Modern Logging Music, Kingpin of Shanghai, Horrible History of the Atlanta Falcons

PLUS: Onion Island, Isley Brothers, What a Robot Dog Taught Me About Consciousness

𝐈𝐍𝐕𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐈𝐆𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍𝐒:

𝐎𝐮𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐖𝐨𝐨𝐝𝐬

Casey Jarman | Believer | 1st July 2013

Remembering Buzz Martin, the “Singing Logger, whose six albums — beginning in 1968 with Where There Walks a Logger, There Walks a Man — comprise “nearly the entire canon of modern logging music.” Martin sang about “the slow death of logging and the people it took down with it.”  In 1974 he sold the rights to his catalog to Lawrence Welk’s publishing company, and effectively ended his recording career; when his fortunes faded, he “returned to the wilderness, and never came back.”

As I sat down one evening within a small café

a forty-year-old waitress to me these words did say:

“I see that you are a logger, and not just a common bum,

’cause nobody but a logger stirs his coffee with his thumb.

My lover was a logger, there’s none like him today;

if you’d pour whiskey on it, he could eat a bale of hay.”

𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐖𝐚𝐬 𝐂𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐚?

Justin E.H. Smith | Berfrois | 26th August 2021  

A California-born expatriate reflects on how it is hard “not to begin speaking of California in the past tense.” More: “To be a white Californian is something very much like being a Boer at the southern cape of Africa. It is at once both manifestly obvious and completely implausible that one belongs — cosmically, politically, physiologically — where one lives”

𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐚 𝐑𝐨𝐛𝐨𝐭 𝐃𝐨𝐠 𝐓𝐚𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐌𝐞 𝐀𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐜𝐢𝐨𝐮𝐬𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬

Meghan O'Gieblyn | The Guardian | August 10, 2021

I bark, therefore I am. The creators of the Aibo robot dog say it has ‘real emotions and instinct.’ This may seem over the top, but is it? In today’s AI universe, all the eternal questions have become engineering problems. See also: In WIRED: Can Robots Evolve Into Machines of Loving Grace? Further: Klara and the Sun [Klara is a robot girl with AI who is an ‘artificial friend’] has been named one of the Top 20 books of the year so far by Amazon.

 Further:

Klara and the Sun [Klara is a robot girl with AI who is an ‘artificial friend’] has been named one of the Top 20 books of the year so far by Amazon.

𝐄𝐒𝐎𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐈𝐂𝐀:

𝐐𝐔𝐎𝐓𝐄: I never ask a man what his business is, for it never interests me. What I ask him about are his thoughts and dreams.

—H.P. Lovecraft

𝐄𝐓𝐘𝐌𝐎𝐋𝐎𝐆𝐘:  The word “clue” has roots in ancient fable. According to Greek mythology, when Theseus entered the Labyrinth to kill the minotaur (a half-man, half-bull), he unraveled a “clew” — a ball of string — behind him, so he could find his way back. The word “clue” didn't exist until the mid-1500s when people started to vary the spelling of “clew.” By 1620 it had begun to be used in the purely figurative sense of “that which points the way.”  

𝐌𝐔𝐒𝐈𝐂:  The Isley Brothers perform a handful of their much-sampled love songs for NPR's Tiny Desk Concerts. The Isley Brothers have been performing for eight decades, starting in the ‘50s, touring for two years with Jimi Hendrix as a guitarist in the 60s (video here), and sampled in recent years by R Kelly and 2Pac. Ronald (b. 1941) is still fronting the group today. “It’s Your Thing!” One enthusiastic critic claims they are the most important American band of all time.

𝐀𝐔𝐃𝐈𝐎:  Morgan Dunn | Kingpin Of Shanghai | Damn Interesting | 26th August 2021 | Action-packed portrait of Du Yuesheng, boss of the Green Gang in 1920s Shanghai. “Nothing criminal or even questionable took place in Shanghai without Du’s say-so. Any crook who dared to knock over a safe, rob a well-heeled Westerner or run a numbers game without giving the Green Gang their cut was liable to end up shot, kidnapped, or with their tendons sliced apart by a fruit knife”

𝐕𝐈𝐃𝐄𝐎: SecretBase | Does anyone know how to throw a football? | The History of the Atlanta Falcons, Part 1 | YouTube | 17th August 2021 | The wretched history of the Atlanta Falcons. One of the worst teams in the NFL, historically led by a string of truly abysmal quarterbacks, recently made it to the Super Bowl—and lost. A retrospective of an age of endless losing, chain-smoking, and some of the worst quarterbacking the NFL has ever seen. Interesting both for football fans and history fans (45m 44s)

𝐆𝐎𝐔𝐑𝐌𝐀𝐍𝐃𝐈𝐒𝐄: An Onion Island | At just over 20 square miles, the island of Bermuda is barely a blip in the North Atlantic Ocean. Yet for much of the 1800s, this small British territory boasted an outsized reputation for one unlikely export: onions. Mark Twain was so struck by these Bermuda onions, in fact, that he wrote: “The onion is the pride and joy of Bermuda. It is her jewel, her gem of gems…In Bermudian metaphor it stands for perfection—perfection absolute.” And yet, by the mid-1900s, this once-coveted crop vanished into near obscurity. Why? | Related: 21 Types of Onions and How to Use Them.

𝐂𝐔𝐑𝐈𝐎𝐒𝐈𝐓𝐈𝐄𝐒: Towards a cultural history of the beaver. The animal has had a misunderstood anatomy and used to symbolize powerful forces from the days of Pliny the Elder through the middle ages when it was featured in a marble sculpture of Abelard and Heloise. 

𝐏𝐎𝐄𝐌: Sometimes, When the Light | Lisel Mueller 

          Sometimes, when the light strikes at odd angles

          and pulls you back into childhood

          and you are passing a crumbling mansion

          completely hidden behind old willows

          or an empty convent guarded by hemlocks

          and giant firs standing hip to hip,

          you know again that behind that wall,

          under the uncut hair of the willows

          something secret is going on,

          so marvelous and dangerous

          that if you crawled through and saw,

          you would die, or be happy forever.