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Apparently, lots of famous musicians have died at the age of 27. From this fact resulted a legend that this is an “unlucky” age, and that musicians are more likely to die at this age.

However, this has now been proven untrue by scientists. According to the Washington Post: 

“The researchers — three statisticians and one health economist — devised a study to determine whether musicians who had achieved success (as defined by their having had a number-one album on the British charts between 1956 and 2007) were more likely than the average person in that country to die at that particular age. Their sample included 1,046 musicians of all ilks and genres (among them, the authors note, several Muppets), 522 of whom were designated as being “at risk” for having achieved their success before turning 27.”

Okay, as you may have guessed, this is a joke. For some reason, this particular journal, the BMJ, always does some sort of joke issue in December.

On the other hand, they actually did write a whole article about it.  I mean, they did it in jest, but apparently someone actually did spend time putting it together. And, as you may see by the Washington Post article and this CNN article, the press seems to treat it almost like an actual science story.

Seems to me like a waste of time, but whatever.

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In a distant land, older than the Mayan,
There lived a man—a populist lion—
Who fought for The People like old Bill Bryan
   Would also do one day.
The land wherein dwelt this man
Was governed on a monarchical plan;
Neither democratic nor republican—
  Only one person held sway.

Our populist friend detested this state,
Its various flaws he’d always berate.
With monarchist flunkies he liked to debate
(Till they built the guillotine.)
One day, the Queen summoned him to the palace,
He went there at once, his mind full of malice,
But on meeting her, he lost his ballasts—
   For he’d fallen in love with the Queen!
Thereafter he couldn’t bring himself to oppose
The system by which this lady arose.
He hated the Crown, but the opposite goes
   For the head that wore it.
If the point of this tale seems a little remote:
(It’s not that the people oughtn’t to vote.)
The type of the office doesn’t always connote
  The type of person who’ll go for it.

If you’re wondering what in blazes this is about, I honestly can’t tell you. I sometimes find myself making up rhymes when I’m bored or when I can’t sleep or something, and this is one such case. In style, it reminds me a lot of this, but I wasn’t consciously trying to imitate that song at all.

It’s not very good, in my opinion, but I almost had to post it because of the ease with which it came to me, just to have a record of it. And the “Mayan” thing in the first line is kind of nonsensical and pointless; it’s just an excuse because, for some reason, I really got attached to the “Bill Bryan” line.

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To what extent is it possible to satirize satire, to mock at mockery?

I remember reading a parody of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas written by A.P. Herbert once and not liking it very much. It’s not that I like Gilbert and Sullivan so much that I can’t abide any mockery of them (I don’t think) but somehow it just seemed… hollow. Because it was mocking the conventions of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, which are themselves mocking conventions of other plays. It seemed to me to be one level of mockery too far. You can make fun of something “serious”,–i.e. the conventions of stage tragedy–but you can’t make fun of something making fun of something serious.*

And it’s not just this, but I’ve run across things now and then that try to make fun of something that is making fun of something else, and it rarely seems to work. Like when MAD magazine would do a parody of a comedy film or program, it just felt weak to me, even if it was not an especially funny comedy. Whereas, when they parody a serious, or at least non-comic, film, it was usually pretty good. (I haven’t read MAD in years, however, so I can’t point to recent examples.)

What do you think?

*This raises the question: can you make fun of something making fun of something making fun of something  serious? I don’t know, but I expect it takes calculus to find the answer.

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According to this article, party balloon suppliers are facing a shortage of the key input helium.

I have only an amateurish understanding of anything related to science, but I do remember learning that helium is the second most common element in the universe. So, if we’re really running out of it, and this shortage is not merely an artificial one, it seems to me that the remedy would involve travel to other parts of the universe–maybe just within the solar system, but it would still mean quite a bit of work. On the other hand, it might spur on the creation of an interstellar economy. That would be cool. Although I doubt party balloons will sufficiently justify the costs of it.

(Also, the word shortage is confusing because it has two meanings: the everyday usage of “not much of the stuff”, and the economist’s usage, which means a failure of supply and demand to equilibrate properly, usually due to some issue with the price mechanism. The point is, in the economic sense, you could have almost zero quantity of the good and high demand and still not have a shortage, if the market is operating efficiently.)

And once again, I remind you that my knowledge of science is purely from things I happen to read and things I vaguely recall from school. If anyone with actual knowledge in relevant fields reads this, feel free to comment.

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Via The Escapist, a very amusing article by Lt. Col. Dan Ward of the U.S. Air Force that criticizes the wastefulness and mismanagement the Evil Galactic Empire demonstrated in the creation of the Death Star.

It’s a delightful piece, but in addition, Lt. Col. Ward makes some very important points about organizations and management.

Also, as I think about it, I realize that there is, tragically, a parallel in military history to the Death Star:  the Japanese battleship Yamato. It was a giant and fearsome ship, yet it was utterly squandered in the war, needlessly wasting the ship and the lives of the men aboard.

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I enjoy reading about history for many reasons, but one is that you come across little things like this story from the Wikipedia article about Jim Bridger:

“Supposedly one of Bridger’s favorite yarns to tell to greenhorns was about being pursued by one hundred Cheyenne warriors. After being chased for several miles, Bridger found himself at the end of a box canyon, with the Indians bearing down on him. At this point, Bridger would go silent, prompting his listener to ask, ‘What happened then, Mr. Bridger?’ Bridger would reply, ‘They killed me.'”

I’ve known guys who told stories like that.

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Okay, I don’t get this controversy over the Michele Bachmann Newsweek cover. I mean, she always looks like that, doesn’t she? Her eyes are just strange-looking, in my opinion.

It’s like complaining that a picture made Jimmy Carter’s teeth look funny, or that a picture of Eisenhower made him look like he was bald.

Anyway, Bachmann should henceforth use the “Kubrick stare“. It works for her, I think.

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It strikes me as ironic that at the end of a week in which David Brooks was denounced by Conservatives for a column he wrote, the Conservatives also have been unwittingly arguing for one of Brooks’ old ideas: “National Greatness Conservatism“. There’s quite a bit of chatter on Breitbart sites and the like about how the end of the space shuttle program is another symptom of Obama not believing in “American exceptionalism”. Even the guy filling in for Glenn Beck yesterday was talking about it.*

If you ask me, this is where the Nationalistic part of the Party really shows up. They don’t really hate government, they only want a government that aggrandizes American superiority. They will never want to cut Space spending, and they sure as hell will never cut the closely-related Military spending.

Personally, I think both are of tremendous importance, but the Space shuttle program needed to be ended. Human beings have a difficult time in space, and I personally believe that the near to mid-future of space exploration lies, as it should, with remotely controlled machines, like the Mars rovers etc.

*I’d like to provide you with a link to a transcript of this show or something, but I’m dashed if I can find it. It seems to be impossible to get at anything on the Glenn Beck site without taking a loyalty vow to the Esoteric Order of Glenn Beck.

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It ſeems the Preſident called on Congreſs to curtail their July 4th receſs Harry Reid agreed to this, ſaying “the Senate will reconvene on Tueſday the day after the fourth”.

It is my opinion that both the Preſident and Congreſsperſons ſhould have to work through the fourth of July. However, in honor of the holiday, they ſhould be required to do ſomething ſpecial.

You know how athletic teams ſometimes wear “throwback” uniforms? That is juſt what our politicians ought to do on July 4th. They ſhould be required to wear wigs and tri-corner hats and all of that on July 4th.

By the way, I remember the U.S. Army ſuggeſted they would adopt “throwbacks” for their April Fools’ day joke this year. I was trying to think of ſomething ſimilar to do on this blog…

(Explanation here.)

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In light of this scandal, I felt obligated to revisit an old question of mine: why must all scandals now have the word “gate” conjugated with some key word? I understand the Watergate allusion, but a person investigating what Watergate was based on the use of the term in the vulgate would wrongly think Nixon must have instigated some water-related scandal.

Well, I investigated, and it seems it was William Safire who propagated this. It’s an annoying little thing, and ought to be expurgated. One or two such references are amusing, but in the aggregate they mitigate the humor of the thing.