Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 40 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Well, That Changes Everything!
A bit of fun for Friday night and the weekend. Have you ever run across a bit of information that changed your whole perspective on something? Now, it might have been something large or small, but it turned your view, maybe giving you a new insight?
I listened to a lot of country music growing up, and lately I have gone back and found some of what I grew up with on the youtube machine. For instance, there is this song:
About a year ago, I listened to that, and something came through. That song was not written by a woman. That is guy talk. I looked it up. Sure enough, it was written by Joe South. Now, it was recorded by Billy Joe Royal before Lynn Anderson, but she really made it famous and made it her own. When I mentioned this revelation and research to my wife, her reaction was, “A woman could have written it.” Yes, dear. It is possible. And flying monkeys could come out when my cat yawns, too.
That was one sort of insight. There, I realized something and then confirmed it. But there are insights that go the other way. For instance, and related to another song from my relative youth:
John Denver had been off the charts for a few years, and he made his comeback with that song. It was a more mature singer with a deeper voice than Denver had been a few years before. It really was a great song to make a splash with.
Most songs are not made famous by the songwriters. You might never even have heard of the songwriter, like Joe South, whom I mentioned above when talking about “Rose Garden.” I looked up the songwriter of “Some Days are Diamonds,” and soon had a revelation. The songwriter was named Dick Feller. No, seriously, that was his name. He was born and given the name of Richard Dean Feller by his parents. But as I was looking up information about him, well. . .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deena_Kaye_Rose
How did that second verse go again?
“The face that I see in my mirror
More and more is a stranger to me.
More and more I’m aware that there’s a danger
In becoming who I never thought I’d be.”
I have never heard that song the same way again.
Have you ever cottoned onto or come across a fact that changed the way you see something? It doesn’t have to be about a song. It could be about anything in your life. Tell us all a story, Ricochetoisie?
Published in Music
Don’t keep us in suspense! What did your wife say to that?
Yes, but not now.
I am not near as crazy as you think I am. I simply nodded. But I do not agree with her opinion. The songwriter’s sex was so obvious that I was not surprised to have it confirmed.
There is time.
Absolutely.
Way back in My early years, discussions were, ” I say this is right,” and the other would say, “No, this is right.” Leading to heated arguments.
I read Aristotle’s De Anima and it had a profound affect on the way I have discussions.
Aristotle stated how He perceived Himself as a midwife to people’s thoughts (brilliant). He would lead and guide the opposition until They would come to His conclusion.
Ever since then, instead of telling the opposition what I think, I question the opposition leading Them to what I think. Letting Them think They came to the conclusion Themselves.
Life changing perspective.
Ain’t I talked about the 2020 election enough already?
You could summarize.
It’s almost like those old guys from way back in the day knew something.
Professional baseball has spread out since it started sometime around 1839. It didn’t reach the west coast until I was a kid, when two local teams moved out of NYC–the Giants to SF, the Dodgers to LA. (San Diego, an expansion team, came later) The general story was, the Depression and WWII brought a lot of people to California and eventually it got rich and populous enough to support its own teams.
All true as far as it goes. But one obvious and vital factor was left out: air travel. San Francisco and Los Angeles were already large enough to justify MLB by or before 1930. They didn’t get teams for another quarter century because trains were not fast enough to make west coast match-ups reliable. (Trains, and the extent of their routes, dictated the size of the leagues even by the 1880s).
The first American passenger jets didn’t appear until 1958, but already, by the early 50s, it was possible for four-engine propeller airliners to fly between the coasts in 8 hours, weather permitting.
So it wasn’t the beaches or the bikinis or Disneyland that won us the Dodgers. It was aviation.
Again?
That about sums it up.
Oh, just put the link.
Teams also traveled by bus in the old days, and that made a much longer ride than going from NYC to Boston or some such.
John Madden had a fear of flying and would travel by bus to all the games.
But aviation also kept baseball away from you. The St. Louis Browns (now the Baltimore Orioles) had an agreement to move to Los Angeles and the vote for approval was set for the first day of the Winter Meetings – on December 8, 1941.
Needless to say, the opportunity for the American League to plant their flag in Southern California was lost to Japanese aviation over Pearl Harbor. The Browns would actually win the pennant in 1944 and move to Baltimore a decade later. The National League ruled the West Coast until Gene Autry got an expansion franchise for 1961. The A’s would follow in 1968 and Seattle would come and go in 1969.
Ok.
This resembles the so-called Socratic method my law school instructors routinely employed to challenge and tune up our analytical thinking, so we would end up “thinking like a lawyer.” h/t to Professor Kingsfield and his lookalikes at my law school in the 70s.
The Paper Chase was one of the surprise mid-sized hits of the Seventies. It wasn’t a Star Wars or a Smokey and the Bandit, but it was a pretty big deal at the time, and it was followed by a TV show.
And the withdrawal of the SCOTUS nomination of Douglas Ginsberg resulted in a funny SNL sketch, The Rolling Paper Chase.
“Send in the Clowns.”
It was written by Stephen Sondheim.
About a year ago, I stumbled up this version by Lou Cariou and Glynis Johns:
Glynis Johns Send in the Clowns (youtube.com)
Hearing her sing it in that tone of resignation that the song demands completely changed the way I heard it.
I know what Arahant means about the man-woman thing. Apparently Frank Sinatra made this particular song famous by recording it. Frank, what were you thinking? This is clearly a song for a woman.
For me, there are a couple of song phrases that I strongly associate with understanding myself. As a kid I was a ‘little professor’, always sober and uptight (and encouraged that way by my parents). As I moved through college, I shed many of those constraints, so (even though the song is not really about that), the Bob Dylan line from My Back Pages “I was so much older then; I’m younger than that now” seemed to describe my transition perfectly.
At the same time, I always thought differently than my peers, one way or another. I had no problem thinking outside the box, but I had real problems thinking inside the box and looking normal. Thus the Waylon Jennings line “I’ve always been crazy, but it’s kept me from going insane” always seemed to fit me as well.
I had an oil and gas client, one of whose non-operating partners was named Richard Small. I never asked him if I could call him by his nickname.
Aristotle was taught by Plato. Plato was taught by Socrates. Questions?
Yes, from the original musical.
Been there, done that. Understand all too well.
Despite enjoying him as an actor, I always have to have some sympathy for Tucker Smallwood.
Absolutely true. On the other hand, it would have been fine as a name for the short wheelbase version of a possible Preston Tucker “woodie” station wagon if the company had survived.
Johns did it first. Sondheim: “Glynis had a lovely, crystal voice, but sustaining notes was not her thing. I wanted to write short phrases, so I wrote a song full of questions… And then I wrote it for her voice, because she couldn’t sustain notes. Wasn’t that kind of singing voice. So I knew I had to write things in short phrases, and that led to questions, and so again, I wouldn’t have written a song so quickly if I hadn’t known the actress … I wrote most of it one night and finished part of the second chorus, and I’d gotten the ending … [T]he whole thing was done in two days.”
Sinatra did have a hit with it but so did Judy Collins just two short years later.
Yeah, but he had a week to get there.
St. Louis Browns were originally the Milwaukee Brewers (1901) when the AL formed. They moved in 1902.
Then the Boston Braves moved to Milwaukee in 1953, and on to Atlanta in 1966.
The Pilots spent one year in in Seattle (1969) before moving to Milwaukee. They were the first team to switch leagues in 1998 when they moved to the National League.
My first Programming job in the 1980s, there was an edict that all names were to be stored in the database in signature format (First name Last name) and never last name, first name. The story was that the policy was set by an upper manager named Richard Small.