Would You Like to Try Again?

This article is a couple of years old but still worth scratching your head over. Slate magazine assembled a panel of voters who ranged from writers to musicians to nominate the songs they thought would be added to the so-called Great American Songbook in the coming years.

The "Songbook" concept is pretty malleable -- it's not an actual book but instead a more or less widely accepted canon of jazz and pop music standards frequently covered and reinterpreted by vocalists. So it could pretty easily accumulate new songs even though there's no set criteria for inclusion. Some general characteristics include relatively more complex lyrics and a kind of flexible character that can be adapted by a wide range of singers and stir a wide range of emotions.

So the Slate panel nominated its own candidates and the article at the link gives the top 30. It's a pretty dumb article and not only because of some of the songs -- which we'll get to in a minute. Whoever wrote the intro rightly pointed out that the Songbook acquires new tunes according to no set formula. But then the writer whiffed by calling Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" "a commercial disappointment from a critically derided band." Journey may have been critically derided during its late 70s and early 80s heyday but "Believin'" hit #9 in the Billboard Hot 100 and sold a million copies. The article hadn't been published for very long before someone -- probably someone old enough to listen to the radio in 1981 -- engineered a correction that suggested "Believin'" was a commercial disappointment compared to the other singles from the album. But considering that "Stone in Love" didn't chart and "Still they Ride" barely cracked the top 20, some more correction is in order.

In any event, when we get to the songs themselves we have to first confront the question, "Wha," as in, "What were you people thinking?"

Included on the list are several rap and hip-hop tunes -- I'm a big fan of some old-school rap, in which clever rhymes and even cleverer wordplay elevate a rapper and his or her tune above the wannabes and competitors. But the panelists, exploring mostly music from the last 25 years or so, include songs with a blizzard of unrhymed free-form sexual boasting and FCC non-compliant verbiage unlikely to be covered on any wide basis.

A few suggestions make sense, like Idina Menzel's Frozen soundtrack smash "Let It Go," but for every one that does is another that makes none. Like Liz Phair's "**** and Run," in which the singer laments awakening next to yet another in a long string of one-night stands instead of being in a relationship. I'm no professional music critic or writer who can make Slate's list, but I think one pretty strong indicator a song won't make the Great American Songbook is that you can't sing it in front of Grandma.

It's hard to say what exactly the panelists thought made their suggestions a good fit for the Songbook concept and maybe that's the problem, that they didn't really know themselves. Either way the idea that someone is going to karaoke or re-record a version of Eminem's "Lose Yourself" in, say, 2065, means these suggestions may be filed and forgotten.

Font of Unwisdom

If I told you that someone had written an academic paper about whether or not people perceive typefaces as "conservative" or "liberal," and I explained to you I used those terms ideologically, rather than to describe a style, you would probably say something along the lines of "you're kidding."

I wish you were right.

Prescription: Sample Your Wares

Bookstores are among my favorite businesses on the planet. One of the neat things that's been happening in the last few years is the survival and strengthening of the independent bookstore. Endangered and dying in the 1990s because of giants like Border's and Barnes and Noble, the independent store watched the megabox domination crumble when pushed up against Amazon. A well-run bookstore is one of my most-loved places to be, and one where I can easily waste more hours in a day than is good for my punctuality.

But sometimes they're stupid, such as the Whitcoulls chain in New Zealand. In the aftermath of the horrible massacre in Christchurch, the chain has pulled from its shelves the book 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson.

Peterson is a Canadian professor who has gained a significant following with his no-nonsense approach to what can seem to be a crazy modern world. He's gotten flack for refusing to use people's preferred pronouns when addressing them if those pronouns contrast with their obvious gender. In 12 Rules, he offers some common-sense ways for people to help reduce stress in their own lives and make them better people for themselves as well as those around them. A self-declared agnostic, Peterson has no real problem with those who adapt his rules to fit a more religious way of life even though he doesn't really frame them that way. He is not known for any public stance on Islam or its practitioners. The book itself does not address Islam or argue against it.

Current speculation is that someone in the chain saw a picture of Peterson hugging a fan, who was wearing a T-shirt that said, "I am an Islamophobe." Because of this, it's thought, the chain feared he might be linked to anti-Muslim sentiment. We don't know, because Whitcoulls isn't talking.

We do know, however, that among the books still on their shelves and available for online ordering is a book called My Struggle, written while the author was in prison for treason. Published in 1925, you would probably know it better by its title in the author's native German language: Mein Kampf.

Priorities

While the latest empty maw of a "story" was consuming the nation's attention by chronicling the unfunny Grade-Z bullying schtick of a comedian who was simply following the lead of the Unfunnny Grade-Z Bullying Schticker-in-Chief, an anniversary happened in a government agency.

The four members of the Federal Election Commission passed the mark of collectively having 32 more years of work than they were supposed to. Commissioners are appointed for finite terms, but since the governmental persons who are supposed to appoint their replacements haven't, then they haven't stepped down. And two spots on the Commission remain open because of the same problem. It's one thing for a government agency to never die, long after whatever original purpose moved has been fulfilled. It's a whole other thing for the people serving as its governors to never quit and never get replaced, sometimes for more than a decade after their actual term ended.

Naturally, as the story notes, they have new offices.

So What Happened?

A Facebook friend suggested that "for 11 minutes, there was peace on Twitter." She was referring to the fact that Thursday, an employee of Twitter on his or her way out the door shut down President Donald Trump's Twitter account and it stayed down for 11 minutes.

And of course she was wrong, because Twitter itself didn't go away for those 11 minutes and it remains the knee-jerk exercise in group think that it has been for most of its existence.

Twitter initially said that a glitch of some kind caused the shutdown before learning about the gift its former employee left behind. Twitter spokespeople said they are investigating the matter to learn how it happened.

Few tears would fall from these eyes if the president never Tweeted. Things would be a lot calmer. Few tears would fall from these eyes if Twitter itself didn't exist -- not entirely because without Twitter I think it's impossible to have a President Trump. Maybe largely, but not entirely. It is here, though, and many people use it and it's become a medium of expression for them.

Unless some overgrown toddler has a tantrum and decides to play games, that is.

WTH, WHO?

Tedros Ghebreyesus is the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), and he fibbed earlier today on Twitter. He said he was "re-thinking" the appointment of Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe as a WHO Goodwill Ambassador.

Dr. Ghebreyesus does not seem to understand that thought cannot have been involved in initially selecting Mugabe, therefore the decision to retract the honorary appointment is actually "thinking" instead of "re-thinking.” Mugabe is on record more than once defending the practice of extra-legal arrest and torture. His kleptocracy and corruption have so wrecked the Zimbabwe economy that he schleps his 93-year-old carcass out of the country for medical treatment. He's had journalists who wrote things he didn't like arrested and tortured.

In making the largely ceremonial appointment, WHO said that Mugabe would focus on non-communicable diseases such as heart attacks and strokes. Considering that Mugabe's own organ of that name must indeed be a shriveled and dried out husk, it seems that the WHO statement was designed to induce strokes more than prevent them.

Breaking News!

Charles Hill at Dustbury makes sure to help CNN stay out in front of keeping people informed.

Point of View?

A photographer featured at Bored Panda has taken close-up pictures of spiders' feet. Magnifying tiny details hundreds of times, the photos show what appears to be soft fur and tiny little paws.

The headline suggests that pictures may change the way one looks at spiders. I find this unlikely in my case, since I don't think the corpse left behind when I smash it with any handy object will have such intriguing detail.

Retail Woes

At a conference in Kansas City, so I visited a Container Store. They sell a brand of modular shelving that I like and I needed two shelves to help me finish out a unit. They can be ordered online, but I thought since I was in the area anyway, why not just pick them up?

Me to clerk while holding sheet with shelving items listed, since they weren’t out on the sales floor. “I was needing to get these two items.”

Clerk calls manager, who is on another call, so she goes to the back room of the store to talk to him directly. She returns.

“We don’t actually keep those in the store anymore; they would have to come on the truck, which would be here Wednesday.” Since I won’t be here until next Wednesday, I decline. I’ll wind up ordering them anyway, because they will get to my house as fast as they would get to a store, even if I lived here and could come back by and pick them up.

I wish I could figure out why retail stores seem to be having trouble keeping business.

Peaked TV

Even though the book has yet to be published, Showtime has bid a whole bunch of money to turn The President is Missing, a collaboration between thriller author James Patterson and former president Bill Clinton, into a television series.

Patterson and Clinton announced the book in May. It won't hit bookshelves until 2018, so Showtime's press release about the the whole deal is skimpy on details. Rumors that the former president, when told who had picked up the book for adaptation, commented "I'm the one who gets to write those scenes, right?" are as yet unconfirmed.

Not Even James Bond...

... could make an AMC Hornet look cool. But the one he tried it in is up for auction, just the same.

This Speech is Free

Writing at The Washington Post, Catherine Rampell notes a new poll which, if accurate, shows that 49% of the people who responded to it are silly twits who should not be allowed back into a voting booth until they can demonstrate they understand the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

The poll was taken in light of recent campus events in which industrial-sized toddlers threw tantrums serious enough that the adults involved were unable to complete their planned activities. In much the same way that a two-year-old's meltdown in the grocery store can make mom or dad head home and schedule the trip for later, the chanting children afraid of all ideas but their own have forced speakers to record their talks for online viewing or in some cases cancel altogether. Were this poll -- asking whether or not campuses should allow guest speakers to appear if their words "are considered hateful or offensive by some" -- conducted on an actual campus, we would expect a large group to respond the same way their emotional peers respond to naptime at the day care center.

But the new poll was not conducted on a campus and includes the responses of everyday Americans who are supposed to be more grown up than that. And if it's right, 30% of those people think universities should not have such speakers on campus, with 19% being unsure about it. The questions in the poll are reprinted exactly as they were asked, so there's no guesswork involved: 30% of the people responding have forgotten what country they live in and 19% require spinal reconstruction.

We can allow that people didn't listen closely to the question, I suppose, and maybe they didn't notice the words "considered" and "to some." The problem is that "hateful" and "offensive" are by definition subjective standards. Sure, some speech is clear, cut-and-dried hateful and would be seen as such by everybody.

But most such speech lives in a gray area that requires one to accept a particular definition of hate or offense in order to consider it hateful or offensive. I, for example, mired as I am in my traditional Christian theism, would consider a speech advocating mandatory readings of Phillip Pullman in church to be offensive. Many people, though, would not think it offensive at all and might want to hear this presentation. According to the poll 30% of people think that I, in my role as "some," should be able to prevent that speech from being given because I consider it to be offensive.

The irony in this situation, I think, is that most of the speech that really is hateful and offensive should be heard more often because exposure to it frequently drains it of power. In my example, a regular reading of Pullman would quickly point out how lightweight his thought is when it comes to theism. When you hear a good old-fashioned anti-Semitic "Jews run the world!" ranter start going off, you figure out pretty quickly what a load of hooey it all is. When people watched the ilk of Bull Conner set dogs and fire hoses on polite, well-dressed folk who wanted to do radical things like vote in elections and sit down at a lunch counter, even those who probably retained quite a bit of racial prejudice started saying, "That's not what this country is about."

And I'll confess overreacting with my suggested remedy to the problem. I'm not in favor of disenfranchising people who should know better -- if for no other reason than on some issue or another I've been among their number and will be again. People who don't know what they're doing have just as much right to vote as people who do. Even if it seems the former are already distinctly over-represented in elective office.

Oooookay

Spent some time driving on the state highways over the last couple of days and noticed a sign before entering construction zones.

Obviously, those areas can be very dangerous for workers and motorists need to pay careful attention when driving through them. It's one of the reasons speed limits in the zones are so much lower. Bright orange signs, lights, traffic cones -- several things are in use to alert drivers to their need to slow and watch closely.

But one sign, I'm not sure of. "Don't hit our workers! Avoid $10,000 fine," it read.

Because not severely injuring or even killing another human being through inattention isn't reason enough?

Cart, Horse...

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel doesn't think his city's schools are doing their job of educating the students in them. A number of things, like test scores, graduation statistics and the naked eye back him up on this.

So he's proposed a solution. In order to receive their diplomas, Chicago seniors will have to show "an acceptance letter to a four-year university, a community college, a trade school or apprenticeship, an internship, or a branch of the armed services." In other words, the only people who can have a Chicago public school diploma are the ones who've managed to transcend the dismal system in which they have been laboring for the last 12 years.

The statistics in the Huffington Post story say that nine out of every 10 Chicago public school students has to take remedial courses at whatever college they attend because they can't do the very things that a high school diploma is supposed to indicate they can. That 91 percent figure is from 2014 but I can't imagine it's dropped much since then, if indeed it's dropped at all. It's almost as though the Mayor doesn't want to give kids a diploma until he can be assured that the city's school system hasn't completely wrecked their chances at a future.

And it's kind of a weak goad in any event, because he's only talking about the actual piece of paper itself. Many of those post-high school options in his list kind of require a student to graduate in order to enter them, which means the student has to be listed as having fulfilled all the requirements to do so. Universities don't accept incomplete high school transcripts. If I'm accepted to a four-year university, what the heck do I need the piece of paper for? My mom can probably tell you where my high school diploma is but I have exactly zero idea. Even for people who like to cover an office wall with diplomas and certificates the value of a high school diploma is marginal -- if there's limited room and one has to go, then adios alma mater.

Having worked at a college before, I can point to a lot of anecdotal evidence that few high schools really get students "ready for college." Time management skills, study habits, reading for information, ability to write clearly -- and that's before we get anywhere near actual knowledge content. Smart kids who went to good high schools were not really prepared for the changed environment of campus life and the university classroom. So while they may be worse than a lot of others (and better than a few), this is not a problem limited to Chicago schools.

Mayor Emanuel's proposed solution, on the other hand, has less of an excuse for its seeming cluelessness. The Mayor attended suburban Winnetka's New Trier High School (he was at the west campus when it was still open), identified as one of the nation's top schools in national magazines as far back as the 1950s. From there he went to private Sarah Lawrence College and picked up a master's from the private Northwestern University.

So he oughtta be smarter than this.

A Pirate Looks at Whatever the Mandatory Retirement Age Is Now

Jimmy Buffett, who has parlayed a single Top-10 song ("Margaritaville") and a laid-back beach bum persona into a four-decade career, is about to branch out into a new arena.

Buffett is already the owner of two restaurant chains and a merchandise store but has decided, in a move befitting the Baby Boom generation of which he is a part, to open Margaritaville-themed retirement homes. Despite the image he often projects, Buffett is actually a savvy businessman and wide-ranging artist. He's created Broadway plays and written three books in addition to recording and touring.

Here's a suggestion for a reworking of "Margaritaville" into its new setting:

"Wastin' away again in Margaritaville.

 Searchin' for my

Lost glass of teeth..."

Best of luck to Mr. Buffett; the place sounds like it would be a heckuvan interestng time.

Nobody Saw Me Do It, And You Can't Prove Anything.

I am sure that many of you who saw this notice about a theft of rare books immediately suspected me. Thanks, but I'm not that clever.

Actually, the person who is suspected of ordering the books be stolen is known as "The Astronomer." Which means this whole scenario is being transferred into Final Draft files in at least a dozen Hollywood basements even as we speak.

The Real Winner?

A person on reddit crunched some numbers and Brilliant Maps posted this interesting result as a take on last week's presidential vote.

Had "Did Not Vote" been a candidate, it would have won in a landslide of almost Reaganesque proportions with 490 electoral votes to Hillary Clinton's 32 and Donald Trump's 16. In only seven cases did the vote for one of the actual candidates running exceed the number of eligible voters who stayed home: Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Wisconsin and the District of Columbia.

None of the nation's largest electoral prizes would have gone to either candidate -- including New York, the declared home base of both of them. So if you're all wound up about the results, rather than blame the people who voted for the candidate you didn't like or some third-party doof (sheepishly raises hand), you might save some disapproving glances for the people who didn't even do that.

Perspective

The next time someone tells you that you are too ambitious, tell them at least you didn't try to convince the German government to drain the Mediterranean.

This Place Smells Like a Frathouse

In the 1960s' Heineken Brewing Company head Freddy Heineken didn't much care for seeing all the trash when he visited Curaçao. Nor did he think it was right that so many people there lacked housing. His solution:

Yes, beer bottles shaped like bricks, which could be mortared together to build housing. Consumer tests showed that buyers didn't care for the square bottles, so the brick-style containers never went on the market. Rumors that the housing departments of major American universities opposed it on the grounds that dormitories would be empty as students constructed their own dwellings are, as far as we know, unfounded.

Pity. Might have cut down on the stone-throwing, too.

Unclear on the Concept

Companies that produce movies, music and television programs try very hard to stay ahead of the people who put their work online for free. One way to do that is to get search engines to not list the sites that make the downloads available.

But Warner Bros. may have cast their net a little too widely in asking Google to de-list a number of sites where Warner Bros. material can be viewed or downloaded. They included sites that offer legitimate streaming, such as Amazon. And they included their own site.

Yes. A media company has asked Google to stop listing its own site because doing so violates copyright laws.

And they called the duck "Daffy."