Changes

I notice that myspace has added a feature to show when your friends update something -- much lake Facebook has done for some time already. Of course, my facebook page scrolls forever when I login (not my actual profile page, just that edit/update page you login to), with all the stuff my 3 friends have been up to. I've got 53 friends on one myspace page, and 36 on the other. Fortunately some of those profiles are fairly dormant, so maybe I won't be inundated with updates each time I login. On the plus side, it will be nice to know when there is something to check out, not all my friends post bulletins every time they update the site, so I'll be able to keep up better. And since I activated that annoying captcha screen for friend requests, the spam has dropped way off too.

Celebrities on parade...

Yeah, one of those rants. Hey, I'm working black Friday (fortunately, at a place that isn't going to be abnormally busy), and when it comes to people who make more in a day than I do all year I'll rant all I want.

First there's Heather Mills -- she's getting beat up pretty bad in the press, what with breaking Sir Paul's heart and all, but that whole relationship is something that probably should have never happened. It would have been more appropriate for her to have married me than Paul McCartney -- at least I'm only 3 years older than her. The Beatles were already world famous before I was born -- they were nearly split up by time she was. But I digress, the latest headline has her berating the world's wealthy elite -- on the verge of her getting millions of pounds from Sir Paul for doing nothing more than being married to him for a couple of years. A little ironic, don't you think...

Then there was the big headline about Tom Cruise and the Gay Question (we have the truth inside!). There are only 2 things in the world that Tom Cruise has shown genuine, true, and lasting love for - Scientology, and himself. He's a guy, and I suppose you could twist that into meaning he's gay, but that's a real long stretch. Ooops, I forgot a third thing -- he also has genuine affection for his career. Enough of the snarkiness -- unless he really is a sick and twisted person, he has to love his kids. At least he has to love little Suri - I can't imagine any father seeing a child he fathered and not being in love forever with that child.

But I'm a normal guy...

A longish year...

I just noticed that I've been at this latest version of blogging for a year now. I guess that means Blogger is finally stable enough to use now. I've been reading through the posts I put in last year, mainly about the elections and the Democratic rise to power (and how little has changed in the year since then). How my son, while being delayed in some aspects was pretty bright otherwise -- he's taught himself to read, and is (according to his teacher) so far ahead of the other kids in his kindergarten class. I just wish he would teach himself to use the toilet like the rest of his class...

I still have not gone over and updated my old website -- oh sure, bit's and pieces of it -- but I did go on the dead link hunt (and again just over hte weekend). It still suprises me how often formerly huge sites dry up and blow away, while mine remains. I think my site is about the only source of information on the old Titanic, Adventure out of Time game left on the web (and according to the logs, I get hits for that). The logs are interesting too, a lot of traffic comes from the support files for my myspace and blogger pages, but there are still plenty of hits for other stuff too -- and every entry from a search page includes what the search was for, so I get some pretty strange results (I use the phrase "bart simpson naked" in a review for The Rose and the Sword, because the actress that does Bart Simpson had a nude scene in the film -- I got hits for that).

So after a year, this is still going on pretty good. I even have another blog going -- this one a more refined copy of the blog on my redshirt myspace page (which is itself a consolidation of my twitter posts). So while my attention has shifted, my presence online remains strong...

I fear Huckabees...

I was surfing last weekend (channel, that is) and came across Gov Huckabee explaining his presidential platform, and his idea for tax reform. He would like to ditch all income taxes and replace them with a 23% federal sales tax. This, he's says, would be fair -- rich people spend lots of money, so they'd pay lots of taxes, while poor people don't spend lots of money so they won't pay lots of taxes.

I'm thinking he's nuts. There actually was a time I thought something like that was a good idea -- of course, there was a time when I thought Bill Clinton was a good president (instead of being a promiscuous horn dog with lucky timing). How many of you that live in a state that charges sales tax buys stuff online just so you can avoid sales tax? Rich people will start doing the same thing, except they'll buy overseas -- and live there if need be. Meanwhile poor people will be paying nearly $4 for a gallon of milk (and gas). Huckabee says that with no taxes, companies will be able to charge less for goods, because they will take out the tax portion of the cost. And I believe in the tooth fairy.

The current system is not exactly fair -- the richest people pay large sums of money, while some people at the lower end of the scale pay nothing at all. Under his system everyone pays, unless they buy overseas - something poor people won't be able to do. There is already a rather obscene gap between the haves and the have not's in this country -- the middle class is dwindling a little more each year. Huckabee's proposal won't help.

Even if he is the Family Friendliest candidate...

The Prisoner...

George Ryan, the former Secretary of State and Governor of Illinois -- and potential Nobel prize nominee -- started his 6 1/2 year prison sentence yesterday in a Wisconsin federal penitentiary. That's kind of a shame when you think about it, if he'd been allowed to serve his time in Illinois, maybe some of those inmates he unilaterally released from death row could have been in his posse. Instead, Illinois' crookedest governer will sit in a Wisconsin prison cell until he's 80 years old. It's bad enough that he used his position for financial (and even public opinion) gain -- but his fall took out most of the Illinois republican party with it. The best the republicans could come up with to run against the current waste of space was Judy Barr Topinka -- I can't even remember what she was, treasurer I think, she was that non-descript. So we've been stuck with the lousiest governor since Dan Walker (another democrat who couldn't get along with the Chicago political machine), Disco Stud Rod "Bag-o-chips" Blagojovich (or something like that). The man perpetuates the national stereotype that Chicago is the state capitol of Illinois (it's not, by the way) and that anything south of Joliet, and west of Rockford doesn't matter.

He's bad enough that legislators are writing up bills to allow for a California style recall election. It won't go through, but it's nice to a dream...

A good start

I just read this line from an article at Slate.com

(As of Wednesday, more than 1,700 lawyers and politicians had been arrested in Punjab alone—just one of Pakistan's four provinces.)

Gee, how can we get some of that action over here?

p.s. I don't mean you EM...

150 posts

I don't know, is that a milestone? Technically this is post 151, so is it really a celebratory moment? Oh well, it's been mentioned, so now I can get on to more interesting things.

Would you mind repeating that?

Seriously, if you haven't seen it yet, you need to watch this display of doubletalk from the leading democratic presidential candidate.

A sample of things to come

Once again, I'm looking at some online news articles -- today I come across an item about a copyright infringement suit against Sean "P.Diddy puff daddy (zippadee doo dah)" Combs and the late Notorious B.I.G. concerning a nearly imperceptible 5 second horn sample from a song by the Ohio Players. He originally got hit with a $4 million judgement (which has since been reduced) and had the record pulled over copyright infringement. They replaced the sample with something else, and re-released the album and everyone's happy. I guess.

But come on, 5 seconds? Especially 5 seconds that noone but an Ohio Player would recognize and was so incidental that it's replacement didn't significantly alter the song. To further complicate things, there is a provision in the copyright standard that allows for "Fair Use". It allows an artist to use another artists "copyrighted content in new and transformative ways, so long as you use small amounts and do not cause too much harm to the market for the original work." An unrecognizable 5 second sample used in a completely different song would certainly seem to apply here. But Combs didn't even offer that arguement.

As an amatuer singer/songwriter this interests me. I have 2 Akai samplers sitting in my home studio right now. So far, the only thing I've ever used a sampler for is to create some unusal sycopated arpeggios for 1 song, and I'm not likely to use them for anything more sophiticated than that (maybe a rythm loop sometime, who knows). My friend Jimmy, on the other hand, creates his music almost exclusively with samples. He has software that allows him to loop and repeat chunks of music which he carefully crafts into some fairly interesting music (I actually do the same, except I create the music chunks myself using synthesizers, then use the sequencing software to loop and repeat the chunks). For the most part, his music uses the "license free" samples that came with the software (meaning he has the right to use it as he sees fit), but occaionally he likes to do tributes, which contain samples from other sources. He's a big fan of the duo Tatu, and one song uses a very short verbal sample - he's done a tribute for the "Evil Dead" movies just full of samples from the films - and he's done a song for "Speed Racer", and a whole album for "Cowboy Bebop". If he were to ever actually try to market his music, it could become a clearance nightmare. I have songs that use riffs that sound like the ones in popular recordings (the most obvious one being from a Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers song), but they aren't samples because I played the parts myself.

And that's where you start wondering what the point is. What's the difference between sampling the opening horn riff from "sledgehammer" and paying a horn section to play it again for your record? Or my friend Jimmy sampling tatu, or finding a girl who sounds like them to say the line for him? Or me sampling the electric piano part from "breakdown" or playing it myself?

But, back to the article, which ends with an interesting bit of conspiracy paranoia...

Why would Combs, one of the biggest names in hip-hop, fail to defend sampling? Maybe it was simply inadvertence. Maybe it was a strategic decision (albeit a very bad one, as it turned out). Or maybe it was more calculating. Combs and his label can afford to pay for samples. Many aspiring artists and their fledgling labels—the next generation of would-be moguls hungry to unseat Diddy—cannot. Maybe Diddy cares more about the benefit of reduced competition than defending the work of the artist and the technique that helped create his empire. Tell us, Diddy, what were you thinking?

Yeah, what were you thinking?

Poor poor pitiful me

I just read most of an online article by an author who finally got her book published after 8 years of shopping it around. The book is about "a romantic, sexual relationship between 15-year-old Stew and 40-year-old David" and "was intertwined with the story of a lesbian lawyer, her lover, and her legal partner." She complains that she "had published seven novels and two nonfiction books between 1984 and 1998 with excited, positive reviews, translations, awards, and all the signs of success. But suddenly I could not get anyone to take this book"

Gee, I wonder why no one was interested in publishing this book? It seems like just the thing the publishing arm of NAMBLA (the North American Man/Boy Love Association -- or something like that) would want first rights to. Then she starts into a lengthy whine about how the conservative movement has stifled the lesbian literary community to the point where no one wants to write lesbian fiction in this country. And now that she's finally published her book, it's getting ecstatic reviews -- from the alternative lifestyle press -- main stream media doesn't acknowledge the existence of her book at all.

So now this author, starts complaining how no one respects lesbian authors and fiction -- and I'm having flashbacks to Ellen Degeneres complaining how no one was watching her sitcom now that it was by a lesbian and had lesbian comedy in it. She claims it's all due to the "myth of merit based publishing".

Maybe it's because most Americans don't think your book is very good -- have you ever considered that???