Head Pain

Some days you wake up with a great and blinding pain in the head. I woke up this morning asking myself why Angelina Jolie's father was Richard Clayderman. And then I really woke up and spent some time wondering why I thought that was true. And now my head hurts.

Oh yes. I was on a Billy Joel binge last night (and that has nothing to do with my head pain, by the way). I came away laughing and feeling high after finishing off with The Downeaster, Alexa — especially this verse:

So if you see my Downeaster "Alexa"
And if you work with the rod and the reel
Tell my wife I am trolling Atlantis
And I still have my hands on the wheel...

There's a marvelous thought hidden in there, one of the many in that song.

Everyman Overboard

It's probably a sign of how old I am that the death of Karl Malden (dead today at the age of 97) hit me harder than the death of Michael Jackson. There's no doubt that the latter was more famous by a few orders of magnitude, and more talented by the same factor.

But Malden was more a part of my life. I learnt about car chases, interrogating suspects, figuring things out and being phlegmatic under pressure by watching him in The Streets of San Francisco. In that five-year TV series, he acted as Detective-Lieutenant Mike Stone, the senior partner to Inspector Keller, acted by Michael Douglas.

He actually did win an Oscar; like his Emmy, it was for being a great supporting actor. Here's to Karl Malden, an everyman who taught us nameless people how to be supporting actors!

Of Human Bondage (and other stuff)

Ah, today is a milestone day. Herr Hierophant finally got his dative covalent bond (although highly polarised and almost ironic) within the amorphous State. Meanwhile, the rest of us got to endure (if we were so minded) a whole news cycle on the life and times of the late Michael Jackson.

I've ignored MJ apart from the peculiar and singular highlight of his 1982 album, Thriller. I suppose you had to be there. But MJ never really had any impact on me. It's not that MJ wasn't part of my musical upbringing; he was everywhere during the years of my youth. Rather, it's more a reflection on the fact that in the early 1980s, when I was attending secondary school, even Marvel Comics' Power Man, Iron Fist had more impact on me.

By the time I was really musically aware, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, Billy Joel, and even the retroactively-discovered Beatles had more influence on what I thought good popular music was about. With characters like Madonna and bands like America around, I think I completely ignored MJ during that period.

And now he's gone, aged 50 and a bit. So also is Farrah Fawcett, aged 62, and I think she had more influence on my growing-up years than he did.

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In other news, about two hours ago I became an uncle for the third time. Heh.