Where Confusion Reigns

     Recently the State of California passed a law that requires male college students to get explicit permission from their female partners before engaging in the sex act.. The young woman has to say," Yes. Let's have sex" before the young man is allowed to begin the act of copulation. If he doesn't receive this permission with these specific words (or a variation thereof), at a later date the young woman, having regretted the encounter for some reason, is allowed to report the young man to the college or university administration as a "sexual offender." She can claim that she was "date raped", drunk, under the influence of some sort of drug, pressured into doing the nasty or that he took advantage of her during a time when she was weak and vulnerable and just wanted a hug and that turned into a session of attempted baby-making. In other words, all the onus is on the man, and he must get explicit permission from the young woman to go farther than third base. A wink and a nod will not do. Actions will not do. He must have, at least, a verbal, out loud version of, "Do me, baby!" before his BVDs go to half mast.
     What the law does not say is what happens if said young and dewy-eyed co-ed goes to the campus rape reporting desk and say that Tommy Varsity took advantage of her for his own evil pleasure and she didn't say, "Hey! Yeah! Let's do something my father would kill you for doing to me. I want to do IT!", and the brute boy, upon being dragged into the campus police station on a charge of some sort of rape (the term "rape" here is very broad) says, in response to the charge, "Gee whillikers! Sally Ann not only gave me permission. She demanded that I dip my wick. I can clearly remember her saying, 'Give me six inches of your best, big boy!' And she was stone cold sober. We'd spent the night at Starbucks drinking double espressos for three hour talking about the shading in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" But, of course, since women are the nobler sides of human nature, at least as far as the education establishment is concerned, Tommy will be kicked out of college and Sally Ann remain in college and have the added benefit of being a victim of male sexual abuse despite the fact that she did demand that Tommy give her his best (she just regretted it later when she realized that he had been making the beast with two backs with her best friend Mary Jo a day later). Unfortunately, poor old Tommy, soon to be working the fry basket at McDonald's and trying to get an apprenticeship as a dry wall hanger (good luck with that, Tommy, since you don't speak Spanish), didn't record Sally Ann's urgency on his iPhone or have her sign a paper, written up by a lawyer, for her to sign giving him permission to do something that would shock his old grey-haired mother.
     For some reason, because the state college and university systems in California seem to hold themselves apart from the rest of the great unwashed citizens of the state, claims of rape, of whatever sort, are not investigated by the local city or county law enforcement authorities. Why? Who knows? Academics hold themselves apart from the rest of society in a way that Socrates and Plato would have found laughable. By the colleges and universities police themselves and, thus, claims of rape (of whatever sort) are not investigate by trained detectives, but by university cops and "equality boards" made up of politically correct academics, usually from the Women's Studies field.
    During the same week a feminist group declared that the iconic photograph of the celebration of the end of World War Two of a sailor in his summer white uniform kissing a nurse in her whites was, in actuality, not a celebration between two people of the end of an awful war, but was, in fact, a photograph of a rape. The reason given by the  "fighters for women's equality and foes of patriarchy) is that the man and woman did not know one another at the time of the kiss. The man just grabbed the woman, in their opinion, and planted a big old smooch on her without, I suppose, the woman giving written and notarized consent. The man in the photograph was always unknown. Several men claimed to be the sailor. The nurse, on the other hand, was known. And she said that when the end of the War was announced on the billboard oputside the N.Y. Times building she was so happy she would have gladly kissed a duck because she was so happy. She never complained about being victimized by a swabbie. In fact, she stated that she enjoyed the kiss. But our feminist betters have decided that the nurse was just a victim of the "patriarchy" and just didn't know any better. To them the woman was as raped just as if she had been thrown onto Devil's Island as the only woman among a bunch of male hardened criminals. In other words, women before about 1970 just didn't know their own minds. They were mental slaves to the male conspiracy that wanted to make all women into either Stepford Wives, for home use, or round-heels for fun. And it might, and should be noted for the sake of this argument, that the womyn (to use the 1970s spelling of the word among the hairy armpit, short-haired and awfully loud crowd) of this professional woman victim crowd are all university or college graduates, except for a few drones of the male type with wispy beards an a lot of empathy (it's a good way to get some leg -- apologize while taking the plunge ("It's just my awful male and XX chromosome that makes me want to do this, but I can't help it. And thanks for giving me permission. Just sign on the dotted line").
     Which brings us to the Seven Sisters colleges back East. The Seven Sisters colleges are women's colleges which were founded in the mid to late 1800s. Now, some over 100 years later, they are all still woman only colleges despite many of their alumni demanded that the men only colleges become co-ed. And, of course, if one to say that Vassar, for example, should start accepting male students said women would say that a female only Vassar is a great tradition and givers the "second sex" a chance of a good education away from the pressures and distraction that men cause while West Point or Virginia Military Institute gain by having women in the classes because women bring a softer side to being an Army officer. In other words, the thought is to kill the enemy with kindness instead of an A-10 Warthog or M-16.
     A couple of weeks ago Mount Holyoke college, which is one of the Seven Sisters, decided that it would be a good thing to accept trans-gender people as students. Truth to tell, this writer (and all here at Bloody Nib Manor) are not quite sure what a trans-gender person is. Is it a man who dresses as a woman and says that he is a woman? Is it a man who has silicon breasts and is undergoing some sort of estrogen treatment? Is it a man who has had his man-hood removed and replaced with a plastic surgeon's version of a vagina? Could it be a guy who looks like a guy with a beard and body odor who says that he feels like he is a woman inside? This writer actually heard a recording of the president of Mount Holyoke announcing this new policy and the woman was actually in tears of joy at this change. The president of the college was awfully proud of the college being "accepting" of the "other". But the fact remains that Mount Holyoke will not accept male homosexuals, effeminate men who like women for sex partners or male gymnasts or figure skaters to its hallowed halls of academia. So the whole "accepting" thing is a bunch of nonsense. What was not stated is that would a woman who decided that she was a man and had had a penile build done in her "secret area" be accepted as a student with all the joy that a lady-boy would.
     The Seven Sisters colleges seem to be the source of all the above nonsense. Back in the old days when common sense reigned a man who claimed that he was really a woman or a woman who claimed that she was really a man was not called "trans-gender." That person was called just plain crazy in the same way that most East Indians call sadhus crazy despite the fact that ignorant Western tourists or "spiritual leaders" call them "holy men."
     Let's face it, universities and colleges, are the hot-houses of social idiocy. They may be great to get a technical education; nursing, engineering, chemistry, physics and avionics, but when it comes to what was once known as the liberal arts they are just, for the most part, pits of bad thinking and political correctness. A father works in a steel mill 50 or 60 hours a week and drinks cheap beer to relax on the weekends in order to send his dear little daughter to Vassar or Columbia or Long Beach State and, after about one semester, he ends up with a daughter who hates him because he's part of the patriarchy that held her down because she couldn't play (because she didn't have the stuff, but she has an excuse) Varsity football in high school, or that he didn't kill the boy he caught making out with his daughter in the boy's car after the prom in high school. In other words, since the daughter has gone to a Seven Sisters (otherwise known as the Sapphic Sisters) school or has joined a Sapphic sorority under the direction of her Women's Studies professor, Dad has become a Hitler who would be as likely to shoot her in the back of the head as give her a Christmas gift. And said daughter, with her trick education in liberal arts, is pissed off because she can't work at NASA because she doesn't have the scientific education but she blames NASA for being anti-woman because an understanding of the writings of Virginia Wolffe should be as good as an understanding of physics or astronomy to get a man (or more usually a woman to Mars). So she blames her Dad because he was a guy. And once she hits 30 and realizes that being a lesbian isn't all that great because her partner won't change the light bulb or clean out the garbage can and any kid she has will be a crap shoot from the local sperm bank, decides that she's not a dyke (excuse the crudity, but I'm an old man), and finds a nice young fellow and she becomes a suburban mommy but passes on the poison she learned in college to her spoiled rotten brats who are diagnosed with Autism or ADD or hyper-activity because she wants to talk about the oppression of the patriarchy with her Vassarite girlfriends while she doesn't discipline her kids.
     We're doomed.

I Slam! You Slam! We All Want to Slam Islam!

    Some time ago this writer publicaly stated that he was going to no longer write pieces against Islam, illegal immigration and the general idiocy of the ruling class.
     Since then it has developed that due to the ineptness of the current administration "militant" Islam is on the march in Syria and Iraq. ISIS (or ISIL or the Islamic State of the Caliphate) promises to forcibly instill Mohammedanism on the whole world. The liberal "thinking class" wrings its hands telling us that ISIS is not Islam. Of course ISIS is not Islam. In the same way that all Germans were not Nazis. Islam in the Middle East just lays down and keeps quiet while ISIS goes on its march to their self-perceived world-wide victory hoping that they can come into the conquered areas and profit. Think of the French during World War Two. Most French put up with the Germans and a lot of them collaborated with the Hun. Not many resisted the Nazis ( a few Huguenot villages hid Jews, and there was as small resistance supplied by the British and Americans) but most of the French just lived with being occupied by Germans. And once the war was over and France was liberated every damn body and his grandmother claimed to be a member of the Resistance. Those who couldn't get away with the claim were shamed, but the French, being French, took the que sera sera route and not long after started honoring Nazi collaborators with literary awards.
      That seems to be the way it is in Syria and Iraq. The average Mohammedan, upon being invaded by a bunch of savages, is not loathe to rat out the Christian family or Yezidhi family that his family has been living next to for centuries much the same way the French and Germans ratted out their Jewish neighbors. In news reports Christians and Yezidhis have described how their Mohammedan neighbors informed on them to ISIS.
     And consider this: as far as reported, there have been no local Mohammedan militias formed to fight against ISIS. Everybody seems to think that the government army has the job of fighting while everyone else is sitting around eating pistachio nuts and drinking mint tea. And the armies would rather surrender with the knowledge that they'll be executed while on their knees rather than while standing up and fighting. Hope may spring eternal, but a study of history, especially of Mohammedan history, shows that there is little mercy when dealing with a Mohammedan with a gun or sword. The Solons of the Middle East like to say that the U.S. has a short history while the Arab nations have a long history, but it seems that the average Abdul wearing an Iraqi or Syrian army uniform never seems to recall that if he surrenders to an invading self-proclaimed Madhi he'll probably be dead withing two days after flying the white flag.
     Here's a thought experiment: Imagine that some crazy Christian cult of about 13,000 (a Reconstructionist group of some sort, let's say) decided that it was about time to take over the the United States starting in Michigan. And imagine that they are trained and armed and that they are bound and determined to impose their Apocalyptic theology and governance on the nation. How far do you think they would get? Would it not be true that every Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist, Jew, agnostic and atheist with a deer rifle, a rabbit gun, a .38 Special or a .45 would be out hunting that bunch once the government failed to do so? A lot of Americans would shiver at the thought of an army coming into their town, but a lot would be fighting against them. The only ones who would really lay down are those bastards on Wall Street because they are looking for profit and not right. And if the Reconstructionist Army took over Wall Street the Wall Streeters would find themselves looking at the ugly end of an M-60.

Idiocy Knows No Bounds

Political idiocy is one thing. Moral idiocy is quite another:
 'Paedophilia is natural and normal for males' - Telegraph
This writer was never a big fan of comic books after the age of about 12 years old. And then the preferred comics were something like "Our Army At War" or "Sad Sack." Times have very much changed. It seems that Archie Andrews of the Archie comic books was killed protecting his gay anti-gun friend, and Thor has suddenly turned into a female called, "Thor."
Now, here's the question. Why have not the writers of the "Archie" comic books not have done something as edgy as having Veronica having an abortion after having been knocked up by Jughead or the principal of Riverdale High? Could it be that, because of the current tolerance of gays (about 1.5 to 3.0 percent of the general  population) is a lot more easy to deal with instead of than difficult issues? Just imagine Veronica laying on a surgical table having an abortion as compared to Archie's friend being gay and anti-gun. The difference is what one decides to do as opposed to what one says one is.
Regarding Thor. In Old Norse mythology Thor was considered a bit of a dope with a lot of strength. He was the farmers' god. If Marvel wants to make Thor a woman instead of a man, that's their business, but they make themselves look very silly.
The Western world has gone on a fast track to not a very good place. We just don't recognize it because the path is shiny and seems clean. 

Well, One's Musical Tastes are Really Pretty Subjective, But the Mando is Da Kine

     This writer, while not being a professional writer and not particularly educated in writing, realizes when he has written a bad piece of writing. The last post by this writer was a bad piece for one main reason. It was unfocussed. While the topic of the mandolin may have seen as the focus, the actual focus should have been what the mandolin is and can do and is an often ignored instrument.
     Having said that, your faithful correspondent would like to put forth the idea that classical piece do have to be played on violin to sound good.
     Not everybody can play the violin in the classical style, especially nowadays when one measures one's self against a Midori or Heifetz via YouTube.
     But, really, the violin is not really all that. There are several instruments that are not considered "class" instruments that can play the Western canon as well has violins and such.
      Back in the late 1940s and early 1950s John Sebastian presented a number of classical musicians with a recording and asked those musicians what the instrument in the recording was. Some of the musicians said that it was an oboe and others said that it was a violin. The instrument was, in fact, a chromatic harmonica.
     Here's an example of Bach's Air on a G string played on a chromatic harmonica:
     ▶ Bach - Air on the G String - YouTube
     There is, in the above example, no string involved.
     Unfortunately, there has been no readily available version of the piece done on the mandolin simply because all to many mandolinists  have fallen into the "hard pick" school of playing. They'd present the piece much better using match book covers as plectrums than hard picks like bluegrass players use.
     This following piece does well on a mandolin simply because the player realizes the strengths and weaknesses of the mandolin. And just a note: your faithful correspondent, for some reason, for all too a long a time, thought that this piece was called Taco Bell's Cannon:
      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNcsyvEIzpo
      A lot of mandolinists and harmoncaist really don't quite know what to do with classical music because the wider culture demands bluegrass, blues or rock. And that's pretty sad because they have limited themselves.
     There is, despite what the politically correct crowd say, a Western canon of music that goes beyond the nonsense that is played on the radio and that is far more complicated and rewarding than Asian or Middle Eastern  music.
     The following two examples need no comment except that one is hard pressed to imagine that such music being created in Asia or the Middle East:
      Air on a G String Original Instruments
      Canon in D: Pachelbel
      And just to show that that we at Bloody Nib Manor aren't awful snobs, consider this old thing from he 1930s. It's a great mando piece:
       ▶ Skillet Lickers-Hawkins Rag-1934 - YouTube

An Ode to the Mandolin

     Those who have visited Bloody Nib Manor have probably noticed that there are a number of musical instruments laying around the shack. Some are played and some just showed up in the middle of the night, the piano being the main example of an instrument that has become a form of furniture and a place to put dust collectors. There are three guitars (one inherited from the late Baroness Masako, mother of Lady Nib, one belonging to Lady Nib, and one, the cheapest, belonging to this writer), a couple of ukuleles, a half dozen harmonicas, a quiver of tin whistles, and, most important for this article, three mandolins. One of the mandolins is of the old Neapolitan bowl back style, one is of the old Army-Navy skillet style, and the third is a cheap reproduction of the Lloyd Loar Gibson A model.
     Of all these instruments the most important and most pleasing for your faithful correspondent are the mandolins. The mandolin was this writer's first musical instrument. He took lessons, at the age of about thirteen from an old Italian man who was primarily a violinist who also was the conductor of the Palos Verdes Symphony back in the 1960s. At this time the guitar, especially the electric guitar was in the ascendant and the mandolin was considered an ethnic instrument outside of areas of the South, where it was considered a bluegrass/hillbilly instrument. This writer, was, in a sense, out of time and out of place. But who knows what makes people like certain instruments and certain types of music?
     To get to the point, let's look at a bit of history of the mandolin, its music and how it is under-appreciated.
     The mandolin as we know it came to it's final form in the 1720s. The mandolin is really not much more than a violin that is plucked instead of bowed. A mandolin can play music written for the violin and a violin can play music written for the mandolin. The mandolin family has several members: the mandolin, the mandola (a plucked version of the viola), the mando-cello (the plucked version of a cello) and the mando-bass (the plucked version of the bass violin). There is also the piccolo mandolin, which is rarely heard because it's really a freak. The thing called an Irish Bouzuki is really a form of mandola.
     The original shape was the bowl back or Neapolitan (or "tater bug") mandolin. The sound of those instruments, while loud, is also mellow. The later developments of the instrument resulted in "flat back" mandolins that were cheaper to make while being louder. The most popular models in the U.S. are now the Loar A model (a flatback with a teardrop shaped body) and the Loar F model (a flatback with a scroll shape on the right side that is often used in bluegrass music).
      Vivaldi wrote pieces especially for the mandolin, and many Bach pieces translate well to playing by the mandolin:
    
Prelude from Partita No.3 BWV1006 - J.S. Bach - Mandolin - YouTube

      For much of the 18th and 19th centuries the mandolin was considered the normal plucked instrument in Western Europe and the United States. The Spanish guitar was still in development and the English guitar (also known as the lute) was considered as old fashioned as the sackbut. The default stringed instrument at the time was the violin, but the mandolin came in a close second and was played by those who could not master the bowing technique or because who wanted to play an instrument that had a livelier sound than the fiddle. The mandolin, because of it's loud voice, was especially suited to small bands. It was also more portable than the violin (no bow and rosin required) and it was popular among sailors during the age of sail and among cowboys (that bit with Gene Autry  or Roy Rodgers playing a guitar as an old West cowboy is inaccurate. A mandolin could be much more easily be carried on horseback than a guitar. Also, the guitar at that time, in the U.S., meant the parlour guitar, which was considered a instrument suited for women). The mandolin got to the U.S. before the great Italian migration to the U.S. in the 1880s/1890s, but the infusion of Italians brought a different dimension to mandolin playing in the U.S. The old joke in New York was that if one wanted to learn the mandolin all one would have to do was go to a barber shop because all barbers were Italian and all Italians played the mandolin.
     From about 1890 to 1920 was the golden age for the mandolin in the U.S. There were amateur and professional mandolin bands and orchestras all across the U.S. The mandolin was used in recordings instead of the guitar because of it's ability to play loudly for mechanical recordings. The mandolin had become a mainstream instrument, but things went south for our little friend with the advent of electric recording and the idea that a guitar had more nuances than the mando. And the poor thing was banished to the ethnic hinterlands of Italian and bluegrass and old time music:
The Godfather Theme 
Eskimo Waltz 
Hawkins Rag 
Never On Sunday 
     Actually, the last of the above is Greek and was originally written for bouzouki, but it plays as well on mandolin.
     Later in the 20th century some Irishman decided that he wanted to play a mandola but didn't want to call his instrument a mandola (too Italian) and decided for some unknown reason to call it an Irish Bouzouki (flatback, unlike a real Greek bouzouki), and a form of mandolin took off again. Earlier Bill Monroe gave the mando a kickstart with his bluegrass music. But it's been a long time since a real mandolin master like the late Dave Appolon was on the popular music scene. Evan Marshall and Dave Grishman come close, but neither of them have the subtlety in style to make the mandolin sound anything other than nervous. The Italians and Portuguese and Japanese continue to develop the mandolin in ways that the Americans don't. They see it, as we all should, as an all round instrument with as much variety of styles and nuance as the guitar or piano. It's all in the training and technique. A mandolin is as capable, in the hands of a master, of caressing the listener as it is barking; it can cry as well as a violin and make one want to dance as much as a fiddle.
     The mandolin is a great little instrument that has long been neglected for anything but folk and ethnic music, and the world is worse off for the neglect. This writer is not one of those boneheads who thinks that music will save the world, but he does believe that music will make the trip down to anarchy or dictatorship a lot more comfortable. And the mandolin is the best little wooden friend one can have during a rough time.
 

 

Back Again! Unfortunately For You

     It's been almost a year since this writer's last blog post.
     There are two reasons for this hiatus. The first is that your faithful correspondent is a lazy man by nature and finds that writing is hard work. To paraphrase Hemingway, a blank page is like facing a white fighting bull while holding nothing more than an idea and pen. Who needs that? That's work. The second reason is because a promise had been made previously that the blog posts would be more upbeat and less critical of the international situation than they had been. But over the past near year we here at Nib Manor have looked in vain for a world getting better in those things that concern us. In other words, we have tried and been found wanting. The ever-lovely Lady Nib has spent countless hours on her fainting couch clutching a bottle of smelling salts after reading the news and such looking for the uplifting.
     So it appears that yours truly will have to take the prerogative of the nobility and the politician (being of the former and disdaining the latter) and break his promise to be a Sunny Sam. Life is good, but there are a lot of dark and evil portions of the world that go unremarked by our media lords.
     But to prevent the impression that this writer thinks it's a good idea to throw the unsuspecting into the deep end of the cesspool, we'll start with something that has been addressed in several previous posts and is pretty light. The topic will be: Cheap Musical Instruments!
     Those who know this writer know that he has no musical talent whatsoever. But he keeps trying. After a childhood spent studying the mandolin (not bluegrass mandolin, but American popular music style mandolin) he decided that perhaps instruments such as the harmonica, the pennywhistle or the ukulele may be the vehicles to financial riches. None of those turned out very well and his carer on the music hall stage went up in flames like a Pinto at a petrol station. The mangled chords of 1920s ukulele songs, bad imitations of the Harmonicats and tin whistle versions of "English Garden" still cause the hounds to howl and Lady Nib to stuff cotton waste into her ears. But hope springs eternal (or infernal, depending on your point of view {or what you can hear}).
     Music is one of those things a bit like golf. You can't buy a game or talent. But if you've got the game or the talent you can get by with either K-Mart golf clubs or an $80.00 guitar. The player makes the tool work for him. The intonation may be a bit off (in the case of guitars, dulcimers or ukes) or the balance may be a bit off for golf clubs or horse shoes, but the person who has the talent or persistence can get much more out of a cheap instrument than a person with an expensive instrument without the talent or willingness to put in the hard work. One of the most entertaining guitarists the writer has seen in person was a guy playing on the Redondo Beach pier. His guitar was cheap and it looked like it had been sat upon by a very fat person; the sound board was almost like a bowl. But they man overcame the limits of the instrument because he knew the instrument.
     Having written that, while one can get by with a cheap instrument, one really can't get buy with a rotten and bad instrument. Recently this writer bought a Hohner Old Standby Harmonica. In the past the Old Standby was Hohner's second level diatonic harmonica behind the Marine Band. It was a pretty good harp and was actually favored by some professional harp players over the Marine Band because the reeds were easier to bend. Apparently now Hohner has decided that the Old Stanby is a toy harmonica dedicated to putting any young and aspiring harmonicist off the instrument. The particular harmonica in question not only had a stuck draw reed (which was soon corrected after a bit of investigation and fiddling) but at least three reeds were way out of tune. Nobody who is not willing or not knowledgeable about the mechanics of harmonicas could play a decent tune with the thing unless it was some strange Central Asian musical scale.
     The point is that Hohner has really let harmonica players down by allowing this thing out of the factory in China. And it's not a matter of the thing being now made in China instead of Germany. The Chinese take harmonicas more seriously than Americans. They teach harmonica in schools. They know what is and is not a decent harmonica. Allowing this thing out of the factory is almost criminal for the simple reason that few people who want to take up a musical instrument are really interested in spending a lot of money before they decide whether or not they like playing or have a talent or are willing to put in the work for the instrument. A Marine Band costs about $30.00. A Special 20 costs more. An Old Standby costs between $10.00 and $15.00. All are cheap compared to buying a guitar or drum set, but to use the golf analogy, if one buys a set of clubs that have shafts so bent that they look like something from a Three Stooges bit it is unlikely that the aspiring harmonicist will progress beyond an out of tune version of Hot Cross Buns.
     This writer has played $20.00 ukuleles that sound okay and $6.00 tin whistles that were in tune. Why cannot Hohner get out a modern version of their previous second level harp that is in tune and doesn't have stuck reeds. It makes one what to start playing the bones or the spoons.