Marvin Sings

This months LP is not an LP but two singles: Marvin as well as The Double B Side.

Not to be confused with the Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy theme music (a condensed version of Journey Of The Sorcerer by The Eagles) the Marvin singles were produced by John Sinclair. John was a friend of Stephen Moore (The voice of Marvin in the radio and TV series). They worked together on the songs (Douglas Adams was credited but wasn't involve in the writing of the songs).

The first single, Marvin was released in June 1981 on Polydor Records and included Marvin and Metal Man. The single reached number 52 in the British charts. The second single called The Double B Side consisted of Reasons to be Miserable and Marvin I Love You. This second single wasn't as successful as the first one, and a third single (which included a Christmas song!) was recorded but never released.

 

For the Hitchhiker movie's soundtrack, a new version of Reasons to be Miserable was recorded by Stephen Fry (singing in the third-person).  In the Hitchhikers radio series Marvin sings a lullaby commonly known as How I Hate the Night or Marvin's Lullaby (not to b confused with Marvin's Lullaby from the TV series How I Met Your Mother).  The lullaby was published in the book Life, the Universe and Everything, in which it is described as "a short dolorous ditty of no tone, or indeed tune."

 

"Now the world has gone to bed
Darkness won't engulf my head
I can see by infra-red
How I hate the night

Now I lay me down to sleep
Try to count electric sheep
Sweet dream wishes you can keep
How I hate the night"

The line "try to count electric sheep" is a reference to Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which inspired the movie Blade Runner.  According to Don't Panic: The Official Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Companion, Douglas Adams wrote a guitar tune for the lullaby, and thought it should have been released.  I think I agree.  In the radio series, Stephen Moore sings the words to a tune resembling Abendsegen from Engelbert Humperdinck's opera Hansel and Gretel.

The British group Radiohead named their 1997 song Paranoid Android after Marvin.  The Spanish electronic music producer Daniel Canelo named his musical project The Happy Marvin Project also in reference to the character.  The German band Pastell used Marvin's lullaby as the basis for their song Marvin, a tribute to Marvin. As it happened, the first public playing of the song was just after Douglas Adams left the earth so the song seemed to take on somewhat of a new meaning.

Here's Pastells Marvin, a tribute to Marvin:

 

"Life. Don't talk to me about life."

Two Infinities

Electromagnetic Immorality

Some time ago I posted about how magnets on your left temporal lobe can make you more artistic, but that opens up the question: what happens if you put the super magnet on the right temporal lobe?  Well you disrupt the brains moral compass that's what.

 

Want to make somebody lose her belief that harming somebody else is wrong? All you have to do is stick super magnets in the right side of their hat.  Using a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), in which magnets are used to disrupt neural activity in specific parts of the brain, scientists managed to "turn off" people's moral centres. 

 

Researcher Liane Young and colleagues applied transcranial magnetic stimulation  to disrupt neural activity in an area of the brain known to process information about beliefs and then asked twenty subjects to rate actions on a scale from one (morally forbidden) to seven (morally permissible). The researchers report that study participants judged actions in which a person believes he or she will cause harm to another person-but fails to do so-were more morally permissible during TMS application to the brain region responsible for processing beliefs, compared to when TMS was not applied, or applied to other brain regions.

 

Now we can see why most supervillan minions have elaborate headgear as part of their uniform.  In addition to making a bold fashion statement, having a switch to turn both creativity and moral reasoning on or off on a whim, built in to your employees uniforms has its distinct possibilities.  In other words, if you need an army of minions willing to kill for you without hesitation, you're going to need a lot of magnets. 

The Dark Side of the Rainbow

The Wizard of Oz:  A girl named Dorothy is transported to a magical land where she kills the first person she encounters.  She teams up with three other outcasts to kill again.  The court case would be: Exhibit A, one farmhouse.  Exhibit B, one bucket of water....  Dorothys' gang consisted of:  a heartless, ax-wielding android;  A deceitful, bipedal, sentient lion; a mentally unsound, rag-faced, shambling horror; and Dorothy herself, a foreigner intent on impressing her beliefs through violence on the local communities.

 

Then there's Glinda the Narcissistic Witch of the North. She floats in near the beginning of the adventure all smiles, and magic superpowers and insisting on wearing a crown.  But one wonders where was she during all the bad stuff?  Was she floating around in the clouds watching the whole series of unfortunate events? Dorothy had the slippers to take her home form the beginning, did Glinda make her go through all that trouble for her own amusement?  Or was she just to inconsiderate to bother telling her anything useful about them right away?
 

 

Glinda is not quite the good witch she paints herself to be, at best she's self-involved and inconsiderate of others. At worst she's a sadist who enjoys watching others suffering until she decides to come in and save the day, so she can bask in their adoration.

The hanging munchkinsdebacle.

One of the legends of The Wizard of Oz film is that one of the munchkins hanged himself on the set and his body can bee seen  at the end of the scene where the Tin man joins Dorothy and the Scarecrow.  Other versions of this story involve a stage hand or the daughter of one of the producers.  The other side of the story is that many exotic birds were borrowed from the LA zoo for filming and were everywhere throughout the set causing unexpected background movements.

 

There's various footage all over you tube (including some faked dead munchkin footage), the most recent addition to the story is that the DVD has had the munchkin digitally edited and replaced with a bird so only the VHS version from the mid 80's has the dead munchkin in it, making it all a big cover up by the studio.

 

The thing here is, that as much as I would like there to be a dead munchkin swaying back and forth while Judy Garland and her companions sing and dance by, I actually remember seeing the bird when I watched it as a kid.  It seems crazy but at times I seem to have a disturbingly good long term memory.  The Wizard of OZ was on every year when I was young, my school music teachers would tell us to watch it and I remember the bird spreading its wings. I think we're talking 1979, 1980 and 1981 here, which pre-dates the distribution of the movie on VHS where all the brujha began.

One of the things that keeps this story circulating (aside from some people believing absolutely anything) is that many workers were losing their jobs at the studio at that time, and there was a make-up artist who committed suicide and is believed to have worked on the film. But  this was not in the middle of the studio and was after the close of production.

 

Aside form any pendulums made of dead munchkins, if you really feel like a head spin, try playing Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon album with the movie and seeing how the songs seem to match up with the scenes.   It really works, it gives the whole thing a very unsettling vibe.  Despite the rainbow on the cover of the album, various members of Pink Floyd have denied that they wrote the album while watching The Wizard of Oz or that they were inspired by the movie at all. But eerily it does match up...  Here's the how to: start the album at the third lion’s roar in the MGM movie title right before the film starts. Alternatively if you don’t want to try it old school yourself at home, here’s the you tube version. You'll be surprised at how suspiciously the songs match up with what's happening in the coinciding scene. Go on try it.

 

 

At risk of being a spoil sport, here's what is actually happening: your brain is designed to seek associations between various stimulus, so you automatically hone in on, and identify, any coincidental similarities between the music and the visual.  It just so happens that The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wizard of Oz have an extraordinary number of these coinciding similarities.

 

 

Celebrity Hobgoblins

A relatively new scientific finding called the "Flashed Face Distortion Effect" causes the brain to turn attractive people into deformed, weird headed, hobgoblins.
 

 

Cycling quickly through pairs of eye-aligned faces on a screen, the brain seems to exaggerate features and interpret each face as a caricature of itself. The degree of distortion is greatest for faces that deviate from each other in relation to particular features.



 

 

You can read more about it at: http://mbthompson.com/research

 

Hacking Your Brain

Can't solve that difficult engineering problem? Wish you could draw better? Need to think outside the box? Evil plans not planned so well? Or still haven't learnt to ride without training wheels?

Imagine that with the simple press of a button you could control the operation of your brain to increase the speed, capacity for problem solving or even creativity its self. Imagine if you could achieve this without surgically implanting circuit boards and optical fibre into your skull.

Well you can with magnets!

Using transcranial magnetic stimulation (or TMS), Australian researcher Dr. Allan Snyder tested his hypothesis that some savant and creativity abilities occur because the left hemisphere suppresses and confines the raw impressions of the right hemisphere. Using TMS to suppress the left anterior temporal lobe, Snyder found that subjects become better at drawing, better at estimating the number of dots on a screen, and better at recognising word duplications in proofreading.  Basically he uses magnets to create temporary brain damage and makes people better for it.

Allan Snyder, aside from having a bad sense of fashion, is the director of the Centre for the Mind at the University of Sydney, Australia. You can find out more about his research at: The Centre for The Mind dot com.

Further studies, at the University of Gottingen in Germany, have shown participants given transcranial magnetic stimulation indicate an improvement of around ten percent in learning of motor skills and were three times more likely to solve a difficult, unfamiliar problem than those in a control group. Also some not so top secret investigations into transcranial magnetic stimulation funded by the US military, have lead to plans of flight helmets with a built in devices for the improving of pilot performance with the flick of a switch.

Now you can't just go sticking fridge magnets on your head. You'll look like an idiot and they don't have the magnetic field strength to mess up your brain. What you're going to need is an 70mm electromagnetic butter?y coil with opposing currents in each coil loop, creating a focal magnetic field below the intersection of both coils. The magnetic field intensity should be approximately 2 tesla on the coil surface which will roughly translate to around 0.5 tesla in the brain.  Stimulation is applied for approximately 15 minutes at 1 pulse per second and focused the left anterior temporal lobe area of the brain. If that sounds hard to make, try masquerading as a neurosurgeon, you can just go buy a pre-made one. It's a MagPro magnetic stimulator by Medtronic.

Once you've got your super magnet, you're ready to give yourself the creativity upgrade you’ve been waiting for. Just strap that baby on your head and plug in those kilowatts.