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Monday, November 26, 2018

Musical Monday - Feels Like I'm in Love by Kelly Marie


#1 on the Billboard Hot 100: Never.
#1 on the Cash Box Top 100: Never.
#1 on the U.K. Chart: September 13, 1980 through September 20, 1980.

To a certain extent, this song kind of encapsulates the early 1980s. It is classified as a disco hit, but it isn't quite sure if it actually is disco. What I really want to talk about is just how ridiculous this video is. Not the song, which is more or less a fairly standard-issue dance tune with a couple of synthesizer flourishes, but rather the performance. Everything from the over the top makeup and feather earring on Kelly Marie to the gold lamé suits the two backing dancers are wearing, to the terrible choreography (including little laser gun motions to accompany the little musical bridge before each chorus), to the terrible silver boots the jumpsuit Kelly is wearing. This doesn't even get to the really awkward attempts to get Kelly into the flow of the video by having her join the dance routine, which only serves to demonstrate that while the dancer on the Kelly's left is a better dancer than the guy on her right, they are both professional dancers and Kelly really, really is not.

As ridiculous as this video is, one can see the kernels of what would become the 1980s contained within it. Whoever came up with the style and tone of the video was clearly trying to put the 1970s behind them, but wasn't sure what to do, so they are kind of groping in the dark, throwing whatever they could think of against the wall to see what might work. Despite the often ludicrous result, you can kind of see the seeds that would germinate into the look associated with some of the signature acts of the 1980s such as Madonna, Toni Basil, and even Annie Lennox. They may not have been directly influenced by Kelly Marie, but at the very least they were probably drawing from the same pool for inspiration.

Previous Musical Monday: Upside Down by Diana Ross
Subsequent Musical Monday: Don't Stand So Close to Me by the Police

Previous #1 on the U.K. Chart: Start! by the Jam
Subsequent #1 on the U.K. Chart: Don't Stand So Close to Me by the Police

List of #1 Singles from the Billboard Hot 100 for 1980-1989
List of #1 Singles from the Cash Box Top 100 for 1980-1989
List of #1 Singles on the U.K. Chart for 1980-1989

Kelly Marie     1980s Project     Musical Monday     Home

Saturday, November 24, 2018

Book Blogger Hop November 23rd - November 29th: 282 Is the Smallest Multidigit Palindrome Sandwiched Between Two Twin Primes


Jen at Crazy for Books restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another, but then couldn't continue, so she handed the hosting responsibilities off to Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them.

This week Billy asks: You meet an interesting person of the opposite sex at a club. Suddenly, they start acting as if they're a character in a novel you've read, and they are firmly convinced that they ARE that character. First, which character is it, and second, how do you react?

Since most of the books I read are science fiction or fantasy, anyone who starts acting like a character from one of them is likely to seem a little like and oddball. I suppose the most likely candidates would be for someone to behave like Tenar from Ursula K' LeGuin's book Tombs of Atuan, although she spends most of the book believing she is the incarnation of the immortal priestess of the Nameless Ones. Another possibility would be for someone to believe they were Eilonwy from Lloyd Alexander's Book of Three and the rest of the Chronicles of Prydain, although a self-centered princess with a magical glowing golden ball is seems like someone who would come off an something of an odd duck. A third possibility would be for someone to take on the persona of Éowyn from J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, but a horse-riding shield-maiden who longs for a glorious death in battle would be a little bit out of the ordinary.

I can't say exactly how I would react to someone acting as one of these characters, but given that most of my friends are kind of oddballs already, I don't think someone who thought they were Tenar, Eilonwy, or Éowyn would be all that notable. Any of them would probably end up being good friends with the redhead, and would almost certainly fit right in with our circle of friends.


Book Blogger Hop     Home

Monday, November 19, 2018

Musical Monday - Upside Down by Diana Ross


#1 on the Billboard Hot 100: September 6, 1980 through September 24, 1980.
#1 on the Cash Box Top 100: September 13, 1980 through September 27, 1980.
#1 on the U.K. Chart: Never.

One of the mantras of the early 1980s was "disco is dead", but one really has to question whether this was true or not. Songs like Upside Down seem like they should be called disco songs, but since disco was so disfavored, they weren't. Is this song disco? Is it R&B? Is it some combination of the two? This is certainly a dance song, and it seems to have a disco-ish beat, but no one I know seems to think of it as a "disco" song.

One possible reason for the treatment of this song may simply be that it was recorded by Diana Ross, and she had enough heft to make people overlook that it is a song that probably belongs in a musical genre that was "dead" when it was released. On the other hand, one has to wonder where this song stands in Ross' larger career. She had come to superstardom in the 1960s as part of the Motown group the Supremes, and had broken away to become a top level solo artist in the 1970s. Even though this was one of only six number one hits Ross had as a solo artist, it is well down the list of songs that people are likely to come up with when they think of Ross' career.

This is not to say that Upside Down is an obscure song. If it is brought up, most people (at least in my experience) will recognize it, and many will recognize it as having been performed by Diana Ross, but in a career that had reached the incandescent heights that Ross' had, it is kind of overshadowed. This is compounded by the fact that this song came out in what can only be described as the twilight of Ross' career - she only reached the top of the charts one more time, and to do that she had to pair up with Lionel Ritchie for the duet Endless Love. Further, Ross was being eclipsed by other divas who rose in the late 1970s such as Donna Summer. Ross still had career left before her, but her glory days were in the past, and that seems to have resulted in this song being a little bit overlooked.

Previous Musical Monday: Start! by the Jam
Subsequent Musical Monday: Feels Like I'm in Love by Kelly Marie

Previous #1 on the Billboard Hot 100: Sailing by Christopher Cross
Subsequent #1 on the Billboard Hot 100: Another One Bites the Dust by Queen

Previous #1 on the Cash Box Top 100: Sailing by Christopher Cross
Subsequent #1 on the Cash Box Top 100: Another One Bites the Dust by Queen

List of #1 Singles from the Billboard Hot 100 for 1980-1989
List of #1 Singles from the Cash Box Top 100 for 1980-1989
List of #1 Singles on the U.K. Chart for 1980-1989

Diana Ross     1980s Project     Musical Monday     Home

Saturday, November 17, 2018

Book Blogger Hop November 16th - November 22nd: 281 Is the Smallest Prime (p) for Which the Decimal Period Length of the Reciprocal Is (p -1)/10


Jen at Crazy for Books restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another, but then couldn't continue, so she handed the hosting responsibilities off to Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them.

This week Billy asks: Do you take notes about the book you are reading as you read?

The answer is usually yes, but it really depends on the kind of book I am reading. For novels or novellas, I will make some notes as I go, often to keep track of characters and places, especially ones that have names that look similar to other characters and places. Sometimes I will make notes on themes or recurring motifs in a story, but I only do this rarely, as my experience has been that you usually can't really begin to break down a novel until you've finished it.

On the other hand, I take extensive notes when I am reading collections and anthologies. Actually, that's not quite accurate. Really, what I do is write the review of the book as I read it. As I finish each work of short fiction in a compilation like that, I write a review of the story before moving on to the next one. When I finish the entire book, I have an assortment of reviews that I can stitch together into a cohesive whole.


Book Blogger Hop     Home

Wednesday, November 14, 2018

Biased Opinion - I'm Done With Twitter

With the move impending, I've decided this is a good time to make some other changes too. Some big, some little, but all notable to some degree.

I think I am done with Twitter for good.

I've used Twitter a lot over the years. I set up my first account nearly a decade ago. At one point I had three active accounts, each of which I used for different purposes. I racked up more than thirty-three thousand tweets on my main account. I met people, made connections, made friends. I initially met the redhead through a Twitter interaction. As a social networking platform, Twitter is a great idea and showed so much promise in the early years.

Despite this, I have come to the conclusion that Twitter is just not something that should be supported. At the extreme, I think that Twitter may be something that needs to die, or at least be driven extinct by something else. This is not a complaint about the technology, but rather a complaint about the people who run Twitter. The short version is simply this: The guys who run Twitter are way too friendly towards the misogynists, racists, homophobes, transphobes, and even outright Nazis who infest their site.

I've been increasingly uneasy about using Twitter over the last year or so as it became apparent that their system for handling loathsome individuals was not merely to accept that they were present in their user base, but to help defend and protect them as well. I suppose that the first glaringly obvious indication that this was the case was back during the days that GamerGate began, although the fact that Twitter was a refuge for people willing to spew venomous hatred at women was apparent even before then. Even during the darkest hours of GamerGate, there was some hope for Twitter - it was possible to believe that with the evidence of the rampant harassment and abuse that was running through their community highlighted in such glaring clarity, that Twitter would figure out that they needed to clean up their site and make their service a less hostile place.

Unfortunately, this belief was not borne out, or rather it was borne out, but only if you were one of the harassers. Twitter's official policy is that they want to make Twitter a "safe place where people can express their views", but what they really seem to mean is that they want to make Twitter a safe place to be a Nazi. Or a QAnon supporter saying all Democrats need to be in jail because they are running a worldwide child sex ring. Or an advocate for the genocide of people because of their race, or religion, or sexual preferences. Or an advocate for raping women who have opinions online. I know this, because Twitter has repeatedly told me, in response to reports I have sent them of such tweets by others, that these sorts of comments are perfectly fine and do not violate their terms of service.

I have seen tweets asserting that all liberals should be killed because liberals support Planned Parenthood. I have seen tweets asserting generalized violence against transwomen, and threatening specific violence against specific transwomen. I have seen tweets supporting killing all gay people in the United States, and threats of violence made against specific gay people. I have seen anti-Semitic, racist, and misogynistic comments, including the advocacy of murdering all of the people in those categories. I have seen accounts specifically (and explicitly) created in order to harass and threaten specific people - and I know they were created for such a purpose because the people who made them said that was what they were created for in the profile header of the account. All of these tweets and accounts are, according to Twitter, just fine and don't violate their terms of service.

The really telling element is that Twitter has shown that they can police their site, they just don't choose to do so. In some countries, Twitter is required to block Nazi accounts by law, and so they do. Twitter could ban the Nazis, racists, and misogynists if they wanted to. They know who they are. They just don't want to. Conversely, Twitter has become very diligent at policing the Twitter activity of those who are targeted by Nazis, racists, misogynists, and homophobes. I have seen trans activists suspended for using the completely accurate term "TERF" to refer to trans-exclusionary radical feminists. I've seen accounts banned merely for pointing out that some particular piece of information being passed around the conspiracy theory loving QAnon supporters was actually untrue. I've seen accounts suspended who did nothing but get targeted by right-wing hate mobs. Time and again, Twitter has made it clear that they are on the side of the Nazis.

4Chan has well-deserved reputations as hosting the sewer of the internet. Twitter is rapidly proving that they are a dumpster fire. In addition to the fact that Twitter enforcement has apparently aligned themselves with the worst elements of their user base, there is the fact that Twitter has become one of the primary means of disseminating right-wing conspiracy theory bullshit, which is aided by the extensive network of bot accounts that reside on the site. Just like with the Nazis, Twitter could clean up this aspect of their service, as it is pretty easy to determine what accounts are bots, but they don't, and the reason seems to boil down to money. By allowing the bot accounts to remain, Twitter inflates its user numbers, and consequently inflates their ad revenue and the reports they can provide to investors. According to some measures, approximately fifteen to twenty percent of Twitter accounts are bots and sock-puppets being used to push conspiracy theories like those spouted by QAnon, and Twitter turns a blind eye to this in an effort to make money.

This doesn't even get to issues like the fact that Twitter is used to harass artists like Rian Johnson and Noelle Stevenson over their creations, or the fact that I find myself needing to use blocking services with parameters so broad that I had, at last count, a couple hundred thousand accounts blocked and I still ended up blocking and reporting dozens of accounts every day.

In the end, the only conclusion I can come to is that Twitter is unsalvageable. Yes, reading messages about John Scalzi's crazy burritos and Chuck Wendig's rants about Star Wars has been fun, but the negatives of Twitter have come to outweigh the positives by so much that it isn't worth it to keep using it.

I'm done with Twitter. I don't think I'll miss it.

Biased Opinions    Home

Monday, November 12, 2018

Musical Monday - Start! by the Jam


#1 on the Billboard Hot 100: Never.
#1 on the Cash Box Top 100: Never.
#1 on the U.K. Chart: The week of September 6, 1980.

Few things really hammer home how different the U.S. and the U.K. are culturally than the music of the early 1980s. While the U.S. was making soft rock songs like Sailing and Motowned-up disco songs like Upside Down into the top hit in the U.S., the U.K. was following up Bowie's Ashes to Ashes with a Beatles-inspired song by a punk band fronted by a guy who looks like he really wanted to be John Lennon. Both sets of songs have their merits, but it is interesting that the U.S. was far less receptive to punk than the U.K., and far more enthusiastic about highly polished and produced material.

Like most punk bands of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Jam has an almost garage band feel. This song almost sounds like someone set a tape deck to record during a rehearsal session. The song has a very Beatles-esque feel, which isn't all that surprising since the guitar and bass riffs were more or less lifted from the Beatles song Taxman. This song was the Jam's second number one single in the U.K. I don't think any punk band other than Blondie ever got to number one in the U.S., and Blondie had to do it by essentially abandoning their punk roots and making disco, reggae, and rap songs.

Previous Musical Monday: Sailing by Christopher Cross
Subsequent Musical Monday: Upside Down by Diana Ross

Previous #1 on the U.K. Chart: Ashes to Ashes by David Bowie
Subsequent #1 on the U.K. Chart: Feels Like I'm in Love by Kelly Marie

List of #1 Singles from the Billboard Hot 100 for 1980-1989
List of #1 Singles from the Cash Box Top 100 for 1980-1989
List of #1 Singles on the U.K. Chart for 1980-1989

The Jam     1980s Project     Musical Monday     Home

Saturday, November 10, 2018

Book Blogger Hop November 9th - November 15th: 18 People at a Round Table Can Shake Hands With Each Other in Non-Crossing Ways in 280 Different Ways


Jen at Crazy for Books restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another, but then couldn't continue, so she handed the hosting responsibilities off to Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them.

This week Billy asks: Do you subscribe to any book subscription boxes?

No.


Book Blogger Hop     Home

Monday, November 5, 2018

Musical Monday - Sailing by Christopher Cross


#1 on the Billboard Hot 100: August 30, 1980.
#1 on the Cash Box Top 100: August 30, 1980 through September 6, 1980.
#1 on the U.K. Chart: Never.

To a certain extent, the last two weeks illustrate one of the major differences between the pop charts in the U.S. and the U.K. While the U.K. had the experimental and quirky David Bowie song Ashes to Ashes at its top, the U.S. had Christopher Cross' kind of milquetoast Sailing in the number one slot. This isn't to say that Sailing isn't a perfectly fine song, but it is a middle of the road soft rock tune that takes pretty much zero chances. It is a polished song, expertly performed, and ably produced with all aspects seemingly geared towards producing a commercially successful piece of music, which makes it pretty much like every other song that Christopher Cross produced in his career.

It is easy to forget what a big deal Christopher Cross was in the early 1980s. He had two number one singles (one of which was this one), five other top twenty hits, and won five Grammy Awards, all within the space of three years. Then, almost as suddenly as he achieved success, Cross all but vanished from the pop music scene. His first two albums peaked at number six and number eleven on the U.S. charts. His third album only made it to number 127. None of his later albums even charted. His last top twenty hit was Think of Laura in 1983. After that, he only has two songs reach the top 100, and the more successful of those only reached as high as number 68. Cross' fall from popularity was so fast, and so complete, that it seems like he kind of got forgotten by a lot of people.

I remember seeing an interview given by Cross in which he asserted that his career was ended by MTV and the rise of the emphasis on visual media over musicianship. There is the possibility that this is true, but on the other hand, it seems to me much more likely that the kind of late Seventies/early Eighties style soft rock he specialized in just got a little too boring for people's tastes, and the musical world left him behind. Note that I am saying this as a person who likes many of Cross' songs like Sailing, I just recognize that he was kind of a one-note act and the act got old.

Previous Musical Monday: Ashes to Ashes by David Bowie
Subsequent Musical Monday: Start! by the Jam

Previous #1 on the Billboard Hot 100: Magic by Olivia Newton-John
Subsequent #1 on the Billboard Hot 100: Upside Down by Diana Ross

Previous #1 on the Cash Box Top 100: Take Your Time (Do It Right) by the S.O.S. Band
Subsequent #1 on the Cash Box Top 100: Upside Down by Diana Ross

List of #1 Singles from the Billboard Hot 100 for 1980-1989
List of #1 Singles from the Cash Box Top 100 for 1980-1989
List of #1 Singles on the U.K. Chart for 1980-1989

Christopher Cross     1980s Project     Musical Monday     Home

Saturday, November 3, 2018

Book Blogger Hop November 2nd - November 8th: The Conquest of Wu by Jin That Resulted in the Reunification of China Began in 279 A.D.


Jen at Crazy for Books restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another, but then couldn't continue, so she handed the hosting responsibilities off to Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them.

This week Billy asks: Do you do collaborations with brands or other bloggers? Which collaboration was your favorite and why?

No. Everything on this blog is produced solely by (and for the most part for) me. I don't even do blogging tours, mostly because I know I can't keep to a posting schedule. I collaborate on other things, but not on this blog.


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