Halloween Again

Today is Halloween (All Hallows’ Eve, All Saints’ Eve), the yearly celebration which uses “humor and ridicule to confront the power of death,” according to Sam Portaro in A Companion to the Lesser Feasts and Fasts. Are you now at work in costume? Did you pack a brown paper bag with soul cakes and an apple for lunch? Did you bring a thermos of hot apple cider – made with a dash of cinnamon? Me neither.

Tomorrow is the Gaelic festival of Samhain, marking the end of the harvest season and the beginning of the darker half of the year. Samhain starts at sunset on October 31 and ends at sunset November 1. From sunset until sunrise, this is a liminal time of year – a threshold in which the supernatural beings that walk amongst humans can more easily enter our world. Tonight, you should sit near a bonfire with your friends. It will help to keep away the Aos Sí – the survivors of the Tuatha Dé Danann – whom you certainly don’t want to anger or insult. To learn more about Samhain, the Aos Sí, and the Otherworld, consult your neopagan handbook. Or Google. Whatever.

Tasmin Archer

The song of the day is Sleeping Satellite from the 1992 album Great Expectations by English pop singer Tasmin Archer. This extended version video was edited by DJ Rafa Burgos (Rafael Burgos Hernández).

Pentatonix, the Album

After winning the third season of NBC’s a cappella talent competition, The Sing-Off, the singers of Pentatonix moved to Los Angeles to begin their music careers. Winning the competition meant the band had won a recording contract with a major record label, Epic Records. A week after moving to L.A., the label dropped them, telling the band, “An a cappella group will never make it in the music industry.”

Pentatonix didn’t agree. They forged ahead, posting songs to YouTube that garnered views – hundreds of millions of views. They distributed music through a small record label called Madison Gate Records. Their success attracted the attention of RCA Records, which bought Madison Gate’s contract with Pentatonix.

From 2012 to 2014, Pentatonix released three EPs, a compilation album, and two full-length albums of Christmas music. In 2014, their second holiday release, That's Christmas to Me, became the highest-charting holiday album since 1962 and the fourth-best-selling album in the United States. The band, with producer Ben Bram, won Best Arrangement, Instrumental or A Cappella for "Daft Punk" at the 57th Grammy Awards.

Last week, Pentatonix released its latest album, self-titled Pentatonix. This week the numbers are in for the Billboard 200 album chart, and Pentatonix made history. Their album is the first a cappella album to debut at number one on the Billboard 200 chart.

In less than four years, Pentatonix have gone from hearing they “will never make it in the music industry” to being a Grammy-winning, multi-platinum-selling band. One could list a number of reasons for why it happened: talent, skill, astuteness with social media. But as important as any other reason, it happened because they believed in themselves. Congratulations, Pentatonix.

The Iran Deal

Iran deal.

In 2009, a week before Obama took office, Republican Senator Mitch McConnell said, “Say no to everything he does, no matter what it is.” Is this the way government is supposed to work?

In 2010, when Obama issued a postelection invitation for Congressional leaders to join him for dinner to discuss “how we can move the American people’s agenda forward,” not one Republican from the House or Senate showed up. They said they just didn’t have the time.

Six countries have jointly negotiated a nuclear deal with Iran. Those countries are the five permanent members of the UN security council (China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, United States) plus Germany.

What does the deal require of Iran? Iran must eliminate its stockpile of medium-enriched uranium and reduce its stockpile of low-enriched uranium by 98%. For the next 15 years Iran may not buy any new uranium-enriching or heavy-water facilities.

A new poll finds that 59% of Americans support making a deal with Iran that restricts their nuclear program in exchange for loosening sanctions. Two thirds of Democrats and 47% of Republicans support a deal.

It isn’t just Obama that wants a deal; it’s also the other five world powers who have been negotiating with Iran. The deal is supported by 60 nuclear security experts and by more than 100 American ambassadors.

The deal requires Iran to get rid of 98% of their enriched uranium, reduce their number of centrifuges from 20,000 to the 6000 oldest centrifuges, and allow constant monitoring of their two big reactors. One of those reactors is inside a mountain and would likely not be destroyed by an air strike.

If we don’t do the deal, many of the sanctions are going to go away anyway, because the other countries are not going to continue them. So do the deal and get all the above, or do nothing and get nothing.

Ronald Reagan tried to trade weapons to Iran in return for hostages. We took Iran’s side in the Iran-Iraq war. We took Iraq’s side in Operation El Dorado Canyon. We shot down an Iranian airliner, killing 270 Iranian civilians.

Do nothing, do the deal, bomb, or invade are our four options. If we do the deal, the last two options are still available. If we do the deal, maybe we won’t have to use those last two options.

MØ

The song of the day is 2015's Kamikaze by Danish singer and songwriter MØ (Karen Marie Ørsted). The song was written by MØ for her upcoming second studio album and was produced by Diplo and Jr. Blender.

Outrage

People are outraged again, as is the fashion these days. This time the outrage is over a school resource officer who arrested a female high school student. The student was disruptive and refused to leave the class when asked to do so, so the officer was called to make the student leave. The officer asked the student to leave several times, but the student refused. So the officer tackled the student to the floor, handcuffed her, and took her away.

When I was a kid, that kind of thing wouldn’t happen. Every student knew that “acting-out” would result in a phone call from the teacher or principal to the student’s parents, and that phone call would result in the student being punished by a parent. Back then, punishment didn’t involve time-outs or being grounded. Punishment was corporeal and usually involved a leather belt or a switch.

But we live in more enlightened times and corporeal punishment is frowned upon. So what should the officer and/or teacher have done? It’s simple: make the student want to leave the room. Give her motivation. There are so many ways. A few that come to mind, from least to most unpleasant, are:

Encourage her to leave by giving her a wet willy. In both ears, if necessary.

Tell her, “If you want to stay, you can stay until your parents come and pick you up. They’ll love that.”

Threaten her with summer school.

Threaten her with a cream pie in the face. Show her the pie.

Put a tarantula on her desk.

Make her watch reruns of Hee Haw and The Brady Bunch until she begs for euthanasia.

With a little thought, anyone should be able to come up with a long list of effective motivations. When a teacher asks a student to stop misbehaving and the student says, “No,” – what the student is really saying is, “What’s my motivation?”

And if these motivations fail, well … did you know a cattle prod can be had for as little as 25 bucks? Batteries not included.

Broccoli Again?

The World Health Organization says processed meats like bacon and cold cuts cause cancer in humans. A 50-gram portion, equivalent to 2 or 3 slices of bacon, increases your chance of getting colorectal cancer by 18 percent. And cheese and sugar are as addictive as a drug. (There goes pizza and cola.) And don’t get me started on hotdogs. Too late, I already got started on hotdogs (see previous post).

Oh dear. What can we eat?

Doctors say, “Just replace all those bad things with broccoli.” It’s a healthy food and will “help you maintain a healthy weight and a thinner waist line.” Well, of course it will. Because every time you want to eat, you’ll look at your bag of broccoli and you’ll decide you’re not really that hungry. “Broccoli again? I’ll eat later … maybe.”

My advice is: eat what makes you happy. Life is a terminal condition. No matter how healthy you try to be, you’re going to die. You might as well enjoy yourself on the way to your funeral. Just keep in mind this line from Andria by 2nd century B.C. Roman playwright Terence: “Moderation in all things.”

Hot Dog News

In the news recently: a company called Clear Labs has been studying food using genetic analysis. The project is called Clear Food. Their first study was on hotdogs. If you love hotdogs, you may want to stop reading now.

Ok, you’re still with me. Here’s the result of their study: of 345 hotdogs and sausages from 75 brands analyzed for the hotdog report, 14.4% “were problematic in some way.”

Ten percent of vegetarian hotdogs contain meat. The study I read didn’t say how much meat.

Some hotdogs contain meat not listed on the label. Three percent contain unlisted pork. That doesn’t bother me personally. If a turkey dog contains a little chicken, I’m okay with that. If a beef hotdog contains a little turkey, I’m okay with that. If a hotdog contains cat or dog or armadillo, that is a problem.

Human DNA was found in two percent of hotdogs. I assume that’s from people coughing or sneezing or spitting on the meat. I’m not okay with human DNA in my hotdogs. On the other hand, it would not surprise me to learn that a lot of restaurant food contains human DNA.

Some companies exaggerate the amount of protein in their hotdogs by as much as 250 percent. My reaction: meh. People don’t eat hotdogs because they want protein. People eat hotdogs because with the appropriate toppings, they taste so darn good. Chili-with-onion dogs taste better than chili with onion. Slaw dogs taste better than coleslaw. You wouldn’t eat hotdog relish out of the jar, but put it on a hotdog and you have a tasty treat. And isn’t that what it’s all about?

Bottom line: enjoy your hotdogs. Don’t spoil the occasion by thinking about what you might really be eating.

The 1975

The song of the day is 2014's Chocolate by British rock band The 1975.

What’s In A Name

Today I was listening to a television news journalist and I heard, for the first time, someone correctly pronounce the name Fukushima. (Fukushima is the Japanese city that had a nuclear disaster after it was struck by a tsunami in 2011.)

It doesn’t surprise me that people mispronounce names. But in the age of Internet search engines, it’s so easy to learn the correct pronunciation of a word that it’s almost a mark of laziness when people don’t bother to do so. Especially if your job involves speaking to millions of people.

Ever since the nuclear accident, most Americans have pronounced Fukushima this way:

fuu kuu SHEEE ma

I suppose people do this to make it sound similar to another widely mispronounced name: Hiroshima. Most Americans pronounce that name this way:

hero SHEEE ma

Both pronunciations are wrong. Fukushima is correctly pronounced this way:

f’KUU sh’ma  (KUU is lightly accented.)

The schwa is an “uh” sound represented by the symbol ə. I replaced it with an apostrophe because Japanese speakers put so little stress on those syllables that the schwa sound virtually disappears and you only hear the consonant.

Similarly, Hiroshima is pronounced this way:

hih ROH she ma (The 1st i sounds like the i in sit; ROH is lightly accented.)

If you’re on television, try to get it right! It’s why you’re paid the big bucks.