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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Month: June 2008

  • Summer Music Project 2008: Week Two

    I only ask fifteen minutes of your time, this go-around. The music is modern, innovative and toe-tappingly good. As a bonus, there’s a whole lot less of my aimless yammering to suffer through. What more could you ask?

    By next week I’ll probably have the A/C unit in the window. That’s probably going to put a halt to the voice work for the duration of the project, I’m afraid. I had a hard enough time eliminating the outside noise with all of my windows shut, and the air conditioner is altogether too good at letting the outside world into my bedroom. How’s that for planning, eh?

    That’s okay, though. I spent half of my time tonight just trying to hunt down the worst of the clicks and pops. Future weeks will be orders of magnitude easier to assemble if all I have to do is mix tracks and write up some color commentary…

  • Five days later, only one has listened.

    I’m not even certain that the only download of the Genesis mix from Friday actually involved a live human being, given that the hostname in the logs doesn’t look particularly legitimate. My only problem with this theory is that I’m not sure how a robot would click on the audio player widget. I could be wrong, of course, and the sole listener is certainly welcome to chime in.

    So. Do I bother cranking out the other thirteen if nobody at all gives a damn?

  • Touched By An Atheist

    Taking up a worthy challenge, I present George Carlin on Mad TV in, “Touched By An Atheist.”

    (The Python-esque disclaimers are just icing on the cake.)

  • So long, you cantankerous old man.

    Well, here’s news I didn’t want to wake up to: George Carlin died yesterday.

    Let’s be fair and note that this wasn’t entirely unexpected. He suffered from heart problems for quite some time, and it’s not like he was some spring chicken. He made it to 71, which is a fair bit past my own life expectancy given my genetics.

    But still, this is sad news for me. Carlin played a significant role in pointing me toward my current fascination with the power of language for good or ill. He changed his style significantly at several points in his career but at every stage he liked to point out the silly and, later on, the sinister aspects of how we use words in America. Analyzing and understanding the why behind someone’s choice of words is a large part of critical thinking as applied to individuals and society.

    Lest I forget: He also made me laugh. A lot. I’m a big fan of laughter. Hell, I still have portions of his routines stuck in memory, to be recited at appropriate times. Well, mostly appropriate. Okay, sometimes.

    Anyway.

    I think it’s time to grab a few more of Carlin’s comedy albums from eMusic…

  • Summer Music Project 2008: Week One

    Welcome to summer, friends.

    I’ll warn you right from the get-go: This one’s a bit wordy, in part because of some introductory material that won’t need repeating. Future installments should feature roughly half the amount of jabberjaw on my part. With that out of the way… let the festivities commence!

    Believe it or not, I had this thing done four days in advance. My plan is to have two more in the can by next Friday and maintain an at-least-one-week buffer through the course of the season so I’m not doing last-minute panicky stupid things or (worse) dropping weeks. Anything’s possible, they tell me…

    I have no idea whatsoever how this is going to sound on different speakers or headphones from mine, and that scares me because I know how lousy the headset microphone I’m using really is. What might kill this whole project faster than anything is that I might just not be able to stand the lousy production quality anymore.

    Oh well. Worse come to worst, you’ll get music mixes with written commentary. That counts for something, I hope.

  • From Russia With Love by Ian Fleming

    I was handed a stack of Ian Fleming novels a couple of weeks ago, and I finally got around to reading through one of them.

    “From Russia With Love” is the story of a well-planned, well-executed trap, one into which Secret Agent James Bond walks blindly, right up until the jaws are snapping shut. It’s a gentleman’s travelogue with occasional violence and one instance of sex. The book’s more interested in the meals and cigarettes than with setting and story, let alone characterization. The most meaningful relationship in the book isn’t between James Bond and Tatiana Romanova, but between James and his Turkish friend, Darko Kerim.

    In short, it’s not at all what I expected. Bond’s hardly the supercool hero who has everything figured out from the start. For one thing, he’s a bit squeamish about cold-blooded killing. Perhaps this is because it’s ungentlemanly… as is smelling of rat tunnels. He makes an entire series of strategic blunders throughout, and in fact only survives through a combination of dumb luck, some preparation from Q Branch, and a suddenly stupid and self-absorbed opponent. Even then, at the very end of the book, he botches things again and is left for… well, not quite dead, but he’s in bad shape.

    I mean, what?

    It’s a very odd book, and certainly not timeless. A bit of research after-the-fact tells me that this is one of the best-regarded selections from the series. I think that’s my cue not to pursue Ian Fleming’s books further, don’t you?

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