Errors-To: owner-ecto@athos.rutgers.edu Reply-To: ecto@athos.rutgers.edu Sender: ecto@athos.rutgers.edu From: ecto@athos.rutgers.edu To: ecto-request@athos.rutgers.edu Bcc: ecto-digest-outbound@athos.rutgers.edu Subject: ecto #152 ecto, Number 152 Thursday, 6 February 1992 Today's Topics: *-----------------* For we believe...I'm a believer "Common Ground" travels Surprised it took this long! Travellin' Man Don't feel _too_ old Now You've Got Me Using The Dictionary, and other picture postcards ======================================================================== From: katefans@chinet.chi.il.us (Chris n Vickie) Subject: For we believe...I'm a believer Date: Wed, 5 Feb 92 16:42:11 CST Vickie here, my gray hairs are standing on end.....re Greg's list: The Monkees! Geez, I used to be deeply, hopelessly, teenybopperishly in *looooove with Davy Jones.I still firmly believe that they were much more talented and interesting (the band and the writers) than generally given credit for. It is nice to see the names of those songs popping up unexpectedly like that. They sure brought back some major memories. To all the younerphiles here, I hope your eyes aren't rolling too far back in your head :-) because that group made some great pop music, so much fun to bop around to. Some of the songs and lyrics were downright political and weird too. Ecto Mom (feeling right now like the oldster in Little Big Man) "I'm cold...where'd I put that quilt I stitched up during the Civil War?" :-) ======================================================================== Subject: "Common Ground" Date: Wed, 05 Feb 92 22:56:38 EST From: jeffy@lewhoosh.umd.edu Here's number 3 of the B/R demos. If I didn't say it before, many thanks to Angelos for transcribing the first one... COMMON GROUND We pass our ends through common spirit Looking for universal word There is no time For second guessing I'll plant the seed You'll bring the rains We'll wait for light The canvas is ready now It's painfully bare We have the colors Thrown into the air There is no room for indecision You'll plant the seed (in the ground) I'll bring the rain (for my pain) We'll wait for light (... light) Walk on common ground The mold is broken [out] The frame is uneven Only a memory for the blueprints There is no need to look behind We'll plant the seed (in the ground) We'll bring the rains (for my pain) We'll wait for light (... light) The bodies are buried now The earth is [calm] The walls must be taken down Stone by stone There is no reason doubt For consolation I'll plant the seed (in the ground) You'll bring the rains (for my pain) We'll wait for light (... light) You'll plant the seed (in the ground) I'll bring the rain (for my pain) We'll wait for light (... light) We'll plant the seed (in the ground) We'll bring the rain (for my pain) We'll wait for light (... light) We'l plant the seed (in the ground) We'll bring the rain (for my pain) We'll wait for light (... light) |Jeffrey C. Burka | "Show what you are / Be strong, be true | | | Time for you to / Be who you are." | |jeffy@lewhoosh.umd.edu | --Happy Rhodes | ======================================================================== From: Jeanne B Schreiter Subject: travels Date: Wed, 5 Feb 92 22:04:18 CST Warning: sentimental letter ahead. Erase now and don't get mushie. I've written a lot of poetry out in the past three-4 weeks...and I just want to say...since my computer STILL IS NOT functioning...I don't have the time/hours to put it up..therefore: (ready?) I'm sending it to Vickie via tape..and I figure she'll get some of my ramblings tomorrow, or the next day at the very least. Vickie will be receiving my most current works, a few pretty rusty, some in 4-5th drafts..eventually...eventually, I'll get them on ecto. Barry: I should have your tape (possibly 2) to you by Valentines Day (BTW: Happy!!! Valentine's day everyone..) and, we've think (Tom and I) we've converted by friend D^2 to Happy...most wonderful! The biggest news is that 1) if all goes well I'll have a job in CA one of these fine crisp mornings and 2) (ranks right up there w/ 1), I can rejoin you all again. :) Thanks for listening.. Vickie..I still think your voice is wonderful.. :) Missing you.. Jeanne ======================================================================== Subject: Surprised it took this long! Date: Wed, 05 Feb 92 23:30:49 EST From: jeffy@lewhoosh.umd.edu I finally made my first HGP-related purchase...Wim Mertern's "No Testament" CD single (I've been unlucky in trying to find _Maximizing the Audience_). I fail to understand why Tower insists on placing Mertens in the rock section. He's in with the rock indie/imports in the DC Tower, along with bands like LPD, Coil, Area, DCD, and the entire range of possibilities. I would imagine he's in the only Belgian minimalist composer in the section. ;-) After finding the Mertens space empty, I started looking through the import CD singles and was surprised to see "No Testament" for only $6. It's wonderful! The first two tracks are really great. The 3rd and longest leaves me a bit cold, but the final two tracks (both short...1:21 and 0:22) are neat/fun. If you like Justin's selection on HGP, I would recommend this "single." I also picked up _Solace_. I'd never heard any Sarah McLachlan, but have been reading the raves about her on r.m.g (and here) for years. It looks like you folks have really found another winner. She's spectacular. Now I wish I could hear her B-side of "Solsbury Hill." I also seem to remember a concert report from maybe 2 years ago stating that she'd sang "My Lagan Love" which must have been pretty incredible. I can't wait to get more of the HGP stuff. I finally found a copy of Sonny Sharrock's _Highlife_ but at $20, I decided I could live with my copy of "Kate" for now. Alas, I've found no Steeleye Span (well, I would have found some tonight if I'd been able to get a parking space in Georgetown; I remember seeing a few of their albums at the store I shop at in Georgetown). I've also seen a bunch of June Tabor around, but I'm not sure what to buy (yes, I know, Steve Fagg's HGP selection is from _Ashes and Diamonds_ (which brings up something I've been wondering about for a week or two. Is "ashes and diamonds" a common phrase? Or is Roger Waters a June Tabor fan? I couldn't figure out why the phrase sounded familiar at first, but I finally placed it..."ashes and diamonds, foe and friend/we were all equal in the end", a line from "Two Suns in the Sunset", the final song on Floyd's _The Final Cut)). And on yet another related notes, I saw a copy of albums by, I think, "Silly Sisters" or "Weird Sisters" or something like that--a collaboration between June Tabor and Maddie Prior. Anybody know much about this "group" and/or have albums to recommend? Thanks to Steve for putting June Tabor on the HGP. I've been wondering about her for _years_. It's a kite thing, you see. She shares her last name with a guy who revolutionized stunt/sport kiting back in the mid-80's, and every time I'd see one of her albums, I'd get really curious. But not curious enough. More's the pity. Jeff |Jeffrey C. Burka | "Show what you are / Be strong, be true | | | Time for you to / Be who you are." | |jeffy@lewhoosh.umd.edu | --Happy Rhodes | ======================================================================== Subject: Travellin' Man Date: Wed, 05 Feb 92 23:33:49 EST From: jeffy@lewhoosh.umd.edu I'll be in New York this weekend with a bunch of friends (ie I can't really get together and do an ecto-gathering, much as I'd like to). I'd like to know, though, if any of you New York types can recommend any record stores or book stores or anything else that might seem remotely interesting. It'd be greatly appreciated. Next weekend, I'll be in Austin. I mentioned this once before, and got e-mail from Brian Bloom about it, but I seem to have misplaced that e-mail. Yes, Brian, I'd like to get together at some point if possible. Same goes for anybody else in the area, though I don't think there actually are any other Austin ecto-folk/love-hounds (no, this is not being crossposted...;-) Jeff |Jeffrey C. Burka | "Show what you are / Be strong, be true | | | Time for you to / Be who you are." | |jeffy@lewhoosh.umd.edu | --Happy Rhodes | ======================================================================== Subject: Don't feel _too_ old Date: Wed, 05 Feb 92 23:38:40 EST From: jeffy@lewhoosh.umd.edu Actually, Vickie, one of my close friends in college was heavily into the Monkees (one of her favorite bands; her favorite being the Who). I used to get subjected to diatribes about how the _could_ play their own instruments and occasionally did. She kept trying to get me to see _Head_ but it never happened. So it goes. And to whomever felt dated because they could quote 90% of the lyrics to "Bus Stop" by the Hollies, well, you shouldn't feel bad either. I could probably quite around 75% of 'em, and while I could be wrong, I think it was written before I was born. You were just dealing with idiots on whichever newsgroup the incident occurred on. Oh. I had a question about that list of tunes by the Monkeez...one of the songs was "Door Into Summer," which was also the name of a wild book by R.A.H. I don't suppose the song had anything to do with that book, did it? Jeff (who can still shock and amaze people by informing them that one of the Monkees put together the great movie _Repo Man_) |Jeffrey C. Burka | "Show what you are / Be strong, be true | | | Time for you to / Be who you are." | |jeffy@lewhoosh.umd.edu | --Happy Rhodes | ======================================================================== Date: 4 February 1992 14:23:06 CST From: Subject: Now You've Got Me Using The Dictionary, and other picture postcards (There is nothing wrong that I know of with the Rutgers server, or indeed any other, unless it's still making four copies of all my postings. More specifically, it isn't holding up postings sent to it Tuesday until Wed- nesday or later. I started writing this on Tuesday, ran out of time, and am now resuming work on it on Wednesday--MP) In last night's episode of _Northern Exposure_, one of the subplots con- cerned Chris' quest for a cow suitable for tossing. At one point, in the general store, Ruth Ann says of Chris something on the order of "His ideas are far out, but sooner or later he usually comes up with something interesting." (Fatigue kept me from assimilating the exact language.) It seems to me that this post is likely to be something like that. It may cover a number of things that were more current last week than this, before it gets around to the current hot topics on ecto, but will hopefully get around to something interesting sooner or later. I've had to reduce my gross number of individual essays lately, due to the need to devote time to matters related to the Februar y meeting of my other magnificent obsession, the Chicago Sociological Practice Association, and so have had to crunch a large number of concerns together into a single mega-essay while I have a spare moment or two (*10**n? :-) ). Hope- fully, it will prove lucid just the same, and will not cause anybody's mail reader to blow up from sheer volume :-) (cf. the concerns expressed by Meredith at one point last week). _In re_ Martin's response to my witticisms last week regarding Foster's Lager: it has occurred to me that Foster's comes in a predominantly blue can (standard size as well as the inimitable oilcan, unless the latter _is_ the standard size in Australia). If one handles them with sufficient intensity, the blue may become fuzzy. If not refrigerated, the contents will remain warm. This is as close as one can probably come to a warm fuzzy blue beer, short of dyeing the stuff itself (talk about stilted and unnatural blue :-) ). The latter reminds me of nothing so much as the practice of many Chicago bars (pubs, in the Commonwealth idiom) on St. Patrick's day, of selling (stilted and unnatural) kelly green beer, even as the natural color of Guinness Stout comes reasonably close to that of the Chicago River. (When the Guinness gets suffi- ciently stale and warm, what is more, the flavor may also converge with that of the river :-(', or so I tend to imagine.) (Overnight, it occurred to me that the political types who organize the af oresaid parade do, in fact, dye the river kelly green. I doubt if it makes the water taste any better, though I've never actually tasted it under either color .) _In re_ mjm's query: Carl Kadie is still at Urbana, and now runs the Computers and Academic Freedom mailing list (subscriptions to comp-academic-fre edom-talk-request@eff.org; also available on many systems as the alt.comp.acad- freedom.talk newsgroup). I enthusiastically recommend this mailing list/news- group to all of you; some of the current discussions are extremely relevant to our current concerns about lists-v.-newsgroups, flame wars, and parallel forums on Kate (and possibly other topics, on many of which more below). _In re_ the Mess O' Morphs (not to be confused with the Mess in Washington :-) ): it is good to see that people are finding out for themselves what these terms mean; but I still don't think we ever resolved my original existential question: who would be the mesomorphic ecto-goddess, alongside those who represent the other two somatypes? (In the long run, we may want to give some thought to adding somatype to the masterfile of member data. :-) Nahh. :-) ) Those whom I have apparently turned into slaves to the dictionary will be gratified to know that the increasing number of bits of business in what seems to have become the _de facto_ second language of ecto, namely German (in con- trast to the apparent emergent second language of Gaffa, which is French), have had me poking my nose into Langenscheidt's more often. I may have been broken of slavish dependence, however, when I was reading _The Aspirin Wars_ (full of fascinating information on the establishment of I.G. Farben, the efforts of the makers of Tylenol to require bottle warnings that over 40 aspi- rin tablets in one dose could be hazardous to your health, etc.), and was on the verge of looking up the words on a Bayer advertising truck, when I looked closer and discovered it was in Dutch, not German. (Might my fascination with such a book be an indication that I find life a headache? :-) ) Angelos, _in re_ his snow poll, wondered out loud to me whether a "not bothered to reply" was equivalent to a "refused." The answer is: generally no. Refusal is an affirmative act by a respondent, as contrasted with a data void resulting from the respondent's failure to respond. (For those who have yet to develop the ambiguity tolerance that comes from a life in the social sciences, the distinction may indeed be subtle.) The two outcomes are typically coded separately; in a mail survey (including email, as in the presen t case), failure to return the questionnaire at all, despite repeated contacts, is not even counted in the data; it only reduces the response rate. Since I wrote the last paragraph, the results of the poll have been posted . I should probably be proud to be the only free-thinker in the sample with respect to whether to answer yes or no. But as I was about to say: the whole snow issue reminds me of the 25th anniversary, a couple of weeks ago, of the epic Chicago blizzard of 1967, which deposited 20something inches overnight. The day before the anniversary, there was a fairly light snowfall, at least where I live, which had been forecast to be heavier. On the anniversary itself , I went to see a retrospective of great Second City sketches from the past 30+ years. There was an opening remark by one of the actors: "One hundred years ago today, it was January 26, 1892." Enough said, especially now that it's war ming up here. To turn to more current and universal topics: My copy of the Ecto SiG tape arrived on Saturday. I didn't have time to listen to it immediately, so I decided to give Vickie's usual resplendent wrapping job overnight to live; I was pleased to notice that on the envelope, Vickie had inherited my nasty habit :-) of plastering things with epigrams. I also was pleased to find the key chain with a picture of Happy "free inside," as they used to say on cereal boxes when I was a kid. Through the inimitable blue tissue paper, I noticed th e heart-with-a-V sticker, and immediately thought of the numerous occasions on "Dick Buckley's Archives of Jazz" (WBEZ), when he states that some number from the 1940's originally came out on V-Disk, a wartime music delivery system for the troops. Might this, I mused, qualify as a V-Tape for our troops in the Gaffa flame wars? :-) But seriously, folks: In the sweet name of economy of phrase and the avoidance of redundancy (me talking like that? Incredible! :-) ), suffice it to say that I like it as much as everyone else does, especially the interview and the Bartlett/Rhodes numbers, collectively "not sold in stores ," as the saying goes. Hope one of these fine days, we all can get copies of the outtakes. _In re_ the current brouhaha over gaffa, flames, and warmroom: Kudos to Kiri, Angelos and Jeff for their insightful analyses. Being one of the more casual Katefans in ecto, I'm not sure whether I'll ever get an _irresistible_ impulse to subscribe to Jorn's new venture. Nor am I sure where I stand in relation to the various sentiments expressed on all sides. I felt vaguely ill at ease reading some of them, but I'm gratified and reassured to see them expressed vigorously and forthrightly in these pages. From time to time, I have worried that our joint and several commitment to the "warm fuzzy blue" ideal in the abstract, could lead to a shared image of ecto as a sort of protected enclave, where the parameters of fair comment would tend to be construed narrowly when dealing with emotionally charged issues such as this. In the present case, that doesn't seem to be happening. I came across some- thing yesterday in comp-academic-freedom-talk, which somehow reminded me of my unfounded anxieties: >The upshot of the CMU policy is this: the search for truth has been >superceded by the idea that people's egos and psyches are so fragile >that they must be protected from any and all offense. Even if we >can't objectivelly define what it means to be offensive, that's ok, >say the CMU apologists. Truth is now irrelavant. I wish I could be more confident about applying the old aphorism, "It can't happen here." I'm just glad that to all appearances, it's not happening here. To go back to more cheerful matters: people still seem curious about who/ what the father of warmroom is, if gaffa is the mother and ecto is the baby sister. It has been posited that Jorn is the father, but if the previous assumptions are clung to, it becomes a matter of cross-species parenting (or whatever a human and a newsgroup add up to), which is typically a natural impos sibility. I have no definitive answer to offer, but am somehow reminded of the great words of Rus Arnold: "Necessity is the mother of invention, and laziness is the father." All of which reminds me of yet another nexus between very long posts, and these improbable _tchotchkes_ I dream up from time to time: Vickie's spoiler warning last week on the "Making of the Ecto SiG" reminded me of Burma Shave signs, of all things (a sure sign of superannuation :-) ). I initially doubted that one could make a fuzzy blue shaving cream, but Vickie later told me that certain shaving gels (a product I don't normally use, thus explaining away my ignorance of this fact) do come in blue. After a week of pondering, I finally came up with the idea of packaging such a concoction as ECTO SHAVE, complete with Ecto Shave signs. Since I lack the flair for doggerel that the original Burma Shave sign writers had, I have settled for the following juxtapositions of large (in all caps) and small (in lower case) lettering: FUZZY skin surfaces + BLUE Ecto-Shave = WARM responses to smooth skin (never was any good at centering lines on the fly :-). The perspective may in- deed be androcentric, but what the hell? :-) ) To try to counterbalance all that with something gynecentric: I just got a reply to my latest film trivia quiz on the net (on women's sports films), which asked "know any interesting women of strength who arm-wrestle?" If any- one on ecto fits the description, I'd be glad to put you in touch with my interlocutor. Just thought I'd pass it on :-). Earlier, someone expressed some anxiety in these pages about losing Vickie to WXPN if that station picked up her show, and it caught on. I'd much prefer to see her do it on WBEZ, here in Chicago; or else if WFMT ever adds a fourth rotating host to "The Midnight Special," alongside the redoubtable Ray Nordstra nd, Norm Pellegrini and Rich Warren, I can recommend the logical choice. While on the subject of radio: anyone catch a story on _Morning Edition_ (NPR) last week on Enya, and possibly some other artists of frequent interest to us? I just caught fragments of it, and a local insertion pre-empted it on the program's second cycle. Last but least: I would be interested in learning more about the Update newsletter Jessica mentioned. A more important question is, is it anything Happy and Kevin ought to know about if they don't already? Happiness. Mitch Pravatiner Adjunct Visiting Lecturer in Survey Design, Philology, and in the College Whadyaknow-Notmuch U. (number one college choice among this year's Boomdidiwana High graduating class) _________________ "It smokes, it drinks, it philosophizes. At this rate I'll be 60 before you even get to the point." --Humphrey Bogart in _Beat the Devil_ (directed by John Huston, 1954) ======================================================================== To join ecto, please send electronic mail to the following address: ecto-request@athos.rutgers.edu To have your thoughts included in the next issue, send mail to: ecto@athos.rutgers.edu The ecto archives are on hardees.rutgers.edu in ~ftp/pub/hr. There is a README file explaining what is where. Feel free to send me (or leave in the incoming directory, just let me know) things you'd like to have added. To subscribe to "Ecto", the printed fanzine, send $8 to: Ecto PO Box 11291 New Brunswick, NJ 08906 Ecto is issued 8 times/year, and will include photos and as much material from non-net members as we can get! Donations above the subscription cost are welcomed - all money goes to bringing you better issues! I've been told I'm too far from humble to even have it in quotes, so, just "your moderator" -- jessica (jessica@athos.rutgers.edu)