The Wooden Finger Five: January 2013

Summer is the season for listening to girls singing sweet, summery tunes. These are five of the songs currently soundtracking my days in the sun.
 
1. Origins - Tennis 
 

To date, wife-and-husband duo Tennis have fit more in the category of bands that I would want to like. But this song is a gem; reminiscent of The Sundays’ similarly excellent hit ‘Summertime’. It’s part-‘60s pop tune, part substitute Captain Planet theme music (‘Have you confused your power with mine?’)   

 2. All Your Gold – Bat For Lashes

Natasha Khan’s ‘Laura’ is getting more plaudits, and while it’s a good song it’s a bit bare for my tastes. ‘All Your Gold’ recaptures the bells and whistles of Natasha’s ‘Two Suns’ album, but with somewhat of a spookier overtone.  

3.  Forever – Haim

Does this song remind anybody else of that Donna Lewis hit from the mid-90s ‘I Love You Always Forever’? Perhaps Ms Lewis would now be considered as cool as these three sisters if she too looked like she stepped off the set of ‘Portlandia’. The video to this song has made it on to my YouTube favourites list (just above the similarly cool and summery Friends track ‘I’m His Girl’).

4. Serpents – Sharon Van Etten

This is one of those songs that gradually builds and builds, but not really in the conventional U2 kind of way. The sounds kind of spiral around before they reach their full force, and without announcing it the song becomes a very different beast to how it started off.    

5. Shiver – Lucy Rose

I first heard of Lucy Rose in an NME article that was trying to convince people that this pixie-like folk singer is actually something of a hellraiser. Don’t expect to hear that in her music however; her album ‘Like I Used To’ is as every bit as soft and melodic as you think. This is the best track from that record.

BEER!! [2] - Genesis Dry Hopped Session Ale

Name: Genesis Dry Hopped Session Ale

Brewery: Shmaltz

Place Of Origin: Saratoga Springs, New York, US

Type: Session Ale. What is a Session Ale you ask? This article from Beeradvocate tries to explain it.

Alcohol Content: ? (But according to the article above, it must be less than 5%.)

Why I Bought It: If you think it’s for any other reason than the upside-down label, you’re underestimating how superficial I am. (Apparently the upside-down label is a mistake. Maybe I shouldn’t have recycled the bottle – it’s a collector’s item!)

Taste: Just an ordinary, lightish ale really; that’s not meant to sound like a bad thing.

What I did while drinking it: Watched the penultimate episode of Season 1 of ‘Girls’. What a great show, even if nobody drinks that much in it.

What I did after drinking it: Watched the final episode and dreamt of New York.

The Top Ten Most Viewed Wooden Finger Posts (and The Best Of Everything) of 2012

And to finish the year off, these were the ten most viewed posts on this blog that were written this year:

1.       Album Cover Review – Lana Del Rey: Born To Die

2.       Album Review – Coldplay: Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends

3.       Quick … Name The Five Sports In Modern Pentathlon

4.       Mid-Year AFL All-Australian Team 2012

5.       Is Andrew Bogut A Bust?

6.       Rejigging the Olympics Medal Tally

7.       How To Rate Every One Day Batsman Ever, or Why Viv Richards is Probably The Best

8.       ‘Uncanny Avengers’ #1 and ‘Saga’

9.       The Finger Points Outwards No. 42 – Does Distracting Free Throw Shooters Work?

10.   Jimmy McNulty And The Economics Of The Baltimore Serial Killer

The first two posts were thousands of views ahead of the rest, and each racked up more views than the rest of the top ten combined. They probably did so for the same reason: they are high on the list when one does an image search in Google for the covers of those albums. Google searches tend to be the highest determinant of traffic for this blog, irrespective of content.

Now, some personal favourites for 2012:

Best Book: On Warne – Gideon Haigh
Best Album: Lonerism – Tame Impala
Best Song: Pyramids – Frank Ocean

Best TV Show: Mad Men
Best Film: The Dark Knight Rises
Best Comic: Saga – Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples
Best Sporting Event: Hawthorn v Sydney AFL Grand Final (though I got more satisfaction from the Melbourne Storm’s NRL Grand Final win)
Best Sportsperson: Usain Bolt
Best Website: The Basketball Jones
Best Post: The Flight Of The Pixie Point Guards – Andrew Rafner on The Basketball Jones
Best Beer:  Mountain Goat Rare Breed Before The Dawn Black IPA
Best Twitter Feed: Tim Siedell (@badbanana)

Prospero Ano Nuevo!

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The ‘Fightback’ In Cricket And Regression Toward The Mean

The word ‘fightback’ in cricket – often used to denote an improvement in the performance of a team – always annoyed me. Possibly this may have been because growing up I was a nervous Aussie cricket supporter, and given that the Australians had the upper hand in the majority of matches they played in, the word was seemingly most often employed by commentators cheering on the efforts of the other team. But possibly there was also a sense that a ‘fightback’ was not really that big a deal, that is a sense that it would be unusual for all 11 members of a cricket team to perform poorly.

This latter point is essentially the idea behind the concept of regression toward the mean. I like this term, because it puts a cricket team’s supposed ‘fightback’ into proper perspective. Say that a team is 4/40 – a pretty bad start to any team’s innings, and you have two batsmen who have to get off the mark out in the middle. What would you expect each of them to score? If they each scored about 40 runs, and added about 80 runs to the team total, you might be inclined to say that they had done very well, and that they had led a ‘fightback’. But really, scoring about 40 runs each is what you would expect, on average, the No.5 and No.6 batsmen to score. Now it could be that the team being 4/40 indicates that batting conditions are worse than average, and that would mean a batsman who performed at their average had actually done pretty well. Nevertheless, the point is that the anchor for one’s expectations should be what a batsman has done over his career rather than how the other batsmen have performed on any particular day.

Similarly, if a team is expected to make on average about 350 runs per innings, and they make only about 100 runs in the first innings, it shouldn’t be at all surprising that they would make substantially more than 100 runs in the second innings. Again, it’s nothing more extraordinary than a team regressing towards its mean performance. And the same applies if a batting team gets off to a considerably better-than-average start: you would expect that it is more likely than not that their performance from there on in will deteriorate, and the bowling team’s performance will improve in comparison.

Of course none of the above will seem that revelatory to cricket-watchers who have completed a course in statistics. But it’s a reminder that, during the course of a single match, when one is wondering what has been the driving force behind a supposed ‘fightback’, the answer often isn’t anything more dramatic than performance simply regressing to the mean.

The Finger Points Outwards - No. 51

ECONOMICS:  A conversation with the economics professor who created the board game Anti-Monopoly, including his legal troubles with Parker Bros.

 

BASKETBALL: Researchers find the surprising truth about whether basketball coaches overreact by benching star players when they get early fouls.

SOCIAL POLICY: Rave, By Dave: a blog about Australia’s tax-transfer system.

 

The Shit Gamer’s Review: 'Batman – Arkham City'

‘Batman: Arkham City’ has to be one of the greatest video games of all time (well, one of the quotes on the front of the ‘Game of the Year Edition’ I have says as much). One can get lost in its bleak cityscape for hours on end, gliding and grappling between the rooftops, or mixing it up with the Arkham City inmates at ground level. The gameplay is a combination of role-playing game and beat-em-up, effectively combining the two main elements of Batman’s crime-fighting methodology: detective work and hand-to-hand combat. (I’m sure it’s not the first Batman game to do this, but anyway it does it very well.) Similarly, the Catwoman sequences manage to throw in most of the things you would want to be Catwoman for: burgling, whipping, bounding up walls, and wrapping your legs around enemies’ necks.

One might argue that RPG’s lose a bit of their lustre nowadays in that you can easily look up the solutions online if you want to. I admit I looked up the solutions from time to time (this one from Game Pressure proving to be the most helpful). Allow me to make the following justifications. First, the game itself provides a lot of hints, and so looking up guides online doesn’t add as much as you might first think. Second, I only used them when I had been wandering around aimlessly for some time. Third, you could argue that it is within the character of Batman to use all the resources available to him, and that Batman feels more like Batman when he knows exactly what he’s going to do next.  Finally, video games are a lonely experience, and seeing others raise the same questions you are raising helps you feel decidedly less solipsistic.

It took me essentially one obsessive week to finish the main storyline, but that is just a small part of what ‘Batman: Arkham City’ has to offer.  There are many side missions, and hidden prizes to collect, and once you finish the game you can go back through it all over again, with harder enemies. But here’s the paradox: as much as I loved ‘Batman: Arkham City’ I just wanted to get through the main story as quickly as I could. As I already said, I used cheats whenever I was wandering aimlessly for a few minutes. Indeed (SPOILERS!) when, two-thirds of the way through, Catwoman is given the chance to leave Gotham City rather than go back and save Batman, I thought ‘beauty!’ and took the exit. When (SPOILERS AGAIN!) I had slogged my way through all the bad guys and had to endure throwing that freaking Remote Batarang 450 times and had actually finished the game, and then found out there was some sort of extra mission at the end, my heart sank a little. I admit it: I have no patience. I don’t explore. I’m just driven by the need to finish. I’m sure there are areas of life where that’s an asset.   

(A final aside: yeah, yeah, she’s just a computer-generated character and it's Wolowitzesque to say it, but Talia al Ghul in ‘Arkham City’ is hot. Like, really hot. And if you do feel silly ogling a bunch of pixels, do an image search for the actress who did her voice instead.)

Album Review: Melody’s Echo Chamber – Melody’s Echo Chamber

French singer Melody Prochet uses her supposed ‘echo chamber’ to full effect on her debut album. Typically, her tracks begin with about 0:05 or 0:10 of relative quietude and bottom-of-the-scale frequencies, before the synthesisers appear and the plus-10kHz frequencies light up with red. ‘Endless Shore’, at track number six, is the definitive MEC track in this regard, with a fairly consistent block of red-level intensity at the 10-15kHz mark, while the highest frequencies primarily remain only in blue. The pattern is more or less repeated on another stand-out track ‘Some Time Alone, Alone’, which proceeds along with a similarly shoegaze-like spectrography.

'Endless Shore':

 

'Some Time Alone, Alone':

Other tracks dial down the energy a touch: single ‘I Follow You’ has a milder, bluer, and more stable profile than the two tracks mentioned above. Seventh track ‘Quand Vas Tu Rentrer’ though stands out in contrast to a lot of the album (its lyrics are in French, for one thing). It stays mostly in the sub-5 kHz range, particularly at the start of the track which has only a few, repeated notes and the faint strands of Melody’s distorted voice. The track then builds up gradually, and only starts to move well up the scale when the drums enter in around halfway through.

'I Follow You':

‘Quand Vas Tu Rentrer’:

 

However, the greatest activity at the upper frequencies comes on two of the later tracks – ‘IsThatWhatYouSaid’ and unexpectedly, the closer ‘Be Proud Of Your Kids’. Both are essentially instrumentals: ‘IsThatWhatYouSaid’ is purely one, and its barrage of loud, spinning noises keep it nested in the double-digit kHz range.  Meanwhile, the sound of ‘Be Proud Of Your Kids’ is more intense than it may first seem given that its most memorable component is a young girl speaking shrilly in French. In reality though, that actually forms a minor part of the overall file, which combines a cluster of instruments with Melody’s largely indecipherable but sufficiently vociferous lyrics.    

‘IsThatWhatYouSaid’:

 
‘Be Proud Of Your Kids’:
 

All in all, ‘Melody’s Echo Chamber’ is a debut that doesn’t flitter around in the lower ranges, but continuously reaches for the 22kHz border. Some audiophiles might prefer that there was a bit more variance in how the tracks progress, but those who like their spectrograms splashed in red with a splatter of white will surely not be disappointed.

Graphic Novels You Would Like If You Weren’t Too Chicken To Read Them: Building Stories

Over the next few weeks, various websites will start naming their lists of best comics and graphic novels for 2012, and it’s a foregone conclusion that Chris Ware’s ‘Building Stories’ will be near or at the top of most of them. ‘Building Stories’ is probably the most acclaimed comic since ‘Watchmen’; it’s so acclaimed that even book reviewers such as Publishers Weekly have ranked it amongst the best books overall for 2012. (Indeed, you could almost say that it’s so acclaimed that those who fancy themselves to be in the ‘literary know’ might be too chicken not to read it.)

Book reviewers and hardcore book readers are to some extent book fetishists, and even those (like myself) who have acquiesced to owning an e-book reader still have a fondness for the look, feel and smell of a thick-as-a-brick hardback. They know that, in most cases, their preference is irrational; the words are no different whichever form you read them in, and the electronic versions are usually far cheaper and do not clutter up your living space. But ‘Building Stories’ gives them all something to point to as evidence that the ‘physical’ form is superior. Ware’s new novel comes in the form of 14 separate sections of different shapes and sizes, which (theoretically, at least) can be read in any order. It’s therefore a book whose reading experience is essentially impossible to replicate in electronic form, which I think explains at least part of its appeal amongst the world’s remaining readers. 

The 14 different sections of ‘Building Stories’ come packed in a grand-looking box, shown below:

On the back of the box, I’ve heard, is supposed to be a guide for the order that the various sections should be read in. (But if you can figure it out, you’re a better reader than I am.)

If you look more closely on the back of the box, you’ll see that my copy was ruined by my having to peel an over-adhesive sticker off. I’m not going to publicly denounce the store I bought it from for their sticker policy and the disregard it shows to collectors (apart from to say it’s a store that should definitely know better than that), but needless to say I was NOT HAPPY AT ALL!!!

And this is how all the sections sit when you open the box. Really, this is exactly how they sit, because I’m obsessive enough to make sure that I’ve kept the original ordering within the box (even if that’s different from the order in which I’ve read them).

 

This is my favourite part of the collection: it follows a single day in the lives of the main characters (Sep 23, 2000), and it’s made to look like a Little Golden Book. You could even write your name on the inside front cover – of course, I wouldn’t dream of doing that in a million years …

 

 

I got excited by this one for a moment – I thought it was a board game! Now that would’ve broken down some literary barriers! Alas, it’s not, it’s just a well-reinforced comic strip.

 

At the bottom of the box is this monster newspaper-sized section. I haven’t read this one yet, because like any broadsheet it’s a bit hard to read while you’re in bed unless you’re plotting to take your partner’s eye out. I’m become even more hesitant to read it now I’ve spotted the huge, creepy picture of a grimacing little girl lurking somewhere in the middle (not shown). It’s the most disturbing Ware drawing since Jordan Lint’s wife seemingly tried to swallow his head whole.