(From FB–before that I know not.)
Well, I Am an “Olde Pharte” but. . .
I do still prefer double-action. Still, I take the point:
Get the T-Shirt here, if you want. (I have no connection whatsoever with the seller. I just appreciate the T-Shirt’s comment. :-))
Literacy on the Internet
Whether one considers social networking forums, specialty forums focused on whatever topic, blogs, or even professional “news” outlets and “scholarly” articles posted on the Internet, I’ve come to the conclusion that well over half the people that present themselves as English speakers would benefit greatly from buying and religiously using Rosetta Stone English Level 1 for as long as it takes to master basic–very basic–English.
That is all.
It’s the (Stupid) Culture, Stupid
*sigh* It’s just one more thing in a long, long list of dirty laundry issuing from an increasingly dumbed down popular culture, but it’s one of those things that irk me even more than people who have apparently been jamming a fork behind their eyeballs and stirring long enough to miss the first R in FebRuary. *sigh*
Whadafug you talkin’ ’bout, Willis?
OK, I’ll just let that one slide and answer the question anyway.
This A.M. I woke hearing a children’s song–well, almost always sung as a children’s song–in my mind’s ear. A real earworm the thing is. Anywho, After a couple of hours, I thought, “Hmm, Self, I wonder if folks have posted any YouTube videos of this song?” So, in answer to my question to Self, I did what any moderately curious person asking such a question of Self might do and input a lil searcherooo.
Yep. Lots of folks have posted videos of the song, and of the first page of searches returned EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM RENDERS THE TUNE DIFFERENTLY AND ALL OF THEM WRONG. “Why,” I asked Myself, “would these people who can play guitar or piano (well, keyboard) get the tune wrong–sometimes by one note in a phrase, sometimes by several?”
They’re illiterate. The song isn’t some folk song but has an actual composer and actual written music and lyrics still under copyright. Sure, anyone can get a mechanical license to produce a version of the song, but any even semi-musically-literate person should AT LEAST be able to GET THE NOTES RIGHT–at least ONCE!
Searching instead for the first recording of the song–by Peggy Lee of all folks!–yields someone who WAS musically literate actually singing the notes that Arthur Hamilton wrote:
Any moderately musically literate person will hear many, many examples of performers (I refuse to call them “artists”) rendering otherwise well-known tunes wrong–usually in ways that limit the range of notes, narrowing the tune to eliminate intervals that either the singer or his audience can’t discern.
Yeh, yeh, it’s just a kids’ song, and most of the other music butchered by pop ears and performances is just pop fluff, but it’s also another area where our culture is getting dumber and dumber.
Think about two common meanings of “dumb” there. When the culture becomes UNABLE to express certain things because it’s both dimmer-witted–lacking the wit to express something–and “mute” as it were, lacking the actual means of expressing a thing, then that area of the culture is drifting into a “dark age” where not onl;y does it not know how to do something but it is losing the memory of once being able to do a thing.
And it’s not just music that this applies to in our culture, folks. A widespread Dark Age coming. . . maybe.
My Least Favorite Month of the Year
Sure, when I was a wee tad, I occasionally heard strange word pronunciations (strange to my ear because I lived in a somewhat literate family environment and began reading at an early age), like “warsh rag” for “wash cloth” (“warsh” never seemed to be accompanied by “cloth” for some reason) and “drore” for “drawer”. Somehow, though, I was never exposed during my formative years to people who simply could not pronounce the months of the year correctly. Hence my least favorite month of the year, a time of the year nowadays when I have to continually bite my tongue to keep from shouting
Memories
Every now and then things long misplaced just pop into focus from long-ago memories. Here’s one from those after school snack times in front of the TV (B&W, of course) before heading out to play for a bit before dinner (well, actually “supper” in our home :-)). Every afternoon about four a brief video of a jet in flight accompanied by music and the reading of “High Flight” would hold me for a very short time:
The poem
“High Flight”
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air….Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.
Where never lark, or even eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
– Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.–John Gillespie Magee, Jr.
Just one more memory, burnished by time, softly glowing. I can still hear it as one of “the voices in my head”.
Can You Spot the Fake?
Answer: It’s the guy with the bad golf swing who’s also poorly photoshopped to back up the laughable claim that he goes skeet shooting “all the time”.
Note: the photoshopped pic purporting to be of The Zero with his saddle oxfords, golf gloves and a shotgun turned up in a Tweet from New Republic with a link to a fake White House site. TNR, of course, is just anther limb of the Democrat Octopoid Hivemind. Since it was caught out, it’s tried to blame its stupidity on Twitter.
Apart From Innumeracy and Grammar Failures, Moderately Interesting. . .
What? Oh, this article about the feds making those who unlock their dumb phones criminals. Sure, the info is pretty much useless to Olde Phartes like me who just use a cell phone to make calls (don’t try calling my cell phone, cos I won’t answer), but it’s interesting nonetheless.
Still, how many times can one read something like,
“There’s more than a few ways around this. . . “
. . . without gagging and searching for a way to dopeslap, then tar, feather and hang the author from the highest tree?
There ARE. . . ways, idiot. Count it out. Plural. Got it? (No. He can’t count and can’t parse a simple sentence in English. Typical Hiveminder.)
Continue reading “Apart From Innumeracy and Grammar Failures, Moderately Interesting. . .”
“Low-Information” Voters Wake to Reality
. . . well, at least a few are.
A Reasonable Analogy
Both the so-called “War on Drugs” and our borders themselves are frauds of monstrous size, each in its own ways. Neither the “feddle gummint” policies on drugs nor its almost complete lack of border enforcement make any sense. . . except when viewed as anarcho-tyranny encouragement of real criminals and criminalizing the personal liberties of citizens.
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1. The fedgov needed a constitutional amendment in order to be able to pass the Volstead Act which prohibited the manufacture, import, distribution or sale of ONE drug, alcohol. The Eighteenth Amendment has since been repealed and the Volstead Act is null and void. Where then does the fedgov get any LEGITIMATE authority for its so-called “War on Drugs”?
2. The fedgov’s de facto “cheesecloth” border policy (effective policy: open borders) is even more nonsensical, because the effective policy is both contrary to black letter law on the books and defines a country that has already been conquered by anyone who wishes to do so. No borders=no nation.
These two areas pretty well describe the idiocy that is now our national government. It’s completely without legitimate authority in almost all areas in which it exerts power and in areas where it does have legitimate authority it’s either unconcerned with effective enforcement or incompetent.
What we need at this point is for all civilian bureaucraps, all fedgov politicians and the normal inhabitants of the Pentagon, etc., to hold a plenary session in some huge venue–I’d even go with “built for the occasion”–in DC and for God to send a massive flood to wipe ’em all out. The nation could then hold a memorial service honoring the one or two honest and decent politicians or bureaucrats caught up in the flood and a new Independence Day celebrating our freedom from the illegitimate harassment by unconstitutional exercises of power and incompetent (or willful disregard for) enforcement of legitimate areas of authority.
Well, I’d be willing to settle for enough blackmail on enough congresscritters to get another amendment submitted to the states to remove Eighth Amendment protections against “cruel and unusual punishments” for fedgov politicians and bureaucraps (and enough blackmail on enough State legislators to get it so we could then get it ratified) and a follow up law allowing tarring and feathering (hot tar and feathers, at night, flaming torches encouraged *heh*) of fedgov politicians and bureaucraps who abuse their powers to harass citizens.
I’d bring the popcorn to every “torch party” I could attend.