91av

Named Ron

We have been such good little Feedbacks over the past few weeks that the powers that be have allowed us to indulge in a little illicit nominative determinism, so long as we keep it quick and open the windows after we’re finished.

Annie Brown writes in with the following newspaper clippings, one from The Guardian, noting that “Australia’s biggest wheat farmer, Ron Greentree, faces more charges of illegal land clearing”, and another from The Sydney Morning Herald on the same topic: “In his limited spare time, Mr Greentree pursues a family passion for the woodchop.”

Annie isn’t sure what the opposite of nominative determinism is, but says this must surely qualify. Well Annie, we have an answer for you. A quick search of the Feedback archives reveals it to be nominative contradeterminism.

Olm sweet olm

A few weeks ago, 91av published a story about a cave-dwelling olm in Bosnia and Herzegovina that appeared not to have moved in seven years. An olm is a sort of translucent salamander with a highly instagrammable face, and so the internet was naturally transfixed.

Many of our readers identified with the lazy little thing and its desire to carve out a moment to itself amid the bustle of modern life. So Feedback was keen to get in touch with it to see what it made of the fuss.

After weeks of looking, we eventually managed to track the olm down, in the exact same spot where it was last seen…

91av: Are you the lazy olm?

Lazy olm: Who’s asking?

NS: 91av.

LO: Never heard of you.

NS: That’s hardly surprising, is it, it’s not like you get out much.

LO: Fair enough. What do you want, anyway? I’m busy.

NS: Doing what? Lying down on a cave floor without moving for seven years?

LO: Stick around long enough and I’ll make it eight.

NS: The comedian Tim Minchin tweeted that you might in fact be a depressed salamander, and that before accusing you of laziness we should check our privilege. Do you think that’s fair?

LO: Why – is it overflowing?

NS: Is what overflowing?

LO: My privy ledge. It’s hard to lie down for seven years without generating a spot of run-off.

NS: Changing the subject as adroitly as we are now changing position, do you have any hobbies?

LO: Yes.

NS: Do any of them not involve prolonged naps on the floor of a damp cave?

LO: No, although I am considering capitalising on my new-found fame by launching a lifestyle brand.

NS: Finally, what would you say to the Twitter user who joked that it was only natural to axolotl questions?

LO: And you call me lazy.

Stay in ur lane

Feedback’s capacity for musical appreciation ranks somewhere below that of your average olm. But even we found ourselves bopping along this week to a track released by a little-known artist called Elon Musk. Musk, we gather from a light perusal of the web, moonlights as something of a tech entrepreneur.

His true calling, however, is as a professional megamixologist, if the success of Don’t Doubt ur Vibe is to be believed. Not only did Don’t Doubt ur Vibe make the SoundCloud top 10 for an unspecific period of time, but it did so with the noted drawback of being almost impossible to listen to.

Whether you would describe the electric car pioneer’s oeuvre as battery acid house or future garage, what cannot be denied is that the song is 4 minutes and 1 second long. On that, we think even the sternest critic would agree.

What’s more, it is absolutely indisputable that it contains 14 words. And as a little light mathematics will verify, 14 words go into 4 minutes and 1 second quite a few times indeed.

We have absolutely no hesitation in describing this as a bona fide sound of the summer. Provided the summer is a person who does sums and that person is Elon Musk.

La vie en rose

On which note (aha), our eye was caught by a story in The Times charting the glumification of popular songs. An analysis of lyrics dating from 1965 to 2015 revealed a decline in cheery words such as “love” and “joy” and a rise in gloomy words such as “hate” and “pain”.

Had the researchers , they might also have noted the rise of nonsense words such as “ur”, but who are we to doubt their vibe.

There are all sorts of explanations for this morose trend. Perhaps people are genuinely getting more miserable. Or perhaps people were always this miserable, and musicians have only now realised there is money to be made in catering to their gloom.

Or, perhaps perhaps (this is the technically correct way of stacking perhapses, incidentally*), modern lyrics preface words like “hate” and “pain” with other words like “let’s not” and “I feel no”, which makes everything all right again.

*OK, this isn’t technically correct. The ever-vigilant 91av subeditors allowed us to keep this in only if we added a disclaimer immediately afterwards.

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