A reason to be an old-fashioned man
March 26, 2008 – 1:06 pm
I could never figure it out, either
March 20, 2008 – 11:20 pm
Completely out of the blue, the QM writes:
I’d long known that The Verve lost all their Bittersweet Symphony royalties due to allegedly ripping off the Rolling Stones’s Last Time. But I could never figure it out, since I don’t think there’s anything in LT that sounds like BS.
Then I finally found out that the accusation was that The Verve used “too much” of a sample from an orchestral version (I’d say more an adaptation that a version) of LT.
Thanks to YouTube I found the orchestral original. “Too much” of a sample is, shall we say, a massive understatement.
and answers a question I hadn’t asked, but had wondered about for a long time. How cool is that?
Sounds pretty cool
March 18, 2008 – 3:15 pm
A sneak peak at Wordpress 2.5:
A customizable dashboard, multi-file upload, built-in galleries, one-click plugin upgrades, tag management, built-in Gravatars, full text feeds, and faster load times sound interesting? Then WordPress 2.5 might be the release for you. It’s been in the oven for a while, and we’re finally ready to open the doors a bit to give you a taste.
Some nice screenshots at the link, too.
Truth in advertising
March 8, 2008 – 1:08 am
Somewhere, an exhausted airbrush artist is taking a very well deserved nap.
…and we’re back!
March 8, 2008 – 1:01 am
Bet you didn’t even notice we were gone.
So anyway, Kelly at dreamhost fat-fingered the firewall and locked out a half-million customers, which wasn’t a big deal to me, but did lead me to head over to dreamhoststatus.com and have some fun snarking in the comments at all the whiny bastards who claim to be losing a zillion dollars a minute every time their nine buck a month shared web hosting hiccups, and posting little haikus:
my blog’s five readers
yearn for my half-assed ramblings
dreamhost strikes again
Just another exciting Friday nite Saturday morning at Archenemy HQ.
FMG9 (but they should call it “The Man-purse”)
March 5, 2008 – 10:56 am
Another vending machine item in Anarchotopia.
Dire prediction
March 3, 2008 – 10:48 pm
Hillary will probably become the new Teddy K. –a lioness of the Senate, serving there until the end of days for most of us. She will even enjoy and perhaps earn a unique sort of authority, an uber “been-there-done-that” wisdom. If she ever writes a candid book, it will be riveting.
(my emphasis)
Dog bites man
March 3, 2008 – 10:02 am
Really hot, talented actress opens her mouth and ruins everything.
Ok, Ok…. there were warning signs:
- She’s French
- She’s a spokeswomen for Greenpeace
Where was she when Larry Summers needed her?
March 2, 2008 – 7:11 pm
Charlotte Allen in the Washington Post, writing something that surely would not have been published during the Summers controversy:
“Women ‘Falling for Obama,’ ” the story’s headline read. Elsewhere around the country, women were falling for the presidential candidate literally. Connecticut radio talk show host Jim Vicevich has counted five separate instances in which women fainted at Obama rallies since last September. And I thought such fainting was supposed to be a relic of the sexist past, when patriarchs forced their wives and daughters to lace themselves into corsets that cut off their oxygen.
I can’t help it, but reading about such episodes of screaming, gushing and swooning makes me wonder whether women — I should say, “we women,” of course — aren’t the weaker sex after all. Or even the stupid sex, our brains permanently occluded by random emotions, psychosomatic flailings and distraction by the superficial. Women “are only children of a larger growth,” wrote the 18th-century Earl of Chesterfield. Could he have been right?
[...]
We exaggerate, of course. And obviously men do dumb things, too, although my husband has perfectly good explanations for why he eats standing up at the stove (when I’m not around) or pulls down all the blinds so the house looks like a cave (also when I’m not around): It has to do with the aggressive male nature and an instinctive fear of danger from other aggressive men. When men do dumb things, though, they tend to be catastrophically dumb, such as blowing the paycheck on booze or much, much worse (think “postal”). Women’s foolishness is usually harmless. But it can be so . . . embarrassing.
Alas, no one’s foolishness is harmless in a democracy.
Good news and bad news
February 28, 2008 – 5:16 pm
Assuming they’re both guilty of what the rumors say they’ve done, the upside is that they aren’t as stupid as they sound. The downside is that they’re even bigger scumbags than I’ve been assuming they are, if that’s even possible. And if the Clinton campaign’s denials are true, well, that means in addition to being a slimy, disgusting politician, she’s as stupid as she sounds.
Slippery slope, indeed
February 27, 2008 – 3:45 pm
…the first place to legalize marriage with robots will be Massachusetts, where liberal jurisdiction and high-tech meet.
Heck, I predict we’ll even legalize marriage with gay robots!
(I leave the inevitable riffs on Azimov as an exercise to the reader)
Suburban reclamation project
February 18, 2008 – 6:57 pm
Well, the switcheroo of the office and the living room progresses - lots of crap has been moved, the network is up again, etc. Aches and pains have just necessitated a beer break. I anticipate an additional Vindaloo-related break shortly, as well.
Aquatic Art
February 18, 2008 – 4:37 pm
I did not know that there were international fish tank layout contests. Apparently its a no-no to use opening treasure chests and bubbling deep sea divers in your layout.
In spite of that, the designs are amazing. More here and here.
Snarking at BoBos
February 15, 2008 – 11:28 am
#41 Indie Music
If you want to understand white people, you need to understand indie music. As mentioned before, white people hate anything that’s “mainstream” and are desperate to find things that are more genuine, unique, and reflective of their experiences.
Fortunately, they have independent music.
A white person’s iPod (formerly CD collection) is not merely an assemblage of music that they enjoy. It is what defines them as a person. They are always on the look out for the latest hot band that no one has heard of so that one day, they can hit it just right and be into a band BEFORE they are featured in an Apple commercial.
[...]
Heh. Many more (sushi!) at the link.
(via Illka)
UPDATE: also via Illka, Half-Sigma highlights a SWPL commenter’s guess at the ethnicity of the blog’s author. Right or not, there’s a lot of interesting (well, to me) info there about Asian-American culture.