Tonight, I’d like to check out some of my assumptions and logic chains with you guys.

I have no idea what sort of response I might get to this posting, but I’m very much up for a vigorous and even acrimonious debate if it goes there. You have my explicit permission to be rude to me on this particular one. As if you needed permission.

Rachael (who is Awesome) and I were chatting about our value systems this weekend, as we sometimes do on road trips. Philosophical types, we are.

We both test out to be seriously lower-left on the Political Compass. You can argue about how valid this sort of categorization might be, but my personal experience is that most people who take the test end up muttering “Yeah, I guess that pretty much places me,” when they see the result. A few consider it to be a moronic attempt to describe complex human beliefs on a mere two axes, of course. They’re probably the smart ones.

But it’s a lot better than the simple Left vs. Right paradigm that’s prevalent in this country.

Rach and I are rowdy social-liberal, anti-authoritarian types. We mistrust and despise anybody who wants to be in charge, and we’re down with ‘Live and let live, I don’t care how weird your shit is, as long as you don’t intrude on my space with it’.

I suspect that most of the folks who frequent EOB have a similar attitude.

(Incidentally, people who test lower-left have ALWAYS despised George Bush and the Thug Party. It’s visceral, perhaps not even a choice on our part. We spit at people who test upper-right. It’s a mongoose-snake issue.)

But there’s a place that Rach and I and many friends seem to radically diverge from a lot of the traditional Left.

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For the past few days, I’ve been ponderously pondering what to post today. Most of what comes to mind is fairly dark, because that’s what most often interests me. Big surprise there, right?

Anyhow, while I work my way though that, I thought I’d put something lighter up as a place-holder for the evening.

Last year, Sir George Martin, often called ‘The Fifth Beatle’, and his son Giles remixed a bunch of Beatles songs to create a soundtrack for a Cirque du Soleil show. The remaining Beatles and the estates of the departed ones approved the project.

You can find the resulting CD track listing here, with free streams of four of the songs:

Love

I’ve cruised several boards and checked the comments about it. Some people think it’s a cool thing that they did. Others consider it sacrilege. You can make your own decisions on that, based on your particular religious beliefs about the Beatles.

One comment did strike me as being spot on, though. The remix of ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ takes from the softer demo that George did, and has absolutely none of the guitar line played by Eric Clapton.

Someone needs to be shot for that.

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Which cleverly segues into my next post above.

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