James Naismith (2) vs. John Adams; Shakira advances

Yesterday’s battle featured a seeded namesake versus an unseeded alleged tax cheat.

Doug brought up an intriguing idea:

One of the pluses for Milne was his qualifying in multiple categories. You may have to give this one to Shakira given the lyrics to Hips Don’t Lie, which has “Shakira Shakira” in the first verse. Though Dan brings up a good point about Mr. Beetlejuice, not to mention Keaton starring in the movie “Multiplicity”, where he replicated himself. Reifying replication!

Unfortunately this works for both candidates so it doesn’t help us make the decistion.

Despite personally being a huge Michael Keaton fan—I’d definitely go to hear him speak!—I had to go with the strongest argument, which came from Raghu:

I don’t really care about either of them, but as I am currently in a boring part of a Zoom meeting I visited Skakira’s home page, which has a large button marked “Discover Shakira’s Perfumes.” I did not click, but nonetheless it led me to think: (1) hopefully the finals of this matchup will be in person and not online, and (2) given that, I would rather discover Shakira’s perfume than Michael Keaton’s perfume.

This comment hit the spot, given our recent interest in non-visual graphical display. It also made me wonder: if you click on a perfume button during a zoom meeting and you aren’t muted, will a pleasant smell waft out from the speakers of everyone else’s computers?

And Owen writes:

I’d love to hear from the wild boar that stole Shakira’s handbag; perhaps they could make a cameo alongside her?

We’ll see how Shakira fares in the second round when she faces the juggernaut that is A. A. Milne.

Today’s matchup

James Naismith is second-seeded in the “Creators of laws or rules” category . . . I guess you’ve all heard of him. John Adams is the composer who shares the name of a famous revolutionary.

In preparation for this competition I went to the library and borrowed a record of music by John Adams, also got something by John Luther Adams, the composer whose claim to fame is that he shares a name with a more famous composer, who shares a name with, etc. Neither Adams’s music appealed to my taste. But you can be a composer of dissonant, tuneless music and still be a good speaker, right? Or, to put it another way, give James Naismith a banjo or whatever and he might sound even worse. And Adams might have a killer two-handed set shot.

Any thoughts?

Again, here are the announcement and the rules.

9 thoughts on “James Naismith (2) vs. John Adams; Shakira advances

  1. Gee, can’t lose here. I like both of their creations in general; though I’ve only actually played one myself, I’ve attended performances of the other a few times. If we’re going with the “smell my perfume” test, I think the composer would get the nod here. Plus I just couldn’t imagine an opera about “Nixon in China”, but wow it works. So I’ll vote for John Adams as the speaker that defies expectations.

    But what about the combination: music about basketball? For best basketball music, I’ll nominate “The Old Playground” by Bruce Hornsby and the Range. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NgDdermIAo It has one of my favorite lines:

    “Everybody knows: how you play is who you are.”

    Works in lots of contexts.

  2. You can be a composer of dissonant, tuneless music and still be a good speaker, but if I had good speakers in my audio system I wouldn’t use them to play dissonant, tuneless music. James Naismith is a slam dunk in this round.

  3. If you think John Adams is dissonant, I don’t really know what to say. It gets *much* more dissonant than that! I mean, John Adams is pretty much known for being consonant, relative to the incredibly dissonant and tuneless stuff he grew up with. Tuneless maybe, but listen to “Shaker Loops” or “Phrygian Gates.” That is consonant and tuneless, thank you very much!

    • Dmitri:

      The record that I listened to was called Century Rolls and it sounded pretty dissonant to me! But maybe “dissonant” is just musical-ignoramus-speak for “music I can’t follow.”

      • Fair. He explored more dissonant stuff later on in his career. But he came to prominence as a champion of (mostly tuneless) consonance.

        Remember, for musicians dissonance is like Bayesian statistics — when you get bored of doing things the normal way (which is NHST in the analogy) you move to the more esoteric stuff.

  4. Well you can think of “dissonant music” (an oxymoron?) as changing the rules of music. Naismith wrote rules for basketball. I’d much rather hear him riff on how they’ve changed and what he’d roll back or add than hear or hear about dissonant music.

    So move Adams into Naismith’s category and he loses there.

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