Musical primacy

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This post of mine sparked the following reflections.]

Our responses to music are closely tied to emotion as well as memory. People who are brain-damaged and cannot speak can sometimes access music and even lyrics; different parts of the brain seem to be involved. A person going through a difficult emotional time—particularly romantic heartbreak, the subject of so many popular songs—can find music acting as a cathartic releaser for emotions otherwise kept hidden.

Although some people are disinterested in music, most of us are very very drawn to it. We have our favorites, and our favorites can be tenacious. Like Proust’s madeleine, a song or piece of music can vividly conjure up a lost time and place, distant people, and heartache or joy and almost everything in-between.

I have long thought that we all have a general tendency to prefer the first version we ever heard of a particular work, especially if we’ve grown familiar with it before hearing other versions. Of course, that first version must be a good one, but given that, it seems that the first one embeds itself into our minds and hearts in a way that makes it difficult to dislodge from its place of primacy.

There are many pieces, classical music and popular, that I know so well in their first versions that I can sing along (albeit badly) with every note, every nuance and hesitation and diminution, every accelerando and crescendo and shade and color. New versions just seem so wrong, even if other people might love them.

I’m sure there are exceptions where I’ve grown to love the later versions. But right now I can’t think of any. Well, maybe this one—but I wasn’t all that fond of the original in the first place:

The original:

Or was this the original? I think it was the original original (it sounds a lot more familiar to me):

As I said, neither is a big favorite of mine, but I think the Taylor version is more interesting. And the public seems to agree with me.

One exception to the primacy rule for me is Mark Knopfler. My favorite Knopfler version of any Knopfler song is usually the one I’m listening to at the moment. With Knopfler, it’s all good.

Two possible suspects?

The New Neo Posted on by

At this point I hesitate to report on “news” connected with the Boston bombings, because so much released by the MSM about the aftermath of this story has proven false. So take the following with more than a grain of salt.

Many newspapers—such as, for example, the Boston Globe—are reporting that the FBI is planning to release photos of two backpacked men in the crowd whom they’d like the public to help them identify. Obviously, they think these might be the bombers. But the NY Post has actually accompanied its story with a photo supposedly of the two men, even though this does not appear to be an official FBI photo but is instead the sort of thing that’s been speculated on at websites such as this one (hat tip: “Kustie the Klown”).

Just to show you some of the confusion, here are two sentences from that same Boston Globe article:

Authorities have clear video images of two separate suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings carrying black bags at the explosion sites and are planning to release the images today in an appeal for the public’s help in identifying the men, according to an official briefed on the case…

Jason Pack, a supervisory special agent with the FBI’s national office, said Thursday that the agency has not made a determination on whether there will be a press conference, or whether to release photos.

The Globe story says that the men in the videos “were seen separately on videotape ”” one at each of the two bombing sites, which are located about a block apart.” But the photo in the Post is of two men standing together.

Different “authorities,” different stories.

Do you look like your dog?

The New Neo Posted on by

I had a small white fluffy dog, a smallish-to-medium-sized cockerpoo. We got him when our son was eight years old.

No one in our family looked like him (the dog, not the child), although I suppose we were all about medium-sized (for people, not dogs). He was a wonderful dog, friendly and calm, not barky at all despite the fact that he was not big. He had the temperament of a big dog in a smaller dog’s body, and he didn’t shed, which was a fabulous thing.

We didn’t look like our dog, but some people and their dogs do have a marked resemblance:

peopledog1

peopledog2

More at the link.

Bad explosion near Waco

The New Neo Posted on by

Horrific explosion in a fertilizer plant near Waco, Texas, with many injured and many feared dead.

I am not a conspiracist. And this is, after all, a fertilizer plant. Fertilizer is highly explosive, and I don’t see why a fertilizer plant would be a target. So my guess is that this is an accident. But I can’t help but notice that Friday is the 20th anniversary of the Waco siege.

This has certainly been a dreadful week.

Breaking news: suspect arrested

The New Neo Posted on by

We’ve had false reports about this sort of thing before, but…

A suspect has been arrested in the Boston bombings, identified by video.

No doubt more will be coming on this, but that’s all there is as of now.

UPDATE 2:15: the videos are reported to have been from the Lord & Taylor department store.

I keep forgetting that many of you—probably most of you—are unfamiliar with the area of the blast. Almost anyone from or near Boston, or who visits the city a lot, is very familiar with the area, because it’s a very popular spot for shopping and for tourists. The Lord & Taylor store is very near the finish line of the marathon.

Once again, though—this may all merely be a rumor. Reporting on this story has been rife with misinformation so far.

UPDATE 2:20: Now the police are issuing denials.

Looks at the moment as though it’s another false rumor in a string of them. The MSM has not exactly been covering itself in glory in covering this story.

UPDATE 4:30: Now we’re hearing that authorities have found an image of a possible suspect but have not identified or apprehended him.

High Noon

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: The following case is one of the reasons I think the ricin letters may have been sent by someone out for revenge.]

“High Noon” is such a dramatic movie, it’s easy to forget what starts the whole thing rolling: a man Kane helped convict and who has just been released from prison after serving his sentence has vowed to kill Kane, and returns to town (with a few eager confederates) to do it. He almost succeeds, and the dramatic action of the movie relates how and why he fails.

But that sort of risk is one that modern-day authorities can also run, as this Texas arrest shows. If they have actually caught the proper perpetrator (and it sounds very much as though they have), these two murdered Texas lawmen—DA Mike McLelland and assistant DA Mark Hasse, as well as McLelland’s wife Cynthia—were not killed by any fringe group such as the Aryan Brotherhood or by drug cartels, as many had theorized. The motive was revenge by a man filled with rage:

Police reportedly zeroed in on Williams after several emails making threats to other county officials were linked to him.

Those threats, though, were not his first.

Williams, who served as a justice of the peace, handling-low-level legal cases in Kaufman County, has been prosecuted by McClelland and Hasse on charges that he stole three computer monitors from the courthouse and misused law library funds…

Prosecutors also brought up an incident in 2010, when Williams reportedly became irate when he learned that an attorney on an arbitration case he was handling had canceled a hearing.

‘First thing I heard was Eric say, “I’m going to kill him,”‘ attorney Dennis Jones, testified, according to the Dallas Morning News. ‘”I’m going to kill him, his wife, his kids. I’m gonna burn his house down. I’m gonna stab him.”‘

Despite this, Mr Jones and the man Williams threatened to kill both testified that they thought his words were harmless and that he never would have hurt anyone.

Doesn’t sound all that harmless to me. But then again, I have the wisdom of hindsight. Of course, he didn’t kill that particular man; he killed three other people against whom he had a similar grudge.

Here’s the scene from “High Noon” it all reminds me of (unfortunately I couldn’t find this particular clip at YouTube), except of course for the very different ending:

The marshal [Kane] exclaims: “You’re a judge!” The practical judge replies: “I’ve been a judge many times in many towns. I hope to live to be a judge again.” And then the judge confronts Kane with his suicidal decision – the camera zooms in on the empty chair where sentencing was pronounced years before:

“Why must you be so stupid? Have you forgotten what he is? Have you forgotten what he’s done to people? Have you forgotten that he’s crazy? Don’t you remember when he sat in that chair and said, ‘You’ll never hang me. I’ll come back. I’ll kill you, Will Kane. I swear it, I’ll kill you.'”

[ADDENDUM: Apparently Williams’ wife was the shooter in all three murders. Perhaps.

It’s a bit difficult to get the story straight from the somewhat garbled reports, but as best I can decipher it he’s saying she did it and she’s saying he did it.

You may recall that, in the movie “High Noon,” Kane’s pacifist Quaker wife ends up killing Frank Miller, the guy who’s been stalking him, thus saving her husband’s life. It’s her moment of truth.

Quite a different situation from this one. That was in order to keep Miller (the bad guy) from killing Kane (the good guy). Here we seem to have a wife and husband pointing the finger at each other as the killer of the good guys.]

And then there’s ricin…

The New Neo Posted on by

…apparently sent in letters to President Obama and Senator Roger Wicker (R).

The incident not only reminds us of 9/11—after the WTC attacks, you may recall, there were a series of anthrax-letters to politicians—but these ricin-letters were intercepted as a result of those earlier anthrax-tainted missives. You may recall that, after the anthrax letters were received and had done their dirty work, the protocol for reception of snail mail on Capitol Hill and at the White House changed, and remote screening facilities were set up. That new method of screening mail has continued to this day, and it is how the ricin was detected.

During the period when the anthrax letters were being sent, people were already tremendously on edge because of 9/11. Many thought the two events were connected. Whether they were or weren’t has never been definitively determined; you can read about the murky case and findings connected with the anthrax letters here.

Now no doubt the same questions are being asked: is there a connection between what happened in Boston and the ricin letters? We have so little information so far that it hardly even makes sense to speculate, except to say it’s possible. Conspiracy theories abound, and would have abounded about the Boston blasts even if there had been no ricin letters. Already there are Boston-Marathon-truthers who are spinning their tales.

My own hunch—and it’s extremely subjective, based on very little, and highly subject to revision—is that the two incidents are unrelated. That the ricin letters were sent by someone with a grudge, particularly against Senator Wicker, who seems an oddly low-profile target for such aggression. Is there something of interest in his past that might prompt a desire for revenge in someone who thinks he/she was wronged by Wicker? Looking at Wicker’s Wiki entry nothing really leaps out, although this of of slight possible interest: that as a member of the House (which he was until 2007), Wicker “worked on issues related to medical research and on economic development for his home state.” Maybe there was some medical researcher who felt slighted by Wicker?

As I said, not a very strong theory, but it’ll do for now till something better comes up.

As for the Boston bomber[s], my also-highly-subject-to-revision guess would be one or more Islamisicst semi-freelancers, probably already living in the Boston area and seeing the marathon as a target of opportunity rather than having any special grudge against runners or their families. They could easily figure out that policing and providing airtight security for a huge event that spans twenty-six miles is virtually impossible, and much more difficult than most other sports venues.

I am almost certain that future marathons (not just in Boston, either) will feature more security, however. Even I can imagine ways to tighten security in the area where the largest crowds congregate, near the finish line. And I think people (and authorities) should become more aware that unattended packages or backpacks are a red flag.

More information on the Boston bombs

The New Neo Posted on by

This might have some meaning as a clue, although a rather non-specific one:

The explosives used to kill three people and injure 176 at the Boston Marathon on Monday were most likely some kind of “pressure-cooker” devices that sent sharp bits of shrapnel flying into victims in the vicinity of the blast, several law enforcement officials said Tuesday…

Rudimentary explosive devices made from pressure cookers have been widely used in attacks in Afghanistan, India, Nepal and Pakistan, all countries where the cooking device is common, according to a Department of Homeland Security warning notice issued in 2010. But they have occasionally turned up in attacks in the United States as well: Faisal Shahzad, an American citizen who tried a car-bomb attack on Times Square in 2010, included a pressure cooker loaded with 120 firecrackers in the collection of jury-rigged explosives in his vehicle. The devices smoked but never exploded.

It turns out Southerners are not so very fat after all…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and what’s more, they seem to be more truthful about their weight when asked.

But the most interesting thing to me about the survey described in the article was this:

“Everybody underreports their weight but women do it more,” Howard said.

Men, on the other hand, do something else that affects the Body Mass Index, which is weight divided by height squared and is used to define obesity.

“They overreport their height, which makes them seem less obese.”

Women say they’re thinner than they really are. Men say they’re taller than they really are.

Makes perfect sense to me.

What “sense of safety”?

The New Neo Posted on by

While in the car yesterday I was listening to some Boston-based talk shows, and I heard some people going on and on about their shock at what happened at the marathon, and how it destroyed the sense of safety they had prior to the blast.

I have a question for them: where were you on a certain sunny day in September, 2001?

If a person didn’t see that as a watershed event, and feel that our sense of safety—although necessary in order to go about our daily lives—was severely compromised that day (and even earlier, if we’d been paying attention), then I wonder about that person’s ability to perceive events.

Of course, in a larger sense, we all should retain our sense of safety even after both 9/11 and the Boston blast. Why? Because, statistically speaking, our chances of being killed or injured in this way remain vanishingly small.

Nevertheless, in recent decades those chances have increased, and our perception of their frequency and likelihood of occurrence certainly has. In the words of the cliché, “that’s what the terrorists want.” And that’s what they tend to get.

I was thinking last night about what the turning points were in my perception about safety from terrorism. Certainly 9/11, which seemed especially up close and personal because of my connection to so many of the places involved. But even before that I can remember incidents that made a deep impression on me and brought home the fact that terrorism can strike anywhere, any time.

The massacre of the Israeli athletes during the Munich Olympics was one. I’m neither Israeli nor an athlete, but the peacefulness of the venue and its sporting nature multiplied the shock of the attack and was a precursor to yesterday’s blast. Another incident—one about which some of you may be unaware—was this especially horrific attack that occurred in 1972, the same year as Munich.

I think people naively and protectively insulate themselves from these things by emphasizing certain unique characteristics of each attack. “Oh, that one happened in Israel.” “Oh, that one targeted athletes”—or the military, or capitalists in the WTC, or whatever it is that we ourselves are not.

But nearly everyone can relate to standing in a crowd and watching a sporting event, and that increases the shock value of a terrorist attack that all of us should have seen coming. The only question was where and when. “Who” remains to be seen as well, although if we play the numbers, we can guess the most likely perpetrators.

Some of the Boston bombing victims

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s some information about the eight-year-old Dorchester boy who was killed, and whose other family members were injured. Only one person in the entire family of five, his brother, escaped physical injury, but he is understandably severely traumatized psychologically.

Very very very sad, and ironic, since the family had moved after the first blast in order to get away from where they thought it was especially dangerous. Apparently they moved towards the second bomb’s ground zero instead.

This article is about two brothers who each lost legs in the blast.

Reports are that, like these brothers, a great many of the injured have lost legs. When I heard that, it occurred to me that someday, as part of their healing, these sudden traumatic amputees might even meet and help each other. Sometimes people who have shared an intensely horrific experience draw close in a way that is difficult to describe. It can be one of the few—the very very very few—silver linings to this evil cloud.

Explosions at Boston Marathon

The New Neo Posted on by

[UPDATE 9:40: Now we’re hearing more about the terrible injuries, which include a lot of amputations. I haven’t watched the more graphic images, and don’t intend to. But it occurs to me that one of the few pluses of this having happened in Boston (a city involved in 9/11 as well, because two of the four planes involved took off from there, and a great many of the airplane victims were therefore local to the Boston area and New England) is that it has one of the very best medical systems in the world.

UPDATE 9:30: I’ve been watching local TV coverage, and the reporter was saying that we don’t know who did this, or why.

Although that’s certainly true, and although it certainly matters what the answers might be, I would submit that to a certain degree we do know. A terrorist or terrorists did it, and the object was to cause terror.

Terrorists, whether foreign or domestic, whatever philosophy they are promoting (and there’s no question that Islamicists are disproportionately represented) among them) have the goal of disrupting daily life—especially happy celebratory times, or ordinary times when people feel safe and relaxed—and making people feel fundamentally unsafe. A subsidiary but not unimportant motive is terrorists’ desire to blow people up, watch the commotion, and feel their own power to wreak havoc. Sometimes there is a further goal of inspiring a backlash against the terrorist act that can then be exploited in myriad ways.

UPDATE 6:35 PM: the JFK Library explosion appears not to have been the result of a deliberate act.

And I’m not sure whether this report on a suspect is true, or just a rumor. I’ve heard both. Here are the denials.

UPDATE 5:30 PM: The news is even worse than originally reported. Two people are dead, and many many more are injured. See also this.

Another explosion has been confirmed at the JFK Library in Columbia Point, a bit south of Boston. In that one, fortunately it appears that no one was injured.]

Terrible:

Dozens of people have been injured after an explosion at the finish line of the Boston Marathon Monday afternoon. At least 12 people were seriously injured and transported to local hospitals, according to Boston ABC affiliate WCVB.

The Boston Globe cited witnesses who reported hearing two large explosions shortly before 3pm ET, more than four hours into the race. The Associated Press reported at least one of the explosions came near the entrance of the Fairmont Copley Hotel. Meanwhile, photos posted on Twitter showed several people severely injured along Boylston Street–at the center of the Boston’s main shopping district. Local news reporter Jackie Bruno wrote that she saw some people with their limbs blown off.

Note that there were two explosions, which indicates terrorism. As for potential perpetrators, there are many possibilities. The leading one would always be Islamicists, but because of the target it’s by no means certain that’s the case. Someone with a grudge against the Marathon? Someone from either side of the political spectrum who wants to make a point about Patriots Day? Someone who just likes to see things blow up in a venue where there are a lot of cameras?

Of course, terrorism at sporting events is nothing new. Remember Munich, 1972? And the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bomb?

Whatever the source, terrorism wants to instill terror, to make people feel unsafe in the seemingly safest of places. I’ve been at the finish line of the Boston Marathon (not as a runner). It’s ordinarily a festive, happy, delightful occasion, like a big party. Now, this.