Sam’s Place

E took the baby to the inlaws for a few days so I could study for the Series 65 exam. The investing parts were OK but the irrelevant regulations made my eyes pull back into my head. But I passed the test today. I don’t have to read boring stuff anymore.

My MySpace site is now up & running. Now I just need to customize it a little to make it less ugly.

I realize that I forgot to mention Ben Riseling, now of The Wigg Report, & now living in North Carolina. At least he’s not (back) in Brooklyn like everyone else. He played sax on the Tyler recording.

Previous episode here: http://www.samkoritz.com/?p=83

You can see where this is going: both of my acquaintances, my boss & my buddy, who killed themselves apparently had mental suicide soundtracks. Which got me thinking about how easy it is for people to be swayed. Movies, for example, are absurd. We watch them knowing that the actors are pretending, the same plots are rehashed over & over again, yet we pay good money to be emotionally manipulated. (My cousin Nan Goldin wrote that the moment just before a movie starts is when she’s most happy — or something like that.) And music plays an important part in making movies work. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the tv show) quickly moves from comedy to melodrama to horror, & after watching the episodes a 2nd or 3rd time you start to notice how, for example in ”The Zeppo,” the sappy romantic music drops out mid-scene to mock the show’s own overheatedness.

Scientists are divided about why music exists. Some intriguing info from “Sorry, Maestro Barenboim. Music is for idiots and Neanderthals,” by Terence Kealey, The Times:

Geoffrey Miller has examined the gender and age of the singers of 6,000 recent jazz, rock and classical albums, and showed that 90 per cent of commercial songs are produced by males, and that their peak age of production is 30 (the peak age for male success in coition, apparently).

Dr Anne Fernald has shown that babies respond appropriately, with smiles or frowns, to praise or admonishment when delivered in baby talk, even if the language is foreign. “What a good girl!,” delivered in French, provokes a happy smile in an English nursery.

Studies on mothers have shown that, in the privacy of their homes, 100% of mothers sing to their babies.

Jenny Saffron has shown that human babies are born with perfect pitch.

More music science here: http://www.progressdaily.com/?s=music.

And speaking of Buffy & singing, here’s a song from 1 of my favorite episodes, “Once More with Feeling“:

Every single night the same arrangement
I go out and fight the fight
Still, I always feel the strange estrangement
Nothing here is real,
Nothing here is right
I’ve been making shows of trading blows
Just hoping no one knows
That I’ve been

Going through the motions
Walking through the part
Nothing seems to penetrate my heart
I was always brave and kind of righteous
Now I find I’m wavering
Crawl out of your grave you’ll find this fight
Just doesn’t mean a thing

She ain’t got that swing

Thanks for noticing

She does pretty well with fiends from hell
But lately, we can tell
That she’s just

Going through the motions
Faking it somehow
She’s not even half the girl she…
Ow!

Will I stay this way forever?
Sleepwalk through my life’s endeavor

How can I repay?

Whatever
I don’t want to be

Going through the motions
Losing all my drive
I can’t even see
If this is really me
And I just wanna be
Alive

—-

Also, Intangible Assets http://www.progressdaily.com/2006/10/08/intangible-assets/

Beatrice!

I just finished reading Charlton Heston’s autobiography — one of two he’s written, I think — In the Arena. Unlike some of my friends, I don’t mind his guns rights work nor his anti-Ice T Cop Killer agitation. I wanted to know more about two of my favorite dystopian movies, Planet of the Apes & Soylent Green. Why did a right-wing hawk make an antiwar film (based on a French sci-fi novel) during the Vietnam War? I also liked Touch of Evil. Turns out Heston was in a bunch of other movies that I haven’t seen, & some plays. He marched for civil rights but hates affirmative action racial preferences.

In my unscientific sample, Heston’s book is better than sleeping pills when recited to very pregnant person.

Heston was stationed in Alaska during WWII & just when he was about to go help invade Japan, the nukes fell, & Heston got to go home. So it’s sorta understandable that he would be in favor the mass destruction. It saved a million Japanese lives, blah blah blah. Fine. But then he comes back to it chapters later & it’s rah-rah-rah for Enola Gay. Here’s the real deal on Hiroshima, a p.o.v. that Heston doesn’t even mention: http://antiwar.com/henderson/?articleid=9443. Regardless, Heston’s ends-justify-the-means enthusiastic support for the destruction of cities full of civilians is terroristic.

So that was enough reading of every word for me. I skipped forward to the parts I was interested in. And he never did explain the whole Apes thing.

—-

Frame Dependence http://www.progressdaily.com/2006/08/30/overconfidence-frame-dependence/

—-

Mirrored at Antiwar.blog http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2006/08/30/you-maniacs-you-blew-it-up/

So we went to a childbirth prep class, & the doula (when did that become a word in English?) asked the class how many were planning a “natural” childbirth, & no-one raised her/his hand. The doula said that that would make her cry, & went on to “encourage” childbirth sans epidermal anesthesia by showing disturbing videos of it, including the birth of a premie covered in monkey fur. A few thoughts on so-called natural childbirth:

- What’s Going on in There? says that, while plenty of American women give birth without epidermals, so few have completely drug-free births that there’re no reliable statistics.

- People are unnatural. Our stomachs, for example, are designed to digest meat processed with heating technology. Our heads are freakishly large and blunt-shaped. I haven’t researched this, but it seems likely that since other mammals have smaller and more streamlined heads, their baby vs birth canal ratio is smaller, & thus their childbirth pain is less. From that point of view, lessening human childbirth pain with drugs returns humans to the natural world’s norm.

- Epidermals today are a lot “lighter” than a few decades ago. Moms can now feel the contractions, just not the pain.

- Alot of the childbirth exercises involved squatting. Do cultures that use hole-in-floor squat toilets, no chairs, etc. have less painful pregnancies?

The doula said that women in many other countries don’t experience childbirth as painful, since they aren’t as afraid of it, due to cultural differences; for example women in poor countries haven’t watched movies that portray childbirth as being painful. But women in most rich countries do use painkillers during birth, & childbirth in poor countries is much more dangerous. Why would women where childbirth is safe be afraid of it, while women where it’s not be unafraid? And as for pregnancy pain being a modern phenomenon, what about pre-modern (to say the least) Eve and, “in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children”?

Essentially, what the doula did was un-empower the couples in the class & encouraged us to feel that we need — surprise! — a doula. I’m not saying that this was the doula’s overt aim, just that self-interest is powerful — that’s why judges recuse themselves, and why we shouldn’t elect a military industry CEO to a position where he can start wars.