Lost

A couple summers ago, I had a little time on my hands, and so I started watching Lost online, following a few people’s suggestions.  Up until last summer, you could do this for all the past seasons, and you could last summer too, but only on questionable mirror sites.   The final season is starting now, and though I don’t think I will have time for it, I will probably get around to it after school is done (a season only lasts about a week if you don’t have anything else to do.)

The storyline has been barely believable up to this point, which is fine for a sci-fi influenced drama, but with the end of the last season, they lost control of the plot.  The last season will resolve some of the story lines, but the main one really ended last season.

The reason is that the cliffhanger of the finale was a nuclear explosion that was set off by the characters after they traveled back in time.  Up until that point, there was some sense of sci-fi logicality that the story follows.  But with the bomb, they took a step too far.  The problem is that there is no dramatic suspense to this.  The question, ‘what will happen’ is simply the question, ‘what happens when we travel back in time and dramatically change the past?’  There is no solid answer to this question, and so whatever does happen, it will simply be the whim of the story writers, whatever they want to have happen.  But this is not real drama, it is just speculation.  It is just ‘let’s say *this* is what happens after an event like this.’

If there is a logicality to the mystery island, there is a sense that all the drama must follow that logicality, no matter how weird it is.  But with the explosion, the island does not govern the logicality any more.  Even if it did, and something even stranger happens after the blast (which is how I presume this is going to go)  this would not be more dramatically satisfying turn of events than the ending of most of the story lines.

The nuclear blast was a deus ex machina turned on its head.  Even the most dramatic discoveries – that Whidmore was once the leader of the island, that Locke comes to life, that Sun does not travel back in time- was essentially an unfolding of a plot that remains mysterious.  But there is no mystery to the explosion.  The only mystery will be how the writers decide to deal with it.

To spell it out, there are a variety of options, none of which are any more decisive.  The time loop edition would have the original flight land in LA, leaving no one to go back in time to change the past, preserving the island, making the plane crash, allowing them to blow up the island, meaning they land in LA, meaning…

In the ‘weird island’ edition, the nuclear explosion affects the island’s mysterious forces and creates weird event, season 6.

The ‘Faraday’ edition follows his line of thinking, simply ending the story line by making it not happen in 04 through the bomb in 76.  This would involve a long scene with everyone getting off the plane in LA with lots of emotional music about how tragic it is they never got to know each other. But that could only last like 10 min, max.

The ‘Sun’ edition would involve more time travel, and the stopping of the bomb for a better solution that leaves everybody happy.

With any sci-fi that involves the time travel paradox, we willingly suspend theoretical skepticism as to the local solutions of the problem.  But those solutions can never remain a mystery.  There is a sense that any time travel story must set up its world in advance, so that it can remain consistent.  Here, there is no obligation for the writers to remain consistent.  Since the world is in our memory as much as in theirs, a good ending to the show would mean being consistent to the world.

Of course, the writers have had no trouble ending characters with the drop of a hat, and this is more evident when you watch a whole season in a week.  So maybe it is over for everyone, and the last season is all Locke, all the time.  But that doesn’t make any sense, since Locke isn’t Locke anymore, but Island dude number 2, who has no dramatic past.

So it is up to Sun to go back in time before the others and warn them not to detonate the bomb, because it will make no dramatic sense.  She does go back in time, because she sleeps with the Asian Dharma guy at the beginning of one of the shows.  And, I guess it won’t be horrible if the detonation led to some even stranger turn of events that can be resolved in the last season.  We like our diaboli ex machinae, and one in six seasons isn’t bad.

2010: A new decade? Sure!

Just like we saw in 2000, 2010’s celebrations irked those who correctly count the beginning of the new decade as 2011, pointing out that there was no year 0, making year 1 of every decimal unit the ‘beginning.’  Now, credit where credit is due, and these folks are correct.  However, it is clear that what we love is the changing of the number.  It is not very often that the left three decimal places of the year move.

So I have been thinking about this for four days, off and on, and would like to give some justification for the early celebration.  First of all, just because the numerical units with which we count follow cardinal succession, it does not follow that we necessarily count off the time unit decimally.  Take the hours of the day, for example.  Midnight, 12:00 a.m., is the beginning of the day, and, indeed, when the ball drops, not 1:00 am.  The 12 hour clock, the one which we Americans live by, has a lot of numerical problems, to be sure.  It is neither quite in base 10 nor in base 12, for some reason we follow the contradictory convention of calling noon 12:00 pm and midnight 12:00 am.  Yet this is what the numbers of our day are.  In their cultural usage, they are more real than abstract cardinal numbers.  So let’s just be Quinean on this and deny that there is any sort of analytical hygiene to numbers.

Second, I think that we usually ‘ring in the new year’ with a celebration of the year as a whole, and celebrate the new as least as much as the old. Resolutions, Auld Lang Syne, etc., are forward looking and it is also full of memories.   So when we celebrate 2010, it is a much more appropriate pivot, celebrating the new 0.  Even if there was no 0 in between 1 BC and 1 AD, 0 holds some significance of starting over, at later decimal iterations like 2000 and 2010.  Again, this is more of a connotation to number than a ordering of cardinals.

Following that, just changing “AD” to “CE” does not erase the vestige of ordinal numbers that are implied by counting from the birth of Jesus.  If we celebrate 2010 as the big new year in its entirety, we celebrate the Two thousand and tenth year of our Lord.  When I celebrate my 29th birthday, I will be celebrating a completion of twenty nine years, having started with 0.  And, it is my birthday the whole day.  Thus, even though there was no year 0, it would make more sense if there was.*  Furthermore, there is no reason not to celebrate all the new 0 years, as beginnings the way it should have been.   (And of course, Jesus’ actual birth or even his existence does not pertain here, since the historical reality of the counting system as a whole is in question).

*That 0 should have been included for clarity is reinforced by the ISO standard of naming 1 BC as year 0000.

We have not really gotten around the problem, though.  With the medieval interpretation of Jesus, it is different than with me, because of the eschatological significance of ANNO DOMINI, in which the mere presence of Jesus made for the first year as a new era in some divine plan.  So the first year of our lord was one, the second two, and so on, even though in the second year of our Lord he was only one year old.  That is why the legalistas of the world wait to celebrate the 2010th yearly completion on 2011. A full switch from AD to CE would be a switch from ordinal to cardinal, from 1-10 to 0-9.

The only way to do this is to spend one of these momentous years partying for the whole year.  “The great party of ‘10.”  This way, we will align New Year’s celebration with the completion of the year.  Thus New Year’s 2011 will be the completion of the first year of the new era, just like our birthdays are the celebration of completion of the number of years we have lived.  Not only with this line us up with the ISO system, it will also align with other calendars like those of S. Asia, as well as the 24 hour clock time.  So let’s get started. The 20-oughts only deserve nine years anyway.

Beyond Good AND Evil

Although I shy away from being an outright Nietzsche fan, his thought really does capture the basic starting point from which any real philosophy can proceed.  This is because he levels the playing field in exactly the right way.  I know it is distasteful for many to use Nietzsche to justify one’s religious beliefs, so I won’t try to be syncretic here.  But I do think that there is an absurd tension between  science and religion which I chalk up to a Barnes and Nobles racket: for every Rick Warren, a Richard Dawkins.

I might have written about this general topic before, but a trip to the bookstore today brought it up again.  I think the most deeply vexing question for a Christian is the problem of evil.   Most solutions I have heard are unsatisfying and you can tell their proponents don’t really believe in them either, so I won’t rehearse them.  But it is this question that upsets the well-rehearsed proselyte.  Often, after some evangelistically motivated soul tries and fails to convince someone about God, he asks, well, what do you believe in?  How can you believe in nothing?

The common response, from the enlightened athiest humanist, is often to appeal to ’science’ or ‘rationality.’  And I have even witnessed a number of these interactions where there is some explicit appeal to Kant.  But what I think Nietzsche is right about, and what people don’t get, is that his critiques work just as well against science as religion when it comes to life, ethics, etc.  At the end of the day, to believe in some Kantian world is just as goofball as believing in a God that allots some value to our existence.  And to believe in the guiding force of nature is not only a flagrant non sequitur, but it is falling into Barnes and Nobles’ craftiness.  What the bookstore did is simply invert the value on ‘evolution’: hooray for the truth of religion, hooray for the truth of science.  While they appeal to both sides of the fence, they keep the fence productively divisive.

If all these athiests read their Nietzsche, they would perhaps have a better grasp on what really is at stake for believing in science.  “Pursue your best or your worst desires, and above all perish!  In both cases you are probably still in some way a promoter and benefactor of humanity” (Gay Science – here I am quoting Nietzsche, what do you know.)

For me, then, the only two beliefs I have any respect for are religious faith and radical existentialism.  The liberal BS about the general goodness of humanity, our place in some ‘natural order’ or about the power of science and technology hides its  ideologies and encourage stagnation of mind and soul.

I think the existentialists and Nietzscheans can take care of themselves in this discussion, because most of them are really smart.  But I also think there is still something to be said about the productivity of a rich faith (in any belief), and this gets lost because of all the grandparents that drug bored youth to sunday school and extremists who use religion for power.  I understand that this is a fairly large group of people.  But this doesn’t negate the possibility – and maybe I am only talking about possibility – that faith could be productive.

Of coure, Nietzsche’s critique of religion still stands.  It is the position against which any real apologetics would need to address itself.  And, I think it is the only position (that, and other religions). When I promote faith, I am not really talking about justifiable belief or even truth, but honesty towards what metaphysical commitment one holds.  If there is another sort of dishonesty in holding untenable beliefs, it is not the same as the dishonesty in which liberal scientific thought presents itself at the bookstore.

Bach Prelude, American Express version

If you are going to appropriate a good piece of classical music to make a credit card commercial, then you ought to do it well. I was overall impressed with the American Express commercial that just came out that paired the prelude to Bach’s 1st cello suite with a series of video stills of facial gestalt-invoking objects. I don’t exactly know what they are offering here, but I think it was a well-crafted minute.
It was far from perfect, and sinister as only a credit card company can be, but there are some good things to point out.
First of all, it is exactly a minute, which cuts out over half the prelude (Yo-Yo Ma’s version is just over 2:20). There is an even shorter version of the commercial that cuts out even more, with a glaring jump to the end after the high G climax. That one is really bad.
But sticking with the one minute version, the principle seems to have been to streamline it as much as possible. The commercial cut takes out the two central cadences in the middle of the prelude, which perpetuates the piece’s 16th-note motor rhythm, which I think is one of its appealing aspects for modern ears. It also makes the cut to allow for the full development of the climax moment. This cut occurs at 29″, right where the smiley iron turns on.
Now that I have played it over, the cut is more glaring, but I think it would not be too rough for someone who only vaguely recognizes the piece. Hence, the prep for the climax occurs at the beginning of all the smiley objects, where the guy says, ‘happily.’
The actual climax is well done, and very subtle. It seems to me that it is accomplished with light: the first outdoor lighting is with the houseboat, just before the climax, and the actual climax (47″) on the boat is the first glimpse of sky, and the rest are lit with sunlight, (even the airport scene is the first direct window light), whereas all of the beginning frames were fluorescent or at best sunlight reflected off white wall (the chairs with the coat). The change in light source, even in the commercial format, is reflective of the event in the music where we feel we have entered into the tonic clearing. Another good thing they did is that each still is coordinated rhythmically with the music. Both the cello and the images breath together in a nice way.
So, on the whole, artistically done. I think it is unique in that the music is really what does the selling: Bach himself is selling you a credit card, that is what the music has been about all along. This is at once pure evil and pure genius. I can think of few other musical examples that function so strongly in a commercial pitch. Perhaps Copeland’s Rodeo selling us Beef (it’s what’s for dinner. Bum Bum Bum) comes close. Maybe there are others. But music is usually background, or more explicitly trying to mess with our head. Here, American Express is saying, yes, Bach is messing with your head, and he is telling you to get our card. There is no hidden agenda. It is pure, revealed agenda.

Closet Aisaphilia

Being a fan of Asian culture often seems to mean Anime and the really glizty pop culture content.  If I ever admitted that I was as asiaphilic as I really am, people would probably associate that with having piles of Manga at home and  But there are a few central elements of Asian (mostly Japanese and Chinese) culture  that I have constantly been amazed with.

1. Go.  Go has perhaps some of the simplest rules of any board game, and yet it is incredibly difficult and takes years of training (to be good, and I am really bad).  The cultural history of the game is also rich, and so there are many elements of etiquette and protocol that reflect a highly refined tradition.  I was struck with Yasunari Kawabata’s novel “The Master of Go” which describes a generational tension in Japan in the late ’30s, with one of the final players trained in the pre-Meiji period meeting the rising youth of the modern era, which among other things, reflects the complicated role this game serves in the history of Japanese culture.

2.  Tea. The variety of Asian teas, especially green tea, fascinates me.  Even if one does not get into the elaborate ceremonies surrounding it in Japan, I enjoy the idea of the perfected simplicity of tea preparation. For some time, I had this awesome, totally kitschy, cast iron teapot I would make tea in.  I had this about the time when I was living alone in Pullman in almost empty apartments, because I never bothered to buy any furniture. So I would sit on my floor or at my small kitchen table, drink my pot of tea, and listen to the radio.  My favorite tea is long jin, or ‘dragonwell’ which I once saw advertised as Lao-tzu’s favorite drink.

3.  Basho, the poet.  Haiku is perhaps the most stereotypical Japanese things to love.  But even in English translation, I am amazed at the subtlety of classic haiku.

3. Taoism.  My favorite ‘philosophical’ text of all time remains the Chuang-tzu, and the Dao de Jing is another fascinating book with a lot to think about.  In my first round of grad school applications, I was accepted to the University of Hawaii for graduate school, where I was going to pursue comparative philosophy, since this was a focus of mine in my undergraduate philosophy degree.  But, I decided I would be able to cover more ground if I tried to continue to do both music and philosophy, so ended up going to Stony Brook.  No regrets, but am a bit dissapointed that I have not had time to study in this area much since then.

4.  Buddhism.  With Daoism, I think the hippy new-agers sort of ruined the reception of these positions in the US.  The philosophical rigor that is possible from these traditions is amazing. And, to a large extent, I think they are right about a lot of stuff.  The writings of Dogen, Nishida (not strictly Buddhist but very much connected) and others are very interesting.

5. Stationary.  Apica notebooks, Sailor, Namiki, and Pilot pens, and a slew of other brands make really good paper and pens for not very expensive.  The quality of the paper is at least as good as the European brands, and better than the

6. Martial arts.  There are many traditions of martial arts in the world, but the Chinese and Japanese traditions seem to have cultivated the artistic as much as the martial aspects of these practices.  Maybe this just boils down to the fact that Bruce Lee is awesome.  I have never studied any martial arts, but hope to at some point.

I guess I should also note my dissapointment with many aspects of Asian culture, since there is a strain of cultural purity that seems influential in countries like Japan and Korea, and the clear political problems surrounding China  certainly should not be overlooked.

So minus the excessive anime culture, I probably am a classic asiaphile, although it does not really come out in my personal presentation.  It really is just a set of interests, and not a stylistic rule.

Wish List

I was sort of surprised last year when I got pretty much everything on my Christmas list from my parents in law.  If I understood how it worked, I would not have asked for so much stuff.  This Christmas I have an honest list, a few kitchen gadgets, a good crescent wrench, a warm hat.  Hopefully I never make a lot of money, because I secretly have very expensive tastes.  So here is a wishlist where money and materialism have no limit.

1.  Automatic watch with second hand sweep, 10 bps or more: pure time.  The second hand smoothly moves across the face.  None of this digitized numerical consciousness.

or even spring drive, which is not even subdivided

2. Natural Trumpet.  I really like the sound of natural trumpets  – and they are fun to play.  They are not that expensive, which is why it annoys me when people play on homemade contraptions or dilapidated old ones (Stony Brook baroque ensemble!  Get with it!)  These Eggers are quite nice and the same price as a decent Bb ($1,500-1,800).  And never complain about brass instrument prices to woodwind, string, or piano players:

http://www.eggerinstruments.ch/lt_e.htm

3.  Pilot M90 Limited Edition Fountain pen.  I have a few cheap fountain pens, the most expensive is about $15, and they are pretty nice to write with.  But the real good ones start above $100. This one has a really interesting style.

http://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=79065

4.  Monette cornet.   I like the double shepherd’s crook.  I have one of the first Prana mouthpieces, since I got my C in 03 when they were just starting on this.  I can imagine they have gotten pretty good.

http://www.monette.net/newsite/descriptionPRANACORNET900.htm

I would also be happy with a reasonably priced four valved flugelhorn,  rotory valve piccolo, good F double horn, or vintage Mt. Vernon Bach Strad with 42″ bell with a good contemporary leadpipe, or first generation Monette Bb.  Eb too, I suppose, but they are really only good for a couple things.

5.  Custom wheels, Phil Wood hubs, 42 spokes, nice wide touring rims.  Phil Wood hubs cost more than most people’s bikes.

http://rideyourbike.com/wheelbuilding.html

I could probably go on with bike stuff, clothes, and shoes.  But this list would be the sort of stuff I might actually buy if I had money to burn.  It’s all pretty excessive, but these are pretty awesome objects.

Coffee in a pan

If you just dump coffee grounds in a pan with hot water, it is really strong and gritty. In Washington (origin of Starbucks, by the way), I’ve heard this called “Mexican coffee.” Mexicans there make up the migrant and agricultural workforce, as they do in many places. Thus coffee made in a pan without a coffee maker or French press or anything corresponds to the poorest group of people. Interestingly, I was talking with this person from France, who said this is called Turkish coffee. That makes sense, since this is where much of the labor is from. And a Macedonian student I met said, if I remember right, that this was called Greek coffee.
The twist to this I think is that ‘Turkish coffee’ is actually a pretty refined method of preparation. I don’t think most people think of it as an explicitly disparaging method of coffee preparation (well, probably Washingtonians do in their more racist moments) Yet compared with French and Italian styles of coffee preparation, which takes out the grinds like civilized culture, I sense a bit of pretension on the part of the European styles over the “less cultivated” near East. I think it is also called mud coffee sometimes, which is a less subtle way of framing it.
As it stands, Making coffee in this way is actually quite good, and I imagine that one could refine the technique to very high levels (a quick check on Wikipedia seems to confirm this). But it is sort of interesting that the name for this method corresponds to labor forces in various regions, where there is sometimes racially motivated tension.
Honestly, I do feel pretty pretentious when I make coffee in a French press. Maybe there is some solidarity to be had with the proletariat by drinking strong gritty coffee.

Philip Gossett: new material from La Forza del Destino

Opera scholar Philip Gossett held a colloquium over here at Stony Brook on research he has recently been doing in St. Petersburg, the location of the first performance of Verdi’s opera La Forza del Destino.  He found a number of key ‘alternate takes,’ to be a bit anachronistic, of the opera’s performance.  It was interesting to be one of the first people in the US to hear some of these selections (Dr. Gossett’s rough and lively performances singing and accompanying himself on the piano were a propos to the fragmentary state  of his examples).  It was also interesting to see how the work as a whole came to be and its detailed history of preparation and performance.

On one hand, there is some romance to the idea of searching out old theatre archives for unknown parts and forgotten manuscripts of one of the great Verdi operas.  And for the guy who is responsible for putting out the critical edition of this piece, it is of great fortune that Gossett was able to work through these archives.

But on the other hand, the discovery of yet another Italian aria that didn’t make the cut historically did not leave me inspired.  These didn’t seem to be lost masterpieces, but simply extra material that didn’t fit for some reason.  The importance of this decreases exponentially the further you get away from the world of Italian opera today.  In the end, this is not what I signed up for.

Part of this is a classic type of privelidge, I suppose.  I was simply not bred for real historical musicology: my language skills are lacking, I have a limited knowledge of European history (better than average, I suppose, but no specialist knowledge about any epoch), I don’t know any repertoire really well, let alone a deep knowledge of ubiquitous genres like opera (playing trumpet, and not violin or piano left me with little connection to the masterworks).  All of these things would have had to emerge when I was younger.

I was attracted to musicology for the same reason people are attracted to entomology: they like bugs, and they find they can use bugs as a lens and a measure for broad environmental, social, and economic issues.  I like music, and I find social and philosophical issues important and interestingly informed from the perspective of music.  But this doesn’t get me far.  Those who have the privelidge of codifying the official knowledge of music from its sources, through critical editions, to informed performances are blessed, to be sure, and they are the ones who have a clarity of purpose and depth of knowledge in their field.  I wish the best for them, and in a sense, they are the first rate scholars of my field.

So will I be a second rate scholar?  Probably: I just don’t have the cultural chops to command a specialty the way Gossett does.  In this sense, ‘New Musicology’ is automatically second rate musicology.  There is just no way for any of us to synthesize the body of knowledge that these individuals have collected.  And there does not seem to be an impetus to trace out his path: what would “the next great Italian opera scholar” look like?  Probably someone who has read a lot more critical literature than primary sources.

But second rate musicology is, once in a while, first rate critical theory, cultural studies, applied anthropology/sociology or aesthetic theory.  But the only people who could make that judgment are the Gossetts of the world, who lay claim to the official knowledge – the correspondence of evidence with the facts.  This makes things complicated.  The ideal musicologist has deep command of a field of music history, and can theorize from that.  But this ideal is impossible.  It is the rare instance where someone can discover music and then theorize from it.  I should have been spending the last decade learning languages, watching opera, studying history, learning repertoire.  But I spent it reading philosophy in English, learning pedagogy, writing many papers on the far edge of speculation on music.  I never did get around to watching La Forza del Destino.

So, I am sure I will come up with something intelligent to write about, but it’s not going to add to the knowledge set of music.  The best I could hope for is to subtract a bit via some subtle critique of something.  I see no other route except for an indecisive ‘change in perspective’, that is, unless I am somehow able to get to the meat of some real problem – but real problems are scarce in this field.

“Leave me alone” is not a political position

I ought to have said more about Habermas’ talk besides how poorly it was run.  I think there was a lot to unpack.  In the questions period, a student asked how we can put faith in the state to secure human rights, when this means giving the state power over people’s private lives.
This is a quintessentially American thought that is ubiquitous in the conservative ranks, especially younger conservatives: that the state should not be given power over our lives.

Habermas’ reply — besides his comment that this was not that interesting or important of a question because it was so obvious — was actually quite clear and pretty forceful (and interesting and important for us non-brilliant folk):

Rights only come through political legitimation.  The history of the US is filled with instances of people fighting for their rights through political means. In fact, it is only by getting political rights that we could be said to be free from the state.  The perspective of less government = more rights confuses the real situation with some Orwellian/Randian/Southern confederacy fantasy of a state apparatus that only tramples on individual rights.  But human rights are political rights – the only way to gain rights is to fight for them legally.  In that sense, the government has to legislate regarding the private affairs of citizens, if only in a negative sense.

For Americans, this is probably confused becuase of issues like gay marriage.  At its base, this issue functions essentially the same as other civil rights issues: society looks down on gays, gays fight for their political rights, and then the political apparatus finally grants them these rights in a legal sense.  Now, it might be pointed out that if the government didn’t meddle with personal affairs in the first place, then gays wouldn’t have had the problem to begin with.  But this is absurd, considering it is from the socially conservative cultural forces that their lack of rights were expressed.  And in any case, this is to confuse the historical actuality that today, now, the most powerful and meaningful activism is the legal and political.

When Bush tried to constitutionalize marriage limitations, he was working in the opposite direction: using the state apparatus to shore up social conventions held by conservatives who normally don’t want the government messing with them. So such a scenario is certainly possible, but this only means that the only means of countering the state’s use of its power is through political means: putting legislators, etc. into office who will    This is one of those fundamental inconsistencies with the Right that doesn’t often get worked through: you can’t justify both social and fiscal political conservatism with the same ideals.

This is not a taxes issue: the military, the only legitimate governmental institution for some conservatives, costs more than any liberal governmental policy.  But this is not really a critique of conservatism as a political force, it is really a critique of a confused libertarianism that I hear too often.

So, Habermas.  His position is an interesting one, in that he works from a highly realistic view of political possibility but at the same time holds onto goals that were originally articulated from a perspective much further to the left.

Billy Cannon in Megafault!

So, as with most bloggers, (I assume) I watch closely the stats on my site visits. There are not many, so it is always interesting to see why someone happened upon my humble blog. WordPress shows me when a specific websearch sends someone here. Last week, someone searched “why is it ok to be dumb in the us” which happens to bring up one of my posts, on the first page, no less (in Google). I am afraid I was probably unable to be of much assistance in this case.
But it got me thinking, what if I just picked the hottest search trends of the moment, and combined some of them. Would this get me any more hits? If so, maybe I could generate some snowball effect, and propel myself into blogging fame. Let’s see how it works.
So I don’t even know who Billy Cannon is or what Megafault is about – sports player and movie, I think. I thought it would have been tasteless to use the death of Stephen Gately, the singer from Boyzone, who was number one on Google trends.
I don’t really think that this is how the internet works, but on the other hand, it is probably weirder.