Short people live in the future, so the Babies! are very advanced... and other thoughts I just had now. (Awesome Covers Of Already Awesome Songs)

Just so you know, not everything in my life revolves around the song "Sweet Talk, Sweet Talk" by The New Pornographers, although you could be forgiven for thinking that because I mentioned the song not that long ago, and I actually listen to this song a lot, even though listening to it is hard to do because I haven't yet bought the album, so I have to go to Youtube and play the video for it, which I do quite frequently, making me happy that I live in the era of smartphones so that I can, while driving home, look up "Sweet Talk, Sweet Talk" on Youtube and play the video, listening to it on my headphones.

Keep that in mind: It's illegal to text while driving, but not illegal to look up New Pornographers' videos while driving.

Along the way, I found an alternate version of Sweet Talk, Sweet Talk, a cover version of it by The New Pornographers themselves. Here it is:



And I'm posting it now because I have several things to say about that, and they are:

1. When I try to listen to this video on my phone using headphones, for some reason, it comes through as lispy: The sound doesn't quite synch up so that I hear all the "s" sounds as "th" sounds, which is really quite annoying to me.

I had been wondering why that was, and then, reading The New Yorker last night, an article about a scientist who studies perceptions of time, I found out that when watching movies and the like -- including, presumably, videos on Youtube -- engineers don't try to make the sound match the image perfectly, because our brains edit what we're seeing to make the sound match the image -- provided that the gap isn't that large, our brains automatically edit it out.

That was explained and then expanded on by the scientist noting that we quite literally are living in the past: our brains are always a tiny amount of time behind what we're doing, as they gather up information about our surroundings and piece it together, and that lag means that what you're seeing right now actually happened a few milliseconds ago.

Your whole life is a tape delay.

And, weirdly, short people are less delayed. So Sweetie, who is 9 inches shorter than me, is actually living in my future and I should ask her what things are like so I know what to expect when I get there. And the Babies! are clearly way ahead of us both... as evidenced by this actual picture of Mr F, taken last Friday just after he got home from school:



P.S. All that stuff about time and short people is all true. You can read about it here. Expect me to blather on about this article a lot until I read something else that catches my attention.


2. Remember, I said I had other things to say about this song. So I also will note that I got Mr Bunches to like this song by playing this video, in which you can see them playing the instruments. Mr Bunches is into instruments now; his three favorite things in the world at this moment are airplanes, musical instruments, and climbing on things:


and when I wanted to stop watching his videos and instead play my music while I cleaned up, I played the video in this post for him and pointed out all the instruments, so now he loves this song, and when he watches it, he goes to get my guitar and sits and tries to play guitar in time to the music, which is both cute and extremely encouraging because I never even considered that he might someday be a rock star and I could live off him that way, so it just goes to show you that 90% of parenting is simply "making sure you listen to your music." (I'm like Dr. Spock for the 21st Century.)

3. Finally, I'll get a little (more?) philosophical with this post and point out that you, like me, probably at one point wanted to be a rock star. Sure, maybe you didn't try out for a rock band when you were a freshman in college, and maybe you didn't sing a bunch of songs rewritten as law-school-related parodies like I did in law school, and maybe you didn't with your high school friends invent a fictional band that you were all part of called "Critical Mass," a band that never existed except in your minds, but even if you didn't go that far you probably wanted to be a rock star at one point.

And you probably wanted to be a rock star because they're rich and get to travel and have groupies and own islands and do all those rock-star-type things, but when you considered that you never considered whether the actual being a rock star was as cool as it seems, and when you look at this video, you get the other side of being a rock star, which is this:

It must be godawful boring playing the same songs all the time. Watch that video again: Look at their eyes. Most of them look like they're standing in front of a copying machine or getting ready to work an assembly line.

Their job is playing music for a living, and they look less excited than I get when I see that there's a new case dealing with illegal repossessions. (Okay, I know I'm weird.)

So think about that, the next time you plan on being a rock star or wish you were one: Is it any better to be bored, playing a viola, than it is to be bored sitting in a meeting?

Aside from the whole "owning islands, being rich, etc." part, I mean.

Also, if you still want to be a rock star and think you might become one some day, find a really short person and ask them whether, in the future where they reside, you became one.

In the end, the route I took to the answer could be described as... (Cool Things I Never Learned In School)

Why are things described as "byzantine," and what does that really mean?

Up until about two weeks ago, I'd never really given any thought to the word byzantine, even though I used it from time to time.

Using words without really knowing what they mean is how you get a reputation for being smart: most people are to impressed/embarrassed to ask you what it means or question how you're using the word, so if you're even close, you get a reputation for being very wise, at least until someone says "what does that mean?"

And, really, things being byzantine didn't come up all that often, as you'd imagine, but then I listened to an episode of This American Life in which Ira Glass talked to (or about, it's hard to tell on that show) a guy who specialized in underwater Byzantine archaeology.

Honestly: a thing that you wouldn't imagine existed, a thing so specific that you couldn't even dream it up, is a guy's whole career, a career that began when he (for some reason) went scuba diving and found what archaeologists know to be a sunken ship from the Byzantine Empire and what the rest of us would assume to be "a bunch of junk on the ocean floor" and not even all that much junk, either: just some scraps of wood that were lucky (?) enough to be buried under the sediment before they decomposed or were eaten by starfish or something.

This guy -- these guys, actually, Fred van Doorninck and George Bass -- began recreating this Byzantine ship by pinning parts of it to the ocean floor using sharpened bicycle spokes, on repeated scuba diving trips, until they were able to reconstruct the ship entirely, and then were able to actually reconstruct it the right way, after an acquaintance who actually knew something about boats pointed out to them that their first effort at recreating the boat was wrong and the boat wouldn't actually sail.

(Which really says something about how archaeologists are putting together dinosaur bones and the like, doesn't it? Completely aside from the fact that they're making up dinosaurs based on scraps of bone, two archaeologists put together what they thought was a boat, but, being unfamiliar with boats, built it wrong, so are we absolutely sure that T. Rex looked like a T.Rex?)

Anyway, aside from thinking that it was amazing that there could be such a thing as underwater archaeology, and thinking it was amazing that as a kid who at one point wanted to be an oceanographer and at another point wanted to be an archaeologist...

... my mom tried to talk me out of the latter by pointing out that it wasn't like "Indiana Jones" career, but who says it couldn't be?...

... that as such a kid, I never knew that "underwater archaeology" existed, and why not? When kids are going to grade school and high school and trying to imagine what they might be in the future, why is nobody telling them there's an Institute of Nautical Archaeology that they might want to consider?

It might have ended there, but for the fact that then I heard, on Pandora, a new song from The New Pornographers (The Best Rock Band That Isn't The Beatles, U2, or The White Stripes), the song being Sweet Talk Sweet Talk:



Which to you is just the song behind the latest Kindle ad, but to me set off a chain reaction that resulted in me going to read stuff, because I heard that song the same day I listened to This American Life, and, if you listened closely to it, you'll realize (like I did) that the first verse is:

A mistake on the part of nature, You're so fabled, so fair, just sit anywhere, I've pencil-sketched the scene, It's feeling byzantine.

And byzantine is mentioned lots in that song, which has the usual obscure New Pornographers lyrics that make me feel like it must be nonsense, something I have to believe because otherwise I'd feel like I'm stupid, and I hate feeling stupid.

Which all led me to wonder what, really, does byzantine mean and why do we use it to mean complicated or labyrinthine?

So I read up on the Byzantine Empire -- not books about it, but articles about it -- and learned that the Byzantine Empire was an offshoot of the original Roman Empire, also called the Eastern Roman Empire, and that it began, more or less, around the time of Justinian, who also helped codify the Roman laws and tried to incorporate them with Christianity...

... cue the political reference: So we have Justinian to blame for the fact that in 2010 we elected people who feel that God's okay with Britney Spears marrying on a drunken whim but not okay with two men promising to love each other forever...

...and that after that the Empire thrived, more or less (can you thrive, "more or less"?) for about 1000 years, never giving up the ambition of retaking the Western Roman Empire even though for a period of time there was no Western Roman Empire, because Italy had fallen into ruin, Rome largely abandoned, and was overrun by "Lombards," which is German (I guess) for longbeards, but also never actually retaking the West, either.

The Byzantine Empire did do some pretty amazing sounding things, like defeating some people called the Ostrogoths, and conquering North Africa, and as far as I can tell it was not the Ottoman Empire, because it lost territory during the "Byzantine-Ottoman" wars, as well.

All of which does not tell me why Byzantine = complicated.

So I kept looking, and came across one of those anonymous web pages where people with no accreditation give answers to questions, and this one talked about how "byzantine" as "complicated" arose from the way Byzantine generals solved their problems.

I then searched for stuff related to that, and came across a Wikipedia page entitled "Byzantine fault tolerance" which began with a reference to the "Byzantine Generals Problem," which itself is a kind of logic problem along the lines of that one about everyone on an island being a liar; it's apparently used to help solve programming problems and has to do with how "loyal" generals know that the command they're receiving is a valid one.

Which then led me to investigate how the Byzantine Armies were organized, and I found that they're amazingly complicated: they were set up along "themes," or thema, with generals holding civilian and military power and judges holding judicial power, and some people getting land grants to support their troops. When the large size of these "themes" led to revolts, the structure was complicated further, setting up levels and levels of divisions and groupings of men.

Scholars then say that the weakening of the themes -- and resultant complication -- led to the eventual demise of the Byzantine Emperor (or greatly contributed to it.)

Which all means that byzantine, properly understood, doesn't just mean complicated, it means complicated for specific reasons that undermine its effectiveness.

If that seems like a lot of work to understand a song from The New Pornographers, keep this in mind: I still don't understand it. But it is catchy.