I was around for the Mount St. Helens event, but it is odd to think we are further away from it than it is from Pearl Harbor. The 80’s seemed so far away from that global war. Today, it feels like we forgot the lessons of the war. Heck, I think we’ve forgotten the natural threat of Mount St. Helens.
We visited my Sister in Law and her idjt of a husband just after the event. It was amazing to see the area. My best friend was living in Pullman at the time and when we visited him the ash was everywhere.
I was 11 years old and lived about 100 miles to the northwest of St. Helens and remember it very well. It happened at about 8:30 AM and my mom and I were outside and we heard a large distant ‘BOOM’ and then shortly thereafter they came on the TV with live coverage. The ash was blown east that first day so we got nothing but places like Yakima, the Tri-Cities and Spokane were plunged into darkness.
Little remembered fact is there was another large, but not quite as large, eruption the following Sunday May 25 and for that one the ash was blown west and we got covered in it.
The defining event of that time if you lived in the northwest.
The visitors center there is a must visit if you are ever in the area.
I was 5 years old when it went off and the only thing I vagualy recall about it is finding a very thin layer of ash on my parents cars several days/weeks later… in upstate NY.
A Pliny eruption.
I got a permanent suspension from Twitter. I’m sure my liberal enemies ratted me out.
Jack Posobiec had a picture caption contest. The picture showed Putin looking at a screen with Biden on it. My caption was, “We will bury you.”
You all certainly know that I was referencing what Nikita Khrushchev said about the West during the height of the Cold War.
I appealed, but I have little hope. It’s not like Twitter is fair or run by fair-minded humans.
I visited the area about 20 years after the eruption. On the way up to the visitor center, there were signs indicating when the forest was replanted so you could see the growth patterns. One area was not replanted so that researchers could observe how nature regenerated itself.
Cornhead, you will survive without Twitter. A lot of people, like me, have never used it or have left. A good stiff Double Single Malt will ease the pain
Cornhead, take that suspension as a badge of honor.
The enviro wackos back then predicted the wildlife, forest, vegetation and fish would either never come back or it would take 100 years or so.
They over estimated this time period by about 98 years.
I visited the St.Helens area about 6 months after it exploded; suffice it to say it was a huge mess. I tried driving from the town of Castle Rock towards St. Helens; did not get to far- road closed..
If I recall correctly the towns of Castle Rock and Longview, Wa. had bulldozed into giant piles the ash they had cleaned up from the volcano.
The prevailing winds had driven a lot of ash towards Eastern Washington and even Spokane – at the other side of Washington – got a good dose of ash.
Many years later – 1994? – I went to the St.Helens visitor center; y’all should go, very interesting.
A few months ago the subject of the Sapir-Whorf anthropological/language hypothesis came up here i.e. the idea that your native language shapes your ability to perceive and think in certain particular ways, and not in others.
Although this hypothesis is nowadays regarded as outmoded and incorrect, I’ve always thought that Sapir-Whorf made a certain intuitive sense.
As I wrote here back then, you learn your mother tongue, and are raised in a particular culture, whose particular language is preoccupied with and conveys certain cultural norms, certain preferred ways of looking at the world and vocabulary describing it, which also supplies you with a very specific group of topics of primary concern, which are usually uppermost in your culture and mind, and this particular language and culture—as opposed to all other alternative languages and their cultures–shapes and constrains how and what you routinely identify, perceive, think of, and deal with; the constituents of your/the world, whether the world of a herdsman outside of Ulan Bator, of an Australian Bushman, a small traditional farmer in the Italian countryside, an Eskimo, a painter in Paris, or an executive in New York.
That language supplies you with a very specific toolkit or set of eyeglasses—some tool kits and sets of glasses much more specialized, expansive/effective than others–with which to encounter, identify, think of, and to deal with what you perceive as the world of things, people, and ideas around you.
It thus seems very reasonable to believe that that particular shaping, that particular vocabulary, those specific categories, and those specific constraints—that toolkit and that particular set of eye glasses–has a decisive effect on what you primarily perceive, (even on what you can perceive) and how you think about and deal with what you perceive; your habitual categories and patterns of thought, your view of the world, and how you focus on and apply the specific tools that your language supplies to deal with that world that you perceive.
Well, just today, I happened to be viewing one of “The Great Courses,” this one on the topic of “Color,” and in the first lecture, enumerating and describing three basic concepts, a well-known experiment was cited and discussed which–using African tribesmen, the Himba, as an example–demonstrated that, if your culture/language does not have a word for a particular color, you either have a very hard time perceiving/identifying/differentiating that color from others, or you can’t see it at all.
Thus, this experiment—not specifically aimed at testing Sapir-Whorf, and coming at the issue of how our perceptions work on their most basic level—would, nonetheless, seem to add strong evidence in favor of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
Neo: I’m not sure if you saw this but it captures what many of us have been through.
I haven’t used Twitter for almost a year now, I originally signed up in 2008, did little with the account until 2014 or so. Back in Jan. 2021 when I tried to login I was informed that I was thought to be a ‘bot and to prove I wasn’t I’d have to allow Google complete access to my computer system. That I will not do and so I can’t even quit it because to do that requires logging in and I can’t. I suppose by now they may have cancelled my account but I don’t care anymore one way or another.
Snow on Pine,
I’ve worked in almost 20 foreign countries, been to a few more for pleasure. I always try to learn at least a little of the local language and have studied a few in depth and I’ve thought a lot about this topic.
I agree with your observation. Latin and German, for example, have declensions, Italian and Spanish, for example, do not. One must construct a Latin or German sentence. It’s akin to building and we even see this in long, German, compound nouns. Speaking and writing are a process of construction. In Italian and Spanish things are more free form, colorful, dynamic, lively, emotional. Speaking Spanish and Italian is akin to singing. In German and Latin you control emphasis by word placement. In Spanish and Italian emphasis is verbal and physical (body language, hand movement), like a dance.
The Ancient Romans were known for their Engineering, as are modern Germans. Italians and Spaniards are known for their art production; painting, statuary, music… The Germans had a period of excelling at music, but it was Classical music. A symphony is many complex parts working together within very rigid forms, or at least it was 150, 200 years ago. We don’t hear much from Germany music-wise after the early 1900s, but Italy, Latin America… And, of course a lot of music from England and America, two more nations without declensions and comparatively liberal grammar rules.
Is “Moonlight in Vermont” a Christmas song? I only hear it this time of year, but it covers at least three seasons and makes no mention of the Holiday, yet it seems associated with the season somehow. Was it in a Christmas movie?
Unfortunately, even at Christmastime it is not played often enough. It’s a beautiful song.
I was once forced (AGAINST MY WILL) to detour off a perfectly safe interstate between Seattle and Portland and drive closer and closer to Mt. St. Helens. Every whirring turn of my wheels closer and closer to this mouth of hell drove me deeper and deeper into fear until I wanted to run away with my hair on fire. Take it from me… never ever have a relationship with an amateur vulcanologist. Better yet, get safely away from the chain of volcanoes on the California Oregon Washington borders. Perhaps a mountain cabin somewhere in Yellowstone.
I was on an airplane on the way to England when the mountain exploded. We watch TV of it. I’m waiting for Yellowstone to go next. I’ll be 84 next birthday so I wish it would hurry up.
Gothamite: I went to your link. Excellent. This was my favorite part:
“ So welcome to the right side, friend, and join us in laughing at all the idiotic name-calling that is applied, with increasing hysteria, to try and stop more and more normal Americans from joining our ranks. Fascists? Conspiracy theorists? Anti-science racist TERFs? Whatever. We have a better word to describe ourselves: free.”
“Perhaps a mountain cabin somewhere in Yellowstone.”
Haha. Definitely. Right on top of the supervolcano. You won’t feel a thing, whereas with these puny mini-volcanos there will be a few uncomfortable moments watching the lava wave coming at you but maybe the ash flow tuff, pyroclastic flow, meltwater tsunami, or base debris avalanche will get there first.
I was a kid when St. Helens blew. We could see the mountain from my parents’ place in Oregon and it was seeping out smoke and ash for months. When it finally blew the smoke and ash column was enormous! Everyone had tons of warning to get out but people decided to stay. It’s a miracle only 57 died. I was sweeping up ash off the porch for months. Also, people made the ash into glass decorations and Christmas ornaments.
I was climbing around on Mt. Rainier in August of 1979, not all the way to the top, an took great pictures including Mr. Saint Helens with snow on the top. Three years later I was back up on Rainer looking South at Saint Helens and what a difference. Lots of great stuff up in the Pacific North West and lots of problems with the politics and social devastation in the metro areas we traveled up there regularly for a number of years for summer vacations and then quit, never more ‘quoth the raven’, never more.
The fact is that St. Helen’s 1980 eruption is a relatively small one as such things go. Even Pinatubo in 1991 was 10 times larger.
Eva Marie: I sent it to my conservative friend who is the one who changed me and he said “you can thank me for ruining your social life”. I told him that I have heard being a hermit improves your chances against Covid-19
I remember that morning very well- I was in my bedroom listening to Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 when the news broke on the radio that the mountain had exploded. I went into the living room to turn on the television to watch what news they had.
Here in WA the thing I remember most clearly about that day is the Seattle Mariners were playing in Detroit that Sunday morning and they were showing the game with a little box in the corner of the screen showing the eruption. That was pretty cutting edge for 1980. I-5 was closed as the Cowlitz and especially the Toutle River were so clogged with logs and other debris there was fear the bridges would collapse (they didn’t).
In Kelso, WA due west of the mountain they got buried in ash from the following week’s eruption and it led to a large reshaping of the area as the ash turned out to be really good for things like parks and golf courses.
Gothamite, thanks for the Tablet link.
I remember reading that guy years ago and thinking, somewhat exasperatingly, “OK, just another annoying, if intelligent and eloquent, leftist. Sigh, etc.”
Then several years back he all of a sudden he started making sense and I had to ask myself if I had got him all wrong, but then I realized something must have happened and he must have had a change of heart. Or attitude.
Well, now I know…
RIP John Lennon
December 8, 1980
I lived then in Kenmore Square in Boston. I was actually reading Cynthia Lennon’s memoir of her life with John, when WBCN abruptly switched to a sad, discordant song from the “Double Fantasy” album, “I’m Losing You.”
After the song was over the DJ, who went by the moniker “Oedipus,” announced that John was dead.
Here are some surprising quotes I ran into recently.
____________________________________
* John, basically, made it very clear that if he were an American he would vote for Reagan because he was really sour on (Democrat) Jimmy Carter.
* I also saw John embark in some really brutal arguments with my uncle, who’s an old-time communist… He enjoyed really provoking my uncle… Maybe he was being provocative… but it was pretty obvious to me he had moved away from his earlier radicalism.
* He was a very different person back in 1979 and 80 than he’d been when he wrote Imagine. By 1979 he looked back on that guy and was embarrassed by that guy’s naivete.
It’s from a tell-all bio, so who knows. But it wouldn’t surprise me. Lennon was a complicated fellow, strongly emotional and confused, but hardly stupid either.
A sad memory of the reports of the explosion was the final radio message from a geologist at what he thought would be a safe distance: “This is it!”
Sean Lennon is also refreshingly sane, politically. (Unless it’s his brother….)
Kate,
Yep, that was David Johnston a UW geologist. The Johnston Observatory at Mt St Helens is named after him. Lots of great stuff on YouTube about him.
Of course, it’s not like she was a black career criminal attacking cops trying to protect others. So there’s nothing sympathetic about her. She’s white and a Trump supporter. She clearly deserved to die.
Gothamite at 1:11
The writer of the Table article is still clueless, but less so.
She says;
“Sometimes, these measures had unintended consequences (see under: Stalin, Josef), but that wasn’t reason enough to despair of the long march to equality.
Stalin’s measures were not unintended, they were purposeful and intentional. Any idiot knows this. And it’s well known that Stalin’s next mass genocide was to be directed at Russian jews, but he died before he could begin another round of his mass exterminations.
And I am not sure, but her former friends and colleagues hatred of Israel, appears to have been the turning point in her thinking.
Nothing wrong with this being the “needle that broke the camel’s back;” pushing her to become a thinking individual instead of the leftist Borg that she was.
Her former friends would be dancing in the street if Iran dropped a couple of nukes on Israel; they would say, “Israel had it coming,” or “its Israel’s fault.”
In her article she totally neglects to mention the ACTUAL RESULTS of the liberal progressive polices she, presumably, still supports . Have they actually helped people or not?
Like many (most?) NYC liberals, what matters most to them is being able to attend those cocktail parties on the Upper West Side and being able to “hang” with your cool liberal friends. Being part of the correct crowd can sure be uplifting and comforting experience.
And it never occurred to her before her “coming out” that the intolerance and insularity that she and her friends exhibited was good evidence that their pseudo-religious political beliefs were communist/fascist at the core.
While it’s good that folks wake up to reality like Liel Leibovitz eventually did, sort of, it is troublesome that it’s only when they themselves become victims or targets of the intolerant and really nasty stones tossed their way, that they reconsider their world view.
How about looking at the facts and developing opinions based upon facts.
Liel is male.
Looks like Capitol Police killed another unarmed woman on 1/6.
I don’t think Julie Kelly has demonstrated that. All things considered, I would like to see the security camera video they’ve been hiding, as well as an audit of her autopsy report.
JohnTyler, I think he’s taking you through his thought process as he was moving from left to right.
Huxley, the marathon Beatles documentary by Peter Jackson is really quite good if you are any sort of fan. Close to 8 hours culled from 150.
Rick Beato has recently posted two videos with his take. He readily admits huge fan status, but points out some salient facts to keep in mind while watching. One big point is that they were all under 30 at the end. And the extremely productive period of 1965-66 where they cranked out 3 albums and numerous singles they were in their early 20s.
The end is near in the documentary but still amazing to watch how they developed songs…eg..McCartney just fooling around and strumming the bass when suddenly the opening phrase of Get Back pops out. And as Beato says, we all owe Yoko a big apology; it’s very obvious she had nothing to do with the breakup.
Here on the Front Range of CO we had darkened skies and ash.
When Lennon was killed I had just finished being the executive producer on the filming of the last series of films that he appeared in along with Yoko. The day before I think it was. Anyway, here’s that day in detail.
I can’t recall where I read it, but at the moment, based on some articles I read, I don’t think that video is what it purports to be.
Gerard vanderleun:
Do you want us to believe that anyone could force you to do anything against your will?
I resolve all doubts against the Capitol Police and the deep state Democrats who are in charge. It’s appropriate to make conclusions based on their handling of the situation.
First, the standard of proof is simply more likely than not. It isn’t a criminal standard of proof. (btw — this is also the same standard we should apply regarding whether the election was stolen). The only court here is our minds and what we believe. We don’t need proof beyond all doubt. We don’t even use that extreme a standard for science!
Two, the Capitol Police have not acted in good faith at any stage of the process. They have lied constantly. They have withheld evidence from the public. They have abused defendants. They have zero credibility. Thus all possible doubt resolved against them.
Three, It is perfectly legitimate to assume culpablility by them simply because of their refusal to share all the video. They have the power to clear themselves. That they don’t allows any reasonable person to presume that the evidence does not clear them.
Four, the deep state supervising the Capitol Police has an appalling track record of dishonesty, fraud, corruption and criminality. It’s appropriate to consider that when evaluating what we know.
Five, we know they killed one woman without cause the same day. And we know they engaged in a coverup of that killing.
Based on the foregoing, any reasonable person should suspect that the second woman was killed. If the police can’t or won’t provide the public with the evidence under their control, I conclude they are responsible for her death.
stan:
A person doesn’t have to believe the Capitol Police to think those videos are bogus. I think they are bogus. I wish I could find some of the articles I read on this, but I haven’t got time right now. Suffice to say the articles were from the right, not the left.
Not long after January 6th, I read several long accounts of Boyland’s death from interviews with a good friend of hers who was with her the whole time. He made it clear that she collapsed and did not mention being beaten. I think he would have seen fit to mention it if that had occurred.
The autopsy never mentioned marks on her from a beating. You might think the doctors are lying, too, but the other autopsies (including Sicknick’s) seemed fair enough.
So I do not believe she was beaten, much less beaten to death. Of course, I’d like to see all the surveillance videos released.
I was stationed on the USS Halsey & we were on liberty in Portland for the Rose Festival (Danny Thomas was the grand marshall!) when Mt. St. Helens erupted. I had just had a late snack at a bistro near the river when I left I noticed it was snowing but it looked strange–grayish, not white. I ran into a shipmate who excitedly said liberty was canceled & get back to the ship, we were pulling out. Our next liberty stop was Monterey where the mayor told our captain to take our unruly crew and leave.
Neo…. well, not anyone. But a few, a happy few, who abide with the Dude within the circle of trust and the rug that really tied the room together.
physicsguy:
I’ll get to “Get Back” eventually.
I don’t have Disney+. Is it a matter of signing up @ $7.99/month?
huxley,
Barry Meislin beat me to it, but Sean is very common-sensical and unafraid of making waves through speaking truth on social media.
Mark Steyn wrote some good stuff on Lennon’s politics. I’ve just spent about 10 minutes searching http://www.steynonline.com and can’t find what I’m looking for, although I did find some great Steyn reviews of Beatles songs that I recall reading in the past. I’ll keep looking, but, regardless, I think you’ll enjoy his song reviews if you head over there and search for them.
I will add my recommendation to visit the Mt. St. Helens visitors center to those above. My gf and I did that in the late 90s. A couple of things I remember from that: One, forests that were devastated by the eruption were treated differently depending on whether they were on land owned by lumber companies (in which case the companies salvaged logged the downed trees) or on government owned land (in which case the fallen trees were left in place). The scientists studying the ecosystem’s recovery were very pleased by this since it gave them a side by side comparison. Second, the park ranger who was showing our group around was very excited by the unique chance for ecological research that the eruption had given them. He said it was as if an H-bomb had been set off in a national park and “I am pretty sure we never would have gotten Congressional approval for that!”.
@Snow On Pine:
I’m convinced that Sapir-Whorf holds. One could perhaps niggle about various strong and weak forms, but obviously language and thought have potential for virtuous cycles *and* stagnation.
What Chomsky and Friends appear to have done to Linguistics is as much a crime as that perpetrated by Boas and Buddies let loose on Anthropology.
Combined effect: Incoherence.
A big thanks to the person who recommended I go read Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech last time this topic came up.
Does the name Booth Tarkington mean anything to anyone here?
“Now, if you will excuse me, I am going to pour a drink for myself and my wife, and we are going to watch The Magnificent Ambersons. One wonders what Tarkington would have thought of the ability to view nearly any movie at any time. He probably would have viscerally recoiled, and perhaps it is corrosive, allowing too much private gratification, and too easy gratification, both of which erode a society’s fiber. Yet streaming of films does not have the huge drawbacks of much other technology, and allows worthwhile cultural enrichment not otherwise possible, so in this, as in most else, I will not follow Tarkington’s prescriptions.”
A big thanks to the person who recommended I go read Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech last time this topic came up.
Zaphod:
‘Twas I. You’re welcome.
I heard of Booth Takington in my high school American Lit class, but mostly I am aware of him, as the linked author suggests, via Orson Welles’ “The Magnificent Ambersons.”
A Boston film fanatic friend had a rare 35mm copy of “Ambersons” that was used in its restoration. I’m not sure which version I saw, but like most Welles it’s worth a viewing.
I love being able to watch so many movies at nearly any time. I would even give up my jet pack for the ability.
Welles was a fascinating guy. There oughta be a big Hollywood biopic on him like “The Aviator” for Howard Hughes. Or … “Citizen Kane.” Turnabout, fair play and all that.
I wonder if Hollywood’s wounds have yet healed from being manhandled by the Welles wunderkind.
My customary Welles plug:
See “F for Fake”!
Zaphod:
So which HK speakers did you buy? I’ve got some old Bose which hum or crackle at various frequencies. Most distracting.
Also, in which drawer of your apartment filing cabinet do you sleep?
huxley,
Yeah you have to sign up for a month of Disney+ at $7.99 which I have done.
I thought ‘Get Back’ was really good but I am a superfan that really gets into the making of the music and this has a lot of that.
Griffin:
Well, I am close to a superfan, so I may do it.
Anything else on Disney I might like? The first Flubber movie might crack me over!
huxley,
Not much for my tastes but they do have the old movies. All the Pixar stuff and the Marvel universe and Star Wars things none of which I care about so I will be a one monther only.
@Huxley:
Did you get a graphics card for your NUC on steroids?
No highs, no lows: it must be a Bose!
You want Bose if you’re after a noise-cancelling aviation headset… otherwise out the window it goes! How I know: I started with one of those Bose satellite sub-woofer systems in the 1990s. Then one day I walked into the classical room at HMV Hong Kong and heard the opening bars of Pletnev’s Hommage à Rachmaninov disc on their audiophile system and was struck by lightning. No comparison.
This time, I’ve bought the KEF LSX wireless bookshelf speakers but am feeding them with Cat 6 cable and also have them interlinked with Cat 6. So far very impressed. Space constraints mean that I have to house them inside IKEA Kallax shelving so am still after some acoustic tiles to line the spaces they inhabit. This is kind of sub-optimal. Bookshelf speakers should never go on bookshelves. Should go on heavy sand-filled stands on floor spikes according to the Audiophile Gods. But anyway can’t have everything.
What’s good about these speakers in small spaces is not just the DSP they do for you. They have co-axial mid-range and tweeters. This helps greatly with imaging when the speakers are not far from the listener.
Ran through one of the Chesky audiophile test discs yesterday and unless my memory playing tricks it’s doing better than my pretty good discrete component system I had back in early 2000s.
I’ve also got the matching KC62 mini sub-woofer. Delivered this morning, but won’t have time to set it up before the weekend. Not so much to thump out extreme levels of bass, but should open up the LSX mid-range a bit more if outsource the bass. We shall see. Err hear.
Obviously I’m Top Drawer! 😛 Actually I live in a low-rise building with only G/F, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6 floors. 4th, k4th (k=1..n), and 13th floors are Right Out in HK. But being the kind of person I am, I’d live on the 4th floor if they had one! Still a human filing cabinet though.
huxley,
I saw Ambersons for the first time a several years ago. I read that Wells traveled off to Brazil to work on some project or other very shortly after putting the final cut on Ambersons in the can. Then the studio drastically re-cut the second half of the film. Purportedly, Wells watched the theatrical release once and declared it ruined. Wouldn’t you love to see the director’s cut?
Have you seen the film “Mank” written and directed by the Fincher bros.? I wasn’t blown away, though I often underrate good or great films on one viewing. It is about the two Mankiewicz bros. and the writing of the screenplay for Citizen Kane. Wells’ character makes a lengthy appearance in one scene. Quite intriguing.
I agree Wells deserves a good biopic.
_____
I think the National Film Registry is a nice idea, but they should figure out a system to stream them all. The fee structure is the problem I suppose.
Zaphod:
Whoa … sticker shock! Maybe I should settle for a KEF LSX speaker stand at $349 and imagine the sound. I think we play in different leagues together.
I like to aim at the meaty bang-for-the-buck middle of tech. Any suggestions?
I got sticker shock looking at today’s graphics cards too. I’m not a gamer. Occasionally I launch Sid Meier’s old “Alpha Centauri” and try to avoid stepping in the xenofungus. (Hey! Alpha Centauri, Trisolaris. It’s all coming together.)
So, I’ll wait and see if card prices come down. In the meantime, I’m working to rehabilitate my chess. Practicing tactics and revamping my opening repertoire.
Have you seen the film “Mank” written and directed by the Fincher bros.?
TommyJay:
Geez. I saw the title and assumed it was about Frank Mankiewicz, McGovern’s campaign director in 1972!
Hunter S. Thompson’s portrait of that Mank was funny enough I could imagine a possible film.
I’ll check out the real “Mank.”
@Huxley:
I figure if I’m going to be a Covid Quarantine Hostage for another year or so, my captivity (if not that of the neighbours) had better be soothed with good audio. I also have to pay through the nose to get all my amplification, DSP, and streaming black boxes *inside* my speaker cabinets so as to save space. You likely won’t have this issue and can do things much more economically with cabled up discrete components.
My kit is relatively dirt cheap by audiophile standards. KEF’s flagship speakers cost USD200K/pair and to do them justice would require componentry and architecture to match. Mind boggles.
Best bang for the buck will involve spending some time as opposed to money bucks distilling the suggestions of far more experienced people than me. What little I know in current year, I’ve gotten from Steve Guttenberg and John Darko — both of whom have very successful YouTube Channels. If you dig around, both these guys have suggestions for systems under $500, $1,000, $1,500, etc. That’s what I’d do if I had more time and self-control. (My weakness is that I’d want to try out every combination of sub-$500 goodies and end up paying much more than I just did!)
A lot of your decision making will be determined by things like preferred sources too. I have a lot of CDs in storage in Australia and no idea when I’ll get a chance to rip them — so it’s all streaming for me at present.
Zaphod:
My hippie guru, Stephen Gaskin, preached that what the world needed was for millions of Americans to become voluntary peasants. That made good hippie sense at the time, but I never was quite so convinced or unselfish enough to go live on his commune.
Which is to say, I’m still kinda cheap most of the time.
Gaskin died a few years ago. The Telegraph did a classic great Telegraph obit. From there I looked up more and discovered that Stephen had a son who ditched the whole hippie pacifist communal ethos and became a serious state-level competitor in the Mixed Martial Arts. It’s a funny ol’ world.
I chuckled watching ‘Get Back’ when McCartney jokes that he thinks he’s getting the Hong Kong Flu which of course was a major pandemic in January of 1969.
Shockingly they didn’t all go into quarantine.
@Huxley:
You’ve had a very interesting life!
There’s that General Semantics again, too.
Perhaps what we need now is Armed and Dangerous General Semantics.
Zaphod:
How is General Semantics? That old coot.
You say, he’s armed and dangerous?
Well, I never.
@Huxley:
For sure he’s not buried in Grant’s Tomb.
Wow… Here’s something new (for me). The Dresden Frauenkirche was of course destroyed in the Late Unpleasantness.
Not a high priority thing to be re-built in East Germany (although they did do a lot of work on the Zwinger and a lot of other old buildings), so nothing happened until after reunification. They didn’t start on it until 1994. Completed in 2005.
Looks worth hunting down. The 1970s Staatsoper Dresden recording on DG is amazing… but you don’t get to *see* the forest. And the pitchforks and scythes.
“Several witnesses felt the magnitude 5.1 earthquake that morning. Some didn’t. It’s not certain whether Dave Johnston, alone at Coldwater II, felt anything at all. But we know he was among the first to see the enormous bulge on the north slope fail. He was staring it in the face. And when it came down, he knew. Grabbing his radio, he shouted, voice cracking with the intensity of the experience, “Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!”
Vancouver never heard. Something, possibly the eruption itself, interfered: his last transmission was picked up by a ham radio operator who recorded those words, together with others too garbled to understand, on the tape recorder hooked to his unit. He relayed the message, and tried to reestablish contact. But Dr. David Johnston and Coldwater II were gone.”
They say that the landslide caused by the eruption moved *faster than the speed of sound* down the side of the mountain. I can’t imagine what that was like, to see that happen from only six miles away.
Zaphod, Huxley – I use at set of KEF LS50 with a Sonos Amp for music at my house – at the time I got them, the LS50 Wireless didn’t support AirPlay so I’d kind of scratched them off my list. The new LS50 Wireless IIs have a number of nice updates including AirPlay support, so I’d probably go that route now – but probably out of Huxley’s budget at $2499.
At a somewhat more moderate price than the KEF LSX would be a pair of Sonos One SLs – closer to the price of the speaker stands – that still sound pretty good. Not LSX or LS50 good, but well above average for most general listening. A single Sonos Five might also be worth consideration if you can find one to listen to.
huxley,
I subscribed to Disney+ for one day (a month is the minimum cost) to watch, “Hamilton.” If you like musical theater I highly recommend it. If one’s goal is to set the biography of Alexander Hamilton to rap with a non-caucasian cast (except for the intentionally comical and foppish King George III) I can’t imagine anyone doing a better job than Mr. Manuel Miranda did.
@Rufus:
Now that’s a recommendation!
Zaphod, I was working on a crazy scheme to go over to Paris with a friend to see Regula Mühlemann in recital when Everybody’s Favorite Pathogen came down the pike. So much for that.
The Frauenkirche ruin was there in 1990 when I was in Dresden. It was an interesting city, Dresden was, even for what little of it I got to see at the time.
@Philip Sells:
She’s a Revelation to me! Thanks be to the YouTube Gods.
Dresden and Leipzig are on the list for whenever it’s convenient to travel again.
The Dresden Frauenkirche architecture reminds me a little of Esztergom Basilica which I also hope to see one day.
NewYorkCentral, Zaphod:
Howzabout the “KEF Q350 Bookshelf Speakers (Pair, Black)” I see on Amazon for $749 or for “Like New” at $471 (more my speed)?
My hippie guru still might not approve, but he’s dead.
@Huxley:
I’ve never heard them, but I don’t think you could go wrong with this choice.
Skimmed the first review I could find and they’re saying all the right things.
I need to do something. Even I can tell my Bose sound terrible. I suspect the two years in a U-Haul Storage Locker did them no favors.
@Huxley:
“I suspect the two years in a U-Haul Storage Locker did them no favors.”
It may have done nasty things to the rubbery suspension material around the circumference of the speaker cones. I’ve had rubber items like the feet on roll-on luggage liquefy in storage. Whatever it is, not going to be economical to attempt to fix the problem, so throw caution to the winds and go for it!
If they are older speakers many had foam surrounds not rubber, and the foam deteriorates over time, cause said to be ozone in the air IIRC. They can be replaced. I’ve done my Infinity RSb pair twice since I bought them in 1982-3 and a small pair of Boston acoustics once.
@Geoffb:
Valid point. But these are Bose speakers. Somewhere out there there is a landfill yearning to embrace them.
In the late 90s there was an online list of the Audiophile Sins of Bose. One of them was using the cheapest possible materials for speaker cones and surrounds. Could never read about this in the consumer magazine press because Amar Bose was notoriously litigious and could afford to do process is the punishment legal harassment of anyone and any organisation who published a bad review.
Not that Bose is a bad company. Some of their stuff is great. Fit out a stadium for sound, Bose are your boys. Pilot a plane, ditto.
Funny thing is that the first high-value purchases I made in areas of timepieces, cameras, and hi-fi were all things advertised copiously in National Geographic during my impecunious youth in the Eighties. Either advertising works, or I’m particularly suggestible. Of course my first non-cheap hi-fi was a Bose system too.
“Somewhere out there there is a landfill yearning to embrace them.”
Sounds like what our heirs will say about 50% of our basement.
i made an error. RSe not RSb. Old brain.
“Sounds like what our heirs will say about 50% of our basement.”
Have been sorting and discarding accumulated random crap for the past week and still have a ways to go. And there’s still half a storage locker in Australia needs going through with a fine-toothed comb. The other half, I just hired some guys to back up a truck and haul it off to do whatever they liked with it.
Henceforth, minimalism!
Re: Bose.
The only ones I remember were 901s back when they first came out. Looked at them and may have listened in a music store but decided they weren’t for me. I don’t know if Bose made any other home speakers. Haven’t thought of that brand in many years.
Zaphod,
Nice that it is that easy to have someone take it away. Not that easy here as the enviro-nazis have rules about what can be disposed of and how. Plus I’m getting too old to make that many trips up and down the basement stairs.
Leave a Reply
HTML tags allowed in your
comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>
I was around for the Mount St. Helens event, but it is odd to think we are further away from it than it is from Pearl Harbor. The 80’s seemed so far away from that global war. Today, it feels like we forgot the lessons of the war. Heck, I think we’ve forgotten the natural threat of Mount St. Helens.
We visited my Sister in Law and her idjt of a husband just after the event. It was amazing to see the area. My best friend was living in Pullman at the time and when we visited him the ash was everywhere.
I was 11 years old and lived about 100 miles to the northwest of St. Helens and remember it very well. It happened at about 8:30 AM and my mom and I were outside and we heard a large distant ‘BOOM’ and then shortly thereafter they came on the TV with live coverage. The ash was blown east that first day so we got nothing but places like Yakima, the Tri-Cities and Spokane were plunged into darkness.
Little remembered fact is there was another large, but not quite as large, eruption the following Sunday May 25 and for that one the ash was blown west and we got covered in it.
The defining event of that time if you lived in the northwest.
The visitors center there is a must visit if you are ever in the area.
I was 5 years old when it went off and the only thing I vagualy recall about it is finding a very thin layer of ash on my parents cars several days/weeks later… in upstate NY.
A Pliny eruption.
I got a permanent suspension from Twitter. I’m sure my liberal enemies ratted me out.
Jack Posobiec had a picture caption contest. The picture showed Putin looking at a screen with Biden on it. My caption was, “We will bury you.”
You all certainly know that I was referencing what Nikita Khrushchev said about the West during the height of the Cold War.
I appealed, but I have little hope. It’s not like Twitter is fair or run by fair-minded humans.
I visited the area about 20 years after the eruption. On the way up to the visitor center, there were signs indicating when the forest was replanted so you could see the growth patterns. One area was not replanted so that researchers could observe how nature regenerated itself.
And from the mushroom cloud that has become the Covid vaccine, compare and contrast:
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/explosion-new-heart-conditions-dismissed-post-pandemic-stress-disorder
https://www.theepochtimes.com/fda-says-it-now-needs-75-years-to-fully-release-pfizer-covid-19-vaccine-data_4145410.html
Cornhead, you will survive without Twitter. A lot of people, like me, have never used it or have left. A good stiff Double Single Malt will ease the pain
Cornhead, take that suspension as a badge of honor.
The enviro wackos back then predicted the wildlife, forest, vegetation and fish would either never come back or it would take 100 years or so.
They over estimated this time period by about 98 years.
I visited the St.Helens area about 6 months after it exploded; suffice it to say it was a huge mess. I tried driving from the town of Castle Rock towards St. Helens; did not get to far- road closed..
If I recall correctly the towns of Castle Rock and Longview, Wa. had bulldozed into giant piles the ash they had cleaned up from the volcano.
The prevailing winds had driven a lot of ash towards Eastern Washington and even Spokane – at the other side of Washington – got a good dose of ash.
Many years later – 1994? – I went to the St.Helens visitor center; y’all should go, very interesting.
A few months ago the subject of the Sapir-Whorf anthropological/language hypothesis came up here i.e. the idea that your native language shapes your ability to perceive and think in certain particular ways, and not in others.
Although this hypothesis is nowadays regarded as outmoded and incorrect, I’ve always thought that Sapir-Whorf made a certain intuitive sense.
As I wrote here back then, you learn your mother tongue, and are raised in a particular culture, whose particular language is preoccupied with and conveys certain cultural norms, certain preferred ways of looking at the world and vocabulary describing it, which also supplies you with a very specific group of topics of primary concern, which are usually uppermost in your culture and mind, and this particular language and culture—as opposed to all other alternative languages and their cultures–shapes and constrains how and what you routinely identify, perceive, think of, and deal with; the constituents of your/the world, whether the world of a herdsman outside of Ulan Bator, of an Australian Bushman, a small traditional farmer in the Italian countryside, an Eskimo, a painter in Paris, or an executive in New York.
That language supplies you with a very specific toolkit or set of eyeglasses—some tool kits and sets of glasses much more specialized, expansive/effective than others–with which to encounter, identify, think of, and to deal with what you perceive as the world of things, people, and ideas around you.
It thus seems very reasonable to believe that that particular shaping, that particular vocabulary, those specific categories, and those specific constraints—that toolkit and that particular set of eye glasses–has a decisive effect on what you primarily perceive, (even on what you can perceive) and how you think about and deal with what you perceive; your habitual categories and patterns of thought, your view of the world, and how you focus on and apply the specific tools that your language supplies to deal with that world that you perceive.
Well, just today, I happened to be viewing one of “The Great Courses,” this one on the topic of “Color,” and in the first lecture, enumerating and describing three basic concepts, a well-known experiment was cited and discussed which–using African tribesmen, the Himba, as an example–demonstrated that, if your culture/language does not have a word for a particular color, you either have a very hard time perceiving/identifying/differentiating that color from others, or you can’t see it at all.
Thus, this experiment—not specifically aimed at testing Sapir-Whorf, and coming at the issue of how our perceptions work on their most basic level—would, nonetheless, seem to add strong evidence in favor of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
Neo: I’m not sure if you saw this but it captures what many of us have been through.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-turn-liel-leibovitz
Hovaness Symphoye No. 50 Mt. St. Helens:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJ9A5tn-9RE
Hovaness Symphony No. 50 Mt. St. Helens:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJ9A5tn-9RE
I haven’t used Twitter for almost a year now, I originally signed up in 2008, did little with the account until 2014 or so. Back in Jan. 2021 when I tried to login I was informed that I was thought to be a ‘bot and to prove I wasn’t I’d have to allow Google complete access to my computer system. That I will not do and so I can’t even quit it because to do that requires logging in and I can’t. I suppose by now they may have cancelled my account but I don’t care anymore one way or another.
Snow on Pine,
I’ve worked in almost 20 foreign countries, been to a few more for pleasure. I always try to learn at least a little of the local language and have studied a few in depth and I’ve thought a lot about this topic.
I agree with your observation. Latin and German, for example, have declensions, Italian and Spanish, for example, do not. One must construct a Latin or German sentence. It’s akin to building and we even see this in long, German, compound nouns. Speaking and writing are a process of construction. In Italian and Spanish things are more free form, colorful, dynamic, lively, emotional. Speaking Spanish and Italian is akin to singing. In German and Latin you control emphasis by word placement. In Spanish and Italian emphasis is verbal and physical (body language, hand movement), like a dance.
The Ancient Romans were known for their Engineering, as are modern Germans. Italians and Spaniards are known for their art production; painting, statuary, music… The Germans had a period of excelling at music, but it was Classical music. A symphony is many complex parts working together within very rigid forms, or at least it was 150, 200 years ago. We don’t hear much from Germany music-wise after the early 1900s, but Italy, Latin America… And, of course a lot of music from England and America, two more nations without declensions and comparatively liberal grammar rules.
Is “Moonlight in Vermont” a Christmas song? I only hear it this time of year, but it covers at least three seasons and makes no mention of the Holiday, yet it seems associated with the season somehow. Was it in a Christmas movie?
Unfortunately, even at Christmastime it is not played often enough. It’s a beautiful song.
I was once forced (AGAINST MY WILL) to detour off a perfectly safe interstate between Seattle and Portland and drive closer and closer to Mt. St. Helens. Every whirring turn of my wheels closer and closer to this mouth of hell drove me deeper and deeper into fear until I wanted to run away with my hair on fire. Take it from me… never ever have a relationship with an amateur vulcanologist. Better yet, get safely away from the chain of volcanoes on the California Oregon Washington borders. Perhaps a mountain cabin somewhere in Yellowstone.
I was on an airplane on the way to England when the mountain exploded. We watch TV of it. I’m waiting for Yellowstone to go next. I’ll be 84 next birthday so I wish it would hurry up.
Gothamite: I went to your link. Excellent. This was my favorite part:
“ So welcome to the right side, friend, and join us in laughing at all the idiotic name-calling that is applied, with increasing hysteria, to try and stop more and more normal Americans from joining our ranks. Fascists? Conspiracy theorists? Anti-science racist TERFs? Whatever. We have a better word to describe ourselves: free.”
“Perhaps a mountain cabin somewhere in Yellowstone.”
Haha. Definitely. Right on top of the supervolcano. You won’t feel a thing, whereas with these puny mini-volcanos there will be a few uncomfortable moments watching the lava wave coming at you but maybe the ash flow tuff, pyroclastic flow, meltwater tsunami, or base debris avalanche will get there first.
I was a kid when St. Helens blew. We could see the mountain from my parents’ place in Oregon and it was seeping out smoke and ash for months. When it finally blew the smoke and ash column was enormous! Everyone had tons of warning to get out but people decided to stay. It’s a miracle only 57 died. I was sweeping up ash off the porch for months. Also, people made the ash into glass decorations and Christmas ornaments.
I was climbing around on Mt. Rainier in August of 1979, not all the way to the top, an took great pictures including Mr. Saint Helens with snow on the top. Three years later I was back up on Rainer looking South at Saint Helens and what a difference. Lots of great stuff up in the Pacific North West and lots of problems with the politics and social devastation in the metro areas we traveled up there regularly for a number of years for summer vacations and then quit, never more ‘quoth the raven’, never more.
The fact is that St. Helen’s 1980 eruption is a relatively small one as such things go. Even Pinatubo in 1991 was 10 times larger.
Eva Marie: I sent it to my conservative friend who is the one who changed me and he said “you can thank me for ruining your social life”. I told him that I have heard being a hermit improves your chances against Covid-19
I remember that morning very well- I was in my bedroom listening to Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 when the news broke on the radio that the mountain had exploded. I went into the living room to turn on the television to watch what news they had.
Here in WA the thing I remember most clearly about that day is the Seattle Mariners were playing in Detroit that Sunday morning and they were showing the game with a little box in the corner of the screen showing the eruption. That was pretty cutting edge for 1980. I-5 was closed as the Cowlitz and especially the Toutle River were so clogged with logs and other debris there was fear the bridges would collapse (they didn’t).
In Kelso, WA due west of the mountain they got buried in ash from the following week’s eruption and it led to a large reshaping of the area as the ash turned out to be really good for things like parks and golf courses.
Gothamite, thanks for the Tablet link.
I remember reading that guy years ago and thinking, somewhat exasperatingly, “OK, just another annoying, if intelligent and eloquent, leftist. Sigh, etc.”
Then several years back he all of a sudden he started making sense and I had to ask myself if I had got him all wrong, but then I realized something must have happened and he must have had a change of heart. Or attitude.
Well, now I know…
RIP John Lennon
December 8, 1980
I lived then in Kenmore Square in Boston. I was actually reading Cynthia Lennon’s memoir of her life with John, when WBCN abruptly switched to a sad, discordant song from the “Double Fantasy” album, “I’m Losing You.”
After the song was over the DJ, who went by the moniker “Oedipus,” announced that John was dead.
Here are some surprising quotes I ran into recently.
____________________________________
* John, basically, made it very clear that if he were an American he would vote for Reagan because he was really sour on (Democrat) Jimmy Carter.
* I also saw John embark in some really brutal arguments with my uncle, who’s an old-time communist… He enjoyed really provoking my uncle… Maybe he was being provocative… but it was pretty obvious to me he had moved away from his earlier radicalism.
* He was a very different person back in 1979 and 80 than he’d been when he wrote Imagine. By 1979 he looked back on that guy and was embarrassed by that guy’s naivete.
–Fred Seaman (John Lennon’s personal assistant from 1979-Dec.,1980)
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2011/06/john-lennon-reagan-democrat/352312/
____________________________________
It’s from a tell-all bio, so who knows. But it wouldn’t surprise me. Lennon was a complicated fellow, strongly emotional and confused, but hardly stupid either.
A sad memory of the reports of the explosion was the final radio message from a geologist at what he thought would be a safe distance: “This is it!”
Sean Lennon is also refreshingly sane, politically. (Unless it’s his brother….)
Kate,
Yep, that was David Johnston a UW geologist. The Johnston Observatory at Mt St Helens is named after him. Lots of great stuff on YouTube about him.
Griffin, nice to know he is remembered.
Looks like Capitol Police killed another unarmed woman on 1/6. https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/06/the-demonization-of-rosanne-boyland-begins/
Of course, it’s not like she was a black career criminal attacking cops trying to protect others. So there’s nothing sympathetic about her. She’s white and a Trump supporter. She clearly deserved to die.
Gothamite at 1:11
The writer of the Table article is still clueless, but less so.
She says;
“Sometimes, these measures had unintended consequences (see under: Stalin, Josef), but that wasn’t reason enough to despair of the long march to equality.
Stalin’s measures were not unintended, they were purposeful and intentional. Any idiot knows this. And it’s well known that Stalin’s next mass genocide was to be directed at Russian jews, but he died before he could begin another round of his mass exterminations.
And I am not sure, but her former friends and colleagues hatred of Israel, appears to have been the turning point in her thinking.
Nothing wrong with this being the “needle that broke the camel’s back;” pushing her to become a thinking individual instead of the leftist Borg that she was.
Her former friends would be dancing in the street if Iran dropped a couple of nukes on Israel; they would say, “Israel had it coming,” or “its Israel’s fault.”
In her article she totally neglects to mention the ACTUAL RESULTS of the liberal progressive polices she, presumably, still supports . Have they actually helped people or not?
Like many (most?) NYC liberals, what matters most to them is being able to attend those cocktail parties on the Upper West Side and being able to “hang” with your cool liberal friends. Being part of the correct crowd can sure be uplifting and comforting experience.
And it never occurred to her before her “coming out” that the intolerance and insularity that she and her friends exhibited was good evidence that their pseudo-religious political beliefs were communist/fascist at the core.
While it’s good that folks wake up to reality like Liel Leibovitz eventually did, sort of, it is troublesome that it’s only when they themselves become victims or targets of the intolerant and really nasty stones tossed their way, that they reconsider their world view.
How about looking at the facts and developing opinions based upon facts.
Liel is male.
Looks like Capitol Police killed another unarmed woman on 1/6.
I don’t think Julie Kelly has demonstrated that. All things considered, I would like to see the security camera video they’ve been hiding, as well as an audit of her autopsy report.
JohnTyler, I think he’s taking you through his thought process as he was moving from left to right.
Huxley, the marathon Beatles documentary by Peter Jackson is really quite good if you are any sort of fan. Close to 8 hours culled from 150.
Rick Beato has recently posted two videos with his take. He readily admits huge fan status, but points out some salient facts to keep in mind while watching. One big point is that they were all under 30 at the end. And the extremely productive period of 1965-66 where they cranked out 3 albums and numerous singles they were in their early 20s.
The end is near in the documentary but still amazing to watch how they developed songs…eg..McCartney just fooling around and strumming the bass when suddenly the opening phrase of Get Back pops out. And as Beato says, we all owe Yoko a big apology; it’s very obvious she had nothing to do with the breakup.
Here on the Front Range of CO we had darkened skies and ash.
When Lennon was killed I had just finished being the executive producer on the filming of the last series of films that he appeared in along with Yoko. The day before I think it was. Anyway, here’s that day in detail.
https://americandigest.org/the-day-we-killed-john-lennon/
stan:
I can’t recall where I read it, but at the moment, based on some articles I read, I don’t think that video is what it purports to be.
Gerard vanderleun:
Do you want us to believe that anyone could force you to do anything against your will?
I resolve all doubts against the Capitol Police and the deep state Democrats who are in charge. It’s appropriate to make conclusions based on their handling of the situation.
First, the standard of proof is simply more likely than not. It isn’t a criminal standard of proof. (btw — this is also the same standard we should apply regarding whether the election was stolen). The only court here is our minds and what we believe. We don’t need proof beyond all doubt. We don’t even use that extreme a standard for science!
Two, the Capitol Police have not acted in good faith at any stage of the process. They have lied constantly. They have withheld evidence from the public. They have abused defendants. They have zero credibility. Thus all possible doubt resolved against them.
Three, It is perfectly legitimate to assume culpablility by them simply because of their refusal to share all the video. They have the power to clear themselves. That they don’t allows any reasonable person to presume that the evidence does not clear them.
Four, the deep state supervising the Capitol Police has an appalling track record of dishonesty, fraud, corruption and criminality. It’s appropriate to consider that when evaluating what we know.
Five, we know they killed one woman without cause the same day. And we know they engaged in a coverup of that killing.
Based on the foregoing, any reasonable person should suspect that the second woman was killed. If the police can’t or won’t provide the public with the evidence under their control, I conclude they are responsible for her death.
stan:
A person doesn’t have to believe the Capitol Police to think those videos are bogus. I think they are bogus. I wish I could find some of the articles I read on this, but I haven’t got time right now. Suffice to say the articles were from the right, not the left.
Not long after January 6th, I read several long accounts of Boyland’s death from interviews with a good friend of hers who was with her the whole time. He made it clear that she collapsed and did not mention being beaten. I think he would have seen fit to mention it if that had occurred.
The autopsy never mentioned marks on her from a beating. You might think the doctors are lying, too, but the other autopsies (including Sicknick’s) seemed fair enough.
So I do not believe she was beaten, much less beaten to death. Of course, I’d like to see all the surveillance videos released.
I was stationed on the USS Halsey & we were on liberty in Portland for the Rose Festival (Danny Thomas was the grand marshall!) when Mt. St. Helens erupted. I had just had a late snack at a bistro near the river when I left I noticed it was snowing but it looked strange–grayish, not white. I ran into a shipmate who excitedly said liberty was canceled & get back to the ship, we were pulling out. Our next liberty stop was Monterey where the mayor told our captain to take our unruly crew and leave.
Neo…. well, not anyone. But a few, a happy few, who abide with the Dude within the circle of trust and the rug that really tied the room together.
physicsguy:
I’ll get to “Get Back” eventually.
I don’t have Disney+. Is it a matter of signing up @ $7.99/month?
huxley,
Barry Meislin beat me to it, but Sean is very common-sensical and unafraid of making waves through speaking truth on social media.
Mark Steyn wrote some good stuff on Lennon’s politics. I’ve just spent about 10 minutes searching http://www.steynonline.com and can’t find what I’m looking for, although I did find some great Steyn reviews of Beatles songs that I recall reading in the past. I’ll keep looking, but, regardless, I think you’ll enjoy his song reviews if you head over there and search for them.
I will add my recommendation to visit the Mt. St. Helens visitors center to those above. My gf and I did that in the late 90s. A couple of things I remember from that: One, forests that were devastated by the eruption were treated differently depending on whether they were on land owned by lumber companies (in which case the companies salvaged logged the downed trees) or on government owned land (in which case the fallen trees were left in place). The scientists studying the ecosystem’s recovery were very pleased by this since it gave them a side by side comparison. Second, the park ranger who was showing our group around was very excited by the unique chance for ecological research that the eruption had given them. He said it was as if an H-bomb had been set off in a national park and “I am pretty sure we never would have gotten Congressional approval for that!”.
@Snow On Pine:
I’m convinced that Sapir-Whorf holds. One could perhaps niggle about various strong and weak forms, but obviously language and thought have potential for virtuous cycles *and* stagnation.
What Chomsky and Friends appear to have done to Linguistics is as much a crime as that perpetrated by Boas and Buddies let loose on Anthropology.
Combined effect: Incoherence.
A big thanks to the person who recommended I go read Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech last time this topic came up.
Does the name Booth Tarkington mean anything to anyone here?
https://theworthyhouse.com/2021/12/08/america-moved-booth-tarkingtons-memoirs-of-time-and-place-1869-1928-jeremy-beer/
“Now, if you will excuse me, I am going to pour a drink for myself and my wife, and we are going to watch The Magnificent Ambersons. One wonders what Tarkington would have thought of the ability to view nearly any movie at any time. He probably would have viscerally recoiled, and perhaps it is corrosive, allowing too much private gratification, and too easy gratification, both of which erode a society’s fiber. Yet streaming of films does not have the huge drawbacks of much other technology, and allows worthwhile cultural enrichment not otherwise possible, so in this, as in most else, I will not follow Tarkington’s prescriptions.”
A big thanks to the person who recommended I go read Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech last time this topic came up.
Zaphod:
‘Twas I. You’re welcome.
I heard of Booth Takington in my high school American Lit class, but mostly I am aware of him, as the linked author suggests, via Orson Welles’ “The Magnificent Ambersons.”
A Boston film fanatic friend had a rare 35mm copy of “Ambersons” that was used in its restoration. I’m not sure which version I saw, but like most Welles it’s worth a viewing.
I love being able to watch so many movies at nearly any time. I would even give up my jet pack for the ability.
Welles was a fascinating guy. There oughta be a big Hollywood biopic on him like “The Aviator” for Howard Hughes. Or … “Citizen Kane.” Turnabout, fair play and all that.
I wonder if Hollywood’s wounds have yet healed from being manhandled by the Welles wunderkind.
My customary Welles plug:
See “F for Fake”!
Zaphod:
So which HK speakers did you buy? I’ve got some old Bose which hum or crackle at various frequencies. Most distracting.
Also, in which drawer of your apartment filing cabinet do you sleep?
huxley,
Yeah you have to sign up for a month of Disney+ at $7.99 which I have done.
I thought ‘Get Back’ was really good but I am a superfan that really gets into the making of the music and this has a lot of that.
Griffin:
Well, I am close to a superfan, so I may do it.
Anything else on Disney I might like? The first Flubber movie might crack me over!
huxley,
Not much for my tastes but they do have the old movies. All the Pixar stuff and the Marvel universe and Star Wars things none of which I care about so I will be a one monther only.
@Huxley:
Did you get a graphics card for your NUC on steroids?
No highs, no lows: it must be a Bose!
You want Bose if you’re after a noise-cancelling aviation headset… otherwise out the window it goes! How I know: I started with one of those Bose satellite sub-woofer systems in the 1990s. Then one day I walked into the classical room at HMV Hong Kong and heard the opening bars of Pletnev’s Hommage à Rachmaninov disc on their audiophile system and was struck by lightning. No comparison.
This time, I’ve bought the KEF LSX wireless bookshelf speakers but am feeding them with Cat 6 cable and also have them interlinked with Cat 6. So far very impressed. Space constraints mean that I have to house them inside IKEA Kallax shelving so am still after some acoustic tiles to line the spaces they inhabit. This is kind of sub-optimal. Bookshelf speakers should never go on bookshelves. Should go on heavy sand-filled stands on floor spikes according to the Audiophile Gods. But anyway can’t have everything.
https://us.kef.com/speakers/computer-speakers/digital-hifi-speakers-lsx-wireless-speakers.html
What’s good about these speakers in small spaces is not just the DSP they do for you. They have co-axial mid-range and tweeters. This helps greatly with imaging when the speakers are not far from the listener.
Ran through one of the Chesky audiophile test discs yesterday and unless my memory playing tricks it’s doing better than my pretty good discrete component system I had back in early 2000s.
I’ve also got the matching KC62 mini sub-woofer. Delivered this morning, but won’t have time to set it up before the weekend. Not so much to thump out extreme levels of bass, but should open up the LSX mid-range a bit more if outsource the bass. We shall see. Err hear.
Obviously I’m Top Drawer! 😛 Actually I live in a low-rise building with only G/F, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6 floors. 4th, k4th (k=1..n), and 13th floors are Right Out in HK. But being the kind of person I am, I’d live on the 4th floor if they had one! Still a human filing cabinet though.
huxley,
I saw Ambersons for the first time a several years ago. I read that Wells traveled off to Brazil to work on some project or other very shortly after putting the final cut on Ambersons in the can. Then the studio drastically re-cut the second half of the film. Purportedly, Wells watched the theatrical release once and declared it ruined. Wouldn’t you love to see the director’s cut?
Have you seen the film “Mank” written and directed by the Fincher bros.? I wasn’t blown away, though I often underrate good or great films on one viewing. It is about the two Mankiewicz bros. and the writing of the screenplay for Citizen Kane. Wells’ character makes a lengthy appearance in one scene. Quite intriguing.
I agree Wells deserves a good biopic.
_____
I think the National Film Registry is a nice idea, but they should figure out a system to stream them all. The fee structure is the problem I suppose.
Zaphod:
Whoa … sticker shock! Maybe I should settle for a KEF LSX speaker stand at $349 and imagine the sound. I think we play in different leagues together.
I like to aim at the meaty bang-for-the-buck middle of tech. Any suggestions?
I got sticker shock looking at today’s graphics cards too. I’m not a gamer. Occasionally I launch Sid Meier’s old “Alpha Centauri” and try to avoid stepping in the xenofungus. (Hey! Alpha Centauri, Trisolaris. It’s all coming together.)
So, I’ll wait and see if card prices come down. In the meantime, I’m working to rehabilitate my chess. Practicing tactics and revamping my opening repertoire.
Have you seen the film “Mank” written and directed by the Fincher bros.?
TommyJay:
Geez. I saw the title and assumed it was about Frank Mankiewicz, McGovern’s campaign director in 1972!
Hunter S. Thompson’s portrait of that Mank was funny enough I could imagine a possible film.
I’ll check out the real “Mank.”
@Huxley:
I figure if I’m going to be a Covid Quarantine Hostage for another year or so, my captivity (if not that of the neighbours) had better be soothed with good audio. I also have to pay through the nose to get all my amplification, DSP, and streaming black boxes *inside* my speaker cabinets so as to save space. You likely won’t have this issue and can do things much more economically with cabled up discrete components.
My kit is relatively dirt cheap by audiophile standards. KEF’s flagship speakers cost USD200K/pair and to do them justice would require componentry and architecture to match. Mind boggles.
Best bang for the buck will involve spending some time as opposed to money bucks distilling the suggestions of far more experienced people than me. What little I know in current year, I’ve gotten from Steve Guttenberg and John Darko — both of whom have very successful YouTube Channels. If you dig around, both these guys have suggestions for systems under $500, $1,000, $1,500, etc. That’s what I’d do if I had more time and self-control. (My weakness is that I’d want to try out every combination of sub-$500 goodies and end up paying much more than I just did!)
A lot of your decision making will be determined by things like preferred sources too. I have a lot of CDs in storage in Australia and no idea when I’ll get a chance to rip them — so it’s all streaming for me at present.
Zaphod:
My hippie guru, Stephen Gaskin, preached that what the world needed was for millions of Americans to become voluntary peasants. That made good hippie sense at the time, but I never was quite so convinced or unselfish enough to go live on his commune.
Which is to say, I’m still kinda cheap most of the time.
Gaskin died a few years ago. The Telegraph did a classic great Telegraph obit. From there I looked up more and discovered that Stephen had a son who ditched the whole hippie pacifist communal ethos and became a serious state-level competitor in the Mixed Martial Arts. It’s a funny ol’ world.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/10946714/Stephen-Gaskin-obituary.html
I chuckled watching ‘Get Back’ when McCartney jokes that he thinks he’s getting the Hong Kong Flu which of course was a major pandemic in January of 1969.
Shockingly they didn’t all go into quarantine.
@Huxley:
You’ve had a very interesting life!
There’s that General Semantics again, too.
Perhaps what we need now is Armed and Dangerous General Semantics.
Zaphod:
How is General Semantics? That old coot.
You say, he’s armed and dangerous?
Well, I never.
@Huxley:
For sure he’s not buried in Grant’s Tomb.
Wow… Here’s something new (for me). The Dresden Frauenkirche was of course destroyed in the Late Unpleasantness.
Not a high priority thing to be re-built in East Germany (although they did do a lot of work on the Zwinger and a lot of other old buildings), so nothing happened until after reunification. They didn’t start on it until 1994. Completed in 2005.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dresden_Frauenkirche
It’s a huge internal volume with a great big dome.
Found out about it here:
Regula Mühlemann: Exsultate Jubilate – W. A. Mozart
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_fA-Ls4RXk
It’s early days, but I can feel Ms Mühlemann replacing Patricia Janecková in my fickle affections.
She’s in this movie adaptation of Der Freischütz, too. Trailer here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kekJoVMl8O0
Looks worth hunting down. The 1970s Staatsoper Dresden recording on DG is amazing… but you don’t get to *see* the forest. And the pitchforks and scythes.
An older filmed version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8GFvzxLq4Y
Always been my contention that Weber started the German ball rolling… Wagner just gave it a kick along 😛
“Interesting times” revisited….
Evergrande has defaulted:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/evergrande-has-finally-defaulted-heres-what-happens-next
Kate and Griffin beat me to it (I snooze, I lose) – Dr. David Johnston of the US Geological Survey. There’s a section at the Mt. St. Helens museum about him. From a more recent Scientific American article (https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/rosetta-stones/the-cataclysm-vancouver-vancouver-this-is-it/) about the eruption:
“Several witnesses felt the magnitude 5.1 earthquake that morning. Some didn’t. It’s not certain whether Dave Johnston, alone at Coldwater II, felt anything at all. But we know he was among the first to see the enormous bulge on the north slope fail. He was staring it in the face. And when it came down, he knew. Grabbing his radio, he shouted, voice cracking with the intensity of the experience, “Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!”
Vancouver never heard. Something, possibly the eruption itself, interfered: his last transmission was picked up by a ham radio operator who recorded those words, together with others too garbled to understand, on the tape recorder hooked to his unit. He relayed the message, and tried to reestablish contact. But Dr. David Johnston and Coldwater II were gone.”
They say that the landslide caused by the eruption moved *faster than the speed of sound* down the side of the mountain. I can’t imagine what that was like, to see that happen from only six miles away.
Zaphod, Huxley – I use at set of KEF LS50 with a Sonos Amp for music at my house – at the time I got them, the LS50 Wireless didn’t support AirPlay so I’d kind of scratched them off my list. The new LS50 Wireless IIs have a number of nice updates including AirPlay support, so I’d probably go that route now – but probably out of Huxley’s budget at $2499.
At a somewhat more moderate price than the KEF LSX would be a pair of Sonos One SLs – closer to the price of the speaker stands – that still sound pretty good. Not LSX or LS50 good, but well above average for most general listening. A single Sonos Five might also be worth consideration if you can find one to listen to.
huxley,
I subscribed to Disney+ for one day (a month is the minimum cost) to watch, “Hamilton.” If you like musical theater I highly recommend it. If one’s goal is to set the biography of Alexander Hamilton to rap with a non-caucasian cast (except for the intentionally comical and foppish King George III) I can’t imagine anyone doing a better job than Mr. Manuel Miranda did.
@Rufus:
Now that’s a recommendation!
Zaphod, I was working on a crazy scheme to go over to Paris with a friend to see Regula Mühlemann in recital when Everybody’s Favorite Pathogen came down the pike. So much for that.
The Frauenkirche ruin was there in 1990 when I was in Dresden. It was an interesting city, Dresden was, even for what little of it I got to see at the time.
@Philip Sells:
She’s a Revelation to me! Thanks be to the YouTube Gods.
Dresden and Leipzig are on the list for whenever it’s convenient to travel again.
The Dresden Frauenkirche architecture reminds me a little of Esztergom Basilica which I also hope to see one day.
NewYorkCentral, Zaphod:
Howzabout the “KEF Q350 Bookshelf Speakers (Pair, Black)” I see on Amazon for $749 or for “Like New” at $471 (more my speed)?
My hippie guru still might not approve, but he’s dead.
@Huxley:
I’ve never heard them, but I don’t think you could go wrong with this choice.
Skimmed the first review I could find and they’re saying all the right things.
https://www.whathifi.com/kef/q350/review
Be a devil and go for it!
Zaphod:
I need to do something. Even I can tell my Bose sound terrible. I suspect the two years in a U-Haul Storage Locker did them no favors.
@Huxley:
“I suspect the two years in a U-Haul Storage Locker did them no favors.”
It may have done nasty things to the rubbery suspension material around the circumference of the speaker cones. I’ve had rubber items like the feet on roll-on luggage liquefy in storage. Whatever it is, not going to be economical to attempt to fix the problem, so throw caution to the winds and go for it!
If they are older speakers many had foam surrounds not rubber, and the foam deteriorates over time, cause said to be ozone in the air IIRC. They can be replaced. I’ve done my Infinity RSb pair twice since I bought them in 1982-3 and a small pair of Boston acoustics once.
@Geoffb:
Valid point. But these are Bose speakers. Somewhere out there there is a landfill yearning to embrace them.
In the late 90s there was an online list of the Audiophile Sins of Bose. One of them was using the cheapest possible materials for speaker cones and surrounds. Could never read about this in the consumer magazine press because Amar Bose was notoriously litigious and could afford to do process is the punishment legal harassment of anyone and any organisation who published a bad review.
Not that Bose is a bad company. Some of their stuff is great. Fit out a stadium for sound, Bose are your boys. Pilot a plane, ditto.
Funny thing is that the first high-value purchases I made in areas of timepieces, cameras, and hi-fi were all things advertised copiously in National Geographic during my impecunious youth in the Eighties. Either advertising works, or I’m particularly suggestible. Of course my first non-cheap hi-fi was a Bose system too.
“Somewhere out there there is a landfill yearning to embrace them.”
Sounds like what our heirs will say about 50% of our basement.
i made an error. RSe not RSb. Old brain.
“Sounds like what our heirs will say about 50% of our basement.”
Have been sorting and discarding accumulated random crap for the past week and still have a ways to go. And there’s still half a storage locker in Australia needs going through with a fine-toothed comb. The other half, I just hired some guys to back up a truck and haul it off to do whatever they liked with it.
Henceforth, minimalism!
Re: Bose.
The only ones I remember were 901s back when they first came out. Looked at them and may have listened in a music store but decided they weren’t for me. I don’t know if Bose made any other home speakers. Haven’t thought of that brand in many years.
Zaphod,
Nice that it is that easy to have someone take it away. Not that easy here as the enviro-nazis have rules about what can be disposed of and how. Plus I’m getting too old to make that many trips up and down the basement stairs.