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I must exorcise myself of the demons that have possessed me. I must. Please forgive me for what I am about to do to you.

• Billy Joel, “An Innocent Man”
• Foreigner, “Double Vision”

These are the two abysmal excuses for songs that have been stuck in my head for the past 72 hours or so. To make matters worse, as far as I can tell, they’ve appeared there completely of their own accord. There were no wayward encounters courtesy of the grocery store PA system. No drive-by musical shootings from a passing car radio tuned to some classic rock station. No forthcoming “blast from the past” concert announcements that might have reminded me that such dinosaurs still roamed the earth.

No, the ultimate unfairness in all this is that these Elvis-forsaken bits of dreck have apparently come to besiege me from deep inside the recesses of my own brain.

There are only two ways known to humanity to rid oneself of earworms such as these:

1. Finding a good “head cleaner”: i.e., a tune with enough oomph to drive the offending ditties away, and with enough staying power to keep the demons from coming back. The downside, of course, is that you’re simply replacing one earworm with another — but, done well, the new demon is much better to live with for a few days.
2. Passing the infection on to new hosts. Which, my dear friends (or former dear friends, as the case may be), is what I’ve just done to you.

Ted Striphas is running a caption contest on his blog involving a photo of a baby holding a book by every toddler’s favorite French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze. I’m still working on my entry (how could I not? Ted’s offering such fabulous prizes!) but — in the meantime — I was reminded of a moment about 18 months ago when I found myself watching after an almost-a-toddler for a few hours while her parents were otherwise occupied. And watching Svetlana play with her fuzzy books while surrounded by Ron and Z’s mountains of critical theory tomes inspired me to do a few literary mash-ups of my own.

Baby’s First Spivak
see the happy people. we call them “altern”

see the sad people. we call them “subaltern”

see the altern speak. hear the altern speak.

see the subaltern … no. no, you don’t.

the end.

Baby’s First Gramsci
karl was right. but karl was wrong.
let me tell you how in song.
rich men rule. rich men bad.
rich men make the poor real sad.
karl thinks poor are fooled by rich
who turn poor’s minds off like a switch.
i think poor are pretty smart.
rich don’t rule their minds — they steal the heart.
poor can still defeat the rich
but it’s not easy — life’s a bitch.
poor folks minds are full of doubt
but strength of will should see them out!

Baby’s First Said
once upon a time, there was a happy land called “the west.” only the people from the west didn’t know they were part of “the west.” they thought they were the whole world.

then one day, some people from the west met some people from “the east.” and the people from the west realized that they weren’t the whole world anymore.

but the people from the west liked to think that they were the whole world. so they pretended that the people from the east were weak and lazy. and so they sent soldiers with guns to kill the people from the east and steal their gold. and they told lies about the east that made the people from the west believe that all this was fair and good and right.

eventually, the people from the west forgot that the stories they were telling about the east were lies. but they couldn’t stop telling those stories because those stories made it possible for them to still believe that the west was the whole world.

and they all lived unhappily ever after.

I never got around to Baby’s First Deleuze, but maybe now I need to do so . . .

It’s about time that advertisers started taking women seriously as intellectuals, rather than as pretty faces and hot bodi–

–waitasec. Nevermind. This is, after all, an ad for silicone breast implants.

Even better, though, is the that the site linked above gives you the chance to click through for a larger version of the same image . . . that turns out to be the same size as the original image. Which doesn’t do much to inspire confidence in what the product will do to enhance one’s . . . intelligence.

[Tip o' the linking hat to Stay Free!.]

A few months back, I wrote about an intellectual property debacle that landed in Jonathan Sterne’s lap, courtesy of an essay of his that appeared in a Sage journal.

Today, I find myself on the verge of having a(nother) comparable story of my own to tell . . . but I’m holding off on sharing the full details here until there’s a clearer resolution to the current problem. One way or another, there is a cautionary tale to be told here. The only remaining question is whether that tale has a happy ending or not.

On Monday, March 25, the high in Minneapolis was 81 degrees. Record for the day. Two degrees shy of the record for the month. I don’t think anyone had any illusions that we’d simply bypassed spring and headed straight into summer for good — or even that we’d seen the last of temps in the 30s and 40s. But spring appeared to have well and truly sprung.

Right.

It’s snowing today. For the second time since that balmy March Monday. And we haven’t seen the sunny side of 50 in more than a week. This does not make me happy.

The pictures don’t quite do it justice . . .

. . . if only because they don’t necessarily capture . . .

. . . the openness of the space very well . . .

. . . but Margaret and I are on the verge of a crosstown move to a new home.