Hodgepodge

Yesterday I got off on a bit of a wild rant, but the music video thing has bugged me for years -- ever since video killed the radio star (supposedly the first video ever aired by MTV) -- and it just all came spilling out. Today I present a hodgepodge of items of interest to celebrate the beginning of my week off from teaching (I still have to show up 3 days next week for professional development activities). So ...

Given that Walk the Line is coming out this weekend, I thought this little bit over at Marginal Revolution was appropriate:

I'd always thought that Sun Records and Sam Philips himself had created the most crucial, uplifting and powerful records ever made. Next to Sam's records, all the rest sounded fruity. On Sun Records the artists were singing for their lives and sounded like they were coming from the most mysterious place on the planet. No justice for them. They were so strong, can send you up a wall. If you were walking away and looked back at them, you could be turned into stone. Johnny Cash's records were no exception, but they weren't what you expected. Johnny didn't have a piercing yell, but ten thousand years of culture fell from him. He could have been a cave dweller. He sounds like he's at the edge of the fire, or in the deep snow, or in a ghostly forest, the coolness of conscious obvious strength, full tilt and vibrant with danger. "I keep a close watch on this heart of mine." Indeed. I must have recited those lines to myself a million times. Johnny's voice was so big, it made the world grow small, unusually low pitched - dark and booming, and he had the right band to match him, the rippling rhythm and cadence of click-clack. Words that were the rule of law and backed by the power of God.

Those are Bob Dylan's words from Chronicles, Vol. 1. I knew Bob and Johnny had a friendship of a sort, but I didn't know Bob was that much of an admirer.


I know this story already has sparked some outrage, but I felt the need to mention it too. I am amazed by the Fulton County (GA) judge who ORDERED Georgia Tech to reinstate the football player who "was arrested June 21 in Atlanta in connection with a marijuana distribution operation based in California. According to a criminal complaint filed in Fresno, Calif., Houston conspired to possess and distribute about 100 pounds of marijuana, which has a street value of about $60,000." GA Tech had already let him back in school, but he was kicked off the team. Judge M. Gino Brogdon, though, felt Tech's decision to exclude the player from football "was arbitrary and strikingly dissimilar to the school's treatment of other similarly situated athletes who have been accused of breaking the law." Tech's argument is they've never had another player charged with a felony, so they don't quite see how they can be arbitrary and dissimilar in this case. Sigh; another what's the world coming to?

Another interesting thing that caught my eye in today's paper was this discussion of the scientific consensus on the human contribution to global warming. Though I am a big fan of environmental protection and I contribute money to lots of environmental causes, I do believe skepticism can be valuable. Today there seems to be a rush to embrace this everybody knows thinking on global warming and I'm afraid we're missing valuable contributions from dissent. Just as in politics, dissenters such as Bjorn Lomborg are being dismissed out of hand by many in the mainstream. I read his book and I wasn't overwhelmed, but he did make some valid points that I think are worth investigating. Science is supposed to be about the investigation of alternative theories (I thought) until the answer is found (if ever). I liked the column's mention of "this year's winner of Nobel Prize for medicine, Barry Marshall, who believed ulcers were caused by bacteria, when the establishment knew that Marshall's theory was "preposterous" -- except that Marshall turned out to be right." I'm not arguing for intelligent design in the classroom, but scientists shouldn't just dismiss alternative theories simply because everyone knows the answer is X.

Anyway, some things to mull over. I'm going home to have some fun for a couple of days -- until I have to grade those stats tests.