Note to Self: Become Airship Privateer

You probably didn't know that the Goodyear blimp Resolute was a privateer during WWII. When I thought that the United States hadn't issued a letter of marque (which authorizes privateering or other hostile actions by civilian parties) since the War of 1812, well, my goal of being a pirate just didn't seem viable. But now that I know that there have been licensed American sky pirates, a world of possibilities has opened up.

Who wants in?

Now, you may ask, how on Earth would we get a letter of marque these days? You can vote for Ron Paul, that's how. Yes, Ron Paul, Republican congressman and noted coot, thinks the U.S. should encourage anti-terrorist privateering. Really, the only question is what to name our lighter-than-air death-dealing machine. I propose the USS Howard Taft. Or possibly Lighter Than Bombs.

(Paid for by the Alliance of Privateers and Sky Pirates for Ron Paul)

Did you know there was a new maciej-powered blog afoot?  Now you do.

Yes More Drama

In Defense of Auto-Tune

Anyone who keep at least half an ear turned towards the state of pop music today knows what Auto-Tune is. And even if someone can’t identify it by that name, chances are if you say, “you know, the T-Pain effect,” they’ll catch on quickly. Indeed, T-Pain has made truckloads of money off the simple vocal modulation software, turning his otherwise mundane voice into a hectic, delirious hook machine. By using this newfound voice to storm the Billboard charts, T-Pain brought Auto-Tune to the attention of many other hip-hop and pop artists. An interesting article published this summer in the New Yorker includes an interview with T-Pain, and details the history of the software, which dates back to 1997 and a Cher hit single. Now, as more and more high profile artists (e.g. Lil Wayne and Kanye West) begin to employ Auto-Tune, more and more music critics and fans are clamoring for its destruction, claiming that it’s been played out and is standing in the way of artistic expression. In my opinion, they couldn’t be more wrong.

It’s important to remember that this type of vocal modulation did not enter the hip-hop realm yesterday. Let us not forget the late Roger Troutman’s classic hook (recorded using Auto-Tune’s grandfather—the vococorder) on 2pac’s smash hit “California Love.” Has the phrase “city of Compton” even been pronounced as fantastically? Of course, vocal modulation in this instance was limited to the chorus, and perhaps a few more eyebrows would have been raised if Pac himself had started distorting his own voice. But let us not make the same mistake as those who refuse to admit that the genre has any relevance since the demise of Pac and Biggie. Like any healthy genre, it has evolved, tried new things, and become something that is both different and the same. I propose that the increasing use of Auto-Tune is simply another hip-hop experiment. It may remain, it may die out relatively quickly, but while it’s here, why not embrace its artistic potential?

Consider the following examples. Lil Wayne, long claiming to be the best rapper alive, only scored his first number one hit after running his rasp through Auto-Tune. So, there’s no doubt that this shit sells records. But, there’s more to Lil Wayne’s use of the technology than a simple money grab. I would argue that it allows him to put even more inflection into an already ridiculously expressive voice. Take his track “Rider,” recorded over a revamped version of Pac’s “Ambitionz Az A Ridah” beat. Created early-on in Wayne’s experimentation with the Auto-Tune effect, it lends his voice a positively tortured quality, which couldn’t be more appropriate considering he is rapping and singing about an almost uncontrollable love for a woman. “You only like her, I’m trying to wife her,” he plaintively croons. And at about 2:19 into the song, the effect crescendos as Wayne repeats the chorus: “I won’t deny her, shawty is a ridah…” It’s hard to imagine this song working at all without Auto-Tune, but it remains one of the most interesting and passionate pieces that Wayne has recorded.

To draw from slightly more recent material (in an effort to prove that Auto-Tune has not yet exhausted its possibilities), consider the song “My Life” off The Game’s new album LAX and featuring Lil Wayne. The song takes a serious tone, as Wayne’s chorus conveys both the exhaustion of a hustler’s life, as well as the survivor’s guilt that one may feel from seeing their friends fall to violence, drugs, and the legal system. Heady stuff. The additional emotional impetus that Auto-Tune affords Wayne cannot be discounted, especially on words like “grinding,” “tired,” “lawd,” and “eyes wide.” It’s impressive stuff, it continuously sends chills across my skin, and I’m glad it exists. I can’t say it would be possible without Auto-Tune.

Finally, consider Kanye West. Featured on the song “Put On,” the first single off Young Jeezy’s new album The Recession, Kanye employs the Auto-Tune effect in his verse. Now, while the effect has been used primarily in choruses, artists like Lil Wayne have not been afraid to rap entire songs using it. “Rider” is one example, “Lollipop” another (though the lyrics to that particular track are so ridiculously puerile that we won’t take it into serious consideration). The result of spitting an Auto-Tune verse is a rap that is remarkably melodic. I’ve always considered the naturally melodic nature of Wayne’s voice one of his greatest assets as an emcee. Now artists like Kanye, whose voice can be about as melodic as a dead fish at times, can record something like his “Put On” verse—a rap that I sometimes catch myself whistling as I’m riding in elevators. Touching on the loss of his mother and the lonely nature of superstardom, Yeezy’s verse is packed with emotion, and it’s all vamped up to a higher level with Auto-Tune. His voice itself seems like it’s crying as he laments the fact that he has little in his life to find solace in anymore. The amount of anguish conveyed is stunning. It blows me away every time.

I write this because of the recent news that has leaked out about Kanye’s upcoming album. Apparently, he plans to use a whole heap of Auto-Tune and sing a lot. If true, it would be a wild direction to take, but, considering what this guy has had on his mind lately, could be a fantastic artistic endeavor. And, if his Auto-Tune work on “Put On” is any indication, this could work out extremely well. Yet, as I was reading the comments below the news story, I was surprised by how many people were furious with this possibility, griping about how Kanye has sold out, fallen in line with the rest of the crowd, etc. Please, people, let’s not damn the man and the entire Auto-Tune effect just because you’re tired of T-Pain. Auto-Tune will not change who a person is nor alter their innate artistic genius, it will simply provide a new and colorful palate with which to express themselves. Even with Auto-Tune, Kanye will still be Kanye, just as Lil Wayne is still Lil Wayne. They will not become T-Pain. T-Pain is T-Pain.

There shall be rejoicing and dancing in the streets, for the evil one has finally left our fair city.

Read Roger Ebert's parting shot to Jay Mariotti.

I'm glad I read xkcd. (xkcd)

This post brought to you by the Annoy Carl Wheeler Foundation for Annoying Carl Wheeler. (Carl Wheeler)

The Commercial Rise and Artistic Fall of Dwayne Carter

It’s been two weeks since the official release of Lil Wayne’s official studio album Tha Carter III, and I’ve spent the last fortnight listening to the record, re-listening to the previous installments in Tha Carter series and wealth of Weezy mixtapes, and asking myself why Wayne is no longer the best rapper alive. I was a believer after listening to Tha Carter II—a devotee even. At that point (the album was released in 2005, but I never even heard it until the beginning of 2007) Wayne had yet to achieve the obscene level of stardom that he currently holds. In fact, I considered him extremely underrated. When I traced my steps backward and picked up the original Tha Carter, I was baffled as to how more people could not be talking about this kid from New Orleans. His dexterous yet playful verses left my mouth agape and my head shaking in a way that one generally only expects from rap saints like Pac and Biggie and living deities like Jay-Z.

Then the articles gradually started trickling in. XXL wrote a feature story. Wayne’s tattooed and grinning visage framed in trademark dreadlocks began appearing on a variety of magazine covers. His fame was growing by leaps and bounds, only aided by the immensely popular (and entirely free) Da Drought 3 mixtape, which became the hottest hip-hop topic of the summer. Weezy was finally getting the attention he deserved, I believed. Now all that was left was for him to release Tha Carter III at the end of the year and set the record straight once and for all. It would make-up for the previous, largely overlooked Carter installments and would make Wayne’s claims as Best Rapper Alive undeniable. Da Drought 3 was an excellent appetizer—the mixtape format allowing Wayne to be more playful, rapping over others’ beats and cracking jokes without really saying too much. There was entrancing wordplay that demonstrated a love for language, and a willingness to play with his voice that made his flows positively melodic, but little real substance when it came to coherent narratives—always a sticking point for Wayne, but one that he seemed to be improving on in his studio work. I awaited Tha Carter III in hopes of new tracks akin to “Tha Mobb” and “Fly In” from the Carter II—tracks with unparalleled flows that, coupled with Wayne’s newfound public following, would vault him into a higher pantheon of emcees.

Then the levees at the Young Money Studios broke. More than just a leak, the entirety of the Carter III flooded out into the streets months before its scheduled release date. Bootlegged copies of the album compiled by The Empire in a mixtape named The Drought Is Over 2 found their way onto every Wayne fan’s hard drive before the end of August. Wayne tried to play this off as no big deal, claiming he wouldn’t have used those tracks anyway—a position that we now see to be not entirely true based on his recent explosion at The Empire DJs on a radio program (numerous death threats and slurs were directed their way). I don’t think anyone could have predicted how this leak would throw Wayne’s career off kilter at the time; we were all just happy for the new tracks. Now, however, in the wake of a lackluster and underwhelming Tha Carter III, I wish the lid had been kept on the original project and Wayne was allowed to release The Drought Is Over 2 as his official Tha Carter III. All the greatness was there. There was even thematic coherence, as many of the songs dealt with a melancholic longing after lost love (perhaps signaling an emotional maturation on the part of Wayne, who had dealt primarily in M.O.B.s beforehand). Listen to tracks like “Something You Forgot,” “Scarface,” “I Know The Future,” and “La La La” for proof of this collection’s superb nature. Were Wayne allowed the time to clean things up a little more on the album, as I’m assuming he would have in the months remaining before the album’s original release date, he may have released a flawless product. As is, it’s pretty damn close, which is not something you can say of most things bootlegged. Yet, as a mixtape, it fell short of most major critics’ radar (save an article in Vibe magazine that listed most of the tracks as Weezy’s best of ‘07) and its effect on Wayne’s legacy and prestige was thusly diluted.
And the official Carter III was pushed back. Christmas 2007, initially, then January 2008. February, March, April, May followed with more rumors of release, but still nothing. In the meantime, Wayne used the extra time to further catapult his stardom by lending guest appearances to almost any artist in any genre you can think of.

And there was yet more leaking. Another whole Carter III’s worth of tracks was poached by The Empire and released on mixtapes like The Drought Is Over Part 4. While not quite as thematically focused as The Drought Is Over 2, it felt like another worthy Carter III had passed by in bootleg form. Tracks like “One Night Only,” “Trouble,” “When They Come For Me,” and “Burn This City” show Wayne in his top form. While one can’t be sure of Wayne original intentions for this material, it seems likely that he did not mean for it to wander off in the hands of rogue DJs. While nearly every track on The Drought Is Over Part 4 was impressive and album worthy (the Kanye West produced “Comfortable” with Babyface even made the jump to Tha Carter III), it should also be noted that Wayne’s flow no longer seem as tight; he began to sound lazy on some tracks and his thoughts became more disjointed—perhaps a side-effect of his chronic abuse of prescription cough syrup (and god knows whatever other drugs; you can look up the tour bus arrest reports to read about the illegal pharmacy Wayne had driving through the South).

A friend of mine thought that Wayne had become too obsessed with his own celebrity and it was effecting what he rapped about, which I suppose is the case for almost every musical artist—the best work comes when they’re still poor unknowns. Once you are a celebrity, what else do you have to rap/sing about but your own celebrity? In fact, Wayne seemed bent on crafting himself as something above homo sapiens, something he strove for through increased use of Auto-Tune (the vocal modulation device that T-Pain has built a career out of). Wayne’s voice already being one of the most unique in rap, he seemed to transcend the inherent cheesiness of the robotic vocals and became something positively ethereal. Listen to him croon painfully (in a good way) on the track “Rider” for proof of this. Still, his increased love for his new voice made me worried as he became more of a singer and less of a rapper. This is clearly evinced in the number one song in the country right now—“Lollipop”—a song so lyrically brain-dead that it’s almost painful, yet also strangely addictive. I’ve yet to switch the station when it comes on the radio, despite how amazingly overplayed it and its remix are.

When Tha Carter III release date of June 10th was finally set in stone, many fans were feeling more annoyance at the delays than eager anticipation for the product. After all the setbacks and gradual increase in his lazy rapping, I was relying on Tha Carter III to redeem Lil Wayne. If it wasn’t as good as the leaked material that came before, I would have to conclude that the peak of his artistic career had passed. Now, after listening to Tha Carter III several times, I would place Wayne’s best work in the time range of Tha Carter through The Drought Is Over 2 mixtape (though I suppose you could extend that through The Drought Is Over Part 4 and not really be wrong). Tha Carter III simply doesn’t pass muster. Wayne actually sounds tired on the album. Just listen to him sigh heavily on the intro to “Mr. Carter” (which is probably the best song on the album, and gave me false hope as the second track). He sounds positively exhausted, as if the effort needed to express himself coherently has simply become too much. One could argue that Jay-Z beats him on his own track, which is ironic considering that Hov’s verse is about passing the torch to Weezy.

In the same vein as Wayne’s apparent fatigue, he sounds out of breath on many of his verses, as if his rapping behind the beat isn’t just for effect, but that he’s actually having trouble keeping up. As opening tracks go, “3 Peat” seems tragically weak compared to what has come before—the epic “Tha Mobb” on Tha Carter II (Wayne’s best song, in my opinion) and the adroit “Walk In” from Tha Carter. The word lazy continues to be the most apt descriptor for this new style of rapping from Wayne. “A Milli” is fine, in my opinion. The trance beat grows on you, and the minimalist snares, bass and handclaps are perfect for freestyling. The only problem is that Wayne doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense on the track, which I am actually more forgiving of than many critics because I think it demonstrates Wayne’s love for individual words and being playful with language. There is no excuse, however, for “Got Money” with T-Pain. Wayne should be above such fluff.
The aforementioned “Comfortable” with Babyface is a standout, as is the other Kanye West produced track “Let The Beat Build.” West’s production seems to fit Wayne’s flow quite well, though the latter track shows the same signs of mental stumbling by Wayne that are apparent throughout Tha Carter III. Production is actually a major sticking point for me with Tha Carter III. Now, I don’t have a huge problem with Mannie Fresh, but he’s far from my favourite producer, and too much of his stuff sounds identical. So when Wayne broke from him for Tha Carter II, I think it might have been one of his best career moves. For that album he culled a wide variety of beats from a handful of mostly unknown southern producers. The end result was a fantastic sonic landscape for the rapper to navigate. Naturally, with Wayne’s increased fame, Tha Carter III would feature appropriately famous producers. The end result this time, however, is a mish-mash of cookie-cutter and just plain bad. “Dr. Carter” and “Phone Home”—two of the weakest tracks on the album—suffer from production missteps by Swizz Beatz and Cool and Dre. The former isn’t outwardly grating, but simply has no life to it, while the latter contains a hook so obnoxious that one has to wonder what Dre was hearing through those headphones. Similarly, “La La,” produced by the ever-insane David Banner, only leaves one wishing that the original “La La La” had made the album.
The rest of the album is made up of a handful of tracks that are merely good, falling short of great, and not even approaching epic. The message of “Tie My Hands” shows social maturation on the part of Wayne, but Robin Thicke is ultimately an R&B producer and his beats are almost always too laid back for a Hip-Hop album (though the jazzed-up “Shooter” from Tha Carter II came closer than most to a successful crossover). “Shoot Me Down” is positively chilling and largely a success. “Playing With Fire” isn’t quite as good, but Wayne’s comparison of himself to MLK is frighteningly passionate, and his third verse is a rerecording of one from The Drought Is Over 2 song “World Of Fantasy.” (It’s hard to blame him for this transfer of old material; it’s probably one of his best verses and it works really well with this beat.) Wayne is easily outshone on “You Ain’t Got Nuthin,” which demonstrates that his good friend Juelz Santana is perhaps the next to watch for the title of Best Rapper Alive, and the closing track “Don’t Get It” is a moderately entertaining high, rambling rant, though it’s somewhat misplaced here (one wishes he had just stuck to rapping on the track; it’s a nice beat). And then the album ends, and I think to myself, “That’s it? That’s what everyone waited years for? What happened?”

This is the realest review I’ve found yet of Tha Carter III (http://www.tinymixtapes.com/Lil-Wayne), and it purports that Wayne traded in his title of “Best Rapper Alive” for the moniker of “Biggest Rapper Alive.” That’s hard to argue with. At the very least, he had a change of heart since he recorded “Tha Mobb,” in which he rapped: “Crossover? Whatever. Mainstream? No!” Tracks like “Got Money” and “Lollipop” are about as mainstream as they come. Of course, now Wayne is richer than ever before, and it’s hard to criticize him for following the paper. Furthermore, compared to some of the stuff that’s put out these days, Tha Carter III is not actually a bad album. It’s just a disappointment compared to what has come before in Lil Wayne’s career. Now, I’m not going to say that Wayne can never regain his former greatness; stale artists find ways to reinvent themselves all the time. Personally, I would like to see him take some time off and step away from the mic for a little bit. As it is, he’s stretched himself too thin and diluted his material by oversaturating the market. Maybe he can spend some more time in his hometown of New Orleans, which he moved away from for a long time after Katrina destroyed his home. I think he still has more to say, but needs to take a rest for a little while. There have been rumours and indications from the man himself that he wants to become an R&B singer. If that’s the case, then I wish him all the best. Maybe he can breathe new life into that game, as well. Of course, on one of his own remixes to “A Millie” (pretty much every rapper in existence has one now—a testament to how nice the beat is) he says that he’s celebrating Tha Carter III’s impressive sales by starting work on Tha Carter 4. Whatever. I’m not going to protest that, either. In fact, no matter what he decides to do, I’ll probably follow Wayne’s career through its entirety. He’s certainly made things interesting thus far.

Obie Trice is the best rapper alive.

Wayne might be tied with him, but he's becoming so postmodern it's kinda hard to tell.

Now where was I? Oh right, the South: Spring break was a nine-day road trip from Atlanta to Chicago. How can that take nine days, you say, O imaginary reader who serves as a rhetorical device? Why, you go by way of North Carolina, Kentucky, and New Orleans.

Day 1:
I arrived Wednesday shortly after 11:00 PM. Zach (The Car Owner), Jason (The Pikey), Boz (The Comic Relief), and Jen (The Questionably Intrepid), are waiting at the airport. We drive north. Atlanta, I hardly knew ye.

Day 2:
We visit Ty Cobb's grave in booming Royston. A forty is puored. There is a reading from the book of Cobb ("You are driving me to Reno tonight", Cobb told his new biographer).

Later, we see Tallulah Gorge, largest conyon east of the Mississippi. There are waterfalls, gorgeous views, moonpies, and extravagant numbers of stairs. At the gorge floor, we venture into restricted areas, and sun ourselves up on the rocks of the river crossing. The crossing consists entirely of large, half-submerged rocks. Naturally, I venture halfway across, agile as a mountain goat. Before I can embarass myslef on the truly difficult portion, Jen falls in the river. She is recovered swiftly, but this necessitates a hasty retreat to the car (did I mention the stairs?).

Day2, Part2:
We attempt to drive the scenic Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina. This is harder than finding a 500-mile-long tourist attraction sounds. Eventually, we find an entrance, a visitor's center, and an abrupt closure of the road. Due to possible avalanches, we are told. Not to be deterred, we set out the opposite direction along the parkway, and are rewarded with a series of spectacular vistas.

It was shortly thereafter this that we nearly died.

As we approached the first tunnel of the Parkway, a sign indicated "Turn Lights On". Zach, driving, felt confident the lights were on. As we entered the tunnel in high spirits, we turned up the music and began accelerating, we realized rapidly that 1) the lights were not on, 2) the tunnel had no lights of its own, 3) the tunnel was curving. Zach managed to break and swerve, barely crossing the midline of the road (this was clear from the skid marks). After this he turned the headlights on. Then we headed into a bright white light.

Four tunnels later, we discovered that this part of the Parkway also dead-ended, fortunately at another marvelous overlook. As we stood gazing at the setting sun, there descended from the mountain a bearded man with flowing hair, with a companion. And yea, verily, he showed us the true path (to the ridgeline). He called himself Fiddle Dave, and invited us to his concert in Asheville.

After declaring Fiddle Dave our new savior, kicking USGS property, and identifying the sight of a midget killing, we head for Kentucky, listening to World War Z all the way. This is all the more compellign since we abandon the main highway in favor of Carolina backroads, which show an incredible favor for switchbacks. On arrival in Lexington, we discover all rooms are occupied as a result of a high school basketball tournament. We drive another 20 minutes, find a room in Georgetown, and collapse exhausted.

TO BE CONTINUED (AND POSSIBLY EDITED)...

Never ever do business with Virgin Mobile.

Ever.

Dead Reckoning
Well, I'm not dead yet. CS is really becoming a bit of a death march. Our assignment: draw shadows on a heightfield based on some angle of the sun. Seems simple enough, right? Took three people 20 hours. I wrote the drawing functions, while Rob and Alex engaged in a lively debate on how the fuck the math was supposed to work. Also, it did not help that the professor did not write useful code, and in fact had to extend the project from Wednesday to Friday, after realizing Wednesday morning that he could not complete the assignment, because his code was fatally broken.

But yes, those are how shadows should look on Puget Sound with the sun shining from the northwest.

-Loot is a play about British people doing unconscionable things. As a result, it is entertaining. Also Zach (my former roommate) and Joel (my current roommate) played major roles.

-For spring break, I am travelling from Atlanta to Chicago by car. First stop: Ty Cobb's grave (Jason's idea. I'll consider spitting on it. Ty Cobb was a dick.)

-I have considered revising my aesthetic principles. Currently, I hypothesize that the two most important factors in art are beauty (truth-based) and comedy (falsehood-based). That is, comedy is funny because it is cleverly wrong, and beauty represents soemthing fundamentally true. I realized I've missed entire genres here, most majorly horror, which I will guess is based on the "uncanny valley" principle, or a balancing point between truth and falsehood. Furthermore I'll postulate that good horror-related art is that which disturbs us in some valuable way.

Anyway, you can see how it increases the complexity to have points of excellence in the middle as well as at the extremes.

-Finally, I have disposable income. Now if only I had time to spend it. At least tech support will never go out of style.

Kinetics
Time hurries on, leaves that are green etc. I'm starting to get a hang of this quarter, now that it's sixth week. Hoo boy. I probably shouldn't think about the year being half over, especially since it's been hard to go more than a day at a time (two programming classes and a new job will do that). At least the job pays well.

Writing sporadic. Artistic portion of the brain swings between feverish bouts of inspiration and stretches of "I haven't written anything in a while, have I?".

I'm taking one class next quarter. One: Game Construction. But first I have to get through the next 6 weeks while also managing to have fun and stay active socially. I really just want to relax and then pursue my own prjects of awesomeness at about 70% of this pace.

More Intersting, Less Whining
-I put my shiny glowing balls in a spotlight. Yes, really. That's the magic of Computer Graphics. We had to program a box full of bouncing balls. They had specular highlights, and I gave them inner light.

-The custom of going drinking immediately after turning in the Computer Graphics project is an excellent custom. Note: do not order pizza from the University Pub. However, ordering Cholie's through the (nigh-legendary) "Chole Hole" at The Falcon is encouraged.

-I went to the Cove (Hyde Park's Other Dive Bar (TM)) last week with Zach and Boz. Nice place, but they do check ID.

-Moment of excellence:
Zach: "Hey guys! Watch me kick this chunk of ice and nothing bad will happen!" *SPLAT*
Pat: "You forgot to set your plant foot. Way to go, Lawrence Tynes"

-Go Giants! I saw only the first 57 minutes of the Super Bowl due to a very poorly timed work shift. I caught up online, however. Eli Manning, significantly more unstoppable than usual. Really, the city of Boston was going to be insufferable for quite a while if the Pats went 19-0. Glad they put an end to that. And it was a pretty awesome game.

-Reading my brother's Facebook notes leads me to believe I should try to explain more of my philosophical underpinnings in entertaining fashion. Also that I should make more puns about apes.

-My gold shirt has made an appearance on stage. The character who wore it was named "Fluff". The play was "All in the Timing" by David Ives. Tragically, I was denied the honor of "Special Thanks" in a UT program. I am crushed.

-It is occasionally flattering to be hit on by a dude, but ultimately not terribly useful.

Maybe More Like a Fortnight

...Than a tenday.

-You haven't really lived until you've had cheap whiskey from a flask, while standing in a trash enclosure behind a Buddhist temple, in a snowstorm, while there's a service going on in the temple, with loud drums. I believe I almost converted on the way out.

-Despite the preceding statement, I turn out to be employable. I'm now doing Windows tech support for two of the local seminaries (out of four. No, I can't explain it.) through an outside company. Megan is my co-worker, and in fact recommended me for the job and did my training. My take on this is the phrase "Comedy Goldmine". Also, some advice: if you happen to have five servers, make sure that all of them restart after a power outage, especially the one that all the other need to function properly.

-Unfortunately, my major is still trying to kill me. At this stage, taking more than one CS class per quarter is becoming problematic, in that many of them assign a workload which does not really permit taking another serious class. Since I am in both Software Construction and Computer Graphics, death awaits me at every turn. On the other hand, I will be able to render a really sweet-looking 3D Scrabble board by the end of this (The project for Software Construction is producing a working multi-player, web-enabled Scrabble game).

-I am beginning to believe that one should either be totally aware of the consequences and plan accordingly, or be utterly incognizant and wing it for all one's worth. Situations with humans seem to be in the latter category, although there are mitigating factors.

-I seem to be falling for Joan Baez again, which is a shame as she's well out of my age range. Significantly younger women: if you believe you may be Joan Baez (or for that matter Joan Jett), you have my attention.

-I think there should be an investigation as to why "electrangle" is not currently a word.

I'm Late!
I'm almost a tenday late on my current tenday-posting policy. For shame. I have become almost as unreliable as the Sun-Times. I blame this lousy Smarch weather. Except for that bit where it was 60 degrees for three days.

-Productive relations between insomnia and poetry-writing continues. Have a couple new poems, but they still need cleanup; works of 4 AM tend towards surreal jumps and dense metaphor.

-Something useful? Okay. Bars/clubs I've been to this month:
Delilah's: 2771 N Lincoln Ave. This place is pretty fantastic. Two floors, cheap drinks, friendly bartenders, and an absurdly well-stocked bar that glows with an inner light. All the drinks are pretty reasonably priced, but they also have rotating specials basically everyday on beer and whiskey. $2 Maker's Mark, seriously. Quality and variety of DJs as well. Plus there's a guy who wanders around selling tamales in plastic bags. Downside: They have Malort.

Small Bar: 2049 W Division St. Also a fairly nice place. Chief advantages include a table that was formerly a door and a row of throne-like chairs in the back. Also an excellent beer selection. As you might have guessed, it is a fairly small bar. For those of you who are into football(soccer), it is also a soccer(football) bar.

Sonotheque: 1444 W Chicago Ave. The cover here is pricey (up to $12), but it is a good place to see a DJ you know you like. Seating in the form of leather couches and an array of TV/projector screens help the atmosphere. Tendency of crowd to dance appears sub-optimal, though I am usually part of the problem in these matters.

Molly Malone's: 7652 Madison St, Forest Park. If you happen to be in Forest Park, need to find a place whose kitchen is open late, and don't mind a considerably older demographic, this is your place. Comfortable pub/restaurant, and certainly better than the place down the street that was having karaoke night. If you're looking for hip, however, well, I have been there with my grandmother.

- You should probably see There Will Be Blood.

- Going-out-of-business sales are fun. Thanks to the closing of the Hyde Park Co-op, and more specifically their liquor store, Zach and I acquired 8 handles of pre-mixed drinks for $25. We now have a rainbow array of the cheapest 26-proof Margaritas, Mojitos, and Long Islands available to man. The margarita is basically kool-aid and tequila, but the other two aren't bad.

Just when I thought that Chicago's worst excuse for a newspaper couldn't possibly do anything else to disgrace themselves, they manage to disgust me to the point of no return. You'd think that the Sun Times would deal with the embarrassment of having to lay off a huge chunk of their newsroom quietly. Nope. Instead, the paper continues to brag on every single front page: "Still Only 50 Cents!" Nice, Sun Times, that's real stand-up of you. Maybe if you just went ahead and raised your prices like the other newspaper in town that you seem to despise so much, you wouldn't have had to disrupt and derail the careers of so many decent reporters and editors. Or perhaps you are concerned that no one would pay more than two quarters to read the drivel you print everyday and call news. Well, here's another idea: How about you can that Mariotti fellow? I'm sure he's eating up a lot of salary. And certainly the removal of a stale shock-jock sports writer can only improve what little integrity your pulp newspaper may still cling to.

Since I can't seem to sleep...
Recommendation: Omnibus, Tarkio.
What happens if you take the Decemberists and replace all conceptual instances of "the British Empire" and replace it with "rural Montana"? You get Tarkio. It's a little more complicated, but Tarkio is Colin Meloy's band from his college years in Missoula, Montana. Omnibus is a collection of all their recorded material, and as such is a little unpolished and uneven, but the highs are so blisteringly high that it's easy to accept.

The album includes early versions of "Annabelle Leigh" and "My Mother Was a Chinese Trapeze Artist" which are fairly well realized, but there a several originals that are even better. Tarkio's flavor covers a fair amount of ground from "traditional" to "alt-country" to "high-distortion bar band". Songs in the latter category include the dark Tom Petty-ish jangle of "Carrie" and the grinding "This Rollercoaster Ride". Also entertaining is "Helena Won't Get Stoned".

Meloy says in the liner notes that wanting to be in a band with a banjo was a major factor in Tarkio's formation. Said banjo is played (by Gibson Hartwell) to great effect on the standout tracks "Weight of the World" ,"Neapolitan Bridesmaid", and "Better Half". These also feature some great writing by Meloy( "Bridesmaid" references both the Bible and Albert Camus). On the mid-tempo, indie-er side of things are "If I Had More Time" and "Following Camden Down".

"Sister Nebraska" sounds a bit like a country-tinged predecessor to "Song for Myla Goldberg". "Save Yourself" is an epic lament full of echoing pedal-steel. "Mountains of Mourne" is a nice rendition of an Irish song from the 19th century. "Tristan and Iseult" is spare and subtly gorgeous, casting mythical figures into college kids ("God I love you, but you trouble me.").

There are missteps, especially in the sometimes rough production, and a few fairly uninspiring lyrics. "Am I Not Right?" is a bit too confessional (and not all that catchy), and "Mess of Me" sounds like it was scrounged off a demo tape. One understands why Meloy and Hartwell express a bit of embarassment in the liner notes. This is the nature of compilations meant for completists (There are 27 tracks here in all, most of which actually stand up quite well).

While the impetus for its widespread release was clearly the burgeoning fame of the Decemberists, the material stands well on its own. As someone with a love of banjos, pedal steel, and bar band esthetics, I think there's some pretty fantastic material here.

Weight of the World - One of many songs which might be my very favorite ever (Right click and save).

I can hear my graphics card: not in the sense that I have a powerful fan on it etc., but rather a confluence of two conditions has arisen. Firstly, I have absurd professional quality earphones (because my mom works at Shure). Secondly, The headphone jack on my PC is not particularly shielded from the electromagnetic effects of the rest of the machine. This mean I have been able to detect audibly the transmissions along various buses in my PC, most notably (as far as I can tell), the graphics output.

Dragging windows produces a faint crackling/buzzing sound. Larger windows produce louder noises. Maximization and minimization produce more of a beep. Progress bars tend to fizzle.

I do not think there is any useful application of this phenomenon, other than to tell whether the graphics bus is in use. It fascinates me nonetheless. I used to be able to determine the speed of a dial-up connection from modem noises.

Hmm. I think the keyboard may be involved as well. holding down "shift" brings on a rapid machine-gun rattle unrelated to any action onscreen... or not, as testing it on the desktop suggests. that rattle may be the text cursor refreshing.

That aside, Merry Christmas/Xmas/Atheist Kids Get Presents Day to all. The development of Christmas as a secular holiday is a strange but perhaps unavoidable phenomenon in our culture (brought about, paradoxically, through Christianity's dominance in the culture). It intrigues me, especially as the custom of gift-giving is now ingrained in our economic system as the make-or-break event for retailers.

Our economy is dependent upon the widespread acceptance of a tradition once tied to a religious celebration, which was itself positioned to compete with older religious ceremonies. I think there's a kind of hilarious beauty to the course of history sometimes.

Side note: scroll bars sound sqeaky.

I don't mean to belittle religion or the giving of gifts: I myself am now undertaking to read all the sci-fi novels I got today. First up: Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land, is engrossing so far. Other gifts: Leather jacket, baked goods, socks, sweaters, cash.

And Naps!
Saw (possibly a rerun) Bill Clinton on the Daily Show Monday. A digression in the conversation about what's changed about Congress in recent decades. In a phrase: sleep deprivation. With the ability to commute by plane, and the need to be constantly fund-raising, very few people on Capitol Hill are getting a decent night's sleep and getting re-elected. Therefore our congresspeople are more irritable and thinking less clearly.

Makes as much sense as anything else.

Fortunately, all is not lost, as a watching of Escape from New York demonstates. Things could be worse. We still have New York. And we haven't elected any bald presidents. Now, I haven't seen Escape from LA recently, but it's hard for me to imagine how that can be the "sillier" of the two movies.

Thoughts on a recent issue of Newsweek (I am not up to date. There have been finals): That Mike Huckabee sure is charismatic; too bad he doesn't believe in science.

Rhythmic Surrealist Purgatory
I was writing a song today, and I realized I had two parallel phrases, any two words of which could be exchanged across phrases. Observe:

"Through a haze of darkest morning, in a blaze of deepest white"

Blaze/haze and deepest/darkest are completely interchangeable for the most part, meaning the phrases are completely rearrangeable except for the rhyme scheme. This is probably a sign that I should shoot for more meaningful phrases, although I think the configuration above is the most "sensible".

So yeah, this phenomenon is now to be called "Rhythmic Surrealist Purgatory."

I will probably keep the line though.

I am unexpectedly cheerful at the moment. I had my own song stuck in my head for while. It was glorious. It's also absurdly simple to play, and gives the impression that I can sing (This is much safer to say than "I can sing," which is not something I have ever really confirmed).

So maybe I'll ba able to record that. I don't actually know whether this cheap computer mic will work for vocals, though it picks up the guitar decently enough (Can't do both at once unless I learn to sing a lot louder while staying in key).

Probably finish some poems over the break, too. I should really look into getting published.

I've spent the past few days working through the collected archives of American Elf, a diary comic by rock star/cartoonist James Kochalka. It's chock full of whimsy, and kind of adorable in a way I don't normally expect to appreciate (Cute is not typically my bag). This is a good one.

And you take to wing
And you take to stranger things
[wanders off humming]

Festive or Something
21st birthdays, a sacred rite of passage. And also they make things convenient. Also a convenient reason to party for a week. This is good because what with classes being over and the population being sparse, there's not much to do but celebrate Megan's 21st. Good times.
That and write and draw a little.

This is a notebook sketch/abstract thingy I did a while back. Trying to see if I can pretty it up with some image software and the like.

-On an entirely different note, I occasionally worry that I can play odd games with my state of happiness. I suspect I'm far more interesting when I'm discontent, and this takes energy to cultivate. Being at the top of my game is tiring on several levels. I'm still hashing plenty of things out, I guess.

"Black Excited to Return to Projects"
The above is still the best/worst headline the Maroon has ever published, about a Professor (Robert Black, I believe) leaving some post and pursuing independent projects. I am not sure whether they considered the alternative reading of that headline.

Anyway, as winter sets in, with its ice storms and such, I've been trying to start my own projects, such as webmastery, telature, and birdkeeping.

-The bird is a dove by the name of Erik Emanuel the Orange (aka Erik, aka Birdman, aka "a little communist"). He is mine for break by way of my roommate Rob's girlfriend Lindsey. He is surprisingly entertaining, and today has displayed an enthusiasm for full-throated cooing. He almost sounds like an owl.

-Also in my living room is Falcon, the name given to the computer I got for free from the library in June. It is basically my Dell desktop minus a graphics card and a hard drive. Fortunately,we had a spare hard drive lying around in Lurch, the Shady Dealer's old webserver. However, Falcon seems to disagree with Lurch's hard drive, and may be expected, whenever something must be loaded from disk, to flail wildly for a second, bewildered by the existence of its own hard drive, before loading the data.

-Falcon is running Kubuntu Linux 7.04 (aka "Feisty Fawn". The latest version is "Gutsy Gibbon", with "Hardy Heron" on the way... Programmers, they're quirky. ). Goddamn this OS is secure in ways I'm not used to dealing with, such as requiring a password for commands that might bone your system. Which is reasonable and all, but mildly inconvenient. Despite this, it is now equipped with Apache (webserver), MySQL (database), and PHP (server-side scripting language). After some more effort, all these things became aware of each other and play nicely. So now Falcon is hosting my in-progress update of the Max Palevsky Scav page... but only for my local network, since letting in the internet at large is going to take more finagling.

-I am maybe also designing the Shady Dealer's new site if I have enough time.

-I've been recording random things on guitar and trying to figure out what to do with them. Chord progressions in need of lyrics, mostly. I also have a version of "Man of Constant Sorrow" that mostly works, even though I'll need to rerecord the vocals. And I did it with a chord arrangement that I haven't seen before.

-People have been telling me I need to be more aggressive and confident so here: "Dammit you motherfuckers, I'm pretty goddamn awesome!"

-End of Quarter Score for my workplace: MacLab 30, Professionalism 4. As recorded by "MacLab vs. Professionalism: The remote server program". Yes, I wrote a program to keep track of an arbitrary measure of the ridiculousness of my workplace.

Thoughts
-Some stories I can either seize a room for 15 minutes or I can't tell at all. "Naked in the Bronx" is the best example. It gets epic. When that's done, the other 2 stories of my odyssey on the Eastern seaboard are on the table, but it's really only worth telling one at a time.

-I've been thinking lately a bit about philosophy, mostly ethical justifications. It turns out I have:

1) A list of things I won't apologize for. Currently, this amounts to "things that are funny, things that are true, and things done for the best of reasons" ... but this is not particularly well-defined or explained

2) A list of things I am helpless in the face of. This is poorly enumerated indeed, though examples surface from time to time. By "helpless in the face of" I mean things that one cannot respond to in any way but the way in which one does. Things that only have one proper response, regardless of what common-sense or utility dictate.

I wonder whether these are useful in general.The best maxim I can discern from mine so far is this:
"All's fair in love that's true."
I am significantly more skeptical of war.

-Great achievements in marketing (Concept Joe's, product and slogan Marty's): Scrote Spice, "I wanna dip my balls in it!" ... yeah, maybe you had to be there.

-Have you ever considered the obscene implications of the term "three-hole puncher"? This happens when you work around office supplies long enough.

Being a Hopeless Romantic is Exhausting
Seriously. And I'm not even a very good one. In the interest of not causing horrendous and unproductive awkwardness, I have minimized my John Cusack Index this year (the JCI measures the number of boomboxes lifted above the shoulders, number of windows shouted at in the dead of night, and other such actions). Mostly I restrict myself to the odd inscrutable comment in the midst of otherwise normal conversations. And poetry, but that's pretty inscrutable too (or at least plausibly deniable).

And after all that, it takes a certain kind of stubbornness to choose a dumb love over a smarter apathy (I am fairly sure that at some point it becomes a choice). It keeps you up at night. Of course, a lot of things can. What I really worry about is the heat death of the universe... well, occasionally. My sense of perspective has a tendency to go briefly overboard before resetting to "When's lunch?".

Semi-relevant Mountain Goats lyric: too slow to catch them all, not too far gone to care.

More relevant Dire Straits lyric ("Romeo and Juliet"):
She says, "Hey it's Romeo, ya nearly gave me a heart attack./
He's underneath the window, she's singin' "Hey la, my boyfriend's back./
You shouldn't come around here, singin' up at people like that./
Anyway, whatcha gonna do about it?"

Astute observers will observe (that is what they do) that I'd written two songs about Romeo and Juliet before I knew and loved this one.

It's a hapax legomenon prefix phenomenon!
Occasionally I stay up too late and read the blogs of interesting people (also I have homework). Today I began debating whether or not I should ascribe to these things a word more lofty than blog, which in it's etymology implies something terse and non-fictional. Web-literature = Weberature? Being myself, I am concerned that the eymology here is flawed. "Telature" from the Latin tela for "web, weaving", although this I think could could refer to something else. Web literature is still literature, after all...

I've got it. Weblog = blog --> Webliterature = blit

Next question: the plural: "I've been reading the blit." vs. "I've been reading the blits."
Follow-up: the British plural: "I've been reading the blits about maths."

PS. Cursory web searching reveals "telature" appears to be an incredibly rare word for the art of weaving. Given it's scarcity, I'm going to start using whenever I feel the art of web design need to be treated with high pretension.

PPS. Hypothesis: Web design, as an artistic field, is most similar to architecture, in that human navigation of a space must be considered.

This Needs to Be Recorded in Abbreviated Form to Confuse Posterity

Sex Workers Union --> Sex Mines --> Poon Lung

Credit goes to Alex, many moons ago, but I was reminded forcefully by my use of "poon" in a game of Scrabble (actually, Scrabulous). Actually, I originally wrote that as "game of scrapple". The rules of this hypothetical game are best left as an exercise for the reader.

I've been writing code all day. Huzzah?

Write Something Every Tenday?
Let it never be said that I did not eventually fulfill at least one thing I promised. There's a Go! Team track linked in the previous post. Download, fools.

Maybe also to recommend soon: The Shout Out Louds. I went to their show at the Logan Square Auditorium last Friday, and bought Our Ill Wills, their second album.

Also, Blogger randomly advocated this blog, which fill me with glee, especially in light of The Shady Dealer's plan to restart the once-great tradition of the University of Chicago Mustache Race. It was abondoned sometime in the 30's.

Thought for the day: In my Networks class, we need to write a reliable network communication protocol (like TCP). In order to make sure we are providing reliability properly, and because wired ethernet is reliable under any sane circumstance, our professor has provided a layer of deliberately unreliable code. "Now providing unreliability!" I'm writing a poem about it. Srsly.

Stuff and Nonsense.
Hi everybody, remember me? It's been a wacky two months. Some thoughts:

-So I'm giving You Could Have It So Much Better a better listen than I usually do, and it strikes me as an odd mixture. Byrds meet Doors meet eurotrash. And some other more recent influences. I'm very sketchy on those.

-The CTA is scheduled to get worse in less than a month, which is especially disconcerting due to my needing 2.5 hours to reach the Double Door on Saturday, only some of which was my fault.

-I feel strongly that should our society collapse in the foreseeable future, marketing will be heavily involved. Approaching, for example, politics from a perspective of selling product results in an orchestrated effort to deny useful information to the electorate. Which is perhaps problematic. Maybe I'll expand on this sometime.

-Speaking of the Double Door on Saturday, the Go! Team put on a characteristically fantastic performance. They are still best described as "the soundtrack to the happiest day of your life." Lots of new songs, which were all excellent. We saw Ninja coming out of the bathroom. For the 99% of UChicago that hasn't heard of this band: [We Just Won't Be Defeated]

-Sometime I'll write up my September trip to New York and Washington, especially the now infamous "naked in the Bronx" incident. And the only slightly less colorful "escape from Long Island" episode. And the reason I owe the Virginia State Police a favor

-There's also some poems I should put up / finish writing. I'm toying with the idea of a book of "Science Fiction Poetry" as an approach. I think it's an untapped genre. Artificial intelligence stuff like "Branch Prediction" would fit in. Also I keep trying to write songs about post-apocalyptic wastelands.

-Taking Computer Science classes here is somewhat akin to taking a Spanish class where all the lectures are about linguistics, but which still requires weekly papers in Spanish. Which is to say the programming side of things is not very often taught to us, per se, so much as the theory we're expected to implement. Or, as roommate Rob says, "Do you know C?" *Tosses C manual at you* "You now know C."

-Thanks to the requirements of my Computational Linguistics class, I now know Perl. It is casually psychotic, in a functional way.

I'd just like to point out to everyone how brilliant I am.

Way back on April 1st, I wrote on this very blog that the Cubs would win 86 games this season.

As it turns, out they only won 85, but since they made it to the playoffs, I'll count my prediction as a success.

Hurray for October baseball!

Iggy Pop: Hideous troglodyte, Man of the People.

Casey: "I touched Iggy Pop and both Ashetons!" [actually an Asheton and a Watt].

More on Lolla soon.

Sri Lanka.