Wednesday, February 19, 2020

ANCIENT EGYPT: Giza revisited, by JD

The first part of this post appeared originally on Nourishing Obscurity, here:



First introduction to the Pyramids comes on the road to Giza where the hedges are all shaped accordingly.

The only thing missing from the photograph below is sound. And the sound would be beep-beep. Non stop all day everywhere you go beep-beep; not an angry blaring of horns just a quick beep-beep for the sake of it.



This is a very familiar sight. Everybody knows what they look like and we all know they are very large stone constructions but they are huge. It is not until you stand in front of them that you realise just how big they are.

At 480 feet, the Great Pyramid of Cheops (or Khufu if you prefer) is taller than any Cathedral in England. St.Paul’s in London measures 365 feet from the floor of the nave to the tip of the cross on the dome so it could easily disappear within the outline of the pyramid.



Here is a good indication of the size with people at the base and also at the entrance.
The sign sitting on the 7th course of blocks about halfway up to the entrance reads “no smoking inside the pyramid”.

I wonder what John Greaves would have thought of that; he carved the name ‘J Gravius’ in the King’s Chamber in 1637.

The limestone blocks are partially intact around the base as can be seen here. They say that if you want to see the Pyramids you just need visit Cairo’s City of the Dead where a lot of the casing stones were used for building houses and monuments.

Even more impressive was the red granite facing of the third pyramid. After all this time it still appears highly polished and the heiroglyphic characters on the face are clearly defined. The fit and finish of the stones is astonishing.



According to Herodotus it took twenty years for a force of 100,000 to build the pyramid. I heard some time ago of an American engineer who decided to calculate the time in man-hours that would be needed for the construction including all ancillary work such as quarrying, carving, hauling etc. His answer was more or less as Herodotus had said.

I may never return to Cairo but I am glad I was given the opportunity to see one of the wonders of the world.



________________________________________________________________________________

It has been more than thirty years since I took those photos and I have 'revisited' Giza in various books I have read over the years trying to get a better understanding of the enigma.

Recently I came across this video which sparked my interest once more. It's about half an hour and starts and ends with Nikola Tesla and in between it has Graham Hancock explaining the significance of the dimensions and location of Giza and its famous pyramids.



He didn't mention that the number 432 pops up again in the mean radius of the sun - 432,000 miles: and the famous Kali Yuga of Hinduism will last 432,000 years according to Sri Yukteswar (he is on the cover of Sgt Pepper top left corner!) I'm pretty sure Graham Hancock knows all that but he wouldn't want to make things too complicated or confusing.

When I first stood in front of the pyramid I thought "that is not possible!" but there it is, so it must have been possible for somebody at some point in history. Unlike Hancock I know how to build large structures but I still have no idea how it was done. A lot of years ago a friend of mine called it "God's calling card" which is no more nor less plausible than any of the other theories I have seen and heard.

Monday, February 17, 2020

Sleepers, awoke!

When you read the term ‘woke’ these days, you assume it is to do with dizzy-headed left-wing idealists making a fuss over the things the government (Lab or Con) is happy for them to witter about – generally, sexual matters that ought to be private, equality of outcomes (well, up to a certain level in society), and the benefits system that can be used to bully the poor, subsidise workers’ wages and boost corporate profitability.

Oh, and greenery. Apparently the reason we are deindustrialising a small country whose bloated population depends on industrial trade, and turning for our power needs to solar panels that work only intermittently in a cloudy climate and windmills that have to be deactivated in a gale, is to protect ourselves against the carbonavirus, that disease which, so we are told, will be caught by all and is 100% fatal... except in the East, to whose coal-fired economies our corporations have transferred our productive capacity and from which they derive vast wealth that must be hidden in tax havens.

Let us turn from this ship of fools as they sail in search of fantasy adventures with Tintin (yep) Thunberg at the helm, Snowy yipping excitedly by her feet; for that’s not where ‘woke’ started.

Pace Wikipedia, the first time I was struck by the contemporary usage was when watching the 2008 TV series ‘Breaking Bad’. Walter White, a man who has always done the right thing, studied hard, passed lots of exams and gone into teaching, suddenly realises that life has shafted him. Underpaid for his learning – Anglos despise education – he is eking out his salary by labouring at a garage, only to be spotted and mocked by his students. His conditioning breaks and returning home, he says, ‘I am awake.’ For if you only do what you’re supposed to do, you get what you’re supposed (but not by you) to get. That word, with its ominous undertone, was like the moment in ‘The Long Ships’ when the Viking leader who has long sought a huge golden bell, disgustedly flings away the little one he finds hanging in a deserted chapel, only to have it strike the dome with a great ringing sound…

I heard a tinkle in c. 1990 when none of my life company’s excellent pension funds was hitting the 13% growth ceiling assumed by the regulator as reasonable for projections. I heard it when, post-dotcom bubble, the stockmarkets halved in 2000-2003 and yet all that happened was monetary reflation, especially in mortgages; I heard a clang when the loan-fakery blew up in 2008, Congress refused to bail out crooked banks with $700 billion, and the US Treasury Secretary ‘Hank’ Paulson ordered them to vote again and shares re-collapsed; and when, instead of financial reforms, the money-pumping continued at a far greater rate, reinflating the burst balloons of the S&P 500 and the FTSE. Again, when I read recently of the hundreds of billions of emergency overnight government lending to banks in the US ‘repo market’, rather like the old custom of desperate businesses ‘kiting’ cheques over a weekend because there wasn’t enough in their account on Friday. Nobody up there is doing the right thing, but they want you to keep calm and carry on.

The whole thing is running on tick. Fiscal conservatives wail about the levels of government debt, but that’s only half the story. If you want to see the big picture, look for the overall burden of credit in the economy, both public and private; known (in the US, at any rate) as ‘Total Credit Market Debt Outstanding’, or TCMDO; and compare it to the overall level of economic activity, aka Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Back in January 2012 McKinsey reported (page 5) that the UK’s total debt-to-GDP stood at 507% - rivalling the moribund Japan (512%).

At that time America’s TCMDO-to-GDP was merely 279%; but by the third quarter of 2019 its TCMDO had soared to $74.56 trillion. This compares with US GDP of $21.44 trillion  – so, by late last year, their total-debt-to-GDP had not fallen but risen, to around 348%. Unfortunately, the British government is rather more coy about such matters and does not publicly disclose such data on a regular basis, so I can only guess that we, too, have sunk deeper into the mire.

Worse still, debt-to GDP can deteriorate in two ways: a rise in debt, or a fall in GDP. Should there be a serious economic dislocation caused by say, a Covid-19-seized-up China, or a vindictive French Brexit trade negotiator, then we shall all find out that whatever happens to income or investments, debts remain fixed. If masses of individuals or their governments start defaulting, there will be a domino effect, and austerity may not be enough to stop it (indeed, may itself worsen GDP.)

The alternative is to pump even more money into the system, as has been happening for a long time; but possibly on an accelerating basis. So far we haven’t seen high inflation (though it is significant that almost the first act of the new 2010 ‘Conservative’ government was to stop issuing index-linked NS&I savings bonds.) One of the reasons we haven’t, is the declining velocity of money – the rate at which a pound changes hands annually. This 2018 article illustrates the general principle and trend  – the money supply is increasing, but not pushing GDP correspondingly higher. Whether capital projects like HS2 will turn things around is a moot point (look out for cheery government references to ‘job creation’ without details re limited duration), especially if the work is given to the Chinese.

It may be that a long-cycle economic downturn is unavoidable, as Irving Fisher and Nikolai Kondratiev theorised; and could be sudden, as latterly Hyman Minsky and following him the Australian economist Steve Keen have suggested (Keen would like to see a ‘debt jubilee’ to clear accounts and restart the system). Writing in 2008 before the Global Financial Crisis hit, Charles Hugh Smith forecast 2020 as the confluence of several negative trends including the passing of ‘peak energy’.

As long as there is a Welfare State, the government will have irreducible obligations (despite trying to declare the disabled and dying as fit for work) and as national earnings wane it will be increasingly difficult to balance the books. Something will give, and if there is not a debt jubilee then it will be the currency, I suppose. Already the law has changed to permit ‘bail-ins’, i.e. in another emergency, depositors’ account balances may be converted to shares in the rotten banks where they are held; but the strategy could go further, in raiding the value of money itself.

Back to gold, that ‘barbarous relic’ beloved of those who really don’t trust their rulers. Something funny is going on here, as ‘Tyler Durden’ has just noted: suddenly (in a two month period), the UK has exported a massive £12 billion-worth of gold and this has distorted official figures about the health of our economy. The Bank of England holds some 310 tonnes of gold (far less than it used to), which if pure and at current prices would be worth only around £9.3 billion, so presumably there is some other explanation. However, you may have noticed in the Daily Wail in past months, advertisements for gold coins for sale by the Royal Mint; and something you probably haven’t noticed, but rang a little gold tocsin in my head: a recent Privy Council meeting (chaired by Jacob Rees-Mogg) on 6th November 2019 approved the issuance of a variety of gold coinage including a £7,000 one. Where is that gold coming from? Not from a Chinese government grateful for all the business we’ve given them. So, from stock.

What’s the thinking behind that last? Revenue-raising? Part of a long-term plan (as gold bugs suspect) to keep down the market price of gold so as not to scare the populace? Or an opportunity for those in the know and with deep pockets, to secure at least some of their wealth in advance of a looming financial crisis?

The discovery of great hoards of Anglo-Saxon gold shows how the yellow metal is no protection in the worst case; but I fear there may soon be a clapper of alarm that will jolt the middle-class poseurs out of their dreamy world-saving playing-about and make them ‘woke’ for real.

Sunday, February 16, 2020

ART: Joaquín Sorolla, by JD

Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida 1863-1923 is a Spanish painter, born in Valencia, and is relatively unknown outside his native land.

He is regarded as the Spanish Impressionist and if his depiction of light is not quite as good as Monet it is certainly exceptional.
http://www.joaquin-sorolla-y-bastida.org/biography.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joaqu%C3%ADn_Sorolla

The Sorolla Museum in Madrid is well worth a visit https://www.gomadrid.com/museums/museo-sorolla.html -
it was his widow and later his son who bequeathed the house to the State.








Saturday, February 15, 2020

Wine Snobbery: A Glass Half Full, by Wiggia


This title was conceived after a conversation a couple of weeks back with an  acquaintance who likes to drink and is interested in wine. He was referring to a tasting he went to at a local wine merchant's and the customer there who appeared to be blinded by wine speak and elitism; I am not fond of isms but know what he was getting at.

Anyone who has read my articles on wine realises I do enjoy it and the whole history of wine, how it is made, the grapes used etc etc. It is a hobby that I enjoy as I do talking about it. Many talk of their love of wine, I certainly have loved a few great bottles in my time but love ! As in all-consuming, no; others may see themselves differently. It is all a matter of perspective, which brings us back to the conversation I had with this fellow drinker.

In many people's eyes wine does invoke this image of someone slathering over a glass and using terms of endearment more suited to something else that you would only use in private ! There is a whole lexicon of strange words and phrases used to describe wine. Many by leading wine critics are pure fantasy, used to convey a sense of superiority in these matters. Terms that suppose the human faculties can discern inert substances in wine are plainly ludicrous but are used nonetheless in the attempt to make that critic's review stand out from the mob; tasting notes by their nature are limited and therefore repeated, hence this fantasy-speak.

Still, all this this quite correctly conveys to an outsider the impression that there is an awful lot of snobbery and elitism within the wine circle.

If anyone goes onto a wine blog - and there are many - there are reams of quotes and statements supporting this view about wine; which is strange in a world that is dominated by supermarket wine buyers who couldn’t give a monkey's what some double-barrelled wine critic wrote about their plonk, all they care is it fits the budget and fulfils their taste requirements.

So does this snobbery and elitism exist. To a large degree yes, even now. The forums for wine drinkers show this trait all too well: whole threads become more than 'this is what I drank last night', they become 'what I drank last night was more expensive and rarer than that which you drank', that old world wineries are the only place to buy ‘fine’ wines from and the new world is fermented gnat's piss; and many in direct conversation will do the same. This moment scotched that thinking some time back, yet many still believe……..



There is absolutely nothing wrong in people who have the spare income to spend it in a way they enjoy and if that means a £500 or more bottle of wine then that is their choice, but often the writing on the same wine belies the truth about it. Whatever the cost, whatever grand name on the label, whatever the vintage, you still have to like it and we all have different tastes, so there is no greatest or there shouldn’t be. Wine is a food. Some will love a style, others will wrinkle their noses and reject it, it is that simple; but not for a wine snob, who will defend his bad bottle with a litany of excuses, many invalid. None, or few, seem capable of saying 'that was bloody awful' or simply 'I didn’t like it', they will have a whole lexicon to use of words that describe their disappointment and how the next bottle will be wonderful.



The correlation in people's minds of qulity to price is shown here, nothing new in this but it does show how you can fool some of the people...



'Great wine' is a much-used term usually attached to a tasting of a top-rated Bordeaux, Burgundy, Rhone, Barolo et al., but a great wine is one you enjoy whatever the provenance or price. I myself have been fortunate to drink some very high-ranking wines and many I have enjoyed; the best are memorable, but they represent a fraction of what is out there and among the lesser lights are bottles that have brought equal enjoyment. Thinking about the price clouds your judgement as in the videos here, it really does; yet the wine snob will never admit to enjoying a cheap wine, even if it is good.
Victoria Beckham was quoted as saying she would never drink a wine under £10 a bottle. Well, she doesn’t have to, but the assertion was it would be a poor wine, and that is simply not true: many £10-and-up bottles are not that good either and many even more expensive bottles have proved a let-down.

The wine snob will never ever admit to drinking anything popular. The rise in popularity in a grape variety will coincide with the wine snob deriding it and promoting an unheard-of wine from an unheard-of village made under a waning moon and a thunderstorm; these things bring great kudos to wine snobs and they will promote the same, until they have to move on because the unheard-of wine has become ‘popular’.

I read an allied thread on a wine forum where someone said in effect you had to take such and such courses on wine to be able to appreciate the finer points, implying those who didn’t were somehow inferior in their take on a wine - “how could they possibly know?” If that is not wine snobbery I don’t know what is. I have never taken a wine course. Would I? Not now; a basic course is not a bad thing for a beginner to simply understand the basics, but I am too old and it would add little, at great cost, to what I have picked up over decades of consuming, reading, travelling, tasting etc. What more do I need? Yet so many of those who take these courses love to tell how, hundreds of pounds lighter and now on Diploma level or whatever, they are more knowledgable than those who have not taken that route and they all clap like seals when one of their soulmates achieves a pass. Wine drinking is a pleasant pastime, not a civil service exam - and do they go on!

You can add to the swot, the idolator: the drinker who believes that certain wine makers deserve sainthood, so wonderful are their products and so dedicated are they to their winemaking that they deserve special status. The bottom line is, they are farmers making a product for consumption by the public. Yes, many enjoy what they do for a living, as with others in life in different occupations, but it is a commercial enterprise, and some are better at it than others. It is that simple, whether it is the small village winery or the giant conglomerates.

But you would never believe that if you heard the wine snob speaking: they and the whole wine world belongs to them and their self-belief.

Even the storage of wine becomes the cellar-owner's world of right and wrong. If you wish to store decent wine for long periods then a cellar with a fairly constant temperature is a plus. As very few people own a cellar now the wine snob will buy a wine storage cooler and if they really believe all the hype then it will be the one with two or even three different temperature zones for all those wine type variations. That is, of course, only if you believe this, which is mainly twaddle: it has been scientifically shown that all wines will survive quite a large temperature fluctuation with no ill effects. Serious wine snobs will talk about various serious faults a wine can develop if you don’t have the perfect storage facility. Most of these faults are one-in-a-thousand cases: I have never suffered any of them. You are far more likely to have a faulty bottle because of a manufacturing fault, dodgy cork or some form of taint getting into it. For all but the wine snob, a place under the stairs will be adequate in most cases, and being an expensive wine will not alter how it reacts to heat or cold.

Many years ago I went to a wine tasting put on locally by a very good wine merchant. It was only because it was local that I bothered to go. On arrival there were about 50  people already tasting the wines on three long joined tables in the shape of a horseshoe. We started out behind two or three couples armed with notepads and clipboards to make notes of the tasted wines. For me, if I liked a couple of wines I was well capable of remembering them and cannot see the point on notes of a raft of wines I don’t like, but each to his own.

We got about half way round and I had heard the wine-speak of the group ahead as they scribbled their notes, and as we reached roughly the halfway point they all tried a well-known red wine, mumbled approvingly, scribbled and moved on. I poured a tasting measure, and smelt and tasted, and the wine was very obviously off; I called one of the organisers over who agreed immediately, took the bottle away and changed it. Now you might say 'clever dick', but the truth was they were wine snobs in front of us trying to impress each other with their knowledge of wine but could not tell a totally flawed/awful bottle.



There are a whole list of things that divide the wine snob from the wine geek. Geeks are wine drinkers obsessed with vineyards, latitude, soil and obscurity etc.; they can also bore the arse off you given the opportunity, but they are not snobs.

Snobs obsess about the glass they use, unless it is Riedel or similar, very costly and very easy to break; no wine can be drunk and enjoyed without them. They actually believe this. They buy expensive wines and collect to such a degree that because the drinking ‘window’ is so far in the future their collection just grows and grows, never to be drunk, just admired.

If there is one item that epitomises the wine snob it is the corkscrew. The wine snob only ever uses the “waiter's friend” or sommelier's corkscrew; for some reason it has come to distinguish the ‘serious’ wine drinker from the others. Its only real value is the space it uses and for wine waiters that is why it is used: it fits in the pocket. However, for the wine snob, difficulty in learning to use it is points gained; all other corkscrews are for amateurs, despite the fact I have used a winged corkscrew for over thirty years that has never failed to extract a cork other than a couple that simply crumbled to nothing. That really is of no consequence to the wine snob: a waiter's friend it has to be, or nothing.
Naturally it follows that the obsession with removing a cork ‘correctly’ means that any bottle fitted with a screw cap is instantly fit only for the proles: no self-respecting wine snob would entertain a bottle with a screw cap on the table, God forbid; even the devil's spawn, a non-100%-natural cork, isn’t on the same level of evil; the mere thought of not being able to show your skills learnt over many years with the waiter's friend is too much to bear.

The ability to swirl everything, tea, coffee, water like a nervous tic is a skill well-learned by the WS. It is a forerunner to over-emphasised sniffing; side-on gives you extra bonus points, and slurping with much exaggerated jowel movements.

All wines without exception have to be decanted, sometimes for days, this goes with the 'all must be kept forever' syndrome before it is ready to drink, often to the extent that a case of wine will be opened and bottles drunk at strategic points in time, none of which are the correct time. Is the correct time for the perfect bottle ever reached? Probably not, such is the snobbery about drinking windows, the endless imagined aromas and tastes and the vocabulary. This is a true note by a wine reviewer heard at a tasting regarding two different Champagnes: “ 'One can always tell Krug from Roederer,' he said, 'by the sound of the bubbles.'  Give me strength, if ever there was a phrase to differentiate between the drinker and the wine snob, that just about takes the biscuit.



Things are not as obviously elitist in the wine world as in years gone by, when any self-respecting wine merchant had staff that all wore tweed jackets, bow ties and looked down on the customer if he didn’t fit a certain profile with that something-on-the-sole-of-my-shoe look, and many did.

More importantly, I have hardly ever met a wine-maker with that same attitude. Even the more famous ones have all been down to earth and would engage about their wines with you without any silly embellishments. As the late Vincent Leflaive said at a dinner and tasting of his sublime but hugely expensive white Burgundies after being questioned by a diner on the style of his wines vis-a-vis someone else's: “If you don’t like them that way, don’t buy them.” It really is that simple.

Friday, February 14, 2020

FRIDAY MUSIC: Ian Luther, by JD

I have no idea who he is except that he is/was a busker travelling round Europe but he seems to have carve out a little niche for himself. Definitely better than your average busker because he writes a lot of his own songs plus a hillbilly(?) version of Hey Joe!
https://www.ianluther.co.uk













Thursday, February 13, 2020

COVID-19: look on the bright side

We might be all right, according to Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty on R4’s Today programme (Wednesday): China and foreign countries may succeed in containing the virus, with maybe ‘a little bit of onward transmission’ in the UK; and a change in the season may help.

That’s the picture so far and if you re-visit the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 tracker you’ll see the death toll outside China has actually gone down to one: they’ve diplomatically hidden the other one, in Hong Kong, in the list of ‘mainland’ cases, presumably to avoid irritating the Chinese Communist Party as it addresses the protest-ridden colony and institutes a harder administration there.

On the other hand, we could be headed for pandemic, as Professor Ferguson told us on the same programme the previous day: ‘He estimated about 60% of the UK population in such a situation could be affected, which if the mortality rate was 1% could result in hundreds of thousands of deaths.’ Given 66.87 million UK citizens that’s about 400,000 fatalities.

If you appreciate dark humour, you could reflect that it’s an ill wind… Like flu generally, this virus seems to be most deadly to oldies with chronic health problems. ‘Seniors’ (mealy-mouthed term) like me clog up the housing market: ‘Sixty-eight per cent of older homeowners live in a home that has at least two spare bedrooms, technically known as ‘under-occupation’, says Shelter. We’re a burden on the NHS and social care; and a good ol’ pandemic would cut a swathe through elderly, toad-like [© Phil Jupitus] Brexit supporters, so giving the better-educated and idealistic young an opportunity to demand a repeat EU referendum (assuming BoJo’s negotiations aren’t weak enough for their taste.) We’d be a great source of spare parts for transplants, now that the Government has taken possession of our very bodies; and as for the tricky business of reforming the House of Lords, the average peer is aged 70  – why not let Nature cut the Gordian knot for us? (It could even refresh the Chinese leadership, though on average (see Table 4) they’re younger than Their Lordships.)

On the other hand, if levity is inappropriate, consider that every death so far has been in China - except for the one in the Philippines, and he was Chinese. Spare a thought for the victims, and the millions now living self-isolated in ghost cities in the Middle Kingdom while they wait for the curse to burn out. In the West we are focusing more on the potential economic fallout from having become dependent on a globalist system that made coolies of a billion Easterners and billionaires of a few Westerners.

One way or another, we shall count the cost.

Tuesday, February 11, 2020

Coronavirus: a storm in a teacup?

Are we making too much fuss over the new virus? To date 910 people have died, which is less than half the annual toll from road accidents in the UK alone.

Provisionally, ‘2019nCoV’ seems much less deadly than SARS. Within China, the mortality rate is running at about 2.3% of the 40,195 infected; the two who died out of 378 cases abroad represent a rate of only 0.5%, though small figures are more likely to be statistically misleading. However, as business site Quartz warns, it’s too early for complacency: during the 2003 SARS epidemic the World Health Organisation (WHO) initially estimated a SARS fatality rate of around 3%, which later had to be revised to almost three times higher. Remember, 89% of coronavirus cases have so far neither died nor recovered.

Still, only two deaths have happened outside mainland China. It would be nice to reassure ourselves that ‘it can’t happen here’ and there is a suggestion that some ethnic groups may be more susceptible. Russia Insider cites a Chinese scientific study on the 2009 ‘swine flu’ pandemic that felt ethnicity might be one of the factors determining vulnerability to the H1N1 virus; and a new piece of research has tentatively (awaiting peer review) indicated that the alveoli (lung cells) of ‘Asian males’ have more receptors to which 2019nCoV can bind, so making those people more likely to succumb.

However, there may be other and possibly more significant predictors. A 30 January paper in The Lancet, looking at 99 ‘Wu flu’ patients in Wuhan’s Jinyintan Hospital, noted that they tended to be older (average age 55 years) and predominantly (two-thirds) male; and half of the sufferers had existing chronic illnesses. The risk pattern resembled that for viral pneumonia generally, and as with the latter, smoking may be a factor (52% of Chinese men smoke; among women, only 3% but they are often exposed to second-hand smoke.) Anybody here fit the profile?

The spread into the rest of the world is in its early days. The symptom-free incubation period is said to be about two weeks and although it’s currently thought that the virus can’t be passed on during this stage we are still learning. Besides, when exactly does one move onto the infectious stage? Charles Hugh Smith, who was predicting a pandemic a week ago, repeated his warning on Sunday, suggesting that governments are concerned to pretend for the sake of economic stability that everything is under control. In that context, it seems both understandable and yet near-insane that the WHO should urge that travel restrictions not be imposed.

Smith’s article gives reasons to disbelieve official assurances. It’s also worth noting that part of the Chinese strategy for containment was to extend the Lunar New Year holiday to 10 February in many local areas, so what happens now the great back-to work has begun? Many people must be desperate to start earning money again and so they have an incentive to ignore a ‘bit of a sniffle’.

Even if the fatality rate is indeed relatively low, the rate at which infection can spread appears to be high, so that a small percentage of a large number could result in a high victim count. In this country we have very good medical facilities but even the best could be overwhelmed by demand, as happened in Wuhan. The UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock is therefore right to label the risk to Britain as ‘serious and imminent’ – a declaration that empowers him to use force if necessary to prevent individuals absconding from 14-day quarantine, as one of them was reportedly threatening to do.

A stitch in time… if the crisis got out of hand stringent measures would demand to be employed. There are allegations that the quarantine effort in China extends to welding sufferers’ house doors shut, and herding others into guarded camps with inadequate medical care, just to stop the viral wildfire spreading. One Twitter user claims that a Hubei woman was shot dead while trying to get through a protective blockade. What would we do?

Let's do whatever we can not to have to find out.

Monday, February 10, 2020

Hey Joe: Evolution of a folk song

The Wikipedia entry on this famous song is here. It names three other songs as inspirations:

1. Niela Miller: 'Baby, Please Don't Go to Town' (1955):



Lyrics (found here):

Baby, what you’re gonna do in town?
Baby, what you’re gonna do in town?
I’m gonna sit at a bar with my feet tucked in,
Drinkin’ all the beer and whiskey and gin,
And I’m lookin’ at the young men always hangin’ ’round,
Lookin’ at the young men always hangin’ ’round.

Baby, what you’re gonna do in town?
Baby, what you’re gonna do in town?
I’m gonna talk to those young men very soon,
All to-night till to-morrow noon,
And tell ’em how my man, he puts me down,
Tell ’em how my man, he really puts me down.

Baby, please, don’t go to town.
Baby, please, don’t go to town.
’Cause when you’re flirtin’ and full of gin,
One of those boys is gonna do you in,
And your man, he won’t be around,
Your own man, he won’t be around.

2. Boudleaux Bryant's 'Hey Joe', recorded by Carl Smith in 1953:



Lyrics (from here):

Hey Joe, where'd you find that pearly-girly?
Where'd you get that jolly-dolly?
How'd you rate that dish I wish was mine?

Hey Joe, she's got skin that's creamy-dreamy
Eyes that look so lovey-dovey
Lips as red as cherry-berry wine

Now listen Joe, I ain't no heel
But old buddy let me tell you how I feel
She's a honey, she's a sugar-pie
I'm warning you I'm gonna try to steal her from you

Hey Joe, though we've been the best of friends
This is where our friendship ends
I gotta have that dolly for my own

Hey Joe, come on let's be buddy-duddy
Show me you're my palsy-walsy
Introduce that pretty little chick to me

Hey Joe, quit that waiting, hesitating
Let me at her, what's the matter
You're as slow as any Joe can be

Now come on Joe, let's make a deal
Let me dance with her to see if she is real
She's the cutest girl I've ever seen
I'll tell you face to face I mean to steal her from you

Hey Joe, now we'll be friends till the end
This looks like the end, my friend
I gotta have that dolly for my own

3. A song generally known as 'Little Sadie' but appearing under various titles, the earliest being a lyric from the Ozarks,  'Bad Lee Brown' (1922) partially written down in 1948:

Last night I was a-makin' my rounds,
Met my old woman an' I blowed her down,
I went on home to go to bed,
Put my old cannon right under my head.

Jury says murder in the first degree,
I says oh Lord, have mercy on me!
Old Judge White picks up his pen,
Says you'll never kill no woman ag'in.

and another version recorded in 1930 by Clarence Ashley as 'Little Sadie'



Lyrics (from Lyric Find):

Went out one night for to make a little round
I met little Sadie and I shot her down
Went back home and I got in my bed
Forty four pistol under my head

Wake up next morning 'bout a half past nine
The hacks and the buggies all standing in line
Gents and the gamblers standing all round
Taking little Sadie to her burying ground

Then I begin to think what a deed I'd done
I grabbed my hat and away I run
Made a good run but a little too slow
They overtook me in Jericho

I was standing on the corner, reading the bill
When up stepped the sheriff from Thomasville
He said, young man, ain't your name Brown?
Remember the night you shot Sadie down?

I said, yes, sir, my name is Lee
I murdered little Sadie in the first degree
And first degree and the second degree
If you got any papers, won't you read 'em to me?

They took me downtown and dressed me in black
Put me on the train and started me back
They crammed me back in that Thomasville jail
And I had no money for to go my bail

That judge and the jury, they took their stand
The judge had the papers in his right hand
Forty one days and forty one nights
Forty one years to wear the ball and the stripes

'Little Sadie' is a narrative and focuses on the murderer's escape, capture and trial; Bryant's 'Hey Joe' is cast as a one-sided conversation but is about the lust for someone else's girl, without the element of tragic consequences (though we don't hear the boyfriend's response to the proposition!)

Of the three, Niela Miller's seems closest to what came next, because it includes themes of infidelity and death, encapsulating them in a moment of foreboding. Her rendition conveys that histrionic note of an almost unavoidable tragedy about to occur, although as she herself says in a comment thread on Youtube (ranging from 2017 to late 2019), comparing her song to Billy Roberts':

"... my song ended with hope. His ended with murder."

Billy Roberts - see also https://heyjoeversions.wordpress.com/more-about-billy-roberts/

'Hey Joe' was written in Greenwich Village, New York and copyrighted in 1962 by her one-time boyfriend, Billy Roberts. All the elements are here: infidelity, jealousy, murder by pistol, conversation (this time two-way, with a bypasser). The narrative is crisply contained in two snapshots: the moment of intention, and then after the event. Roberts was then busking on the streets and in the coffee houses of New York.

He then moved to San Francisco and in 1965 discovered that his song had been pirated, adapted and commercially released by a Southern Californian 'garage' band called The Leaves. The odd riff is echoed in Hendrix later.



Lyrics ( from here):

Hey Joe, where you goin' with that gun in your hand?
I said hey Joe where you goin' with that gun in your hand?
I'm going out to find my woman now, she's been runnin' around with some other man
I said I'm going out and find my woman now she's been runnin' around with some other man

Well hey Joe now what are you gonna do?
Well hey Joe tell me what are you gonna do?
Well I guess I'll shoot my woman now, that's what I'll do
Well I guess I'll shoot them both before I'm through

Well hey Joe tell me where are you gonna go?
Well hey Joe I said where are you gonna go?
Well I guess I'll go down to my place in Mexico
Said I guess I'll go down to where a man can be free
And there ain't gonna be no hangman's ropes put around me

The rendition - thrashy - is at odds with the melancholy essence of the lyric.

Then we come to Hendrix - the version everyone remembers, first recorded as a single in October 1966 with his band 'The Jimi Hendrix Experience'; melancholy, dramatic, with backing vocalisation and the superconfident, powerful electric guitar of the master musician:


Lyrics (from Musicmatch)

Hey Joe, where you goin' with that gun in your hand?
Hey Joe, I said where you goin' with that gun in your hand?
Alright.
I'm goin down to shoot my old lady
You know I caught her messin' 'round with another man.
I'm goin' down to shoot my old lady
You know I caught her messin' 'round with another man.
And that ain't too cool.
(Ah-backing vocal on each line)
Uh, hey Joe, I heard you shot your woman down
You shot her down now.
Uh, hey Joe, I heard you shot you old lady down
You shot her down to the ground. Yeah!
Yes, I did, I shot her
You know I caught her messin' 'round
Messin' 'round town.
Uh, yes I did, I shot her
You know I caught my old lady messin' 'round town.
And I gave her the gun and I shot her!
Alright
(Ah! Hey Joe)
Shoot her one more time again, baby!…

AFTERMATH

In this later (can't find exactly when) version by Roberts himself, the introductory chords are as used by Hendrix, and the song ends with more instrumental, wordlessly savouring the tragedy.



Lyrics (selected from here):

Hey Joe, where you goin' with that gun in your hand
Hey Joe, I said where ya goin' with that gun in your hand

I'm goin' down to shoot my old lady
You know I caught her messin' 'round with another man
I'm goin' down to shoot my old lady
You know I caught her messin' 'round with another man
Huh, and that ain't too cool

Hey Joe, I heard you shot your woman down
You shot her down down
Hey Joe, I heard you shot your lady down
You shot her down near the ground

Yes, I did, I shot her
You know I caught her messin' 'round, messin' 'round town
Yes, I did, I shot her
You know I caught my old lady messin' 'round town
And I gave her the gun, I shot her

In 1968, Frank Zappa's The Mother Of Invention parodied the song, the Leaves' hasty tempo, the Beatles' 1967 'Sergeant Pepper' album cover and the by then well-established 'flower power' culture of San Francisco, in their own album 'We're Only In It For The Money', as 'Flower Punk':


Lyrics (from here):

Hey Punk, where you goin' with that flower in your hand?
Hey Punk, where you goin' with that flower in your hand?

Well, I'm goin' up to Frisco to join a psychedelic band
I'm goin' up to Frisco to join a psychedelic band

Hey Punk, where you goin' with that button on your shirt?
Hey Punk, where you goin' with that button on your shirt?

I'm goin' to the love-in to sit & play my bongos in the dirt
Yes, I'm goin' to the love-in to sit & play my bongos in the dirt

Hey Punk, where you goin' with that hair on your head?
Hey Punk, where you goin' with that hair on your head?

I'm goin' to the dance to get some action, then I'm goin' home to bed
I'm goin' to the dance to get some action, then I'm goin' home to bed

Hey Punk, where you goin' with those beads around your neck?
Hey Punk, where you goin' with those beads around your neck?

I'm goin' to the shrink so he can help me be a nervous wreck .

... dissolving into aimless mumbling hippie-chatter at the end.
_________________________________________________________________________

Finally, back to Niela Miller: here are some of the things she says on that YouTube thread.

We have to remember that Roberts didn't simply purloin her song but adapted elements in it, and musicians have always been inspired and borrowed from others (and even their own previous works), so as I once saw (on TV) Mick Jagger explain to a child, once you've made a song other people can do what they like with it... but at least we can credit Miller with her part in the evolution of this wonderful piece: