I was on an airport shuttlebus once and overheard someone say they went to the Harvard of Ohio.
MIT is the Georgia Tech of the north, it is reputed.
This probably isn't the thread to say that, given a meager little injection of knowledge, my doubts about X is the Y of Z as a purely linguistic phenomenon -- or even as a cliche, really -- have become increasingly nagging, is it?
2: I figured Language Log had weighed in. Couldn't find it though. I'm like the Google Searcher of Yahoo! Answers.
5: It seems exactly the right thread to say that, actually.
The first one that comes to mind is "The Harvard of the [X]".
Midwest: Michigan
Proletariat: CUNY
Deaf: Gallaudet
Pilates schools: The Pilates Center in Boulder, CO
SUNY system: SUNY Geneseo
South: Rice, Ole Miss
Evangelicals: Wheaton College
Native American educational world: Haskill University
Crimean Tartars: Zincirli Medrese
I see my rooting around to gather examples has been rewarded with pwnership of the first order.
Mayonnaise is the Harvard of Condiments.
9: That's called being the Standpipe of Gary Farber.
See? I knew it was the wrong thread. Now people are all asking me what I mean, and so on.
It's really vaguely formed. I suppose I don't quite understand why "X is the Y of Z" is anything other than a relatively literal entailment of a conceptual metaphor. I guess it's a little bit clumsy, but how are we doing anything different when we talk about e.g. the "king of all media" or "bathroom dirt's worst enemy"?
14: Wait, so you think it's (probably, given the gamut of things that annoy a person) mildly annoying that someone suggest this type of statement to is a purely linguistic phenomenon? I didn't make any such claim, but okay I can see that.
Or are you saying there's a simpler metaphorical device going on (X is the Y), so why all the hubbub? Which also: okay.
Or something else?
15: I'm saying that treating it as sort of unique and cliched based on the semantic structure maybe elides how fundamental that kind of analogy is to the way people talk.
I'm also apparently excited to get in over my head talking about a subject I barely know anything about. Which I guess is par for the course, but...
Little of both of those.
The snowclone label is useful because it's both multi-use and a cliche. I'm not sure if that's the same thing as a "relatively literal entailment of a conceptual metaphor", but it seems like a fun thing to have a word for.
If "King of all X" or "X's worst enemy" are filled with lots of different values for X, then they get to be snowclones too. The bar is low, but it's still a useful concept.
it seems like a fun thing to have a word for
Yeah, I mean, surely. Which hey, why X in the Y-bowl, you know? But there I went.
elides how fundamental that kind of analogy is to the way people talk
Now we're getting somewhere. If it's the way people talk, I would wager it's recently the way people talk. It seems to be a habit of an age that's comfortable with and ironic towards a certain amount of pre-processing in its thought. The remixer's argot.
I have a 21-lb cat sitting in my lap and purring as I type.
See, I would say that it's not recent at all, that it's just a particularly explicit version of the kind of metaphor that's embedded basicaly everywhere in language.
This is dependent on reading it as not a purely ironic construction, that I think holds per the original language lab definition.
It can be used ironically, but every kind of metaphor can be used ironically.
I suppose, backing up, that it is certainly interesting to have originally identified this, just from a taxonomic point of view, but it still seems like too basic a construction to me to really qualify as a cliche.
No fan of 20th century music should fail to identify the King of Pop, the Chairman of the Board, the Godfather of Soul and the Walrus of Love.
The Venice of the North: Amsterdam; Brugge; Stockholm. Fight!
SUNY Geneseo is the Harvard of the SUNY system. I thought that Binghamton was better. Isn't it supposed to be the Berkeley of the East.
Should be ?/./? I seem to have an issue with question marks.
Only somewhat related to the Tribeca theme, I liked that article and am interested in learning more about Perriello.
A colleague and I were discussing the house my family and I bought and he said: "So you didn't realize you were moving into the Orange County of West Cleveland?"
14: But isn't the deal here that a snowclone relies on the synecdoche at its core to be intelligible? "king of" or "worst enemy" are just hyperbole, while "Paris of" or "Harvard of" imply a set of associations for the signifier that is more than just "big city in France" or "fancy East Coast college".
The "Talented Mr. X" construction allows us to substitute all our knowledge of the narrative of the novel for what's being said about the new subject. (Although mostly ironically, as is pointed out.)
Unfogged: The lively and often pretentious discussion around a marble-topped table at a late 19th century Montmartre cafe of the Internet
X is the Y of Z is certainly a construction, but it's pushing the bounds of snowclonehood, if you ask me. Sifu, have you read any of Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier's discussions of it? He usually calls it "the XYZ figure" or the "XYZ metaphor". I think the first place Turner discusses it is in Reading Minds, which I doubt you'd have had call to read, but I think it also comes up in both Mental Spaces and Mappings in Thought and Language, and The Way We Think as well.
It's so sad what things have come to in the US car industry, it used to be that the Cadillac was the Rolls-Royce of automobiles.
23, 32: I've heard St. Petersburg called this as well. But clearly the honor is Duluth's.
clearly the honor is Duluth's
For a while there, it could have been Grand Forks.
The German Athens? Milwaukee.
I was just yesterday in a conversation in which it was offered that Houston is the New York of Texas, and that Carlsbad is the Paraguay of New Mexico.
As much as I dislike this snowclone, Charlotte is most certainly the Tribeca of the South. They even have very similar excellent southern Indian food. People who live there say that it seems most of their neighbors come from NYC, where they lived in Tribeca and worked in banking, and now they live in Charlotte and work in banking. The architecture is even similar, and you can buy pancetta at most of the grocery stores.
The first one that comes to mind is "The Harvard of the [X]". Midwest: Michigan
It's even a line in the alma mater. "The Harvard Of The West" rhymes with "The Leaders Of The West".
When I did big brothers/big sisters in college, I was hanging out with the family, and one of the kids was sharing some non-accomplishment. The mom scoffed it by saying, "That's like being valedictorian of summer school."
38, cont'd: And Tribeca is no great compliment, either. Next to the Upper East Side, it's probably the most boring and homogeneous part of Manhattan.
OK, I see that Duluth is the Venice of Minnesota. So all those Europeans can duke it out amongst themselves.
Before studying abroad there, American expats described Brno to me as the Buffalo of the Czech Republic. This seems accurate, but I have yet to see Buffalo (the Venice of the Great Lakes region?).
A couple of years ago (God, a decade ago...), there was an article in the Washington Post that called Montevideo the Newark of Latin America.
The Venice of the North: Amsterdam; Brugge; Stockholm. Fight!
None of the above: Birmingham.
I've always considered Harvard to be the Durham of America.
Ooh, last night I also called Brooklyn the DC of New York.
I'm told the Irish are the blacks of Europe, and Dubliners are the blacks of Ireland, and the Northside Dubliners are the blacks of Dublin.
Saskatoon is the Albuquerque of Saskatchewan, and its University of Saskatchewan is the University of Saskatchewan of Saskatchewan.
38, 41: I was thinking the same thing. Tribeca? It's the new location for the "cheap," giant high-rises filled with the recently graduated, supplanting the UES as the white hot center of America's 5th year of college.
A fairly popular t-shirt in Ann Arbor back in the days before irony -- "Harvard, Michigan of the East".
48: Everything is a Stiff Little Fingers song today!
Paddy is a moron. Spud thick Mick.
Breeds like a rabbit. Thinks with his prick.
Anything floors him if he can' fight or drink it.
Round them up in Ulster. Tow it out and sink it.
Green wogs. Green wogs. Our face don't fit.
Green wogs. Green wogs. We ain't no Brits.
If the victim ain't a soldier why should we care?
Irish bodies don't count. Life's cheaper over there.
50: It was there when I was there. Maybe I brought the irony!
Oh. 51 and its bollocksed formatting is me.
i've been to Buffalo i can imagine Brno now and Montevideo, wonderful
the Irish are the blacks of Europe
our UB's anthem says she is 'the white princess of Asia' and we play that line a lot in related jokes coz we can't alas say that she is sufficiently pretty and clean to qualify for that epithet, yet
hopefully i'll see that transformation in my lifetime
51: "White Noise" is a great song. I've always wondered, though, if there are British skins who listen to it without irony.
It's even a line in the alma mater. "The Harvard Of The West" rhymes with "The Leaders Of The West".
I'm pretty sure it's "Hail, Hail, to Michigan, the Cesspool of the West." (okay, that's probably not the alma mater.) Or "Assholes of the World."
(Most easily bastardizable fight song ever. Hail! da da da da da da Hail! da da da da da da)
but we pronounce it not like UB you-bee, u like in hussar and b like in bacon, that's the proper pronunciation of the nickname
don't quite understand why "X is the Y of Z" is anything other than a relatively literal entailment of a conceptual metaphor. I guess it's a little bit clumsy, but how are we doing anything different when we talk about e.g. the "king of all media" or "bathroom dirt's worst enemy"?
It'd certainly be a mistake to think that a snowclone was by definition a cliché, or evidence of bad writing. "Anti-semitism is the socialism of fools" is pretty pithy, for instance.
57 -- thine alabaster cities gleam undimmed by human tears
Try singing it to the tune of Auld Lang Syne
I've always considered Harvard to be the Durham of America.
I think Durham gets first dibs on being the Durham of America.
52: hg, I'm pretty sure my time in fair Ann Arbor far preceded yours.
The Poles are the Chukchas of America. The Belgians are the Chukchas of Europe.
I'm the Sleepy Dwarf of the Unfogged posters..
Charlottesville, VA is too round to be a triangle of anything.
Historically reenacted Sally Hemmings: We did it in the rotunda.
Dick Dietrich: Oooh, that must have hurt.
The South Pole is the North Pole of the southern hemisphere. Surprisingly, the converse is not true.
64: You sure? I'm as old as the hills.
By which I mean the spin-off of Laguna Beach.
the other day someone contacted me from the South Pole on the skype, which turned out to be UK i was suspicious of course, coz you don't know what perverts are there out there
but this one seems harmless coz he's mostly offline
The Perriello ads in that Lithwick article are all pretty funny.
69: Yes. I am older than the dirt that piled up to form the hills.
For this cons:truction:
Does
"X is the Y of Z"
always mean
"X is to Z as Y is to the whole world?"
No, I think it means "X is to Z as Y is to a geographical analog of Z so obvious as to be unstated." Might be the whole world, but might not.
Tribeca, for example, is the Tribeca of NYC, not of the planet, for the purposes of the analogy. The planet hasn't got a Tribeca, unless there's a country devoted to housing for well-off professionals of an artsy bent, with spiffy restaurants and kind of industrial architecture.
But Tribeca is the most notable Tribeca-like thing in the world, therefore it is the Tribeca of the world.
(it would be understood as such among the people saying the phrase)
unless there's a country devoted to housing for well-off professionals of an artsy bent, with spiffy restaurants and kind of industrial architecture
If only Luxumbourg could get its shit together and go modern, or if Singapore could get a soul and become arty.
31: aha! I knew I wasn't being original.
61: isn't that sort of embedded in the very term, though? Certainly the original Eskimo snowclone is sort of necessarily cheesy.
Tribeca probably isn't the most prominent Tribeca in the world -- I'd bet there's a Tribeca of Tokyo, or Shanghai, or Mexico City that fills the Tribeca niche for more people than Tribeca does. I just don't know what the Tribeca of Shanghai is because I'm a NYC provincial.
X is the Rodney Dangerfield of the Republican Party
Y is the Bill Monroe of trance music
Z is the Leone Helmsley of American politics
Selena was the Tejano Madonna.
Ron Silver is the poor man's Al Pacino
And to Sifu's original question, I think the geographical nature of the metaphor is conceptually important enough to make it seem like a type of metaphor that's worth individual attention. The relations between locations and areas are thick, and the "X is the Y of Z" statement is a claim that your thick knowledge of the relationship between Y and whereever Y is located will be deeply informative about the relation between X and Z.
Dipping is the redneck's nicotine patch.
X is the Rodney Dangerfield of the Republican Party
Y is the Bill Monroe of trance music
Z is the Leone Helmsley of American politics
Sarah Palin for all three
||
I just had a cognitive dissopiphany.
John Dingell has been the congressman from the outskirts of Detroit and the US auto industry for what, 54 years? And for each one of those years, it's become a worse place to live and the US auto industry has declined. But his power and credibility has increased?
|>
80: I don't think it's necessarily geographical, and I would argue (again, not remotely originally) that all metaphors work that way.
Birmingham used to be the Pittsburgh of the South.
Canton is the Akron of Akron.
And Massilon is the Canton of Canton.
(Cleveland is the unspoken city at the "top" of that chain.)
A formulation like this that I've noticed is "x is the Bob Dylan of y". In this case y can a be a geographic entity like Mongolia or something else like trance music or Generation X.
84: Yeah, maybe. I still have a sense that the XYZ construction is, while not always geographical, at least almost always thick (which not all metaphors are): that the construction tells you something about the qualitative nature of the metaphor.
Snowclone is the Midwest of Linguistic Terms.
88: Does the X always have to talk really funny?
Steve Forbert is the Bob Dylan of 1979.
Jack Horkheimer is the Bob Dylan of naked-eye astronomy.
Antonio Aguilar was the Elvis Presley of Mexico. So I was told by real New Mexicans from New Mexico
a relatively literal entailment of a conceptual metaphor
Well, there are two reasons.
First, conceptual metaphors don't have literal entailments. Otherwise it would be literally true that LIFE is a JOURNEY, MAN.
Second, conceptual metaphors are a crock of shit.
Woman is the nigger of the world.
If you don't believe me, take a look at the one you're with.
Camille Paglia is the Wesley Willis of political commentary.
Otherwise it would be literally true that LIFE is a JOURNEY, MAN.
"You mean it isn't a fountain?"
Life is a highway. And I'm gonna ride it all night long.
91: Maybe. Part of the problem with this formulation is that Bob Dylan means very different things to different people
98: Thanks, LB! That was my father's favorite joke!
82 -- I don't think one ought to mention Wasilla's Ellie Mae Clampett in the same breath as Bill Monroe.
Joe the Plumber is a journeyman.
102: Hey, Charley -- did you just send me a kind of inexplicable email (it looks like some DC local news page) at my work email? It came from your lawfirm address, and I'm wondering if it was spoofed, or if there was something relevant about it I didn't understand?
95: I should have said "explicit". On point two are not nyah nyah nyah. No, seriously, I don't have that strong an opinion, but would've thought you'd be at least slightly sympathetic to the concept?
95: That kind of thing is some kind of folk lit crit, or theory: literal and metaphorical meaning, entailments. It keeps cropping up!
Flatt & Scruggs, though, would be fine:
Well now its time to say good by to Todd and all his kin.
And they would like to thank you folks fer kindly droppin in.
You're all invited back a gain to this locality
To have a heapin helpin of their hospitality
Hillybilly that is. Set a spell, Take your shoes off.
Y'all Don't come back now, y'hear?.
It was me. I'll explain offline.
107: what I was referencing was not "folk lit crit", no.
I should refine my 105: w-lfs-n, had I been asked to guess your opinion on conceptual metaphors before you said anything I would have guessed "skeptical indifference shading into slightly sympathetic interest"; what don't you like about the idea? Who pissed you off?
110, 111: Ah, I see that "conceptual metaphor" is a term rather than a loose construction -- which is weird since I've actually read Metaphors We Live By, but obviously didn't remember the term itself. Thanks for the tip-off.
Ben is pissed off all the time. Like me and Bob, though for different reasons.
Wait, I thought conceptual metaphors were poetry, and chicks dig it. Poetry I mean.
No offense, ben, but I choose pleasing chicks over pleasing ben every time. That's just how I roll down the highway of life man, sweet smell of colitas in the air.
sweet smell of colitas in the air.
You spelled colitis wrong, Tripp.
Apo gets a low-hanging-fruit yellow card.
Apo,
Oh, great, spoil the mood why don't you? I'm weaving the spell man, I'm being smooth. Laydeez?
Apo gets a low-hanging-fruit yellow card.
Keep my personal genitals out of it. Sheesh, a guy can't get any breaks around here.
117: Somebody comments, he answers quite quickly,
A girl with colitis goes by.
A favorite: Homer is the Riviera of Alaska.
Petersburg claims to be the Wobegon of Alaska.
119: There will be no breaking of genitals here. If that's your sort of thing, there's always The Valve.
Don't talk with your mouth full, Apo.
the best thing from the snowclones page:
There once was an X from place B,
That satisfied predicate P,
He or she did thing A,
In an adjective way,
Resulting in circumstance C
When I was stationed at MCRD, PISC the locals were pushing the town as a tourist destination, before the movie folks found it. The T shirt:
New York
London
Paris
Beaufort
You've probably seen similar.
I been asked to guess your opinion on conceptual metaphors before you said anything I would have guessed "skeptical indifference shading into slightly sympathetic interest"; what don't you like about the idea? Who pissed you off?
My facebook status tells all. Lakoff and his epigone Turner, and his epigones, pissed me off. There's scads not to like about the idea. An extremely modest reformulation of some of the more basic so-called metaphors (it's true, spatial words are used for time!) might be acceptable, but as it is I'm surprised anyone gives those guys the time of day.
I have an algorithm for writing a paper that "uses" or "does" blending, by the way. First, you take an ordinary, possibly even plausible and interesting argument. Then you add a confusing diagram, cite Fauconnier & Turner, and dust liberally with the phrase "the blend". Ta-da! You're doing cognitive science!
New York
London
Paris
Beaufort
Everybody talk about... pop music!
Talk about pop music.
The Black Hills are definitely the Alps of the Dakotas, Manitoba, Nebraska, and maybe Saskatchewan.
Jesus, I spent 10 minutes blathering the following, to find that ben was just happy enough to express impatience.
----
On review, I'd say that Sifu's 14.2 and 16.1 seem roughly right: I'm saying that treating it as sort of unique and cliched based on the semantic structure maybe elides how fundamental that kind of analogy is to the way people talk.
"literal" and "entailment" in 14 were non-starters, and I don't see what's at stake in gesturing in that direction*, but yeah, if you get that our language use is rife with analogy, or what seems metaphorical meaning, then the X is the Y of Z formulation is just one more.
Which isn't to say that the form of the statement hasn't become a cliche, i.e. a snowclone.
* I could construct something to explain it, which would go: this is an unpacking -- Sifu said a making explicit -- of what's going on in a conceptual metaphor like "prices are rising": the upping of the prices is as the upping of any number of other things. Mm, does this work? Can you drill down to a metaphor-free level of explanation? How is the increase in the prices like a balloon going up in the air? Really? (There, it's just that counting further is more, and ascending higher is also more. Why is going higher more? Or why is counting further 'up'? There is no way to get rid of these 'up', 'higher', 'further' ways of speaking.) It begins to look as though there's nothing but metaphor, really; in which case the distinction between the metaphorical and the, what, literal, is bogus.
That said, I confess to a certain attraction to the suggestion that if there is anything all the way down there, it's physically based: Im Anfang war Die Tat.
Sorry. End reverie.
Which isn't to say that the form of the statement hasn't become a cliche, i.e. a snowclone.
A cliche and a snowclone are not the same thing.
Talk about pop music.
I enjoy Brian Eno.
My father was an inarticulate man, but brilliant in his own unique way.
it used to be that the Cadillac was the Rolls-Royce of automobiles.
The story is told of the salesman who was presenting a component to the executives of the Ford Motor Company. He proudly proclaimed that the component was the "Cadillac" of its type. No sale. File under know the audience.
Wagner is the Puccini of music, or so I'm told.
A snowclone is a category of cliche. In a few cases a new snowclone might be marginally witty, but at a certain point the wit dies.
Wagner is a the toxic leaden slag of music.
"[" is the "while(*p){" of Brainfuck.
A cliche and a snowclone are not the same thing.
Okay. Substitute Which isn't to say that the form of the statement hasn't become a cliche, i.e. in one form, a snowclone. Whatever.
138: But, in the long run, all wit dies.
Gloves are the shoes of hands, and spats are the gloves of shoes. Interestingly, spats are also the opposites of hats.
Wow, I can't believe how badly I fucked that up. Spats are the hats of shoes, and the opposite of a hat is a pair of sandals.
The opposite of a hat is barefoot.
Hey now. No dissing on Wagner. Dude is awesome.
W-lfs-n is to "Conceptual metaphors suck" as George Bush is to "Government never does anything right".
145
This is where I started. Nice to see it come around again.
Facebook is the Summer of Love of Generation Awesome.
Because Poe wrote on both.
Hey now. No dissing on Wagner. Dude is awesome.
Richard or Robert?
I am he who is A, B & C
I fill out no apps
My life is cheap
I have no worries
I do not fret
That I haven't been to the Akron, Ohio of Oklahoma
yet.
max
['Or the Durant, Oklahoma of New York City.']
The opposite of a hat is barefoot.
We've been over this already. Chudnovsky and Seymour have defined the anti-hat in excruciating detail.
Socks are the underpants of shoes.
Onychomycosis is the chlamydia of feet.
Omigod. Not Jack. Are those three-quarter sleeves on that double-breasted leather jacket he's wearing?
Richard, of course.
All I neeeeeeed
Is just a little more length
At the end
Of my sleeeeeeves.
154: Hell, that was in 2005; I could scarcely be expected to know.
Wow, that Jack is a dreamboat, that is for sure. I think the sleeves and the upturned collar were to tell all the tweens that he was harmless but also a rebel, yeah, an almost dangerous rebel but safe and a softy inside.
In other words the perfect male.
As a French Horn player I like me some Wagner too, especially the Valkyrie motif from the Ride of the Valkyrie.
Cause I'm a rebel, yeah, an almost dangerous rebel but safe and a softy inside.
Further to the link from the link provided in 154: W-lfs-n has made me laugh out loud with delight twice in two days now, though in this case with a post written 3 years ago.
Unfortunately, I cannot agree that the opposite of a hat is a sandal, or even a pair of them.
I had Tristan und Isolde stuck in my head for about three months earlier this year. It was a difficult period.
I liked Matt Weiner's argument that the anti-hat should be a foreskin.
anti-hat is soulless according to my people's doctrine
that's like synonymous though, so it's soulful if the opposite of it
We already knew that Tripp was a Nazi, but JM surprised me.
Surprised and hurt me.
Hats, collars, and belts play a major symbolic role in "The Secret History of the Mongols" (the life of Chinggis Qan).
A big proportion of what I know about Mongol culture comes from that book, which was written fairly early in the Thirteenth Century. But some things are not obsolete yet.
154: Hell, that was in 2005; I could scarcely be expected to know.
The fact that I could scarcely even conceive of writing that post now, let alone actually do it, only shows what terrible effects graduate school and age have worked upon me.
I was so carefree then!
145: Rather than sandals, I would argue that, as a hat is a smallish concave object worn to cover the top of one's head, the earth is a large convex object worn to cover the bottom one's feet. And before you object that the earth is not "worn", I would point out that both the earth and hats are stuck on with gravity.
Actually I think very few hats are stuck on with gravity, not if they fit, anyway.
Further demonstrating their oppositeness!
Wagner is the Puccini of music, or so I'm told.
Wagner is the Bruckner of opera. And Miller's High Life is the champagne of beers.
Ah, but we stick to the earth with friction, too. You can't have it both ways.
I was so carefree then!
I know: there's something to be said for it.
Part of the problem with this formulation is that Bob Dylan means very different things to different people
Next thing, you're gonna tell me that there's more than one way to interpret a work of literature.
Next thing, you're gonna tell me that there's more than one way to interpret a work of literature.
Which one?
It's amazing what you can learn on facebook.
very few hats are stuck on with gravity
I use gravy.
I had Tristan und Isolde stuck in my head for about three months earlier this year. It was a difficult period. Honestly?! That is amazing, and I know what you mean. How did you get into the music? Not many seem to these days.
For me it was actually the french horn and classical music in general. Do you play an instrument?
61 out of 200 correct.
You left 113 questions unanswered
wow, i got 61 correct out of 87!
i did not finish the test coz got impatient with it
I suspect, apostropher aside, that a large percentage of hats would come off if their wearers were unexpectedly inverted, and I doubt those that came unstuck would be considered not worn, suggesting that one earth is indeed the opposite of many hats.
We stick to the earth with friction? This is a koan, isn't it?
though on second thought 70%, still there's some space to grow
I suspect, apostropher aside, that a large percentage of hats would come off if their wearers were unexpectedly inverted,
There may be confounding effects here. We need to consider whether the hats would come off were the vertical component of the gravitational force affecting the wearers zero.
How did you get into the music?
I think it started when I went to see a young composer concert where a small-orchestra setting of T & I was featured. Then WNYC had a week-long radio special on the music as part of the Bill Viola staging at the Lincoln Center (tickets were out of this world, and the show mediocrely reviewed). Then my honey and I piddled around with the piano score for a while. Then we went to see James Levine conduct it at the Met.
I am prone to audio hallucinations, and for a while there, the "Tristan chord" was following me around everywhere.
My honey plays---piano and tonbak---conducts, and composes. He's a pro. I can bang on the piano, but my family has a bunch of talented amateurs. I've told the story around here before I think about how my great-grandmother bought two Steinways and an organ with the chicken money from the Utah farm.
very few hats are stuck on with gravity
Ever since the boating accident and subsequent metal plate I mostly rely on Casimir forces. When in a vacuum I mean.
Everyone likes the prelude to Tristan and Isolde. It's the Hey Jude of classical music.
Although I suppose a suitably sized helium balloon surreptitiously attached to people's hats would suffice. Although to demonstrate that gravity wasn't the dominant force at work, the ballooned hats should remain stable under normal perturbations.
It's the Hey Jude of classical music.
Does that it has an ending that drags on and on repetitively?
Take 2
It's the Hey Jude of classical music.
Does that mean it has an ending that drags on and on repetitively?
JackMormon,
Our living room has a baby grand, and a clavinova (for shows), a couple old pump organs, and even two accordians. It is funny what 'honeys' will do.
I assume you mean more than having a tune stuck in your head when you say audio hallucinations.
I get stuck tunes all the time, but have only had the hallucinations a couple times. They were very cool - ambient sounds would sound like chords with very interesting timbres. I was almost sorry to have those go.
No, it's more the middle of it that goes on. But more like ever-modulating upwards, ever-crescendoing, ever-peaking with unbearable pleasure. You could say it gets a bit repetitive, though, if you had no soul.
Jackmormon,
Ignore the unfeeling cretins. We know better.
But more like ever-modulating upwards, ever-crescendoing, ever-peaking with unbearable pleasure.
My auditory hallucinations are much more likely to be: doorbells, cellphones, churchbells, clockchimes, knocks on the door, people calling my name. Just one step up from white noise and "huh, I thought you said something." The Tristan chord hallucination was after literally weeks of humming it and thinking about it.
If only Nietzsche were alive today. He too was degraded by Wagner for a time, but he overcame it.
198: I hope it was clear that I was dissing Hey, Jude not Tristan und Isolde which I don't believe I have ever heard.
As if there's anything wrong with dragging on and on repetitively.
JM, and you're not a musician? Everyone I've known who has music going constantly in his or her head is a musician. An amazing phenomenon. A boyfriend years ago was like this. Perpetual music. In his head. He said it wasn't necessarily distracting.
We have yet to hear Walt Someguy's justification.
I hear songs in white noise if I'm all alone. My anti-depressant seems to make this worse.
They're almost never songs I'm especially fond of, just very familiar pop songs.
205.---No, it's more like the kind of hallucinations most often written about in slightly deaf older people with very little stimulation in their lives who hear snatches of theme songs from their childhood in the washingmachine's hum. Not usually very glamorous. Listening to NPR constantly helps ward 'em off.
The Tristan chord hallucination was after literally weeks of humming it and thinking about it
The same thing's been happening to me lately, only it's the theme song from The Muppet Show.
I didn't see you there, John. Awkward!
There's almost always a song going through my head. Am not a musician.
I enjoy it when there's a song going through my head that may have not gone through anyone else's head in world history. I feel special and unique.
Nobody else in this city is on my wavelength, man. That being the wavelength that is currently broadcasting "Panic and Hysteria" by Lungfish on a 24-hour loop.
Or a song that most people don't even notice, or have forgotten the existence of, let alone feel it to be omnipresent. Like Cliff Richard's "We Don't Talk Anymore", and Gordon Lightfoot's "Sundown", two of my brain's favorites from a month or so ago. Or today's selection, "Stick 'em Up" by Quarashi.
Two songs that are quite similar can reinforce each other in a sort of complementary negative feedback loop. For example, I just noticed that Quarashi's "Stick 'em Up" bears a strong resemblance to Zebrahead's "I'm Money", meaning that those two jock jams are going to be cycling around in my brain for the next week unless I resort to drastic measures.
Zero is the one of addition really should be "one is the zero of multiplication".
After I pointed out that you're a Nazi, I can hardly hope for mercy.
Nid, the thing about this perpetual music in one's head that I've heard reported is that it's not necessarily already-heard music. It's made up.
Go figure!
205:
Listening to NPR constantly helps ward 'em off.
Really? In my experience listening to NPR actually seems to attract the slightly deaf old people looking for stimulation.
I think there is almost always background music running through my head, but it is on one of the low priority processors or something. I can ignore it, but it is there when I want to pay attention to it. I like it.
I've noticed if I listen to a CD on the way into work in the car, then when I go back to the car later the song in my head is taking up where the CD left off.
But hearing doorbells that are not there would be a drag. I wouldn't like that at all.
Actually I'm pretty sure I am an odd duck about visual things too. When I was about five they took me to the eye doctor because I talked about seeing things, meaning things I can faintly see things with my eyes shut and then must look through them with my eyes open. I didn't have the words to accurately describe what it is.
I don't call these hallucinations. cause they are not the same as real things, but I do need to ignore them to see what is really there. It is like I have extra visual buffer space and those images are also available to my brain, but also easily set aside.
Like the sounds, I like the images. I used to think this is what people meant when they talked about their imaginations but I don't think that is exactly it.
It is more like being able to look at an old photo again whenever you want, but in your head.
Like most people, I almost always have a song going in my head,* but usually only five or six second snippets.
A few weeks ago I had several jumbled snippets of a song** in my head. As a mental exercise, I tried reassembling them in the correct order, as if I was cutting and pasting in a purely mental version of Audacity. I couldn't get very far, but it seemed like a useful concentration building activity. I was actually supposed to be meditating at the time, and it seemed to be an appropriate thing to do.
______________
*Right now "I want to be with you" off my kids' Sandra Boynton CD Blue Moo
**The Evens "Cut from the Cloth", which is now in my head again.
I don't call these hallucinations. cause they are not the same as real things, but I do need to ignore them to see what is really there.
Wow, that's weird Tripp. Its like the false-pattern-recognition phenomenon that JM was describing, but its still present once you realize that you are projecting a pattern that isn't there. Once I realize that I was just projecting a pattern that isn't really there, I loose the perception.
The other day I was listening to a song on my iPod, turned it off when I got in the car, switched on the CD player, and it resumed playing the same song at the moment where I had just turned it off.
This is one of those things that make me think I'm going insane, until I think through the probabilities a bit.
Some of the art of Henri Michaux seems to be about the kind of pattern projections that Rob is talking about. The way your eye and brain process vision, rather than the things that you see. Some of it is drug-induced, but not all. Not all of it is "art"; some of it seems like a sort of lab report.
129 will be repurposed as pattern language, 'Shorter...'
rob,
Yeah, but is not like the optical illusions where you can see the young girl but then it switches and you can see the old hag. It is more like watching a scene behind a scrim while very faintly there is another image projected on the scrim. Usually the projected image is a still image, not moving, but sometimes it is a visual loop, maybe a second in duration.
Needless to say this helped a lot during school, kinda like have an open book test all the time, except it is not 100% complete or reliable. Still I was HS Valedictorian out of 560 but a big part of that was because I decided to try back when that was not a cool thing to do. It helped less in college when you had to know concepts and not just where to look things up in the book.
The analogy between the prelude and Hey Jude is that they're both long, repetitive, and everyone likes them.
Speak for yourself, Walt. "Everybody" in the sense of "la canaille", "the riffraff", "the vulgar mob", etc.
226: "Everybody" is the Tenderloin of Collectives.
Zorn's is the axiom of choice of lemmas.
Time is the form of intuition of inner experience.
By definition, someone who doesn't like Hey Jude isn't part of everybody. Some people say they're not even human.
Clinton for Secretary of State? Bad call. It's not a good fit and she's needed in the Senate on healthcare and labor, especially since we're going to lose Ted Kennedy sometime soon.
In my experience listening to NPR actually seems to attract the slightly deaf old people looking for stimulation.
In my experience, that would be Rush Limbaugh and Fox News radio. I am not happy about this.
"Clark Kent is the Superman of alter egos" is the "Zorn's is the axiom of choice of lemmas" of comments not by Ben W-lfs-n.
231 -- I don't see why she would want that job. It may be that I just don't know her at all. It may also be that the whole thing is misdirection, and she's having fun tormenting Matthews et al.
Or, better: "Clark Kent is the Superman of mild-mannered reporters"
198 reminds me of the climbing B part from Sarah Dougher's What She'd Trade, which I listened to on constant repeat for a few weeks. I'm sure the T&I is much more bigger and complex, but I like that riff.
Not really a snowclone, but there is a lovely (though possibly apocryphal) description of Washington, D.C. attributed to Yvonne de Gaulle: "Washington is what you would get if Paris farted."