perfidy

There was no way I wasn't going to read an Economist article that started like this:

THEODORE STURGEON, an American science-fiction writer, once observed that “95% of everything is crap”. John Ioannidis, a Greek epidemiologist, would not go that far. His benchmark is 50%. But that figure, he thinks, is a fair estimate of the proportion of scientific papers that eventually turn out to be wrong.

Dr. Ionannidis' article, entitled "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" turns out to be a really interesting read. It uses numerical and statistical methods in an attempt to prove that, in fact, 50% of everything scientific is crap.

I'm sure it's just me, pretending to think too deeply on a stormy day in Houston, but there's a circular irony to his assertion that got me chuckling.

Once past that, the reasons that his statistics seem reasonable are many and credible. As a ferinstance:

Dr Ioannidis began by looking at specific studies, in a paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in July. He examined 49 research articles printed in widely read medical journals between 1990 and 2003. Each of these articles had been cited by other scientists in their own papers 1,000 times or more. However, 14 of them—almost a third—were later refuted by other work. Some of the refuted studies looked into whether hormone-replacement therapy was safe for women (it was, then it wasn't), whether vitamin E increased coronary health (it did, then it didn't), and whether stents are more effective than balloon angioplasty for coronary-artery disease (they are, but not nearly as much as was thought).

Not to worry, though - that's all part of the process, as we're reminded, not by Dr. Ioannidis, but by the Economist's science editor:

Science is a Darwinian process that proceeds as much by refutation as by publication. But until recently no one has tried to quantify the matter.

A fun fact to remember next time I hear of breathless new scientific hypotheses. Also important to remember? Even highly authoritative sources, as measured by number of citations elsewhere, are not guaranteed to be the truth might be crap.

No, really. From this nifty and cleverly named job predictor thingy I picked up from Rocket Jones I learned that I could, even should have been a Brain Surgeon. Sadly, when I enter my actual, full name rather than my admittedly goofy nom de net it tells me that my true vocation is Circus Freak. Playing around a bit, I confirmed my suspicions about my long detested middle name:

Walter, your ideal job is a Rear End of Panto Cow

I don't know exactly what a Panto Cow is, but it can't be good.

To avoid any potential shyness on the part of my coworkers, here is what they should be doing:

• Johno, your ideal job is a Office Gopher. Strangely, that is very similar to what he actually does. This thing is good!
• Patton, your ideal job is a teasmaid. I'm not sure what that is precisely, but it sounds vaguely gay.
• Geeklethal, your ideal job is a Dentist. I am sure what that is precisely, and it sounds vaguely gay.
• Ross, Your ideal job is a Professional Tramp. No doubt about it, a bit swish. And slutty, too. I wonder if they've nationalized tramps in Canada?

Well, there you have it. Three fags, a gopher and a brain surgeon. That's us in a nutshell.

According to the press release for his book, Music Lust,

"After listening to just one radio show from Nic Harcourt - Music Director at LA's KCRW and host of "Morning Becomes Eclectic" - you'll not only have discovered new music, you'll be introduced to an artist or album that you may have missed in years past. Harcourt is arguably the most savvy tastemaker to grace the airwaves these days.

Ever read High Fidelity or seen the film? Remember how the guys in the music store would sit around and endlessly count angels on the heads of turntable needles? You know - "name your all time top five side one, track ones." "Name your top five country songs about death." Now Nic Harcourt has now made a book out of his particular lists. From what I've heard of him and his output, Harcourt has good (if quirky) taste in music, so this an interesting notion.

The idea for Music Lust comes from an idea by a Seattle librarian named Nancy Pearl, who wrote a book called Book Lust, a set of recommended-reading lists that updates a venerable library tradition of culling the good stuff according to a given librarian's quirks and considered opinions. Pearl made a splash recently in the library field with that book and with the accompanying "shushing librarian" doll modeled after herself. The title Book Lust is itself a pun on the American Library Association's trade publication Book List, which reviews new and forthcoming volumes of interest to all sorts of libraries, both of which have in turn inspired a much snarkier version of Book Lust in the online magazine Bookslut.

It is from this ongoing dialogue of belletrists and literary enthusiasts that Harcourt drew his inspiration, even borrowing his subtitle nearly intact from Pearl's volume: "Recommended Listening for Every Mood, Moment and Reason."

The trouble is, the longer one spends with Music Lust, the less likely it appears that Harcourt grasps the true spirit of the tradition he is engaging, and the more likely it appears that he has instead produced a well-meaning but shallow quickie that does little to help the noble cause of introducing good music to good people.
It's not that Music Lust is a bad book. In fact, to be actually bad, Harcourt would have had to have failed much more spectacularly. For example, Martha Bayles' 1996 Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music is a bad book. Exhaustively researched and carefully argued, Bayles nonetheless manages to misconstrue nearly every single salient point about the development of American pop music in the 20th century, ultimately coming to the conclusion that but for African-American musicians, American pop traditions would have long ago become brutal, spiky creations of the dry European intellectual pitfalls of modernism and postmodernism. I mean yeah, I guess, but... no. That's a bad book. Music Lust, which aspires to nothing so lofty, is instead well meaning but superficial and fundamentally confused.

A number of years ago, a good friend of mine who chose to forego college in favor of the thousands of books he was already reading, gave me a gift. It was a sheaf of closely typed pages containing what he felt were the best and most important books he had read - ones that he thought everybody should read - along with brief and penetrating paragraphs about who each author was, how they had touched him, and why we should read them. It was all there from Paul Auster to Emile Zola, a pearl of great price bestowed upon me by a good friend who felt he had something important to share with the people in his life. I read from that list for years and discovered some authors (Bukowski and Chandler in particular) who changed my life.

Music Lust aspires to be something like that but on a grander scale; a best-friend list for the whole wide world. Organized alphabetically, the book contains short essay-lists on subjects like "Headbangers Ball" and "Jazz Vocalists: The Ladies," intended to serve as letters of introduction for uninitiated listeners searching for a point of entry into new and intimidating territory.

Unfortunately, there are some problems. Let's begin with the way the book is organized. Although the book's alphabetical structure makes good sense when you look for entries like "Icon: Neil Young" and "Icon: Frank Zappa" toward the end, it makes less sense when "Happy Trails: Cowboy Singers" shows up under "H" and "Livin' Large: The Big Band Boom!" appears under "L." While I suppose the argument could be made that the book is organized like this to encourage accidental encounters, the argument could also be made that such a scheme means that to find anything dependably in this slender and alphabetical volume, one must consult the index.

Some of the lists themselves also raise the question: "why?". For example, "The Call of Wales," a review of Welsh singers (filed under "C"), includes four entries total: Tom Jones, Shirley Bassey, Jem, and Charlotte Church. Of those, Jones and Bassey are legitimate classics. Everybody should know who they are. Jem is a relatively unknown new singer-songwriter for whose US success Harcourt is partly responsible; to each his own, and fair play. Charlotte Church... well, a few years ago she released an album of pretty schlock titled "Voice of an Angel." Although it's Harcourt's book and therefore his perogative to do what he wants, this just feels like he's padding out a slim list.

In a similar vein, much of the text accompanying each list is too brief and shallow to convey enough information to do the job Harcourt wants. For example, this is the description for Neil Young's Zuma, one of Harcourt's top-choice Young albums:

"This album finds Crazy Horse accompanying Neil as he hits his stride with a batch of songs that feel comfortably inhabited."

While factually accurate, the same exact sentence could apply without a single change to Rust Never Sleeps, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, Ragged Glory, Sleeps With Angels and even the live Weld. Nothing there tells us why Zuma is special and more worth your time than Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, which does not appear on the list. A more apt description, placing the album in the context of Young's career arc and giving the reader some clues as to how it will sound and feel might be

"This album finds Crazy Horse accompanying Neil as he digs into a batch of songs that seem in all their winsome noisy charm to be a defiant rebound from his recent beautiful bummers On The Beach and Tonight's The Night."

In general, Harcourt's writing seems "surfacey" often enough as to make me wonder how much time he put into the project. There are dozens of excellent books out there to tell readers who John Coltrane was: why praise him with a vague and fluffy capsule bio only to recommend, of his entire output, A Love Supreme? Although Harcourt does mention that that record was Coltrane's musical and spiritual rebirth after kicking heroin, that assertion lacks heft on its own. Three more sentences would probably have been enough to guide the interested listener through his early days with Miles (with recommendations, say Kind of Blue!), his early solo work (My Favorite Things!), and his struggle with smack, magnifying A Love Supreme within its glorious context for the cost of 100 extra words or so.

One difficulty any author of a book like this faces is resistance from the congnoscenti, e.g.; me. Harcourt is walking a thin line between promoting the Nick Harcourt Experience As Heard On KCRW and providing a broader overview, a Rough Guide to What's Good as it were, and sometimes the tension shows.

Why, for example, does the Heavy Metal ("Headbangers Ball") section contain mentions of Zeppelin, Sabbath, Maiden, Priest, and Metallica, but also AC/DC (who are NOT METAL)? That's the entire list! Could the metal list not have included quick mentions of, oh, I dunno, Megadeth, Anthrax, Slayer or Sepultura, just to name four great examples of the diversity of the genre? Given that Harcourt's Afrobeat list contains exactly four entries (Fela and Femi Kuti, Fela Kuti drummer Tony Allen, and Brooklyn's Antibalas), I wonder if Harcourt did a little digging first or just phoned it in. If AC/DC can be metal, could not (for chrissakes) Afrobeat pioneer Hugh Masekela not have rated a sentence?

While I recognize that a book like this really can't be all things to all people, that is the book's explicit mission and principle, and it simply doesn't deliver. Why leave Marty Robbins off a three-man list of essential "Cowboy Crooners" (Gene Autry, Tex Ritter, Roy Rogers)? Is Nick Drake really perfect nighttime driving music, or did Harcourt just watch that VW commercial a few too many times? Why a section on poets/lyricists that includes only Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith and Jim Carroll? That's three... why not pad it out like Wales and throw in Jim Morrison, Laura Nyro, and... and... frickin' Jewel?

In keeping with the High Fidelity spirit of the affair, here are my top five beefs with Harcourt's editorial decisions:
5) When making a list of recommended music by bands with food names, is it too much to ask that Bread be left off the list entirely on general principles? At the very least, could we have avoided writing the phrase "take a bite out of Baby I'm-a Want You?" Also: "The Jam" is not a food name.
4) In a list of "Great First Albums," does it really make sense to include Funkadelic's shaky debut but leave off Elvis Costello's My Aim Is True entirely? (And does it make sense to leave Elvis Costello out of the book altogether? Maybe coulda lumped him together with David Byrne, Dave Thomas, Howlin' Pelle Almqvist and Kingsmen singer Jack Ely in a list called "Nervous!")
3) Was the list "It's Raining Cats and Dogs" strictly necessary? What do Josie and the Pussycats, Skinny Puppy, Cat Stevens and Cat Power have in common except the cute concept? Many of the lists are of this kind, lumping together bands named after chocolate, or with "twins" in them (The Breeders, Cocteau Twins, the Stones ("Glimmer Twins")) in ways that are probably meant to be lighthearted and revelatory but come across as just pointlessly random.
2) Although hip-hop, disco, metal, Madchester, jazz organists, and Afro-beat each get their own lists (and punk, country and jazz get at least three lists each), there is no list for "funk."
1) Finally... the index contains two entries for Tangerine Dream and none for James Brown.

Let's dwell on that last one for just a moment. In a book which purports to offer music for "every mood, moment, and reason"... Tangerine Dream: 2, James "The Godfather" Brown: 0. Arty proto-techno collective without whom every boutique on Bleecker street would be without the incessant "BOOMchkBOOMchkBOOM" of their acid-house sountrack: 2. Arguably the most important musician in all of pop music of the second half of the 20th century whose music is the very embodiment of joy, sexuality, and defiance: nada.

Anyway, that is all angels-on-heads-of-pins stuff that every music lover will go through when reading Music Lust. I'm sure ten different critics would have ten different beefs. Safe to say I think the book is often lacking; I will move on.

Ultimately this collection of all of Nic Harcourt's recommendations of what to listen to any time - both those picks which are clearly close to his heart and the ones he had to research a bit - leaves the inescapable impression that just about any serious music writer could have written this book and done almost as good a job. The main selling point, the true attraction, is in Harcourt's individual style as a DJ and a tastemaker. Harcourt seems to realize this and plays that part to the hilt.

But, this approach has its serious downside. To begin with, although Los Angeles is a very large place and KCRW reaches therefore a large radio audience, Harcourt is still only a recognized authority on "what's good" to about 3.4% of the country. Therefore outside Los Angeles county, his opinions for the most part are exactly as good as the grizzled guy in hornrims and vintage Stooges shirt at your local record store. Also, Los Angeles as a place, as a cultural landscape, is not like anywhere else, and it's not a sure bet that Harcourt's Angeleno hipsterisms will play in Peoria.

The main drawback, however, is that to dig Nic Harcourt you have to dig his stock in trade, which is shiny and atmospheric downcast adult-oriented pop. I like such noises as much as the next guy (in fact much more than the next guy!), but a steady diet of Harcourt mainstays Badly Drawn Boy, Air, Zero 7, Starsailor, Jem, Coldplay, and a little Nick Drake for historical color quickly ends up feeling like an air-conditioned Swedish furniture showroom - everything of neat and curvy chrome, of plastic and blonde wood, and a little too cool for me.

In trying to be all things to all people Nic Harcourt has overreached his goal and produced a well-intentioned volume guaranteed to completely foil its own ambitions. As the personal "what I like" essay of one British DJ who lives in Los Angeles, Music Lust is beyond reproach. Who can say how useful that is to me and you, but fair enough. He's a very good DJ and has a faultless ear for the kind of thing he does. But in trying to assemble a masterful list of everything that's good in pop music for an entire country, an entire world, full of his best friends, Harcourt has managed to prove that he is, in fact, a very good DJ with a faultless ear for the kind of thing he does. Although people sincerely looking to broaden their musical horizons could do worse than Music Lust, they could easily do better too.

And they could start with James Brown.

Full disclosure: I once worked for a company that put out a compilation of live performances from "Morning Becomes Eclectic," and I once worked for Nic Harcourt's boss' daughter, though I was not involved with the project and never met Harcourt or his boss. Absolutely outstanding compilation, though.

Scene: FEMA offices, int. day. GARETH sits at his desk shuffling papers and playing with a toy ambulance. Michael Chertoff approaches.

MICHAEL: Uh, Gareth, something has come to my attention....

GARETH: Can't talk; busy. Saving lives.

GARETH makes ambulance noises.

MICHAEL: Actually I think we should clear this up. It's about your resume.

GARETH: My resume? Why, do you have something for me to put on it?

MICHAEL: Well, here's the thing. We called your old boss in Edmond Oklahoma, and there seems to be some discrepancy.

GARETH: Discrepancy?

MICHAEL: (sighs) ... Can you just read me this line here?

GARETH: (reading) "Assistant City Manager"

MICHAEL: Well, in Oklahoma they say you were Assistant TO the City Manager. That's a bit different, don't you think.

GARETH: (mumbles) Same thing.

MICHAEL: What?

GARETH: Same thing.

MICHAEL: No, they're not.

GARETH: What?

MICHAEL: Assistant TO the city manager is a different job than the one that's on your resume. One involves budgeting, administrative coordination and regulations compliance. The other involves coffee and Xerox. Which was it?

GARETH: It's a typo.

MICHAEL: What's a typo?

GARETH: In Oklahoma, it must be a typo.

MICHAEL: ...

GARETH freezes a moment, than bolts from room. From EXT we hear sound of a car starting and tires squealing.
Uhhh.... what, Johno?

Well, first, go rent The Office, both series, and watch them. I'll wait.

You back? Good.

Now: from Time Magazine:

Since Hurricane Katrina, the FEMA director has come under heavy criticism for his performance and scrutiny of his background. Now, an investigation by TIME has found discrepancies in his online legal profile and official bio, including a description of Brown released by the White House at the time of his nomination in 2001 to the job as deputy chief of FEMA. (Brown became Director of FEMA, succeeding Allbaugh, in 2003.)

Before joining FEMA, his only previous stint in emergency management, according to his bio posted on FEMA's website, was "serving as an assistant city manager with emergency services oversight." The White House press release from 2001 stated that Brown worked for the city of Edmond, Okla., from 1975 to 1978 "overseeing the emergency services division." In fact, according to Claudia Deakins, head of public relations for the city of Edmond, Brown was an "assistant to the city manager" from 1977 to 1980, not a manager himself, and had no authority over other employees. "The assistant is more like an intern," she told TIME. "Department heads did not report to him." Brown did do a good job at his humble position, however, according to his boss. "Yes. Mike Brown worked for me. He was my administrative assistant. He was a student at Central State University," recalls former city manager Bill Dashner. "Mike used to handle a lot of details. Every now and again I'd ask him to write me a speech. He was very loyal. He was always on time. He always had on a suit and a starched white shirt."

In response, Nicol Andrews, deputy strategic director in FEMA's office of public affairs, insists that while Brown began as an intern, he became an "assistant city manager" with a distinguished record of service. "According to Mike Brown," she says, "a large portion [of the points raised by TIME] is very inaccurate."

Under the "honors and awards" section of his profile at FindLaw.com — which is information on the legal website provided by lawyers or their offices—he lists "Outstanding Political Science Professor, Central State University". However, Brown "wasn't a professor here, he was only a student here," says Charles Johnson, News Bureau Director in the University Relations office at the University of Central Oklahoma (formerly named Central State University). "He may have been an adjunct instructor," says Johnson, but that title is very different from that of "professor."

. . . .

Speaking for Brown, Andrews says that Brown has never claimed to be a political science professor, in spite of what his profile in FindLaw indicates. "He was named the outstanding political science senior at Central State, and was an adjunct professor at Oklahoma City School of Law."

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to announce that today for the first time I benched over 200 pounds. Well, it was 210 pounds on a machine, since I don't have a regular spotter and I'm accident prone enough to kill myself good if I try to bench with freeweights, but still. Freeweights, I could probably do 200 for a rep or two, but I'm probably not going to try and find out any time soon, so let's call it the nice round psychologically significant 200 and have done with it.

This is especially gratifying considering that when I started lifting eighteen months ago I could bench about a third of that, so I think we can say that progress has been made.

I'm gonna be ri-ri-rrr-ri-ripped!

When guns are outlawed, only bodyguards for business and the wealthy will have guns. Although the waters in New Orleans have left behind a santorum of deadly chemicals and viruses, it seems to have washed the area clean of its rights as well. From the New York Times, which if anything is probably halfway in favor of this kind of thing, if you got the grey lady drunk enough to let her guard down.

Meanwhile, the city is confiscating firearms from civilians, including legally registered weapons, Mr. Compass said. "Only law enforcement are allowed to have weapons," he said.

But that order apparently does not apply to the hundreds of security guards whom hotels and some wealthy individuals have hired to protect their property. The guards, who work for private security firms like Blackwater, are openly carrying M-16's and other assault rifles.

h/t to the Volokh Conspiracy's Orin Kerr.

So far I haven't had the most respect for Arnold Schwarzenegger as governer of California. Maybe it's having seen him in "Kindergarten Cop," or maybe it is his inability to singlehandedly lift the slcerotic legislature of our nation's most populous state out of its doldrums as he promised.

Or maybe, just maybe, it's crapola like this.

California lawmakers became the first in the country to approve a bill allowing same-sex marriages.....

The legislation could be vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has expressed an acceptance of gay marriages but said it's an issue that should be decided by voters or the courts.

So, wait wait. Let me get this straight. The question of gay marriage, according to leading Republicans and sundry conservatives, is a matter that must be left to the people and their representatives and not imposed by fiat by activist courts, unless it is a matter that must be left to the people and the courts and not imposed by fiat by activist... people's representatives.

Right. So, activist courts are a threat to the republic except when they are defenders of our liberties and legislatures are the duly designated voice of the people except when they are loose-cannon petty tyrants who must be stopped by the courts (threats to the republic and defenders of our liberties, Amen) and the people (who, as we know, also buy Franklin Mint commemorative plates and Beanie Babies), which people are in turn morally suspect sheeple who (per Rick Santorum) must be protected from themselves by legislation (passed by loose-cannon petty tyrants or sacrosanct conduits to the Will of the Populace) and upheld by judges (threats to our republic or defenders of our liberty, yr pick).

Three thoughts spring to mind like Spaniel pups who've been into the Maxwell House tin again. Big thought the first: NO WONDER the Governator never gets a damn thing done! He doesn't even understand how his state's government works! And for a guy who could lift like ten thousand pounds in his prime, he sure has experienced some scary bone loss in the spinal region. Better get that checked out before he hurts himself.

Outsize mental bolus the second: ...or maybe he understands too well how his state government works in all its resplendent contraditions and is playing a deeper game, one that he and his friends at the Heritage Foundation call "freeze the beast" in which the size of state government is reduced by grinding the parts against one other, much like throwing a '65 Charger in reverse at highway speeds, causing the drivetrain to leap out of the car and onto the road, stopping the car's forward progress in a spectacular fashion. Rhetorical tricks like the one above amount to a dazzling shell-game of trickery and misdirection designed to confuse everyone - the citizens of the Golden State, its judges and legislatures, and even the big-government conservatives in the Republican leadership - long enough for Schwarzenegger to grind the gears, strip the transmission, and spirit California's government away to two cabins on a small ranch outside Fresno connected to the outside world by a single dialup modem. Brilliant!!

Johno's Brain Poop the third: While it is a little unfair to take Schwarzenegger to task as a spokesman for his party as a whole, I'm not above being a little unfair, and he is one of the most prominent Republicans in the country. The way I see it, either gay marriage is an issue better left to the people (and, dammit, their duly elected representatives who speak for them) than to a judiciary whose powers do not include drafting new law, or the people need to be saved from themselves by all-knowing judges and/or legislators. For the record, the second option there wouldn't pass the guffaw test if Moses (or Confucius, yr pick) were the judge and Solomon were Speaker of the Heezy, so let's focus on the first option, the one that Schwarzenegger has discarded.

Even though I am in favor of gay marriage, I'm not dumb enough to miss the fact that the Massachusetts decision last year set the cause across the country back about fifty years. So while some of the Republican party are all like "step off yo, courts!," Arnold seems to have strayed off the reservation far enough to send exactly the opposite message which, although possibly politically expedient in the very short term, is in the long term a maneuver of monumental stupidity. The Republicans can stay in power only so long as their main messages remain widely appealing, inoffensive, and not confusing. Two legged stools aren't so good for sitting.

In other news, it looks more and more likely that the Massachusetts State Legislature and voters will eventually end up endorsing the Commonwealth's Supreme Judicial Court decision from last year, thereby putting the cart back behind the horse where it belongs. Currently, there is a proposed Constitutional amendment before the State Senate which would ban gay marriage but uphold civil unions. That amendment is losing support from both sides as the dedicated opponents of gay marriage show their true colors and back a total ban on legal gay unions of any stripe, and as supporters of gay marriage abandon civil unions as a half-measure. Given the climate of the state now, I strongly doubt the opponents of gay marriage have a shot at getting a total ban into the Constitution. The so-called Travaglini amendment (after the Senator sponsoring) is, politically speaking, their last good shot. They will radicalize themselves right out of the argument.

[wik] In the comments, Patton points out that in the bizarro-world of California politics, the courts *really do* have to decide this issue. Because the in/famous Prop. 22 was a ballot initiative and not a piece of legislation, it is up to the courts to deal with it. Which, when you think about it is even more delicious... I now fully appreciate the rich irony inherent in the fact that in California, in order to satisfy the beautiful symmetries and patchwork of federalism, the courts really do have to decide the issue of gay marriage.

One good piece of news out of Lake Chemipoo: reclusive indie-rock icon Alex Chilton has been found alive and well and acting all cranky in an undisclosed location.

I would like to take a moment to recommend any of Big Star's output to all and sundry. Sure, their first couple records and Chilton's stuff with the Box Tops is nice and all, but Third/Sister Lovers is the world-beater. If taken in small doses on (say) an iPod, it becomes clear that that record, recorded at a time when the band were barely speaking, is a gem.

Also nice: ex-Big Star guitarist Chris Bell's post-Beatles weepie, I Am The Cosmos.

That is all.

[wik] Ok, ok ok. Radio City also takes the cake, being more Chris Bell and less Chilton. The two make a nice contrast.

I looked up some figures, ran some numbers, crunched others, and made what I think is an interesting model.

First, consider the world-wide Zionist conspiracy. You know, the one that has Jews running the entire world and, in the process, slowly exterminating Muslims. THAT Zionist conspiracy.

Next, consider the populations in opposition. As best I can determine, there are about 12 million Jews, total, on planet Earth. Yes, that includes populations both in Israel and Manhattan. There are between 1 billion and 1.3 billion Muslims on the planet, again, as best I can determine. But that's a much easier figure to remember, since it's thrown into to virtually any press relating to the Muslim world in general.

Now. According to the CIA World Factbook and just about everywhere else I cared to look, China's population is about 1.3 billion. There are about 6-odd million people, total, in Israel. Not all are Jews, of course, but for purposes of this exercise assume enough of the 6 million ARE Jewish that they might as well all be Jewish. There are about that many people in Massachusetts, and in terms of land mass Israel and the Bay State are close enough to call them the same size. Actually if Mass lopped off Cape Cod and gave a sliver off the west side of the state to New York, it'd come closer to Israel's land area. But I stress we're talking generalities here.

So dig it: The subjegation of the entire Muslim world by Israel would, in a demographic sense, be like Massachusetts enslaving all of China.

That well-established and robust theme of the Muslim world doesn't make a lick of sense, even on its face, let alone in terms of utter kookiness from its conception. And even if you consider the entire global Jewish population, they'd have to each be personally responsible for ruining well over 100 Muslim lives, while at the same time living their own.

Does it bother anyone else that it is impossible for such a tiny number of people to be responsible for keeping 1/5 of the world's total homo sapiens in misery, yet are continually blamed for it? And worse, that people believe it?

Or, perhaps not, since spoofs don't count.

In Tuesday's UK Telegraph, a story entitled A-Z of Rock Biopics. Among its more helpful bits, in random order, you'll find encyclopedic entries like this:

Dylan, Bob: Some critics maintain that the great English classical actor Sir John Gielgud was mis-cast as Bob Dylan in the 1975 biopic "A Tiresome Rain Is Expected Shortly".

Or this:

Edelweiss: Perhaps the most catchy and popular of all the tunes in The Sound of Music (1966). This is often seen as the very first rock biopic, telling the story of the Von Trapp family singers and their flight from Nazi Austria.

The original director, Alfred Hitchcock, had planned to make it a much darker, more disturbing film, with the ageing Joan Crawford as the drink-addled Maria, Edward G. Robinson as her sadistic employer and the Von Trapp children played entirely by surviving extras from Tod Browning's classic 1932 movie Freaks. In the original screenplay, Maria attempts to get rid of the first Countess Von Trapp by cutting up a clump of poisonous Edelweiss and baking it in a chicken pie.

But my favorite?

Choking on one's own vomit: The current wave of rock biopics has made one British company, "Vom of Norwich", a world leader in the production of artificial vomit. "In the old days, producers of rock biopics found it impossible to find a product with the right texture and consistency, but since 1999 we've changed all that," says chief executive Brian Spanner. "We make it to our own unique recipe, and are now producing 10,000 gallons a month. It's a great British success story."

A great British success story, indeed - because I don't think you can do rock biopics without vomit. But, dayam - 10,000 gallons a month?

Chief Justice Rehnquist Dies at His Home

This, of course, was utterly predictable as a short-run event right after Rehnquist said, several weeks ago, that he was not planning to retire, and would serve as long as he was able.

The shit, as they say, is fixing to hit the fan, and the partisan flames will be doused in Sterno starting Tuesday. Soon, everyone's going to be wondering why they made such a big deal about John Roberts. I await with great anticipation and not just a little trepidation the name of the nominee for this new vacancy.

No anticipation, only trepidation, regarding the soon-to-be-unleashed heart-rending flood of messages from special interest groups wanting money from me to fund their campaigns in support of/opposition to whichever poor bastard is nominated.

Marvelous.

[wik] It's started. Alan Dershowitz & Chuck Schumer have lit what appear to be the first two bags of dog poo. After perhaps one more such prank from the Left, I'd expect that Pat Robertson or some such other wingnut drops the first stinkbomb from the Right prior to end of day, Sunday.

[alsø wik] Well, damn - that was clearly one of the strategic possibilities, but not guaranteed in any way, and not one that I thought would be chosen - Bush Nominates Roberts for Chief Justice. Notwithstanding that there's still a lot of chaff emanating from the right about Roberts being "another David Souter", Bush claims that the people have had a chance to see him and they like him. This, therefore, will make filling the Chief Justice's slot all that much more efficient. Mind you, Harry Reid says this changes everything in the confirmation process, but also mind you, Harry Reid is an asshat.

As for people getting to know about Roberts these last several months and becoming comfortable with him: That may be true, but in my case, the thing I think is most attractive about him is that last I checked. Ann Coulter doesn't like him at all. Not to pick on Ann, whom I find bright, articulate, endlessly amusing to read, and generally wrong in intensity if not direction, but I try to only allow myself one standard deviation from the center, and if Roberts is on her shitlist for not being radical enough, that might make him good enough for me.

Also, perhaps unlike those better informed on matters than I, I don't consider there to be much practical difference between an Associate Justice and the Chief Justice, beyond ceremonial matters. Having had Rehnquist, whom Alan Dershowitz called "a right-wing thug", in the Chief Justice's seat hasn't had any absolute impact in the direction of the Court's rulings.

Nevertheless - I think it appropriate to row back. Roberts' confirmation will clearly get even more interesting, and the choice for the other open slot, the better to let Ms. O'Connor retire, will be comparatively boring. Just to retain symmetry, however, maybe they can choose a woman who used to date John Roberts. What are the odds of that, I wonder?

(I'm reposting this from a comment on Patton's post)

Please.

oil : 70 / 60 = 1.16
local gas price: $3.75 / $2.19 = 1.7

Did the wholesale price of gasoline just rise? We don’t have figures there. If the wholesale price rose by 70%, then the oil companies ARE gouging, because their piplines are full of $60 oil. If the wholesale price has stayed the same, then the stations are gouging the public, by 50% or more. Oh wait—almost all stations are owned by the oil companies. So that’s them again.

Don’t pull out your “short bus” metaphor unless you pull out a calculator at the same time.

Yes, big oil is looting the nation. Per barrel shifts in oil prices have lengthy, delayed effects, not instantaneous market reactions down to the _pump_ level. Psychologically, the oil companies saw the opportunity and took it. They know they’ll have no reaction from this administration, and an innumerate citizenry will...do nothing.

I’ll agree with you on one point—price controls are not the answer here. Nationalizing some of this certainly is. I don’t have a problem with states (or the federal governmen) owning refining capacity and stations. Leave the private sector pirates in place; if they’re truly as “efficient” as claimed, then they’ll be just fine, and no government-run entity could possibly compete with them. They’ll earn their business the old-fashioned way, with lower prices and better service.

Yeah, right.

Hey, fuck it. Doesn’t affect me—it’s just those poor people who are going to have trouble paying the gas bills, getting to their increasingly shitty jobs, as the GOP chops the budget for public transportation into non-existence. 50% of the national guard’s equipment is over in Iraq, and unavailable for disaster relief.

Think about this: This is a much bigger disaster than 9/11. We have potentially (and quite probably at this point) thousands of people dead. We have a major city _destroyed_, mostly by inaction and incompetence at every level. The hurricane left the city generally intact!

And if you think this country has done a great job preparing for “terrorist attack”, exactly what would have happened differently if Al Qaeda had detonated explosives at the levees, instead of the hurricane?

Michael Brown, “director” of FEMA, said two days ago (on Thursday) that he was “unaware” that there were people in the Superdome. The fucking director of FEMA didn’t know that there were thousands of people there.

Michael Brown was Joe Allbaugh’s college roommate. GOP-activist Michael Brown’s prior experience was running the “Arabian Horse Alliance” or some silly bullshit like that. Some reports indicate Brown was “invited to resign” from that job amidst accusations of incompetence.

Brown’s FEMA placed Pat Robertson’s (yes, the same crazy-ass Robertson we know and love) “Operation Blessing” at the number two position on the cash giving list, before the Salvation Army, before just about everything else you’d recognize. Brown’s speeches have him complaining about the fact that he can’t be “spiritual” in public.

I know exactly what kind of “Republican” Michael Brown is, and there’s exactly _nothing_ conservative about this man. He is either a smart man who is a nasty fucker, or he is sufficiently stupid and egocentric so as not to have an understanding of his own deeply _lethal_ incompetence.

Patton, he is not like you. At the heart of it, I _respect_ the conservatism you represent. It’s a conservatism derived from realism, that wants restraint, that wants a government to do less, and give its citizens more freedom. That is a genuine and respectable goal, and when the country votes for it that’s fine with me.

This cabal of entitlement frat-buddies has hijacked the GOP, and this country desperately needs its real conservatives back. Please, please, find some...beg them to come back. There’s little elsewhere to turn.

While I'm making fun of the editorialists at the Boston Globe (see below), I might as well bang on the piece by Ross Gelbspan (a rental, not a staff member of the paper) earlier in the week, informing me, among other things, of Katrina's real name:

THE HURRICANE that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name is global warming.

When the year began with a two-foot snowfall in Los Angeles, the cause was global warming.

Now, I know - the two foot snowfall in Los Angeles has been thoroughly debunked, for the simple fact it didn't happen, and Gelbspan's article is full of inaccuracies, not least of which is that, you know, actual meteorologists think he's blowing bubbles here. There's nothing out of the ordinary about the cycles of hurricanes in recent years, and while that doesn't diminish the pain felt by the Gulf Coast victims of Katrina, it does invalidate hurricane season as the jumping off point for another slobber-fest about global warming. Perhaps more important, it gives me a reason to cite an interesting article in today's UK Telegraph on the matter.

I'm a global warming skeptic, relative both to the importance of the small changes alleged to have occurred over the past couple centuries and to the asserted causes. You see, I remember only too well the claims of last century that we were heading for a new Ice Age. And, heck, I've even seen stories about global warming being caused by the sun, for cripes' sake, and I don't want to hear that this, too, is within Bush's purview.

As to causes, and the blame for their existence, it's probably not helpful to Mr. Gelbspan's already weak case to find, all gathered up in one place, the purported cause for a significant fraction of all global warming:

Burning peat bogs set alight by rainforest clearance in Indonesia are releasing up to a seventh of the world's total fossil fuel emissions in a single year, the geographers' conference heard yesterday.

It would be a lot easier to take the alarmists on this and other matters more seriously if they did their homework. From the Taranto column linked above, Gelbspan gets tweaked pretty hard by a reader, excerpted here for anyone who doesn't care to go read the entire piece, even though you should:

(from reader Eric Free of Oceanside, Colo.)
You are way too cynical and know-nothing in your mockery of RFK2 et al. The flood in Genesis was caused by Global Warming. So was the Johnstown Flood. So was Curt Flood. So were the Ten Plagues and the splitting of the Red Sea.

The Chicago Fire of 1871 was caused by Global Warming. So was the Panic of 1873. So was the Panic of 1837. The bubonic plague too was caused by Global Warming (how could you forget this?). So was the fall of Constantinople (note the parallel with the war in Iraq). And the Red Chinese onslaught across the Yalu River in the Korean War was caused by Global Warming. So was the Normandy Invasion in World War II. So was the Norman Invasion of 1066. And the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and Haley's Comet. And for that matter the Hale-Bopp Comet.

The title weather in "Bartholomew and the Oobleck" was clearly caused by Global Warming. So was the pink snow in "The Cat in the Hat." So was Andersonville Prison during the Civil War. So was the entire Civil War. So was the Amityville Horror. So was the Dunwich Horror. So was the failure of the Colorado Rockies to make it to the World Series every single year that they've been a Major League franchise. So was the failure of any of the three "Matrix" movies starring Keanu Reeves to win an Academy Award for Best Picture.

AND GEORGE W'S ELECTION TO THE PRESIDENCY IN 2000 WAS CAUSED BY GLOBAL WARMING!!! (Why do you think he opposes an end to it, after all?)

Lack of homework + alarmism = not being taken at all seriously. But then, if folks like Gelbspan did their homework, while they might still hold the same opinions, in very few cases would they remain alarmists.

And that don't sell newspapers, now do it?

Anyone with pretense to staying current on the news of the day is going to trip over a lot of tripe, and most tripe isn't worth commentary.

Important ideas & issues, discussed among adults? Sure, I'll opine on those, whether I agree or not with the idea's originator. And sometimes, I'll even become convinced I was wrong. Goofy ideas? Not generally worth the bother of comment, because they're spun out with enough centrifugal force that nothing I can say or do will change the spin for those who encounter the idea after me.

However, I was reminded, via an opinion piece in the Friday Boston Globe, that there's a level of goofy that is worth, nay, demands commentary, even if only for my own sanity.

In the piece, one Derrick Z. Jackson of the Globe fulminates about the looting that's the result of Hurricane Katrina. I was initially prepared to ignore it, because we've seen the "looters", good and bad, in many repeats on the news over the past week, and I didn't care to listen to yet another complaint about how so many African Americans, yet so few persons of pallor, had been shown treating plasma TVs and Nike shoes as base necessities of life. Feh. They'll sort it out amongst themselves, I figure, and no amount of concern on my part will change it. I'd much prefer that time be spent on medicating, housing, clothing, and feeding the victims.

But then I read on, and he's not talking about the good, the bad, and the ugly of New Orleans.

PRESIDENT BUSH yesterday told ABC-TV, ''there ought to be zero tolerance of people breaking the law during an emergency such as this, whether it be looting or price-gouging at the gasoline pump or taking advantage of charitable giving or insurance fraud."

Zero tolerance is meaningless when the White House lets the biggest looters of Hurricane Katrina walk off with billions of dollars.

He's talking about the oil companies, those rotten bastards!

In the midst of this charity, big oil looted the nation. The pumps instantly shot past $3 a gallon, with $4 a gallon well in sight.

That couldn't have had anything to do with the shutdown of roughly 25% of our national refining capacity, or the price of oil, world-wide, rising to $70/barrel, because both of those would just be crazy-talk. So he must have a point, right?

If Bush really meant what he said, he would call for a freeze or cap on gasoline prices, especially in the regions affected most dramatically by Katrina. He would challenge big oil to come up with a much more meaningful contribution to relief efforts.

Insurance companies are expecting up to $25 billion in claims from Katrina. For ExxonMobil, which is headed to $30 billion in profits, to jack up prices at the pump and then only throw $2 million at relief efforts is unconscionable.

Wait a minute, Derrick Z. - I just came back to my senses, and there's a typo in your story. You meant "Carter" where you said "Bush", right? I'm a grizzled-enough veteran of life to remember those days, and they sucked like a Hoover, because the economy did just what economies do when confronted with the bleatings of economic idiots such as yourself who think that prices can be arbitrarily controlled without unintended consequences. Of course they can't, any more than supply can be changed arbitrarily without affecting price.

Price controls never, ever work in the markets for scarce commodities. Ever. And if the government makes it illegal to charge market prices in a market where the non-vertically-integrated producers have only ephemeral control of their raw material costs, then the oil will just go to other markets, such as China, where price is distorted in a complementary manner - gasoline prices are subsidized there, and the people are therefore insensitive to the raw material cost, consuming oil as fast as they can buy the machines required to burn it. Because that's what markets do when you fiddle with them. The act poorly.

Oh, and the bit about ExxonMobil heading for $30 billion in profit this year while the insurance industry is looking at a $25 billion payout for Katrina? Just a coincidence, I'm sure, slipping in that bit about insurance companies, who presumably aren't gouging us on gasoline costs and otherwise have nothing to do with his storyline. But if I didn't know better, Che, I'd think you were sneakily advocating that the oil companies should pay the costs of the damage, rather than those who were actually paid to assume the risk. Word games are funny that way.

My sincere hope is that anyone with at least a high-school quality understanding of basic economics will roundly ignore the maunderings of Mr. Jackson and those in his circle of illiteracy. The alternative is oil shortages and prices that don't come back to earth when market forces say that they should.

And, for the record, for the first time in my personal experience, I paid more than $3.00/gallon for gas on the way home from the office today. My first $50 fill-up in anything smaller than an 18-wheeler, in fact. It pained me at some level, but I understood, and while the ladies at the Diamond Shamrock fell all over themselves trying to explain to me that they weren't just boning me on behalf of their evil corporate masters, I politely asked them to stuff a sock in it, as I already knew that.

Unlike Derrick Z. Jackson, you see, I don't attempt to reshape the observable facts to justify my feelings of victimhood.

Video: Anderson Cooper of CNN loses his shit on Sen. Mary Landrieu. And he's right to do so. Man's been in New Orleans since Tuesday; he's seen some things, and to have a Senator go on his show and pat her colleagues on the back for all the stern attention they are surely paying to the situation seems a little... crass. Thanks to Crooks & Liars for the video hookup.

My first reaction upon hearing that the governer of Louisiana had ordered the National Guard to shoot to kill looters, was "good."

Then I got over myself. James Joyner runs down only a few of the ways in which this is a very, very bad idea: there's a little thing called the Constitution; posse comitatus; the right to trial by jury and the presumption of innocence; and so on. Not to mention the "Jean Valjean" effect, in which it is impossible to tell whether that guy over there is after bread, water, and blood pressure meds for his mother or just a scumbag. One needs helping and the other arguably needs shooting, but since when do the scumbags wear big helpful signs reading "I Need Shooting?"

Civil society exists in order to save us from our worst and most destructive impulses, indeed it exists to channel those impulses where necessary into places where they can do the least harm. I sincerely hope that the Gulf Coast does not descend into Congolese style (or Haitian style, or what have you) anarchy. The Republic is strong, but it's not bulletproof.

The Gulf Coast for the near future is going to be home to the full catalog of human suffering. My esteemed colleague GeekLethal has aptly summed up the feelings of us all directly below as to the dire situation facing the residents of New Orleans, Biloxi, Gulfport, and a hundred other unfortunate locales. But Michelle Catalano has done a great service for us, by cataloging all the good news too. Humanity might be depraved; humanity might be perverse (and this from a secular humanist!); but in the darkest hours the good will out. Go read it, if only to beat back the despair.

I have never been to New Orleans.

It seems I never will.

I am not concerned for the physical structures of the city. The distinctive architecture of a cityscape, of this unique cityscape drenched in history and bourbon, will survive. They almost always do, don’t they, the oldest buildings with the longest memories weather catastrophe in a way that modern homes and mods and pods don’t.

There is a metaphor there, for deeper thinkers than myself to consider: the impermanence of modern creations, built on the same capricious sediments as the old, but lasting only a second. Or a primeval sentiment, the lifetimes of achievement and struggle, erased by a force of nature. I remember Thucydides…or maybe it was Homer? …in the earliest histories of our civilization describing desolation wrought by war as though it were caused by a storm. The most destructive natural force that society of pre-gunpowder, pre-industrial, pre-nuclear seafarers could conceive of was a hurricane.

And so it is again, a prehistoric monster has risen from the sea, storming ashore to rend and break; steal, scratch and kill.

Or we can drop the poetics and just say that Katrina kicked the country square in the balls.

Even though the buildings will stand or fall, and the fallen ones will be rebuilt and the damaged ones repaired, my concern is not for them. Any city is greater than the arrangements of steel and stone that serve as its signature. They’re about people, at their core, not about the Sears Tower or the Empire State Building or every refurbished French Quarter brothel.

And it’s the people I see now that give me pause.

Continual reports of armed gangs roaming, pillaging at will; firefights over both booty and supplies; rescue personnel, helicopters, boats, doctors, and hospitals all coming under fire; hopelessness from those victims trapped between the toxic floodwaters, flowing by high as a house, and the toxic souls of the thugs who prey on them. Even the Superdome, the best-case accommodation for the worst-case scenario, has quickly fallen to a public health nightmare, complete with dysentery and gunfire in the night.

It’s less the people themselves who scare me, though. It’s that they confirm my worst expectations, my deepest beliefs about what would happen if our civilization broke down. In just a matter of days, perhaps 48 hours, New Orleans is what happens. Not Mogadishu, not Ivory Coast, not East Timor or Fallujah. Not them. Us.

And sadly enough, this scenario has come and gone a thousand times in a thousand works of fiction. Roving brigands are a staple of the post-apocalyptic landscape: Jerry Ahern’s The Survivalist; Robert McCammon’s Swan Song; Stephen King’s The Stand; Larry Niven’s Lucifer’s Hammer (which also gave us extensive flooding and a glimpse of coming to grips with an inundated landscape) … and on and on and on, through a deep bench. Film of course has excelled at mirroring our fears of disaster or lawlessness; Mad Max alone did it three times, and there are dozens and dozens more. Even zombie movies seem a tad prescient lately. New Orleans might also suggest what’s to come if someone pops a nuke in a shipping container in Los Angeles or New Jersey or Virginia; see Schreiber and Kunetka's Warday for scaries in that vein.

We are told that it is criminal gangs largely running amok through the city. I am highly skeptical though that MS-13 or the Bywater Crips are up on their eschatological fiction; they’re not following a script, which leads me to believe that there is something deeper, something more fundamentally homo sapiens, that finds delight in making other peoples’ lives hell on Earth. We’ve all seen it before in crises around the world, but maybe there was apart of me that thought our society was above all that.

If I do someday make it to New Orleans, what city will I find? Will it be again the polis that was, or the lobotomized remains?

[wik] (JOHNO SEZ): GL says it right. The entire situation seems absolutely batshit insane in its apocalyptic sweep, just like something out of the novels we nerdy types read to titillate our jones for simulated eschaton. On September 11, 2001, part of my brain could not help but judge the quality of the special effects used to simulate the collapse of the World Trade Center (wow... it's just like the movies!), demonstrating that I was securely in the grip of a merciful sort of shock that insulated me from the full truth of the horror unfolding before my eyes.

And so again. Nobody, no novelist, no hater of the Gulf states, could write a tragedy this ugly, so outrageously terrible in its cartoonish excess. (A note: I felt the same way about the tsunami earlier this year. Some things are just too immense to feel real.) Think about it: if the water doesn't get you, the industrial chemicals will. If the industrial chemicals don't get you, the raw sewage will. If the raw sewage doesn't get you, the giant rats will. If the giant rats don't get you, the nutria will. If the nutria don't get you, the water moccasins will. If the water moccasins don't get you, the alligators will. If the crocodiles don't get you, the floating balls of fire ants will. If the floating balls of fire ants don't get you, the roving bands of armed marauders will. And if you somehow manage to survive all that, you still stand a chance at getting your ass shot by a New Orleans policeman looting your local Wal-Mart.

When Bill Evans Trio bassist Scott LaFaro died in 1961, the shock of losing his close friend and musical soulmate drove Evans into a yearlong spiral of depression. It was only after Chuck Israels came on board take over bass duties that Evans began to return to some semblance of his former self, either personally or musically.

In May 1963, the re-formed Bill Evans Trio (with Israels and new drummer Larry Bunker) settled down for a short stay at the Los Angeles club Shelly's Manne-Hole. The Manne-Hole was, in the 1960s, what the Viper Room was to LA in the 1990s - a hip room owned by an elder statesman and beloved old-time scenester (The Manne Hole by jazz drummer Shelly Manne, and the Viper Room by jewboy drummer Chuck E. Weiss). Fans of Bill Evans usually point to the LaFaro-Paul Motian lineup as the best trio he ever put together, and surely some in the crowd at the Manne-Hole had that pre-judgement in the back of their minds even then, but hey... not so fast.

Anyway, so there's Bill Evans, not long after the death of one of his closest friends and greatest musical collaborators, playing one of the hippest rooms in Los Angeles with a new band that might well suck the big one because it's not Motian and LaFaro up there. And being Bill Evans, what does he do? If it were Monk, he'd probably have turned in a cold and spiky set of musical 'eff yous' and finished the night off demolishing the piano with his bare hands. Miles would have either not shown up or played one note for two hours with his back to the crowd. But that's not Bill Evans' way. At a critical juncture in his career with the weight of his reputation weighing on his shoulders, with a new band and a suitcase load of bad mojo, what does Bill Evans do? He plays even prettier.

Most people, even people who "don't like jazz," know Bill Evans from his work on Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, which album does surely contain some of the finest moments of his career. It is a fair showcase of his style; the refined, delicate, almost fragile-seeming touch, the string-of-pearls single note lines and the floating, extended harmonies derived from French Impressionist composers like Debussy, Ravel and Satie are all abundant. These are the tools with which Bill Evans crafted a career as one of the finest and most sensitive interpreters of jazz on the piano the world has seen. When he wanted to, he could swing and wail, but usually Evans' playing seemed so cerebral, so human, so personal and humane, that even the wildest moments seemed perfectly in hand.

And so The Bill Evans Trio At Shelly's Manne-Hole, destined for reissue soon by Concord Jazz, is a lovely little record. Evans seems to have developed a form of telepathy rather quickly with his new sidemen. Together the three dig into pieces that Evans knew by heart; "'round Midnight" is here, and so is "Stella by Starlight," but the whole set is magic. "Isn't That Romantic" and "All The Things You Are" (a Hammerstein and Kern composition) are practically master classes in how to play sensitive, textured jazz without the need to rise above a mezzo-forte.

Where the original trio were renowned for their ability to get inside a song, the new lineup is somehow even more sensitive and lovely even without the benefit of years spent together. Occasionally the group erupts into what I'd call a "bop moment," but in general At Shelly's Manne-Hole catches the pianist in a contemplative mood and the band magnifying the effect tenfold.

1963 was the same year that Evans recorded his famous album Conversations With Myself, using then-novel multitracking technology to create three-way piano dialogues with himself. Although I enjoy that album, I have always thought it feels a little closed off, stifling even, as if the conversation were for Evans' benefit alone.

Although not as historically significant, The Bill Evans Trio at Shelly's Manne-Hole is a more accessible route into the beautiful mind of Bill Evans at this critical point in his career. Evans' ability to conjure himself into trancelike state of pure introspective creativity makes this album well worth having for any jazz fan, especially fans of Evans who are curious about the merits of his "other" trios.

(This post also appears at blogcritics.org, your connection for news, entertainment, and the latest in thinly argued partisan politics. Though they would disagree with that last bit.)

Is there a greater soul singer than Al Green?

That is mostly a rhetorical question, or more precisely it's not a question at all but rather a Zen koan meant to clear the mind. Of course there is no greater soul singer than Al Green, unless you like them rougher (in which case Otis Redding is your man) or churchier (Solomon Burke is for you) or stranger (in which case Stevie Wonder rings your bell). There is no better soul singer than the smooth, the beautiful, the seductor, The Reverend Al Green.

Arista recently reissued Al Green's first album, Back Up Train, originally recorded in 1967 when the singer was just 21 years old and still billing himself as "Al Greene." Performing a set of songs mostly written by producers Palmer E. James and Curtis Rodgers, Back Up Train is more or less a promising prelude to what would become an unparalleled career as king of smooth soul. None of the songs are particularly weighty, mostly being generic but likeable soul workouts, although the title song and "Stop and Check Myself" (which was co-written by Green) do stand out as choice cuts.

The real interest on Back Up Train is in hearing Al Green's famous voice before he quite figured out how to use it. All the pieces are there, buried under generic Fauxtown arrangements: the moans, the croons, the shouts, growls and hiccups and the bell-clear beautiful tone, everything that Green would eventually ride to the top of the heap. In general the attraction of the album is in hearing Green dig into this fairly forgettable batch of songs and come up with moments of real emotion. Listening to Back Up Train is like reading Einstein's high school physics papers, scanning for hints of the evanescent brilliance that would one day make him immortal.

(This post also appears at blogcritics.org, your connection for entertainment news and general madness.)

Fat Possum recording artist R.L. Burnside died yesterday morning in his hospital bed in Memphis, according to his label.

R.L Burnside was born in Oxford, Mississippi in 1926 and lived most of his life in the hill country above the Delta. He learned to play guitar from a neighbor, and by a great stroke of luck that neighbor was the great Delta Blues musician Mississippi Fred MacDowell. From MacDowell, Burnside inherited that driving, rhythmic, almost rudimentary one-chord style that distinguishes much of the blues from that region.

However, like most people who play the guitar, Burnside kept his day job. He worked as a farmer and a fisherman, occasionally playing local juke joints or recording a side. It was only in the 1980s that his star began to rise as he played a few European festivals. Subsequently signed to the good people at Fat Possum, Burnside spent the rest of his life releasing a series of outstanding albums that updated his ramshackle Delta style with modern production touches.

In 1992, Burnside recorded an album with indie-rock huckster Jon Spencer titled A Ass Pocket Full of Whiskey which effectively married Burnside's blues sound to the Blues Explosion's chaos and noise. This album catapulted him from relative obscurity to (at least) cult status, and with his third album for the Fat Possum label, 1998's Come On In, his career really hit its stride.

Produced by a fleet of young white hipsters including a member of Atari Teenage Riot, Come On In meshed the Delta blues with electronic and dub sounds with surprising results. Burnside's signature heavy-footed style, reminiscent of other Delta players like Lightnin' Hopkins and John Lee Hooker, works surprisingly well alongside looped drums, snippets of distorted clavinet, and bass-heavy dub production. Although critics differ on the merits of this album, it is one of my all time favorites in any genre. (This is, I admit, partially because my wife is also a huge fan of this record.)

Over the course of his subsequent albums for Fat Possum, Burnside would continue in this vein, alternating down-and-dirty blues with experimental tracks. The two I own, Wish I Was in Heaven Sitting Down and Well, Well, Well are equally good but very different. Heaven is essentially a Delta blues recording with some electronic production that at times sounds tacked on but for the most part only supports Burnsides' mile-deep songs. Less driving than Come On In, Heaven engages an atmospheric side at times that is unlike any other blues record I have heard.

Well, Well, Well, on the other hand, collects recordings from as far back as 1986 and includes a great cover of the murder ballad "Stagolee" as well as Lightnin' Hopkins' "Mojo Hand" and Howlin Wolf's "How Many More Years." Although arguably a grab bag of odds and ends, the album hangs together nicely thanks to the strength of Burnsides' repetitive, hypnotic slide guitar work and haunted vocals.

In 2003, Fat Possum put together a collection called Early Recordings, a group of solo recordings made in 1967 and '68 when Burnside was farming. A couple of his best songs that would turn up later on his 1990s albums appear here: "Goin' Down South," and "Come On In" in particular. It is fascinating to hear Burnside in his 'natural' element, unsurrounded by a band, drum loops or studio shine: to wit, he sounds exactly the same. Better yet, Early Recordings contains a number of excellent Delta Blues songs that never turned up on his later "official" albums, making it an essential for, well, everyone.

If you are a casual blues fan, but don't know Burnsides' work, I would recommend starting with Come On In or Early Recordings. The latter is a less out-there starting place - if that's your taste - but if you miss out on his experimental stuff you are doing yourself no favors. I also hear very good things about his second Fat Possum album, 1994's Too Bad Jim. A Ass Pocket Of Whiskey is good too, but probably not the best place to start unless you like your Delta Blues with a side of theremin. Also, many songs appear on both Come On In and Ass Pocket, making only one of them (take yr pick!) truly essential for casual shoppers.

Fat Possum deserve a lot of credit for keeping R.L. Burnside's flame burning. They are a great label, dedicated to the artists on their roster to the point of practically parenting them when necessary. In fact, as far as I know, Burnside was able to live off his music income for the last years of his life, a rare blessing especially for an old Delta farmer. Besides Burnside, Fat Possum have revived or started the careers of Junior Kimbrough (whose juke joint is next door to the Burnside residence), Asie Payton, wierdo T-Model Ford, insane wierdo cracker Hasil Adkins, and insane wierdo cracker freakshow Bob Log III, and Akron, Ohio duo The Black Keys, all of whom are worth a listen.

R.L. Burnside was a member of a dying breed of musicians from rural Mississippi who played a music that belonged to an age that fades a bit more every day. That's not to say that he is or was ever a museum piece, but rather he is an emissary from Greil Marcus' "old, weird America," the place where William Faulkner, Johnny Cash, and John Lee Hooker drink together and tell stories.

I hope he is in heaven sitting down.

As I type this, the umpteenth bus has entered my adopted home town of Houston, headed for the Astrodome to drop off refugees plucked from New Orleans' now-fetid Superdome. We'll have something like 25,000 of these unfortunate New Orleans victims before the weekend, along with as-yet uncounted victims from elsewhere to my east. My hope, in common, I'm sure, with that of the city officials from Houston, New Orleans, and the other affected areas, is that the absence of complete natural disaster on the south side of Houston will make the Astrodome a more friendly place of refuge than the Superdome turned out to be, and that we've got enough other housing to provide for the victims' needs.

"Mind-boggling" only begins to describe the devastation along the gulf coast east of Houston. You've seen the same TV shows I've seen, and the pictures of dead bodies, to say nothing of the looters and dreadfully forlorn people who've literally lost everything but their lives and the clothes on their backs are at once heart-rending and overwhelming. We don't know yet how many thousands have died or when the destroyed cities (because it's not just New Orleans, lest we forget) will again be habitable.

I had a call last night from a good friend in Baton Rouge, 80 miles or so northeast of New Orleans, and it seems that the 25,000 heading to the Astrodome are peanuts, relatively speaking. Baton Rouge, a city of 440,000 or so folk, is expecting 500,000 people before the weekend's over. It goes without saying that the infrastructure there is ill suited to a 115% increase in population, but there, I just said it. The ripple effect isn't going to help Baton Rouge or any of the other cities which experience significant influx of desperate homeless folk.

Dr. Mike Crouch, my Baton Rouge correspondent, also informed me of several other interesting bits about the state of things in the Big Easy, some troubling, some less so. Businesses, overall, appear to have been ill-prepared for the catastrophe. Mike's well plugged in to the goings on in the region, and heard repeated anecdotal evidence of untested disaster recovery plans, even though this is "the big one" New Orleans has been scared of for the last century. Many professional services firms are likely to be starting from scratch once this is over. Given the fact the municipal infrastructure is "totaled", a case could be made they were going to start from scratch anyway, but it's hard to overstate the economic ripple impact likely to emanate from this physical disaster, even without reckoning New Orleans itself as a complete write-off for the time being.

Mike also tells me that Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans, is putting on a performance worthy of Rudy Giuliani's September 2001 efforts, and that the city couldn't be in better hands, so they've got that going for them. Peggy Noonan informs us that Haley Barbour, Mississippi's governor, is likewise acquitting himself well, and that Kathleen Blanco, Louisiana's governor can still get in the game:

She can turn this around. The waters may have peaked; a comeback will at some point commence. She showed anguish and now she can show fortitude, like a fighter made hungry by pain. Go, Kathleen, your state needs you. People will take their cues from you. Butch up, punch back, wade in. Literally. Be there.

So at least I'm not alone in temporarily being overwhelmed by this disaster, which is only a small relief.

I'll hazard a guess (wild-ass speculation, more like) that ten years from now, the area might have recovered some semblance of its past glory and gaudiness. If we're lucky, that is. The indirectly or less seriously affected areas, such as Baton Rouge, Houston, and any other temporary refuges, will likely end up thinking they've got legitimate complaints. At which point, I hope they just shut up and tough it out, because there's no way, absent new acts of a vengeful or random Mother Nature, the comparison will be apt.

It's that bad.

And the enormity of the disaster is such that, when I think about the ongoing attempts to help, they all seem so initially trivial as to be of almost no ultimate help. Witness this, just in from the club where I work out:

The WestLake Club would like to help support the community and the hurricane refugees displaced in Houston. We have compiled a list of ways the Members and Employee Partners of the WestLake Club can help by donating their time, money, or materials to those in need.

Help pay for Hotel Rooms - Help provide shelter at a local hotel with your monetary donations.
Cash Donation in your desired amount or a check made out to Studio 6, $40 will pay for a family to stay one night
**If every Member would donate $10, what a difference we could make. (Actually a $11,500 difference, to be exact).

Donate Material Items (WestLake will donate these items to the American Red Cross)

Paper goods such as plates and cups; Cleaning supplies, such as bleach, Top Job, Mr. Clean; Bottled water (no glass containers); Single serving snacks such as Pop-Tarts and cereal bars; MREs (Meals Ready to Eat); Sheets, pillows and blankets; Disposable diapers; Baby formula; Toilet paper and wipes; Peanut butter; Personal hygiene products; Clothing; Games and toys; Dog and Cat Food (Donated to the SPCA); Gift Cards for gas, groceries, or Wal-Mart

Volunteer your Time (In the upcoming days, the WestLake Club will have a posting of locations around town)
Volunteer Houston, 281-564-6669
American Red Cross, 800-HELP-NOW
American Red Cross Shelters in Houston, 713-313-5480
Houston Food Bank, 713-223-3700

Donate Blood

I'm struck by the "if only" near the top - if every member at the club donated $10, there'd be enough money to provide one night's housing for less than 300 families. And that pretends the hotel in question even has rooms available. While I know it's not a waste of time, this seems to be a task akin to decomposing Mt. Everest using a nail file.

But the folks of the Gulf Coast, in Houston and elsewhere, as well as the broader nation, will surely surprise me with what they're capable of to help those in need.

Keep a good thought, please, for those who've lost so much. And in the meantime, let's butch up.

[wik] Several addenda, based on later information that might, in some cases, even be true. If I could get hold of Mike Crouch, I'd ask him whether Ray Nagin has just gone insane, or whether he really is the antithesis of Rudy Giuliani, contrary to Mike's original declaration.

First, see this bit from Ray Nagin's radio interview.

And then, have a look at this comment on a post over at Donald Sensing's site, One Hand Clapping.

After you do, if you're anything like me, you'll think less well of Ray Nagin than Mike does. Or used to - he may have changed his mind by now.

Perhaps I'm more credulous than I should be, but I'm utterly unmoved by complaints that the Feds are doing less than they could be doing. They appear to be doing a whole lot more than Nagin, and at least they're not complaining profanely while laying the blame at someone else's doorstep.

I would like for Cindy Sheehan, the Environmental Minister of Germany Jürgen Trittin, Islamic whackjobs and this fucktard to go drink a large, steaming mug of shut the fuck up.

Hurricane Katrina was not the fault of George Bush, the Republicans, American environmental policy or a vengeful Allah.

Hurricane Katrina has left in her wake devastation and suffering. Thousands may be dead, and those remaining in New Orleans and the worst-hit portions of Mississippi and Alabama are in dire need of assistance. The first and simplest thing to do is to donate money to those who are trying to help. The Red Cross has a convenient web page where you can donate money via credit card. Over $11,000,000 has already been donated, and that just scratches the surface. Give all you can.

After giving to the Red Cross, consider other, more targeted aid. Instapundit has an immense and still growing list of organizations that can translate your money into help for the refugees of Katrina. I might also suggest The IOCC, the International Orthodox Christian Charities. They have low overhead; they focus on providing aid that doesn't merely ameliorate immediate needs, but that wil help prevent future need as well.

Tell your friends and family to give.

Spread good ideas, like this one from Donald Sensing. He suggests that printing and dropping leaflets over the affected areas would provide much needed information for those cut off from the outside world.

And pray for those who have died, for those who have been saved, and for those awaiting help, for the brave soldiers, firemen and police officers risking all to help others, and especially for those who have resorted to looting and violence.

I recently took up homebrewing as a way to give myself even more burns on my hands and arms; bread baking just hasn't been doing the trick. From time to time I am going to post the results of recent brews as a way for me to archive recipes and procedures.

My first brewing attempt, two weeks ago, was a clone of Bass Ale. Saturday I will bottle it and about three weeks later will know if I'm a hack or a god. Water into wine? Pah! I'm turning water into beer! I didn't bother doing a lot of the usual rigamarole associated with brewing the first time around: I didn't write down how many IBUs (international bittering units... seriously) of bittering hops I used, much less what varieties were used (though I can make an educated guess at East Kent Goldings); I didn't take a specific gravity reading of the unfermented wort (that's "raw beer" to you); and I didn't keep any kind of journal. I mainly just wanted to do a test run and focus on a-b-c procedures so I could work out a system that will serve me down the road.

My second attempt took place this last weekend. (If any of you are brewers, you just said 'wait, Johno... your fermenting bucket is fulla beer... what are you doing? Well, see, I bought two fermenting buckets so I could do two batches at once - I'm wicket smaaht.) I'm a fan of porter in general, but I tend to like drier (less sweet) examples more. My all time favorite is the Edmund Fitzgerald Porter at the Great Lakes Brewing Company in Cleveland, and I'm chasing something like that. Their porter is actually quite sweet with chocolate and various estery flavors, and with 37 IBUs it's pretty darn hoppy. I am after something a little lighter but with a similar hop assertiveness. Details below the fold.

August 28 2005
Brew #2
All Thumbs Porter

2 cans (6.6 lb) Coopers Amber liquid malt extract
1 lb crystal malt, 40L
1/4 lb chocolate malt
1/4 lb black patent malt
bittering hops: 1 oz Eroica
finishing hops: 1 oz Hallertau Mittlefrueh
yeast: 1 packet Safale 33 dry yeast reconstituted in 1.5 cups 90 degree water

Steeped grains in ~3 gallons filtered tap water from room temp to boil, removed grainbag at boil. Added malt extract, returned to boil and added bittering hops. I don't know IBUs... too bad. Boiled uncovered 1 hour. Finished with the Hallertaus for last 5 minutes of boil time. Covered pot and moved to bathtub and waiting ice water. The ice water cooled the wort to about 95 degrees in less than 1/2 hour, and I added cooled distilled water to bring wort to 69 degrees and 5 gallons total volume before pitching the yeast. Removed to the basement to ferment at 73 degrees.

OG 1.048

Now a word about my thumb. I cut the hell out of the back of my right thumb adding the malt extract (can lids are sharp!!!), but managed not to bleed in the wort. Nevertheless, immediate medical attention was required; I could see veins and tendons down in there. I didn't go for stitches, but my ever forbearing wife went to the drugstore for some "steri-strips," which work just fine in a pinch. I finished the brew session trying to use only my left hand for everything, which is a fairly challenging prospect.

After 48 hours there was no evidence of fermentation. I was sure I killed the yeast.

After 72 hours, I popped top on bucket to re-pitch a new batch of yeast and found happily fermenting beer with yeast flocculating happily. Huh. Guess I need a new bucket lid that doesn't leak. Primary fermentation done in 72 hours: check. Drew off a bit with sterilized spoon and tasted- great! Very dry with nice hop flavor and aroma, a good astringency that will mellow with conditioning and good medium body. Detected a fair amount of fusel alcohols that need to condition away but they will. Not sure how final brew will taste... I didn't detect much residual sweetness; maybe that will reemerge as the astringency mellows. As long as I didn't contaminate when I peeked, this should turn out well. I may use some more chocolate malt next time to add a little more body, but I'm very happy with the roasted notes the black malt is providing and the way that plays with the rather thin spiciness of Hallertau hops.

[wik] A note to my compatriots: I am a good shot and a former Boy Scout with a strong survival instinct. I will do what I can when the zombies come to make sure that we get to the Catastratorium alive and well. But I'm thinking in the long term. What good is a secret zombie- and bomb- proof bunker if you can't eat well and get hammered while you're in there?

[alsø wik] Final gravity: 1.014.

[alsø alsø wik] The beer turned out delicious... a good session beer, dry, crisp, malty, maybe a little husky thanks to too-hot steeping? Next time I might use Fuggles instead of Hallertau Mittlefrueh for finishing hops, and juuuust a few more.