A creature of good humour and bad company, brave, a spendthrift, prodigal almost to generosity, talkative almost to eloquence, bold almost to effrontery; the best possible devil’s-pie; with fool-hardy waistcoats and scarlet opinions.

Les Miserables

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The Willowz – “Cons and Tricks”
Talk in Circles

Just some straight-up noisy garage rock. Love the “busy” tone about 2/3rds through. Apparently this was on Jersey Shore? Doesn’t matter, great song.

Reamde (Neal Stephenson, 2011)

Like most Neal Stephenson books, Reamde is unsatisfying. But unlike Anathem, which was unsatisfying because it just barely missed following through on a powerful and fascinating premise, Reamde is unsatisfying because it aims so low. It is a surprisingly unambitious and overstuffed series of procedurals that has you waiting for a payoff that never comes. Page by page it is enjoyable, but around 900 of the 1040 pages are enjoyable in more or less the same way, and you reach saturation long before they run out; the remaining 140 pages are essentially irrelevant navel-gazing.
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Lead Belly – “Black Betty”
Negro Sinful Songs

After hearing the 1977 Ram Jam version of this song, I was curious about its origins. Turns out it dates back to at least 1933 (almost certainly decades before), but was first commercially recorded by Lead Belly in 1939. Betty herself seems to be everything but a trouble-ridden woman; “Black Betty” is said to refer to a whip used in prisons, or the black wagon used to transport prisoners, or (as early as 1736, noted by Benjamin Franklin) a bottle of whiskey.

They are irregular, obscure, various, so infinite, Proteus himself is not so diverse; you may as well make the moon a new coat as a true character of a melancholy man; as soon find the motion of a bird in the air as the heart of man, a melancholy man.

Anatomy of Melancholy