Another story of a cruel and unreasonable ruler: The Chief and the Carpenter (“Animated Tales of the World,” 2002), from the Caribbean. This one has a touch of the Tower of Babel to it.
SciFi SongFest, Songs 81-82
Two songs about gigantic, multi-armed entities who have departed:
81. David Bowie, “Glass Spider” (1987):
82. Leslie Fish, “Where, Oh Where Has Cthulhu Gone?” (1996):
Fish’s line “The old god woke at once and screamed” seems like it might be a callback to the lines “Then once by man and angels to be seen, / In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die,” in Tennyson’s almost-sonnet “The Kraken” – which in turn was very likely an influence on Lovecraft’s original conception of Cthulhu in the first place.
Middelboe Chronicles, Part 29: Richard III
If yesterday’s Shepherd Boy Tumur illustrated Plato’s dictum that the best ruler is one who doesn’t want the job, today’s Richard III (“Shakespeare: The Animated Tales,” 1994) illustrates the corollary: that the worst ruler is one who wants the job very, very badly.
It’s a bit surprising that we don’t get to see Clarence’s famous butt:
GLOUCESTER: Simple, plain Clarence! I do love thee so,
That I will shortly send thy soul to heaven ….
But, soft! here come my executioners. …FIRST MURDERER: Take him over the costard with the hilts of thy sword, and then we will chop him in the malmsey-butt in the next room. …
CLARENCE: Where art thou, keeper? give me a cup of wine.
SECOND MURDERER: You shall have wine enough, my lord, anon. …
FIRST MURDERER: I’ll drown you in the malmsey-butt within. …
DUCHESS OF YORK: Was never mother had so dear a loss! …
These babes for Clarence weep and so do I …GLOUCESTER: That is the butt-end of a mother’s blessing.
I can’t resist appending a clip of my favourite version of Richard III – Ian McKellen, of course:
SciFi SongFest, Songs 79-80
Two songs of attempts at alien contact:
79. David Bowie, “Baby Universal” (1991):
In “Baby Universal,” the titular baby – who may be an echo of the Star Child who arrives in the skies of Earth at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey – attempts to address the human race, apparently via telepathy: “Hallo humans, can you feel me thinking? / I assume you’re seeing everything I’m thinking”:
80. Klaatu, “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft” (1976):
On the other hand, Klaatu – a band taking its name from the extraterrestrial visitor in The Day the Earth Stood Still – attempts telepathic contact in the other direction:
For better or worse, the Carpenters’ cover version is better known:
Turned Into Tongue and Trim Ones Too
This video about PragerU is worth watching, especially for its first half on conservative critiques of feminism. Pull quote:
When women are lagging behind men, for example in the wages they get paid, this is no problem whatsoever; it’s just a natural result of men and women’s biological differences. But when men are lagging behind women, such as receiving lower grades in school, well, that’s “everyone’s concern,” and we need to institute system-wide reforms in order to reverse the trend. And I like how biology is used here: it’s presented as both the reason to preserve a system when men are ahead, and also as the reverse – to reform a system when men are behind. The message seems to be that any societal system should cater to male biological traits (or at least conservatives’ estimation of what male biological traits are).
The second half of the video (starting at 16:31), on economics, is more of a mixed bag, since it’s essentially a left-conflationist attack on right-conflationism, with no Ramsey’s Maxim in sight, and thus predictably offers a fairly even balance of good points and confused points. But the very end (starting at 25:22), on graphs, is funny.
Middelboe Chronicles, Part 28: Shepherd Boy Tumur
As with yesterday’s The Multi-Coloured Jackal, so with today’s Shepherd Boy Tumur (“Animated Tales of the World,” 2002) from Mongolia, a naïf is made a ruler and his idle prattle is interpreted as deep wisdom: