RIP Billy Lee Riley, Sun Records Artist

Billy Lee Riley, Rockabilly Singer and Sun Records Artist, Dies at 75 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com

Billy Lee Riley, a rambunctious performer who helped develop the Sun Records sound as a studio musician for other headliners, died here on Sunday. He was 75.

The cause was cancer, his wife, Joyce, told The Commercial Appeal in Memphis.

Mr. Riley’s singles included “Red Hot” (with its memorable lyric, “My gal is red hot, your gal ain’t doodly squat”) and “Flyin’ Saucers Rock & Roll,” the song that led him to call his band the Little Green Men for a time.

Mr. Riley was one of the early performers who recorded at the legendary Sun Records in Memphis, but he was overshadowed by his associates, including Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis. Among many songs, Mr. Riley and his band played on the original Sun recording of Lewis’s “Great Balls of Fire.”

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Nancy Davenport, Photographer

i heart photograph: nancy davenport

nancy davenport

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Bill Clinton in Pyongyang to Negotiate for Imprisoned Journalists

BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Bill Clinton arrives in N Korea

Former US President Bill Clinton has arrived in Pyongyang, North Korea's state news agency KCNA reports.

He travelled there to discuss the fate of two jailed US reporters, South Korea's Yonhap news agency says.

It says Mr Clinton will try to negotiate the release of Laura Ling and Euna Lee, who were sentenced to 12 years hard labour in June.

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Fake Essay Goes Undetected for Years

What If You Pull a Literary Hoax and Nobody Notices? - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Peter Monaghan writes:

Perpetrators of literary hoaxes often like to be discovered, if only for recognition of their cleverness. But for someone or someones at the literary-studies journal Modernism/Modernity, that gratification has been a while coming.

In 2004 the journal, which is the quarterly of the Modernist Studies Association, ran a review essay of the writer David Foster Wallace's story collection Oblivion. The essay was a put-on, a leg-pull, a sham, in ways that take some explaining for nonspecialists in recent American fiction. But no one publicly called attention to the con until last month.

Mark Sample, an assistant professor of contemporary American literature and new-media studies at George Mason University, blew the whistle on his blog, Sample Reality. The review essay that provoked him, "An Undeniably Controversial and Perhaps Even Repulsive Talent," was attributed to a certain Jay Murray Siskind, in the department of popular culture at Blacksmith College. No such institution exists, nor does Siskind, other than as a rather Mephistophelean character (as Sample puts it) in the acclaimed novel White Noise, by Don DeLillo.

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A Farmer Fights Back (What He Says About Turkeys Is Absolutely True)

Read the whole essay here: The Omnivore’s Delusion: Against the Agri-intellectuals — The American, A Magazine of Ideas

The biggest environmental harm I’ve done as a farmer is the topsoil (and nutrients) I used to send down the Missouri River to the Gulf of Mexico before we began to practice no-till farming, made possible only by the use of herbicides. . . .

Young turkeys aren't smart enough to come in out of the rain, and will stand outside in a downpour, with beaks open and eyes skyward, until they drown.

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Swiss Particle Collider A Disappointment So Far

Large Hadron Collider Fizzles, Adding to the Mysteries of Life - NYTimes.com

The biggest, most expensive physics machine in the world is riddled with thousands of bad electrical connections.

Many of the magnets meant to whiz high-energy subatomic particles around a 17-mile underground racetrack have mysteriously lost their ability to operate at high energies.

Some physicists are deserting the European project, at least temporarily, to work at a smaller, rival machine across the ocean.

After 15 years and $9 billion, and a showy “switch-on” ceremony last September, the Large Hadron Collider, the giant particle accelerator outside Geneva, has to yet collide any particles at all.

But soon?

This week, scientists and engineers at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, are to announce how and when their machine will start running this winter.

That will be a Champagne moment. But scientists say it could be years, if ever, before the collider runs at full strength, stretching out the time it should take to achieve the collider’s main goals, like producing a particle known as the Higgs boson thought to be responsible for imbuing other elementary particles with mass, or identifying the dark matter that astronomers say makes up 25 percent of the cosmos.

The energy shortfall could also limit the collider’s ability to test more exotic ideas, like the existence of extra dimensions beyond the three of space and one of time that characterize life.

“The fact is, it’s likely to take a while to get the results we really want,” said Lisa Randall, a Harvard physicist who is an architect of the extra-dimension theory.

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The "Episodics vs. Narrative" False Dichotomy, For Fiction As For Life (And Where Does Poetry Fit?)

Lee Siegel on the End of Episode Books and Novels - WSJ.com

Lee Siegel writes:

[E]pisodic fiction has been dealt a sorry hand of late. Our most popular critically acclaimed novels are pure narratives. Their straightforward storytelling style connects events together in one continuous thruline whose fundamental purpose is to reveal the Big Fated Meaning of life. In the war between Narratives and Episodics, the former are winning hands-down.

A few years ago, the British philosopher Galen Strawson took up those battling world views in an essay that caused quite a stir in philosophical circles—the distinction between Narratives and Episodics is, in fact, his. Mr. Strawson came down heavily on the side of the Episodics. He believes the idea that “human beings typically experience their lives as a narrative or story of some sort” is an insult to the endless possibilities of existence. What really gets his goat is the accompanying notion that you have to be a Narrative to be good, that “a richly Narrative outlook on one’s life is essential to living well, to true or full personhood.” In Mr. Strawson’s eyes, the idea that one’s life is a story is the equivalent of wearing a blindfold and living in a prison cell.

He has a strong point. Episodics do seem to have a firmer grasp of reality’s fluid nature. Rather than experiencing life as a continuous thread of related experiences, Episodics consider their “self” to be in a state of continuous flux. What happened to them a year ago happened to a different person than the person they are now—the past has no bearing on present experience. (“I actually said that? I couldn’t have!”) In this view, Episodics are sober, disenchanted beings, alive to the principle of ceaseless change that drives human existence.

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O Arizona: Angry Mother Pepper Sprays Kids (At Least She Didn't Have a Gun)

Police: Mom Pepper Sprays Daughters - Phoenix News Story - KPHO Phoenix

A Tempe woman was arrested on aggravated assault charges on Saturday after she began pepper spraying her two daughters during an argument, police said.

Michelle Antone, 35, displayed signs of alcohol impairment, officers said.

Police said the incident began as a domestic dispute.

Antone had awoken at about 4 p.m. and was intoxicated, investigators said. Her two daughters, ages 10 and 15, fled the home after Antone became belligerent toward them.

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