The Scream is Recovered

Reports today that the stolen painting, Munch's The Scream, has been recovered.

I guess that means the one I bought in that back alley wasn't the real thing.

Perspective

Turn on your sound and sing along to the song with lyrics and animation. (via Doc)

The Tao of Sluggo

Revisiting The Greatest Nancy Panel Ever Drawn, an animation by Glyph Jockey.



And the original cartoon panel.

New Music for Old People

Blog buddy Clarke Ching recently asked about New music for Old people?, whining about "the music these kids listen to these days," and extoling the virtues of the Eagles, Billy Joel and Neil Diamond. Riffing on my comments to his post here...

Eagles? Billy Joel? Neil Diamond?

Given my age of 55, I'm plenty familiar with them.

Actually, I've heard them almost all I want to hear them.

Almost.

While I did/do like these "adult MOR" artists in small doses, if I was forced to listen to Billy Joel a couple times an hour on a long drive, I'd be tempted to follow his lead and drive into a big tree.

After all, at some point in time, they were new music, too.

Try some streching. Two favorite versions of Hotel California are the Spanish version by The Gipsy Kings and the Ska/Punk version by Pennywise. Check them out. I'm not usually appreciative of covers or remakes, but both of these blow the original - which I do consider the best of the Eagles catalog - out of the water.

One strategy I take is browsing through the iTunes Music Store. Click and listen to the samples. If I come onto something I like, I go to the upper right corner to the "people who bought this also bought" links, and take a few steps away via those links. Also, don't forget to check out the weekly free tunes on ITMS as a no-risk way of trying before buying. Some of my friends also like Pandora as a exploration tool.

If you're complaining about the music you feel forced to listen to, you've got to put in a bit of effort to explore.

"Play only music from bands you can't stand." -- A line from Do Something Different - my favorite song from my favorite punk polka band, Brave Combo (gotta love that url), who also did some great collaborations with the late, great Tiny Tim.

I have built my own radio station this way (and from ripping my non-trivial CD collection), with about 5000+ songs on my iPod. Sure it's got a bunch from the 50s, 60s, and 70s, (heavy on Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon, Manhattan Transfer, Talking Heads/David Byrne) but it's also got plenty from the 80s (Golden Age of MTV Synth-Pop), 90s and 00s (Wilco, Modest Mouse, Franz Ferdinand, Fatboy Slim), not to mention the 30s and 40s, as well as 19th, 18th, and 17th centuries. Not only spanning time, but geography as well, having gotten into Brazil and Africa as well (partially from Paul Simon, Ry Cooder, and David Byrne starting points).

My latest iTune purchases include Tony Bennett, Mozart, Bruckner, and Shakira (Hips Don't Lie, with Wyclef Jean - sometimes you want something new to move to).

Eclectic for an old fart, eh?

Over the weekend, I listened to a couple editions of the Sly Crooner podcast. He lays some stories and commentary around his martini-powered loungey music. In one of the pieces I heard this weekend, he pointed out that every generation grows the boundaries of music by getting into things designed to piss off their parents and that they can call their own. I agreed with him, smiling, when he expressed an interest in looking forward to what the children of today's rappers come up with to piss off their parents.

It should be wild.

Unless you're stuck in the mud of your adolescence.

Reality Hacking with Truthiness

Mark Federman, through his What is the (Next) Message? blog, puts a Mcluhanesque spin on Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert, writing about the audience engagement in recent bits and the emergence or re-creation of a participative pool of cool media around The Colbert Report in a television landscape that's largely otherwise turned hot.

Reaching out beyond the confines of the cathode ray, plasma, or lcd (guess we can't just call it "the box" anymore), Colbert seems to be what I remember being called a "reality hacker". From Wikipedia (at least today)...

Reality hacking is an artistic practice that...emerges from the intersection of hacking and hacker culture, contemporary art, activism, and net culture. Reality hacking takes as its basis a broad, phenomenological point of view of the world, and considers (often unorthodox) investigations into everyday objects and situations a meaningful way of probing into the working of varied social contexts.

Sounds like a good description of what Colbert's doing.

And, after all, Colbert's personna has already hacked his own reality via truthiness. Rather than just reporting and commenting on the news like his influences/targets (O'Reilly, Scarborough, et al), extending his reach into the reality of the rest of us is an very interesting next step.

Or is it pulling us into his reality? I guess Mark's mention of convergence covers both possibilities.

[Technorati tags: stephen colbert | television | convergence | reality hacking]

More Common Sense on Terror

From Wired News article, Refuse to be Terrorized:

"I'd like everyone to take a deep breath and listen for a minute.

"The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics.

"The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.

"And we're doing exactly what the terrorists want. [more]"

Variation on a recent theme around here. I'll try to make it the last one for a while. The horse is dead enough. No more kicking required...

...At least until the next time the fear level is raised by the powers that be. After all, we are entering election season.

We're All Atheists

From Cyncical-C Blog's posted video clip about Teapot Atheists:

"We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further." - Richard Dawkins

Deadwood Pancakes

Rated R - Deadwood Pancakes video (wmv), from Justin Schlegel.

Bonus: monkeys (wmv). "Pops, they're just like us."

Imagine a Walk on the Wild Side

The music mash-up works phenomenally as music.

The video's just icing on the cake. From The Party Party, via onegoodmove. (Quicktime required)

Never seen the guy so articulate.

Be Afraid?

Terror, Terror, Everywherror:

"Be afraid. Be very, very afraid. Because if you're not sufficiently afraid, you may begin to ask the types of questions that will make those in authority very, very afraid. Questions like, so how plausible was the alleged plot to blow up ten aircraft on route from the U.K. to the U.S. using explosives mixed together in mid-flight, from precursors smuggled on board disguised as sports drinks, hair gel, or other innocuous-looking stuff? The short answer, not very..."

Remember all those post-9/11 comments starting with "The terrorists have won, if..."

Sigh.

Advice for Bloggers

From Doc Searls...

"...the best way to get a link from any blogger is to link to them first. But geez, make the reason something other than a link exchange. Sure, sometimes I'll link to something somebody's said about something I've said, but it's always either because the other writer said something interesting or because what they said moves a conversation forward. I never link for the sake of reciprocity alone, or to perpetuate any "elite".

...snip...

"Want to succeed in the blogosphere, or the Web in general? Easy. Do search engine optimization. Here's how:

1. Write quotable stuff about a lot of different subjects.
2. Do it consistently, for months if not years.
3. Link a lot, as a way of giving credit and of sending readers to other sources of whatever it is you write about.

"That's it."

That's it.

"Let Sandy Koufax Pitch At Mel's Head!"

Dennis Leary, the Red Sox, and "Melvin Gibstein" (as Penn Jillette calls him)...

Not really a huge baseball fan, but you don't have to be to appreciate this.

Not Terrorized

From John Rogers in "Wait, Aren't You Scared?":

"I am just not going to wet my pants every time some guys get arrested in a terror plot. I will do my best to stay informed. I will support the necessary law enforcement agencies. I will take whatever reasonable precautions seem, um, reasonable. But I will not be terrorized. I assume that the terror-ists would like me to be terror-ized, as that is what is says on their nametag, rather than, say, wanting me to surrender to ennui or negative body image, and they're just coming the long way around."

Terror

It's strange that media that originally attracted me for their humor have also turned into sources for serious thinking as well. Penn Jillette, The Daily Show, and Colbert all come to mind, along with one of my newest addictions, the show with zefrank.

After last week's liquid bomb threat, his video podcast hit the nail on the head. Fortunately, thanks to the zefrank wiki, I can easily quote the good bits:

"Now, the way I see it, you can't have terrorism without terror. The strategy of terrorism is to use isolated acts of violence to instill fear and confusion into the population at large. A small number of people can incapacitate a society by leveraging our inability to understand risk. [...snip...]

"As long as a small group of people can inflict mass panic across a large population, the tactic itself will remain viable. One way to deal a blow to the effectiveness of terrorism is to deal with the terror itself. [...snip...]

"Bush today said this country is safer today than it was prior to 9/11. Personally, I don't think he knows. Whether we like it or not, terrorist attacks on Americans are now part of the global reality. They will continue to happen. Many places around the globe have had to deal with a similar reality for years. India, Ireland, England, Spain, Russia, to name a few. In many cases, these societies have pulled together and not allowed isolated acts of violence to tear at their fiber. Like disease and the forces of nature, it's a risk that we have to rationally come to terms with. The government's responsibility is to make sure that fear and terror are not disproportionate to the reality of the situation."

Terror doesn't have to be based in devastating and destructive events like 9/11. Depending how things are handled, unsuccessful threats can be sufficient to create and perpetuate terror and its effects. (Somewhere in a cave in Afghanistan, someone is probably still laughing about the a bet that they could make a whole country of travelers take off their shoes.)

The liquid bombs were found long before they reached the airport in the UK. The kneejerk silliness of stopping hair gel and iPods at the airports in the US only served to raise the level of the sense of terror. (Can you spell "mid-term elections?") To me, these are evidence of our losing the "war on terror." Not only that, but even worse, we're being hit as much by "friendly fire" than by attacks real or imagined, successful or thwarted.

Unauthorized Public Photo - Caught Napping

Someone sent me an anonymous email pointing out that "the homeless problem in Short Hills Mall continues," with the following evidence.

Exploring YouTube

Just spent the last couple hours getting into YouTube, deeper than the traffic jams, lip syncs, cartoons, and goofy stuff. If you visit YouTube, be sure to check out the most discussed pages for some quality stuff.

Found two pieces worth sharing, one from someone 23 years older than me and one from someone 38 years younger.

Like I said, both worth sharing.

Let's see, how does this iSight camera thing work?

Bull's Hit

Bull's Hit -- Penn & Teller present their rational, libertarian bent views on diverse subjects, now available for free download on Google Video. If you haven't caught them on Showtime, check out the following subjects online.

*profanity*; *creationism*; alien abductions; conspiracy theories; recycling; gun control; endangered species; *religion*; the bible; family values; the apocalypse; signs from heaven; the occult; 12-step recovery programs; exercise v. genetics; *environmentalism*; hypnosis; ghosts; the war on drugs; *feng shui / bottled water*; *college*; *PETA*; and abstinence.

*my favorites*

Serious

Frank - DG Picnic 2006
Originally uploaded by Frank Patrick.

Titanic and Sin City. Huh?

Titanic and Sin City. Huh? -- I got an email from Amazon today recommending I buy Titanic because I had previously purchased King Kong (the original), Batman Begins, and, get this, Frank Miller's Sin City.

Huh?

OK - maybe the big ape and the big boat have romance in common, but Sin City? Titanic is one of those "classic" movies that I have never seen and have no plans to ever see beyond clicking by it on cable, along with Gone With the Wind and It's a Wonderful Life.