mememiner.com

Another bizarro politically-themed painting

This one involving Ron Paul:

Teeth pulled.

Long story short: one tooth grew in sideways, bottom wisdom teeth were impacted for year, finally broke through and immediately started showing signs of surface decay. Meanwhile, part of the biting surface of my upper rearmost molar is pressed up against another tooth, started to decay, badly. Can't see the decay though, but a month ago I started to feel it. 1 week of awful tootaches later, I find myself at the oral surgeon getting three teeth extracted. Only problem is, I can only get local anesthetic. Doc was quite good and managed to extract the teeth without cutting them, but being awake during something like this sucked. Mouth has been sore ever since, but less so each day. Hurt really bad after infection developed in socket but antibiotics cleared it up.

At any rate, here's the teeth I got pulled. The one on the ~~right~~ left shows extensive decay. No, I'm not proud of this, but the tooth was screwed up to begin with (growing in sideways, etc.) and since my mouth is pretty crowded as is, one less non-functional tooth doesn't bother or embarrass me.

Gary Gygax, RIP

Gary Gygax, who along with Dave Arneson, created Dungeons and Dragons, died this morning at the age of 69 at his home in Lake Geneva, WI.

I am very saddened to hear of his passing. I cannot put into words how influential Mr. Gygax was in my life. He not only taught me to use my imagination, he taught me how to apply it within a system of rules and boundaries. That experience, more than any other, I believe is responsible for whatever moderate amount of success I have achieved as an adult.

Thanks for everything Mr. Gygax. I hope you find the lands of your dreams in the afterlife.

Like Hope, But Different

Yes We Can

I’m caucusing for Barack Obama on Tuesday. I’m going to allow myself to hope that this man can bring the change this country so desperately needs. I’m doing this for my kids’ future.

My mind is made up. Watch this video, and you might make your mind up, too. I feel cheesy for even writing this, but man - this video struck a chord.

Proposed Republican Party bumper sticker for 2008

“Vote Republican. You can wreck a country in 8 years, but it takes 12 years to kill it”

(Hat tip to Sadly, No!)

Cheeseburger In A Can

Not kidding:

Cheeseburger in der Dose

I dunno how I feel about eating a canned cheeseburger on my next backpacking trip, but I’ll bet that when you pull it out, it looks nothing like the example cheeseburger on the product page.

Only 3.95 euros, if you’re interested.

Link via Gizmodo, via William Gibson’s blog, who says, “GOT YOUR FUTURE RIGHT HERE”.

Bassline House

So, lately I’ve been listening to a lot of speed garage. Around the time most of this stuff was coming out I was so deep into other musics that I heard speed garage a couple times, decided it was too “hand-baggy” for my tastes and never really listened to it again. Of course, speed garage would go on to mutate into 2-step garage, introducing breaks into the mix, 2-step would turn into grime as the MCs became more prevalent and the music started to shed the house elements, and finally, evolve into the conventions of what we now call “dubstep”.

]]> I love me some dubstep. However, listening to speed garage, man, speed garage was PARTY MUSIC. Dubstep can be party music too of course, but so much of it these days is so damn serious. Speed garage, on the other hand, rarely took itself too seriously, and if it did, it wasn’t speed garage anymore, it was trancey deep house or something. What I really love about speed garage is how it fucks with your expectations. Most of the tunes would give you those gay hands-in-the-air drumlines and divas wailing about this and that and another, and right when you think OK, fuck this shit, all of sudden here comes this BIG-ASS fucking raw distorted bassline to completely contrast with everything else that came before it and make you fucking move that ass. Of course, like everything else, at some point speed garage died and nobody really noticed because they had moved onto other things.

Flash-forward to last year. Dubstep is abso-fucking-lutely huge in the UK, starting to make some big inroads in the states, and even the locals are starting to make dubstep tracks. Of course, with all the hugeness came the adherence to convention, the taking it’s shit too seriously and, like IDM and minimal techno, it fell in love with itself and started to think it didn’t really need to keep pushing the boundaries and/or didn’t need to please the crowd - it became music for music-makers.

I’m not saying that’s what all dubstep producers are doing, but let’s face it, a lot of it sounds exactly the same. Half-time steppers with wobble basslines and the same snare on the same beat of every measure throughout the song with zero variation. I myself dabbled in production like this and while I can see the draw (it’s not rocket science to wrap your head around the formula) it’s just a dead-end, conceptually.

Enter bassline house. As far as descriptive subgenre names go, it’s not bad, it’s pretty accurate in fact - but really, it’s a speed garage revival, and then some. It’s a revival that acknowledges what’s happened to UK bass music in the last 10 years and incorporates a lot of those changes into it’s conventions. A lot of those production tricks you hear with drum n bass and dubstep, that multi-band compression that just makes the basslines tear and burn, is present. However, it also brings in a lot of the quick vocal stutters and a bit of the glitch from IDM, too. Of course, the Roland analog bass drum kicks, hands-in-the-air handclaps and high-hat patterns from house/garage are what underpins it all.

The way I describe it, it sounds like a mess, musically - and it is, a great big fun-as-hell mess. Stripped-down and minimal are not adjectives you’d use with “bassline”. On top of all I’ve described above, it also includes fun/clever/nasty samples, Grimist MC rapid-fire vocal science and even some nods to Miami bass and acid. I’ll be damned though if it doesn’t work, and no doubt about it, this is not headphone music. This is PARTY music. This is music for slappin that ass, smokin that spleef, waving that bottle of champagne in the air. This ain’t delicate, introspective music for being serious, for the chin-stroking artiste with the turtleneck and the parties that use the Helvetica font all over their “modern”-looking flyers. It’s not gonna get it’s own night or even a DJ slot, at Mutek, EVER. It’s a great big mash-up of convergent styles, it’s kinda st00pid, it’s totally ghetto, and I love it.

Let me quote the “lower end spasm” blog:

“…niche bassline house, is the anti-dubstep. Huge banging blines that buzz and wobble like the best of em, but also no reserve on the drums, no holding back, just euphoric breakneck tempo all the way….Give me huge, “dumb” bangers over ponderous meditation music ANYDAY.”

Who knows, maybe it’ll be gone within the year, but for now, it sure is fun to listen to, and a welcome reprieve from all that “serious” music.

Here’s a couple mixes and links to check out:

http://dot-alt.blogspot.com/2007/08/faggatronix-4x4-birthday.html

http://www.i-dj.co.uk/features/featurespage.php?ID=48

http://www.rwdmag.com/articles/6487/About-To-Blow-Bassline.html

http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/009952.html

and of course, smugpolice, which has a shitload of downloadable mixes.

Personally, alot of it rubs me the wrong way at times. I’ll be grooving to a track and then the producer will ruin it with a completely lame vocal sample.

What I really dig about it though, is the promise that it holds. Listening to these mixes, I think, what if, instead of all this wailing diva crap, what if they turned it all darkside and shit? What if somebody started coming out with some serious rootsy dubbed-out productions? It seems like adding those 2 beats back somehow gives you another great big landscape to explore, and like with everything else, all this ghetto/party bassline stuff is just the protoplasmic form from which other, more evolved musical lifeforms will emerge (“dubline house”, “bassline techno” maybe even, yes, “minimal bassline”)

Of course, if that happens, it’s likely to follow in the footsteps of everything else, and evolve so much that it becomes “oedipal” - it takes a moment to pause for self-reflection, falls in love with itself, and never looks back from whence it came. Or maybe it doesn’t happen, who knows. In the meantime, it’s fun party music, its’ fresh, and it’s totally recommended.

(originally posted to the mtn-raves mailing list and edited slightly for clarity)

The Story Of Stuff

Nothing really ground-breaking here if you’ve been following this sort of thing for a while, but the presentation packs a punch in it’s succinctness. As with any distillations, some things are kinda brushed over, for instance, the part about the computer’s motherboard only needing to have it’s chip replaced when the rest of it is just fine is a gross oversimplification. It ignores all the supporting technologies needed to realize the speed gains of that newer chip. Also, she might like that she’s still using that ole cathode-ray tube monitor but the fact is, LCDs consume way less power and are healthier for one to use than the old CRTs. Those things aside, she makes a good point. We have a linear production-to-consumption process on a planet with finite resources and an ever-increasing demand for consumer goods. It’s not sustainable.

Personally, rather than throw out those old shoes, broken lamps, broken monitors, old computers and crap into a landfill, I’ve been taking them to CHARM, and while it’s not exactly cheap, it’s way of voluntarily reclaiming the externalization of the price of those things.

Also, when I was growing up I learned to never take anything for granted, and never throw out something useful. I’ve still got an 9-year-old Dell XPS T600+ workstation, running Ubuntu Linux. Despite the fact that it tends to hang when the room temperature gets too high, or when it’s asked to perform a particularly CPU-heavy compile, it still gets the job done. I am a huge advocate of squeezing every last bit of life out of a computer as possible. Before we got the T600+ in 01 (it was originally my work computer when I worked at Active.com, purchased in 99), we were using Missy’s old computer, which she got from her dad, and he had purchased it in 1993, I believe. I had replaced the motherboard and put in an AMD K6+ of course, but the PSU, case, etc. were still all the same.

How Bush Intends To Keep Us In Iraq After He's Gone

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/01/25/bushplanforiraqwouldbea_first/

“President Bush’s plan to forge a long-term agreement with the Iraqi government that could commit the US military to defending Iraq’s security would be the first time such a sweeping mutual defense compact has been enacted without congressional approval, according to legal specialists.

…

At a House hearing on the pact on Wednesday, Representative Dana Rohrabacher, Republican of California and a former Reagan administration official, accused the Bush administration of “arrogance” for not consulting with Congress about the pact. If it includes any guarantees to Iraq, he said, Congress must sign off.

“We are here to fulfill the constitutional role established by the founding fathers,” Rohrabacher said, adding, “It is not all in the hands of the president and his appointees. We play a major role.”

…

“A commitment that the United States will act to assist Iraq, potentially through the use of our armed forces in the event of an attack on Iraq, could effectively commit the nation to engage in hostilities,” Biden wrote. “Such a commitment cannot be made by the executive branch alone under our Constitution.”“

It’s just one thing after another with these guys. It’s not enough to do all the damage they can in the 8 years they hold office. They’re gonna try to force their insane policies on the next (likely Democratic) administration as well.

Ultimately it will go to the courts, and how it ultimately winds up will depend on whether Justice Kennedy sides with the Roberts/Alito/Scalia/Thomas unitary executive theorists or with the Souter/Ginsburg/Stevens/Breyer separation of powers adherents.

Hopefully by the time that the Supreme Court hears this case, Clinton or Obama will be in office and the current unitary executive proponents will be having second thoughts about advancing that power to a Democratic administration.

Missing White House emails

There’s this article in Time Magazine entitled “Where Are The White House Emails?”

The answer is pretty obvious. They were intentionally destroyed. They were destroyed because they contained information that’s either damaging or embarrassing to the White House. This should be plainly obvious to everyone. For all that talk back in the 90s from the Republicans about the “missing Rose Law Firm billing records”, their silence on this issue is deafening.

I am so sick of being outraged by this administration. It’s just one thing after another. “Ignore it” some might say. If my children’s future wasn’t being so damaged by the decisions that are being made there, maybe I could - but all I see is the most evil, corrupt and incompetent administration in American history. It’s difficult for me to see how people can still justify their votes for Bush.

Star Wars Toys That Didn't Make It

Hehe:

http://www.mcmorran.org/pages.php?page_id=15

Fire Todd Sauerbrun

Just fucking fire him already. 21 points off of punt/kickoff team fuckups? Exhibit A:

“We’re not worried at all,” Sauerbrun said. “We respect the hell out of him, don’t get us wrong. Absolutely. But we’re not going to go out there tiptoeing around.”

What’s surprising is that Mike Shanahan, tactician Shanahan, let Sauerbrun kick not once, but twice to Devin Hester. Both kicks straight up the middle resulted in Hester running them back for TDs. The blocked punt in the third quarter which also resulted in a Chicago TD was the icing on the shit cake.

I realize Sauerbrun caused Ellis Hobb’s fumble in the 2006 playoff victory against the Patriots, and Denver was in a big bidding war with the Patriots over him earlier this year, but his direct responsibility for 21 points to a chump team like the Bears is a fire-able offense. His punt average of 48.5 yards is really respectable and all, but he showed today that he’s not capable of strategic thinking. The Broncos should have dumped him after his problems with ephedra came to light earlier this year.

The Broncos defense shares some of the blame too, giving up 14 points in a little less than 5 minutes to a shitty Chicago offense is pretty weak, and the Ponies’ failure to capitalize on third-down conversions (I think they were 1-for-8 today) also hurt (and continues my extreme antipathy towards Jay Cutler), but really Sauerbrun and special teams should shoulder the blame for today’s loss. Of course, as shitty as the AFC West is, the Broncos can lose today and still make it to the playoffs.

What are readers of Conservapedia interested in most?

So there’s this “conservative” version of Wikipedia called Conservapedia, which describes itself thusly:

Tired of the LIBERAL BIAS every time you search on Google and a Wikipedia page appears? Conservapedia began in November 2006, as the class project for a World History class, meeting in New Jersey, of 58 advanced homeschooled and college-bound students.

So, it’s a Wikipedia for conservatives, right?

Take a look at the top 10 “most-viewed pages”: http://www.conservapedia.com/Special:Statistics

HA-ha

Wee bit obsessed are we?

(H/T to Atrios)

P.S. Just in case they decide to modify this page so it’s a wee less, umm, insightful vis a vis the conservative mindset, here’s a screen capture, preserved for posterity.

The Invisibles

Just started reading The Invisibles, this amazing comic book that started publishing in the mid-90s on Vertigo.

Wow.

I know that I’m like, 12 years behind the curve on this one, but 12 years ago I was freaking on jungle and drum & bass white labels and learning how to do OO Perl. Hell, 12 years ago I was still hacking on the SGI Indy for Investigative Reporters and Editors. I didn’t have time for no comics, but I do now, and man, what a mind-blowing series. It takes place in a universe where chaos magic and all that are realized to their full and reality-altering potential. I’m only up to issue #7 (with 52 more to go) but it’s already quite apparent that this is one of the most literate yet still entertaining comic series I’ve ever read.

Thanks, Josh