Friday, June 03, 2016

Friday Night Is Music Night - there is a fault

Owing to a technical problem, JD is unable to share his latest selection. He suggests a test card placeholder, and so here is the first British tuning signal image, from 1934:

This and more, here: http://www.meldrum.co.uk/mhp/testcard/bbc_tune.html


... plus a BBC interlude film:



... and a relic interesting from several points of view. I suppose I should put in a trigger warning about old colonial attitudes, but I hope the visitor to this page can look beyond emotional back-readings to the original intent and the value of historical records:



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Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Like twilight on a harsh landscape


Routine comes down like twilight on a harsh landscape, softening it until it is tolerable. The complexity is too subtle, too varied; the values are changing utterly with each lesion of vitality; it has begun to appear that we can learn nothing from the past with which to face the future — so we cease to be impulsive, convincible men, interested in what is ethically true by fine margins, we substitute rules of conduct for ideas of integrity, we value safety above romance, we become, quite unconsciously, pragmatic.
F. Scott Fitzgerald – The Beautiful and Damned (1922)

Behind the endless debates and controversies of the public arena there is a cold and passionless reality. We experience the complexity of it all as intelligence, reason, debate, honesty, dishonesty, integrity, lies, errors, laughter, tears, jokes, tragedies and so on and so on. This is the joy of living, of discovery, of understanding that harsh landscape which is the only one we'll ever know. Apart from those invented to deceive us of course.

As Baruch Spinoza knew, a defence against deception is our ability to observe the workings of natural law. We observe and are influenced by what we see and feel. Those influences feel like intelligence, curiosity, decision making, choice, debate, compromise and options but they are all of these things and yet none of them. They are the effects of natural law.

Only when we understand natural law do we get closer to that harsh landscape because by understanding it we adapt to it and come to know and even love it. Our understanding is an integral factor in its passionless workings, even down to the long forgotten trajectory of a flint tipped spear. That is all the freedom we have but it is enough. In spite of all our limitations it has dragged us from that spear to where we are now.

Elites know all this at an instinctive, grasping, predatory level. They know that if they limit our curiosity and our consequent understanding of natural law then they also limit our freedom and our ability to participate in the way things are and the way they have to be. They limit our ability to distinguish true from false.

To my mind this is why the public arena has become so peculiar, so riddled with emotional blackmail and obvious drivel. Reason has finally become inconvenient, a hindrance to government by elites. They need to preserve their social distance but for some time natural human curiosity has been eating away at the mystique on which their puny Olympus sits.

So they substitute rules of conduct for ideas of integrity.
And they encourage us to value safety above romance.
And we cease to be impulsive, convincible men.

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Sunday, May 29, 2016

Referendum conundrum, simplified

If you don't believe in democracy, don't vote. If you do, vote "Leave".

If you think it doesn't make any difference, you will soon be taught a devastating lesson: the EU is already privately tossing around ideas for Britain's punishment:

https://www.euractiv.com/section/uk-europe/news/house-of-lords-warned-eu-will-punish-uk-if-it-votes-for-brexit/


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Sunday Serenade: Hoffnung's Horrortorio

Listening to Radio 3 (for a change) yesterday I heard an interview with the composer Joseph Horowitz (it was his 90th birthday and they'd made him a cake). He spoke of being commissioned by Gerard Hoffnung to write a Gothic comedy piece with a clever barrister who "knows nothing about music." Dracula's daughter marries Frankenstein's son:



Hoffnung's legendary wit and raconteurial ability are shown in his 1958 address to the Oxford Union:




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Friday, May 27, 2016

Friday Night Is Music Night: tinkling the ivories

JD writes: More musical delightfulness; this time on the piano. Hard to know what to include and what to leave out but these are some of my favourite pianists.

The piano: King of instruments- "No other instrument has been as important to the history of Western music as the piano. Since its invention in Florence three hundred years ago, the piano has become many things to many people—a bridge between the worlds of classical and popular music and the ultimate composer’s companion." http://www.films.com/id/749

And here are some of the finest players of that 'king of instruments' in the world of popular music-

Duke Ellington, Willie 'the lion' Smith, Billy Taylor:



There is added poignancy to this video by Allen Toussaint in that he died a few hours after the show:



 And here are two of the best from the world of classical music:

- Glenn Gould who, as usual, is so engrossed in the music he sings/hums along with it. He IS the music:



- and Nikolai Demidenko:

-

Enjoy :)


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Wednesday, May 25, 2016

Step by step

Foxconn have been working on this for some time. From the Independent we hear

60,000 workers at Apple supplier Foxconn have been replaced with robots, according to reports.

The figure comes from a local government official, who said employee numbers at one of Foxconn's factories in Kunshan, near Shanghai, have been drastically slashed in recent months.


Perhaps the Chinese government has an expanding role for all those dumped workers.

The Chinese government plants 488 million fake comments every year

Harvard Study based on leaked email archives reveals massive astroturfing operation

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Tuesday, May 24, 2016

REFERENDUM CONUNDRUM

Someone who supports Remain in the issue of membership of the institutionally undemocratic EU, is happy with the idea that the people's vote shouldn't matter.
So why would they vote in the referendum?


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All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.