Money

Not even Pink Floyd performed this intro live
sina-drums

Cool tune. I especially like the intro.

All Hail The Algorithm

Leningrad Cowboys - These Boots by Aki Kaurismäki [High Quality]
Leningrad Cowboys

I don't know what caused this to popup on YouTube, but I'm glad it did. Aki Olavi Kaurismäki is a Finnish filmmaker.

The Decemberists

When The War Came
TheDecemberists

I'm reading a story about a new Russian play about The Decemberists. Okay, but who are the Decemberists? Google knows:

A Decembrist refers to one of the liberal Russian noblemen and military officers who led an unsuccessful uprising against Emperor Nicholas I in December 1825. Inspired by Enlightenment ideals and Western European reforms, these revolutionaries sought to abolish serfdom and establish a constitutional government in Russia.

The term has expanded over time into a metaphor for someone willing to sacrifice personal comfort, privilege, or status for a greater political or social cause.

The 1825 Uprising
Following the sudden death of Tsar Alexander I, there was a confusing succession crisis. Taking advantage of the chaos, a group of about 3,000 officers and soldiers gathered in Senate Square in St. Petersburg on December 26, 1825. They refused to swear allegiance to the new Tsar, Nicholas I, and instead called for the accession of his brother Constantine and the creation of a constitution.The rebellion was quickly suppressed by forces loyal to the Tsar. In the aftermath, the leaders were executed and hundreds of other conspirators were imprisoned or exiled to the harsh climates of Siberia.

Historical Impact
Despite its failure, the revolt became a foundational myth in Russian history. The martyred Decembrists became a powerful source of inspiration for succeeding generations of Russian dissidents and revolutionaries throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Cultural References
The name has since been adopted by modern entities, most notably the indie folk band The Decemberists. Frontman Colin Meloy chose the name to draw on both the historical drama of the 1825 uprising and the general melancholy associated with the month of December.

Did The Decemberists sing any songs about Russia? Yes, they did:

Yes, The Decemberists sing the song "When the War Came" (from their 2006 album The Crane Wife), which is explicitly set in Russia. The song tells the true story of the agricultural scientists and botanists at the Vavilov Institute in Leningrad during World War II. To protect a massive, priceless seed bank from being eaten by the starving, besieged population, the scientists made a pact to guard the seeds and tragically starved to death in the process.

 The Decemberists are famous (in my mind) for The Mariner's Revenge Song.

Boogie Belgique - Forever and Ever

Boogie Belgique - Forever and Ever (Official Music Video)
Boogie Belgique

Cool tune. Video appears to be San Francisco traffic circa 1970. Also cool.

Urban Hike

Maynard Ferguson - Gonna fly now - Mike Douglas Show 1977
4greatmf

The Adaptive Curmugeon has a fine story about urban hiking wherein he mentions the above tune.

The Curmudgeon’s Urban Hike: Part 2

Amerimacka - The Cosmic Game

Amerimacka - The Cosmic Game
Thievery Corporation

I really like the horns that play early on then again at the 4 minute mark.

I'm thinking that everything we have built are all devices to expand the reach of the most savage animals on the planet. Humans, shoot, all living things are almost infinitely complex. No matter how much we have learned about the human body, we have only scratched the surface. Everything we have figured out is like a cheat code to get us past some obstacle. Someday, maybe, we will understand it all, but I suspect it will be more than one person can comprehend. We might need a hive mind to be able to really understand it all. Some people might be okay with being a member of hive mind, but I suspect most people won't be. Or maybe I overestimate the desire for independent thought.

I've been hearing the argument about capitalism versus socialism since forever. It occurs to me that the big problem with capitalism is that it makes no provision for anyone but the winners. As we develop new technologies, all those who learned a trade under the old ways will find themselves out of a job. Some of the new kids will learn the new ways and be incorporated into the capitalist hive, but because they are more productive, the hive won't need as many of them, so all the excluded are going to be pushed out to the edges. Problem lately is that productivity has been improving faster so we have new waves of technology constantly rolling over the landscape. These wave went from 10,000 years (think fire and ax) to 1,000 years (stone buildings) to 100 years (sailing ships) to ten years (rockets and satellites) to one year (smart phones) to monthly (I can barely keep up) to daily (I'm swamped) to hourly (we're all swept away).

All this talk getting rid of billionaires isn't helping. Take a billion dollars from one person and distribute it to ten million people and each person gets $100, which might buy a tank of gas and, if you're lucky, a six pack of beer. And a week later, where are you? Howling for another billionaire. You would need 50 billionaires to get everyone $100 a week for a year. That ain't gonna work.

We've seen that welfare doesn't really work. Giving money to the poor has just given us a permanent underclass. The biggest problem is that it is very difficult to organize a group of people into a productive operation. The problem is not that we have a shortage of organizers. We have plenty of organizers doing non-productive things, like running scam calling centers, or defrauding the government. To build a productive organization you need an idea that is a least plausible, and someone who is willing to take the gamble that it will pay off. It might work out and it might not, but someone has to be willing to try.

But all this fussing about jobs and housing and war is just avoiding the elephant in the room - the umpteen zillion old folks on social security and Medicare. All I can see is that inflation is going to continue to increase. I suspect it might be ten years before the rate starts going up monthly. About then the rate will start going up exponentially and within months we'll be using trillion dollar bank notes to buy groceries. That's when people will start using the Chinese Yen or Crypto-bit strings.

Boston - More Than a Feeling)

Boston - More Than a Feeling (Official HD Video)
Boston

Heard this in the car this afternoon, can't remember the last time I heard it. From 1976 if you are counting.

FC Kahuna - Hayling

FC Kahuna - Hayling [Official Video]
Skint Records

Blasting

Bachman Turner Overdrive - You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet 1974 Video Sound HQ
NEA ZIXNH

It's a nice day today, so I've got the windows down in my car, cruising up Highway 217 and this tune comes on the radio. Actually, YouTube Music via my smartphone and then through a headphone cable to the radio. So this tune comes on and it's a banger, so I wanna hear it loud. But I've got the windows down. Ever notice that nobody ever drives with the windows down anymore? Anyway, back to the radio. Can the radio handle it? And more importantly, can the speakers? I've dealt with dead speakers before (for example) and I don't want that. Unfortunately the only way to find out if they can take it is to turn up the volume, so I did. All the way to 35. Normally I'll have it around 15 or so when I am driving around in town, 25 MPH or less. On the highway with the windows up I'll turn it up to 20 to 25. This 35 business is uncharted territory, but the radio and the speakers handled it just fine. I think full volume on this radio is 40 or 50. Never tried it.

I think somebody spent a couple of bucks on the sound system before I got the car. The radio is a Kenwood with a detachable faceplate. It has one big knob that, besides turning like a volume control, it also acts like joystick to do I dunno what. I kind of learned a couple of things, but then I started using my smartphone and forgot all about the front panel controls. Now I use the buttons on the steering wheel. On the right side of the wheel I have buttons for the cruise control, which I use the heck out of. The stereo controls are on the left side of wheel. They allow me to changed the volume and channel and also mode. It has five or six modes (USD, CD, Radio, Blank/Inactive?, and Auxiliary, which is the one I use with my smartphone). So I no longer even have to touch the front panel.

10 Hits from the 1960s

Hits from 60s
Chuck Pergiel

Haven't heard some of these for a long time, but I totally remember them.

New Ear

Still Machine - Echoes Within (Official Music Video)
Someoddpilot Records

I dunno about this tune. It's not pop-rock with snappy lyrics and a cool beat. Atmospheric is what I say now. We shall see. But this story on Willamette Week is why I'm posting the tune:

Portland’s Salvo Beta Releases New Music for the First Time in Decades by Daniel Bromfield

A cochlear implant has inspired Sean Wolfe to try making music in a new way.

Salvo Beta, the project of Portland electronic musician Sean Wolfe, just put out its first new music in nearly 25 years. And in order to make it, Wolfe had to learn to hear music in a totally new way.

His two remixes of the Chicago band Still Machines’ song “Echoes Within” are directly inspired by his experience with a cochlear implant, or CI—a surgically implanted prosthesis he received in 2024 after losing most of the hearing in his right ear.

“There’s basically a wire with a bunch of electrodes, and each electrode only triggers a certain frequency band,” Wolfe explains. “The in-between sounds are kind of weird.”

In order to achieve the desired effect on the remix, Wolfe manipulated a Moog synth sound through spectral shaping, a production technique that allows producers to alter individual frequencies. The result sounds something like a bell pinging underwater; the post-punk source material is clear, but the music sounds waterlogged.

“One of the things that really kind of shaped how I started making the music is inferring how frequencies can be shifted and perceived by someone like me, who has one of these CIs,” he says.

Twinkle, Twinkle Little Spy by Len Deighton

1958 The first prototype ammonia maser in front of its inventor Charles H. Townes. The ammonia nozzle is at left in the box, the four brass rods at center are the quadrupole state selector, and the resonant cavity is at right. The 24 GHz microwaves exit through the vertical waveguide Townes is adjusting. At bottom are the vacuum pumps.

This story is set in the 1970s, near as I can tell.

I'm gonna give this book a 4. I was gonna give it a solid 3.5, but goodreads doesn't allow half points. First off, I was able to read the whole thing in four days. Given that it often takes me months to get through a book, that's pretty good. Of course, time spent reading the book depends on whether the story gets a hold of me or not. This one has espionage, a doll, a dollop of science, and a heaping spoonful of the KGB (Soviet secret police), so yeah, right up my alley.

The story tells us of Bekuv, a Soviet MASER expert defecting to the USA, his wife and the CIA agents and MI6 agent assigned to pick him up. They pick him up in the Sahara desert, take him to Washington D. C. Talking to Bekuv, our agents start to hone in on a leak somewhere in the US government. Eventually their focus lands on one guy and the whole story explodes. There is a hostage scene at the airport that makes no sense, but then maybe if you are suddenly feeling this extreme pressure, you wouldn't be making any sense either. So maybe realistic. Probably wouldn't be handled like this now, but we've had fifty years of studying hostage situations, so we might do better.

Now we're back in the Sahara desert at a secret Soviet satellite communications station. The Soviets have set up shop in an old fortress with sixty foot walls. Inside the fort are two satellite antennas, each sixty feet in diameter, along with a helicopter. I'm thinking such an establishment would need to be at least 500 feet square. I looked for old fortress and satellite stations and found plenty of old satellite stations and plenty of old forts, so many that I haven't been able sort them all out. Did not find a Russian satellite station set up in an old fort, but that doesn't mean it wasn't there.

Both the US and Soviet governments want Bekuv because his knowledge of MASERs, but his interest lies entirely in communicating with alien civilizations. Quasar CTA-102 get mentioned on page 52. Look it up on Wikipedia and we find this line:

"In 1963 Nikolai Kardashev proposed that the then-unidentified radio source could be evidence of a Type II or III extraterrestrial civilization on the Kardashev scale."

Algeria
Blue are mentioned in the book. Purple are old fortresses.

I made a map with all the places mentioned in the book, well, at least all of the ones I made note of. The map also has a couple of giant Soviet radio telescopes cause that's what our man Bekuv would have liked to get his hands on.

Notes:

• Chapter 1 Page 1 Adrar Algeria
• Chapter 3 

GAZ-69



• Page 13 GAZ 59A Russian four-wheel drive field car does not exist so we have GAZ-69 
• Page 16 Dornier Skyservant

Desert Tour in a VW Bus

• Page 17 bright new VW bus marked Dempsey Desert Tours
• Chapter 4 
• Page 19 Washington Square New York University

Fats Waller plays Alligator Crawl (piano solo, 1935)
gullivior
• Page 23 Alligator Crawl

Chinoiserie

• Page 23 "it was all chinoiserie and high camp, with lanterns and gold-plated Buddhas"
• Chapter 6 

Dmitri Shostakovich - Waltz No. 2
The Wicked North

• page 43 Shostakovich. Soviet composer and pianist.

Pulsar P3 - When a Digital Watch cost more than a Rolex - 1970s LEDs
Techmoan

Page 49 Pulsar wrist watch

Blazar CTA 102

• Page 52 Quasar CTA-102, 
• Page 52 1924 Society - There are a bunch of 1924 Societies, but no UFO related ones. However, 1924 is the year Edwin Hubble proved there were other galaxies outside of the Milky Way. Gawd, why do we have such a pansy ass name for our galaxy? Shouldn't it be something like 'The God King Galaxy', but in Latin so it's impressive.
• Chapter 12 'No Extradition' graffiti in Ireland. It was frequently used to protest the transfer of Republican prisoners from the Republic of Ireland or Northern Ireland to prisons in the United Kingdom.
• Chapter 14

Perry Point VA Medical Center

• page 127 Commodore Perry US Navy psychiatric hospital

Ilyushin Il-62

• Page 192 Ilyushin airliner

أم كلثوم - فكروني - بعد ما اتعودت بعدك غصب عني [Umm Kulthum – Remind Me – After I Had Grown Accustomed to Your Absence, Against My Will]
Rasha Gamal

• Page 195 Om Kalsum the Ella Fitzgerald of Arab pop
• Page 198 the Atlas Mountains and then the Ouled Nail and then Loghouat
• Page 206 In-Salah, Adrar, Reggane, Timbuktu

AKMS machine pistol

• Page 214 AKMS machine pistol

I'm thinking I need to look into this business of Soviet satellite communications stations and old forts in the Sahara. And MASERs. We shall see.

Bonus. 2nd thing that popped up when I searched for Ouled Nail.

Dance of the Ouled Nail
MosaicDanceTheaterCo

Previous post about this book.

Music Playlists

Whenever I post a music video I add it to an annual playlist. Here is a list of such lists:

• Pergelator 2026
• Pergelator 2025
• Pergelator 2024
• Pergelator 2023
• Pergelator 2022
• Pergelator 2021
• Pergelator 2020
• Pergelator 2019
• Pergelator 2018
• Pergelator 2017
• Pergelator 2016
• Pergelator 2015
• Pergelator 2014
• Pergelator 2013
• Pergelator 2012 A
• Pergelator 2012 B
• Pergelator 2011
• Pergelator 2010

I don't know why there are two for 2012. Gimme a break, it was 14 years ago. I tried checking to see if all the songs in the lists are also in the blog, but that exhausted my patience very quickly. Might be able to get AI to do it for me, but I'm not sure I want to get that involved.

I probably should put this list in the sidebar, but I haven't made any edits to this blog's layout in a coons age and I don't see me changing my ways any time soon.

There were also two playlists for 2013 but one had over 60 videos, and not all of them were music videos, so I changed the name. 

Hot Rod Race

Hot Rod Race 1
Arkie Shibley & His Mountain Dew Boys - Topic

Doom scrolling through YouTube and this short pops up. The tune catches my ear so I have to track it down. It's Hot Rod Race from 1950. Some people think this was the first Rock and Roll song. Reminds me of Hot Rod Lincoln by Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen.

Edwyn Collins - A Girl Like You

Edwyn Collins - A Girl Like You (Official Video)
Edwyn Collins

Song came out 1994. It's been on my playlist since forever, thought for sure I would have posted it, but I haven't, so here it is.

Always Remember Us This Way Remix

Always Remember Us This Way
Aspinal - Topic

Just popped in my head this morning. Used Google song search to track it down. I could remember it perfectly in my head but I could not sing it for shit. Google was still able to sort it out. Weird.

Morcheeba - The sea

Morcheeba - The sea (Live) - Le Grand Studio RTL
Le Grand Studio RTL

Mah Nà Mah Nà

manamana
Evgeniy Jeka

"Mah Nà Mah Nà" is a popular song by Italian composer Piero Umiliani. It originally appeared in the Italian film Sweden: Heaven and Hell (Svezia, inferno e paradiso). On its own it was a minor radio hit in the United States and in Britain, but became better known internationally after it was used by The Muppets and on The Benny Hill Show.

The Passenger

Iggy Pop - The Passenger (Official Video)
Iggy Pop Official

Get Smart

Melbourne Ska Orchestra - Get Smart (Official FULL Version)
Melbourne Ska Orchestra

The television show Get Smart ran from 1965 to 1970, which was when I was in high school. No wonder this tune is embedded in my brain.