TBTL Lives! Too beautiful to live? Not yet.

Luke and Jen

Blatherwatch has just reported on Too Beautiful To Live's beating the odds. This is possibly my favorite radio show of all time; a show without T & A, or people ranting about gasoline and taxes, and it miraculously survives. This show is all over the map, from tedious to sublime, and it's the best "talk" radio I've ever heard, except for Jean Shepherd's sublime run of shows for 20 years on WOR in New York City.

"TBTL: it lives!
Everyone wants to know: Is KIRO's show Too Beautiful to Live?

Seems the KIRO suits were high-fiving each other Monday: "We're the highest rated show on the station in the 18-34 demo," says Luke Burbank, the host of the new low-concept show (m-f, 7-10p). "

Read the full article here.


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Poem: The Variations (newly revised)

The Variations

1.
I don't know which is better
The thing itself
Or the chicanes lacunae variations
Selections shadings emendations
Redactions prevarications blurring
And sharpening that transmogrify
The tale with time

2.
I don't know which is better
To see the baby emerge
Or to see who the baby becomes

3.
I don't know which is better
To keep pondering the variations
Or to not

4.
My rogue and rococo thoughts
Skitter sideways
Like a side-shuffling crab

Using evasive tactics
In case anyone locks on
And attempts to impose

A framework
Of coherence and congruence
On these fitfully nuanced palabra

5.
If you actually understand
What I am writing
We have all missed the point

Sometimes I don't know
What it means
Until someone else tells me

6.
Sometimes I don't know
If it's better to pull your leg
Or my own

7.
I don't know which is better
The fog and detours
Or the thing itself.
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Happy Birthday to the universe

click the universe to enlarge

I never actually got around to posting this at the end of April, but on April 27th, in 4977 B.C., the universe was created, according to German mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler, considered a founder of modern science. Kepler is best known for his theories explaining the motion of planets.

Kepler was born on December 27, 1571, in Weil der Stadt, Germany. He studied Copernicus' theories of planetary ordering. Copernicus (1473-1543) believed that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the solar system, a theory that contradicted the prevailing view of the era that the sun revolved around the earth, and a theory that earned him the title "heretic."

In 1600, Kepler went to Prague to work for Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, the imperial mathematician to Rudolf II, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. Kepler's main project was to investigate the orbit of Mars. When Brahe died the following year, Kepler took over his job and over the next decade, Kepler learned about the work of Italian physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), and another heretic, who invented a telescope with which he discovered lunar mountains and craters, the largest four satellites of Jupiter and the phases of Venus.

Kepler corresponded with Galileo and obtained a telescope of his own. In 1609, Kepler published the first two of his three laws of planetary motion, which held that planets move around the sun in ellipses, not circles, and that planets speed up as they approach the sun and slow down as they move away. In 1619, his third law came out, which used mathematical principles to relate the time a planet takes to orbit the sun to the average distance of the planet from the sun.

Kepler's research was central to Sir Isaac Newton's (1643-1727) law of gravitational force.

In our century, we developed the Big Bang theory, which showed that his calculations were off by about 13.7 billion years.
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Those Minority Report Cooties Are Almost Real: BAE Systems Bugs To Be Deployed This Year

BAE Systems Photo

British defense giant BAE Systems has created a series of tiny electronic spiders, insects and snakes that could become the eyes and ears of soldiers and maybe even save thousands of lives.

BAE Systems and the U.S. hope to have their prototypes on the front line by the end of the year, entering booby-trapped buildings or enemy hideouts to transmit location data back to the "good guys" quartered out of harm's way, or even to Pocket PCs used by soldiers in the field.



BAE Systems recently signed a $41 million dollar contract to develop the robot insects for the US Army.

Researchers hope to also create machines that can fly like a butterfly. Some of the creatures will be fitted with small cameras, others will be equipped with sensors that will be able to detect the presence of chemical, biological or radioactive weapons.

"The idea is to get a number of these working together — some tiny, some maybe up to a foot in length, and all going into a building together carrying out different tasks. Eventually we hope to have animals flying and slithering," said a Program Manager, Steve Scalera.
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My Favorite Fictional Presidents

President Mackenzie Allen (Commander In Chief)


President David Palmer (24)



President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho (Idiocracy)



President James Marshall (Air Force One)


President Merkin Muffley (Dr. Strangelove)


President Thomas J. Whitmore (Independence Day)




President George W. Bush (because this can't be real. Can it?)



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My last stop in London: Abbey Road

The well-graffiti'd sign for Abbey Road

I'd always wanted to stop by Abbey Road. I even remember the day the album came out. By the time The Beatles The Beatles album came out (a/k/a "The White Album"), I would usually try to go to the record store and buy it the first day.


The studio building today

On Saturday, I had my chance to see the street The Beatles made famous, and the studio where they'd recorded most of their albums.

I'd already bought an all day pass on the underground, and getting to Abbey Road Studios was just a matter of going to the Saint John's Wood subway stop and walking a couple of blocks.

I thought there would be tour buses, and maybe even some ancillary souvenir stands! No. But I wasn't the only one to drop by that famous studion and crosswalk. It wasn't a mob scene, but there was a steady stream of mostly American, French, and German tourists.

Abbey Road then:



Abbey Road now:



To get to Abbey Road, you exit the Underground at St. John's Wood Station (the Jubilee line), walk down to Grove End Road, and follow it for a couple of blocks. You'll come to a monument on a pedestal, and the famous crosswalk. It looks a little different now...the zig-zag lines and the lights on posts you see are to warn drivers there may be some clueless people blundering around the crosswalk.


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Meet The White House Cabinet from Idiocracy

A clip from the movie Idiocracy: meet the secretaries of state, education, energy, defense, and the attorney general.


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Hyde Park and the Italian Gardens

Speaker's corner at Hyde Park--a traditonal gathering place
for speakers, and protests in general

I did go for a couple of walks in Hyde Park--it's across the street after all. I didn't hit Speaker's Corner, which I liked so much when I was here in 1982. It was filled with cranks and even some normal people bellowing invective from the corner.




The fountains and pools of the Italian Gardens

I stopped by the Italian Gardens, which are wonderful, extremely orderly, and old. A Belgian architect built them in the 1800s, and they have recently been restored to their full glory.
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A day in London

An English breakfast

My day in London started off with a 20 Pound breakfast (e.g., $40): coffee (tolerable, for once), orange juice, cold cereal, milk, toast. I made the mistake of saying yes when they asked if I'd like a glass of water...kaching! 2 pounds! At both hotels I stayed at in England, you couldn't just order an ala carte breakfast. You had to pay for the whole "buffet" even if you really just wanted a croissant and coffee. Sure, I could also have had the deep fried fish, the red Leicester cheese, the cold cuts, the bangers and mashers, the ham, bacon, and kidneys, the scrambled eggs, the ubiquitous whole stewed tomatoes, the baked beans, the danishes, blood pudding [think something like blood sausage], fried mushrooms, kippers, really scary looking spuds, and croissants. But I really just wanted joe, a little wheat (they call it brown bread) toast and some f***ing corn flakes! The day just got better and better after that.



I went into the Underground, jumped on the Central line subway, and headed east to St. Paul's Cathedral. I was knocked out last May in NYC to see the exponential leap in the subways from when I lived there. Well, the London subway system, The Underground, is even better than that. I took probably five train rides today, and I don't think I ever waited longer than three minutes. Is this cool, or what? About 12 minutes later, I climbed out of the subway station about a block from St. Paul's Cathedral. It was hard to miss, even for a functionally retarded orienteer like me.


view through the transept to the altar

There were a lot of tourists, of course, and there was about a 20 minute line just to get in and pay your 10 pound admission. Unless you were a worshipper. Wow. It is one of the largest domes in the world, and the naves and transepts are fantastically ornate and gorgeously baroque. The paintings and frescoes and mosaics picturing the various Apostles are lush and understated. The scale of the place is humbling.


The interior dome of St. Paul's seen from the transept. It some three hundred feet high, and massive


Outside St. Paul's

I spent a great deal of time in the crypt, after I explored the sanctuary, side chapels, organ room. I saw the Duke of Wellington, Lord Nelson, Christopher Wren, and William Blake's (God bless his soul) tombs and monuments.

Aside from some bishops, poets, artists, and cardinals, the statues and memorials are largely for British war heroes who seemed, many of them, to have died heroically in obscure wars and battles, mainly--so far as I could read--defending or working to acquire more colonial real estate back in the days of the British Empire. The inscriptions on the statues are hilariously bombastic, florid, and jingiostic. Marcel Proust or Faulkner would have been bollixed trying to unravel some of these fantastic paragraphs of hero-worshipping verbiage!

Next, I sat in on a morning service in the nave. There are no pews (it really would spoil the effect of that vast, gleaming marble floor), just solid, ordinary chairs. They did have kneeling pads attached to the back. It was the usual mumbo jumbo, someone in red robes fiddling with water and wine at the altar, getting everything ready for the big Kahuna to stride in in his starched white habliments to say mass and communion.

I dropped by the store, and picked up a book about Henry the 8th's wives, and another one on the Blitzkreig. After that I started climbing the stairs up to the Whispering gallery, about 300 steps up. Whew. I didn't go all the way to the outside dome at top (with it's excellent views of London). It wasn't so much that I didn't want to climb anymore, as my fear of exposure at great height. I didn't want to lean on that rail! I trudged back down after circling the entire dome (where a whisper can be heard a hundred feet away), and spent some more time staring up at the ceiling and the dome.

view down the nave of St. Paul's grand altar

I left St. Paul's after about two and a half hours and stopped for quick double espresso at a cart outside (my first decent coffee this whole trip). I walked the couple of blocks to the millenium bridge, or as the locals call it, the Wobbling Bridge [1] and cross the River Thames. It was filled with boats--both private and tourist. I was tempted to hop on one of the tour boats. Well, not that tempted.

Just a block from the Wobbling Bridge, I arrived at the Tate Modern museum. First I visited the Picabia-Man Ray-Marcel DuChamp show. It was good, but I've never been a huge fan of any of them except for DuChamp's magnificent and kaleidoscopic "Nude Descending A Staircase."

I spent a lot more time in the set of galleries they call "Poetry and Dreams" with its unique way of showing contemporary art growing from and reconnecting with art of the past.

A large room in the center of this cluster of galleries is devoted to Surrealism, and the nearby galleries show other artists who responded to or rebelled against Surrealism, and explored deeper into dreams and archetypes. Surrealist techniques such as free association and weird symbolism have been reinvented in new and sometimes bizarre contexts. I love this stuff! I saw a lot of great paintings today, and a lot of new paintings I was not familiar with before today.

A Miro canvas from the Dreams and Poetry galleries

A colored realist concrete sculpture by Peter Peri--it's larger than life

The Tate Modern is fairly close to Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, so I decided to go for a "twofer." Other than knowing Shakespeare once trod there, it wasn't really much different than, say, the Elizabethan theatre in Ashland, Oregon. I'd love to see a play there some day.

After the Globe, I walked back across The Wobbly Bridge toward the subway. I got off at the Tottenham stop near Oxford Street to go to a couple of record stores, and a touristy t-shirt store, where I bought a Union Jack, and a t-shirt for my son Del. It was getting late, and I went
back to my hotel, fagged, and knackered, as they say here.

[1] The day the Queen opened the bridge in 2000, thousands of Londoners walked on it the first time. Their synchronized footfalls caused the bridge to wobble frighteningly (think about the Tacoma Narrows Bridge a/k/a Galloping Gertie, and its collapse). CNN wrote about the Seven Million Dollar Fiasco:

LONDON, England -- London's Millennium Bridge has re-opened to the public after a £5 million ($7 million) repair programme to correct a wobble which forced its closure after just three days. The bridge - described as a "blade of light" by promoters - was inaugurated by the Queen in May 2000. The bridge was described as a "blade of light" More than 160,000 people crossed the bridge during its opening weekend during which the swaying effect was noticed. The extreme wobble meant the bridge had to be closed after fears for public safety. Those who had made it across said they had been surprised by the swaying sensation, comparing the vibration to the feeling of sea-sickness. They later fixed the problem by adding a series of shock absorbers to the bridge.


The Wobbling Bridge in an AP file photo after
is was re-opened and pronounced "safe"
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Elected! The plea of Obama, McCain, and Clinton (with Alice Cooper Video)

click to enlarge

The Beach Boys (and Back Street Boys) "When I Grow Up To Be A Man" (with lyrics)

This is without a doubt one of the great Beach Boys' songs. Only Brian Wilson could have written this song, although his cousin Mike Love later sued him and was granted credits and royalties. If you know the songs Brian wrote solo, you'd know a knucklehead like Mike Love could have never written this. [1] If he DID write the lyrics, they were clearly channeled straight from Brian's skull. I am in London, at two at night in my hotel room, and I naturally thought about the Boys. For a long period of time, they completely owned England, and often outsold concurrent Beatles releases. They influenced the Beatles, and pushed them forward to new frontiers (particularly with Summer Nights and Pet Sounds). These moving man-child lyrics that capture the soul of Brian Wilson.



Incredibly enough, the Backstreet Boys have covered this tune. I don't know much about them, being a little outside their target demo, but they have incredible voices, and this is an incredibly respectful and interesting cover...



When I grow Up To Be A Man

When I grow up to be a man
Will I dig the same things that turn me on as a kid?
Will I look back and say that I wish I hadn't done what I did?
Will I joke around and still dig those sounds
When I grow up to be a man?

Will I look for the same things in a woman that I dig in a girl?
(fourteen fifteen)
Will I settle down fast or will I first wanna travel the world?
(sixteen seventeen)
Now I'm young and free, but how will it be
When I grow up to be a man?

Oooooo Ooooooo Oooooooo
Will my kids be proud or think their old man is really a square?
(eighteen nineteen)
When they're out having fun yeah, will I still wanna have my share?
(twenty twenty-one)
Will I love my wife for the rest of my life
When I grow up to be a man?

What will I be when I grow up to be a man?
(twenty-two twenty-three)
Won't last forever
(twenty-four twenty-five)
It's kind of sad
(twenty-six twenty-seven)
Won't last forever
(twenty-eight twenty-nine)
It's kind of sad
(thirty thirty-one)
Won't last forever
(thirty-two...)
When I grow up to be a man
Will I dig the same things that turn me on as a kid?
Will I look back and say that I wish I hadn't done what I did?
Will I joke around and still dig those sounds
When I grow up to be a man?

Will I look for the same things in a woman that I dig in a girl?
(fourteen fifteen)
Will I settle down fast or will I first wanna travel the world?
(sixteen seventeen)
Now I'm young and free, but how will it be
When I grow up to be a man?

Oooooo Ooooooo Oooooooo
Will my kids be proud or think their old man is really a square?
(eighteen nineteen)
When they're out having fun yeah, will I still wanna have my share?
(twenty twenty-one)
Will I love my wife for the rest of my life
When I grow up to be a man?

What will I be when I grow up to be a man?
(twenty-two twenty-three)
Won't last forever
(twenty-four twenty-five)
It's kind of sad
(twenty-six twenty-seven)
Won't last forever
(twenty-eight twenty-nine)
It's kind of sad
(thirty thirty-one)
Won't last forever
(thirty-two...)

[1] According to the Wikipedia, (and my own earlier research) "In November 1969, the Wilson's father Murry Wilson, sold the copyrights to the band's songs to Irving Almo for approximately $700,000.[1] Many years later in April 1992, just after Brian Wilson had won a lawsuit which recovered many of the copyrights to his songs, Mike Love filed a lawsuit against Brian Wilson claiming that he had not been given credit, and therefore hadn't received royalties, on over thirty of the band's songs, many of them hit singles.[2] One of these songs was "When I Grow Up (To Be A Man)". The song was originally credited solely to Brian Wilson but Mike Love claimed that he had a hand in writing the lyrics. Mike Love won the lawsuit and the song-writing credit was amended, therefore ensuring future royalties on all of the songs that he had claimed he had a hand in writing.

Recording
The song was recorded over two sessions in 1964 at Western Recorders. The instrumental track was most likely recorded on August 5 with the vocals being overdubbed five days later on August 10. The instrumental track, arranged by Brian Wilson, features Carl Wilson on lead and rhythm guitars; Al Jardine on electric bass guitars; Brian Wilson on acoustic piano & harpsichord; Carrol Lewis on harmonica and Dennis Wilson on drums. The song features both Mike Love and Brian Wilson on the lead vocals with backing vocals by Brian, Carl & Dennis Wilson, Mike Love and Al Jardine.
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Back in London

Click the photo of Hyde Park to enlarge

I am back in London, after a road trip and 44 hour stay in the North Country. The trip took four hours this time. Above is the view from my room on the 15th floor of the Royal Lancaster Hotel, directly north of Hyde Park. I am about to stop by a pub and then go to a nice looking Indian restautrant I spotted about two blocks away, about which, more later.

Jack 8PM, London
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