Bounded in a Nutshell

Amontillado somehow doesn't seem worth the risk of getting sealed away in a cellar.

The Internet is a source for a great many good things, as long as you don't care about accuracy.

Most recent evidence: I'm figuring out the chords to a Loudon Wainwright song (White Winos, if you're curious) and it's one of these songs where I have trouble keeping the verses straight. This isn't because they're sort of random, the way that (say) Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone is sort of random (in that you could easily swap around bits and pieces of the verses and stand a good chance of no one noticing); there's a story there, and the order's important. It's because each verse has a number in the first couple of lines (from one to five), and I can't keep the numbers straight, and that throws me off.

…what? There's like 120 different permutations of five numbers, how am I supposed to know which one to use?

Anyway. As I'm testing my chords/fingerings, I figure it would be nice if I had the lyrics in front of me. And lo and behold, I'm on the Internet, where lyrics sites have flourished on and off for a dozen years or more. I'm enough of a geezer to remember the WUSTL lyrics FTP archive, which might even predate Nevada and the original on-line guitar archive; there were lawsuits and such in the 90s, and then some agreement was reached. Or possibly people just decamped to Switzerland. Anyhow, there's whole bunches of lyrics sites.

And they all crib from each other.

This is obvious, in the same way that it's obvious when students are copying off each other: there may only be one way to get something right, but there's a myriad wrong answers, and the mistakes you make tend to be idiosyncratic. If I see two students who've both managed to square 6 and get 32, I get suspicious; likewise, when every lyrics site I check omits the first verse (what, was the line …when she was alive too much of a downer?), then I begin to wonder.

Of course the problems don't end there; the lyrics on each site are shot through with (the same) errors. Let's looks at the second verse (which is of course listed as the first):

mother liked her white wine
she'd have a glass or two
almost every single night
after her day was through

san se chardonnay chaiblie
pinot gris jiot
just to take the edge of
just to get the glow

So OK, we're drinking white wine; the "Chardonnay" makes that clear. But "san se"? "chaiblie"? "jiot"?! I'd almost be impressed they got "Pinot Gris", except for that "jiot" hanging around afterwards. (The corrent lines there? "Sancerre, Chardonnay, Chablis, Pinot Grigio". Googling on that string actually gets you to a correct and complete version of the lyrics.) The "of" for "off" at the end of the penultimate line is common enough to be forgivable, but the list of (really rather famous) wine types? Never.

I almost wonder if this is how the lyrics sites get around copyright. The original lyrics may well be protected, but does that protection extend to obviously wrong transcriptions?

Notes from the beginning of spring:

• I've finally done the smart, sensible thing and cancelled my NetFlix subscription. It turns out that I don't actually feel likely watching movies by myself very often, and certainly not so often that I can't walk up the street to the video store when the impulse strikes; it'll be cheaper that way, too. As evidence for this, I now need to send back my current three discs… which I've had for months plural, and haven't watched any of yet.
• Speaking of charges on my credit card bill… earlier this month I was at a conference in Florida. When I got to my hotel, the desk clerk told me that she couldn't find my reservation; after much hemming and hawing, I was assigned the Worst Room in the House; my roommate and I checked out the next day, with him settling the account and finding up accommodations elsewhere via Connections™. Well, I guess they found my reservation after all because apparently I've been charged for one nights' stay. I do not see this ending well for the hotel.
• I'm beginning to make plans for a trip east this spring, with Halifax being the technical destination but a certain amount of meandering through Québec and the Maritimes along the way. Applications for travelling companions are being accepted at this time.
• I've somehow been persuaded to start doing the FaceBook thing. I imagine that if you know me IRL then tracking me down on that site won't be hard, but since I've barely looked at what all it's for I may be wrong on this account.

Cheddar that has been aged for two years or more really shouldn't taste like process cheese food.

Damn you, Vermont! I blame you!

The thing about daylight saving time is that we believe it.

I look at the clock in the corner of the screen, and it tells me that it's 2:43 in the afternoon. Twenty-four hours ago it wasn't, but I look at the clock and say to myself, yeah, that sounds right to me. This might be because I have no internal sense of time-in-the-world, objective time, and hence must take my cues from the timepieces around me. Or that I do have such a sense, but what it tells me is that what it says on the clock is (roughly) correct. Or maybe that I recognize on some level how arbitrary it is to assign particular numbers to particular hours, and hence any label will do.

(I've never swung between more than three time-zones in a single trip, which I suppose isn't much, but I get the same effect when I travel from Eastern to Pacific: I accept what the clocks around me say, and generally adjust pretty quickly to the consensus.)

We talk about gaining and losing hours when we make the shift from standard to DST, but that's just a convenience of the notation. All we're doing is relabelling hours, and then being silly enough to believe that we've done something real.