Super Bon!

I don’t normally blog about the weather but this morning’s commute took over 75 minutes. Oh, how I long for -20. It’s the north. It’s supposed to be cold. It’s not supposed to rain on top of the ice.

So I learned today that the Oxford English Dictionary missed the boat on psychoacoustics. I noted some definitional errors when work on The Audible Past, so it’s fun to find another one. Allow me to quote myself:

They chart the first reference to Harvard’s laboratory to 1946, though according to Harvard University’s archives the laboratory had been in existence since 1940 (Harvard University Archives, Records of the Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory, UAV 713.9, accessed online at http://oasis.harvard.edu:10080/oasis/deliver/deepLink?_collection=oasis&uniqueId=hua08005, 17 January 2006). This, in turn suggests that the term was in common use among researchers interested in auditory perception from sometime in the 1930s.

The first noted use of psycho-acoustic, however, was as an adjective to describe a section of a dog’s brain in the 1880s.

As you may know, there is branch of social scientific media research where they count the number of times a specific phrase occurs in a show. We’ve elevated it to a game with Twenty-Four.

Carrie selected the phrase “we don’t have time.”
I selected the phrase “you’re just going to have to trust me”
our mystery guest selected “we don’t have a choice.”

After four hours over two nights, Carrie is in the lead 7-2-2.

I may have mentioned in the past that my riding is solidly Bloc. By an overwhelming majority. This is no surprise since it’s largely Francophone working class. But there’s a development of new condos and duplexes up by the old rail yard (where Loblaws is on Rachel, for the locals). This is an area for new money and young professionals. In fact, the only other American I’ve ever seen at our Loblaws moved here from Texas for some corporate gig and was living in one of the new townhomes with his wife. Anyway, up there, in the last week, a whole bunch of Conservative Party signs have reared their ugly heads. Scary.

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In other news, a new book chapter has appeared:

“What’s Digital in Digital Music?” In Digital Media: Transformations in Human Communication, eds. Paul Messaris and Lee Humphreys, 95-109. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. This is a brand spanking new essay, not a reprint or anything.

Overall, the book looks good substantively, as many of the essays are expanded versions of talks I heard at a conference in 2003. But it continues my proofing curse. The header on the last page of my article is wrong, and I noticed a typo in the table of contents on the title of Barbara Warnick’s essay. C’mon, Peter Lang, hire some proofreaders!

One of the best playoff experiences ever was watching Pittsburgh upset Indianapolis. And I like the Colts. Now, I’m rooting for the Stillers all the way, despite the fact that such an outcome is improbable. I guess fandom is the believing in the impossible part.

In other news, I’m happy to report that changes are underway here at sterneworks.org. Not sure when they will all come to fruition, but in the next month or so some stuff will start looking slightly different, and I’ll have a more powerful back end. Or at least the site will.

Question of the night: if cultural historians disallow work that covers more than a quarter century on methodological grounds (at least for work that covers the 19th century forward), then what’s a good name for work that covers a century or more of what we might otherwise call “history”?

. . .is discovering music I already own for the first time. I have this thing where I’ll buy like five new CDs at once, and then I’ll get into up to three of them and the other two sort of sit. Sometimes for months. And then one day, something will cue me and I’ll start listening and think “wow, this is amazing.”

Current case in point, The Books, Lost and Safe. Earlier this week, I was reading one of my students’ papers on a looper pedal and he included a CD demonstrating it. I thought “gee, when he hits the reverse function, it sounds like The Books.” That made me want to hear the books, and lo and behold, here’s the new album to which I haven’t really listened. It’s awesome.

Can you say cryto-Zionist? A movie that’s supposed to show a “balanced” view clearly casts the Israeli assassins as the moral agents in the film. And though they are punished for what they do, they also show remorse and doubt — unlike their Palestinian victims, who, while appearing as decent people in face to face interactions, never know any remorse for (or question) killing Israelis. Yep, one more version of “it’s primitive, they’ll just keep killing each other.” Disappointing.

Mise-en-scene was good, though. Not so much the establishing shots as the insides of rooms.