Make a Wish

It's fire season.

The Santa Ana winds aren't blowing very hard, but it is very warm - around 90 today. I have a work colleague here from back east and I was explaining to her this morning that it's fire weather and it would be hot. She was too busy staring out of the window. She pointed a shaky finger at a big black bird on the pathway light post about a foot from the window and said, "Is that a...vulture?"

I replied, "Yeah, it's a turkey vulture. Don't worry, they don't attack you unless you're dead. The other 20 in the flock are over there." I pointed out the rest of them, drying their wings on the lawn. You get used to the things. At work it's likel iving in a cartoonist's desert set with the rattlesnakes and opuntia and vultures.

Anyway, we sorted out what work she needed to do and I left her to it. About three o'clock a helicopter went over, too low to be commuting, and someone checked the CHP scanner. Sure enought, there's a fire on the 2 lane highway which is the only route past my work. It's at Milestone 12, we're at Milestone 10. That means the road would be closing at the first mile to anything coming our way and closing entirely at the other end.

I live at the Milestone 1 end, so there was still chance to get out in that direction. As I milled around bumping into myself in the sort of confusion you get into when you realize you haven't made any evacuation plans, three more fire calls came into the CHP *and* a reported vehicular accident, all on the same highway. I called up my colleague and said, "You remember I said it was fire season. (Hearty fake chuckle.) Well, there's a fire. The road will soon close and you might be trapped here all night?"

Sensible woman, she said she'd leave right away. I thought about it for five minutes and left myself. On the way back to Milestone 1 I passed 16 fire tenders coming the other way, and a couple of ambulances heading up towards, and hopefully two miles past, my workplace. It took me forty minutes instead of 20 to get home. But, IAM HOME, which is the main thing.

Of course I forgot to get her cell phone number, so I'll have to call every hotel in town, and let her know. "Say, er, if the company building still exists tomorrow, I'll see you there at 7 am.(Hearty fake chuckle.)"

Oh, the title of the post? The helicopter that we heard was dumping fire retardant ahead of the fire. As it came over our property and dipped lower, it blew all the fluffy seeds from the dandelions and similar plants up into a Ridleyscott of gossamer airfluff. My supervisor, who watched the helicopter fly over, said to me, "When you blow the seeds off a dandelion clock, you have to make a wish."

She has an unusual take on the mobilization of the emergency services, but not a bad one, I think.

A lien on my soul

My family's musical traditions were a murky stew. My mother's family mostly sang and listened to Music Hall songs - I can still sing rather more of My Old Man Said Follow the Van or recite more of Stanley Holloway's The Lion and Albert that you might imagine - and my dad was solidly Matt Monro and Frank Sinatra. Skiffle, which had revolutionized Britain, had passed them by, with the possible exception of "Chewing Gum" (I think that got grandfathered into Music Hall), and Elvis was regarded as joke, one of those youngsters you can't tell if he's a boy or a girl, can't sing without heaps of reverb and is sure to sink into the mire from which he accidentally arose, like some quiffed vacuum fluctuation.

In the bumbling way kids do, or at least did pre-Wikipedia, I found rock and roll, learned it had blues roots and decided to dig around. BB King and John Lee Hooker and the hundreds of other major influences on rock seemed to go unsaid in those days. Too obvious to mention, perhaps, for the grown-ups who were actually playing music. The one man everyone mentioned was Robert Johnson.

So, I picked up King of the Delta Blues Singers volumes 1 and 2 at an early age, without actually having heard any other original American blues that I can recall. They were recorded in 1936. The songs of Robert Johnson's I'd heard by British artists were recorded from 1967 on. A thirty year period, in which those playing his stuff had also listened to Elvis, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon and a host of other musicians forming a bridge. I hadn't, and Robert Johnson might as well have been a Martian for all the similarities a naive 13 year old could detect between say, his Malted Milk and Black Sabbath's Paranoid. Luckily I was an avid Science Fiction reader, so the problems of First Contact didn't throw me. It took a while to apply this discipline, and it took even longer to grow up enough to know what Robert Johnson was singing about, and why he sounded so hunted, even haunted, on every track. It took about ten years, then, to figure out why he was the one every rock musician mentioned first.

Led Zeppelin famously borrowed his lyric "squeeze my lemon" in The Lemon Song and a little less famously, because it was performed for a BBC session and not released until many years later, they covered his Traveling Riverside Blues. They doubled the "l", as British people do, and added in words from other Robert Johnson songs and even other blues songs, as Robert Plant is wont to do, and fundamentally changed the guitar part from compelling to absolutely sublime, as guitar gods do. I recorded it from a BBC broadcast and had it on cassette tape for many years before it was released, and it is still my favorite Led Zeppelin song. There's something about the structure, the way it fits together and seems sort of inevitable, like a beautifully designed roller coaster, the highs and lows scripted and set in motion to play out perfectly, the musical equivalent of one of the executive desk toys in spinning chrome.

Here it is. Led Zeppelin's Travelling Riverside Blues.





Now, Myles Kennedy of Alter Bridge has been suggested as a singer for Jimmy Page's, John Paul Jones' and Jason Bonham's new band, the "To Be Decideds". Does he like Traveling Riverside Blues? Yes, he does!

Alter Bridge’s management offered a terse “no comment” to Classic Rock’s official enquiry regarding the rumours; the fact that the band included Robert Johnston’s ‘Travelling Riverside Blues’ (from whence Zep borrowed the immortal “Squeeze my lemon…” line) seems to imply the deal has already been done. And, so long as it was temporary, why the heck not?


He plays it straight, with just a little adjustment here and there to make it smooth.



(He's singing in Copenhagen; I hope the womens in Tennessee don't mind the lyric change.)

Here's the original, in Martian. Robert Johnson in a hotel room in 1937. Second Contact, in this case, as he'd been recorded once previously. Imagine that meeting of cultures! Stanley G. Weinbaum's creatures were not separated by the gulf that's being bridged here by this flimsy magnetic tape - or was it still wire in those days?



I put the others first to build the (alter) bridge in case you haven't heard Robert Johnson before. Please feel free to decide it's infinitely superior to the modern interpretations. I'm used to people saying that.

The Life Aquatic

Oceangal forwarded this video on the jellyfish of Palau.



These jellyfish live in saltwater in the center of the island, trapped away from the sea. In their new little homes (there's more than one lake) they seem to have thriven. The jellies are farmers, or perhaps farms, depending on your level of anthropomorphism. They keep algae inside their bodies and live off the by-products of the plants' photosynthesis. In return, they ferry the algae from sunny area to sunny area during the day, and at night take them down to the low-oxygen level of the lake where some of the weirder bacteria live. They pick up nutrients from them for their plants and then go back up to catch rays the next morning. The jellies also catch the occasional copepod and eat it.

Although jellyfish look as though they're going somewhere, they aren't really swimming like a frog or an otter; their bell contracts and relaxes in the same way a heart does, with as much conscious thought as a heart puts into its beat.

Apparently these can barely sting, so snorkelling around in a cloud of them is a nice experience.

Un-Planted

At the end of October, in Superhype Awry, I whinged about people's perception that anything Jimmy Page does without Robert Plant will be Led Zeppelin without Robert Plant in it, and therefore doomed. In fact, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones have been careful for 11 months not to say Led Zeppelin reunion or anything remotely similar. That hasn't stopped everyone, even lost Japanese WWII soldiers still hiding out in jungles on Pacific Islands, even Ambrose Bierce, even Lord Lucan and the crew of the Marie Celeste, from going online and telling each other that Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones going on tour without Robert Plant would be a misuse of the name Led Zeppelin.

Jimmy must have wanted to clear this up once and for all, because yesterday his spokesman told Rolling Stone, "Whatever this is, it is not Led Zeppelin. Not without the involvement of Robert Plant."

Thank you spokesbeing.

This clarification was instantly successful, as you can see by reading the comments below the article. This commenter, for example: "Touring without Robert Plant is fine, but I think it's really stupid for them to still go by Led Zeppelin, because they simply aren't."

I'm not making that up. The article is above, with the spokesguy's comment as I've reprinted it here, and the comment is below, posted after the dude had presumably read the article.

When I lived in London, I used to go to a pub in Canning Town that featured live bands on the weekends. About once a month, they would have The Blues Band. Singer Paul Jones and bassist Gary Fletcher were from Manfred Mann, Tom McGuinness and Hughie Flint were of McGuinness Flint, and they were supplemented with slide guitarist Dave Kelly, a mainstay of the blues scene (and Jo-Ann Kelly's brother). These were the rockingest gigs I've ever attended. I doubt the pub paid the band much, if anything. They had a good time, we had a great time, and although you'd imagine it would eventually get old, drinking beer and singing along to "What did I do to make you mad this time, baaaaaaaaaaaaybee?", it actually didn't. Sometimes I wish Jimmy and John Paul were just a little less rich and famous, so they could shrug off the fans' hyperactive expectations and just do this circuit, bringing rock 'n' roll fun to people who just like having fun.

Give me your funny paper

I have the American version of a pension scheme, an IRA. They're simple. All your life you put your own money into buying stocks and bonds, and when you retire you have a fortune, it says here. I'll avoid going into the similarities between everyone getting rich by putting money into stocks and everybody getting rich by putting money into one-armed bandits for the moment. (It's not like I had no choice; I mean, I could have put it into houses instead...)

Anyway, the IRA's robot sent me a warning email today. It said, "[I]t may be time to revisit your plan. The equity portion of your investments is currently at 30.91% and your current target asset mix suggests that 70.0% may be more appropriate." Which is good advice.

The really sad thing is, two months ago I did have 70% of my retirement money in equities. I didn't sell them. They just lost so much value that the few bonds I own overtook them. In other words, I'm screwed. My retirement account has lost a fortune in hardly any time at all. I daren't look to see what the actual damage is.

Should I believe the robot and buy more equities? After all, they're cheap. Or should I just find finance workers and, hanging them up by the feet, collect the coins that drop out of their pockets? Yes, that seems much more satisfying.

What a beautiful buzz

From Shine a Light, the Rolling Stones live with Jack White. Loving Cup is one of my favorite Stones tracks and this is a nice version which seems to gain added Stoniness from the non-Stones member. I don't know how White does this - older musicians seem to love having him around, and he seems to add something special to them. He's a musician's musician who's popular with the crowd as well, I guess.



In this case, a lot of the thrill is seeing how happy he is to play with the Stones. Getting a smile from Jagger, a signal to go into the coda from Keef, it makes his night and in turn he makes mine. Dig the accents - Mick sings the first line, Jack takes the second in perfect Jaggerese, which seems to set off some sort of accent-one-upmanship in Jagger. I suppose it doesn't take much with him, but it was odd to hear a little bit of Boston in amongst all that...that...that whatever-it-is accent he sings this in.

If they'd sung the whole of Exile, I'd have been an even happier camper.

Control (DVD)

I rented the DVD of Control this week. It's the life story of Ian Curtis of Joy Division, as filtered through the medium of his wife's book and the bleak kitchen-sink influenced film making of Anton Corbijn. (You may know him from such films as 'everything Depeche Mode ever did'.)

We all know the end - Ian Curtis hangs himself at 23 - but the director keeps it on track as a document from first to last. I grew up in Yorkshire, leaving in 1976. Curtis and the band grew up around Manchester (Lancashire) at exactly the same time. Perhaps the shock of self-recognition is in the story itself, not in the cinematography or direction. The album covers, fashions, dialect, haircuts, and soundtrack of Bowie, Iggy, Bowie, Lou, Bowie... all were familiar to me from the little diary I kept in those days, one or two secretive lines a day.

Ian Curtis didn't write a line or two a day, but kept notebooks bulging with poetry. I hadn't realized that the man who so personified teenage angst, poetry and depression was not actually a gloomy, clinically-depressed glowerer, but a perfectly regular kid who developed epilepsy in his late teens. Either the disease or the fistsfull of prescription drugs he took for it seem to have clouded his judgment, or at least that's the impression the film gives. His suicide was not the result of some awful T. S. Eliot bout of introspection but rather that he stole his best friend's girl, married her very young, encouraged her to have a baby too soon, and then - bloody rock stars - fell in love with a pretty European girl and couldn't figure out what to do about it. Drinking a bottle of whisky, listening to Iggy's The Idiot and watching a Werner Herzog movie on the TV one night surely didn't help.

The movie does not dwell too much on the Manchester scene, though we see a little of punk and post-punk around. We meet Tony Wilson, of Granada TV and Factory Records, of course. We see Joy Division's robust manager and their heavy, mohican'd roadie. (It seems that one constant in any rock band's success is the early acquisition of the loyalty of a heavy who will be your roadie. There's a philosophy in that somewhere.)

According to the film, at least, success didn't actually bring them any money - they seemed to be on a low weekly wage throughout. The bleak mid-seventies northern row-houses feature heavily, with their gas instant-water-heaters rusting on the wall near square ceramic sinks, the baby imprisoned in a little playpen on the miniature living room floor and the hand-washed arrays of babygros (onesies) dripping near the kitchen ceiling on the creel (a wooden rack for drying clothes, raised and lowered on a rope).

There's a few amusing bits. In particular, where it resembled the less carefree moments of Gregory's Girl (which I highly recommend), some of the tactics the band use to get noticed and some the manager uses to get someone else out in front of a budding riot. The music is awesome - recreated by the actors for the film, it manages to be Joy Division, although I think this will have more effect on people who already know the music, where a couple of riffs will do it. Joy Division's full impact comes over after a good long listen, and the three minutes or so each song gets in the film may be to short to catch a newbie's attention.

There didn't seem to be a take-home message. The person who watched it with me said, "It's an argument for a manager giving the band some of the money earlier. You can't hang yourself in a tumble-dryer."

And that's a fact.

Star Star

Star Magazine, the LA Groupies' organ, , which ran for five issues in the glam-soaked mid-seventies, has a web presence. An article from June 1973 lets the girls put themselves in their best light, which, frankly, is not that flattering.

These excerpts are from the interview with them here:

STAR: Do you ever get into real fights?

QUEENIE: Sure, like once, I wanted Mick Ronson, the guitarist in David Bowie's band. He was going with this ugly girl named Leslie and I can't stand her. So I was dancing and making my little eyes, and wiggling my legs and everything. It just made me so mad that she was with him. Anyway she made faces at me so I went up to her and splashed her gin gimlet right in her face! After that, Mick came over to me and left Leslie sitting by herself with her runny makeup and sopping wet hair.

STAR: How about Marc Bolan?

QUEENIE: Marc Bolan-definitely. The girls just go mad over Marc. I
guess because of the way he looks with his hair and he's skinny, and the way he dresses.

STAR: Really?

SABLE: I just hated Marc Bolan. He just thinks he's so in it because he has T-Rex. He's really a little brat.

QUEENIE: He is not-he's beautiful!

SABLE: He's a brat. He just stands in a corner and talks to all these black people. Anyway, one time I went over and I was going to pour a glass of wine on him. So Mary was supposed to push me to make it all look like an accident. Only it was too
fake, it didn't work on time because she just touched me on my back and the next thing I knew I just flipped my wrist and my drink poured all over him. It looked too fake!

It gives me a sense of where Jimmy Page was coming from when he said the groupie feuds in LA eventually got down to "razor blade sandwiches" (which is a good name for a group). With girls like this waiting for him in LA, I think I see why he allegedly preferred hanging with drag queens at night clubs.


(Getty Images)

Well, except for that time. And on many other occasions. In fact it apparently took him a while to start worrying...

Kawaii Octopus

Megaleledone setebos. Many octopuses evolved from a common ancestor that lived off Antarctica more than 30 million years ago, according to a "Census of Marine Life" that is seeking to map the oceans from microbes to whales.

Kawaii!

From Marine Census, Reuters.


***

Secrets

US spending on Health Care was over $2 trillion in 2006, and has been rising sharply for many years. According to Kaiser, "recent rapid cost growth, coupled with an overall economic slowdown and rising federal deficit, is placing great strains on the systems we use to finance health care, including private employer-sponsored health insurance coverage and public insurance programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. Since the year 2000, employer-sponsored health coverage premiums have increased by 87 percent." (My emphasis.)

There are various plans to reduce this spiralling cost; some are discussed at the website linked above. They include group health plans, government regulation and improvements in efficiency. The latter includes streamlining services and developing 'algorithms" which provide the fastest (most efficient) diagnosis and treatments. None of these plans take into account the major cause of rising health care costs, which is that health care companies are private, and have to make money for their shareholders every quarter, or they will go out of business.

I work in healthcare, for a private company. Before I go any further, let me say I always do what my company tells me to do, unless it's against the law, which it hasn't been so far. Mostly this doesn't bother my conscience at all. What's good for my company is good for me, since they pay me.

We had a trainining session on the protection of intellectual property. "Intellectual property" means "something the company knows that is worth money as long as no one else knows it". Examples are the formula for Coca-Cola and the ingredients of Big Mac Special Sauce. One major leakage of intellectual property is through vendors. Someone who sells us something may ask, "How exactly do you use our product? If you tell us how you use it, we can tailor it so it's better for you."

Stop, said the trainer. If they know how we use their product, the vendor could easily disclose this information to our rivals, either by accident or for money. This type of discussion should only take place under a non-disclosure agreement, an NDA. This is a standard practice in all industries, and frankly, isn't new to me or to anyone else. Okay, done, training session over.

But there was something in the way it was said. "If you tell the vendor the steps you took to optimize their product for use, you're disclosing information that cost the company money and time to produce. If a rival gains that knowledge without having to spend the time and cash, then we are reducing costs to our rivals."

Saying the magic words "reducing cost" tripped a switch in my mind. I did not hear that passage as an employee of a publicly traded company. I heard it as a patient, and as a patient that has had to spend a lot of money paying for the extremely high cost of healthcare in the USA. It came out quite flatly to me: "It is in our interest to increase the cost of healthcare."

Our company prides itself on patient care, and I'm sure if I mentioned this perception to management they'd say that the message was that rivals would be discouraged, only we would offer that particular service, no costs would increase and everybody would be happy.

Yeah, sure. But looking at it another way, under current laws regarding intellectual property, and under current standard practices regarding intellectual property, it is in a company's best interest to keep even the most minor, low-grade discoveries quiet in the hopes of increasing the costs to everyone else.

Healthcare really is too important to be left to private companies.

Elected!

Sorry, couldn't help myself. This meant absolutely Sweet Gollywaddles All to me when it came out in 1973 (though I bought the album for other reasons). Seems more apropos today.

I think Vince Furnier is actually Republican. Sorry Vince. Hahahahaha!

PS. Boycott lettuce.

Gollywaddles

I've mused before on the spectacle of intelligent people trying to prevent other people - some intelligent, some not - from swearing in public.

If you accept it's necessary - and you're the unlucky slob who has to enforce the rule - you have to go to extraordinary lengths to do so. When I last mentioned it, it was in the context of a filter to stop the public writing offensive tags on a library cataloguing program. The wider argument was about what is offensive, which turned out to be a surprising variety of things. In fact, it would be easier to give a list of non-offensive words that could be used to catalogue books than to try to keep up with some people's ability to find offence.

Comments like this were bandied about:

If there are issues with the word testicle, then perhaps scrotum and ball-sack might be considered? My son, who is 'In the Army Now', would definitely use those instead of testicle(s) although he probably wouldn't spell them correctly.

And then we got into whether "leet" (1337) variations of the same might profitably be banned. And whether, say, a book about testicular cancer could be tagged with the word "testicle", on the grounds that some, e.g. sufferers from testicular cancer, might find it useful in a way that trumped someone else's right to be offended.

And there was much more to it. (Original post on Making Light is here.)

Today, the Supreme Court has been faced with a similar task, to decide whether "fleeting expletives"[1] in broadcasts should be punished by the current penalty (hanging, drawing and quartering) or whether broadcasters should simply be forced to crawl on their hands and knees all across America and apologize to every child they harmed.

The Supremes took a completely different tack. Expletives, fleeting or lingering, apparently fall foul of a law prohibiting material that "depicts or describes sexual or excretory activities or organs". And that's it!

The New York Times reports:

“Why do you think the F-word has shocking value or emphasis or force?” Chief Justice Roberts asked Carter G. Phillips, a lawyer for Fox Television Stations, which had broadcast some of the offending language.

The chief justice answered his own question: “Because it is associated with sexual or excretory activity. That’s what gives it its force.”

Justice Antonin Scalia added that this was the reason people “don’t use ‘gollywaddles’ instead of the F-word.”

There's quite a lot more at the link - the discussion of a possible "but it was funny!" defense, and the offhand declaration that "dung" seems to be acceptable but "shit" isn't. Not that they said "shit". The solicitor general said, "We think that the S-word is patently offensive".

I'm still not sure how to reliably differentiate between a person who describes excretory activity because they have a mandate to educate, and someone who says, "Shit! Tee hee! I made a funny!" but I guess they know, because one is an expletive and one isn't.

I suppose I'll know it when I see it.


[1] "Fleeting Expletives" would be a good name for a band!

Tomorrow

Hey, I voted! I'm proud of myself.

On November 16th, 2007 I became an American citizen. Today, November 4th, 2008, I voted in a presidential election.

It's a shame that the intervening 11 1/2 months has kind of supplied the proof that America really was sucking the entire planet down a black hole (before 2008 people suspected it but couldn't really prove it). It was embarrassing. Hopefully, if we skirt the black hole for another few months, things will change around significantly.

Here's to tomorrow.

Cornucopia of sea monsters

Discovery Channel has been running a series of "the 27 best deep sea species". Unfortunately it was timed to end on Halloween so the last few are all rather creepy and bloodthirsty, but number four on back are rather fetching. Here's a good place to start, with a snail that has gold plated its foot. Well, it's fool's gold, and a gastropod's foot is also its stomach, but it's kind of a gold-plated foot. It is actually armored, with scales like something from a computer game, and appears to have developed the armor to avoid cone shells, which are famously armed with spears. Yes, undersea life is red in tooth and claw, or at least bluish in radula and gastropod.

Gold footed or scaly-foot snail.


My favorite is the more romantic Venus' Flower Basket, a sponge that is chosen by a pair of shrimp which willingly imprison themselves inside it and live out their lives together. It's a beautiful living basket and apparently a Japanese symbol of everlasting love.

Going for a song

The Devil is selling Robert Johnson's soul on eBay. Apparently he (the Prince of Darkness) is having a tough time making ends meet and is cashing out. Since souls are intangible, all you'll actually be able to wave around is the certificate of authenticity.



Satan doesn't seem to have much of a seller history, so buyer beware if you're going to pick this one up. Me, I'll wait for him to sell off Jimmy Page's, though I hope it'll be a good long time before that one goes on the market.

LINK. Currently waiting for a bid of $17.50, the auction ends on November 5th.

Happy This Time of The Year!

Happy Diwali, Halloween and Samhain!

Dumbo Octopus

Grimpoteuthis, the Dumbo Octopus. Isn't he cute?



They swim, like Dumbo, by flapping their ears. Or whatever those things are.

Or whatever it was Dumbo did. (I saw the movie when I was four. I realize it was seminal but I'm not that sure on the plot.)

Superhype awry

It seems that JPJ and Jimmy Page aren't allowed to play together with a new singer – the fans (and Harvey Goldsmith) have spoken. Newspaper reports following an interview by John Paul Jones in Exeter seem universally focused on how crap it would be for Led Zeppelin to tour without Robert Plant. The odd thing is, no-one's said that there'll be any tours as Led Zeppelin without Robert Plant.

The Guardian: Led Zep reunion: promoter says no

Led Zeppelin's former promoter has warned the band against a reunion tour, questioning whether there is any "compelling reason" to get back together.
"I certainly don't think they should do a big tour because I can't see the point of it," Harvey Goldsmith told a crowd at the MusExpo conference in London this week. "I think some of the band really want to go out and do it and other parts of the band need to understand why they're doing it, and if there's no compelling reason to do it, then they shouldn't do it."

Rolling Stone: John Paul Jones Hints At Led Zeppelin Tour Without Robert Plant
(A million comments on the subject:)

Entertainment News
Plant-less Zeppelin gig draws criticism

Jones said the remaining members plan to record a new album and go on tour as Led Zeppelin.

Celebrity Watch, Times Online

Frankly amazing times for BBC Radio Devon, which broke a gigantic world exclusive on Tuesday. Cornering Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones at a “guitar show in Exeter”, a cub reporter got him to reveal that Led Zeppelin will be re-forming - and seeking to replace the legendary Robert Plant with new lead singer!

As you know from this blog, John Paul Jones used the words "Jimmy, Jason and I" at the Guitar Show, not "Led Zeppelin".

And at the Radio Devon interview, he did not say anything about "Led Zeppelin". I heard the Radio Devon announcer say it. That's not the same thing.

The Late Show BBC Radio Devon Tue 28th October. (From Steve Sauer)

Here's my transcript:

Radio Devon: You are working with Jimmy Page, you are working with Jason Bonham. What is happening? We've heard Robert Plant doesn't want to do it. We've heard Myles Kennedy has been mentioned. What is happening?
JPJ: Well, er, we're trying out with a couple of singers and basically when we know what we're gonna do, we'll let you know. (Laugh.) Let everybody else know.
Radio Devon: You obviously wanna do it though?
JPJ: We do wanna do it. We're sounding great, what we're doing. We're very happy and we wanna, er, get on and get out there. Time's getting on.
Radio Devon: Is there a feeling that if you don't do it shortly you wouldn't wanna do it?
JPJ: Not that we wouldn't want to, but it's got to be right, you know? Not just trying to re-create, find another Robert. I mean you could pick somebody out of a tribute band. What's the point of that, you know? We don't want to be our own tribute band.
Radio Devon: And just a final point, will there be a record coming out? Is it just touring you'll do?
JPJ: Yeah, there would be a record, a tour, and ya know. But, we've got to have everybody on board, everybody on and that's what we're working for, that's a proper job.
Radio Devon: We're looking forward to it. So there you have it. Zeppelin will tour without Robert Plant in the not too distant future.

Could the compelling reason be they want to play loud music again? Not cash in as "Led Zeppelin"? I'm worried we might not get a chance to find out after this reception.

***

Twitterpated*

On October 16th, the Army's 304 Military Intelligence Battalion Open Source Intelligence Team put out a document, impressively marked "For Official Use Only" detailing the various insidious ways Terrsts could use technology to sow Terr in America.

Information Week, in its article, Terrorists Could Use Twitter For Mayhem, Army Report Muses says,

"It [the report] touches briefly on "Pro Terrorist Propaganda Cell Phone Interfaces," using cell phone GPS data to assist terrorist operations, mobile phone surveillance, possible use of voice changing technology by terrorists, "Potential For Terrorist Use of Twitter," and other mobile phone technology and software that bears further consideration."

It's true, too. They could. They could also, say, write something on a notepad, put it into an envelope and mail it, so I think we should look very carefully at this "US Mail" thingy, as I'm sure it could come back to bite us on the ass one day.

I was thinking of some more technological ways to teach Terrsts how to organize, but luckily Rick in comments has put a few together for us. "Rick" says,

"You forgot the following:Pens, pencils, paper, cardboard, paint, walkie-talkies, bullhornes, postage stamps, xerox machines, telegrams, telephones of all types, whiteboards and dry erase markers, sharpies, emails, web sites, billboards, shouting, speaking at normal volume, whispering, sign language, coded gestures, pig latin, Navy signal flag banners, silkscreened T-shirts, carvings on tree trunks with pocket knives, vanity license plates, sky-writing, signs on blimps, coded whistling, backwards recordings embedded in pop songs, bogus advertisements, hoaxes with secret underlying meanings, varying lengths of thin and wide necktie ends, messages in wadded up pieces of paper, graffiti in public places including restroom stalls, limericks, and utterly ridiculous Pentagon press releases."

All true. But, look, Rick - and Army's 304 Military Intelligence Battalion Open Source Intelligence Team - I can't believe you both spent several minutes on this horrible threat and neither of you came up with steganographically embedded code words in Britney Spears pictures on Flickr.

Any more of this slack thinking and the Terrsts will have won.


*Twitterpated defined for the confused.


***

John Paul Jones confirms rehearsals taking place

Today, October 26th, 2008, John Paul Jones answered questions from musicians and fans at Mansons Guitar Show in Exeter.

He was asked about the current rumors regarding a Led Zeppelin "reunion" tour. He confirmed that he, John Paul Jones, was rehearsing with Jimmy Page and Jason Bonham. Robert Plant does not want to do this for the moment. Robert did not want to "make loud music any more" so they had been working with "the other odd singer". JPJ said that they don't know who will be chosen, but "as soon as we know we will tell you." He really hopes that "something will happen soon", he added.

He said the band sounded "fantastic".

Here is the segment on YouTube, as posted by Nick337.

Undersea Boris Johnson found

Possibly the cutest sea monster ever, the avocado-sized piglet squid.



Found at Zooillogix by the indefatiguable Oceangal. Picture courtesy of Cabrillo Marine Aquarium.


The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, was overjoyed to learn of the existence of his watery cousin:

Pretty Jack White

I was checking my stats and someone came to the blog this morning on a search for 'pretty jack white' (no quotes). It seems like slim pickings out there for blogs using the words "pretty jack white" so I might as well get in at the head of the curve.



I bought the two Raconteurs CDs this week, Consolers of the Lonely and Broken Boy Soldiers, having been seduced a live boot provided by a friend. They got here yesterday and I will listen this evening.

I missed the White Stripes bandwagon, but that's all right. A bit of artistic maturity is a fine thing.

OK, pretty Jack White. I think we can all agree on this.



Hand to mouth shots always slay me.

Baroque and Berserk

Ol' Roy Harper - hats off to him - is on a bit of a publicity push at the moment. I've been listening to his stuff recently, and even - gasp! - buying some! Yes, in the 21st Century I've paid money for music! Via his web site so he actually gets some of it!

From one article, "Cult Fave Roy Harper Reintroduces Himself to the US", I learned that he is recovering from prostate cancer, but will consider touring again, plucky man.

And that there are reissues:

While Harper's musical style and lyrics may account for the lack of greater mainstream acceptance, his name and voice are probably familiar to rock fans. Led Zeppelin recorded the song 'Hats Off to (Roy) Harper' from 1970's 'Led Zeppelin III,' and Harper sang lead on 'Have a Cigar' from Pink Floyd's 1975album 'Wish You Were Here.' Now his distinct music is being reintroduced to Americans through the recent reissues of his earlier studio albums: 'Flat Baroque and Berserk' (1970), 'Stormcock' (1971) and 'What Ever Happened to Jugula?' (a collaborative album with Jimmy Page, 1985).

There's another, much longer, article at Popmatters, Hats Off: An Interview with Roy Harper

It says he's in his seventies and was born in 1941, so it must be being published in the future... or my math is crap. It's a full career retrospective and includes a little on my heroes, e.g.

Yet while Harper never achieved mega-rock star status, the people he hung out with did. Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, David Gilmour all were close long-time friends. In 1970, Led Zeppelin recorded the tribute “Hats Off to Roy Harper” and put it on the folk-leaning, III. Harper remembers how he heard about the song.

“I went up to see them in their office, and Jimmy handed me the record, and I was like ‘Oh, new record ...’ and twirled it around a bit and said, ‘Yeah, that’s great.’ And I gave it back,” he says. “[Jimmy] he handed it back to me, and said, ‘Well, look at it then.’ And I sort of realized I should be looking at something else. And then, of course, I saw it, and I said, ‘Oh, dear ...’”

Harper says he’s still in touch with friends from the old days, and had just attended Robert Plant’s 60th birthday. Still the gap between their success and his was large. Was that ever difficult?

“Well, you can imagine, being a multimillionaire and all of that ... the level on which I operate is nowhere near that,” he admits. “Automatically, they have completely different lives from me. Although I must say that particularly Robert does his absolutely level best to keep his feet on the ground and stay in touch, constantly. Robert actually does his best all the time. Not that the others don’t. But after so many years, after so much life experience, people do become separated, you know?”

I can imagine that. I've lost touch with a lot of friends from the seventies, and I don't even have the being-a-multi-millionaire excuse.

The long article is well worth a read.

If you feel an inkling to buy Roy Harper albums, do visit his own website, www.royharper.com . You can buy the them there and have the satisfaction of knowing he'll see the sales and not just a royalty check 18 months down the road.


***

Four Chords

All the following songs use the same chord progression. It is the famous C Am F G, or various keys and minor variants of same.

Happy listening.

D'yer Mak'er – Led Zeppelin



Apparently people have problems with that title – it's pronounced Jamaica and is the penultimate line of the old joke,
"I took my girlfriend to the West Indies last week."
"Oh? Jamaica?"
"No, but it was fun trying."

You might not get it. I doubt anyone this century has taken a girl to the West Indies and not made her, but I said it was an old joke.

Bleeding Love - Leona Lewis

For some reason they don't want this embedded – fine, don't sell records then. Usually I embed them myself but can't be bothered with this one. Nice record, though, in its way. And she was tied to a pole in the dark with Jimmy Page at the Olympics, so she's all right by me.

Grown ups are just silly children - Roy Harper

Can't find an embeddable one of this either, but Roy's all right by me, and he has quite likely been tied to a pole with Jimmy Page at least once, so I'll forgive him.


Stand by Me - Ben E King





Every Breath You Take - The Police



Why Must I Be a Teenager in Love – Dion and the Belmonts



Who Put The Bomp – Barry Mann




Hungry Heart – Bruce Springsteen

(A little different)




Last Christmas - Wham




There are thousands more – apparently over 100 hot hits with the same chords. It's not what you've got, it's what you do with it that counts.

Keep a'Coolin', Baby

There's a persistent belief that scientists used to believe that an ice-age was imminent, and now they believe that the Earth is warming. The subtext is that scientists can't make their minds up and clearly can be ignored as hysterical lunatics. I've mentioned before that this is not true; there was no general belief amongst scientists in the seventies that the Earth was cooling. In that piece I mentioned a round up of texts from the time published on the web as "Was an imminent Ice Age predicted in the '70's? No."

There's now a newer review of the literature out. What's their conclusion?

The team’s survey of major journal papers published between 1965 and 1979 found that only seven articles predicted that global average temperature would continue to cool. During the same period, 44 journal papers indicated that the average temperature would rise and 20 were neutral or made no climate predictions. The findings were “a surprise to us,” Peterson says. For decades the “skeptics had repeated their argument so often and so strongly that we misremembered the tenor of the times.”

Their report is published in in the September Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, and there is a write-up of the paper in Science News: Cooling climate ‘consensus’ of 1970s never was.