The Four Best Best New Artists Who Weren't.

Maybe one of the reasons why people in the entertainment industry are so afraid of the New is because so often, they're wrong about something new being something good.

Take the Grammys, for instance. Every year, there's a Grammy award for "Best New Artist." I'm not sure who votes on these things, but all the evidence is that the people who vote for Best New Artist have the worst taste in music, and that's a shame, because it not only reinforces society's love of the old, but it also bypassed some very very good acts that should have been Best New Artist, but weren't.

To rectify that wrong, I've selected The Four Best Best New Artists Who Weren't -- six "New Artists" who were up for the not-so-coveted Best New Artist Grammy, but who then lost out to...some people you never heard from again.

1. The J's With Jamie.

Year Nominated: 1964.

Representative Song: "Your Dog."




Why They Should've Been The Best: That song's catchy, isn't it? It should be, because "The Js With Jamie" know a little something about catchy. Time Magazine said this in 1964 about "The J's With Jamie:" "They have probably been heard by more people more times than any other group in the history of sound." Back in the day, they made $250,000 a year, "the day" being the 1960s, when $250,000 a year was nothing to sneeze at.

Lost To: "The Swingle Singers." No, I've never heard of them either. But because of that loss, "The Js with Jamie" have the ignominy of having not a single word devoted to them in Wikidiotpedia. And that's on a site so devoted to cataloging (and writing poorly about) the minutiae of our world that it has a lengthy dissertation on "Dungeons & Dragons," a thesis that includes carefully researched footnotes (like this one:)

“Generally, when you are subject to an unusual or magical attack, you get a saving throw to avoid or reduce the effect.” There is identical language in sections titled ‘Saving Throws’ in (Tweet 2000:119).

They can footnote D&D, but they can't say anything about a band that was so catchy they became the go-to group for commercials. Things might have been different had The Js With Jamie been named Best New Artist. They might have a Wikipedia page, and they might (like The Swingle Singers) still be around to this day. With a website that includes this actual question:

* ...the question asked by a little boy in Cerritos, California : 'What were you thinking when you joined the swingle singers?'

I think, most of us were screaming and jumping around with joy... ! For many of us it has been a life-long dream to perform with this group and we are all very happy to have the privilege of being part of the history of the swingle singers !

Is there anyone out there, honestly, who had a life-long dream of doing this:



Although that IS very cool. Not as cool and catchy as "The Js With Jamie." But very cool.


2. Elvis Costello

Year Nominated: 1979

Represenative Song: "Veronica."




Why He Should've Been The Best: Elvis Costello might be the only rock'n'roll artist ever to voluntarily dumb down his own wordplay (besides the lead singer of "Warrant," that is.) Costello called himself "Rock and roll's Scrabble champion," because of his love of wordplay and obscure lyrics, then ultimately toned it down to avoid losing his audience -- maybe because he remembered that your message is only effective if understood? Maybe because he wanted to leave obscure puns based on Chaucer to Sting? Who knows: whatever the reason, Costello dumbed down his lyrics to, oh, about the graduate student level, and went on making smart, fun pop rock that nobody ever got a chance to listen to.

Lost To: "A Taste Of Honey." What can be said about a group that apparently stole its name from a Herb Alpert single? How about this, from Wikidiotpedia: "Two ladies up front singing and playing bass and guitar, this innovation was unheard of in its time. " Interestingly, if you search Wikidiotpedia for "proper grammatical construction of a sentence" you'll find... nothing. You will find, though, that "A Taste Of Honey" lit up the charts in 1981 with a version of "Sukiyaki."




So in 1981, you were listening to this:


But you COULD have been listening to this:



3. Timbuk3:
Year Nominated: 1987

Representative Song: No, it's not The Future's So Bright, etc. etc. Timbuk3 made a lot more songs than just that one. Like one of the sweetest, saddest love songs ever, a song worthy of being made into a movie... "The B Side of Life."




Why They Should've Been The Best: Timbuk3 made great music, and in doing so, made a lot of political statements, and as is the case with most political statements made via song, the statement itself was completely lost and/or ignored. (see also: "Born In The U.S.A.", "Our Country," Every Song That Tried To Make A Point Ever") The Future's So Bright, blah blah blah, was a catchy song that mocked the very people who adopted it as an anthem, and their adoption of that anthem meant it got overplayed to the point of nausea, which meant that nobody could stand to ever listen again to Timbuk3 (see also "Men Without Hats.") Which meant that people not only didn't get a chance to misconstrue "National Holiday," but also missed out on the sad, bluesy, partially a capella "Eden Alley," the steel-drum tinged "Sunshine," the trucker-blues number "Mudflap Girl," the also-sweetly-sad "Don't Give Up On Me," and even the pulsing rocker "Too Much Sex, Not Enough Affection" (featured in D.O.A.)

How quickly did Timbuk3 fade away? So quickly that there's no mention of most of those songs on the Internet... at all.

You can listen to snippets on Amazon, if you want. But you don't hear about them because instead of Timbuk3 as Best New Artist, we got:

Lost To: Bruce Hornsby & The Range. Which is kind of like having plain oatmeal for breakfast and then finding out 22 years later that you could've had Peanut Butter Cap'n Crunch. Quick: Name a Bruce Hornsby song. You can't, can you? And if you can, then quick: Name a second Bruce Hornsby song and describe the difference between them. You can't do that, either, can you?

I tried to Google "Bruce Hornsby number one hits" but my computer shut down out of sheer boredom the moment I finished typing Hornsby.

4. Fiona Apple.
Year Nominated: 1998.
Representative Song: "Extraordinary Machine."



Why She Should've Been The Best: Everyone who reads this for any length of time knows that I'm a big Fiona Apple fan, almost entirely by accident. What's not to like about Fiona Apple? Great voice, interesting songs, obviously very talented... and seemingly determined to not have a musical career, which might explain why she wasn't chosen. There are all kinds of rumors behind what took so long for Extraordinary Machine, Fiona's last album, to be released and most of them have to do with claims that she turned in a record full of bells and whistles and quirky songs that horrified record company executives, balanced by Fiona's own version of events, saying that she was the one who was unhappy with the original album and went back to the studio to re-record parts of it. The result is that Fiona Apple has released three albums in 12 years, and one of those albums had, as its title, a 90-word poem.

Lost to: Paula Cole. Granted, Fiona Apple's difficult background and behavior made it tough for the music industry to want to reward her, but did they have to go 180 degrees from her and give a Grammy to the generic sounds of Paula Cole, instead?

Paula Cole's biography on this site has three interesting quotes:

There's this one: "After graduation, she enrolled at Berklee [sic] full-time, studying jazz singing and improvisation, and 'becoming a sexual being'." I'll assume the site, not Paula, spelled the college's name wrong. But basically, in college, Paula studied jazz and fooled around -- making her identical to 99.9% of all other college freshmen.

Then there's this one, on her early career performing jazz songs: "There was that side of it that made me think, 'How am I ever going to live like this? It's so depressing.' " Which is what I think about jazz, too. And a world where Paula Cole got the Grammy for Best New Artist.

Then there's this one: Although she is aware of skeptics who consider "Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?" nothing more than a one-off novelty hit and who speculate about whether they'll ever hear from her again, Cole, of course, holds no such doubts. "Hopefully good art will appeal to many different people, and people will realize I'm not just about 'Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?,'" she told Request magazine. "There's a lasting artist here. In a decade, I think that will be pretty clear."

And it is. In the decade since she was Best New Artist, Cole hit the charts one time, rising to 112th with "I Believe In Love" in 1999. Following that, let me quote from her Myspace page:

My relationship with my record company became increasingly remote and strained. I left. Or, as they see it, they dropped me.

Which leaves Paula these days touring the northeast and writing on her Myspace blog, apparently with a new record deal -- which, judging by the sample you're forced to listen to if you link to her Myspace page, is going to feature songs that sound exactly the same as her first go-round.

Click here to see all the Whodathunkits?!!

Click here to see all the other SemiDaily Lists!

Click here to see all the MiniBests!

Click here to see all the other topics I’ve ever discussed!




Celebrity Adoption:

Choose Me
by

brianefp

Get this custom shirt
at Zazzle

Be one of the 175,000 families that have a brighter future.

In every dark cloud, there's a silver lining, right?

That's certainly what C’elle thinks. "C'elle" is the company that helps women collect stem cells found in menstrual blood for use in future therapies. C'elle allows women to collect those stem cells in a non-invasive, non-threatening, way, right at home, using their own system. Once collected, the stem cells are cryo-preserved for use in future therapies that can help fight heart disease, diabetes, and stroke -- and even be used in sports medicine and anti-aging regimes.

The C'ell process is done right in the home and is simple to do, and has been around since 1992, helping 175,000 families. You can learn a lot more about C'elle on their "About Page," but the basics are that C'ell is trying to turn that dark cloud of monthly menstruation into a silver lining of cures for debilitating diseases -- so there'll be fewer dark clouds in the future. So maybe skip right to the Order Now Page, and give the gift of curing and health to someone -- your daughter, your mother, your wife, or even yourself.

The Best New Food

It's a MiniBest!

You'd think at this point that it would be impossible for humanity to invent a new food, wouldn't you? After all, we've (apparently) already used up all our stories and all our themes, so that we're reduced to constantly retelling the story of how Kirk & Spock met at Starfleet Academy (and then how they drag-raced to see who would get to date Uhura... although I may be mixing up my rehashed-movie-plotlines here...)

(And I'll come back to Star Trek: Again? later on in this Month of New)

But you'd be wrong, because human ingenuity knows no bounds, at least not when it comes to repackaging things that include "Cheese Sauce." If you are unfamiliar with what I am about to unveil, you should sit down. (If you are familiar with it, then you're probably already sitting down, because too much cheese sauce for breakfast tends to cause chest pains during movement.)

Readers, I give you, The Toaster Scramble:

The big problem with eggs was, as we all know, they cannot easily be carried from place to place. Anyone wanting a heaping helping of scrambled eggs had to either sit in one place to eat it, or had to have a pocketful of egg juice all day. And is that any way to run a society? Heck, no.

And luckily, we don't have to do that anymore. We can now carry our eggs with us, neatly and cleanly and easily, and without resorting to all that frat-boyish "wrap" nonsense (you know it's a tortilla, right? And you know that they call it a wrap because if they said 'tortilla' you wouldn't buy it, right?) Because a serious man in a serious job who is seriously on his way to his serious office* (*while listening to "Convoy" on his iPod but doing so seriously) cannot eat a "wrap." "Wraps" are for people who have hangovers and wear boxers that you can see above their pants.

Serious people demand a light, flaky pastry crust for their pre-cooked frozen scrambled eggs packed into cheese sauce with real sausage bits. It makes it so much easier to carry it in a pocket.

I have no idea how people survived without these. No wonder it took us so long to discover America. Right, Stephen Hawking?

Someone get Dane Cook's agent on the line.

Every Sunday, in the paper, I see the ads and there's always a flier for ordering "personalized" checks. And every Sunday, I think "That is a blatant case of false advertising and they should be sued."

(Bored, tired lawyers = bad for society.)

The checks aren't personalized at all. They're just generic checks that everybody has, or could have, if they didn't linger too long over the Shopko ads. Puppies? A farm scene? That sort-of-half-scene rainbow? As I like to say: pleh.

I'll say it again: pleh.

How are those personal? If they're not personal to me, they're not personalized, are they? (Do you suppose two people ever realize they've got the same checks and then fall in love? Wouldn't that make a great Dane Cook/ Jessica Alba movie? "Check Me Out: Dane thought he was doomed to spend life alone consoled only by his checks with pictures of puppies hugging kittens while riding motorcycles... until one day he wrote a check at a gas station while Jessica wrote her check at a gas station, and it was love at first "-- dang, I can't think of a catchy check-related phrase to finish that up.

Anyway, I don't waste my time with puppies, rainbows, and great military encounters. I personalize my checks using Vista Print, which lets me create ACTUAL personalized checks. Not just two or three predetermined designs that someone in Peoria thought were cute. Vista Print (which lets me do business checks and personal checks, and lets me print my own checks right on my computer, if I want) has 72

--72!--

Different options just in "personal checks" alone -- options like the tiger-print background & border (my personal favorite), and options including putting a logo or symbol next to your name (so I could put that frog with two pens on, maybe? Remember that one? 'Cause I do) and then I can order checks easily and cheaply, right off the Internet.

No more puppies and tanks for me: It's all tiger-prints and frog logos from here on out, baby.

The Best New Word

Here is today's thought problem: Why is a word like a pizza?

The answer is because both mean whatever society wants them to mean.

A while back, I waxed philosophical on when a pizza stops being a pizza and starts being something else, the point being that no matter what definition you apply to a pizza, there's something else that fits that definition, something that we'd all agree isn't a pizza. Then I came down on the side of a pizza being anything you'd want it to be.

I have had that same discussion with Some Guy At Work, off and on, here and there, about words, and what words mean, and whether they mean what people think they mean. A chief offender, in our opinion, is ironic, which used to mean -- or is supposed to mean -- an outcome that is the exact opposite of what was intended, an outcome that in some way thwarts the designs of the person whose intentions are at stake. Like what happens in this comic from Subnormality, a comic I only recently discovered and began to love only to have the author go on hiatus for a while.

But thanks to Alanis Morissette, a generation of people grew up thinking "ironic" means "coincidental in an annoying way." That's how they use it, now, and, I suppose, that's what ironic means now.

Because words have to mean what society thinks they mean, don't they? If I'm listening to two teenagers talk, and one teenager says to the other "I didn't study for the test at all last night, and then as it turns out, I got mono and had to stay home from school," and the other says "Ironic," what good would it do me to say that's not ironic at all, that's lucky, there's a difference, you know? They know what they mean, and they don't care what I say it's supposed to mean.

Or take "random," which has come to mean weird for kids these days. Or the word Penultimate, which is Some Guy At Work's pet peeve. Penultimate means "second to last," or it did, to most people who used it, for a long time. But now, more and more people are saying penultimate when they mean ultimate, when they want to say last, but want to say "last, only more special than simply being the last one." People describe the Superbowl as a the penultimate game of the season, and they don't mean It's second to last, they mean it's more than the ultimate game, it's greater than that.

This isn't new, at all, either: I'm reading the Lensman books by E.E. Smith and in the overly-long, kind-of-boring early chapters, Smith writes about how the Arisians plan to create a master race of Lensmen has shown signs of working, but will not payoff until the penultimate result of the breeding program. (Yes, it's kind of creepy in the way it keeps talking about breeding programs and collective minds and the like. I think fascism really sunk into a lot of early science fiction writers a lot more than people realized.)

I don't think Smith meant to say that the Arisians breeding program would reach fruition with the second-to-last result; he likely just wanted to make the ultimate result a little more ultimate. Somehow, saying ultimate has become not enough. If something is the ultimate contest, the ultimate showdown, that seems to be sort of lacking, doesn't it? In an era when potato chips are extreme, "ultimate" becomes commonplace so society decided to make something be ultimate-er, and took a word that was just lying around and not doing anything and used that.

In 20 years, I bet, penultimate will be defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as more than ultimate, a higher order of extreme enjoyment. Unless between now and then people start using it to mean something else entirely.

That's the beauty of language, and particularly of English, which has become a melange of other languages and made-up words and hyphenates and hodgepodges from around the world. English just absorbs words and because its rules make no sense in the first place--

-- as evidenced by the word its, right there: if something belongs to someone, we use an apostrophe to denote possession, so we say things like Obama's plan is to destroy capitalism in order to save it, or Axl Rose's mental state is not good, but when we want to describe things that belong to It, we drop the apostrophe entirely--

because its rules make no sense in the first place, anyone really is free to make up a word or assign a new meaning to a word or absorb a word from another language, and to stop using words that we don't want to use anymore.

As a result of English being, in essence, a nonsensical language cobbled together with duct tape and hope, looking at a list of Words Of The Year from 1906 on can be fascinating. (And, yes, this is what I do instead of working.) Ever been to or heard of a "peace rally?" That was the word of the year...

... for 1919. (Take that, Baby Boomers!)

Just as we're doing with ultimate and penultimate, Society decided that we needed a word that was more exciting, more powerful, than star, and so we began using superstar. In 1925. Who, I wonder, was the first superstar? Who was so big, in 1925, that the word star couldn't adequately describe them?

Pizza became popular, as a word, at least, in 1935, eight years before people talked about passion killers -- what we would call granny panties.

I say frequently that I'm a member of the real Generation X, the children of the baby boomers, and I use that term thinking that Doug Coupland made it up when he wrote his book by that name. But Generation X was the word of the year in 1952. Leave it to the Baby Boomers to try to grab that, too.

Ever tell your kids not to say the F-Word? People began using that in 1970. We got PIN Numbers 6 years later.

From that whole list, nothing jumps out at me more than the fact that OED has declared metatarsal as the word of the year for 2002, saying about that designation:

The term came into general use when the England football captain David Beckham broke one in his left foot just before the World Cup in Japan. In 2006 it was Wayne Rooney's metatarsal fracture which dominated the headlines.

And that's how you can tell it's a primarily British list. Nobody in America had any idea who David Beckham was before he showed up in our magazines in his underwear (or chuddies, the 1995 word of the year) and showed up in our cities with Posh.

And, do you suppose that posh means the same thing to kids who know Posh Spice better than they know about a posh life? "Posh" began being used in the 1930s, more or less, although it's not clear how it began being used. People say it stood, originally, for Port Out, Starboard Home on ship-passage tickets to India, but that's been more or less debunked. It may have been a misprint from a P.G. Wodehouse story reprinting some university slang, but however it got started, posh always meant upscale and fancy... until now, when posh it seems to me is associated more with pouty, over-accessorized, overblown rich people. In the future, will we describe something as posh and mean it negatively? God, I hope so.

So the new words are compiled mostly on a British list, but I think that's appropriate. What better role for England, these days, than keeping tabs on its eponymical language? Not guarding it or keeping it clean -- we're not talking about French, after all -- but simply keeping track of it, declaring what things are and where they came from, keeping in mind that the Uncertainty Principal applies, if it applies to anything, to language, too.

With that in mind, I went looking for the list of new words compiled by the Oxford English Dictionary -- the only dictionary which can tout that it was compiled, originally, by a raving lunatic -- and that's fitting for English, too, I think -- to choose what I would pick as The Best New Word.

Only before I got into reading the whole list of new words, I noticed that there's a frequently asked questions section, and that one of the FAQs is Will you put the word I invented into one of your dictionaries?

And in reading the answer to that question, I learned that when it comes to words, there are people, and then there are people. Or, as the OED says:

All of Oxford's English dictionaries aim to include primarily those words that have genuinely entered the English language. The use of a newly invented word by a single person is not sufficient to merit a dictionary entry (unless the person happens to be, for example, William Shakespeare or Jane Austen).

So if Jane Austen invents a word, it shoots straight into the OED, but if I, or you invent a word, OED will sit on that for a few years or centuries until the Madman approves it.

That's not the only fascinating thing referenced in that answer. The OED people go on to say:

In previous centuries there were dictionaries in which writers listed words which they thought
might be useful, even if they did not have any evidence that anyone had ever actually used them. Often these were derived from Latin or Greek words, like the 'inkhorn' terms which became fashionable in the 16th century.

I would love to see a Dictionary Of Possibly Useful, But Not Yet Used, Words. I have half a mind to create one of my own. But that entry created another question: What's an inkhorn term? And the answer to that is a sad one:

An inkhorn term is an invented word that didn't make it.

Remember the "Island of Misfit Toys?" Somewhere out there in the Multiverse is "The Island Of Inkhorn Terms," populated by

eximious (excellent, distinguished, eminent)
illecebrous (alluring, enticing, attrative)
deruncinate (to weed)

and

temulent (drunk)

And what I'd like to know is why isn't "eximious" still being used? We could put that in place of the new use of penultimate, so if something is more than ultimate, it is eximious.

Like this:

"Hey, did you see that Superbowl game?"

"No, man, I was too temulent."

"Too bad for you. It was eximious! And the cheerleaders were illecebrous."

The OED goes on, in their answer to the FAQ, that "There is nothing to stop you using an invented word." So you've got their permission, which is good to know. Dictionary Cops won't break down your door if you describe something as blornge.

--Post the Video, Matt!--

-- but OED won't necessarily adopt it. They've got standards, you know. Standards that don't let just anybody go and invent a word and have it in the dictionary. You want your word in the OED? Better be as famous as Jane Austen, or as famous, at least, as R.M.Hare, 1950.

You know R.M. Hare, 1950, right? You have to know him. R.M. Hare is a guiding beacon of hope to people looking to get their words into the OED -- if you're a ...

... what's the word for a person who wants to get a word into the dictionary? There doesn't seem to be one, and saying person who wants to get a word into the dictionary is so awkward. I should just invent a word, right now, for that...

If you're a wordier (pronounced "wer-dee-ey"), R.M. Hare is the Green Light across the Bay for you.

R.M. Hare has been described as a "leading British moral philosopher of the last half of the twentieth century." He did something-or-other about something-or-other, most of which has been lost to history.

What hasn't been lost to history, at least according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is R.M. Hare's invented word:

blik.

I bet you use that all the time, don't you? Use it in a sentence, right now. Here's mine:

I had a little blik between my teeth but I flossed it right out.

As it turns out, R.M. Hare would think that I used blik incorrectly; he meant it to mean a point of view. That's how he used it in his argument about something-or-0ther. R.M. Hare described a hypothetical lunatic (not, apparently, the one who wrote the first OED) who had a hypothetical belief that all the dons at Oxford wanted to kill him. Then he said this:

However many kindly dons are produced, the reaction is still the same [to believe that dons are trying to kill him]. Now we say that such a person is deluded.... But it does not follow that there is no difference between what he thinks about dons and what most of us think about them-otherwise we should not call him a lunatic and ourselves sane, and dons would have no reason to feel uneasy about his presence in Oxford.

Let us call that, in which we differ from this lunatic, our respective bliks . He has an insane blik about dons; we have a sane one.

And the word blik entered the English language and the OED and has been there, presumably entirely unused, since then.

Other words deemed worthy of entry into OED's hallowed halls? Vril, coined by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Vril doesn't mean, as you would otherwise guess, a dark and stormy night. It means a tremendous magical force wielded by people. It appeared in Bulwer-Lytton's novel The Coming Race.

(Did you know that Bulwer-Lytton was the guy who came up with the phrase the pen is mightier than the sword? I didn't, until today.)

I guess the point is that we should not be afraid of changing meanings of words or of using new words, and even inventing words ourselves -- we've got permission to do just that from the OED, remember -- and using new words and inventing new words might be just the priming the pump of entertainment and art needs to get going on making new stuff, so that 9 million people won't accidentally see Fast & Furious in one weekend.

To help that along, then, I've not only invented my own word, above, but I'm going to do what I can to popularize one of the newer words that OED let in. Sure, it doesn't have the heft and philosophical bulk of a blik or a vril, but I think this Best New Word can more than hold its own in our modern world, and so it is with great pride that I nominate TBOE's Best New Word and urge you all to use it, as often as possible, in conversation today:

Bahookie.

(It's a Scottish word for buttocks.)

Related: Here's that essay on Pizzas & their toppings.

This theory drove Some Guy At Work nuts. Probably still does.

You'll note that I never answer the question in here: You'll have to go look it up yourself if you want to know.

The other night, I had to help Middle with her astronomy, a subject I love, but also a subject I took 14 years ago. So I'm a little rusty on it; the only thing I remember offhand about astronomy these days is "My Very Exciting Magic Carpet Just Sailed Over Nine Palace Elephants," -- and I can sing that song by memory-- but I can't even tell you what the "E" in Elephants is supposed to stand for.

Middle's question that night was How do we measure stars using atmospheric motions. And that is not the kind of info that I just retain -- not when I've got all these song lyrics to keep in my head.

But with most search engines, if you try to find the answers to that question, you'll either get links to celebrities ('cause, stars) or you'll get links to academic papers full of gobbledygook.

With AAfter.com, though, the results are much better. AAfter.com Answers Homework and does it quickly and easily. I typed in the question "How do you measure stars using atmospheric motions" and got links to about 10 different sites, right on page one, with the answers I needed: links to videos and pages that had the information readily available and understandable even to me.

AAfter.com can help find SAT test preps and can even help kids identify which parts of the sentence are which -- type in a sentence and use some of the codes they have, and it'll identify the pronouns and verbs and things. So if you can't remember the lyrics to "Lolly Lolly Lolly Get Your Adverbs Here," you're still on solid ground.

AAfter.com also gives cash back when you purchase through them, allows background checks, reverse phone lookups, and even helps out with Twitter -- so you, like me, should bookmark it now.

Three of The Best New Bands I Just Heard Of Today For The First Time.

It's a SemiDaily List!

I'm still saving the world for new things and fighting off The Death of New.

It's not just Hollywood that's afraid of new stuff; the music industry is also afraid of new sounds and new music and new artists... and they're afraid of them because we are afraid of them. (As usual, by "we" I mean you. I have tons of songs on my iPod from bands I've never heard of.)

The music industry is afraid of new music and new artists because music listeners don't want new artists and they don't want new songs. A list of the top 25 concert tours in 2008 shows that only four of the top 25 were anything even remotely new -- if "Jay-Z and Mary J. Blige" can be considered "remotely new." And two of those four are Miley Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers.

So people won't go see new bands in concert. Why? Because they don't hear them on the radio. And why don't they hear them on the radio? Because radio stations won't play new songs for fear that you'll turn off the radio or switch stations; studies show that if radio listeners hear an unfamiliar song, they're likely to turn the station off. (One website mentions this as part of the lesson for songwriters: repetition, it says, is important.) It's a lesson I learned firsthand when I was a college-radio DJ at the least-heard college radio station ever.

But, seriously, how many times in your life can you possibly hear "Brown-Eyed Girl?" Does it make your drive home more fun to hear "Satifaction" for the 1,000,000th time? I'm all for listening to old favorites here and there, but I like them mixed up with some new stuff now and then. And you should, too, or there's not going to be any music once the Rolling Stones and Tom Petty die. To help you out, I've picked out three bands that I never heard of before today -- all of them new bands, and I will give you a great song by each of them:

1. Florence And The Machine, "Kiss With A Fist."



Why Radio Stations Won't Play It (Besides The Fact That It's New:) The relationship in this song appears to be less the "idealized romance" that sells so well in the music industry, and more the "I Can't Believe My Picture's On 'The Smoking Gun' Type of Romance that music industry types actually engage in.

The Old-Standard Song This Should Replace: Radio stations could get rid of "Brown-Eyed Girl" and its sweetly-soporific nostalgic romance. The modern era demands not hazy-eyed looks back at where we went, but a hot-blooded look at where we are now. (Note: I am assuming that all of the actions in this song are metaphorical.)

2. Red Light Company, "Arts & Crafts."



Why Radio Stations Won't Play It (Besides The Fact That It's New:) The lead singer's got funky hair; radio stations got burned by Hanson & Nelson. No more long-haired guys.

The Old-Standard Song This Should Replace: On the other hand, Tom Petty's got hair like that, and aren't we all a little tired of "Don't Come Around Here No More?" There's still room on the radio for American Girl, but we could retire most of Tom's other stuff and put this in place as the new slightly-melancholy arena rocker for the next 30 years.

3. Dinosaur Pile-Up, "My Rock 'n'Roll."



Why Radio Stations Won't Play It (Besides The Fact That It's New:) Well, the name, for one thing. Dinosaur, Jr., had a song on indie radio a long time ago, and is there really room on the radio for two dinosaur-themed bands? Plus, in the South, they're legally required to refer to dinosaurs as "Dinosaurs, those tools-of-the-devil fake fossils." That gets in the way of announcing the song.

The Old-Standard Song This Should Replace: On those top 25 tours, Bon Jovi (1) and Van Halen (11) represent the hard-rockin' segment of the music audience. But listen to Dinosaur Pile-Up and pay attention to the drums and the way those guitars grind it out, especially at the end of the song . Is there any doubt that if it came down to a musical melee, the Dinosaur Pile-Up guys would beat the tar out of Jon & Eddie? They're so tough, I'm going to include a second song by them, "Love Is A Boat And We're Sinking"



Which itself could push all those old Talking Heads songs off the radio, too.

Don't forget to page down and Read The Best New Sport, also posted today!

Click here to see all the other Whodathunkits?!!

Click here to see all the other SemiDaily Lists!


Click here to see all the other MiniBests!

Click here to see all the other topics I’ve ever discussed!

Claudius wanted to be the first man to reach the stars... and maybe he was. Alone, drifting through space with nothing to keep him company but the dot... speck... rock that is drifting there, too, Claudius reflects on what brought him to this point: A spaceship, a dream of reaching the stars he always saw when he closed his eyes... and murder.

Eclipse is a Mobius-strip of a psychological horror thriller that takes the reader on a twisting, turning trip through Claudius' troubled childhood, his time at NASA, and a grimy hospital or prison, peeling back layer upon layer of the personality of a boy who could close his eyes and see the stars, a boy who dreamed of reaching those stars... and maybe he did.

Download the first chapter for free at Scribd

Eclipse is available for purchase through Lulu.com for as little as $1.25 per download, or $11.50 by paperback. Coming soon to a bookstore near you, but why wait?

Click here to buy it now.

And, for a limited time, if you are one of the first 50 to purchase the book and send me a picture of yourself holding the book, I will mail you one of these fine t-shirts, free of charge.

Welcome a new TBOE Reader.

Guess who's reading The Best of Everything now? Only Entertainment Weekly columnist Mark Harris (and unknown Hollywood insiders.)

Just before April began, I wrote about my theory about "The Death of New" and decried Hollywood for not innovating and continuing to give us things like "Fast & Furious" instead of "Hamlet 2 The Real Musical."

Hot on the heels of me, Mark Harris in this past week's Entertainment Weekly wrote a column about... you guessed it: Hollywood not innovating. In his column "Stop The Inanity," Mark wrote about "a long-standing Hollywood agenda — a desire to shun challenging material in favor of easily replicable formula product," and noted that Hollywood studios "recently announced the development of new movies based on Monopoly (yes, the board game), Clue (yes, the board game), and Candy Land (yes)."

Which I also thought of first.

I'm glad that Mark Harris has taken up my crusade to make the entertainment industry give us something new. Thanks, Mark, for the help, and welcome to the ranks of TBOE readers!

Who else reads TBOE? THIS guy. And you. You read it, too.

That way, the cat has to share in the copay.

As you might guess, my writings here on The Best of Everything generate a lot of questions from readers, psychiatrists, people I meet on the street -- and sometimes one person is all three of those things -- questions that I periodically answer.

Far and away, the number one question I am asked after people read a little of this is "Did you take ALL the medications you were supposed to today?" The answer to that is "I gave some of them to the cat."

The second most-asked question is "Where do you come up with all the cool music that you're always talking about and/or listening to here and on your other blogs?"

The answer to that question, surprisingly, is also "I gave some of them to the cat." No, wait, it's not. The answer to the question of where I get my music from is: I get it from Kerchoonz.

Kerchoonz is the music-and-video site that lets artists get paid when you, and me, the listeners, listen to and download their music -- legally. They're putting the power in the hands of the people it belongs in: Me and you. All you have to do is go there and listen to some of the newest indie music around -- stuff that hasn't hit the radio, the commercials, television, nowhere, yet. You'll be like me: on the cutting edge of music.

Kerchoonz even made it easier, now, to post those videos elsewhere, so if you like a video or band, you can copy it over to your blog or website easily (and without worrying that it'll get yanked, like some of those other websites. I won't name them, but they rhyme with "Shmootube.")

So if you want to be like me, the directions are simple: check out Kerchoonz, and give the cat no more than 3 out of every 7 pills.

The Best New Sport

Baseball season is, apparently, here again, if the boring headlines in the sports section of our local, too-small paper are any indication. I'm not sure if it was Opening Day or not, recently, because as soon as I saw the headlines, I started to go numb from the brain down with boredom.

I feel kind of sorry for people who like baseball, who watch the games and root for teams. They seem anachronistic, wearing their caps and watching pitchers stretch and talking about "RBIs" and "At-bats" and "other baseball terms that I can't think of right now because I don't really care." It's such a boring game, and nobody really cares about anything that happens in the world of baseball anymore, do they? Nobody who counts, at least.

I've tried to like baseball, too. I played it as a kid, and watched all the games that I could, sitting next to my dad and having him tell me what was going on, because as a kid you do lots of stupid and boring things that your parents make you do because they want you to know what their childhood was like. That's why my own kids have to sit through repeated viewings of Star Wars and listen to me tell them how the special effects back then were way better than all these CGI-graphics-effects nowadays.

As an adult, then, I tried a couple of times to get excited about baseball, once even starting a fantasy baseball team and joining a league before realizing that I had no idea who these players were or what the stats meant or how the scores were generated, so I ended up picking players whose names I thought sounded good on a roster. (I finished third, so all those people overthinking their fantasy baseball rosters, keep that in mind.)

But I just couldn't get into it. The thought of the 162-game season, with 9 innings, 6 outs per inning, 3 strikes per out... the numbers pile up and up and up and nothing ever really happens. The only exciting part of baseball, ever, is the ninth inning of the last game of the World Series, and that's all the baseball I watch.

But people out there still cling to baseball and pretend it's exciting and fun, the way we pretended the last few games of D&D when we were kids were exciting and fun, all the while thinking "I wish I'd gotten invited to that party and was making out with Jenny Lewis right now." D&D eventually faded away, as new interests (girls, drinking beer we'd gotten my older brother to buy, and hoping to get invited to parties) took its place, and I assume the same would happen with baseball, if only...

... if only...

... if only there were a new, awesome sport to replace it!

And not just baseball fans, either -- a new, awesome sport could replace all currently existing sports, which, lets face it, are boring. Basketball is boring. Football is getting boring and primed to get boring-er by adding more games. And since those are the only sports worth mentioning-- well, those plus luge, I won't mention the other sports that people pretend to care about.

I've suggested fixes, here and there, to sports in the past: Fixes like making Brett Favre the all-time quarterback for all 32 NFL teams, or shortening baseball games to five innings, or shortening basketball to about 20 minutes and having the teams play an entire tournament in one weekend, but those were stopgap fixes, and, just as US voters did with capitalism last November, I've decided to scrap the old and replace it with the new. So today, I will present, for the first time, The Best New Sport, a sport I have invented this morning on my drive into work by mulling over those things that work in current sports, and combining them all into one.

So, let's build a sport! Here's what my new sport will have:

1. "Unintentional" Violence: Sports fans worldwide love violence -- but not intentional violence. That's why boxing and baseball are on the decline, while football reigns supreme. Boxing has intentional violence, and we're not supposed to like that. We're supposed to look down on that and feel superior to people who like it, and snicker at them -- the way we all treat people who like "mixed martial arts" (which used to be called "karate" before participants realized that we were snickering when they called it "karate.") Baseball has no violence, though, and suffers as a result. The only people who like nonviolent sports are Moms, and they're not allowed a vote. (Baseball would jump in popularity if it would only adopt the rule we used to use in "Whiffle Ball:" a runner could be tagged out by throwing the ball at him.)

How much do sports fans love unintentional violence? So much that soccer fans have to riot to add a little violence to their sport, because there's not enough on the field. (And please, don't give me that "it's called football here, mate" stuff. Americans have decided it's called soccer. We gave you Levi's and the iPod, so we get to name sports. Get over it. Or we'll have Madonna try to adopt kids from your country, too.) It's no accident, either, that basketball got more popular as play got more physical.

Football, though, has the right amount of unintentional violence. The ostensible goal of football is to get the ball in the end zone. All that hitting and tackling and chop-blocking and accidental crippling? Boy, we wish we could cut down on that.

So The Best New Sport will be a contact sport, but contact will be incidental to the game (honest!).

2. Weird Scoring (But Not Too Weird.) The most popular sport in the world, football (seriously: your sport is soccer. Stop it) has weird scoring, but not too weird. 6 points for a touchdown. 2 points for the "extra point" or "point-after." Unless you kick it, in which case it's 1 point. Unless that kick is a "field goal," in which case it's 3. And 2 points for a "safety." Got all that? Basketball is a close second: Two points for a basket, unless you shoot from really far away, in which case it's 3. But 1 point for a foul shot.

Compare that to the other extremes: baseball? 1 point per run. Not "a point per base," or "2 extra points for a home run" or "1/2 point for sliding." Just 1 point per run. Boring! But then look at tennis. Ever read a tennis score? It's impossible. They always say something like "Serena Williams beat Venus Williams, 6-2, 4-1, 3-5 (2-0)." What is THAT? And they use not just points but words. "Love." There's no love in sports. "Advantage?" They're just making that up.

And The Best New Sport's scoring won't involve any "math," either, like bowling does. None of this "go back three frames" and "X" and "slash marks." Nor will there be things like "par," or any of this "lowest score wins" like in golf. "Lowest score?" That's communist. Or elitist. Aren't those the same thing these days?

3. A Team In Every City: For some reason, sports are geographically-based. Nobody says "You must like that movie, it was filmed in your state," or "I bet you'll watch this TV show, it's set in your city." But tell someone you're from Kansas City, and they say "I bet you root for the Chiefs." Right after they say "Oh, God, I'm sorry for you. Is it terribly boring?" Tell someone you root for the Buffalo Bills (as I do) and they say Did you grow up in Buffalo? Say "No, but I once visited there," and they give you a confused look -- the same look Jenny Lewis gave you in high school that time you dropped the hint about going to the party with her.

So The Best New Sport will have a team in every city. Everywhere. In the world. Except Russia and China, because they're the bad guys again. And the Mideast because it's unsafe. And South America, because what really goes on there? I don't know, and I don't want to find out, plus I saw on a TV show that llamas live there and I don't want this sport associated with llamas. And except Africa, because the UN passed a resolution that the only sport people in Africa can compete in is marathons and when I see those really-fit runners it makes me (almost) put down my BBQ Fritos. And except Europe, because I don't want to have to list ticket prices in Euros, as that's creepy. And except Central America, because the unions will get mad about NAFTA even though that happened so long ago nobody's really sure what it is anymore, except Bill Clinton, and who listens to him?

And there will only be one team in Canada.

With all those teams all over the world, everywhere (with those few limited exceptions), that will help naturally build the next ingredient:

4. Arbitrary Rivalries: Try this on for size: Man, don't you hate those___________. Then fill in the blank with the name of the team from the city nearest you. Satisfying, isn't it? There's nothing quite like deciding just to hate someone for the simple reason that they make their living playing for a team that's located near, but not too near, your city. For me, it's the Chicago Bears and the Minnesota Vikings. I hate those Vikings and Bears. Even when the Vikings and Bears are actually from Wisconsin -- I hate them. And I love Wisconsin players, even when they're from Chicago or Minneapolis?

Confusing? Don't think about it. Just let the hate roll. Everyone needs to hate someone, but you get in trouble if you go around saying things like "Man, I hate those" coworkers/racial groups/genders/age groups. And with Obama in the White House, it's not cool to hate politicians anymore, either. So what's left? Rush Limbaugh? Yeah, we can hate him, but that's for good reason. With The Best New Sport having a team in every city in the world, (with a few limited exceptions) you'll be safely hating people in no time.

5. The Name Will Have The Word "Ball" In It. That's a key ingredient for a successful sport. The three biggies all have it: Football. Basketball. Baseball. Those would-be sports that people claim to like but never watch? All missing this important part. Golf? Hockey? Soccer? I bet if you renamed Hockey and called it Puck-Ball, ratings would double. (Meaning 2 people would watch every game.)

I'm thinking "Awesome Ball." Let's go with that.

6. There will be Statistics. And lots of 'em. That's the only way to get the baseball diehards over to my sport. Baseball exists solely for the statistics, something that basketball and football realized only belatedly. Baseball has, by my unofficial but highly scientific estimate, over 100 billion different statistical categories. Compare that to tennis, which has just one. The only statistic tennis keeps? Which continent Venus is playing Serena on. Golf has only the two statistics: Number of consecutive wins by Tiger Woods, and how hot his wife is.

Football and basketball have been fighting back. Watch a football game or read coverage of the game, and you'll see statistics like "sacks" and "rushes for loss" and "yards after catch" and all that. Basketball started tracking "assists," (described by The Boy as "almost baskets.") If you're going to get the baseball nerds and/or have George Will periodically write incomprehensible but poetic sounding columns about your sport, you've got to have statistics.

7. Time Limits. Another major part of any great sport, and one that's overlooked by all too many would-be contenders. Both football and basketball place a time limit on their games. (Hockey does, too, I understand, but they do it in Canadian time, which nobody understands. How complicated is Canadian timekeeping? Here's a sample: The basic unit of Canadian time is the "loony" and it's equal to 3.2 minutes -- but only in the Northern Hemisphere and not within two weeks of the solstice. Hockey's time is kept using tiny medieval orreries worn on the back of the announcer.) Baseball, tennis, golf: no time limits, and hence no pressure, no urgency. Watch a baseball game: you'll see the pitcher stretch, scratch, yawn, eat a hot dog, do a Sudoku, shake off three or four signs, and never pitch. Golf is the same way. Tennis matches, I understand, go on for hours, or do in theory, at least, since nobody watches them.)

The Best New Sport will time everything. It'll have shot clocks, huddle clocks, game clocks, play clocks, kick clocks, tackle clocks... there will be at least ten different time clocks, all measuring time to the millionth of a second.

8. No particular skills will be necessary to play (or so it will seem.) Another key ingredient to a great sport is that it has to look super easy. Again, football rules over all other sports. Anyone can run, handoff, kick a ball, throw a ball. That's what we say, anyway. Watch a football game with a bunch of fans at a sports bar and wait for the kicker to miss an "easy" 30-yard field goal, and listen to the cries of derision. I once tried to kick a five yard field goal, and nearly pulled a hamstring (I missed, badly.)

The fact that it takes actual skill to play a sport cannot be obvious, though. Fans need to be able to say "I could have made that pass!" or "Anyone can make a free-throw on national television with the championship on the line after they've already played hard for 40 minutes and this is their sixth game in three weeks." It doesn't matter that we can't do it. We have to believe we can.

That's why hockey and tennis do so poorly: We know we can't ice skate, and given our inability to actually smack that annoying fly with a magazine, the odds of us returning a tennis serve are slim. But we can throw a ball, and catch a ball. And tackle. Maybe. Tackling looks a little hard, come to think of it. So we'll play offense.

9. Nothing But Playoffs: The final ingredient: The Best New Sport will have no regular season. All those complaints about how the regular season is meaningless, or too long? Gone. All those years of suffering when your team doesn't make the playoffs? Gone. Nothing but playoffs means that all teams are in the postseason, and every game has meaning -- and not the kind of "meaning" that teams claim to get when they make it into the "NCAA National Invitational Tournament" (Slogan: "Now Featuring the 65th-through-128th Best College Basketball Teams!") or the losers' bracket of some "playoff."

And there will be none of the other extreme, the "No Playoffs Whatsover" junk. NASCAR? I'm looking at you. You can claim all you want that there's a champion, but without playoffs, you're just a liar. (You, too, Golf: Don't try edging away.)

The Best New Sport's season will begin with the divisional playoffs, featuring arbitrary divisions like "North-East" and "South-Southwest" and "Canada" and move into regional playoffs (with entirely different regions, like "Mid-Atlantic" and "Eastern Pacific"), then onto SemiRegional Divisional Playoffs (dividing into three categories: Original Colonies, Louisiana Purchase, and The Rest Of The Country That Got Added Later), then culminating in the final three rounds of playoffs: Nationals, National Regionals, and Divisional Nationals (the latter dividing teams by time zones, the former two by shades of the spectrum) before culminating in the three Championship Rounds, where the final 50 teams will be whittled down to just two, who will square off in what will ultimately become the world's most-watched championship game, which will be referred to formally as the Masters Super World Bowl and informally as "Spring & Summer Madness."

So there you go: Coming soon to a stadium near you -- or maybe to a stadium over in the hated next-town-over: The opening round of the Awesome Ball Divisional Playoffs, featuring the Cape Horn, Idaho Wombats against the East Poplar (Saskatchewan) Tornadoes! Start filling out your brackets now!



Related:

The Best Postseason Sporting Event? The NCAA Tournament -- even though I don't watch it.

Remember when I laid out the groundrules for creating a media scare? No? Then read about The Best Media Scare That Turned Out Not To Be That Big A Deal.

Click here to see all the Whodathunkits?!!

Click here to see all the SemiDaily Lists!


Click here to see all the MiniBests!

Click here to see all the other topics I’ve ever discussed!

Make a Free Flash Slideshow

I will put this on my resume, right above "Once blew a bubble INSIDE ANOTHER bubble."

Here's a creative thought for people who are looking for job, or looking for a better job: Why not become a member of a Board of Directors of a company you believe in?

"Sure," you say, "And I bet those kinds of positions are just laying around waiting for me to fill them." Well, I can hear your sarcasm, and it's unwarranted. Not only are there seats on Boards of Directors open and waiting for you, but it's a great opportunity to do a couple of things you need and want to do. Things like:

-- Bulk up your resume with some impressive credentials,
-- Increase your income potential by building greater contacts and business skills, and
-- Allow you to play an active role in guiding a corporation.

So if you want greener corporations, or corporations that are friendlier to consumers, or just corporations that have better customer service departments, being on the Board of Directors gives you a chance to help steer the corporation that way.

And the part about the positions out there just sitting around waiting for you to fill them? That's taken care of by LIGHTSHIP RESEARCH. How can they help? Read on, my good friend: Read on:

According to Lightship Research Co. www.lightshipresearch.com. There are approximately 60,000 publicly traded companies and an additional 20,000 private companies with boards of directors in the United States. This results in a total of 80,000 boards nationwide. Experts estimate that the average board tenure lasts approximately eight years, meaning that in any given year, up to 10,000 board seats must be filled.

The board is responsible for planning the long-term future of a corporation and work side by side with management. Together, the board and the management strive to align long-term goals and the company’s vision with attainable short-term objectives. The board will often work closely with the CEO - the relationship between board members and the CEO/management team is complex and very important. Before even considering accepting a board seat, you may want to ask yourself:

• Do I believe in the cause/vision of this organization?
Am I at the particular stage of my life to add the responsibilities of board membership?
• What can I personally contribute to the board?
• What do I hope to gain from being a member of the board?

If you are interested in learning more or would like to become a board member you may want to consider http://www.lightshipresearch.com

So quit sitting around on your duff, and go to Lightship Research: start making a positive contribution to your world, and your career!

The Best New Species

It's a MiniBest!

April Is The New Month, fighting The Death of New by pointing out what The Best New Things Are.

I sometimes think "scientists" are just messing with us, and I think that they bring it on themselves that I suspect that.

If they weren't just messing with us, for example, why won't they admit that there was never such a thing as a "velociraptor?" Or that it's amazingly, phenomenally unlikely that dinosaurs were fossilized while fighting each other? How could that ever happen?

My skepticism of "scientists" doesn't just come as a result of my own concrete, utterly logical, scientific reasoning and proof; it comes from the fact that "scientists" bring it on themselves through their own actions. How am I supposed to take "science" seriously when the "scientists" name stingrays after vacuum cleaners and claim that they've found a rare form of rhinoceros beetle whose horn is identical to that of Dim, the Pixar-animated Rhinoceros beetle in A Bug's Life?

When "scientists" do things like that, it makes it all the harder to believe that they've actually found alien organisms living in our atmosphere, as a group of scientists claimed recently. The "scientists" announced in March, 2009, that they've found three new species of bacteria living in the upper atmosphere, and began openly speculating on whether the bacteria were alien organisms-- life from other planets, in bacteria form. The "scientists," who were possibly-backed by Stephen Hawking (who attributes the invention of Kentucky Fried Chicken to Columbus) don't want to confirm yet that the bacteria are alien bacteria, but they do want to speculate, often and as publicly as bacteria-studying "scientists" can, that they've discovered alien life forms, living here on Earth.

Leaving it to me once again to inject some cold hard logic into "science."

The "scientists" sent up a balloon to sample bacteria from the upper atmosphere, and took what they say are elaborate precautions to avoid tainting the study by getting ordinary Earth bacteria in the mix.

Despite those elaborate precautions, which included liquid neon -- the presence of liquid gases is always a part of elaborate precautions -- the "scientists" got not just the three "alien" bacteria but nine kinds of bacteria that were clearly Earth bacteria -- having a 98% similarity to known bacteria.

In other words, the elaborate precautions to avoid getting Earth bacteria led to the "scientists" getting three times as many Earth bacteria as "alien" bacteria.

But, the "scientists" say, The three "alien" bacteria are totally new species, unknown to us -- and therefore the "scientists" are free to speculate on whether the bacteria are "extraterrestrial" despite the near-infinite odds against such a thing happening.

Here's what would have to happen for the Alien Bacteria to have gotten into our upper atmosphere to be discovered by these "scientists:"

The Alien Bacteria would have to have evolved on another planet. Presumably one outside the solar system, since our probes have yet to find any sign of any proof of life on any planet inside our solar system.

The Alien Bacteria would then have to get off of their planet somehow, and get here. Because they are (presumably) not intelligent and not tool-using Alien Bacteria, that means that they would have had to be blasted off of their planet by being on a piece of rock that was near enough to an explosion of some kind to boost that rock into space -- but far enough away so that the explosion would not have killed the Alien Bacteria.

That Alien Bacteria then, despite being adapted to living on a planet with an atmosphere and nutrients and all, would have had to survive on its piece of rock drifting through airless, foodless space, until that rock intersected Earth's atmosphere, at which point the Alien Bacteria would have had to somehow detach from the rock while in the atmosphere -- doing so before the rock's entry into our atmosphere caused it to heat up and burn -- and learn to survive in the upper atmosphere on Earth (even though they didn't survive in that atmosphere on the other planet) and to thrive enough to be discovered by the "scientists."

Yes. All that could have happened, I suppose.

Or, it could simply be that we've just never discovered these bacteria until now but they're terrestrial. Not every brand new species is an alien, is it? If these guys found a new kind of frog, would we have to hear about how we were going to be invaded by the Frog Warriors of Saturn?

There should be, in my mind, some sort of requirement, in "science," that a hypothesis (the "scientists" in the article could look that word up if they're unfamiliar with it) be logical and have factual support before it gets publicized.

But where's the fun in that? And where's the fame, glory and continued research grants in that? Where are the headlines in San Diego papers allowing geologists to be interviewed about microbes on Mars killing the entire human race? Without rampant speculation based on nothing more than a desire for headlines... I mean, "without science as we know it today," how will "scientists" pay their mortgages?

No, clearly, we cannot let our "scientists" be bound to "facts" and "proof" and "logic." We must free them to generate ever-newer, ever-more-fascinating, ever-more-remunerative flights of fancy. And because of that need, I will recognize Alien Bacteria From Beyond The Stars as The Best New Species. May it, and the "scientists" who discovered it, live long and prosper. That's certainly the goal, right?

Especially the prosper.

The New Month Posts:

Read The Best Fake Musical In A Real Movie here

Read The Best Fake Musical In A Real Movie, Reader Nomination here.

Click here to see all the Whodathunkits?!!

Click here to see all the SemiDaily Lists!

Click here to see all the other MiniBests!

Click here to see all the other topics I’ve ever discussed!