie. Colors will be too bright, outlines too distinct, the blue balance will be too heavy, and so on.

And LCD screens, which are the most common kind of flat-screen televisions sold today, have inherent flaws which fine-tuning and optimizing can't cover up.

So it may be awhile before I send my old set out to pasture. I may wind up watching more movies on the iPad at the gym than I do on my set, but at least I know when I watch it on my set I won't cut my eyeballs open on the red-green contrast setting.

Exit, Grinning...

With the death of Larry Hagman, television loses one of its best villains ever. And I mean ever. The scariest sight on television was not some Sopranos thug or Dexter psycho or Game of Thrones inbred deviant. It was J.R. Ewing flashing his pearly whites in your direction, uttering the words, "Have I got a deal for you." The "Who shot J.R.?" cliffhanger at the end of season two of Dallas was a TV event unlike any other and while the near-fatal wound tamed the venomous one for a season, he was back in form before very long.

I've no idea of Hagman's personal religious beliefs, but I am willing to bet that if there is a personification of evil such as the being some name Satan, Hagman's might be the only soul he doesn't want to capture. After all, if you give J.R. Ewing enough time, he'll find a way to get the better of you. And eternity is plenty of time.

From the Rental Vault: Triple Bob

The first two Bobs are Mitchum and Ryan, who face off in 1951's The Racket, the second movie version of a play from the 1920s. Mitchum is Tom McQuigg, an incorruptible police captain looking to fight a mob takeover of his city. Corruption is rampant in his department and the prosecutor's office, meaning that a citizen's commission also wanting to clean up the city is always at least two or three steps behind. Robert Ryan is Nick Scanlon, a local heavy whose violent methods don't fit well with the newer, slicker crime organization taking over his business.

Scanlon is paranoid and jittery, with foes on both sides of the law and troubles with his brother that make him suspect everyone -- which may be the reason he opens up with McQuigg once. The captain is his enemy, but at least Scanlon knows where he stands.

Eventually, a reporter (Robert Hutton), a new beat cop (William Talman) and -- of course -- a dame (Lizabeth Scott) become mixed up in the conflict as McQuigg and Scanlon move towards a final confrontation. Everyone plays their assigned roles smoothly, with Mitchum and Ryan standing out most of all.

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The third Bob is Ryan again, in On Dangerous Ground the very next year as NYC detective Jim Wilson, whose over-immersion in his job has dangerously frayed his control. Even in the pre-Miranda Warning era, his level of violence is getting the department in trouble and is close to getting him fired. Opening scenes show other officers readying for work among their families, but Wilson has no one.

Eventually his boss sends him upstate to help in the hunt for a murderer. He joins a group of vigilantes led by the victim's father, Walter Brent (Ward Bond), and is taken aback by Brent's bloodthirstiness. When the pair are stranded overnight at the home of blind Mary Malden (Ida Lupino), Wilson begins to see how far over the line his own brutality has taken him when it becomes clear Mary knows more about the murderer than it seems at first.

Again, Ryan does a fine job as a man barely clinging to the edge of civilization and his sanity. He sees the people he pursues as garbage and that allows him to do anything to them to get what he wants, covering himself with the badge that's all he has left, even if it doesn't mean anything to him anymore. Lupino adds some depth to a role heavily laden with retread dialogue and mawkish scenes. Ward Bond is also a surprise, moving aside from his usual genial nature to display hatred and rage better than you might think he could. Ground is not anything that would win awards and it lost money at the box office, but the fine performances of the three leads make it worth the effort of wading through some of the excess cheese of the second act.

Weekly Musicality

Although women had made their mark on the charts in country and western almost since its earliest recordings, Gail Davies scored a first when she started producing her own records for Warner Brothers in 1979 -- she may have been the first woman to produce for a major label in Nashville. The daughter of musician Tex Dickerson and the father of former BR5-49 co-vocalist Chris Scruggs, Davies had her strongest run in the late 1970s and 1980s. Wild Choir, a 1986 project listed as performed by  the band of that name, is heavily dominated by Davies' vocals and Davies-written songs.

There's plenty of Nashville flavor through the album, but Davies took advantage of the different setting to play around with some New Wave and dance-influenced tunes and arrangements. "Girl on a String" and "I Don't Wanta Hold Your Hand" could bring plenty of big hair and skinny ties out on the dance floor, and the keyboard backgrounds of "Never Cross that Line" match up with any synth-heavy Madonna ballad of the time.

The genre called "alt-country" was still a few years in the future, and probably wound up drawing more from punk influences than from the dance-oriented pep of New Wave. But Wild Choir is a good preview of the reality that musical genre lines could be crossed and that the product could be very interesting.

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Son Seals had a voice and a guitar-playing style that were completely his own even though they were deeply steeped in traditional Chicago blues. He was consistently inventive, meshing his blues instincts with funk's rhythms in 1976's Midnight Son and submerging them in a jazzy backrgound in 1984's Bad Axe. Spontaneous Combustion, a set recorded n 1996 at Buddy Guy's Legends club in Chicago, is an excellent introduction to both Seals the artist and the performer.

A good portion of modern electric blues focuses so heavily on guitar solos that the songs themselves get buried in an avalanche of over-picking. But although Seals flashes plenty of string skills, he rarely lets the soloing get away from him or get in the way of the song itself. Not every solo has to be loud and lightning fast; the slower and mellower showcases are just as important depending on the songs.

From the growling roar of "Don't Pick Me for Your Fool" to the horn-supported groove of "Landlord at My Door," Seals powers through a dozen of his own compositions as well as some great covers. The set may lack some of his standards, such as "Bad Axe" itself, or "I'm Going Home" and "Buzzard Luck" or the instrumental "Hot Sauce," but the lack is just a good excuse to pick up more Son Seals albums, and I find it hard to consider that a bad idea.

A Loss for Science

Although a number of folks have pointed out the deep depression which is about to descend on Colorado and Washington, two states which recently legalized marijuana just in time for Twinkies to disappear, I haven't seen many articles other than this one that bemoan the loss to high school science experiments.

I call upon President Obama to honor his commitment to education of the nation's schoolchildren and personally intervene in the Hostess crisis. If the man can take your tax money and mine and keep wheezing old GM on life support, he can by gosh take it and strike a blow for the reality-based community and the American school teacher.

Welcome Aboard?

OK, so the Big Ten is going to have 14 teams. Whatever, because as much as I like watching the games I'm under no illusion that anything in college sports makes a lick of sense.

But I will quibble with one of the statements made by Rutgers president Robert Barchi, who says that academically, the Big Ten is a good fit for his school. Mr. Barchi, your school paid Nicole Polizzi, AKA "Snooki," $32,000 to speak to its students. You should probably not be so willing to use the word "academics" in connection to it.

Can't Wait

One of the very few good things about the Black Friday shopping day is that it will be the end of those vapid Target commercials contorting Christmas songs into monumentally-even-more-vapid Target jingles.

Pleasant Surprise at the Gym

I'd rather not watch the American Music Awards -- ever, but a lady at the gym had the TV turned to it, so I happened to catch two pretty neat things. One was a neat tribute from Stevie Wonder to Dick Clark.

The other was a performance of the song "Gangnam Style" by Korean rapper PSY. Watching hundreds of folks dance and sing along while a chunky short guy raps in Korean can almost erase the memory of seeing Justin Bieber "perform" and win awards for it.

Seeing a live duet of PSY and MC Hammer mashing up "Gangnam Style" and "2 Legit 2 Quit" just pretty much justifies the whole silly show's existence.

Storage Overload?

Ever thought your brain was full?

Well, while it may not be possible to actually use all of the brain's capacity to store memories -- there's more space than there is time in a human lifespan -- Cambridge neuroscientist Daniel Bor suggests that it is possible to reach the limits of what the human brain can process.

The problem is that everyday life presents the brain with a monumental amount of data. And since our brains don't plug into the wall, they require energy to run those processors. Bor points out that a newborn baby's brain uses up 87 percent of the body's resources, and even in an adult a quarter of the energy required by the body is used to run ol' Mr. Noggin. This may be a telling statistic; it's possible that someone like Roseanne Barr, Ann Coulter or Eric Holder is simply suffering from an overly-reduced calorie intake rather than the obvious condition.

Because of those situations -- the high data load presented by even an ordinary day and the high energy demands of the brain -- Bor thinks that attempts to increase the amount of brain input, via a sort of wired system or artificial intelligence boosts or something similar may not be successful. The data input could overload the processing capacity, perhaps resulting in a literal Blue Screen of Death as the brain shuts down from the increase. Or it could require so much of the body's energy that health of the body's other parts might suffer: "Well, I can't heal this minor flesh wound, because the brain is sucking all the calorie input. Sorry about the gangrene."

So while it's glaringly obvious that some people's brains don't function at anywhere near the upper edge of their design specs, it may very well be that they're functioning at or near their own individual limits.

Which can, if you think about it, be kind of depressing in more than one instance.

Throw the Bum Out?

Few people are as ready to send a coach packing as college football fans. In my own beloved state, there is one school with a devoted fanbase (many of whom actually attended the school) that regularly alternates between calling the head football coach a genius and a troglodyte who couldn't hit the ground with his visor. Earlier this season, a loss to Kansas State made for much cause of rumbling and grumbling, until subsequent convincing wins -- especially one over a certain school to the south -- made it obvious that the coach was again the Einstein of the gridiron and could do no wrong.

There are plenty of cases where replacing a coach has seemed to improve a team's performance. But how often does that actually happen? Scott Adler, Michael Berry and David Doherty, in a paper published in the Social Science Quarterly, studied the performance of college football teams between 1997 and 2010 and measured what kind of impact a coaching change could have on a program.

They found that when the program performs poorly, changing coaches makes little short-term difference. That's probably expected. But they found little difference in the long run as well: If your program stinks and you change your coach, you're not going to be much better off than a program that sticks with their poor schlub instead of showing him the door.

When programs aren't bad, but just mediocre and nothing special, then replacing a coach actually hurt team performance when compared with teams that kept their coach.

The online abstract of the study doesn't show if it examined what kinds of records those coaches had when they were hired -- were they successful elsewhere or not, were they young coaches just learning or old ones playing out a last string till retirement, were they top-notch talent at a lower level of competition looking for a foot in the door to move up, and so on. Those elements could have an impact on how the coach performed, but it seems that overall, a lousy program is more than just a lousy coach.

Of course, one of the main interesting facts about the study is that it shows how the wisdom of many sports fans, the ones who call for the coach's head when a game result is anything less than a 77-0 blowout, is not so much wisdom as it is knee-jerk silliness.

But no study is really needed to prove out that theory.

(Hat tip: The Sports Economist)

Weekly Musicality

The number of bestselling musicians working in the contemporary Christian music category who are Roman Catholic is probably not large, but Audrey Assad stands out near the front of the field for more than alphabetical reasons. Her debut album The House You're Building was Amazon.com's Best Christian Album of 2010, and the February 2012 follow-up Heart continued to build her reputation for delivery of thoughtful spirituality via mid-tempo, piano-based folk pop.

Music teachers may lament how many young women who sing follow the Taylor Swiftian pattern of sticking with a bare handful of notes and rarely challenging themselves vocally. Assad does not have that problem, using her voice as one of the instruments in helping to set the tone and mood of her songs. They all rest on the keyboard, of course, but here and there are touches of some different rhythm instruments underlying the melody that offer a few distinctive flavors.

Her songs display a wide level of reflections on the Christian life  -- "Blessed Are the Ones" contemplates the intricacies of being a newlywed and "Wherever You Go" voices God's encouragement to the ones who may have found themselves, like the prodigal son, in a far country after the party's over and the money's run out. And her songwriting gift allows her to couch these reflections in three-minute bites with symbolism and words that stick after the music itself fades out.

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It's interesting how quickly we can forget that bands from other countries which make it big in the U.S. aren't the only bands on those other countries' music scenes. Record stores in Australia, for example, have more on their shelves than AC/DC, Kylie Minogue, Men at Work, INXS and the Divinyls. Siblings Chris and Annalise Morrow, for example, enjoyed a tidy little run in the late 1970s and early 1980s as The Numbers, with an Australian Top-40 single, several appearances on Australian television and stints operning for quite a few international acts on the Aussie legs of their tours. But you'd have to be someone with a serious power-pop New Wave jones to run across them in the U.S.

If you were such a person, you would probably enjoy their debut album, The Numbers, from October 1980, which while a product of its time is also a surprisingly durable quick slice of the guitar/poppy side of the New Wave genre. The Morrows, along with drummer Simon Vidale, create several 11 zippy toe-tappers that rely on their harmonies, Annalise's ability to move between bright and gloomy tones and Chris's solid jangly strings.

The pop format doesn't prevent reflection or some nice wordplay; "5 Letter Word" is a rumination on how being separated from a loved one (by estrangement, circumstance or time) is a little like being dead as far as the other is concerned. In "Mr. President," Annalise Morrow lets a would-be controlling fellow know, "You're running for President/But you're not even a resident/In my world."

A Numbers retrospective called Numerology collects several tracks from their singles, EPs and two studio albums. Otherwise, you might find them while vinyl diving at used record stores, either here or, I suppose, in Australia.

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In the late 1990s, Fargo, North Dakota (of all places) offered the world a pair of teenage wunderkinder who played the blues like performers at least three times their age. On the fellow's side was Jonny Lang, and for the young ladies, Shannon Curfman did the honors. Lang played on Curfman's 1999 debut, Loud Guitars, Big Suspicions and continued to record regularly, including some recent output that's definitely gospel-influenced.

Curfman also continued to record, although not as frequently. She was 15 when Guitars came out and 2010's What You're Getting Into was only her fourth studio disc. By then 26, Curfman was less able to rely on the uniquness of being talented for her age and was expected to be more or less just plain talented. She's succeeded well, carving out a sound of her own while making obvious nods to lady guitar slingers before her, such as Bonnie Raitt. Curfman's voice has some of the same rock swagger, mixed in with a little honky-tonk feel, that has made Raitt's work appealing for many years.

She co-wrote six of the songs on the album, including the cautionary tale of the title track and the hard-rocking "Free Your Mind." And she didn't shoot low for her covers, including Eric Clapton's "The Core," Fleetwood Mac's "Oh Well" and Queen's "Dragon Attack." Several of the tunes would be well-served if Curfman would dial back the intensity a notch or two, but if she continues to develop and add dimension to her work as a musician, then subsequent releases could be something special.

Vend-O-Moron-Matic

On track to see more than five hundred murders this year, His %#@&in' Honor Rahm Emanuel, Mayor of Chicago, has decided to take decisive action to improve the lives of some of the citizens of his fair city.

He's banning high-calorie snacks in vending machines on city property.

Between Emanuel and New York City's Michael Bloomberg, I'm beginning to believe you really don't have to be all that smart to be the mayor of a major American city.

The Key Stone-head State

If stadiums still used phonographs instead of digital music players, high school hockey in Pennsylvania could probably still include the National Anthem, as long as they sped up the record to 78RPM.

It seems that the high schools, in renting their arenas, only pay for a certain amount of time and when that time is up, the lights go off. So in the interests of saving money, Pennsylvania state school officials have directed the games omit that pesky "Star-Spangled Banner" because it takes too long and costs too much money.

Trouble is, most recorded versions of the anthem clock in at around a minute and a half. Even Jimi Hendrix's psychedelic fuzzed-out version from Woodstock is less than three and a half minutes long. If the schools are paying a rate so high that an extra two minutes really breaks the bank, then I think they've got other problems...like state school officials who could use a math refresher or two. Followed by a wee little bit of history.

"Portable" Orchestra?

This article at Collector's Weekly describes them, portable machines in the early 20th century called "orchestrions" that went a step beyond player pianos by having bells and pipes that could sound like stringed instruments as well as brass and woodwinds. One of them, shown in a picture towards the bottom of the page, even had violins mounted inside and played mechanically. Not many exist today, which is why the story is at a site called "Collector's Weekly."

In this case, portable was definitely in the eye of the beholder. The average orchestrion weighed in at two tons. While that was lighter and took up less space than an actual orchestra, it wasn't the kind of thing you could clip on your belt for your morning perambulation.

Like the player piano, the orchestrion played its songs as a paper roll punched with holes was fed through a reading device. The holes controlled which instrument would play and what note would sound. Punch cards, in use in computers up until thirty or so years ago, operated not too differently.

Anyone familiar with the names of piano, organ or jukebox makers will see some recognizable labels in the story, like Wurlitzer and Seeburg. There are interesting parallel to some modern music-player history. Seeburg machines took off in popularity when they developed a standardized roll that could be played on multiple machines, kind of the way the .mp3 format came to dominate online music sales and playing. The standard roll also broadened the variety of music available on orchestrions, as more people than just the Seeburg company could create them for different songs.

The combination of Prohibition, which reduced the size of the places where people wanted background music playing while they partied and phonographs and radio, which could provide smaller music-makers as well as add the human voice into the mix, did in the orchestrion in most venues.

Plus, they had no headphone jack and the loud tunes -- as always -- tended to tick off the 'rents.

Can't Stop the Signal

The Science Channel will celebrate 10 years of Browncoats tonight.

Don't nobody call me or nothin'.

Who-Rah?

On November 10, 1775, the Continental Congress approved the creation of what is today the United States Marine Corps. Four of my uncles served in the Corps, one during World War II in the Pacific.

A Marine lieutenant, like any newly-commissioned military officer, receives a one-time allowance for a unform purchase of $400. Under their new collective bargaining agreement, approved by membership on Friday, officers in the Transportation Security Administration will receive an annual uniform allowance of $446.

We hear much talk about how the military needs to modernize in order to fight our nation's enemies. Apparently, though, they will need to unionize in order to fight for the same kind of perks available to people who sit on stools and paw through your luggage.

Musicality

After 2005's Blame the Vain, Dwight Yoakam was mostly involved in screen roles while dabbling in the recording studio, other than his Buck Owens tribute album in 2007. Whether the hiatus fueled a burst of musical creativity or whether he just still had it in him, 3 Pears is a concentrated burst of the kind of imagination that's shown up here and there in releases throughout his career.

Although certainly a country artist, Yoakam has never been content to just mine that field in either songwriting, music to cover or the styles that influence him. In 3 Pears, he blends many of them for an album that on paper wouldn't seem to work nearly as well as it does. "Take Hold of My Hand" opens with a funky bass groove that keeps its soul while being the foundation for Yoakam's unmistakably honky-tonk voice and a traditional steel guitar. "Dim Lights, Thick Smoke" layers many of those same elements over a cowpunk center that will probably be a concert favorite. "Nothing But Love" is a rocker tailor-made for a duet with Social Distortion's Mike Ness.

None of these stylistic unions sounds forced, produced by Yoakam (and Jack White on couple of tunes) to blend their common elements well enough that the distinctions work like spices in a sweet dessert -- they add instead of detract. Apparently Yoakam decided that if he was going to wait seven years between original releases, he'd put in a substantial amount of work into the product of the hiatus, and it paid off well.

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Singer Dee Dee Penny (Kirstin Gundred) released her first Dum Dum Girls singles, EPs and album as the leader of a frequently-rotating cast of backup musicians. For her second full-length album, 2011's Only in Dreams, she enlisted a more permanent band and worked with a number of outside producers. The change didn't reduce any of the Dum Dum's earworm appeal, only added a much stronger sound of Penny's own vocals into the mix. The sound still relies heavily on 1960s low-fi jangle pop, the key element for Dum Dum fans.

The addition of clearer vocals to the mix allows Penny's Chrissie-Hynde inflected voice to give some depth and dimension to the songs that some of the earlier all-buzz numbers didn't have. That's appropriate for some of the heavier subject matter Dreams, tackles, influenced by Penny's mother dying in 2010 and the heavy touring schedule's stress on her family. But it also makes kiss-off rockers like "Just a Creep" more fun -- she's not a great operatic or Broadway singer, but she has the ideal instrument for this kind of album and it makes In Dreams a good step forward from the Dum Dum's earlier work.

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The Informants' second album, Crime Scene Queen, is the musical equivalent of a Hard Case Crime paperback. That publishing house has been printing new and reprinting old hard-boiled stories of tough guys, killer dames and the often seedy world they inhabit. Informants' singer Kerry Pastine leads a retro-jump blues/rockabilly combo that is just as much a part of that noirish world of cigarette smoke, whiskey from the bottle and shadowy deeds done in shadowier alleys.

In fact, the title track would be a great soundtrack opener should anyone ever decide to try to film one of Hard Case's stories, right down to the echo vocal done over a PA microphone. The Informants' don't hang out exclusively on the mean streets, offering some peppy tunes for the dancing folks, like "Get Twisted" and the zydeco-influenced "Marilon." "Salvation" has a gospel feel even if the subject matter is an unreliable lover.

But the hard-edged world of the has-beens and never-quite-was's always beckons, both in the sound and the seen-it-all tones of Pastine's vocals. The Marvelettes might have asked "Please, Mr. Postman" for a letter, but the Informants follow Sister Wynonna Carr in asking "Please, Mr. Jailer" to let her man go free.

Get With the Program?

Physicists have used supercomputers to model what they call the "quantum chromodynamics" of some small spaces. Very simply put, quantum chromodynamics are the way that some of the basic forces of the universe, as well as some of the most basic subatomic particles, interact.

Funny thing is, when you model the quantum chromodynamics of an area, you pretty much recreate it in the simulation. Within the confines of the simulation, there's no way to tell the difference between it and the real thing. Of course, since the equations that model chromodynamics are incredibly complex, the size of the area that's being simulated is incredibly small -- a few "femtometers" across. A femtometer, for the curious, is .000000000000001 of a meter. But as computers get more powerful, they can simulate larger areas. And within those larger simulations, the same conditions would apply: There would be no way from within the model to tell it was a model.

This idea leads physicists, who like to think about weird things, to the supposition that the entire universe might be a kind of computer simulation being run by an incredibly powerful supercomputer.

Some physicists in Germany point out that some ordinary measurements, which can be made with modern technology, might indicate whether or not the world we live in is indeed a computer simulation. That would be very interesting if true, but since we wouldn't know the difference in our everyday experience, it's hard to see what it might mean. Unless of course you take the red pill.

On the other hand, if the world is a computer simulation and it's running on some immense version of Windows, that would explain a lot of things, from Joe Biden's high office to the popularity of Twilight, the Black-Eyed Peas and Lady Gaga: They're glitches.

But I'm thinking that the popularity of The Jersey Shore makes the simulation idea tough to believe. There's no program I can think of that would be able to explain that.

By Any Other Name

According to this article, astronomers estimate there could something like 160 billion planets in our Milky Way galaxy. And that's waaaaaay too many for astronomers to sit around and dream up names for, so a group of them formed a little website at www.uwingu.com to allow people to submit potential planetary names.

The names will then be voted on to get the most popular. The organizers hope to raise a little money for charity and promote awareness of astronomical research.

With 160 billion to work with, it would seem that just about any submission could make it into the lists. So I will be proposing the names "Biden," "Limbaugh," and "O'Reilly," but I will insist that these names be reserved for Jupiter-like planets, which are essentially large balls of gas with no solid material involved whatsoever.

Should there be a planet which has a retrograde orbit -- meaning that it circles its sun backwards compared to the other planets of its system, I will suggest the name "Pelosi." And should a planet be found orbiting the star Scheat (or Beta Pegasi) or one nearby, which is the star nearest the tail of the constellation Pegasus, the clear choice for a name considering the location is "Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid." The reason -- and resemblance -- should be obvious.

First Star to the Right...

Thanks to astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, Superman knows where he was born. The writers of Action Comics included Dr. Tyson in a storyline about Superman seeking the location of Krypton, his homeworld.

And as usual DC Comics honcho Dan DiDio exhibits a lack of clues by suggesting that finding Krypton (which orbits the red dwarf star LHS 2520) is a "milestone" in the DC universe. Several stories have Superman or other folks headed back to the site of the destroyed planet, so Tyson's effort is not the first time Krypton's been found. But on the other hand, this is also not the first time DiDio been's a dork, so I guess it evens out.

The Exercise of the Franchise

From two years ago:

The stickers came about because so few people do vote that, I believe, folks thought that some kind of reminder might jog some memories to do the same. But when comedian Chris Rock disparaged people who said, "I take care of my kids" as though it was a medal-worthy achievement, he said, "Whattaya want, a cookie? That's what you're supposed to do!" I feel similarly about the idea that I should brag about having done one of the very few things I'm supposed to do as a citizen of the United States.

Voting would probably feel better if we had better people to vote for, but most of the better people decided to get real jobs and benefit people using their own money instead of mine. But lest ye think me too cynical, I do recognize some sense of civic pride in casting my ballot:

But there is a very good feeling that accompanies voting. Not the sense of participating in my nation's republic, although that is pretty darn cool when you think about it. No, what really feels good about voting is that, by your choices on the ballot, you get to say, "Talk to the hand," to the people who have relied on demagoguery and disinformation to try to sway voters their way. You can say, "Hasta la vista, baby," to candidates whose shameless misuse and manipulation of the facts represents some of the worst our system has to offer. You can say, "Make a new plan, Stan," to career politicians who figure that since they've run out their string at one level of public office they'll get voted in at another so they can keep feeding at the taxpayer's trough.

People spend a lot of money to get elected to public office. They buy ads, they buy signs, they pay campaign staffs, and so on. And yet, for free, you and I get to tell more than half of them, "Bite me."

You can't get much more American than that.

Closure

The brick-and-mortar portion of the books and printed resource material supplier for my denomination announced it will close next spring. The news wasn't well-received by some folks, who will try to convince the publisher to keep some of the physical stores open.

The protestors have some points on their side. The publishers will be reducing their operation to the call-in and online ordering services only, and both of those, shall we say, suck. I recognize that's not a theological term, so I'll recast it for those with delicate sensibilities by paraphrasing John 11:39: They stinketh. At a previous church, I got tired enough of paying for expedited shipping that arrived late, incomplete orders and a website that featured the best user interface 1996 had to offer that I stopped using them altogether. I ordered material printed by my denominational press through Amazon. For less than I could order it from the denominational store, even considering my ministerial discount.

But the stores were no prize either. Of course a church book store shouldn't open on Sunday, but limiting Saturday hours to 10 AM to 4 PM is just clueless. Too often, the kind of denomination-specific material that can't be found anywhere else wasn't available at the store. Some of their shortcomings weren't their fault; my denomination hasn't lit the world on fire with quality authors, curricula and material, so much of what the stores stocked could be found at other religious bookstores, some of which stayed open until as late as 7 PM on Saturday.

I have no doubt the stores lost money. But the whole operation loses money, and I have to admit some of my fellow clergy play a role. For many years, people who charged items to their account could carry large balances without interest charges or collection efforts much beyond frequent letters reminding them they owed money. If yer not gonna stock stuff a lot of people buy, you'd better make sure you collect on the stuff you do sell.

Here's hoping Jeff Bezos is a Methodist.

(ETA: I know Mr. Bezos is not a Methodist; it's a joke ;-) Also, the fact that the publishing house is closing all the stores is another sign they don't really know what they're doing; a few of them are really very well-run within the confines dictated from the home office and I imagine they turn a profit.)

Classic

Watching David Niven chase around In a gorilla suit in the original Pink Panther movie is pretty much worth the price of admission. Peter Sellers is just a bonus.

Pro Tips

-- When you walk up to the people selling tickets at the local high school football game and offer them a $100 bill to pay for your $5 ticket, chuckling, "Well, good, I needed the change" after they practically clean out their money bag to break it for you is a good way to be remembered as an ass.

-- On a related note, the people taking the money aren't going to invent a senior citizen's discount for you on the spot just because you say that schools "up by the city" have them.

-- There aren't many things in sports prettier than a quarterback hitting the receiver in stride and watching said receiver zip down the field at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light.

-- When the television sets at the gym use just plain old speakers to be heard instead of a fancy audio headphone system, turning the TV up really loud in one room so the people on equipment in another room can hear it better than they can the set in front of them is another good way to be remembered as an ass.

-- High school students who paint their faces at their high school games are perfectly normal. Adults who paint their faces at professional football games are...well, not normal, maybe, but generally acceptable. Adult men with children (who are not themselves players) who paint their faces at high school football games are...misguided.

-- When your legs actually blanch under the hems of your shorts because they're that tight and cut off your circulation, you may have crossed over the line of sensible ways to attract the attention of boys.

Radio Radio

There are a lot of things everybody knows about radio and the music it plays. Such as, there are a few big stations that influence what everyone else plays. They play songs first and then other stations in smaller, less hip markets pick up the trail and start playing the same songs.

Also, that broadcasting conglomerates, especially like Clear Channel Communications, control what gets played on the radio. Clear Channel, in fact, was almost solely responsible for driving the Dixie Chicks off the airwaves after singer Natalie Maines snarked on then-President George W. Bush at a concert in London.

And that radio driven by ever-increasingly hyper-specialized formats stinks up the universe.

UCLA sociology professor Gabriel Rossman has something to say about the first two sets of common knowledge in his book Climbing the Charts. He may have something to say about the third, too, but he doesn't say it in this book. Rossman studied things like when songs began to be played on what radio stations, how quickly a song gained airplay and what pattern, if any, did the airplay starts follow among the different stations.

Among the things Rossman learned was that the idea of a few key stations leading the way for all the rest doesn't pan out when you study the numbers. He calls this the "opinion leadership hypothesis," and when he examines how the airplay of some popular songs spread when they were introduced  -- their "diffusion" -- the numbers don't add up. When graphed, diffusion by opinion leadership (everybody follows in the footsteps of a few key stations or one large conglomerate) would make a smooth "S"-shaped curve. But the actual diffusion stair-steps, which is a lot more like the shape that would show up if airplay was driven by an external factor, such as record company promotion.

As far as the Dixie Chicks shutdown, Rossman's study of when stations stopped playing their songs showed that the smaller broadcasting companies and more independent stations stopped first. The larger conglomerates lagged behind. Again, this is the kind of thing that shows more radio stations responding to outside forces -- in this case, listeners upset with Maines' comments -- than to some kind of top-down decision. It would also seem to make sense with the idea that local stations, which depend on local ads, would respond to pressure more quickly because they don't have any broadcast partners to help carry the load if they get in trouble with their listeners.

Since he's a sociology prof, Rossman's primary interest is in watching how changes spread through networks. That's the meaning of the subtitle phrase "diffusion of innovation."

Because the other meaning of innovation, which has to do with change and creativity, hasn't been very applicable to most of 21st century radio or the music it plays for quite some time now.

Fish in a Barrel, Again

So some Hollywood types are worried because movies don't embed themselves into the culture the way they used to. Even a weekly box-office winner may not be seen by as many people as watch an episode of a popular TV show.

The article touches on a couple of reasons, mostly dealing with the ability to pick up TV content "for free," or at least for being able to watch it at any time in your own home after paying your cable bill. Movies, on the other hand, are initially shown in just a few places and require you to pony up every time you drop in.

Of course the "fish in a barrel" of the post title is the idea that movies don't embed themselves in the culture they way they used to is because few of the movies being released today carry that much weight or have that much depth. Throw The Godfather against the cultural wall and it not only sticks, it becomes a part of the wall. Throw (insert any of 90% of movies released in the last 10 years or any of 99% of Oscar winners in that same time frame) against the cultural wall and you'll be surprised if it even makes it there, let alone sticks.

The item I think the story overlooks is that culture itself is pretty fragmented -- there really isn't a single popular culture or even a dominant one. The writer suggests that if Argo, a well-received movie in theaters today, keeps doing well for a few more weeks it might match the one-night viewing total of Glee. Sounds like a reasonable measure of the two works' relative cultural impact until you check out what some of those ratings are and realize that the TV shows themselves aren't really all that weighty in cultural terms.

For example, on the random date of May 22, 2012, Glee had 7.6 million viewers. Ignore that total lags behind an NCIS rerun and accept the Times writer's thesis that Glee is the show with the larger cultural impact. Really? There are about 310 million people in the U.S., which means just about 2.5 percent watched that episode of Glee. As an "impact," that rates somewhere along the lines of being hit with a really aggressive feather.

In 1983, the series finale of M*A*S*H drew 121.6 million viewers at a time when the U.S. population was only 233 million. Percentage-wise, that's 52.2 percent -- more than half the country. If don't think that "more than half" is a number implying a significant impact, then Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, Al Gore, John Kerry and John McCain would all like to talk to you.

There really is no unified popular culture anymore -- there are many micro-cultures. Some larger than others, but none of them displaying the kind of dominance in entertainment choices and styles we may remember from as recently as 10 or 15 years ago. That, it seems to me, is one of the major reasons movies don't embed themselves in the cultural consciousness the way they used to.

And yeah, a lot of them suck, too.