random iggy pop songs

• SoKo - "Let Me Adore You"
  slow weaving female vocals

Mark Forsyth - "The Etymologicon"

An amazing book linking words and their history together.  Almost too many examples to quote.

Every weakness of human nature comes out in the history of etymology. Probably the most damning word is probably. Two thousand years ago the Romans had the word probablis. If something probablis then it could be proved by experiment, because the two words come from the same root: probare.
    But probablis got overused. People are always more certain of things than they really should be, and that applied to the Romans just as much as to us. Roman lawyers would claim that their case probabilis, when it wasn't. Roman astrologers would say that their predictions were probabilis when they weren't. And absolutely any sane Roman would tell you that it was probabilis that the Sun went round the Earth. So by the time poor probably first turned up in English in 1387 it was already a poor, exhausted word whose best days were behind it, and only meant likely.

Sausages make taste lovely, but it's usually best not to ask what's actually in them. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it was a sausage-maker who disposed of the body. In nineteenth-century America, the belief that sausages were usually made out of dog meat was so widespread that they started to be called hotdogs.

The funny thing about archery is that you don't usually aim at the target. Gravity decrees that if you aim straight at the blank your arrow will hit somewhere below. So you point the arrow somewhere above the blank, and hope that this cancels out the effects of Newton's troublesome invention. That's why aim high is another archer's term; it doesn't mean that you'll end up high, or it's not meant to. You aim high and hit on the level.

The Oxford Dictionary admits that 'In Middle English it is often doubtful whether blac, blak, blacke, means "black, dark" or "pale, colourless, wan, livid". [...] There are two good explanations. Unfortunately nobody is quite sure which one is true. [...]
    Once upon a time, there was an old Germanic word for burnt, which was black, or as close to black as makes no differnce. The confusion arose because the old Germanics couldn't decide between black and white as to which colour burning was. Some old Germans said that when things were burning they were bright and shiny, and other old Germans said that when things were burnt they turned black.
    The result was a hopeless monochrome confusion, until everyone got bored and rode off to sack Rome. The English were left holding black, which could mean either pale or dark, but slowly settled on one usage. The French also imported this useless black word. They then put an N in it and later sold it on to the English as blank, leaving us with black and blank as opposites.
    The other theory (which is rather less likely, but still good fun) is that there was an old German word black which meant bare, void, and empty. What do you have if you don't have any colours?
    Well, it's hard to say really. If you close your eyes you see nothing, which is black, but a blank piece of paper is, usually, white. Under this theory, blankness is the original sense and the two colours – black and white – are simply different interpretations of what blank means.
    And, just to prove the point even more irritatingly, bleach comes from the same root and can mean to make pale, or any substance used for making things black. Moreover, bleak is probably just a variant of bleach and once meant white.

 

The Old English word for bread was hlaf, from which we get loaf; and the Old English division of labour was that women made bread and men guarded it. The woman was therefore the hlaf-dige and the man was the hlaf-ward.

Hlafward and Hlafdige
Hlaford and Hlafdi
Lavord and Lavedi
Lord and Lady

 

In 1898 a German pharmaceutical company called Bayer decided to develop an alternative to [addictive morphine]. [...] and worked out a new chemical: diacetylmorphone, which they marketed as a 'non-addictive morphine substitute'. [...]
   Bayer's marketing chaps set to work. They asked the people who had taken diacetylmorphine how it made them feel, and the response was unanimous: it made you feel great. Like a hero. So the marketing chaps decided to call their new product heroin. Heroin remained a Bayer trademark until the First World War.

Anacreon's poems (anacreontics) are all about getting drunk. [...] In the eighteenth century an English gentleman's club was founded in Anacreon's memory. Two members wrote a society drinking song called 'To Anacreon in Heav'n'; a good song with a catchy tune. Because it was hard to sing, it became an ad hoc test of drunkenness used by the police in the eighteenth century.
    Francis Scott Key was an American lawyer. During the war of 1812, he was sent to negotiate with the British fleet for the releaes of certain prisoners. He dined aboard HMS Tonnant, but when the time came for him to leave, the British got worried. Key was not familiar with the British battleships; if he went ashore he could and would pass all this information on to the American forces. They insisted he remained on board and he was forced to watch the bombardment from the wrong side. The American flag at Baltimore remained high and visible amid the smoke. Key decided to write a song about it. He stole the tune from the Anacreontic Society, but wrote new words that went:
    O, say can you see by the dawn's early light...

 

Alcohol comes from [Arabic] al (the) kuhul, which was a kind of make-up. Indeed, some ladies still use kohl to line their eyes.
    As kohl is an extract and a dye, alcohol started to mean the pure essence of anything (there's a 1661 reference to the alcohol of an ass's spleen), but it wasn't until 1672 that somebody at the Royal Society had the brgiht idea of finding the pure essence of wine. What was it in wine that made you drunk? What was the alcohol of wine? Soon wine-alcohol (or essence of wine) became the only alcohol anybody could remember.

= is an equal sign because the two lines are of equal length.

There's a small dot in the middle of the Pacific Ocean whose natives called their home Coconut Island, or Pikini, which was mangled into English as Bikini Atoll.
    Bikini Atoll was put on the map by America in 1946 when they tested their new atomic bombs there. Atom is Greek for unsplittable, but the Americans had discovered that by breaking the laws of etymology, they were able to create vast explosions, and vast explosions were the best way of impressing the Soviets and winning the Cold War.
    In 1954 the Americans tested their new hydrogen bomb. It turned out to be an awful lot more powerful and ended up accidentally irradiating the crew of a Japanese fishing boat. Japanese public opinion was outraged.  Protests were made, hackles were raised, and a film was made about an irresponsible nuclear test that awoke a sea monster called Gorilla-whale or Gojira. The film was rushed through production and came out later in the same year. Gojira was, allegedly, simply the nickname of a particularly burly member of the film crew. Gojira was anglicised to Godzilla.
    [...]
    But where the Japanese saw a threatening monster, the French saw what the French always see: sex. A fashion designer called Jacques Heim had just come up with a design for a two-piece bathing costume that he believed would be the world's smallest swimsuit. He took it to a lingerie shop in Paris where the owner, Louis Réard, proved with a pair of scissors that it could be even more scandalously immodest. The result, Réard calimed, would cause an explosion of lust in the loins of every Frenchman so powerful that it could only be compared to the tests at Bikini Atoll, so he called the new swimwear the bikini.

 

 

Traders in North America: the native Americans didn't care for money.  They used sea shells.  At some point, traders started using tobacco, but it was large and cumbersome.  They gave up on that, and started to use deerskin. Buckskins soon bcame the common barter of North America and a standard barter basically is money.  So money became "bucks".

 

M. John Harrison - "The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again"

This took me way too long to get through. Although the writing is nice, and the feeling of creeping despair and desolation nice, it always bothers me if not much happens. And not much happens here, which is probably the point.

Victoria and Shaw, two lost people, one in London, one in a small town. Hints about strange creatures. But never something concrete. I'm not sure I get this.

People talked in loud voices all day outside the house.
    They bustled out of their cars, slammed the doors, greeted each other in unison an octave apart: 'Orright?' The subsequent exchange often took place under the auspices of saying goodbye. Over before it began, it nevertheless seemed difficult to complete. No one was anxious to let anyone go.
    'Well, cheers, love, see you Saturday. Is he? No, no, he's not coming. Not on the Monday anyway...'
    Twenty minutes later they were still there, still accepting but psotponing a drink, still repeating everything twice, still reminding one another at intervals that they mustn't stop because were off to the Top Time Hotel, or over to Chirk to deliver a door; or because they were casting the summer performance of The Tempest in the leisure centre down at Pale Meadows, the usual story of incompetence and under-commitment on all sides. Every time a conversation wound down, it began again. When there was no one else to talk to, they shouted into their phones.

'I'm at that stage where you're still in love but you aren't quite sure what with. Reality begins to dawn.'
  And then: 'Lots of room for improvement here but no money.'

Leaves off the willow, berries on the hawthorn. Victoria kept away from the fields. She kept everything at a distance; drove the Fiat as far afield as Runcorn; forgot ther appointments. November, meanwhile, gave up on itself without warning, and suddenly the town had been dragged into the first week of December. The Christmas lights went up; someone towed Wee Ossie's Toyota out of the lay-by on Pale Meadows. One morning the rain turned briefly to snow.

Video Games (videogames)

 I've been playing so far

• Metal Gear Solid V - "The Phantom Pain"
• Horizon: Zero Dawn
• Death Stranding
• the Missing
• Red Dead Redemption 2
• The Witcher 3
• Portal & Portal 2
• Wreckfest
  
• Spec Ops: The Line
• Not For Broadcast
• Biohazard
• Cloudpunk
• Scanner
• Kentucky Route Zero
• Nier: Automata
• Little Nightmares III
• Observer: redux
• What Remains of Edith Finch
• Alan Wake
• Control (Ultimate Edition)
  
• 12 Minutes
• Dark Souls
• NieR Replicant ver.1.22474487139
• Ghost of Tsushima - amazing history and good gameplay
• the Last of Us - great story telling and music
• the Last of Us part 2 - still good, sometimes a bit less story wise, but the part where Joel gets killed, or Ellie's birthday flashback are amazing
• Metal Gear Solid 4 - Guns of the Patriot
• Vennineth 
• Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice
• The Stanley Paradox
  
• Disco Inferno
• Deus Ex - Human Evolution (Director's Cut) 
• Deus Ex - Mankind Divided
  
• Elden Ring
• Blind Drive
• Getting Over It
• Late Shift
  
• Soma
• Remember Me
• Stray
• Call of Juarez: Gunslinger
• Echo
• Deathloop
• Aragami
• Celeste
• Norco
• A Plague Tale: Innocence
• A Plague Tale: Requiem
• Immortality
  
• Silicon Dreams
• God of War
  
• God of War: Ragnarok
• Horizon II - Forbidden West
• Dead Space (2023 remake)
  
• Volumes (?) - 3D sneak game
• started 5min of "Wild West" (?)
• Dredge
• Close to the Sun
• Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
• White Shadows
• Vampire Survivor
• As Dusk Falls
• Firewatch -[way earlier,  had covid, before tLoU, close Kentucky Route Zero]
• Humanity - "lemmings game"
• Metal Hellsinger (hardly played, rhythm based metal music game)
• Armored Core IV - Fires of Rubicon
• Unpacking
• Somerville
• Life Is Strange 
• Beyond: Two Souls (disappointing narrative "scifi" game with Elliot Page)
• Trek To Yomi - beautiful samurai game in old 60's style movie style
  
• Tokyo:Ghostwire
• Bloodborne
• Where the Water Tastes like Wine 
• Baldur's Gate 3
• Lies of P
• Hi-Fi Rush
• The Talos Principle
• Returnal
• Dark Souls II - Son of the First Sin
• Themysia
• Pacific Drive
• Elden Ring - Shadow of the Erdtree DLC
• Nioh
• Dark Souls III
• 1000xResist
• Quantum Break
• Papers Please
• Mass Effect 1 (Legendary Edition)
• Mass Effect 2 (Legendary Edition)
• The Forbidden City
• Mass Effect 3 (Legendary Edition)
• Katana Zero
• Blue Prince (absolutely amazing)
• Clair Obscur 33
• Slay the princess (great)
• Arctic eggs (wonderfully weird, david lynchian)
• Black Myth: Wokong
• Shadow of the Colossus

random Iggy Pop confidential songs

2021-01-29

• Sun Ra Arkestra - "Sea of Darkness / Darkness"
  strange, nice
  
• John Hammond - "Evil"
  good jazz
• Beauty Pill - "Instant Night"
  curious female vocals
• Idris Ackamoor & The Pyramids - "Rhapsody in Berlin (part 1 and 2)"
  crazy busy
• Clara Smith - "Black Cat Moan"
  amazing old record, starting with cat meows
• Teresa Salgueiro - "Lisboa"
• Mulatu Astatke - "Yegelle Tezeta"
  nice instrumental, swinging.
  

Flickering Lights

Film from director of "Adam's Æppler" and others, also with Mads Mikkelson. Four somewhat petty criminals find themselves in a derilict restaurant and slowly start building a real life there. 

Enjoyable enough, though not even close to his later work.

The Serpent

Interesting enough series about a serial killer who hated backpackers and killed them in Thailand. Has Jenna Coleman in it (previous Doctor compagnion)

The "dutch" of Billie Howle, main dude from the Dutch embassy, is terrible. I can't understand it.