John & Belle Have A Blog

20 Songs

10 Songs I Listened to Today
1. "Feelin' Satisfied" -- Boston
2. 'Willin'" -- Little Feat
3. "(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais" -- The Clash
4. "Stroke it Noel" -- Big Star
5. "Ride On" -- Parlaiment
6. "Date With Destiny" -- Nightmares on Wax
7. "Take Time to Know Her" -- Percy Sledge
8. "It's Tricky" -- Run-DMC
9. "Transdermal Celebration" -- Ween
10. "Hong Kong Flu" -- The Ethiopians

10 Songs I Would Have Listened to Today if All My LP's Weren't Moldering in Some Crappy Storage Place Out Abercorn Extension in Savannah, Georgia, God Damn It to Hell
1. "Jesus is on the Mainline" -- Mississippi Fred McDowell
2. "Yellow Pills" -- 20/20
3. "Girls of Today" -- Shoes
4. "Iration" -- Fishbone
5. "Love is Gonna Let Me Down" -- Toots and the Maytals
6. "Fixing to Die Blues" -- Bukka White
7. "Rolling in My Sweet Baby's Arms" -- George Jones
8. "Thrift Store" -- Pianosaurus
9. "Couldn't I Just Tell You" -- Todd Rundgren
10. "Straighten Up And Fly Right" -- "Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys"

All roads lead to Rome

I am off tonight for Rome to attend a traditional Jewish wedding. Not something that American ex-pats in Singapore - of mixed Swedish, Norwegian and Scots descent, in case you were curious - do every day. But my dearest college friend and former roommate is the groom, and I can just barely swing it. After all, he trudged all the way from Rome to New York for our wedding. And then he provided almost free housing for our Roman honeymoon: a spare room in his apartment. Most newly-wed wives would balk at camping out with hubby's old college buddy. But Belle immediately apprehended the benefits, the delightful company of an old friend, the Eternal City.

So there you have it. It's back to the dear old Roma for me! (And Belle is very sorry she must miss it. Too darn pregnant.)

Here is an interesting page. The Roman Jewish community - although not large: approx. 15,000 these days - is the oldest in Europe. Don't really know much about it myself. My friend has managed the impressive cultural trick of moving from Boston to Rome and more or less completely settling in. He sure wasn't Roman when we were living together in Hyde Park, Chicago. I remember when he took his first Italian class. (Ah, memories.)

No blogging for a couple days, probably.

Roses Really Smell Like Boo Boo

So, I got bought this new CD, Death Cab for Cutie's Transatlanticism and it's just terrible. I blame Nylon magazine. They seem so cool and hip, like how they make those odd, machine-embroidered pictures of the cosmetics they review instead of using photos, and right in the same issue they were touting all these other bands I like, and going about the reclusive geniuses in Belle and Sebastian. And they said Death Cab for Cutie "builds a footbridge between Superchunk and Built to Spill." How am I supposed to resist that? Two great bands that could taste great together. They also noted that Death Cab for Cutie "isn't quite emo." I should say not. People, this band is wusscore. They built a long, massively diverted footbridge between the two aforementioned rocking bands' weakest songs, a bridge that stretches over the interminable marshlands of completely wussing out. As we listened to track two, I asked John, "am I listening to the Goo Goo Dolls wussy younger brothers or something?", and he said that wasn't fair to the Goo Goo Dolls, who rock way harder than that. Think about it. (Hey, in looking for links, I see that the Goo Goo Dolls are still around, grunging it up in a cleaned-up, mid 90's, pretty-boy way, just like back in the day!) None of these Death Cab guys even has good hair like that one guy in the Goo Goo Dolls, and the hair is the best part of that whole band. I haven't made so total a CD-buying error since my local record shop proprietor convinced me to buy a Ryan Adams CD (I know, I know.) I guess he thought since I like Sparklehorse I'm all alt-country up in here? Seriously, fuck a bunch of Ryan Adams. That shit is a coaster right now.

To add insult to injury, HMV was sold out of the new Shins. And the latest Belle and Sebastian. And I paid Sing $40 *&%&^$&^ dollars!!! If I only hadn't had Zoë with me I would have used the listening station, and spared everyone a lot of grief, but I was missioning. At least the new Mojave 3 album is good. And I finally got a copy of Speakerboxx/The Love Below, so I can listen to Andre 3000 get his black nerd on. It is so amazing. So all is not lost. But let this be a lesson in ever listening to music-buying advice from people whom I don't personally know, even if they have cool magazines and/or record stores. No, wait, actually it's a lesson in not listening to stuff online first.

Imperturbable Eggplant

Zoë's great aunt Laura has been visiting and returns to the old country, Ameriky, tomorrow. Zoë drew her a picture of Zoë and Laura. (Zoë is the eggplant on the right. What adjective best expresses her mood, would you say?)

One or two things

Brian Weatherson muses:

More generally, "three or four" is an interesting phrase. It would be decidedly odd to say "Three or five jobs interest me", although one could imagine circumstances under which that is true. It's not that "three or four" is an idiom, but there is something odd about the construction.

By extremely odd coincidence, just a few days ago I descended into this very pit of perplexity whilst reading page 1 of chapter 1 of Patrick O'Brian's H.M.S. Surprise. (Which you can see here.) Please consider the oddity of the sentence: "Some of the civilians had a stuffed and noncommital air, and one or two of the sailors remained staring at the sheets of blotting-paper laid out before them." O'Brian is quite a good writer, but this is just plain sloppy. We humans can count up to five sailors at a glance last time I studied cognitive science. (Then again, where is it written that the narrator is using a human eye and brain to gather data, rather than some other organ of limited omniscience?) The coffin nail, surely, is that iron laws of anaphora would seem to demand that the sentence conclude: 'laid out before him or them.'

One or two points Brian makes have a certain twiddly intriguingness. But I've had two or three beers. Click on one or two of these links, if you like.

PMLA: the Good, the Bad, the Ugly

Ritual ribbing and roasting of the MLA as always this year. Everyone chatting around the fire. (See also here.) And Chun and I had a civil back-and-forth. But I can understand why people are tired of it, too. (Here's where we were this time last year.)

The problem, such as it is, is that the likes of Scott McLemee's Chron Piece - which he describes as an inconsequential squib - is obviously an inconsequential squib, not a platform engineered to take the strain as culture warriors and regular folks pile on heavily from all sides. It's therefore unfair to hold McLemee liable for injuries. On the other hand, I can see why - if you think the MLA isn't a complete joke - these pieces are frustrating. In effect, if not in intent, they foreclose serious debate. Since no other kind of piece on the MLA gets written for general consumption, everyone is now on a hairtrigger with their jokes and mockery. But the measure of serious scholarship should not be one's ability to soldier on reading your paper even though people in the audience are squeezing whoopee cushions at odd intervals. On the gripping hand, if something is funny, you are just plain allowed to make fun of it. That's some sort of moral rule.

Yu Sheng

Gong Xi Fa Cai! Happy New Year! (Well, slightly belatedly, but it goes on for days...) Here is a Belle version of a traditional Singaporean New Year's dish: yu sheng or raw fish salad. This dish originated here but is apparently becoming popular elsewhere in the Chinese world. All the ingredients are arranged on the serving plate separately, and then the diners get together to toss them with chopsticks, as high as possible, saying "lo hei", which means "to toss it up" but, like everything else in Mandarin worth mentioning, is some sort of homonym for 'get mad cash', in this case: "to prosper more and more". Since I'm not supposed to eat raw fish while pregnant I made this variation with seared fish. This would also be the way to go if you don't feel confident of your sashimi-grade fish. Provided you do, then just fan out thin slices of any kind of fish you'd like to eat raw; alternating tuna and yellowtail would look nice.

Mystery of Human Origins

Well, now I know where those bodies I went to see came from.

WSJ on moral philosophy

Can anybody honestly maintain that working Americans should be coerced to ante up for golf awareness? Discuss.

Ftrain & Harper's

Sometimes I remember to mention how much I enjoy Ftrain. And now what a nice design for Harper's. It's elegant and functional. Go poke around. Go read this.