Ruminations

At least to my southwest Florida Gulf Coast town.

(Living to reach science-fiction dates often leaves me with an odd melancholy sense of having missed out on the adventures that would’ve been playing out in Storyland, but I’m glad not to be inhabiting the rest of that classic Ray Bradbury story (1)—not that I would be by that point.)

(1) https://users.wpi.edu/~zrbutzke/Docs/BradburyStories(1).pdf (2)

(2) Whose title derives in turn from a classic Sara Teasdale poem:

"THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS"
(War Time)

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

https://i.imgur.com/KNBhPeP.gif
https://web.archive.org/web/20260626040810if_/https://ezgif.com/save/ezgif-557a83fa8275526c.gif

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Source: the oldest reference I’ve been able to find for this GIF seems to be 19 March 2015 from design-warez.ru, which was defunct and up for sale by the time the website was captured on the Wayback Machine. A less luridly colored possible reference source at https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-cKjVURFr-98/V5P9Ba0RsDI/AAAAAAALhqg/QM_ijhe4DYMyD7R0OgMI7pIsTTxQm1frA/w426-h569/11225302_1487883748172840_3077941018649052009_n.jpg is likewise gone, leaving only this Tineye.com thumbnail:



Baпeнмцнa, whoever you may have been, I’ve preserved this as best I know how.

2 January 1976 - 3 March 2026.

(Image source: Shagai (October 2007), by Yaan on Wikimedia Commons; manipulated through the decisions of a conscious sapient being using https://ezgif.com and https://www.lunapic.com/editor/)

…is the fact that I’m right across the alley from this, local and freshly caught:



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For National Indigenous People’s Day.

Content notes: this poem portrays the processing of a dead buffalo in specific anatomical detail; the slaughter is not shown.

Carrie House, "Sweet Grass"

One morning I, Navajo, wake up in Tiwa country
Friend from Taos Pueblo tells me they just killed a buffalo
Ten people are standing around, looking at each other
I watch the tractor's rear wheels come up and off the ground
The operator soon notices and lowers the buffalo
A man cuts the buffalo open
Everyone looks around at each other
Someone asks, "Who here can butcher?"
Someone says, "She can, she's a Navajo!"
I say, "Is this why he drove me up here?"
I ask for a wheelbarrow and a galvanized pail is placed down
I say, "This is for Minnie Mouse, where is a wheelbarrow or two?"
A wheelbarrow and several big buckets arrive
Two men open the cavity and I put my head and arms in
Steam from the inside smells of sweet grass
I close my eyes and am overwhelmed by the sensation of being
in a mother's womb
I carefully pull everything out and onto the wheelbarrow and buckets
Everything is huge; the heart, the kidneys, the book, the liver....
My pocket knife is the sharpest knife in the group
One evening I, Navajo, eat buffalo in Tiwa country

The ecstatic line Steam from the inside smells of sweet grass reminds me of this account by the late Lakota medicine man John Fire Lame Deer:

In the old days we used to eat the guts of the buffalo, making a contest of it, two fellows getting hold of a long piece of intestines from opposite ends, starting chewing toward the middle, seeing who can get there first; that’s eating. Those buffalo guts, full of half-fermented, half-digested grass and herbs, you didn’t need any pills and vitamins when you swallowed those.

Which, in turn, recalls this quote from C.S. Lewis:

The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by ‘the veil of familiarity.’ The child enjoys his cold meat, otherwise dull to him, by pretending it is buffalo, just killed with his own bow and arrow. And the child is wise. The real meat comes back to him more savory for having been dipped in a story…by putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it.

Except that the reality Lewis seeks to recover comes by way of a white English boy’s exotic Wild West fantasy—-here, House’s narrative, like Lame Deer’s, stakes claim to the substance and significance and meat of her and her Tiwa hosts’ rightful buffalo, and of the mastery of traditional skills brought to its preparation.

(Brought to my attention by radiantfracture: https://radiantfracture.dreamwidth.org/310500.html; check out the link for his insightful commentary.
House’s is a Two-Spirit identity that it’s not my place to label; I’m using the words “she” and “Navajo” in deference to her own choices here.)

The Most Mysterious Song On The Internet has been a haunting memetic legend since 2007, taped by a teenager named Darius from a German radio broadcast in 1984 and uploaded by his sister Lydia on various forums. With its at once melancholy and hopeful melody, stern metallic baritone lead vocal with distinctive melismatic styling, half-intelligible lyrics that invited interpretation and resisted resolution, and urgent sense of youth, passion, and Call To Adventure, the song (known as “Like the Wind”, “Blind the Wind”, “Check It In, Check It Out”, and others, depending on how you construed the words and which line you extracted for the title) quickly became the stuff of endless speculation and urban legend.



A timeline, valid through November 2021:
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMysteriousSong/comments/p2l92j/uptodate_timeline_and_master_link_post

Patient, diligent, and hyperfixated crowdsourced research has at last cracked the case: it’s “Subways of Your Mind” (1983), by German New Wave band FEX! https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMysteriousSong/comments/1gjbrs6/tms_is_found_the_song_is_called_subways_of_your/

Turns out that at least three of the band members (vocalist/lead guitarist Ture Rückwardt, keyboardist Michael Hädrich, and bassist Norbert Ziermann; drummer Hans-Reimer Sievers has yet to be heard from) are still alive and had had no inkling of their role in an enduring Internet mystery; it must have been like being accosted by a ragtag band of pirates who return the heirloom ring you left in a West German club restroom in 1984. On 4 November 2024, Hädrich provided a cleaned-up version…along with the other two songs on the original cassette EP.



Rückwardt, Ziermann, and Hädrich convened on 7 November 2024 for an acoustic reunion:


Update: Hans-Reimer Sievers, who seems to have withdrawn from music for some time, has come forward; he still owns his old drum kit and band tapes, and it looks as if a full reunion is imminent; dare we hope for new material?

FEX now have an official YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@FEXband-official/videos

For no other reason than because I think it’s cool and want to share, having been among the Lucky 10,000 this spring: presenting “The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet”, AKA “Like the Wind”, “Blind the Wind”, “Check It In, Check It Out”, “The Consequence of Living”, and “Summer Moon” among others.

This song, purportedly taped circa 1984 from a West German radio broadcast, has been making the online rounds since 2019–and has stubbornly defied all attempts to establish provenance; part of its captivating oddness comes from the singer’s stern metallic baritone, heavy accent, and melismatic vocal styling unusual for Western pop music of the period.

Furthering the song’s mystery is the tantalizing half-intelligibility of the lyrics, resisting resolution and encouraging open interpretation; even the title is an individual judgment call. It has the air of an artifact captured from a parallel universe.

Nor does it hurt that it’s a 24-karat banger.

Sources:

Sir Terry Pratchett, by Dominic Lipinski, 2011: https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Observer/Pix/pictures/2011/6/11/1307803056873/Terry-Pratchett-assisted--007.jpg?width=700&dpr=2&s=none&crop=none

(Crossposted to little_details.)

I’m awed and delighted by the sort of monuments to their obsessive special interests, in sprawling fractal encyclopedic detail, that people have posted on the web to share: there’s an invaluable body of folkademia out there.

1. Flutetunes.com: https://www.flutetunes.com/

Since 2009, the people at Flutetunes.com have been posting a new public-domain flute score every day at 10:00 UTC on the nose, listing the composer, history, key, time signature, BPM, and genre, including downloadable sheet music, MP3s, and MIDIs (the last are adjustable for key and tempo, for the sake of transposition.)

The website's database is exhaustively searchable by genre, nationality, composer, difficulty, and arrangement; this is where I was able to find out that the piece Lizzo famously performed on James Madison’s crystal flute was “Carnival in Venice”, and that the meandering oboe solo that opens “1984” on David Live was in fact Debussy’s “Syrinx.” They’ll even post arrangements of original compositions contributed by volunteers (they’ve got an arrangement of that Creative Commons YouTube and Tiktok favorite, Kevin McLeod’s “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys.”)

Flutetunes.com also includes a variety of other flute resource pages: articles on flute technique; outlinks where one can buy flute sheet music for works still under copyright; a virtual metronome; templates for printable staff paper, and a compilation of further miscellaneous flute-related links. The two site operators are so determinedly anonymous that they won’t even accept donations; they’re the Phantom Flutist Enablers.

2. The World Carrot Museum: https://www.carrotmuseum.com;
https://tinyurl.com/world-carrot-museum; https://web.archive.org/web/20220928195840/http://www.carrotmuseum.co.uk/

The Junior Woodchucks’ Guide to Daucus carota, courtesy of John Stolarczyk of Skipton, England. Carrot art, biology, cultivation, history, recipes, folklore, and pop culture are all covered here; should you ever need to know about the British government’s propaganda campaign to promote carrots during World War Two rationing (with posters, mascots, and period recipes!), or what the deal is with that lone purple floret on a Queen Anne’s lace blossom, or musical instruments made from carrots, the World Carrot Museum’s happy to oblige.

(Note that the website has been down since September 2022; the above URLs lead to a Wayback Machine archive. Stolarczyk still has an active Twitter devoted to all things carrot: https://twitter.com/carrotmuseum?lang=en)

3. The Museum of Menstruation: http://mum.org

(Warning: the front page is text-only, but some links are NSFW.)

Harry O. Findlay’s Museum of Menstruation is a grand rambling cross-referential time suck covering cultural, historical, medical, and commercial aspects of the subject. Just a few of the topics this display aisle of menstrual esoterica covers: Belts to hold sanitary pads (and if you remember those, you've almost certainly outlived your menstrual worries); artwork with menstrual themes; home remedies for menstrual discomfort sent in by his readers; various religious attitudes toward menstruation; historical menstrual hygiene methods.

Since Findlay has grown old, and doesn't think that he as a cis man is the ideal curator of such a museum, he's sent out an invitation to anyone--preferably a current or past menstruator--interested in taking over his work and hosting his physical collection: http://www.mum.org/future.htm)