Category: Pop Culture

9-11 Conspiracies

I wish to give my $0.02 on my take of the 9-11 tragedy. First of all, there are indeed a lot of questions regarding the tragedy, all legitimate. Such as: the buildings collapsing demolition-style on their foundations, a rare event, in fact an event which has never happened historically with any burning skyscraper. Unless it’s being deliberately demolished. Who would want to demolish the skyscrapers? Who would gain from such demolition? No one has a clear answer, although I feel that the buildings could not have burned in that way, and buildings 1, 2, and 7 all have coincidentally fallen in the same manner, falling straight down as they did on their foundations. It would seem to defy probability, as well as physics.

But was the Government in on it? Could any government seriously keep a secret on something involving thousands of emergency response personnel and many more in the armed forces? Not to mention the CIA (CIA personnel had offices in Building 7), and other branches of government? Anyone remember the conspiracy headed by Nixon into Watergate? How long was that a secret?

But if we simply look at what is obvious, we see things that ought to alarm us. Governments around the world, including the United States government and the Canadian government, have used the spectre of terrorism to scare us into having our rights taken away on many other things, not all having to do with terror. Our police forces which are equipped to fight crime, not terror, have been funded to the hilt and expanded at a time when crime is at the lowest it has been in decades. Should we really be afraid that the next 7-11 bandit could be a terrorist as well?

I don’t think that the Bush government of the day had the skill or competence to pull off a 9-11. What we all must agree to, however, is that they knew how to exploit the opportunity to take away the rights of its citizens, and detain them without warrant or trial. This is a violation of  habeas corpus, a law which is as old as 13th century England. It is a law that protects a person from arbitrary detention by the state. Violate that law, and you have Gitmo in a nutshell.

Keep your eye on the ball, and let’s not get ourselves distracted with the niggly details of 9-11 physics and any associated conspiracy theory, no matter how much that keeps us up at night thinking. The taking away of your rights is more obvious than any falling building. In the end, your rights are what matter more than the event of almost 10 years ago.

In addition, I would also like to add that while we may easily dismiss the “government” conspiracy theory for 9-11, this does not allow us to say that “conspiracy theories” should always be suspect. For that matter, if we say we are against conspiracy theories, then we should be against saying that the “Al-Q’aeda did it”, since that is a conspiracy theory too.

Visits: 94

The Psychology Contrarian II: The Obsession with IQ

At best, these websites present these people as numbers first, people second. To what extent does saying that Marie Curie has an IQ of 190 or so add to or take away from her discovery of radioactivity or her other contributions to Chemistry and Physics to which she literally paid for with her life, all the while fleeing the Nazis? To what extent does Shakespeare’s assigned IQ of 210 add to or take away from his being the most quoted writer in the English Language? And finally, just who is this guy “William Sidis”, and who in the h-e-double-sticks gave him an IQ of 250 to 300?

William Sidis (1898-1944), was an American who had an undergraduate degree at MIT, and then a studied for a law degree at Harvard before he reached 18. By that time he had given occasional lectures to professors. He was portrayed as Will Hunting in the 1997 movie Good Will Hunting. But Will Hunting was portrayed more as a thug first, intellectual second (it was the reverse in real life). In real life, the psychologist he was to see was his father, Boris Sidis. Now, isn’t that a tad, shall we say, unethical? Exactly what was to be the outcome here? The only way you can be clinically objective about your own son is to not have feelings for your son at all, and doesn’t that defeat the purpose of therapy in a rather deep and profound way? I guess one way to become screwed up is to have issues with your father; and one way to be really screwed up is to have that same father for your therapist. NOOOOOOOO!, I can hear him screaming. Ah, but I digress.

No one doubts that Sidis was a prodigy. But what of the number given to him: 250 – 300, which pretty much isolates him from the rest of humanity (even going back to the dawn of antiquity)  as an intellectual? Is this number even meaningful? Is it legitimate? An IQ like that would make him “smarter” than Leonardo da Vinci, or Michelangelo. Even Albert Einstein had to give the world his special and general relativity theories while chugging along with his meagre 205 IQ.  On this scale, Isaac Newton was an also-ran; and Galileo could be arrogant to the Pope, but like John The Baptist, he should not feel himself fit to tie the sandals of someone on the scale of Good Will Sidis, apparently.

Will Sidis, as far as history can tell, is just known for being smart; he didn’t contribute anything, except for this “human thermodynamics/entropy reversal” stuff, which few have heard of. His contribution doesn’t seem as all-encompassing as Einstein or Michelangelo, so having the IQ score alone is nothing to be envious about. Nearly all of those slowpokes who meandered to their historical achievements had to do so while galumphing along with the humble 190-210 IQs that God gave them, if we are to believe the posthumous IQ scores given to them.

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The Psychology Contrarian I: The obsession with IQ

When there are no serious researchers that would place any relevance on our current obsession with IQ and what it measures (indeed, what exactly is it measuring is itself a mystery: does intelligence even have a definition, or am I missing out on something?), I wonder why there are web sites which even go so far as to go back in history, centuries before there were IQ tests or even a field of psychology as we know it, and begin to assign IQs to people like Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Aristotle, Hypatia, Isaac Newton, and so on, as if we were handing passing out candies, albeit to dead people.

I think IQ is the last bastion of that age where math was taken too seriously, and secret societies were formed out of assigning numbers to strange and abstruse things. The IQ, much like saying “chair = 5”, was and is the last of these to fall. The same care and attention given to assigning numbers to daffodils and planets is being given to historical figures who had never seen, heard of, or taken these tests. It forms an easy method by which we can feel we understand the world without having to go through all the bother of reading of people’s biographies or accomplishments, or knowing anything about them at all. Their entire intellectual and scholastic oeuvre can be summarized in a three-digit number, and that’s all that matters to those of us who are IQ-obsessed.

One such person who was IQ obsessed was Rick Rosner, whose first IQ test was about 150, but repeatedly took more tests such that his IQ was inflated to 170 to 190. He said in an interview that 150 was OK for being the smartest in your high school, but not OK for being the smartest person at a place like Harvard. A 150 IQ just sort of blends in.

Of course, this logic fails because it confuses IQ scores with achievement. There is more to life than smarts; of course we can all do with more of it. The main ingredient, and possibly the most important ingredient leading to achievement and success in life is self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is the ability to make manifest the goals you set. Self-efficacy takes focus, determination, and discipline. These are things well within the reach of any average person.

Visits: 125

Crappy Album Covers #329 — Mathematics and album covers

Hey,and I thought I was the only one with a collection of mathematical music. Now, is my time to shine, and make millions! Now, courtesy of Strider’s Records, comes this great collection of mathematical ditties! Using various trigonometric equations, a waveform is fed into a sequencer, where you get the following 16 second hits that will make me obscene piles of money! (Some are up to 18 seconds, for the record)
Get a load of these UFO sounds:

Then, party to “throat-singing” simulations:

And then join the after-party for some warbling simulations:

Then, mellow out to my rendition of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music:
This is an alternative cover for Rick Wakeman’s first-ever recording, Piano Vibrations. It’s here, because of the geometric figure on the cover.

Visits: 98

Crappy Album Covers #328 — Setting high expectations then fighting them …

Here are the Brady Bunch’s Marcia and Peter Brady (for real). Chris Knight and Maureen McCormick got together to make an album some time after the series ended.Maureen did a string of B-movies along with several cameo appearances on television, and was going through a rough time in her career for a couple of decades, but is still acting, and has also written an autobiography about “surviving” having to play Marcia Brady, who had, as a result of the sitcom, become a role model for the perfect all-American daughter.
Cindy Brady is actually on the cover, but the lighting, subject and camera angle were so bad that she changed her name to LenaZavaroni. Actually, Lena is for real (1963-1999), and here she is at age 10 for her 1974 album, “Ma! He’s Making Eyes at Me”. She lived for most of her life in Scotland, where she had a strong fan base. She had also performed with Frank Sinatra and Lucille Ball while in Hollywood. At age 35 she succumbed to anorexia, a disease she had been fighting against since age 13.

 

Visits: 252

Crappy Album Covers #327 — Already knowing your cover is crappy

I don’t know about you, but this album, by El Tadeo, is being sold by everybody from Napster to Amazon to websites as far-removed as Japan. The reason I am sure it sells so well, is because this is a comedy album with explicit content, which is dull if all you know is English. As you would guess, this album is in Spanish.I guess El Tad expects us all to plop it on our turntable and just let it happen. But I know what’s going on. El Tad is channelling the late John Lennon, who oft times wore a toilet seat around his neck in some of his early concerts. Soon, El Tad will be thinking he is more popular than Jesus. Let’s just pray he doesn’t let this toilet seat thing go to his head … doh! Too late!

The LP was reissued as a CD in 2009. I couldn’t find the year of the original pressing.
Putting cutie monsters in a child-style drawing on the cover does not excuse Alphabutt from the overall grossness in concept. Year unkown. Berkeley, California native Kimya Dawson appears to be somewhat of an activist and has at least 6 albums out.

 

Visits: 157

[Media Monday] Collision of cultures

Another in a series of highly-circulated videos. Somewhere off the coast of Ireland in the North Atlantic, a large, fully-armed ship tries to avoid a collision with something on its radar which it thinks is another ship. They make radio contact, and find this smart-alecky Irish dude on the other end. American bravado versus Irish snarkiness. Who wins? This is an ad for the Swedish company Silva Navigation Systems.

Visits: 108

Crappy Album Covers #325 — Christmas Messages you probably don’t want to hear

One knows that Yoko must have been going though a creative slump back in 1991 when Ryko released this EP. It’s hard to fathom who would spend their Christmas putting this one in their CD player.
… Unless, of course, this 2006 Billy Idol album was their only alternative. He should have released this under his birth name, William Broad. Unless he can make “White Christmas” sound like “White Wedding”, it’s probably not going to work out. The track list includes mostly traditional Christmas songs.

 

Visits: 106

Crappy Album Covers #324 — The Horror, the horror …

Some covers are ugly for a reason. This one’s ugly because it’s a bootleg of a live concert in Philadelphia by the Danish heavy metallers Mercyful Fate. Bootlegs normally have substandard covers done by someone who did not understand the fine line between scary and ugly. You can listen to this bootleg for free here. The sound isn’t that bad.
This LP (year unknown) is a sound effects album by the BBC. The cover is probably intended to be a summary of the contents therein.

Visits: 408

Crappy Album Covers #323 — And remember this Christmas season, Don’t stink and drive

Antonio Fargas‘s claim to fame was his work as police informant Huggy Bear in the 1970s police drama Starsky and Hutch. He also acted in a string of so-called “blaxploitation” movies such as Foxy Brown.

He has appeared in many movies and even had a role as Doc in the now-defunct series “Everbody Hates Chris” as late as 2006.

And, there is this track “It’s Christmas” from the album, showing that some Carribean rhythms are not out of place on a Christmas record:

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No, actually, this is not an album cover, but a picture of the character in question. Click on this, and it links to my source for all this, Wikipedia.

Mr Hankey The Christmas Poo was a South Park character back in 1997 that was a talking and singing poo (are there any other kinds?). The poo would only talk to certain characters. To everyone else, Hankey would just kind of lie there and be … poo.

Imagine having a conversation with Hankey, with passers-by looking at you talking to a poo lying on the sidewalk. Everyone will think you’ve lost it, especially when you try to convince the passer-by that Hankey’s singing to you, too.

Hankey, purportedly, is a reaction to recent moves made by many officials to order the removal of nativity scenes from government buildings. The idea that creators Terry Parker and Matt Stone had, was to represent Jesus as poo. Got you angry for the Lord already, didn’t it? See? It worked!

Apparently, Hankey generated little controversy, probably indicating that no one cared. But actually, someone did care enough in 1998 to nearly file a lawsuit. That lawsuit came from John Kricfalusi, creator of the Ren and Stimpy show. Seems that Parker and Stone stole his idea of a talking poo, because Kricfalusi created the idea of Nutty the Friendly Dump earlier, another talking and singing poo. And so the battle of the poos began in earnest, with each cartoonist fighting for their claim to being the rightful poo creator. But all this misses the point of course. We all create our own poos, and it is the poo within ourselves that we must reckon with. Only when we get our poo together that we find we can go on in life. At least that is what my poo told me. Well, not my real poo, more like my inner poo.

 

Visits: 84

Crappy Album Covers #322 — Pretentious Prog

On a faraway planet, children crawl out of their homes inside of outdoor toilets to greet the Sun God. They call their place the “Houses of the Holey.” 

Led Zeppelin’s 1973 classic “Houses of the Holy” yielded a minor single, D’yer Maker, but it did end up as one of the top 200 albums of all time, according to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and also won a Grammy in 1974.
The Korean version of this album is a lot crappier where the robot (or whatever it is) is fishing the band members out of a rusty trash barrel (or a busted rooftop, it’s hard to tell). 

This is the album containing the 1977 monster hit “We Will Rock You/We Are The Champions”.

 

Visits: 136

[Adult Content] Crappy Album Covers #319 — Giant Chix Attack Manhattan!!!!

This was likely the same cover used for the prog rock group Jo Jo Gunne for their 1972 LP “Jumping the Gunne”, revived here by Rhino Records, who knows album curios when they see them. 

Yes, as you might guess, this was likely the album cover blamed for ending their one-hit wonder career, precipitating their breakup in 1975. Their first hit from their previous, and debut album, a UK top-10 hit called Run, Run, Run, charted in 1972. It also made the American top 40 the same year.

They have since re-formed in 2005 and have started touring again. They even have a web site.
Harry Potter has secretly been taking female hormone supplements, and they tell him the transitioning surgery will be painless. He wants people to call him Alison Arngrim from now on. 

Alison Arngrim, who by now is 48 years old, is a New York born actress and stand-up comedian. Her biggest role was during her youth when she played Nellie Oleson in the TV serial “Little House on the Prairie”.

You can actually surf to Alison’s own website, where she parodies Nellie Oleson with her 2010 book “Confessions of a Prairie Bitch” more than I ever will.

 

Visits: 99

[Audio] Crappy Album Covers #316 — More Commercial Tie-ins

An example of Commercial Tie-Ins: This is possibly a record given to Michelin Tire salesmen in order to give the salesmen something to say to their customers by way of promoting the tires. Here is a track from their promotional material, from about 1960, though it may not have come from this particular album. Kudos to Bunk Strutts at Tacky Raccoons for bringing this to my attention.
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This is from one of my old posts. I post it again because I have found a soundtrack from such albums courtesy of April Winchell.

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Visits: 194

Crappy Album Covers #314 — Bruno’s Younger Half-Brother

Bruno’s younger half-brother Tomas wanted to get into show business too. But unlike Bruno, he went to Spain where he thought there may be more of a market for playing accordion while taking your clothes off.At a certain point, when he has taken all of his clothes off, he plays his accordion down at the groin level …. verrrrrry delicately…..
Tomas’s father Andre, mother Bertille, and big brother Laszlo has decided to put out a French-language album, to show off their linguistic diversity. Bertille can’t do much except stare at the floor since she sprained her wrist playing maracas a little over-zealously last week. Laszlo wishes he were in a heavy metal group, but his father made him take accordion lessons instead. This “family band” thing is cramping Laszlo’s style.Don’t know much at all about these records.

 

Visits: 95

[Adult Content] Crappy Album Covers #313 — More people that worry me

The kind of only definition of romantic that this album conjures up is reminiscent of cheap 70s porn, with the requisite bad acting and bad writing. Since this is an instrumental album, it could very well be the same musicians that performed on the movie. Martin Denny is a well known pianist who should know better. He is known as the “father of exotica” music. Definitely not the father of erotica, with this LP.
Surely this is some kind of joke. If it indeed is a joke and not a real record cover, it has  to be the best retouching job in the history of photography. But alas, it is the real thing. This is a various artists collection of racy music and comedy. Even by today’s standards, the album cover and title give me the creeps. I just hope she returns her pussy back to her daddy once she’s done playing with it. I mean the cat.

Visits: 125

Crappy Album Covers #311 — Dogs and Cats

Watchtower fans (both of them, I guess) might get annoyed about my honest question, along the lines of: does the title of their 1989 album, “Control and Resistance” refer to the dog or the Rush-influenced lyrics?progarchives.com lists copies of this CD from $15.00 to $40.00, depending on the condition.
zoice.com had this album, no idea what it’s about. But in case you couldn’t figure out the theme of the album, and don’t understand the language and alphabet used, I guess it’s about cats. There is a female cat, a mad cat, and a sleepy cat.  The cat woman depicted in the photo doesn’t look too expressive, but if she’s holding a pistol, I guess she doesn’t need to be.

Visits: 71

Crappy Album Covers #272 — Lone Ranger References

I’ve heard it all since my childhood… The Lone Drycleaner, and others. But here is “Metal Rap” from a group called Lone Rager, released no later than 1984.

This is metal, so while it goes against my no-metal policy, it is not a shocking cover as you can see … Just stupid.

A Lone Rager vid appears below.
And here is the Lone Arranger. This 1980 LP by Ernest Gusella must have been where Russell Oliver got his ideas from (see video below).

The 10 tracks of experimental/Jazz music have titles such as “Body Art Disco”, and “Pissin’ in the Snow”. You might want to play this on your second date at the very earliest.

Here is Metal RAPsody by Lone Rager:

Ta da!!! Here is Russell Oliver, the Loan Arranger:

And here is an Air Farce satire on Russell Oliver:

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(Video) Miraculously Good/Bad Luck (La Chance 3)

Here is the latest instalment:

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(Video) Miraculously Good Luck/Bad Luck (La Chance 2)

I haven’t posted anything related to this since last year. These videos just fascinate me. I can’t get enough. More to come later.

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Visits: 151

Crappy Album Covers #247 — Arguing over the death of God

J. C. Crabtree questions Nietsche’s assertion that God is dead. It is likely that Crabtree didn’t read Frederich Nietsche when he made this record, but who knows?

There is no information I could find on this person, although a search turned up this J. C. Crabtree, but makes no mention of a ministry or of making records.
Here is Gertrude Behanna for the second time, here to just show up J. C. Crabtree with her assertion that God is in fact not dead. Heck, with her it’s not even a question.

This album was already discussed here.

To finally settle Nietsche’s question, well, I was talking to God the other day, and He told me Nietsche was dead. That final assertion is much more provable.

Visits: 117