Phthursday Musings: And to all a good night

I had thought I wouldn’t put one of these out this week. But, hey, I’m off work. So here we go.

Christmas is upon us! There are a lot of things to be said. For now I’ll say this: We’re all exhausted. Those of us with the opportunity to recharge over these couple of weeks, let’s not blow it.

I am sharing a link to a published peer-reviewed paper. You don’t need to read the whole paper; the title alone tells so very much of the story:

Honey bees (Apis cerana) use animal feces as a tool to defend colonies against group attack by giant hornets (Vespa soror)

This research paper is a gift to everyone, because at once it’s about a super-fascinating scientific concept - that an insect can use a tool - while at the same time, it’s literally about poop.

Speaking of literally, my beloved child has recently taken to using the word… a lot. Like, literally, he says it all the time, as in, not literally, because that is not literally what literally means. This is all apparently because the guy from the goofy Minecraft videos he watches says the word all the time. It is all literally ridiculous.

There is a good stand-up bit from many years ago by David Cross all about the word literally. Here it is. Very NSFW. But it’s Christmas Eve. And we’re in a pandemic. You’re not at work anyway!

Like much of the rest of the world, we recently watched The Queen’s Gambit. If somehow you’re not aware, it’s about chess. Another thing that’s about chess, if somehow you’re not aware, is “One Night in Bangkok”.

On a lark, I found the video. And it’s, well, it’s literally a video:

I mean, it’s terrible. It would literally have been better to watch four minutes of chess being played.

It’s so bad that it reminded me of this:

I’m not sure if actual money was spent on any of the, erm, props, or, errrrhm, animation, but if so, to what possible end? They could have literally just had Robert Palmer sing holding a hot potato and it would have been better.

Because I watched these two videos, YouTube helpfully suggested that I would probably next want to watch this one:

Ahh, now, this one is more ripe for META-SPIEL, since it’s kind of a video about a video, but it’s just going to be a jumping off point for me to talk about one of my favorite subjects.

So, “Easy Lover”. Thanks to the Yacht Rock guys, I understand “Easy Lover” as belonging to a category of “Billie Jean” clones. But it’s got to be the best of that lot, right?

Assertion: “Easy Lover” is the best thing Phil Collins was ever involved in.

A lot of Phil Collins songs from roughly this era have somehow persisted in the classic rock canon. But not this one. It’s in the pop canon, of course, but it’s not something that would be touched by rock radio. But it’s harder rocking than a lot of what would be found there. Is is the synth? The harmonies? The song technically being on an album by a solo black artist who doesn’t come from a rock background? Oh hmm.

My personal trajectory from perhaps junior high forward went a little like this: oldies, classic rock, modern rock, indie rock, country rock, and while today I’ll default to classic rock radio in the car if I just want radio, and I’ll default to indie rock at home, I’m liable to pop up anywhere. The other morning I listened to Vivaldi and followed it with John Lee Hooker. That’s just how it is these days.

Nowhere in my trajectory was there an ostensible place for the music most popular as I grew up. For the longest time I actually thought that the mid-80s were an especially bleak time. In retrospect, though, what passed for mainstream pop at the time was stuff like “Easy Lover”, which seems waaaaay better than what was passing for mainstream pop at a lot of other times. The biggest album ever was Thriller, right? And if you just evaluate the album on its own merit, it’s thoroughly brilliant.

I’m not sure where this is going, so to abruptly wrap it up: There’s fantastic music literally wherever you look, across all sorts of genres. Okay, the 30s might not be your thing, and okay, I’m hard pressed to identify any fantastic in “new country”, and okay, there does seem to be something especially weird and boring about a lot of mainstream pop over time, and okay, you’re probably not going to hear anything fantastic in The Gap if The Gap actually even still exists, and okay, this is literally not abrupt, but the point is, step outside your comfort zone, including into mainstream pop. You might be surprised.

My pre-pandemic intention - not one necessarily well-communicated to my wife, who will raise many pointed questions about this section - was that, should Leicester play European football, we’d schedule a Euro trip around one of those matches. In part this stems from wanting to experience European football, and in part this stems from a complete inability to decide what the best possible European destination would be for a trip.

As worldly as I’d like to think my thinking gets, I’ve never actually gotten to mainland Europe. I’ve only gotten as far as Ireland / Northern Ireland. My list of things to see and do in Europe is literally so long that it’s functionally meaningless. I want to go to Helsinki, Prague, Barcelona, Kraków, Chișinău, Edinburgh… these places are nowhere near one another and at best you could tackle two in a single trip. And although I’m definitely a collector type, I don’t want to go on a trip just to tick off a list of countries visited. I want to actually experience a European city.

This year, Leicester made Europa League, and wound up with group stage matches in Athens, Braga, and Luhansk. I can’t imagine convincing her to go to eastern Ukraine, but Greece and Portugal? Those feel like they would have been two excellent arbitrary selections.

And now who does Leicester get in the first knockout round? Slavia Prague. A direct hit on my list. Alas, not this time around.

Her target is something warmer anyway. Turin in the summer, something like that. You know, I hear even the old ladies play football in Turin. 2022 maybe?

One last thought about the Christmas season.

For a long time I’ve observed that my sense of schedule has been off. When you’re in school, you have a regular seasonal schedule. You get out of school, get a job, and maybe there’s some residual aspects of it all - time off work, go home for the holidays, snow starts appearing, etc. For me, a lot of this got lost over time.

Well, this year, we’ve all been stuck at home, and we’re mostly not going anywhere, and work is home and school is home and everything’s weird, and so even though so many of us need a break, it’s hard to get a break when daily existence is so similar.

I have no fantastic answer. I wish I did. I could use not just a break but also something akin to a reset. Like… a power down within the break. A firmware upgrade. I literally don’t know what I’m saying.

But whatever it is you need, please, try to find it. You deserve it.

And to all a good night.

Literally.