I got interested in a recent presidential ruling, a two-year exemption for some coal-fired power plants from the new, stricter EPA regulations on mercury emissions. I took a look at the list of plants in the proclamation and mapped the ones in Pennsylvania; you can check out my new page with (one version of) the map here. Enjoy! If that’s the right word.
But that map is not what I came here to talk about, I came here to talk about yodeling.
There is a song I really like called “I Am The Mercury,” by Jimmy Spheeris. The title caught my attention at first because it reminded me of an image from a science fiction novel involving alchemy, where a student sees a plate in one of the secret texts: it was described as a wild man’s face, maybe caught halfway into a scream. The picture (inside the book, in the novel) was titled “Lead Man,” but I remembered it as something-something Mercury — possibly because of the connection between mercury and insanity?
Anyway, there is no connection between the book and that song, but the song is incredible:
What I really like is that chorus, “let it rain on the mountain,” and then that wild yodeling shout — I don’t know if that even is yodeling, it seems very Americana, a folksong-ey barbaric mountain yawp. I know I’ve heard it somewhere before…
I knew it had to be in some John Denver song, so I Googled “John Denver yodeling” and found the one I was looking for pretty quickly: “Calypso,” a song about Jacques Cousteau and his research ship. And so, just because I can:
And that brings us back to thinking about the environment. And, now that I think of it, that definitely is yodeling.
PS This is what I wrote twenty years ago.
