Hurray for Artificial Intelligence?
Here is something relaxing and thought-provoking.
Recently, when researching Al Bowlly (known as “the British Bing Crosby”), I discovered that he recorded “Blue Moon” in 1936. This astonished me because I knew that song only as the Doo-wop rock classic, recorded by The Marcels in 1961. (My late father would be quietly chuckling at my ignorance.) It turns out that the song was a Rodgers and Hart creation, but with a bizarre history. The music was written in 1933, and four sets of lyrics were written at different times by Hart, culminating in “Bue Moon” in 1934. Details are here: Blue Moon (1934 song) - Wikipedia
My particular interest in this is the phenomenal variety of arrangements that the song has gone through. I’ve rarely seen a better example of how flexible and inventive music can be. My favorites, all excellent, are the following three:
Al Bowlly (ballad, 1936)
The Marcels (Doo-wop,1961)
Diane Shaw (cool jazz, 2006)
Here are some succinct comments on other versions:
Elvis Presley – a good straight rendition, the slowest I’ve heard. Many people don’t realize that Presley was an excellent ballad singer.
Billie Holiday – A quirky rendition that completely ignores the spirit of the lyrics
Ella Fitzgerald—Beautifully sung, but in a hideous, mush arrangement that sounds like elevator music
Bobby Vinton—Great voice, but so plastic—just a guy singing a song
Frank Sinatra—More plastic
Dean Martin—I like Dean Martin, but he demolishes this song through truly awful phrasing
You might add to the amazement that there is a 7+ minute garage rock arrangement of it, by one of my favorite English speaking Greek bands. I consider it amongst their worst songs, so you might click on it out of curiosity, but you have been warned 
It’s so horrible it is not even funny … 
On a similar note, just to redeem the band a little bit, being a fan of old bands that keep on playing for decades has the beauty that you keep finding out about obscure songs or singles that they issued once upon a time when we couldn’t really find out about them, but now via the wonder of the internet we can finally listen to all those rare hidden gems, like this one that I found a few days ago and I was ecstatic with it:
I wonder sometimes how beautiful it is that some people managed to stay within the same band for 30-40 years and still persevere with making music and doing what they like and how they like it. 
Yes, that is a rather awful version of “Blue Moon”; the background screech hurt my ears. It seems purely perverse to junk up a perfectly good melody with something worse than white noise.
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It is relaxing in its own way, but in just 30 seconds it is a good message for life by Gennaro Gattuso.
Giving up is easy, perseverance is hard and sometimes the result is good, sometimes it is not.
But at least you tried …
… just like the interpreter 
Half of the things are from Japan
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Land of the rising (arti)san
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Elephants 
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What a remarkable channel:
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We had a similar discussion on how some people argue that this would be a good plan for Go, as well.
Very thought-provoking, especially the comments of the people sharing their bad/sad end-result experience with that sort of attitude. 
In the discussion about go, it was proposed to promote casual go playing, not to hand out 1d certificates to weak players.
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Yes, that’s why I said “similar” and not “the same”. To avoid any misunderstanding, the main thought-provoking factors here, as far as I am concerned, are three (more can be added, obviously):
a) A balance needs to be found between the attempt to be popular and the attempt to be easily accessible, but not trivial (e.g. the idea of making 9x9 “the real game” and 19x19 “the game for the few purists/nerds/whatever”) … similar things are happening to popular video games recently like “The Elden Ring” and “Baldur’s Gate 3” were casual gamers are out ranting and raving about “exclusion” and demanding from the Devs/companies “to offer reduced difficulty settings” in the case of Elden Ring and “real time mode instead of turn based” in the case of Baldur’s Gate 3. In both cases the Devs/companies refused. Just because there is a big target group demanding something, that does not mean that we have to cater to them.
Here is an interesting article on that:
I quote:
In many ways, the discussion about Elden Ring isn’t actually about Elden Ring at all. It’s about who’s allowed to have a voice in gaming, and which segments of gamers are catered to. It’s about the very existence of difficulty modes being abhorrent to a small but vocal subset of gamers, and the toxic discourse over easy mode. If you can’t “git gud,” as they say, you shouldn’t be gaming at all.
Getting information from other games with similar problems and reading those discussions, instead of trying to re-invent the wheel, is not a bad idea imho. (The people already enjoying the game casually being branded as “toxic” once something grows too large, is also quite another “thought-provoking” thing that also needs to be taken into account, but that is a different issue.)
b) The people in the comments sharing all those experiences and, ultimately, realising that their training and their prizes are a bit of a sham. That always leaves a bad aftertaste and, long-term, it leads to disatisfaction and less parents willing to involve their kids in an activity/game that they themselves were ultimately unhappy with/from.
c) Last, but not least, what would make us happy, as the current players/community. I imagine those old karate-masters are not happy with all those “lame black belts being handed out like candy” just like I am not very happy with people getting “proficiency in English” degrees, by taking exams that are so watered down that it practically creates people that just have certifications, without any actual ability in English. Of course this situation is good for the “English teaching private schools”, but not really for the students and the parents. In the same fashion, the vast majority of us are not owners of teaching schools or anything analogous. Most of us are just players, so I am not really buying the idea that we are somehow responsible for making Go popular by any means and at any cost. We got into playing Go to have some fun, not to assume a position of “product marketing specialists”. For some people that might be fun (and good for them, that takes quite the skill), but that is certainly not true for everyone.
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The titles are a bit of an exageration for clicks, but the content is solid. I really liked how the idea of reversing moves to see if the are effective (which is used in Go studying), was presented in such an action-based activity.
The whole philosophy presented in both videos was quite impressive, actually. Good job.
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ooooook:
that was a bit disturbing, but quite on point.
Great fun.
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Chess is featured heavily - which is expected - but those four things can really be applied in Go, as well
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