Venues Less Desirable Than Summerfest

Musicians live and die on their concerts. Getting gigs is how you get your name out there and how you make a lot of your sales and money. It's also a way to get people who only know one song of yours to listen to a bunch of your other songs.

If they hate what they're hearing, though, it also gives the fans direct access to the offender.

Meet, via Wikipedia Roulette, Haji Saifo, a folk singer of Tajik descent, in his prime during the 1980's. Recordings of Saifo's songs are rare- he lived in Central Asia, after all.

Though a video of him is available here.



But recordings of Saifo missed the point of listening to him. The point of listening to Saifo was to see just what he would say next. Saifo's songs were never the same twice. He would follow maybe a particular topic, but then go ranting on that topic, or maybe some other loosely-related topic, long beyond the point where an album could hold him anyway. Sometimes a song might last a half-hour.

And quite often, Saifo would end up dragging the audience into the lyrics, guests of honor included. He was not necessarily flattering, either. Or sometimes he was too flattering. Sometimes he would question the manhood of a groom at his own wedding reception. Sometimes he would hit on the bride, or at least the bride's breasts. How the audience took Saifo's rantings depended on the audience. Some had fun with it, knowing what they were getting themselves into. Some got a little uncomfortable. Some threw food at him.

And according to accounts, this was his downfall. Remember, Saifo was performing in Afghanistan, with a prime in the 1980's. It was only a matter of time before he would rant to the wrong people. As the story goes, in 1998, he found the wrong people: the wedding of a Taliban general. It's not clear what exactly happened, or what he said. But the story maintains that he said something in his lyrics, and the Taliban audience responded by doing something with their guns.

Tough crowd.

That's Some Nice Flutin', Boy

In one long-ago episode of the Simpsons, Ralph Wiggum had a flute up his nose. It was a long time ago. Specifically, this was the episode where Bleeding Gums Murphy died.

Today, playing Wikipedia Roulette, you are going to find out that a flute up the nose is done in some cultures on purpose. Unsurprisingly, the instrument is called a nose flute. It's found in Hawaii, DR Congo, China, the Philippines, New Zealand and India.

Here's a sample of the Hawaiian one, the most prominent of the nose flutes, also known as the ohe hano ihu, and more on why in blazes you're playing it with your nose. I'll just let the expert talk...



When playing it, you want to breathe gently. First off, it's not going to sound very good. Second, you never want to blow your nose into your musical instruments if you can avoid it.

If you'd like to buy one... unfortunately, this appears to be one of the few things you can't buy on the Internet. So you'll have to make your own. That's what you're supposed to do anyway. It's pretty simple; all you need is a stick of bamboo wood you can blow into, preferably with a thin wall, and get both your hands onto. Put one hole into the side of the wood towards the end; that's where your nose is going to go. Close the nose end of the stick. After that, place a couple finger holes onto the same side of the wood; those are your finger holes. It's your call as to how many holes you want, but the standard is three, with the middle hole in dead center.

That's really about it. The sound you get out of the flute is going to depend on the size of the stick's cavity, the length of the stick and the location and size of the holes. Every flute is going to sound different.

After that, it's a simple matter of explaining to your friends that, no really, this has REAL CULTURAL VALUE and will you stop talking about how you bent your wookie already.

Rapid-Fire Book Club, Green And Yellow Edition

First off, clearly, this must be done.



And an NFC Champions shirt must be bought. That done, an addition to the Rapid-Fire Book Club was done in the meantime; there was a Barnes & Noble gift card that needed a workout.

Bathroom Readers' Institute- Uncle John's Bathroom Reader: Colossal Collection of Quotable Quotes
Fuller, Alexandra- Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood (suggested by someone on a Fark thread)
Grant, John- Discarded Science: Ideas That Seemed Good at the Time...
Sass, Erik; Wiegand, Steve- The Mental Floss History of the World: An Irreverent Romp Through Civilization's Best Bits

In addition, my birthday brought three Penny Arcade collections: The Warsun Prophecies, Birds Are Weird, and The Case of the Mummy's Gold, which makes that a complete set of the first six books there.

In conclusion, in the interest of equal time, here is the Steelers' equivalent song.

Happy Birthday, Self

I turn 26 today, and as such, I claim perogative to post Weird Al and knock off early.

Hey, at least I'm honest about it.

The Musical Equivalent Of MS Paint

In 1992, Mario Paint was released for the Super NES as a showcase for the 'Mouse' peripheral that would then see fairly common use through the rest of the life of the Super NES. The main attraction of the game was, of course, the painting: you got 40 different colors, 60 textures, some stamps, and a couple coloring-book pages if you want them; have fun.

There was also a music composition device. You were given 16 different sounds and a musical scale. It doesn't sound like much, and the default song given doesn't exactly inspire greatness:



Surely, I never came close to making anything decent. Neither did my brother, despite playing the trumpet in middle school. Perhaps it was because of too much time spent making "elephant noises", and as you can plainly see, there is no elephant available on the menu.

But when any sort of creative tool is given to a mass of people who have grown up surrounded by technology, there is always going to be somebody who can take a minimal amount of tools and get maximum value out of them.



A hack of the tool has been made, Mario Paint Composer, which over time has added the ability to further fine-tune the tempo, speed it up way past the high end allowed by the Super NES, and a few other things, including, over time, four new sounds, but has stuck to the spirit of the original tool.

Which means with enough talent, someone can go do this...



...or this...



...or even this, which has got to be the king of Mario Paint compositions, with extra credit for sticking to the original 16 sounds...



I'm still not anything resembling musical. Though I at least now know that music composition isn't supposed to go "Okay, we had an A flat, so now we should have a sharp, let's say F sharp, and then we should have a C to balance it out. What haven't we had in a while? B? Get one of those in; make it a flat." Maybe you can do better.

WhoThe Heck Is Parson Brown?

Is what you've likely asked at some point if you've had Winter Wonderland drilled in your ear. Which by now you surely have.

'Parson' was just the term they used when the song was written (1934) to refer to a priest. "He'll say 'Are you married?'; we'll say 'No man/ But you can do the job when you're in town'" refers to Parson Brown marrying off whoever's doing the singing.

Man, is that song out of date, isn't it? First off, nobody uses that term anymore. Secondly, priests used to travel from town to town like that, but not anymore. Third, later on the song talks about going off to "frolic and play the Eskimo way" when we don't call the Inuit that anymore either, and you know sooner or later kids are going to start asking what's an Eskimo. And then there's "later on we'll conspire" and these days it doesn't really matter what the next line is because by the time you get it out you're eating pavement with your hands in cuffs.

And while we're at it, Santa Claus Is Coming To Town. Why are we singing to kids "He sees you when you're sleeping/ He knows when you're awake/ He knows if you've been bad or good/ So be good for goodness sake"? Yes, kiddies. The old man is watching you sleep.

And if you're good, the old man who watches you sleep will come into your house through the chimney. To give you a present.

This is not something you could get away with telling children in 2010 if it were not already established tradition.

American Idol, Sort Of

American Idol is running ads for the upcoming season regarding the fact that they represent, well, a broad cross-section of America. Fair enough, they certainly go to a broad enough cross-section of audition cities.

This would have passed by unnoticed and uncommented on, except for one little mistake: they started to show some of the actual winners and their hometowns. And the states seemed to... cluster. Texas. Alabama. Arkansas. Missouri. Oklahoma.

My brain sometimes latches onto the strangest, most inconsequential things. This turns out to be one of them. And with me, sometimes the only way to get it out and make room for something else, something more important, is to just go with it. I warn you in the profile over there to your right. I never said what kind of knowledge you'd be getting around here. Just knowledge of some sort. Sometimes you get election coverage, sometimes you get economic disaster in Albania, sometimes you get me turning my full investigative fury on an innocent American Idol commercial that did nothing wrong to anyone. Back in the glory of statistical masturbation.

This is probably how those studies end up happening on things like the pattern in which a skunk sprays when it gets run over by a Mack truck. People like me happen.

The show can let anyone it chooses through the audition process, any combination of people at all, but once they turn control over to the viewers, they lose almost all control over what cross-section of America survives to the end. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to pull out a map of the United States. We will then mark off, on that map, the locations of the hometowns (at the time) of every contestant in American Idol history that has placed in the top five.

First, we'll list them off.

SEASON 1
1st: Kelly Clarkson, Burleson, TX
2nd: Justin Guarini, Doylestown, PA
3rd: Nikki McKibbin, Grand Prairie, TX
4th: Tamyra Gray, Atlanta, GA
5th: R.J. Helton, Cumming, GA

SEASON 2
1st: Ruben Studdard, Birmingham, AL
2nd: Clay Aiken, Raleigh, NC
3rd: Kimberley Locke, Nashville, TN
4th: Josh Gracin, Westland, MI
5th: Treynce, Memphis, TN

SEASON 3
1st: Fantasia Barrino, High Point, NC
2nd: Diana DeGarmo, Snellville, GA
3rd: Jasmine Trias, Mililani Town, HI
4th: LaToya London, San Francisco, CA
5th: George Huff, New Orleans, LA

SEASON 4
1st: Carrie Underwood, Checotah, OK
2nd: Bo Bice, Huntsville, AL
3rd: Vonzell Solomon, Fort Myers, FL
4th: Anthony Fedorov, Trevose, PA
5th: Scott Savol, Cleveland, OH

SEASON 5
1st: Taylor Hicks, Birmingham, AL
2nd: Katharine McPhee, Los Angeles, CA
3rd: Elliott Yamin, Richmond, VA
4th: Chris Daughtry, McLeansville, NC
5th: Paris Bennett, Fayetteville, GA

SEASON 6
1st: Jordin Sparks, Glendale, AZ
2nd: Blake Lewis, Bothell, WA
3rd: Melinda Doolittle, Brentwood, TN
4th: LaKisha Jones, Flint, MI
5th: Chris Richardson, Chesapeake, VA

SEASON 7
1st: David Cook, Blue Springs, MO
2nd: David Archuleta, Murray, UT
3rd: Syesha Mercado, Sarasota, FL
4th: Jason Castro, Rockwall, TX
5th: Brooke White, Van Nuys, CA

SEASON 8
1st: Kris Allen, Conway, AR
2nd: Adam Lambert, San Diego, CA
3rd: Danny Gokey, Milwaukee, WI
4th: Alison Iraheta, Los Angeles, CA
5th: Matt Giraud, Kalamazoo, MI

SEASON 9
1st: Lee DeWyze, Mount Prospect, IL
2nd: Crystal Bowersox, Elliston, OH
3rd: Casey James, Fort Worth, TX
4th: Michael Lynche, St. Petersburg, FL
5th: Aaron Kelly, Sonestown, PA

Man. If this isn't a testament to a talent show's credibility resting on the actual quality of the talent it finds. Riding high earlier on with Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood and Chris Daughtry and Bo Bice and Tamyra Gray, and then you look at more recent years and... Danny Gokey. Lee DeWyze. What the hell. The talent pool fell off a cliff after season 5.

But anyway. We will map the hometowns (as best as possible, anyway) to see what kind of pattern emerges, if any. Winners are shown in red, runner-ups in pink, 3rd place in blue, 4th in green, 5th in grey. The seasons are noted. So Burleson, Texas, hometown of Season 1 winner Kelly Clarkson, is denoted by a red 1.

Here's the map. Linked because it's way too big to fit here.

As the commercial indicated, it stacks up in the South, particularly in the top three. When fourth and fifth get added in, you start to see the Rust Belt pop up a lot as well. The Dallas, Atlanta and Los Angeles metro areas seem particularly prone to getting people deep into the competition, though Los Angeles didn't start making these showings until Season 5 while Dallas and Atlanta began placing immediately. And Birmingham, Alabama has come up with two of the winners, Ruben Studdard and Taylor Hicks, something no other STATE has managed.

Meanwhile, New York, city or state, hasn't put a single singer in the top five yet as we head into Season 10 (and not for lack of trying on the part of the show; auditions have been repeatedly held there). New England is also entirely absent. The Mountain West only has David Archuleta of the Salt Lake City metro and, if you want to be generous, Jordin Sparks of the Phoenix metro.

South Carolina and Mississippi are also absent. And with the series in well-publicized chaos, they may want to hurry. Besides, they're in the part of the country that seemingly has all the singers who are actually any good.

Alpha Dog of the Week

Stephen Colbert is off this week prepping for a week of shows in DC and what is now the Rally To Restore Sanity And/Or Fear. So I shall pick up the slack for him today, which means I must declare an Alpha Dog of the Week.

(woof)

My Alpha Dog of the Week is Jessica Simpson's dad, Joe Simpson.

(arf)

Jessica is going to be doing a Christmas special, or, more accurately, she did it on Thursday and it will be shown on Christmas. A vocal group of veterans, 4Troops, was set to appear alongside Jessica in the special, who stated over and over on stage how much she supports the troops.

Joe, however, decided to cut their number from the program. According to Page Six, he didn't like the fact that they were in camo pants in blazers- the same dress as they were in when they did a routine on the USS Intrepid- as opposed to tuxedos. They spent six hours in a basement before being told this, while Jessica, who according to her representatives had just returned from a tour of the Persian Gulf, her inspiration for the special in the first place- appears to have been oblivious to what was going on.

Joe deemed the veterans "too scruffy".

Well, that takes some balls right there, Joe, keeping your daughter in the dark and then kicking out a major part of the reason anyone's on stage that day. So what if they're veterans? They spent a year or more in Iraq and Afghanistan getting shot at so you don't have to; what's six hours in a New York basement not getting shot at? They even have all the amenities down there, up to and including nothing that will randomly explode. It may have been appropriate dress for David Petraeus, but you're in the civilization you've been protecting now. We have standards.

Besides, what singer dresses in fatigues? ...you know, besides 50 Cent. And Rihanna,a resident of Barbados. And Elvis. And the star of the movie Private Valentine, Jessica Simpson.

In fact, for helping to save a support-the-troops Christmas special from any actual troops, I say the military should probably get Joe Simpson, my Alpha Dog of the Week, a Christmas gift.

Head down to West Virginia, and seize all the coal.

What's With Miley Cyrus?

If you are a parent, or knows someone who is, or in fact have eyeballs, you are probably aware that Miley Cyrus is rather emphatically casting off the Hannah Montana persona for one of a definitely not Disney-approved nature. Her latest (and as she tells it, last) album, 'Can't Be Tamed', is full of barely-veiled shots at the House of Mouse. There were some warning signs beforehand, most notably the 2008 Vanity Fair shoot where she was photographed barebacked and topless- but as of late she has projected just about as wild and sexual an image as one can do prior to their 18th birthday (which comes November 23).

So what's going on?

In 1987 Daniel Wegner of Trinity University conducted a three-part psychology experiment. In the first part, students were asked to just say whatever they thought for five minutes. This was easily done.

Then in the second part, they were told to do the same, except they were told to try not to think of a white bear. Every time they did so, or said 'white bear', they were to ring a bell in front of them. Of course, now all the students could think about was the white bear. They'd try to block it out, but it was easier to do when they just, you know... didn't think of one. Now that they were told to suppress it, here it is and it won't go away. They'd end up ringing the bell rather often.

Then in the third part, the students were given permission to think about white bears. The result was that their thoughts just became 'white bear white bear white bear'. The white bear utterly overwhelmed them.

Compare to Miley. Early in life, Miley was pretty much any other pre-puberty girl, except that she happened to be the daughter of Billy Ray Cyrus. She'd go to a Baptist church, wear a purity ring.

Then she moved to Hollywood in 2005 and became Hannah Montana, and along with it an army of Disney makeup and wardrobe people, and a rock-star persona. She also got a Disney personality construct: no overt sexuality, no excess showing of skin, nothing about boys that's not Disney-approved (she wound up dating a Jonas Brother). All white bears that Miley now had to suppress, while being made- and developing her own accord- into an attractive young woman.

The Vanity Fair shoot came about amidst all this. Ding. Prior to that, pictures surfaced of her flashing her bra strap and draping herself over an unidentified male. Ding. She broke up with Nick Jonas and decided to "just figure out who I really am." Ding.

But now she nears her 18th birthday, Hannah Montana will soon wrap, and now she, like all Disney teen idols, must strike out into the entertainment industry without Disney's assistance. Or to put it another way, she is now free to express herself however she sees fit.

White bear white bear white bear white bear white bear.

What does Miley need to do? Well, now that the white bear is here, it's pretty tough to make go away. But she does need to dial it back. Dolly Parton may be fine with the image, but she's had years of her own to properly develop, at her own rate. She started thinking of the white bear naturally, and just generally knows what she's doing. Miley didn't and doesn't. She is at risk of having it consume her at a young age, and needs some sort of proper guidance that, clearly, she is not getting.

None of this is to say Dolly is not worthy of advising Miley. In fact, Dolly Parton is probably the best mentor Miley could possibly have concerning this kind of thing. Like I just said: Dolly knows what she's doing. She knows how to convey a sexual image without having it consume her. She's actually a corollary to another aspect of the white bear experiment: some subjects were told from the beginning that they had permission to think about white bears, without any prior suppression. They thought of the white bear less frequently than those who had been suppressing it.

If sexual expression is the direction Miley wishes to go, Dolly's just the person to tell her how to go about it properly. But all the sound advice in the world does no good if it is never given in the first place.

It's a very delicate time in Miley's life, as it is with any child star, particularly Disney child stars. The most dramatic example is Britney Spears, a former Mouseketeer. Her mental derailment after leaving the safety of Disney is well-documented, which progressed to the point where she began making prominent appearances in death pools, in which people make predictions on which celebrities they believe will die in the next year. She recovered, but only after her father asserted legal control over every aspect of her life, control that is currently ongoing.

Miley, obviously, is nowhere near that point, and this should not be regarded as a statement that she will ever reach that point. Christina Aguilera was a Mouseketeer as well, and made the transition expertly. But Spears is to be regarded as a cautionary tale. Control the white bear, or the white bear will control you.