ear plugs

Kirsten played a gig with her new band last night at the Red and Black in D.C.

The show could have used better sound and it was abbreviated - the club fit four bands on the bill from 9:45 p.m. to 12:30 a.m. (and is it a D.C. licensing issue which forced the band to quit at 12:30? Bizzarre, when closing time is 2 a.m.). The set was cut to about five songs, which didn't inconvenience many; the crowd at midnight on a Thursday in the out-of-the-way club was pretty sparse.

But what caught my attention was a sign behind the bar - "Ear Plugs, $1." I don't remember seeing a music venue selling ear plugs. At first I thought it was a nice touch for the bar to offer a product geared toward preserving it's clientele's health.

Then I thought it might just be a statement on the quality of bands the club tends to book.

i don't understand...

I haven't done anything to hurt it, or even use it much, the last week or so. I've barely even used it since Monday. So why did my middle toe on my right foot suddenly start hurting yesterday, and feel worse today? What doth it protest?

The Rodenator!

I loved this item in Wired Magazine last month. Who wouldn't want to force a bunch of explosive gases down a gopher hole and ignite them? I wonder if I can rig something up for less than $1,900, though.

The actual movies of the wonder in action are a little bit disappointing:

If you're looking to kick up dust, it appears to work well enough. But the product also has the cheesiest promotional video ever:



Rodenator- Let's kick some gopher ass.

blasphemy of the day

A head shot of Pope Benedict XVI was flashed up on TV the other day. Looking at it, I couldn't help but think he was a dead ringer for Emperor Palpatine.

(And I'm not the only one.)

OD on FotC

I've been gorging myself on Flight of the Conchords lately.
Partly, it's just because I miss Kiwi accents and want to hold onto the New Zealand connection anywhere I can. Partly, it's because they're damn funny.

Since I returned to this country I've been preaching the Conchord message through You Tube clips. Then I found out they'd have an HBO series starting up in June.

I prepared by going to an advance screening (I need to find more of these, I like seeing movies for free) of Eagle vs Shark. The movie has one of theConchords as the lead and one of my New Zealand comedian acquaintances in a role as well.

The HBO show started last week, it's two episodes in (still haven't met anyone here with HBO, so BitTorrent has been my savior).

Also this week I ended up downloading the six episodes from the BBC2 radio series.

This all may be a bit much. I'm just waiting for some of the other New Zealanders to make their way over here.

a thought

the Decemberists have had the top spot on my iPod since I was first introduced to a couple of their albums about a year ago.
I've realized since almost all of my friends also have the Decemberists in their music collection, or at least know who they are. I've also realized I've never heard any of their songs outside of a personal music collection context.

This led to another thought: what is driving dissemination of music these days? In my experience, music has always been spread by word of mouth (at least the stuff that isn't forced onto you by big-label marketing). But growing up in a rural area, I had very little idea there was a whole universe of recorded music existing outside the radio or carried by a national CD retail chain.

When I was in high school, the Internet was in its nationwide infancy. It wasn't until my junior year of college I heard the term mp3. It wasn't until I arrived at college I realized people had music collections full of bands I'd never heard of.
Kids today (I love using that term - it pushes me so far into the "old" category it feels like a joke, and I can pretend its ironic and I'm still young instead of the truth) must have a slightly easier time finding the currents of the musical underground. But I think you still have to have a reason for searching it out.

Whether it's online or off, you still discover new music through word of mouth. I think the one difference is now the kids who are outsiders and are in an area without an outsider scene (the goth kids, the punk kids, the fill-in-the-blank kids) can now find the scene online.

It seems like more people are going around or leaving behind the market campaigns. It's what all the "new-media" theorist say. But certainly not more people, I don't think. I'm not sure even the Internet is going to push even close to a tipping point where the big-money marketing becomes just one more voice in the crowd.

things I'm learning from reading "Salt" by Mark Kurlansky

Or, more accurately, things that had never occurred to me before:
* The main reason salt earns itself a book about its historical importance is historically, salt was the only way to preserve food.
* The above fact is fairly obvious when you stop to think about it; refrigeration has only been widespread for less than a century. However, according to the book the practice of canning is only about 200 years old. Growing up, my mom canned fruit andtomatoes every summer. My grandmother canned in greater quantities. Canning was a big part of homestead histories of the U.S. frontier. I had always assumed it would have been in revolutionary times, as well. Nope.
* I'd heard of food being preserved by salt before refrigeration. I didn't realize this meant it was often pickled. Or smoked dry along with the heavy salting. I also never bothered to think about the end result, the fact that salted meat required boiling or soaking in fresh water before eating.
* As it's hard for me to think of salt's place in a world without refrigeration, it's similarly hard for me to think of salt production in a world without large-scale commercial salt factories. Today the industrial production and easy transportation makes it impossible to think of salt as a scarce commodity. But when you're forced to get it by evaporating salt water in large ponds, and you're in a rainy climate, it starts to become a lot harder to get salt in large quantities.

I'm becoming a big fan of books with a single noun as the title. "Stiff". "Rats". "Salt".