SILICON SOAPWARE wafting your way along the slipstreams of the Info Highway from Bubbles = Tom Digby = bubbles@well.sf.ca.us http://www.well.com/~bubbles/ Issue #87 New Moon of February 11, 2002 Contents copyright 2002 by Thomas G. Digby, with a liberal definition of "fair use". In other words, feel free to quote excerpts elsewhere (with proper attribution), post the entire zine (verbatim, including this notice) on other boards that don't charge specifically for reading the zine, link my Web page, and so on, but if something from here forms a substantial part of something you make money from, it's only fair that I get a cut of the profits. Silicon Soapware is available via email with or without reader feedback. Details of how to sign up are at the end. ********************* There's a commercial on the radio that starts out with a line about trusting that the sun will rise tomorrow. Yes, most of us do trust in the sun rising and setting. But nowadays we have more than mere faith. If something were to happen to the sun during the night, somebody on the daytime side of the world would notice and put the news on the Internet, giving the rest of the planet advance warning that it would not be rising as usual. Even if whatever happened were so catastrophic that everyone on the daytime side of the world was struck dead, people on the night side would notice the stoppage of normal Internet traffic and realize something was amiss, even if they didn't know what the problem was. So if predawn Internet traffic is more or less normal you can trust that the sun will rise. ********************* Speaking of sunrise, Groundhog Day was a few days ago. Groundhogs in various parts of the country came out of their holes around sunrise and predicted either an early spring or six more weeks of winter. Not much unusual there, since they've been doing it for years and years. But with the state of world affairs these days, I got to thinking about possible terrorists. Might they try to sabotage the various groundhogs to force six more weeks of winter, or maybe even more winter than the normal six weeks? If they're subtle enough about sabotaging the groundhogs, we may never know what hit us. It'll just be month after month of unending winter with no obvious cause. At least with nuclear winter scientists can tell that it's from all those nukes people were setting off. But groundhog sabotage may not be as obvious. So it's something we need to be especially alert for signs of, whatever those signs might be. And no, I don't know how one would sabotage groundhogs to get more winter beyond the "normal" six extra weeks. Perhaps it's best that such technical details remain classified. ********************* Talking about sunrise and related things brings up sunset, and the traditional thing about wishing on stars. The version I heard as a child was that you should wish on the first star you saw at evening twilight. But what if that's a planet? Two of the brightest star-like things in the night sky are Venus and Jupiter. Since they're bright, they're likely to be the first "stars" you see. If you wish on one of those by mistake will the wish still be given the same consideration as if you'd wished on a true star? Maybe it's OK to wish on Venus or Jupiter instead of what astronomers think of as a "star". But it kind of messes up the song: "When you wish upon Jupiter, Makes no difference ..." The scansion changes, and there may not be a good rhyme that fits. So maybe you should be careful to wish only on true stars after all. ********************* In unrelated news, I went and saw that new Mothman movie. Although I kind of liked it, most of the reviewers didn't. Maybe the giant moth creature puts out some sort of pheromone that repels movie critics? ********************* And speaking of movies, here's some news from Cartoonland: Wrong Tunnel Blamed in Truck-Train Smashup We now take you to City Hall, where a press conference is in progress on the collision between a semi truck and a freight train on Bloomthidge Mountain Road last night. The Chief Investigator is answering questions: Q: What do you mean when you say the truck driver put up the wrong tunnel? A: You may not be familiar with the way things are done here in Cartoonland. Bloomthidge Mountain Road gets relatively little traffic, so the Highway Department never bothered to dig the tunnel where the road goes under the peak. It just dead-ends into a vertical cliff face on both ends. If you want to go through, you have to put some kind of a picture of a tunnel entrance on the cliff face, then drive through the tunnel you put up the picture of. Q: You mean like they do in cartoons in the movies? A: Exactly. After all, we're in a cartoon right now. Q: So what's this "wrong tunnel" business? A: Although most drivers started out putting up pictures of the tunnel the Highway Department would have dug through Bloomthidge Mountain had they bothered to dig the tunnel, somebody eventually discovered that they had other options. They could put up a picture of some other tunnel if they wanted, and it would work just as well. And it didn't matter where the other end of that tunnel was. It could be halfway across the country, or even halfway around the world, and it would still work. Q: Sort of a cross between a short cut and the Star Trek transporter? A: Pretty much, yes. Q: Once you've gone through the tunnel and come out the other end, do you leave it behind, or is there some way you can take it down and use it again? A: You can take it down, but you have to do it off-camera when nobody's looking. And we can't talk about how it's done or what the process looks like. Q: When you put up a tunnel, what does someone at the other end see? A: We can't talk about that either. And that too always happens off- camera. Q: But again, what's this "wrong tunnel" business? A: It's customary to carry tunnels rolled up like window shades, because they're easy to handle that way. So it's not always obvious exactly what tunnel you have, although we do encourage keeping them in labeled mailing tubes or some such. It appears that somebody gave the truck driver a railroad tunnel in place of the highway tunnel he was supposed to have. So he put the tunnel up, not noticing that it had railroad tracks at the bottom instead of pavement. So just as he had gotten back into his truck and was about to start into the tunnel, along comes a freight train with boxcars full of anvils and assorted tank cars full of chemicals and another boxcar of Mad Scientist lab equipment: Ka-WHAM! Then since there were no tracks on the highway outside the tunnel to guide it, the train ran off the edge of the road into the canyon. Q: Any casualties? A: The engineer from the train is on crutches, with one leg splinted and one arm in a sling. He's expected to make a full recovery. The truck driver is worse off. He's in the hospital, where his condition is listed as "All bandaged up like a mummy, three limbs in traction." But he may be the lucky one, because there's a good chance that once the bandages come off he'll have some kind of mutant superhero powers from all those tank cars full of chemicals plus the unknown radiation from the lab equipment. Q: What kind of powers? A: Nobody knows. Scientists are analyzing the wreckage, but there's no agreement on findings. The mad scientists say the sane ones are too unimaginative to figure out the answer, while the sane scientists say the mad ones are too crazy to do anything right, including this kind of analysis. We may have to just wait and see. Q: But back on this "wrong tunnel", how did the truck driver get a railroad tunnel in the first place? A: Detectives are looking into that. One of the rival trucking companies is run by notorious criminals, and we think they may have switched tunnels as a form of sabotage. They've done other kinds of sabotage in the past, like putting darkness bulbs instead of light bulbs in other companies' headlights to make the road even darker at night than it would be with no lights at all, or swapping the gas and brake pedals, or reversing the steering wheel, or printing up fake road maps, or other stuff like that. But so far they've never succeeded at anything significant. If it's them, this would be their first major success. Q: If the truck driver does become a mutant superhero, might he be able to help? A: There's a good chance. These kinds of thing often work out that way. And that's all we have time for right now. But stay tuned for further developments. ********************* Viking Funeral on the Train This was several years ago, when a bunch of us went camping up on Mount Pleigiomorth, me and Billy and Sam and, of course, Joe. Joe was in poor health, but we didn't know how bad it really was until he just up and died. So then we had to decide what to do with the body. We didn't want to cut the trip short to go back into town, and this was before cell phones and even if we had one we wouldn't have wanted cops and coroners and such crawling around what with all the drugs we'd been doing, so we decided to bury him right there. Well, "bury" wasn't exactly the right word because he'd always said he wanted a Viking funeral, where we'd put the body on a boat and set it on fire and let it drift out to sea. So we were going to do that. Problem was, we didn't have a boat and we weren't near any big bodies of water. Then Billy suggested we use the car. We'd prop Joe up in the driver's seat with a bunch of firewood in his lap, then siphon some gas out of the tank to help get the fire going, and set the car to slowly driving down the road. So we put Joe in the driver's seat and stuck his hands onto the wheel, and started stacking the firewood. Along about that time the drugs started wearing off, so it occurred to us to take our food and camping gear and such out of the car before lighting it. And as we took the stuff we wanted to save out of the car even more of the drugs wore off and we started wondering how we'd get home once the car was all burned up and driven away. There was a railroad track a couple of miles away where a late-night freight would always stop and wait on the siding for another train to go by. So maybe we could hop the freight to get home. Then even more of the drugs wore off and we decided we didn't really want to burn up our car, and even if we did, it wouldn't drive itself very far down the road before running off into the ditch or something. Then Sam suggested we do the Viking funeral on the train. There were always a couple of empty flatcars back toward the end with loads of room for the body and the firewood and all that, and we wouldn't have to burn up our car. So we drove the car, with dead Joe and the firewood and the gas we'd siphoned out of the tank, down to where the railroad siding was. And sure enough, along about midnight the freight pulled onto the siding and stopped, and sure enough, there was an empty flatcar at the end. We didn't have much time, but we managed to get Joe's body laid out on the flatcar on top of a layer of wood, with more wood piled around, and we were even able to pour the gas and recite some poetry some of us thought we could remember, before the train started to move again. Then we lit the pyre and jumped off before the train got going too fast, and stood there reciting more poetry we thought we could remember as the whole thing receded off into the distance, becoming just a point of flickering light way across the valley. Then we went back to our camp and slept until the rest of the drugs wore off. Then it was morning, and we were supposed to head back into town that evening anyway, and sitting around the camp without Joe was kind of a bummer, especially with the drugs all worn off, so we went home a few hours early. There was a bit of an aftermath. Jim, who hadn't been able to make it that weekend, was driving around town really late that night when he stopped at a railroad crossing. And something about the train seemed very odd: The last car, a flatcar, was on fire. So we told him about Joe dying and about how although he hadn't known it, he'd been the last one of our group to ever see Joe. ********************* I was browsing around the Sunnyvale Public Library, and found a big book titled "Tuning". It's about how musical instruments were tuned in olden times. There were literally dozens of different ways to do it. The book also describes a musical concept that I had never heard of, and which our culture has apparently lost: "The characters of the keys". Musical harmony is based on a human tendency to hear frequencies related by the ratios of small integers as harmonious. Although you can tune an instrument to give perfect chords by that standard in one key, for math reasons it is impossible to make all the keys come out right. Modern equal temper spreads this error out so that all keys are "not too bad". But back before equal temper was in vogue, they used various other tunings. The simplest (just intonation) made the main chords in one key (usually C) come out perfect, while certain other keys sounded horrible. There were also various "mean tone" tunings. These made more of the different keys sound pretty good, although there were still always at least one or two in which chords didn't sound right. Some tried to tune to what we now call "equal temper" but usually did not succeed at it because they didn't have the right technical knowledge and technology. Since a given interval on the keyboard sounded smaller or larger in some keys than others, and many people could tell the difference, a given melody would sound different if you transposed it to a different key. And as mentioned above, the harmonies would sound different as well. Composers of the time knew about this, and used it. If they were writing in keys where chords wouldn't sound good they might, for example, put more emphasis on the melody, where the slightly "wrong" intervals might give it a distinctive feel that would be lost in other keys. Or they would use the out-of-tune chords to give a feeling of tension or some such. Thus "the characters of the keys". The book quotes descriptions from that time of a few keys: C major = Cheerful and pure, virginal chastity. D major = Joyful and militant, mirthful, triumphant, victorious. E-flat minor = Horrible, frightful, a soul's greatest distress. Although I didn't see it mentioned in the book, I suspect that's why so many classical works have the key as part of the title: "Prelude and Fugue in F Minor" or whatever. The composer was evoking a certain mood that would be lost if you transposed the work to some other key. And audiences may well have known what the different keys felt like, so the name of the key in the title meant something to them. But now, with true equal temper, those differences have vanished. Today, if you transpose a piece of music it sounds higher or lower, but is otherwise pretty much the same. I'm reminded of the line from "Both Sides Now": "Something's lost, but something's gained, in living every day." Although we've lost the perfect harmonies of just intonation and the ability to alter the feel of a piece of music by what key it's in, we've gained the ability to change keys to accommodate high or low singing voices, and to write songs that change key in mid-stream or that use chord changes that would not have worked under the old systems. And we can still invoke some of the moods by using complex chords with various degrees of dissonance in them. The book was "Tuning" by Owen H. Jorgensen, 784.1928 J. There's a detailed review of it at http://www.foxtail.com/Tech/jorgensen.html Also, if your local library is Dewey Decimal, you might want to browse the shelves around 784.1* for whatever else on the mechanics of musical instruments might turn out to be interesting. ********************* Jazz Standing on the bridge over a Mississippi River I could almost see the jazz, Currents of music sliding through the water Rippling and eddying and sea-changing Up the river from New Orleans. And in Memphis and St. Louis and Wherever, Jazz in the water supply? Faucets dripping music late at night when sleep won't come, Cool rhythms in your hot coffee in the morning, Blues oozing from the gravy at dinnertime, At hot trumpet steaming up the bathroom after a shower? Too bad jazz isn't a monster. It would've made such a nice horror movie. Thomas G. Digby written 0220 hr 7/29/74 entered 1215 hr 3/05/92 ********************* HOW TO GET SILICON SOAPWARE EMAILED TO YOU If you're getting it via email and the Reply-to in the headers is ss_talk@bubbles.best.vwh.net you're getting the list version, and anything you send to that address will be posted. That's the one you want if you like conversation. There's usually a burst of activity after each issue, often dying down to almost nothing in between. Any post can spark a new flurry at any time. If there's no mention of "bubbles.best.vwh.net" in the headers, you're getting the BCC version. That's the one for those who want just Silicon Soapware with no banter. The zine content is the same for both. To get on the conversation-list version point your browser to http://bubbles.best.vwh.net/cgi-bin/mojo/mojo.cgi and select the ss_talk list. Enter your email address in the space provided and hit Signup. When you receive an email confirmation request go to the URL it will give you. 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