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Rahko is a creature in Finnish mythology. This Rahko being is connected with the moon, but exactly how is a question. 

In one version, he is a thief who was bothered by moonlight, which can perhaps be a nuisance if you are a thief. He decided to paint the moon black with tar. This results in the new moon, and also the face you may see when looking up at the moon. 

In another version, spirits known as kapeet eat the moon, and the Rahko forges a new one out of cow hooves and fat. 

So in the aggregate, the Rahko is responsible for either the moon being there or for it not being there. Or perhaps both. After all, the phases of the moon are cyclical.

What the market will bear

Say what you want about this:

It does prove that the sixties were weird on a level you don't often hear about. Of course when people talk about the sixties, what they often mean is the early seventies, when bands in faded jeans were all over FM radio and All in the Family proved that hippies were just your annoying son-in-law.

But in 1967, it was apparently all about ad men and publicists going down Sunset Strip and trying to convince the freaks that commercials are a real happening, man. There's a bit of the put-on in all this, but it was also real. An actual agency commissioned these skits and songs. From the sounds of it, they even got Thurl Ravenscroft involved. It all adds up to a huge "What the hell am I listening to?"

Purple shoes to fill

Uh-oh.

A Broadway musical of Purple Rain. Huh.

I have affection for the movie, but the story is a little trite. What advantages does it have? Prince as a performer, obviously. Morris Day makes a good foil. There's a good rapport between Prince and the actors who play the Kid's band, the Revolution, who also happen to be Prince's actual band, the revolution. And Clarence Williams III is also an asset as the Kid's troubled father.

Most of these advantages are pretty much impossible to reproduce. Find a guy who looks sort of like Prince and can sing like him, and he still isn't the real thing. Maybe put him in a biopic.

Keys

Johnny Staccato is an odd duck in TV Land. It started in 1959, when Peter Gunn had been on the air for a year, and it seems to have given itself the challenge of out-Gunning Gunn. Thus while one show featured a private detective who hung out at a jazz club and dated the chanteuse, the other had a detective who actually sat in with the band. John Staccato, played by John Cassavetes, was the pianist at Waldo's, alternating with John Williams. Yes, that John Williams. And it was pretty vanguard jazz, aspiring to Dave Brubeck/Sonny Rollins levels of sophistication. 

Cassavetes apparently didn't like the show, which may be one reason why its only season ended in March rather than May. It probably doesn't say much about the quality of the show, since he doesn't strike me as someone who'd want to be tied down to any TV show. He did still direct several episodes.

The quality of the episodes varies, but it has a pretty good batting average. Cassavetes's twitchy intensity was well suited to playing an eccentric gumshoe, believe it or not. They could also pull in some impressive guest stars. The second episode is an entirely obvious murder mystery, but features Martin Landau in a key role, providing a cool to Cassavetes's hot. And yes, offscreen wife Gena Rowlands shows up, in an episode that really drives home how different air travel was during the Eisenhower era.

Digging that crazy sound

"Art of Noise" refers back to both a Futurist manifesto and a British electronic group most influential for the fact that they really weren't a band at all. Currently it's also an exhibition at New York's Cooper-Hewitt museum. Some of the old music players are quite striking, suggesting in a few instances a fictional history a la Steampunk or Dieselpunk. 

I read a review of this show in the hard copy edition of the New York Times. The article suggested that the era of owning music is ending. Could well be, but if you're able to resist this trend, you probably should. Consider that there are words that there are words artists or record companies could want to censor out, or feel pressured to do so. Or perhaps worse, feel a need to insert words that weren't there. Or, say, the single edit of a song is such a hit that the album version eventually disappears. A world of streaming-only music probably would be quite a bit smaller by comparison.

More scenes from the end of the Internet

I was recently locked out of my email account. It had happened a couple of times before and blown over after a couple of days. This time it was looking like more of a long-term thing, and in the event it lasted the better part of a week before I got in touch with the provider and restored usage.

Why did it happen? It seems to fall under the broad category of "suspicious activity." I've gotten a number of phishing emails, to be sure. Everybody has. And I wouldn't be surprised if someone else had gotten these phishing attempts but dummied up to look like they're from me.

But it also may have thrown the system out of whack if I logged in from something other than my home computer. The library, say. An increasing number of websites get paranoid if you log in from someplace other than your home computer. They might require you to log into your email and respond to something they just sent you. But your email provider might get a little freaked by that as well, and send a request to confirm your identity.

This can complicate things in terms of editing a wiki or commenting on a blog. It may, in fact, prevent you from doing these things at all. Luck of the draw. But people expect a certain amount of mobility in connection with the internet. Take that away and they might start losing interst.

Why do I keep this blog? This is why.

A bird, nesting, right over the doorway.

I first saw the bird in the nest a couple of days ago, above the door I generally use to get to the sidewalk. The bird didn't move, so I figured it must be artificial. Some kind of garden decoration somebody had planted up there either for a gag or because they just liked the way it looked. Although the nest was a little messy for that.

But today I came back and the building's Russian handyman pointed the bird―which looks like some kind of columbiform―out to me. It's real. She's real, and had a chick next to her. Maybe there's a daddy bird out there getting food for them? We don't know. 

Late afternoon, early evening, we had a thunderstorm. I went downstairs to look at the bird through the little window over the door. This time I did see her head move. And later on, at night, her head was turned so she could look inside. 

How could this not be a blessing?