Peromyscus

The roads must roll

2012-01-30T19:46:00.000-08:00

When a state is unable to service the infrastructure under its purview, it means the state is decadent. We've known for a couple of years that California is broke, but for California to explicitly say it's not going to look after some roads...that's the beginning of the end.

Here, we learn that difficult roads are toast, so to speak.

In a standoff with federal forest officials, Caltrans is proposing to abandon a popular, cliff-hanging highway in the San Gabriel Mountains because it is too expensive to maintain.
Caltrans' proposal to walk away from California Highway 39, enjoyed by an estimated 3 million people a year, comes as the state struggles to close a $9.2-billion budget shortfall.

Auto play turntables and coitus interruptus

2012-01-30T17:48:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago, John Scalzi posted a video of his 13 year old daughter reacting to her first sight of a vinyl record. She did not believe that anything so primitive could possibly have existed.

It caused a bit of a fuss, as a lot of people assumed it was staged or rehearsed. So much so that Scalzi disabled comments on the video and put up a rebuttal, here, which MIGHT be staged.

It is hard to believe that she lived for 13 years in a house with LPs and never opened one before, I admit. Then again, some years ago I came home after Cleaner Monthly Visit Day and found the record player was on, with the stylus gouging a deep groove into the rubber mat. I thought that it was possible to hit the "auto play" button by accident, though, so I bought a new stylus and gave them the benefit of the doubt. A few years later, it happened again. I phoned the cleaners' firm and tried to describe what had happened, and the owner said, "You can't possibly expect the cleaning crew to know what a record player is!"

I retorted that a crew who rubbed cleaning cloths across buttons on equipment ought to be aware that "on" buttons activate things, and he agreed to come out and watch the record player in use. He grudgingly admitted that there was enough clicking, arm movement and subsequent loud noise that maybe someone should have known that they had pressed a button, even though he clearly felt that no normal person had ever seen a turntable in action and couldn't be expected to recognize one.

Scalzi junior's rebuttal was an interesting development for me today, of all days, as my biggest news this fine day - and probably biggest news all month - is that renowned vinylphile Jack White announced he is releasing his first solo album. It will be available, on vinyl of course, on 23rd April. The single is available for download (equally of course) tonight, but the vinyl single will be on sale on February 7th. The album is called Blunderbuss and the single (on vinyl!) is called Love Interruption. The b-side, in the classic way of vinyl, is not on the forthcoming album, and is called Machine Gun Silhouette. Rob Jones is said to be involved.

The single is streaming at Jack White's new website www.jackwhiteIII.com at this very moment.

Enjoy, assuming your daughter and/or your cleaning crew have left you with a workable stylus!

How thick is your bubble?

2012-01-26T21:12:00.000-08:00

How Thick Is Your Bubble?

Not Provided

Score » 11 out of 20 (55% )
Result On a scale from 0 to 20 points, where 20 signifies full engagement with mainstream American culture and 0 signifies deep cultural isolation within the new upper class bubble, you scored between 9 and 12.

In other words, even if you're part of the new upper class, you've had a lot of exposure to the rest of America.

Quiz School

Take this quiz & get your score

How Thick Is Your Bubble? » Quiz Make

It's a quiz, so I took it. Since I was born in Britain to parents who strived mightily for middle class but began and ended up working class, and am naturally socialist, it's inevitable that I have a window in the bubble. And some of the questions I disagree with anyway. But YMMV.

Charles Murray is responsible for "The Bell Curve", so I'm not sure I want to read his book.

Also it took me about a week to fix their terrible HTML for the "certificate" so it would display.

Fashion news

2012-01-23T23:52:00.000-08:00

Disney is selling a Mickey Mouse Joy Division t shirt.

This may mean that the Mayan apocalypse really is round the corner. Mickey Mouse and Joy Division? Disney knows the origin of the band's name, right? They know the lead singer committed suicide? They have like, listened to Joy Division? And also, FWIW, have they considered whether the waves really could form a face and ears?

Actually, I like the shirt. Except the model's ultra-pc 'pick any three races from five' look is a bit off-putting, as is his banana-bent face.

Via Pitchfork, who are frothing at the mouth.

Harmonica - Graham Bond Organization

2012-01-23T18:42:00.000-08:00

Hella rare video of Ginger Baker, Graham Bond and Jack Bruce. The Graham Bond Organisation playing Harmonica.

From the film Gonks Go Beat.

Song penned by Marty Wilde. And that's Dick Heckstall-Smith with the stuffed tiger. If you've ever wanted to see Ginger Baker poked with a cane by a disappointed schoolteacher, this is your clip. I really like - or perhaps I should say totally dig - British R&B.

My new beauty regime

2012-01-23T16:37:00.000-08:00

Photoshop by Adobé.

Fotoshop by Adobé from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.

I have to admit it works. The initial cost is a bit steep but the effects are quite long lasting. I like how after the Liquefy demonstration improves her contours you can see a resulting bend in the forearms. That's Fotoshop. By Adobé.

Megaupload - Filesonic

2012-01-22T22:20:00.000-08:00

Looks like Filesonic didn't wait to be busted the way Megaupload was. There's a unilateral change on their front page.

This does make me wonder how to share legit files - it seems like thousands of people have had their files seized during the MU bust. At least Filesonic is trying to do the right thing.

No one knows how the camera lucida...

2012-01-22T21:19:00.000-08:00

As a kid, one of my obsessions was Egyptology. One of my favorite books was C.W.Ceram's Gods, Graves and Scholars (Goetter, Graebe und Gelerhte), which I think I almost learned by heart. In my teens I got hold of another of his books, The March of Archaeology, which was pretty much identical except for a larger format with many more good-sized pictures. Each page began with the first phrase of the text in bold on a line of its own, and one page was headed, "No one knows how the camera lucida".

It went on to add, "...was used by [Edward William] Lane to obtain this picture. The camera lucida was a device much favored by draftsmen of the period. It is still used by beginners in art schools. In principle the instrument is extremely simple. By means of a rotatable glass prism, the artist can cast a reduced image of the object upon a sheet of paper. [...] Lane's remarkable "air view" shows the pyramid of Chephren from above the north-east corner of the Great Pyramid."

Today I thought I saw the equivalent viewpoint from a modern camera obscura, or camera as we call them. It's from a Nova article investigating who built the pyramids.

Excitedly, I went back through all my books. (Would you believe that "no one knows how the camera lucida" doesn't bring up any Google hits? (Well, until tomorrow when the Google bot finds this, of course.) Usually you can find these phrases through Google books.) After a while I remembered March of Archaeology and found the picture Edward William Lane projected and drew between 1826 and 1827.

Ceram was right - the viewpoint on the top of the pyramid is not the same as Lane's drawing. His really does appear to have been drawn in mid-air. The cut stones on top of the Great Pyramid (now called Khufu's pyramid) are accurate (as this detail shows) and Chephren's (now called Khafre's) capped pyramid is completely accurate also. But it's from above!

How about that? How did the Victorian drafstman guy get this particular shot?

RIP Megaupload...no, wait, what's that knocking I hear?

2012-01-19T19:08:00.000-08:00

Today, the FBI took down exceptionally popular filesharing website Megaupload. It's hard to see it as anything less than a power-play after the anti-SOPA and anti-PIPA strikes yesterday, but on the contrary, it appears that the Fibbies have been after Megaupload for about two years. Since the company has servers in Virginia, they had an 'in', and since New Zealand has an extradition treaty, it was possible to go out and arrest the company's owners, seize their bank accounts and take down their domain name. The owners face up to 55 years in gaol. Yep, 55 years for hosting files in cyberspace. Those annoying FBI warnings at the beginning of every legitimate DVD (but not on pirated DVDs) are true. They mean business.

When I heard about it, my first feeling was, "Great! Since Megaupload has 50,000,000 visitors every day, then we can quickly find out if MPAA and RIAA's stupid claims that every download is a lost sale is true. Because on Friday, we are going to see fifty million downloads of paid MP3s, movies, games and porn.

Edit: I originally posted a new IP address for them, but I've removed it as it may not be legit and may host malware. Don't visit it.

In which case a) sorry and b) now we can watch for those five hundred million paid downloads that are due to happen Friday and every day subsequently!

[Picture carefully cropped from a royalty-free Dover image
taken out of one of their free mailings I get on a weekly basis]

Megaupload makes a fortune, and it will be hard for them to claim that all their files were fair-use, or home movies of Gramps pushing Little Billy on a swing, so naturally they were a good first place for the FBI to go. However, it does make you wonder - if the FBI can take down infringing "pirate" sites like Megaupload, why do they need PIPA or SOPA? They already have the necessary powers to take down and prosecute.

They need the bills passed because they give them the ability to censor websites and insist they are removed from search engines. By also insisting that websites self-police, the new bills would simply cause the hated YouTube to disappear. YouTube couldn't possibly check every video and every soundtrack and of course, certainly couldn't tell if a video or soundtrack gave a link to a censored site. YouTube is home to videos showing such things as abuse of power, and the US government would be just as happy as the Chinese government, or the Arab dictators, if YouTube didn't exist.

In an exciting development, anonymous immediately went after several government websites and shuttered them. We'll soon see if they can recover as fast as Megaupload.

SOPA and PIPA.

Normal media on the bust (LA Times).

Ars Technica on why the government selected Megaupload.

RT on the counterattacks.

Or follow #Megaupload on Twitter.

Edited: I've seen figures that put MU's traffic at fifty million a day, not five hundred million. Edited to show the lower figure. But either way, are any musicians you know flush with cash over the last three days? No, thought not.

SOPA and PIPA

2012-01-17T21:38:00.000-08:00

In a couple of hours, several major websites will be going dark to support action against two "anti-piracy" bills which, if passed, would severely weaken the internet.

I like the internet. I'm sort of against piracy, but I certainly don't have any reason at all to believe that a person copping a free track or free movie off the internet would, if prevented from doing so, begin to pay money for them. And I'm certainly not convinced that the best way to stop them downloading something is to pass legislation that would make it impossible for Google, Reddit, boing boing, YouTube, all your favorite blogs including this one - and thousands of others, to function.

There's a nice flowchart about SOPA and PIPA here. Or you can check Wikipedia. For the next few hours, it's the only thing you can look up on Wikipedia, so there's plenty of netsurfing downtime you can spend on this project.

Eating that, I am not

2012-01-17T20:46:00.000-08:00

I'm a sucker for anything Star Wars-related, and viola! (as they say on the internet) here comes another collectible to pique my interest.

The French burger chain Quick has designed a nifty line in Star Wars burgers. You can get the green Jedi Burger, the red Dark Burger, or if you dare, the black Dark Vador Burger. I assume the red burger is Darth Maul - my favorite - but they seem to have chickened out on finding a word for Maul in French. It means 'muzzle' (animal's mouth) in German so I guess it's not a great candidate for international burger names. Various websites are happy to inform me that Dark Vador is Darth Vader - the French language apparently not being well-equipped with either a "th" sound, or a schwa on on the end of words - but no one seems to want to tell me exactly how they make a black bun for a burger.

I could probably come up with something relatively wholesome for that if I tried, however, but what has me really stumped is the stuff that looks like a ring of teeth on top of the Jedi Burger. What is it? At first I thought it might be poutine, but that's the other Francophones, isn't it? Not the original old skool ones. It's evidently emblematic of the light side of the Force but as off-white melted cheese (if that's what it is) it just seems to emphasize the beigeiness, waffledom and slightly crusty look of the Jedi. The dark siders have always had more style.

Apparently the burgers are the equivalent of $6.29, which is cheap at half the price and I'd have one of each, except the air fare would be another $1,000 and that puts me slightly over my weekly burger budget.

The blues

2012-01-13T20:01:00.000-08:00

Peter Green. Because Peter was the blues.

There's nothing quite like a Scotch education

2012-01-08T00:23:00.000-08:00

And there'll never be anything like Ivor Cutler and his Life in a Scotch Sitting Room ever again. (Or John Peel, to popularize it.)

Santorum

2012-01-06T09:00:00.000-08:00

I once looked up Santorum on the internet's Urban Dictionary and apparently it means, "That frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex."

Interestingly, it's also the name of a God-bothering moron who is running for president of the US on a ticket that can best be described as American Sharia. And so, when I read this headline on Catholic Online, I wasn't, at first, sure which type of santorum they were describing.

"Santorum comes from behind"?

Cute Chimeric Monkeys!

2012-01-05T21:49:00.000-08:00

Are these the cutest monkeys ever or what?

I've seen a few articles today saying that 'science' has now created 'genetically modified' monkeys, with the usual invective about playing god. Both the newspaper articles and the BBC World Service news I listened to were keen to mention the genetic tampering. These two artificial chimeras are apparently the result of Frankenstein let loose. Except.

There isn't any genetic modification here. Many, many creatures are chimeras. Your mother is, for example. And so was mine. Whenever a human female gets pregnant, the fetal cells get into the mother's bloodstream and settle down into her cells, creating a body that's genetically more than one 'person'.. And that's true for any other placental mammal. Almost every adult female monkey - not to mention ape - is a chimera. It doesn't modify anyone's genetics, just complicates the immune response and of course any work PC Plod tries when trying to identify anyone.

These monkey chimeras are made by letting two embryos live side-by-side until they incorporate each other (as many do in real life). I only hope they get chance to live as the cute chimeras, and don't get relegated to the experimental lab.

The Kills on Jo Whiley 12-22-2011

2012-01-05T21:12:00.000-08:00

A nice 25 minute YouTube from 22nd December 2011. Not exactly flac quality, but great to listen to.

I adore The Kills. This is a balls-out recent video with the famous drum guys and scarlet Alison Mosshart hair.

Best Peromyscus joke ever

2012-01-02T13:50:00.000-08:00

Possibly the only Peromyscus joke ever.

Carrie McN sent me a link to this Overboard comic from Halloween:

Thank you and happy new year, Carrie!

Alice in Wonderland (1966) Jonathan Miller

2011-12-30T22:30:00.000-08:00

I watched the 1966 Jonathan Miller Alice in Wonderland this week.

Fascinating version. Miller did a "Wednesday Play" biopic on Charles Dodgson the previous year (included on the disc) in which hinted that the characters in the book (such as the dormouse) were not actually furry animals, but caricatures of other academics at Christ Church that Alice would have met and find funny. I've read The Annotated Alice, so I know most of the math jokes and so forth, but I didn't know the source of the characters. Miller didn't have much money but nevertheless persuaded half the greatest actors in Britain to be in the production - Sir John Gielgud, Sir Michael Redgrave, Peter Sellers, Leo McKern - and Peter Cook, channeling the Goon Show, as the Mad Hatter, along with Wilfrid Brambell (Steptoe) as a very camp White Rabbit. And Malcolm Muggeridge.

Miller aimed the production at adults - which led to the tabloids of the day assuming it was pr0n of some sort (it isn't) and portrayed Alice as a self-contained older girl, stiff and formal in the Victorian way, but with a biting superiority whenever she gets chance to snap at one of the little animals she meets after going through the tiny door. None of the animals is in costume and some of the 'plot' is missing, so you have to know the book. Luckily I learned the book by heart when I was little and annoyingly completed all the poems she forgot to finish and carped about the missing bits - for instance, early in the book Giant Alice cries tears of frustration, which gives rise to a lake that almost drowns all the other characters. In this movie, you see her face glistening with tears and then a cut to her being the same size as the little animals and encouraging them to dry off. They also cut Bill the Lizard's hilarious early part, but she still snatches his pencil from him when he's in the jury box, leaving him to write on his slate with his finger, so that's all right then. Some of the humor is missing, but a couple of times the actors add in funny (and quite Carrollian) lines of their own. The social satire is entirely elided, and even Alice's last line in Wonderland, "You're nothing but a pack of cards!" is cut, which means that the point of the story never quite makes it onto film.

The overall feel of the movie is psychedelic. However, it was made in 1966, which means that the Summer of Love was not yet here, Surrealistic Pillow (and White Rabbit) had not been released, and although Haight-Ashbury was winching its way into into our as-yet-unexpanded consciousness, I don't think Jonathan Miller ever spent much time there. This means that what resembles 'psychedelia' must have been in the air before everybody tuned in, turned on and dropped out with Leary in 1967. The transitions between the scenes that make this seem so very, very LSD-related must have been based on dream-logic, as in the book, not on Are-You-Experienced experiences on the part of Miller. [1] I've seen a couple of reviews that say this movie is dated, because of its sixties feel, but my belief is the sixties began to resemble the movie, rather than the movie drew on the sixties for its own look-and-feel. [2]

Alice - who is a child, and therefore should be seen and not heard - narrates most of the movie in her head. When she does speak, it's to put down one of the animals with a vicious remark. The Mad Hatter's Tea party is a venom-filled conversation between an angry Alice and (no slouch at insults himself) Peter Cook as the Mad Hatter, with occasional interjections of whimsy by the deeply drunk Dormouse. The conversation between the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle is between two brilliant, non-animal-headed actors; old men reminiscing about their schooldays on a deserted very British pebble beach. It's a Last of the Summer Wine for mythical animals. The final court scene, where the Knave of Hearts is tried for stealing the tarts is a surreal tour de force, with Peter Sellers and Wilfred Brambell hamming it up, nothing being quite the right size (Alice being between one and two miles high at the time), and some of the theater boxes that line the walls of the courthouse appearing to be hotel rooms, with people shaving and washing up in them as they observe the scene.

The DVD also includes a 1903 silent version of Alice, and a very interesting commentary track that has the feature, or possibly bug, that Jonathan Miller rabbits about whatever he wants to, so the explanations of each scene are given while other scenes are on screen...and at one point Miller says, 'And this is after Alice has got rid of her flamingo', when Alice wasn't carrying a flamingo previously. Miller seems to be able to see the animals in the scene even when his actual cinematography didn't include them.

[1] Yes, I know the caterpillar in the book is sitting on a mushroom and smoking a hookah.

[2] I don't want to put anyone off seeing the movie by saying this, but if you look at the difference between Disney's Alice (1951) and Disney's It's a Small World After All (1964) you can see the quality of sixties-i-ness appears in the latter ride. Without having any singing dolls in it, this Alice has that atmosphere. A less obnoxious sixties-i-ness reference may be The Prisoner (1967) but that was after this version of Alice so I can't count it...

Kills Vogue video - Into the Unknown

2011-12-28T21:15:00.000-08:00

Moody and atmospheric, the Kills explain how the music plays them rather than the other way round, and they're superstitious, filmed by an arty type.

It's described as "Six minutes for a rockumentary filmed in London by videomaker Giorgio Testi (under Marilena Borgna's supervision) that tells the moments before a concert of The Kills." The rest of the description seems to have been translated by Siri via Google from Italian through Greek into English but it sounds very cool if you don't think about the meanings too much. And the video is lovely.

Vogue Kills video.

Cooking a pie tonight.

2011-12-28T20:04:00.000-08:00

Oh, and having said all that, don't get me started on the common American dish "Beef Shepherds' Pie". What on Earth (Terra) is a beef shepherd? Or are they ordinary shepherds who go cattle rustling whenever they feel the need for a pie coming on?

Astronomy

2011-12-28T19:43:00.000-08:00

When I was a kid, the moon was called Luna. There were lunar expeditions and lunanauts, and the Russians had Lunokhod and so on and so forth. Since I moved to the US, I've noticed that most people call it "The Moon". I've even seen someone wonder on the internet why the Moon doesn't have a name. Today, I saw a piece in Universe Today about what if the Earth had two moons? Let's call the other one "Luna", the author writes, apparently unaware that the first one is already called Luna.

Worried, I checked Wikipedia. It says the moon's name is The Moon. I can find barely any mentions of lunanauts in Google (and my spellchecker doesn't recognize it) and although I see things like "lunar surface", Wikipedia says that's just the adjective from the Latin name of the Moon.

I haven't been this disturbed since I learned that the word I learned for "fart" as a young kid - poop - didn't actually mean fart to anyone else, unless it was that day that I learned the lumpy vegetables I called turnips were actually rutabagas, and no-one else in the adult world was under the impression that they were turnips.

So what happened? Did I switch timestreams or move to an alternate world or something? Did I go back in time and step on a butterfly? What am I going to find out next?

If it's that the sun's name isn't really Sol, I give in. I know that Mars - it is still called Mars, right? - isn't called Ares, and I'm pretty sure the other famous one is called Venus and doesn't have a sekrit name only I know about.

ObFuturama:

Professor: "I'm sorry, Fry, but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all."
Fry: "Oh. What's it called now?"
Professor: "Urectum."

Yorkshire accent

2011-12-27T19:21:00.000-08:00

Yorkshire is a state of mind

2011-12-26T19:10:00.000-08:00

Yes it is.

The Mighty Boosh nail the Yorkshire experience. Also, hat is on fire.

Jean Genie - David Bowie on Top of the Pops, 3rd January 1973

2011-12-22T08:33:00.000-08:00

The BBC, bless it, managed to lose the tapes of this particularly iconic performance. On the other hand, its relatively lax attitude to editors and cameramen taking home tapes have saved more than one precious show and this is a case in point. Fish-eye lens cameraman John Henshall took a tape home with him, and it surfaced recently. It was played last night, December 21st 2011, on BBC2's TOTP Christmas Show.

The BBC (bless its cotton socks, once again) showed it with the intro and ending missing and purple bubbles over the video explaining how lucky we were to be able to see this performance. Somehow ZiggyStardust TV managed to get hold of an unadulterated tape, and here it is.

I remember seeing this as a kid, one of the most exciting performances to date on the then still bland and nannyish British TV of the time. This was quite late on in Glam Rock, so a lot of glitter had passed under the bridge and the stakes were raised. Bowie's trick here was to bring on the least limp-wristed glam rock-out ever...even though, by the accidents of fate, The Sweet brought out an almost identical sounding Tobacco Road-influenced song at the same time - Blockbuster. But the aptly-named Sweet never could manage to muster quite the menace of Jean Genie, despite their reputation for playing heavy rock when the teenyboppers weren't looking.

Looking at Bowie again with a few more years experience, it's obvious that the man's a star and it seems quite likely he knew he was a star since first glancing in the mirror as a young boy. The comparison at the time was with Marc Bolan, who had a similar initial trajectory, but never broke through the cocaine-and-red-wine barrier to create new material when the teenage girls went on to something new. I'd say Bowie's closest analog was Lady Gaga, who has leveraged sheer ambition into superstardom, but I'm not convinced that she has a clue how to write a pop song. David Bowie had more songwriting talent in his Ziggy Stardust haircut than most pop musicians have in their entire bodies during their entire career. Even though Jean Genie was based on an old riff, the lyrics pop and sparkle. The intro and outro are among the most exciting in popular music, and the band, miming away on their Marshall stacks, are not miming to the single track, but to a re-recording. And Bowie, while not exactly Sonny Terry, blasts a solo on the harmonica that leads wonderfully into Love Me Do for a couple of bars. (I wonder if the Beeb paid Macca for it?)

Also, you have to love Trevor Bolder's sideburns.

Blockbuster - The Sweet

Tobacco Road - The Nashville Teens

If you want to see the TOTP2 version, it's on YouTube as well, of course, until SOPA is passed and YouTube goes away.

Plucky comet survives sundive

2011-12-15T23:07:00.000-08:00

For some reason the sight of comet Lovejoy surviving a trip to within 88,000 miles of the sun's photosphere makes me happy. Discovery says that it resisted temperatures of a million degrees. No wonder it got out of there fast.

Possibly, of course, whoever was on it got Marvin the Paranoid Android to pilot it away while they teleported somewhere else.

John Carter of Mars

2011-12-12T23:44:00.000-08:00

I haven't read much Edgar Rice Burroughs. He's always been there, as part of the foundations, one of us, a science fiction fan. I think I've mostly read Tarzan, and missed out on the swashbuckling planet-winning ways of John Carter. John Carter debuted in 1912, making him a hundred years old. Next year, 2012, the movie comes out.

Burroughs set his adventures on a dying planet Mars - the prominent dark 'canals' that can be inferred on the planet's surface encouraged many at the time to think that Mars had once held flowing water. In most cases, this seems to have led to the immediate thought that the planet was drying up, and therefore the inhabitants must be desperately holding on. John Carter is transported to this planet, whereupon he has many adventures featuring jeweled, naked princesses and performs mighty deeds, due to his Earth-gravity-accustomed muscles, which propel him easily through the air on tiny Mars.

Hollywood has been making Tarzan films almost as long as he's been around, but seems to have waited until now to film John Carter, possibly because it's only now that we have the necessary CGI. I'd say that it was also that it's only now we could have films featuring naked princesses, but apparently the movie does not stay true to the book in that respect.

Here's the trailer, which looks exactly like a Star Wars prequel film. That's not necessarily good.

But wait - what is that music? Is it Kashmir, by Led Zeppelin?

Indeed it is.

If you can't wait for the movie, Project Gutenberg has the etext. Beware, though, that if, like me, you thought that it was a good idea to set the action on Mars so that we could have action-adventure without bad-mouthing any actually existing races, Burroughs still manages to screw the pooch by setting the first few pages in the wild wild west, giving him plenty of chances to work in references to 'savage Apaches' and their torturing ways.

Hurricane Bawbag

2011-12-09T20:11:00.000-08:00

See the video. (Warning: links to Facebook.)

Buy the shirt.

Alison Mosshart - Close Your Eyes

2011-12-08T11:13:00.000-08:00

I'd never heard this track before.

Please to be ignoring the perv-over voice that introduces the track. Once Alison gets going, everything's all right again.

Still more rocker than rocking chair

2011-12-07T23:08:00.000-08:00

At the gym yesterday I happened upon an insurance ad that made we want to throw up.

It featured a good-natured Dad type looking for health insurance. He's apparently ancient enough to need Medicare, although he looks 45. While telling us how he can get insurance - by phoning 1 800 born2bwild or something - the ad shows him being interrupted by his granddaughter's all-girl band, who are butchering some tune or other faintly in the distance.

He strides into her bedroom and sternly demands she gives up her nice white Gibson SG, which she hands over, biting her lip. Taking it, he straps it on and rips into the guitar intro for Born to be Wild, which the rest of the band happily follow. Smiling grey-haired granny gets down and boogies in pseudo-arthritic fashion to the beat while the musicians do an amazingly life-like impression of the Archies' cartoon band, all wide blank smiles and poor sense of rhythm.

The message is clear. He may be in need of old-person's insurance, but inside him is that sixties rebel just waiting to bust out! He can teach the young whippersnappers all about rock'n'roll!

What made me want to puke wasn't the sight of grand-dad leaning back against one of the teenager's backs and rubbing against her in a lame imitation of rockin' free-spiritedness that came across as horrifyingly, painfully skeezy - though that was was quite an emetic - it was the company's clumsy and off-putting attempt to co-opt a group of people that it would have cheerfully spat at in 1967.

Easy Rider, the movie that brought Born to be Wild to the forefront of American consciousness in 1969, was about small-town hatred and fear of hippies, of freedom, of sex, of any variety of individuality. It portrayed the Japanese proverb that was paradoxically the foundation of middle-American values - the nail that stands out must be hammered down.

Anyway, that was then. Now that the ex-longhairs have money - and better yet, have chronic diseases to cash in on - cynical, calculated TV ads have been devised to woo them.

Of course, there's something of the 100 Club Factor at play here. This refers to a London club which holds about 300, and to the people who claim to have seen the Sex Pistols there at their legendary gig in 1976 - a number which must be in the tens of thousands. Many of them actually believe they were there. In the same way, ninety-nine percent of people watching this ad did not grow their hair, smoke dope and ride Harleys to the Mardi Gras in 1969; they went to school while working tables in the evening, dreaming of graduating to a cushy job in plastics and obligingly obeying the media by hating hippies, who they were told were commie traitors who would seduce their sisters while somehow managing to be fags at the same time. The insurance company has calculated that they will nevertheless manage to identify with youthful grand-dad in this cynical and exploitative ad.

It's interesting to contemplate a Medicare-related insurance ad that really was targeted at older folks with a spark of actual counter-culturalism left in their osteopenic bones. Perhaps gramps could help his grand-daughter make a banner for Occupy Wall Street, or granny could teach her how to make Molotov cocktails for those days when unelected alter kockers like the loathsome Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of the ironically named Health and Human Services, overrules the FDA and decrees unilaterally that young women should not be allowed access to emergency contraception. Y'know, like today. The first time ever the government has overruled the FDA doctors and scientists, and it just happens to be in the service of ensuring women cannot have control over their own bodies. What a coincidence.

Where's my Harley?

The Craft Lab

2011-12-07T07:39:00.000-08:00

On Saturday, I went to our local Ecology Center.

Now, I didn't know, before last week, that we had an Ecology Center. I live in Orange County, home of Nixon's Western White House, and one of the most Republican spots known to man. Although there's always been a light sprinkling of surfers and bikers, the majority of the population look, act, spend and vote like they'd tar and feather any hippies who came around talking about that global warming or recycling nonsense.

The Orange County Register is the favored organ of these people. The rag'll tell you it is a small government, small-L libertarian paper, but when it comes to covering actual living politicians, as opposed to Randian imaginary ones, it is 138% Republican. So it was a bit of a surprise to read on the Orange County Register's web page that there was a 'do' on at our local Ecology Center. The Craft Lab!

So on Saturday we trooped off to the keeping-chickens-in-the-yard part of town (it's at least 250 yards from the center cross-roads of the city, so I guess ordinances are more relaxed way out there), and found a nice old wooden house set back fifty feet or so from the road, planted all around with demonstration local native plants. (Local native plants seem to be mostly Century Plant, maguey, yucca, penstemon and Dudleya.) Apparently it's the oldest wooden structure in San Juan Capistrano, which is saying something as the Los Rios district is nearby. It's still surrounded by farmland. About half an acre of it, but farmland nevertheless.

STB and I had booked a whole day of handicraft workshops. We started off with Homemade Skincare, which was a revelation to both of us. I had made cosmetics from an Edwardian book I found when I was about 12, and mostly found out that things you make of oatmeal and egg whites are very wholesome, but mold thinks so too. I'd never bothered since. I didn't have the heart to tell the workshop leader about it, since my pre-hippie book was very big on using spermaceti, which I suspect would be frowned upon by the Ecology Center. (To be honest, it was unobtainable back then as well.)

We made brown sugar skin scrub, which I'd never heard of. It's made by adding almond oil and a drop or two of essential oils to a mixture of brown sugar and turbinado sugar, which you would then use as an exfoliant. Not right there, in the ecology center, mind you, back home in a shower. The cheery demonstrator used such phrases as "Well, I don't need to explain this bit...I'm sure you're all used to working with essential oils!" We nodded dutifully, and so did the real Real Housewives of Orange County who were attending the workshop with us, although they were telling the truth and we were just lying.

After that it was off to the kitchen to make beeswax candles. For some reason I'd assumed that these would be those wrapped-honeycomb ear-candling type candles, but no! This involved melting real beeswax in a portable gasring double-boiler arrangement that would make OSHA cringe, and pouring it and wicking it (for votive or tea candles) and, later, a very relaxing session dipping our wicks, so to speak, in the wax to make the traditional tallow-candle shaped candles...except being beeswax they smelled heavenly instead of smelling of tallow. We now have a roomful of candles at home that we daren't light as our knowledge of the burn rate of pure beeswax is sadly lacking. I'll tell you who else liked the beeswax smell - the bees! They came flying in through the window to reclaim their wax, but we gamely kept it out of their greedy little mandibles.

We also learned how to make little journals out of paper with mulberry bark covers; holiday cards from magazine snippings and punches, rubber stamps and glue; and terrariums, where we all got chance to make our own and take it with us. At the terrarium-making class, a small boy with angelic curls asked an interesting question about the moss used as decoration/soil cover in the little bowls of succulents. "Why do they call it moss?"

At first I dismissed that as a daft question. ("Because it's moss, that's why!) But I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since. Either he was a very unusual young man, or kids today have a different approach to the world than we did. I assumed that words had been sort of handed down - not necessarily on stone tablets, and not necessarily by Adam naming everything, but at the very least, from proto-Indo-European. (Yes, I did know about all that at 12.) He seemed to assume that words are chosen for a reason, a sort of innate bow-wow theory, expanded to include moss, which doesn't say "Moss! Moss!" when you call it. Possibly it's something to do with Xboxes or Facebook.

We also had a vegetarian lunch made largely out of plants grown on the premises, supplemented by the produce from the farmer's market next door.

This was a fun day out (and a fungi out also, since we bought a box of grow-it-thissen oyster mushrooms from the store). Most of the center's folk seemed literally identical to the staff of the Whole Thing, a wholefood cafe and store in London I frequented in about 1980, not only in terms of granola quotient, but also in facial features, hairstyles and clothing choices. It may be that they are aliens or spirit guides who move on from windmills and solar kilns in one city to rain-water storage and composting in another whenever their disguises are revealed, or just maybe the vaguely counter-cultural in the west have chosen the same look and habits since approximately 1961. One day it could catch on with the rest of us.

Anyway, the next day I used the sugar scrub in the shower, and later my skin felt a little uncomfortable. I diagnosed a reaction to essential oils...whatever they are...but when I got home I discovered a four-inch scratch down my leg. Sugar is sharp. I guess I'm going back to the spermaceti and benzoin skin care.

HR speak

2011-12-05T23:07:00.000-08:00

My HR department emailed a rudimentary Excel spreadsheet to us accompanied by partial explanation,

"Certainly we will continue to partner on issues as it arises, however, we can use this to capture pertinent data and utilize as a springboard."

I printed it out and it filled most of an 8.5" by 10" sheet of paper. I tried but I found it a bit lacking when I tried to use it as a springboard.

Mastermind on Led Zeppelin

2011-12-02T09:41:00.000-08:00

As suggested by commenter Mike, here is a Mastermind round featuring questions on Led Zeppelin.

When I used to watch that programme, you were only allowed to be an expert in Cuneiform or Drill Head Technology of the 19th Century. And things like that.

The whole street's lit up - lit up by Fairy Lamps!

2011-12-01T21:40:00.000-08:00

When I first saw this video of Saks Fifth Avenue's Christmas lights, I assumed it was a fake. The illusions, particularly when the windows "open" and stars and lights appear "inside", are so real that I naturally assumed, as one does, that only very good CGI could possibly look that real.

However, seeing it again from a second, clearly genuine, viewpoint shows that it is a real light show.

It's not actually very Christmassy (or Holiday-y) and lacks plot, action and conflict, but apart from that it's breathtaking.

It reminded me what Lt. Commander Thomas Woodrooffe would have said. Lt. Commander Woodrooffe is still justly famous for being asked by the BBC to narrate the spectacle of navy ships displaying a light show during a Fleet Review. So drunk was he that all he could manage to get out was a series of slurred variations on "The whole fleet's lit up! It's lit up!" in a delighted mush-mouth mumble. This performance was so striking that people still say his catch-phrase today, seventy-five years after he said it - because, yea verily, that was way back in 1937 (the Good Old Days). Luckily it's been captured for posterity, unlike most of the gems the BBC produced in the analog era.

Elgar's Nimrod was not included in the original broadcast but it adds a nice Imperial touch, doesn't it?

Possibly the best bit is when the lights go out leaving him in darkness, and he says, in shocked surprise, "Itsh gone! The whole fleetsh gone!"

Iconic Jimi Hendrix nite spot to close!

2011-11-30T09:07:00.000-08:00

Horrors! One of the treasured - indeed fabled - eateries of my youth is to close.

The first (and, really, where it counts, the only) Harry Ramsden's fish and chip shop, in Guisely, Leeds, is set to close down. It's been open since 1928. I only recall getting to visit it once or twice, and my memory of it is of a giant, neon-lit barn filled with red-faced Yorkshiremen, situated on top of a desolate moor where winds howled across cringing heather. It's possible my memory is faulty. The fish and chips were nice, though.

View Larger Map

Fish and chips are soul food to Yorkshire people (and many others, though regional variations like Deep Fried Mars Bars and chips, and Eel Pie and Mash with Green Liquor abound in those foreign lands). We had one in our town, of course, but Harry Ramsden's was a sort of Holy Grail of fish shops, unattainable (because kids don't have cars and Wuthering-Heights-Ville was off the beaten bus route), mirage-like and unique.

Anyway, Jimi Hendrix once ate there, after being shooed off stage by the Leeds constabulary during an allegedly over-the-fire-limit gig in Leeds, 12th March1967. The BBC has an article on the Leeds Spring of Love:

The Troutbeck Hotel was the venue for Hendrix's historic gig, and it was dangerously over-full before the band even took to the stage. Reports suggest up to 900 fans squeezed in, a mere 700 people more than the place could accommodate! ...As the gig heated-up, Ilkley policeman Tom Chapman decided enough was enough and stopped the gig. One boy in blue versus nearly a thousand Blues fans was never going to end well - and Hendrix just kept on playing. What happens next is unclear - some say there was a 'riot', others say people just went on their way. For his part, Tom Chapman denies there was big trouble.

The Jimi Hendrix Forum takes up the story:

"Later on that evening, a woman called Sheila Lilley was waiting to be served at Harry Ramsden’s famous fish shop. behind her in the line appeared none other than Jimi Hendrix dressed in psychadelic gear. He said to Sheila that he was sorry that the gig had to be cancelled after just one number. He signed her a photo. She still has it. Framed on the living room wall."

This is the most famous appearance of a legendary guitarist in a fish and chip shop, and that's probably it for Harry Ramsden's in general. But I feel I ought to include this picture of even more angelic legendary guitarist Paul Kossoff eating fish and chips with his dad, David Kossoff. It's from the Free Forever DVD. It's not Harry Ramsden's but it'll do.

Note that Dad David holds his knife properly while young Paul is a punk. Tch! Young people of today...well, young people of forty years ago... no manners.

Porcupine hogs corn on the cob

2011-11-29T20:27:00.000-08:00

The cutest video ever...Teddy the Porcupine doesn't want to share his corn cob with his keeper. The unusual thing is he actually says so.

The YouTubeosphere seems divided on whether he's speaking Jawa or Ewok, but I think it's just plain old English.

A couple of years ago I decided my new band name would be the Talkupines. Teddy should be our lead vocalist.

The video is copyright 2011, Zooniversity LLC, at www.zooniversity.org and www.facebook.com/zooniversity

Nothing to see here, move on

2011-11-29T09:32:00.000-08:00

What the Tea Party call the "Lamestream Media" is funny, isn't it? Here is this week's Time Magazine's worldwide covers from its own site.

(That might be a bit large but you get the point.)

The rest of the world sees a picture of revolution. The US gets a cute cartoon that almost imperceptibly suggests you ought to be anxious and worried. Is this just one of those things, a complete accident based on ditzy editors and deadlines and gormless motorcycle couriers or something, like on the TV? Or is it important that Americans be vaguely upset and apprehensive, while keeping them from any images that might remind them there is an alternative to "hanging on in quiet desperation"?

Bringing the battlefield to your door

2011-11-29T07:57:00.000-08:00

Senators Demand the Military Lock Up American Citizens in a “Battlefield” They Define as Being Right Outside Your Window

...the Senate is gearing up for a vote on Monday or Tuesday that goes to the very heart of who we are as Americans. The Senate will be voting on a bill that will direct American military resources not at an enemy shooting at our military in a war zone, but at American citizens and other civilians far from any battlefield — even people in the United States itself.

The article does give a way to oppose the bill -by supporting the Udall amendment, which is a bit like agreeing to download malware because it promises to get rid of some other malware you already caught somewhere. It would be better if the bill simply didn't exist.

The Senate vote is this afternoon.

Anybody with that old, "If I'm not doing anything wrong, I have no need to worry," is fooling themselves. Dismantling Posse Comitatus isn't a joke.

More info.

Forty years gone

2011-11-27T22:10:00.000-08:00

I managed to miss the 40th anniversary of Led Zeppelin IV (or whatever your personal pet name for that album may be). It was released forty years ago, on November 8th, 1971.

It was the first Led Zeppelin album I 'just missed' and bought after-the-fact. I remember walking to my local record shop and placing a pre-order for Houses of the Holy, the fifth album. and talking with the record clerk there. "Not putting their name on the last album cost them a lot of sales," she said. When I looked skeptical, she added, "A lot of people just browse the stacks. If they don't see a name on the LP, they don't consider buying it." Well, it certainly didn't do too badly, earning six time platinum in the UK and 23 times platinum in the US. (And only five of those sales have been me buying it in new formats every few years.)

The album has managed to gain a lot of notoriety one way or another. Do the words to Stairway to Heaven say Satanic things when played backwards? (No.) If you hold up the inner sleeve to a mirror, can you see a black dog looking back out at you? (Yes.) What do those four mysterious symbols mean? (Who cares in the 21st century, when Wikipedia will tell you something fans argued over and researched exhaustively for 30 years?) If you want to read about listening (and holding sleeves up to the mirror) I recommend Erik Davis' small but perfectly formed tome, which is titled with the four symbols...so just let's call it Led Zeppelin IV.

Jimmy Page, who hasn't done much in twenty years, decided to come out of his shell this month and accompany his friend, Roy Harper, at Roy's 70th birthday concert. It's hard to imagine (Hats off to) Harper as a seventy year old, but as they say it beats the alternative. Jimmy came out and played Same Old Rock with his friend, with that same skill and that wonderful tone he gets from his acoustic guitar. You'll have to pardon a bit of political posturing at the beginning of this; it's the best filmed YouTube clip I could find.

This didn't involve any pissing on sheep, for which I'm sure the sheep are truly grateful.

Roy Harper with Jimmy Page - The Same Old Rock - Royal Festival Hall 05/11/2011

Student Health and Safety update

2011-11-21T09:20:00.000-08:00

Update:

UC Davis chancellor Katehi issues statement

Apparently the chancellor of UC Davis had the non-violent, non-resisting students pepper-sprayed because she was concerned about their health and safety!

Driven by our concern for the safety and health of the students involved in the protest, as well as other students on our campus, I made the decision not to allow encampments on the Quad during the weekend...

Well, I never.

Crying like a fire in the sun

2011-11-21T09:15:00.000-08:00

It's worth watching to the end, where the vicious assholes who had stood by while seated students were pepper-sprayed at point-blank range, are allowed to leave, and they do so, blinking in slight bafflement as they back away.

In a follow up article, we learn, in the new Health Speak that the anti-Occupiers have adopted (for they often say that demonstrations have to be broken up for health and safety reasons) that blasting chemical weapons into the the eyes and throats of non-resisting students stops them from being hurt by the police who are called in to deny them their First Amendment rights:

Charles J. Kelly, a former Baltimore Police Department lieutenant who wrote the department’s use of force guidelines, said pepper spray is a “compliance tool” that can be used on subjects who do not resist, and is preferable to simply lifting protesters.
“When you start picking up human bodies, you risk hurting them,” Kelly said. “Bodies don’t have handles on them.”
After reviewing the video, Kelly said he observed at least two cases of “active resistance” from protesters. In one instance, a woman pulls her arm back from an officer. In the second instance, a protester curls into a ball. Each of those actions could have warranted more force, including baton strikes and pressure-point techniques.
“What I’m looking at is fairly standard police procedure,” Kelly said. (From Chicago Sun Times.)

Is it, Charles? Is it standard police procedure to gas a bunch of youngsters sitting on the sidewalk? Curling into a ball "warrants more force", including "baton strikes"?

You know, it's probably true that it's standard. Which is one more good reason to have a protest movement, isn't it?

Journal of Journeyman Research

2011-11-20T21:14:00.000-08:00

Hilarious article here.

There was a book written a couple of years ago, called Outliers, by Malcom Gladwell. It postulated that to become an expert – in anything – one needed 10,000 hours of practice. Gladwell didn't say that's all it took. He said that's how long it takes to internalize the procedures and reproduce them by instinct, whether your subject is flying a Navy jet or playing a violin. This was an important book, or at least the blog posts picking it up and propagating its findings made it an important book. It meant that all those with ~500 hours under their belt, who had felt clumsy and stupid and considered giving up, suddenly had something to keep them going – the understanding that the fumbling eventually goes away and is replaced by instinctual understanding. It gave hope, in other words.

The twits who wrote the article above, David Z Hambrick and Elizabeth J Meinz, must have felt a little miffed that Gladwell appeared to say (if you were a poor reader) that any sorry specimen of hoi polloi could reach great heights if they practiced for 10,000 hours. This led them to research Sorry, Strivers: Talent Matters and get it published.

They strive manfully enough themselves to prove that it's actually IQ that makes you successful. They locate a paper that tells them, and us:

The remarkable finding of their study is that, compared with the participants who were “only” in the 99.1 percentile for intellectual ability at age 12, those who were in the 99.9 percentile — the profoundly gifted — were between three and five times more likely

To what? Don't leave us in suspense!

to go on to earn a doctorate, secure a patent, publish an article in a scientific journal or publish a literary work.

Jiminy Crickets! That's amazing!

Wait, what?

earn a doctorate, secure a patent, publish an article in a scientific journal or publish a literary work

That’s all? Who cares?

They explain the results thus:

A high level of intellectual ability gives you an enormous real-world advantage.

Hahahahahaha! They think that a doctorate, a patent, a peer-reviewed article or a published literary work reveals "an enormous real world advantage"! I wonder if they've ever even seen the real world?

Losers.

Tell me why

2011-11-16T07:48:00.000-08:00

I was listening to BBC World Service yesterday, and even they - et tu, Brute? - had someone on who just didn't know why the Occupy Wall Street protesters were protesting. He said it loudly and repeatedly over the course of ten minutes or so until I had to leave for an appointment. I saw it in three or four news articles yesterday as well. Oh why, oh why are you protesting? Why won't you tell us, sweetums? Just tell us and then we can all go back to being normal.

I think it's quite plain why they're protesting - and why I support them. The whole "why are these inarticulate hippies protesting? Aren't they just jealous of others' success?" schtick is completely manufactured. They are complaining because laws over the past 20 to 30 years have been increasingly rigged so that money flows towards people who already have money. If you're young, you generally don't have any money (that you've earned, anyway) and there are stringent mechanisms in place to make sure you never get any. Well, just enough to buy an X-Box or an iPad or something, to keep you docile.

This cartoon sums it up very nicely. Unfortunately I can't read the signature. It looks like Hurwiti, but I can't find that easily in a Google search.

For the visually impiared, the cartoon shows protesters at Wall Street carrying banners that say things like:

End Corporate Welfare
Stop Corporate Control of Government
Banks Got Bailed Out We Got Sold Out
Bring Back Glass Steagall Act
Wall Street Bailout is socialism for the wealthy

... and so forth. The rich Monopoly board Rich Guy is leaning out of a window with a megaphone saying, "Say they don't know WHY they're protesting." In front of the crowd, a pretty TV news blonde is smiling widely into a camera as she says, "...they don't really seem to know WHY they are protesting!"

It's a message the media seems to have taken to heart. I first saw this cartoon on October 26th. It's November 16th and the media are still pretending they can't figure it out.

Darth Maul returns...

2011-11-14T21:19:00.000-08:00

My favorite Sith is back - in Clone Wars, starting in spring.

Teaser trailer from Lucasfilm here.

New modes of news

2011-11-14T00:01:00.000-08:00

Looking at the news the last four days has been a depressing experience. There was the failure of Phobos-Grunt, for instance, and the very real thought that eventually Phobos-Grunt will fall to earth, depositing 12 tonnes of Nitrogen Tetroxide and Hydrazine somewhere unguessable. That should be fun.

But I did notice a trend, and that was the trend of having non-humans read the news. I know we all love Siri - and we spent a good hour on Friday afternoon asking her what she was wearing and whether she was married (she did not reply in good humor to the inquiries) - but it's odd that non-humans have such a presence in the news. I assume that the volume of video is so high that not enough Emo layabouts in bedrooms can fill it up.

Here, for instance, via Youdopia, cute critters discuss the banking crisis.

They have a point. Obviously, news travels fast in the river delta of the Uncanny Valley. But deeper in the upper tributaries of the valley, we learn of two automatons discussing the recently discovered outbreak of child-rape at Penn State. It's interesting to hear robots discuss this most disgustingly human failing, and even more interesting to see that they envision it as a tiger attacking a zebra in the locker room showers. Can't say I've ever heard of NMATV, but I'll be tuning in to their droidcasters more often.

Interesting that JoePa, if that be he, is presented as Harry Potter.

Remembrance Day

2011-11-13T20:37:00.000-08:00

Today was Remembrance Sunday. It inspires all kinds of thoughts about man's inhumanity to man, though today I think I saw more posts pitting dueling war poets against each other than actual memorials to the fallen. Eventually, someone gloomily remarked in a comment thread somewhere that war didn't seem to have been any better when it was fought by poets.

Quite so.

This site has a number of photographs of what, exactly World War I did to the landscape in Europe. All those trenches, and bombs, and the eventual destruction of explosive caches literally pocked the landscape, so almost one hundred years later, the earth has not recovered.

Never mind that every plowing season, the land yields bones instead of rocks, but large stretches of it, as at Verdun, above, is unplowable, ripped up by conflict.

The current American fad for using drones may be cowardly, and would almost certainly be illegal if the US wasn't the 400 pound gorilla at the UN, but I can quite see why a general may prefer to call a "surgical strike" instead of sending ten thousand men over the top to die, as repeatedly happened during WWI. Literally millions died - it's unthinkable. Less than a hundred years ago, too. My grand-dad fought in that war. He lived through it, and I don't remember him ever saying a word about it. Not all the soldiers were poets.

On top of the world

2011-11-11T09:01:00.000-08:00

No relation to this, of course, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers playing On Top Of The World.

The couple of little guitar breaks are Eric Clapton inventing modern electric guitar. It was produced by Jimmy Page. There's a bit of difference between 1935 Mississippi Delta and 1965 London (to say the least) but given my own situation, I heard the Bluesbreakers first. This track, and the others at the same time - I'm Your Witchdoctor, Telephone Blues - will always be my touchstone tracks.

Sittin' on top of the world

2011-11-11T08:58:00.000-08:00

The Mississipi Sheiks, Sittin' On Top of the World.

Nigel Tufnel Day, 11/11/11

2011-11-10T18:54:00.000-08:00

Obviously, since the internets are what the interwebs are, the day 11/11/11 belongs to Nigel Tufnel, the Spın̈al Tap star whose amps went up to 11.

On being grilled if 11 was better than the normal 10, Nigel replied that it was "one louder", and no one can argue with that.

In view of his achievement, 11/11/11 has been declared to be International Nigel Tufnel day, and I don't see why this hero of rock shouldn't be honored this way. The power of LA Weekly is behind us in this push (and I'm not referring to Big Bottom), so here we go.

Tell all your friends: Friday is Nigel Tufnel day.

Drum Kings

2011-11-09T21:57:00.000-08:00

My friend Kali Durga posted a drum moment on her tumblr*, and coincidentally an acquaintance posted an epic one on another music newsgroup.

Jack White I'm familiar with, although I hadn't seen the particular bit of juggling he does at 6:12.

Gene Krupa and the orgiastic Sing Sing Sing I am very familiar with, but Buddy Rich - although I've heard of him, of course - was an unknown quantity. Which means that during this video I knew exactly what ace drummer Krupa was about to do. But I was pleasantly surprised by Buddy Rich. I get the impression he was allowed to win, but all's fair in network TV. This is from a Sammy Davis Jr. show. What else?

It's obvious that Jack White is the Krupa fan.

Excellent drumming is excellent, from all three.

* I suspect this isn't the permalink and will break soon.

Bon Voyage to a friend

2011-11-07T19:35:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine is going back to the Philippines today. She's been in the US thirty or so years. She came here after college, married and settled down. When I interviewed her for a job thirteen years ago she told me solemnly she'd be going back home in five years.

She was with me for more than five years - I abandoned the job first. She stayed behind and eventually left to work for another firm. We kept in touch as she built up her personal business outside of work, at first just beautiful cakes of amazing artistry and complexity, and then later food of all kinds.

I'm sad to see her go, but so excited about her new life in her old home. When I met her last week she was bubbling over with excitement and plans. She remembered the five-year-commitment with a giggle and laughed regretfully that it had taken her so long to put her affairs in order and put her familial demons to rest.

Although she's a vegetarian as much as possible (and a serious student of Chinese philosophy and health) she cooks what people ask for and so she gave me a piece of chorizo to take home. My experience of chorizo hasn't been good - you see it in the supermarket case with an ingredients list that reads like the "remember to throw away" instructions to a slaughterhouse. Well, I cooked her chorizo according to her instructions* and it was one of the most sublime treats I've ever eaten. She gave me the "low salt" version and yet it burst with flavor. "Vodka and wine," she told me with a wink.

I don't think she drinks, either.

I asked her if she still spoke the language (it's not Tagalog, it's a more local one) and she said, "Yes - I still dream in it!" To dream in a language you haven't heard spoken in more than twenty years...that's a thinking point right there. She's going home, even though we're all told we can't go home again.

I'm sure I'm committing some sort of Orientalism, but I'm imagining figs throwing massive roots over the stonework around the yard, and servants bringing obscure pans as they are called for. Wait, no, I'm not imagining it, that's how it is, she said.

Au revoir, Marlenie-Beanie! I'll miss you.

*Crumble the chorizo into a shallow pan of boiling water. Let the water evaporate and then continue to toast until the sausage is lightly browned.

Walking the walk

2011-11-06T21:02:00.000-08:00

It's odd to have to get older to appreciate the things we had when we were small. But today I heard something from the past that almost certainly influenced my biggest influence.

I love Tyrannosaurus Rex. And I love Beltane Walk.

It dominated my early youth. And now, courtesy of 106 FM, I hear Jimmy McCracklin's The Walk.

It makes me love Marc Bolan all the more.

Seminole Freak

2011-11-01T20:58:00.000-07:00

The city of San Juan Capistrano issues me phone alerts if something is likely to trouble my peaceably tax-paying status. Verizon, for my convenience, transcribes them and emails them. So today I was warned of a local nuclear accident.

"The 3:00PM today. There will, this is an important message from the city of San wan Capistrano at approximately 3:00PM today. There was an ammonia release at the Seminole freak nuclear generating station from unit number three. At this time. There is no danger to the health and safety of the public. There has not been any radioactive material release. Another update will follow at5:30:00PM. This concludes this message"

After a little while I actually got to hear it. It turns out that Seminole Freak isn't a new nuclear generator in town, it's just how San Onofre (the tits nuclear plant) sounds to Mr. Verizon.

Some 'I'll bite yer legs off' moments in mythology

2011-10-30T19:33:00.000-07:00

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, and sometimes fiction is stranger than other fiction. In this case, myth is weirder than the Monty Python version, which was weird enough.

As a kid I read every myth and legend I could get my hands on, except the British ones. For some reason Matter of Britain and / or Morte d'Artur just gave me hives. Possibly because it was positioned to me as a romance – doomed Art and Jennifer and their friend Lance and all their machinations. I read Lord of the Rings, of course, and loved it to an unnatural extent. And I loved Monty Python. Who else could think up the Black Knight, who fought on when all his limbs had been sliced away, threatening to bite our heroic ker-nig-h-t on the legs? Who could think up the Killer Bunny, the fluffy cave-dweller that dismembered the Grail seekers with its flying attack?

Recently I obtained from a second hand shop a rather dry tome called Nine Lives—Cats in Folklore, by Katharine M Briggs. One story she details is from The Vulgate Merlin – of which I had never heard – as detailed by a Lady Wilde. It concerns a killer cat.

Apparently, a fisherman had promised his next catch to God, but when he caught it, he thought it would be better to eat it himself. And so he promised the next catch to God, and you can guess what happened. And so, when he cast the net the third time, he drew out a coal-black kitten. Thinking it would make a good ratter (as you do) he took it home. It's not entirely explained why the cat was living underwater, but a rapid Google search to get me up to speed on Arthurian legend leads me to believe it was his kitten, and he had been feeding it on Sirens' milk. And feeding cats on Sirens' milk is apparently much like getting your Gremlin wet and/or feeding it after midnight.

Well, the Devil Cat caused so much damage that Merlin mentioned it to King Arthur as something he ought to be doing something about. Merlin, the King and his knights set off to the Lake of Lausanne, where they found that all the people had fled, because no one would live there for fear of the kitty.

Merlin showed him a deep cave with a wide mouth, set in the mountain. And here I'm going to switch to Lady Wilde's actual words. Since Briggs quoted them and they are already on the internet at Library Ireland, I'm assuming they are out of copyright.

"And how shall the cat come out?" said the king.

"That shall ye see hastily," quoth Merlin; "but look you, be ready to defend, for anon he will assail you."

"Then draw ye all back," said the king, "for I will prove his power."

And when they withdrew, Merlin whistled loud, and the cat leaped out of the cave, thinking it was some wild beast, for he was hungry and fasting; and he ran boldly to the king, who was ready with his spear, and thought to smite him through the body. But the fiend seized the spear in his mouth and broke it in twain.

Then the king drew his sword, holding his shield also before him. And as the cat leaped at his throat, he struck him so fiercely that the creature fell to the ground; but soon was up again, and ran at the king so hard that his claws gripped through the hauberk to the flesh, and the red blood followed the claws.

Now the king was nigh falling to earth; but when he saw the red blood he was wonder-wrath, and with his sword in his right hand and his shield at his breast, he ran at the cat vigorously, who sat licking his claws, all wet with blood. But when he saw the king coming towards him, he leapt up to seize him by the throat, as before, and stuck his fore-feet so firmly in the shield that they stayed there; and the king smote him on the legs, so that he cut them off to the knees, and the cat fell to the ground.

Then the king ran at him with his sword; but the cat stood on his hind-legs and grinned with his teeth, and coveted the throat of the king, and the king tried to smite him on the head; but the cat strained his hinder feet and leaped at the king's breast, and fixed his teeth in the flesh, so that the blood streamed down from breast and shoulder.

Then the king struck him fiercely on the body, and the cat fell head downwards, but the feet stayed fixed in the hauberk. And the king smote them asunder, on which the cat fell to the ground, where she howled and brayed so loudly that it was heard through all the host, and she began to creep towards the cave; but the king stood between her and the cave, and when she tried to catch him with her teeth he struck her dead.

The cat's feet were still in the hauberk and the shield; and rather than get them out of the shield, they left them in as a trophy. But the feet left in the hauberk were put into a coffin and kept.

The Monty Python crew were well-versed in the classics - at least they went to the right university for it - so they may indeed have read the story of the Killer Cat. Their version is a little more hilarious, though.

I can't find a copy of The Vulgate Merlin on line, so I'll have to take Lady Wilde's word for it. Her book is ANCIENT LEGENDS, MYSTIC CHARMS, AND SUPERSTITIONS OF IRELAND WITH SKETCHES OF THE IRISH PAST, 1888

Income inequality

2011-10-27T01:14:00.000-07:00

So, when I say that income inequality is bad, why do I say that? If everyone gets a basic wage, who cares if someone gets more?

This TED talk explains how corrosive income inequality is. It's 16 minutes long, but it delivers the goods.

(Via More Words Deeper Hole)

Steppin' Razor

2011-10-24T09:17:00.000-07:00

The Kills, playing Peter Tosh's Steppin' Razor acoustic.

And the Kills playing Steppin' Razor with just a tad of amplification.

I love this band.

The other part of the medley seems to be Willie Cobbs - or Bo Diddley - or whatever, but how come that murderous riff disappeared in the Kills version?

This T S McPhee version is the one I grew up with.

Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-24T08:50:00.000-07:00

I'm not actually at Wall Street, and so I'm not technically Occupying Wall Street, but I just wanted to post that I am one of the 99%.

This website has more than thirty graphs that show why income inequality today is not just slightly higher than in previous eras, but radically different. And it's not from Radical Marxist Instigator Weekly, it's from Business Insider. Every single chart shows we're not going through some readjustment or growth, but a change to a different way of life.

They ate all our money. They vacuumed it up. We don't have it. It went to banks. Then they claimed they were too big to fail, and got bailed out. They went on to pay outrageous bonuses on their non-existent profits.

Now I hear bankers on the radio explaining how our pensions and 401ks are unsustainable and we must expect them to be downsized. I heard them on BBC World Service today, in fact, explaining how our greediness must be curtailed.

I'm not greedy. I've paid into Social Security all my working life. To hear some lackey roar about how I feel "entitled" and I need to be disabused of the notion annoys me. They took our wage increases for the last thirty years, 401(k)s, they took our mortgages, they got a trillion dollar 'bail-out', and now they want our pensions and Social Security. No. Too much already.

Orange Claw Hammer

2011-10-23T19:39:00.000-07:00

Never heard this before. Captain Beefheart in Dylan mode and Frank Zappa in Paul Simon mode, tackling a Beefheartesque folk song.

Hollis Brown must be turnin' in his grave.

Eyes of Providence

2011-10-23T17:01:00.000-07:00

Jimmy Page, wearing a shirt with an eye-in-the-pyramid design on the back. (That's Bill Graham, the famous promoter, with him.)

This shirt also starred in The Song Remains the Same.

And here's Alison Mosshart. (Picture found on Tumblr, so no credit for it.)

Result?

Best buddies!

(That last one is Ross Halfin's, if you can't
tell by the watermark.)

999, as it were.

2011-10-19T23:21:00.000-07:00

How would tax burdens change if we were to go to Cain's SimCity 999 mix, you ask. Well, it would mean the rich paying so much less tax that you will get tired of scrolling down before you find out how much.

If your scroll finger is youthful and refreshed, try here.

Pandas

2011-10-17T23:54:00.001-07:00

Hidden kitty

2011-10-01T19:48:00.000-07:00

Most of my acquaintances said it took them an instant to find the cat in this picture. I have to say it took me five minutes.

It is really there, and not at all hiding.

Guy on a buffalo

2011-09-28T22:08:00.000-07:00

Two Americana greats, with accompanying video of the guy on the buffalo. I laffed.

Bears, Indians and Such

Orphans, Cougars and Whatnot

Go ask Alice--

2011-09-28T18:26:00.000-07:00

Steve Simels of the awesome blog PowerPop found and posted this gem.

It's Grace Slick's original vocal track from White Rabbit, unaccompanied. It starts around thirty seconds in, after the introduction (which you can't hear) so be prepared for the silence. Early in the morning, which this is, I can't read very well and I read this as being the 'uncompressed' vocal track and wondered vaguely how much compression there was in 1966, and whether that's something Jefferson Airplane would have indulged in.

Simels thinks Jefferson Airplane have a pre-echo of punk rock, but on this evidence I have to disagree. It sounds like 1966 - I can hear the icy purity of Sandy Denny (of Fairport Convention) but each line seems to end with a warm, Germanic inflection that reminds me of Nico. I can't tell if Slick is doing this on purpose, or if it her own style.

I know someone who can't listen to female vocals. Listening to this outpouring of power and dynamics, I have no idea why.

Why I'm sad I no longer live in Britain.

2011-09-23T23:25:00.000-07:00

That is all.

The Kills, Kissy Kissy (Acoustic)

2011-09-20T23:42:00.000-07:00

I can't figure out a way to rip this video, so the best I can do is show it to everyone.

The Kills, singing Kissy Kissy on a rumpled bed somewhere in rock and roll ville.

Christ, I had to go to 32 bit Internet Explorer before I could even embed that fucker. But it's worth it, isn't it, Pop Pickers?

Death Penalty

2011-09-20T23:14:00.000-07:00

So, as long as your skin color isn't white, it's okay for Georgia to kill you on suspicion you're a bad guy. They don't need to *prove* it, because it's up to you to prove you are innocent. I know that's not what it says in the law, but that's what it said in this case. Websites have taken down the assertion, but they always leave a trace.

You shouldn't have to prove you are innocent. The law says they have to prove you are guilty. Maybe that seems like nitpicking, but in a couple of days they are going to kill Troy Davis because he couldn't prove he was innocent.

Could you "prove" your innocence if the weight of the state was thrown against you, some day when they needed a perp? I couldn't. I'd be hard pressed to prove what I did 24 hours ago yesterday, never mind a year ago.

It's not a good idea to give the state the right to kill you. They might not always use their powers for good.

Interwebz, health and privacy.

2011-09-20T20:52:00.000-07:00

Google+ just went from private to beta...or so I'm told. I joyfully went over there to sign up with my real name...because they're big on real names...with my other email address. After about 30 screens I just gave up. It's not worth it. Why do they want to know all that stuff about me, and how do I keep it separate from anything else?

My company, a big health care firm, recently told me they were going to 'push' 'Gazelle' to my 'BlackBerry', a program that puts all my health records on line - for easier access, of course. And that was the same day I signed up for a $100 discount on my health care next year* if I filled in a questionnaire which I subsequently learned 'may' be shared with my insurance company. Am I really going to tell my employer and my health insurance company how much I drink, smoke, exercise and eat? I don't fucking think so. The tobacco questions were legally binding too, so I did answer them honestly. (I don't smoke, so it's easy to tell the truth.) Insurance companies drop you for any tiny thing they don't like. Why the hell should I tell them my eating habits for $100? My employer, you crazy.

I don't want my health records on line. I'm happy with them in big paper binders at my doctor's office. I trust my doctor (marginally). I don't want Google learning my real name and attempting to reconcile it with everything it finds on line (including Gazelle). It's bad enough it tracks this blog and this name everywhere. Watching my name pop up at the bottom of every news article I read because the comments sections is primed to accept my contribution is eerie enough. I've never signed up for Facebook and I never will. Employers now routinely ask for the Facebook name and password during job interviews. No fucking thanks. At least I can say with a straight face I don't got one.

You know, a couple of years ago, I insisted we get a static IP so I didn't have to convince the bank I was me every time I logged on. I think it's about time we went back to a dynamic one. Everyone I meet in real life knows who I am. You guys know who I am. I don't need Google following me around like a spaniel, or my company, or worse my health insurance, vacuuming up all the information I post on line.

*Health care this year - about $2000 from me and about $7000 from my company. Not exactly rock bottom as it is.

Scott Wade's dirty car pictures.

2011-09-18T22:08:00.000-07:00

Writing art in dust on unwashed cars here.

The key is that he's not just creating an artwork, but the artwork changes over time, as dust settles and rain softens.

Dinosaurs

2011-09-18T20:38:00.000-07:00

When I was a little kid, dinosaurs were totally cool. After Jurassic Park, they were sick. But now I learn they are far beyond cool. They actually look like this.

Yes, they are giant furry man-eating chickens on acid with extreme prejudice.

It turns out that they've always had fluffy feathers, which is why they now have flight feathers. The crow or turkey vulture or parakeet watching you right now is a dinosaur. I kind of knew it by how they cocked their head when they looked at me, but now science has something to back that up.

Wired has a lovely article detailing the recent finds: dinosaur feathers in amber. The picture above is by Lida Xing as quoted in their article.

The Raconteurs, MI Fest, September 17th 2011

2011-09-18T20:16:00.000-07:00

Alas I could not fly to the opposite side of the country to see the legendary Raconteurs in concert at MI Fest yesterday. But I've heard about five accounts of their show and the verdict was they ROCKED.

Here is a most extraordinary version of Your Blue Veins.

Does Jack really plant one on Dean Fertita as they leave the stage? With his wife watching from the other side too?

A less snoggy view of Your Blue Veins.

Broken Boy Soldier.

Consoler of the Lonely

It's great to see these guys back in action. I've never seen the Raconteurs but now I'm desperate to do so. Hope the informal tour continues.

Edit: Here's Level.

Little Jack is the coolest person ever.

Astounding stuff.

Red dot

2011-09-18T19:16:00.000-07:00

From 9gag.com, who are too cool to watermark their jokes but I forgive them.

Business Cat:

Morning Doves

2011-09-12T17:00:00.000-07:00

Here's a picture I took at at an eatery early morning Monday. This young couple came in to order breakfast and sit by the window. While they waited for the food, they looked, not at each other, and not at the view, such as it was, but only at their cell phones. It struck me as the inverse of Edward Hopper's Nighthawks - it's day instead of night, natural light swamps the electric light, the figures are in relief rather than lit, the waiter is not central, but absent, the viewpoint is looking out instead of looking in, and the characters are not loners engaged in picking up strangers, but friends ignoring each other while taking comfort in their closeness. And there is a door.

It's a cell phone picture. (What do you think *I* was reading while waiting for breakfast?) The resolution on the BlackBerry is terrible and most things come out the color of a mudflow with rainbow glitter sprinkled over it. In this case it's performed very well, although I admit I have adjusted the color balance in Photoshop. I may continue to adjust it as it's not quite perfect. Also, I do know about the Rule of Thirds - Photoshop even gave me a grid dividing this into ninths (unasked) when I cropped it. I ignored the tetchy critter.

The Kills, House of Blues, San Diego September 11, 2011

2011-09-12T16:40:00.000-07:00

Saw the Kills last night and they are shaping up to be one of my top favorite bands. There's something about Jamie's guitar that seems to mine a well of...uh...plumb a vein of? some deep rock structures so that everything he plays seems seminal even though at the shortest count, fifty years of rock have already passed...uh...under the bridge. (Metaphors are deserting me.) Listening to Kissy Kissy, I seem to hear every rock riff I ever enjoyed inside the sparse guitar-and-drum-machine arrangement, and song after song can summon up the Kills' odd mixture of nostalgia and shock of the new. Recently, they've added a Mellotron, and for some reason, they can now sound like New Order at its finest, even though I'm not convinced New Order ever had a Mellotron.

They are also very danceable.

They move a lot, and so not a single picture of the Kills last night from my cellphone is worth posting. But I will anyway, as a block of text is very intimidating.

Suffice to say Alison Mosshart's new pink hair is a shock to those of us who envied her thick, straight black locks, but it works beautifully on stage where it's a colorful centerpiece to the duo's kinetic act. Jamie was craggy and masculine as usual, machine-gunning the faithful at the barrier with his guitar and generally appearing to have fun.

I'm feeling a bit ranty about support acts though. Yesterday we had two. Why on earth would any concert goer need more than 33% of a support act, never mind 200%? What are they actually for?

Yesterday we had Mini Mansions. I've seen them before, supporting the Dead Weather, and quite liked them then. They have a Beatlesque way with words and harmonies that is completely charming, though Heart of Glass appears to have mutated since then to lose the great slide guitar. I'd be happy to pay $5 to hear them in a bar or something. Their main drawback, in my view, is that they don't have a drummer. Their lead singer plays a snare drum and a floor tom, standing up while singing. However, his job is to go "BANG!" on a drum whenever he feels a "bang" is the noise the music needs. This is all very well, but the drummer-as-timekeeper concept is entirely missing and it makes me feel like I'm at a rehearsal where the drummer couldn't be bothered to turn up. I imagine there are drummers out there who would like the gig, and the singer would be able to go "BANG" when he felt like it even afterwards, so what's the downside in hiring one?

The other support act was Eleanor Friedberger. She had a vigorous musical style that seemed very 80's Valley. She was dressed in standard Lesbian chic - blue shirt and pants, natural hair and natural skin, and a big, big, green guitar. Her singer-songwriter style made us wonder why she'd brought a band - a workmanlike drummer (hey Mini Mansions, there's your chance!) and a bassist and guitarist, both with really boring, non-rock'n'roll hair - since they didn't seem to add anything to it. By happenstance, they stayed still long enough for me to get a picture.

A name for them formed immediately - Tom Patty Smith and the Heartbreakers - and nothing they did made me think they'd improved on the 80's originals. However, my feet began to hurt so much from standing that I was close to the point of demanding human sacrifices when they fortuitously left the stage. I totally wanted to go home and read a book. My appetite for rock and roll had been ground off to a nub (uh, metaphors haven't recovered yet). So much for support acts being "warm up" bands.

So, once again, what is a support act for? If it's to get me ready to rock'n'roll, these two weren't it. I'd prefer a decent DJ with 45 minutes of great dance tunes to loosen me up than two hours of derivative post-rock. Oceangal said she'd like something like a comedian, to get us out of ourselves and ready for the headlining act. Is the point to break new music the headlining act really likes? I had no sense that was the case yesterday. And if people want to break new music there has to be a way of doing it that doesn't lead to me to wanting to buy voodoo dolls of them and sticking pins into them. Is it simply to sell more drinks before the headliners come on? I think you might have something there. Give me a two drink minimum cover charge then, man, so I don't have to stand up two hours on a crowded dancefloor before the Kills come on.

Frankly at my time of life, my ideal concert-going experience would be to have Pegasus whisk me off in my favorite armchair and deposit me at the barrier approximately one drink before the headliners come on.

Heaven.

(Edited)

New ponds for old, part 2

2011-09-11T08:00:00.000-07:00

Go to part one.

Once the fountain was placed, we started the water. The little blue shark has been in the fountain bowl for years. We found it under the silt and put it back in again. We're hoping that the moss will come back to life once it's been rewetted for a bit.

We had to cut the plants back drastically. But basically, Jimmy likes it.

So that's a positive result.

New ponds for old, part 1

2011-09-10T20:08:00.000-07:00

In about 2001, we dug a hole in a planter in the atrium, and put in a hard-shell pond liner. We filled it with water, put ferns around the outside, put a fountain in it, and presto, a lovely white-noisemaker for sleeping purposes and a refuge for our iguanas.

That one's of Jimmy, in about 2007.

The hard shell pond liner was guaranteed to last ten years, or fifteen years or something. And it was in a planter - not subject to earth movements, giant pointy stones or tree roots. Nevertheless, this year it began leaking. This was a big problem. The fountain was just about maneuverable when we were forty. Now it's too heavy. Draining the liner and inspecting it showed numerous tiny splits in the plastic, of unknown origin. We taped them over with pond repair sticky patches and refilled.

Bingo! For two months. Then it started leaking again. Miserable fish. Algae covered atrium. Roots growing in drain.

We called the manufacturers who said they still had that model and it would be $60, but since they no longer had any California dealership arrangements, it turned out shipping would be $400. We were too British and polite to mention the warranty thing.

So, we had to 'repair' the hard pond liner by overlaying it with a flexible pond liner. Last week we bought a flexible pond liner that people use to drape over shaped ponds in the ground. Our assignment - to line our hard liner. First we had to disassemble the fountain and haul it out with a block and tackle. Luckily STB understands pulleys. I 'did it' in physics but never actually pulleyed anything.

Then we had to drape the flexible liner over the hard shell pond liner and fill it slowly, ensuring that the folds in the material went where we wanted them, rather than where the weight of the water put them. The plants growing around the shell are very aggressive, so we had to tuck the flexible liner right underneath the lip of the hard liner. I still think that the ferns will get under it, so I guess we'll have to clean it out occasionally.

Once it's all tucked in, we left it to condition for a week. And then the effort of craning the hardware back in occurred.

Click to go to part 2

Baby Gecko

2011-09-10T17:53:00.000-07:00

A change from Baby Ruthless, at least. I found this baby gecko outside my house in the middle of the night. What was I doing up in the middle of the night? I have no idea. For scale, he's sitting next to the 1/2" of grout between a 12" Saltillo tile and the white stucco wall. He looks to be three or four days old.

A couple of days later I was up in the middle of the night - same reason - and his dad was there instead.

Alison Mosshart: What a Wonderful World

2011-09-09T03:13:00.000-07:00

This is proof that Alison Mosshart and Baby Ruthless are two different people. Alison has covered the granddad-beloved smarm-fest What a Wonderful World. If Baby Ruthless had a solo single I'm sure it would be called something like I Claw My Way Into Your Frozen Grave And Consume Your Soul (Baby).

It's quite nice, isn't it?

Although, I guess, it was for the TV show Sons of Anarchy, which I bet isn't a reality show about people who rescue baby rabbits or anything.

Robot Chicken

2011-09-07T23:11:00.000-07:00

The Oliver Postgate chicken.

These little piggies went back to the start...

2011-09-05T19:53:00.000-07:00

The following is an ad. If you can overcome cynicism long enough to watch it until its final frames when the sponsor's name appears, I think you'll be able to concentrate on kvelling over the marvelous animation.

The soundtrack is Willie Nelson covering Coldplay's The Scientist, although I have to say I couldn't tell his treatment from theirs. The theme is a farmer moving from traditional to intensive farming methods, and after a while realizing no-one is benefiting - himself, his customers or his livestock - and so he goes back to the start. The commentariat at YouTube is particularly scathing about this ad, as getting emotional over this little fictional story doesn't actually mean you're doing anything about factory farming, but I reckon as long as you bear that in mind while watching, no harm done.

And the animation, by London's Johnny Kelly, is as I said, superb. There's a making-of video available here. It really is stop motion, using molded and even three-d printed characters arranged on a long, long table so the video looks like one extended tracking shot. It works perfectly with the song. Logically, a linear tracking shot implies time passing as well as geographical space passing, and by definition you can't get 'back to the start', but in this treatment, the story is told in such a way that the time paradox adds to the experience rather than nullifying it. Nice video.

Sunspots in OC

2011-09-04T18:38:00.000-07:00

And it was off to Orange County Museum of Art today to see the last day of the Alexander Calder and Contemporary Art Exhibition, Form, Balance, Joy.

OCMA is in central OC, near Fashion Island, so driving around there entails spotting Maseratis, Lamborghinis and Ferraris. If you only have a Porsche, you're non-U. My Hyundai (Hyundai Hyundai's his name) doesn't even register. Inside the museum we toured the Calder exhibition and then went to the closing day artist's talk, which didn't feature Calder of course (that would be table tapping) but a young artist called Jason Middlebrook and an itinerant astronomer called Bob Noss. (STB called him a street astronomer, which is a great name and possibly the official title for this kind of guy - he had set up a telescope outside for us all to look at eruptions on the sun.) Middlebrook told us about his Calder-influenced art - he does a lot of mobiles, though unlike Calder's thin-sprung sheet iron, Middlebrook tends to go for organic pendulums, driftwood or dumpster wood. Bob gave a gosh-wow tour of the solar system which did indeed wow most of the audience, who had presumably come here for the art but stayed for the science. They then all asked Difficult Questions like "What is gravity?" and "If the universe is expanding, what is it expanding into?" Bob fielded them without difficulty, tempting me to ask, "If light travels one light year a year, and that galaxy you talked about is a million light years away, how come we can see it since the Creation is only 6,000 years old and the light hasn't gotten here yet?" I didn't, though. Orange County is only 1/3 fundie and so the audience might have spotted me as a troll. I expect Bob can answer that pretty smoothly, anyway. Astronomers all over the world learn to deal with lunatics early on, as an infallible sign of lunacy is discovering the Secret of the Universe, such as Einstein Was Wrong, and the walls of observatories are literally papered with the letters people write.

Eventually someone asked about gravity, and after Bob had explained it, this presented a chance for Middlebrook to leap in and actually talk about his art, as after all, mobiles are all about gravity. And his other pieces are boards - raw wood boards, painted - that leaned against walls, taking the characteristics, as he explained, of both mobiles, which are subject to gravity, and paintings, which are confined to flat walls. Afterwards we finished touring the exhibition. I think most people are familiar with Alexander Calder, and the show didn't exactly shatter one's expectations, although there was more recycling of used materials in the pieces (both Calder and modern) than I'd expected and the cards that explain things pointed this out repeatedly. I noticed that those perforated-leaf steaming trivets came up a lot in the modern pieces and broken tail-lights came up in Calder's - and many people are familiar with the tin can Bird, 1952, one of the most joyful of all pieces of art (pictured above).

Black Mahal, Orange County Great Park

2011-09-03T11:24:00.000-07:00

Last night we went to Orange County Great Park, home of the World's Most Boring Balloon Trip, to see Bhangra band Black Mahal play their fusion of funk, hip-hop and traditional Punjabi music (with a little reggae on the side).

Led by traditional singer and dhol player Ustad Lal Sing Bhatt, augmented by bass, drums, saxophone and trumpet, they are a party mixture of P-Funk, Public Enemy (if PE had had their great uncle on vocals) and as STB pointed out, classical-era Gong. They taught us some Indian dance moves but we must have been too crappy at it for them to actually teach us a whole dance.

Lots of fun.

Lick My...

2011-09-03T11:15:00.000-07:00

The internet is all a twitter...so to speak...over the fact that Jack White produced a single with Inane Clown Posse singing. The record seems to have been a joke based on the fact that Mozart (for it his he) made beautiful music, but in this case called it something naughty. Here it is. Judge for yourself.

Ha ha! Oh, wait, wrong video. That was the same joke done better twenty-seven years ago. In fact, I'm not going to link directly to the JW single. No point in encouraging people.

I feel a little sorry for ICP. From the recent interviews it seems Jack called them over, gave them the hilarious joke to sing and then kicked them out.

"He explained to us the song was basically called 'Lick My Ass,' and we went, 'Ah, figures. 'Lick My Ass' featuring ICP,' " the Detroit rap duo's Violent J tells Billboard.com. "We like to think there's more of a method to our madness. We don't just do songs with a dumb name. But once (White) explained to us how (Mozart) had a sense of humor and everything, and we saw how excited (White) was about it, that got us fired up, and we really got into it." From Billboard.

But it was definitely a collaboration. I like [B-Side] "Mountain Girl" a lot better than the ["Lick Me in the Arse"], myself. It was more ICP's feel. We were kinda hoping they'd go with that as a single, but it's cool. The more I hear ["Lick Me in the Arse"], the more I dig it.
But as far as things we woulda done--like stacked our vocals or doubled our vocals--they weren't having that shit. This is garage-rock style. You go off, one-take style. From Village Voice.

When they were finished recording, White played them some of the material he'd been working on, including songs with Tom Jones and Detroit rapper Black Milk. J returned the favor by playing White some of "The Mighty Death Pop," "but he just did not seem interested," J says. "He was real nice about it, super cool, but it was kind of like look-at-your-watch, let's go." From Detroit News.

Thanks to Mike in comments for bringing this up, and to Kali, who found all the articles about the single (but is unlikely to agree with my conclusion. Or Mike's either.)

And thanks to Spinal Tap for "Lick My Love Pump" (Nigel was always my fave rock musician.)

OK, I relent. Here's the trailer to the ICP version, which ends up with the text telling you which URL to use to "hear it in it's entirety". That really is a very Third Man Grocers' Apos'trophe. Well done.

Raccoons

2011-08-30T20:33:00.000-07:00

For the last ten days, the local raccoons have ripped up my lawn looking for, apparently, grubs that resemble succulent prawns that live under the turf. I've attempted to kill the grubs, which this late in the season means applying Sevin, a totally poisonous dust, to the grass.

It hasn't made any difference - each night the raccoons have torn up the turf. But something in their dynamic has changed. This morning at 6 am, I heard them fighting. I got out too late to see what they where squabbling over. A few minutes ago at dusk, I heard them fighting again, and watched them climb into the tree that serves as their stepladder between my yard and everyone else's. Hopefully this means that the free shrimp bar is over and the patrons are arguing about the remnants. I'm only sorry that I had to apply the world's worst insecticide to get it done. Next year I'll apply less harmful barrier products earlier in the year.

Today in Shopping

2011-08-28T23:37:00.000-07:00

I was treated as a potential criminal at a store today. It was the Farm to Market in San Juan Capistrano, where I go to get cheap local produce, herbs, spices and above all, organic hair dye. My hair's been fading from red to ginger over the past couple of years. Being of British origin, ginger doesn't exactly cut it, so I first resorted to henna, then Herbatint. I suspect Herbatint is made of exactly the same stuff I would buy in Vons, but it's very careful to tell me it's "herbal" and I fall for that kind of stuff.

The woman behind the cosmetic counter asked me if she could help me, and I said no. After a second I realized all the hair dye had been put behind the counter glass, so I said, "Apparently you can help me...I need a box of Herbatint and it's behind glass now."

She fished for the shade I wanted, handed it to me and then as I made to push the cart off into the uncharted waters of the Made-Up Vitamins Aisle, she stopped me. "You can't put that in the cart. I have to take it up to the front. We've had kids taking them. Are you done shopping?"

I wasn't done shopping, I said, but I didn't point out I was far from a "kid".

"Nothing personal," she said as she took the box from me. "You can collect it when you're ready to leave."

It might have been "nothing personal" but I felt like I'd been singled out as a common criminal. I fumed in humiliation all the way through the store and wanted to leave without collecting the dye - at $17, it was twice the price of everything else I was buying combined, but not exactly an X-Box or an iPhone - but I realized that if I left without it, I'd definitely be known forever as the Woman Who Tried To Lift Our Hair Dye But Was Foiled.

"Ready," I grated at her when I was set to leave. She made small talk and wished me a nice day about eleven times on the way to the cash register, but all I could think of was that she'd essentially accused me of being a thief.

I won't be going to Farm to Market in San Juan Capistrano in future. I don't need to be humiliated while shopping. The city has a farmer's market in town once a week where I can get fresh vegetables, and I can buy ordinary hair dye at Vons like a normal person. It won't be "herbal" but then again it doesn't seem to harm anyone else.

Farm to Market is one of those places that sells organic veg along with things like negatively-charged water (the extra electrons stop the water molecules clumping together, apparently), water with added oxygen, and Colloidal Silver. SJC is a pragmatic town, and I'm surprised there are enough Fans of the Woo to keep Farm to Market going. Well, it just lost me, and my steady $20 a month. A major blow, I'm sure.

I first got this treatment many years ago in East London, when I was shopping in some megastore - English equivalent of Target or Walmart - and a security guard came up and followed me around. He didn't follow at a discreet distance, but shadowed me from a foot away, looking at what I was looking at and bending when I bent down to look at something. I spent longer than I should have pretending it wasn't happening and trying to act normally, but after a while I gave up and left the store, which is what he undoubtedly wanted. I never went back there again, either, but since I can't remember where it was, I can't badmouth it on the internet.

I remember later, also in East London, going to a chemist's opposite the teaching hospital where I worked and asking for carbon tetra-chloride. The assistant called for the pharmacist who came down some wooden stairs from the attic like a wandmaker from Diagon Alley, and stared at me like I was a bug. "I don't have any carbon tetra-chloride, and even if I did, I wouldn't sell it to YOU," he said, as if I were Amy Winehouse or something. "What do you want it for?"

"I need to clean carbon deposits off the nylon spindles on my amplifier knobs," I said, trying to be reasonable in the face of frank condescension. "The build-up is making the sound crackle when I change the settings."

"Use nail polish remover. Acetone," he said, walking away from me.

I wanted to shout at him, "Nylon is soluble in acetone, you utter failure as a supposedly degreed chemist! It'd soften the spindles and wreck my entire amplifier." But I didn't. I just learned to hate East Londoners.

Although I no longer wear a leather bike jacket and a Ramones t-shirt, it appears I'm still in the drug-addict/thief class as far as store owners are concerned. Fuck 'em all.

Scrubs, the jammies of the medical professon

2011-08-22T22:32:00.000-07:00

I saw another woman in the supermarket wearing scrubs today.

I HATE that. I can just imagine her shopping while thinking, "Shit, what a horrible day I've had in the Emergency Room, treating people with MRSA, Rabies, drug-resistant TB...that HIV-positive guy who'd had the bloody catfight with the Hepatitis C-infected guy...then the possible-Ebola guy bleeding out all over the floor and Ol' No Nose Phil, the Leprosy Man, coming in to have a few bits of dying flesh snipped off...I'm too tired to even change my clothes!" Meanwhile she's squeezing avocados and bending over the peaches looking for a good one.

I can also imagine her leaning over some deathly ill Flesh Eating Bacteria Guy in the hospital cleaning out his wounds as her scrubs' top rubs against him, the same top she was wearing when she carried the bag of moldy onions on her hip back to Von's to get her money back at lunchtime.

A rose in Spanish Harlem blooms no more

2011-08-22T22:23:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Jerry Leiber died.

Who?

The guy who wrote Hound Dog, among a thousand more.

Nick Ashford died today as well.

RIP both.

Black Waterside

2011-08-16T00:06:00.000-07:00

As for White Summer/Black Mountainside, in case anybody feels my fangirliness precludes adequate exploration into Jimmy Page's roots, here's Black Waterside by Bert Jansch.

And here's the corresponding Zeppelin tune. Can't figure out how to embed it, so you'll have to click. I think Jimmy wins, but then I always did.

And White Summer? Davey Graham.

Led Zeppelin, the I

2011-08-15T23:24:00.000-07:00

For whatever reason, today was Led Zeppelin day. Always loved the first album. I'd had it for many years before someone told me Jimmy Page's guitar on the album was a Telecaster. Listening to I Can't Quit You Baby, it was natural to assume it was a Gibson ES 335.

Nope, it was a Telecaster - same as on Communications Breakdown, the world's first angry punk song.

I'm not the world's biggest fan of I Can't Quit You Baby, which I think of as a Savoy Brown song, but hell, it's a fuck of a version.

Daily Telegraph develops a sense of humor

2011-08-13T09:45:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure how the Torygraph managed to match up the (stock looking?) picture with the headline but it made me laugh like a drain.

You can find the original at the Daily Telegraph site. Hope they don't change it!

Radio Off

2011-08-11T07:40:00.000-07:00

SiriusXM just dropped BBC Radio 1 from its lineup without warning. On the 2nd of August, I paid a year's dues, on the 9th, BBC Radio 1 disappeared to be replaced by a disembodied voice saying I can find songs like the ones I used to enjoy on several channels.... It didn't explain how I could find people like Annie Nightingale and Zane Lowe, or things like Radio 1 outside broadcasts from Ibiza, or the Live Lounge.

I cancelled - they gave me my dues back minus two bucks - complained, and will listen to Radio 1 on the website instead, although that wrecks the timeshift that XM used to put into it. (It was streamed five hours late, so the times on the BBC clock were correct for the east coast - three hours wrong for me, but not as weird as listening with an 8 hour offset.)

I'm not sure what the issue was. I've seen folk say that the BBC did it, as they are readying for iPlayer, and I've seen people say that XM simply backed out of the negotiations. Either way, it wasn't a nice thing to do. And it's not like I have other things to take my mind off it, like lay-offs at work, the Crisis of Capitalism or the England riots.

How could I dance with her mother?

2011-08-08T00:07:00.000-07:00

I was alarmed today to learn that the worst song ever just became No. 1 in the UK charts. It has a couple of inescapable hooks, but still. I mean, I sometimes hum Hot Butter by Popcorn, or it may be Popcorn by Hot Butter forty years later, but I don't have it confused with a good song.

On the chart show today they interviewed Cher Lloyd and she's 17 and new to the business, which almost made me hold off from posting. But on the other hand, I was first taught Clementine when I was six, and although Sir Mix A Lot was not around when I was six, I could have learned Buttermilk Biscuits at the same age. It's no excuse to say you put them together because you were just seventeen (if you know what I mean).

Also, it doesn't explain what a Swagger Jagger is. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with Mick Jagger and I'm not getting anywhere trying to track it to Staggerlee. I wish I could.

All I get from it is orange boxes without topses were shoes for Clementine and a touch of Buffalo Girls go around the outside, around the outside. Or Buttermilk Biscuits.

At least Clementine is out of copyright.

I quite liked that Friday song. And that Pricetag song. And the Friday song by the Pricetag lady. Whatever happened to the good songs of three months ago?

Watching the Detectives

2011-07-29T20:49:00.000-07:00

Reader Mike, in the comments to yesterday's post, points out he's heard dubstep before, and pretty much all the rest.

Hey, Mike, where have you heard this before?

Panic! At The Disco: The Ballad Of Mona Lisa... by jimihubabua

Mmmn?

I think the vocal bears an uncanny resemblance to one Declan McManus' Washing the Protectives, though I'm willing to concede they may both have had a common ancestor.

Also, it has Steampunk imagery, which I'm pretty sure Mr. Costello was too cool to get mixed up in. (I look at the Raconteurs funny too, when it comes to the Steampunk thing.)

Have some Dubstep

2011-07-28T21:35:00.000-07:00

There's a lot wrong with the world, and other blogs are tackling that. In the meantime, here's some dubstep tracks.

Ah, that's better.

England is Awesome!

2011-07-28T07:20:00.000-07:00

So says Jon Stewart, in a clip that apparently can't be shown in Britain due to Parliamentary Copyright, whatever that is. Here he is talking about the News of the World scandal and various arguments and fisticuffs from Wendi Deng to David Cameron. I'm told that link works overseas, if you're bold enough to click it.

The Sky's The Limit

2011-07-27T08:24:00.000-07:00

Recently, I've been seeing a new phrase around. boing boing currently has it on its masthead as the 'phrase to live by'. It's everywhere, and it is, "Don't tell me the sky is the limit when there are footprints on the moon".

It almost makes you cry with the soaring fabulousness and human yearning inherent in the precise and crispy wording, doesn't it? However, "the sky is the limit" already means that there is no limit. "Don't tell me the sky is the limit" makes no sense. If you think the existing catchphrase was intended to crush people's native imagination and will to succeed, then you are poor at English.

It's still a nice phrase though.

Rango, DVD 2011 (Spoilers)

2011-07-25T15:36:00.000-07:00

I watched Gore Verbinski's Rango yesterday. What an odd film. I spent the first half of it hating it, and only began to make sense of it near the end, shortly after the bats with machine guns had chased our heroes and their ~~gasoline tanker~~ I mean wagon carrying a water jug down the ~~Death Star trench~~ I mean desert canyon.

The animation is breathtaking. Every fur texture, the hair, the scales, the clothes, all are perfect. The facial expressions and gaits are wonderful, naturalistic when called for and properly exaggerated when needed – for instance when Bill Nighy's sinister Rattlesnake Jake decides to crush someone in his coils. The landscapes are fine, and the lighting is so good that it genuinely looked as though someone had built and lit the sets for a master DP. On the other hand, the movie featured so much sudden death, mutilation, injury, roadkill, impaling on cactus spines, being set on fire, guns being handled by children and loss-of-eye-due-to-arrow-through-socket that it made me actually uncomfortable.

(Many spoilers below.)

The main character (voiced by Johnny Depp, as brilliant as usual) is a chameleon (get it?) who has no name (get it?). He lives in bliss in a glass tank (get it?) putting on plays with his pet-toys. On the way from somewhere, in the middle of the desolate Mojave Desert, his tank falls from the family car and shatters (get it?). Wandering in the desert, the humidity-loving lizard finds a cowboy town called Dirt (cf. 'Earth,' get it?). His blarney impresses everyone in the ~~Star Wars Cantina~~ local saloon and so he proceeds to remake himself, as chameleons do, naming himself Rango (get it?) and setting himself up as the hero by talking up a storm as a bandit-killer. Every town needs a hero and Rango becomes sheriff.

Earlier, on his way from his shattered tank on the asphalt to the desert itself, No-Name-As-Yet meets a roadkill armadillo, midriff squashed flat. The armadillo offers Rango sage advice. This early disturbing scene rather set me up to hate the movie. And – it seemed rather abrupt. When wannabe-mythical characters are called from their tanks or other comfortable dwellings to cross the river on their Hero's Journey, they usually wander around and say why me? a lot, and the ferryman who offers sage advice is usually less dead. All became clear a lot later on.

The various animals who live in Dirt are running out of water due to a Chinatown-style conspiracy. There's a run on the water bank, a classic Western (water) bank robbery, and all kinds of Western water-related shenanigans all lifted with a fairly heavy hand from other movies.

Rango wins the heart of a girl called Beans. STB thought Beans was a lizard and that's possible. However her character flaw, or whatever it was, was freezing up and not being able to move for ten to fifteen seconds every now and again, so I thought she was a Fainting Goat. Well, whatever. Adventures are had, and eventually Rango is exposed as a motormouth actor, not a real hero, and is forced to leave the town in disgrace.

So at the end of the second act, as usual, the hero has lost everything he ever had and there is no hope of return. Then – suddenly – in a twist from the usual Scriptwriter's Handbook – he meets the armadillo again. This time he's whole and his sage advice makes sense. Rango is given a vision of the Spirit of the West (Clint Eastwood, natch) and then Crosses the Road. This crossing is much more harrowing, as he literally walks across the I-15 freeway, with cars and trucks driving over him and yet just missing him. (I suspect Gore Verbinski has seen The Trip.)

This is the true crossing to the other side. The breaking of his tank and the task of becoming the hero to a town was actually still the chameleon being a chameleon, and the suspiciously dead ferry-armadillo was not his ultimate spiritual guide. The hallucinogenic sequences of the spiritual journey in the desert led STB to remark, "Oliver Stone called, wants his movie back." The initial scene of the talking roadkill finally made sense – the fever dreams of dead animals in the desert calling you on, Oliver Stone's dying Indian at the roadside.

On The Other Side of the Road, Rango learns that the town's water is being piped to Las Vegas (it isn't named but we see its iconic skyline). I couldn't work out if Las Vegas existed in the movie or if it was a metaphor. After all, characters all the way through the film whisper the rumor that "the water is being dumped in the desert". "Las Vegas" and "water is dumped in the desert" are synonymous in one major respect, but not in many others. It made my brane hert, so I gave up.

Rango gets some magic plants-of-burden to work on reversing the pipeline, rushes back to Dirt, gets the girl, saves the day and inundates the town with water. All's probably well with the world, except that previous scenes have shown that the town is in a dry lake bed, so they'll all have to build arks. Maybe that's being saved for Rango Part II: Waterworld.

Comic-Con day three or two or four

2011-07-22T23:14:00.000-07:00

This is certainly an education. I get up out of bed and queue for a while and get into a room where Stephen Spielberg and Peter Jackson are discussing the new Tin Tin movie with the fans, and showing a couple of clips. Then, time with Kate Beckinsale and others to discuss the new Underworld movie (it's in 3D!), and then a half hour with the folks behind Attack the Block.

Comic-Con doesn't actually give an individual fan access to a meteoric director (except for the fan this morning who wore a t shirt begging for a chance to shake Spielberg's hand, which was picked up by the cameras, so he did get the chance) but it does bring us all into actual contact with the people who make the creative decisions. A director who normally gets his (it's always 'his') only clues from box office receipts now gets to hear a roar or a laugh or baffled silence from a live audience of 6,000. (No baffled silences today.) That's got to be a good thing.

As well as a thousand Steampunks, Stormtroopers and Alice in Wonderlands, today a guy is wandering around in a mouse mask, like Deadmou5. The mask is covered in LCDs, so when someone stops him to talk, his habitual blue grin reacts to their presence - commonly by swirling clockwise and then rocking until it goes back to a grin with a mouth at the bottom, but often by blazing into red and yellow sweeps of information like those a squid will spill over its body in its instances of communication.. At a SIGGRAPH the fellow would have his own installation. Here at Comic-Con, where about 5% of the 120,000 attendees like to dress up, he's just one person. He certainly caught my eye.

Comic Con visit

2011-07-22T00:09:00.000-07:00

I'm spending the next few days at Comic Con in San Diego.

The geeks milling about outside San Diego Convention Center, by STB

I've never been before - always been more of a Worldcon person, but the last time...Denver, I think...I felt I'd rather go to somewhere well-attended enough to draw big names and generally be splashy and oversized and colorful.

Well, Comic Con is certainly all of those. It's easy to see the relationship between the dour and ernest fannish Worldcon and the much bigger media convention. The same types of people are there, but instead of six thousand at best, there's well over a hundred thousand. About the same proportion are dressed in costume, which means there's a LOT of people in costume, and the major difference is I've no clue who all of them are. Presumably anime characters I've never heard of. Highlights today included not getting into a Harry Potter fandom panel because the vast room was filled before the line even started moving where we were and then listening to Jon Favreau (with Guillermo del Toro) in a vast cinema hall talking about Cowboys and Aliens and showing a long clip of a very cowboy movie indeed. With, as advertised, aliens. And then we went to see Penn and Teller. Teller is not actually mute. Hmm. My world is turned upside down.

Oh, and lots of people on panels use lots more profanity than at SF conventions. Oh, and I got to teach STB the "Yo dawg, I heard you like [Y] so I put [X] in your [X] so you can [Y] while you [Y]" meme.

Good times.

Jimmy Page Dot Com

2011-07-20T21:11:00.000-07:00

Jimmy Page recently opened a website. A day late, you might think, but not a dollar short. The site features a "This day in history" section which - for 24 hours only - showcases something Page did on that day. Sometimes it's something I've seen before - recently the 1977 Seattle Superdome Noise Solo was featured. Truth be told, I already have that on Very Slightly Unofficial Video. Today, it was a completely unheard before, 1961 Jimmy Page track, called "Jet Black" by Neil Christian and the Crusaders. (It's a take on Jet Black by the Shadows.)

Jimmy Page Dot Com says that none of these "this day in history" pages will be archived. They are up for that day and not available after that. Obviously, the clever and or motivated will be able to archive them, as I have with the rather-astonishing-for-1961-Jet Black. But to experience them in the first place, you have to go to Jimmy Page's website, and sign up.

Have I posted these before?

2011-07-18T22:56:00.000-07:00

Jimmy Page (for it is he) playing with the Black Crowes last week:

13-Jul-11

The otherwordly experience of seeing an empty I405. (If you're not Californian you won't know and won't care, but here it is. The 405 on a good day.

Yeah, luckily we didn't get Carmaggedon.