That’s Three Dog Night performing for The Spirit of America Spectacular on July 5th, 1981. I say that’s the real birth of Yacht Rock.
Of course “Yacht Rock” was a web series, a kind of unmoored cable TV show starting in 2005. No one knows who first used the term, but that made it popular. The original musical term for mostly saccharine, overproduced, mellow music was soft rock, or the California Sound, or maybe adult-oriented rock (AOR). Music critics mostly use yacht rock as a pejorative, but that’s falling by the wayside more and more. It might be because people like it more than they like critics, so critics find ways to like it publicly and hate it in private.
This concert was part of The Spirit of America Spectacular, a nationally televised and radio broadcasted patriotic extravaganza. America used to have more than mostly peaceful arsonists roaming the land. Some people used to like it here. George Bush the elder was VP back then, and even sent in a telegram to express his approval. It’s a good format for messages from George. You could never tell what that guy was saying just by listening to him.
Anyway, that’s the permanently docked Queen Mary in Long Beach in the background, and about eleventy-zillion yachts. The lineup was The Beach Boys, Rick Springfield, Three Dog Night, and Pablo Cruise.
Now according to the intertunnel, the key nodule of Yacht Rock is something like Michael McDonald, Kenny Loggins, Steely Dan, Christopher Cross, Toto, and Ambrosia. I’m at a loss to explain how anyone could think Christopher Cross and Steely Dan have anything in common. When you get caught between the moon and New York City vs. I crawl like a viper through the suburban streets. If you think Don’t Take Me Alive is comparable to the theme from Arthur, there’s no hope for you. But I do get the drift.
Let’s run it down my idea of Yacht Rock’s adumbration. In 1981, the Beach Boys had long since morphed into the Beach Men. They were wandering aimlessly in the soft rock wilderness, until they ran aground with Kokomo, a song that makes Jimmy Buffet look like the Sex Pistols. I say they’re exhibit A in Yacht Rock pantheon.
I’ve got no beef with Three Dog Night. They can all sing and play their instruments. Shambala was a damn fine song. But they eventually hooked up with Paul Williams to write songs for them. He also wrote songs for the Carpenters, Streisand, Helen Reddy, and egad, The Sandpipers. If your yacht was big enough to have an elevator in it, he was your man. They belong.
Next. Rick Springfield is rock music for girls, I guess. I could never tell him and Bryan Adams apart, so I’m not the guy to judge his total Sloop John B-ishness. We don’t need him, anyway, to prove our point. Because the last band on the docket, and the dock, was Pablo Cruise:
Case closed. July 5th, 1981. It’s the real birth of Yacht Rock. Fight me.
Tora! Tora! Tora! is a pain in the ass to type. I’m not one of those eleventy!1111!1!11!1 guys from the internet from ten years ago. I like to think I’m a competent male writer, so exclamation points are rarer than honest congressmen in my text. I have to go looking for the exclamation point, and hunting for it three times in a row makes me peevish. It also makes me peevish to be unable to tell you if, you know, the movie is any good. If I was getting paid, I could write either side of the equation for you. But I’m doing this for free, so all I can rely on is my opinion. I’m not sure I have one.
Let’s go to the trailer, shall we, while I try to make up my mind one more time:
Of course trailers like these were designed to get you to drag your carcass to the theater or drive-in the next time you had five bucks burning a hole in your pocket. You couldn’t tell if a movie from the 1970s was going to be good by relying on the trailer. You had to go see it to figure it out. The TV, VCR, and the internet took all the mystery out of movies. You could just flip the channel or pop in another tape or whatever, or fold your laundry while Freebie and the Bean plays unwatched in the background.
Well, I saw, you know, this movie in the theater when I was a little kid. It used to be on TV a lot. You could rent it ten ways from Sunday after a while. Hell, at this point, you can watch the whole thing, or download it, straight from the Internet Archive.
I watch this movie every once in a while. I have no idea why. I think it’s sorta like the reason people eat Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. It’s no good, but they like it anyway. I have a hunch that the movie isn’t any good, but I wouldn’t swear to it. I wouldn’t swear at it, either, so maybe it’s not that bad. The movie didn’t make any money back in the day, and the critics weren’t kind to it. But here we are, talking about it, and maybe watching it once a year. I’m really not sure why.
The internet will tell you that Richard Fleischer and Akira Kurosawa directed this movie. Akira was hired to do it, but he bugged out before it started. But the internet loves Kurosawa for more or less the same reason it likes Mac and Cheese, so he gets mentioned when the movie gets mentioned at all. At any rate, Fleischer, and some guys with unpronounceable names made of little pictures made the thing back in 1970. Richard Fleischer’s whole career was Mac and Cheese, now that I think of it. He directed plenty of profitable pictures, but you mostly watch them ironically, or not at all. Stuff like Fantastic Voyage or The Vikings. Why do I watch them, too? I don’t know, but I do.
When you get right down to it, Tora… you know, the movie is dry as dust. In a way, it’s duller than a documentary would be. The events plod along and you get the impression that someone had a clipboard with a long list of things that had to be included, and checked them off one by one. It has an enormous cast of That Guys on the American side, and a bunch of Some Japanese Guys playing the villains.
Except they aren’t, really. Its funny, but the Japanese characters are portrayed as either fairly noble or completely clueless. If it wasn’t for Tojo, you wouldn’t find anyone to dislike enough to call a villain. And the Americans are so clueless in their own right, finding heroes is harder than you’d think. But then again, the American soldier’s vibe in World War II was mostly just farmboys and guys from Brooklyn who shrug and spit on their hands and get on with it. Americans are not a traditionally warlike people, I don’t think. We don’t have a bushido class that I’ve seen, anyway, or a Prussian officer class. Even the uniforms are drab.
Maybe the most interesting part of the movie was all the model ships they constructed to film it. Those were great. I’m sure it’s evident without me even mentioning it, but I sniffed a lot of model airplane glue as a kid. It was a big thing back in the 60s and 70s, and we built plastic battleships in between P-51 Mustangs and funny cars. Check out these from the movie:
That’s from the Model Ships in the Cinema website. It’s one of those wonderful websites that used to be common on the intertunnel but is very rare these days. People used to post things on the internet simply for the love of it. The movie spent a lot of time, money, and effort into building an American and a Japanese fleet. And these things aren’t tiny things floating in a glorified bathtub. Some were forty feet long, and were powered by golf cart motors. They were big enough to climb on:
So, you can watch Tor… you know, the movie. I have, and will again. If you can determine if it’s any good at all, I wish you wouldn’t tell me. I’m not sure if I’d like it less if you told me it was terrific, or it stunk, but either way, I’d rather just enjoy it in peace. If enjoyment is the correct word. Beats me.
Let’s consult the dictionary first. It’s dry as dust, but we’ll go with it for now:
Harmony /här′mə-nē/
noun
An orderly or pleasing combination of elements in a whole.
“color harmony; the order and harmony of the universe.”
True dat. But it’s only a good start. Let’s keep going. It has a more cogent definition in music:
In music, harmony is the concept of combining different sounds in order to create new, distinct musical ideas. Theories of harmony seek to describe or explain the effects created by distinct pitches or tones coinciding with one another; harmonic objects such as chords, textures and tonalities are identified, defined, and categorized in the development of these theories. Harmony is broadly understood to involve both a “vertical” dimension and a “horizontal” dimension, and often overlaps with related musical concepts such as melody, timbre, and form.
Yikes. That’s like Health Class in high school, trying to explain getting jiggy wid it. Doesn’t do justice to the topic.,
Well, it’s Tuesday. Time to clean out the bookmarks again, and maybe read some of them.
My wife and I went to the Planet Fatness gym this morning. You have to be careful what you look at in there. The patrons and staff are a hot mess, but I don’t mind that so much. Unfortunately, there are teevee screens on every surface, and the people who appear on cable shows and commercials are terrifying looking now. On top of that, the place has signs on every surface that declaim that it’s a “No Judgement Zone,” which makes my eye twitch every time. I was going to inform them that they spelled judgment wrong, but I didn’t want to sound judgmental.
Welcome to Garbage In/Garbage Out (GIGO). Formally, in AI circles, this is known as AI model collapse. In an AI model collapse, AI systems, which are trained on their own outputs, gradually lose accuracy, diversity, and reliability. This occurs because errors compound across successive model generations, leading to distorted data distributions and “irreversible defects” in performance. The final result? A Nature 2024 paper stated, “The model becomes poisoned with its own projection of reality.”
All these analyses are written by rubes. Google results have been a ridiculous sewer of SEO-optimized drivel for at least 10 years, each inexpertly copied from other sources written by people who can’t write. AI just automated it. Nothing has changed, except all the words are spelled right by chatbots.
The numbers are eye-opening: hiring of new grads by the 15 largest tech companies has plummeted over 50% since 2019, according to a report released this month by the venture firm SignalFire, which found that before the pandemic, graduates comprised 15% of Big Tech hires, a figure that has dropped to just 7%.
This has nothing to do with the industry. The “human resources” industry has been entirely captured by indolent women who can’t make up their mind to hire anyone, and whose only amusement in life is saying no to men. Tinder for personnel is the new normal.
About a month ago, Duolingo decided that it would gradually fire all contractors and instead, use AI in a bid to become an AI-first company. Beyond firing contractors, Duolingo planned to make AI a requirement for every aspect of its business. Now Luis von Ahn is trying to do damage control, and failing.
Duolingo is a lousy, childish, ineffective way to attempt to learn a foreign language. How they generate the slop is irrelevant. Try Pimsleur. You know; like an adult would.
Denmark will raise its retirement age to 70 by 2040, the highest in Europe, after a controversial vote in parliament. The increase in retirement age was approved in the country’s legislature, with 81 votes in favour and 21 against.
People who have never worked a day in their lives vote to make people work every day of their lives.
When Alexander Hamilton became the nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury, he immediately began to prepare a schedule of tariffs, along with excise taxes on such commodities as alcohol and tobacco. The Constitution forbids taxing the exports of any state, and so American tariffs have always been laid only on imports. Collectors were named for each port, and these were considered plum jobs because the collector got to keep the money, earning interest on it, until it was forwarded to the federal government a few times a year. Hamilton’s tariffs, along with the refunding of the national debt and the establishment of a central bank, transformed the American financial situation. By the end of the 1790s, the U.S. had the best credit rating in Europe, its bonds selling over par. By 1800, federal revenues, a mere $3.7 million in 1792, had nearly tripled to $10.8 million. About 90 percent of that revenue came from tariffs—a ratio that wouldn’t change much, except during the Civil War, for more than a century.
In a way, there were only two really important figures in America’s founding: Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. They had diametrically opposed worldviews. More or less, Hamilton’s ideas won out. But the most important figure in world history to date, not just American history, sat at the head of the table and told both of them to STFU from time to time, and they did. Old Muttonhead sure was something.
A Google search that surfaced Three Rings CIC’s “Google Business Profile” now featured… my personal mobile number. And a convenient “Call” button that connects you directly to it. Some years ago, I provided my phone number to Google as part of an identity verification process, but didn’t consent to it being shared publicly. And, indeed, they didn’t share it publicly, until – seemingly at random – they started doing so, presumably within the last few weeks.
Way, way more information at the link. Remember all those movies where the CIA is filled with hypercompetent computer soopergeniuses and ninja-like assassins? Yeah, they’re movies.
Wilson frames Goethe’s life through the prism of his greatest work, his “life-masterpiece”: the dramatic poem Faust. It is the story of a sixteenth-century mage and his blood pact with demonic powers, which enables a life lived in the constant pursuit of knowledge, power, and explosive fun. Goethe began it in his twenties when he was still a law student; he finished it shortly before his death at the age of eighty-two. It is a unique phenomenon in world literature––the truest species of magnum opus, made by the author from the living stuff of his life just as he sought to make his life into a work of art.
Goethe can be heavy sledding for today’s iPhone intellects. You could always watch The Devil and Daniel Webster to get the drift. Or maybe if that’s too challenging, you could just watch The Sorcerer’s Apprentice from Fantasia again. Or if that’s too much work, you could get a coloring book or something. Make sure you stay between the lines.
According to poet John Taylor’s 1635 verse biography of The Old, Old, Very Old Man, Parr was raised in the Shropshire village of Winnington. Born in 1483, the son of a tenant farmer, he worked as a servant until he inherited his father’s role in his mid-thirties. Something of a late developer in his personal life, he married for the first time at 80, and for the second at 122; he also did public penance at 105, when he “frailly, foully, fell into a Crime / Which richer, poorer, older men, and younger” were prone: he committed adultery.
He died when he was 152? I’m reminded of a gibe: He was so old he had God’s phone number.
The proliferation of AI-assisted schoolwork is worrying academic leaders. 66% think generative AI will cut into students’ attention spans, according to a survey of university presidents, chancellors, deans and more from the American Association of Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) and Elon University’s Imagining the Digital Future Center.
I went to school a long time ago. It was plenty chaotic long before spellcheck arrived, never mind Chad. Chicken Littles just like characterizing any change as “chaos.”
When I was little my father took me to the graves on Memorial Day.
He was a younger man than I am now. He’d drag any of us he could catch all over the Boston landscape to one boneyard after another. Memorial Day wasn’t just for the military dead for him. It was some sort of druidical day. Touch the stone. Pull the weeds. Say the words. Explain to your son who that person was and what they meant to him. Then off to look for the next stone marker by the next oak in the next town. I never understood it. To me it seemed like the stone was all there was to them.
He was a veteran. Everyone was, once. Army Air Force in World War II. He hung below a B24 in a little glass ball and watched the Pacific and the Zeros pass by. He never spoke of it, really, until he was dying in front of me.
I don’t know if he knew he was dying. I don’t know if you look that visitor in the face, ever. Humans don’t seem capable of dealing with the idea. If you’re 114, I imagine you figure you’ll die tomorrow. But not today. Never today. You know you’re dying when you’re 10, too. You file that knowledge away with the things that live in the back of the closet and out by the woodpile on a moonless night.
Towards the end, I took him to the doctors a lot. His body wasn’t sick. It was a villain, an enemy at that point. It didn’t let him down; it turned on him. But I’d take him to the doctor just the same — who seemed more in tune with the wraith of endless malady that shared my father’s body than my father himself. They took turns working on him like a heavy bag. I’m not sure which showed more mercy. Doctors have precious little mercy in them, in my experience. It’s not in their job description, anyway. I don’t understand why people look for it from them.
I had almost nothing to do with my father for about 15 years or so. He was lost to me, or I was lost to him, or something. I got the feeling towards the end there that I was of some small use to him, and I liked it. I took him and sat with him while we waited on chairs that would make you feeble if you weren’t already, then afterwards we ate a donut and drank coffee at the Dunkin’ Donuts while gaping like shut-ins at the traffic passing by. He lost all his teeth when he was a child, and had a soft spot, always, for a jelly donut.
It’s hard to describe what came out of his mouth while we lingered there on those afternoons. I’m not sure he was talking to me. He was unraveling a long string, and allowed me to sit with him as he did it. The string wasn’t coherent. It was all one skein, but it was bits and pieces of things, knotted together roughly, all out of order, but all of immense interest to me. I think the Rosetta Stone has mundane things written on it, doesn’t it? What’s mundane… depends.
All these people appeared among the clatter of the cash registers and the muffled sound of the traffic outside, suspended in fleeting words in the air in front of his eyes, eyes gone the color of dishwater from their blue beginnings. He produced laundry lists of my flesh and blood; himself when he was younger, described like any other stranger; far-flung relatives; friends gone but not forgotten. They assembled as he called them up in an imaginary mob behind him until there were too many to count. He was their priest, or maybe their Ouija board, their lawyer, their mourner, raiding their tombs like Carnarvon.
And nothing passed their lips but a terrible murmur that my father could not hear: Why the world would give them a stone when all they asked for was bread.
Month: May 2025
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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