Songs in a Subjunctive Mood II

This is a rerun of an old post, with the extra songs Laura contributed in the comments. Mostly because I want to see if Peter has any extra suggestions.

“If It Be Your Will” – Leonard Cohen
“Your Song” – Elton John and Bernie Taupin
“If I Were a Carpenter” – Bobbie Darin
“Six Ribbons” – Jon English
“If You Could Read My Mind” – Gordon Lightfoot
“If I Can Dream” – Elvis Presley
“If You See Her, Say Hello” – Bob Dylan
“If She Knew What She Wants” – The Bangles
“Time after Time” – Cyndi Lauper
“If I Were a Rich Man”  – Harnick and Bock
“If I Knew You Were Coming I’d’ve Baked a Cake” – Cookie Monster

Antics

By way of @Meanjin comes this Oulipian word game: Antics.

Make a vaguely meaningful sentence where each word adds a letter to the one preceding it, and which gets to more than three letters. Their example:

“A: an ant, anti-antic, antics.”

It took me five minutes to write a Perl script which generates all valid chains for a given corpus, but the word list I’m using has too many abbreviations for the results to be interesting, so it gives things like ‘O ob obe obes obese’.

An Integrated Development Environment or IDE is a specialised programmer’s editor. Mine likes to gobble up all available resources on my computer and then grind to a halt when I need it most.

I, id IDE. Idea? Ideal.

Nil(e)stoddgers Rundlofgren

When I was a teenager I used to get Todd Rundgren, Nile Rodgers and Nils Lofgren all mixed up. This sort of thing is why I wasn’t very good at being a music nerd, and why true music nerds will always be able to catch me out, but it did give rise to an imaginary producer of even greater scope and versatility than either Todd or Nile. Imagine if the same guy was responsible for ‘Le Freak’ and Bat Out Of Hell and ‘We Gotta Get You A Woman’ and Like a Virgin.

Since I didn’t give a damn about Springsteen, Lofgren really only exists for me as a kind of phonetic bridge between the other two. Although if all pop music were to be plotted on a kind of triangular continuum he would serve nicely as the pole of “hokey sweaty authenticity” to be set against Todd’s “solipsistic studio wizardry” and Niles’ “commercial funkiness”.

Degenerate matter

A brief linguistic history of particle physics

I: The Classical Period

atom (ca600BC) from the Greek ἄτομος “that which cannot be cut”

electron (1847) from “electricity”, ultimately from the neo-Latin electricus, “amber-like”

proton (1919) from the Greek πρῶτον “first”

neutron (1939) from the Latin neutral and Greek suffix -ον

positron (1936) portmanteau of “positive” and “electron”

neutrino (1930s) a pun of Enrico Fermi on the Italian for neutron, neutrone

II: Alphabet Soup

muon (1936) originally “mesotron” from the Greek μέσος “middle”, then shortened to “meson”. After whole families of other mesons were discovered, it was renamed the μ-meson or mu meson in 1947. As it turns out, the mu meson was not a meson after all, and so was renamed the muon. Things go downhill pretty quickly from here.

pion (1947) originally pi-meson, after the Greek letter π

kaon (1947) originally K-meson, after the letter K

Followed by J/ψ, Σ, Λ, etc.

III: Mr Gell-Mann Has Time On His Hands

quark (1963) from the sound made by a duck, and only a reference to a phrase in Finnegans Wake by accident

gluon (1964) named after glue

Higgs boson (1964) after Peter Higgs, one of the physicists who hypothesised it, and “boson” is from physicist Satyendra Nath Bose. Many physicists at the time were working on the idea of a scalar field which imparts mass to all other particles, so it could easily have been named the Englert, Brout, Guralnik, Hagen or Kibble boson.

In which your author tries his hand at Kipling

My response to Pete’s latest rhyme challenge, ‘oblige’: an excerpt from Liberal Guilt, music by Andrew Lloyd Weber, lyrics by Clive James, book by Martin Amis. The show is a wickedly barbed satire on the depraved, hypocritical morality of middle-class types who read the Guardian and adore Clive James and Martin Amis.

The following verse is from the Senior Detective’s lament as he picks through a crime scene. Crusading left-wing journalist Frank Beard’s house has been broken into and his teenage daughter apparently abducted:

“Brutal,” they cry, “jingoistic,” they yelp,
But we’re always obliging and ready to help
When their lives have been shattered by villainous men -
Well, we don’t hear no chatter of politics then!

If asked “Do you like Kipling” I am now bound to answer “Actually, yes. I like to Kiple on the bus to work.”

Orange

(Only a partial solution to Petey’s challenge. And it really needs a New York accent to work.)

New rhetorical devices

symbiosis

“We” as applied by members of a couple where it is not strictly speaking possible, for example “We’re pregnant”

Homeric epithet

use of references to The Simpsons to delineate character eg “that guy who looks like Mr Burns”

asymptote

“So what I’m saying is… if you don’t have anything on… I’d like to… you know… could we… do you think…”

“Go out for dinner?”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

Fragment of a showtune lyric

I’ve seen cities of steel and a place called New Zealand
Where mutton outnumber the men,
But suburban and grim Neasden’s mock-Tudor chimneys
I’ll never return to again.

(In response to Pete’s latest rhyme challenge, “chimney”. I’d like to apologise to Neasden, New Zealand, the English language, the memory of Peter Cook and sheep everywhere.)

The Bummalo

I know people have their doubts about Wikipedia but it is unmatched as a resource to trawl for possible answers to cryptic crosswords, and without it I suspect I would never have been made aware of the bummalo, which is also known as the Bombay duck.

Neither a duck nor a buffalo pronounced through a mouthful of mozzarella, the bummalo is in fact a species of lizardfish native to the Gulf of Arabia, prized as a delicacy when salted and pan-fried, despite its pungent odour.

In these strange days, when genetic science is striding rapidly ahead, we may soon hear of a chimaeric creation, a semi-aquatic cow with the smell of a fish, the mouth of a lizard and the name of a duck and a city. This hellish creature is the bufmalo, or bumfalo, depending on the distribution of chromosomes.

I don’t know if the bummalo should now be referred to as the Mumbai duck. Or, indeed, the Mumbai fish. Perhaps it will be the last surviving relic of the name ‘Bombay’, just as ‘Leningrad’ only survives in the subtitle of the seventh symphony of Shostakovich.

King John

Shakespeare: the funny bits

I’ll admit it, I haven’t finished King John yet, but I bet there’s nothing better in it than this:

Chatillon: In brief, a braver choice of dauntless spirits
Than now the English bottoms have waft o’er
Did nearer float upon the swelling tide,
To do offence and scath in Christendom.

I’m still following the Auden lectures. Those plays which he disliked he jammed into single lectures with other duds: halfway through reading The Taming of the Shrew, King John and Richard II in succession I needed to take a break for some Barthelme and Delany. “Bottoms” means ships and to “waft” is to sail.