Sep 30 2014
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
Sep 29 2014
So, I posted this short rant on my Facebook wall yesterday and I thought it might be a decent discussion piece:
only humans could be arrogant enough to think that we could destroy or damage large parts of earth’s ecosystems and natural defenses and not manage to change the earth detrimentally. we have paved over, removed, and added things to the land, air, and water, which, even when naturally occurring, do not occur at the rates and levels we have contributed to them.
the earth may have had natural rhythms and periods of warming and cooling, but that’s when left alone with what earth had on its own. what we’ve done to it over the past couple centuries in the name of making our lives easier and some of us richer, cannot – absolutely cannot – have not had any effect. i don’t need any friggin graphs, charts, or studies to tell me that. i just need to not be stupid to know it.
only humans could be arrogant and stupid enough to believe that all we’ve done to it would not make a detrimental difference in the earth’s well being. arrogant and stupid, that about sums us up.
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Sep 28 2014
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
Fifteen or so years ago I used to consider myself one. As far as I knew, it meant I’d vote in every election, I’d vote for everyone on the party line- never splitting, and I’d vote for a yellow dog if there was a D next to its name. You could say I’ve evolved though I still can’t spell worth a dam.
I used the phrase recently in a conversation with a political neophyte who had never heard it before and I was asked indignantly what the hell I meant by that! I tried to explain as best I could, when I was interrupted and asked “yes but why the term yellow dog?” as if I had just dissed every yellow labrador retriever fan on earth. Labs are great! I really like them and they like jumping on me and licking my face! Honest!
So why the term yellow dog? I had to admit I was completely stumped. I guess I’m just not as well read and worldly as I pretend to be. Who’s the neophyte now she asks.
Following Auntie Mame’s advice, first stop, Merriam-Webster. Everyone one has had an Auntie Meme figure in their life right? To the inter tubes!
Definition of YELLOW-DOG
yel·low-dog adjective1: mean, contemptible
2: of or relating to opposition to trade unionism or a labor unionFirst Known Use of YELLOW-DOG
1880Browse
Next Word in the Dictionary: yellow-dog contract
Well that’s Not Cool. I’ve never considered myself anti union. Even back in 1998 when I was a self labeled YDDem. Mean & contemptible… well that depends on who you asked.
I had a vague recollection about yellow-dog contracts from a junior high history class. Better click on that to see how truly Not Cool this is.
Definition of YELLOW-DOG CONTRACT
yellow-dog contract – nounan employment contract in which a worker disavows membership in and agrees not to join a labor union in order to get a job
First Known Use of YELLOW-DOG CONTRACT
1920
Ugh. My 1998 self was not my best self.
So the first known use of Yellow-Dog was in 1880.
First known use of yellow dog contract was 1920.
But wait, there’s more. Onto wikipedia.
Yellow Dog Democrats was a political term applied to voters in the Southern United States who voted solely for candidates who represented the Democratic Party. The term originated in the late 19th century. These voters would allegedly “vote for a yellow dog before they would vote for any Republican”.[1][2] The term is now more generally applied to refer to any Democrat who will vote a straight party ticket under any circumstances.
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The first known usage to date of “yaller dog” in relation to Democrats occurred in the 1900 Kentucky gubernatorial contest involving Kentucky Governor William Goebel. Theodore Hallam was criticized at a Democratic Party meeting for first supporting Goebel, then campaigning against him.The critic pointed out that Hallam earlier had said “if the Democrats of Kentucky, in convention assembled, nominated a yaller dog for governor you would vote for him” and asked “why do you now repudiate the nominee of that convention, the Honorable William Goebel?” Hallam responded:
“I admit,” he stated blandly, “that I said then what I now repeat, namely, that when the Democratic Party of Kentucky, in convention assembled, sees fit in its wisdom to nominate a yaller dog for the governorship of this great state, I will support him – but lower than that ye shall not drag me!“[7]
There are indications that the term was in widespread and easily understandable use by 1923. In a letter written in Huntland, Tennessee by W. L. Moore of Kansas City, Missouri on May 9, 1923, on the occasion of his 90th birthday, Moore writes:[citation needed]
“I am a Democrat from inheritance, from prejudice and principle, if the principle suits me. But I have passed the yaller dog degree.”
Emphasis mine. The only wiki link I included in that quote from the yellow dog page was the one for that Democratic Kentucky Gov William Goebel. If you click through you’ll learn that he really was a pretty unscrupulous politician even by politician standards. As you might expect he shifted loyalties and principles as needed. Though after rigging his own election for Governor, he was shot the day before he was to be sworn in. He only served for 4 days before he kicked the bucket. No one was convicted. Cough.
More from the wiki:
The phrase “yellow dog” may be a reference to a breed of dog known as the Carolina Dog indigenous to the Americas, specifically the Southern United States, and not descended from Eurasian breeds.[3]
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The Carolina Dog, or American Dingo, was originally a landrace or naturally selected type of dog which was discovered living as a wild dog or free roaming dog by Dr. I. Lehr Brisbin. Carolina Dogs are now bred and kept in captive collections or packs, and as pets. A breed standard has been developed by the United Kennel Club that now specifies the appearance of these dogs.
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Carolina Dogs were discovered during the 1970s living in isolated stretches of longleaf pines and cypress swamps in the Southeastern United States.
Clicking through to the wiki on Carolina Dogs, it seems unlikely anyhow that Abe Lincoln and the others that used the term Yellow Dogs were referring to this breed or any other yellow haired dog. You could break it down a bit more and look up all the possible meanings of the word Yellow and the word Dog. But I don’t think that answers the deeper question of how this phrase came to be used as a point of pride. That will take someone better than me.
News & Blogs below
Sep 27 2014
One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three.
It’s amazing to me (though perhaps it shouldn’t be) how many dances have signatures of three.
Ok, enough with the doggerel, it was making my head ache anyway.
But it’s true enough that an amazing amount of music written specifically for dancing is in 3/4, 3/8, or 6/8 time (not Rock of course which is relentlessly 4/4, or the Polka in 2/4). I suppose I should take a moment and explain Time Signatures.
Signatures are a notational convention to let the musician know “how many beats are in each bar and which note value constitutes one beat.” They look like fractions, but mean something entirely different. The beats per bar is the first number and can really have any value, bars are a mere divisional convenience (like periods), though they do effect the accenting. The second number, the note value, is almost uniformly 4 or 8. This corresponds to the duration of each individual note where open notes without a staff last for 4 beats, open with staff 2, solid with staff 1, solid with staff and a flag 1/2, solid with staff and 2 flags 1/4, etc.
What makes it confusing is that solid with staff is called a quarter note because it conventionally (in 4/4 time) takes up a quarter of the bar and a whole note (open, no staff) takes up a whole bar (I think I’ll have some of Chuck Pierce’s Prestone now).
Anyway how many beats also gives you an idea of how the music is naturally accented. Common (4/4) time is accented DAH, duh, Dah, duh with the 3rd beat slightly less prominent than the first. Cut time (think Sousa) the same except twice as fast though it’s easy enough to transpose into a 2/4 Polka but then you lose the inherent subtlety of the 3rd beat as all the down (first) beats are accented the same. Confused yet? I sure am.
If the beats per bar are divisible by 3 (3/4, 6/8) each bar is accented DAH, duh, duh (or in the case of 6/8 DAH, duh, duh, Dah, duh, duh). The 6/8 accenting really gives you a better feel for the rhythm of the music as actually played and while you can duplicate it notationally in any signature with the Triplet, if you’re going to be using it with frequency being divisible by 3 is a time saver.
Personally it’s this coincidence of quarter time and third time in the 6/8 and 12/8 signatures that make them intellectually attractive to me though I’m not a composer, have barely any theory, and as a performer am in the words of the immortal Leonard Falcone himself- “Hopeless.”
One of the defining characteristics of modern and post-modern “art” music is using creative time signatures, eccentric accents, and syncopation to distance itself from this “tyranny of the barline” and Stravinsky was one of the strongest proponents, but you can’t dance to it very well.
Back to dancing. Wikipedia implicitly likens “classical” dancing to Square Dancing and now that I think about it I can see the parallels. Performed in groups like a line dance, participants were expected to know the moves with a certain interchangability as opposed to individual efforts like the mosh pit mania of Rock or even the stylized but solo (well, pairs) of contemporary ballroom styles.
Excluding the Polka the 3 most popular types were the Minuet and the Scherzo (an uptempo, long format Minuet), and the Waltz all in 3/4 time. What made the Waltz particularly scandalous was not really the music, which was actually fairly conventional, but the fact that the dance is performed in the “closed” position where you are looking at your partner and can even give them a squeeze if nobody’s looking.
So this morning I’ve decided to illustrate each of those 3 types and as a bonus I’m including Le Sacre du printemps which was so revolutionary in its noise that it nearly caused a riot.
For a Minuet I’ve chosen a piece by Jean-Baptiste Lully who introduced the trio section to the form.
Menuet pour Trompettes
For a Scherzo I’ve selected a piece by Schubert who finished much more than he left unfinished and along with Beethoven really popularized this format in “art” music.
Scherzo Presto from Symphony #6
And for the Waltz you can’t go wrong with some Johann Strauss. This is Opus 4, Kettenbrücke-Walzer, about a suspension bridge.
Kettenbrücke-Walzer
Oh, Stravinski.
Those kids. They’ll listen to any kind of cacophony.
Oblgatories, news, and blogs below.
Sep 26 2014
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
JFK and Nixon participate in TV’s first presidential debate; Cuba ends Mariel boatlift; Composer George Gershwin, poet T.S. Eliot and tennis star Serena Williams born; ‘West Side Story’ hits Broadway
Sep 25 2014
So what is “science”?
Well, to put it briefly, science is the study of phenomena characterized by the scientific method of either simply recording results in an objective way (observation)-
Objective journalism is one of the main reasons American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for so long. You can’t be objective about Nixon.
Or proposing a falsifiable hypothesis (a predictive model of reality that can be disproven by experiment) and devising an experiment to test it that is duplicable (if you perform it rather than I, you will get the same results) or supported by multiple independent observations (Economics is not science, it is a pack of tortise shell rattle shaking shamen).
And let’s not forget Einstein’s definition of insanity-
Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
That. Is. Science.
Also this-
The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.
–Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)
Science Oriented Video!
Science/Tech News
Water vapor and clear skies discovered on Neptune-sized planet
Sarah Gray, Salon
Wednesday, Sep 24, 2014 05:03 PM EST
A major discovery was announced on Wednesday by NASA: Water vapor and clear skies were discovered on a Neptune-sized exoplanet outside of our solar system – 124 lightyears away.
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The discovery of water vapor may immediately trigger giddy feelings – water is one of the building blocks of life, as we know it. However, the clear skies are just as exciting. Usually thick atmospheres prevent more in-depth study of Neptune-sized exoplanets.
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Though, HAT-P-11b is not an Earth-sized planet in an habitable zone, this discovery is still furthering the discovery of more exoplanets. Astronomers hope to apply these similar discovery techniques to super-Earths, other exo-Neptunes and more.
Science/Tech Blogs
The Obligatories, News, and Blogs below.
Sep 24 2014
Ok, I’m sick right now, so I’m going pretty light on this one. I can’t believe I missed it when it was written some 13 odd years ago, but it’s well worth the read as it’s still pertinent. Yeah yeah, I know it’s the Onion, but it’s right on the mark!
God Angrily Clarifies ‘Don’t Kill’ Rule
NEW YORK-Responding to recent events on Earth, God, the omniscient creator-deity worshipped by billions of followers of various faiths for more than 6,000 years, angrily clarified His longtime stance against humans killing each other Monday.
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Sep 23 2014
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
Richard Nixon gives his ‘Checkers’ speech; Rome’s Augustus Caesar born; Lewis and Clark finish trek to America’s West; Psychologist Sigmund Freud dies; Musicians Ray Charles and Bruce Springsteen born.
Autumn arrived in the Northern Hemisphere last night at 10:29 PM EDT.
During both the vernal and autumnal equinox, day and night are balanced to nearly 12 hours each all over the world.
Instead of a tilt away from or toward the sun, the Earth’s axis of rotation is perpendicular to the line connecting the centers of the Earth and the sun during an equinox.
Daylight in the Northern Hemisphere continues to gradually diminish until the winter solstice, which occurs on Dec. 21, 2014. The opposite occurs in the Southern Hemisphere, where daylight continues to grow longer.
How King Arthur Pendragon will be Celebrating at Stonehenge
Druid leader King Arthur Uther Pendragon is preparing to celebrate one of his favorite events of the year at Stonehenge – the autumn equinox.
Arthur, the leader of the druids and self-declared reincarnation of King Arthur, explained the rituals and meaning behind the equinoxes – the lesser known dates in the druid calendar after the summer and winter solstices. [..]
“We’ll be leading the festivities and ceremonies at Stonehenge. English Heritage will allow us in just before dawn and we’ll get into the centre circle, then myself and one of the arch druids will be leading the ceremony in the centre circle.
“After the centre circle I’ll be doing my own ceremony over by the heel stone where we’ll have drummers and pipers and poetry, dance, and so on. One of the things about the Druid tradition is it’s a celebration. What we tend to do at Stonehenge is to celebrate whatever we’ve set up for, which is the turning of the wheel.”
Druids celebrating the equinox have a similar prayer for all major events. They will call to the four quarters to ask for peace: “We’ll say ‘is there peace in the east?’ and the response would be ‘there is peace in the east’. Then we’ll go around to the south, west and north, then we’ll turn inwards and say is there peace or let there be peace throughout the whole world.”
The group will then have a celebration, with poetry, dance and music. In ancient times, the equinox would signify the start of winter. People would begin stocking up on food.
Fall Begins Monday: Equinox Myth Debunked
Referring to the equinox as being a time of equal day and night is a convenient oversimplification. For one thing, it treats night as simply the time the sun is beneath the horizon, and completely ignores twilight. If the sun were nothing more than a point of light in the sky, and if the Earth lacked an atmosphere, then at the time of an equinox, the sun would indeed spend one half of its path above the horizon and one half below.
But in reality, atmospheric refraction raises the sun’s disc by more than its own apparent diameter while it is rising or setting. Thus, when the sun looks like a reddish-orange ball just sitting on the horizon, it’s really an optical illusion. It is actually completely below the horizon.
In addition to refraction hastening sunrise and delaying sunset, there is another factor that makes daylight longer than night at an equinox: Sunrise and sunset are defined as the times when the first or last speck of the sun’s upper or lower limbs – not the center of the disc – are visible above the horizon. [..]
Certain astronomical myths die hard. One of these is that the entire Arctic region experiences six months of daylight and six months of darkness. Often, “night” is simply defined by the moment when the sun is beneath the horizon, as if twilight didn’t exist. This fallacy is repeated in innumerable geography textbooks, as well as travel articles and guides.
But twilight illuminates the sky to some extent whenever the sun’s upper rim is less than 18 degrees below the horizon. This marks the limit of astronomical twilight, when the sky is indeed totally dark from horizon to horizon.
The gifts of the autumnal equinox
Most of us have very mixed feelings about the autumnal equinox. We all understand the way it can (quite literally) darken one’s spirits. That’s especially true in a place like Vermont, where summers are breathtakingly beautiful and dispiritingly short. Everywhere, however, the autumnal equinox reminds us that another summer has past, the natural world is growing quiescent (or dying), and we are older. There is less sunlight. Less warmth. No blueberries.
Soon that ultimate bacchanal of death will be here, Halloween.
And what follows Halloween? The gray morass we call November. That’s usually the month when I finally get around to raking the trillions of leaves that have swooned (starving) to their death in my yard. Some are still phantasmagorically beautiful. All are annoying when they stick to the tines of my rake.
For the next three months, the days will continue to shrink and the nights will grow very, very long. There will be days in the not too distant future when it will feel here in Lincoln that the sun is falling behind the ridgeline to the west a little after lunch.
Have I depressed you enough?
But here’s the strange and wonderful reality that marks this time of the year: It actually feeds the soul’s need to cocoon. To nest. To hunker down after the zeal and sheer busyness of summer. I love those first fires I build in the woodstove – the aroma, the warmth, the luminescent little blaze through the palladium glass windows. I love collapsing on the floor in the den in the waning light of a Sunday afternoon and reading – often with a cat on my back. (Occasionally, as a matter of fact, with a 17-pound cat on my back.) I love the permission that short days and long nights give me to watch DVDs of two-decade old episodes of “Seinfeld.” [..]
The truth is, I really don’t mind the autumn. For the first time in months, we can savor the sluggishness that all of us, once in a while, crave. After all, in a mere 90 days – 13 weeks – the days once more will begin growing longer.
Sep 22 2014
So, in honor of the worldwide marches yesterday, I give you a few of my weekend reading on Climate Change.
First, a WaPo editorial urging action:
A climate for change: America should not wait while the world warms
FOR MORE than a century, scientists have understood the basic physics of the greenhouse effect. For decades, they’ve realized humans can affect the climate by burning coal, oil and gas. But the country’s leaders remain divided on the need to curb greenhouse emissions, let alone how to do it.
Among mainstream scientists, this paralysis is mind-boggling.
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Sep 21 2014
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
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