what you meant to do, part I

welcome friends to a new section of my blog i'm calling:

"what you meant to do." 

here will i climb atop my soapbox and in all rightness declare a better decision on could have made in a given circumstance. and by better i mean better. so for instance: you had a star wars trilogy marathon at your house last saturday. what you meant to do was have a star trek, evens-only, marathon (2, 4 & 6). see how it works? let's begin. 

so, you bought a jethro tull album: 

what you meant to do was buy a gentle giant album: 

you dig yes. hell, you even like alan parson's project. but on this sunny saturday with nothing to do, you wanted some prog-rock with a medieval chant / church organ / acid jazz rhythm section kinda thing. like a foolish fool, you went with 'tull. now everyone thinks your not-altogether-awesome. but why did you mean to buy gentle giant? 

let's start with the obvious. just glancing at the picture provided above, one can quickly discern that gentle giant is slightly more ugly than jethro tull. and if rock and roll has taught me anything (besides TCB) it's that the uglier you are, the more you are likely to rock. rod stewart's been a sex icon for three decades and married a supermodel. janis joplin won the superlative for "ugliest boy" in high school. i rest my case. 

and don't think i'm pulling one of these it's-cool-cause-no-one-has-heard-of-it things.  take the aforementioned rthym section of Ray Shulman and John Weathers. the bass pops in perfect synch with each hit of the snare creating these funky breakdowns over Derek Shulman's meandering vocals - and all the while Kerry Minear on the organ is just comping away (and occasionally throwing in these slick little runs).  it's been done, for sure. but they are able to do it so well. as far as a comparison to Yes goes, it's definitely more Close to the Edge than Fragile (i'm thinking siberian khantaru and total mass retained in particular). meanwhile, tull is plugging away at pretty standard jazz licks with flute stabs here. 'tull always seems to loose it's edge to me. This Was is basically a blues album, Passion Play is an almost painfully repetitive and Minstrel in the Gallery had a great A-side but that damn 20 minute song about humpty dumpty and the birds and ... well, whatever the hell that was. 

in 'tull's favor Ian Anderson does have an amazing voice and range.  if this were a songwriter's competition, i'd have to give it to Anderson over Shulman. but in musicianship, experimentation within the genre - not to mention arrangements - the trophy goes, without a doubt, to gentle giant. 

i ffffound it

we are the robots. 

following up yesterday's short, ridiculously poorly written / organized rant about the internet, i thought i should share with (who?) you one of the best sites on the ol' information super highway. as soon as you're sure your boss isn't looking, go check out ffffound. it's essentially an open lexicon of photos - no organization, no blogging or anything. it's like finding a big moebius strip lined with photos; you search and search and then end up back in the same place you started. 

in fact, it's the most like surfing you are likely to find on the internet. you just cruise, seemlessly falling from nerdcore photos, to absurd japanese print adds and technical diagrams until you stubble onto photographs that are, for all intents and purposes, pornography and then, miraculously, emerge into a world of television pastiche and high art. 

it's like a little microcosm of life or something - or rather, the distilled stuff of life. pictures without context, art without ownership. you end up looking, trying to process what you're seeing but what you're seeing can't really be understood because it isn't an encyclopedia - it's just a pile of pictures. it's like when you play a computer in chess: it can't be thrown off or bluffed because it simply doesn't know what that means. the pictures you see are processed, but they don't really mean anything to you without an author or some context to tie it into. i would look at some picture of a star wars something-or-other and think "i like star wars" but i couldn't explain what the image meant to me because i didn't know the who / what / where / when / why. it was just an image, click and it's gone. 

wild stuff. or maybe i just like to wax metaphysics. 

tubes and lasers

welcome: to the world of tomorrow! 

the internet is pretty amazing for a series of tubes. i mean, sure, we all remember that senator who couldn't articulate at all - AT ALL - the internet in any vaguely recognizable way ("an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock"). but seriously, who can rightly explain the internet?

google image search, that's who: the internet is lasers.

personally, my favorite term was always information superhighway because if brevity is the soul of wit, surely al gore and some guy from south korean are surely the wisest of us all. check out this picture of the T1 backbone of the internet circa 1996. 

in closing this brief, non-sensical entry, everyone should go read this newsweek article from 1995 about why the internet will never amount to anything. of particular hilarity: 

"Yet (some expert who makes me look like an ass) predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure ... We're promised instant catalog shopping--just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?"

umm, amazon averaged $1,236,250.00 a month last year. how much did your mall make? 

amazon.com's income statement, 1997-2007 (source: morningstar.com)

(USD $MI)

watch out for that -

- flying ray? 

by now, we are all well aware of the dangers associated with breaching the habitat of the wild ray. if nothing else, steve irwin's untimely (but - let's face it - inevitable) death at the deadly whip-tail of a ray taught us to leave rays the hell alone. but this, as well as more recent developments have led me to change one of my fundamental beliefs about life. 

you see, many years ago, while watching discovery channel's shark week i decided that sharks were natures most evil creature - pure evil, in fact. they mentioned this one island that these man-eating sharks go to every year at the same time when a kind of bird goes there to lay eggs. when the eggs hatch the cute little bird guys all have to learn how to fly by getting up in the air and over the (now shark infested) water. thing is, these sharks leap outta the water and grab the little guys right outta the air. then - and here is the really messed up part - they don't eat them. they break their necks, bite off a wing or something and LEAVE THEM DYING AS A WARNING TO OTHER BABY BIRDS. pure evil, right? 

but, as i mentioned, my view has changed. sharks don't really kill alot of people - in fact, on average only about 20 a year. mostly they just take a leg or a chunk of flesh. so really, in the end, they are not so much evil as they are colossal assholes. although, they do sleep with their eyes open - a warning never to trust an animal that doesn't have eyelids (reticulating membranes don't count). 

having heard a story this morning about a woman killed by a ray, i now believe that the ray has taken the sharks place as a nature's most evil creature. a woman, just hanging out on her boat, is suddenly and viciously attacked by a ray that LEAPS OUT OF THE WATER AND TACKLES HER. apparently, there is a similar - in fact nearly identical - case from 2005 but i failed to find a link to it. i did however find this story about a man who was stabbed IN THE HEART by a ray. see, while sharks are built like torpedoes and full of teeth, your common ray is much creepier. utilizing a long poison bard he STABS YOU IN THE F***ING HEART. this brings up some crucial shark-to-ray comparison points: 

1. most shark attacks are due to sharks mistaking people for shit they actually like to eat - like turtles and seals and stuff. sharks don't like the taste of what is essentially a big hairless monkey. 

2. sharks tend to bite extremities, because they look meaty and delicious - can we really blame them? 

3. rays, on the other hand, seem to have an in-depth knowledge of human anatomy, that not only denote amazing powers of intellect, but also a deep seeded will to destroy all humans.  

in closing, i think rays are nature's #1 most evil thing. a close second is the sacculina carcini, which is only saved the number one slot by being slightly more awesome than it is evil. in contrast, i believe that dogs are the most A+ super nice animal on earth. as proof i submit this video of a dog leaping off of a boat to attack a shark. someone give that dog a medal. or some snausages.

i do apologize if all this talk about evil and animals killing people has bummed you out. as a way of apologizing, i present you with this awesome page where you can waste several minutes basking in nostalgia. 

lay them busters down

lemmme chin witcha bo. 

after my recent trip to washington state to visit a very dear friend i acquired a whole bunch of gangsta rap which i proceeded to listen to.  among feelings of straight illin', i realized just how unacculturated i am to rap culture.  i go through periodic periods of interest in hip-hop and rap and i always have to learn a bunch of words just to enjoy it. not that i mind, it just always makes me feel like such a honkey. 

i can distinctly remember listening to this scarface song back in highschool and having to ask one of my friends who or what OG was. he was kind enough to stifle his laughter. this time around though, i used my honkey powers of discernment to locate an online rap dictionary. now i'm gonna pump it, puff it, and pop it. additionally i will undoubtably pitch woo like a true OG.  also, if you haven't yet, you should really go check out the true story behind the regulators. 

next stop: east si-i-ide motel.  

so long, gary

gary rolls a natural 1. 

people, i'm sorry. you better sit down for this. gary gygax, the creator of dungeons & dragons ... is dead. the man who drew millions of pimply-mal-adjusted teenager into caffeine-fueled arguments about the differences between goblins and hobgoblins has gone to a better place. it's too bad he fumbled on his death save this morning but i'm sure a few heart attacks will weaken your constitution as much as a Venomous Vial of the Necromancer's Brew (-6 CON, fortitude save DC36 halves).

on the plus side, there is a slot open in Al Gore's team of space-time infraction fighting super nerds. 

but not all is lost, dear readers. for in the venice architecture biennale, a young architect named christian waldvogel has unveiled his plans to pump the molten metal out of the earth and use it to construct a "rounded, twenty-faced icosahedron" which we would all live inside of and which he dubs "earth 2.0." i will repeat, for those of you with extreme anterograde amnesia: 

"a rounded twenty-faced icosahedron." those of you familiar with dungeons and dragons will know this as a d20. for everyone else, that is a 20-sided die and the indispensable tool of any dungeon master worth his weight in geldings. 

gary gygax will live on - through the might of earth 2.0