Being the Queen is not all about singing, and being a diva is not all about singing. It has much to do with your service to people. And your social contributions to your community and your civic contributions as well.
-Aretha Franklin
Linky Friday: Honoring Aretha Franklin
If you haven’t already, here is Tod Kelly’s excellent piece memorializing: “The Electrifying Aretha Franklin.”
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WY66elCQkYk&w=560&h=315]
You Better Think:
[Th1] Your mind can play tricks on you. Think your nose is smelling something? Phantom smells might just be messing with your senses, and your mind.
[Th2] This has been my experience as well. Managers think they can coach. They can’t, for the most part.
[Th3] Looking for a cure for pessimism? Critical thinking skills is a good place to start.
[Th4] Think your pet could be a service animal? First they have to past some tests, and beat out the stuffed animals.
[Th5] Scary thought. Chinese community in Wales still think of autism as “communicable disease”. And other socially isolated groups have the same issues.
[Th6] “Think of the children,” is a common deflection in debates. But according to this study you should, as co-workers tend to take workplace frustrations out on the children at home.
[Th7] What the chef really thinks when you order your steak well done, among other things that aggravate them.
[Th8] Most parents will tell you cellphones have not been good for kids. If you think that was a problem, just wait till having their own robots gets here.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgh0EJfq7DU&w=560&h=315]
The Day is Past and Gone
[Pa1] Bloomfield has long been Pittsburgh’s Little Italy, but like so many neighborhoods, change has come.
[Pa2] 70 years ago, a plane crash in the Swiss Alps lead to an amazing story of survival. Now melting snow has revealed the plane itself.
[Pa3] Well…that’s a different suggestion; an argument for bringing back feudalism.
[Pa4] “Look at everything that has come and gone,” a Pagan perspective on their Midsummer celebration.
[Pa5] Fascinating story on the biggest mistake in the history of physics.
[Pa6] Just titling it that way is a bold statement: “The most underrated composer in history.”
[Pa7] The very unsexy history of video game sex. The pixelated nudity of the Atari 2600 was just as wrong then as it appears now.
[Pa8] The story of finding a WW2 destroyer that sank more than once, and the new underwater tech that is changing how we find and explore shipwrecks.
[Pa9] The wild history of skateboarding movies.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgzH5Rg-jJY&w=560&h=315]
Chain of Fools
[Fo1] You can fool a sparrow, but only if they don’t know you; “Researchers can change dominance relationships between birds by altering the colors on their heads, but only if the birds don’t already know each other”
[Fo2] “We are the fools who have stayed” the last couple in a dying Spanish town, who have maintained that status for 30 years.
[Fo3] Frankly surprised this doesn’t happen more often: Guy photoshops adult film actors name onto little league graphic, fools media outlets when it goes viral.
[Fo4] Fish oil fool’s gold? Omega-3 is a $30Bn industry, but does it actually help anything health wise?
[Fo5] Does the name still apply if you write down the 5 dumbest unwritten rules in baseball?
[Fo6] They may be fools, but at least they are self-aware and in on the joke: Vice goes there with the Flat Earth Societies favorite conspiracy theories.
[Fo7] Despite the title this is not the most foolish tattoo I’ve ever seen, but it made a good run at it.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1p92gQTQCg&w=560&h=315]
It Won’t Be Long
[Lo1] Nothing last forever, so before you wed you better finish the paperwork on the pre-up for the dog.
[Lo2] Before too much longer the video might show you said that, even though you didn’t. The coming world of “deep fakes”
[Lo3] Despite continuing promises that it won’t be long, autonomous cars are further away than you might think.
[Lo4] As soon as the mid-terms are over, those running for POTUS in 2020 will really start in on their campaigns. Vice would like to submit a list of Democrats who will not be president.
[Lo5] Long on promise, short on results; the widening world of self-help apps.
[Lo6] Turns out the trick to being an ant is to be one of the lazy ones, or at least one of the ones who have to wait their turn and idle while the rest are tunnel building and other things.
[Lo7] With the long promised hype of Tesla starting to fray people’s belief in Elon Musk, some believe it might be time for a intervention, or at least somebody experienced in running a company.
Will Truman Memorial “This Won’t End Well” link:
[WT0] “Everyone realized there’s tons of money to be made if you can figure out how to get AI integrated into the Defense Department.”
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsMGHzOQrps&w=560&h=315]
Aretha Franklin, Queen of Soul
[AF0]
It’s her voice we all will remember, but her piano playing was spectacular, and she could still perform like few others could well into her 70’s.
Check out Franklin’s 2015 performance at the Kennedy Center Honors in Washington, D.C., of Carole King and Gerry Goffin’s song “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” part of the evening’s salute to honoree King. It’s an extraordinary performance that fortunately was documented and posted to YouTube, where it has tallied more than 12 million views, at least in part thanks to the over-the-top reaction shots from King herself, clearly awestruck when Franklin sits down at the piano.
Elton John, another musician renowned for his skills at the piano, brought up that performance when I interviewed him shortly after that night. He could barely contain his enthusiasm.
“Did you see the Kennedy Center thing with Aretha?” he said sitting at the kitchen table in his Beverly Hills home. “It’s one of the great performances of all time. I watched it five times in a row. You couldn’t start the day off better off than that. And she’s 74 years of age …
“At one point you thought maybe she was losing her voice, but she hasn’t, and at the end she goes for it, and it’s thrilling, it’s so thrilling,” he said, sounding more like the giddy music fan than a grizzled veteran of half a century in the music industry trenches. “How often do we get thrilled like that anymore, come on?”
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHsnZT7Z2yQ&w=560&h=315]
WT0: Clearly the DoD has not watched the Terminator series or learned the right lessons from it.
Paging John ConnorReport
ClearlyReport
The best case scenario is that the AI realizes its job is stupid and decides not to do it.Report
Pa6: I find this sort of provocative claim more distracting than anything else.
You want to make the argument hat Rimsky-Korsakov is underrated? That we should give attention to more than the couple of warhorses that made it into the standard repertoire? That his music is more interesting than that? I’m listening, and defaulting to “sympathetic.”
State rather that Rimsky-Korsakov is the most underrated composer in history, and I am immediately thinking of other underrated composers. As I write this, I have on music by Johann Heinrich Schmelzer. Never heard of him? My point precisely. Is he more underrated than Rimsky-Korsakov? If you are a classical music listener, you have at least heard of Rimsky-Korsakov, and have heard those warhorses. You probably haven’t heard of Schmelzer, much less heard his music, unless you have a particular interest in the early Baroque. The dramatic claim about Rimsky-Korsakov having raised these thoughts about Schmelzer, the supporting argument tends to fade into the background.Report
I’m glad someone took this up from that link. It is pretty much where I was reading both the headline and the piece. The perfect example is I did not know of Schmelzer till you told us, and I like discovering new composers, or artist in music in general that way. Starting out with a heavy handed rant turns me off more that makes me sympathetic.Report
Shouldn’t we be R-E-S-P-E-C-Ting Aretha Franklin? It’s what she wanted, just a little bit.Report
Trying to be a little different here, as just about everyone is going with that angle.Report
Pa5: Fresnel wasn’t some nobody when it came to light.Report
Pa3 – for the record, Taki is a terrible horrible no good very bad person.Report
At first I was disappointed to see that the article was paywalled, and then I saw who wrote it.Report