Children of a Future Age, Reading this Indignant Page

Meissner, the effect please -





I will allow you to insert your own Insane Clown Posse remark here.

Tonight's Mixed Media edition is heavy on current British Synthpop, with my normal affection for Female-fronted acts, although not fitting entirely to the traditional Whiny Babe Music category.

Bat For Lashes. From Britain, I told you this was a story about Britpop, the standout single so far is Daniel. Somewhat ethereal, but not too, too dreamy, with heavily aspirated vocals, although I think the official video is unfortunate. Joe Bob sez Check it out!

The Good Natured (sorry for the MySpace link, Wikipedia is apparently running behind). More Britpop, and a hat tip to netik for turning me on to these people. Well, this nineteen-year-old performer from London, actually, brings a sound reminiscent of early Smiths and The Beautiful South. Stand out tracks are Skeleton and Tongue Tied.

The Bird and the Bee. Out of LA, but with a lot of collaboration with British Synthpop artists under the lead singer's belt, veevi introduced me to this duo a year or so back, and they're lovely. Their most recent albums include Rayguns Are Not Just The Future and a brilliant album of Hall & Oates covers. Check out Again & Again and Rich Girl. Again, sadly, the official video is a bit unfortunate.

Modernaire. A Britpop band that you can't find, kamileon turned me on to them a while back. They've only done one EP, that we've found, but it's tasty, tasty goodness. Check out Bloodshed in the Woodshed. They're apparently performing now as The Moulettes, but I haven't had occasion to listen to the new work yet.

Little Boots. British Synthpop and New Wave are not dead, one of her tracks has Philip Oakey providing vocals, my brother pointed me at her cover of Freddie Mercury's Love Kills from the 1984 Metropolis soundtrack. Also a bit of a Motels vibe on some of her tracks, and perhaps a touch of Terri Nunn, which again isn't surprising, given the crowd she's running with. Check out the single New In Town, my favorite track of hers is Meddle, but I can't find a good reference performance on the web to share.

Sleepthief. American Electronica, because this can't be just a story about Britpop. Hat tip to @water_of_fire for turning me on to them, Sleepthief are very much in the vein of Delerium and Conjure One, with a debut album from a couple of years ago including an amazing cover of Duran Duran's Chauffeur, which you should check out. The lovely vocal on that track is by Kirsty Hirkshaw of Opus III, who adsah_98 pointed me to so many years ago.

And with that, I bid you a Fine Night Tonight, with a raft of tasty britpop and electronica to guide your way.

Current Music: The Good Natured - Skeleton

In another venue, someone argued 'the people who caused the mortgage meltdown be in jail?!'

I don't know if any of you, dear readers, happen to hold that view, but, if you do, would you be so kind as to tell me, in general terms, who you think ought to be in jail, and in specific terms, what you think they should be in jail for?

Let me note two important things at the outset: remember that lying to people is usually only against the law if you're doing so to cheat them out of money (which is why Bernie Madoff is in jail), and it's unconstitutional to make laws that make something retroactively illegal.

Got your moral outrage ready? Go!

I've been watching Mad Men for the first time recently.
It's extremely good.
I finished the first season a few weeks ago, and watched about half of the second season yesterday.
In between, I read most of Liar's Poker, about bond trading, Salomon Brothers, and the invention of interest-rate swaps. It was extremely surreal, because in many respects, it seemed like the world of Sterling Cooper and the world of Salomon Brothers just weren't very far away from each other.

I was looking through recent articles I've pulled aside for signal boosting, and there are a number of science snacks among them. Thus, without further adieu, some science crunchies for a Friday evening:

• More clues to Autism. Continuing research is showing that autism and a host of other conditions are strongly correlated with Mitochondrial dysfunction.
  
• Some tricks for destroying gender differences in math and science performance. The best part about this exercise, it's something that students can do without institutional support. And it seems to be effective against other stereotype-based performance failures, too. Which is incredibly sexy.
  
• On a lighter side, James Burke's Connections series can now be streamed over the web. One of the best pieces of television out there about how disciplines are interrelated and how technology staggers forward. Look around you!

In the Summer of 2008, Hill House Publishing was putting together a set of special editions of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. Being fond of such things, I ordered one of each.

Unfortunately, before they'd ever sent any to me, Hill House Publishing imploded. So much for the tasty special editions.

However, around about this time last year, word went out that Harper Collins was picking up the ball, and would be finishing up the run. I sent word to them to inquire, and a very nice young woman got back to me, mortified that no one had contacted me before then. Hill House had sent them a bunch of info about customers who had not yet been fulfilled, and apparently they'd neglected to mention me. She went about trying to track down any information about my order in the records they'd been given by Hill House, and was going to get right back to me to get me my books.

I went to Arisia with a warm glow, impressed by HC having their act together...
And promptly forgot about the whole thing entirely.
So I didn't notice when the next step, of actually getting books out to me, never happened.
This morning I was reminded of the whole thing, because my favorite Noir imprint, Hard Case Crime, which went away earlier this year when their underlying publisher went out of business, is coming back to life.

So I sent an inquiry to Harper Collins, wondering what they'd ever found.
And a very apologetic, now slightly older but still with the company, young woman will be sending me some books later this week.

Wonders will officially never cease.
As of early this morning, AIG (remember them? the people who thought it was a good idea to insure every mortgage-backed security in the country, and promised to make good to the MBS investors if the homeowners didn't pay their mortgages? used to be the largest insurer on the planet) has prepared a plan for paying back the Federal Bank of New York and the US Treasury. We had expected that AIG was going to be one of the two remaining sources of losses in the 2008 federal bailout of the US financial system.

We were wrong. Now both Chrysler and AIG are expecting to return profits to the federal treasury, instead of losses. The dickering now going on between the Fed, the Treasury, and AIG, is about how much money the US Gov't will make on having prevented the world bond market from collapsing. Pretty neat.

Although it does present a problem for Tea Party governance - if we're actually making money on the financial system bailout, stopping that spending won't improve the state of the federal treasury. (As a side note, we've also come out ahead on the Chrysler deal, which is actually more surprising than AIG making money - a bunch of economists were reporting at the time of the AIG bailout that the Feds should make money on it, but should and three bucks will get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks. No one was nearly that optimistic about Chrysler)

I can't remember the precise day when I decided that I no longer needed to own every book that O'Reilly published. It was probably about when they published their third book on Oracle databases, and I had to admit that even though the books were quite good, I'd never be able to remember all that information, much less use it.
But I still keep track of when a publisher or an editor is so reliably on that I can recommend that someone buy anything they publish, much like I keep an eye out for artists and authors whose new work I will purchase sight unseen.
It is thus with a heavy heart that I must report that my current favorite intro-to-investing series has jumped the shark. I have always been of the view that Gold investors are basically crazy, since a bet on Gold is a bet that Civilization will Fall, and if Civilization actually does fall, trust me, you have more immediate problems than the state of your investment portfolio. To paraphrase a late 19th century economist, The Means Of Production is Where It's At.
And commodity investors are the next step further around the bend than gold-bugs. So I looked to the most recent installment of the Little Book, Big Profits series with some curiosity. Perhaps they would point out what it is that those Commodities people understand that I don't, that makes them not dangerously insane pessimists?
Sadly, The Little Book of Commodity Investing shows that no, those people really are looped. Whereas most of the Little Books series are very good introductions to a classic investment style, even the one by Ben Stein, Commodity Investing is an unmitigated puff piece, unsullied by resorting to actual arithmetic or, particularly, either logic or analysis. Frankly, the depth of their consideration goes about as far as People Always Want More!, but it doesn't even have the defense of being stoned when they said it. Yes, people do always want more, but that doesn't mean that they're going to give you money because you believe that.
For that matter, 200 pages of saying Commodities are a great investment! doesn't make it true - although, if you believe it does, Julian Simon may be interested in making a bet with you. Little Books Editors, shame on you!

Picoreview: Joe Bob sez Bad Clams, would not eat again

A collection of interesting things from the outside world..

• Oakland wants to be Portland when it grows up. Or, at least, Oakland is considering building a streetcar line down Broadway and trying to replicate the Pearl District story. I still need to read the proposal and analysis, but this sounds unabashedly cool.


• I don't normally signal boost The Onion, but this article about one of Britain's recent cost-cutting measures is priceless. Be Seeing You.


• Goldman Sachs and the SEC have settled the criminal case against Goldman for duping investors in a large, failed synthetic derivative investment in mortgage securities. Many people are touting this as a win for Goldman, who got off without admitting guilt or wrong-doing, but with publicly promising to never do it again. Also, with the largest securities fine in history, $550 Mn, and a loss of ~25% of their market capitalization since the suit was announced. Wall Street is believed to be scrambling now to adjust their business practices so as to minimize how much damage the investor lawsuits do to major derivative-writing houses. Market-watchers widely assume that a) if Goldman was doing it, everyone else was doing it too, and b) there is never just one cockroach and the SEC went after the case that they could win most easily. Also, here's some more background on the GS story from The Big Picture.


• From the financial blog, The Big Picture, a discussion of how and why the US Residential market is going to suck for the foreseeable future. Alright, I misstate - we can estimate when the US residential market will start being a place where home-sellers can again make moneyrecover what they've invested in their homes over the years, it's just farther in the future than you would like it to be, if you're a home-owner who might want to move someday, or if you make your living off of something related to housing, such as, say, the US economy.


• Turning from Finance to the world of Technology, HTML 5 looks like it will be very, very cool. For example, someone wrote a version of the classic game Asteroids in it. That you can play in any modern browser. Without being actively connected to the 'Net. Which is right up there with Google implementing Pacman as an in-browser game.


• Okay, back to Finance. The US Gov't bailout of the finance industry keeps getting cheaper. Congress authorized spending $800 Bn on the effort back in 2008, which many critics on both the Left and Right loudly decried was money straight down the drain. As the WSJ reported back in April, the expected total cost has now fallen to less than $90 Bn. That would put the effort at costing roughly one percent of GDP, one-third what the S&L crisis did in the early 90s. Not too shabby for turning a probable Depression into a merely deeply unpleasant Recession. Just think how cheap it would have been if voters hadn't been insisting back in the early 2000s that the gov't hire regulators who were asleep at the wheel for the rest of the decade...


• There's a fascinating new paper from some researchers with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston looking at the impact of credit card incentive programs on the pricing of retail goods in the US. In the very short form, credit cards are effectively driving up the nominal retail prices of many goods, which has the result of transferring wealth from people who pay cash to people who pay with credit but pay off their cards every month. Not a surprise, but nice to see someone pulling the data together.


• I read a fair bit of Jonathan Carroll's work, after the chair of the upcoming Reno Worldcon gave me a copy of Carroll's The Land of Laughs about two decades ago. He does all the normal writerly new-media stuff these days, including a blog and LJ and Twitter and RSS feeds. He often sends out snippets of other people's work that are worth signal boosting, such as this lovely little piece about changing your life for love.


• Finally, a plug for some lovely software - I've recently started using InstaPaper, so that I can flag articles as I'm browsing to read later and easily come back to them and flag them when I want to share. It's very cool, and works in your browser on your desktop, your mobile device, what have you.

There are still three entirely unrecognized songs on the list, but I'm guessing people aren't going to get them, so here's the final list, with scores!

I think next time around, I'll have to grant additional points for songs identified later. People who don't see the post in the first day are being a bit unfairly penalized for not responding early enough.

1. What You Feel, Buffy Musical soundtrack
   corpsefairy, melissa_actress
   Why'd you run away? Don't you like my style?
   
2. One Thing Leads To Another, The Fixx
   vvvexation, hydrolagus, malabar
   The deception with tact, just what are you trying to say?
   
3. I Do Both Jay and Jane, Larissa
   tacky_tramp, feyandstrange
   I met a boy, his name was Jay, he was so fine
      I met a girl, her name was Jane, she wants to be mine
   
4. Living in the Plastic Age, The Buggles
   hydrolagus, ragani
   Every day my metal friend, shakes my bed at 6am
   
5. Sunday Bloody Sunday, U2
   blue_estro, kest, shoutingboy, vvvexation, michiexile, mangosteen, tronpublic, malabar, plymouth, rikibeth
   I can't believe the news today
   
6. Waiting on a Friend, The Rolling Stones
   tronpublic, bloodredrosev - This was the least recognized Major Pop Hit on the list.
   Watching girls, passin' by, it ain't the latest thing
      I'm just standin' in a doorway
   
7. I'm on Fire, Bruce Springsteen
   shoutingboy, mangosteen, hydrolagus, anthologie, malabar, corpsefairy, jeffpaulsen, zunger, rikibeth
   Hey, little girl, is your daddy home?
   
8. Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen, was looking for the cover by Frankie Goes To Hollywood
   shoutingboy, 3diff, tronpublic, rikibeth
   In the day we sweat it out in the streets of a runaway american dream
   
9. The Waiting, Tom Petty
   shoutingboy
   Oh, Baby, don't it feel like heaven right now
   
10. Hell, Squirrel Nut Zippers
    mangosteen, hydrolagus, 3diff, ratontheroad, ragani, anthologie, malabar, corpsefairy, jessicac, zunger, rikibeth
    In the afterlife, you could be headed for the serious strife
    
11. Boy in the Bubble, Paul Simon
    shoutingboy, src, hydrolagus, tronpublic, corpsefairy
    It was a slow day, and the sun was beating
    
12. Eleanor Rigby, The Beatles, was looking for the Industrial cover by Godhead
    blue_estro, kest, shoutingboy, vvvexation, michiexile, solan_t, src, hydrolagus, 3diff, ragani, anthologie, tronpublic, malabar, corpsefairy, jessicac, zunger, plymouth, rikibeth
    Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been
    
13. Blinded by the Light, Bruce Springsteen, although I was looking for the Mannfred Mann cover.
    src, tronpublic, jeffpaulsen, rikibeth
    Madman drummers bummers and Indians in the summer with a teenage diplomat
    
14. Hold on Tight, ELO. I didn't realize this was originally a Springsteen song when I put it on the disc.
    mangosteen, src, 3diff
    Hold on tight to your dream
    
15. Fever, performed by LA artist Devil Doll
    vvvexation, src, malabar. Most people don't realize that Peggy Lee was actually covering an earlier, quite successful, hit.
    Never know how much i love you
    
16. Rich Girl, Hall and Oates, was looking for the cover artist Bird and the Bee
    src, tronpublic, malabar, jeffpaulsen. It's really interesting how people misremember the lyrics to this song, too.
    You're a rich girl, and you've gone too far
    
17. Rapture, by the artist known as Vaio until Sony threatened to sue her into a neighboring plane of existence, thereafter known as Iio. Because that's not confusing.
    The night I laid my eyes on you
       Felt everything around me move
    
18. Dirty Laundry, by Bitter:Sweet
    Tasty, tasty torchy badness
    I've got a bad boy and that's alright with me
       His dirty laundry's nothing that I can't keep clean
    
19. Surrender, by Lunascape
    A lovely, lovely breakup song
    The daylight, cried for a cure
       I will wake over you
    
20. Pure Imagination, originally performed by Gene Wilder in Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory. I was actually looking for a recent techno mix performed by the band Ford
    vvvexation, mangosteen, corpsefairy, jeffpaulsen, rmd, iamradar, , darthsunshine, noirrosaleen
    Hold your breath, make a wish, count to three
       Come with me, and you'll be, in a world of pure imagination

tronpublic

shoutingboy

7½		tronpublic - we have a winner!
7¼		shoutingboy
6½		mangosteen - dude, you can dj with me any time
6		corpsefairy
5¾		rikibeth
5½		malabar
5		src
5		hydrolagus
5		vvvexation
4		3diff
4¼		jeffpaulsen
3½		ragani
2½		anthologie
2½		zunger
2½		bloodredrosev
2		michiexile
2		blue_estro
2		kest
2		plymouth
1½		jessicac
1¼		melissa_actress, but it's a very well-deserved point!
1		solan_t
1		ratontheroad
1		rmd
1		iamradar
1		noirrosaleen
1		feyandstrange
½		tacky_tramp
½		darthsunshine