"The Christian Life" is one of the highlights of The Byrds' 1968 album Sweetheart of the Rodeo. But it was probably inevitable that it would be misunderstood. No, Gram Parsons wasn't trying to convert his listeners to Christianity. He had much eager sinning left to do in his short lifetime. On the other hand the song has nothing to do with peak-2020 "everything is about race" cultural politics. I don't know where you'd even get something like that.

No, the simple truth is that Parsons heard the Louvin Brothers' original and was moved by it. Therefore he covered it with the Byrds, and opted to treat the sentiment behind it respectfully, whether he shared it or not.

Tales of a short month

I only just found out that February is named after Februus. And who is Februus, you ask? The Roman god of purifications. Associated with Hades/Pluto and the Underworld. 

Tomorrow is the Ides of February, Ides being another idea that comes down to us from the Romans. To them ritual was very important, and is woven into the very fabric of time. And in some senses theirs wasn't that long ago.

Getting to Zzz

The old exercise about counting sheep to fall asleep sounds like a joke, especially now that it's been depicted in countless decades-old cartoons. But I'm pretty sure it's for real.

I say "pretty sure" because I've never gotten to sleep by counting sheep exactly. But the principle behind it is something I've found to be helpful. In essence you just mentally take part in something simple and repetitive. Not tedious, but not emotionally charged either. It's a good knockout drop.

Marooned

I just recently read The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares. It's an interesting novella (about 100 pages) which puts romantic frustration in a narrative with some science fiction trappings. Bioy Casares was a friend of Jorge Luis Borges and there are a couple of connections to the edition I read. For one thing JLB himself wrote a foreword to the story. Also his younger Sister Norah contributed some nice illustrations.

What really surprised me afterwards was finding out that former Police drummer Stewart Copeland had written an opera based on it. Nice to see he's keeping his hand in, though.

My God, what have you done?

 

This has bugged me since I first saw it and still does. Sorry if you're reading this and it's a treasured childhood memory. The Muppets should be doing their own―well, you know what I mean―interpretations of songs. If The Muppet Show were going to do a version of "Penny Lane" they'd never just restage the Beatles' promotional film. So why is Kermit just doing David Byrne moves in a David Byrne suit?

On balance I think it's good that Muppets Tonight existed, if only because it gave Prince a change to perform for children. But the mixture of Henson's absence and the meddling of American TV networks seems to have caused standards to slip.

Our old friends

It's only very recently that I learned about or even heard of Ludovic Slimak. He's a paleoanthropologist who studies Neanderthals, a perennial interest of mine, so I have to pay him at least some attention. 

Scientists have gone to extremes on the Neanderthal. Some have dismissed them as incapable of symbolic thought, inherently incapable of art or language. Others have posited them as an enlightened race with a deeper understanding of nature than our own. Both of these seem unlikely to me. But they were different from us. But different in what way?

Slimak has a lot to say. One of his ideas is that modern humans, Homo sapiens, are standardized and efficient. His vision of the Neanderthals, by contrast, were creative, making things that are irreproducible. For him this is why we survived and they didn't. 

To some extent it's always going to be up for debate. We know where they lived, for the most part. We know that they had much thicker bodies, more nose-heavy faces, etc. But alas, we can't speak with them. Even if it's possible to clone them from moribund DNA that would just be our creation. So we have to interpret and make educated guesses.

Weld done (sorry)

 

For reasons of my own I wanted to see what a sculptor does when their work involves welding metal. This is by far the best video I found on the subject. For one thing there's no narration, which I don't need and would only be a distraction.

The finished sculpture is pretty cool as well. There's a suggestion of the Easter Island Moai, sure. But the context makes it a bit unusual.