Month: January 2006

Ouch. Whatever happened to “Sorry, we can’t find your information” or something less strident?

Access denied makes me feel like I’m trying to break into their site, rather than buy something.
Continue reading “harshing my mellow”

Slave To Love / Street Life – Greatest Hits / Roxy Music
African Night Flight / Lodger / David Bowie
– 3 : In Ruhig Fliessender Bewegung / Symphony No.2 “Resurrection” / Simon Rattle/City Of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra
The Bends / The Bends / Radiohead
If It Takes All Night / Country Life / Roxy Music
Baby Plays Around (Demo) / Spike Bonus Disc / Elvis Costello
Out of the Blue / Country Life / Roxy Music
Definitive Gaze / Real Life / Magazine
Symphony No.5 in C minor, op.67, Allegro con brio / Symphony No.5, Op.67 & “Egmont” Op.84 / Ludwig van Beethoven
Because You’re Frightened / Rays And Hail 1978-1981 / Magazine

Plucked from the comments at The Washington Monthly:

Just goes to show there is nothing a Conservative can say or do that can get them ejected from a media platform.

• Armstrong Williams: Took bribes. Still employed.
• Ann Coulter: Advocates genocide. Still employed.
• Michelle Malkin: Advocates concentration camps. Still employed.
• Pat Robertson: A veritable fountain of bad behavior. Still employed.
• John Lott: Fabricates data. Still employed.
• Chris Matthews: Equates Michael Moore to Osama Bin Laden. Still employed.
• Bill O’Reilly: Serial sexual harasser and liar. Still employed.
• Rush Limbaugh: Drug addict. Still employed.
• George Will: Stole Presidential debate briefing books, lied about it, then lied about his conflict of interest. Still employed.
• Robert Novak: Complicity in national-security related felony. Fired by CNN, IMMEDIATELY hired by Fox.

And on the Left:

• Phil Donahue: Highest rated show on MSNBC. Cancelled because of insufficient cheerleading for Iraq war.
• Michael Moore: Highest-grossing documentary filmmaker ever. Has trouble finding distributors for work and cannot get TV deal.

Whatever, I guess.

Now playing: The Wand by The Flaming Lips from the album “The Wand – Single”

If you ever wondered if folksonomies — user-created taxonomies — were any good, a round or two of this game should dispel any confidence you may have had.

fastr – a flickr game:

Fastr is a game that uses flickr images. It loads ten images that all share a common tag, one by one, and you guess what the tag is. When you guess right, the tag will turn blue

Amazing how meaningless the tags are, how irrelevant they to anyone but the person who created them.

So, I hear an argument? What’s wrong with that?

Nothing, but then why share the tags? The idea of tagging is to allow artifacts to be associated with like artifacts. If the tags themselves don’s associate with the artifact, what good are they?

AKMA opines on how he rates his iTunes tracks (following on the 5 ★ notion):

Stars:

Here’s the way I assign stars to my iTunes:

0 stars: There’s a reason for keeping this around, but I don’t want to hear it
un-checked: This is either spoken word or temporarily off my listening list
1 star: This song is pretty unfortunate
2 stars: Baseline: good enough to enjoy, but not outstanding
3 stars: Noteworthy in some way; better than most of my baseline choices
4 stars: A favorite of mine, but my taste may be idiosyncratic here
5 stars: Everyone should like, and if you don’t, I’m comfortable thinking that it’s a peculiarity of your taste more than of mine

As I work through own criteria (and yes, I agree, a range of 5 stars is pretty coarse-grained), here’s what I come up with (oh, what an ineffective educator I could have made).

I start with a bare listenability of 3 stars: you start there and move up or down.

0: get rid of it. No reason to listen to it, so why keep it around, save for completeness?

So ★★★ means I don’t mind it coming up any time. Never grating, always welcome. 4 and 5 ✭ are easy enough: the kind of thing you seek out when you want to hear something good.

But what gets 1 or 2 stars? Generally, tracks that didn’t meet the standards of an artist’s usual work or the weaker tracks on a given release (are we done with albums as a form factor yet? We had the 40-45 minute package for the first 20 years of mass-appeal rock music, and the 60-70 minute CD for the last 20. Time to get back to singles or at most mini-releases of 2-5 consistently good tracks, instead of the same tracks with a bunch of others that bear nothing in common but the time of creation).

I think I like AKMA’s baseline of ✭✭ with ✭✭✭✭✭ reserved for those tracks everyone should like.

I do some fudging as well. I take classical stuff out of the mix, since I only load stuff I like or am trying to learn more about. Likewise jazz: don’t know enough to judge and it’s not a genre where you want to make snap judgments like stuff I mostly listen to. Spoken word likewise gets excluded.

I mostly use the ✭ system to load the iPod anyway, using the ratings to choose what gets loaded (mostly a mixture of stuff I have added lately or that I know I feel like having around).

Now playing: Never Saw Blue (Full Length Drums Mix) by Hayley Westenra from the album “Odyssey” | Get it (and I have no idea how I am going to rate this. These free tracks from iTunes are very spotty).

I read through this piece by Anne Herbert and found this passage resonating in my head: she mentions someone introducing their band as “Failure to Disperse” something that just sounds quietly radical or politely intransigent. In other words, something we could use more of, I think.

Some of the most important work to do now is to fail to disperse and
to remind others to fail.

People with microphones who may be more interested in their
own interests than in ours are strongly recommending that we
disperse.

Suggestions popular now include being scared of the group
or groups du jour–gays like me, immigrants like the family I
come from, people in other countries we haven’t met, poor people,
people who aren’t pale or aren’t suit-bound or both, people who
don’t live inside.

Be scared of them, miss any connection you might have with
them.

Disperse.

If you’re in one of the recommended icky groups, be more scared
of everyone else.

Disperse.

Also suggested to you by those who want to control you:

Watch lots of TV. Inside, in your own place. So what you mainly
know about other groups is what people who plan to profit from
your fear tell you to make you scared.

Stay in your car. See other people as good or bad drivers,
in your way or not. Don’t see their faces and possibly, in their
faces, their story. Keep your face behind a windshield so they
won’t see your face and your story.

Stare at screens. Don’t have very many times and places to
look at people.

Disperse. Be alone with whatever manipulative info is coming
at you through screens. Spend less and less time being in your
own physical situation with your own body and your own impressions.
Disperse; break life.

Watch TV and say how stupid it is. That’s fine. Just as long
as you watch it. Using your intelligence to say that TV is stupid
is not really having a very strong connection with your own intelligence.

Not a new idea (this book came out 6 years ago and I think others have follored up on the ideas therein).

Continue reading “perspectives”