I have the Pennsylvania Polka, which was “popularized” in Groundhog Day and performed by Frankie Yankovic, still as my wake-up alarm ringtone. Jankovic was, you won’t believe it, born to Slovene immigrant parents! It all comes around…
He was considered the premier artist to play and rarely strayed from Slovenian-style polka. At his peak, Yankovic traveled extensively and performed 325 shows a year. He sold 30 million records during his lifetime and won the first Grammy awarded for a polka album in 1986!
I’m reminded of an interview I saw, where the head of Fender pointed out that the best-selling musical instrument in America was, until the 1960s, not the guitar, but the accordion.
Speaking of, while Americans watch paint dry on public TV to relax (Bob Ross), we here in my neck of the woods have Alpenpanorama. Every morning, two hours of live web-cam footage from the alps accompanied by light instrumental polka music, very relaxing. The alps are the highest and most extensive mountain range that lies entirely in Europe, stretching approximately 750 miles across eight countries: Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Slovenia, and Switzerland. There is nothing better to have playing in the background, white noise indeed! Here is a massive 100 item YouTube playlist with that.
And it gets better! Frankie the polka king enlisted in the armed forces in 1943, and cut numerous records while on leave prior to his departure for Europe. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge where a severe case of frostbite nearly required the amputation of his hands and feet. Fortunately, he was able to beat the gangrene before that became necessary, and was awarded a Purple Heart. The doctors urged him to have his fingers amputated, but he refused, as that would have ended his music career. After getting out of the hospital, he and four other musicians were assigned to special services to entertain the troops, including General George Patton and his Third United States Army.
Jim: I take your corrections. Someone should solve food at some point. Who is working on this?
Isegoria: Apparently his Grimmer than Hell collection includes the Lacey stories.
Szopen: Reminds me of the story of Dr. Witaszek who during WW2 tried to use typhus on Nazis. He was captured, tortured and executed. Children were sent to German families in order to be Germanized (recovered by red cross fortunately) and wife was sent to Auschwitz.
Bruce: David Drake’s Lacey and His Friends assumes the output will go to oligarchs.
Felix: The Transparent Society by David Brin, if I recall, assumes there will always be Flockish cameras and the like. So, make their output public. Side note: Amazon’s “Customers also bought or read” for this book is quite the interesting reading list.
McChuck: Being seen in public is fine. But what Flock camera coverage does is effectively stalking.
Isegoria: I haven’t read In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man: A Memoir. Does the father come back to die under the son’s care?
Michael Lynch: Actually Junod did have that father and wrote a book about it.
Phileas Frogg: He combined gentle and meek kindness with implacable strength. A consummate Christian gentleman, and a better man than I.
Szopen: I was too young to ever read them, and in fact I only learned about them after the fall of Communism. I was only 13 when the first semi-free elections were held. I mostly remember hearing old jokes with my parents laughing and explaining why it was funny — and then slowly they stopped laughing.
Bruce: Szopen, is that what happened to Krokodil and Szpilki? Or were they too establishment?
Szopen: In Poland, a similar phenomenon appeared with respect to comedy: the quality of comedy shows fell in the first few years, because previously a lot of comedy was based on innuendos and clever allusions, hinting on something which people supposed not to know or were not supposed to think or say. Once those things could be said in the open, comedians kept depending on old tricks and it was just not fun anymore.
Gaikokumaniakku: When East Asians ask me whence come my antiquated notions of the USA, I read selections from the first Little House book to them. The dear, sweet, sympathetic little girl hopes that her father will bring back a dead bear, because she loves to eat bear meat.
Isegoria: No, xanthan gum isn’t anti-microbial. Natamycin is an anti-fungal commonly used in products such as cream cheeses, cottage cheese, sour cream, yogurt, shredded cheeses, cheese slices, and packaged salad mixes. Nisin is a polycyclic antibacterial peptide produced by the bacterium Lactococcus lactis that is used in processed cheese, meats, beverages, etc. during production to extend shelf life by suppressing Gram-positive spoilage and pathogenic bacteria.
Jim: Isn’t xanthan gum used as an antibiotic agent, especially in dairy products, or am I thinking of something else?
Jim: What actually mattered was not the profession of the user, but their expertise. The more domain experience someone had, the more successful they were in using Claude Code in that domain. And, even more interestingly, the more useful output they got from Claude from each prompt. This is because each session begins at the center of the manifold, and human expertise is required to push it further and further into distant regions. The more expertise you have, the more you can push the session in a...
Jim: Biotech is arguably AI’s most promising application.
Jim: James James: Granted, the Great Halfrican Uprising Media Spectacle presumably was astroturfed with real money—to the extent that the banks’ circulating credits can be described either as “real” or as “money”—which must then have found its way into the pockets of real people.
Jim: *A media spectacle involving Halfricans somehow, or a different media spectacle involving a rabble of white people wandering the premises of the so-called “People’s House”, one would not.
James James: Black Lives Matter may have been fleeting, but for the people who stole millions of dollars and bought multiple houses, the consequences were not fleeting. These short-term movements could also be conceptualized as temporary astroturf fronts for permanent political machines.
I have the Pennsylvania Polka, which was “popularized” in Groundhog Day and performed by Frankie Yankovic, still as my wake-up alarm ringtone. Jankovic was, you won’t believe it, born to Slovene immigrant parents! It all comes around…
He was considered the premier artist to play and rarely strayed from Slovenian-style polka. At his peak, Yankovic traveled extensively and performed 325 shows a year. He sold 30 million records during his lifetime and won the first Grammy awarded for a polka album in 1986!
I’m reminded of an interview I saw, where the head of Fender pointed out that the best-selling musical instrument in America was, until the 1960s, not the guitar, but the accordion.
Speaking of, while Americans watch paint dry on public TV to relax (Bob Ross), we here in my neck of the woods have Alpenpanorama. Every morning, two hours of live web-cam footage from the alps accompanied by light instrumental polka music, very relaxing. The alps are the highest and most extensive mountain range that lies entirely in Europe, stretching approximately 750 miles across eight countries: Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Slovenia, and Switzerland. There is nothing better to have playing in the background, white noise indeed! Here is a massive 100 item YouTube playlist with that.
And it gets better! Frankie the polka king enlisted in the armed forces in 1943, and cut numerous records while on leave prior to his departure for Europe. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge where a severe case of frostbite nearly required the amputation of his hands and feet. Fortunately, he was able to beat the gangrene before that became necessary, and was awarded a Purple Heart. The doctors urged him to have his fingers amputated, but he refused, as that would have ended his music career. After getting out of the hospital, he and four other musicians were assigned to special services to entertain the troops, including General George Patton and his Third United States Army.