§1 The benefits of watching baseball
The best baseball announcers have voices like cat purrs, reducing stress and healing bones.
Archive for the ‘Weeknote’ Category
Weeknote 11, 2024
Posted in Weeknote on March 17, 2024| Leave a Comment »
Weeknote 10, 2024
Posted in Weeknote on March 9, 2024| Leave a Comment »
§1 The #1 song a century ago
What the kids were listening to this time of year in 1924.
Weeknote 9, 2024
Posted in Weeknote on March 2, 2024| Leave a Comment »
§1 Writing prompt
“Jesus Christ loves you, but He sure hasn’t convinced me to yet.”
§2 With age comes knowledge
I am now old enough to understand why old people love watching baseball so much. I can sink into a telecast like it’s a comfortable recliner.
Weeknote 8, 2024
Posted in Weeknote on February 24, 2024| Leave a Comment »
§1 Extraneous information omitted
As of February 20, 2024, this Easton Press book page lacked any information about either the author(s) of the book’s text or when the text was written.
Weeknote 7, 2024
Posted in Weeknote on February 17, 2024| Leave a Comment »
§1 Billy Joel finds his second wind
Billy Joel’s resurrection of his past in the video for his new song “Turn the Lights Back On” is a use of deep fake video that I can enjoy.
Weeknote 6, 2024
Posted in Weeknote on February 10, 2024| Leave a Comment »
§1 A writing prompt
“Thank you for making the effort to produce the illusion that I have a choice about this decision.”
§2 Relationship advice
§3 SOFA
“Nothing is fixed, nothing is permanent, and nothing lasts.”
§4 A tune to brighten your day
Is it a gloomy Monday where you are? Do you need the lightest of light-hearted tunes?
Weeknote 5, 2024
Posted in Weeknote on February 3, 2024| Leave a Comment »
§1 xkcd
§2 A writing prompt
“So what if they would have snubbed each other five years ago? I’ll bet in another five years they won’t know what they were thinking today. But they need each other now, and sometimes nothing else matters but ‘need’ and ‘now’.”
§3 Fun with meter
“You killed my father / Now prepare to die” can be sung to the meter of “I hear you knockin’ / But you can’t come in”.
§4 Quotation
“If I only get to bring one recording to a desert island, the lyrics better be about how to make a boat.”—Ted Gioia
§5 Brunch?
“I want to have a message at the end…because I always want that…”—Hannah Hart
§6 When The Jam surrendered
Many criticized Paul Weller for breaking up The Jam right after releasing chart-topping single “Beat Surrender,” but why not go out at the top? Were The Jam ever going to release a better song than that one? How many bands ever have?
Weeknote 4, 2024
Posted in Weeknote on January 27, 2024| Leave a Comment »
§1 Things We Take for Granted
It is only in the past half-century or so that every conceivable subdivision and admixture of the rainbow has been available [to painters] in off-the-shelf tubes.
— Philip Ball, Bright Earth : Art and the Invention of Color (Chicago : Univ of Chicago, 2003, 2001), pg. 8
§2 The cool side of the pillow
Make that the ice cold side…
§3 The eternal fight against piracy
Bret Devereaux explains why several countries are counter-attacking against Houthi pirates in the Red Sea.
In essence: “Without cheap sea-freight, humanity is much poorer; poorer in ways that are real.”
§4 Another suitable Trump song
I predict that 10cc would not sue the Trump campaign for playing this song at his rallies.
Weeknote 3, 2024
Posted in Weeknote on January 20, 2024| Leave a Comment »
§1 That’s it!
One minor irritant in what could be a truly tragic year in American political history is the return of this sort of thing.
§2 “Fake It ‘Til You Make It”
The flaw in the advice to “fake it ’til you make it” is that if you pick the wrong thing to fake, you’ll never make it, and you’ll always be fake.
§3 R.I.P., P.D.Q.
Peter Schickele (a.k.a. PDQ Bach) provided me with hours of entertainment when I was in my 20s with his musical sketch comedy.
§4 Sometimes one has to move on
“Do not give dogs what is holy; and do not throw your pearls in front of pigs“—Jesus Christ (Matthew 7:6)
“There ain’t no point in talkin’ when there’s nobody listenin’, so we just went away”—Rod Stewart
§5 Racism is just dumb…
…and isn’t life hard enough without gratuitously making oneself dumber?
Weeknote 2, 2024
Posted in Weeknote on January 13, 2024| Leave a Comment »
§1 Open up your Golden Gate…
“California, Here I Come” was first recorded 100 years ago this week.
Weeknote 1, 2024
Posted in Weeknote on January 6, 2024| Leave a Comment »
§1 Quotation
“[A] huge segment of the ‘free speech activist’ culture is just absolutely pathologically oversensitive to criticism and dissent and […] much of the ‘we hate cancel culture’ culture is consumed with telling people to shut up.”—Ken White
§2 Free Mickey!
This Tom the Dancing Bug cartoon welcomes Mickey Mouse to the public domain.
§3 Disco fever spread everywhere
In 1978, the Grateful Dead recorded a disco song.
Weeknote 52, 2023
Posted in Weeknote on December 30, 2023| Leave a Comment »
Weeknote 51, 2023
Posted in Weeknote on December 23, 2023| Leave a Comment »
§1 The power of Bob Dylan
If you wonder how Bob Dylan got to be such a big deal in the first place, take a listen to this performance from 1963.
§2 Farewell, Evernote
I have closed the free Evernote account I had used since 2012. The first strike was the cascade of upgrade pop-ups that Evernote has required me to click through since the company was bought out a year or two ago. The second strike was the abrupt limitation of free accounts to one notebook and 50 notes (the limitation itself was fine, the abruptness of its imposition was disturbing). The third strike was the latest of those upgrade pop-ups turning my CPU into a significant heat source.
Bottom line: I no longer trust the company.
The notes that were simple lists are now in Google Drive. I haven’t decided yet how to replace the rest of the functionality.
Weeknote 50, 2023
Posted in Weeknote on December 16, 2023| Leave a Comment »
§1 Quotations
“Sometimes the most interesting aspect of a scientific or cultural product is not its overt content but rather its unexamined assumptions.”—Andrew Gelman
“Why would anyone go skiing when they could sit in the comfort of their own homes and break their kneecaps with a hammer?”—Dylan Moran
“[W]e’ve underestimated just how much of a worldwide trauma the pandemic was. I don’t just mean closures [related to the pandemic]; I mean everything. People getting sick is traumatic. People dying is traumatic. Not knowing what’s going to happen is traumatic. COVID skeptics lying about the whole thing is traumatic.”—Michael Siegel
“How you play is what you win.”—Ursula LeGuin
“I know when my client work is valuable[, ]because they rehire me.”—RJ Andrews
§2 A first-world problem
If one happens to possess all the material objects one ever wanted, one then must sit with having learned that possession of those objects does not bring with it everything else one once imagined possession would bring.
Weeknote 49, 2023
Posted in Weeknote on December 9, 2023| Leave a Comment »
§1 A song lyric
“You can put your cards out on the table
But if nobody wants to play
Well, you haven’t got a game, you got a mess”
— Patty Larkin
Superficial Cat 