KISSOFF 2023

WRAPPING UP THIS YEAR, I will focus on the pleasurable rather than the problematic. Here’s a selection of SimanaitisSays 2023, the particular research, composition, and presentation of which gave me pleasure. 

Let’s Keep Swingin’. Back almost a year ago, NPR reported “What Makes That Song Swing? At Last, Physicists Unravel a Jazz Mystery.” SimanaitisSays jumped in with “It Don’t Mean A Thing If….” 

The Dorsey brothers, Jimmy and Tommy. Image from olddmagazinearticles.com.

Tumbling rhythm isn’t unique to swing: I cited Berber folk music (heard when visiting Morocco) and even touched on a personal note, what with the family tale of my maternal grandfather possibly having gigged with Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey (all of whom came from the same Pennsylvania coal-mining town of Shenandoah.

Theoretical physicist Theo Geisel studied swing and concluded that its sound was the product of ever so subtle deviations of timing, “just 30 microseconds, or a fraction of the time it takes to blink an eye.” 

Baby’s Blinks. Speaking of eye blinks, last month SimanaitisSays picked up on “Infancy Tidbits,” including the fact that babies blink far less often than adults, “only two or three blinks per minute on average” whereas the average adult “blinks about 15 times a minute.”

Image by Leif Parsons, in “The Claim: Babies Blink Less Than Adults Do,” The New York Times, December 8, 2008.

Baby Blues. Their eyes, not the musical genre: “Gee,” I wrote in ‘Ol’ Blue-eyes, Jack Benny, Me, and Those Similarly Endowed,’ “I never realized how rare blue eyes are. We make up only eight percent of the world’s population, according to AucklandEye.” 

Image from AuckandEye. 

“Eye color,” SimanaitisSays wrote, “depends on how much melanin is present in the iris, which is made of two layers, the stoma in front, the epithelium in back. We all have brown pigment in our epithelium layer. But us blue-eyed folks have pigment-free stoma.”

And babies? AucklandEye observes, “Since the human eye does not have its full adult amount of pigment at birth, most Caucasian babies are born with blue eyes. However, since human melanin tends to develop over time—this causes the child’s eye colour to change as more melanin is produced in the iris during early childhood.”

Sleuth Humor. Having mentioned Ol’ Blue Eyes, I recall one of Frank Sinatra’s divergent activities: his Rocky Fortune radio role. Brief though it was, October 6, 1953–March 30, 1954, Rocky Fortune “drifted from job to job, each one turning more hazardous than expected.” In one, for example, he’s hired to pilot a doomed rocketship in a faux financing scheme.

Rocky Fortune from YouTube, episode 1, October 6, 1953. 

From SimanaitisSays, “My favorite Rocky quips: ‘… I’m alone with Iris, who’s wearing a flannel skirt and a little boy’s shirt. Which never looks like that on no little boy.’ And ‘Even in my weak condition, I can appreciate that she’s got more curves than the Jersey Turnpike.’ ” 

Other good quips came from Pat Novak for Hire, a pre-Dragnet radio gig for Jack Webb. A typical line: “She sauntered in, moving slowly from side to side like 118 pounds of warm smoke.”

And to counter all this feminine jazz, there’s Sam Spade saying as a lady pours him a drink: “Yes, up to the lipstick mark.”

A.I. For Good and for Evil, 2023 will be remembered as the Year of Artificial Intelligence. As such, it has been a frequent topic here at SimanaitisSays: A.I. GIGO summed matters up with the familiar adage Garbage In/Garbage Out. A.I. to Revolutionize Weather Prediction describes its potential Good. On Chatbots and Other Hallucinators and More A.I. BS suggest its Evil.

If you identify any other particular themes in the year’s SimanaitisSays, you’re a better characterizer than I am. Each day, it seems, I write more or less whatever comes to mind. And—full disclosure—I delight in giving it a last editing at 6:06 a.m. just after it goes live.

This sure beats running from drugstore to drugstore with an editorial pencil.

I wish you all a Joyous New Year. ds

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2023