February 22, 2010
Spencer Harris, hit king/basketball player
I’ve updated my earlier post on the minor leagues’ all-time hit leader, Spencer Harris, after Seattle librarian Bo Kinney passed on news stories from the 1920s with information about Harris’ activities as a basketball player and referee, even as he was playing pro baseball. My extensive search for information about Harris’ life hadn’t turned up his basketball experience, so I’m glad to know that.
January 30, 2010
A tiny bit more about the history of the record for the world’s longest baseball throw
I have updated my earlier post about the progression of the record for the longest baseball throw after getting some more information about a claim that Tony Mullane broke the mark in 1881. As I say, it’s all a work in progress.
August 7, 2009
What? I couldn’t hear you, the music was on
I hear music in my head all the time. That must be an exaggeration, although it doesn’t feel like it. Now if I’m actually listening to music–on a CD, on the radio or in person–I don’t have music competing with it in my head. But typically, if there is silence, or someone is talking, or I’m watching something on TV (sometimes even if it has a musical score), I hear music. (Right now it’s Lindsey Buckingham’s “Don’t Look Down.”)
No one would have to know this, except I often pat out a drum accompaniment to whatever it is I’m hearing, slapping my hand (or hands) against my knee (or knees) in time to the tune. Or unconsciously start playing some sort of air stringed instrument. This drives my wife crazy. (She may use a different term, but she can always post a comment if she wants to.)
So she’s been asking me about what’s going on in my head when this is happening. The music sounds, to me, just like it would if I were listening to a CD. It’s not too loud, it doesn’t keep me from hearing other things around me (so the title of this post isn’t accurate, it was just meant to get your attention). Sometimes hearing a few notes of something will start a particular tune in my head, or if I hear a discussion that triggers a memory a particular song will start. But I have some degree of control over what I hear; I can summon up whatever song I want to hear, as long as I’ve heard it before. I don’t hear songs all the way through unless I am making an effort to. Usually it’s four or eight bars in a loop until the next tune comes up. I honestly have no idea how long this has been going on.
My curious wife (her epitaph will consist of the single word “Why?”), who thinks this sounds very strange, took it on herself to research my condition and came up with “musical hallucinosis,” described by T.D. Griffiths in the neurology journal “Brain” as follows:
Musical hallucinosis is a disorder of complex sound processing. Subjects perceive complex sound in the form of music in the absence of an acoustic stimulus. As such, the phenomenon might be regarded as an example of mental imagery, defined as `mental acts in which we seem to re-enact the experience of perceiving an object when the object is no longer available’ (Halpern and Zatorre, 1999)….Musical hallucinosis may be associated with structural brain lesions, epilepsy or psychosis (for reviews, see Berrios, 1990; Keshavan et al., 1992). However, it is most commonly seen in subjects with moderate or severe acquired deafness, and as such it may represent an auditory form of the Charles Bonnet syndrome.
(Wouldn’t “The Charles Bonnet Syndrome” make a great band name?)
Gee whiz, that sounds a lot more serious than this feels to me. Further reading makes me think whatever it is I “have” is different from what people diagnosed with musical hallucinosis have. For starters, many of those people truly suffer and would do anything to make the music stop; I enjoy the sounds I hear. The condition seems to be most often related to older people (older than I am) and people with significant hearing loss (my hearing appears to be fine). I have a considerable variety in the songs I hear, it’s not like one tune I can’t stand just gets stuck in there for days or weeks. The volume is not too loud, and the songs strike me as being musically “perfect,” not out of tune or otherwise annoying. (I’ve switched over to the James Bond theme now.) And I can manipulate the music I hear; I can extend certain passages, focus on particular instruments or add instruments, change the key.
I should add that I can’t play any instruments myself, nor can I read music.
Every once in a long while–maybe two or three times a year–I wake up with a melody in my head, almost never with any words accompanying it, a melody I don’t remember ever hearing before that strikes me as an original “composition.” I like these melodies and typically forget them within an hour, they don’t seem to return.
Okay, your turn to judge…is this weird?
August 6, 2009
This grips me more than would a muddy old river or reclining Buddha
My wife, who is very hip and who encouraged me to start this blog to improve my own HQ (Hipness Quotient), looked at my tagline here and said, “Do you think anyone under 50 will know Yul Brynner?” A reasonable question to ask about someone who’s been dead for almost 25 years. And a reasonable question to ask if your image of someone is stuck in the ’50s. But no, my reference to Yul Brynner is way hipper than that. It’s from the ’80s. (From Frank Rich‘s review of the musical from which my tagline comes: “For over three hours, the characters yell at one another to rock music.”)
I don't see you guys rating the kind of mate I'm contemplating...wait, wrong play
Okay, maybe I am skewing old here. But no apologies for that.
Thanks to my wife, I now know that Yul did not spell his last name “Brenner.” I didn’t realize that until I went Googling to find a link for this post and discovered it was actually “Brynner” (which makes sense as a transliteration from Бринер, his name in his native Russia…one might instead use “Brinner,” but “Brenner” would’t have made the cut..wouldn’t “Breenyer” be more accurate?).
Okay everybody…back to your bars, your temples…your massage parlors…
August 1, 2009
Name that decade!
Even if you are disturbed by this assertion by ESPN.com columnist Bill Simmons that “Almost Famous” is the movie that defines this decade, there’s an even more disturbing message here…namely, here we are, with just five months left in the decade, and we still don’t have a name for it. We knew this was going to be a problem in 1999, and we still haven’t fixed it. I haven’t heard ANYone make reference to “the aughts” or “the double zeroes” or any other term to describe the years from 2000 to 2009. That hasn’t been an issue yet, since we aren’t yet looking back on it, but trust me, any decade that features the demolition of two of the world’s tallest buildings and the concomitant deaths of thousands of people, the election of the first mixed-race U.S. president, and the greatest global financial collapse in 70 years is going to be looked back upon. And it will need a name.
But I am here to predict that, one hundred years from now, commentators will say the attacks on the World Trade Center took place in “twenty-oh-one” as opposed to “two-thousand-one.” I say we would have said “twenty-oh-one” at the time had it not been for that darned “2001″ movie that had the term “two-thousand-one” pounded into our brains for 30 years. And once you’ve gone “two-thousand-one,” well, it’s hard to call the next year “twenty-oh-two.”
My sincere regards to Charles Osgood of CBS, who has used the “twenty-oh” terminology consistently since the start of the decade. It’s not such a big deal now, since “two-thou-sand-nine” and “twen-ty-oh-nine” have the same number of syllables. But starting in “twen-ty-ten,” we’ll save a syllable compared to “two-thou-sand-ten,” and my theory is the structure with the fewest syllables will prevail. I’m curious to see how long it will take for the “twenty-0h” usage to become dominant (I’m sure some people will never change), and then at what point people will refer to “twenty-oh-one” when looking back and forget “two-thousand-one” ever existed.
So join me now, use these next five months to prepare and start saying “twenty-oh-nine.” Of course, purists will argue that “oh” is a letter, “zero” is a number, so “twenty-oh” isn’t proper usage. But I’m not that pure.
July 20, 2009
Why bother with a table of contents?
This morning my wife handed me a very fat magazine, thinking I would be interested in one of the articles teased on the cover. The only thing was, she couldn’t actually find the article. Well, if the editors like the piece enough to promote it on the cover, doesn’t it stand to reason you, the reader, would be able to find it in the table of contents?
But the table of contents in Fat Magazines is always a challenge. This particular Fat Magazine is a fashion title, but I find this can apply to publications like Vanity Fair as well. Fat Magazines violate Preston’s First Rule of Publications, namely: the table of contents must appear no deeper in the book than page 5. I hate having to look for where to look for an article. This particular magazine (238 pages total) has a table of contents that starts on page 22. From there it goes on to violate Preston’s Second Rule of Publications, which is: no more than one page of advertising may appear between pages of the table of contents. In this case, the contents are on pages 22, 28, and 42. I know that front of the book is valuable ad space; all I’m asking is, if you’ve decided to include articles in the publication, give us a fighting chance to find them.
There had not been a Preston’s Third Rule of Publications until I went searching for this particular article, but this experience has caused me to add this rule: any article teased on the cover should be easily found in the table of contents. In this case I looked at the contents once, twice, three times, put down the book in case I was suffering from a temporary case of male-pattern blindness, then picked it up again and STILL couldn’t find the article. I was about to start the process of flipping through all 238 pages when a very close reading of the contents located an article I guessed to be the one I was seeking. I say “guessed” because NONE of the nine words used to tease the article on the cover appeared among the ten words used to describe the article in the contents. But when I turned to the article, yes indeed it was the one I wanted. Of course, the time I had available to read it was consumed by trying to find it. (Time spent blogging about it doesn’t count, because it’s therapeutic.)
The experience does make me wonder, though…for Fat Magazines like this, where content is clearly secondary to the advertising, why waste valuable space on ad-free table of contents pages? If the point of having the contents appear well into the book is to make the reader flip through ads trying to find the contents, why not just make readers flip through the whole magazine and see ALL the ads while trying to find the stories teased on the cover? Doesn’t that seem like the logical extension of this philosophy to you?
