This is hard. There are so many to choose from. We started going to their concerts in the 1970s when we were living in Providence, and have been going for decades, actually, including their occasional forays to London. A couple of years ago we timed our trip to Boston so we could hear their Christmas concert, as well as go to the Revels for the first time in a couple of years. The Camerata is responsible for the best bunch of Christmas music ever to have been recorded by a single American group, so I’ll just mention the highlights–A Medieval Christmas, A Renaissance Christmas, Noel (medieval French), Sing We Noel (early American and English), An Early American Christmas, A Mediterranean Christmas. They’re all great. Blue light special for bargain shoppers–you can get a threesome set (Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque) cheap at this time of year. I guess if I had a favorite, it would be Sing We Noel. But that old Medieval Christmas has held up well for well over thirty years now, and it’s still one of the best Christmas albums out there.
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Here’s a story that makes you think.

• Abusive GOP lawmaker
• Slips her something that distorts her perceptions
• Beats the hell out of her during allegedly consensual sex
• No safe word to make it stop

Damn. Sounds kinda like a metaphor for American political life, huh?

UPDATE: Woops – now it’s a felony assault charge….

The New Possibility, by John Fahey. Actually, this was Fahey’s first Christmas album, and there were a number of follow-up albums, but you can get all the first and most of the second on a single CD with the same title. Fahey was a visionary and peripatetic American guitar player who has influenced practically everyone who happened to even walk near a guitar since. Starting out with his own label (Takoma) at a time when crating your own label was practically unheard of, he built an incredibly loyal following during the 1960s and thereafter that stayed with him until his death several years ago. Most of his albums were straightforward and blues-based, but he could get very experimental as well–the first half of Requia, for example, is straightforward guitar–the second side sounds like Charles Ives on drugs.
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Christmas in Eastern Europe. Anyone who has been in an American supermarket over the years knows what an increasing nightmare trying to get through the checkout line can be, especially if you have kids of any age. That’s because the stores put all the “impulse buy” items there–candy, soap opera magazines, the latest Adam Sandler DVD. And at the holidays they load it up with all sorts of silly holiday stuff, including really bad Country Christmas CDs. But occasionally a gem slips through.

There’s this label called Laserlight, that may or may not still be in business, and they specialize(d) in inexpensive (cheap!) CDs, mostly classical music, with the occasional Jerry Vale or The Lettermen’s Greatest Hits thrown in. These are the CDs you used to find in, say, the Wal-Mart bargain bins, or by supermarket checkout lines—and for all I know, you may find them there still. Full story »

Let’s begin with a quick trivia question. What legislator’s Top 20 donor list includes the following?

• Blackstone Group (Financial Services)
• Bain Capital
• FPL Group (Energy)
• DLA Piper (Corporate law firm, representing Global 1,000 and Fortune 500 companies)
• Kindred Healthcare
• Beacon Capital Partners
• Comcast Corp
• Brownstein, Hyatt et al (Corporate law firm)
• Venable LLP (Corporate law firm)
• Hummer Winblad Venture Partners
• Apollo Advisors (Private equity firm)
• River Terminal Development
• Time Warner

We’ll have the answer for you at the bottom. Full story »

THE DEPROLIFERATOR — A large part of the lore of crime is the history of those transporting precious goods and the highwaymen who prey on them. Valuables are most vulnerable when in transit. Removed from safe storage and the constancy of inanimate walls, they become susceptible to the capriciousness of the human element. For example, their guard corps may be infiltrated by agents of those who covet them. This is as true of nuclear materials as anything else. Full story »

It’s that time of year again. Yes, I’m talking about holiday season, when we all join together and recreate the timeless materialistic ritual of shopping. Some of us try and take it in the true spirit of giving, but if you’ve turned on a TV lately then you know that ’tis the season is really all about our culture’s obsessive wanting. “Wanting” is a word with multiple definitions, and in America, we’re guilty of them all.

As I think about what to get people this year, I find myself wishing that I could truly give, but if I give something that serves only to worsen a pathology, then I’ve hardly given in any meaningful sense, have I? Would you consider giving a bottle of Wild Turkey to an alcoholic? Full story »

Welcome to the Tournament of Rock – Legends Final Four. Let’s get it started. Up first, The Rolling Stones and Neil Young, the winners of the Budokan and Red Rocks regions, respectively.

#2 The Rolling Stones: Listen	#5 Neil Young: Listen

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Nowell, by Glenda Dove, Mitzie Collins, and Roxanne Ziegler. Who also did Ornaments, and Rejoice. Who? I have no idea, except that they seem to live in upstate New York, and their album is on Sampler Records, out of Rochester, New York, and Sampler has a website. Order all three. I bought this record about fifteen years ago (on vinyl!), and loved it, and it’s still great. Harp, dulcimer and flute, that’s it. Some great jazzy arrangements too, and the song selection ranges from medieval to recent–they cover the lot. Some of the arrangements are just stunning. I’m listening to it right now, in fact. You should see their picture. They look as if they like nothing better than playing pretty music, making apple pie, and looking for a nice scrap for the center of the quilt. And probably making samplers for their grandchildren. In fact, they look just like us. Or some of us, anyway. Just load these babies up in your iPod and you won’t listen to anything else for days.

That’s it for today, being a day of rest and all.

Whether or not statistics back it up, conventional thinking holds that men want sex more than women. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I see sex as cyclic to men, like eating when hungry. Women, untroubled by semen accumulating in their testes (or whatever it is that drives us), could arguably be categorized as a-cyclic. To them sex isn’t a reflexive response, but a choice that’s the product of a series of events on any given day that make them feel especially valued and attractive. Unfortunately, it’s tough to reproduce those circumstances — or get men to — in the workaday world. Full story »

Beware the new blog meme about hash smoking in the Afghan National Army. Yes, i referenced it a few weeks ago, but i did so for humor and was quick to point out that U.S. soldiers got just as high a generation ago in Vietnam. I then went on to make the point that the problem isn’t ANA guys getting high. The new, embryonic meme is that an Afghan National Army of the sort talked up by D.C. isn’t possible because, “all the men there– yes, all of them– are stoned all day, every day on the strongest hash (much of it opiated) on God’s earth.”

Wow, that’s a lot of bullshit for one sentence.
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Update: The UK Daily Mail has a story about the possibility that the Russian state security services (FSB) may have been behind the CRU hack.

According to the National Post, criminals impersonated network technicians and tried to break into the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and gain access to the network servers. This follows many break ins and burglaries at the University of Victoria where papers were rifled through and where a dead computer was stolen.

Brad Johnson at The Wonk Room is following this story, as is Kevin Grandia at DeSmogBlog.

It’s too early to say whether these attacks on CCCM and the UofVictoria are related to the illegal release personal emails from the Climate Research Unit, but the timing is certainly curious. In my experience, two incidents can be coincidence, but if another one or two pop up, it’s likely that we have a coordinated campaign against climate science.

Actually, for the country that invented the Christmas carol, you’d expect there to be a pretty wide range of choices, and you wouldn’t be disappointed, but still, you’d expect more. That’s probably because the folks who would be making these albums are perfectly happy down at the church caroling away. Why hasn’t June Tabor put out Christmas albums? Thankfully, Kate Rusby did one last year, and it’s a treat. But the clear winner here is the Albion Band, or The Albion Christmas Band. They have several albums out, and they’re all very English and very folky, including the brand new one this year, Traditional. Which means simple songs simply presented, with a modicum of accompaniment, but with great gusto.
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First, the results: perhaps S&R voters are tired of conventional wisdom. Some would examine the results of ToR voting to date and reply that “conventional” isn’t the problem, they just lack wisdom, period. In any case, voters felt no reverence whatsoever for the seedings, as they have now evicted the last (and most prominent) of the #1s. The numbers: #3 The Who 53%; #1 The Beatles 47%. Isn’t that a fine kettle of fish?

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This is a bit of a mix in terms of category, because I have no idea what music gets called these days, or why. Folk used to have a fairly specific meaning in US music—and it still does in the UK and much of Europe. But lines have gotten pretty blurred the past several decades, and now it seems as if “folk” is applied to pretty much anything that isn’t rock. And even here it gets messy—what genre would one call The Levellers, for example? Anyway, the choice here is pretty straightforward–The Roches, We Three Kings. Since there are three Roches, the title is ironic, I suppose. But it’s a wonderful album–the Roches all have high thin reedy voices, but they harmonize extraordinarily well, and there are some lovely arrangements of all sorts of music, from the usual carols to Handel, and some of their own songs as well–Star of Wonder is a gem. This was my kids’ favorite Christmas album when they were smaller, perhaps because of their definitive version of Frosty the Snowman, sung in New Yawkese. It still gets plenty of play each Christmas. We’ll give this one to the Roches–this album has just brought everyone I know just too much sheer enjoyment.
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Back in 2005, self-described “rogue economist” Steven D. Levitt teamed up with journalist Stephen J. Dubner to write Freakonomics, a book that rose to #2 on the NY Times Nonfiction Bestseller List based largely on the controversial topics within its covers. Some of those topics included analyses of cheating by teachers, the economics of being a crack cocaine dealer, and the impact of legalized abortion on the crime rate. Levitt and Dubner (hereafter L&D) have recently published a second book, Superfreakonomics, and even before it was published it had made a huge splash in climate circles over its last chapter (Chapter 5 – “What do Al Gore and Mount Pinatubo have in common?”), the one that attempts to tackle climate disruption.

I’m greatly troubled by the content of Chapter 5, but only partly because of the many factual errors that L&D made. Full story »

“Overture, curtain, lights Full story »

Allow me to present you with two quotes from Representative Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI), one from March 2007 and one from December 2009:

[T]he Administration is allegedly curbing Federal scientists from presenting scientific findings that are at odds with its policies. Before we start screaming “McCarthyism,” we should examine how little merit these accusations actually have. (Source)

and

These e-mails betray the true thoughts and motives of many leading climate scientists. It shows a pattern that’s closer to scientific fascism than the scientific method.(Source)

The first was Sensenbrenner defending the Bush Administration from accusations (later proven) that scientists were being pressured and their work interfered with for political reasons. The second refers to the Swiftboating of CRU scientists (aka Swifthack – see here for the best roundup of links on this subject I’ve found on the Web).

Care to explain your apparent hypocrisy, Rep Sensenbrenner?

Also, two different journal publishers have publicly said that the contents of the emails are not sufficient justification to open an investigation into scientific misconduct. Full story »

This is tricky. You want it to be calm, since you don’t want the kids to get up and start dancing–that alone lets out The Nutcracker. You don’t want too much singing, because that would be distracting, and you want kids to enjoy Dylan Thomas’s wonderful language and stories. What would be nice is if you knew any Welsh composers who wrote Christmas songs, but you don’t, and I don’t either. So, instead, you want something kind of quiet and noodling and soporific…wait! How about A Celtic Christmas?

Well, how about something else?
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