Neil Sinhababu: Wolf Parade, "Yulia" + "Tell Detroit that I thank them"

Friday, July 17, 2015

Wolf Parade, "Yulia" + "Tell Detroit that I thank them"

This is Wolf Parade's "Yulia", sung by a Soviet cosmonaut to his beloved on Earth as he's lost in space on a failed mission. Dan Boeckner writes haunting love songs set around the former USSR, and here are the last lines of this one:

So when they turn the cameras on you
Baby please don't speak of me
Point up to the dark above you
As they edit me from history
I'm 20 million miles from a comfortable home
And space is very cold
Yulia
There's nothing out here nothing out here nothing out
nothing out here nothing out here there's nothing out here
nothing nothing out here nothing out here nothing nothing out

While I'm on a former USSR kick -- somebody wrote this in a discussion of World War II tank battles, and it's beautiful:

While swimming on a beach in the river flowing through Krasnodar, in southern Russia, another American student and I struck up a conversation with an old, scarred man. He was surprised to find that not only were we foreigners, but Americans. He asked where we were from and I replied, “Have you ever heard of Detroit?” His eyes welled up and he started to cry, then he grabbed me in a strong embrace and said, “In the Great Patriotic War, Detroit gave me a tank with which I killed many German fascists. Tell Detroit that I thank them.”

Welcome to my blog! You can visit my homepage here if you like.

You can check out this fun philosophical interview I did in 2017 if you're interested in my views on a number of issues ranging from the Humean theory of motivation to romantic relationships with people from other possible worlds.

I've been blogging since 2004 at a number of different sites. Maybe this is a good place to show you the best posts from previous sites I've run.

One of the more interesting things I've made on the internet is a blog called "War or Car" that described things you could buy for the price of the Iraq War. I was running it for four months in 2008, through the Presidential election. You could buy every American household its own Toyota Prius -- hence the name of the blog. More amusingly, you could buy every living panda its own stealth bomber, and do a variety of other awesome whimsical things instead of killing a ridiculous number of people.

At my longtime personal blog, The Ethical Werewolf, I made a logic puzzle loosely based on Sir Mix-a-lot's "Baby Got Back". It occasionally gets tweeted or otherwise linked around for public amusement.

A few years ago, people at the Philosophers' Cocoon asked me to do a blog post for them about my job at the National University of Singapore. I'm still there today, and I like it!

In 2012 I ran a little site called VoteSeeing that ranked the accuracy of pundits trying to predict the Presidential election. Some nice people at a philosophy blog called NewAPPS asked me to post my results there. Daily Kos won, and Nate Silver took second place.

I did a guest post for Daily Nous on the undersupply of journal space. This is why rejection rates at good philosophy journals top 90%. I think a lot of good work isn't making into print, and can't be discussed by the community.

My color vision isn't very good, so I tried out some color vision glasses to try to see green. I was wondering whether I'd see a color I hadn't been able to imagine before, and I wrote about that for Amy Kind's imagination blog. I think the answer might be yes, though it's unclear.