Horses In The Sky

Horses In The Sky is the name of the new CD by A Silver Mt. Zion, one of the (many) spinoff bands consisting of members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor.



Lately I'd given up following all the releases of the various side projects, but I've decided I want to hear this one for two reasons: A) Band leader Efrim actually sings on this one... I'm not sure I can wrap my head around the idea of vocal music from this crew. B) This very moving (you'll see what I mean) review on Popmatters.com.

BTW, I looked for audio samples from this album, but couldn't find any online.

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Insultmonger

http://www.insultmonger.com/swearing/french.htm

(WARNING – Site contains adware traps .. don’t click on things that you don’t know about (closing the window is a good thing on popups)

One of my more favorites from this site ..

(original French verse) Essaye cette manoeuvre: Prendre 50-60 pas en arrière. Prendre plusieurs souffles profonds. Sprinter en avant à toute vitesse. Faire un triple saut périlleux en l'air et disparaître dans ton propre cul.

(English translation -- Try this maneuver: Take 50-60 paces backwards. Take several deep breaths. Sprint forward at full speed. Do a triple summersault through the air, and disappear up your own ass.)

Paraphrasing from the Matrix – “ I like cussing in French, it’s like wiping your ass with silk”

If you’re industrious, you can root around in the site’s hierarchy and find other interesting languages to learn about as well .. (Spanish is a must – and Oh! . There’s Finnish too!)

C5

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As if that wasn't severe enough...

I have a mental image of a transit authority guy rifling through your smoking wallet, and trying to count the fused-together change in your pocket. :D Found on somebody's blog.  

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Syria to cartoonist: "That's not funny"

BBC's World Edition has an interesting profile of a Syrian cartoonist whose images of generic "powerful" figures abusing generic "weak" figures hit a little too close to home for the Syrian government- they shut down his magazine, and now he can't get his work published in any newspaper in the country.

I'd love to see some of his cartoons (they look more like pen-and-ink drawings filled in with watercolor) at full size. A Google image search turns up a few more of his images.

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QTVR: Made in Taiwan

Awesome! This is a beautiful 360 QTVR image taken during the independence protests in Taiwan last weekend.

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VisibleMan

This is my friend Richard's site. He lives in Atlanta and is one of my best friends. This fact doesn't necessarily merit his mention here-- but his art sure does. Check out his galleries on VisibleMan. Very cool stuff.

Monty

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Now here's an episode of Cops...

...I would really love to see: one day with the Washington, DC police department's Gay and Lesbian Liason Unit. (I was able to go straight to the page... if it asks you for a login, remember BugMeNot).

The guy in charge of this unit sounds like a real hard-ass, but with a funny side (no pun intended!!):

He has an anti-authoritarian streak, using a piece of tape to conceal the last number on the tag of his police cruiser to avoid photo radar cameras. When hundreds of men in chaps and biker caps paraded into the Washington Plaza hotel in January for the leather convention, a car full of gawking Japanese tourists waved Parson over and asked what was going on. "The inauguration," he answered.

It's a long article, but keep reading... it has a few eye-rolling stereotypical statements near the beginning (IMO), but gets much better as it progresses.

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I (Heart) Huckabees

I orignally posted this as a "comment" on the Green Acres story you posted (I wish I could see those! They sound great).

Speaking of surreal, I just watched a movie last night called "I (heart) Huckabees" and I absolutely LOVED and I mean L-O-V-E-D it. It was absolutely MARVELLOUS.

The movie begins with this guy who's obsessed with and convinced that a seemingly innocuous "coincidence" is significant. He hires "Jeffers & Jeffers," an "Existential" Detective Agency (which, oddly enough, work on a "sliding scale"???). The detectives eventually get to the bottom of the coincidence's amazing deeper meaning by employing some rather odd and extremely ineffective-sounding investigative techniques (which include what has to be the worst grasp of "covert" surveillance I have ever seen).

My rating on the movie>? 9.5/10. It completely reminded me of "Being John Malkovich" in the pacing and strangeness of the overall premise, the lightning-fast pacing (which isn't driven by an overly-busy, mad-cap plot, but by the incredibly tight, super-structured dialog).

The result was absolutely magical. Mark Wahlberg puts in an awesome performance, as do Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman. Word. Ride your bike to work.

In fact, I just looked at some reviews of the movie on Rotton Tomatoes and this movie is literally 50% down the middle. Some get it-- have playful, open minds, that is-- and some don't. I thought "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" would be my Rosetta Stone movie (you like it, you're "in" with me), but perhaps I could use this movie and that one together for a one-two punch. Like them both, and chances are, well, chances are you're probably already a member of this blog. Dont' like them, and well, still, I relish the idea of using these movies to torture the (living) dead.

Monty

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Paintings with a sense of humor

Tomas Bjornsson is a Danish artist with an off-kilter sense of humor. (He's also the cousin of someone I know on a discussion board, which is how I found his site.)

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May, 1963

We listen to "A Prairie Home Companion" almost every weekend... I got hooked on the show in college back in the 1980s, then sort of lost track of it. When I re-discovered it in the new millenium, I found that Garrison Keillor had lost none of his edge, and if anything was funnier, and more subtle, than ever. My favorite part of the show is always the second hour, when Keillor tells a story about "Lake Wobegon, my hometown."

The Lake Wobegon stories are always best around the holidays. This weekend's show is a repeat from 2003, but Keillor's Easter story was possibly my favorite "Prairie Home Companion" moment yet. A 14 year old girl plays "Jesu, Joy Of Man's Desiring" on piano in church for the Easter service, and sends her aunt, sitting in audience, back to her wedding day in 1963. What I love about this story is how effortlessly Keillor moves through time... he puts you in the mind of that one woman sitting in church as she drifts from the present to the past and back again.

You can hear the story in question here(it's about 15 minutes long, RealPlayer format).

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Caffeinated opinions

Even though I'm not a coffee drinker, I love this.

I may submit my own quote: We are being held prisoner, please help, tap tap tap.

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Tool: USA Monitors Foreign Media Reaction

News flash: The USA is even AWARE of the foreign media:

Each business day, the U.S. Department of State's Office of Research produces an Issue Focus of foreign media commentary on a major foreign policy issue or related event. These reports provide a global round-up of editorials and op-ed commentary from major newspapers, magazines and broadcast media around the world. Following a one-page analysis of the commentary, readers will find block quotes sorted by geographic region and country. An Issue Focus normally covers one to three weeks of editorial opinion. The latest reports date back one week.

My friend Katherine sent me this.

Monty

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We! Are! There!

We're currently working our way through the second season of Green Acres on DVD, and I have to say, this is one of the only sitcoms that I loved as a kid, that is actually FUNNIER when I watch it as an adult.

Was there any other American sitcom, especially from the mid-60's "golden age" of sitcoms, that owed more of a debt to Luis Bunuel and the Surrealists? Hell, the show had gone off the air before Bunuel's brilliant farce The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgousie even released, but Green Acres was every bit as absurd as that film.

Oliver Douglas was like a 1960s Alice in Rural Wonderland. Dream logic ran the show. Consider: Oliver's socialite wife, Lisa, could apparently talk to barnyard animals. The Douglas' handyman, Eb, pretended to be their son so often that they even tried sending him to college. The Ziffels' son, Arnold, was a pig, but only Oliver seemed to realize that fact, while everyone else insisted he was human. One of the house-painting Monroe brothers, Ralph, was actually a girl, but again, only Oliver seemed to notice. Phone calls, the only contact with the outside world, had to be made from a phone pole swaying in the sky. Mr. Kimball, the county extension agent, only seemed capable of carrying on a conversation with himself, who he always disagreed with.

Every episode was full of strange little dreamlike twists... visitors coming in through a window, people talking with each other's voices, elaborate plans stymied by a pregnant cow or a case of mistaken identity. There wouldn't be another sitcom this blatantly surreal until David Lynch and Mark Frost did On The Air in 1992... another one of my favorite series, but anyway. :)

One little piece of personal trivia... Pat Buttram, who played the Douglas' relentlessly opportunist neighbor Mr. Haney, was my grandfather's cousin.

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About damn time

This CBS article says that Congress took a hit to their approval rating over the grandstanding they did about the Terri Schiavo situation last weekend.

Public approval of Congress has suffered as a result; at 34 percent, it is the lowest it has been since 1997, dropping from 41 percent last month. Now at 43 percent, President Bush’s approval rating is also lower than it was a month ago.

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How rich are you?

How rich are you? I found this link which will tell you the answer. And naturally, you might be surprised (although, the people on this blog probably won't be. When I lived in New York City, I was in the top 0.726%, over the past two years I have slipped down to 11.26%. Once my business gets up and running, however, which I expect shortly, I'm hoping to get up in the top 0.5%, where I belong. :-)

Monty

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Someone please tell me how to publish files with this HELLO blogger tool (which I like) which will allow the files to go in the same post? 

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I found this article today and thought this was a fascinating piece. An excerpt:

NEW HAVEN, Conn. -- As art restorers in London inspected a 230-year-old painting by master landscape artist Thomas Hodges, they noticed the canvas was thicker in some areas than others. Using an X-ray machine, they peered behind the lush greens of New Zealand and discovered the oldest known painting of Antarctica.

Just the other day I noticed that here, in my home office, I have a few mottled spots of paint which seem raised higher than others. I had it X-rayed, but nothing conclusive showed up. One art expert, foremost in his field, believes it's an original but accidental hand-print left in plaster by one of the finishers back when my condo was built in 1978.

Monty

- - -

The painting which apparently, under X-ray, reveals secret pirate booty buried under an Antarctic penguin nest.

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New Weezer tune

Apparently the next Weezer album is called Make Believe, and the first single is "Beverly Hills." (RealPlayer format) I kinda like it.

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Oldboy

I've been reading a lot about this Korean movie Oldboy for the last month or two, and REALLY want to see it when it comes out on DVD. It's a revenge flick: A businessman goes out drinking one night, only to wake up in a hotel room where he's sealed in and held prisoner for 15 years- he doesn't know why, or by whom. Then, he's let out, and still doesn't know why, but decides to find out.

I gather it gets a little violent from that point on. :)

The reviews have mostly been good (Rotten Tomatoes score: 76%), and apparently Quentin Tarantino went bananas over it at Cannes last year. Here's a trailer.

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Blocking Ads

Guys,

I use a product called AdSubtract to block my online ads, and it does a pretty effective job. It blocks pop-ups and a lot of the advertisements on a lot of sites. I like this offer a lot, and bought it about a year ago. I thought it was worth my money.

http://www.adsubtract.com/

But there is another way to block advertisements as well, for free, and believe me, Microsoft absolutely hates this "hack". There is a large community on the Internet that collects the web site addresses which "serve" adds to other sites (like MSNBC, CNN, etc.). Check it out:

http://remember.mine.nu/
http://remember.mine.nu/hosts

And if you want to download the hosts file, it's the second link.

To modify the hosts file-- named, simply, "hosts", with no extension-- if you're using XP, it is in

c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc
Find it, and paste the content in there, and watch.

Microsoft hates this "hack" so much that in XP Home, they will offer to "repair" the hosts file for you (keeping it blank) to prevent this. So... if Microsoft hates it, USE it!

Monty

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Big Brother is watching in VA

Geez... "intersection cameras" in Virginia can now be used to nab people with delinquent taxes or outstanding parking tickets. They hope to expand the system for use against people with overdue library books. (No joke.)

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Fun Browser Security Test

Well, this is cool. I hear a lot of kvetching about which browser is right and which is wrong. As much as I hate Microsoft (more and more each day), I still use IE with the Maxthon plugin. Maxthon rocks, by the way.

Anyway, I just tested my browser for vulnerabilities, and it came up with zero. How's yours doing?

http://bcheck.scanit.be/bcheck/index.php

Maxthon is here:www.maxthon.com

Worth it.

Monty

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Cool(ing) tower art

Some sort of Swiss art exhibit consisting of decorated nuclear cooling towers. At first I thought this was a Photoshop job, but I think they're done with projectors (notice the patterns shining up onto the steam). This one is my favorite. The words in the upper corners are "back" and "next."

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What would Tom play?

Tom Waits lists his favorite 20 albums in The Guardian. A lot of them are predictably obscure, but I love that he mentions the Pogues. His comments about each are especially cool if you imagine them being read in Waits' voice... heh heh.

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Unrest re-release

One of the best albums of the 1990s is getting re-released! Unrest's Imperial f.f.r.r. was always my favorite by the band... very angular, sweet pop one minute, and icy, ambient experiments the next. The only review I can find is here, though I hate the way the writers at Pitchfork always have to be "cooler" than the music they're reviewing. Aquarius Records has it on their new releases page for now, too. (2nd item down, at the moment.)

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This is a test

This is just a test image (of a house in The Sims 2). I'm playing with Picasa and Hello's BloggerBot for sending pics to the blog. 

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