Faroff is one awesome mashup artist. He has good instincts knowing what music goes with what. Here is 42 minutes of mashups that I’m gonna download. You should too.

edit: The player doesn’t seem to be working. :/   Still learning the quirks of tumblr, here.. Go to this link to hear it:

http://www.4shared.com/audio/LpEmETEm/Mixtape_Bootie_Rio_-_Setembro.html

Best.Movie.Ever.

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA Reflection nebula NGC 2023 lies nearly 1500 light-years from Earth. It lies within the constellation of Orion (The Hunter), close to the well-known Flame and Horsehead nebulas. NGC 2023 stretches a vast four light-years across. This picture only displays the southern part, with colors resembling a sunset on Earth. Stars are forming from the material comprising NGC 2023, and this Hubble image, which was posted on Monday (Aug. 15), captures the billowing waves of gas, 5000 times denser than the interstellar medium.

From www.space.com

Gonzo journalism

Job searching sucks. I’m not going into the trials and tribulations of my search here. Instead, I’m going to post my resume as it appears and some of things I’m gong to do with it. Tumblr’s blog format is narrower than a regular letter, so I don’t know what that will do to the margins. I’m omiting my contact address and phone. Those who do want to contact me through tumblr will know how. I will leave in my email, because heck, I ain’t afraid of spam. RESUME

Tardigrade!!!

Reached in the silver bag and pulled an R. My friend pulled a D. He goes first. After pulling out six other tiles, he passed the bag to me and began studying his letters.

It’s been a long time since I’ve played Scrabble on a real board, with real wooded tiles sitting on a real wooden rack. With the onslaught of network site apps, my modern scrabble experience contributes to the inevitible carpal tunnel that will someday render me a fragment of a person. I pulled an E from the bag.

Ergonomics is a luxury science for those who can afford such nice chairs.

My friend scowled with his palm covering his mouth, elbow on the table while he stared at his letters.

The game was spontaneous. I had come to visit, have a beer. I haven’t seen my friend in a good long time. Events had been taking sharp turns left and right and I was at sea and the weather was stormy. I was on my own, leaving my family temporarily with the hopes of re-establishing ourselves in our old stomping grounds. I had left my job at the zoo four months previously and was having difficulty nailing down a job. That was stressful enough, job-searching, but it was amplified with the absence of my family. I pulled an M.

Minneapolis, Minnesota is the city I wanted to live in. When we had moved to Oklahoma eight years previously, we had always told ourselves that it was a temporary move. Our daughter had been born, and even with both of us working, we weren’t pulling enough income in to support ourselves. My wife took the maximum amount of unpaid maternity leave from the hotel because I had decided to take a job in Pock Island. The plan at that time was that I would secure the job in Iowa, and then she would transfer through her company to a nearby hotel. I had just left Festival Theatre as the Technical Director. I loved that job, but unfortunately it was seasonal, and even if it were full-year, I wouldn’t have been pulling in more than $16K. I managed to supplement my income working as a freelance techie and overhire in some of the local theatres and scene shops, but still I wasn’t pulling in enough for a family of four. Theresa was bringing in an steady salary as AGM in the hotel, but I needed to get some financial security. After some searching, I had discovered that the dinner theatre in Rock Island needed a Technical Director. I applied and as fortune was smiling down on me, secured that job. My aunt lived in Davenport, across the river, and arrangements were made for me to stay with her until our whole family could transfer.

My friend readjusted. Apparently his letters weren’t all that great. I pulled four more tiles from the bag and held them like candies in my palm.

T. so far I could make TERM. M. nothing. B. BERM? no. G. GERM. better, but not great. I was going to have to rely on his vowel for anything better. I placed GERM on the right side of my rack and the MTB on the left.

A hushed “well” escaped under my friend’s breath. He laid down his letters. COP, with the C on the star. “14”, he said, and wrote it on the empty scorecard and reached for the bag.

“Not a bad start” I commented. He nodded and took a swig of his beer. I looked at my letters again. Obvious was COPE, with GERM going down. That would be 16 points. But I hesitated, there had to be something better than coping with a germ. I played with my letters. Random anagramming led me to smile to myself. There, sitting innocently on my rack was REMTMBG. I made a little space after the third letter. REM TMBG. I could feel a wash of seratonin going over me.

These represented to me two favorite bands from my history. I have been with these two bands for over twenty years. In high school, a friend of mine brought Eponymous on a school trip. Previous to this, my exposure to music was pretty much limited to whatever was on KLIZ, the local top 40 radio station that played the same songs in rotation every day. Janet Jackson’s “Nasty Boys” played exactly at 6:03 every night. When I heard “Finest Worksong” I was amazed that this music was available for anyone to hear. Pretty naive , when I look back on it, but all retrospection is marinaded in naivete. In my first year of college, I was introduced to They Might Be Giants by a friend, and I have worn that medal ever since. That year REM’s Out Of Time came out and that brought my library to a grand total of 5 cassettes, which I was pretty proud of until I compared my paltry collection to other freshmen. Heather invited me to her dorm and she played an album called Flood. I knew there was more interesting music out there, but this album had the most inventive sounds and lyrics that I had ever encountered. I immediately begged for a dub of it, which I constantly played until I memorized every word on the album.

I have since collected several albums and my musical horizon widened to at least be socially passable, where I could actually talk about music with people and have some relevance. REM and TMBG were standard in my library, though. I searched out these two bands whenever I had eight dollars to spend at the Fetus, and I filled out those collections. The last REM album that I got was Monster, which was a heavily electronica diversion from their original music, and suddenly I lost interest in them. I didn’t pick up New Adventures in Hi Fi because I wasn’t aware of it. And the following year, Bill Berry left the band, and to me. The book was closed. I feverish collect TMBG’s albums, but I stopped right before Mink Car, due to my having to maintain priorties with my expenses. My son was already 2, and my daughter was on her way.
My job wasn’t allowing any room for luxuries, so this was one that I had to postpone. I vowed I’d get it, though, once we had stabilized. I still haven’t picked it up yet.

My friend rapped his knuckle on the table. I looked at my letters. without thinking, I put down GROMMET, using his O. 16 points. Same as if I had put down GERM. Things being equal, I prefer longer words to shorter ones. I don’t know why.

I just read an article from NYTs titled Killings in Norway Spotlight Anti-Muslim Thought in the United States, regarding how Anders Behring Brevikhad used sources and quotes from mostly American bloggers and anti-jihadist websites as inspiration and pedestals for the belief that what he did was good and right. One of the influences was Robert Spencer, who operates the jihadwatch.org, whom Brevik quoted 64 times in his 1500 page manifesto, according to the NYT. Also mentioned as being an influence is a blogsite called The Gates of Vienna which is operated by a Virginian consultant who calls himself “Baron Bodissey” which is apparently temporarily shut down due to increased activity over the weekend.

I went to jihadwatch to see Spencer’s response to Brevik’s quoting him. Hr. Gunnar Thorenfeldt, of the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet asked him his response to being an influence. His exact response?

“If I was indeed an inspiration for his work, I feel the way the Beatles must have felt when they learned that Charles Manson had committed murder after being inspired by messages he thought he heard in their song lyrics. There were no such messages. Nor is there, for any sane person, any inspiration for harming anyone in my work, which has been consistently dedicated to defending human rights for all people.”

I have two SERIOUS problems with this. (Well I have more than that- but I want to focus on two)

First and foremost is Spencer’s view that  his own vitriolic anti-Islamic stance cannot be a factor in someone’s else’s actions. This is one of the most cowardly acts of hand-washing that I can think of. If you preach hate, you should expect and WANT people to hate. To spread the message of hate and then say “That’s not what I meant” when someone acts upon that message, that is prime example of backpedalling that I have ever seen.

Mr. Spencer says his work defends all human rights. Does he then believe that Muslims are not human? That’s what I read here.

The second problem I have with Mr. Spencer’s response is his invocation of the Beatles’ Helter Skelter to be analogous to this situation. When U2 performed HS in their album Rattle and Hum, they famously said they were “taking it back” from Charles Manson. Helter Skelter is a song, describing an amusement park ride, and possibly analogizing it to the idea of reincarnation (“When I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide”), which the Beatles were kinda into. Manson wrongly interpreted the song was prophesying an apocalyptic racial war. Many people have interpretted this song and thousands of other pieces of art to mean this or that or whatever.That’s what art does: is it lends itself to interpretation. Why? Because each piece of art is self-contained. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. When you reach the end of the art, there is no more but interpretation.

Spencer’s anti-Islamic blog is NOT a song, is NOT self-contained, and does NOT hold itself up to interpretation in the same vein that art does. Jihad Watch is a news-gathering self-directed watchdog of Islamic strategies, paranoid that every Muslim is a threat and must be carefully monitored lest they destroy his way of life. The blog is constantly updated with new information, and the blog’s followers contribute in the comment section, which leads to more information-gathering. That is what a successful blog does, it posts outside information and digests it into a form that it can process for its own purpose.

U2 wanted to take back “Helter Skelter” from the association of Manson and his misinterpretation, to bring the song back to balance of its original intent, a good song. And U2 did that in Rattle and Hum successfully. Fans rejected Manson’s use of the song and condemned that use. Mr. Spencer, saying he feels like the Beatles, should be ashamed of himself, not for comparing himself to what is arguably the most influential band in the 20th century, (he should be ashamed of that too, but that’s a digression), but for not taking responsibility and accountablity for the actions that others take who are influenced by his work. Of course Breivik got no absolute instructions from Spencer. Spencer never told anyone to kill innocent children at a camp. But if you’re going to spread the message of hate, don’t you think that hate will arise?

Now I’ve done it. Set up a tumblr account. Haven’t I learned from myspace, flickr, facebook, photobucket, tribe, twitter, youtube, livejournal, digg, linkedIn, or any of other networking websites that IT REALLY DOESN’T MATTER!.

I missed out on friendster, and I think I’m going to skip google+. Anyone connected to me must know that most of my time is spent on facebook, sometimes to the irritation of them. But lately my fb activity has waned, and I don’t now post every little snippet that comes to my head. Which I feel is more plateauing and balanced.

What I find appealing about tumblr is the style of posting things that I like on it, rather than the ho-hum statuses of facebook “We’re going to get ice cream!” Also, there aren’t the tempting game-apps to be found here (If there are.. please DO NOT TELL me about them.. This is the part of bliss that i want ignorance to serve). My addiction of choice on facebook is Treasure Madness, and there are hundreds of times I wonder why I’m wasting my time playing it. Addictions being what they are, though, I can’t stop.                                     I will have you, Angry mask

                                                         ***

I want my internet experience to be more fulfilling than what it is. For another blog somewhere, I found that it was lacking in some pizzazz. It was a rather dry entry, merely stating that I hadn’t blogged for a while, and I couldn’t really come up with anything to make it more interesting. So I did a random image search on google with the query “Interesting thing” and found many interesting images. Of course safesearch was on, so these interesting things are those that I can freely and publicly share. One image that captured my attention was this one

    This is what is known as a Highly Decorated Pig or Altus Decoratus Porcos

It’s by Belgian artist Wim Delvoye, who just happens to be my favorite artist currently. His website is here, and I higly suggest it. You can see a pooping machine and some very delicate backhoes, religious X-rays and stained glass soccer goalposts. This particular pig is located at Galerie Guy Pieters in Paris (or Saint Paul, or Knokke, or Sint Martens, I wasn’t sure which one exactly, and my sciatica is acting up, so I can’t cross the street and ocean atm until that clears up)

I spent a good deal of time on his website after I found the Highly Decorated Pig. I had seen it before, a few years ago, but I had forgotten about it. It was good to revisit it.

So in comparison, I would very much rather visit a French gallery, in which a man will tattoo pigs or throw bananas into a contraption to make his very own fecal matter and put them on display than go to a video game version of a farm and pretend to do hard labor. I would rather discover treasures in the real world (damn you sciatica and Atlantic Ocean!) than click a mouse button to virtually dig for a cartoon Aztec artifact, which I can then trade for facebucks, so that I can finally buy that Angry mask.

                                           you WILL be mine

Side note for those of you who might become concerned about my health. I do not have problems with my sciatica. I just said that for highly dramatic purposes. The only medical condition I suffer is acute hypochremata, in which my wallet does not produce the necessary amount of funds that I need to live a full and enriching life. Put a penny in the jar to help save a lifestyle, please.