Blogs that sound the same

If you were listening to instrumental guitar rock 4 years ago, you might have heard the song "If I Could Fly," by supreme guitar extraordinaire Joe Satriani.

If you've been listening to popular radio for the last few months, then you've heard the song "Viva la Vida" by British band Coldplay.

Well now, Satriani says that if you've heard the Coldplay song and not his, then you've actually heard his song, except with words.

Last week in court, the "Satch Man," as Satriani is called, sued Coldplay, who have been dubbed the "new" Beatles or the dung Beatles, depending on who you ask, for plariarism over allegations that their song "Viva la Vida" borrowed the melody from his song "If I Could Fly." Satriani said that he was shocked the first time he heard Coldplay's tune. "It was like a dagger through the heart," he said. Chris Martin, the lead singer for Coldplay adamantly insists that his band did nothing wrong and thinks the lawsuit filed by the guy whose name rhymes with "Moe Batriani" is absurd.

There's even a video on You Tube that got over a million hits in the first day that compares the two songs. The video plays clips from each song that leave the viewer with the obvious impression that the only really good Coldplay song is just a rip off of Satriani's labor of love. The maker of the video then overlays the two songs which actually sounds better than either one standing alone, but don't expect the two to tour together anytime soon.

Could it be that Coldplay came up with a statistically significant similar melody out of pure happenstance, or is did they think that Satriani's music was instrumental simply because he could not speak or speak out? Music has been around for a long, long time and melodies have enjoyed remarkable originality through the years, but could it be that we are simply running out of new, unique melodies? Are similiar songs just musical accidents? I oftened wondered this when I was a kid, and since that time there have been thousands of new, original recordings hitting the airways and even more thousands going unreleased on albums. If man has already produced every possible melody, then the mathematical concept of the "pigeonhole principle" dictates that at least two melodies will be the same, not counting deliberately recycled melodies like "Twinkle Twinkle," the "ABC" song, and "Baa Baa Black Sheep."

This means that there might be another "Achy, Breaky Heart" somewhere down the lines, perhaps as an instrumental orchestral piece. Lynyrd Skynyrd's classic "Sweet Home Alabama" might someday reappear as a country song sung by a rock artist--oh wait, Kid Rock already did that. But sampling or oversampling existing tunes is entirely different that "original" works that sound eerily the same. Why, just last August, the Black Crowes sued Gretchen Wilson, claiming her ditty "Work Hard, Play Harder" sounded a lot like the Crowes "Jealous Again" hit.

The most famous case is probably a lawsuit brought about by former Beatle (not of Coldplay) George Harrison against The Chifons, claiming their "He's So Fine," is a rip-off of his "My Sweet Lord." Sounds like the same song to me with an synonymous title. And there are others:

• Mercury and Bowie's "Under Pressure" and Vanilla Ice's "Ice Ice Baby"--of course ICE will tell you that there's and extra "duh" in his version . . . DUH!
  
• SClub7's "I never had a dream come true" and Eliot Yamin's "Wait for you"--the former American Idol standout didn't even TRY to hide this one.
• Backstreet Boys "Drowning" and O-Town's "All or Nothing"--Boy bands copying other boy bands is downright uninteresting.
• Sly and the Family Stone's "Thank you for letting me be myself" was boosted by Janet Jackson in "Rhythm Nation."--She later thanked Sly and the Family Stone for letting her just be themselves.
• The Christmas Classic "What Child is this?" and "Greensleeves"--what are Greensleeves anyway?
• Francis Scott Key's "Star-Spangled Banner" and Ozzy Osbourne's "Crazy Train"--well, maybe not so much
• Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven all sound like Wagner, Handel, and Vivaldi--supposedly all good for babies. I wonder if THEY can tell the difference?.!
  
• Even the number 1 rock and roll song of all time, Led Zepplin's "Stairway to Heaven" sounds eerily similar to Spirit's "Taurus," a song that predates it by 3 years!!! Say it isn't so!!! That one HAD to be an accident.

Of course there are many, many others. If you care, just "google" it or do a search on "You Tube." What should or could be done in situations like this? Well, that's for the courts to decide. I'll I know is that in the most recent case, I'm very excited to learn of the great song by Joe Satriani. I've been listening to it over and over. So, thanks Coldplay for turning me on to such a great tune. Keep 'em coming.

Web Logging

or Blogging for short. An activity that is sweeping the globe, replacing diaries and personal journals. Today, just about everyone has a blog. You can find one on literally any topic you want. But what happens when you've got good ideas or just plain mental garbage that you'd like to put out into the Blogosphere community but you just don't know where to start? Good news! There's a new book for you.

Blogger extraordinaire Arianna Huffington (huffingtonpost.com) has just published a new book entitled "The Complete Guide to Blogging." In it, she puts forth delineated, enumerated sequences by which someone interested in getting into the act can follow. With a new blog appeared world-wide every half second, the book outlines how the the people NOT contributing to the approximately 175,000 new blogs per day can join the Blogosphere. Believe it or not, tip number one is NOT to "google" the topic of "how to start a blog," but rather the deeply profound and insightful tip of "Blog your passions." The chapter then goes into more detail about WHICH passions to blog: your "obvious" passions, and your "hidden" passions.

Although I was able to start this blog with a little initiative and the finger agility that was necessary to typed the keyboard in the correct sequence, I could see how the sale of the book could be useful to some people, people like Arianna Huffington. But even to someone like me without real passions who already has a blog and who manages to crank out 3 to 4 posts a week, the book appears to offer something useful. Theirin contained within the pages are not only the "obvious" things needed to blog, but also the "hidden" tricks needed for a "successful" blog.

Now we're getting somewhere. What IS a successful blog? What do bloggers expect to get out of their efforts? Some do it for money. Some do it for attention. Some do it for entertainment. Some do it for pleasure. Some do it to share their vision with the world. Some do it because they have no job and don't feel like getting dressed. Some do it merely for a personal catharsis.

For me, I'm not as interested in drawing such a large readership, but rather do it for more personal reasons. I've kept a written journal much of my life, and an online blog is great, cheap way to keep everything in one place. The fact that others may view my writing has certainly shaped the topics and the way in which I write, but it still serves the same purpose: a purging of emotions and a forced session of introspection and creativity through hyperbolic writing (NO, my son is not REALLY getting a tattoo.) The fact that two people read this blog is a delightful bonus, and I do enjoy reading the occasional comment left and the interactive repartee. Anything that gets me thinking and laughing or gets others thinking and laughing is worth it in and of itself. After all, our family credo is "learn a lot, love a lot, laugh a lot." Blogging a lot seems to help me personally accomplish those three, although my wife really dislikes my "love" of the computer at times.

So information is a powerful thing, and how-to books have been immensely popular as more and more do-it-yourselfers begin to do things for themselves. If you're blogging for profit and want your blog site to get thousands of hits each day, then Huffington's book may be for you. I hope you have valuable passions to share. If you're interested in rewiring you house, then I suggest foregoing the Time/Life book on electricity and hire a licensed professional to do it. But if you are interested in just hammering a few keys at the computer to put down some of your own thoughts for your own sanity, enjoyment, or as a way of having "real" conversations with your wife remotely, then just go to www.blogspot.com, wait for a half-second interval, and create your own web log--clothing optional!

Need . . .more . . . ink . . . .

Aside from meetings, I think one of the worst inventions of man is paperwork. Everywhere you go, or anything you do usually requires some sort of documentation or form to fill out, many times, more than one. For instance, I've got 7, yes SEVEN, accounts at the local hospital. Each time in entered and re-entered the hospital, whether as an admitted patient or on an outpatient basis for lab work, I had to go through the entire administration process all over again. This took anywhere from 45 minutes to 45 days, depending on the line in front of you and whether or not the pens were functioning or not. Luckily for me, if there was a silver lining to be found, my wife had to endure most of those since I was undergoing preoperative procedures in the OR.

Last week, as November came to a close, I went to the hospital for one of my last three lab draws. With only two more to go, both coming in December, I was told that my outpatient account was only good from month to month and that I have to . . . . yep, you guessed it . . . . re-register for the month of December!! Being a patient, understanding guy, I wasn't going to take up the issue with the wonderfully pleasant lab secretary to whom I had come to like (becoming chummy with hospital employees over a long period of time is not necessarily a good thing if you are a patient and not a co-worker, but that's another blog.) I knew the administrated red tape and bureaucratic hoop-jumping is out of her control. She was merely informing me of the protocol, a protocol she was no doubt taught during an administrative meeting.

One hour later, I was good to go for another month of lab draws. With all the information easily rolling over in the computer, there were only 5 or 6 . . . . . . dozen papers to sign. I thought I was going to have to get admitted to the E.R. to take care of my acute writer's cramp.

At least with the hospital, with so many agencies, billing practices, insurance companies involved, and liabilities, I can somewhat see how the paperwork could pile up. Not so in another instance. Earlier this summer, my 5-year-old daughter decided to have her ears pierced while we were shopping at a local mall. Trying to encourage her against her painful fears of getting holes in her skin, we were happy to duck into the nearest boutique before her courage waned. We had to do this fast, but that was not going to happen because of all the forms I had to fill out. Who knew that the actually piercing process, including deciding on which piercing posts to use, what color stone to select, carefully marking the ears so that they would turn out symmetrical and getting mom's approval on their position, cleaning the ears, and loading and using the gun would actually take less time than it took for me to fill out all 3 pages of required documentation. I had to give my social security number, driver's license number, my address and phone number, my birthday, and even my favorite color. I had to do everything but submit a DNA sample to prove that I was my daughter's legal guardian (the fact that she was calling me "Dad" and that she's got my nose didn't count for anything.)

Afterwards, there was the credit card processing and signing, along with an instruction booklet outlining "post-piercing" ear care, for which I had to sign an affidavit attesting to the fact that I had received it. WOW! I really don't know to this day why that process was so unnecessarily complicated. I'm guessing everyone out there today that is providing a good or service to anyone else in just practicing the CYA policy. It sure was a different experience, though, from when I put a piece of ice behind my ear in 7th grade and shoved one of my mom's studs through the thick part of my lobe. No paperwork involved, only pain and blood. Later that night I'd have to implement my own CYA policy when my dad discovered what I had done, but that's another blog.

Being a teacher, there's always paperwork. It's part of the job, I guess. Preparing lesson plans, quizzes, tests. Grading homework, quizzes, and tests. This paperwork is necessary to the job and for assessment. There's also the taxing, time-consuming responsibility of writing letters of recommendation for the dozens of students who need a good word from you to get into the college of their choice. Although I don't mind writing these, they all seem to ask at one time, and they always seem to need them by yesterday. But in addition to all the "tolerable" and "necessary" paperwork, there's a lot of useless tedium that falls under the CYA policy that puts increased burdens on all teachers: IEPs. 504s. Learning Objectives. Daily Agendas. Hidden Agendas. Educational Motives. Ulterior Motives. Documenting phone calls and e-mails to parents. Documenting modifications for special students. Documenting interventions for failing students. Documenting interventions for apathetic students. Documenting continuing education hours and professional development hours. Documenting this, that, and everything else. Sometimes it feels like documenting what needs to be done, what will be done, and what has been done supersedes actually doing it.

I guess what I'm really getting at is that I miss having a teaching assistant this year to help me with grading all the papers that seem to reproduce exponentially when left unattended, all these papers that I take for rides home and back to school each day.

Maybe I'll just quit assigning homework and giving quizzes. That should free up enough time for me to fill out the 10-page application needed for my 8-year-old son to get his tatoo.

Working Stiff

Into my third week of physical therapy now, I'm becoming more and more limber and flexible every single day, but still relatively slowly. I'm working on bending and straightening my leg, two very important movements that we all take for granted, but that currently cause me much pain and fatigue in trying to accomplish.

As a matter of pragmatics, I've been focusing on the bending part, doing wall slides, heel slides, and squats in order to stretch both the locked-up knee and the crazy-tight quads. My progress helps me to do simple things like walk down stairs reciprocally, switch pedals from gas to brake to gas in the car, and to kick my cat. As it turns out, the bending is the lesser important goal. It's the straightening that is more critical. With the knee acting like a hinge, not being able to straighten the leg is tantamount to having a small stone stuck in the hinge, preventing it from coming together. Scar tissue acts like the stone in the hinge, and after time, it becomes so hard and calcified that it can only be removed by surgical intervention. The mention of the word "surgery" was enough to get me focusing on straightening the leg more aggressively. Additionally, the quads cannot get a true firing unless the leg is straight, impeding the efficiency of my progress.

The exercise is simple: put a couple of pillows under my heel and let gravity do its thing. I add a 5 pound weight just below the knee to help it along. If that gets old, and it gets painfully old after only a few minutes, I transition onto my growing belly (not enough aerobic exercise and too much Thanksgiving leftovers) and let my leg hand off the bed. Moving the weight to the ankle gets the most painful (and effective) stretch. I try to sustain this for 10 to 15 minutes, but my wife usually makes me stop sooner so the kids don't have to hear so much swearing.

For all my hard work, I finally hit zero degrees yesterday for the first time. That's a straight leg making up what mathematicians call a "straight angle" of 180 degrees. Although it initially required the assistance of electro-shock therapy, (or "e-stim" as the people administering the electrocution who don't actually feel the shock call it), I was able to flex to zero on my own after the juice subsided. The Aloe Vera on the electrical burns seemed like such a nice way to celebrate my accomplishment. Of course, my good leg hyperextends a few degrees, so I still have progress to make past zero. Besides, after a full day of teaching on my feet, the blood pools in my knee, making it swollen and stiff. Additionally, it also stiffens up each night, as I sleep with it slightly bent and very still (spooning pose). This means I lose most of any progress I make the day before. Sounds great, huh?

As for the leg bending, I went from 90 degrees yesterday at the beginning of the 1-hour sesssion to 109.99 degrees at the end. Because I was torturing myself so mercilessly on the squat machine and managing not to cuss up a storm, the therapist rounded the final number to 110 degrees. That means I made a 20 degree gain in the bendy direction and 8 degrees in the straight direction (I came in at 8 degrees) for a total of 28 degrees of total gain!! I promised I wouldn't cuss in front of my kids anymore, so the therapist fudged and gave me a nice, round 30 degree gain.

What does that mean? That means this morning I woke up having lost 30 degrees of flexibility--Da*$%@ It!!!! Sorry kids, I didn't mean to wake you.

The therapist says that it's normal to lose what I've gained, but not desirable. What is lost is more easily reagained the next time, but the pain in getting there isn't any less. So either I give up sleep, train myself to do heel slides while sleeping, or deal with daily setbacks.

Right now, running again seems so far off in the future if at all. At least I have food to comfort me.

That reminds me . . . It's time to eat. Looks like tonight is "Turkey Étouffée."