Fa-la-la-la-la Is No Accident

Piano music The Christmas Song

Christmas is the one holiday that has its own music. In fact, music is so much at the core of Christmas celebrations that three of the top fifteen best-selling singles of all time are Christmas-themed, and public venues start playing carols right after Halloween, two months early. Think about it; no other American/western European holiday involves theme music.

I realized this fact last night while attending the second holiday concert of this season, listening to a stream of sublime medieval motets and “Marian polyphony” by Chanticleer. As they sang dozens of songs about mangers and Magi, I tried to think of songs for Halloween or Thanksgiving, and they are rare, ancillary, afterthoughts. In the religious elementary school I attended as a child, Easter and Christmas were considered equally worth of pageantry, and we performed songs for parents in both. But few people would now sing “Go to Dark Gethsemane” or “Christ the Lord is Risen Today” while shopping for chocolate bunnies in March.

Music is a fundamental part of the Christmas experience, as old as wassailing and gift-giving, almost as old as snow and the change of the seasons.

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The Singularity Always Happens

How did the Mongols conquer Asia? Where did knights come from? Look at the feet. Photo from arstechnica.com.

Will the Singularity happen? I’m currently reading an international spy techno-thriller pot-boiler whose premise centers around the creation of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), just asTerminator: Dark Fate is raking in big bucks in theaters. Scary futures are big entertainment business. It’s a perfect time for a provocative question like the one Fandango asks today:

Do you think the singularity will occur? If so, what time frame do you think it will happen in and how will it impact humanity? Alternatively, do you think or care at all about the potential for reaching singularity?

The short answer is: World-threatening technology is perpetually created by humans. Humans then create an alternative to pull civilization back from the brink. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

My autocorrect: “You didn’t type candy corn, you typed child porn….” Your IP address has been forwarded to local law enforcement.
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We Don’t Remember the Future Imperfect

Author’s Note: I apologize, in advance, for mangling Spanish, misinterpreting quantum physics, and injecting so many puns into this essay.

Time is perfect. We are imperfect. We remember only the past. We don’t remember the future.

The past is always tense, the future perfect.

Zadie Smith

This quote from English novelist Zadie Smith is today’s provocative question (muchas gracias, Fandango). It suggests we remember the negatives and hope for the positives. The future hasn’t occurred, so it can be what our imagination creates. This is also a play on grammar, which is a subject much on my mind these days as I am attempting to learn Spanish. So, for me, the tense is confusing. The present might be more like the collapse of a wave, given that the arrow only goes one direction. But the Multiverses suggest that the arrows might go several directions, if we could but see them, and that would make the future perfect. Let me explain what I mean.

One view of the Multi-verse, photo of Into the Spider-verse by Sony Pictures

Tenses Are Difficult. Futures Are Also Difficult.

The use of the word Tense, in the sense of verbs and grammar, comes from the Old French word for time which was tens. That’s not to be confused with the current French word for time, temps; language has changed. Language, like time, moves forward (and collapses). The word does not refer to “tense” as in stretchiness, which comes from the Latin tendere. This is why Zadie Smith’s quote is a looping play on words, since it mixes emotions and grammatical expressions, and either deliberately or innocently uses them wrongly. Tense does not mean tension. It is a homophone. Which is intense. And perhaps what she intended.

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