Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

There are no moderate republicans – only extremists and cowards.

The media handbook says “controversial” is the most negative description that can be used for a Republican.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

“Can i answer the question? No you can not!”

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

You cannot love your country only when you win.

I’m starting to think Jesus may have made a mistake saving people with no questions asked.

T R E 4 5 O N

This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.

Since we are repeating ourselves, let me just say fuck that.

You passed on an opportunity to be offended? What are you even doing here?

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.

People identifying as christian while ignoring christ and his teachings is a strange thing indeed.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

Battle won, war still ongoing.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

People are weird.

Let there be snark.

You are here: Home / Music / A Little Night Music Open Thread

Reader Interactions

98Comments

  1. 1.

    Jeff Spender

    Berners on my wall going crazy that San Fran flipped to Bernie.

    Ignore the popular vote totals, this will make ALL THE DIFFERENCE.

  4. 4.

    Mnemosyne

    I just finished the chapter in Jane Austen’s England about how everyone was filthy and never bathed and it was common to poop in the street and now I don’t think I can ever read a historical novel again. Eeeeeewwwww.

  6. 6.

    dp

    I’m playing my (newly reloaded) iTunes sequentially again, and tonight I’ve made it to “Bruc…..”

    So you can imagine what I’ve been listening to all night.

  7. 7.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Omnes Omnibus: Quick question for you, it originated with Bella Q and had to do with mortars that was way outside of my expertise. She was asking about 4.2 mortar. I told her as far as I know mortars are classified by weight, but that’s way outside of my areas. We await the dispensation of your knowledge!

    Thanks.

  16. 16.

    the Conster, la Citoyenne

    @Jeff Spender:

    In a dead thread I half jokingly posited that if Sanders officially concedes, it might trigger a Heaven’s Gate event. Please convince me I’m being overly dramatic.

  17. 17.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Omnes Omnibus: Great. Otherwise I’d have had to run down my former teammate from USAWC who is a retired Marine artillerist. At this hour, doing it this way, was much easier.

  23. 23.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Adam L Silverman: US Army classifies artillery by projectile diameter, thus a 4.2 mortar fires a round 4.2″ in diameter regardless of payload type or weight. (Disclaimer: I once worked on an Army project involving 4.2″ mortar rounds filled with mustard agent [NB not a gas at room temperature] awaiting decon & destruction under terms of the Chemical Weapons Convention.)

    Royal Army usage pre-NATO classified artillery by projectile weight, thus this verse from Dominic Behan’s rousing Irish rebel ballad “Come Out You Black & Tans” addressing the British occupiers:

    Come tell us how you slew
    Them old Arabs two by two
    Like the Zulu they had spears & bows & arrows
    How you bravely faced each one
    With your sixteen-pounder gun
    And you frightened them damn natives to the marrows

    Maybe that’s where the original confusion came from.

  24. 24.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Mnemosyne:Some people were aware of both Hamilton and Burr prior to the play. LMM did something brilliant. OTOH, it wasn’t history.

  25. 25.

    SoupCatcher

    @Jeff Spender: Ah, got it. Shine on, crazy diamonds, shine on.

    eta More broadly, I’m quite pleased that both Sanders and Clinton broke 2 million votes in California while Trump only cracked 1.5 million. And, with 1.2 million votes still left to count, Clinton will easily break 2.5 million and might crack 3.

  26. 26.

    Jeff Spender

    @SoupCatcher: It’s like playing a game of Risk, and celebrating that you took Indonesia while your line in Ukraine collapses and you lose the entire continent.

  30. 30.

    Mnemosyne

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Depends on your definition of “history.” For the first time in the history of the Tony Awards, all four of the top musical performances went to actors of color, and three of those four actors were in Hamilton.

    And the play adheres pretty closely to the actual history. The biggest change is that he places the death of Philip Hamilton before the election of 1800, not after.

  42. 42.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Uncle Cosmo: That’s where my confusion came from. I’d always seen historic references to “X pounders” and it stuck in my head. Which is why I recommend she ask Omnes. Had I known you’d worked with them, I’d have recommended you as well. I knew I was out of my areas of knowledge and did know just enough to know I didn’t know the answer.

  48. 48.

    burnspbesq

    @dp:

    tonight I’ve made it to “Bruc…..”

    Which is your favorite Bruckner symphony?

  49. 49.

    eemom

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Some people were aware of both Hamilton and Burr prior to the play. LMM did something brilliant. OTOH, it wasn’t history.

    Rather a masterpiece of passive aggression ya got there.

    I like J. Geils band, and that song in particular.

  50. 50.

    burnspbesq

    If you haven’t heard it yet, the new Allen Toussaint record, “American Tunes,” is quite wonderful. It’s the last thing he recorded before his untimely death.

  52. 52.

    Adam L Silverman

    @efgoldman: Since it doesn’t have a high capacity magazine, he was okay under DC’s municipal ordnances or ordinances.

  55. 55.

    Emma

    @eemom: And all the little boys piling on. Me, I’ve had a big weird-ass craving for Sin City. And anyone who knows my musical taste could tell you this might qualify me for the padded rooms.

  56. 56.

    Steeplejack

    Paula Cole, “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?”

    When this song first came out I somehow acquired—no idea how—a CD that contained eight or ten remixes of the song. Several of them were really good, so much so that the original doesn’t sound quite right to me—like it’s slightly too fast. Go figure.

    At first I linked to the original version of the song in the first link above. I was wishing that I could run down some of those alternate mixes—the CD is long gone, lost in a period of personal upheaval—and I did a halfhearted search on YouTube. Eureka! I found the whole CD as one long clip. So now the link above is to one of the Sylkscreen mixes that I really liked.

    (Somehow all this was triggered by Mary Chapin Carpenter.)

    ETA: I edited the link to start at the right point in the clip, but it’s 14:10 if the sync doesn’t work for you.

  63. 63.

    jacy

    Okay, I’m going to vent for just a sec. Because I’m working late and I’m pissed off. For those of you who remember, the last two years have been pretty shitty for me. I found out my husband was having an affair with the mother of one of my 9-year-old’s classmates, and two weeks later found out I had ovarian cancer. He left, I had chemo, blah, blah, blah. I had a bad reaction to chemo, then found out I had a (not-cancer) tumor of the parathyroid. (after several exploratory surgeries and months of testing.) But, so what, lots of people have to deal with worse. So I picked myself up, kept working, kept taking care of my kids (who he rarely saw, in fact, didn’t see my 16-year-old for 5 months), got better. I decided to move my lot out the hellhole small town cauldron that was choking us, only as far, of course, as the courts would allow. 47 miles away to Baton Rouge, bought a lovely 5 bed, 3 bath house in a great neighborhood. For two years, the jerk has fought me on child support — not paying a dime — spending god knows how much money to lawyers to avoid paying money to his children. Finally got to the point where he was going to have to pay (the court date was supposed to be today). But two weeks ago, was served with papers that he is suing me for custody, so that I can’t change schools. Went to court on Monday to answer to the 17-page suit that says I’m an unfit mother because I alienated him from his children. (I didn’t. He alienated them quite well himself.) And come to find out, there’s a better than even chance that at the end of the summer, the boys will be living with him in his ratty two-bedroom fourplex apartment, and I’ll be paying him child support. Why? Because it would be too traumatic for them to leave their current schools, and their father deserves a chance to show he can be a better parent. And even though the idiot texted met the night before court saying that he was only doing this because he was damned if he was going to pay child support, we have to go to trial, which my lawyer says could go either way. And in the interim, he gets the kids for most of the summer, so he can show his good intentions, which I was advised to agree to, so I would look cooperative. Fuck me.

  67. 67.

    Mnemosyne

    @jacy:

    I don’t have any advice, so I’ll just say, “Christ, what an asshole.” Hopefully your documentation will prevail over his mischief-making.

  72. 72.

    jacy

    @Mnemosyne:

    Our best strategy is that over the next 7 weeks he’s going to realize a) parenting is fucking hard, and b) parenting is fucking expensive, and run screaming the other way. And I paid for summer camps for the boys already in BR, and he works in NOLA, so he’s going to do a 5-6 hours of driving a day some weeks to to get them back and forth. And he had to cancel Disneyworld with his girlfriend, which will probably not go over well. My lawyer bets he’ll fold, and I have a fuckton of evidence that he’s not been a parent for two years, so I hope it’ll be okay. It just pisses me off that I worked so hard to make a new life and he’s trying so hard to sink it, and not caring if the kids get crushed in the process. And I have to spend the summer with a bleeding ulcer over the whole mess. pah.

  77. 77.

    Steeplejack

    @jacy:

    God, that’s awful. My thoughts are with you and the kids. If I run into any hit men, I’ll send along contact info.

  78. 78.

    Adam L Silverman

    @jacy: We’ll keep good thoughts. I have seen this far, far too often with friends and colleagues.

  80. 80.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Steeplejack: She’s got a tremendous vocal range and a hell of a set of pipes! Its a great album. She’s turned the whole thing into a sequential music video movie called the Odyssey, which is telling some sort of coherent story, but I haven’t quite figured what that is yet. On the album Ship to Wreck is the first song, but in The Odyssey its the fourth video/chapter/what have you.

  81. 81.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Mnemosyne: Okay, wasn’t sure who it originally belonged to. Its a very good song. And Costello is a unique, in a good way, musician.

  84. 84.

    I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet

    @jacy: Far too often, men can be stupid, vengeful creatures when it comes to dealing with their former spouses – especially when money is involved. My best friend from HS turned into something just short of a monster when he divorced his wife of ~ 20 years. :-(

    I’m very sorry that you have had to deal with so much over the past few years. No matter how it turns out, know that you’ve done your best for your kids and yourself. That’s ultimately all you can do, and your kids will ultimately recognize what you’ve done for them.

    Hang in there. Best wishes.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  85. 85.

    jacy

    @Mnemosyne:

    Thank you. That was something my therapist talked a lot about, how people from narcissistic families, even if they seem fine for a long period of time, can fall under stress, and BANG, just revert to the whole narcissistic mindset. It’s weird that he was a great guy who I was madly in love with for 20 years, and then suddenly he hit 45 and he was just gone. Or not gone, so much, as turned into his mother.

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Thanks. I’ve seen it happen to a few other people after it happened to me. I’ve been dating a really wonderful guy for 9 months — his wife did the same thing. So he’s a 24/7 dad with two young kids, and mom pops in every so often and weeps that she doesn’t want to lose her kids, then takes off for another two weeks. It’s just mind-boggling. But she came from the same kind of unhealthy narcissistic family my husband did. They turned into people who don’t know how to adult.

  86. 86.

    Adam L Silverman

    @jacy: I’ve dated enough divorced women to know, unfortunately, that your situation, as you know, isn’t unique. I can only say it was terrible to experience every time I saw it because you’re watching someone you care about get ripped up over and over again. Again: we’ll keep good thoughts.

  87. 87.

    Mnemosyne

    @jacy:

    Unfortunately, most people return to what they know and are comfortable with when they’re under great stress, and children of narcissists can let their inner narcissist loose because it’s familiar and doesn’t require any additional thought.

    Plus, midlife crisis. My own brother went pretty nuts at his midlife crisis, though both he and his ex-wife have remarried.

  88. 88.

    jacy

    @I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:

    Thank you. One thing, my kids are great. I’m very proud of them, and they’re good, kind, empathetic little monsters. :)

    But money is a big thing. I make a bit more money than he does, and his girlfriend makes a LOT more money than he does, and there’s something really weird going on inside his head about the whole idea that he needs to support his kids when they don’t live with him. I would feel sorry for him, if he didn’t keep mucking everyone’s life up. I wish he would take all the energy he’s expending in feeling sorry for himself and use it enjoy his kids, before they’re gone. I would also like a 1967 Shelby Fastback Mustang and five more French bulldogs. And a maid. I will probably get none of the above.

  90. 90.

    Origuy

    @Steeplejack: There’s a Scottish country dance called “Sleepy Maggie” done to that tune; it’s one of the most popular. It’s not usually played that fast for dancers, though; musicians tend to crank up the fast tunes when they are just playing for an audience. (Or each other, sessiuns can get pretty frantic.)

  92. 92.

    Steeplejack

    @Origuy:

    Good to know. I think it’s a traditional song, so I’m sure there are several variations and names. I saw the Chieftains do it live about a hundred years ago and have always liked it since then. Would love to see it arranged for acoustic guitar.

    Huh. Just looked on YouTube to see if someone like John Renbourn ever did it, and I found this ukulele(!) version.

  94. 94.

    ThresherK (GPad)

    @Steeplejack: I am not into David Crosby, but his singing on “Hero”, produced in the patented Phil Collins manner, from the early 90s makes for a very moving record (and metaphor).

  95. 95.

    Steeplejack

    @ThresherK (GPad):

    Have you listened to If I Could Only Remember My Name . . .? It was released (in 1971) at the height of the popularity of CSNY, but it has always struck me as the work of a more private, less “Crosby” Crosby. And it has really held up for me over the years.

    My only quibble is that I would move “Cowboy Movie” to the end of the album (or maybe the beginning). It seems less of a piece with the other songs.

  96. 96.

    J R in WV

    @jacy:

    Seems like that text would be a valuable piece of evidence, both of his ill intentions towards you and towards his children, and to the courts as well.

  98. 98.

    Miss Bianca

    @Origuy: Damn, I always miss the music threads! Are you a player? (I mean of some instrument, not the other meaning). Or a dancer, then?

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