Brian spricht zu viel auf Deutsch
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I only am required to give my name rank and serial number. My name is Brian Schend. I don't have a rank. I have a Social Security number, but i'm not the kind of dumbshit that would put it on a web page. My picture.
On my recent tours of the web I found a web page called Spelriet, which is an organization dedicated to reforming English spellings. See, here's the thing. Unlike everything else in the world, with writing systems, smart people write in stupid ways and stupid people write in smart ways. Japanese, for example, probably has the worst writing system in the world. It's actually two systems. There's the kana system, which is a syllabary ( each symbol is a syllable ), and there's 60-something of these. But, there's two styles of kana that look nothing alike, and you need to know both to read the language. Then there's Kanji. These were taken from Chinese orginally to represent Japanese words. But then the Japanese borrowed words from Chinese, so the same Kanji can represent either the original Japanese or wun ov the many Chinese borrowing. Here's what's ridiculous. Every word in the Japanese language can be written with the 60-something Kana symbols. Kanji does not benefit anybody in speed or clarity. So while it's smart to use the simpler kana system that is easier to read and very consistent, the "smart" Japanese folks use Kanji. What's really stupid is that even when you do use Kanji, you still need to use the Kana to show the suffixes and things. Same story with English. Everyone can recognize the word "hoo", but "smart people" spell it "who." Again, the smart people do it stupidly, and the stupid people do it smartly. Anyways, I agreed with the Spelriet guys, and made my own English spelling system. Der-z noe reyzn wey kood-nt swich tu bétr spélingz. Spéling, áftr ol, iz súmthing us húemnz invéntid, soe der-z noe réyzn us húemnz ka-nt chaynj it. You know, one thought I've had that could fix tons of problems is to leave out the vowels in long words. "Pschlgy" <-- Could that be anything other than psychology? I don't think so. It would make these long words easier to spell without making them much harder to read. You'd still need some vowels. The first and last vowels would have to stay, and if there's two vowels in a row, you'd have to write the both ( biolgy ). Another thought is to replace vowels with apostrophes, but still keep the first and last vowels and two vowels in a row. "Ps'ch'l'g'y." Then clean up the consonant spellings: "S'k'l'jy." Or, you could write the stressed vowel and leave the others out: "S'kol'jy". This might even work for evry word in the whole bloody language. I should develop this idea further. But i haven't
The English language is in complete denial about what words are swear words. If you watch TV or read newspapers, the words always bleeted or x-ed out are always body function words - fuck, shit, ass. These words have lost most of their offensive power. If you walk up to some random person on the street and say, "What the fuck is going on, man?", most people won't be very disturbed by it, even those who wish you hadn't said it. The real swear words of today are the racial slurs - nigger, dirty jew. If you walk up to a random person on the street and call them a nigger, you're in deep shit. If this is a high crime section of LA and the guy you said it to was black, you're as good as dead. So why this shift in swear words? Swear words match the taboos of society. Sex useto be taboo, but now it's openly discussed just about anywhere. There are only a few places here and there that still ban certain kinds of sex. As a result, the offensiveness of fuck is just the word itself and the meaning doesn't offend anyone. This is a shallow offensiveness that doesn't last. But, in the last 50 years, racism has become extremely taboo. It's banned in almost all forms everywhere. The offensiveness of the word nigger, then, is not just the word itself, but the racism attached to it. This combination of word and meaning gives nigger a long life as a swear word. A perfect example of this shift in swear words are allegations that Hillary Clinton called someone a "Jew bastard" in the 1980s or 1990s. 50 years ago, the scandal would have been about the word bastard, the sexual word. Today it's about the word Jew, the racial word. By the way, the phrase "swear word" itself comes from English's first swear words. Words that used God's name in vain. This is why people yell God, Jesus, Damn, and Hell when they hit their thumbs with a hammer. Being non-Christian lost offensiveness a long time ago, and today the most offensive of those words is damn. Even that word won't give you a second look from most preachers.
You know, 3 years ago, I would have told you that it'd be a miracle if I ever got a date. Now i'm married. No matter how hopeless and cynical a person seems, well, who knows, love is an unpredictable thing really. My former roommate, Lars, is always cynical about everything. He always has some damn excuse for why someone won't work. But then again, maybe those excuses are keeping him from disaster. Sometimes when it's right it's right and when it ain't right it ain't right. My first dating experience was when this screwed-up and immature girl named Holly. Her sister noticed that I seemed nervous and was shaking when I hugged her. Well, the whole thing wasn't right. I have never been nervous or shaky when hugging Willow, my wife. This is right.
Some items have been edited to avoid making her mad.
She'll say something to me, but i don't hear her. I say "What?!" She responds "I love you." ( Which is not what she said. She tickles me mercilessly. In a sick Pavlovian experiment she has tried to make me associate tickling with [removed] to make me [removed] whenever i'm tickled.
There's a common attitude amongst people that Christian Rock sucks and isn't as good as other styles of music. They're right. Christian rock is music for people who don't care about music. It comes down to what makes a style a style. Rock usually uses a small group of musicians, and almost always has guitar, electric bass, and drum set. It's defined by a loud driving beat. Rap is rap because of a repeating line with people speaking in rhythm above it. American rappers rap about egos or crime, French rappers rap about politics, but it's still rap. Romantic opera is defined by large orchestras, thick sounds, and big powerful singers. The point about all these styles is that it's the music that makes them fit the style, not the words. Rock lyrics, for example, range from love, child abuse ( Pearl Jam ), politics ( Rage ), serious nonsense ( Nirvana ), silly nonsense ( They Might be Giants ) and even sometimes religion ( Depeche Mode, altho Personal Jesus criticizes religion ). Christian rock is Christian rock because the words are religious - nothing to do with music. If these people cared about the music, they'd listen to heavy metal or grunge or rap - those styles are defined by music.
This is one of the easiest topics to cover. Some people say that all pop/rock/rap/whatever music sucks. Does it? No. What people forget is that most new music you hear is crap while most old music you hear is high quality. It has nothing to do with style, just age. Why? Well, most music that's written sucks. That's why new music is mostly crap. But no one will bother to pull 200-year-old music out of a dusty drawer if it ain't no good. That's why all the old music we hear is great. There was as much crap music in 1700 as today. We just don't hear the crap of 1700. To put it another way, when was the last time you heard New Kids on the Block on the radio? ( BTW, in case people don't know, New Kids was the first "Boy band" and was all good looks with no substance. At one point, they wrote a song about all their previous songs. Sad, really )
Well, to start this whole thing out, I need to cover some music history, specifically a comparison between Baroque music and today's. For those of you not familiar with the whole thing, baroque music is music from around 1600-1750. Most people who think baroque think Bach, but the baroque style was already on the way out by his time. Anyways, the similarities between baroque and today's music are remarkable. Music before baroque, renaissance music, was very controlled, very complicated, and focused on large groups. This is similar to romantic music at the end of the 1800s. Then the first baroque guys enter the scene. They decided to get rid of the ultra-complicated polyphony of before and switch to simple chord and one melody. Along with this, they developed a system called figured bass, where you look at the bass note, and then little numbers tell you what chord to play. Of course, in the early 1900s, the first jazzers came on the scene, tossed out the complicated Wagner stuff, went to chord and melody, and used combinations of letters and numbers to give you the chords. Back in the baroque, the most popular group of the time was the trio sonata, with 2 violins, a bass instrument, and a harpsichord plunking chords. When the music had words, it was about love. Another thing in Baroque times was the invention of opera. This was invented by a couple of marginally greats ( Peri, the best known ), but made great by Monteverdi. After he left the scene, opera declined, and eventually lived only on spectacle and big-name singers. The trio sonatas modern counterparts are the jazz trio and the rock band. At the beginning of this century, opera was reinvented by marginal greats ( Gilbert and Sullivan ) and made great by the Gershwins into Broadway musicals. It has since declined, and Broadway is turning to spectacle too ( like the real-life helicopters on stage in Miss Saigon ). Improvisation began to die as the baroque era went on, mainly because of larger groups. With larger groups, improvisation either makes the music ultra-complicated or is totally pointless. Those who've played piano in big band jazz can testify to that - there's no reason for you to play chords when all the saxes are doing it. Also in the baroque era, a great new development in keyboards - the piano. But the piano wasn't used for much until quite a bit later. Similar to the electric keyboard, which so far has only been used by people too cheap to hire real-life string players ( usually in music theatre ). Baroque music, which had started so simple, was complicated, controlled and structured, much like the renaissance music that came before it, by the 1700s, Bach's time. Around 1750, some folks got sick of it and simplified everything again, but they didn't keep improvisation. This new group of composers began to call the old music "baroque" which means a bad pearl, but back then it was like saying the music was shit.
What does this have to do with rock? Well, i think i make it damn clear that history is repeating itself. I give rock 50 years at best. The younger generation, the people who are babies today, will notice that rock music is just a huge shitload of noise. The difference between the rock band that makes it in the future and the one that lives in obscurity ( like Bach did ) will be clarity. If you go to a bar where a rock band is playing, what will you hear? Usually, lots of guitar noise, everyone is playing all the time, and the only thing that gets out clear is the vocals ( And even those ain't clear most of the time ). If you got 2 guitars and one organ all playing all the time and off the same chord chart, you will have just noise, unless you find good players who have the restraint not to play. The next generation is not gonna wanna hear this noise band crap. And this is already happening. Cobain was very careful about voicing chords on guitar. Lots of his tunes have instrumental guitar or bass line that clearly stick out. Even when it is all chords, Cobain was careful to voice them so that one note of each chord could be heard above the others. This allows a line to be heard prominently over the chords, and because of that, ain't noise. Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Metallica, all the bands that have really lasted have written music with clear lines sticking out over the chords. At some point some band will be so disgusted at the level that rock has declined to, that they will refuse to call themselves "rock," and they'll call rock "Shit music." And the name will stick. From then on, rock will forever be in Shitsville.
Some people seem to have the attitude that "Singers aren't real musicians." This is bullshit. Singers are, in fact, better musicians than instrumentalists. Singing something requires knowledge of the pitch and melody of your own part, as well as the harmonies in other people's parts. This is not true for an instrumentalist. Their instrument does all of that for them. Of course, instrumentalists don't need to learn to correctly pronounce 5 or 6 different languages.
There is another issue that is also being ignored. In the USA, most instrumental players start at age 10 or 11. At that age, a would-be singer doesn't even have their voice. As a result, singers get started later, but still manage to understand pitch and harmony better than their instrumental counterparts. The gap in rhythm skills is because singers start later, tho. The instrument figures out pitch for a player, but it doesn't figure out the rhythm for them, so singers and instrumentalists are equal-oppurtunity there.
I don't know how many of you are familiar with libertarian philosophy, but the basic belief is that government does almost nothing and profit takes care of the rest. This is not like the US republican party - Libertarians want drug and sex laws eliminated, too. In the state of Washington, they are one of the best known third parties. They are also wrong. Profit can't do everything. One example Libertarians like to use to show how private business would do better is public busing. They say stuff like, "Busing isn't making profits" and blame this on inefficiency. Well, let's look at Bellingham's WTA bus system. Only 1 of its 20-something routes makes a profit. Is this inefficiency? Well, WTA's bus 3, 4 and 10 go thru the Birchwood neighborhood of the city. It runs every 30 minutes or every hour depending on time of day. But, in order for service in this area to make a profit, service would have to be reduced to about 2 or 3 times a day. Once the service was reduced, a bunch of people would stop riding, because the service sucks so bad. So it still wouldn't profit. What I haven't mentioned yet is that there are lots of seniors in that neighborhood that are dependant on bus service that wouldn't exist in a profit based system. So profit doesn't fix the public busing problem ( which doesn't really exist ). Without regulation, the profits go to the cruellest, not the most efficient or highest quality. A cruel man like Al Capone was willing to kill his more efficient competition, something most people aren't willing to do.
This page was created by Brian Schend at dondegroovily at gmail dot com. Last updated when dinosaurs romed the earth. He is widely regarded as an introvert and has even been known to defecate. I am not responsible for your staying up all night reading this page and not getting any sleep. Batteries not included. Call your mother.