round the tree goes the train

                 One of the things I like  least about not being married is the inability to be a kid. You hit thirty or so and all of a sudden people start  giving you funny looks if you happen to wander over to the sand box. I'm not a touchy feely type guy in the first place - if a guy touches me my first reaction - unless I know him- is generally hostile.
              And likewise, as I age it gets easier to disregard Christmas  when you don't have any children. Consciously, of course, I understand the yearly holiday rituals and the myth of the eternal return - but  hey a myth is different when it's your myth that is up on the intellectual chopping block.
              Plus it's been my great fortune to have played piano since childhood and having access to a record collection from infancy. I've always been able to connect with my child hood more then others seem to.
               The last element in the soup isn't quite so pretty. For some people life brings a measure of happiness, for others not so much. We don't get much choice in which illusions we are permitted to continue believing.
Sometimes we tire and no longer find it possible to make the effort we once did to convince others we are decent people.
               Charlie Chaplin, who's father was a drunk, had a direct insight to how the personality splits. specifically the promises we make when we are drunk are forgotten in sobriety. WC Fields, also a   drunk, would open a bank account in every city he played  with the result being that even now there are accounts in his name scattered around. The think being that as the thief will tell you the greedy man is the easiest target - and when you come down to it we all have our flaws.


                   I was struck by some cave drawings in the UK. There as in many such drawings you have to go way deep into the cave to find the drawings - there's no hint otherwise of what's coming up - and I feel a kinship with these artists because they were indifferent seemingly to those in their era's liking their art. Maybe they felt that no one else could understand it?

       In any case ?I couldn't let the day pass without  posting this years  <a href="http://www.megaupload.com/?d=P16PTEXK"> christmas song,.......</a>

                It seems that megaupload is back from downtime - In fact the rumor is they have been getting some heavy flak from the copyright protection scene - which I remind you I am at least theoretically part of.  But the scene ain't that simple. When Alicia Keys, Janis Ian, Puff Daddy and I are thinking the same thing there just may be something to it.

here's the "blunt" url                http://www.megaupload.com/?d=P16PTEXK

for the file which is only 25 meg or so.  There's a seven minute ambient piece which is the intro part of the "extravaganza"  called        At the Depot    the Christmas song is just a pno/voc demo such as one does when they need to formalize the material.

              hava a happy

                           

continuation

  Well there hasn't been any change on the config side from this end so it's probably something really obvious and dumb I'm overlooking   - in the meantime   google gives you a gig of file storage   and I'm up loading the   tunes to that for the time being  - now all i have to do is figure out how to "share" this file   really would like to avoid coming in on Saturday when the net bogs down and plus am supposed to meet  this guy  in awhile

Okay - so this isn't going to break anybodies back  - I'm nowhere near moving as many gigabytes as I was before the economic crash et al - but at least well see if google is fast and or reliable -  Apparently there was a form of FTP transfer here at google docs and that has been  done away with .    You know the bad news on APPLe is they don't give a f**"** for the content makers anymore - they thurst after telecom riches and that in practical terms means incredible as is sound updated software  even flagship stuff like FCP  winds up being worse with each iteration.   And I'm afraid googles gonna go t hat route as well   and basically I don't have to the time to monkey around with all these changes - at least Microsoft you learn it once and that's it  - you can move on to other things - in any case I'm tired and cranky and gotta go and will look into what went wrong here at some later date.

    Possibly theres something funky on this end - because I've used megaupload for years and it always works like clockwork  - upload and then comes the  link. 


https://docs.google.com/open?id=0Bx1tLrz_cnzrZjBjZmVkYTYtZTM5OS00YjQ3LTk1OWYtNmZmYzAzYmY4NGYy


and I repeat



https://docs.google.com/open?id=0Bx1tLrz_cnzrZjBjZmVkYTYtZTM5OS00YjQ3LTk1OWYtNmZmYzAzYmY4NGYy



thanks for stupping bize


  - Tamlin

'ello december

-  right well running strange tonight  - foro whatever reason megaupload oisn't kicking back the  L url  so I'm making a very quick and hopefully temporary detour  to wu and we'll see  - but in the meantime I get to uling this stuff.

    this is Norma by the way .. We're trying something new..

                         I was lying in bed with ALF this morning. He always takes a while to wake up, and I was trying to get him interested in current events because I'd just had a dream about them. You know how dreams are, on the surface they are about immediate things and underneath they are about things that really concern us.

   But it's always hard to get the ALF interested in current events. I mean he stood beside Moses at the parting of the red sea and comforted Alexander upon the death of his boyhood love - so compared to these guys George Romney and Roone Arledge are pretty much historical non entities.

  But I try.  In my dream I started out thinking about how candidates change what they say according to what's gonna get them laid - because they are men.  And then I went on to thinking that if you like someone's looks they can say and do anything and you'll make excuses for it, but if you don't then no matter how good or nice they are  they are out of luck.  I don't know where ALF fits in, ha hah. Actually he's a doll  IT took a while for me to figure that out but the secret is to find a guy who doesn't care about anything but you then they'll do what you want.

         ( ALF's note: My dear the great and turrable lesson  was it larned by Parnell and that woman. She brought down the people, she brought down the nation and their souls as well shall hover here twixt heaven and hell till the second coming of the blessed savior Jaysus Christ who shall judge the living and the dead and all those in between  when the dead rise from their graves and the living shout hallelujah hossannah!)

        Norma; See what I mean?

         We're still working on putting the pieces together. Greetngs to the scene- To Stairway, Red Telephone, Miko, the two Waynes.  Slash/Root   et all

            and thanks for downloading the tunes they're sorta premature at this stage  but hey, they are cheap enough 

  
                                                   





                  Here's   Tamlin     he's better at this stuff then I am .

        The Mark Twain house in Stanford  Connecticut will be open to the public on December fourth. It will be decorated, as much as possible, in the manner it was whilst the deceased humorist  and public speaker lived there with his wife and children.  This event will be something of a grand re opening as the administration the house has recently concluded a court case which found the previous administration guilty of embezzling one point five million dollars over the previous seven years.

             "We're  doing extensive research to make the house authentic to the era and the way it would have been when Sam lived here," said one of the caretakers. All caretakers refer to the previous owner as "Sam", so as to establish greater intimacy with the dead author.

              The caretaker continued, "Just to do the research to find out how one room should look will cost about a quarter million dollars."

         Live music on the piano will be provided on the day of the tour.

         Tickets are thirty dollars and available either online or at the door.

       This next mention hardly deserves to be written out. Let's call it an observation. Fortunately I don't know what it means and therefore can not be accused of willful imposition of the readers time.

     The story begins with a lady, sort of. She was a psychology teacher in Hofstra University which I attended in the late seventies. It wasn't so much that we did not get  along as that we could not get along. It was almost as if there was an invisible barrier between us.

          The mind does tend to do things like it will absolutely refuse to remember some people's names. It will refuse to remember anything about them other then a vague distaste perhaps.  And what is remarkable as well,  this sort of thing can happen even in the absence of specific issues of disagreement.

         In the case of myself and this teacher we never got  far enough along to disagree about anything.  It is something that we rarely consider the implications  of when we think that many a mind is made up about another person within the first few seconds of meeting them.  This works both in positive terms and in negative terms.

            Most of us are familiar with prejudice. Actually prejudice makes a lot of sense - we look at someone - recognize that they are in a group competing with with our group and we hate them for it. What's so irrational about that?

             On a personal level guys go after girls and think they should dress nice, or be nice, or have a sense of humor, when in fact she's made up her mind within a few moments of meeting the fellow and all the other stuff is just to ease the situation along.

              As far as I was concerned and as far as I could tell the same with the woman , there were no romantic complications involved. Perhaps it's so that there's never absolutely no romantic feelings for good or ill when members of the opposite sex meet, but such were in this case not a big deal. It was something else.

          I've spent thirty years trying to bring the "Something else" into the conscious mind. There was no great animosity between us, rather it was a case there being, just beyond the fogs of pleasantry and manners, an impenetrable wall. Furthermore I never then or since got the impression that the resistance to communicate was based on personal feelings. It was more as if I had to be stopped not for who I was, but because of who I represented.

   Remember that psychology is considered something of a soft science.   Unlike mathematics or engineering where the hypothesis either works or doesn't in a soft science the results are up for interpretation. Especially in the seventies this was problematic. Psychoanalysis was being questioned more then ever and there was a grab bag of theories competing for the status of authenticity and the federal dollars that would follow.

        One of the tragedies that has plagued the field for centuries that those afflicted with mental disorders are often the least able to press their needs upon society.

         Before I conclude the observation though there's two more things to be aware of.

      After two or three years as an undergraduate I began to realize that the department of psychology was split into two factions.  One was the experimental faction, which was sort of laid back and let the results show up when they did. The other was the behavioral modification faction. At this time what that meant was psychoactive drugs - and we are not  talking about Ayuhaska, the south american hallucinogenic plant. The second group was to me a little frightening, because they were, and are, more then willing to render opinions as to others mental fitness at the  drop of a hat.

       This is not to deny that essentially that is their job but I always get a shiver when the hangman takes a little too much joy in his work.

   And as well one probably need not mention that whether it is the misreading of astronomical positions, the incorrect assessment of humors, or even the  failure to sustain correct genetic readings, at times there have been medicines far worse then the diseases.

           The second pertinent factor is I wrote a term paper for this teacher and placed in on her desk. It was about the conditioning of chickens - no joke. And I hated it.  i hated it  even more when a week later the woman informed me she had not received the paper and I had to write the thing over again.

    How this happened I do not know.I do know for certain the paper was there, and perhaps it fell off her desk. I've never accepted the possibility that the woman lied just to  be obnoxious. Not that she liked me too much, but it would be unprofessional.   I think actually she saw the paper there and assumed it was garbage and threw it out.  This happened on an unconscious level however. What she was doing was being a good team player.

       By purposely attempting to discourage me in following through my possible desires to go in to the field she was acting, albeit  unconsciously, as a gatekeeper.

For all I know she may have done me a favor but it must be admitted that she was probably able to ascertain, in her own mind, that I was not of the philosophical orientation that she felt most comfortable with.

      For as to the great question - "Who to advantage nature or nurture?" Those who have been fortunate as to circumstances often insist their seeming superiority is in the blood and genes  whereas those of lesser fortune tend to focus on the more pragmatic advantages of   food and shelter.  Suffice to say I am of the latter category and she was not.  Suffice to say, as well, her actions, and those of others dissuaded me from choosing psychology as a career.

   Epilogue-  Saying I hated writing up the result of psychological experiments remains an understatement. By chance Paul Krugman this week  quoted Alan Greenspan's assessment of the economic picture a few years ago and it struck me what I hate about a certain style of writing - and thinking. It's a closed system.

    Greenspan didn't care about the truth he just wanted the party to keep on going.

That was how he became Very Important!

     And there's so many people like that it makes me sick.

       It's all a bloody con job. One came upon them in the hundreds during the first flush of the information revolution - people talking about networking, and synergistic relationships and new paradigms and enhanced productivity and it was pathetic. Perhaps that's one reason why I don't belong in academia, despite the many who suggest I do.

     It's also sad. Words on a merry go round. I got a d minus on the paper and in retrospect I wished I had failed it. I should have failed it. I am ashamed that I did not  - because it was a stupid assignment  meant not to enlighten but to enslave - meant to demonstrate one's willingness to submit to authority. 

    If I cared more about it I would have purposely failed it. After thirty years I still feel guilty about it, because I went along with it. I did what I knew was wrong not because the pay was so good, but because I couldn't be bothered doing what was right.  I guess I didn't take them seriously enough.That was my real crime - hubris.

   Returning to the present  I'm still waiting on the upload to Wupload

         the file has two originals and two covers - the originals are on four month spec for a local band which means we'll see what they think of them but for four months only I and them can record them.  Then there's Red River Vally inthe arraignment by Paul Weston and Jo Stafford

 duh what's going on ?  both sites have allowed uploads but have prevented me from getting the url to download them - am running short of time

me  no like  this  = will attempt correction  meanwhile will post  this

  tamlin