Tag: Open Thread

This Pony Party is an open thread.  Chat amongst the ice and snow and cold temps…if only in your imagination!  Please do not rec.

Wednesday I’m headed north to the lake house, where I’m supposed to have Inet but maybe not, one reason I’m agitating for Wednesday.  

Could be gone until the day after eksmas (Friday) and while I would normally expect to be available as usual between 11 pm and midnight certainly, I’ll also unavailable during “family time” at my sister’s which includes at least 2 huge meals a day.  She doesn’t have a connection.

If I have access I’ll be working out of a flash drive on a borrowed machine which is always excellent fun.

Still I’m hoping and planning on staying in touch, looking forward to it actually.

But the lake house could be basically uninhabitable unless you wanted to camp out by the fireplace.  No heat, no phone, no electricity, no water.

No fun at all.

Nor is staying at my sister’s although I’m usually allowed a quiet corner to sulk.

I’ll expect she’ll get tired of cooking and be glad to see our backs.  I imagine we’ll leave right after breakfast Friday, after lunch if we leave from the lake house (which should mean net).

The NOLA blogs are at war … Xmas video war, that is.

From Tim’s Nameless Blog I found the name of this war is “Hostilidays”:

The other night I showed my Precious Daughter what grown-ups do for Christmas. Well, grown-ups who are also NOLA Bloggers, that is. If you didn’t know, they engage in a Christmas video war dubbed the “Hostilidays.”

The idea is to post the most silly, annoying and offensive videos. So far, a whole slew of bloggers have joined in battle including Oyster, Maitri, Varg, Greg, Leigh, Loki, Adrastos, Mark, and Howie.

I had not participated in this ugly annual exchange–until now.

Tim’s daughter gave him this one.  Chinese version of Jingle Bells.  She’s learning Chinese in school, nize.

Other than the strange sofa covering, that didn’t hurt too much at all!

Open Thread is Open!

We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.” It was “illegal” to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If today I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country’s antireligious laws.

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

Guess Who?

A New Media Paradigm. Part I

A New Media Paradigm. Part II

The point is not really the type of music you like, so I apologize to all the Country Music fans I’ve offended even though my true opinion is in fact that I’d rather have my ears Van Goghed than listen to it.

It’s all about the money.

In the vinyl business model your $12 album paid about $2 to the store and about the same to the artist.  The rest went to the greedy bastards in the music business.  Especially during the transition to digital when you had to buy everything twice this was quite a lucrative racket and enabled Record companies to pay Sports Star advances to people like Michael Jackson, Prince, and Madonna.

The interesting thing about advances is that they are advances against future revenues, so it’s not like any of those people were getting real money, what they were getting was the same old $2 only all in a lump up front.  Don’t produce, lose your popularity, sell less, and some soulless accountant shows up at your bling bedecked mansion and tells you your blow budget is cut off.

Bummer to be you dude.

But the soulless accountant and his record company exec friends were still Aok until they started sailing off the shores of digital Somalia.

When you start cutting into Polygram’s blow budget now you’re in for some trouble dude.

I’m both a purist and a technician and I know that it’s simply not possible to duplicate all the information contained in analog media, but as you keep getting incrementally nearer the limits of your derivative you rapidly approach something that is close enough for jazz.  Your brain will fill in the missing pieces.

But once digitized the question simply becomes how many.  If you can play it you can duplicate it, maybe not exactly but close enough for government work (much less than you need for jazz) which is exactly where the execs went to protect their intellectual property.  Unfortunately for them the world is flat and different cultures have different ideas about what exactly property and ownership mean.  Ask Scandinavians (noted pirates and cut throats since Viking times).

So things changed and now you can download your iTunes for $1 a pop and Apple and the artist each get a nickle.

Not quite enough for a swimming pool full of Moet, or even a bathtub.

Still, ya gotta have your bling and the next big thing is concerts and merchandising.  Ever wonder why it costs over a grand to get front row for the Stones?  You’re paying for Keith’s new liver dude and those things are not cheap, even in China.

It has been democratizing in a way.  Now all the artists are starving unless of course you got your start when there was still a mass market and a common culture, but those days are dead as doornails.

Will All Gore attend?  Gmoke over at Daily Kos writes about what Gore has publicly advocated, and folks are taking him up on it, Civil Disobedience Against Coal – March 2, 2009.  Read the email from Bill McKibbon — it’s one of the best I’ve seen when it comes to understanding the consequences and responsibilities of civil disobedience.

Open thread is open!

A New Media Paradigm. Part I

While I have a moment or 2 I’d like to talk about my media habits.

I see a lot.

The TV is on 24/7 unless I’m out.  Usually news as you might imagine.  When I was working as a cashier at a convenience store I’d read 4 newspapers a day including the New York Times and Wall Street Journal which are way overpriced.  When I drive I listen to NewsRadio 88 (Traffic and Weather together on the 8s at 8, 18, 28, 38, 48, and 58 minutes past the hour) unless there’s a Mets game on or I’m out of range (more about the Mets and sports in general in an upcoming episode).

If I’m even out of range of the clear channel stations I like talk radio and occasionally I’ll even stream WABC when my lust for schadenfreude overwhelms me.

Not music so much.

Back in my DJ days my chief utility was librarian and programmer.  When my buddy and I worked he would run the board and I was in charge of finding the next song out of the 1000 CD collection.  By memory with something else playing.  It makes my ears bleed to listen to the plastic mouseketeer boy/girl band American Idol rap crap that passes for popular today.  Music ended about the same time MTV stopped playing videos and started doing reality.

And I’ve always hated country, why do you ask?

But my main point is not to tell you kids that your music sucks although it does (shakes fist at cloud), but to get you to reflect on the changes in the business model of music.  You used to get 7 or 8 great songs an album because they would sell the singles separately.  Then 45s went out of style and you’d get 1 or 2 great songs an album and pay about the same price (adjusted for inflation) as you did for those great A & B side 45s.

Then when digital came out you spent the mega bucks to replace your entire collection.

But digital changed everything.  Vinyl would wear out (two plays, and you can tell the difference between the second and the first) but CDs never do.  More than that, they’re easy to copy.  If all else fails you can put a microphone next to your speaker and tape something that sounds kind of ok, no worse than your average mp3.  Sure it sounds like crap, but so does radio and people have been listening to that for 80 years now.  The fortunate fact is your mind makes up the difference.

Having memorized all those songs I feel no more compelled to re-hear them than to re-read the books I remember the plots from simply by looking at the title on the spine (more thousands and most re-read many times for pleasure).

What I look for from radio on the rare times I listen is novelty.  I want to hear something not only fantastic but new.  My Aunty Mame is trying to get me into books on tape.

What puts me on this track is the recent announcement by NBC that they’re going to cut back on their programming from 22 hours of prime time a week to a Faux/CW like 17 by having Jay Leno cover 10 pm Monday to Friday.

Now not all my predictions come true, but I think this a horrible move, doomed to failure, and not just because I find Leno’s product inferior.

Back in the day I critically watched the Jay vs. Dave wars and Dave has at least the virtue of being funny and Leno not so much.  More than that, the original reason that The Tonight Show moved to Los Angeles was so that they could more easily book guests from the West Coast branch of the Film and Television industry.  No offense meant California (well maybe a little) but 99.99% of those people turn out to be vapid airheads who unscripted can’t put a complete sentence together and won’t talk about anything except their latest project and who they’re fucking, and that badly and incoherently.

Maybe it’s the price you pay for all the sunshine.

Not that David’s guests are that much better.  Intellectual rigor is not something you can expect from the media elite as a cursory perusal of Huffington Post will convince you.  Actors tend to be shallow self centered morons with no sense of shame, including News Actors (not really many reporters around any more).

And now we’re getting to the crux of the problem which is that the format is boring.  At least Rachel Ray and Martha Stewart cook, but most talk shows talk too much.  Who cares?  Jay, there’s a reason people go to sleep after the monologue and it’s not just because they’re old or have to get up in the morning.

Then there’s the repetitive nature of all of it.  Remember what happened to Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?  American Idol, Survivor, Deal or No Deal, CSI, Law and Order, they’re all the same all the time.  Nothing new ever happens.

They’ve just given up.

Even such a culture cannibalizing snooze fest as Happy Days seems like an innovative concept by comparison.  Instead of recycling nostalgia for 30 years ago we recycle it from last week.

My friends we are approaching peak TV.  Channel after channel is filled with stuff I’ve already seen or don’t want to watch in the first place.  And it’s a fundamental failure of the business model; they sell eyeballs and not only are they losing them by droves, but nobody is willing to pay for them anymore.

Their response is to downsize.  Cut the cost of production, worship efficiency, and stifle creativity.

This is a self reinforcing death spiral of deflation and depression.  If your product sucks make more of it cheaper, supply side entertainment.

That’s enough for now, but I expect I will revisit this subject.