There's a reason they're called that

Sloth: 1 Science: 0

Edit: As my wretchedly Funnier-Than-Me friend David points out, the story should be titled "Sloth completes groundbreaking three-year study on human persistence..."

Le Blog Bérubé, we hardly knew ye

On of the defining features of this smoking shambling excuse for a blog is a consistent ability to get around to things far, far too late. While tidying my cyber-shelves, I find this draft claiming it's about time I hooted and pointed at Le Blog Bérubé. So, now, a month after it slipped beneath the waves and the last bubbles popped upon the surface, the time is ripe for me to make grand prancing motions towards it. Obviously "introducing" a Koufax winner (OK, runner-up) to my non-existent readership is akin to dramatically disclosing the existence of Nelson's Column to Londoners, or the night sky or the tendency of things to fall towards the earth, but that's pretty much the purpose of BongoLudo - tardily re-exposing what everyone already knew with a queeny gasp and antic gestures of profound revelation.

Setting aside Bérubé's new opus "What's Liberal About The Liberal Arts?", let me count my debts to him and his "web" "log". Pre-Firstly and leastly, he did me a permanent solid by using the term "The InterNets" (instantly misappropriated and bandied about by me, here and elsewhere), but he provides an enviable Trifecta of webbery.

Firstly, Bérubé is a proponent of pointy-headed Literary Theory who actually appears to love books, and literature. This has proved a massive challenge to me, my clothes still shredded and smoking from my escape from the Clutches of Theory, but I hope I'm man enough to not actually change any of my cherished beliefs and admit there might be something to it.

Secondly, he's an actual participant in what I don't really want to think of as being the front lines of the culture wars - entering into disputation with various luminaries I don't want to specify, because naming calls, you understand? (said with squinty eyes, like Kevin McNally in the wretched Pirates Of The Caribbean cash dairy infomercials), thus actually doing what hardly any folks dare do - stop rolling their eyes, roll up their sleeves and actually engage in debate/abuse/parcheesi.

And thirdly, lastly, and by no means leastly, as well as the Byzantine politics and back-lit lit crit, he write enormously touching accounts of his life as the proud parent of Jamie, a smashing sounding urchin who has Down's syndrome. Nice to see that his other offspring Nick gets the odd mention also.

The Jamie stuff has me piping my eyes and emitting strange sighs and I can't add anything evey remotely useful. The added piquancy, I guess, is that Bérubé is a fully-fledged Literary Theory Person, a species I'd given up all hopes of being inspired by. I speak from a veritable pedestal of ignorance: my grip on po-mo literary theory is akin to that of a pair of tin sugar tongs on the pelt of a galloping mammoth – it simply affords insufficient purchase for any useful purpose. His blog is the first thing I've read that made my check my headlong flight, if not actually retrace my steps or meekly submit my neck to the yoke again.

Anyway, kudos, au revoir and thanks to the Bérubatollah. The web's a duller (if faster) place without ye.

Does not suffice...

I can't be the only one viewing the brou, ha and other ha over Blood Diamond and the ice cartel's Chris Morris-esque self-parody and then pointing mutely at The Atlantic's 1982 article Have You Ever Tried To Sell A Diamond? Odd to think of diamonds as semi-precious stones completely unconnected to notions of love or devotion. Surely one of the greatest marketing successes since St Paul Inc.?

T'Atlantic has a roundup of their ice coverage here, which leads one to hop skip jump via Anil Dash and Cory Doctorow to the NY Post's alps-atop-alps horror-beyond-horror story on the amputee extras used in the movie being stiffed by Warner Bros. Sometimes I think this is what the internet is for.

Absence and Toons

Apologies for another prolonged absence. All manner of stuff going on, hardly any of which fell into conveniently bloggable increments or tropes. But just now, Joseph Barbera dead at 93. Wow, what he lived through, and saw, and made. "Was Scrappy-Doo the Echt Shark-Jumping id-hound?", I hear you ask. And, as Danny Baker often asks, what happened in the Flintstones to the sabre-toothed cat Fred dumps outside, and is then dumped by in the title sequence? "One day Fred will finally win the fight/When he puts that cat out for the night". Baker reckons the cat was in the pilot, but then got greedy, made his agent renegotiate the contract for the rest of the series, and was then cut entirely, but they'd already filmed the title sequence and recorded the music.

Vital News, Affecting All Bipedal Lifeforms

And a verily merrily Grimble to all our reader.

2007? That's a Sci-Fi year.

First Compressions

Via the excellent Alex Ross of the The New Yorker, some excellent thoughts (none of them mine) on compression in modern beat combo music. Everything Louder Than Everything Else is very good, but The Death Of Dynamic Range is just brilliant. Much to over-mull here, but howsabout them waveforms? Exactly the kind of clearly illuminated and illustrated expertise I promise shall never darken the towels of this blog. You have my word on that.

The God Deluge-In

Those InterWebs are awash with reviews and reviews of reviews of Dawkins' The God Delusion. I have nothing to add to the melee other than slack-jawed praise for Stephen Tomkins of Ship Of Fools. Now THIS is how to review someone you don't agree with. That all such commentary should be as fair-minded.

Nomenclatchoo!

Am snivelling with Man-Flu, which can only be a partial excuse for being, once again, last to the feast. Here I am, puffing and chewing and huffing over Leavitt's Freakonomics. I have precisely nothing original to add to the general hooplah, other than "Yes, IntarWebs, I too found it an enjoyable and interesting read". (Be unafraid, gentle reader, that slamming sound you just heard was the presses being stopped and the front page being held.) I particularly like the chapter on baby names, the observations thereon (Jewish/Old Testament monickers get popular with gentile baby-namers, but never the other way round) and the predictions for the future. Observation, Theory, Testable Prediction, that's science, homes!

I can't remember who linked to it (my apologies, IntarWebs), but out-check this Baby Name Graphinator (that may not be the proper term, possibly). It visualises, no, wait, surely we're doing the visualising. It, uh, represents the relative and absolute popularity of American baby names. I particularly like how, as you type successive letters of a name, it shows all the names that stilly apply. Pitifully simple and straightforward to those whose mind works that way, but mine doesn't, and I coo and ooh at it as if it were a kitten in a wellington boot.

There's piles of fun to be had tracing names as they wax and wane, but the oddest case of all is "Adolph". It's enormously popular in the 1880's, still a biggun' up until a precipitous drop around 1910 (and isn't it great to be actually looking at a plunging graph line that does actually literally look like a craggy precipice?). The rate of decrease stays pretty steady right through up to the 1930's but then stays stable throughout the 1940's and 50's before dwindling in the 60's to die out in the early 70's. EHHH?

I'm struggling to picture an expectant couple, or one newly blessed with issue, in the late 40's or 50's, possibly returned from fighting in Europe, saying to each other "Honey, you remember how back before the war we weren't going to call our children Adolph? Well, I've been thinking..."

Life among the celebrities

Slightly shocked and awed to find that the mighty PZ Meyers (he of the fairly compulsory Pharyngula blog) was in Bromley, my Place O'Toil. I posted briefly at his place, but have to mutter aloud to myself further on this matter.

Bromley is many things to many men. It was H.G Well's childhood home before the railway came through (twice) and suburbanised the place to hell. It is no coincidence that so many of Well's plots involve the lavish destruction of suburbs and all that they contain and entail. And let's not forget, no, do let's, no, don't - let's not forget that Wells was a game designer, what with Floor Games and Little Wars.

Anyhoo, back to Bromley's place in The Great Scheme Of Things. I loved this great piece in the Guardian about the famous-amongst-themselves Bromley Contingent, which raised the pressing question: had there been anything better to do in Bromley, would we have had Punk Rock? I remain apathagnostic (see what I did there?) on the matter. Writers I Normally Trust tell me it was all terribly important and things were awfully awful and needed shaking up, but there does seem to be an air of "You Had To Be There" about it all, and surely for the really good stuff you didn't have to be there, you just have to listen to it. This seems to be true about the effectively-unknown-at-the-time Velvet Underground (as the old saw goes, hardly anyone ever saw them, but everyone who did immediately formed their own band). The first few Velvets albums are just boffo. You don't have to have any personal stake or sentimental attachment to the epoch, they just stand up on their own two feet and compel replaying.

Some dreadful Channel 4 talking-head-fest about influential bands and the unexpectedly entertaining Andy McCluskey of Orchestral Manouevres In The Dark made the excellent point that every ten years or so there is a general bewailing about how rock is dying on its corporate arse and live music has lost all its magic, and then someone will re-record the first Velvet Underground album and be acclaimed as the Saviour of the Muse (which obviously allows the accompanying chronicling music journo's to go through the apostolic process of discovery, doubt, witnessing and testamentation). Strokes? White Stripes? I'm looking at you etc.

Perhaps the final word on this strangely cataleptic/catalytic Kentish town is Billy Jenkins' brilliantly unhinged opus "Still...Sounds Like Bromley". Whatever altitude my praise for it attains, it sufficeth not.

Cobwebs, dusting, spluttering

Away for the longest time, what with work and offline occurrences and what not. I could claim that I was readying for the roll-out of an extraordinary bongoludo 2.0, but it would be a tiny flaming lie.

Hope all well with you and all of your doings, normal intermittent and patchy service will be resumed anon.

Howsabout them Nintendos? Remember when they used to make these? Not me, nor my feet.

And the first thing I've read on Salon in years, a whacking great interviewathon with Richard Dawkins. That is all.