Random 10

A really nice collection this week. See what you think.

  • “After The Fall” by October Project (from Falling Farther In) personal favourite
  • “Easy” by Groove Armada (from The Best Of….)
  • “Gleaming Auction” by Snow Patrol (from Final Straw)
  • “Hey Jude” by the Beatles (from 1967-1970)
  • “Juanita/Kiteless” by Underworld (from Underworld Live: Everything, Everything)
  • “Lady With The Braid” by Dory Previn (from In Search Of Mythical Kings) personal favourite
  • “Messiahs Die Young” by Men Without Hats (from Rhythm Of Youth/Folk Of The 80s)
  • “Telegraph Road” by Dire Straits (from Love Over Gold) personal favourite
  • “What Time Is Love? (Techno Scam Mix)” by the KLF (from Ultra Rare Trax)
  • “The World Is Full Of Crashing Bores” by Morrissey (from You Are The Quarry)

(N.b. I’m going to start annotating my particular favourites with this little GIF: personal favourite Hope this isn’t too distracting. Feel free to suggest an alternative graphic…)

PSB: Fundamental

Is it really 22 years since the Pet Shop Boys released “West End Girls”? Wow. Anyway, I’ve just been reading an interesting interview with Neil Tennant about their new album Fundamental. I just picked up an imported copy (made in Argentina), and it’s both great music and politically provocative. The title reflects the theme of the album: the rise of religious fundamentalism.
PSB fundamental

“I’m against fundamentalism of any sort; I think we all are, aren’t we? We don’t want to go back to the seventh century, thank you. I think we take religion too seriously,” Neil explains.
“As a society, here in the UK, we don’t really respect our state religion as it is, whether it’s the Church Of England or Christianity, sure we pay a bit of lip service, for example, we might like the music and the incense and all the rest of it, but we can laugh at it nowadays and we can mock it pretty much with no threat,” he continues.
“So I resent the fact that we are meant to take other religions so seriously and I think we have a right to mock other religions but that unfortunately is a dangerous thing to say nowadays, though it shouldn’t be.”

Not unexpectedly, the flash-point is the intersection of politics, religion, and sexuality.

“‘Fundamental’ is deliberately provocative. The album is dedicated to those two Iranian teenagers who were hung recently for being homosexual.”

And you’ve got to fight for what you believe in. It’s easy to get complacent, to assume that things will work out over time:

“[…] I find the whole gay issue a bore really, I’ve always said it is a political issue. The whole idea of gays was created in the 1970s as a political reaction against oppression and as the oppression fades away, so the idea of ‘gay’ will fade away and we will lose our obsession with someone’s sexuality[…]
Then suddenly religion comes along and you suddenly realize, I think we all have to realize, that liberal rights, dear old dreary liberal rights, have got to be continually fought for. It’s like anything else in life, you don’t climb up to a plateau where the sun always shines, you are always marching on relentlessly. Nothing stands still and liberal rights, which are the easiest thing in the world to sneer at, have in fact taken a long time to create, particularly in the United Kingdom. We really have to fight to make sure we keep them.”

—
[Via Sully]

"In transition" – status update

It’s been a month since I last wrote about my “transition”, so I thought it might be time for an update. Why the diffidence? Mostly it’s because one obviously(?) doesn’t want to reveal all of the gory details (“met X for lunch”, “phone interview with Y”, “brush-off email from Z”). The fastest way to end a discussion about a prospective job is probably to blurt it out all over the blogosphere.
Nevertheless, I think I can safely say that I’m having a pretty good time. I’ve been talking to people from a wide range of organizations about a diverse collection of jobs, and I’m really enjoying the various conversations. They’re all moving at different speeds, from glacial to torrid. In some cases, I’m pushing to get things moving, while in others I’ve found myself getting swept along. Mixed in with all this are the cold calls from people who have found my details from LinkedIn, Dice, my blog, wherever; most of these are wildly inappropriate, but at least one has turned into a serious exchange.
LinkedIn is proving to be an invaluable resource in various ways. For example: suppose that I’m interested in company P, and start talking with a former colleague, X ,who’s working there. He or she passes my resume to a colleague of theirs, Y, who is the (potential) hiring manager. How do I find out what kind of person Y is? I check corporate bio and other resources, find out that Y used to work at company Q. Then I can search LinkedIn for people in my network who were at Q when Y was there; usually there’s someone that I know well enough to ask about what Y was like to work with/for. Etcetera.
And I’ve (mostly) stopped referring to Sun in the first person plural….

Lime Rock photos

I had a great day at Lime Rock yesterday. I’ve posted some of the photos in my gallery; I also shot some video clips which I may post later. After staying overnight at a motel in Lee, I blasted back to Brookline this morning. Traffic was pretty light: for most of the way I set the cruise control to 75 and relaxed (to Amplified Heart by Everything But The Girl), using a little extra right pedal to overtake.
Winning car in the Rolex Cup event Oops! Turn 1 strikes again Familiar sponsorship?

Random 10

Several excellent tracks here, and one that’s not so great.

  • “Bhinna Abhinna” by Sheila Chandra (from The History of Indipop)
  • “Bird on the Wire” by Leonard Cohen (from The Best of…)
  • “Donegan’s Gone” by Mark Knopfler (from Shangri-La)
  • “Evelyn (The Song Of Slurs)” by No-Man (from Dry Cleaning Ray)
  • “Insomnia” by Faithless (from Reverence)
  • “Last orders for Gary Stead” by Saint Etienne (from Tales from Turnpike House)
  • “Nine Shades To The Circle” by the Legendary Pink Dots (from 9 Lives To Wonder)
  • “Somebody To Love” by Queen (from Fantasic 70s)
  • “Talking Vietnam Potluck Blues” by Tom Paxton (from The Best of…)
  • “Ways & Means” by Snow Patrol (from Final Straw)

There’s a lot of really great stuff here. If you’ve never heard “Talking Vietnam Potluck Blues”, nag your friends until you can find a copy. Tracks like “Bird on the Wire” and “Somebody to Love” are classics, and deservedly so. “Insomnia” is one of the best by Faithless: Maxi Jazz’s quietly insistent rapping pulls you into his sweaty nightmare. And I love everything by No-Man (what Steven Wilson does when he’s not leading Porcupine Tree).
And then there’s the track from that Mark Knopfler album, Shangri-La. I bought it from iTMS without previewing all of the tracks: I was hoping for something as good as Golden Heart or Sailing To Philadelphia. Unfortunately it really didn’t work for me. Shucks.
But this leads me to a question. Suppose you buy an album via download from iTMS or some other service, and then you decide that you don’t really like it after all. With a physical CD (complete with jewel case) you can sell it, or pass it on. But with a download, what do you do? Delete it? But do you back it up first? In which case, have you really got rid of it…?
Odd, innit?

British understatement

Here’s Andrew Sullivan, in the [London] Sunday Times, writing about the current interest in whether Al Gore will run for President in 2008:

Gore’s penchant for detail, for policy wonkery, has also, in the wake of Bush, come to seem less of an irritant and more of an asset. After watching the incompetence in Iraq and after Katrina, Americans are beginning to want a president who is interested in how government works. Bush never has been. That was his charm. It has also proved his undoing.

Hmm. Competence. Professionalism. What strange, alien concepts in 21st century America….

Theodicy

It’s easy to ask the question, hard to follow through to the logical conclusion. From the BBC:

Pope Benedict XVI has made a historic visit to the former Nazi death camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau at the end of his four-day tour of Poland. […]
It was particularly difficult for a Christian – a German pope – to speak from such a place of horror, he said.
“In a place like this, words fail. In the end, there can only be a dread silence – a silence which is itself a heartfelt cry to God: Why, Lord, did you remain silent? How could you tolerate all this?” he said in a speech in Italian.

If Benedict’s conception of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent deity is compatible with such horrors, then he’s delusional. Mind you, he’s in distinguished company. Pretzel logicians all. They’d rather hang on to their world of make-believe instead of simply admitting the truth. Human beings did these horrible things to other human beings, and it’s up to us human beings to prevent such atrocities from happening in the future. No supernatural agent is going to save us from ourselves: we have to grow up, take responsibility, and sort it out on our own.

AWOL

Now this is something that I hadn’t really thought about: “More than 1,000 members of the British military have deserted the armed forces since the start of the 2003 Iraq war, the BBC has discovered.”
Anyone know what the figures are for the US armed forces? The nearest thing I could find to a real study is this, which suggests a much lower (proportional) rate of desertion than the British military is seeing. However it needs to be brought up to date.

A good primer on the mind-body problem

Last year I posted a list of all of the philosophy of mind books in my library. (Since then, I’ve added half a dozen more.) If you’re curious about what is probably one of the most controversial areas in contemporary philosophy, check out Alex Byrne’s survey piece entitled What Mind-Body Problem? in the latest Boston Review. (Alex is at MIT, where I’ve been attending some of the Friday philosophy seminars.)