Sunday, November 16, 2008

Flight of the Bumble Bee

Metafilter is a slacker's timewasting internet site. Never look at it! It's too late for me - so allow me to watch for interesting things for you. I stumbled across a Metafilter link to a YouTube clip of someone playing a marimba. They were hammering out "Flight of the Bumblebee" with blinding speed. You remember what a marimba is - they're a big xylophone for grown ups - for a mysterious English reason they are usually played by swivel eyed mad women toward the end of the last night of the proms, god awful. A quick look through the related YouTube clips showed that Flight of the Bumblebee has an unholy appeal to marimba players. They seethe over the piece like iridescent green blowflies on a particularly fetid turd.

Bear with me now ...

Joseph Goebbels was a Nazi minister - naturally this means he was a horrible horrible person. The remarkable thing about him was his exquisite hypocrisy. The man was Minister for Propaganda (Minister of Public Enlightenment was his title, I believe) and thus in no small way responsible for the persecution and murder of zillions of people partially because their appearance didn't conform to the Aryan ideal. So - was he 6'2" of broad shouldered, chisel featured, deep voiced military elan - pah! - he was a potato headed weedy club footed little intellectual. No bad thing in itself, but remarkable given his chosen path in life. For this reason he might be considered to be a very good Nazi.

The point is, that there are fields of endeavor that are evil, and sometimes certain people are very good at them. Talent worse than wasted.

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