"The blog is dead, long live the blog!"

This is it, the official end of "Batholudens." It was a medium-length, pretentiously-named journey. A new, hopefully longer, and plainly-named journey is available at my new website, danbandstra.com.

That website even contains a blog of its own.

Even more excitingly, you can subscribe to that new blog at this rss feed.

Things are all a little stark over there right now. Relatively well-proportioned, but stark. However, as an added incentive to visit, there is a new song up.

Great Historical Writing

"As former President Richard Nixon pointed out in a magazine article not long ago, when a country has the blahs, it sometimes takes something exciting, like a war, to get everybody together again, hup-hupping along. And that is very true. Germany is an example. After World War I, everybody sat around cabarets getting drunk and perverted. When they got mad at Poland, they all felt better."

–Mike Royko, "Panama – the Ideal Enemy," May 7, 1976.

Faraway and Foreign

This book is highly recommended. By the way, I readily admit that blood and seawater have different saline concentrations. This fact was known to me even as I wrote the song. Here is a riddle: to what extent does this discrepancy affect the truth value of the song? The answer:

∆truth=±6.8

If you got a different (incorrect) answer then you may show your work for partial credit. Here is the song:

No. 31 Blues (Tell Her From Me)

I promise the title of this song had nothing to do with Mersenne Primes, gallium, Jeff Burton, or Actium. What does that leave?

Sarah You Been Scarce

From P.G. Wodehouse, "Jeeves in the Springtime:"

Bingo told me all this in a husky voice over an egg beaten in sherry. The only blot on the thing from his point of view was that it wasn't doing a bit of good to the old vocal cords, which were beginning to show signs of cracking under the strain. He had been looking his symptoms up in a medical dictionary, and he thought he had got "clergyman's throat."

From E.B. Shuldham, "Chronic Sore Throat: or Follicular Disease of the Pharynx: Its Local and Constitutional Treatment:"

When I have very lengthly statements to make, I have used what is called egg-flip– a glass of sherry beaten up with an egg. I think it excellent, but have more faith in the egg than the alcohol.

I have more faith in a sore throat than my regular singing voice, but only because it's more likely to make me sound a little like Jack Elliott. Here's a song:

Image Source: Bob Fahey's Web Site

The Very Thought of You

The song at the end of this post is my attempt to write in the "Dream Pop" genre. This is a genre worked by, inter alios, David Lynch. Here is the other song of this type with which I am familiar:



This song features prominently in an important (and, obviously, disturbing) scene in the show "Twin Peaks." The tune (but not the vibe) of the verse happens also to resemble Harry Shearer's theme song for "News of the Digital Wonderland." You can skip directly to the theme song in this episode of Le Show.

Harry Shearer's song isn't really Dream Pop, and neither is mine. I only say that because I largely worked it out during a hypnopompic reverie last week, from when I was asleep after the alarm went off until halfway through my morning shower. Here it is:

I Like The Noise You Make

Ten-dollar words like "preternaturally" rarely fit in any time or place, let alone in the second line of a song. It's a special occasion for a nerd like me: