Review of Peter Knight’s Conspiracy Culture: “Rumour has it that you no longer have to be paranoid
to believe that there exists a conspiracy to spread
conspiracy theories about everything.” New Statesman

Thanks to a reader for pointing me to further discussion of the Death Cycle of Presidents Elected in a Zero Year, which I discussed awhile back. I was not aware of Tecumseh’s curse.

Hollywood Prepares to Fight File-Swappers. Although no widespread Internet film-swapping system has yet emerged, Hollywood executives are running scared, studying the Napster phenomenon as the inevitable digital distribution of movies looms nearer. The Standard

Stars quit charity in corruption scandal: “Luciano Pavarotti has walked out of the high-profile overseas aid
charity, War Child UK, with five other celebrity patrons after
discovering that its co-founder had taken a bribe from contractors
building a prestigious music centre named after him in Bosnia.

The opera maestro – who along with the rock musician Brian Eno persuaded
other stars like Elton John, Bono and Eric Clapton to perform in
concerts and donate royalties to raise millions of pounds for the
charity – quit after discovering that two people involved with the
organisation had taken bribes and that there were concerns over
financial and management controls. Pavarotti himself has raised more
than $10m (£6.6m).

High profile patrons of the charity included the playwright Sir Tom
Stoppard, film and Royal Shakespeare Company actress Juliet Stevenson,
pop star David Bowie, and MTV chief Brent Hanson.” The Guardian

Un-American Activities: The rehabilitation of Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his redbaiting? New York Review of Books

For those few of us who listen: two Village Voice critics grapple with the state of ‘serious’ music today. First, from Kyle Gann, Death Wish “New music is at an impasse — you can’t convince people it exists.

There is a certain small culture around it, but it is impossible to get power brokers outside that culture to believe that anything is going on. The offcial line is, classical music is finished, a closed book, Glass, Reich, and maybe John Zorn the end of history. And it does not help that jazz is ever more officially referred to as “America’s classical music.” First of all, what is that supposed to do for jazz? Legitimize it, make it blandly respectable and therefore ignorable? And it slaps those composers whose training is classical out of the water. With the Wynton Marsalis crowd threatening to bring jazz history to a close and turn it into a repertoire museum, jazz musicians who believe in the ongoing evolution of the art are in the same boat as the new-music people. We need to band together.”

And Voice jazz critic Larry Blumenfeld <a href=”http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0102/blumenfeld.shtml
“>blasts the Ken Burns documentary currently on PBS, echoing much the same concern about the Marsalis hegemony, as I wrote about several months ago. Burns has said that this is a series that isn’t supposed to be for those who already listen to jazz, and dismisses criticism from the jazz critic community, who have complained that it is unduly classicist at the expense of the living tradition of improvisation and the “embrace of entropy” that lies at the heart of jazz. “Burns’s film may raise jazz’s water level in our culture at large, as the record-company executives hope, but it may also signal a final dry season for the music’s forward flow.”

Itch Gets Its Own Neurons. It has long been thought that the itch sensation is conveyed by pain neurons, and that that is why scratching, which stimulates the pain sensors, can relieve an itch. But now it has been found that there are specific, separate neurons in the CNS that respond to itch.

“Eco-pornography”: The latest book by a Pacific Northwest journalist who has given much aid and comfort to environmentalists throughout his career commits the heresy of saying that the “handbasket-to-hell” pronouncements of the Greenpeace set are dead wrong, and that things are improving. He cites new oceanographic and marine biological data to suggest that the notion of a “sacred balance” is askew — the North Pacific ecosystem undergoes dramatic periodic “sea changes” of its own accord independent of human impact. Terry Glavin believes that public despair about environmental degradation is another version of millennialism. He cites a long list of species whose numbers have been rising exponentially over recent decades, and he says the First Peoples fished out the salmon to a similar extent to modern commercial fishing endeavors long before the European presence in the Northwest. National Post

For the perfect party, invite a mathematician. A mathematical theory predicts how large a gathering of people must become before it inevitably breaks down into cliques of mutual interest and mutual dislike.

The same mathematical column has the following tidbit which I find fascianting (and am clipping and saving) but is guaranteed to have only limited appeal, I fear:

Is there
a formula for working out the day of the week
corresponding to a date of birth?

Indeed there is. Suppose the date is September 23,
1959. First, take the final two digits of the year (in
this case, 59), divide them by four, ignoring any
remainder (14), and add the result to the original
two digits (giving 73). Now add to this the day of
the month (23) and divide the result by seven, this
time keeping only the remainder (five).

Next, add the “month number”: six for January (five
in leap years), two for February (one in leap years);
two for March; five for April; zero for May; three for
June; five for July; one for August; four for
September; six for October; two for November; four
for December. Finally, add two and divide the result
by seven, again keeping only the remainder. The
result is the day of the week on which you were
born, starting from one for Sunday. So September
23, 1959, was a Wednesday. The Telegraph

[If you try this for dates >12/31/99, instead of using just the last two digits of the year, you have to use the number of years since 1900, i.e. ‘100’ for the year 2000 etc.]

Violent Children: Where Do We Point the Finger of Blame? The author, a clinical psychologist from Cornell, proposes an “accumulation-of-risk” model that he hopes will stop the finger-pointing. Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine