Relevent to my interests: the triumph of sadness

But through the 1980s and '90s, the dominance of the major key in the Top 40 began to shift, slowly at first and then quite radically: "By 2009," Schellenberg says, "only 18 out of [the Top] 40 [songs] were a major key."

That means that the majority of the Top 40 songs, 22 of 40, were in a minor key — the official sound of complexity and sadness.

So, have some examples I ran across recently.

Addicted to Love, as performed in 1985

I still see Patrick Nagel art at one hairdressers I pass on the bus but I was convinced not to put a Nagel joke into this year's FASS on account of I'm pretty much the one who would get it.

Same song, different musician in 2010

Remember Cyndi Lauper's 1984 hit She-Bop?

Here's her 2005 version:

(original link nicked from scarlettina)

Interesting if true

The good news for Republicans: there was indeed a post-RNC bounce.

The bad news: It wasn't for Romney.

This is my amazed face

Iggie to fuck off back to America.

Supposedly he will continue to blight Canadian soil six months or the year, like a wrecked cask of nuclear waste scattered across a once-green valley. Here's to full time employment at Harvard.

Mindwebs: The Man Who Returned and A Night In Elf Hill and The Valley Of Echoes

The Man Who Returned

This is by Edmond Hamilton, who is perhaps best known for pioneering space opera. This tale of a prematurely buried man who claws his way free of the grave to return to his family, a family curiously in the habit of delivering expository dialog in front of windows, is nothing like space opera.



A Night In Elf Hill

Dig that crazy space-slang, daddy-o! Also, is there a Spinrad story of this vintage whose protagonist is not a monumental sexist prat?

I imagine in settings like this one, honey-traps like this one are something the manual eventually covers. Unfortunately for this guy, he is in the process of being sort material for that chapter in the manual.


The Valley Of Echoes

I don't know much about Gérard Klein but this 1966 story of men desperately looking for any sign of life on an otherwise disappointing Mars is respectably modern.