Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs and Chanteys

Aye, this is a CD I shall be purchasin’.

Leering, full of menace and the threat of pain, “15 Men on a Dead Man’s Chest” is arguably the most famous pirate song ever committed to tape (and thanks to its refrain, “Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum,” it also ranks among the more pro-booze sing-alongs in the children’s section of the music store).

But as a genre, pirate music remains obscure even by musicologists’ standards. To spotlight a genre that has all but disappeared — as well as cannily promote their summer blockbuster “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” — Johnny Depp and director Gore Verbinski commissioned an expansive compendium of such seafarer music, “Rogue’s Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs and Chanteys,” due Aug. 22 on Anti- Records. Its 43 tracks include contributions from Sting, Bono, Lucinda Williams, Lou Reed, Loudon Wainwright III, Van Dyke Parks and Bryan Ferry among an eclectic roster.

I need to be thinkin’ about restorin’ Pirate Mode here, too. The place is gettin’ too…lubberly.

Turning gold into straw

Hold it. In the recent terrorist arrests, the British were able to do their job while supporting the rule of law, and the US pressured them to rush the arrests for political gain?

It’s amazing how this administration is so good at turning even great successes into spotlights into their own incompetence and corruption. David Neiwert’s new substitute teacher does a fine job of exploring the psyche of the Republican clown show—coasting by on dogma, authority, and a black & white view of the world seems to work well for getting elected, but man, it sucks as a way to run a country.

Ham and Wilkins on Downe

Hey, Wilkins! I know you were a lucky dog who got to visit Darwin’s home a while back, but did you know who else had been there?

Ken Ham.

He seems to have had a different reaction than you did.

It was a book that attacked the foundations of the Christian faith,
with an impact that was felt around the world. I prayed, “Lord, bring down this
‘house’—this ‘house’ of evolution that has permeated cultures around the world.”

Ol’ Ken does have a sense of mission, though. I guess mumbling to a nonexistent being isn’t effective in accomplishing his ends, even if that nonexistent being is supposed to be superpowerful.

The ministry of AiG is one the Lord has raised up to combat Darwin’s
legacy. In reality, AiG vs. the evolutionary establishment is a battle between
two opposing legacies. Darwin’s legacy has permeated nations around
the world, and wherever there’s a formal education system, Darwinian evolution
is taught as fact. 

Millions around the world are being led astray by this horrible legacy.
We can see the effects of it nearly everywhere: millions of
students are being taught that Genesis is “nonsense.”

Actually, we don’t teach that Genesis is nonsense—we don’t even mention the Bible, for the most part. Students who are taught to think and evaluate the evidence manage to figure out for themselves that Genesis is nonsense. If he wants to defeat us, he’ll need to campaign against logic, evidence, skepticism, the scientific method, and thinking…oh, wait. Darn. That is his strategy. Curse you, Ken Ham, you’re always one step ahead of us!

Africa: our past, perhaps our future

The story about the ranking of evolution support in Western nations did not include any data on Africa. America’s standing might have looked a little better if it did; the news from Kenya is not good. Evangelical churches want to suppress the Kenya national museum’s fossil collection. This includes some of the most impressive examples of humankind’s ancient history, such as multiple australopithecine specimens and Turkana Boy; it’s arguably one of the world’s foremost collections of hominid fossils. This is where many of Richard Leakey’s finds are stored.

[Read more…]

Read the freakin’ paper!

Rick Moran at Right Wing Nut House is moved to complain about the declining understanding of science in our country, which is a good start. Waking up the wingnuts to the fact that science is doing poorly in the US is a good thing, far better than the usual science denial we get from that side of the political divide. However, he takes exception to the idea that a good part of the blame belongs to the religious and to the far right. Instead, he blames the failure on schools run by Democrats.

It goes without saying that those school systems — mostly located in large cities and the rural south — don’t need a belief in God to keep them from understanding evolution. All they need is local government (run by Democrats for the most part) to run the schools so incompetently that students can graduate while lacking the scientific fundamentals.

[Read more…]

Good. Bad. They’re the ones doing the hosting.

The Tangled Bank

Tangled Bank is coming up, to be hosted at the FrinkTank. This could be interesting; we usually don’t have any guidelines beyond that the topic of the submitted articles relate to science, but the frinksters will be giving special preference to “submissions that contain curse words, gratuitous nudity, or general bad taste“. I was thinking of sending in that one with the breast shot that met the standards of gratuity and bad taste, but I think we all want to forget that one.

Anyway, send your links in to the FrinkTank, to me, or to host@tangledbank.net by Tuesday.

Signs of the coming Cephalopocalypse

This could be a new feature here, rather like RaptureReady’s Rapture Index. I’m collecting omens and portents of the coming of our imminent doom at the hands suckers of the Tentacled Great Old Ones. It’s a race: will the cephalopods beat Jesus? A distinct edge goes to the squiddies—at least they’re real.

i-af9ee751611ed4a01875916bc4cd7634-menacing_squid.jpg

As mentioned earlier, cephalopods are turning up in our nation’s rivers and highways.

i-1f63a4881d760bf30741a98600f0fea4-cthulhu.jpg

Martin Rundkvist reports that the Swedish Research Council’s new outreach magazine is called…Tentakel.

i-8dbcf78e4498d0e4e4bb8e2c9fe74167-cephalomoon.jpg

Majikthise reveals that the cephalopods have conquered the Moon. (Oh, and here’s a much prettier carving).

Our current Cephalopocalypse Alert Level: 6.7, Glass. Marine molluscs are taking advantage of modern science, beware of strange people in lab coats that have too many arms.

Is incompetence an act of God?

An Alabama church collapses on a Thursday night; fortunately no one was hurt. As we’ve come to expect, a god gets credit, never mind that maybe a truly beneficent god would have prevented the collapse in the first place.

“Thank God nobody was hurt,” Pastor Jeff Carroll said. “He chose to let it come down on a Thursday evening when nobody was there.”

This story has an additional twist, though. Why did the church collapse?

The congregation and volunteers designed and built the new church apparently without filing plans or gaining approval from local or state entities. Carroll, himself a homebuilder, said he was not aware of any requirements and remains unconvinced a government body should have a say in how a church is built. “If the state and the church are separate, I don’t understand why they think they’ve got jurisdiction,” he said.

It seems to me that houses built on faith lack any substantial means of support, as this little story illustrates. I’m a little bit sympathetic with Pastor Carroll’s position, though: let’s remove churches from all secular oversight and impose no demands or restrictions on their construction, except that in the spirit of fair warning we should require large signs be posted all around them, announcing the hazard but reassuring congregants that god himself is holding the building up. That’ll drive everyone with a lick of sense away from them, and those consenting adults (we’ll have a new reason to forbid the attendance of children!) who believe in ghosts propping up the bricks…well, they’ll be removed from the population one way or another.

I wonder if any insurance companies in Alabama have been alerted to the construction standards of Jeff Carroll homes?