Gig Reviews: They Might Be Giants

It looked I wasn't going to get to go to this one.   I didn't feel like going alone and the one person I knew who liked them was in Canada on the day.   My usual concert buddy I drag to things I want to see was away too.   Then my brother asked me if I wanted to go with him.   Hurrah!   I had no idea he liked them.   So off we went, looking forward to a night of glorious weirdness.   The opening act were really enjoyable.  A fun band from Northern Ireland called the Wonder Villains.   I'm so sick of opening acts you could sleep through, so they were a nice surprise.   The first thing the band did when they got on stage was to rearrange the audience.   We were on the upper level in seats, but the people on the lower floor were seated nicely at little lables.   They Might Be Giants were having none of that.   They got everyone to stand up and come up to the front.   Yeah!   That's how you get a party started!   And I saw people mving aside to let a wheelchair user through to the front.   Made me feel warm and fuzzy inside.   So the band were just as wacky as expected and put on a great show.   They didn't do a few of my favourites though, like Experimental Film.  Ah well.   The highlight was definitely Istanbul.   And Marty Beller stayed behind at the end to sign tickets.   I love it when people do that.   Good show.      

A Short History of Nearly Everything: Measuring a Meridian

"If you had to select the least convivial scientific field trip of all time, you could certainly do worse than the French royal Academy of Sciences' Peruvian expedition of 1735.   Led by a hydrologist named Pierre Bouguer and a soldier-mathematician named Charles Marie de la Condamine, it was a party of scientists and andvetures and who travelled to Peru with the purpose of triangulating distances through the Andes.

At the time people had lately become infected with a powerful desire to understand the Earth - to determine how old it was, and how massive, where it hung in space, and how it had come to be.   The French party's goal was to help settle the question of the circumference of the planet by measuring the length of one degree of meridian (or one-360th of the distance around the planet) along a line reaching from Yarouqui, near Quito, to just beyond Cuenca in what is now Ecuador, a distance of about 320 kilometres.

Almost at once things began to go wrong, sometimes spectacularly so.   In Quito, the visitors somehow provoked the locals and were chased out of town by a mob armed with stones.   Soon after the expedition's doctor was murdered in a misunderstanding over a woman.   The botanist became derranged.   Otheres died of fevers and falls.   The third most senior member of the party, a man named Jean Godin, ran off with a thirteen-year-old girl and could not be induced to return.

At one point the group had to suspend work for eight months while La Condamine rode off to Lima to sort out a problem with their permits.   Eventually he and Bouguer stopped speaking and refused to work together.   Everywhere the dwindling party went it was met with the deepest suspicions from officals who found it difficult to believe that a group of French scientists would travel halfway around the world to measure the world.   That made no sense at all.  Two and a half centuries later, it still seems a reasonable question.   Why didn't the French make their measurements in France and save themselves the all the bother and discomfort of their Andean adventures?

The answer lies partly with the fact that eighteenth century scientists, the French in particular, seldom did things simply if an absurdly demanding alternative was available, and partly with a practical problem problem that had arisen with the English astronomer Edmond Halley many years before - long before Bouguer and la Condamine dreamed of going to South America, much less had a reason for doing so.

(...)

They chose the Andes because they needed to measure near the equator, to determine if there really was a difference in sphericity there, and because they reasoned that mountains would give them good sightlines.   In fact, the mountains of Peru were so contantly lost in coud that the team often had to wait weeks for an hour's clear surverying.   On top of that, they had selected one of the most nearly impossible terrains on Earth.   Peruvians refer to their landscape as muy accidentado - "much accidented" - and this it most certainly is.   Not only did the French have to scale some of the world's most challenging mountains - mountains that defeated even their mules - but to reach the mountains they had to ford wild rivers, hack their way through jungles, and cross miles of high, stony, desert, nearly all of it uncharted and far from any source of suppplies.   But Bouguer and La Condamine were nothing if not tenacious, and they stuck to the task for nine and a half long, grim, sun-blistered years.   Shortly before concluding the project, word reached them that a second French team, taking measurements in northern Scandinavia (and facing notable discomforts of their own, from squelching bogs to dangerous ice floes), had found that a degree was in fact longer near the poles, as Newton had promised.   The Earth was 43 kilometres stouter when measured equatorially than when measured from top to bottom around the poles.

Bouguer and La Condamine thus had spent nearly a decade working towards a result they didn't wish to find only to learn now that they weren't even the first to find it.   Listlessly they completed their survery, which confirmed that the first French team was correct.   Then, still not speaking, they returned to the coast and took separate ships home."

Music: The Popcorn Song

An old one, that gets stuck in your head like nothing else:

Book Reviews: Going Solo

This is another autobiography by Roald Dahl.   This one is about his time in the air force after leaving school.   It's obviously a story about courage, but it's also one about exotic adventures in a far-off land, but mostly it's just about a young man trying to find his way in the world.   It's also about how much surviving a battle is down to chance.   Very harrowing.   The number of near death experiences in this is...quite an eye-opener.   I enjoyed this one much more than Boy.   Again though, some thing that comes through very strongly is the strong relationship between Roald Dahl and his mother.   The ending, where Roald Dahl is shipped home due to injuries and is reunited with his mother moved me to tears.   Perhaps my favorite bit though, is the description of the people he met on the way out to Africa.   It reminds me so much of my life in an expat community.

“What I remember so clearly about the voyage is the extraordinary behaviour of my fellow passengers.   I had never before encountered that peculiar breed of Englishman who spends his whole life working in distant corners of British territory.   Please do not forget that in the 1930s the British Empire was still very much the British Empire, and the men and women who kept it going were a race of people that most of you have never encountered and now you never will.   I consider myself very lucky to have caught a glimpse of this rare species while it still roamed the forests and foot-hills of the Earth, for today, it is totally extinct.   More English than the English, more Scottish than the Scots, they were the craziest bunch of humans I shall ever meet.   For one thing, they spoke a language of their own.   If they worked in East Africa, their sentences were sprinkled with Swahili words, and if they lived in India then all manner of dialects were intermingled.   As well as this, there was a whole vocabulary of much-used words that seemed to be universal among all these people.   An evening drink, for example, was always a sundowner.   A drink at any other time was a chota peg.   One’s wife was the memsahib.   To have a look at something was to have a shufti.   And from that one, interestingly enough, RAF/Middle East slang for a reconnaissance plane in the last war was a shufti kite.   Something of poor quality was shenzi.   Supper was tiffin and so on and so forth.   The empire builders’ jargon would have filled a dictionary.   All in all, it was rather wonderful for me, a conventional young lad from the suburbs, to be thrust suddenly into the middle of this pack of sinewy sunburnt gophers and their bright bony little wives, and what I liked best of all about them was their eccentricities.  

It would seem that when  the British live for years in a foul and sweaty climate among foreign people they maintain their sanity by allowing themselves to go slightly dotty.   They cultivate bizarre habits that would never be tolerated back home, whereas in far-away Africa or in Ceylon or in India or in the federated Malay states they could do as they liked.   On the SS Mantola just about everybody had his or her own particular maggot in the brain, and for me it was like watching a kind of non-stop pantomime throughout the entire voyage.”

 

Songs: Doesn't Remind Me

I'm not quite sure why I like this so much.   I usually like things that are a bit bolder.   Still, this is good.   And is a surprisingly good karaoke song.  

Gig Reviews: Josh Ritter

Given everything you know about my musical tastes, it may surprise you to know that one of my favourite singers ever is a country singer called Josh Ritter.  I've been to see him a couple of times, most recently in Glasgow.   It was an odd sort of gig for me, as it was seated.   Haven't been to many of those.   It's a whole different experience.   Calmer, more comfortable, but not as much energy, and so much further from the stage.   The first time I saw him he created absolute magic on the stage.   He was mesmerising.   So so powerful.   This wasn't quite up to that standard.   Maybe it was the seatedness that did it.   Or perhaps that he didn't do a lot of my favourite songs.   He did do Lillian, Egypt though.   Hurrah!   Still a good show and I'm glad I went.   The venue was lovely too.  The Old Fruitmarket.   I'd never been there before and it was quite lovely.   All fairy lights, and still with the old storefront signs up.  

 

         

Music: Gymnopedie No. 1

I love this.   It's so bittersweet and melancholy.

Book Reviews: Boy

This is Roald Dahl's own account of his childhood.   It describes his time at school, his friends and their escapades, his family and long summer holidays in Norway.   I enjoyed re-reading it, but somehow I wanted more from it.   I wanted the autobiography of one of the most brilliantly creative and imaginative and disgusting children's writers to be full of weird occurences, colourful characters and wacky adventures.   Instead it mostly seems to consist of being miserable at school.   There are a few nasty medical procedures described as well, reminding us how recently we didn't have things such as anaesthetics.   It's not a very happy book.   What does come through is what a great woman Roald Dahl's mother was and what a great influence she had on him and how strong their relationship was.   She sounded like a very strong and brave lady.   And his descriptions of Norway make you desperate to go and spend long summer days exploring the fjords alone to your heat's content.