In my article about
The Queen’s Gambit I mentioned that
I was lured back into chess after Youtube fed me a video by “Chess
Simp”, who plays games with handicaps suggested by his viewers:
e.g., if you can move a pawn, you must.
There is now a whole site, Drawback Chess, that offers this
experience to everyone: you get assigned a secret handicap (e.g.,
you can only capture on odd-numbered moves, or your rooks can’t
move laterally, or what have you—there are dozens) and
play someone who is also playing with a secret handicap.
I played a bunch of games on this site, but eventually I couldn’t
take it anymore: having everything lined up for a brilliant winning
move, only to be barred from playing it due to my drawback, just became
intolerable.
I got this email from Dell: “Your Dell Alienware AURORA
R16 system’s warranty is expiring in 3 years and 2 months, and
you need to manage your warranty online to extend its
coverage.”
Yeah, I’ll get right on that.
This month Bashar al-Assad was deposed, and while looking at the
coverage of his ouster, I discovered that his signature looks like
this:
And that… that does not look like Arabic script.
I took Arabic lessons for a couple of years as a kid, and here is how
I learned to sign my name:
But I guess that is very easily forged?
It occurred to me that perhaps the issue here is that there might not
be as much variation possible in Arabic script as in Roman
script—at least, not enough for handwriting to be used
for identification purposes the way it is in the West.
When I looked into this, I saw some indications that the idea behind an
Arabic signature is to turn it into a distinctive if illegible glyph:
I can’t read
this
or this
And here are the signatures of some of Assad’s counterparts in
nearby countries:
Saddam Hussein
Muammar Qadhafi
Of course, even in the West we do see signatures like some of those
above.
Former treasury secretary Jack Lew was forced to change his frankly
idiotic signature before he was allowed to sign the dollar bill:
We almost instantly find faces unique, even though
objectively one human face is not really that much more different
from another human face than one orange is from another orange.
My understanding is that this is in large part due to the fusiform
face area of the brain, specialized to make the tiny distinctions
between faces seem immense.
I feel as though this is one of the things I’ve known since
childhood, but apparently that’s impossible: I just discovered
that this neurological structure wasn’t described until 1992 and
wasn’t named until 1997, when I was already in a Ph.D.
program.
So I have no idea how I first heard about the fusiform face area.
I just keep running into the false memory of having learned about
it as a kid.
While looking into this, I discovered that the scientist who
first described the fusiform face area, Justine Sergent, had been
subjected to multiple anonymous accusations of ethical
violations.
But the only violation that was ever substantiated was that, while
doing PET scans of the brains of pianists, she had changed the
stimulus from letters to musical notes without notifying an ethics
committee.
For this she was formally reprimanded by David Johnston, principal of
McGill University.
In response, Sergent killed herself.
McGill shut down an inquiry into the matter.
Johnston was named Governor General of Canada.
Anyway, the reason I mention this is that the fusiform face area
is very powerful.
One day I clicked over to Youtube and got fed a video in which David
Letterman reminisced about Bob Dylan’s appearances on his
show.
This in turn led to a video with a story about Ringo Starr going to
a Dylan concert; apparently the the two got to chatting during
the intermission, and Dylan asked Ringo whether there was any
particular song he’d like to hear.
Ringo asked him to play “The Mighty
Quinn”, the storyteller said, which Dylan was none too
happy about because he’d just played it ten minutes
earlier.
That got me thinking, hey, I think I’ve heard that song, but it
certainly wasn’t Bob Dylan singing it—I’d had
no idea it was one of his.
Was this one of those Dylan songs like “All Along
the Watchtower” that became famous for a cover
version?
It turned out that the answer was yes: in 1968,
“Mighty Quinn” hit #1 in the U.K.
and #10 in the U.S. as performed by a band called Manfred Mann.
I pulled up a video of their version, and the singer looked
oddly familiar to me:
And almost instantly, I realized why.
My fusiform facial area was insisting that he looked like Karen from
The Wonder
Years—Kevin’s hippie sister:
I was a big enough fan of The Wonder Years
in my early teens that perhaps it’s not that
surprising that the connection would click for me so quickly, but it
still seemed way out of left field.
Nevertheless, I looked into it.
I knew that Karen was played by an actress named Olivia d’Abo.
I poked around for some information about this Manfred Mann band.
Their lead singer circa 1968?
Yeah, he was named Mike d’Abo.
My retinas sent a blurry black-and-white image of this guy I’d never
seen before to my fusiform face area and in about half a second it reached
thirty-five years back and pulled up a memory of his daughter.
I discovered that Manfred Mann had had an even bigger hit in
1964 with a song called “Do Wah Diddy
Diddy”.
This time, as soon as I saw the title, whatever portion of the brain is
responsible for remembering music started playing the song at me.
Unfortunately, the version I remembered went like this:
“Chicken Littles just a-walkin’ down the street, singing do
wah diddy, diddy dum, diddy doo / Kentucky Fried Chicken’s
got my favorite thing to eat, singing do wah diddy, diddy dum, diddy
doo / They look good (look good), taste fine (taste fine) /
Only thirty-nine cents, gotta have ’em all the time”
Yeah, that’s
a
real commercial from 1987 and it is the version of the song my
brain has had ready to go at a moment’s notice for over
thirty-seven years now.
I don’t know the real lyrics.
Speaking of music: as regular visitors to my site know, these
days I pretty much only listen to one musician, Poppy.
However, as I noted at the end of my first article about her five years ago, the
fact that she skips from genre to genre so often had me reconciled to
the possibility that before long she would stop making music I
liked.
I once compared her to Sparks, and as much as I like Sparks, they
certainly had periods that weren’t for me—hell,
between 1984 and 2002 they pretty much just did Euro dance music.
Poppy’s 2023 glitch-pop album Zig seemed
to confirm that, yep, she was striking out in a direction I didn’t
much care for.
I’d given 2020’s I Disagree an
album score
of 108; 2021’s EP Eat scored a 63 in only
five songs.
But Zig, with more than twice as many songs, I
have at a 28 or so.
Ah, well, I thought, if
“Switch” turns out to be her last great song,
so be it.
The Beatles only put out albums from 1963 to ’70, after all, and
Nirvana only managed 1989 to ’93, so 2015 to ’22 is a
pretty good run!
Happily, though, all this copium was premature.
Last month Poppy released an album called Negative
Spaces, and it’s a masterpiece—right now I
have it as my #4 record of all time, just edging out Nirvana’s
In Utero.
It’s mostly metal, and it took me a while to get into it until
I adjusted—the hooks are not as obvious as in her
alternative rock stuff.
And, interestingly, as of this writing it doesn’t look like
any individual songs are going to make it into my
Top 100—you
need at least a 16 to make it, and the best songs on
Negative Spaces are 15s and 14s.
But there are very few songs that aren’t
15s and 14s—it’s just a really solid album from
start to finish.
As you might expect from a album credited to a singer rather than a
band, vocals are a strong point—though normally what most
grab me about a song are the guitar riffs and other instrumental
hooks, here the melodic hooks are what most jumped out at me.
One of the chief gimmicks of the album is that, in keeping with the
genre, the songs are full of screams and death growls—except
Poppy has one of the most beautiful voices on the planet, so the way
she shifts back and forth between sonic assault and vocal elixir is
very striking (in both directions).
If a single line of a song is a molecule, here even the atoms are often
lovely—in the song
“The Cost of Giving Up”, for
instance, individual words like “come” and
“carry” are just pure candy.
I was also taken by the song structures—several of them
abruptly downshift to slow codas at the end, which is a nifty
trick.
And while I generally don’t care about lyrics, I do have to
say that lines like “The cycle is vicious / The greed is a
sickness / Evil is all around” certainly do capture the
tenor of the times as we head into a very scary-looking 2025.