Muscle memory/Monday notes

Fun story, I hope: Kind of awesome/scary. Was looking for something on YouTube the other day, and one of the recommendations on the margin was, remarkably and for some unknown algorithmic reason, an upload of a vinyl rip of The Beatles’ Second Album* in full. Had to give it a listen. (Yay, harmonica fills on “Thank You Girl”!)

I’m working on some other stuff as it rolls along. We get to “You Can’t Do That,” among my favorite songs for about 30 years. I’m nodding along. The song ends.

And I go to stand up.

I catch myself, because I have no earthly conscious reason to stand up. I was doing something. Several things, really. Why would I stand up? I’m completely confused.

Until “Long Tall Sally” starts, and it smacks me in the face.

For the past 20 years or so, I’ve listened to “You Can’t Do That” digitally. On the “A Hard Day’s Night” CD. On my computer, a rip of that CD. Individually, if I click on that file by itself.

But for the previous 10 years, I’d listened to it on vinyl.

And when I’d hear “Devil In Her Heart,” “Money” and then “You Can’t Do That,” Side 1 was done. I had to get up and turn the record over to Side 2 (beginning with “Long Tall Sally”) or start it again.

So basically something I did in third grade and haven’t done since late in college reappeared automatically. Unreal.

….

Josh Bailey gets the latest long-term deal from the Big Club.

Arthur Staple has the whole Parker Milner thing resolving with an AHL two-way contract; Milner’s arrival in the organization was first heralded some time ago by B.D. Gallof. Still have a couple of people insisting T’s still need dotting and I’s still need crossing.

The Canadiens announced Blake Geoffrion’s retirement. I wish I could make a “to sign with SKA St. Petersburg” joke, but just glad to see he seems to be doing OK after last fall’s scary injuries.

The familiar names are in the coaching staff for the U.S. Under-17 team going to the Five Nations tournament. But they’re familiar, anyway.

Many fun things in this Alexei Kovalev interview from Dave Stubbs in Montreal.

Enjoyed Jimmy Fallon sending Matt Harvey out to talk to New Yorkers about a certain pitcher. Also almost kind of enjoyed the Home Run Derby, in spurts at least. Really the only other one I did was the 2008 version at Yankee Stadium. I assume I only can tolerate it if I know where the balls usually land and can go “ooh.” Fielder’s shot — what, second one of the night — that almost cleared the porch was pretty neat.

Maddening Fun With Google Translate, Beast of New Haven/ex-Isle edition. Lie down on one of the Sunday flights. By the way, I missed that Yahoo killed off AltaVista last week. AltaVista was (a) my first go-to search engine, the place to go when you knew what you wanted but not where to find it (Google supplanted it), while Yahoo was where you went to browse for what you needed, or if you actually knew where you needed to go and just needed its address (I guess Google pretty much supplanted it, too); and (2) the first host of “Babelfish,” which provided us way too much fun with press-release translations over the years.

RIP, Pat Mathers, AHL royalty.

And I thought that very first episode of “Glee” had some incredible potential*****. It turned into a surreal teenypop record-sales engine. Held out hope for a long time it might come back around. No chance now. RIP, Cory Monteith.

*-Kids! Way back in the day, we had these things called “records.” They were made of vinyl, they spun around at 33 1/3 or 45 (or 78) revolutions per minute on “turntables,” and they had two sides. And you know how the Beatles** were on Parlophone, a division of EMI? Capitol was its U.S. arm, and while the early days of that relationship are a fun story, for our purposes let’s just say that Capitol didn’t release anything exactly as Parlophone did until “Sgt. Pepper’s.”*** “The Beatles’ Second Album” had some stuff from “With the Beatles,” some stuff from two British singles and some stuff from a future British EP. Unless we read books and stuff, a lot of us didn’t know better until 1987, when the CDs**** came out. All the CDs used the British album lineups, and they used different mixes — some of them really different — of those songs that we knew so intimately. Now get off my lawn.
**-Kids! If you don’t know who the Beatles are, immediately rectify the situation. We’ll wait.
***-Kids! While all the Capitol albums have their own unique charms for us old folks, and while they’ll give you most of the singles that you’ll otherwise get only on those “Past Masters” CDs (while missing some stuff from the “Hard Day’s Night” era, long story), the only Capitol album that’s actually in any way better than its U.K. equivalent is “Rubber Soul.” Find an actual copy of that in stereo (Capitol actually rereleased the American versions of eight albums on CD, in both stereo and mono, in two box sets in the middle of the last decade) rather than sequencing your mp3s, if only for the false-start version of “I’m Looking Through You.”
****-Kids! CDs were… bah, ask your parents.
*****-Along the way and right from that pilot — review linked within that link — I found myself agreeing so much with VanDerWerff that it was kind of scary.

Michael Fornabaio