Friday, 23 August 2019

(It's Eve's day!) (Classic art alert!)



Heard of this?

     This is getting serious, and undeniable.


     Whistleblowers are emerging, hand over fist, from the very bowels of these tech giants. Curiously, most of them can demonstrate lifelong membership in the left wing of the American political spectrum. And yet, they're crying foul.
     And the tech giants are fighting back. Zach Vorhies was swatted by his own employer, Google, in retaliation for exposing them. That amounts to attempted murder by cop.
     Expect to start hearing more about the abuses, and attempts to, not just stifle, but actually silence dissenters, by the big, bad, tech outlets.
     How did the sheep working for these firms not know that their employers are the very sort who killed Karen Silkwood? This used to be an industry of smart people.
     By the way, for now, at least, until they start hiding this, too, you can look up what really is trending on Google right here. Just enter anything to see how often others are searching for the same thing. Try, oh, I don't know ... Adam Schiff. See how low the graph is? Now, try just the letter Q.

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Now this is fascinating.


     What he's hinting at is called sand hydraulics, and many suspect that the pillars in front of the Hebrew temple were giant, sand-hydraulic cylinders which were part of a mechanism that concealed the ark of the covenant. In fact, sand hydraulics appears to have been employed by many of the ancients in many applications in temples.
     I'll have to get into more details some other time, but, the bottom line is that it appears that so many hands have had their way with the Giza plateau, that it is now impossible to tell what it originally was.
     Worse still, the athors of all those many books on the subject have been so very selective in their presenting of the evidence that, no matter what you've read, you've likely been given a completely unreliable impression of the place.
     Fortunately for us, though, there are new researchers who are well aware of that problem, and are working to bring us all the facts.
     I'm predicting that we'll find that there were originally just the two, larger pyramids, and the original Sphinx, but nothing like it appears today. I think it was just a rock that happened to look like a lion, so they carved a pool enclosure around it, and redirected some water from the Nile to keep the pool full and flowing.
     And I say that because water figures so prominently into so many temples all over the world. The 'street' between the temples at Teotihuacan, for instance, would be flooded with 'living' water, and the worshippers ferried from temple to temple by ferrymen. Sound familiar?

     And it's not just Giza!



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Don't watch this.

     I mean it. The subject, and even some of the language is rough. But, if you can take it, it'll refresh your memory and/or catch you up on some important news.


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It's all about the wheels!

     I'm of the opinion that the 1963 Ford Falcon ranks among the homeliest vehicles ever produced. I mean, I find it so ugly, that, if I had one, ... well, I'd do this to it.


     Because this is beautiful!
     One of the things I noticed even an a kid was that you could take the nastiest looking car from a junkyard, put the right wheels and tires on it, and magically transform it into the hottest, coolest, baddest (I know, right?) car on the road. You could turn it into something that people would literally run up to you with fistfulls of money, wanting to buy from you.
     Apparently, I'm not alone in this. The so-called Rat Rods are practically built around this very idea. Even auto-makers and 'tuners' (what we used to call hot-rodders) place 'stance' (the size, style, and positioning within the body of the wheels and tires) at or near the top of their list of concerns.
     For comparison, just look at the 'stance' of these two Dodge Challengers, one a 1970, the other a 2010, 40 years apart.


     Just look at those silly, sad little wheels on the 1970, trying to look as big and bad as the thinking of the day would allow.

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From my playlist

     I hardly know where to begin with this one. Let's just call it Jim Steinman music, more commonly known as Meatloaf. And I'm going to put a lot of it up here for you all, but only because of the many faces Jim's music hides behind that you probably weren't even aware of.
     And, no, they are not the same person, Jim and Meatloaf, although born a mere 33 days and 1,500 miles apart, but they might as well be synonymous. Jim Steinman's music and Meatloaf's voice go together like, well, like nothing else. I've never heard of such a pairing before or since.
     Sadly, Meatloaf's voice is failing, and Jim's output has faltered, but I knew, back when I first heard Bat out of Hell, in 1977, that a corner had been turned.
     And, indeed, for about a decade, Jim's music, as delivered by Meatloaf's powerful vocals, steamrolled the music world. So magnificent and memorable were Jim's songs (one critic even described it as bombastic), that every fading star and shoulda-been came clamoring for a shot at redemption with help from this bombastic music. And that's why I'm going to show you today Jim's works that were sung by people other than Meatloaf.

     Air Supply got to number 2 on the charts, in the US no less, with this Jim Steinman song, but then went back to singing their cheesy bubble-gum, puppy-love, romance stuff, and their career went right along with it.


     Bonnie Tyler came out of nowhere with this typically weird 1980s music video, and then went right back to nowhere.


     Celine Dion fanned the flames briefly with this one, but then went the Vegas route because she just wasn't selling any more. Maybe she should have had Jim pen her some more hits.


     Even Barry Manilow got a shot in the arm from some real music, for a change, but that, too, didn't last.


     Babs herself even gave us about the only thing of hers I'd ever buy. (Guava jelly?!)


     In fact, back in the day when I actually bought music, there were only a couple of acts whose entire oeuvre graced my collection of some 400 albums, and Jim Steinman's music led that set, outpacing even Yes.
     And his music was always immediately recognizable, at least to me, by those long lines. Most lyricists assemble what few lines they can manage to make rhyme in short stanzas with even shorter lines, but Steinman's lyrics were entire paragraphs stuffed into the same space.
     And, oh, how I loved those lyrics. Unlike the often vague, impressionistic, even stream-of-consciousness words that others relied on to appeal to the widest audiences possible, Jim's lyrics were practically like folk songs, telling very specific stories that might have come from you or me. (Ahem. Let's just not discuss the how or why of Paradise by the Dashboard Lights.)
     But, the point is, that that entire first album was one long love song, tracing an all-too-common relationship from its all-too-common beginnings all the way to 'the end of the line', culminating in For Crying Out Loud (You Know I Love You), a song I regard as probably the greatest, sincerest (if, like much of his work, a bit blue collar, even profane) love song of all time.
     And yet, Jim's very best work, in my humble opinion, wasn't sung by Meatloaf or any other famous set of pipes. Instead, it was sung by a relative unknown as the theme music of both the (sort of) main character and the movie itself: Streets of Fire.
     Oh, and, just in case you haven't noticed it yet, another thing that makes Steinman music (and videos) so easily recognizable is his motorcycle and leather fetish. And you'll see it on full display here.

Putting the POWER in POWER ballad!

You'll want some good speakers for this.

     Listen to that piano! You just don't hear music like that anywhere else.
     The movie is really all about the three guys, and their obsession with the girl, which, I suppose, really makes her the main character.
     Never heard of it, have you?
     And why should you have? It went, like the other (pretty good) song in the movie said, nowhere fast.

Same trailer, different song

Get a load of those motorcycles!

     The story was silly. The visuals were an odd 'deviation' of 1950s Detroit blue-jeans and motorcycle boots. The acting, especially from the romantic lead, was awful.
     And yet, this movie, though they'll never admit it, at least bumped, if not launched several careers. Just look at the cast today. You know most of them, and they're all famous now.

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~~ Marcus Aurelius ~~