Month: January 2023

It’s spelled Raymond Luxury-Yacht

Spotted this on Mastodon (Burlington Free Press for that date, apparently). I’ve seen the “jass” spelling before (they were the Original Dixieland “Jass” Band and their first record was “Dixieland Jass Band One-Step” after all, even if they adopted the -zz spelling within a year of the recording) but “jacz” and “jasz” are new to me. The -zz spelling seems… you know, exactly right for the music, but that could just be because that how it’s been for the last hundred-plus years. Eubie Blake said “jass” was considered a Very Bad Word, hence maybe the -zz spelling (a bit softer and sounds less like “ass”?). I wonder if jacz or jasz would’ve ever stood a chance given how Slavic they look by comparison…

The Space Merchants

First book for the year at last (we are clearly not out of the reading slump yet). I’ve had ebook copies of the Library of America’s series of American SF of the 50s and 60s, and I decided to finally kick the year off by breaking into those… starting off with messrs Pohl & Kornbluth’s Space Merchants from 1952. I’ve never been 100% sure how I feel about SF literature, but I have admittedly simply never read a lot of the generally acknowledged classics in the genre, so I should probably do that…

Anyway, I liked this one, some time in the future the US is very much ruled by competing advertising agencies (corporations have senators and the presidency is inherited), and our hero is an exec at one of these agencies charged with solving the ultimate problem: how to sell the colonisation of Venus. Basically what ensues is a kind of futurist corporate thriller (the other big agency is not happy at the exploitation of Venus being stolen from them) embedded in a somewhat acrid satire of 50s American concerns, with a conservationist organisation clearly meant as a stand-in for communism; plot isn’t always the clearest when it comes to who’s doing what and why, some aspects are only thinly explained, but on the whole a decent read from start to finish.

Well that’s encouraging

The Doomsday Clock has apparently never been this far advanced in the 75 years since it was first conceived of, mostly thanks to the invasion of Ukraine. (I do feel there’s an element of fingerpointing in how the website specifically offers Russian and Ukrainian translations…) Looking at the history of changes to the clock over the decades, that means it’s not even quite as bad as the 80s when I think we all just expected nuclear war as a matter of course, something Reagan would get around to whenever his astrologer said it was a good time to do it. I love living in the modern world…

When did you even start?

One thing I hate about Youtube is these fucking bot-produced “motivation” channels that it keeps recommending to me. I had to kind of laugh at this one, called WAKE UP, capitals used advisedly, cos it recommended me a video about Jordan B. Peterson (as an awful lot of these channels do, which is a large part of why I hate them) called “Stop Being the Nice Guy”. Which is, clearly, something I don’t think Jurr Durr ever started being in the first place…

Anyway, went to see what other nuggets of “wisdom” this channel had and, well, I found the above three “Stop Being the Nice Guy” videos in a row, two by Peterson and there’s a THIRD by him further down the page. The third one in the row above is, of course, by Andrew Tate, whose cult is even more obnoxious that Peterson’s and who seems to be the other main source of videos for the channel. Like Peterson, I don’t think that being a “nice guy” (even in the Elliot Rodger “I’m the perfect gentleman!” way) is something Emory has ever suffered from… This appears to be the channel’s earliest video and it comes from him:

“Time to up wake”? And this is a more recent one:

Yeah. That seems more like him. Parenthetically, there was yet another “Stop Being the Nice Guy” video featuring Tate immediately after this one. But I suppose “WAKE UP” works better as a Youtube channel name than “BE A CUNT”, even though the latter appears to be the message it really wants to convey…

950,000?

So I just discovered these are a thing:

NINE HUNDRED AND FIFTY THOUSAND VOLTS? I can’t find anything online that agrees about how dangerous voltages of this sort are (as little as 50V could kill you but 10,000V might not?), and indeed I’m finding stuff saying 950,000V here is advertising bullshit and current flow is what you should really worry about… but even if it is advertising bullshit, I’m still a bit worried about who would want something that theoretically deadly and why…

Anyway, I heard about Hike N Strike via Stephen Colbert, funnily enough, whose latest monologue addressed some January 6 insurrectionists being jailed, one of whom was a guy called Richard Barnett, the guy who was photographed in Nancy Pelosi’s office, and who was just found guilty on all counts including entering with a deadly or dangerous weapon… the weapon in question being one of these Hike N Strike things. Though, hilariously, he apparently tried to claim it wasn’t dangerous cos it had been in the shower with him the day before; I can only suppose there was no toaster he could take in the bath with him…

Lena

This was fascinating viewing. I think I may have been dimly aware that “the Lena image” was a thing, I have somewhat vague memories of reading somewhere that an image from Playboy had played some sort of key role in the development of digital image processing, but I knew nothing else apart from that… so this was really educational, and I have a lot better understanding of why Lena was and is important, and what she means for the industry and the culture at large.

Take it away. PLEASE.

Saw this posted on Facebook a few days ago, don’t recall seeing the video before (probably saw it on Countdown at some point and I’ve just forgotten) and had almost completely forgotten the song… indeed, this may actually have been the first time I’d heard it since it came out. Hasn’t left my head since then. Which is a bit of a problem cos… I don’t like it. Chorus and verses sound like they’re from different songs that have been beaten together into one, and the Beatles pulled that trick off successfully a few times, but oh it doesn’t really work here. And like I said, I can’t get the fucking thing out of my head now. Help.

Ardern/Abbott

Still a bit perplexed about Jacinda Ardern’s resignation as PM of NZ. Caused shockwaves here and there when that news came out the other day, and a lot of people are speculating as to why… I suspect this piece nails the matter. In any case, the reaction seems to have been largely regretful, lots of people wishing she wouldn’t go, except obviously for Rupert Murdoch’s tools. Some headlines I grabbed via Google:

Stinging! That’ll teach HER to run a country where Rupert has a minimal presence, unlike the monopoly on the Coalition that he has here…

Continue reading “Ardern/Abbott”

Sure you don’t need that education?

So Pink Floyd, or whatever passes for them these days, are gearing up for the 50th anniversary of their most famous album, but because it’s 2023 and the Internet is still a thing, this is apparently the sort of response they’ve been getting from people who I can only assume have never seen what that album’s cover art was. DINOSAUR BAND USE GAY COLOURS ME NO LISTEN NO MORE! Good thing the band never went with this originally, hey…