in case I was under any delusions that graduate school was something other than a very long time ago

Jay uses the example in his sociology class of Radiohead letting fans choose how much to pay for their new album and discovers that no one in his class appears to have heard of them.

Completely unrelatedly, an unusually kind-spirited friend of mine recently had occasion where she was supposed to speak extemporaneously for a few minutes about her "least favorite celebrity." She ended up drawing a blank. I told her that if I had been me, I would have done Paul McCartney (see, e.g., here or here). We then decided that maybe this wasn't a good idea, given that the task was only to speak briefly and that there was some incentive not to come across as a raving lunatic during that time.

i think i may have blogged this before, but some things are so true that they bear repeating

ABBA's "Take a Chance on Me" is the saddest song in the history of the world. It came up on iTunes again, and I couldn't listen to it all the way through. Aboriginal dirges about the loss of their land and society and how they are not building McMansions on top of Uluru are not so sad. "They'll Need a Crane" by They Might Be Giants, while also sob-in-your-Snapple sad, requires a more refined sensibility to appreciate and even then still isn't as sad.

The first verse, in case you don't remember and for some reason want to be thrown into melancholia:

If you change your mind, I’m the first in line
Honey I’m still free
Take a chance on me
If you need me, let me know, gonna be around
If you’ve got no place to go, if you’re feeling down
If you’re all alone when the pretty birds have flown
Honey I’m still free
Take a chance on me
Gonna do my very best and it ain’t no lie
If you put me to the test, if you let me try

It's made much sadder by it being very cheerfully. Is this song part of Mamma Mia!? Is Mamma Mia! being done as a high school musical? I've always said I'm lucky I'm not one of those people who has to wear a cyanide pill in a locket around his neck, as there are faculty meetings I would not have survived. I think a gawky high school girl singing this song with sincere enthusiasm could likewise send me over.

(ongoing series) how the english language would be different if it had been designed by quantitative social scientists

19. There would be more exact synonyms for "suggest," that most magical word of assertion without authorial commitment or responsibility.

There are too many suggests in this thing I'm revising, so I just changed one to "indicate." But, compared to "Our results suggest that X", saying "Our results indicate that X" is so strong. I guess I could use "raise the possibility that X", although going to that well too many times is way more conspicuous than when one does it for "suggest."

Complete non-sequitur addendum: I don't feel like this is worth a post unto itself, and yet feel compared to share it with you if you haven't seen it: a mash-up combining "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and "Bootylicious." The video isn't that compelling, but the mash-up of the music, which apparently dates from 2001, is fabulous:

with lyrics like these, who would have ever thought the halcyon era of boy bands would come to a crashing end?

So, a friend was effervescing to me on the phone about this show "Mission: Man Band", where they take some guys from 90's boy bands who didn't go onto any solo glory and put them together to give them one more shot at glory. Kind of like when I was a kid and the cars that were the losers in the preliminary rounds of the demolition derby would have a special round and the winner would go on to the finals, as if a car that had already lost in one demolition derby and participated in a second was really going to be a good contender in the finals.

I wasn't hooked on my friend's excited recap until I realized one of the guys was the lead singer of the group who did the song "Summer Girls," which my friend didn't even remember. "You know, the Abercrombie and Fitch song." "What Abercrombie and Fitch commercial was it in?" "No, it's the song where they say 'Abercrombie and Fitch' so many times you think it has to be a commercial."



The lead singer is the recruit into Mission: Man Band. Apparently his life had gone down a negative spiral as it was after their one song in the sun, but then he also now has leukemia. It makes the video poignant, as it was only eight years ago and the guy looks like he presumes he's got bigger days in front of him, as opposed to this video being the apex of his career.

What's especially notable about "Summer Girls" is it has some of the best rhymes in the history of half-hearted-hip-hop. My three favorites:

3. Fell deep in love / but now we ain't speaking
Michael J Fox was Alex P Keaton

2. (as part of the chorus)
New Kids On The block / had a bunch of hits
Chinese food makes me sick.

1. (perhaps the best rhyme in the history of boy band music)
When you take a sip / you buzz like a hornet
Billy Shakespeare wrote a whole bunch of sonnets

social forces: the top 3 journal that isn't even in the top 10 in sociology impact rankings

See post here at orgtheory, with the full sociology top 10 listed in the comments. Also, see earlier post and follow-up of mine in which I dispute the usefulness of the idea of "Top 3 journals" in sociology anymore, especially if taken seriously for the purposes of rankings of quality-productivity of either individual faculty or whole departments.

Of course, many people who read this blog don't care about sociology journals, and for you I have a beatboxing flutist doing the Beverly Hills Inspector Gadget theme song, which is at least worth watching for upwards of a minute if you've never seen it (HT to a certain diva whose secret blog I rip off again and again):



I have decided that at next month's ASA meetings, I will help restore some of the luster to Social Forces by staging a performance in which I do a beatboxing reading of one of its articles. Details to follow.

which isn't to say that jer-tang clan is anything to trifle with, either, especially when i'm wearing my fetching australian cricket jersey

I called a friend earlier because she e-mailed to say she was having some problems and could use a distraction. I distracted her by pulling up Wikipedia and reading the "Legal Troubles" section of the Wikipedia entry for ODB from the Wu-Tang Clan. I tell you, there are enough troubles listed there to take anybody's mind off their own.

"In 1997, when he would have been 29 years old, he was arrested for failure to pay child support for x of y children. What's your guess for x and y?"
"Six and eight."
"Wrong, three and thirteen."
"No way he's paying support for ten out of thirteen children."
"It doesn't say he was paying support for the other ten; he just wasn't arrested over them. You know, I can't tell if the two times mentioned getting shot in 1998 during a home-invasion robbery are actually the same incident or two completely separate incidents."
"Probably the same incident."
"Yeah, what are the odds? Unless, well, you're this guy. Apparently once in the courtroom he called the female prosecutor 'a sperm donor.'"
"I'm not sure I get that."
"Me neither. Part of the thing that's interesting is that, while all this was going on, people sort of talked about him like he was kind of an eccentric college professor or something. Tee-hee, sometimes he's absent-minded and wears mismatched socks; sometimes he has a routine traffic stop escalate into a charge of attempted murder. He wasn't being talked about like one of the most completely dysfunctional and internally-poisoned persons ever to achieve fame for genuine artistic merit. And all because he came up with the idea of imitating the school teacher from the Charlie Brown animated specials while he rapped."

great beginnings are so much more common than great endings that the latter should be cherished at every opportunity

I had a conversation with a friend today about the video for Radiohead's "Just." (12 years ago! I wish time only flew when one was having fun.) Anyway, if you've never seen it, it's worth watching once:



Much more satisfying than the use Sofia Coppola made of the same device.

Unfortunately, I can't watch the video without it reminding me a little bit about my walk from University of Wisconsin Parking Lot 34 to the Social Science Building, circa February 2004.

in my inbox

From a friend:

Your sudden obsession with the Wu-Tang Clan is only the very tiniest bit 
disturbing, and yet still I hope it lasts only for today.

A longer story beginning with "Wu-Tang Clan Aint Nuthin to [expletive deleted] With" coming up on the shuffle of my iPod while jogging. It's not even a song I like, especially as it is so clearly a ripoff of Freaktoastt J's "Freaktoast J is Not a Toy (Don't Give Freaktoast J to Children Under Five)."

I'm at the office today wearing an Australian cricket jersey, which looks sort of like this. Everyone who has come into the office today--and we are having an informal thing, so people are actually here today--has said something like "I like your shirt." None of them actually like it, but people are too polite to say, "Wow, what a strange and brightly-colored wardrobe choice for someone over thirty-five."

the boy detective at work

I love the folks at Stata, but right there in the Stata manual:

As always, Stata is 100% compatible with the previous releases...

If only this was true. Instead, when Stata goes to a new version, my collaborator and I have to go through and figure out what parts of our programs have been broken by changes. I've spent the last two hours trying to figure out a bug that has been caused by a change to their -asmprobit- command (alternative-specific multinomial probit, which to my knowledge has never actually been used by a sociologist, and I actually think that's just as well). Whatever the problem is here, it is so ridiculously subtle it is putting my boy detective skills to the test.

I've got a lead, but I don't think I'm going to get this solved before I have to leave to meet people for this Boston Harbor Islands adventure today. Ugh. I'm already pushing it time-wise (if you are wondering why I'm writing a blog post then, it's that I'm waiting on Stata to execute something).

Apropos of nothing, last night I heard Kiss's song "Beth." I've always wondered: do you think the guy is really not going home to his beloved because his band needs to practice? Or, do you think that's just an excuse he's using because he's really out tomcatting around? He is a guy in a metal band, after all.

the three classic blunders, the first two i learned from the princess bride and the last i learned from angela

1. Never get involved in a land war in Asia!
2. Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line!
3. If your voice has always been overrated and it isn't aging well, never say 'Help me somebody' and toss the mic to Patti LaBelle!


(fast forward to 1:38 into it [2:36 remaining], and then watch the next sixty seconds. don't watch more than that or else suddenly there's el debarge.)

A little like asking someone for help with an itch on your back you can't reach and having them rip out your spine with a scythe. Still itch? Higher? To the left?

Of course, the real showdown of the divas would be me and Miss Patti doing "Love Shack." I am not a stage presence to be trifled with, at least when I've got me a Chrysler that's as big as a whale.

Speaking of which, apparently Jerry Marwell did "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" (one of my standbys) at karaoke in Madison a few nights ago, and dedicated it to "Jeremy, who's no longer with us." This resulted in some confusion among the karaoke faithful about whether I was dead. (I'm not, although I have recently somehow screwed up my back.)

readers, help: is it who or whom?

Elsewhere, the editor of Skeptic magazine—[who(m)?] you might expect to be a tough sell—called Born to Rebel ”the most rigorously scientific work of history ever written” (Shermer 1996, p. 63)

(Yes, this means I am up in my office writing late on a Saturday night. I've never had much pretense to a life. I guess I will admit to feeling a little pathetic--not, though, because of being up at the office working, but because I'm listening to INXS while I'm here.)

driving to evanston with sal

Sal hooked in his iPod FM transmitter. The tacit arrangement became that he would control what song was played, and I would control what volume it was played at. This worked well after the tension induced by his choosing to follow Metallica's "Unforgiven," for which the volume was sharply lowered, with Metallica's "Enter Sandman."

Later:

"This has got to be one of the Top 5 all-time songs."
"Yeah. Top 5. Ever."
"Are you mocking me?"
"I do think it is a great karaoke song."
"Top 5 all-time!"
"I also agree there is something special about the lyric 'Your hair reminds me of a warm safe place where as a child I'd hide.'"
"Can you imagine a world without this song?"
"It's like the microwave oven. Once it was invented, no one could understand how they'd ever lived without it."
"Nothing brings people of different races together like this song. Everybody, everybody comes together and sings along to this song."

Songs Sal chose that resulted in the sharpest volume increases: "Rehab" by Amy Winehouse, "Billie Jean" by Michael Jackson, and "Luka" by Suzanne Vega (for which I also rolled down the windows and opened the sunroof). Non-Metallica song that resulted in the sharpest reduction in volume, "I Want To Sex You Up" by Color Me Badd. There needs to be a way that you can turn down the volume far enough that sound starts to get sucked back into the speaker.

dear, you know you're still number one, but girls, they want to have fun

A dollar well spent is to go over to iTunes and buy Greg Laswell's cover of "Girls Just Want to Have Fun".* Laswell offers what I have been arguing for years via karaoke is the correct interpretation of the song: to be sung by a male, not a female, and to be sung sadly/ruefully/bitterly, not exuberantly. It's unclear from the recording, however, if he also steals my tactic of choosing an audience member at random to be the target of this rue.

Two other songs I downloaded from the same list: "Infinity" by Merrick, and an acoustic rendition of "Overkill" by Colin Hay. The latter is interesting for being recorded over twenty years after than the hit version by the same artist and being, perhaps inarguably, better. All these songs are of the mellow and easy-to-work-by variety.

* Via a list on the private blog of a certain friend; my ability to link to friend's blogs has been hindered in recent months by the rise of the private blog.

dan myers has 279 kiss songs on his iPod.

I was all ready to post something, but then I decided to check out some other blogs first. I promptly learned that Dan Myers has 279 Kiss songs on his iPod, more than twice as many as any artist other than the Beatles and Pink Floyd. My brain is now dominated by this fact. I can't even remember what I was going to post.

I know someone in sociology who once bought his girlfriend a scale for a present and now whenever I see him whatever else I think, "You bought your girlfriend a scale and presented it to her as a gift." Likewise, whenever I see Dan Myers, I will now think, "This man has 10,000 songs on his iPod, and still fully 2.79% of them are by Kiss." Not to draw any parallels between those two examples other than their being facts about people that, once learned by me, cannot be unlearned or even temporarily forgotten. 279 songs! By Kiss!

I had this roommate in college whose last name was spelled the same as mine but was not related and pronounced it so it rhymed with "crazy." His favorite bands were Kiss and the Beach Boys. I like two Beach Boys songs total, "Wouldn't It Be Nice" and "God Only Knows", and two Kiss songs total, "Detroit Rock City" and, um, "Detroit Rock City."* Once I put up a couple posters in our dorm with his name and phone number advertising for members for a band that would play Beach Boys covers while wearing Kiss makeup and dressing in superheroes Underoos. I remember it included the line "Must be able to gyrate, but do so only when the situation warrants and is tasteful." My recollection is that he was angry when he saw the poster, but then also sort of sad when it hadn't prompted any calls.

* "Detroit Rock City" is by Kiss, right?

tell you what: when we do get the band back together, we're changing the name to something that starts with a tilde

Am I the only person who ends up listening to a disproportionate number of 10,000 Maniacs songs because they are on the top of my iTunes list and occasionally for whatever reason it starts playing from there? Sure, I'll always love "What's the Matter Here?," but they're probably my best example of a band that seemed all "socially conscious" back when I was in my 20s and seem now more "'socially consciousness'" whenever I listen to the same songs more than a decade later. (As in, authentic vs. authenschtick.)

Just now, I was just listening to their song "Headstrong" and was reminded of its lyric, "If we were living in a house afire / I don't believe that you could rush out and escape / and not rescue me." I remember hearing it way back when and thinking, for neither the first nor last time, "Wow, some feminists have really low standards for what they expect from men." Really, he loves me! I can't tell you how wonderful it is to sleep next to a guy and think, "This one, he wouldn't just let me burn to death!"

another icarus plummets to earth

After, as an aside, I posted a link to the video for Liam Lynch's "United States of Whatever," I got a few e-mails wondering if I had seen the video for his song celebrating his nephew "Arlo." Indeed I had, and like everyone else I thought it was catchy, fun, and sweet. The guy was on a roll. So now he has got a brand new video posted on his sister's site, and it's, well, pretty much completely lame. Suck-tastically sucky, if you know what I mean.

I feel bad for the guy, I wonder why he couldn't keep the momentum going. Could it be poor nutrition? Check out this video.

Speaking of taking care of oneself, I went to the gym this evening after a hiatus that has lasted since my recent spate of traveling. Will I be able to keep up that momentum? Stay tuned.

in which a compact disc is purchased

(my copy of the Turbo disc and its packaging)

For our younger or more-blurry-memoried readers, compact discs are round metal discs, about five inches across, that were the standard medium on which music was sold back when music was sold on media (in "record stores"!). They are like the CD-ROMs still sometimes used to distribute software--indeed, the "CD" in CD-ROM stands for compact disc--only they contain music rather than software.

Anyway, while I am currently spending as much on music as I ever have, I have not bought a compact disc since I don't know when (come to think of it, I do know when). Until now, that is. Via PayPal, I purchased a copy of Turbo, recently released by the Chicago-based Millimeters Mercury. I much enjoyed an mmHg (get it?) show I saw last year in Madison, despite being permanently brain damaged by the dirty taps at the bar where they were playing.* This alone would have been cause enough to buy the "CD", not to mention that it's what all the cool people seem to be listening to nowadays (hipness-insecure readers take note). Additionally, however, I had to buy Turbo on CD because it's not available on iTunes due to the sometimes capricious and suppressive regime at Apple Music.

Given that mmHg had to distribute Turbo on "CD", they made it fun: the album comes packaged inside a real 5-1/4" floppy disk, floppy disks--first in this larger size, then in a smaller and less floppy size--being the primary means of distributing software before the CD-ROM. According to their website, you can specify the color floppy disk you want; I didn't realize this or I would have selected yellow.

Of course, the first thing I did upon receiving the "CD" in the mail--music, sent through the mail! such a reminder of the Great Columbia House Binge of 1995!--was import it into iTunes. I really don't know when the last time was I actually played music off a "CD" instead of as a computer file; I wouldn't even know how to go about doing so here in the RV (can you play CDs in an Xbox?).

From my first time through it, Turbo gets the official and coveted JFW two-thumbs-up, with an extra mutant-thumb-up for the innovative packaging. Two of my favorite songs are "The Sun is Falling" and "Broken Typewriter," which are both available for perusal in live versions on the mmHg website.

I have heard from another mmHg fan there is a hidden track somewhere on/in/near the CD, but I can't find it.

*I lost four IQ points and an entire day of my life from the ensuing headache--the result of drinking a mere two pints of the tainted beer--leading to my resolution that I will never ever drink beer on tap again except at the halcyon hypersanitary environs of The Karaoke Kid.

insomniaTunes, continued

I have bought 50 songs in the 37 days that I have had iTunes. I don't even know if I spent $50 on music in 2003, unless you count CDs I bought as gifts.* The vast majority of these songs were bought in the middle of the night and on a completely spontaneous impulse, which before iTunes would been just a short-term culture-craving that passed unfulfilled. My three most recent acquisitions: (1) "Survivor" by Destiny's Child (Survivor)**; (2) "You Can't Hurry Love" by The Supremes (Millenium Collection edition); (3) "Be My Plus One" by Freaktoastt J and The Mountain Goats (Paprika Twill).

* In which case, the tally would include, inter alia, Clay Aiken's Measure of a Man, which I bought for a certain friend's mother after the friend told me that her mother had put it on both her birthday and Xmas lists but her family had conspired not to give it to her.

** This was apparently one of those gazillion-selling played-everywhere hit songs that, being completely alienated from all mass culture, I had never, ever heard (or even heard of) before a couple of graduate students did it at karaoke.

she was successful beyond all her expectations and wondered what could possibly be the capstone of her great career. and then she met rick dees.

From CNN.com:

MEMPHIS, Tennessee (AP) -- Estelle Axton, co-founder of the famed Stax Records Co., which generated hits from acts including Sam and Dave, Otis Redding Jr. and The Staple Singers, has died. She was 85.

[...]

"Were it not for her, there's no way Stax could have become what it became," said David Porter. [...] Between 1960 and 1975, Stax's roster also included Booker T. and the MGs, Rufus Thomas, Albert King, Johnnie Taylor, The Mar-Keys and the Bar-Kays.

Axton and other family members went on to establish the Fretone label which produced Rick Dees' 1977 hit "Disco Duck."

Update, 9:20pm: iTunes does not have "Disco Duck" available for online purchase!

regarding some songs mentioned in recent posts

1. Regarding "Mandy", from a reader in Copacaba, NA: "This song has SO been on my mind! I was so jazzed to see you downloaded it! I bought the sheet music to this song sometime in the 70s and tried to learn to play it on the piano."

2. Regarding "Wouldn't It Be Nice" and "God Only Knows": From a reader in Surf City, USA: "It's so creepy that you just said this - I was just making the exact same point to some friends this weekend. Same two songs and everything. I tend not to use the word oeuvre, but you know." I probably wouldn't use the "creepy," especially since the merits of the songs have always seemed an objective matter to me (in other words, what's creepy is that other people should argue with us about it.) Another reader from Hawthorne, CA, was surprised by the omission of "Don't Worry Baby," which I did decide was good enough for the Beach Boys Bronze Medal and honored it with a download from iTunes.

3. Regarding #2 above, I should also note that I had a friend in college who had this grand scheme to start a band that would play only (and alternately) Beach Boys and Kiss covers, while dressed in adult-sized Underoos-costumes of various Marvel Comics superheroes. I was surprised when he did not get any credible responses to the posters he put up looking for bandmates. I remember the poster had this sentence attesting to his good singing voice and stage presence and then went on about how onstage he "would gyrate when the situation warranted and was tasteful" or something like that.