Patterico's Pontifications

12/9/2016

This Is The Greatest Thing I Have Seen on The Internet in Ages

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 9:44 pm



The wonderful band House of Freaks had this great song about the development of the atomic bomb, and the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki:

I was surfing the Web and saw this description of the song by singer Bryan Harvey, may he rest in peace (and may his and his family’s murderers rot in hell):

Dark and Light in New Mexico

Another one by me before I met Johnny. Title came from some folk record I have about music in New Mexico … I turned it into a song about the development of the a-bomb. I have a video tape of George Wendt, aka Norm from Cheers, singing this song on a British Karaoke show in about 1988. He was a Freaks fan, we used to see him at shows. The video is great. He’s huffing and sweating and trying to hit those notes. This was the pinnacle of my career up to that point. We were baffled that a famous guy would like us.

You can’t read that and not want to see the video. Behold the miracle of YouTube:

The whole “why this song?” interchange is awkward, but this is still a keeper.

25 Responses to “This Is The Greatest Thing I Have Seen on The Internet in Ages”

  1. Hostess: “You are involved with the anti-nuclear campaign?”

    Wendt: “No, this is about the extent of it.”

    Truly awesome.

    JVW (6e49ce)

  2. What was the reason for the murders? Drug deal? Feud?

    Elharro (e67849)

  3. Random house burglary with the family home.

    Patterico (115b1f)

  4. Harvey and his family were utterly and completely innocent.

    Patterico (115b1f)

  5. Part of a crime spree. Harvey’s kids were 9 and 4. Someone on Twitter notes one of the killers is slated to die next month. I have marked my calendar.

    https://t.co/OIsk2Kt8Md

    Patterico (1d97e4)

  6. Ricky Gray is fighting not to be executed. He showed no compassion for his victims.

    DRJ (15874d)

  7. He says PCP made him do it.

    DRJ (15874d)

  8. “He says PCP made him do it.”

    So, execute him for reckless use of PCP.

    Besides, as every honest alcoholic knows, evil behaviour is not caused by booze, it and boozing are caused by evil character and morals. Same applies to PCP. May he rot in Hell.

    Fred Z (b0a041)

  9. Give him a lethal injection of PCP and rat poison.

    Colonel Haiku (2601c0)

  10. Let him go out in the style he’s accustomed to.

    Colonel Haiku (2601c0)

  11. I wish we were sorry now.

    AZ Bob (f7a491)

  12. Greetings:

    Lest you all forget, my father was a subject of one of those non-Japanese-American internments from 1942-1945 which included an all-expense-paid tour of the western Pacific with stop offs on Saipan and Pelilieu for some land based-activities. The conclusion of his philosophical analysis about the bombings was that “the only thing wrong with them was we only had two.”

    11B40 (6abb5c)

  13. Never heard of the band and really enjoyed the music. (I also agree that the Bomb was ultimately a good thing. And its existence has contributed to the peace of the post-war period. World Wars now are all or nothing propositions.)

    I looked up the Harvey murders, and was stunned at the savagery. Good Lord. How could anyone fight to save those killers’ lives?! Stunned.

    Patricia (5fc097)

  14. It’s difficult – for me at least – to reconcile my near lifelong perception of the Japanese as a peace-loving, focused, productive people with the absolutely inhuman, barbaric acts they perpetrated in the gathering storm and then during the war. The brutality my uncle who served in the Pacific theater and a co-worker who also served told me of were nauseating and hard to comprehend. A current colleague – of Chinese descent – told me stories of her late mother dodging bullets and fleeing naked for her life from the Japanese invaders. During the occupation, she began sewing any small valuable items like family jewels into the lining of her clothing, which became a lifelong habit she never broke even while living in the USA. Then I read the book by Iris Chang. And the books about the prison camps and the treatment of our captured military people.

    They were fortunate there were only two nukes and that we were the victors.

    Colonel Haiku (2601c0)

  15. They were fortunate there were only two nukes and that we were the victors.

    Maybe this is a kind of luck, yes. The area and atomic bombings of Japan probably helped save my grandfather’s life (he served in Burma).

    But discounting the miseries of air raids and invasion of Japanese offshore territories, Americans and their Western allies weren’t the only victors in the East; the Soviet invasion and occupation of Manchuria was particularly hard on surrendering Japanese citizens and Chinese civilians.

    JP (683605)

  16. There’s this busker who plays piano in front of iconic scenery around the world. Like the Eiffel Tower, the arch in St. Louis, that kind of thing.

    Anyhow here’s an amazing performance with the Griffith Observatory as background.

    Enjoy! [YouTube]

    papertiger (c8116c)

  17. It was a different time, prime minister Abe’s grandfather kishi was a class a war criminal in Korea, yet subsequently was released from prison to form the ldp with kodama.

    There was a Stanley Robinson tale where a young physicist affected by this presentism, goes back and sabotages the first nuclear test, history becomes quite grisly in this new timeline

    narciso (d1f714)

  18. Here’s a Russian Busker with accordion. Her enthusiasm makes up for the language barrier, I think. [YouTube]

    What? No cops?

    papertiger (c8116c)

  19. I know what your thinking. Griffith Observatory is a city park with it’s own security force with nothing to do except be pricks and roust street musicians.
    It would be a different story if it were a professional band on private property.

    Alien Ant Farm – These Days proves that California isn’t a repressive police state, worse than Russia, actively hostile to the native population, especially if those natives happen to be Caucasian. [YouTube]

    Just kidding. Alien Ant Farm was arrested too.

    papertiger (c8116c)

  20. If you haven’t read it, find a copy of Retribution by Max Hastings.

    Will open your eyes on Japan and WW2.

    Harkin (99ba6b)

  21. narciso (d1f714) — 12/10/2016 @ 7:29 pm

    There was a Stanley Robinson tale where a young physicist affected by this presentism, goes back and sabotages the first nuclear test, history becomes quite grisly in this new timeline

    Did he wrote more tahn one alternate history story, or are you thinking of something else?

    I found this: http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-60486-085-6

    The “Lucky Strike” was his first story, a novellete published in 1984.

    This review says the Enola Gay crashes on a test run. The back-up pilot, Capt. Frank January deliberately misses Hiroshima, (but drops the bomb in a less populated area?) When some Japanese scientists tell the rulers of Japan what the explosion was they surrender anyway. (They weren’t so ready to surrender) But January is put on trial and executed! But becomes a martyr, and total nuclear disarmament is achieved by 1956. (???!)

    There’s another story, by Stanley Robinson, a book published in 2002:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Years_of_Rice_and_Salt

    In this one the Black Death kills not one third, but 99% of Europe;s population, and Europe is eventually re-populated by Moslems. Moslems and Chinese eventually go to America, but the Indians successfully resist them. And there’s a 67-year long world war fought mainly between the Moslems and the Chinese. To keep reader identification, the same characters are used in stories told sewt decades and centuries apart, and the explanation is they are reincarnations.

    In this book, some scientists discover the possibility of nuclear weapons after the end of the world war, and conspire to keep the technology secret and publicly pledge never to work on it.

    For starters, if the Black Plague was so deadly, why would non-Europeansbe so immune?

    Sammy Finkelman (fbd892)

  22. If you haven’t read it, find a copy of Retribution by Max Hastings.

    Will open your eyes on Japan and WW2.

    I’ll put it on my list, and thanks for the recommendation. I have to say, though: I find myself increasingly irritated by books that have a Kindle edition and an Audible edition that are not Whispersync integrated with a discount for the Audible edition. It’s SO much easier to read a book when you can seamlessly go back and forth between reading and audio. It’s easy for publishers to enable, so I get angry when they don’t.

    Patterico (115b1f)

  23. 20.If you haven’t read it, find a copy of Retribution by Max Hastings.

    Will open your eyes on Japan and WW2.

    Would also recommend Richard Frank’s Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire. It is surely one of the best English language works on the final months/years of the Japanese war effort and explains Allied and Japanese strategic predicaments in lucid detail. The IJA leadership’s wishful thinking re: ‘postwar’ retention of Japanese holdings in Manchuria and China and continued Soviet military quiescence is especially interesting.

    Review here.

    JP (f1742c)

  24. If overthrowing Saddam Hussein was a mistake because it led to ISIS, then getting the Japanese out of China was a mistake because it led to Mao, and much of the fighting in the Korean War.

    But in reality I think we should say there were intervening mistakes, and the same thing with Iraq..

    Sammy Finkelman (8b8667)

  25. Put differently, even with foreign invasions and regional upheavals, all politics is local.

    JP (f1742c)


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