Monday, December 28, 2020

ECLECTIC : Carey Anne Farrell


 Your ‘cover’ of an earlier hit better not be that : better not be a perfect cover or copy.

Do it different and hopefully better : just similar enough for people to recognize it but different enough for people to see and hear something new and unexpected in the original they didn’t know was there.

A classic case in point is the Animals cover of Nina Simone’s version of DON’T LET ME  BE MISUNDERSTOOD.

Great song, great singer with a great variant of that song.

But someone in the Animals camp, probably Chas Chandler, heard a tiny little bit of nothing, a arranger’s throwaway counter melody buried deep in the dying seconds of the fade-out.

In the blogging biz, we call that ‘burying the lede’ !

The Animals’ team put that tiny bit of nothing in the front and centre and then beat the poop out of it over and over —- making the song a worldwide smash and enduring classic.

And today, nobody but nobody would  think to perform the tune - and no punters recognize the tune - without that hypnotic riff.

The Shangri-Las are usually seen as the girl group to end all girl groups - not the best singers or with best songs and production, but still far and away the most ‘high school girl’ of the lot.

I CAN’T GO HOME ANYMORE is probably their best.

So trying to cover the best of the best is no easy challenge.

But I think Chicago singer-songwriter/author Carey Anne Farrell has done it.

Pause and give it a listen, before or after re-hearing the original. Listen to Nina Simone’s original of Don’t let Me be Misunderstood and then the Animals’ take as well.

Carey’s selection of musical covers is the very definition of eclectic and not all work for me - but this one really does. 

Carey’s voice - though not her visual appearance - says high school lonely better than the original singers who really were just high school kids !

Meanwhile her accompaniment track retained memories of the original bombastic backing track but this time, nicely subdued and subtly spread all over the background.

I could see her version becoming a Spotify hit, the sort you’ll hear in heavy rotation in every retail outlet on the globe for the next decade..

Tuesday, December 22, 2020

Can you tell difference ‘tween the NB Irving newspapers & CBC NB’s non-coverage of the formative years in Moncton that produced our country’s worst mass killer, Gabriel Wortman ?


I can’t.

Instead, it is left to a Halifax Nova Scotia newspaper and a Halifax reporter, Andrew Rankin, to give us the inside story of the horribly warped upbringing of Gabriel Wortman, replete with tons of Moncton area family photos and tons of Moncton area family informants.

Any New Brunswick born and bred reporter, with a lifetime of contacts could have - should have - done this story months ago.

And with all that home team advantage, done it better to boot.

There is an awful lot of things wrong with New Brunswick : Gabriel Wortman’s upbringing is only one of them....

preserving History : its not the size of the vial, its the size of the Hope : Pfizer Penicillin March 1942, Pfizer Covid vaccine December 2020

 

Today, in December 2020, museums all over the world are rushing to preserve the tiny precious vial of Pfizer’s Covid vaccine that was first deployed in their area, keenly aware of the historical significance of those first shots.

Yes, seven shots and seven people vaccinated against Covid, like a single swallow, do not a summer make : not with seven billion of us left to jab.

So those museum-preserved vials does not represent a large dose of the vaccine, rather instead a huge dose of Hope, as Laura Bennett, director of the Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History so rightly observed.

Just as the Nova Scotian doctor who gave the first needles of penicillin on October 16th 1940 to usher in our current Age-Of-Antibiotics definitely knew.

They were a huge dose of hope mixed with an incredibly small amount of penicillin. 

But how did he know that? For penicillin, like insulin, is measured by its biological activity, not is chemical activity so that early researchers had a devil of a time determining their product’s potency.

It was rather simple, really.

Consult any lavishly illustrated book on common drugs, as found in any good pharmacy school library and you can’t help but notice that the drug samples shown all look boringly alike : like table salt or table sugar.

Table salt and table sugar are typically the only pure as pure compounds we ever see in daily life - if we did see others, we’d see that they too are crystal clear.

It is in fact the mere sight of transparent regular crystals of a compound that tells us it is indeed finally 100% pure.

So our Nova Scotian doctor, Martin Henry Dawson, knew by looking at the first penicillin powder he dissolved and then injected into Charles Aronson and Aaron Leroy Alston, that this thick rusty sticky mess had to be miles away from being pure.

In fact his team later estimated that first injection was about 8 units of penicillin per gram, instead of pure penicillin’s 1.6 million units per gram.

So what he was injecting into those two dying young men was .0005% pure penicillin - and 99.9995% pure HOPE.

His tiny team had home brewed that historical first penicillin - not a good sign that the rest of the world’s seriously ill would get any doses.

So it was another historical Red Letter Day when the world’s first pharmaceutically-produced clinical penicillin was injected into another of Dr Dawson’s dying patients.

It too was not pure - at best, it offered up just 1% penicillin and 99% Hope - but hope it did indeed offer up, not just for that patient but for our whole world.

 For on D-Day’s beaches and for most of 1944, 80% of all the world’s clinical penicillin came from just one company and just one site alone : Pfizer and its Marcy Avenue plant.

Go ahead - misname it Mercy Avenue - I won’t scold you.

Now that historic Pfizer vial, first used on March 6th 1942, unfortunately was not preserved for the museum record.

But it looks like a second time around, Pfizer is having better luck...

Saturday, December 19, 2020

July Collins’ performances : popular versus great

 Judy Collins’ version of SOMEDAY SOON has been a great success, with millions of amateurs and bar bands attempting ,usually successfully, to carry the song off in the half century since it was released.

Judy Collins’ version of THE RISING OF THE MOON is sixty years old and has no one attempt to cover it - not even Collins herself : as she grew older she lost the brio needed to carry it off successful.

Songwriting experts - a money grubbing lot - think her version of SOMEDAY SOON far the more successful song, because of the offers it generated in a song she did not write, at least paid off in all the concert tour offers she received as a result.

But I think her version of THE RISING OF THE MOON one of the artistic wonders of the 20th century - one that will be played a 100 years after she dead and buried.

If it sounds a bit like Franz Schubert’s more war-like lieder, it may not be a coincidence. RISING too was originally written as a poem to be read, later converted by a musician (here Judy) into a dramatic recital in two voices, with the instrument ( here a guitar, not a piano) playing a very active role continuously commenting on the text.

So now let me put it this way, the failure of the opera LA BOHEME to be able to be taken home and played on the guitar by any amateur, after a few hours of rehearsing is a failure, sure, but one failure : it has many other successful artistic qualities. 

I am NOT arguing against shortness and simplicity and in favour of length and complexity as a sign of great art :  Collins’ RISING OF THE MOON is not at all long or complex : but as I said, it requires an apparently rare quantity and quality of brio to pull it off successful.

You have all heard Collins’ SOMEDAY SOON zillions of times : few of you have ever heard her version of THE RISING OF THE MOON.

Give it a listen and tell me if it isn’t truly great great art...

Friday, December 18, 2020

‘$705,000 cash in an AMMO box’ : the twin obsessions of mass killer Gabriel Wortman : guns & money

Gabe’s twin obsessions : GUNS & MONEY

As a poet, lyricist, headline writer or as copy writer, one always looks for those phrases that say the most with the fewest words.

So the news that mass killer Gabriel Wortman kept a small fortune in cash, $705,000, in an ammo box was like a Godsend to me.

It seemed to accurately describe the complicated life-long arc of this complicated killer in as few words as possibly.

Even as a kid, friends remember him as obsessed with guns. His criminal career to make money also began as a kid : stealing building supplies.

It only broke down on the night of April 18th 2020 : when he left all that money in his home he was burning down, before proceeding out with a 1000 rounds and his guns, to lay waste to as much of the world as possible before suiciding-by-cop....

Thursday, December 17, 2020

Worse than dying at 27 - far far worse - is peaking at 27 and then facing a half century or more of a sharp decline in quality

Still touting youthful rebellion - at age 77....

 A half century ago, when most of the Rolling Stone members were around age 27, the band was recording its (a) greatest album or (b) its last great album : either way, EXILE ON MAIN STREET.

People tell me they have done some good things in the fifty years since.

I guess.

Haven’t heard much of it though.

But I do like “MISS YOU”.

At least gold winning Olympic athletes are allowed to retire at their peak (often around age 27) and allowed to become sales managers or something.

Scientists often do their most creative thinking around age 27 as well, but are allowed to become scientific sages and department and lab heads despite their best days long behind them.

But great artists of all sorts are expected to go on being creative, not just to give us journeyman-level art until they die.

For some, writers of books fictional and truthful, it doesn’t seem a problem being fruitful into their old age : these books often require the wisdom that comes with age.

With visual artists much the same.

Often the same with  dramatic performers, if agism doesn’t restrict them to mostly non-leading roles.

Dancers are often more like athletes : the spirit willing and eager but the body is weak. 

But poets and musicians who gain fame for writing and singing lyrical material with a youthful energy-filled, hopeful naive quality, find it hard to write and sing something new in that mood beyond their forties.

The talented Chuck Berry could no longer write  and sing the popular Chuck Berry  style songs a dozen years after he started while the much less talented Jerry Lee Lewis was singing as well in the 1980s as he had in the 1950s.

Chuck wrote his own stuff and after a while he ran out of things to say and new ways to sing them and play them.

Jerry Lee never wrote his stuff and new songwriters gave him new stuff to sing in new ways.

This was the problem with the Stones, or U2 or REM etc : being a self contained band of composer-performers they found it hard to really do new things despite trying very hard to re-invent themselves.

They didn’t really want to be re-invented and neither did their fans really want that of them.

They became a human jukebox, forced to play all (& only) their old favourites, forever, to the generation that first heard them.

Dying at 27, picked at the peak of perfection, starts sounding not half bad...

Lots of Canadians got very rich during the GREAT DEPRESSION : Gabriel Wortman would have been one of them

 


Canada’s Pollyanna Press doesn’t like to discuss it, but lots of present day Canadian zillionaire families first got their wealth during the GREAT DEPRESSION, feasting upon the weak and vulnerable in a time of near universal disaster.

If all your wealth wasn’t liquid and gone down the drain on the stock-market, if it was instead in something solid like residential real estate, you could do quite well out of the GREAT DEPRESSION.

In general, wages and other costs fell : albeit along with consumer demand.

Except in one crucial area : residential rentals. Many people had to give up living in their own individual house and now had to rent a part of a house instead.

But lets start at the beginning.

New house building starts fell basically to zero and many current working class house-occupiers either couldnt pay the mortgage or had the mortgage paid up but urgently needed money to feed the family.

If you had a little loose capital and no heart, you simply offered them ridiculously low prices on their homes, knowing they badly needed cash, any cash - even unfair cash, - and would probably then go double up with relatives for their new accommodations.

Their single family homes, after a bit of slap-dash partitioning, would be added to your slum-landlord holdings and would be profitable, even at low rentals, because your buying price was also so very low. 

And you could maybe even stiff the original owners a little : delivering the half of the price quickly and then stalling, stalling on the other half knowing they had no money to waste on a court case.

This is how we have seen Gabriel Wortman operate : offer the poor & vulnerable a pittance on their properties and then stiff them as they unlikely to sue.

In the case of Aaron Tuck, we now see a new wrinkle : actual violence & threats of violence to convince a stubborn land owner to sell up on the cheap and get outa Dodge to protect their families.

Aaron didn’t budge, figuring Gabe would only go just so far with his violence.

Like most everybody else who came across Gabriel Wortman, he guessed wrong....


Pfizer goes it alone on COVID vaccine in 2020, just as it did with Penicillin in 1944 !

the UPJOHN COMPANY has a website devoted to its WWII medical supplies production that would get an A+ from any historian or archivist !

Pfizer did not “make” its penicillin all by itself, anymore than Ford “makes” its cars all by itself. This grimy bit of machinery was something Pfizer lacked and the Upjohn company had in spades : so much of Pfizer’s penicillin powder actually arrived to the end user inside a Upjohn labelled bottle : supply chains really do matter.

It is hard to believe that a corporate memory can extend back over 75 years, but Pfizer’s recent actions brings that into question.

Pfizer in 2020 chose to remain at the very outer edges of Trump’s OPERATION WARPSPEED just as it did in 1944 with the OSRD-led obsession ‘to take as long as we have to synthesize penicillin and patent it, before we deliver to WWII’s dying troops and civilians’.

Pfizer marched to a different drummer : seeing natural (patent-free) penicillin as cheaper, quicker and easier to make than the delusion of synthetic patent-able penicillin.

(And they were proven right, time & again : Penicillin still hasn’t been commercially synthesized 90 long years after this ‘synthetic autarchy’ obsession began !)

Thus Pfizer took none of Trump’s money (er the American taxpayers’ money) and shared relatively little production information with his Covid team. Just as it did in 1943-1944.

It simply promised to (A) deliver a safe effective vaccine as quick as it could and to (B) sell as much of it as possible to Trump’s government as the government wanted. 

(A) it did - in spades.  As it did in the Spring of 1944 - delivering 80% of the entire world’s penicillin - including almost all of the stuff that landed on the D-Day beaches. Many of us are here today solely because grandpa got some Pfizer penicillin when he really needed it.

But regarding (B) : Trump, his nose badly out of joint, declined the initial offer from Pfizer and now his team is playing catch-up - now willing to use the War Production laws to force suppliers to focus all-in on getting materials that Pfizer needs to really up production.

But don’t hold your breath :  Republicans are generally loath to force businessmen to do anything, even when lives depend upon it : in WWII as in 2020...

Friday, December 11, 2020

In World War II, the difference from being an occupied territory and a ‘forced’ ally wasn’t always clear and seemed to vary day by day

The stupidest thing he ever did : declaring war on the USA when it had no intention of doing the same to him...

A previous post mentioned that probably the majority of the world’s territories were not actually free to decide whether to be Allied, Axis or Neutral : they were - legally - dependent colonies and protectorates.

But was Egypt, for example, really free to decide? There was a lot of grey areas where the formal - nominal - power to choose was totally constrained by real world politics.

Of course, as soon as the warring powers began invading, they added a lot more grey into the situation.

Poland was quickly divided into three legally different zones : France into two.

Was Vichy France really a willing partner in New Order Europe ?

Was Iceland and Greenland really eager to be occupied by Britain ?

And how willing were countries like Finland and Bulgaria to be co-belligerents with the Axis ?

After May 1940 in Europe and May 1942 in South East Asia it got much harder to be a genuine Neutral.

The time to display truly independent action was probably much earlier when both sides were more even.

I firmly believe that if neutral Sweden had a treaty with Poland, France and the UK to defend Poland from war aggressors, Hitler would not have invaded Poland and also that Stalin would have walked away from any plans to share conquered Poland with Hitler.

Sweden’s large and close land mass was the only real way Britain and France could directly intervene in Poland, not merely annoy Germany’s outer edges to the West.

Spain on the Allied side and Turkey on the Axis side were big enough to alter the war’s course. Noway actively  on the Allied side might also have altered the war’s course.

The biggest Neutral of them all : America, could have decidedly altered the war completely if it had entered the war in September 1939 : even better, threaten to in August 1939...

Despite Hollywood producing a Trumpworld like definition of the truth about America in  WWII, the USA would NEVER have entered the European war, until Hitler first declared war on them.

America’s largest ethnic originating group, far and away, are Germans and 1941’s Congress & Senate simply won’t have voted to declare war on Germany, Pearl Harbour or not...

WWII’s colonies had no independent, official, position on whether to be Axis, Allied or Neutral

Canadians are continuously surprised to learn that Newfoundland never declared war on Germany in 1939.

Newfoundland had given up its independent Dominion status, as equal to Canada or Australia, during its terrible version of the Great Depression. It was a British Colony, an odd legal form of a colony, but a colony nonetheless.

So when Britain declared war, all her colonies were automatically at war.

That is a huge chunk of the world without an official say so on the moral course of the war.

But wait ! There is more, lots & lots & lots more.

In 1939, most of the world was a colony of some major or minor nation.

France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, Italy all had  huge colonies & protectorates overseas. As did the USA and Japan.

Colonies overseas are always the clearest cut : colonies that are contiguous with the colonial power are less so. But Russia and Germany also had (contiguous) colonies, unofficially if not officially. China too.

I have probably let out some other colonial powers circa 1939 : comment below to correct my errors and to add other colonial powers to the list.

If we get into the weeds, large (& small) ethnic minorities often feel they are left out in their nation’s majority’s rush into war or neutrality : Quebecers or Afrikaners for example differed wildly from their nation’s official position.

I believe that Canada’s first nations, like Australia’s aboriginals, were generally pro the decision to go to war. But all ‘darker peoples’ had plenty to complain about as the war proceeded and they always got the short end of the stick, without any real say in the matter.

But more importantly, each and every adult individual, as some point during the six year old world war, had their own personal opinion on the course their nation/colony was officially taking on the war.

For this war was intensely ideological : many people were (semi) privately more or less pro or anti Fascism, broadly defined, than their own government.

WWII was thus a globally, albeit generally civil, civil war.

By this, I mean many Americans quietly approved of the way Germany mistreated Jews, but were not willing to put on a brownshirt and openly rebel with arms against FDR’s government.

Both the Free French and the French units that served in Hitler’s campaign against communist Russia, for an example, were a tiny fragment of the entire French population at home and abroad.

Resistance was often reduced to ‘going through the motions’ on whatever course your government wanted you to do. People generally went to war because they felt they had to : no rush to the flag in this war, anywhere.

WWII, in this sense, was totally unlike WWI....

a DRAM is a micro-drama , conducted internally within an individual or a small tight group

Virtually everyone who casually asks for a wee dram of whiskey would be shocked and insulted if their host actually delivered upon their request.

If you filled a very tiny, baby-sized, teaspoon to the level top that would be a dram : about 1/8th of an ounce of liquor.

It thus delivers us a sharp history lesson : whiskey for a very long time was extremely scarce and extremely expensive.

Drinkers at their dram shops could only afford to drink - slowly ! - a tiny teaspoon every now and then.

Dram has had many meanings over the centuries : a small coin in ancient times, then used by pub owners for wet measure of alcohol and by doctors and druggists for dry measure of medicines. 

(DRAM, (D-RAM), a form of computer RAM, obviously, has no connection to the older term.)

I have extended, invented, an additional meaning for the ancient term : as a very small drama, a micro-drama.

A drama as far away as possible from the huge nation versus nation dramas usually found in Grand Opera.

Or is it ?

For my micro-dramas, DRAMs, occur mostly inside one person’s conscience, or inside the conscience of a small tightly knit group.

“Should I Go or Should I Stay ?” by the Clash would be a classic pop DRAM.

The construct would generally run along those lines : ‘should I (we) do X...or... should I (we) do Y’ ?

So one could well see a US president, as well as the inner circle around a US president, debating internally about what to do as the Russian freighter filled with atomic bombs steams towards Cuba.

Oops ! That story has been done.

But you see my point : the art form has the potential to tie something as small and as personal as the thoughts inside one’s head, with globe-altering events outside.

In my book ,the dying Dr Dawson has to daily decide whether to quit his quest and take up the quiet life so he can live long enough to have his young son really know him - or whether to plow on and stop penicillin being used solely as a weapon of war and private profit, to instead see abundant cheap natural (PD) penicillin available to all in need throughout the world...

Thursday, December 10, 2020

when we are receiving hospital care, we are all DEMOCRATS ; when it comes to paying for that hospital care, we are all REPUBLICANS

 Do you recognize anything of yourself, or that of friends & relatives, in some of my medically-oriented potted biography ?

I have been in hospitals as a PATIENT many dozens of times over my 70 years - thankfully only twice overnight. The worst was when I was 18, after I got Strep A related glomerulonephritis (kidney disease) so bad that one of my chemical imbalances was so literally ‘off the charts’ that it broke the mechanical recording pen!

 Since my brother had strep related Rheumatic Fever and my sister strep related Scarlet Fever, I was an extremely worried patient, particularly as my mother also had a strep infection that damaged her kidneys. In her case, it was bad enough to give her life-long life-threatening kidney disease and hyper high blood pressure. 

I knew, even as an 18 year old, that  there was some genetic connection to these severe auto immune reactions to relatively mild strep A infections.

Mostly as a result of my mother’s severe illness, I got used to sometimes being one of those PARENT-close relative-close friends who have a high emotional involvement with the patient being visited.

Yes I admit it, many other times, my hospital visits to see others involved little emotional involvement.

And at all times, I was an emotionally involved (cross-torn ?) PAYER of others’ hospital bills. In my province, the sale tax which is on pretty well everything but the air that we breath, is nominally assigned to pay our provincial health costs. In Canada, our income tax paid also has a big chunk handed over to additional pay for health costs.

Emotionally involved as a payer, in the sense that health costs are our governments biggest single expenditure and none of us likes to see so much of our our hard-earned pay going on possibly wasteful hospital spending.

In my case, unlike our Republican voters to the south, I don’t resent my tax dollars being spent on colored folk who “don’t bother to put enough aside to pay for adequate private hospital insurance”.

My resentment, instead, is mostly directed towards those Canadians who smoke, drink, take drugs or indulge in risky behaviour in their sporting activities !

I have never been a hospital administrator, where any personal empathy towards sick and dying people is usually dissolved by an overriding occupational need to prevent the hospital from going into bankruptcy by spending too much...on those sick & dying patients !

But I have been a political candidate, in fact once I ran solely to protest changes in hospital administration - so I have had to publicly stake my career on my public opinions on hospital costs. So yes, at times I have very much been a penny pinching hospital bill payer.

Most of us have donated on behalf of someone sick or dead we were close to - a few of us have also pushed a cart about, or danced with patients, as a hospital volunteer. (I have done all three.) We sign donor cards (me too) or donate blood (not yet).

But quite a few of us have got even closer to the very sick and dying, as a front line health care PROVIDER. And very few of us don’t have some close friend or relative that aren’t or were nurses or doctors.

In my case, my mom was a hospital lab tech and my youngest sister a certified nursing assistant. A cousin was a doctor, another cousin’s kid is about to become one. Among my in-laws, many worked throughout the entire hospital system from cleaner or laundry staff to emergency ward nurse.

I myself was a psych nursing aide, a ward-level front line provider, for four years, in two mental hospitals, on six different types of wards : locked quasi-forensic, severely disabled ‘children’, geriatric, open, acute admission - even in the ‘hospital’ (physical issues) ward.

Your emotional involvement naturally tends to be constantly high with patients who are largely admitted because of their emotional issues : deaths were rare but they do happen and you feel them intensely in patients you have gotten to know very well over the years.

In all of my four ‘medical’ roles : PATIENT-PARENT-PAYER-PROVIDER, I have always been heavily cross-pressured : helping people in need versus cutting costs.

I am always the person most scared when watching TV : its a family joke. I feel tremendous empathy for each and ever character right down inside my bones. This excessive empathy is both a curse and yet a blessing, as a writer.

Like you, I find myself always wearing four or more hats on pretty well any major decision I must make.

So, for instance, while I don’t mind my tax dollars going to be spent on me or my mother as the patient, but I do resent it when a distant in law isn’t willing to pay a taxi to the hospital because Veterans’ Affairs pays for an very expensive and very unneeded ambulance instead.

However, my empathy, my ability to sometimes think like a life-saving Democrat and sometimes like penny-pinching Republican, I think, will serve me well as I attempt a history of wartime penicillin ( and yes, and even WWII itself) as largely an internal conflict between most humans’ empathy for others in need and most humans’ reluctance to put themselves out much to help others, if it costs money, time or physical discomfort and danger.

So this will not be the classical explanation of WWII as a clash between Good and Evil.

This will be an account of WWII that sees the bulk of humanity was morally well intentioned but morally fundamentally lazy.

My tale will be the clash between being morally well meaning and morally lazy : a conflict not just limited as being between individuals in all sorts of nations, Allied Axis & Neutral, during WWII , but also a conflict within most of us, all of the time.

So, if in each very different book chapter and micro-drama (DRAM), I seem to take the side of the protagonists involved in that chapter, it is not an ‘act’.

I have held all of their various views, albeit perhaps in a very muted form, at various times of my life...

Monday, December 7, 2020

Pfizer was first to have PENICILLIN on the beaches of Normandy & now about to be the first to have COVID VACCINE in the arms of Londonderry



The grim-faced man on the left, Pfizer President John L Smith, was an ultra cautious man, moving fast only once in his life : in late summer 1943.

 That was enough, as his nine month long non-stop effort helped win the day on D-Day as only his firm had combat-ready penicillin in time for the the medics’ supplies packs on the Normandy beaches.

Pfizer was supplying, for a time, 80% of the wartime world’s penicillin....

 The employees and share-holders of MERCK , the arch-rival of PFIZER on D-Day and again during Covid-2020, can only rage as their top executives again bet on the wrong horse....