Tuesday 31 March 2020

State of the onion

From time to time (more often in the heady days of Harmless Drudgery's youth) I take stock....
<inline_ps>
Well I just got it myself. Stock...  onion... Oh well.
</inline_ps>
 My last report (18 months ago) started thus:
In its first twelve months, from October 2012 to September 2013, the Harmless Drudgery blog attracted just over 7000 visits. July 2013 was the only month with more than 1000 visits (1070, to be precise). In the first 5 days of September 2017, the total was just over a thousand (1053 to be precise – another 17 would have supplied a pleasing symmetry, but the gist is clear)
'So shaken as we are, so wan with care' as Henry IV Part One put it 'Find we a time with frighted peace to pant'. Well, not 'frighted peace', exactly, whatever that is...
<translation type="informal">
I think what he meant by 'find we a time...to pant' was 'Let's have a bit of a breather'.
</translation>
... but self isolation (which is, I suppose, a sort of 'frighted  peace').

Anyway, the blog is not maintaining that 200+ hits a day level (1000+ in 5 days), but the present performance is not too shabby (nearly 80 a day this month – a good deal healthier than I reported here
At the end of last year I referred to a growing following, then reaching an average of 35 daily visits. Well 35 schmirty-five. This has been a record month (an average of over 55 visits per day)
back in the pre-referendum era):

Last 12 months' 'page visits' to Harmless Drudgery
I suspect the latest month's improvement may have something to do with people
having an unwonted amount of time on their hands
<autobiographical_note>
That 2015 post has called to mind  a song I wrote in the style of Peter Starstedt (he of Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)?  [and little else] fame), which underlines the mistake perpetrated in a review I read in The Times a good few months ago (needs citation, as they say in Wikipedia,  but the object of the review was probably this). It was a review of a biography of Paul Simon, which said that Simon's experience of singing to uninterested audiences in Greenwich Village explained the words 'people writing songs that voices never shared'. I'm not sure whether it was the reviewer or the author who came up with this nonsense, but it was (nonsense, that  is). If the words  had been 'people writing songs that nobody ever listened to, the rotten swine' then maybe the writer's observation would've been less banal, less simplistic, less platitudinous
It's fairly obvious to me (and to anyone else who has written a song that nobody else ever sang – or  even heard) that Paul Simon was referring to precisely that sort of splendid isolation – people writing songs that were never heard outside the song-writers bedroom. 
</autobiographical_note>
But it's time for my constitutional.

b

Update: 2020.04.05.19:55  – Added inline PS

Update: 2020.0414.14:30 – Added PPS

Further evidence of a link between lockdown and blog-readership; (daily figures courtesy of Blogger):


Saturday 21 March 2020

Love in the time of corona


The big news today is that Mr T, the Neanderthal sporter of bling, is treading on peoples' toes Big Time. Trump's edit of his notes for this speech was reported in the Washington Post, with this photo of his notes:


His defence of this deliberate rabble-rousing was disingenuous and plumbed new depths of insensitivity. The World Health Organization's feelings  were made abundantly clear in this tweet:

I write abundantly not because I'm particularly partial to the cliché (if something is going to be clear in any way, the odds are strongly in favour of abundantly ...
 <COCA_NUMBERS>
Search for *ly clear in this corpus. abundantly is second only to perfectly.
Meanwhile, in this much smaller corpus, dedicated to British English, both  perfectly and
abundantly are deposed by a brand new number one – absolutely (which clings on to fifth place in COCA). "Go figure", as I gather they say in contemporary American. (In my teaching days I'd've called "abundantly clear"  a strong collocation).
</COCA_NUMBERS>

...as the adverb of choice) but because it has long been the WHO's position on the naming of viruses. Generally, it's unfair (and misleading) to name a virus after a place. The pandemic known commonly as Spanish flu came from everywhere but Spain (Africa, USA, France):
In August 1918, a more virulent strain appeared simultaneously in Brest, France; in FreetownSierra Leone; and in the U.S. in Boston, Massachusetts. The Spanish flu also spread through Ireland, carried there by returning Irish soldiers. The Allies of World War I came to call it the Spanish flu, primarily because the pandemic received greater press attention after it moved from France to Spain in November 1918. Spain was not involved in the war and had not imposed wartime censorship. 
wikipedia

It was an accident of non-alignment. Cases in Spain only got reported because they could be.  If only they'd had wartime censorship Spain might have avoided that stigma.

But is place relevant in the case of the Coronavirus? Tom Standage, in Go Figure reported (with no source, but quite plausibly) that a majority (6 in 10) of infections that affect humans started life in other species. (Wikipedia has an article on cross species transmission, which may well point to a source if you want to trawl though it.)

And an obvious source of cross species transmission is wet markets – where all manner of animals are thrown together  in painfully cramped conditions (a crate of chickens,  say,  piled next to a crate of piglets). Such markets aren't peculiar to China, though I suspect most take place in south-east Asia; with a fair few in South America and Africa – and chiefly in the developing world. Articles calling for such markets to be banned or suppressed in some way (like this one or this) are becoming more strident.

"But you can't ban them – they're part of our culture" cry the users. Well bad things need to be banned. And stigmatizing them is a good way of ensuring their demise. If it's a question of  weighing the health of billions of people (and, coincidentally, that of the world economy) against the way of life of a few million, I know where my money is.

Though I hate to appear to side with Mr T, I don't mind the virus being given a name that stigmatizes its source; not geographical, though. The "wet market  virus", perhaps.

But it's a lovely day. I shouldn't be cooped up in here...

b


Saturday 14 March 2020

Soothing the savage beast

...a misquote of course. What Congreve [not Shakespeare, the usual suspected source of most iambic pentameter] actually wrote in The Mourning Bride was

Musick has Charms to sooth a savage Breast, 
To soften Rocks, or bend a knotted Oak.
<digression title="factoid du jour">
The Latin for oak, robur, gave English the word robust. (Further info). Strictly, it was no English wordsmith that came up with a word based on robur. as Latin already had the adjective robustus, but the link is still worth knowing about (and I only recently had the "Of course it means that – DOH" moment).
</digression"> 
A recent Classic FM page reported (if report is not too strong  word in this case –  there was a disappointing dearth of hard facts about the paper in question):
New research from the British Academy of Sound Therapy (BAST) has shown there is a common dosage for music and revealed how long an individual needs to listen to it for a therapeutic effect to be experienced.
Clicking on that inviting link in the first line leads not to an authoritative source but to another equally unauthoritative  Classic FM page (which at least gives some detail):
To carry out the trial, students divided 157 adult participants into two groups. The first received ultrasound-guided injections of a benzodiazepine known as midazolam, while those in the second group were given noise-cancelling headphones delivering ‘music medicine’.

For three minutes – the length of time it takes for midazolam to reach optimum effectiveness – patients in the second group listened to a musical recording specially designed to lower their heart rate, blood pressure and levels of the stress hormone cortisol. 
To ensure accuracy of results, researchers used an approved anxiety scale with patients before and after treatment, scoring them from 1-4 on six simple statements, while doctors also rated them on a 10-point scale
.
.
.
And it certainly had the desired effect, with the abstract of the study describing music medicine as a ‘non-pharmacologic intervention that is virtually harm-free, relatively inexpensive and has been shown to significantly decrease preoperative anxiety’ 
Source
There may be some way of getting out of this labyrinth of self-reference, but I don't have the time to find it. If you have, have at it. But it reminds me of a reference I made here to 
...the madrigal All Creatures Now, written during the reign of Good Queen Bess ('See where she comes, see where she comes with flow'ry garlands crownéd...'). I have sung this madrigal before, and [not] given this phrase a second thought: 'Music the time beguileth'.  It doesn't seem to belong semantically (or musically) with either what comes before or after it. So previously I have dismissed this line as just an Elizabethan filler that doesn't mean very much.

But having so recently written That's 'wile', as in 'beguile'... [HD – in that same post] I realized that Bennet (the composer) was referring to the way music has a beguiling effect on the listener's awareness of the passage of time; it wiles time away.
 (And if you'd like an H in that wiles, read that post: I've highlighted in red my reasons for going H-less; but you do whichever you prefer.)

The BAST article used this infographic, which I found quite interesting (although I think the RDA message (the Recommended Daily Amount) is rather lost. It would have been more persuasive (about the music versus drugs issue) if they had used the term RDA:
 Music as Medicine infographic, from The British Academy of Sound Therapy. 

That's all for now. I must get on my HazMat gear before this evening's TCB concert.

b

Update 2020.03.17.16.45 – Added PS

PS
I wronged the Classic FM report. Because the first two links in it pointed to more fairly vapid editorial I assumed that the whole site would be like that. But there is a link to the original paper if you persist.
<apologia>
But I'm afraid that the more web masters' budgets are splurged on the generation of "content", the more editorialisers churn out verbiage by the yard, garnering the vain clicks of us seekers of wisdom and truth. Classic FM weren't (egregiously) guilty in this case though –  I was just a bit quick to write them off.
</apologia>

Saturday 7 March 2020

Timeo spammeros et dona ferentes

That's "I fear spammers even if they're bringing gifts". Sorry about spammeros – not very interesting, but it's a fairly good match for Virgil's Danaos. Ahem:

For the last few months, after years of blissful freedom from such pollution, this blog has become prey to attacks from spammers who post "comments" accompanied by invitations to acts of obvious self-abuse – "Click here" being the favoured euphemism for "Try this noose on for size". The most common (I must have had over a dozen – word-for-word the same) is
Wow! this is Amazing! Do you know your hidden name meaning ? <Link>
At first I just ignored them, for reasons of ingrained IT hygiene.
<autobiographical_note>
In the late 1980s, when DEC was waking up (ever so slowly) to the importance of the Internet ("Why should we care about the Internet, based on Requests for Comments?...
<background>
The central repository of knowledge/standards/best practice in the world of the Internet is a document (of which there are thousands) called Request for Comments (usually abbreviated to RFC, and having – for IT practitioners –little or no implication of invited comments. If it's a standard, it's too late for comments anyway. But it's still an "RFC".
</background>
...I know what my comments would be. We already have our own Easynet linking tens of thousands...
<background>
At its peak, DEC had well over 100,000 employees worldwide, many of whom had a MicroVAX (sometimes more than one), all joined on the Easynet.
</background>
... of computers. Who needs more?") I followed a course on this Brave New World. One of its messages was 
Don't respond in any way to spam – however inviting a link might seem ("Unsubscribe", for  example). All you're doing is confirming that an address is valid – making it a more valuable addition to yet another "Sucker list"
</autobiographical_note>
But now I've realized that the links were still there on the blog, making me in some way complicit. So I am now deleting them. Some, though, are intriguing – sometimes for their inanity (Can they really expect me to fall for that?)  like this one:
Do you understand there is a 12 word phrase you can communicate to your crush... that will trigger intense feelings of love and instinctual appeal for you deep within his heart? 
Because deep inside these 12 words is a "secret signal" that triggers a man's impulse to love, please and guard you with all his heart... 
12 Words Who Trigger A Man's Desire Response<this was a link> 
This impulse is so hardwired into a man's genetics that it will make him try harder than ever before to love and admire you.
In fact, triggering this mighty impulse is so important to getting the best possible relationship with your man that the instance you send your man one of the "Secret Signals"...
...You'll instantly find him expose his soul and heart for you in such a way he haven't experienced before and he'll perceive you as the only woman in the universe who has ever truly fascinated him.
And some speak of a world of improbable levels of paranoia and conspiracy theories:
You should see how my partner Wesley Virgin's report launches with this SHOCKING AND CONTROVERSIAL video.

As a matter of fact, Wesley was in the army-and soon after leaving-he unveiled hidden, "mind control" tactics that the CIA and others used to get everything they want.

THESE are the same SECRETS lots of famous people (notably those who "come out of nothing") and the greatest business people used to become wealthy and famous.

You probably know that you use only 10% of your brain.

That's because most of your brain's power is UNTAPPED.

Perhaps this expression has even occurred INSIDE your own head... as it did in my good friend Wesley Virgin's head about 7 years ago, while riding a non-registered, garbage bucket of a car with a suspended license and on his banking card.

"I'm absolutely frustrated with living check to check! When will I finally succeed?"

You've taken part in those questions, ain't it right?

Your success story is going to happen. You just have to take a leap of faith in YOURSELF.

Mind the boggles.

Time I returned to the real world. But first I'll report a conversation that stirred an old memory from my Grant & Cutler days (1976-8).  A fellow choir member also sings with another choir, which is singing a Kodály piece.
<anecdote>
A colleague at Grant & Cutler (already mentioned in connexion [AND THAT'S THE WAY I SPELL IT, OK?] with the horn blasts in the overture to the Rosenkavalier...
<Rosenkavalier>
([she]...blushed with a giggle that suggested  "Isn't Strauss awful?" as she said that the horns in the overture were "representative of the act of love")
</Rosenkavalier>
) had previously worked at a sheet music shop where a customer had ordered the music for Could I but express in song?  (presumably Malashkin's song, often translated as Oh, could I but express in song? , with the Oh spoiling the story, so let's forget it). 
The customer was told it would take N weeks. After 2N weeks the customer returned to ask where their music was. The assistant looked in the order book and saw that the person who had taken the order knew that there is no [l] sound in Kodály.
<pronunciation_note>
(Wikipedia's transcription s /ˈkd/, though I have usually heard /ˈkʊdand [I'd be surprised if Hungarian  did that peculiarly English thing of taking a simple vowel and spreading it out into a diphthong or even a triphthong])
</pronunciation_note>
The order read:
Kodály – Buttocks Pressing Song 
(presumably a folk tradition well-known among musicologists)
</anecdote>
Bye for now

b