It’s like Susan Boyle all over again, sort of

For those of you who don’t live in the U.S., we have a television program here called America’s Got Talent. A program in the U.K. called Britain’s Got Talent came first, but many other countries have their own version now, so I’m fairly sure you have some idea of what I’m talking about no matter where you live. For example, here’s Armenia’s Got Talent (3:44) and here’s Georgia’s Got Talent (3:33) -- that’s the former Soviet Georgia, not the one with all the peaches -- and I just want to state for the record that (a) it doesn’t take much to entertain some nations and (b) Armenia’s program doesn’t even seem to have a buzzer. But I digress.

This summer a certain segment of our country (the segment watching America’s Got Talent) is going bonkers over three young operatic tenors who named their singing group Forte (pronounced FOR-tay). (Editor’s note. In Italian, Forte means LOUD, and the full name of the musical instrument you probably call a piano is actually the pianoforte, which in Italian means SOFTLOUD. That is neither here nor there, but I thought I’d throw it in for good measure even though you may think I’m digressing again. Actually, it’s all right to digress inside a note, especially if you’re the editor.--RWP)

It’s a pretty safe bet that the segment of the country that is going bonkers over Forte is not the same segment of the country that is going bonkers over Duck Dynasty. The former formerly went bonkers over Downton Abbey and the latter formerly went bonkers over Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo and The Real Housewives of New Jersey. Some days I fear for my country.
I think I’m digressing again.

Originally, Forte consisted of a Puerto Rican, a South Korean, and a New Yorker. Here’s their audition round song, “Pie Jesu” from John Rutter’s “Requiem” (6:12).

Forte was praised to high heaven and passed the audition round.

Acts that pass the audition round go to “Vegas Week” which is held (click here) in Las Vegas.

According to the Puerto Rican third of Forte, the Korean third of Forte unexpectedly “dropped out” shortly before “Vegas Week.” I read later that the Korean third had a problem with renewing his visa. My theory is that his student visa had expired and a team of ICE agents came swooping down on him after he was brash enough to appear sans visa on a nationally televised talent search. (ICE are the U.S.’s Immigration & Customs Enforcement people.) I could be wrong, of course. The Puerto Rican third of Forte doesn’t need a visa because Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States. The jury is still out concerning New York.

The Puerto Rican third and the New York third of Forte were able to find a suitable replacement for the missing third of their act and proceeded to Las Vegas for “Vegas Week.” The judges on America’s Got Talent had absolutely no problem with this turn of events.

During “Vegas Week” the new version of Forte performed Andrea Bocelli’s “The Prayer” (1:50) and wowed the audience again, enough to make it to the “Quarter Finals” at New York City’s famed Radio City Music Hall

At the “Quarter Finals” at New York’s Radio City Music Hall, Forte sang “Somewhere” from Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story (5:12), wowing everyone but the British judge.

Only time will tell how far Forte will progress this season on America’s Got Talent.

Stay tuned.

Things could be worse. You could be watching an Armenian woman twirl hula hoops without a buzzer handy.

Update: I seem to have confused [Country Name]’s Got Talent with The X-Factor. A thousand pardons! The buzzers are on the latter only. [Country Name]’s Got Talent doesn’t have buzzers. I’ll try to pay closer attention in the future.

Navel gazing, or what’s it all about, Alfie?

The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide;
Above the world is stretched the sky, --
No higher than the soul is high.
................--Edna St. Vincent Millay, from “Renascense” (1917)

On July 20th I put up a post called “The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, or How Green Was My Valley?” in which I showed you this map:

and these statistics from Blogger showing the 10 highest countries in terms of readership of this blog:

...Country.......Pageviews
United States..........1044
France......................167
Russia.......................161
United Kingdom.........92
Ukraine......................48
Germany....................38
Australia....................26
Poland.......................24
Turkey.......................20
China.........................17

Well, here it is almost a month later (August 15, 2013) and today’s map from Blogger looks a bit different:

which, being interpreted, means:

...Country.......Pageviews
United States.............920
Russia.......................273
United Kingdom........170
Germany.....................72
Poland.........................49
Australia.....................43
France.........................40
Latvia..........................23
China...........................21
Canada........................12

Specifically, Canada and Russia have become a little darker green and France has become a little lighter green, and Ukraine and Turkey in last month’s list have been replaced by Latvia and Canada in this month’s list.

What does all this mean, exactly?

I’ll tell you what it means, exactly.

People come, and people go, but the world keeps spinning on its axis.

Mrs. RWP went to see her chiropractor last week, and I always accompany her on her visits. I don’t want some 43-year-old dude touching her without monitoring the process. No, I don’t.

I’m kidding.

But only sort of.

Dr. K is a bright fellow and we always have the most scintillating conversations. He was saying something scintillating that included the word minutia and I interrupted him and said, “Didn’t she used to sing backup for Beyoncé?”

“Who?” he said.

“Minutia,” I replied.

Dr. K, sharp as a whip, shot back, “Yes, and she dated Bonjovi.”

Not Jon Bon Jovi, mind you. Bon Jovi. The whole band. As they say, click to enlarge.

(Photo by Rosana Prada (November 2007), used under the provisions of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.)

That Dr. K is such a card. We all had a good laugh and the conversation continued.

That’s not important.

What’s important is the world keeps spinning (on its axis) and statistics change constantly (because with approximately 7.3 billion of us on this planet at the moment, how could they do otherwise?) but you and I, like Old Man River (7:35), we just keep rolling along.

If you don’t know who Samuel Ramey is, you really should look at that clip.

When I watched it, it struck me when Mr. Ramey reached the line, “He must know somethin’, but don’t say nothin’...” that many of you probably think that line applies to me. A little honest self-assessment is always good, so I reflected on my own feeble efforts to inform and entertain with this li’l ol’ blog o’ mine.

It’s true that some days I can’t think of much to say, but that has never kept me from saying it. Like today, for instance.

Still,

The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide;
Above the world is stretched the sky, --
No higher than the soul is high.
................--Edna St. Vincent Millay, from “Renascense” (1917)

It’s all in how you look at it, plus I'll be a monkey's uncle

Here is one of the most famous places in the world, the Rock of Gibraltar at the southwestern tip of Europe, where the Mediterranean Sea meets the Atlantic Ocean:

...and here is a graph that Blogger kindly provided of my blog’s pageviews for the week of August 6-13, 2013:

The second figure could almost be an abstract, reverse image of the first. I have thought and thought and the only thing I can figure is that one view was taken looking eastward from the west and the other view was taken looking westward from the east.

Another major difference between the Rock of Gibraltar and my blog is that the Rock of Gibraltar is home to about 250 barbary macaques...

...and my blog has only 123 followers.

Please do not misunderestimate misunderstand me. I am not, repeat, not intimating in the slightest that any followers of my blog are anything at all like barbary macaques. Nor, in case you are wondering, am I disparaging barbary macaques. In fact, if a barbary macaque wants to become a follower of this blog, he or she would be most welcome here at rhymeswithplague.

I once wrote a song parody, back in the days before organ transplants were common. The medical community was (were?) still experimenting when it was announced on the telly that a baboon’s heart had been transplanted into a little girl’s body. The media referred to her only as Baby Fae to protect her family’s privacy (the little girl’s family I mean, not the baboon’s -- in fact, I will go out on a limb here and say the media probably didn’t give a fig for the baboon’s family). Well, my mind being what it is I immediately thought about an old song from 1926 called “Baby Face” -- it enjoyed another round of popularity in 1948 in a recording by the Art Mooney band, and it was included on the soundtrack of the 1967 movie Thoroughly Modern Millie starring Julie Andrews, Beatrice Lillie (Lady Peel), Carol Channing, and others -- and I dashed off a little song called “Baby Fae” in about thirty seconds. Sometimes inspiration works like that but most of the time it takes a lot of blood, toil, tears, and sweat, to coin a phrase.

If you don’t know “Baby Face” here is Art Mooney’s 1948 version (2:23).

And here’s my “Baby Fae” which should be sung to the same tune. It helps if you try to picture a line of chorus girls singing it; move your hands back and forth if you like, the way they do in show biz.


Baby Fae

Baby Fae,
You’ve got that certain somethin’,
Baby Fae,
Keep that new heart a-pumpin’,
One day real soon
You’ll be a baboon,
Gee, the doctors love ya,
They made a monkey of ya,
Baby Fae,
If you like strained bananas
Sue the A.M.A.,
With missing links they toyed
And now you’re anthropoid,
Our little ape-girl, Baby Fae!

and now for the reprise and the big finish:

Baby Fae,
If you like strained bananas
Sue the A.M.A.,
With missing links they toyed
(dunt dunt dunt DUNT dunt dunt)
And now you’re anthropoid,
(dunt dunt dunt DUNT dunt dunt)
Our little ape-girl baby,
Little ape-girl baby,
Little ape- (*kick*) girl (*kick*),
Bay- (*kick*) bee (*kick*) Faaaaaaaae!

and exit, stage left to wild applause.

I wish I had thought to send it in to Saturday Night Live or somewhere but I didn’t.

P.S. - The A.M.A. is the American Medical Association.

P.P.S. - No barbary macaques were harmed in the making of this post.

P.P.P.S. - In a comment, Carol in Cairns (FNQ) calls my song, or maybe my whole post, “light and witty.” Therefore, to inject some all-too-rare seriousness into our fun, here is more information about Baby Fae.

A worrisome thing that leads you to sing the blues in the night

Let us now praise famous men shift our attention from blue boys and blue periods to the American writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1896 and died in Hollywood, California, in 1940. He wrote five novels
(one of them is The Great Gatsby and the other four aren’t, and one of them wasn’t published until after his death) and several collections of short stories (one of them contains the story “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and the others don’t, and one of them wasn't published until -- déjà vu -- after his death).

Fitzgerald’s American credentials were pretty impressive. His second cousin, three times removed, was Francis Scott Key, the chap who is remembered for having written “The Star-Spangled Banner” (although its original title was “Defence of Fort McHenry”) in 1814; and his first cousin, once removed, was Mary Surratt, a woman hanged in 1865 for conspiring to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.

Before we look at one of his works, first you must read this entire article to get a flavor of his life and to understand better what you will be reading later. Then we will proceed.

Finished already?

Today we are going to look at “The Crack-Up”, a series of three non-fiction articles that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in 1936, late in his career.

Because I like them, that’s why, and this is my blog, after all.

If anyone could be called blue, it was F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1936. His wife Zelda had been admitted to a mental institution and he had not yet met his lover, gossip columnist Sheilah Graham. [Editor’s note. For extra credit, read this. --RWP]

“The Crack-Up” appeared in Esquire magazine in the February, March, and April 1936 issues as a series of three articles. Only the first article was entitled “The Crack-Up” originally. The second article was entitled “Pasting It Together” and the third article was entitled “Handle With Care”.

I know this is a lot of reading for one day, but you will be the better for it.

Here are all three parts of “The Crack-Up”.

One last thing:

This is not Zelda Fitzgerald, nor is it Sheilah Graham.

This is Mary Surratt.

Now maybe you’ll go read that Fitzgerald novel you’ve been meaning to get around to.

A huge oversight on my part

Once upon a time in the seventeenth century, in the country called England, there lived a painter. He looked like this:

He painted that portrait himself. It is, as it were, a self-portrait.
I really grow weary of having to explain everything to you.

What this particular painter longed to do was paint landscapes, but people kept asking him to paint their portraits. One time he painted a portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Andrews. They looked like this:

Another time he painted a portrait of Mr. and Mrs. William Hallett. They looked like this:

As I said earlier, what he really wanted to do was paint landscapes, and you may have noticed that he managed to work landscapes into some of his portraits. But people kept paying him to paint their portraits.

Here is Mrs. Thomas Hibbert:

...and here is Miss Read (later Mrs. William Vilebois):

...and here is Lady Georgiana Cavendish, the Duchess of Devonshire:

...and here is John Needham, the tenth Viscount Kilmorey:

Are you bored yet?

Portraits can be so tiresome, but there is a reason I am devoting an entire post to this artist’s work, and that reason is that I committed a huge oversight. I omitted from a recent post of mine the painting for which this particular artist is most famous, and it deserved to be included.

The painter’s name was Thomas Gainsborough. He was fond of using blues when he painted, but in one portrait he completely outdid himself.

Here is Gainsborough’s best-known work, The Blue Boy:

The identity of the blue boy is unknown. It is thought to be a portrait of Jonathan Buttall (1752 – 1805), the son of a wealthy hardware merchant, although this has never been proven.

A thousand pardons, sir, for my negligence. You deserved better from me. I hope this post in some small way makes up for my having omitted your masterpiece.

Dear reader, if you do not care for Gainsborough, there’s always Picasso's Blue Period.

Black and white and read all over

(Nubian woman, circa 1900)

Black is the color of coal, ebony, and of outer space. It is the darkest color, the result of the absence of or complete absorption of light. It is the opposite of white and often represents darkness in contrast with light.

In the Roman Empire, black became the color of mourning, and over the centuries it was frequently associated with death, evil, witches and magic. In the fourteenth century, it began to be worn by royalty, the clergy, judges, and government officials in much of Europe. It became the color worn by English romantic poets, businessmen, and statesmen in the nineteenth century, and a high fashion color in the twentieth century. In the Western World today, it is the color most commonly associated with mourning, the end, secrets, magic, power, violence, evil, and elegance.

Common connotations of black include power, death, elegance, evil, darkness, mystery, Nubians, Halloween, coal, petroleum, sin, outer space, anarchism, profit, night, bad luck, crime, and sophistication.

Here is an example of the black of outer space: A photograph taken by NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit, settled in for an evening of stargazing, of the two moons of Mars -- Deimos and Phobos -- as they travel across the night sky in front of the constellation Sagittarius. Phobos is the brighter object on the right; Deimos is on the left. Spirit acquired these enhanced-brightness images with the panoramic camera on the night of sol 585 (Aug. 26, 2005). Scientists will use images of the two moons to better map their orbital positions, learn more about their composition, and monitor the presence of nighttime clouds or haze. (For Adrian and other photography buffs, Spirit took the image using the camera’s broadband filter, which was designed specifically for acquiring images under low-light conditions.)

(Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell/Texas A&M)

According to jazz singer/pianist Nina Simone, black is the color of her true love’s hair (7:04).

White, on the other hand, is the color of fresh milk and snow. It is the color the human eye sees when it looks at light which contains all the wavelengths of the visible spectrum, at full brightness and without absorption. It does not have any hue.

As a symbol, white is the opposite of black, and often represents light in contrast with darkness. According to surveys in Europe and the United States, white is the color most often associated with innocence, perfection, the good, honesty, cleanliness, the beginning, the new, neutrality, lightness, and exactitude.

Common connotations of white include purity, nobility, softness, emptiness, ghosts, snow, ice, heaven, Caucasian, peace, clean, light, life, surrender, clouds, frost, milk, good, cotton, angels, winter, innocence, sterility, and coldness.

Here is a white horse, and (just to confuse you) a man dressed in black, and a woman dressed in red who is riding a black horse:

Here is a white house and a glass of milk:

The images are not to scale.

I thought you should know.










Since it has recently come to my attention that (a) someone has already written at length about many shades of grey and (b) a drink called “Black and Tan” purportedly contains alcohol, I have decided not to write about either grey or tan. I wouldn’t want to bore you or to lead you any further astray than you already are.

Introducing Mr. Roy G. Biv

This post is especially for Adrian and Jeannelle of Iowa (not to be confused with Eleanor of Aquitaine) and Elizabeth Stanforth-Sharpe and Neil Theasby and every one of you who ever took a marvelous photograph and posted it in your blog. It is also for LightExpectations (who is a synesthete) and Helsie in Brisbane and Carol in Cairns (that’s in Far North Queensland, you know) and anyone else who has the least bit of artistic sensibility.

Here are some shades of red:

According to Wikipedia, red is the color of blood, rubies, and strawberries. It is commonly associated with danger, sacrifice, passion, fire, beauty, blood, anger, socialism and communism, and in China and many other cultures, with happiness.

Common connotations of red include love, hate, courage, martyrdom, force, heat, energy, happiness, well-being, aggression, anger, seduction, sexuality, eroticism, immorality, autumn, socialism, communism, passion, beauty, fire, masculinity, danger, blood, Christmas, and war.

Here are some shades of orange:

In Europe and America, orange is commonly associated with amusement, the unconventional, extroverts, fire, activity, danger, taste and aroma, the autumn season, and Protestantism. In Asia, it is an important symbolic colour of Buddhism and Hinduism.

Common connotations of orange include warning, autumn, desire, fire, Halloween, Thanksgiving, prisoners, Orangism (Netherlands), Unionism (Ireland), Indian religions, engineering, determination, compassion, endurance, and optimism.

Here are some shades of yellow:

Yellow is the color of gold, butter, ripe lemons, and ripe bananas. It is commonly associated with gold, sunshine, reason, optimism and pleasure, but also with envy, jealousy and betrayal. It plays an important part in Asian culture, particularly in China.

Common connotations of yellow include sunshine, warmth, fun, happiness, warning, friendship, caution, slow, cowardice, Mardi Gras, summer, lemons, Easter, autumn, spring, electricity, liberalism/libertarianism, hope, optimism, and imagination.

Here are some shades of green:

Green is the color of emeralds, jade, and growing grass. It is the color most commonly associated with nature and the environmental movement, Ireland, Islam, spring, hope, and envy.

Common connotations of green include nature, growth, grass, hope, youth, inexperience, health, sickness, Irish nationalism, Islam, spring, Saint Patrick’s Day, money (US), greed, and envy.

Here are some shades of blue:

Blue is the color of the clear sky and the deep sea.

Common connotations of blue include ice, water, sky, sadness, winter, police, royalty, Hanukkah, boys, cold, calm, magic, trueness, conservatism (outside the US). and liberalism (US).

Now we come to a disputed area, indigo.

Indigo is a color that was traditionally regarded as a color on the visible spectrum and as one of the seven colors of the rainbow: the color between blue and violet. Although traditionally considered one of seven major spectral colors, its actual position in the electromagnetic spectrum is controversial. Indigo is a deep and bright color close to the color wheel blue (a primary color in the RGB color space), as well as to some variants of ultramarine. The color indigo was named after the Indigo dye derived from the plant Indigofera tinctoria and related species. The first recorded use of indigo as a color name in English was in 1289.

This is indigo:

It’s all Isaac Newton’s fault. Isaac Newton introduced indigo as one of the seven colors in his spectrum. In the mid-1660s, when Newton bought a pair of prisms at a fair near Cambridge, the East India Company had begun importing indigo dye into England, supplanting the homegrown woad as the source of blue dye. In a pivotal experiment in the history of optics, the young Newton shone a narrow beam of sunlight through a prism to produce a rainbow-like band of colors on the wall. In describing this optical spectrum, Newton acknowledged that the spectrum had a continuum of colors, but named seven colors: “The originall or primary colours are Red, yellow, Green, Blue, & a violet purple; together with Orange, Indico, & an indefinite varietie of intemediate gradations.”

Indigo is therefore counted as one of the traditional colors of the rainbow, the order of which (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet) is given by the mnemonic Roy G. Biv.

Later scientists have concluded that Newton named the colors differently from current usage. According to Gary Waldman, “A careful reading of Newton’s work indicates that the color he called indigo, we would normally call blue; his blue is then what we would name blue-green or cyan.” The human eye does not readily discriminate among hues in the wavelengths between blue and violet. If this is where Newton meant indigo to lie, most individuals would have difficulty distinguishing indigo from its neighbors. Isaac Asimov said, “It is customary to list indigo as a color lying between blue and violet, but it has never seemed to me that indigo is worth the dignity of being considered a separate color. To my eyes it seems merely deep blue.”

Which brings us to violet.

Here are some shades of violet:

According to surveys in Europe and the United States, violet is the color most commonly associated with the extravagant, the individualist, ambiguity, the unconventional, and the artificial. While violet is the color of humility in the symbolism of the Catholic Church, it has exactly the opposite meaning in general society. A European poll in 2000 showed it was the color most commonly associated with vanity. As a color that rarely exists in nature, and a color which by its nature attracts attention, it is seen as a color of individualism and extravagance. In Chinese painting, the color violet represents the harmony of the universe because it is a combination of red and blue (Yin and yang respectively).

There is much to be found online concerning the difference between violet and purple. Here are some shades of purple (which is not violet):

Here’s my favorite painting with colors in the violet-purple area, April Love (1856), an oil on canvas by the pre-Raphaelite painter Arthur Hughes (1832 - 1915):

The Oxford English Dictionary describes purple as a deep, rich shade between crimson and violet. Wikipedia says the word 'purple' comes from the Old English word purpul which derives from the Latin purpura, in turn from the Greek πορφύρα (porphura), the name of the Tyrian purple dye manufactured in classical antiquity from a mucus secreted by the spiny dye-murex sea snail.

All righty, then.

Is your head swimming yet?

If your head isn’t swimming yet, it will be by the time you finish this article about lavender.

Well, class, that’s enough for one day. More than enough.

Tomorrow (or whenever my next post appears), maybe we’ll talk about black and white. And tan. And grey.