Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Counter-Existence

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[original] [updated]

[Images: Original (as far as I can determine) on the left; as often circulated/reposted on social-media sites, on the right. (Click either for a larger version.) While both carry meanings I appreciate, it’s interesting — if unsurprising — that the original seems to have made much less of an impression on people.]

From whiskey river:

Wake up in the morning and say to yourself, “I do not exist now, I have never existed previously, and I will never exist in the future.” When your mind is calm in the morning hours when you awaken, you say something like this, you will get a beautiful warm good feeling. You will feel wonderful, for it relieves you of the responsibility of taking care of yourself to an extent. You will still take care of yourself, but it’ll be completely different. You will brush your teeth, you will take a shower, you will go to work, you will eat breakfast. Yet when you feel that you do not exist, you are totally free from the reactions to the things that are going on. There is no one to react any longer. Therefore, everything that appears to be done by you, will be done in a wonderful way, all the time knowing that you are not the doer.

I know the teaching sounds absurd to most people. Yet this is the teaching that has been propagated by rishis, sages, since the beginning of time. This is it. This is your opportunity to awaken. Why not use it? Do not let another moment go by where you’re sitting there and believing and thinking something is wrong somewhere.

(Robert Adams [quoted at various sites around the Web — no specific source as far as I can tell])

…and:

To the Hand

What the eye sees is a dream of sight
what it wakes to
is a dream of sight

and in the dream
for every real lock
there is only one real key
and it’s in some other dream
now invisible

it’s the key to the one real door
it opens the river and the sky both at once
it’s already in the downward river
with my hand on it
my real hand

and I am saying to the hand
turn

open the river

(W. S. Merwin [source])

…and:

Staying very still in the darkness, I became less and less convinced of the fact that I actually existed.

(Haruki Murakami [source])

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Midweek Thought Break: Venetian Blinds, and How You Know How to Close Them

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Venetian blinds w/wand controlWe’ve got Venetian blinds on most of the windows in our house. Depending on a given window’s age, you open and close its blinds using either a traditional drawstring-and-pulley arrangement, or one of those long rods (the preferred term, apparently, is wands) which hang down the (usually) left side. Twist the wand in one direction, the blinds open; in the other direction, they close.

I have noticed that The Missus and I have different preferences, conscious or otherwise, about closed blinds — preferences in the way they slant: down into the house, or down to the outside. Actually, my preferences differ from room to room, even window to window. The Missus, for her part, seems to always choose the “slanting down and in” option. If you survey the house’s windows by walking from room to room, you’ll see some closed blinds tilting up, and some tilting down. This means that in order to open them, the direction in which to twist the wand depends on who closed them. (You are following this, right?)

I’d noticed that preference a long time ago. As it happens, I’ve got conscious reasons for my preference — can’t speak for The Missus — but the preference isn’t a strong one. (Mostly, I don’t know if my reasons actually make sense or are just the product of an easily distracted imagination.)

Until the last week or so, though, I’d never wondered about the wands. But there I was in front of a window, my left hand on the wand, and I was turning it to open (or close) the blinds, and I suddenly, well, noticed I was doing it. And I said to myself: Huh. How’d I know to do that?

I’d never wondered about The Opening (or Closing) Twist: how do we know which way to turn the wand? Is this a special form of whatzit, muscle memory? (I don’t think so, because there’s a little cognitive switch which has to flip before the muscles take over.) It’s gotta be a learned behavior — can’t imagine our ancestors ever needing the particular skill, right? — and the consequences of getting it wrong aren’t great in any case. (Get it backwards? Oh. Just twist in the other direction.) What interested me at the moment was that I’d surely closed these things thousands of times… and never had to stop and consider — like, “Hmm, which way should I twist this thing for the desired effect?”

Look at the image above. I bet if I asked you to close those blinds so they slant down and in, you’d know which way to twist the wand, wouldn’t you? How did you know to do that?

________________

Aside: We fairly recently got new “French doors” to the back deck. Their glass (like the glass on the regular windows) is double-paned. However, on the French doors, the panes are separated not by a tiny bit of insulating dead air, but by, oh, maybe a full centimeter or two. Sandwiched between these panes are built-in Venetian blinds, which open and close using a sliding switch at the top of the door: push it to the left to tilt the blinds in one direction, to the right otherwise. (You raise and lower the blinds with a sliding switch on the right side of the pane.) This sliding-switch thing still trips me up every now and then; I always have to stop to think which way to push it to open/close the blinds in the direction I want.

Artful Bullies

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'Imperial Art Appreciation: Blue,' by JD Hancock on Flickr

[Image: “Imperial Art Appreciation: Blue,” by JD Hancock on Flickr. (Used under a Creative Commons license.) For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

We are not transparent to ourselves. We have intuitions, suspicions, hunches, vague musings, and strangely mixed emotions — all of which resist simple definition. We have moods, but we don’t really know them. Then, from time to time, we encounter works of art that seem to latch on to something we have felt but never recognized clearly before. Alexander Pope identified a central function of poetry as taking thoughts we experience half-formed and giving them clear expression: “what was often thought, but ne’er so well expressed.” In other words, a fugitive and elusive part of our own thinking, our own experience, is taken up, edited, and returned to us better than it was before, so that we feel, at last, that we know ourselves more clearly.

(Alain de Botton and John Armstrong [source])

…and:

I’m Working on the World

I’m working on the world,
revised, improved edition,
featuring fun for fools,
blues for brooders,
combs for bald pates,
tricks for old dogs.

Here’s one chapter: The Speech
of Animals and Plants.
Each species comes, of course,
with its own dictionary.
Even a simple “Hi there,”
when traded with a fish,
make both the fish and you
feel quite extraordinary.

The long-suspected meanings
of rustlings, chirps, and growls!
Soliloquies of forests!
The epic hoot of owls!
Those crafty hedgehogs drafting
aphorisms after dark,
while we blindly believe
they are sleeping in the park!

Time (Chapter Two) retains
its sacred right to meddle
in each earthly affair.
Still, time’s unbounded power
that makes a mountain crumble,
moves seas, rotates a star,
won’t be enough to tear
lovers apart: they are
too naked, too embraced,
too much like timid sparrows.

Old age is, in my book,
the price that felons pay,
so don’t whine that it’s steep:
you’ll stay young if you’re good.
Suffering (Chapter Three)
doesn’t insult the body.
Death? It comes in your sleep,
exactly as it should.

When it comes, you’ll be dreaming
that you don’t need to breathe;
that breathless silence is
the music of the dark
and it’s part of the rhythm
to vanish like a spark.
Only a death like that. A rose
could prick you harder, I suppose;
you’d feel more terror at the sound
of petals falling to the ground.

Only a world like that. To die
just that much. And to live just so.
And all the rest is Bach’s fugue, played
for the time being
on a saw.

(Wislawa Szymborska [source])

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Out of Nowhere

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'Coming out of nowhere,' by Michael Holler (rolleh) on Flickr

[Image: by Michael Holler on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons license.]

From whiskey river:

I Wonder

I wonder what would happen if
I treated everyone like I was in love
with them, whether I like them or not
and whether they respond or not and no matter
what they say or do to me and even if I see
things in them which are ugly twisted petty
cruel vain deceitful indifferent, just accept
all that and turn my attention to some small
weak tender hidden part and keep my eyes on
that until it shines like a beam of light
like a bonfire I can warm my hands by and trust
it to burn away all the waste which is not
never was my business to meddle with.

(Derek Tasker [source: see note at the foot of this post])

…and:

If your yes sometimes feels heavy and silent and still in your chest that is only because it is still looking for a bell tower in the world. Wait. Be patient. You’ll one day again find a bright and worthy place to hang your heaviness, and when it starts to sway — and the clapper of your joy begins to swing in rhythm with it — your bell will at last be heard, even if initially by only one other. And it will be answered, it will be joined.

Have you ever heard a bell ringing in a little valley town? It’s a lovely sound, but there is something mournful about it as well. But two bells, or all the bells in the valley ringing together at once? That is something else entirely. That is the music the human heart was designed to make. That is the definition of a joyful noise.

Wait for that.

(Brad Zellar [source])

…and:

Darling,
You asked me to write you a letter, so I am writing you a letter. I do not know why I am writing you this letter, or what this letter is supposed to be about, but I am writing it nonetheless, because I love you very much and trust that you have some good purpose for having me write this letter. I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love.
Your father

(Jonathan Safran Foer [source])

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A Quirky Eclectic Christmas Mix (2013 ed.)

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[Video: Big Bad Voodoo Daddy (with She Her & I), “All I Want for Christmas…” See note at the bottom of this post for more information.]

As in every year beginning in 2008, I’ve added ten songs to the bottom of the previous years’ entries. As before, these artists and numbers appear, back-to-back, in the following playlist:

— 2008: —

  1. Peter Robbins et al.: dialogue from A Charlie Brown Christmas
  2. Anonymous 4: Hodie Christus Natus Est
  3. Waverly Consort: Three Spanish Villancicos – Dadme Albcrecias
  4. Perry Como: Home for the Holidays
  5. Mannheim Steamroller: Joy to the World
  6. George Winston: The Holly and the Ivy
  7. Celtic Woman: O Holy Night
  8. John Denver and the Muppets: The Twelve Days of Christmas
  9. Al Hirt: Nutty Jingle Bells
  10. The Roches: Deck the Halls
    — 2009: —
  11. Charlotte Church: Mary’s Boy Child
  12. Madeleine Peyroux/k.d. lang: River
  13. George Winston: Variations on the Kanon
  14. Arthur Fiedler & The Boston Pops: The Toy Trumpet
  15. Eartha Kitt: Santa Baby
  16. Mannheim Steamroller: Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer
  17. Celtic Woman: The Wexford Carol
  18. The Brian Setzer Orchestra: Jingle Bells
  19. Jimmy Boyd: I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus
  20. Cumberland Gap Reunion: Silent Night
    — 2010: —
  21. Sam Phillips: Cold Dark Night (lyrics)
  22. Elvis Presley: Blue Christmas
  23. Loreena McKennitt: God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen (may be my favorite addition to this year’s list…)
  24. The Chipmunks: The Chipmunk Song
  25. Frank Sinatra: Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas
  26. London Philharmonic Orchestra: It Came Upon a Midnight Clear
  27. Tony Elman: Winter Creek
  28. Sara Groves: Toy Packaging (lyrics) (…and this may be my favorite for grins)
  29. Harry Belafonte: Mary’s Boy Child
  30. Ray Conniff Singers: Ring Christmas Bells
    — 2011: —
  31. Ralph Marterie and His Band: Dig That Crazy Santa  Claus
  32. Nat King Cole: The Christmas Song
  33. The Indigo Girls: It Really Is (A Wonderful Life) (lyrics)
  34. Johnny Mercer and the Pied Pipers: Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town
  35. Dean Martin: Baby It’s Cold Outside (also see the wonderful American Songwriter writeup on the story of this song’s composition [thanks, Jules!])
  36. Ferrante and Teicher: Sleigh Ride
  37. Bo Dollis & Wild Magnolias: Shakana Santa Shake It
  38. Neil Diamond: Silver Bells
  39. Taverner Consort, Choir, & Players (Andrew Parrott, conductor): Branle de l’Officiel (Ding! Dong! Merrily on High)
  40. George Winston: Carol of the Bells
    — 2012: —
  41. Michael Tilson-Thomas & Philharmonia Orchestra: The Nutcracker (Overture)
  42. Vince Guaraldi Trio: O Tannenbaum
  43. Troy Hess: Christmas on the Moon (And don’t worry, it’s not just you: no one else seems to understand the lyrics (other than the refrain), either.* America’s Singing Souvenir Troy Hess was four years old when he recorded this in 1970. )
  44. Barbra Streisand: I Wonder as I Wander
  45. Frank Sinatra: Jingle Bells
  46. Al Hirt: Ave Maria
  47. Art Neville: Christmas Gumbo
  48. Ella Fitzgerald: Frosty the Snowman
  49. Dean Martin: I’ll Be Home for Christmas
  50. Choir of King’s College, Cambridge: Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht
    — 2013: —
  51. Knightsong: Christmas Is Coming
  52. Mannheim Steamroller: Pat-a-Pan
  53. Vienna Boys’ Choir: The Little Drummer Boy
  54. Tori Amos: Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas
  55. Cumberland Gap Reunion: The First Noel
  56. I Soloisti di Zagreb & Antonio Janigro: Toy Symphony: I: Allegro
  57. Liuba María Hevia (Spanish-language site): Venid Fieles Todos (Adeste Fidelis) (probably my favorite track in this year’s mix)
  58. Corporal Blossom: White Christmas (see below for more information about this track)
  59. Perry Como: O Holy Night
  60. Enya: Oíche Chiúin [Chorale]

(Note: The playlist goes automatically from start to finish, once you click the little Play button. To fast-forward to the next number, once a song is playing you’ll find a little fast-forward button to the right of its progress meter. And a fast-rewind to the left, for that matter.)

[audio:00_dialoguefromacharliebrownchristmas.mp3, 01_hodiechristusnatusest_anonymous4.mp3, 02_threespanishvillancicos_dadme_albricias_waverlyconsort.mp3, 03_homefortheholidays_perrycomo.mp3, 04_joytotheworld_mannheimsteamroller.mp3, 05_thehollyandtheivy_georgewinston.mp3, 06_oholynight_celticwoman.mp3, 07_12daysofchristmas_denvermuppets.mp3, 08_nuttyjinglebells_alhirt.mp3, 09_deckthehalls_theroches.mp3, 11_marysboychild_charlottechurch.mp3, 12_river_peyrouxlang.mp3, 13_variationsonthekanonbypachelbel_georgewinston.mp3, 14_thetoytrumpet_fiedler.mp3, 15_santababy_earthakitt.mp3,
16_rudolphtherednosedreindeer_mannheimsteamroller.mp3, 17_thewexfordcarol_celticwoman.mp3, 18_jinglebells_briansetzerorchestra.mp3, 19_isawmommykissingsantaclaus_jimmyboyd.mp3, 20_silentnight_cumberlandgapreunion.mp3, 21_colddarknight_samphillips.mp3, 22_bluechristmas_elvispresley.mp3, 23_godrestyemerrygentlemen_loreenamckennitt.mp3, 24_thechipmunksong_thechipmunks.mp3, 25_haveyourselfamerrylittlechristmas_franksinatra.mp3, 26_itcameuponamidnightclear_londonphilharmonicorchestra.mp3, 27_wintercreek_tonyelman.mp3, 28_toypackaging_saragroves.mp3, 29_marysboychild_harrybelafonte.mp3, 30_ringchristmasbells_rayconniffsingers.mp3, 31_digthatcrazysantaclaus_ralphmarterie.mp3, 32_thechristmassong_natkingcole.mp3, 33_itreallyis_indigogirls.mp3, 34_santaclausiscomintotown_johnnymercer.mp3, 35_babyitscoldoutside_deanmartin.mp3, 36_sleighride_ferranteandteicher.mp3, 37_shakanasantashakeit_bodolliswildmagnolias.mp3, 38_silverbells_neildiamond.mp3, 39_branledelofficiel_tavernerconsort.mp3, 40_carolofthebells_georgewinston.mp3, 41_nutcrackeroverture_tilsonthomas_philharmonia.mp3, 42_otannenbaum_vinceguaralditrio.mp3, 43_christmasonthemoon_troyhess.mp3, 44_iwonderasiwander_barbrastreisand.mp3, 45_jinglebells_franksinatra.mp3, 46_avemaria_alhirt.mp3, 47_christmasgumbo_artneville.mp3, 48_frostythesnowman_ellafitzgerald.mp3, 49_illbehomeforchristmas_deanmartin.mp3, 50_stillenachtheiligenacht_choirofkingscollege.mp3, 51_christmasiscoming_knightsong.mp3, 52_patapan_mannheimsteamroller.mp3, 53_thelittledrummerboy_viennaboyschoir.mp3, 54_haveyourselfamerrylittlechristmas_toriamos.mp3, 55_thefirstnoel_cumberlandgapreunion.mp3, 56_toysymphonyiallegro_isoloistidizagrebantoniojanigro.mp3, 57_venidfielestodos_liubamariahevia.mp3, 58_whitechristmas_corporalblossom.mp3, 59_oholynight_perrycomo.mp3, 60_oichechiuin_enya.mp3|titles=’A Quirky/Eclectic Christmas Music Playlist’|artists=Various Artists]

If you prefer, with the player gizmo below you can listen to just the current ten-song list, without having to fast-forward to it through earlier lists. And as in the last couple of years, I’ve also given RAMH regulars (and anyone else who can figure it out!) the chance to use their secret right-bracket decoder rings, to listen to the playlist later without even visiting here. Here we go with this year’s selections only:

[2013 only

[audio:51_christmasiscoming_knightsong.mp3, 52_patapan_mannheimsteamroller.mp3, 53_thelittledrummerboy_viennaboyschoir.mp3, 54_haveyourselfamerrylittlechristmas_toriamos.mp3, 55_thefirstnoel_cumberlandgapreunion.mp3, 56_toysymphonyiallegro_isoloistidizagrebantoniojanigro.mp3, 57_venidfielestodos_liubamariahevia.mp3, 58_whitechristmas_corporalblossom.mp3, 59_oholynight_perrycomo.mp3, 60_oichechiuin_enya.mp3|titles=’A Quirky/Eclectic Christmas Music Playlist’ (2013 ed.)|artists=Various Artists]

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Only You, and You Alone

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'only you can touch me this way,' by user kygp on Flickr

[Image: “only you can touch me this way,” by user kygp (Elisa Dudnikova) on Flickr. (Used under a Creative Commons license; thank you!) That thing which looks like an aerial? I believe it’s called a “snow lance,” used for making snow. (See the stuff spraying from the tip? Wikipedia has more information, including a photo of another one.)]

From whiskey river:

Stop worrying about your identity and concern yourself with the people you care about, ideas that matter to you, beliefs you can stand by, tickets you can run on. Intelligent humans make those choices with their brain and hearts and they make them alone. The world does not deliver meaning to you. You have to make it meaningful, and decide what you want and need and must do. It’s a tough, unimaginably lonely and complicated way to be in the world. But that’s the deal: you have to live; you can’t live by slogans, dead ideas, clichés, or national flags. Finding an identity is easy. It’s the easy way out.

(Zadie Smith [source (in slightly different words)])

…and:

It Took Time

This is a poem about
how you never get the kiss you want
when you want it,

how time twines around your neck, its thorns
digging into your skin so you can never forget
how clinging to a string of hope, threading it
between your spine, and having it unravel before you
in the span of an hour
is worse than any metaphor on nakedness
that you poets will ever write.

This is my reflection in the mirror. This stanza
is the small gap where my fingers try to touch against
the glass.

You can’t even possess yourself; let alone the person
you see standing before you.

The moon
hasn’t come back from the cleaners yet
and I have nothing to slip into tonight that makes my reflection feel
beautiful.

Time is falling through the holes in my pocket. January
is coming soon, and I have a feeling he’s never going to fall
out of love with December.

He’ll still write her love letters. He’ll send her
white orchids on every lonely holiday and pretend that love too
is a place you can cross state lines to get back to,

but it’s that time of the year again, and
calendar sales keep reminding us all that we can never get back
to where we once wanted so bad to lose ourselves in
for good.

(Shinji Moon [source])

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Midweek Science/Poetry Break: Diane Ackerman, “Night Letter to Loren Eiseley”

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Jaguar of Sweet Laughter, by Diane AckermanCorrect: no Midweek Music Break this week. I’ve been working on this year’s Quirky Eclectic Christmas Mix, which will show up here on Saturday, so am a little burnt out on music at the moment. :)

Instead…

I’ve been re-reading Carl Sagan’s Broca’s Brain, from 1979, which deals mostly with the edges which lie between science and, well, everything else. In one chapter, he discusses science fiction: what he likes and what he hates about it. And I came across this curious claim: “…in the verse of Diane Ackerman can be glimpsed the prospect of a mature astronomical poetry, fully conversant with standard science-fiction themes.”

Eh? I thought. Diane Ackerman writes science-fiction poetry?!? This turns out to be the case, all right — or at least, she has done so. I refer you to her collection called Jaguar of Sweet Laughter, for example, which includes (among much else) excerpt from a complete cycle, perhaps a collection of its own, called The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral.

In Jaguar of Sweet Laughter, I also came across the poem below. Not strictly speaking a “science-fiction poem,” nevertheless it does feature an imagined correspondence with one of the great workers at those edges between science and “everything else.”

Night Letter to Loren Eiseley

All night an illness barred me
from that loam-rich sleep
we mammals are born to,
we who lie flat for eight hours
in darkness, then rise, barely rested,
for half a sun, watch color TV
because ancestors had eyes cued
to ripening fruit, laze on platforms
in the sun, and still marvel
at hand-me-down miracles like birth.

Near dawn, I took your Immense Journey
from the shelf, and found myself soon
with lantern-jawed humans, trapped
in the Lost Horizon of our past,
with deft orb-weavers, oracular fish,
and marsh birds that stilt
from pond to pond. Then, nodding
in ricochet delight, I feasted
on the spellbinding fruit you grew—
that way of beholding
which is a form of prayer,
and, on the still white winter morning,
knew I would carry its seeds
to an unworldly place.

(Diane Ackerman [source])

The Clarity of Surprise

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'Sign in Woods,' by user 'dibytes' (Diane Hammond) on Flickr

[Image: “Sign in Woods,” by user dibytes (Diane Hammond) on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons License. For more information, see the photographer’s note on the photo’s Flickr page.]

From whiskey river:

The Reverse Side
The reverse side also has a reverse side — Japanese proverb

It’s why when we speak a truth
some of us instantly feel foolish
as if a deck inside us has been shuffled
and there it is—the opposite
of what we said.

And perhaps why as we fall in love
we’re already falling out of it.

It’s why the terrified and the simple
latch onto one story,
just one version of the great mystery.

Image & afterimage, oh even
the open-minded yearn for a fiction
to rein things in—
the snapshot, the lie of the frame.

How do we not go crazy,
we who have found ourselves compelled
to live with the circle, the ellipsis, the word
not yet written.

(Stephen Dunn [source])

…and (italicized portion):

…“astonishing” is an epithet concealing a logical trap. We’re astonished, after all, by things that deviate from some well-known and universally acknowledged norm, from an obviousness we’ve grown accustomed to. Now the point is, there is no such obvious world. Our astonishment exists per se and isn’t based on comparison with something else.

Granted, in daily speech, where we don’t stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like “the ordinary world,” “ordinary life,” “the ordinary course of events” … But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.

It looks like poets will always have their work cut out for them.

(Wislawa Szymborska [source])

…and:

There are moments when a kind of clarity comes over you, and suddenly you can see through walls to another dimension that you’d forgotten or chosen to ignore in order to continue living with the various illusions that make life, particularly life with other people, possible.

(Nicole Krauss [source])

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Midweek Music Break: She Her & I: “Everybody Loves My Baby”

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She Her & I

“Everybody Loves My Baby” has been bouncing around in pop music for a long time. First recorded in 1924 by Clarence Williams’s Blue Five (featuring a young cornetist named Louis Armstrong, who did not sing at all in this version), it seems to be rediscovered every ten years or so. The lyrics change according to the singer’s gender, but the preferred presentation features one woman singer — or a group of them — playing against a hopping, hot-jazz accompaniment.

About the comma-eschewing trio named She Her & I, unfortunately, I can tell you almost nothing. Their Web site includes no “About” page; a brief paragraph on the home pages says only:

Straight out of the zeitgeist, SHE HER & I is a vintage-meets-modern cocktail of tight harmonies, hot jazz, and big band and gypsy swing.

I think that “gypsy swing” phrase (whatever it means) probably helped me decide to feature them today. In their video performances I’ve seen, they come across as at once flirtatious and slightly scary (of course, I’m easily scared), and they can really sing as well as swing.

Facebook is a bit more informative, however:

Description
Inspired by the Boswell Sisters, Django Reinhardt, Duke Ellington, Etta James, The Andrews Sisters and the fervent joy of New Orleans vintage jazz…

Band Interests
jazz, swing, swagger

Artists We Also Like
Boswell Sisters, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, Django Reinhardt, Duke Ellington, Glenn Miller Orchestra, The Andrews Sisters, Oh dear… the list is long…

(A little poking around there finally uncovered their names: Francesca Vannucci, Corrie Shenigo and Alisa Burket. It also reveals that both their record label and their booking agent is someone — or something — named “Belle Aesthete.”)

I can tell you, unambiguously, that I first discovered She Her & I via another performer’s video of a completely different song. Which performer, which video, which song? Patience, Grasshopper. (All will be revealed in the fullness of time, which according to my watch will be in about ten days a week no, ten days after all.)

[Below, click Play button to begin Everybody Loves My Baby. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:54 long.

[audio:everybodylovesmybaby_sheherandi.mp3|titles=’Everybody Loves My Baby’|artists=She Her & I]

“Everybody Loves My Baby” has been covered by a good range of artists, with a good range of personal styles. (The Andrews Sisters — actually Boswell Sisters — approach seems to predominate.) Most recently, it made a pretty big splash when featured in the HBO series Boardwalk Empire. Wikipedia devotes an entire rather painful paragraph to a parsing of the lyrics, especially their grammatical ambiguities which apparently drive some people crazy. (Not least, one suspects, some people who edit Wikipedia articles.)

For contrast, here’s the first recording, by Clarence Williams’s Blue Five (including  Eva Taylor’s vocals and, again, Louis Armstrong on the cornet):

Finally, a side note: Doris Day may be the only singer to have performed both “Everybody Loves My Baby” (definitely not the “good girl” Doris Day of the stereotype) and “Everybody Loves a Lover.” I don’t believe the songs are otherwise connected (but always welcome surprises (well, some of them)).

Infinitely More Than Meets the Eye

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Infinity Mirror Room, by ®DS on Flickr

[Image: “Infinity Mirror Room,” by user ®DS on Flickr. If you’ve got a fast Internet connection, you’ll want to click on it to see the full-scale panorama — it’s 4.6MB in size. (Right-click and open it in a new window for best results.) For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river (answer to ):

The universe—some information to help you live in it.

  1. AREA: Infinite.
    The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy offers this definition of the word “Infinite.”
    Infinite: Bigger than the biggest thing ever and then some. Much bigger than that in fact, really amazingly immense, a totally stunning size, real “wow, that’s big,” time. Infinity is just so big that by comparison, bigness itself looks really titchy. Gigantic multiplied by colossal multiplied by staggeringly huge is the sort of concept we’re trying to get across here.
  2. IMPORTS: None.
    It is impossible to import things into an infinite area, there being no outside to import things in from.
  3. EXPORTS: None.
    See Imports.
  4. POPULATION: None.
    It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.
  5. MONETARY UNITS: None.
    In fact, there are three freely convertible currencies in the universe, but the Altairian Dollar has recently collapsed, the Flainian Pobble Bead is only exchangeable for other Flainian Pobble Beads, and the Triganic Pu has its own special problems. Its exchange rate of eight Ningis to one Pu is simple enough, but since a Ningi is a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side, no one has ever collected enough to own one Pu. Niginis are not negotiable currency, because the Galactibanks refuse to deal in fiddling small change. From this basic premise it is very simple to prove that the Galactibanks are also the products of a deranged imagination.

(Douglas Adams [source])

…and:

Snow

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes —
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one’s hands —
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

(Louis MacNeice [source])

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