Top Ten Brain Myths

I have a personal pet peeve about hearing the phrase "hard-wired" to describe the brain and/or behavior, and this article from Smithsonian.com is a nice concise debunking of that myth as well as a few others, such as that trite old incorrect notion of only using 10% of your brain. (Ugh. Always hated that one, too.)

[And as a personal aside, I must admit something horrible: I have been making jokes about tongue mapping in Intro Psych for many years now as if there was some validity to the basic concept. I now know that to be false, so to the many years of Intro Psych students that I've led astray, I apologize.]

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"The Silver Gun" by Robert Palmer (1983)

I mean...Urdu? Seriously, Urdu . On an already eclectic and worldly album -- Pride , from 1983 -- "The Silver Gun" closes a chapter in Robert Palmer's career by singing a song about a horse in a language spoken daily by over 100 million people. The liquid bass line and propulsive electronics set out a bedrock for Palmer to ping phrasings rather out of place in Western music, askew astride even the peripatetic minimalism of the rest of the record. Somehow, in the middle of Michigan's Appalachia, I had this on vinyl a few years before the CD era officially commenced. It was an album of effort -- even the cover, a pointillism-and-bronze work, had Palmer's head barely above the water -- but the stitches didn't show to my pre-adolescent eyes and ears. In a career marked by zigs and zags, Pride and "The Silver Gun" were most certainly Other, and for a kid that felt like he didn't belong much of anywhere, it was nice to have those discrete feeling...

Some 2024 Listening Pleasures

It started with a gift of two JBL Control 25 speakers, and by "gift" I mean "borrowed" -- a.k.a. "will never return" -- from an obsolete tech detritus pile at work. I may have snagged more than two gifts, of course, but the raw footage proving such a claim remains elusive. And after installing the JBL speakers into the upper corners of the music room, and after installing speaker stands for the rear speakers I already had, and after making the hard choice between a big-ass bean bag and a comfy leather recliner to properly center myself in the audio field (R.I.P., big-ass bean bag), there was only one missing piece: the Apple TV 4K unit. So for me, 2024 was the year I streamed a lot of music in Atmos through Apple Music, surrounded by new tunes and old bops in thrilling new dimensions. Some might say you don't need surround sound, 'cos the two ears + two speakers modality has been dandy for a while now, but that's like saying you don't need ...

Some Stuff Wot I Done Listened To, 2015 Albums Version

Everyone loves year-end lists. Piecemeal and subjective as they may be, it's always a quick and easy route to jog the memory for moments of pleasure and empathy. Back in the record store days, it was a time that I looked forward to most of all, so let's continue with the tradition here in my little corner of the blogosphere, such as it is. Father John Misty – I Love You, Honeybear From the hairiest ersatz lothario this side of 1975, Josh Tillman's delightful creation lists between cynical takes and hopeful stabs with verve and swagger and just a slice of I-can't-even exasperation. One of the best adult love albums of this or any year. FFS – FFS It’s always nice when expectations are exceeded, and this amalgam of Franz Ferdinand and Sparks was greater than the simple sum of parts at almost every turn. In fact, there are times when the hybrid vigor is such that the songs take flight to a new and uncharted land that is FFS alone. Artful hooks, witty tur...

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