An off note in music history

It is little known today that Signor Alfredo Nobellini, inventor of the accordion, also invented another, even less successful instrument. Always seeking a greater fortissimo, he combined his interest in music with his interest in things that go boom! to produce the explodeon (rhymes with melodeon). Any accordion player could play an explodeon, though seldom for very long.

It is difficult, at this historical remove, to gauge the impact the explodeon had on its listeners, as few critical reviews of performances have survived. Audiences are reported to have been blown away, even transported to heavenly heights. The score of the famous 1812 Overture originally had an explodeon part, but this was later rewritten for cannon, which were found to be easier to manage in an orchestral setting.

Nobellini composed a suite for explodeon and pipe-bomb organ. He was reported to have said, before its only known performance, that it would mark the apogee of his career. Indeed, neither he nor the concert hall is known to have featured in musical history since the event.

"Still working on it."

Beetle Bailey by Gregg and Mort Walker | Sept 5, 2011

Varieties of experience

MUTTS by Patrick McDonnell | August 24, 2011

If the world is not going to end in 2012 ...

… as a new critique of the conversion from the Mayan suggests, some recalculations may be in order.

It's a good news/bad news situation for believers in the 2012 Mayan apocalypse. The good news is that the Mayan "Long Count" calendar may not end on Dec. 21, 2012 (and, by extension, the world may not end along with it). The bad news for prophecy believers? If the calendar doesn't end in December 2012, no one knows when it actually will - or if it has already.

A new critique, published as a chapter in the new textbook "Calendars and Years II: Astronomy and Time in the Ancient and Medieval World" (Oxbow Books, 2010), argues that the accepted conversions of dates from Mayan to the modern calendar may be off by as much as 50 or 100 years. That would throw the supposed and overhyped 2012 apocalypse off by decades and cast into doubt the dates of historical Mayan events.

I guess I'd better start stockpiling light bulbs after all. (From Jerry Pournelle's mail.)

Instruments of dubious value

Not the robosigned mortgages causing such an uproar among the bankers, but "the 10 Most Ludicrous Musical Instruments Ever Conceived." All are described and presented with videos so that they can be seen and heard. All are unfamiliar to me, and for most of them, I'd just as soon they stay that way. There might be a future for the violimba in horror movie scores. The Samchillian Tip Tip Tip Cheeepeeeee, a keyboard "based on relativity," is intriguing and might actually have a future. Or it might be from the future.

Second Rate Snacks ...

… is the name of a blog devoted to, guess what? I read the whole thing and didn't even need an Alka-Seltzer afterwards. Recommended for anyone who has debated the merits of different brands of potato chips and cheese puffs, and, really, who hasn't?

"You were doing it wrong"

That's the title of a thread at AskMetafilter that has been keeping me entertained for days. The initial question:

What in life did it take you a surprisingly long time to realize you've been doing wrong all along?

"Crap, I've been doing it wrong." We've all had those sudden epiphanies where we realize we've been doing something incorrectly, ineffectively or just suboptimally our whole lives, in domains from handicraft to human relations to technical stuff to personal grooming. What have you spent large portions of your life doing wrong?

The first answer: "Tying my shoes." Many people have problems with words such as segue and epitome. Another answer up near the top is "It took me until adulthood to realize that courage, tenacity, and hard work get you a lot farther than plain old smartness." So there are all kinds of things posted here. I was pleased to discover howjsay dot com, an English dictionary of pronunciations. Just pronunciations, no definitions, and it is English, so "balmy" is pronounced as "barmy," and so forth. Another discovery would be this video, demonstrating how to tell when the pan is hot enough.



That video is extracted from a post at Houseboat Eats which explains the whole thing much more fully.

Then there's this mirror trick:

Mirrors are a recurring theme in the thread.

I learned of this from Prof. Althouse, who learned of it from her son John Althouse Cohen.

Metafilter mods are not pleased with the thread and might have killed it, if they had not been distracted, as is revealed in another thread called Doing it right.

Generation gap

I think I have finally found the W.C. Fields movie I was looking for — and its name is "Poppy"

Cascading absurdities, grandiloquent orotundity (or should that be "orotund grandiloquence"), a "talking" dog, a shell game, a fair amount of booze, "Purple Bark Sarsaparilla," without which "this mundane sphere of ours would be barren, bleak, and dank," a pretty girl and a romance, a highly unlikely plot device, a carnival, a certain amount of conniving, not too much bitterness, and the closing line, a bit of fatherly advice to the dear adopted daughter who is about to go straight, "Never give a sucker an even break."

I do not seem to be in agreement with the reviewers at IMDB, who regard this as a minor Fields flicker. The ones they cite as superior seem to me to suffer from excessive bitterness and cynicism. This one is sweet almost all the way through, with just enough bitter to make it tangy.

And the bit with the cigar-box cello and the hat:

Oh dear!

I am the egg man ...

… and I'm hungry! Watch out, potatoes!
Sort of like the man in the crescent moon, only hungry. Looking at those taters with that big yellow eye, mouth wide open. You see it or you don't.

A funny thing happened ...

… at Making Light. Open thread 137 is 90% good humor, only about 5% politics. Good fun, for a while, over there.

I must correct one of the jokes: Skwid at comment #47 tells this one:

An Englishman, a Scotsman, and an Irishman walk into a bar. Each orders a Guinness, and as they're served, a fly lands in each pint.

The Englishman sniffs at the affrontery of the fly and pushes his beer away in disgust.

The Scotsman blinks for a moment, shrugs, and tosses the pint back.

The Irishman turns bright red, fishes the fly out of the beer, and holds it over his glass shouting at it: "SPIT IT OUT, YE WEE BUGGER! SPIT IT OUT!"

He or she has got the Irishman and the Scot mixed up, there. See, Scots are legendarily thrifty. (Says this third generation Scots-American. Dinna ca' us "mean" or "cheap." We prefer "canny.") So the Scot in the joke, who should have been the one delivering the punchline, would be objecting to the loss of the amount of beer that a fly could swallow, because of the ethnic stereotype. That's what makes it funny.

Speaking of thrift:

And speaking of jokes, I'm still working on this one, which came to me in a moment of perinspiration:

"How do you change a seal into a sea lion?"

"Remove one of its electrons!"

I think it's funny, but that's just me. Can this possibly work anywhere but in a chemistry classroom?

Update: In the Making Light thread that gave rise to this post, Erik Nelson links to a nifty collection of surrealist jokes.

"Locations of Ancient Woolworths Stores follow Precise Geometrical Pattern"

Ley lines, ancient geometry, etc.

I should have a "bad science" tag. But I would have to go back and add it to all the warming posts. So, not right now.

Rich people, big houses, no smiles

Unhappy hipsters.

And their somewhat happier pets.

Related: Look at this hipster.

Porpoise bubbles, hippo, zebra

Althouse has had the critter posts, lately.

How to create and play with a bubble ring under water. Porpoises, what can't they do? Build a fire, for one thing. But this is amazing.

And another of those Althouse posts in which she tests the possibilities of concision, I'll quote the whole thing:

How does a hippopotamus get its teeth cleaned? Zebra.

That last sounds like a "No soap, radio" joke.

Newspeak lexicon

At The Peoples' Cube: Neologisms (For inclusion into 2100 Biden-Webster Dictionary).

A taste:

• Condecession: set-asides or subsidies to groups one feels sorry for.
• Defaulty setting: Something incorrect that's widely believed because it was the first explanation proposed rather than because there was any actual evidence or proof.
• Dimprovement: A bad, dimwitted improvement that isn't better, often worse. (Can you say New Coke, Vista operating system or nationalized health care?)
• Feelosophy: positions and policies adopted because they make you feel good or virtuous rather than on any reasoned basis or because they could possibly work.
• Iconoklatch: group of nonconformists who uniformly conform to an "alternative" set of standards.
• Infopinion: The intermingling of news and opinion so that it's hard to tell which is what. Often called analysis.
• Literateur: Someone who talks about and refers to books they've never actually read. Think Wealth of Nations or Das Kapital.
• Malapropitization: Needlessly adding prefixes and suffixes to words to make yourself sound erudite, more scholarlisticalful.
• Nincomproof: A line of thinking both logical yet so unreasonable only an idiot or an intellectual would buy it.
• Oprahtunity: The chance to cash in on fame in one area in another area you really have no qualification for. (Al Gore for instance.)
• Psychophant: A lunatic follower of a lunatic leader. (See Marxist-Leninist)

There are more.

This is not the Faceb00k l0g1n page

Or, More fun with Facebook.

It seems that some Facebookers use search engines to get to Facebook, instead of typing the address in the address bar of their browsers, or using a bookmark. Well, that led to this (1989 comments at last count), which is more fully explained and commented on by Dan Grover, as part of his effort to develop a grand unified theory of n00bs. (The Dan Grover links come and go. If the one above does not work, you might try this one. Or Google's cached version.)

Via The Message Digest.

============================

And then we have Failbook and Failbooking. This stuff is public, and will be preserved. And laughed at.

Related: My Hope.

Posh Nosh

Just the kind of British comedy based on word-play I like. A taste:

Another: Beautiful Food.

Thanks to Althouse commenter peter hoh, who recommended the paella^*. Look for David Tennant in this one, along with the giant prawns.

^* Should one attempt to pronounce foreign words with a feigned foreign accent? Always good for a mild dispute. Pie-yella or pie-eighya ("eigh" as in eight)? Simon Marchmont has his opinion, in that Posh Nosh episode. Toby Young has a paella episode to relate (via). It's not just Americans, Toby Young. Here previously: When in Roma …

The sunny side of climate claptrap

There is always a sunny side.

Though "sunny" implies warmth. Warmth is necessary for life. So the 2009 Miss Earth competition, or pageant, is being held in the Philippines, where it's naturally warm.

The photos in the "Press Presentation" are better at the Telegraph.

I've heard nice things about Slovenia, as a place to live. Miss Greece looks like a character from the Iliad:

Penelope, perhaps; though the red hair would seem to imply Circe; one would hope, not Briseis or Iphigenia.

Thanks to Glenn Reynolds.

Law school pirate

This is illegible as seen here, so click it to get a better view.

That subtitle is likely to be going away pretty soon, but it seems worthy of preservation. It's a testimonial to Althouse's sense of humor.

Related: Pointed, pointless questions.
Sarah Palin is Dumb.
Ann Althouse Is Dumb
"Oh...did I mention Althouse is a dirty libtard pirate whore?"
"Sirs, the smiles will leave your faces when the walls come tumbling in..."
There may be more to come.

Obama on SNL

Not really him, but Fred Armisen playing him. Not worshipful, for a change (change!), but a properly disrespectful SNL bit.

More jokes, please!

Thanks to a correspondent of Rich Lowry at The Corner.