Lily The Pink - Repost from 2010

I knew, even back in 1969, that the reference was to Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound. But I didn't know, until I looked it up for this post, that Elton John, Graham Nash, and Jack Bruce were all in the original UK version, or that the song was based on an older one.



As for Lydia, she was from north of Boston, and there is a well-baby clinic with that name in Salem, founded by her daughter. Her 19th C patent medicine for "female complaints" - presumably menstrual discomfort - contained, among many other useless herbs, gentian root, which gives Moxie its distinctive aftertaste. It was also 20% alcohol.

Thus, Jonathan, Mrs. Pinkham's 19th C herbal concoction was the original Whixie.

#24 - Arch Humor

There is a whole style of comic performance and writing that relies on snark, on archness. It is comic hipness. I won’t try to trace its history, but it includes Carlin more than Cosby, Newhart, or Pryor. You could sense it in Carson and Leno, but it is Letterman’s stock-in-trade. SNL seems to have retained the joys of silliness through its many incarnations, but the attitude of superiority has never been far below their surface. Al Franken breathed it. Monty Python, very little archness. There’s a touch in Steve Martin, and not so much as you’d think in Bill Murray or Will Smith. Very little in Robin Williams.

I must have liked it fairly well over the years – PJ O’Rourke has got plenty, Bryson moved increasingly in that direction. The tone is there in Dave Barry, in Garrison Keillor. But I find it quite tiring and irritating these days. That raising of the eyebrows and looking toward the audience with amusement at how stupid, how gauche, the particular object of ridicule is now provokes a desire to punch their slightly-lifted noses. Except if they can still laugh at themselves.


I have noted how much I value the ability to laugh at oneself as a measure of emotional health. I think some of that is in play here. Rick Reilly used to be able to laugh at himself, and was funny. Now he can’t and he sucks. Bill Simmons still can, for the time being. Barry laughs at himself easily; Keillor can laugh at his young self but less so at his adult self; O’Rourke can still skewer himself (though perhaps less…?), Bryson is a mixed bag on this and always has been. If you go back over the entries in the first paragraph, the pattern holds pretty strongly: those who can self-mock stay funny. Trudeau and Breathed started by being able to laugh at themselves, then lost this. Scott Adams’s pounding on the stupidity and meanness of management worked when Dilbert and Wally’s foibles were also a main focus. As that went, and they became only the hapless everyman observers of the lunacy, Dilbert became less funny.

Ben reads Chuck Klosterman and David Sedaris. I can tell they have this snarky humor - it may be the humor of the era, growing up slowly in the 70's, establishing dominance in the 90's. It is certainly the humor of the reader more than the viewer. I don't know if either of them have the ability to send themselves up, but I'm pretty sure that would be the dividing line whether I liked them.

Update 2011: Wow. I hadn't realised it had gotten this bad. I sense a Firesign Theater reunion right around the corner. So topical, so now!

Update 2019.  I had not included the late-night TV hosts in my original essay, but I think it applies to them as well.  I am not especially knowledgeable about the topic, but it is my impression that they started off being able to laugh at themselves but have become less able to over the years.

Of Pancakes and Candidates - and Feathers

Ben is up from Houston, and is re-experiencing what it was like to grow up here in NH presidential primary season.  We get frequent phone calls, ignoring many because of caller ID.  We didn't have that in earlier years.

We were trying to recall who the candidate was who fell off the back of the stage while flipping pancakes.  Tracy and Ben had been present for the event.  A school snow day, perhaps.  Was that '96 or 2000? Or perhaps even '92?  No, it was all Bush 41 and Buchanan for that one - we would have remembered that.  Was it Gary Bauer?  It wasn't Dole... It wasn't Alexander...Forbes?...Dornan?

It was Bauer, 1996, for those tormenting themselves over it.

We discussed how such foolishness is in many ways a good thing.  Even our stuffiest, most self-important candidates have to venture such things.  They have to risk looking foolish, having to quickly cover, looking a little sheepish.  You can't imagine Vlad Putin putting himself in that position, nor Bashar Assad.  Dictators try to look like a Man of the People by wearing military garb, as Saddam Hussein or a thousand Latin American leaders did.  In the West, and I think particularly in the Anglosphere, we require more.  We make you throw baseballs, and eat kielbasa.

I think Obama is pretty imperious, yet I can easily imagine him covering a pancake-flipping fall with charm and grace. Mao, not at all, and Hu Jintao, just barely starting to make his way into that territory. That tells us something about a country, doesn't it?

It has it's bad side, of course, and isn't exactly a qualification for the presidency.  Plenty of corrupt, glad-handing, back-slapping politicians also have that common touch we like.  But it provides a check on one type of bad presidency, and for that we should be grateful.

It's been that way a long while, too.

I've Got Sixpence

Don't you just know you would like these guys?



HT: cobb

Superstition

There is a specialised program I use at work which crashes nearly 70% of the time when one tries to print.  These crashes, of course, always occur at wildly, insanely inopportune moments, such as when a patient's discharge transportation has already arrived and you are trying to get a signature form with all his follow up instructions ready.

Everyone in the department has superstitions about how to keep the program from crashing - counting to a certain number before hitting Print, tapping the screen a certain number of times, clicking on an empty section of task bar...

I scoff.  Ridiculous.  Those things can't possibly have any effect on the program.  Unscientific.  I have found, however, that loudly singing "Yellow Submarine" works quite well. 

My coworkers are not as entertained as I thought they might be.

Cartoon

Dog, explaining to psychologist with irritation:  I am not paranoid!  Sometimes he only pretends to throw the ball to make me look like an idiot!

Marry, Ageyn Hic Hev Donne Yt

Stick with it until about 2:35, anyway. It suddenly goes all 16th C (see below).

Richard Thompson was a founder of Fairport Convention, the other English electric folk band of the early 70's, and much better known in America than Steeleye Span at the time. I never liked them much, as Sandy Denny's voice was just a little too...something for my taste. The difference has got to be subtle, because it is much like Maddy Prior's.

I never quite forgave Thompson for playing the Joni Mitchell tribute concert, thinking "you need to get out of this." But ethereal voice, unusual tunings, I suppose I can see how you'd have to be on board with Joni if you're Richard. Some magazine - it may have been Playboy - asked popular musicians in the early 2000's what the "top popular songs of the millennium" had been. Everyone else stretched their musical knowledge back a few decades, or maybe a century. They may not have known what a millennium was, or had little idea of history. When I sang old folk songs years ago, many people, even ones you would think quite savvy, had a category "old music" in their brains that covered everything from Depression-era bluegrass backward. They might have the additional bit of knowledge that "Greensleeves" was really old.

Thompson took it seriously and did an entire album on it, starting with Sumer is icumen in. (A song which gave rise to my best literary off-the-cuff joke ever - incredibly brilliant - but gets completely ruined by having to explain it. The punch line is "Loude sing Marcoux." See, that doesn't help you any, does it?) Here's a Fairport Convention tune from the last album he did with them, and the only one I was familiar with until years later.

Two From Volokh

There is always much of interest at Volokh Conspiracy, though much of it isn't so gripping if you ain't a lawyer.  The first is PETA's attempt to have whales freed from Sea World under the XIII Amendment (no slavery). The comments include a mention that the amendment was likely drafted by whale-oil light, and a wonderful extension that notes if the orcas are persons, then so are the sea-creatures they killed, so orcas should be incarcerated, and Sea World is rather ideal for it.  Fun stuff.

The second is a bit more disconcerting.  A lefty blogger declares that if OWS doesn't "work" - not sure what he means by that, but it seems to be a pretty considerable restructuring of society - then perhaps mandatory participation in government-assigned social media groups would be beneficial.  The idea seems to be that making people interact with others unlike themselves in race and orientation to solve problems will create a better citizen and be good for us all. His commenters seem to think this is a fine idea, which is rather chilling that such an idea doesn't immediately set off warning bells.

I hardly need to point out to this audience the possible problems that might arise from this, but I thought a few words might be in order.  The word "mandatory" should always wake one up and cause one to examine the proposal with narrowed gaze.  Mandatory means, ultimately, once the refusal to pay increasing fines and contempt of court charges are taken into account, that we will put you in jail for not doing this. It's worth keeping in mind.  Government should make some things mandatory, but we should be clear about exactly what, and why.  Secondly, I think I sense the liberal fantasy of "if you would just be open minded and not be stupid and a bigot, you would come over to our POV" behind this idea.  The idea that being exposed to a diverse group would be good for us and make us better citizens ultimately rests on that.  That people could be exposed to diverse (read liberal) POV's, and know some minority citizens pretty well, yet not essentially agree with them seems not to occur to the writer.  The assumption seems quite strong that we who disagree just haven't really thought about it much.

I understand that type of bias because that is pretty much what I think of liberals.  But I try to guard against it, and make sure that I've got some specific evidence to put forward every time I make such a claim.  I might ultimately just be rationalising and deluding myself, but I at least make some attempt to find evidence.

Chicago Cubs

Maz quote.  Theo Epstein is going to the Cubs, who haven't won since the 17th Century.

Search words

One of the search terms that brought up my site last week was  ზურაბ წერეთელი

Yeah, I looked it up and see the connection.  Still pretty funny, though.  The script is Georgian, or more specifically, Kartvelian (which I used to get confused with Karelian and thought was one of those weird distant language relationships.)

Squirrels!

I went over to Retriever's to see the iPhone 4S photos, because I knew, depressingly, that she would do far better with a phone camera than I would with thousands of dollars of equipment and an editing studio.  But just posted is a an update on the squirrels which caused 15,000 of us (our household included) to lose power this weekend.

Squirrels are evil, dangerous creatures.  If they didn't have cute, bushy tails, we would recognise them for the rats they are.  When you see a squirrel, think "rat with a cute tail," and you will not be suckered in.

Related.  Pigeons are not really birds, either.  they are rats with wings.

Directions

Tigerhawk links to a huge collection of graphs about employment over at Big Picture.

Yeah, fine.  But my favorite part is his directions over the comments section.

"Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data, ability to repeat discredited memes, and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Also, be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor even implied. Any irrelevancies you can mention will also be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous."

Post 3200 - Voting

A comment I left over at Maggie's.  I haven't said it here in awhile.

PJ O'Rourke gets this one right. The purpose of elections is to vote the bastards out. Negative voting is not only an acceptable, but a preferable alternative. Don't ask yourself who you want. Ask yourself who you want to get rid of. When you think of it, that's been the American way since the Revolution. We didn't know what we were going to end up with for a government. We just knew we wanted out of the current arrangement.

Meerkats

So here's the deal, son. We're animals, and we live by our wits, and we never own anything. Plus, our wits are really just instincts, so it's not going to get any better. No, don't thank me. It's what being a meerkat is all about. Welcome to adulthood.

Waterloo

Driving Lesson

And so here I am again, for the fifth time, teaching a 15.5 year old boy how to drive. Over the years I have learned to say "correct" instead of "right," even in everyday discourse. Many statements that are precise to other drivers, such as "take your next right," are ambiguous to non-drivers, who wonder if you mean any break in the curbing, only paved areas, only marked roads, or what? A friend who had an in-garage accident with his son figured out - much too late - that "Stop!" to a driver means stop the car, but to your son, who you have yelled at for years, it means Freeze. Stop whatever you are doing right now.

Which is sometimes not what you want him to do as a driver.

Tonight I was reminded that cut the wheel; cut it hard is ambiguous to a non-driver. No damage, no emergency, just a caution flag for me.

Driving a standard is always an adventure, because understanding the concepts only takes you so far. Your foot and leg muscles have to develop memory through repetition to get the feel for it, and there just isn't any substitute.

It's a good time to remember James Thurber's grandfather, in Chapter 9 of My Life and Hard Times.

It's Their Territory

Ben, this would have been a much better science project than squirrels.


We’re thinking the bird feeders got ripped down by a bear. We haven’t had a bear recently. It could be a raccoon, I suppose, which would be a relief.

It reminded me of my annoyance with the declaration by some, whenever there is danger to humans because of wild animals, that of course there is danger from coyotes/elk/bears/mountain lions. We are in their territory, and they are only doing what comes naturally. I can see some sense in the idea, but I think it bears thinking about.

Our town is celebrating our 250th anniversary this summer, and even our particular area has had human habitation (also sheep, cow, pig, chicken, and horse habitation) for more than 150. My house has been here 50 years. So if it’s their territory, these are bears with considerably enhanced abilities to do title searches – or keep genealogies, as they seldom live 20 years.

Come to think of it, I don’t know what inheritance rights among bears even are. How do we know that this isn’t some other bear’s territory that our bear is horning in on? Or do people mean that lands that bears used to live on before humans came – that would be 11,749 years this November – are theirs? That they belong to the bear community somehow?

I’m not just being cute here. If you try to pin down what people mean by a bear’s right to be in particular territory, you run into these questions. Are we saying that any environment which might conceivably support a bear, that she might wander into from an adjoining area, that has at some time in the past had a naturally-occurring bear in it, is therefore Bear Land, to be entered by humans at their peril?

As I said, there is some sense to this. If the naturally-occurring bear was kicked out a few weeks ago in order to put up the house you just built, then yes, I do grant that you are entering at your peril. But not, as we might think, because I believe the bear has the superior right to it, but because in my experience, it is hard to explain boundaries to bears, or indeed any mammals, including many humans. It would be rather a work in progress, I think.

That the animal is only doing what is natural to it is not a persuasive argument to me. Bears are naturally attracted to dumpsters, and alligators to small creatures near rivers, including toddlers. Doesn’t make it right. When you really press this idea, it turns out to be another one of those preferences that the whole region be made into a theme park dedicated to the speaker’s imagination of what things looked like in the year 1000 AD. Which ignores not only those successful exploiters of their environments, the Indians, but that change in nature is ongoing.

Combination Of Images

The spelling of the band's name apparently attracted spam comments, so I am avoiding it.

Last one, really. You can go watch more at Youtube if you like. But this is a simply amazing collision of images. Indoor stage - Horse - Trojan Horse - Bagpiper - Rock Planet - and the odd choreography and light accents. Stunning.

Luv'

I know this looks like I must have run across it while scrounging though old ABBA videos - or perhaps after entering "Dutch 70's Soft Porn" on my search engine, but I actually found it while researching whether "a year and a day" had medieval meanings other than homicide common law. (My guess is that it does, but I can't prove it yet. I can only verify them back to the 18th C.) That led to twelvemonth, which led to "All Around My Hat," which led to Steeleye Span's version of that song, which this band covered. Really, I'm innocent.



There are a dozen videos of the group on Youtube, and I'm not convinced that one on the right ever learned to quite keep the beat.

This will substitute for an ABBA update. There is no reference to this Dutch girl group imitating them, but it sure looks it to me. Or maybe Northern European girls dressed like this in the 70's and 80's more than I knew. I wasn't there, after all.

'E Couldn' 'Elp It. 'E 'Ad To

I couldn't resist. Sorry.