2024.12minutiae
  • 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.


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