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I’m In Love, Eternally, With Concrete and Clay

January 31, 2025 No Comments

Concrete and Clay was a #1 hit in 1965 on the UK Singles Chart. It made it to a respectable #28 on the US Billboard chart. Just popular enough, but obscure enough, to interest someone like Wes Anderson. Here it is, along with a protozoan-era music video:

Ya gotta love Unit 4+2’s vibe. By the look of them, they’re obviously going to do the record producer’s taxes after the session, or maybe do some retirement planning for elderly couples in Tunbridge Wells. It demonstrates ably that the sixties was two different decades wrapped into one. The first half looked like this, and the latter part was all feather boas and paisley shirts and satin carnival uniforms.  The song itself is seriously sprightly. It’s got a slightly exotic Brazilian beat, a copious amount of rebar on display in the video, and absolutely the correct amount of cowbell.

The band was called Unit 4 for a while, until they decided they could really use a guitar player and a drummer, hence the +2. The +2 turned out to be Russ Ballard and Bob Henrit. You think you don’t know who those two guys are, but you sort of do if you’re my age. They later hooked up with the keyboardist from the Zombies and made this earworm in the ’70s:

Yes, hair and clothing styles for performers had changed in the interim.

Anyway, let’s get back to Concrete and Clay. I was tickled when my sons started banging it out in their rehearsal space. My brother gave my son a cowbell for Christmas, and they immediately knew exactly what to do with it. I wish I had recorded it before I sold their practice room, mostly because it was attached to the rest of the house. But it was a song with legs, if you ask me. It’s peppy and obscure enough to be interesting, but familiar enough for people to respond to it when you start in with the cowbell.

Right? Isn’t it? Am I wrong here? I have my doubts now. I went looking around for covers of Concrete and Clay, but they’re vanishingly rare on these here intertunnels. Has my thinker upper failed me on this one? Let’s see who’s executing the song on the WooTube:

Whoah. A lot can be explained by the fact they’re German. Our Deutsche freunde are rarely noted for their cooking, but they’re really not noted for their sense of humor. Here’s a German joke:

Judge: So you had a disagreement with your neighbor over a parking space. You accosted them in the street, cursed at them, drove them into a forest, and beat them with a tree limb! Don’t you think that was taking things a little too far?

Defendant: You’re right, your honor. I should have beaten them right there in the street.

Oh well. Let’s head further north, and see How Ilkka & LPX paid homage to the tune:

The late sixties also introduced a lot of people to psychedelic drugs. But WooTube beats magic mushrooms, hands down.

Ronnie Lane and an Unexplained Rockette Perform Ooh La La

January 30, 2025 No Comments

Ronnie Lane was a founding member of the Small Faces, and eventually just regularly sized Faces. He wrote several hits in the ’60s, including Itchykoo Park. He had an interesting and varied career after that. This is a combo he headed called Slim Chance. He was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis around the time this video was made. That’s an especially hard lot for a musician.

Ronnie’s girlfriend asked record producer Glyns Johns to organize a concert to fund a charity called Action for Research into Multiple Sclerosis. Ronnie’s friends were glad to help out. Ronnie’s friends were, according to the wikiup, “Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts, Ronnie Wood, Kenney Jones, Andy Fairweather Low, Steve Winwood, Ray Cooper, James Hooker, Fernando Saunders, Chris Stainton, Tony Hymas, Simon Phillips and others.”

No man is a failure, who has friends. It’s not possible to get farther away from failure than Ronnie Lane.

So You Can’t Afford a House, Part Deux

January 29, 2025 11 Comments

Just a few years ago, it was pretty easy to find an old fixer-upper in Maine, priced at a pittance. A lot of it is gone now, swallowed up in the gray floor-gray walls-gray vinyl-siding maelstrom that has infected the flip this house world. But there’s still some out there. I showed you a shingle style palace for fifty grand last week. If you’re not in a Sangerville, Maine mood, I thought I’d show you that it wasn’t a one-off. How about this brown study, in Madison, Maine?

Madison isn’t as far-flung as Sangerville, so the cover charge is a little higher: $99,000. Madison has nearly 5,000 people in it, which makes it damn near a metropolis in Somerset County. At one time, the town was teeming with factories making things like horse carriages and window sashes and doors and coffins. Just about cradle to grave employment, there. The Kennebec River ambles through the center of town, and it served as the power company and the highway out of town. It helped make Madison into a lumbering town, which supplied the wood for all the factories. There was a paper mill in town, too, but it closed in 2016. I think it’s been re-purposed to make some sort of boondoggly eco-friendly something or other, but whatever they’re doing in there, it doesn’t smell like a paper mill any more when you drive by.

Back to the house. It’s got 4 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms. As far as wrecks go, it’s not all that wrecked.

It’s a Victorian, but a very late Victorian. They banged the last nail in this thing just before banging the last nail into Old Vickie’s coffin. It’s more or less a Queen Anne Cottage style. Asymmetrical, multiple rooflines, clipped corners, bays, wrap-around porches, and lots of things to collect spider webs. It rambles out towards the back and has a nifty attached barn, which is in good repair and neat as a pin inside. That’s quite unusual around here. In general, people in Maine put things into their barns, and leave them there to age for fifty years or so until they figure they can throw them away without feeling bad about it. At my last house, I watched out the window while the neighbors, who had sold their house, cleaned out the garage. Everything but a car came out. My wife and I amused ourselves identifying the vintage of the stuff as it emerged. Hey look, it’s Burt Reynolds’ bachelor pad crushed velvet orange sectional sofa! We were dumbfounded at last, though, when an entire airplane came out of there. Only curse words would do it justice. A f@#$%ing plane!

Back to business. This Madtown fixer is the best kind of neglected. You can fix a house that’s been neglected. It’s constant remuddling that wrecks everything, and eventually makes houses worthless. This house isn’t worthless:

Everything needs a little attention, but nothing is ruined. The dangling outlet hints that you’ll be fishing new wires in the walls eventually, but honestly, after you steam off the wallpaper, you can bash away at the plaster, put in what you need in the way of Romex and plumbing, and patch it back up easily enough.

Holy cow, this place is just short of a palace inside:

OK, maybe not a palace. But you could cock a snook at your friends when you invited them over for dinner. You know, after you spent 10,000 hours fixing the place. C’mon, it’s got pocket doors and wainscotting!

Right off, it’s got a workable kitchen and usable bathrooms. With only a little preliminary work, you could camp out in this house without too much discomfiture, and bang on it to your heart’s content, or your heart’s failure, whatever comes first.

Taxes, at $200 per month, won’t break you. And Madison, while not exactly Tribeca, isn’t completely nowheresville. It has a sorta downtown with modestly impressive brick buildings, with things like bad restaurants and dope stores. Madison isn’t too far from Skowhegan, either, which has a more or less lively, downscale downtown. You could live in Madison, and almost like it. What’s stopping you?

Tuesday No Heavy Lifting Roundup

January 28, 2025 1 Comment

I went to they gym today. I haven’t been inside a gym in many, many moons. Hard work was always my gym. I don’t have a house to bang on anymore, so I decided to lift someone else’s weights for a change. Apparently, a gym has morphed into a place where about fifty percent of the people sit stock-still on very expensive-looking equipment and diddle with their phone. The other half are girls who are the same dimension in every direction watching teevee while lumbering up stairmasters. Both the equipment and the patrons are mostly spangled with purple and yellow for reasons that escape me. My wife and I go together. Apparently, this just isn’t done. The women on the stairmasters look daggers at my wife when she wipes off the seat on my machine while she’s doing hers, too.

So nothing looked like the Nautilus machine in our high school weightroom, which was considered state-of-the-art back then. I don’t recognize about half of the exercises. I haven’t seen CNN since the 1980s, but it’s on half the teevees of the forty screens. The other half were tuned to ex-football players in loud suits two sizes too small incensed that there are only fourteen cameras available to decide if a player made a first down.

Then I walked in the Men’s locker room. Finally, something familiar. That sweatsock smell.

Let’s get on with our Tuesday link pruning:

Nvidia’s $589 Billion DeepSeek Rout Is Largest in Market History

Nvidia shares tumbled 17% Monday, the biggest drop since March 2020, erasing $589 billion from the company’s market capitalization. That eclipsed the previous record — a 9% drop in September that wiped out about $279 billion in value — and was the biggest in US stock-market history.

I am reminded of the 1980s version of this phenomenon. A Japanese man on the subway turned to the fellow next to him and said he owned a dog worth a million dollars. The guy next to him didn’t believe him. He explained that the dog must be worth a million dollars, because he had traded two $500,000 cats for it.

No, Wall Street, DeepSeek is not “far superior”

The results vary across benchmarks, but on average, GPT-4o and Gemini-2 are better. You can see this on ChatBot Arena, for example. Even in the results published by DeepSeek’s authors themselves, you can see that in several tests, the model lags behind GPT-4o from May 2024—which, mind you, is currently ranked 16th on ChatBot Arena.

I tried DeepSeek. It was comparable to the Open AI chatbot from about a year ago. It’s nowhere near the latest version. I asked it for investment advice and it suggested a conservative, sandwich heavy portfolio.

FTC Takes Action Against GoDaddy for Alleged Lax Data Security for Its Website Hosting Services

GoDaddy’s unreasonable security practices include failing to: inventory and manage assets and software updates; assess risks to its shared hosting services; adequately log and monitor security-related events in the hosting environment; and segment its shared hosting from less-secure environments, according to the FTC’s complaint.

Maybe they should also investigate them for being the Hotel California of web service providers. You can check out any time you want, but your credit card can never leave.

Crampons have been used in Norway for over 1,000 years. Espen Kutschera has tested Viking-era crampons.

In the Icelandic Eyrbyggja saga, written in the mid-1200s, we hear about Frøystein, who was a bit smarter than Steintor. The latter latter seemingly forgot to wear the proper footwear: ‘Steintor struggled to stand as the ice floes were both slippery and slanted, while Frøystein stood firm on shoe crampons and struck hard and often.’

Stupid Steintor. I’ll bet he didn’t even rape and pillage correctly. No, Steintor, Froystein would say, you kill the dogs and rape the women, not the other way around.

Suspects in killings of Vallejo witness, Vermont Border Patrol agent connected by marriage license, extreme ideology

Maximilian Snyder, a 22-year-old data scientist arrested in Northern California on Friday on suspicion of murder, and Teresa Youngblut, the 21-year-old computer science student charged last week in connection with the shooting death of U.S. Border Patrol Agent David Maland, appear to follow a fringe, self-described “vegan Sith” ideology that started in the Bay Area and has connections to violence, according to police records, an interview with a person familiar with the group, and years of social media and blog posts reviewed by Open Vallejo.

A vegan sith. Okey dokey. Man, people who believe in nothing will believe in anything.

Google Maps to rename ‘Gulf of Mexico’ to ‘Gulf of America’ for US users

“As directed by the President, the Gulf of Mexico will now officially be known as the Gulf of America and North America’s highest peak will once again bear the name Mount McKinley,” the Interior Department said in a statement last week.

I’m a strict traditionalist in these matters. I suggested that the Gulf of Mexico be named “Here Be Monsters,” like it was originally.

US Balance of Trade In Goods By Country

The data is for the 11 months up to Nov 2024 and comes from the US census FT900 report. However, it should be noted that the data is for good only. The US actually has a slight trade surplus in services, but a very large trade deficit in goods.

Interesting map. For a country we’re supposedly sanctioning the bejeezuz out of, we’re running quite a trade deficit with Russia. And apparently, South America really likes Pepsi or shoulder fired missiles or something.

Big Brother Becomes Little Brother

Called Intelligence Community Directive 406, the order was signed on January 16 by then-President Biden’s Director of National Intelligence in the final days of the administration. It lays out new ways for spy agencies to capitalize on the information and expertise of these corporate superpowers, which could be anything from social media platforms to AI firms. It is not yet clear how the Trump administration plans to exercise these authorities.

In case the NSA is listening, I’d like to aver that I’m not currently doing anything wrong. But mostly because I’m kinda tired.

Have a great Tuesday, everyone.

Lazarus Bands

January 27, 2025 1 Comment

The Family Company is a loose agglomeration of artists pasted over a steady rhythm section of bass, drums, and keys. There’s a raft of similar outfits these days. We’ve had Scary Pockets on the blog before, in various wonderful iterations. Those nice kids from Connecticut have a similar outfit. How about Sugar Shack Sessions? We’ve had Leonid and Friends, and way back when, of course, the Leningrad Cowboys.

Not cover bands, exactly. Not tribute bands, no how. Not even remotely General Business bands. The most recent, quite successful ones like Scary Pockets remind me a little of the band War from back in the day. They were a rhythm section for Eric Burdon, and decided maybe they didn’t need the Eric Burdon portion of their paycheck removed after every performance. They had a ton of hits after they jettisoned the overfed, longhaired leaping gnome.

Anyway, these Lazarus bands resurrect old songs and give them new twists and with their fresh faces and new approaches. Fresh, but familiar is a winning combo in cover band music. These bands use YouTube to get people to come to their shows now, instead of the other way around. Recordings used to pay bigly, but streaming services have driven the royalties paid to artists into the floor. So they use social media to build a crowd, and then sell them tickets and merch in the real world to make their porridge payments. Whatever. As long as they keep making videos like this one, and picking out the right songs to resurrect, I’ll show up. Online, anyway.

Month: January 2025

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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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