lyrics of national anthems

lyrics of national anthems

hi folks: i love this particular country but, until now, i had never seen a translation of the lyrics to its national anthem:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4K1q9Ntcr5g&feature=related

it is the most bellicose, nationalistic, and even racist national anthem that i know of.

compare it with the former lyrics of this national anthem (which is the only one i know of that was composed by an immortal composer. hint: his first name is

joseph):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfzZdSxkzMw&feature=related

these lyrics were thought to be too nationalistic. they are tame stuff compared to the preceding. they are

on the same level with the pride expressed in:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tN9EC3Gy6Nk&feature=related

on the contrary, the following anthem primarily celebrates the ability to take a punch from the preceding:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i426pbQJZ_g&feature=related

clearly, these people have changed a lot!

probably the best anthem of them all, like the preceding one defensive in nature, sung in english by the great paul robeson:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtU3vUOa2sw&feature=related

not an anthem, but a great song nonetheless by a great singer, i cannot resist including it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGSR1jCXojI&feature=related

i must add the following in honor of a great lady. those who are familiar with my writings will be able to guess what anthem this is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTAf27OkuYE

okay, from these guys you had to expect at least a little arrogance!

the following is a tribute to those who are ever vigilant against their unstable southern neighbors:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoZXeUjRXSs&feature=related

this is probably the most poetic anthem of all. could these people ever fight a war? i think they could!:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piv4U4yJPg0&feature=related

clearly, this anthem shows only one aspect of its people!

that's all folks! this got started by my surprise at the lyrics of the first anthem on this list. the list was never intended to be encyclopedic.

and i was limited by my ability to find at least partial translations into english,

good bye for now,

joe n

anthem like lyrics

hello folks: here is a continuation of the lyrics of anthems blog. it includes a few more things that are only anthem like. the emphasis is still on songs with enough english somewhere, perhaps in subtitles, to be comprehensible to an english speaker.

we start with the internationale, a controversial modern version in english. this particular selection was given to me by paul panomarev:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk69e1Vcmvg

even today the above has something to say!

you have heard the paul robeson version of the soviet anthem, there exist stalin free lyrics to the hymn of the soviet union:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-Raafdzxns&feature=related

or, with alternate videos, two other choices:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXOLUrIXqxw&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yDrtNEr_5M&feature=PlayList&p=2DBE6B74DEE7C1E1&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=11

i do not know when the stalin free were lyrics composed, long ago or recently. either is politically possible.

the paul robeson version is illustrated by the film of the actual victory parade in red square at the conclusion of world war 2. you could argue that stalin deserved to be included in the lyrics at that time. i certainly would argue that!

although numbers can lie, it is hard for them to do so. the length and severity of the fighting on the eastern front, the number of deaths there all tell us a clear tale as to who actually paid the bulk of the price to win world war 2. the americans and the british make it seem as if they did the most important fighting in the war. in reality they did very little until the end. the american generation who fought world war 2 has been referred to as "the greatest generation." i can think of two generations who accomplished more, one, the contemporary soviet generation who won world war 2 and, two, the american generation who put down the south and won the civil war.

here is another take on the paul robeson version:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AE0ff5Na4Ns&feature=related

i especially like the selection of historical films in the above.

just in case you think that the soviet anthems pay slavish homage to the leaders, take a look at this anthem from north korea:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpnKJrSvjb8&feature=related

i like the cheerful note in the next song, "heroic worker's factory." it is a stirring example of moral guidance!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9FWIglEFLQ&feature=related

in fact, one can find on the internet countless examples of songs of praise to the great leader. here are two more:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrJY1sDpEDk&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5T2yf-bk1g

the second of the above hints at his divinity. there are many nonmusical youtube videos attesting to the greatness of the leader, "the great master of arts, the great architect, the great athlete, the great economist, the great warrior, etc." they are very serious, not at all tongue in cheek. one will suffice to illustrate the tone:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gu4x56UTSTc&feature=related

this stuff is inspiring to those who are inspired by stuff like this!

i conclude this segment with the "dear leader kim jeong-il, the brilliant commander." it has some background music. i love the initial quote: "one can live without candy. one cannot live without bullets." how true that is!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hp7RkdvyDDI&feature=related

since we are possessed by a desire to fight wars without paying for them, we should at least include the chinese anthem:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp1Xu9wP3J4&feature=related

by the way, contrast our current spendthrift attitude towards paying for war with the responsible attitude of the liberal times of FDR. we have been ruled in recent years by the present equivalent of the degenerate southern aristocracy, not by true fiscal conservatives:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Js-iC1Lofb4&feature=related

let us leave the violence of disney to go to the esperanto anthem espero (=hope). this was sent to me by hoss firooznia. he called it the most idealistic one of them all. it is! even jan pearce said that it could well be the hippie national anthem:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q012YoW41s

recoiling from the peaceful sentiments of the preceding, we go to

the soviet artillery song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DA1y_s2D5M&feature=related

and the panzer lied, untranslated. it needs no translation. it is all about attitude! i include it because i found the link on the website of ulrich's tavern in buffalo. ulrich's tavern was included in anthony bourdain's show on buffalo. it was founded in 1868. i went there for liver dumpling soup. excellent! i asked my waitress why this link was on their website. the waitress did not know. she agreed that it was weird that it was there. she said i would have to ask the owner. but the owner was not there at the time. it is curious to note that ulrich's was founded by germans and retains their cuisine on the menu, but it is now owned by irish and has some fine irish beers. it is a working class place, dingy but in the process of being remodeled. as can be expected from the fact that anthony bourdain went there, it is a good place for some authentic food and drink. the strangest thing about this selection is that it is on the website of a commercial establishment. i do not think that anthony knows it is there. it seems to be a selection performed for some movie:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJ_1wyWmBVM&feature=related

this led me to more germanic stuff:

from the glory days of the third reich, here a song full of sad memories! even though it is untranslated, the meaning is clear enough.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVpM8OPixds&feature=related

american veterans lack such songs. they could use some to temper there arrogance. here is one that used to be popular but is not sung much now:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AD4iQs3rym4&feature=related

just to remember world war 2, here is the trailer for watch on the rhine, the movie starring bette davis and paul lukas. i like the earnestness of it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SD_ZH_zfe8

recall the universal song of the war. it seems to have been sung in many languages. there is supposed to be a version by perry como but i cannot find it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hO8XeS3lsgc&feature=related

on a lighter note, here is some primitive english but filled with inspiring patriotism! and a rather sexy dancer!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuxghiwjgQc&feature=related

the pride expressed in the above is clearly better directed than it was in some previous times.

more in the spirit of the old germany, here is the nazi march "erika" as a tribute to augustin pinochet. the south american leader beloved by republicans like nixon and kissinger and by maggie thatcher was a true fan!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKUu2xeBkt4

in contrast, here is the chilean anthem, very gentle but with a curious death wish at the end:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCli830LXho

now on to revolution!

the classic irish song against british imperialism is the rising of the moon. i like the clancey brothers version but it has no film:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwHm18K3kjs

here is one with film:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUVSvit98Zw&feature=related

it is enlightening to hear an anti-american song from sweden at the time of the vietnam war:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jHq2r6BQA0&feature=related

and here is the vietnamese anthem:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veMwTqvsozA&feature=related

we follow this with some controversial stuff sent to me by paul panomarev:

first, a parody of a nike commercial and the exploitation by that company:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5pJIhFPLns&feature=related

and a song about the general principles of american foreign policy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYHEygjMi1k

this last is created by the french and is a bit anti-american! with its use of a standard tune it reminds me of many of the works of john harper! see the conclusion of this blog below.

i add something which is illustrative of the respect that the bushites have fostered for america in the world:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8D-0p6XtUQ&feature=related

forgetting about revolution for now, here are the anthems of two neighboring countries with much intertwined histories.

in lyrics obviously influenced by recent history, the anthem of east germany seems totally without spirit. but, since the music is pretty good, that part might be by a major composer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoZxY3fSt30

the next anthem is a curious contribution from our friends the poles. it focuses on someone named dabrowski who seemed to primarily an employee of napolean, this anthem seems very typical of the poles. enough said:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nmFHUbVQtA

here is a tune from switzerland which americans will recognize. i wonder who stole it from whom?:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deEFNbWQKtQ&feature=related

in order to continue to wind down this blog, here is a rather crude english version of beethoven's ode to joy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhAecssF83g

still it is remarkable that the english lyrics fit so well!

it is as coherent as the muppets version of the stars and stripes forever:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDA9NbPAK8o

on the other hand, john harper's lyrics constitute a coherent set of alternate lyrics to the above:

Scars and Gripes Forever

Be kind to your web-footed friends

For a duck may be somebody's mother

Be courteous to the creatures in the swamp

Even though you don't know their names.

Don't step on that myxomycetus

It has just as much right to live as you have;

Be careful not to wander off the trail

But if you do and then get lost you won't be lonely.

Be kind to your hard drinking friends

For a drunk may be somebody's brother

Don't sneer at that bum in the street

Someday you may be there too.

And don't throw your butts in the gutter

It might just be a place somebody calls home;

You never know what's coming down the street

But all is well so what the hell, why be bothered.

Be kind to the wives of your friends

For you don't want to insult a mother

And try to say you think they do look fine

Even though they turn to fat.

You might think that this is the end

But you're in for a major disappointment;

This song can go on and go on

Because there's never any need to make the words rhyme!

this is something taught by an ex OSS agent. it is information which everyone should know. finally, you learn something useful from this blog!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWmvfUKwBrg

and, just to end on a subversive note!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DF31qCrclC0

that's all, folks!

joe n

homotopy groups

hi folks! here is my latest opus, “homotopy groups with coefficients.” if you think that anyone else might be interested, it is available for downloading on my website, at the moment listed under the title "samelson products." that will probably change in the near future to "homotopy groups with coefficients."

by sending you this, i reveal that my email list has multiple purposes.

one, it serves to record and disseminate my travels, especially as these relate to cuisine. beef in argentina and fish in chile come to mind.

two, it serves to provide an outlet for political commentary. i am proud of the fact that i have defended canadian health care from political attacks and also that i recognized very early the fact that a major candidate was classic white trash.

but a third purpose is to communicate with some of my old friends in the mathematical world. this can cause trouble. one of our former graduate students came up to me at a conference the other day and said that there was a rumour that i had a blog which was available and that in it i had made some criticisms of grothendieck. he seemed shocked. oh well, it is a good attitude for him to have until he gets tenure.

so now i am utilizing the third purpose. in the words of john harper, “you just finished writing a 565 page book. why in the world are you going over the same ground again?” well there is a reason. let me tell you what it is.

in the process of finishing up the book, one finds many small errors and one corrects them. but, after the process should have been completed but before the publication, i found an error which disturbed me. it was not a typo, it was a real error, albeit minor.

it concerned the effect of the hopf map on the justification of internal properties of the mod p homotopy bockstein spectral sequence. if p was an odd prime, it had an effect on arguments in dimension 3. if p was equal to 2, it effected the arguments in all dimensions. in fact, the description remained essentially the same but the arguments needed to be much more suble. i was resigned to not being in time to change it.

but it gnawed on me. people told me about ancient chinese painters including mistakes on purpose so as to not anger the gods by misguided pretensions to perfection. i felt that my book was already well insulated from charges like that!

but i did communicate my concerns to cambridge, along with what i thought was a brilliant idea. i remembered that the classic princeton monograph by steenrod and epstein used to come with an errata sheet in the back. so i asked whether we couldn’t include one with my book.

up went this request to the highest levels of the editors of cambridge university press. they did something wonderful and totally unexpected. they said, ok, if you really want us to and if you don’t mind the chance that this might delay publication, we will let you make your changes in the body of the text. there will be no errata sheet! i speculate that they felt that the princeton practice of an errata sheet, especially immediately upon publication, was a plebian colonial practice and far beneath them.

so with a few additions to the text, primarily in the form of the words “let p be an odd prime” and “let the dimensions be greater than 3” at the beginning of three sections in the chapter on bockstein spectral sequences, all was fixed.

i had committed two cardinal sins. one, i thought that, if the definitions of the bockstein spectral sequence were the same at all primes, then the general inner workings would be exactly the same. not so! 2 is always different, sometimes in subtle ways. two, even at odd primes, i was a little careless in low dimensions. it turns out that the world of odd primes does not totally part ways with the prime 2 until after dimension three. to the cognescenti, let me just say the words, “the hopf map vanishes at odd primes then, but not before.”

so i did the quick fix of excluding the prime 2 and dimensions less than 4. this effected nothing else in the book. but i knew in my heart that it was a copout, that the prime 2 and dimension 3 both deserved a total rehab. there just wasn’t enough time and space to do that now. maybe there would be time in the second edition, if there is one. we can hope.

but here is the total rehab. it is an expository paper with more depth than it seems. in fact, it contains some new things in the form of significant attention to distributivity laws in low dimensions. this is used to show that certain maps, while sometimes different from multiplications, have the same images in homotopy. in more detail, it has

1) a better proof of the uniqueness of smash decompositions of moore spaces

2) an understanding of the need to use certain fake multiples of the identity in low dimensions in preference to the true multiples of the identity. at odd primes and in dimensions greater than 3, the fake multiples are the same as the true multiples. these maps look like multiples of the indentity from the point of view of intergral cohomology but they are not homotopic to the true multiples. they have advantages, they desuspend one more time and they are they are really zero when they say they are.

3) after introducing these fake multiples, it requires some rather suble computations with hilton-hopf invariants to show that these fake multiples allow the same old identification of the higher terms in the mod p homotopy bockstein spectral sequence. this problem only occurs in dimension 3 for odd primes but it is in all dimensions at the prime 2.

4) in short, that is the answer to harper’s question of “why?”

let me add some reflections. in the course of dealing with real problems in low dimensions, i was forced to rethink in depth the basic foundations of my subject. one finds better ways of doing things. this does not mean that the previous ways are incorrect. for the most part, they are solid. but one now has a far deeper understanding of how things go, what is clear and what is not. in my experience, it is difficult to achieve this clarity without going through a significant review, a review which is far more intensive than a mere rereading would be. perhaps the opportunity to teach another course on these topics would have been fruitful. in the real world of calculus courses and retirement, this opportunity was not available. the discovery of some mistakes and the blessing of free time in retirement led me to redo some of the foundational parts of the book.

and now let me close by asking you all a question. this paper will live for a while on my website, available for downloading by those who wish to do so. perhaps this is a modern form of publication. but, especially when one has had an aortic dissection, one wonders how permanent it is. does anyone out there know of a possible home for publication of a primarily expository paper like this? being emeritus, i do not need to publish. but i still like to and it seems that there are very few homes for papers like this.

in the old days, there were some avenues which no longer exist. for example, some mathematics departments used to make available to the cognescenti the knowledge that they had a collection of mathematical notes, aka typed reprints. often for a nominal charge, you could buy these things.

notre dame, the university of chicago, princeton, and harvard come to mind as places which carried on this practice. notes of artin on galois theory, notes of halmos and kaplansky on naive set theory, notes of bott on k-theory, notes of milnor and stasheff on characteristic classes, and notes of milnor and moore on hopf algebras come to mind as works which originated in this way. all of these are classics. after many years, some of these notes eventually found their way to become books published by mainstream publishers.

but the original notes sometimes had a freshness and spontaneity which their descendents in their full maturity might lack a little. i still think that the early version of characteristic classes is a delight to read. it gets you quickly into the heart of the stuff with beauty and no fuss. who cares if it does not give a rigorous description of the attaching maps for the shubert cells in a grassmann variety? there is nothing wrong with reducing matrices to row echelon form! everybody knows how to do that. or should know. the mere fact that this just gives the open cells should not bother people at first reading. the important ideas are there.

and the original version of the milnor-moore paper on hopf algebras, before they polished it up, is a lot easier to read than the final annals paper.

but those things are all gone now.

let me tell you the tale of another expository paper i wrote. that one was on new theories of homotopical localization and applications to old questions of serre on the infinity of nonvanishing homotopy groups of a simply connected nontrivial finite complex. i am pleased to say that one of the founders of this new localization, a certain israeli topologist many of us know well, used the notes in his course and told me that his students liked the notes and found them illuminating.

i thought i had found the pertect home for this paper, a certain swiss journal with an expository slant. so i sent it there. imagine my surprise when the editor informed me that they were rejecting the paper on the grounds that its subject matter was too “arcane to be of much interest.” after expressing my surprise that some of the early work of serre in homotopy theory was now regarded as arcane, i withdrew the paper and found a lovely home for it in the proceedings of a conference which was held in the swiss alps. those proceedings are now available in the contemporary mathematics series of the ams.

i bit my tongue. i did not point out to the editor of that swiss expository journal that they had published a paper on rational homotopy theory devoted to a sub area that some might think of as arcane. i did not say to the editor that i would communicate to serre the editor’s opinion that serre’s early work was arcane. and i did not communicate it. except for some mild sarcasm, i was exceptionally polite. i withdrew the paper without argument.

but i formed a low opinion of that editor and i will never again send a paper to that swiss journal! the quandary is that one is reluctant to impose too much on the kindness of editors of conference proceedings. so where does one send something like this paper? any ideas?

best wishes,

joe n