Six Billion Happy Memories

I wish someone who looks exactly like

Winona Ryder but yet who isn’t

Winona Ryder would steal me just for

one night and the two of us would create

what kids these days technical kids these days

call a mash-up I mean a mash-up of

me and her now I mean a mash-up of

Winona Ryder’s world and my world now

I mean a mash-up of everything that’s

happened up to now and everything that’s

going to happen starting from right now

and the completed mash-up would become

wildly popular as entertainment

and art and even the people who talk

about politics on Sunday morning

would talk about the mash-up and people

in other countries would do their versions

of our mash-up but changed for their culture

but even people overseas would like

our original mash-up unchanged with

me and the girl who looks exactly like

Winona Ryder but yet who isn’t

Winona Ryder and though we would go

our separate ways after creating

our mash-up everyone around the world

who experienced it would remember

it as a happy memory for them

and we the girl who looks exactly like

Winona Ryder but yet who isn’t

Winona Ryder and I would also

remember it and for us it would be

a happy memory too and so then

when everything is done over the end

that is six billion happy memories

Tanya Tucker’s “Lizzie And The Rainman”

He came riding in on the sunrise
On a hot west Texas day
A fancy man in a painted wagon
With some fancy things to say

Looks like you folks need some water
Well water is my game
And for the small price of $100.00
I bet you I could make it rain

Step back non-believers
Or the rain will never come
Someone start that fire burning
Somebody beat the drum
He said, Some may think I’m crazy
For making all these claims
But I swear before this day is over
You folks are gonna see some rain

They all just stood there staring
Trying to believe
But there was one named Lizzie Cooper
Who said he was a lying cheat
She said, You call yourself a rainman
Well you ought to be ashamed
Starting all these people dreaming
Thinking you can make it rain

Step back non-believers
Or the rain will never come
Someone keep that fire burning
Somebody beat the drum
He said, Some may think I’m crazy
For making all these claims
But I swear before this day is over
You folks are gonna see some rain

Hey Lizzie
Well a man’s gotta have a dream
And if you can’t walk on the inside with me
I’ll meet you in between
Oh, come with me Lizzie
And the stars will write your name
And if you still think I’m lying to you
Look yonder there comes the rain

Step back non-believers
Or the rain will never come
Someone start that fire burning
Somebody beat the drum
He said, Some may think I’m crazy
For making all these claims
But I swear before this day is over
You folks are gonna see some rain

(K. O'Dell/L. Henley)

Both Touched By Something

I’m not ignoring
the impact on Jupiter
from two weeks ago.

Twice in history
since Galileo first looked
only twice in that

four hundred year span
humans have chanced to observe
pieces of something

impact Jupiter.
Comet Shoemaker-Levy
fifteen years ago

went to pieces and
those pieces hit Jupiter
while mankind observed.

And two weeks ago
a chunk of something maybe
a thousand feet wide

disintegrated
in Jupiter’s atmosphere
made a debris field

thousands of miles wide
darkening Jupiter’s clouds.
Even amateurs

with small telescopes
although not as small as mine
can see the debris.

The discovery
was made by an amateur
who saw the dark clouds.

Even the Hubble
is looking now. I am not
ignoring the crash

even though I can’t
see it with my telescopes.
In the late evening

Jupiter rises
in the sky and in my thoughts
both touched by something.

Clouds are swirling there
and there is a debris field
across my thoughts here.

Darkness in the clouds
on Jupiter and darkness
in my thoughts on Earth

both touched by something
both needing further study
both still unfolding.

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The Impact on Jupiter! — Sky & Telescope

All Eyes on Jupiter — Leigh Fletcher JPL Blog

Hubble Captures Rare Jupiter Collision — HubbleSite

Devo And Kim Kardashian

Even though I don’t hang out much at gossip sites—although I do look around now and then for Mischa Barton news—I visit so many different sites in the course of a normal day that I end up glancing through a lot of gossip just sort of by accident. And every now and then I see a piece of gossip that for one reason or another is interesting to me.

Yesterday I heard people talking about Kim Kardashian breaking up with Reggie Bush. Apparently Kim had thought she and Reggie were a couple on the road to getting engaged. Then Kim found herself suffering from what kids these days call a sexually transmitted disease. Kim discovered that while she was being a couple Reggie was sleeping around and Kim’s body was just accumulating all the viruses and bacteria Reggie would scrap off the various other women he was rolling around with and then bring home to her.


I once read in some interview that the guys in Devo thought of themselves as asexual geeks.

That was a generation ago but I suspect in the modern world the whole asexual geek lifestyle might make a comeback.

I can spend hours typing away at my keyboard or hours fretting chords on my guitar and the only impact those hours have on my body is maybe a stiff neck or a callus on one or two fingers. And both my keyboard and my guitar wipe clean with a Windex handy wipe.


Crack that whip
Give the past the slip


I believe it’s time to give the past the slip. This isn’t the world of beatniks, freaks and hippies any longer.


I believe it’s time to crack that whip and give the past the slip.


Are we not men?


Yes, we are. We are asexual geek men. And asexual geek men are safe from the Kim Kardashians of the modern world.

Not Only Unstable Dizzying

Have a look at this bit of verse. I didn’t write this. I’m just passing along the words. I’ll explain where the words come from below. (And a noon update at the bottom!)



so much good

further down

to reach it

we must live

proud and free

resist enslavement

to big crushes

be wary of accepting

it doesn't come often

accepting it

takes away

everything free

melting into

powerful care-taking arms

just suck hard

right out of us

not only unstable

dizzying

it does make us

less free






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Kind of cool, huh? Sexy jazz romance. Beatnik love. Beatnik sex.


Okay. Here’s the deal. These words are a modern version of two classic traditions, found art and Ken Nordine’s word jazz. For people who don’t remember word jazz, here is a YouTube clip of “Think a thought.”

These words were actually spoken—actually in this order, too!—by Sarah Palin during her goodbye speech from Sunday, July 26. A full transcript of the speech is online here.

The full speech is about 2,300 words long. I read the transcript and, throughout, was struck by the words Sarah Palin picked and the order she put them in. Her old speeches were written by a seasoned, professional speechwriter from the Bush organization. The accepted wisdom is that this speech was written by Sarah Palin herself.

There is something of the Goblin Universe here. I can’t say exactly what it is. But there’s something weird here, something very weird. I can’t say I have any affection for Sarah Palin, but it was fun playing with her words. I strongly suspect I had more fun playing with her words than she did thinking up all of them and writing them down.

To create the “verse” above I took just one paragraph—just one paragraph from the two thousand words—and I edited out some words and I added line breaks. I did not move around anything. The verse words appear in the same sequence in the canonical paragraph.

Here is the canonical paragraph, with the verse words in red:

So much success, and Alaska there is much good in store further down the road, but to reach it we must value and live the optimistic pioneering spirit that made this state proud and free, and we can resist enslavement to big central government that crushes hope and opportunity. Be wary of accepting government largess. It doesn't come free and often, accepting it takes away everything that is free, melting into Washington's powerful care-taking arms will just suck incentive to work hard and chart our own course right out of us, and that not only contributes to an unstable economy and dizzying national debt, but it does make us less free.


Goodbye Sarah Palin. Good luck with the words you think up and write down in the future. You think up and write down some good ones!





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Additional Stuff—7/28, 12:30pm

I guess I’m not the only person knocked out by Palin’s words!

I got a link to this last night just after I wrote my post for today. Gawker has: Sarah Palin's Gradual Descent Into Incoherency

And last night Conan did—I swear to the un-nameable elder gods I didn’t know about this until just seconds ago!—William Shatner reading Palin as poetry to bongo music: North to the Future: A dramatic reading of Sarah Palin's farewell speech/mad triumphant soul-cry

Mathilda And Nicole

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Normally when I do a cartoon I scribble out a rough sketch to make sure my idea looks reasonable. Then I switch to good paper and draw a more careful version and letter the text within ruled lines.

Sunday morning I did a scribble sketch for “Mathilda And Nicole” and for fun I applied a little color to it and when I was done I thought, “Oh-oh. If I do a finished cartoon, it sure will be neater than this, but I don’t know that it’s going to be all that much better.”

So I decided just to scan my scratch paper and use my scribble sketch as my cartoon today.


*


This cartoon is built around the idea of mumblecore.

Now I’ve never actually heard anybody use the word ‘mumblecore’ in conversation and I’ve never actually seen anyone even use it writing. However the word is in Wikipedia and if you do a Google blog search the word does get hits.

It means micro-budget filmmaking. Films created using the most minimal equipment imaginable. Consumer grade digital cameras. Webcams. That kind of thing.

The Wikipedia entry for the semi-famous “lonelygirl15” contains a link to the mumblecore page.

I wanted to write about mumblecore for two reasons. First because I like the idea of people making their own movies. Second because Wikipedia says people who do mumblecore are sometimes referred to as "Slackavetes," — it’s a reference to actor/filmmaker John Cassavetes and I think the word Slackavetes is funny. Slacker versions of John Cassavetes.

To my eyes the idea of doing mumblecore with the intention of creating miniature Hollywood productions sucks. But doing mumblecore that uses the elements of Hollywood filmmaking to create something wildly personal and expressive and entertaining strikes me as one of the coolest things imaginable.

“The Blair Witch Project” proved that images and sound and editing are really all you need for a profoundly powerful and amazingly poetic experience. The whole George Lucas nonsense of creating pseudo-Nazi “Triumph of the Will” type spectaculars with glitz and music and endless cinematic manipulations seemed fucked up even before “The Blair Witch Project” and afterward it seems almost like a joke that, little by little, people are catching on to. As fun as the movie “Scream” was a decade ago, today when anyone I talk to hears that Wes Craven is working on a new teen slasher movie everyone just rolls their eyes, mutters, ‘What the fuck for?’ When news got out that “Scream 4” is in development everyone I talk to muttered, ‘Please, no.’ It’s a whole paradigm of filmmaking that has become yesterday’s news.

If people thought “The Blair Witch Project” was an anomaly, a one-off that doesn’t prove a point, just stands alone, the low budget Spanish film “[● REC]” came along and put an exclamation point to the whole genre, becoming one of the best zombie films ever made. (The US remake, ““Quarantine” also was good, but without the religious element, the story completely lost its profound subtext—‘In my Father’s house are many rooms,’ John 14:2)


*


I don’t have plans to do mumblecore about Nicole Richie buying a bottle of perfume. But if Mathilda loves that kind of stuff—celebrities, fashion, pop life—and if Mathilda does a mumblecore film that attempts to capture the passions she experiences, the reality she observes watching Nicole Richie buy perfume, I’d very much like to watch that movie.

Because I think that’s what real movies are—people capturing their passions in a way that can be shared so everyone who watches can experience something of those same passions.

I think that’s what poetry is.

I think that’s what art is.

And I wish there was more of it.

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I’ve never attempted to make mumblecore.
However someday I may try it. I have been
playing with video. Over the last few months
I’ve put up four fifteen-second movies
and six posts that included clips
of me playing guitar.


Fifteen-second movies:

Red Bull: The Movie

Shadows On The Tissues In The Sun

UFO Movie

Umbrella Button: The Movie


Guitar clips:

Carla The Postmodern Groupie

Quasi Una Supervillain Fantasia

Quasi Una Fantasia Again

LeAnn Is Misty Too Much In Love

Quasi Una Fantasia

Me, Happy




. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .


The sequel to today’s post:

Mathilda And Nicole: Perfume, Things Like That

You Damn Punk Kids

You damn punk kids
with your internet porn
and fake birth certificates
you don’t know what it’s like
working in a coal mine
airbrushing images of beautiful women
onto the fuselage of B-17 bombers
while submarines groan and creak through the rocks
bending as tectonic plates move everywhichway
cracking everything praying your buddies get out alive

You damn punk kids
with your Miley Cyrus
sexting you steamy pictures of herself
she took herself in the clouds above the Raisinets
and lollipops with her green bra and her no bra
and the Apple whatever starts overheating
so the CPU has to shut down half of its multiple cores
and instead of moving pictures you get like cartoons
still pictures flying past you in the sky
like bombers looking to spray out booby-trapped leaflets

You damn punk kids
with your flying over your town without pity
where lawyers are inside puking
and Watchmen are outside shooting
everyone not just the scumbags who walked
because of what got the lawyers puking
and that sound is capacitors in the Apple thing
over-charging steaming hissing sparking
and the tumescent German bomb everyone pretends
came from New Mexico by way of Manhattan
falls away from your Nike tapping
to some Auto-Tune Disney girl singing and dancing
and the screaming Apple thing explodes
and the tilting German bomb explodes
and your plane is a silhouette against a high white cloud
getting blown away by a lower little cloud growing up
and your plane is like a black ink drawing
on very white paper composed scribbled colored
orange and blue smeared by a really fucked up artist

You damn punk kids

Counting To Five

I’m a little nervous today.

Some people say when you feel yourself about to fly off the handle or over-react you should stop, take a deep breath and count to ten. The idea, of course, is that even a short ten second pause gives you a chance to calm down and get past your initial reaction.

I don’t really have the patience to count to ten. I count to five. And I’ve given this counting to five business a lot of thought. Since I’m nervous and I expect at some point today I will be counting to five for one thing or another, I thought I’d post about why I settled on the number five.

I’m nervous because my horoscope for today reads:

An upset to the status quo may come as outstanding news to you; however, your nervous system doesn't seem to know it. Make a special effort to calm and stabilize your body's responses.

People who know me know that my nervous system doesn’t like upsets of any kind, especially upsets that involve changing a status quo. Luckily I do have some special efforts I use to calm down and try to stabilize my body’s responses. These counting to five things.

I have two strategies that involve counting to five. I’m going to talk about both of them, but first I have a quick comment about the number five in general.


The Number Five

In the worlds of design and education and psychology, there is a very famous essay called, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two,” written by cognitive psychologist George A. Miller way back in 1956.

The essay has its own Wikipedia page here. And of course the essay itself is online here.

The basic idea is that our thinking and reactions are bounded by the “channel capacities” of how cognitive and perceptual processes function and, as it happens, for one reason or another, all manner of different channel capacities seem to work out to be in the range of five to nine “things.”

We think better and work better if we’re thinking or working with seven things, plus or minus two.

It’s an interesting essay and it’s been wildly influential and I encourage everyone to read it. However for today I mention it only as a kind of foundation. I’m going to be talking about two systems of five things. It’s possible to imagine cool systems built around a larger or smaller number, but as the essay makes clear, five is a good number with a decent theoretical background.


Typically I get upset when I don’t understand something or when I feel emotionally uneasy. I have two different count to five systems, one for each of those eventualities, my philosophical five and my emotional five.


My Philosophical Five

In one or another essay, Ayn Rand wrote that all of philosophy can be broken down into five categories and an easy way to remember them, she suggested, was to think of a human hand.

Just as the thumb is the key digit, the opposable thumb which works with all the other digits, Rand said that epistemology is the key area of philosophy that makes everything else possible. Epistemology is the study of concepts, what it means to “know” things and how we know things.

Just as the index finger might be the most practical finger for pointing out things and feeling things, metaphysics is the most practical area of philosophy, encompassing the hard sciences. Metaphysics is the study of the nuts and bolts reality around us.

The third area of philosophy is morality, also called ethics. As metaphysics studies the nuts and bolts reality around us, morality is the study of our actions within the reality around us.

The fourth area of philosophy is politics. Morality is the study of us as individuals. Politics extends that and studies the interactions of groups of people.

The fifth area of philosophy is aesthetics, the study of our particular, individual consciousness and its interactions with the nuts and bolts world around us, the things we like and don’t like and why we do or don’t like them. Metaphysics encompasses medicine, what is healthy and how to keep our body alive while aesthetics is about our consciousness and, so to speak, what is food for our soul.

I’ve never found this classification system to fail me. If I’m trying to understand something new, I ask myself what broad category does it fall into. Then I ask myself how does it relate to other things I know it that category. One thing I’ve noticed a lot in contemporary pop culture is that people will often take a political problem and offer an ethical solution. For instance, they’ll say, yes TV causes problems but everyone can just switch off their TV. Well, sure, but TV causes political problems—problems involving large numbers of people interacting with other large numbers of people. If an individual decides to switch off one TV that is only an ethical solution that impacts that one person interacting with others.

I also use this system sort of in reverse. I often stop and count through the five categories and look at what I’ve been doing. For instance, if I’ve been writing a lot about astronomy—a hard science, metaphysics—I will nudge myself to start thinking about one of the other categories. Maybe aesthetics and write about art for a while. Or something dramatic that involves ethics. The five categories create a framework that encompass, basically, just about everything in an organized way.


My Emotional Five

Lots of stuff—I mean, lots of stuff—happens without us thinking consciously at all. We get angry. Happy. Turned-on. Turned-off. Whatever, all these things and many more happen for the most part at some pre-conscious level of thinking. (A metaphysical question that touches on both epistemology and aesthetics.)

Since so many reactions happen without us consciously thinking about them, having an elegant five part philosophical scheme doesn’t help much in a moment-to-moment freak out. And I experience those moments a lot.

Not too long ago I learned about some well-established, general psychological approaches to pre-conscious reactions that have become helpful to me and, as it happens, there are five things in this scheme.

Psychologists even call these the Big Five personality traits. And, of course, there is a Wikipedia page devoted to the Big Five personality traits.

The five are:

Openness - appreciation for art, emotion, adventure, unusual ideas, curiosity, and variety of experience.

Conscientiousness - a tendency to show self-discipline, act dutifully, and aim for achievement; planned rather than spontaneous behavior.

Extraversion - energy, positive emotions, surgency, and the tendency to seek stimulation and the company of others.

Agreeableness - a tendency to be compassionate and cooperative rather than suspicious and antagonistic towards others.

Neuroticism - a tendency to experience unpleasant emotions easily, such as anger, anxiety, depression, or vulnerability; sometimes called emotional instability.


I haven’t interacted with this scheme long enough for it to become second nature to me the way the philosophical five have become second nature, but thinking of personality as having these five “dimensions” has already helped me again and again when I’ve found myself reacting with anger or frustration or fear or disbelief or in other extreme ways to some odd situation.

Whenever I feel myself responding to a situation with any emotion I can isolate and name, I stop myself and as quickly as I can I count up through these five traits and I ask myself how whatever situation I am in touches on all five of these attributes. Am I responding in an open or closed way? Do I find myself treating something spontaneous as something planned or the reverse? Am I becoming insular rather than interactive? Am I accepting what’s happening or am I attempting to deny reality or project a fantasy? Am I indulging one or another dark emotion for no particular reason, singling out one or another unpleasant fact and ignoring a multitude of indifferent or even pleasant facts?

I’ve been interested in politics recently and although I’ve discussed a lot of hot button issues with a lot of passionate people I haven’t gotten into any arguments because as soon as I sense myself getting angry—or I sense someone else getting angry—I’ve stopped myself, gone through these five dimensions, and I’ve almost been able to feel—if that’s possible—a larger perspective settling around me.

And, oddly, I’ve been meeting a lot of interesting people seemingly randomly and although I’ve always been a talkative guy, I’ve been even more talkative than normal lately. In a store yesterday a woman out of the blue told me she liked my shirt. For one quick instant I had no idea what was going on. I thought she might be slyly giving me a dig for being overweight. Or for being too casual. But I caught myself, stopped my random thoughts and as fast as I could I mentally reviewed openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism and then it occurred to me that my shirt had a baseball logo on it and this is baseball season. Duh. So I just smiled and said, “You must be a baseball fan.” And she smiled and said she loved the White Sox. So, instead of me freaking out, I spent a pleasant afternoon trading White Sox stories with a pretty cool woman. And all because I kept my wits about me and didn’t get upset when at first I couldn’t imagine why she’d comment on my shirt.


Five philosophical things and five emotional things.


The human brain is very good at processing five things. It can happen very fast. These particular two sets of five things have proven very useful for me. I count through them all the time.


Now, let’s hope they’re up to handling whatever is going to upset my status quo today that my horoscope told me to get ready for.

War, Huh, Good God, Y’All

Ummm . . .

Last night I was humping down to the Perfume River nailing my name into the pages of history by leaving a comment at the Wonkette when I accidently typed out the word “tonight” and had to correct myself and type it “2nite.”

A couple nights back I bumped into the two coolest and sexiest twenty year old girls I know. I was walking into a donut shop and they were walking out. The encounter lasted a full twenty seconds or so and we said hi but if I’m ever going to stretch out those moments into actually sitting down and eating donuts with them then when I leave comments on blogs I have to type the comments as cool as I can.

Every minute I’m away from this keyboard I get weaker. And every minute everyone else in the world squats in front of a screen reading the blogs they get stronger. Each time I get up for a Red Bull and look around the kitchen the walls move in a little tighter. Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission and for my sins they brought me a donut shop, brought it up to me like room service.

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The Wonkette

Full Metal Jacket

Apocalypse Now

Dunkin’ Donuts

William Shatner Is Like Poetry

Performers deal with many different kinds of venues, places to perform. These days, thanks to what’s called viral marketing sometimes it is hard to tell what is a performance and what is a person just getting through the day.

But typically a performance happens on a stage with a microphone.

A cool venue, a cool place to perform, will employ a professional person called a sound man who is in charge of making sure that the microphone is set up and adjusted correctly.

A good sound man doesn’t set up a microphone and then ask the performer to adjust his or her performance to the way the microphone is set up. A good sound man will set up a microphone based on the way each individual performs. If more than one performer will be using the same microphone, a good sound man will create a profile for each performer and change the pre-amps and amps and equalizers and other levels to best capture each performer. The profile, the different settings, in the old days used to get scribbled in marker on strips of masking tape stuck on the equipment next to the faders and knobs. Nowadays profiles are stored in computers and a sound man just clicks on a list to reset all the variables in a sound system for each performer.

The sound man sets up a profile for a performer at what’s called a sound check. Sometime before an actual performance there will be what’s called a tech rehearsal where people like the sound man will try to get conditions to duplicate what they’ll be like for an audience and then set up all their equipment for each performer to match those conditions.

Some performers like sound checks, some performers don’t. Some performers are good at sound checks and working with technical people, some performers make life difficult for technical people. Sometimes a tech rehearsal is a boring, even difficult session, sometimes it’s more entertaining than the real performance.

The last time a sound man needed to get a level for my voice, I positioned myself a comfortable distance from the microphone, took what entertainment people sometimes call a William Shatner pause, and said, “The fog comes on little cat feet.”

Then I stopped and waited. Essentially I took another William Shatner pause.

The sound man said, “A little more please.”

I started again, said slowly, “The fog comes on little cat feet. It sits, looking, over harbor and city, on silent haunches, and then moves on.”

I stopped. The sound man said, “Got it. Thank you.”

As I was walking off stage one of the technical people smiled at me and said, “Hey, Carl Sandburg is good for something.”

Poetry, like William Shatner, always makes people smile. If used appropriately.

Meatballs For Breakfast

Don’t You Fucking Die Mischa Barton

Then the word of the LORD came to me, saying: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you; Before you were born I sanctified you . . .”

— Jeremiah 1:4-5 (NKJV)



This blog, from the very start, from before I even opened a Blogger account, has had as its unreal muse Mischa Barton.


The shadow on the analemma, the bound shape against the infinite, was and is the shadow of Mischa Barton.


Mischa Barton, Mischa Barton


Don’t you fucking die, Mischa Barton.


Do not let this haunting photo that appeared on your blog just weeks ago be a picture of you waving goodbye.


Don’t you fucking die, Mischa Barton.



Mischa Barton hospitalized under psych hold


Mischa Barton apparently made a lot of Hollywood people angry when she pretended to be something very different from the Mischa Barton Hollywood people frequently saw:

People think I'm part of that whole Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan set and it's frustrating. I'm not like that; I have a pretty normal life. People always seem to write lots of untrue things about me. I've just learned to laugh at it and move on. I also surround myself with people who are nothing like the Hollywood set - my family are really intelligent and academic, so they keep me grounded no matter what.

The Interviewed Mischa Barton

But people in Hollywood saw this Mischa Barton:

Despite a drunken driving bust and court-ordered rehab classes, Mischa Barton was spotted drinking herself into a stupor at a trendy Hollywood bar. The 22-year-old former “O.C.” star passed out after downing at least six glasses of wine at the Green Door on Aug. 12, eyewitnesses tell the Enquirer. And her boyfriend Taylor Locke, a guitarist for the rock group Rooney, got so mad that he ditched her, insiders say.

“Mischa and Taylor were at a table on the patio with several friends,” an eyewitness told The Enquirer. “She was chain-smoking and enjoying a glass of white wine, which, over the course of two hours, was followed by at least five more. Her speech became more slurred with each drink, and her head began falling onto Taylor’s chest.

“At one point, she tried to move from her chair to a nearby couch, but stumbled headfirst into the couch. Taylor was mortified! He snapped at her, ‘Mischa, come on! You’re making a fool of yourself. People can see how drunk you are.’ He demanded that she stop drinking, but she only mumbled incoherently.” Disgusted, 24-year-old Taylor stormed off to the inside bar where he hid from her, eyewitnesses revealed.

According to the Enquirer after a while when Mischa realized Taylor had ditched her, she tried to find him but ended up stumbling and falling into two girls ahead of her. Needless to say, she didn’t get far.

The Late Night Mischa Barton

None of us are what we think we are.


None of us are what others think we are.


We are all what God sanctified and formed before we were even born.


It takes a whole long lifetime for all of us to even start to figure out what God sanctified and formed when He made us.

A whole long lifetime.

Please. Use up every fucking year, day, hour and second of the whole long lifetime God gave you. Please.

Please.


Don’t you fucking die, Mischa Barton.

Tricky Times

This is an excerpt from an interview with Muriel Anderson. The full interview is in the August 2009 issue of “Acoustic Guitar.” But screw that dinosaur media stuff because the full interview is online at Acoustic Guitar’s website and at the website you can watch and listen to video clips of Anderson demonstrating the things she’s talking about.

Print is dead.

You’ve written some tunes with complex time signatures. How do you deal with something like 13/8 time?

I put out a limited-release CD called Journey Through Time, where every song was in a different time signature and the track number corresponded to the time signature, on to track 13, in 13/8 time. With that [“A Baker’s Dozen”], I don’t think of it as one, two, three, four, five, six, seven . . . you know. I think of it as groups of beats. Three beats is a long beat, and a little group of two beats is a short beat. So, it’s one two three, one two, one two, one two three, one two three: long, short, short, long, long. So it just keeps that dance feeling.


You’re feeling the higher-level rhythm?

Yes, and when I first started working on those, when I’d hear a rhythm I’d like, I’d just walk in that rhythm, move my body in that rhythm. It got internalized, so that when I went to a guitar it was quite natural.

I’ve always been interested in stuff like this and it’s amazing how musical tools for playing with stuff like this have changed over the years.

When I was growing up, getting the hang of an odd time signature meant, typically, tapping out beats with your fingers. Sometimes you would tap out a basic time with one hand, and then tap out the melody with the other hand.

Nowadays with score writing software packages like Sibelius and Finale the “problem” of tricky time signatures has almost gone away—you just have the software play the piece for you! You can almost always “hear” the rhythmic essence embodied by the combination of a time signature and melody. And then you just play what you’ve heard. There’s nothing to “figure out” like in the old days.

Essentially the computer becomes a non-anthropomorphic musical robot that teaches the musician how to play something.

Frank Zappa used score writing software to generate canonical performances of his orchestral pieces when he worked with classical musicians all around the world.

I don’t really know what to think about all this.

On one hand, the process of figuring out things like tricky time signatures—either as a player working from a score or as a composer notating music you’ve created—is discipline that changes a person, develops their character.

On the other hand, learning tricky time signatures from a software package means you get things correct quickly and the music still becomes internalized then anyway.

I’m not sure that anything is lost by taking away the “struggle” of working out tricky time signatures by doing things like tapping fingers.

But I have read accounts from (pre-computer) famous conductors and even composers where they’ve shared their experiences with this-or-that particularly odd time signature that gave them a bit of trouble and how they resorted to the time-tested method of one hand tapping a beat and the other hand tapping a melody.

When something has been common for many generations and then, practically, disappears in the course of one generation, it is very disconcerting.

Modern musicians won’t think twice about writing or performing a piece in an odd time signature. Modern musicians don’t think twice about odd time signatures.

But we’re relaxed because we have robots teaching us what to do.

We have robots teaching us what to do . . .

Red Bull: The Movie

Galileo And Neptune In The News!

Last October I told the story—in Galileo And Neptune—about how Charles T. Kowal discovered that one of Galileo’s notebooks contained a “pre-discovery” observation of Neptune.

Galileo was studying Jupiter’s moons and, in the process twice made note of a nearby star that seemed to move. Modern computer programs are able to demonstrate that the “star” Galileo observed was actually the planet Neptune.

Now an Australian physicist named David Jamieson is wondering if there might be more to the story. He suspects Galileo may have recognized the significance of the star’s motion. He suspects Galileo may have understood that the “star” was actually another planet similar to Jupiter and Saturn—even though in Galileo’s time understanding of what planets are in general was first becoming codified.

Jamieson is hoping Galileo scholars will search through Galileo’s letters and other writings from that period in search of anagrams Galileo may have “hidden” to announce his discovery without bringing down the ire of the Church.

I posted about one of those hidden announcements, too! In Cynthiae Figuras Aemulatur Mater Amorum.

Here’s the news story about David Jamieson’s current speculation:

Galileo discovered Neptune, new theory claims

Astronomer’s notebooks indicate he may have noticed planet in 1613


By Robert Roy Britt
Editorial director
Space.com
updated 3:55 p.m. CT, Thurs., July 9, 2009


History books tell us that the planet Neptune was found in the mid-1800s after years of speculation and search.

But in 1613, more than two centuries before Neptune was officially discovered, Galileo Galilei knew he had found it, according to a new theory by University of Melbourne physicist David Jamieson.

Jamieson has been studying Galileo's notebooks and found some interesting, buried notations that suggest the great astronomer — then working with a crude, early telescope he crafted himself — was onto something big.

It has long been known that Galileo observed Neptune, but it was thought that he discounted the object as a star and gave it no further thought. But it turns out Galileo may have known the "star" had moved in relation to other stars, Jamieson reveals. That sort of movement would have caught Galileo's attention, since he knew that it was just the sort of thing planets did.

Controversial discovery

Neptune, the farthest planet from the sun (assuming you don't count the recently demoted Pluto), is hard to spot even today. It is not visible to the naked eye. But this week, by coincidence, Neptune is well positioned near the easy-to-find Jupiter, making Neptune findable with binoculars or a small telescope.

Neptune's history of discovery has been controversial from the beginning.

Uranus had been discovered before Neptune, and observations suggest it was under the gravitational influence of another planet, farther out in the solar system, says Geoff Gaherty, who runs the Foxmead Observatory in Canada and writes skywatching articles for Starry Night Education and SPACE.com.

"Predictions of the position of this new planet were made by [British mathematician] John Couch Adams in 1843 and [French mathematician] Urbain Le Verrier in 1845-1846, but both mathematicians had great difficulty in persuading any astronomer to actually look for the planet," Gaherty explains. "Finally on Sept. 23, 1846, a German astronomer, Johann Gottfried Galle, used Le Verrier's chart to actually locate and observe Neptune. This led to a major controversy as to which country should be credited with the discovery; ultimately the honor was shared."

The notebook

Galileo was observing the four large moons of Jupiter — now named for him — in the years 1612 and 1613. Over several nights, he also recorded in his notebook the position of a nearby star that is not in any modern catalogues, Jamieson explains.

"It has been known for several decades that this unknown star was actually the planet Neptune," Jamieson said. "Computer simulations show the precision of his observations revealing that Neptune would have looked just like a faint star almost exactly where Galileo observed it."

But unlike stars, planets orbit the sun. So planets move through our sky different than the relatively fixed background of stars.

On the night of Jan. 28, 1613, Galileo wrote in his notebook that the star we now know is the planet Neptune appeared to have moved relative to an actual nearby star, Jamieson said. He added: There is also a mysterious unlabeled black dot in his earlier observations of Jan. 6, 1613, which is in the right position to be Neptune.

"I believe this dot could reveal he went back in his notes to record where he saw Neptune earlier when it was even closer to Jupiter but had not previously attracted his attention because of its unremarkable star-like appearance," Jamieson said.

If the mysterious black dot on Jan. 6 was actually recorded on Jan. 28, Professor Jamieson proposes this would prove that Galileo believed he may have discovered a new planet.

More evidence?

It might be possible to date the entry by doing a chemical analysis of trace elements on the page, he hopes, and he aims to do that later this year.

"Galileo may indeed have formed the hypothesis that he had seen a new planet which had moved right across the field of view during his observations of Jupiter over the month of January 1613," Jamieson said.

Or, perhaps there are other clues waiting to be found.

"Galileo was in the habit of sending a scrambled sentence, an anagram, to his colleagues to establish his priority for the sensational discoveries he made with his new telescope," Jamieson notes. "He did this when he discovered the phases of Venus and the rings of Saturn. So perhaps somewhere he wrote an as-yet un-decoded anagram that reveals he knew he discovered a new planet."

He presented his new theory in a series of lectures this month as part of the 2009 International Year of Astronomy.


© 2009 Space.com

Carla The Postmodern Groupie

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I don’t know which is more science fiction/fantasy sounding —


Imagine: Star Wars

or

Imagine: Groupies who dig guitarists who play slowly


Like every other guitar player in the world, I guess, for most of my guitar life I was focused on doing everything faster. Transition from chord to chord faster. Play scales faster. Use hammer-ons and pull-offs and partial picking to play phrases faster. Faster, faster, faster.

My heart was never really in it, though.

Just recently I made a conscious decision to indulge my heart and do the exact opposite of the whole classic faster, pussy cat! pick! pick! thing. Instead of trying to be a classic guitar god, the next McLaughlin / Satriani / Vai, I decided to just enjoy myself and play slowly.

I’ve decided, in fact, to make that my musical quest: To become the world’s slowest guitarist.

(So, you know, let’s really hear it for postmodern groupies out there!)

When you play slowly you can concentrate on intonation and building cool, supporting rhythms around the melody without worrying about anything getting lost in a blizzard of—to use Zappa’s phrase—educated gnat notes.

Now, the two videos I’m posting today are not great examples of playing slowly. To be honest, I wasn’t thinking of those things Saturday morning when I recorded these videos. (I’m new to this whole questing paradigm.) But I’ll get there. If you want to swim from England to France, at some point you just have to jump in the Channel and get wet.

I’m at that just getting all wet stage right now . . .

And today’s post is something of the opposite of what I’ve often done in the past. Often I’ve put up lyrics for songs without putting up the music. Today I’m going to put up music without putting up the lyrics.

Since I’m not including the lyrics, I’m going to put up two separate videos. First I will play the melody. Then I will play the song properly, with the melody harmonized.

In the first video, I am playing the melody with a pick. What the kids call a ‘plectrum.’ I don’t really like picks. Basically—in my world—picks are artifacts from the faster/faster/faster era. I’m phasing out my whole thinking about picks. Probably this is the first and last time you’ll see me holding a pick.

One down side of doing these little videos is that instantly, as soon as you do it, you see half a dozen ways it could have been better. I’m getting more relaxed at these videos every time, but I still tense up, still fail to do some cool things that I should have thought of before I started or even while the video is in progress. I’m trying to remember that it’s all for fun and I’m not going to obsess about them, I’m not going to re-do them trying to make everything perfect

There’s always next time.

So, here are a couple of rest stops along my journey, my trip, my quest to become the world’s slowest guitar player.

Both of these videos are me playing the song, “Shadows of Paris,” by Henry Mancini. The song has great lyrics but just to be different from what I normally do I’m not going to post the lyrics. If you want to hear the official version of the song, lyrics and all, check it out here at YouTube.

This first video is me playing the melody, with a pick. I should have finger-picked it, should have played slower, should have paid much more attention to intonation. [sighs] But I’ll get better.





This second video is me playing the song the way I enjoy playing, harmonizing the melody with 7th chords. I like this version a lot, but when I was preparing the video for uploading to Impossible Kisses a whole different rhythm scheme occurred to me. I wish I’d played slower and I wish I had thought faster and worked out the different rhythm scheme first. I budget my time, even on weekends, and I didn’t want to go back and re-do this once I had this version made. But, again, I will get better for my next video.

Los Angeles Is My Daisy

So August has Taylor Swift on the cover of “Glamour” and Miley Cyrus on the cover of “Elle.”

I’m guessing that the insecure 35-year old women who read these magazines are going to be really happy that now they have to compete with the sexualized images of teenage Disney girls.

There was a time when this kind of pop tart extravaganza would have made me pretty happy. But for better and for worse over the last couple of years I’ve gone from thinking of Babylon Sisters as cool jazz to writing things like “Ode To The Concept Of Cotton Candy.”

I suspect that if I’m Gatsby then Los Angeles is my Daisy. When I look out across the lake in my mind the lights I see are the lights of an imaginary but real-life city, not the lights of my lost love’s pier and not the highlights in any young girl’s eyes.

But I wonder what Brian the dog from Family Guy would say about this?

A Supervillain Refresher

Lana is in big trouble.




But isn’t she always?

Lex is desperate to help.




But isn’t he always?







Lionel takes advantage of the moment both to blackmail his son and to offer him some fatherly advice, one supervillain to another.





LEX: “Trust me, Lana Lang has nothing to do with this.”

LIONEL: “Oh, that’s so chivalrous of you. You are the gallant hero trying to protect the damsel in distress.”

LEX: “I’m warning you, leave her alone.”

LIONEL: “All your life you’ve had a tendency to let the damsel lead you straight into the mouth of the dragon. Your feelings for Miss Lang, don’t let them cripple your common sense, son.”

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The End Of A Walter Becker Romance

This was Nicole Bobek:

She was born in 1977 and in 1995 she was the US Champion figure skater. She won the bronze medal at the Olympics that year. A web site evaluated her personality like this:

Open and generous, Nicole Bobek enjoys a wide circle of friends and acquaintances and she thrives on sociability and fellowship. She is adventurous, playful, freedom loving, and always ready for a good time. Bobek rarely allows obstacles or difficulties to keep her down, for no matter how bleak the past or present, Nicole always expects a better, brighter future.


This is now Nicole Bobek:

This is her mug shot from her recent arrest as part of some meth distribution ring.

The world certainly owes this woman—who was never given a chance to be a child—an apology.

She almost certainly will never hear an apology from anyone let alone the world. And since she never had a chance to grow into being human, she probably wouldn’t understand an apology even if she heard one.

*

Addictions are hard on human beings. They’re harder on people who never have had the chance to quite become fully human. All addictions. Any addictions. It is endless grief and horror.

The fallout pattern from the grief and horror spreads out from the center focus in a circular pattern. When a disturbance propagates outward in a circular manner from a center focus, engineers and others sometimes refer to that as ‘sombrero’ fallout because of its circular nature.

Jazz musicians, even pop jazz musicians, get to write about stuff Disney girls never would be allowed to sing about.

This is a Walter Becker song about love and addiction:

In the good old bad part of this college town
Men in business suits they run you down
You take their money just like you take mine
You send it bubbling down the thin blue line
It doesn't matter how it got this way
'Cause we could make it through this thing together
I know you're laughing but I got to say
Now I still want you maybe more than ever

No fooling it's a fucked up world
So be cool my little junkie girl

The cops are out to shut the district down
I comb the ruins of your stomping grounds
Stanyan Street looking like that third world war
You come up blazing like an open sore
Now I believe you but I got to know
How come the right side of your brain is hurting
So take me with you baby when you go
Through to the white side of your China curtain

No fooling it's a fucked up world
So be cool my little junkie girl

In the good old bad part of this college town
Men in grey limousines will drive you down
You take their money just like you take mine
Where does it get you on that thin blue line
Now I can hardly hear you anymore
Your eyes are empty and your voice is hollow
I see you waving from a distant shore
And where you're going I don't dare to follow

No fooling that's another world
Good luck my little junkie girl

Unrequited As A Cosmology

The last time I saw Loudon Wainwright III perform he was headlining at a little jazz club on Chicago’s near-north side. It was a very cool club just north of the river near the Merchandise Mart.

I don’t think that little club is there any more.

There are still a lot of clubs on the near-north side.

Not too long ago Steven Seagal appeared playing guitar and singing with his band at a club just north of the river.

And a few weeks ago a corporation that makes laundry soap rented out a club just north of the river and Mandy Moore sang some songs to a woman who won a contest promoting Gain laundry detergent.

On Loudon Wainwright’s last tour he appeared at a college theater in some far south suburb. I didn’t go. I didn’t want to go farther south and I didn’t want to see Loudon Wainwright III appearing in a school theater.

In a recent interview Mandy Moore said she has started seeing a therapist.

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This is Loudon Wainwright III performing “Unrequited” —

Temping At Impossible Kisses: Chanteuse

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I really am on the lookout for a chanteuse.

But does any girl or woman in the modern world
want to sing slowly? Can any girl or woman
in the modern world sound cool doing it?

Hell, Jennifer Connelly is an Academy Award
winning actress and the production people
on “Dark City” swapped out her real
performance for lip-syncing
in the theatrical release. Damn it!

This is the real Jennifer
being a chanteuse from
the director’s cut
of “Dark City:”

Me And The Damsel Not In Distress

A few nights back I was sitting in the lobby of a fancy hotel just off Chicago’s Magnificent Mile. Not too far from where someone took this photo.

Anyway...

It was around ten o’clock at night so the early evening people were coming in and the late night people were going out.

As I sat there, a couple coming in walked past me. An older middle-aged guy and a beautiful, beautiful young woman in her early twenties. The guy was wearing a tuxedo and the young woman was wearing a flimsy mini-dress kind of thing that was made of some kind of shimmering white and orange fabric.

As the couple walked past me, the young woman turned and looked directly at me. Our eyes met and for a split second we stared at each other. Her face was super-model perfect and, like a super-model, her face was perfectly expressionless. Then, still staring at me, she very slowly, very distinctly, mouthed the words, “Help me.”

I had no idea what was happening, but without thinking—and without breaking eye contact with the beautiful young woman—I very distinctly mouthed the word, “No,” and shook my head.

The young woman’s super-model perfect face lost its perfectly expressionless appearance because she burst out laughing. Smiling—and sparkling all over, teeth sparkling, eyes sparkling, jewelry sparkling—the beautiful young woman blew me a kiss then turned away and continued walking with her date.

I just sat here wondering: What the hell was that about?

I’m sitting here typing still wondering: What the hell was that about?

It was a weird, fun little moment—I love weird, fun little moments!—but it’s hard for me to use it in a poem or story because I have no real idea what happened.

I’m thinking the beautiful young woman and I simply engaged in what a behavioral psychologist might describe as play behavior and I’m thinking play behavior is pretty cool behavior but mostly I’m thinking: What the hell was that about?

Paul And The Damsel In Distress

And it came to pass as we were going to prayer that a certain female slave, having a spirit of Python, met us, who brought much profit to her masters by prophesying.

She, having followed Paul and us, cried saying, “These men are bondmen of the Most High God, who announce to you the way of salvation.”

And this she did many days. And Paul, being distressed, turned, and said to the spirit, “I enjoin thee in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.” And it came out the same hour.

And her masters, seeing that the hope of their gains was gone, having seized Paul and Silas, dragged them into the market before the magistrates . . .

Acts 16:16-19 (Darby Translation)

As often happens with Scripture, what doesn’t get said is as interesting or more interesting than what does get said.


Why do you suppose the demon-possessed girl started following Paul?


I can only think of two reasons.


One, since the demon possessing the girl recognized Paul was preaching the true Gospel, the demon wanted to take the chance to do everything it could to interfere with Paul’s ministry and perhaps even impact Paul’s personal salvation.


Two, the young girl’s human spirit struggling with the torment of possession also recognized Paul was preaching the true Gospel and mustered up what strength she could to follow Paul in the hope that he might be able to help free her of the spirit possessing her.


It’s an interesting issue for Scripture to be silent on.


However, it’s reasonably clear that Scripture isn’t a book as we understand books in the modern world. Rather Scripture is a dynamic interface between an individual and God. It’s our job to focus not on what we’re told but rather on how what we’re told deepens and strengthens our understanding of and faith in God’s will manifesting itself in the world around us as we figure out things for ourselves.

I say “reasonably clear” because after Peter’s famous confession of faith Jesus explicitly says as much: “And Jesus answering said to him, Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jona, for flesh and blood has not revealed it to thee, but my Father who is in the heavens.” Matthew 16:17 (Darby Translation)


The slave girl who followed Paul certainly didn’t do it because she was told to by the people around her. They were making money by exploiting her torment. But by following Paul even to the point of annoying him the slave girl did get free from the spirit possessing her.


In some translations of Acts 16:16 the Greek words for “slave girl” are translated as “damsel.”

Damsel. Just like in the common phrase “damsel in distress.”

2009 2nd Quarter Index

June 2009


Tuesday, June 30, 2009 – Vogue Zombies

Monday, June 29, 2009 – Jenny, I Got Your Number


Friday, June 26, 2009 – The New Horizons Spacecraft As Julia Adams

Thursday, June 25, 2009 – Quasi Una Supervillain Fantasia

Wednesday, June 24, 2009 – Crazy Girl Update

Tuesday, June 23, 2009 – She Comes In Colors Everywhere

Monday, June 22, 2009 – Fog In The Hills Above The Magic Kingdom


Friday, June 19, 2009 – The Once And Future Mandy Moore

Thursday, June 18, 2009 – Saying Mean Things

Wednesday, June 17, 2009 – Impossible Kisses (Wisconsin)

Tuesday, June 16, 2009 – The Girl In The Canadian Negligee

Monday, June 15, 2009 – British Blues


Friday, June 12, 2009 – Quasi Una Fantasia Again

Thursday, June 11, 2009 – Ghosts Are Us

Wednesday, June 10, 2009 – I’m Sorry The World Did This To You

Tuesday, June 9, 2009 – The Dead Movie Store Epilogue

Monday, June 8, 2009 – LeAnn Is Misty Too Much In Love


Friday, June 5, 2009 – I Understand, But Then There’s Tal Wilkenfeld

Thursday, June 4, 2009 – The Sexy Herpetologist Returns! (Sans Sexy)

Wednesday, June 3, 2009 – Hidden Meaning In New Testament Apocrypha

Tuesday, June 2, 2009 – Metaphysics And Apple’s iTunes Store

Monday, June 1, 2009 – That Space Age Archaic Glow



May 2009


Friday, May 29, 2009 – Shadows On The Tissues In The Sun

Thursday, May 28, 2009 – Grinning, Shivering, At The Intertwingling

Wednesday, May 27, 2009 – Quasi Una Fantasia

Tuesday, May 26, 2009 – Hypnotized By Advertising

Monday, May 25, 2009 – Sabine And The Queen


Friday, May 22, 2009 – UFO Movie

Thursday, May 21, 2009 – Me, Happy

Wednesday, May 20, 2009 – Me By The Numbers

Tuesday, May 19, 2009 – Umbrella Button: The Movie

Monday, May 18, 2009 – Video Cuddles Gently Weeping


Friday, May 15, 2009 – Zombie Flowers

Thursday, May 14, 2009 – Forgot To Buy Soap (Distracted By Fantasy)

Wednesday, May 13, 2009 – Breaking Things

Tuesday, May 12, 2009 – Fixing Things

Monday, May 11, 2009 – The Second Death Of Dean Martin


Friday, May 8, 2009 – Someday: The Last Expedition

Thursday, May 7, 2009 – Pris: The End Of A Philip K. Dick Romance

Wednesday, May 6, 2009 – Zombies Are Not The New Vampires

Tuesday, May 5, 2009 – Waves Over Stone

Monday, May 4, 2009 – In Vogue


Friday, May 1, 2009 – Today’s Post Is Not Called “Coupling”



April 2009


Thursday, April 30, 2009 – The Sun Also Rises And Gets Eaten By Zombies

Wednesday, April 29, 2009 – Decision Making And The Bible

Tuesday, April 28, 2009 – Pyramids In Marigold Space

Monday, April 27, 2009 – Paleontology And Desire


Friday, April 24, 2009 – Beautiful Music

Thursday, April 23, 2009 – Watching Women Run

Wednesday, April 22, 2009 – Peter Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill”

Tuesday, April 21, 2009 – Tell The Meek: No, Not Yet

Monday, April 20, 2009 – The Simple Joys Of Maidenhood (Wisconsin)


Friday, April 17, 2009 – Yawn. Oh. Special Effects. Yawn.

Thursday, April 16, 2009 – Love And Kisses On iCarly

Wednesday, April 15, 2009 – Venus In The Morning

Tuesday, April 14, 2009 – RIP Marilyn Chambers (4/22/52-4/12/09)

Monday, April 13, 2009 – Audacity, Audacity, Splat


Friday, April 10, 2009 – Special Appearance By Muskie Light Switch

Thursday, April 9, 2009 – Weasels Ripped My flesh (Bra Attacks!)

Wednesday, April 8, 2009 – Atlas Shrugged, Taylor Swift, Shangri-La

Tuesday, April 7, 2009 – Walt Disney And Chuck Jones: Talking To People

Monday, April 6, 2009 – The Strange Tall Man In A Metal Coat


Friday, April 3, 2009 – I’m Picturing Taylor Swift Naked

Thursday, April 2, 2009 – The End Of A Barry Malzberg Romance

Wednesday, April 1, 2009 – 2009 1st Quarter Index