John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band

JOHN CAFFERTY and the BEAVER BROWN BAND are best remembered for their soundtrack to the movie Eddie and the Cruisers. 

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The band was from the Cranston Rhode Island area in the early 1970s. They were doing the garage band practice when someone saw a Dutch Boy paint can that was called Beaver Brown and that became the original name of the band.  Lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist John Cafferty's name was added to the band's name for their first album's release. 

Before the hit soundtrack made them famous, they had some early success in 1980 with a self-released single that had the songs "Wild Summer Nights" and "Tender Years" - both of which would appear later on the movie soundtrack. Though it had East Coast airplay, they didn't get signed by a label.

The band was sometimes compared favorably to the sound of Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band and critics liked them but it was an offer from producer Kenny Vance to score a movie he was doing that launched their career.

The film was based on the novel of the same name by P. F. Kluge about some reporters doing a story on a fictional New Jersey bar band called Eddie and the Cruisers that was legendary locally in their time locally. 

The film was in heavy rotation on HBO in the early 1980s and the soundtrack album reached the top 10 on the Billboard chart and produced a top 10 single, "On the Dark Side." The album was eventually certified triple Platinum by the RIAA.

John Cafferty & The Beaver Brown Band continue to tour and other songs by them have been used on the soundtracks of other major motion pictures.

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In like a lion, out like a lamb

News about the pandemic seemed to push aside the usual stories on the news about the weather. “In like a lion, out like a lamb” has always seemed a straightforward enough proverb about the weather in March. March begins in winter, and by the end of the month, spring has begun, so it is often a mean lion at the start and a gentle lamb at the end. 

Some websites call the phrase an 18th-century expression. A 1732 citation lists it as “Comes in like a Lion, goes out like a Lamb.” Wikipedia says it originated in Pennsylvania. 

There is even a celestial explanation. In March, Leo is the rising sign but by April Aries is rising. (Ram, kid, lamb?) 

It is less frequently applied to situations where someone starts strongly and ends weakly, as in " The President came in like a lion but went out like a lamb."

Doomscrolling

Have you heard the word "doomscrolling"? Have you been doing it? It is defined as the act of scrolling on your device and reading or skimming the endless stream of bad news that hit us daily on news sites and social media. 

Image:Mote Oo Education | Pixabay

The pandemic, economic hard times, violence in the street and the Black Lives Matter protests are all important stories but seem to all be part of a doomsday scenario.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary people have recently flagged doomscrolling as one of the words it is watching for 2020 for possible inclusion into the dictionary.

The word has appeared in stories in Business Insider, and the close variation, “doomsurfing,” appeared in the New York Times.

Why are people doomscrolling if the news is so negative? It is a combination of a "fear of missing out" (FOMO), a “hurry-up-and-wait” instinct and a real desire to get information on the pandemic and other issues even if that information is incomplete, questionably accurate and depressing.

With so many sources of information at our fingertips, the temptation to doomscroll is seductive to many people.

Vaccine and vaccination

These early months of 2020 have been filled with words (coronavirus, COVID-19) and phrases (sheltering at home, social distancing) that are new or coming into wider usage. Certainly, the words vaccine and vaccination have been used for more than 200 years, but what are their origins?

Vaccine comes from the name for the cowpox virus, vaccinia, which comes from the Latin vacca meaning cow. This pox virus attacked cows. 

In 1796, the British doctor Edward Jenner gave a young patient what became known as the first “vaccinia vaccine” - a vaccine made from the cowpox virus, - in an attempt to protect him from the human form of the pox virus. These first vaccinations were crude by today's standards. Jenner took pus from the cowpox lesions on a milkmaid’s hands and introduced that fluid into a cut he made in the arm of an 8-year-old boy.

When Jenner exposed the boy to smallpox 6 weeks later (!) he did not develop the infection. He also seemed immune to subsequent exposures and lived to age 65.

A caricature by James Gillray "The Cow Pock" of Jenner vaccinating patients who feared it would make them sprout cowlike appendages - Library of Congress, Public Domain, Link

His vaccine practice was not immediately accepted. People feared the counterintuitive idea of introducing a disease into your body in order to fight disease. And the idea of using something from an animal in your body was repulsive. Jenner submitted a paper about his new procedure to the prestigious Royal Society of London, but it was rejected. The president of the Society told Jenner that it was a mistake to risk his reputation by publishing something so controversial.

Jenner published his ideas at his own expense in a short pamphlet in 1798 which was widely read and discussed. Novelist Jane Austen noted in one of her letters that she’d been at a dinner party and everyone was talking about the “Jenner pamphlet.” 

The vaccination process evolved but in that time even the idea of germs was unknown so poor sanitation and dirty needles contributed to issues from the process

Jenner used the word vaccine in his writing and his friend, Richard Dunning, used "vaccination" in 1800, but the Oxford English Dictionary credits the French for coining the term vaccine in 1800 and vaccination in 1803. There are cognates in other languages (Italian, vaccine, Portuguese, vacina, and Spanish, vacuna). 

Today, viral tissue culture methods that were developed starting in the 1950s led to the advent of the Salk (inactivated) polio vaccine and the Sabin (live attenuated oral) polio vaccine. Despite there still be a small minority of anti-vaccination critics, mass polio immunization has now eradicated the disease from many regions around the world.

Nazz

Nazz was an American rock band formed in Philadelphia in 1967 guitarist/songwriter Todd Rundgren and bassist Carson Van Osten. The drummer was Thom Mooney and the lead vocalist/keyboardist was Robert "Stewkey" Antoni. Their first gig was in 1967 opening for the Doors in 1967. 

Like the Doors, their name was just Nazz but people usually referred to them as The Nazz but it is just Nazz on their 3 albums. Their name comes from a track by The Yardbirds called "The Nazz Are Blue." That song doesn't explain the word's meaning (see lyrics below) but as far as I can find an earlier usage in 1952 was from American comedian Lord Buckley who had a monologue called "The Nazz" on one of his records. It that monologue, "Nazz" is a reference to Jesus of Nazareth. In later years, Todd Rundgren stated in an interview that they didn't know about the Lord Buckley or The Yardbirds' references. 

It turned out that another band in Phoenix, Arizona that formed around the same time also used The Nazz as their name but since the Philly band had a hit they changed their name to Alice Cooper.

Between 1968 and 1970, Nazz released three albums between 1968 - 1970 - Nazz, Nazz Nazz, and Nazz III but are best remembered for their first single "Open My Eyes" with the B side "Hello It's Me".

They actually broke up in 1969 but the third album came out the following year.

Todd Rundgren followed up with a string and continuing solo career and stints with his band Utopia. In 1972, Todd recorded a new version of "Hello It's Me" on his Something/Anything album and it reached number 5 on U.S. charts.

 

"Open Your Eyes" and the video released with it is a bit of psychedelic
with some Beatles' A Hard Day's Night as channeled through The Monkees.

The Yardbirds' "The Nazz Are Blue"

...But no matter what's done to me baby

I guess I'll always be blue

I got a hundred and fifty things

Now all I gotta find is you

I got a hundred and fifty things

Now all I gotta find is you

And if the Nazz don't help me baby

You better forget about me too

Alice Cooper

Alice Cooper   (Wikimedia)

The person we know as Alice Cooper was born Vincent Damon Furnier on February 4, 1948. But we also know Alice Cooper as a band whose stage show often included a guillotine, gallows, electric chair, fake blood, boa constrictor and butchered baby dolls.

In 1964, a sixteen-year-old Furnier wanted to enter a local Phoenix, Arizona talent show. He got some friends from his cross-country team to form a group they called The Earwigs for the show. Since they didn't know how to play any instruments at the time, they dressed up like The Beatles and lip-synced to Beatles songs. They won the talent show and were motivated to learn how to play instruments and form a real band which they called The Spiders. It featured Furnier on vocals, Glen Buxton on lead guitar, John Tatum on rhythm guitar, Dennis Dunaway on bass guitar, and John Speer on drums.

They modeled themselves on mainstream rock bands of the time - The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Kinks, and The Yardbirds. For the next year, the band performed regularly around the Phoenix area with a huge black spider's web as their backdrop, the group's first stage prop.

In 1965 they recorded their first single, "Why Don't You Love Me" (a cover of a song originally performed by The Blackwells), with Furnier learning the harmonica for that song.

In 1966 "The Spiders" graduated from high school and they had a local radio hit with "Don't Blow Your Mind," an original composition. By 1967 the band had begun to make regular road trips to Los Angeles to play shows. They soon renamed themselves The Nazz and released the single "Wonder Who's Lovin' Her Now," with B side "Lay Down And Die, Goodbye." 

In 1968 they learned that Todd Rundgren also had a band called Nazz, so they needed a new stage name. They decided the group needed some kind of stage presence or unique stage showmanship to make their mark. Furnier chose "Alice Cooper" as the band's name and eventually adopted this stage name as his own. 

Early press releases claimed that the name was agreed upon after a session with a Ouija board, during which it was revealed that Furnier was the reincarnation of a 17th-century witch named Alice Cooper. But in later interviews, Alice has said that it was just picked because it has the sound of "a sweet little girl" or an old lady.

Two other erroneous origin stories are that it came from a character in the television sitcom Mayberry R.F.D. and that Alice Cooper is the name of Betty Cooper's mother in the Archie comic strips. Neither is the origin.

More important than the name was the idea of a male playing the role of an androgynous witch, in tattered women's clothing and wearing make-up. Cooper has said the look was influenced by the film Barbarella.

"When I saw Anita Pallenberg playing the Great Tyrant in that movie in 1968, wearing long black leather gloves with switchblades coming out of them, I thought, 'That's what Alice should look like'. That, and a little bit of Emma Peel from The Avengers".

The concept of a rock villain was unique and they continued to build their stage image which was in complete contrast to the real "Alice" off stage.

They had their breakout hit in 1971 with "I'm Eighteen" followed in 1972 by the even bigger single "School's Out." and peaked with their #1 album Billion Dollar Babies in 1973.

The music evolved from garage rock to art rock, conceptual rock, rock and roll, some jazz, new wave, and helped shape the sound and look of many metal bands.

Furnier's eventually went solo and legally adopted Alice Cooper as his name. He released a 1975 concept album Welcome to My Nightmare and continued with hit albums like 1989's Poison and Along Came a Spider.

Alice Cooper, the man, has taken up acting, celebrity golf, is a restaurateur, and in 2004 started a classic rock radio show "Nights with Alice Cooper."

The original Alice Cooper group was inducted into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.


The Best Of Alice Cooper: Mascara and Monsters
Alice Cooper's Greatest Hits
Alice Cooper Goes to Hell
Billion Dollar Babies

Gaslighting, Gaslighter

GASLIGHT film by Trailer screenshot - Gaslight 1944 Public Domain, Link

Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation in which a person (gaslighter) or a group secretly attempts to create doubt in a person so that they doubt their memory, perception, or even their sanity.

I have been hearing the term used more lately. Just this month, I saw that the Dixie Chicks have released an album and song titled Gaslighter. The reference in the song is supposed to be to gaslighting that happened in lead singer Natalie Maines' marriage/divorce.

The term originated from the 1938 play Gas Light and was popularized by the 1940 and 1944 film adaptations (both titled Gaslight).

In the play, the scheming husband slowly dims the gas lights in their home, while pretending nothing has changed, in an effort to make his wife doubt her own perceptions.

He also dims other lights and makes noises and voices that the wife hears while he denies that these things are happening. His goal is to have her evaluated and committed to a mental institution.

Gaslighters use denial, misdirection, contradiction, and misinformation to destabilize and delegitimize the victim's beliefs.

Currently, I hear the term applied to politicians who seem to be manipulating the public by using those techniques.

The term has worked its way into popular culture. Pop group Steely Dan has a song entitled "Gaslighting Abbie" on their album Two Against Nature.

Quarantine

The word quarantine has certainly increased in usage in the past two month. The word's origin contains a kind of message for many of us.

The word comes from the Italian quarantena, and means "forty days." It was used in the 14th-15th-century. It designated the period that all ships were required to be isolated before passengers and crew could go ashore during the Black Death plague epidemic.

The practice began as the trentino, a 30-day isolation period that began being used in 1377 in The Republic of Ragusa, Dalmatia (modern Dubrovnik in Croatia).

Today, we are hearing about two and three week isolation periods of "sheltering in" but perhaps a period of 40 days might be better.

Quarantine is not the same as medical isolation. The latter is when someone infected with a communicable disease is isolated from a healthy population. Quarantine may be used even with people who have not been confirmed to have a disease. 

A related term that I have not heard used (yet) is cordon sanitaire which is French for "sanitary cordon" meaning the restriction of movement of people into or out of a defined geographic area, such as a community, region, or country. Originally the term referred to an actual barrier used to stop the spread of infectious diseases.

New York Mets

The New York Mets are in the National League East and are based in the New York City borough of Queens.

They were one of baseball's first expansion teams. The Mets were founded in 1962 to replace both of New York's departed NL teams, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants. The American League team in New York City is the New York Yankees who are based in the borough of the Bronx. The team's colors combine the Dodgers' blue and the Giants' orange.

The nickname "Mets" was adopted as a shorthand to the club's corporate name, "The New York Metropolitan Baseball Club, Inc."

The name also recalls the "Metropolitans" which was a former New York team in the American Association from 1880 to 1887. The shorter form worked better in newspaper headlines.

After the 1957 season, the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants relocated from New York to California to become the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants. That left the country's largest city in the United States with no National League franchise.

There was a threat that a New York team joining a new third league, so the MLB the National League expanded by adding the New York Mets following a proposal from William Shea.


For the first two years of its existence, the team played its home games at the historic Polo Grounds in Upper Manhattan.

In 1964, they moved into newly constructed Shea Stadium in Flushing, Queens, where the Mets played until the 2008 season.

In 2009, the club moved into Citi Field, adjacent to the former Shea Stadium site.

Tom_Seaver_at_Shea_Stadium_1974
(Delaywaves CC BY 2.0, Link)

In their inaugural season, the Mets posted a record of 40–120, the worst regular-season record since MLB went to a 162-game schedule. The team never finished better than second-to-last until the "Miracle Mets" beat the Baltimore Orioles in the 1969 World Series. The win is considered one of the biggest upsets in World Series history.

In the years since the Mets have played in four World Series. These include a dramatic run in 1973 that ended in a seven-game loss to the Oakland Athletics and a second championship in 1986 over the Boston Red Sox. The "Subway Series" ended in a loss against their cross-town rivals the New York Yankees in 2000. Their last Series appearance resulted in a five-game loss to the Kansas City Royals in 2015.

At the end of the 2019 season, the team's overall win-loss record was 4448–4808, a .481 win percentage.

         

Blogging, Statistics and Making a Buck

It is easy to be seduced by statistics. I know several friends who have websites and blogs and are rather obsessed with their web statistics. They are always checking to see how many hits the site gets or what pages or posts are most popular or what search terms are being used to find them. Social media has encouraged this with Likes and Retweets and Reposts. Our smartphones love to send us notifications that someone has engaged with some piece of our content.

For example, I got an alert about this blog:

Your page is trending up

Your page clicks increased by more than 1,000% over the usual daily average of less than 1 click.

https://poetsonline.blogspot.com/2010/12/moving-into-winter-solstice-poems.html

Possible explanations for this trend could be:

• Modifications you did to your page's content.
• Increased interest in a trending topic covered by the page.

Of course, I am happy that people found this post from 2010 and are still reading it and hopefully enjoying it. Google's "possible explanations" for this are both correct, as I did update the page that month and the topic of the Winter Solstice was probably trending across the web as we slipped into winter.

I do glance at my websites' analytics occasionally. I have ten sites and blogs that I do, so it can't be a very regular thing. I do like to look every few months to see what has been happening. I also have a half dozen clients that I do websites for and they are always interested in their stats. But I'm going to write about these origins here whether or not it gets lots of hits. It's not my "job" - though it's nice if someone clicks on an Amazon link that I use and buys a book or something and a few pennies drop into my account.

Speaking of that - I was browsing Amazon to find a book for a friend who wanted to try to start a blog that would make money. I certainly don't have a secret formula for that, but I did find a bunch of people who have written about blogging as a job. The idea of having "passive income" is very appealing - and probably quite difficult to do in any meaningful way. Still, give it a try. If you find the secret formula, let me know - then write the book.

   

Draconian

Draco the Lawgiver carving in the library of
the United States Supreme Court (Wikimedia)

Recently, I have been seeing "Draconian" used in the news to describe things like the measures being taken in Italy and other countries due to the coronavirus (COVID-19). The adjective is used when laws or their application are considered excessively harsh and severe.

Is there a Draco that makes things Draconian? My sons might say is it for Draco Malfoy, a character in the Harry Potter series of books and movies? No. Is it connected to Draco, a constellation in the northern part of the sky or the dwarf galaxy orbiting the Milky Way? No and no, but there is a connection for all of them and that connection is the man Draco who lived in the 7th century BC.

He was also called Drako or Drakon and was the first recorded legislator of Athens in Ancient Greece. He replaced the prevailing system of oral law and blood feud with a written code to be enforced only by a court of law.

But Draco established laws characterized by their harshness and since the 19th century "draconian" became an adjective referring to similarly unforgiving rules or laws.

Murphy's Law

You probably have heard of Murphy's Law and it's likely that you have used the phrase or at least have encountered a situation where this adage (short statement expressing a general truth) or epigram (a brief saying or remark expressing an idea in a clever and amusing way) was used or should have been used.

"Anything that can go wrong will go wrong."

The origin of the phrase is totally unknown and it's likely that people were saying this is something close to it long before anyone attached a name to it. So the question here is whether there actually was a Murphy and if so why the name became attached to the adage?

According to one version, the origin stems from an attempt to use new measurement devices developed by Edward Murphy, an American aerospace engineer who worked on safety-critical systems. The phrase was coined in adverse reaction to something Murphy said when his devices failed to perform.

According to the book, A History of Murphy's Law by Nick Spark, this common bit of philosophy does have a military origin. But the "facts" still seem to be a bit hazy.

Murphy worked at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base on high-speed rocket sled experiments and that's supposed to be where and when the coining of Murphy's law happened.

Reportedly, Murphy was not happy with the commonplace interpretation of his law which he saw as more serious. Murphy regarded his law as an important principle of defensive design - one should always assume worst-case scenarios.

Though Murphy may have been serious, the law that carries his name has been used in many less-than-serious situations.