(Video below With Eric Clapton & Phil Collins)

From Wild things: the weirdest facts from the animal kingdom:

…A male flour beetle (Tribolium castaneum) can mate and impregnate a female he has never met. No other animal is known to have sex by proxy in this way. Many males often mate with each female. The first male will deposit sperm in the female, then a second will arrive and use its spiny genitalia to scrape out his competitor’s sperm, before mating itself. Much of the sperm of the first male is carried unwittingly by the second male on its genitalia. One in eight females are fertilised by proxy. …Animals usually swallow using their tongue and throat. The northern leopard frog (Rana pipiens) uses its eyes. To swallow food such as a small cricket, it closes its eyes and retracts its eyeball into its body. These push into the pharynx and against the prey item, and regular retractions help force the food to the back of the oesophagus …Java sparrows (Padda oryzivora) appear to prefer the music of some composers. Sparrows will listen longer to music by Bach than by Schoenberg, and prefer Vivaldi to Elliott Carter. …Some genetically engineered mice have have hearts that glow green every time they beat. …The wood frog (Rana sylvatica) freezes solid during the winter before thawing out as the temperature rises in spring. The frog has a unique physiology that prevents damaging ice crystals forming within its cells

Source from The Human Marvels, another current favourite of mine. The site rekindled my past fascination with what people unkindly called “freaks” and “freakshows”.

Tai Djin was born in China in 1849. He was born unique, afflicted with hypertrichosis. Unlike Jo-Jo, who would be born a few decades later, Tai Djin was born into a highly superstitious family. As A result they saw his affliction as the work of demons and he was left in the forest to die. A Shaolin monk traveling through the forest discovered the child and took him back to the Fukien Shaolin Temple. There Tai Djin was raised by the monks. He was trained in martial arts and it quickly became apparent that he was exceptional in both appearance and ability. The boy must have been a sight practicing kung-fu with his face covered in fine fur. He quickly became a favorite of many of the Shaolin masters and, as a result, each master passed their knowledge on to Tai Djin. He was a sponge and mastered every technique shown to him. He became the first to master over 200 different empty hand systems and over 140 weapon systems. His various specialties included the infamous Chi Ma, or ‘Death Touch’. After several years of extensive training he became the first Grandmaster of Shaolin and one of the first to master all skills of the seven Shaolin temples.

Scientists discover the mystery of afterlife visions.

The Gyoja monks are amazing.

The ultimate achievement of the sect is the Sennichi-Kaiho-Gyo, an arduous seven-year pilgrimage that includes a staggering 1,000 days of marathon running and a seven-day sleepless fast. For the first 300 days of the pilgrimage, the monk must run 40 km (24.9 mi) each day — essentially a marathon a day for almost an entire year. In the fourth and fifth year, he does 40 km each day for 200 straight days. In the sixth year of the pilgrimage, he increases the length of his runs to 60 km (37.3 mi) for 100 days. Finally, during the seventh year, he runs for another 100 consecutive days, this time covering 84 km (52.2 mi) at a time — twice the length of a marathon. The monk runs in straw sandals (and for the first few years without socks), largely over unpaved mountain paths, through all seasons. And he must do it on a diet of vegetables, tofu, and miso soup. Around his waist, he wears a rope belt and a knife to remind him that should he fail to complete the seven-year piligrimage, he is required to hang himself with the rope or disembowel himself with the knife. Following the 700th day of running, the monk engages in a seven-day fast, known as the doiri, in which he must abstain from food, water, and sleep, while sitting upright and constantly reciting Buddhist chants. Two monks remain next to him to ensure he doesn’t doze off even once. The purpose of the doiri is to bring the monk face-to-face with death. The most recent monk to complete the challenge was 44-year-old Genshin Fujinami (shown above), who finished the pilgrimage in September of 2003. He was the first monk to do so in nine years, and only the twelfth since World War II. By the time his run had concluded, he had travelled between 24,000 and 27,000 miles on foot, roughly equal to the distance around the earth’s equator. The tradition of the Sennichi-Kaiho-Gyo is said to have begun in 831 AD with a monk named So-o. Its story is told in John Stevens’ book The Marathon Monks of Mount Hiei and in a film of the same title.

Source from Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society, a current favourite website of mine.

Related link on marathon monks and scroll down here to read about the Lung-gom-pa Runners of Tibet.

The video I’ve been waiting for….One of the first Blue Note songs that really struck me.

Evil

One of my favourite rock riffs.

Is That You Melissa?

Just bought this.

Stars Stanley Turrentine and Grant Green. An early live recording (1961) of these two regrettably underrated and undervalued jazz musicians who both deserve to be wider known and appreciated, despite the fact that Green recorded more songs at Blue Note from 1961 to 1965 than any other Blue Note musician.

So, in what follows, I’ll attempt to indicate why I’m so crazy about Grant Green.

Green swings on the guitar with a sort of earthy bluesy feel, creating an irresistable rhythm that makes you tap and groove along. But unlike most typical 12-bar blues that tend to fizzle out of interesting lines and ideas and descend into boring predictability after a while, Green constantly keeps his improvisations interesting, engaging and memorable by subtly changing the melodies and rhythms of his original lines. All this despite his comment on the music he plays “It’s all just the blues anyhow.” Green absorbed the music of Charlie Christian and Charlie Parker and “used to sit up all night copying Charlie Parker solos note by note”. [And now, I, sit up for many nights copying Grant Green solos note for note!] In many ways, Green’s frequent non-chordal, single-line approach embodies the sound of classic Blue Note horn players, funky, jazzy, soulful and swinging.

In a book by Sharony Andrews Green Grant Green: Rediscovering the Forgotten Genius of Jazz Guitar, I came across the following quotes about Grant Green.

This is what Michael Erlewine says about Grant Green in the All Music Guide to the Blues:

Critics only seem to know how to rate what stands out. This won’t work for groove music. In groove, the idea is to lay down a groove, get in it, and deepen it. Groove masters always take us deeper into the groove. These artists are our windows into the groove, and their hearts become the highway over which the groove can run. They reinvest. And we ride the groove. This is why jazz critics have either passed…over groove masters like Grant Green and Stanley Turrentine or heard something, but did not know what to make of what they heard (and felt). If music is not viewed as such an intellectual thing (something to see) but more of a feeling kind of thing, then groove masters can be appreciated. You may not see the groove masters, but you can sure feel them. In groove, the sold (and all else) only exists if it adds to the groove. Witness Grant Green’s incredible single-note repetitions. Who would ever think to do that? You wouldn’t think of that. It is done by pure feeling. … He is so far in the groove that it will take decades for us to bring him out in full…we groove on and reflect about this other dream that we have called life. All great musicians do this to us. Grant Green’s playing at its best is like this too. It is so recursive that instead of taking the obvious outs we are used to hearing, Green instead chooses to reinvest – to go in farther and deepen the groove. He opens up a groove and then opens up a groove and then opens a groove, and so on. He never stops. He opens a groove and then works to widen that groove until we can see into the music, see through the music into ourselves. He puts everything back into the groove that he might otherwise get out of it. He knows that the groove is the thing and that time will see him out and his music will live long.

Leonard Feather said this about Green in the liner notes for Green’s Green Street album:

It is accurate, though somehow not adequate, to hail him as a vital new link in the six-stringed lifeline from Charlie Christian through Barney Kessel to Kenny Burrell and Wes Montgomery. But the degree of maturity already discernible in Grante Green indicates that it would be an injustice to him to make the usual comparisons with his predecessors or toss some of the conventional and overworked adjective his way…Christian, let us not forget, was barely out of his teens when he joined Benny Goodman; Kessel was twenty when he made the Norman Granz film Jammin’ the Blues. Bearing this in mind, one should not find it totally unbelievable that in his thirtieth year Grant Green has accomplished at least as much as had his important predecessors when they first came to prominence…Though it may seem heretical, I would venture the opinion that Green has extended jazz guitar playing far beyond [where] …Christian has taken it…If a Grant Green had come along in 1938, playing exactly as he plays on this LP, the arrival of Charlie Christian the following year would have seemed anticlimatic. But this is a hardly valid hypothetical case, since there could have been no Green without a Christian, a Bird, and a Miles”

Producer Bob Porter wrote, “If Green had never recorded as a leader, his contributions as a Blue Note sideman in the 1960s would be enough to make him one of the greatest guitarists in jazz history.

George Benson said “Guitar players were trying to learn what his secret was, and there were people in general who just loved his groove. Grante made the guitar come alive and sing. It was his talent alone. Only he could do it like that. Nobody else I ever knew could make the guitar talk like that or speak like that.”

Elvin Jones said ” I always thought Grant Green was one of the greatest guitarists that ever existed since Charlie Christian. I haven’t seen anybody before or since that could compare to his artistry and conceptions of music.”

All quotes and information taken from Sharony Andrew Green’s book.