Trapped

While watching a couple of videos of tracks from Bruce Springsteen’s upcoming Western Stars release, I scrolled YouTube’s sidebar suggestions of other videos to watch. Among them: “Trapped,” which while not being a Springsteen composition, may be the most ‘80s song in his catalog.

The song was originally by reggae artist Jimmy Cliff, who wrote it in 1972 and watched it do pretty much nothing as a single. The lyrics use the language of a controlling or damaging romantic relationship to express a feeling of oppression in the singer’s culture — a pledge to “someday walk out of here again” could be seen as a promise to drop the bad relationship or throw off the oppression to take the human rights the singer is due.

While touring Europe in 1981, Springsteen bought a tape of Jimmy Cliff songs and liked “Trapped” well enough to try to arrange it for his E Street Band. Cliff’s arrangement had the jaunty rhythm common to reggae but Springsteen slowed the tempo, led with solitary, somber chords from Roy Bittan’s synthesizer and punctuated the song with the kind of anthemic chorus he and the E Streeters were known for. He debuted his arrangement of “Trapped” in England in May of 1981 and it stayed on the set list when the tour returned to the United States.

Then in 1984 a little thing called Born in the U.S.A. happened, and suddenly the devoted but middle-profile fandom that Springsteen had built through the 1970s and early 1980s became mega-stardom. “Trapped” was a popular concert number and made the set list for this tour as well; Springsteen shows had always been more than a simple showcase of his own songs and had their own entertainment modules that never saw an official album release.

In 1985, the famine relief project USA for Africa recorded the single “We Are the World,” featuring dozens of music stars. All money from sales went to famine relief for a variety of sub-Saharan countries, in a ramping up of the Christmas 1984 Band Aid project “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” USA for Africa also wanted to release an album to help raise funds, and several artists donated new or unreleased tracks for it. Springsteen donated an August 1984 recording of “Trapped.” Neither it nor any other donated song was ever released as a single, but “Trapped” hit #1 on what was then called Billboard’s Top Rock Tracks chart and spent 11 weeks in that chart’s top 40. The “official” single release of that time frame, “Glory Days,” spent longer on the Top Rock chart but peaked at #3. Released as a single, of course, it also charted in the regular Top 40.

“Trapped” was the only We Are the World song to gain radio airplay other than the title single and frequently the best-reviewed track on the album. In an interview, Cliff said he appreciated that his song caught Springsteen’s ear and he liked the arrangement — he also liked that through one of his songs, people in difficult situations were getting some help they needed.

The chart position and heavy airplay on album-oriented rock (AOR) stations are things that would probably not happen on radio today. Like many middle-aged people, I am convinced that things were better when I was younger, but in some cases there’s evidence to back me up. The idea that a station’s playlist would include a non-single cover of a decade-old obscurity doesn’t compute at all. None of the various iPod programs that pass for radio station playlists today would have room for it, and no radio station personnel would be given the leeway to play it. That’s if the DJs are actually in the studio when songs were playing instead of being piped in from a station somewhere else or just pre-recorded themselves.

Sure, in terms of music released for purchase these days there’s more variety and diversity than there probably ever has been. But since no one ever gets to hear any of it, the diversity rings a bit hollow. This week circumstances have had me listening to the radio in my truck instead of the podcasts I usually download and play. And so in my own little way, I guess I can also say, “Seems like I’m caught up in your trap again” to the shallow cookie-cutter, lowest common denominator programming on my dial. But I’m headed home tomorrow, so Mr. Podcast can help “teach my eyes to see/beyond these walls in front of me/And someday I’ll walk out of here again.”

Quark!

Physicist Murray Gell-Mann’s exploration of the subatomic realm led him to surmise that what were previously thought of as basic particles — electron, proton and neutron — might be composed of still smaller particles combined in unique and specific ways. He hypothesized these particles and some of their qualities in 1964, as did another physicist working independently, George Zweig. In 1968, experiments at the Stanford Linear Acceleration Center proved the particles exist and in 1969 Gell-Mann won the Nobel Prize.

But in some ways even more important than his discovery of these little bits was his naming of them. Because of Murray Gell-Mann, we will always have a use for the letter Q in Scrabble or Words With Friends, because he’s the one who named them quarks.

Day of Honor

I saw an explanatory meme that helps focus our attention on the sort of "two-part" holiday of Sunday and Monday, Memorial Day. Armed Forces Day celebrates those who wear our nation's uniform. Veterans' Day celebrates those who have worn our nation's uniform but have taken it off after honorable service. Memorial Day celebrates those who will forever wear the uniform.

Many thanks, gentlemen and ladies. May we be worthier of your sacrifice than we have been.

Mona Lisa Speaks!

Well, she looks like she speaks, anyway, after the iconic image is processed through a model developed by the Samsung AI Center.

The machine learning program maps facial landmarks on a source face and applies them to the landmarks on a target face, and then makes the source face do what the target face does. So the brief clip a little ways down the page shows Mona Lisa's face mimicking the speaking motions of a particular target face. The program has a couple of different ways of mapping, and some look better for some faces than others.

I'm not so good at lipreading, and of course I don't speak Italian, but if we were to get animation of the actual Mona Lisa speaking I bet it would be something like, "Can you hurry up, Leo? This robe is sweltering!"

One-Third Right but all Wrong

Missouri Senator Josh Hawley ran an opinion piece in USA Today about what he thinks needs to happen to social media. In a time when more than a few legislators want to see companies like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram broken up because they're too big and supposedly too powerful, the freshman Republican goes several steps more: He wants to see them all die and wither away.

Social media, Sen. Hawley says, have come to function in people's lives like addictive drugs. And that's not a byproduct or a bug but a feature of their business model. They make money by selling advertising, and the way they guarantee advertisers that there will be people who watch the ads is by creating an experience designed to be addictive and time-wasting. We would all, Sen. Hawley says, be better off without them.

When it comes to Twitter I won't argue with Sen. Hawley one bit. Being useless would be a step up for the microblogging platform, which encourages rash, poorly reasoned and unconsidered responses to events or comments. Instagram I've got no opinion about because I've never messed with it. I personally find Facebook a useful communications and publicity platform that lets me put out a lot of content for next to no cost and get it in front of most of the eyeballs I want to see it.

But...

Telling me that social media is bad for me may or may not be true. It may or may not be something I need to hear. But it is with certainty not Senator Hawley's place to tell me about it. The senator graduated with honors from Stanford with a degree in history. His law degree is from Yale. He's clerked for United States Supreme Court Justice John Roberts. He's the reason we don't have to listen to Claire McCaskill anymore. Those are all good things, but none of them suggest any special knowledge about the human psyche or how social media affects it. Meaning the only reason he's putting this opinion forward for consideration is because he's a United States Senator, and social commentary and engineering is not a Senator's job.

You can word-search the Constitution's Article 1, both inside and outside the Senate's specific section 3, and you won't find "parent" anywhere therein. Former Pennsylvania representative Rick Santorum had this problem back when he wanted to be President. He wanted to talk about the problems that sexual libertinism had created in the country in the years since we went meshuggah sometime in the 1960s, even though the job he wanted us to give him has nothing to do with that sort of thing.

Sen. Hawley is doing the same thing. If I knew him personally his opinion on the problems caused by social media might interest me. If he were using that opinion as a means of describing some sort of overall worldview to draw a contrast between him and an opponent it could be useful. But I don't and he's not and there's nothing in his background that makes his two pennies matter more than anyone else's.

If he was in the House I could say, "Representative, shut up and represent," but, "Shut up and Senate" doesn't make much sense. So I'll go with "Pipe down and legislate," although I'm under no illusions such instructions would ever gain Sen. Hawley's attention or be followed if so.

Award Winning

Although the name and the awarding organization might suggest a narrow list of potential awardees, the Libertarian Futurist Society's Prometheus Award has, in its 40-year history, gone to works which could clearly be classified as liberal, progressive or conservative as well as libertarian. The 2018 version of the award, however, went to a book that was very definitely libertarian in outlook and plot action, as well as reminiscent of some earlier works and awardees: Travis Corcoran's The Powers of the Earth.

Powers is set in 2064, some years after a discovery of anti-gravity has allowed a group of settlers to colonize the moon. The technology is jealously guarded by the Lunar settlers, installed on a handful of bulk freighters that retro-fitted to be airtight and maneuverable in vacuum. The national governments of Earth, particularly the vapid former talk-show host in the White House, see the Lunar colony's financial and natural resources as means to prop up their own shaky regimes, while the Lunar settlers see the moon as a place where they can live the way they want: Free from old Earth's stifling and nonsensical mare's nest of laws and regulations. When a supply ship is hijacked by a US military unit a shooting war seems inevitable, and the outnumbered settlers seem bound to lose.

But so did George Washington.

Corcoran seems to have made Powers deliberately similar to Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, down to the inclusion of an artificial intelligence on the side of the libertarian-leaning colonists. He has his own touches, such as a pack of genetically enhanced dogs who can reason and talk, and the considerable narrative space he spends on the terrestrial leaders and their shenanigans. The additional material adds to the page count (Powers is the first of a two-part story; Causes of Separation was published in 2018 and is a 2019 Prometheus nominee) but not much overall to the story. Corcoran is strongest when he's engaging with some of the hits and misses of Heinlein's work; when he's offering commentary on what bugs him about today's world the story tips towards jarringly broad and boring satire.

Powers would benefit from significant tightening of its narrative focus. In the hijacking that starts the conflict the crew tries and bloodily fails to retake control of the ship several times, for example, to no discernible purpose because one or two would have worked. The sequences with the enhanced dogs and their accompanying human wander around the main plot thread with limited intersection and even more limited utility. The Powers-Causes duology is not as didactic and dull as Atlas Shrugged, but it leaves a Randian whiff behind it and presents a very limited case for earning the LFS's top award given it by a vote of the society's members.

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That case gets even more limited when you pick up a couple of the novels Powers beat out for the award, such as Karl Gallagher's Torchship (like Powers, Torchship is a part of a larger work, Gallagher's "Torchship Trilogy"). Even though this first novel of the trilogy is constructed as a series of connnected vignettes about the Fives Full tramp freighter and sometime passenger ship, it still has a coherence Powers lacks. If the other nominees are as much better than the winner as Torchship is, then you could make a good case that 2018's LFS voters should ask for a do-over.

Michigan "Mitchie" Long hires onto the Fives Full as a pilot after demonstrating her math abilities. Humanity's explored worlds are roughly grouped into three categories: those that allow limited networked computers, those that don't and those that have been taken over by artificial intelligence. The interstellar "torchships" need to be able to navigate on the mathematical calculations of their human pilots as well as computers, depending on which planetary system they're in. The Fives' small crew is a colorful group of characters so Mitchie fits in, even though she's concealing her primary role as a spy. She fits in well enough to develop a rapport and then relationship with the ship's mechanic over the course of the three novels, as Gallagher describes humanity's conflicted response to the menace of the artificial intelligence and its own infighting.

But aside from Mitchie's spy work the crew of the Fives Full are just folks trying to keep flying and find a job to enable that -- and in the same way that Powers draws from Harsh Mistress, Torchship draws from Joss Whedon's Firefly. Gallagher writes engaging and likeable characters, and has created an interesting world in which they work. He's set up circumstances to make sliderule-style calculations and wrench-and-spanner ship repairs plausible in a world of faster-than-light travel.

Although Gallagher doesn't entirely stick the landing in the third novel of the trilogy, the world of Torchship is a fun place to visit. It would seem as though he's ended the story as the third novel draws to a close, but there may be room for more stories in this universe -- and they'd certainly be welcome.

Clue Not Apparent

A couple I know are the union of a church musician and a doctor. When they had kids, they quite logically decided that the church musician would work part time and the doctor full-time, in order to get the best benefit of their combined financial and parenting resources. The church musician did not see the need to peg the earnings needle as the only concern.

Now, my walking around the pronouns will clue you in that the father and husband is the church musician and the mother and wife is the doctor. But every parental couple works the same numbers in making the decisions that are best for their families or help them meet their own personal desires, Very often, the mother decides to stay home during early childhood, or consider the job she wants based on how much freedom it provides her to be with her children, whether or not it offers maternity leave and how much, and so on. Choices like this have a heavy influence on what is called the "wage gap," where the earnings of men and women are compared and the wages paid to women found wanting. More realistic surveys, which control for those kinds of choices and other different career path decisions, show the gap to be narrower.

Senator Kamala Harris, who wants to be the Democratic nominee for president, recently proposed a policy that would require companies to obtain an equal pay certification showing they pay their male and female workers the same, or demonstrate that factors such as experience and performance have caused the gap. Companies which didn't hit that mark or properly document the acceptable reasons for not hitting it would have to pay fines of 1 percent of their daily profits for every day they failed to do so. It's hard to tell from the proposal if the fines would apply to companies which paid female workers more than male workers -- probably a rare happenstance but certainly possible.

There's just one problem. Not with the idea of equal pay for equal work, that's only fair. And not with Sen. Harris's plan, which has far more than one problem. And not with the irony that Senator Harris, as a member of one of the two houses of the legislative branch of the government, could introduce legislation today that could create the certification regime she wants to see happen.

No, this problem is that the men who work for Sen. Harris's legislative and campaign offices make, on average, six percent more than the women. Obvious, Sen. Harris's candidacy can't be supported.

Because of hypocrisy? No, of course not. Every human being manages to display a little hypocrisy, and if hypocrisy by itself would keep you from voting for someone then the first Tuesday in November is just another day for you.

No, it's because of the dumb. Apparently neither Sen. Harris nor anyone in her office, in the leadup to this rollout, thought to take a look at their own pay book to see if they could meet the standard they were calling for. If they had, it might have even helped her push her cause: "Good intentions aren't enough," she might say. "Even when you know equal pay is important, you have to keep a close eye on things or they could get out of balance." She could close with the usual, "I'm Kamala Harris, and I approved this message," but then add in another shot of her surrounded by some female campaign staff. "And if you were thinking of giving to my campaign, you might put a couple of extra dollars in the envelope. Some of my employees just got a raise."

Or some other method of handling the matter -- that's an issue better left to wiser political minds than mine, of which there are many. What's disqualifyingly dumb is to never ask, "Hey, how do our salaries measure up on this?" What's flat-out stupid is to think no one else will ask either, including conservative-leaning news outlets who've done it before.

There's no way I'll be voting for President Trump in November of 2020. Although I'm not unhappy with some of his results, he remains a man of unfit character for the office. I'm currently registered as an independent, but in my state my former party allows independents to vote in its primaries. If for some reason Sen. Harris looks strong by the time our primary elections roll around, I'll definitely take advantage of that opportunity and vote for someone else. If I want a president who overlooks the most basic facts about his or her own policy proposals and isn't smart enough to game out the most obvious responses to them, then I'll just stay home because I'm already watching that show.