Look what I found

It started with one bloke and a metal detector. It ended with more than eleven pounds of gold; weapons, helmet decorations, and coins, a total amounting to more than 1500 pieces. It was discovered in Staffordshire, England in a fallow field by a local pensioner, Terry Herbert. Archaeologists were eventually brought in and have dated the haul to between 550 and 750. They speculate it might have been the booty of a particularly successful raiding party, especially since there are no feminine items amidst the jewel encrusted hoard that includes gem studded pieces that were the ornamentation for Angle-Saxon swords and pommels.

Herbert is looking at a more than $1 million reward.

Read the whole story here in the UK's Guardian.

Ultimately at Ends of the Spectrum

Laaaaaast Nite: Sprawl finished its months of preparation with the last practice before Regionals this weekend. While we weren't entirely perfect - still a few kinks here and there - it was our lowest turnover night in I don't know how long, and the offense was clicking a LOT better. Lots of give and gos, lots of hitting deep cuts easily because they were coming from the opposite side of the field, and a seriously crispy endzone offense - we were playing "double score," a drill where you scrimmage and have to follow scores with a score from your set endzone O, and I don't really remember a time were we turned it from within our static set. Nice! Hopefully that's more OUR O than our lack of D :). I personally had zero turns on the night despite handling the whole time and hucking several times. So we're going in to the weekend at something resembling a high point, and hopefully we can cash it in. Here are the pools as of tonight:

Or.. not. Well, they were there earlier tonight. maybe people are bailing or taking the open spots. Anyways, as of this afternoon, we were seeded 4th in our pool with Johnny Bravo taking the top spot. It's going to be exciting regardless; no chumps in our house this weekend, are there dear, so it's going to be all big games all the time. I'll continue to fill you in.

Tonight's the Night: Another exercise in futility from Confessions of a Huckaholic. Alan was out of town, Nipar was gimpy, and with limited firepower we resorted to trying to subsume the Connole-led squad with an all-throws-deep-to-Nyet-all-the-time-plan. It worked out for a little while, actually - caught a bunch of goals deep, threw a few, and we stayed close throughout and took it all the way to 12-12. Still, we just lack firepower - no one could keep up with freakin' Gus, for pete's sake, and we got worked by the other team's give and gos and relative patience. The game ended on a crappy blade from Kid Connole - I sprinted 40 yards across the field for a big, over the top lay-out D on Allyson, but at the last second, Tanya stepped right between us. In a flash, I abandoned the layout plan, sidestepped to avoid Tanya (I still bumped her, but managed not to crush her as would have happened had she undercut me on the layout as it seemed was about to happen), and took a swipe at the disc as I faded off to the side. I got a hand on it, but Allyson reached up and grabbed it tight with both hands for the "goal." I say that because I bumped Tanya, Tanya bumped Allyson, and even though A ended up maybe a foot inside the endzone, it certainly wasn't crystal clear that's where she was when she landed. I was getting up to say nice catch and check the line when she spiked it - yeah, love the fire, but again, not really an obvious case of being in. So I gave a joking "not in" call that didn't go over entirely well. My bad. It was a nice catch, though I am 100% positive that those who give me the "you play to win at all costs" business all the fricocktin' time would never notice that I didn't lay out and get a sure D in deference to not even taking a chance at landing on a teammate (who, by the way, ran in from behind me). I mean, yeah, that's an accomplishment on a sort of Chris Rock "you're supposed to take care of your kids" level, I shouldn't be taking chances on crushing little ladies, but it's the sort of thing I do routinely - and it's not easy to abort mid-lay out - and no one's ever gonna say anything or even notice it. Wah, wah, I know, but seriously, there's only so much oblivious commentary I can't take from people who don't grasp what it means to always respect the competition, always play at full speed and still manage to control the chaos.

So blah, blah, another loss in something that is quickly devolving into a who-cares season. But the HIGHLIGHT OF THE NIGHT - coming out of a timeout, we called isos for our two women players, Beck coming down the open backhand side and Jackie coming down the break side. I flipped Beck a longish (20 yards?) backhand, and she ran all the way through and grabbed the disc in the front left corner for the score! Ah, the love connection. Tres exciting. So we're spreading the disc around and people are having fun, even if we may never win another game. We just lack, lack, lack firepower, and I'm trying to keep spirits up, but it's tough for me and my poorly programmed mind. AH, well. I will take comfort in a Sprawl-feat this weekend.

On an entirely unrelated side note - Baseball Tonight is playing in the background for this, and they just showed a play where Joe Mauer reached into the stands, a fan battled him for the foul ball, the ball *clearly* hit the fan in the hands, and then Mauer grabbed it off the ricochet. Ump rules it's an out. Um, isn't the fan part of foul territory? Are there no rules anymore? Is this not bowling, but 'Nam?

PFTSoP

So this was a rather boring assignment to compare and contrast Camus and Epicurus. And it was limited to three pages, so I couldn't really get into a lot of the nitty gritty Camusian details. Like I didn't get to write:

"In a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger."

(I've always secretly wished that line started with "In a world" so it could be read like one of those deep-voiced movie previews. It's from Camus's Myth of Sisyphus, btw).

Anyways, here goes, please don't ridicule too much, and note that I went 1/2: I did include the phrase "clove-smoking, black-clad adolescents" but I did not work in the TH lyrics, even in a footnote. I have let myself down once again.

Page 623, #4: Compare Camus with Epicurus. In what ways are their views similar? In what ways different?

The name “Epicurus” prompts thoughts of delicious meals, ebullient gusto, and live-for-the-moment vitality. “Camus” evokes clove-smoking, black-clad adolescents in berets brooding over life’s fundamental emptiness. It’s hard to imagine two more disparate popular conceptions of the meaning of life. They are indeed highly dissimilar, but a close reading of the authors’ texts dispels some of the knee-jerk reactions to their philosophies that cause such a popularly-received wide divide. In this essay, I will first outline some of these two views’ commonalities before limning the well-known differences that prompt their separation to the poles of the “meaning of life” spectrum.

Camus's essay "The Myth of Sisyphus" is quite notorious for its insistence that the question of whether to commit suicide is the fundamental question of philosophy. The gravity of this question stems from the ideal, cited from Nietzsche, that a philosopher "must preach by example" and in order "not [to] cheat, what he believes to be true must determine his action" (616, 618). Camus contemplates whether the belief that life "is not worth the trouble" (618) dictates suicide. Epicurus addresses this question as well and answers in the affirmative, arguing that a man who believes that "once born, make haste to the gates of Death" and does not follow up that statement with suicide is merely "speak[ing] in jest," and his "words are idle" (610). Both men, specifically with regards to suicide, argue that certain beliefs about life, if honestly held, dictate certain corresponding actions: a requirement to follow-through on conviction.

Both philosophers also, while maintaining wildly different views of the condition of life, argue for a freedom in how to respond to that condition. Both abhor resignation to one's fate. Epicurus argues that the better man "laughs at destiny," and while he acknowledges the role of chance in life, he maintains that "with us lies the chief power in determining events" (612). Man can take comfort in taking reasonable action, even if outcomes are unsuccessful. Camus is even more emphatic in his conviction that revolt and freedom are the keys to maximum living (620). Even in a workman's life that is analogized to Sisyphus's rock-moving torture, a man can be happy by choosing to own his struggle. While Epicurus is generally considered the happier of these two perspectives, both philosophers actually supply a means - freedom of self-determination in response to one's fate - that allows for a positive outlook.

The final similarity between the philosophers is a shared method that brings about their divide. A divesting of a commonly held belief is the initial seed for both worldviews. For Epicurus, the key is to realize that death is an event which we do not experience and therefore does not bear on us (609). Elimination of this fear of death, of death as an issue, is the step that permits the remainder of Epicurus's pleasure- and pain-focused hedonism. For Camus, the divested notion is the "light and illusion" that life is a sensical, hopeful enterprise, i.e. recognition that life is absurd (618). Once a person recognizes this, he/she becomes conscious, the moment in which "everything begins" and "nothing is worth anything except through it" (619). Both philosophies require an elimination of certain everyday beliefs about the nature of life in order to proceed. This, however, is where the commonalities stop.

The fundamental difference between the two is their attitudes toward death. As noted, for Epicurus, death is a non-issue as it is not an experience, and experiences are all that matter. He also denies that one should be anxious toward death as that is "an empty pain in anticipation" (609). For Camus, the issue is not death-as-experience, but rather the shadow that death casts over all of life's other experiences. Because of death, the habits of everyday living serve no end and lack meaning. It is not whether death is experienced, it is that death detrimentally affects the quality of all life. Because of these attitudes toward death, Epicurus and Camus differ severely on their attitudes toward mortality and toward the aspect of experience that bears on life's meaning. Epicurus appreciates the limitations and temporal nature of life as supplying many things (e.g., friendship) with their pleasurable qualities, and he subsequently focuses on the unlimited quality of experience rather than the limited quantity. Camus argues oppositely that because of our mortality, all we have is a pointless quantity of experience, that the quality is rendered absent by life's absurdity. All we can do is be conscious of the absurdity of the quantity of our experiences and revolt (happily?) against our predicament.

The "revolt" alludes to a further stark contrast between these systems. Camus's outlook is entirely about revolt, struggle, and railing against one's fate. He casually mentions that "living, naturally, is never easy" (618) and that "life's equilibrium depends on ... my constant revolt and the darkness in which it struggles" (619). Epicurus's work, on the other hand, is peppered with references to the ease of life: "the limit of good things is easy to fulfill and easy to attain" (612), "the wealth demanded by nature is ... easily procured," (614) and "that which ... makes the whole of life complete is easy to obtain" (614). Epicurus's focus on prudence and his esteemed goal of freedom from pain are antithetical to Camus's directive to confront one's experiences and see the world as it is: chaotic, unforgiving, utterly irrational: absurd.

The final and perhaps most telling difference is that Epicurus places a premium value on experiences, but Camus places that same exalted value on consciousness of those experiences. Camus seems to want to understand the significance of experiences and concludes that there (usually) is none. Epicurus stops at the experiences qua experiences and advocates for their intrinsic qualitative value independent of their larger meaning (or, perhaps more directly, that their quality is their larger meaning). On a fundamental level, Camus aims at a true but unforgivingly cynical, painful take on life, whereas Epicurus would have us focus on experience and avoid choices which might "know no placation" (612).

By this interpretation, the strength of Camus's representation lies in its attempt at an authentic approach to the negativity he sees in the world that, I must re-emphasize, still allows a free and happy protagonist. It is, if nothing else, absurdly courageous: a stated intention to spend one's life struggling against an impossible meaninglessness. The weakness of Camus's theory is its overtly bleak view on the nature of existence and its seeming saint-like requirements for successful, smiling navigation of such a harsh place. Epicurus's view succeeds to a much greater degree as a practical guide to living in that it maintains meaning in the world and offers an approach toward maximal quality of life. Its weaknesses are, perhaps, a rather superficial treatment of the implications of our mortality on the rest of our lives and a certain predisposition to inauthentic screening. (I.e., I wonder if taking such measures to avoid pain and produce pleasure can preclude recognition that the world is (at least sometimes) a rather terrible, absurd place - the pain of acknowledging this seems like it might pre-qualify as one of Epicurus's pains to avoid). These diametrically opposed views of life's meaning, while frankly incompatible, surprisingly share some underlying constructs and could serve as complements despite their conceptual differences.

What a Way / To Start the Day

I wasn't kidding:

Oh, hi neighbors. I can't quite see you with all that glare... allow me to walk around my car to converse with you.

My, you don't look well. And I can't hear you; perhaps you are hoarse? Allow me to step closer...

Ayeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!

I look forward to having that experience for the next 33 days.

Oh, and something I neglected to mention from Saturday's golfing exploits: On a 295 yard par four, I hit my driver perfectly and rolled the ball into a sandtrap to the right of the green. BOO-YEAH POWER. But that wasn't the best, no, not yet. I blasted out of the trap and dropped the ball within eight feet of the hole! And then, miracle of mircales, hit the perfectly straight putt. That's right, BIRDIE! Up and down style! It was more or less the only highlight of the day, but hey, we'll take it.

I'm off to Sprawl it up in about half an hour. Feel the excitement! Fell the... utter tiredness and desire to go to sleep now after a long day at school. NO! Fight through it! Will let you know how it goes.

In the meantime, ponder this - I'm writing a paper for my applied ethics course comparing Epicurus and Camus. Eh? And there's actually an ounce of commonality (even if they drift from that ounce quite rapidly). I am very tempted to talk about the paradox of immortality by discussing David Byrne's "Heaven" lyrics*. We'll see. Ultimate. Now!

* - E.g., "Heaven /Heaven is a place/ A place where nothing / Nothing ever happens." Epicurus seems to argue that life derives the quality of its pleasures from its temporality, whereas Camus seems to argue that life's temporality is one of the main contributors to its absurdity. But immortality has all kinds of vampire-style boredom attached, no? I will also be shocked if my essay does not contain the phrase "clove-smoking black-clad adolescents." Once again, we'll see...

Depression is a Blue State

Sorry, that title has nothing to do with anything; I just read it in Elegant Complexity (a study guide to IJ) and the now-double-meaning of "Blue State" made me laugh. Liberals of the world unite... in your futile mission to spread compassion. A paraphrased quote from The Colbert Report from a couple of weeks back: "Now convince me why I should be in favor of Public Health option, given that I'm fabulously wealthy, have top-notch health insurance, am very healthy, and don't care about other people." Ha-ha, Stephen, but only kind of.

Back on topic: the week/weekend that was/were. Working backwards, am currently sitting on the couch watching the Cardinals trail the Colts. Steak tonight for dinner, as it's still summer-grillin' weather 'round these parts. Dogs are doing well; both got "chewies" today, which is kinda like crack-laced heroin cheeseburgers. Happy times. Beck and I chilled for most of the afternoon in front of the football, hit the grocery store, hung out at a coffee shop doing the Sunday puzzle, and walked the dogs in the opposite of that order. Sparkle / Wrigley were kind enough to wake up at 5:30 this morning, so our Sunday was extended in time if not in wakefulness.

Our neighbors spun the wheel for "how do we decorate for Halloween this year" and the roulette ball landed in "grotesquely / tackily." I'll have to snap a picture of this surreptitiously, but trust that it involves a life-sized headless skeleton bride and groom. To each his or her own, but preferably not when I'm going to spend the next month looking over and saying hello to what I mistake for people only to be scared out of my gourd.

Fell asleep last night early after an evening of Dexter and delicious pizza (from A Slice of Sicily, check it out Phoenicians!) thanks to the nine hours I spent in the blazing Sunny Azz yesterday. The latter five hours were spent golfing with Beck's cooking internet friend Eva and her husband Che; we hit up Papago golf course where I managed to shoot a 105 using my modified golf rules. (My goal was 2 over par for every hole, or 108, so that's cool; and only five balls lost between Beck and me, three of those coming on one hole in which Beck investigated the acoustics of the sound "Splash!"). Fun times, though long, and my one round every five months plan has not exactly paid off with Tiger-like adroitness. Beck was fantastic, just got better and better as the day rolled on, getting really consistent with solid contact by the end. She claims that getting to the green is really the point of the game, not sinking the ball, which actually makes for a much more enjoyable experience. Fun times, though it's still possibly a little too hot for comfortable golf starting at 12:40.

The initial four hours of sun were spent at Sprawl's next-to-last practice before Regionals next weekend. I am getting psyched because 1, after a summer-ful of injuries, I am finally getting somewhat back to form, and 2, some big-time Ultimate 2.0 style concepts - drop passes to huck, attack the breakside for easy scores, play position defense - are finally taking hold. Though it's a long shot based on any objective measure, at-least-shooting for Nationals is starting to look less thoroughly impossible. We've had some great practices of late, and hopefully this will carry over to a solid performance this coming weekend. PrimetimeDheintime Deion Sanders Justin and I finally got to play some points together for the first time in what feels like forever these past few weeks, and the huck-let-him-run-it-down-strategy continues to serve us well. Props to homes for running some great drills / practices in the past few weeks. Props to all of the Sprawl leadership - BP, Justin G,, Dixon, Vince - a lot of people are starting to fall into roles, which is step one-A of getting to that next Ulty plateau.

I can't reiterate this enough - I'm excited about getting back on the field just because of the stupid duration of this most recent injury, but really I'm just amped that we're getting some gelling going on. I shared with the team recently the idea of Ultimate heroin - those rare games when you go out and it clicks, the other team blinks and it's 13-2 because you're swarming them on D and can offensively do no wrong - and I've seen a couple of glimpses of a capacity in Sprawl to achieve that. We'll see this weekend, I suppose, but I am ITCHING to get on the field with Les Boys Phoenice. YES. I will be sure to keep the excitement-meter rolling through the week. Practice Saturday started at 7 AM, started with a lot of deep throwing and ended with some pretty intense scrimmaging. All told that (plus the golf) was a loooooong day in the sun. I'm appropriately bronze and pretty.

Friday night was fun times, too - Beck and I had butter garlic shrimp for dinner and saw 9, a post-apocalyptic movie about life-force-endowed burlap sacks. It's an animated film with a distinct, thrillingly dark / steampunk look. Beck and I agreed that though it was a gorgeous film, but the plot seemed somewhat tacked on - like they had a great idea for a movie setting and vibe, but lacked anything concrete for them to do. This was entirely instantiated in some pretty terrible, stock dialog (e.g. "I started this; I've got to finish it"). Plus the ending made no sense, always a killer. PLUS we endured some annoying teenagers through the previews - I tell you, every day, my lawn (and the accompanying desire that people get off it) grows a little larger. We did however beat them ... to Mojo after the movie (let's hear it for jokes recycled from Facebook, yeah!). One of the better chocolate and peanut butter-based topping concoctions I've had there in a while, incidentally.

Friday day worked - I had a more-successful-than-they-have-been discussion session with the Bio & Society honors students / Bio & Soc majors in which they finally asked some questions. I still feel like it's too much of a binary discussion - student asks question, Nyet answers it - and I'd rather that something resembling an organic discussion develop. Problem is that even the honors students are operating from a very limited knowledge base - so a lot of the questions are honest "what the heck is going on with bio phenomenon X," and I'm really the only person in the room that has access to the fact foundation in order to be able to address it. Still, getting better, students getting more confident, and it's cool, because it's exactly the kind of thing for which I'm into this business in the firs place. I've got a few with whom I'm making good interpersonal contacts and who have told me that they've really enjoyed the lectures and the discussion class, which gives me all kinds of warm-fuzzies.

Ah, yes, the follow up lecture on Cancer: Genes & Environment. It went well - a little less audience-pleasing than the last detailed account of the horrors of various diseases - but I got a good amount of info across in an engaging way. My big problem was a couple of students who kept asking and asking tangential questions - they ranged from the word association ("Telomerase? I read an article on that once...") to the absurdly complicated ("how does cancer staging work?") to the repeating-what-the-lecturer-said-just-twenty-seconds-ago ("Doesn't the spleen clear red blood cells?"). It's hard to keep momentum when curious peoples keep derailing you, and I tried as best I could to keep things on task. I did, unfortch, have to resort to "why don't we talk about that after class" more than once, which always strikes me as taky because you're all but pointing out the stupidity, or at least inappropriate-for-context-ness, of the question. Ah, well. I was also observed by the Center for Bio & Society director Jane, and she was complimentary afterwards, so hopefully 'twas a good job. Again, I'm psyched that these lectures went well, as this is pretty much my motivation for teaching - you know, moldy minds - though I'd be lying if I'm glad I can focus on my other work and not speak to 200 people audiences for a few weeks.

That's taking it back far enough, I suppose. The only other persistent thing going on is a silly debate from our Applied Ethics class on the existence of timeless, acontextual, universal morality. It's fun to work on developing points of view if a little frustrating to have to backtrack to argue such a naive-take - I don't entirely feel like getting into it, but the general problem with such a stance (a definitive end-all be-all notion of right and wrong) is that it's essentially impossible to articulate how such a thing would be articulated without being subjectively filtered and therefore subject to question of political dynamics, blah blah blah etc. I'm kinda tired of the topic at this point.

Okay, so get psyched for a fun week - one more practice with Sprawl (tomorrow), a league game on Tuesday, the usual slew of classes and reading, and it all comes together in the super-exciting regional tourney in which I should really be working on writing but will instead work on my forehand hucks. Wish us luck...

AR: Pacer

The Amps - Pacer (1995)

A primo example of mid nineties lo-fi indie fuzz garage rock, Pacer is more or less a solo effort by Kim Deal, she of the Pixies and later of the Breeders. The album was a bit of a disappointment sales-wise: the Breeders has just delivered with that super-catchy "Cannonball" single, the Pixies were known for their hooky surf-punk melody-driven ditties, so all signs pointed to a radio-friendly unit-shifter. Alas, what the masses got instead was a lot of questionably-in-tune rockers with endearing melodies often buried beneath a throbbing bass and Bonham-booming drums. So the disc met its fate in a bunch of bargain bins, which is precisely where I picked up my copy for $5 in the early '00s.

After a few spins of letting the leads filter up through the bassy silt, those hooks do eventually sink in. The great thing about Pacer is that the tracks that work sound very little like anything else out there - sure, there's a passing resemblance to Deal's other bands, but really, Side A sounds like a 1960s girl group with a murky four-track distorted amp backing band. The Ronettes as backed by Guided By Voices. Okay, I hate it when reviews do that, too, but it's striking, there's something lulling about the drag-along slow beat harmonies coming from full female voices that smacks of Spector. But the edge behind it, is obviously, a lot harder. The highlights of this effect are the opening title track, "Tipp City," "Mom's Drunk," and "Bragging Party."

The other highlight tracks come in the third slot ("I Am Decided") and the album closer ("Dedicated"). The former rounds out Side A - all of those previous highlights come on the first half of the album - so we once again have a disc where the best material comes up front. Side B, excepting the latter, is a slew of less thrilling tracks that sounds a whole lot more like Breeders/Pixies retreads. So we're left with an album with a really cool, slacker-draw voiced sound that sounds utterly original. It doesn't succeed across the board because of the lackluster B-side, but that first half contains some work that sinks in and in just endearing, charming, but in a visceral way. I would never thought that would have worked - raspy, small-range apathetic girl group vocals over basement rock - but it really does. Definitely worth a spot in your collection.

Status: Recommended (solid)
Nyet's Fave: "I Am Decided"

What are they watching...Episode III

Our weekly look at what the teens and tweens of America are watching. You may have caught our first couple of episodes. This week we highlight a song that we have heard as the ring tone for some young ballers.



Do the youngsters in a college town understand what this song is about? Is the conglomerate a response by outsiders to the structure and strictures of government?

AR: Slip Stitch and Pass

Phish - Slip Stitch and Pass (1997)

Indulge me a little bit as the reunion and concerts and new album and such have put me on a bit of a kick lately. SS&P is an official, traditional-style live album from what gets characterized as an inbetween period of Phish's career: after their arguably best-show-ever but certainly legendary Madison Square Garden 12.31.95 show, after they had gotten big enough to support big scale festivals as a single act (8.16 & 8.17.96's Clifford Ball), but before they had gotten into the so-called cow-funk* that came to dominate their dance grooves of late '97 and '98. The album is culled from their 3.1.97 show in Hamburg, Germany, and the title refers to the fact that the show is cut and presented in an order that does not match the order in which the songs were actually played, a metaphorical knitting move.

* - Presumably this is because it's funky and they hail from Vermont where there are cows. I've also heard it referred to more pejoratively as "white-boy funk" or "Steve Miller funk," which is also probably because it's funky and they hail from Vermont. Ha! Seriously, without delving too much into urban / suburban theories of popular music creation, I think it's fair to say that Mike TPB et al throw down "phunk" just as fine as Parliament or Sly or whoever do, it's just that it's goofy ol' Phish and it's hard to take it seriously as an instrument of social change. In nice beat / can dance to it / bass bombs / wah wah guitar bliss terms, though, it passes the test.

The pre-funk period comment is important to note because the first two tracks on the disc feature some rather thick, groove-based playing that sound like a significant departure from their previous live album, A Live One. The opening track is a sublime cover of the Talking Heads song "Cities;" Phish's take is a very much slowed down shwank-fest, and they absolutely nail it, complete with bubbly mooging and the requisite wah-wah abuse. They *also* keep it short at about five minutes, sticking to tight 32 bar or so instrumental breaks, which just emphasizes that they can make a song their own without necessarily pushing things out to a marathon. Of course, they do like to run 26.2 miles, and the next track is allegedly the very birth of the aforementioned phunk: "Wolfman's Brother"gets the full extended treatment. Many phans cite this specific jam as the inspiration for funky Phish songs and jams that dotted the next two years. The song proper is an energetic, much more lively affair that benefits a lot from the in-the-moment energy (relative to the overly poppy and hated-by-Nyet Hoist version), but the highlight is the focused groove jam. Clocking it at 14 minutes total and ending with about 6 minutes of '70s cop car cool, the tune sounds a sea change for concerts to come.

But that's not even the best part - the group takes their established groove and baby-walks it down to a crawl and cleanly segues directly into another slowed down number, their cover of the ZZ Top blues number "Jesus Just Left Chicago." Page takes the lead vocals and drives the songs with piano accents and takes his turn dominating the soloing; Trey gets some turns, too, and in the end it's a perfectly delivered 12 bar minute modern blues number. Definitely recommended for fans of the blues, cow or otherwise. Continuing the laid-back vibe of the evening, they follow with the deliciously weird, "Weigh," a jazz-rock, bouncy, intricate guitar riff Mike TPB song. This balanced piece showcases all of the players in a contained five minute format. Fantastic stuff, and nothing quite as nice as the opening lyrics, "I'd like to cut your head off so I can weigh it / Whaddya say?" Great tune, and well led by Gordon, who also gets the next song.

"Mike's Song" warrants its own paragraph. First, this is one of my favorite Phish songs - just a super riff rocker matched by a high vocal from the wacky bassist, and a very natural, dark jam section that follows the lead verses. Before this album, "Mike's Song" had not been officially released, and there's still (to my knowledge) no studio version available. And of all the versions to release first, this was a crazy choice. Everything starts fine with another expertly executed, flub free rendition of the composed sections and a move into a soaring, creepy guitar-led freakout. And then things crescendo and crescendo and get more frayed and more dissonant until Trey drops out and we're left with... Page and Mike playing an Eastern-sounding snake-dance number over reverbed looped guitar-effects. About a minute later, things have taken a very obvious Doors-y turn. Mescaline-style. Trey starts chanting random lines from "The End" and mumbles about Indians dying and something from "Peace Frog," then screams, and then repeats taunts of "Careful With That Axe, Eugene" (a Pink Floyd song), then some more talk about "walking down the hall." "Mother" ... then more death wails. Eek... every now and then, Phish hits an edge that is just a little too frightening; you don't always, for example, want to leave your lights out during one of their YEM vocal jams. And here, despite the fact that the whole section is a ridiculously sarcastic, musical joke, things get genuinely eerie.

Of course, that won't last long. They drop suddenly into their lovely but equally ridiculous lounge song "Lawn Boy," a Page showcase that is straight out of a 1950s noir bar scene. Except that Page is singing about "smelling the colors outside on my lawn." And Fishman, of course, keeps yelling exuberantly, "He walks on down the hall!" The goofballs hit a fine surreal note with this one, to be sure. The traditional bookend to "Mike's Song," a fast bass showcase number called "Weekapaug Groove," follows, this time replete with "Mother... I wanna cook your breakfast ... I wanna borrow the car" references to "The End." They go rock star style with this one, and some fireworks come out of all that aforementioned mayhem.

The album closes with a quick a cappella "Hello My Baby" that is unfortunately actually a cappella - the band is barely ambiently picked up by the stage mics, and so the song is way softer than the remainder of the album. It's easier to hear the shhh-ing from the audience than the barbershop quartet on stage, and it's disappointing that the song could not have been better mixed for album purposes. The "encore" of sorts is "Taste," a rocker from Billy breathes that the band, again, juices up in this live setting. Standard, energetic closer to a "show."

And that's just it - this disc is a strange one in that even though it takes up an hour and twelve minutes of your day, it feels very short. That, of course, is because it seems like it should be a Phish show - it was taken entirely from one show, after all - and not a live album. For its purposes as Phish's second live album in 1997, it does a superb job. In the era of livephish, however, it feels very strange indeed to have only about a third of a full concert in the player. True, they picked crispy, choice cuts from that concert, and "Mike's (End)" is sort of a perfect document of their bizarre side. And the first three tracks in particular represent some of the tightest, non-indulgent playing / jamming they've done. And, oh yeah, it's a top to bottom great disc. Still, I can't help but want to hear the rest of it, and in the right order, so the disc is a frustrating experience. And something I've perhaps under-emphasized is that as this was a sort of inbetween show, it's in Europe, it atypically featured a bunch of zaniness in the middle of the Mike's Groove, and the songs are somewhat atypical, it ends up being a non-representative Phish show. Which is a strange thing to say, as I don't know exactly how one would go about crafting a "representative" Phish show - again, you really have to take in this band on the encyclopedic level to get the whole story - but this disc has a definite feel of being "odd," whereas other selections (e.g., ALO) strike me as more typically Phishy.

All of that is coming from the perspective of a total Phish-nerd, though, and in terms of an introduction to the band's live act, this has a ton to offer. So I will split my recommendation here for phans and non-phans, for the converted and for those in need of proselytizing. It's definitely worth checking out this document of Phunk-development - just be careful with that bass, Eugene.

Status: Recommended (for newbies), Recommended (solid) for phans
Nyet's Fave: "Cities"

AR: O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Various Artists - O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)

This dearly loved soundtrack to a dearly loved Coen Bros. film contains a wealth of high quality Depression-era folk Americana mountain music, very little of which was actually recorded in the Depression Era (or, likely, in the mountains). It's a healthy mix of chain-gang spirituals, original era-tinged folk recordings of trad songs, gospel tunes from contemporary artists, blues dirges, and emphatically, ridiculously uplifting folk-cheer up numbers. Great for a low key evening, wholesome dinner music, or just to inform a wider audience of some of the best, most originally American music this side of jazz.

In an almost too good to be fair move, this soundtrack includes three tunes from the divinely-voiced Alison Krauss (she of "If I Could" fame, phans). "Down in the River to Pray" is an a cappella choir gospel chant that, despite its frank repetition with added voices and volume, vibrates with beauty. And because you know, one angel is not enough, in the traditional-sounding folksy number "I'll Fly Away," Krauss is accompanied by Gillian Welch for some delicious simple harmonizing. And because two angels isn't enough - sheesh! - "Didn't Leave Nobody but the Baby" is another a cappella number featuring a trio of Sirens in Krauss, Welch, and Emmylou Harris. The three tracks are gorgeous, nothing less, and jump off the disc.

The other standouts from the soundtrack are the Soggy Bottom Boys (and other versions) numbers, "I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow" and "In the Jailhouse Now." Both are featured heavily in the film, the former especially. In one of the weird and perhaps not great moves of the film, "IAaMoCS," a folk traditional, takes up four tracks on this album. Two are instrumental versions which I could have done without, one is an acoustic guitar take that just RIPS - seriously, to take that tune and turn it into borderline snarling 1937 folk punk is pretty cool- and finally, the version featured in the film, the full band Soggy Bottom style. It's extraordinarily difficult to hear that last one without picturing a mugging Clooney leaning out over an RKO-style big mic. "ItJN" is a more familiar, 1930s style radio number, albeit featuring a yodeler. Very good era-music that serves as the central plot element of the film.

Yet another enjoyable subset is the original folk recording, "Big Rock Candy Mountain," and the slew of get-you-through-the-hard-times tunes, "You Are My Sunshine," "Keep on the Sunny Side," and "In the Highways." Infectious is all I've got on those, and just try not to smile at what sounds like some missing their baby teeth harmonizers on "ItH." Their uplifting brightness is starkly balanced by the likes of "Po' Lazarus," a Black prison gang chant, and the chilling "O Death," a solo a cappella wail that sounds as though it were recorded on an apocalyptic dust bowl road somewhere. All of these recordings have a very earthy, natural mix, so despite the contemporary recording environment, it really does feel like an exceptionally clean set of recordings from the '30s.

To be perfectly honest, you have to be in the mood for this genre / period piece. It's slightly annoying that "Constant Sorrow" is so oft repeated, and some of the darker numbers just don't lend themselves to casual listening. Still, this is an indispensable collection of this particular brand of largely forgotten music, and if you have the same kind of fondness for the film that I do, you get the added bonus of funny images popping in your head throughout its spins. The soundtrack pulls off the trick of being fully integrated with the movie, and the Coens have done the world a favor by reopening ears to this excellent slice of music history. Yes, Gordon Gano, I do love American Music. Baby.

Status: Recommended
Nyet's Fave: "I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow" (Soggy Bottom Boys full band version, but really, that acoustic version kills, too)

AR: Naked Baby Photos

Ben Folds Five - Naked Baby Photos (1998)

I'm not sure if this was actually culled for the sole purpose of fulfilling a recording contract - BFF only made it through three albums proper before calling it quits and sending BF on his suburb-rockin' way - but it sure sounds like it. A rag-tag bunch of rarities, it's primarily less-polished B-side type songs, less polished songs you already have copies of, and off-hand studio and concert onanism that is funny at first but gets old. This one should be carrying a label reading "Warning: Explicitly for Minutiae-Obsessed Fans."

Fortunately, I used to be a bit of a minutiae-obsessed fan, and though I've gotten tired enough of the BFF-shtick that I can't really tolerate a lot of the material on this album, I still have a soft spot for some of it. It's split into a front half that contains studio tracks and a back with live performances. The first is the early embryonic BFF piece "Eddie Walker" which showed that "Proper Noun" ballad was a formula they had working from the get-go. They back up the Name Game motif with "For the Benefit of Tom & Mary," a rollicker that got cut from their debut album. They also predict Folds's Rage Against the Machine parody in "Rockin' the Suburbs" with a screw-around piece called "For Those of Y'all Who Wear Fanny Packs" that actually contains some interesting cacophonous improv but is a little too repetitive / obnoxious to get the job done. The rest of Side A is filler or demos of songs which pale next to the real releases and songs that never should have seen the light of day ("Bad Idea").

Side B is a bunch of live cuts - and again, the versions of their better material ("Underground," "Philosophy," "Song for the Dumped," etc.) doesn't really benefit from the live treatment. A couple of metal-mocking tunes rear their heads, and they're adequately ridiculous - the Billy Joel style piano-hall encore sing-along "Satan in My Master" pulls the trick off nicely by limiting itself to about a minute. All the songs are good, sure, but they end up sounding like less tight versions of the album cuts. The huge exception is "Twin Falls," a Built to Spill ballad cover transferred (unsurprisingly) to piano that turns out brilliantly. Ben Folds's vocals match this song expertly; I actually heard the original well after I heard this version - forgive me, I was raised in Texas - and I still think BFF may have improved on it quite a bit.

So it's basically some toss away stuff you don't need in the end. Interesting enough for big fans of BFF, but there's very little going on here besides the aforementioned highlights.

Status: Not Recommended
Nyet's Fave: "Twin Falls"

Shout Out: Lucinda at the Window

Friend / fellow blogger / fellow disc-er Katherine Nabity's first published novel, Lucinda at the Window, is now available at Amazon. I've ordered it and you should, too. Here's the description from Katherine's website:

Ohio, 1901 - Lucinda Harris had been haunted by childhood tragedy all her life and worked diligently to keep those memories deeply buried. While visiting the ancient manor home of her best friend, she spots a dark stranger one night on the lawn. She finds herself suddenly plunged into a nightmarish world. Has insanity finally taken Lucinda's mind or is it something far more diabolical?

Something is amiss in the Manor, but none of the guests or the servants can pinpoint what it is. Lucinda is acting strangely; the groundskeeper has disappeared; a feeling of gloom hangs over everything. The answer to the mystery seems to lie in a worn journal found buried in the cellar. The entries become stranger and more terrifying as they read on, until it reveals the horrible truth about the Manor. Is there a connection between the two?

None of them could have predicted the strength of the force manipulating them all...or the wrath of a woman they all thought they knew.

Gigantic congratulations to Katherine, and readers of the Ballad - yes, all ten of you - unite and display your power over the Amazon rankings: order a copy today!

First Lecture

Gave my first lecture at ASU this Thursday to a big, ~150 or so person audience (out of the 250 who are supposed to be in the class) in Bio 311 AKA "Biology & Society." The lecture was Cancer: Genes & Environment, though I started it with a focus on general genetic diseases and environment in an effort to get them to understand just what a large, complex and interactive relationship the two domains have. I found out last week that my lecture was to be split in two, which worked out well because it let me go very slowly through the diseases and convey a lot of the particular details that make them difficult to think about in just gene v. environment terms. I'll follow up next Thursday with the section of the talk that discusses mechanics of cancer. Here's a typical slide; if you really want the powerpoint for some bizarre reason, I can e-mail it to you:


Funny things about the lecture:

• I started it with the David Foster Wallace joke: two fish are swimming in a pond, an older one swims up and asks "How's the water?" The two fish look at one another and say, "What the hell is water?" I then repeated the joke, this time substituting the class for the young fish, Manfred (the normal prof) for the older fish, and "environment" for water. No one laughed at either joke - expected - but I'm not sure if people got the point that it is very difficult to delineate that in which you are "swimming."
• In that spirit, I asked them to define what an "environment" is, which one person answered with, for all practical purposes, "it's the stuff that's around the animal." This actually served asa great answer because I could subtly point out ludicrous it was while also noting that it's the pretty typical answer you would get from anyone. Yeah.
  
• I also told the joke to end all jokes - I was discussing the fact that genes and environment is a false dichotomy, because we have no clean break between the two, and genes can serve as environments in some capacities and environments define what genes can be and do in others. I followed this up with "So be careful when dealing with dichotomies, because they can be misleading. There are dichotomies, and there are things that are not dichotomies, and dichotomies are bad.
• No one laughed, so I followed that up with, "Aw, that was funny and y'all don't even know it." Or something to that effect. *That* they laughed at.
• At one point I was talking about Huntington's Chorea, and a girl in the second row asked, "If Huntington's is autosomal dominant, kills you relatively early in life, and it exhibits anticipation (meaning that each generation tends to experience the disease at an earlier age), why hasn't it been selected against?" This would have been a great question if the topic hadn't been directly addressed in the reading they had been assigned to complete before class. I pointed this out, "Great question - actually, one of the articles that was assigned for class today, amazingly enough, addresses that exact idea!" Busted! Much blushing and embarrassment! I then assuaged her fears, "Just kidding, don't worry, I know you have busy schedules and you don't always get to every article. :)" Yes, I managed to say an emoticon.
• I had a slide titled "What is cancer?" with a picture of Milton Bradley. Not only did no one laugh, no one even asked, "why is there a picture of a baseball player on this slide?" I am now worried that everyone thinks that Milton bradley has cancer and not that he is the answer to the question, 'What is (a) Cancer (to the Chicago Cubs)?"
  

I'm sure there are other things I'm forgetting. It went very well; I got a lot of different class members participating with questions and answers, so everything was much more vibrant than the lectures have been typically, and people seemed very interested. SO yay for our side. On the flip, though, the thing that was not funny or good or anything was the waking up at 3 the morning of, the feeling nauseated, etc. Sheesh - I mean, it's the first time I've lectured to that size of a crowd, but I've certainly spoken publicly lots fo times sans problem. Hopefully it was just the "first time in my chosen career" sort of issue, but I had a bad feeling that was going to happen: from the moment that I saw my lecture date was Thursday Sept. 17th, I knew Wednesday Sept. 16th was going to be a bad night of sleep. What are you gonna do?

Anyways, went well, very energetic and conversational, and I only noticed one person in the first ten rows or so who fell asleep. I'm pretty happy about it, and it was good to remember that hey, even though I spend all my time doing research and reading, the whole original point was teaching in a addition to that stuff - so it was great to get out in the real classroom environment and be able to do it.

And on that note, on to the next project...

Barkeep, gimme a drink / That's when she caught my eye

Keep this on the DL, but I've manage to play Ultimate four times now without my leg falling off. This Tuesday the Inglourious Confessions of a Huckaholic put up a good fight against a solid team consisting of Streit, Joe, Wade, Lexi, Ned, Nate, & others. Way too much handling / experience / legs on that team relative to ours; they pulled out ahead initially and though we fought back to lose it 14-11, I don't think the outcome was ever really in question. Our team has everybody coming out, which is cool, but we have a big mix of talent, and getting everybody out there means putting out a lot of very unbalanced lines. We'll push through and have fun, but with the frank amount of inexperience on our team, it's going to be hard to hide anybody.

The game did include the pleasure of having my calf stepped on and pretty badly bruised and then getting a foul called on me. Awesome! Same person griped when I called violation after he caught a disc running, ran out of bounds, and then checked the disc in five yards in-bounds. VOTS in the house. This kinda stuff is ceasing to be worth talking about.

More importantly in terms of this post's title, I felt great while playing, and the knee didn't flare up as much this time the next couple of days. Got sore after a run on Friday, but bounced back after that well, too. This morning I went to Sprawl practice and ran around with the supposed big guns a little bit, and it felt okay while playing and fells okay thus far. Here's hoping the proverbial corner has been turned - I'm still not going to challenge it by playing two days in a row just yet.

So that's it - just a little better-spirited announcement that I'm maybe getting to the point where I can play sports again. The goal right now is to keep it together til Regionals and make an actual, non stat-nerd contribution to Sprawl. We'll see.

Paving Tucson, Part Trois

So we roll back up later on Sunday morning for the big throwdown. If we win, this is the end of our day, so again, there's some big incentive to play our big guns a lot. We do, and are on top for a lot of the game. Of course, we falter toward the end and let them tie it up 12-12 as the soft cap goes on. We score, they score, 13-13 double game point with Sprawl receiving. Work it about halfway up the field, and... a dump goes errant. They pick it up, score, and the winless streak continues. Sweet Roll are your 2009 Desert Section Champs. I made my biggest mistake of the weekend, here, failing to get Brady in the first half enough and being unable to re-insert him in crunch time. He only played a single point of this game, and I felt pretty bad about that.

Still had to play the 2nd place game, so we opened up the subbing a bit but still aimed to crush Monsoon a second time. And we did; it ended 15-12 but was never really all that close. So 2nd place, a guaranteed spot at regionals, and overall some of the best play from a Sprawl team in their short history. Check 'em:

Back Row: EBay, Tim, Brady, Vince, Jason, Aaron, Nyet, Justin G.
Front Row: Ryan, Alan, Jose, Rob, Josiah, BP, Justin D., Tom, Paul, Skunk, Stoli, Dixon
Not Pictured: Nigel

After the tournament, I compiled stats for everyone. They are probably totally meaningless in terms of sample size, but it's still interesting to see what went down. Some people had particularly good weekends - Justins, Stoli, Vince, all looked good on the field and in numbers. BP and Dixon (and Trant on one memorable awful throw) had some highly uncharacteristic gaffes. Overall I'd say we got some good play out of everyone but have cavernous room to improve. I'll just repost the e-mail I sent to the team below. For a frame of reference, elite Ultimate teams score 70+% of the time (80-90 if they're playing well) they receive the disc w/o a turnover. Anyways, read on - me in all my nerd-dom:

A slew of interesting stats from sectionals. Numbers are for all games (with numbers for last three games in parentheses)

If you weren't there, the scores were 15-3, 15-2, 15-9, 13-14, 15-12, for a total of 73-40 (43-35). We scored on 73 of 113 points overall for 65% (43 of 78 for 55%).

Offensive efficiency (i.e., receiving pull & scoring without a turn): 16/44 = 36% (15/37 = 41%)
Defensive efficiency (force a turn & score without a turn): 26/69 = 38% (11/41 = 27%)

Overall offense (scoring whether we turned or not): 33/44 = 75% (27/37 = 73%)
Overall Defense (scoring whether we turned or not): 40/69 = 58% (16/41 = 39%)

Scoring percentage (Scores per possessions): 73/152 = 48% (43/99 = 43%). So 79 turnovers on the weekend (56).

Here's a table for personal plus-minuses and such - totals on the left, last three games on the right. If for whatever reason you can't see the table, I'll attach the xls file, too.

O = O points played
D = D points
T = total points
+/- = +/-
O+ = O point +/-
D+ = D point +/-
PPP = Plus Minus Per Point = your total +/- divided by total points played.
OPO = O+ Per O-point = O point +- divided by O points played.
DPD = D+ per D-point = D point +/- divided by D points played.
%Played = The percentage of Sprawl's points you played for the weekend (or, on the right, in the last three games).

Yellow boxes are above the team's average.

		O	D	T	+-	O+	D+		PPP	OPO	DPD	%Played		O	D	T	+-	O+	D+		PPP	OPO	DPD	Percent Played
Josiah		24	27	51	17	10	7		0.33	0.42	0.26	0.45		21	17	38	8	9	-1		0.21	0.43	-0.06	0.49
Nigel (P)		4	16	20	10	4	6		0.5	1	0.38	0.18		3	6	9	3	3	0		0.33	1	0	0.12
Streit		15	20	35	17	9	8		0.49	0.6	0.4	0.31		12	9	21	7	8	-1		0.33	0.67	-0.11	0.27
Watson		18	22	40	6	6	0		0.15	0.33	0	0.35		13	12	25	-5	1	-6		-0.2	0.08	-0.5	0.32
Brady		12	16	28	10	6	4		0.36	0.5	0.25	0.25		9	5	14	0	3	-3		0	0.33	-0.6	0.18
Alan		15	25	40	12	5	7		0.3	0.33	0.28	0.35		11	14	25	1	3	-2		0.04	0.27	-0.14	0.32
Jose		13	17	30	14	13	1		0.47	1	0.06	0.27		9	7	16	4	9	-5		0.25	1	-0.71	0.21
BP		28	26	54	8	8	0		0.15	0.29	0	0.48		24	19	43	-1	6	-7		-0.02	0.25	-0.37	0.55
Gries		24	31	55	29	16	13		0.53	0.67	0.42	0.49		22	20	42	18	14	4		0.43	0.64	0.2	0.54
Paul		4	20	24	10	2	8		0.42	0.5	0.4	0.21		4	8	12	0	2	-2		0	0.5	-0.25	0.15
Vince		20	36	56	16	12	4		0.29	0.6	0.11	0.5		18	25	43	7	10	-3		0.16	0.56	-0.12	0.55
Aaron		12	26	38	4	2	2		0.11	0.17	0.08	0.34		10	15	25	-5	0	-5		-0.2	0	-0.33	0.32
Dixon		26	33	59	15	10	5		0.25	0.38	0.15	0.52		24	20	44	6	8	-2		0.14	0.33	-0.1	0.56
Dhein (P)		27	30	57	17	15	2		0.3	0.56	0.07	0.5		23	22	45	13	13	0		0.29	0.57	0	0.58
Stoli		17	18	35	19	9	10		0.54	0.53	0.56	0.31		14	9	23	7	6	1		0.3	0.43	0.11	0.29
Trant (P)		14	29	43	5	10	-5		0.12	0.71	-0.17	0.38		13	21	34	2	11	-9		0.06	0.85	-0.43	0.44
Skunk (P)		2	34	36	0	2	-2		0	1	-0.06	0.32		1	24	25	-5	1	-6		-0.2	1	-0.25	0.32
Tom		6	34	40	12	6	6		0.3	1	0.18	0.35		5	21	26	-2	5	-7		-0.08	1	-0.33	0.33
Ebay		18	23	41	11	10	1		0.27	0.56	0.04	0.36		14	13	27	-1	8	-9		-0.04	0.57	-0.69	0.35
Rob		9	0	9	-1	-1	0		-0.11	-0.11	#DIV/0!	0.08		9	0	9	-1	-1	0		-0.11	-0.11	#DIV/0!	0.12