Russell Atkinson's Blog, page 5

More playlist additions

I have continued to seek out new music to add to my playlists. I have been looking primarily at stuff from the early 20th century. You’ll see some ragtime, blues, and gospel in these latest additions. Here’s the list of additions:

SongArtistAll About That BassPostmodern JukeboxCall Me the BreezeBlues TravelerDusty SkiesBob Wills and his Texas PlayboysGone is GoneZoe MulfordGospel BoogieThe Faith QuartetHammond BoogieLightnin’ HopkinsI Am a PilgrimEulalieI Got a WomanMartin LudwigIt’s Tight Like ThatClara SmithLast Thing On My MindTom PaxtonMorning TrainPeter Paul and MaryNiseme JeRevelation Gospel ChoirPray for RainNat MyersRed Rose RagRed Rose Ragtime BandRockin’ All Over the WorldRockin’ the WorldSleepy Hollow RagRagged Rhythm BoysSomething’s Got a Hold on MeEtta JamesThe Davis Street BluesEthan Leinwand

I also removed some songs I got tired of, or at least I removed them from some playlists to reduce the frequency I hear them. Here below are few of these (not a complete list).

Ain’t Nobody’s BusinessTaj MahalJust Strollin’Bob CrosbyTake Me to the RiverLisa BialesEast Chicago BluesEthan LeinwandHot House RagRagtime Jitterbug BandNitty Gritty MississippiRy CooderDeath Ray BoogieRostyPuttin’ on the RitzTaco

I actually reduced my lists quite a bit, especially reducing the piano solo stuff, mostly boogie woogie and blues, while adding a couple of new ones. I didn’t reduce the classical pieces I have in there, and I think I’ll try to add a few more short pieces the next time around.

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Out of Your Mind by Jorge Cham and Dwayne Godwin

Out of Your Mind: The Biggest Mysteries of the Human Brain by Jorge Cham
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This exploration of our brains by two scientists turned out to be more entertaining than I expected. I expected it to be informative, but not as much fun. The chapter titles tell you the gist of the contents: “Where is the Mind?”; “Why Do We Love?”; “Will AI Take My Job?”; “What Is Addiction?” etc. One of the scientists is also a cartoonist and the book is illustrated with his cartoons throughout. At first I almost rolled my eyes at that, but I came to enjoy the cartoons. They always made the point in the text well and usually with a touch of humor. The book is clearly intended for a lay audience, but there is some interesting science in every chapter. The book is a quick read.

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The Women by Kristin Hannah

The Women by Kristin Hannah
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Frankie is a naive 20-year-old nurse from Coronado Island, home of the U.S. Navy base in San Diego. The time is during the early days of the Vietnam War. Her brother is killed in action and she joins up to serve her country. The first half of the book is much of what I expected, the story of the naive girl becoming battle hardened and a highly skilled surgical nurse. She learns to smoke and drink, loses her virginity and bonds with her fellow surgical nurses. The war turns bad and the government lies to the public about it. A lot of it is M*A*S*H like. I thought that part was exciting and well-written.

[Spoiler alert] The second half of the book focuses on how she was treated, mistreated, or ignored after she came back to the U.S. The book went off the rails at that point. Every bad thing that could happen to her did. Her family was ashamed of her and hid the fact she’d been in Vietnam. Strangers spit on her if she wore her uniform. No one, even the VA, believed that she was a Vietnam veteran because “there were no women in Vietnam.” She developed a drug and alcohol problem, etc. It became too Dickensian to be believable. If no one thought she’d been in Vietnam, why would so many people spit on her? Her nurse comrades, now stateside, rescued her several times but she kept self-sabotaging. Her family stuck with her, but neither parent approved of her service. They had envisioned her being a nurse, meeting a doctor, and marrying and producing grandchildren, not serving in a war zone. The author couldn’t seem to make up her mind. As the book progressed, more and more time was spent on Frankie’s romantic life and clothes like a typical chick lit novel then much more on anti-establishment politics of the day – anti-war protests, feminism, and then switching back to Frankie’s nursing career. It bounced all over the place and couldn’t settle on a theme. I’d give the first half a solid four stars, the second half two stars, so I’m rating it the average: 3.

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Copilot vs. Google AI overview

Today I did a small experiment. I was looking for a list of modern day performers who record music from the early 20th Century, i.e. 1910s-1930s. I pasted that query into Google and got a response labeled as “AI Overview.” I’m not sure if this is the same as Gemini. When I’ve clicked on the Gemini icon in the past, I’ve been asked to create a paid account. Copilot (Microsoft’s AI) is free. So I’m comparing free AI to free AI.

Google produced the following:

Many contemporary performers, particularly those specializing in genres like jazz, blues, and swing, often record music from the 1920s and 1930s. This includes tributes, arrangements, and even reinterpretations of classic songs and styles. It’s a common practice within the music world to both preserve and celebrate the sounds of these decades.

It went on longer, but it did NOT name any performers, which I specifically asked for. Copilot, on the other hand, not only had a similar response, but it went on to name half a dozen or so modern performers that do music in the style of that era, including The Hot Sardines and Postmodern Jukebox, both groups I hadn’t heard of. I bought a song of the latter and put one of the former on a streaming favorite list. I pasted the exact same query into both, so I give Copilot the clear win in this case. I’ve also found it to be superior in other searches. It may be time to stop using Google as the default search engine.

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Short What3Words (W3W) post – A1 steak sauce

I’m dismayed at the need for some of my W3W posts, but it seems like this one should be mentioned. If you follow the news you will have heard that Linda McMahon, the Secretary of Education for the United States, was at an education summit meeting in San Diego last weekend. In particular, the events took place at the San Diego Convention Center. That’s where she repeatedly referred to artificial intelligence (AI) as A1, like the steak sauce. So I took a look at some of the W3W combos there.

The very first one that pops up when you enter San Diego Convention Center into W3W is brain.factories.vanish. It seems our brain factories, i.e. schools, are vanishing under McMahon whose mandate from President Trump is to eliminate the Department of Education (DOE) altogether.

I’m sure she would excuse the A1 error as a slip,terms.forgot, also there at the center. But she made this mistake multiple times. She just has no idea what she’s talking about. This is insulting to good teachers who put all their effort into giving the kids a good education, and the center does say they teach alone with zest. But McMahon’s ignorance is a school.actor.slap in the face.

Perhaps the elimination of the DOE is a good idea if people like her are in charge of it.

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James by Percival Everett

James by Percival Everett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I didn’t give this a fair chance at first for several reasons: don’t mess with a classic; an accusation against all white people, etc. But I set those biases aside because my book club chose it and I had to read it. I soon realized it had little to do with Huckleberry Finn and was just an imagined story of a black slave escaping pre-Civil War Missouri on a raft with a white boy (at first) but then departing from Twain’s narrative. It’s implausible, but probably not much more so than Twain’s story. It’s an easy enough read, so I just flowed with the story and enjoyed it.

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What3words – South Louisiana Correctional Center

Here’s another of my signature What3words.com (W3W) bits about the recent illegal ICE enforcement action. In case you’ve inoculated yourself from MAGA news (quite understandable), the Trump administration (Marco Rubio this time) revoked the student visa of a Turkish student at Tufts University.The student, Rumeysa Ozturk, had entered the country legally on a student visa and had violated no laws either in Turkey or here. Rubio revoked the visa because she had led some peaceful pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Tufts, alleging that constituted support for Hamas, a designated terrorist organization. The worst part, though, is that a federal judge ordered the government not to move Ozturk out of Massachusetts but they moved her to the federal jail listed above. That’s a brazen defiance of a judicial order.

I spent too much time trying to find a killer W3W link to the place, but I came up with only one full-length combo that applied: sociable.uneducated.respite, which is probably how ICE would describe it, where the poor unwashed masses can relax while waiting for the plane home. I’ve seen references to the facility as “notorious” and “a hellhole.” It’s a privately-owned detention facility under contract to ICE.

While I didn’t find any great 3-word combos, there were several 2-word combos within the longer ones including:

viciously deputies grape (maybe the A was intended to be an O)migrations rodeoindependence transferredwhites solutionresounding crackers

One other 3-word combo there that might apply to ICE: cherish paid airways.I’m sure they’d like someone else to prove free transport. There’s another fun one about 20 miles away that would be perfect for this facility: crackers.peacekeeping.hill in Ville Platte, LA.

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Blood Test by Charles Baxter.

Blood Test: A Comedy by Charles Baxter
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Brock Hobson is a mild-mannered insurance broker and Sunday school teacher. He makes an impulse buy of a blood test that will allegedly tell him what the future holds for him based on his DNA, and his questionnaire. It says he will commit a felony. He scoffs, but he suddenly feels empowered to commit a crime. He buys a handgun. Things get more serious after that. His ex-wife Cheryl is shacking up with a musclebound lout who calls Brock and Cheryl’s son a homophobic slur. Violence appears in the offing. That’s about as far as I go into the plot without spoilers, but this really isn’t a plot-heavy book. It’s supposed to be a comedy. Kirkus reviews calls it “riotously funny” which is funnier than anything in the book. Another reviewer calls it wry. I’ll buy wry and add tongue-in-cheek. That’s enough to get three stars, but it was less than riveting and had a lot of filler. It was mildly amusing and filled in some time, so I’m not really complaining.

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Polly Von

I just discovered this old recording I made back in 2008. I really like the recording. Unfortunately since arthritis robbed me of the ability to play well now, I can’t even fake a play-along video, so I’m just posting this photo of me playing back in the day.

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Daemon by Daniel Suarez

Daemon by Daniel Suarez
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

The blurb on the cover says Suarez is “A legitimate heir to Michael Crichton.” That’s an insult to Crichton. I only made it 40% through this book because I couldn’t stomach all the sadism and long graphic descriptions of cruelty. One of the first scenes is a drawn out description of what can only be described as child sexual exploitation. The author seems to really enjoy describing it. I was disgusted, but pushed past it hoping that was just intended as an exciting hook and a depiction of how bad the bad guys were, but things just got worse so I stopped. When he’s not writing something offensive, the author blathers on about network protocols and hacking methods that 99.99% of the reading public won’t understand. It’s nothing but a boring ego trip.

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