There's been a new urban myth going around. Someone said there are more people alive today than have died throughout the history of mankind. An article in Scientific American magazine by Ciara Curtin disputes it. She cites sources who calculated that the lowest estimate is that 106 billion people have ever been born. The world population today is 6.5 billion. In the immortal words of Rodney Dangerfield: "You're way off." The myth makers, that is.
Since Tuesday's TV lineup offers nothing to my liking, I usually watch a DVD. Since my next delivery from Netflix hadn't arrived, I pulled another homemade music tape from my VHS library. The highlight was Neil Young and his Crazy Horse lineup burning down the house on SNL in 1989, performing Rockin' in the Free World. It is my all time favorite hard rock performance. Any other live performance I've heard of it, including one that featured a harmonica solo(!), pales mightily in comparison. It has an end of the world feel that makes it so compelling. Of course, the lyrics are straight out of the leftists' playbook, but that is par for the course in arts' world. Young is amazing. His lyrics are frequently faulty, his voice is not great, and his electric guitar playing is at times like root canal, but he frequently hits it out of the park, especially in his acoustic work. Unfortunately, I could not find a clip of the performance at youtube. At its end, he breaks the strings deliberately. They would never have served him better, so they might as well have been cut.
The tape also featured performances from ABC's In Concert series, which ran at two AM Friday night/Saturday morning. Judas Priest, Motorhead, Scorpion, Alice Cooper, and Billy Idol, snuggling up seductively to his hot keyboard player, tore it up. Also included was the best live hard rock vocal I've ever heard, the late Layne Staley of Alice in Chains belting out Man in the Box, screaming at times as if he'd lost his only child. I was so blown away it inspired a short story included in my collection, A Hitch in Twilight. I'm not really sure what the song is about. I speculated that it is a crisis of faith. Here is that clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eipuJPgHFZk
I thank the folks who made purchases today at the floating book shop, especially Herbie, to whom I gave the key to my trunk so he could root around in the bags of goodies Joanne donated.
RIP Don Cornelius, an apparent suicide at 75.
Now playing on the Sock Hop Radio stream: the original version of The Twist by Hank Ballard and the Midnighters. According to Political Man, it was a B side of one of their hits.
Read Vic's stories, free: http://members.tripod.com/vic_fortezza/Literature
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