August 3, 1983: Something extraordinary

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These are Matthew De Abaitua’s words. They are awesome:

Wendy Melvoin is fresh from high school. She is a wearing a V-necked sleeveless top, and patterned shorts. She is playing the first chords of a new song on her purple guitar, opening chords that she wrote, a circular motif with a chorus effect. Wendy is eighteen-nineteen and she has the high cheekbones and diffident confidence of a Hollywood upbringing. She half-smiles at the faces that crowd close to the low club stage. This is Wendy’s first gig with the new band, and the song she is playing is “Purple Rain,” and nobody in the audience has ever heard “Purple Rain” before because this is the night that Prince and the Revolution record the song.

No, seriously. This video link is the foundation of the take you know and love and have been listening to for almost 30 years. They took it live, from here.

The gig is a benefit for the Minnesota Dance Theater. Prince and the Revolution are taking dance lessons and their tutor suggests the gig as a way of supporting the financially challenged theatre; because Prince is a local lad, born and raised in Minneapolis, a city he will always come back to, he agrees to play.

In 1983, Prince is an international star, thanks to “1999″ and “Little Red Corvette.” He has released five albums in five years, from when he was eighteen years old. He has so many songs he forms other bands like The Time and Vanity 6 to play them. He is an impresario and a producer and he is also only twenty-three, not so far away from the poor black kid who stood outside McDonald’s just to smell the food he couldn’t afford. His instinct for self-reliance, his tendency to be dictatorial, has been blindsided by these two sophisticated young women, Wendy and, on her keyboards, her lover, Lisa; for the first time in his life, he will collaborate in a meaningful way.

[…]

The crowd at First Avenue, their faces straining against one another, receive the brief benediction of a wavering spotlight: to them, “Purple Rain” doesn’t sound like any song that Prince has played before: the tight electronic funk, his harsh and weird sex songs, the soul ballads in which he asks for forgiveness — “Purple Rain” is something new, something different. They don’t know how to react. In fact the crowd is so muted that when this recording is prepared for the album, the engineer loops some crowd noise taken from a football game to give it some life.

What do great songs sound like the first time we hear them? Can you remember that feeling? When Bob Dylan heard The Animals’ version of “House of the Rising Sun,” he got out of the car and ran around it again and again he was so excited. The first time you hear a great song is so rare, and it can never be repeated; watching the crowd during this first performance of “Purple Rain,” I see that look on a few faces, a silent shocked awe. On the twenty-seven other recordings of “Purple Rain” on my iPod, the moment the first chord is strummed, the crowd cheer, acknowledging the anthem. They become a congregation, keen to be guided through the Purple Rain, and that has its ecstasies, even if it involves cigarette lighters held aloft, and hands waved in the air. But to hear silence flowing back from the audience, no singalong because they don’t know the words, is to eavesdrop on the shock of the new.

Oh, holy crap just go read the whole thing, and do NOT miss the first link up there — it’s the video.

Via MeFi. This shit, right here, is some quality Internettin’, boys and girls. Enjoy.

PS: The MeFi thread reminded me of this Hall of Fame peformance of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” with Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, Steve Winwood, and others, which I previously mentioned here. The best part, even over Prince’s amazing solo and the degree of “holy shit” you see on the faces of the other musicians is what comes at the end: Prince finishes his solo, tosses the guitar up into the air, and walks — no, struts — offstage.

The guitar never comes down.

What We’ve Learned: Burglary Edition

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Right, so, we got robbed.

Late enough Friday night for to actually be Saturday morning, someone tossed a big-ass decorative stone through our downstairs sliding glass door and made off with my laptop and my backpack, which contained a variety of other delights including my camera and some really nice headphones. Awesome.

Let’s take a look at the tape:

Amazingly, there’s good news
You know what I didn’t lose? Any data whatsoever, thanks to Time Machine, CrashPlan, and Dropbox. Well, mostly the first, since that was the only one I needed to reconstitute my working environment, but had the nefarious jackholes grabbed the backup drive, too, I’d have the extra backups. Food for thought.
So how’d that go?
I ordered a new Macbook online and scheduled in-store pickup in Highland Village. I picked it up, took it home, plugged it into my Time Machine drive, and went to this little guy’s birthday party. When I got home, my computer was basically right where I left it — browser windows and all. Beat that.
Amusing Lesson Number 1
You can, with a big enough check, have your glass door replaced in the middle of the goddamn night.
Did they bring a shop vac and help clean up the glass?
Yes, they brought a shop vac and helped to clean up the glass.
What about Brenda? Is she really gonna move in with that guy?
Apparently so.
Who’s Brenda?
I have no idea, but the glass dudes were seriously discussing it.
So did the alarm go off?
Nope. Somehow, the crazy single lady who lived here first didn’t think to put a glass break sensor in the room where *30% of the wall is glass**. Go figure. Yeah, fixing that ASAP.
Amusing Lesson Number 2
This being Texas, the cops were utterly uninterested in the (obviously, completely, totally unloaded) handgun on the entryway table once I told them it was mine and not evidence.
Do we feel good about that safe now?
You bet your ass.
In which the wonders of plastics are explored
In searching for security solutions to the back door problem, I came across the fact that 3M is doing some pretty amazing stuff with window film. Sure, they can block heat and UV, but they’ve gone much farther than that. Like, you can get stuff strong enough to prevent the “flying daggers of bloody death” hurricane feature, and that will slow down or stymie a would-be burglar. More noise and less progress is anathema to that line of work, so it may well be that we eschew the “ghetto prison” look and go for for some space-age polymers instead.
Amusing Lesson Number 3
If you make enough noise, ADT will promise to help you sooner than October. Score one for “firmly assertive” and “willing to take your business elsewhere”.
Amusing Lesson Number 4
I feel really, really good about my decision to consolidate sensitive information in 1Password now. You should seriously be considering this for your laptops, too, unless you have some sort of whole-disk encryption thing going on.
Do you leave the laptop downstairs anymore?
Are you fucking kidding me?
Does your downstairs look like a holdout set from a zombie movie?
Shut up.

Two more bits on Kluwe and the Vikings

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So, yeah, it turns out this guy is a little odd by NFL standards — giant fantasy gamer, essentially disinterested in football beyond his niche (which he apparently does very well), and possessed of a genuinely quick and well-educated mind. In other words, he’s a huge nerd. That makes this even MORE awesome.

Also, if the first version of the letter offended your delicate sensibilities, well, he’s gone and posted a clean version as well.

Oh, and there’s a great MeFi thread on the whole thing, too. So that’s AN ENTIRE EXTRA BIT at no extra charge. See how good I am to you?

So that’s what he meant

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I’ll admit that, for 25 years or more, I had no idea what Pat DiNizio meant in the lyrics to “Behind the Wall of Sleep,” but now that I’ve actually seen a picture of Jeanie Shrimpton, well . . . right there with ya, buddy.

(Here, in this nuturing group, I’ll admit that I also didn’t understand the Stones reference (“…she stood just like Bill Wyman…”) until at least 1988.)

I think Heathen may have just become Vikings fans

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The context for this is right: Ravens linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo spoke out recently in favor of a Maryland ballot initiative legalizing gay marriage. In response, wingnut jackass Emmett Burns — a Maryland state delegate! — [wrote a letter to the Ravens owner(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/07/brendon-ayanbadejo-ravens-emmett-burns-marriage_n_1863488.html) asking that he “inhibit such expressions from your employee.”

So much WAT, amirite?

Anyway, Minnesota punter Chris Kluwe noticed, and dropped a righteous and mighty smackdown on state delegate Burns in response. It’s a thing of brutal and effective beauty, and you should go read the whole thing.

By way of followup, Kluwe provided some context for his remarks after the fact.

Hugos: Baffling.

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I’m really, really confused how Among Others beat out Embassytown for best novel. The latter was legitimately compelling and inventive; the former is a terribly simplistic young-adult outsider-comes-of-age story that boils down to “Are you there, Sci fi? It’s me, Mori” and leaves more plot threads unresolved than not.

No comfort for the Wolverine

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Hey Michigan….

Yeah, that went about as well as could be expected for Hoke’s squad. Vastly overranked at 8, they got chewed up and spat out by a reloaded Alabama team that, under Saban, is producing NFL players at a terrifying clip.

Even overrated, this was about what we expected from any Big 10 – Alabama matchup. Recall what the 9-3 2010 Alabama team did to Michigan State in the Capital One Bowl, which remains the only time I’ve ever seen a team forced to punt on 4th and goal.

Also as expected, Alabama snags the top spot in the polls, leapfrogging even sportswriter fave USC in the process; the Trojans don’t play quality until November (Oregon on the 3rd).

LSU will drop again before they rise, since they’ve opted to open against creampuffs (and even their SEC schedule starts soft, with Auburn on the 22nd; they don’t play a quality team until Florida in October).

Rightly or wrongly, Michigan counts as a quality win, and those are in short supply early in the year (even if, after the rout, they’ve been dropped to #19).

The new top 10:

  1. Alabama
  2. USC
  3. LSU
  4. Oregon
  5. Oklahoma
  6. Florida State
  7. Georgia
  8. Arkansas
  9. South Carolina / West Virginia (tie)

FSU is way overrated. I’m shocked that South Carolina is still in the top ten, too, given their shaky performance over the weekend — the Gamecocks only barely escaped Vanderbilt.

Bama should cruise over Western Kentucky next weekend without trouble, but meets Arkansas the week after in the first (or second?) real test of the season.

Roll Tide, and pass the whiskey.

And now: The Football Previews

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First, the usual Hater’s Guide at Deadspin, and then the somewhat more focussed and — let’s be fair — relevant Why The Rest Of The SEC Hates You.

The former’s best bit:

Turning our attention to football, how much fun is it that USC is ranked No. 1? That’ll make it all the more enjoyable when the Trojans get destroyed by an SEC school in the national title game. USC is 10 times more lovable when it’s getting crushed. And I remain in awe of Lane Kiffin, a man who now sits atop the college football rankings without actually having done anything, ever. He’s amazing.

So true. I’m not playing favorites; Deadspin continues thusly:

  1. Alabama. I appreciate Nick Saban for being, in essence, the anti-Joe Paterno. There’s no illusion of affection here. No coddling. No “I’m going to turn these wayward young boys into fine young men” bullshit. Saban is precisely what a college football coach should be: a merciless, evil man who will eat your liver raw if you dare get in the way of him winning football games. Anyone not interested in winning games can go get FUCKED, and I find that kind of attitude refreshing in a sea of phony sentimental profiles of coaching legends. No one loves Nick Saban, and that’s good because no one should ever love football coaches. Football coaches are horrible people.

And I salute Alabama fans for their terrifying devotion to FOOTBAW. Can you imagine what Alabama people would be capable of without football to occupy them? I think we should all be happy that the Crimson Tide are there to distract them from starting Racial Holy War. Such shiny helmets.

Once again, Roll Tide.

Even Fox News says Ryan’s full of shit.

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I know you’ll be as surprised as I was to learn that, apparently, a Republican CAN lie too much for Fox News. This morning, Fox is running an editorial on Paul Ryan’s address that includes this:

On the other hand, to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention to facts, Ryan’s speech was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech. On this measure, while it was Romney who ran the Olympics, Ryan earned the gold.

The good news is that the Romney-Ryan campaign has likely created dozens of new jobs among the legions of additional fact checkers that media outlets are rushing to hire to sift through the mountain of cow dung that flowed from Ryan’s mouth. Said fact checkers have already condemned certain arguments that Ryan still irresponsibly repeated.

The author goes on from there.

Roll Tide. Hail Saban.

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The WSJ has a piece on Saban and the Tide up. It’ll rot behind the paywall, so here’s a few key bits:

With all due respect to the 123 other schools that play major-college football, the sport’s foreseeable future boils down to one question: Can anyone stop Alabama?

The Alabama Crimson Tide, college football’s defending national champion, has become the game’s “it” team, an all-powerful and impervious Death Star of a program. Alabama has won two of the last three national titles. Its coach, Nick Saban, won another one while he was at Louisiana State—meaning he has won the title in three of the past seven college seasons he has coached.

The Tide is a 14-point favorite Saturday over No. 8 Michigan—repeat: a two-touchdown favorite against a top-10 team—in its season opener. The last time Alabama was an underdog was 28 games ago, against Tim Tebow and Florida in the 2009 Southeastern Conference championship game. Result: Bama 32, Florida 13.

And then there’s this:

Since Saban’s arrival in 2007, Alabama has produced 11 first-round NFL draft picks, by far the most in the country. Since 2003, only four colleges have churned out more first-rounders than Alabama has since 2009. Three of those programs—Miami, Ohio State and Southern California—have had NCAA rules-related scandals. The fourth school is LSU, which Saban coached from 2000 to 2004. He signed nine of the Tigers’ 12 first-round draft picks.

Hunter, on breakfast

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Because we all need a mantra:

Breakfast is the only meal of the day that I tend to view with the same kind of traditionalized reverence that most people associate with Lunch and Dinner. I like to eat breakfast alone, and almost never before noon; anybody with a terminally jangled lifestyle needs at least one psychic anchor every twenty-four hours, and mine is breakfast. In Hong Kong, Dallas or at home — and regardless of whether or not I have been to bed — breakfast is a personal ritual that can only be properly observed alone, and in a spirit of genuine excess.

The food factor should always be massive: four Bloody Marys, two grapefruits, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crepes, a half-pound of either sausage, bacon, or corned beef hash with diced chiles, a Spanish omelette or eggs Benedict, a quart of milk, a chopped lemon for random seasoning, and something like a slice of Key lime pie, two margaritas, and six lines of the best cocaine for dessert… Right, and there should also be two or three newspapers, all mail and messages, a telephone, a notebook for planning the next twenty-four hours and at least one source of good music… All of which should be dealt with outside, in the warmth of a hot sun, and preferably stone naked.

Carry on.

Dept. of HOLY CRAP

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An Emirates passenger from Bangkok to Hong Kong decided to document his A380 First Class experience.

N.B. that I could not even SEE First on my trip in June. They entered (on the 777) through a different door, and that plane did not appear to have the lounge area the A380 has. But still: HOLY CRAP.

FWIW, economy looks about the same, as does business class.

Houston: Damn Right

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John T. Edge on covers our exploding food scene in Savoring Mutt City: Why Houston is becoming a top-tier destination to eat and drink.

The story begins:

We’re boating the high-top cloverleaf in a kandy-kolored streamline baby, if you know what I mean. A 1967 LeMans ragtop, stardust blue, with red-lined fatties and cigarettes-and-whiskey mufflers.

It’s a summer night, circa right now. I’m in the backseat, leaching liquor and perspiration onto the vinyl. Chris Shepherd, who spent the afternoon at a Vietnamese nail salon here in Houston, is digging his shellacked toes into the front passenger-side pile, while Bryan Caswell palms the steering wheel and blasts Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears through a removable-face Blaupunkt that would have gotten him laid in tenth grade.

Goddamn if that didn’t just send me to eBay motors searching for late-60s absurd convertibles… Apparently, if you don’t care about “original” or “concours,” you can get something for well under ten grand…

“We came in peace for all mankind.”

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Neil Armstrong died over the weekend. He was 82. When he took that famous “one small step,” he was not yet 39 — which shows in his official NASA portrait.

If you haven’t watched it recently, this is a good time to review the video taken at the time. Also, io9 has the text from the Times coverage back in 1969, which is pretty great. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I’m not sure we as a species have accomplished ANYTHING even remotely as awesome as this since July 21, 1969.

This is my favorite picture of Mr Armstrong. Buzz Aldrin took it, after Armstrong had come in from the most significant walk in the history of mankind. You can see the gravity of the moment in his eyes.

Here’s the thing: Armstrong then mostly eschewed the spotlight, and never did anything to sully the accomplishment or what it meant for the space program, for the US, or for humans in general. He was, by all accounts, an unassuming and humble man who understood what he had been a part of in the larger, human sense despite (as is and was obvious) the Cold War aspects of the space race. In an age of serious term dilution, this was a guy who really was a hero.

There’s lots of grreat stuff in the Metafilter thread, which includes a pointer to The Big Picture feature on Apollo 11 from the 40th anniversary a few years ago. (Also noted in that thread: Charles Lindbergh knew both Armstrong and Orville Wright.)

And here’s the other thing. It’s awful that Armstrong has died without seeing another serious move in space in 40 years. We quit in 1972. Nobody’s been out of low earth orbit since, and that means — as XKCD points out — that we are quickly running out of people who’ve walked on other worlds.

This is shameful, and we should fix it.

Good Lord, there were only 12 to start with, and only 8 survive. (The youngest of these giants is the sprightly 76-year-old Charles Duke.) Perhaps, when someday we manage to escape low earth orbit again, someone can do for Armstrong and Aldrin what those great me did for Yuri Gagarin. The notion that these 8 may die without seeing us exceed their journey is the worst sort of anti-tribute.

Finally, here is a statement from the Armstrong family, which concludes with

For those who may ask what they can do to honor Neil, we have a simple request. Honor his example of service, accomplishment and modesty, and the next time you walk outside on a clear night and see the moon smiling down at you, think of Neil Armstrong and give him a wink.

Will do.

PS: Another Neil has a nice blog entry on the subject.

Pelts and Vendettas and You

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You probably heard the news today that Lance Armstrong has declined to engage with the USADA’s witch hunt and cherry-picked arbitration proceedings, which means that body will seek to have him stripped of his Tour de France titles.

Process for a moment that:

  • The most recent event for which he’ll actually be sanctioned is from 2005.
  • They seek to punish him going all the way back to 1999.
  • They have refused to disclose any evidence prior to arbitration.
  • Armstrong never tested positive when racing.
  • The “case” from the USADA is based entirely on accusations from racers who may or may not have made deals to protect their own careers or fortunes. They have zero physical evidence.

I don’t actually care, at this point, if he doped back then or not. Given what we now know of the culture of pro cycling until the last several years, it’s at least possible. But, as in any sport, there are rules and there are rules about following those rules. Lance’s career was during a dope-heavy era; he followed the rules, though, at least as far as not testing positive. And he was tested very, very often. There were no positive tests. Punishing him in 2012 for things that were gray areas or unclear in 2001 seems unfair. Punishing him for “suspicion of doping” — which is what this boils down to — is a travesty.

I think Lance is correct to refuse to engage any further. It is abundantly obvious that the USADA and Tyler Tygart are deeply invested in punishing him regardless of the facts. It’s unclear to me what benefit they’ll gain by doing this, or why this was a better use of their resources than clean-racing programs and enforcement for people actually still racing. It reeks of ex post facto enforcement, and it does not deserve to be treated with the dignity a fair proceeding would merit.

That’s not all, though. Tygart and his cronies will also, through this action, almost certainly harm the work that has defined post-Tour Lance Armstrong: Cancer support and fundraising. They’re not helping cycling, and they’re harming Livestrong.org as “collateral damage,” and are apparently okay with this.

That’s some serious bullshit, and makes it look even MORE like an ugly vendetta.

If you agree with me, why don’t you go here and join me in supporting Livestrong’s efforts. (If you’re curious, here’s their CharityNavigator rating.)

They make it easy and painless to do one-time or recurring donations; the latter is my favorite option — it spreads gifts over time, and makes things automatic. You can even do it in honor, or in memory, of someone.

Go. Give. Make something positive of this witch hunt. You Heathen usually have at least a few extra bucks rattling around, right?

Oh, Right Wingers. You so crazy.

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Only a truly ignorant, frothy, profoundly stupid movement could recast Agenda 21 — a nonbinding (obviously) 1992 UN resolution calling for cooperation to address hunger, poverty, sustainability, and related issues most people think of as worthwile — as some sort of sinister plot bent on robbing us of sovereignty, but, well, that’s where we are.

After a few more whereases, the committee gets down to the business of “exposing … the dangerous intent of the plan,” resolving to send a copy of this gem … to every Republican candidate and elected official in the country, and pushing for the resolution to be adopted into the official Republican Party Platform at the national convention in Tampa, Fla., in August.

But here’s the thing: Agenda 21 has been around for TWO DECADES, and, as the RNC resolution points out, “the U.S. government and no state or local government is legally bound by [it].” The agenda, which grew out of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, is a call for international cooperation to address poverty, hunger, and a host of other issues tied to the unraveling of natural ecosystems. It calls for “the broadest public participation and the active involvement of the non-governmental organizations.”

Good Christ, likely Texas senator Ted Cruz (R-wingnutistan) has been citing it as an all-purpose boogeyman, and is freely telling complete lies about its contents. Granted, that’s a pretty safe sort of lie; nobody ever accused the frothy right wing of, you know, reading these sorts of documents. (You can, if you like, peruse it on the UN’s own site — I found it in about 2 minutes, though I’m one of those educated types.)