I’ve heard it said that it isn’t hard to write a hit song. It’s nearly impossible, but it’s not hard.
There are certain songs that transcend the appellation: hit, that become: standards. People crawl over each other trying to perform them and enjoy the popularity juice that’s obviously in them. They might achieve an original take on these warhorses, but the meat is the song, and the salt is the delivery. These songs are occasionally composed by one-hit wonders, but that’s pretty rare in my experience. It’s usually artists who have a string of hits, some of which get their head way above top 40 ocean and make it up into the standards cloud.
Kris Kristofferson wrote several songs that became standards. He wrote a bunch more that were popular in their own right. I think a solid majority of the population of the United States has recorded For the Good Times at this point. You can hear fat Elvis try his hand at it, or senescent Sinatra mumble it if you like. Ray Price had a number one hit with it, and must have thought he’d stubbed his toe on a golden boulder. Perry Como de-boned it for weak musical teeth, and spent half a year on the British charts with it. Karaoke tapes have gone woolly dragging its carcass over magnetic heads over and over.
I recall an Irishism that states that you’re not dead until no one utters your name anymore. Let’s expand it to include uttering your lyrics.
We went to Bethel Maine. Nice little town. It’s coming on fall. The weather couldn’t make up its mind to be gloomy or not. The sky alternated between lowering at us and showing us a rich cerulean blue mixed with jolly clouds. Of course I could wow you with my penetrating insights about cerulean blue, intoning Pantone shades and cribbing from Claude Monet’s color palette. Maybe I could even impress you by spelling palette correctly, I don’t know. Or maybe I could just admit that I only know the cerulean color from my set of Crayolas from the second grade. Luckily for me, I have a good memory, and even luckier, Crayola doesn’t actually put cobalt stannate in their cerulean crayons, or I would have surely died when I ate mine.
No one is eating crayons in Bethel that I observed. The population of Bethel is approximately no one, so I can draw such conclusions. I exaggerate. The population is about 2500 souls, all of whom were obviously hiding from us. It was Friday in the early afternoon, and almost nobody passed by us on our peripatations. We do have a lean and hungry look, so maybe they were wise to shelter in place, as the saying goes.
There’s a private high school in town with about 200 students lurking in it called Gould Academy:
It’s got a campus that makes most any Ivy League college look like a Calcutta slum.
If the buildings don’t get you to apply, the view from the soccer pitch might:
We’re a couple of weeks early for leaf peeping, but that scene will go technicolor all over shortly.
We don’t get out much, so we’re much more prone to sticker shock than most folks. For example, we ate breakfast in the same diner we visited just before buying our house way back when. It’s one of the few places you can order eggs over hard and they show up that way. Nice people. But I don’t remember paying forty bucks for two people to eat breakfast last time we were there. Or ever. Anywhere. Still, here we are.
It’s silly to talk of sticker shock and Gould Academy. Tuition and board is reportedly about $73,000 a year. For high school. So I assume sticker shock is what they send through the paddles they place on dad’s chest in the ambulance, after a session at the bursar’s office. But I’m sure the tuition equivalent of driving a Mercedes into the ocean every year must result in a short trip to mover and shaker land after matriculation. Let’s paw over their list of notable alumni for Nobel laureates and such:
Amelia Brodka: professional skateboarder. Hmm. Last time I checked, you didn’t need 1220 on your SATs and $300,000 in high school tuition to learn a 50/50 grind, but what do I know?
Margaret Joy Tibbets: Ambassador to Norway for Lyndon Johnson. Hmm. I only vaguely remember LBJ, but I have the impression he appointed Maggie to that post because he didn’t like her. Coulda been worse. I don’t think he liked JFK, either, and look how that turned out.
Geo Soctomah Neptune: Passamaquoddy basket maker. Hmm. I must be getting old. I remember when “basket weaving class” was an amusing euphemism for a basketball player’s curriculum. Old Two Spirit Geo has a Wikipedia page, which is a copious compendium of non-conformity.
Marilyn Mollicone: botanist. Hmm. I’m sorry, Marilyn, but I speak some Spanish and I don’t feel comfortable even uttering your last name. But according to the Wikiup, “She was the longest recorded member of the Josselyn Botanical Society.” So that’s something. I think.
Edward S. Morse: zoologist. Hmm. According to the Wikiup, he is considered the “Father of Japanese archaeology.” I’m not sure how to tie zoology in with Japanese archaeology without causing an international incident, but apparently he did it. And by the way, Japanese Archaeology is the name of my Vapors tribute band. But I digress.
Arn Chorn-Pond: Cambodian musician and activist. Hmm. I always get the heebie jeebies when anyone winds up their CV with “activist.” According to the Wikiup, he advocates for the “healing power of music.” Sounds great, but if you don’t mind, Arn, I’ll stick with penicillin and The Price Is Right playing on a teevee bolted up high on the wall in my hospital room.
Matt Bevin: The 62nd governor of Kentucky. Hmm. He got voted out of office after speaking at a pro-cockfighting rally. I’m not sure I could vote for someone who doesn’t know the difference between Kentucky and South Carolina.
Well, I can see this is a fool’s errand, and even though I’m perfect for that job, let’s move on.
Lord knows how many people might be in this town in the winter. It’s ski country. Even now, before the leaves turn, there are precious few Maine license plates on the street. Sunday River ski resort is down the strada, along with a couple of other, smaller hills. No worries. There’s room for everyone. Bethel is in with the inn crowd:
The main drag is a pleasant allee heading out of the town center:
The grand houses on the street are almost all perfectly maintained, although many of them are no longer grand houses. Lots are B&Bs and museums that aren’t open on any day I noticed, whether you’re consulting a Julian or Gregorian calendar.
A swing by the Event Center was decidedly uneventful.
There’s a nice mix of Greek Revival, Stick Style, Adam Colonial, and assorted other handsome styles. Vinyl siding need not apply.
So visit Bethel, Maine. You won’t be jostled on the sidewalk. If someone approaches you from the opposite direction while you’re walking around, you can always walk down the middle of the street. You can read all the menus posted outside the numerous restaurants whether they’re open or not, which is good, because they’re not. When driving, you’ll have to avoid running over the Billie Eilish wannabee Gould students in the crosswalk, but other than that, it’s smooth sailing.
If you get lonesome, you can always stop at the Irving gas station/Rusty Lantern market on the way out of town. We stopped to let my wife use the bathroom, and unlike the rest of the town, every parking space was full. If you need some beef jerky and vodka, or pretzel rods made by an oil company, the place has you covered.
Wow. Farm Aid was over 25 years ago. I had no idea if they ever helped anybody. There are still a lot of family farmers here in Maine, but the state has been an anachronism in many ways for a very long time. They seem to help themselves, mostly.
It’s hard to argue with anything listed on their “Our Work” page.
I read their tax return. It’s difficult to get a handle on exactly what they’re doing. They parcel out grants hither and yon. I guess that’s the nature of an organization dedicated to small businesses. Farm Aid is based in that bastion of the small, family farm: Cambridge Massachusetts (snicker). And they have three directors making $125,000 a year, and someone who works 20 hours a week making 66 grand. I’ve heard enough. I’m out.
It really isn’t anymore. It’s been thoroughly roped and branded and gelded and optimized and monetized. Totally infiltrated by bad actors. And speaking of bad actors, the video is full of them. No matter. I hereby testify that there was indeed a time when people found things that they found amusing and stitched them together, and put them out there into the ether for no other reason than for the love of it.
Well, it’s Tuesday, the day we clean out our bookmarks. Maybe it should be some sort of holiday. Everybody else gets a holiday, or even a whole month to celebrate their misery. Why not we poor folks with forty-two browser tabs open? So let it be written. So let it be done!
The plan, which saw a juice company dump 1,000 truckloads of waste orange peel in a barren pasture in Costa Rica back in the mid 1990s, has eventually revitalised the desolate site into a thriving, lush forest.
The article, and everyone mentioned in it, appears mystified by the way mulch works. City people are strange creatures.
To create this huge image, the painting was photographed in a grid with 97 rows and 87 columns with our 100-megapixel Hasselblad H6D 400 MS camera. Each of these 8,439 separate photos was captured using a sophisticated laser-guided five-axis camera positioning system that can sense the precise location of the painting so that every photo is sharp – an error of even 1/8 mm in the placement of the camera would result in a useless image.
And to think some guy painted the picture with some goo on a stick with squirrel hair on the end of it.
As increasing numbers of performers and instruments became standard in orchestral repertoire, ensembles became louder, and more string players were needed to balance the sound. The violin is a comparatively quiet instrument, and a solo player cannot be heard over the power of the brass.
I’m from Maine, so I’ve always preferred violas over violins. They burn longer, and throw off more heat.
While many older vehicles from legacy OEMs require a trip to the dealer to be patched, more and more new models can be updated over the air, meaning that owners can have the recall performed from the comfort of their own parking space, provided they have connectivity. Even this isn’t hassle-free, though, as some Rivian owners found out to their dismay late last year when an update broke some infotainment screens.
Hmm. I’m pretty sure some middle-eastern fellahs got over the air software updates on their pagers recently. I’m not sure I want any of that.
Forty hours a week – or let’s be real, more – is a lot of time to be unhappy. Being unhappy at work bleeds into other areas of our lives, impacting our physical and emotional well-being and personal relationships. I’m not advocating job hopping – there are always things that you can try to improve your situation – but as a hiring manager, I regularly see people who have stayed in one place too long at the expense of their own growth and overall career.
After decades of self-employment, I once took a salaried job. I couldn’t believe how short and easy a 40-hour week was. I was home every night for dinner. Toughen up, ya pansies.
Together, the bills, which were passed by Governor Gavin Newsom on Tuesday, make it illegal to use an AI-generated digital replica of an actor’s likeness or voice — or technically, any Californian’s — without their explicit consent.
I guess fraud laws weren’t enough. We needed fraudy-fraudy-super dooper fraud laws to protect poor, put-upon actors. No word on when it will become illegal to use AI to shoplift up to $950 in merchandise.
For example, it’s easier to write a novel using Microsoft Word than using a manual typewriter, but not that much easier. MS Word makes the physical work easier, but most of the effort is mental. (And while moving from Smith Corona 1950 to Word 95 is a big improvement, moving from Word 95 to Word 365 isn’t.)
Writing a novel has always been easy. You just start with a blank sheet of paper and think until drops of blood appear on your forehead.
The added steps would occur between the traditional power and exhaust stroke. The first sequence, then, would be intake-compression-power, followed by compression-power-exhaust.
Adding additional complexity of any kind to a car is malpractice at this point. Every engine in every car should work like the Briggs & Stratton on my elderly lawnmower. I’ve done nothing by pour gas in it and run it for 25 straight years. Take that, Porsche.
“We found that people are strongly biased by first impressions,” said lead author Dr. Allie Sinclair, Ph.D., who did the research as part of her doctorate in the lab of Dr. Alison Adcock, M.D., Ph.D., a Duke professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences.
My first impression on reading the deep thoughts of Doctors Allie and Ali is that they must be handing out Ph.Ds like candy on Halloween at this point. And to make a joke about pre-marital sex regarding the title.
There’s a Twitter meme on how men constantly think about the Roman Empire. Some feminist friends objected that women think about Rome a lot too. To settle the matter, I included a question about this on this year’s ACX survey, “Have you thought about the Roman Empire in the past 24 hours?” (the Byzantine Empire also counted).
That depends. Where is Sophia Loren from again?
Month: September 2024
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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