We all love NASA. And why not, they have promoted a healthy interest in the space program. For years and years, as far as I can remember, NASA has been sending things into space to further our understanding of that harsh environment, and even this one.

Today, as we ponder the amount of satellites and other junk out there, a sense of pride tries to shout from somewhere in the past. Somewhere in time when NASA was not responsible for providing science on par with the instrumentation at their disposal.

But I am disappointed. Today we get the same shit over and over again, while here and there scientists not in on the deception, fuck up. It is sad, thinking to some hard-working student at the University of Arizona, eager to show off something they think is new and profound to all life on this planet. This information is then covered up and the student reprimanded.

What sort of thing is NASA into. What should we be expecting them to be into. I think NASA has a responsibility they are not fulfilling. I think the field of science has a model of honesty and integrity to flesh out. We can most of the time expect the opposite.

There is a film out there called In the Shadow of the Moon which documents the culture surrounding our shooting to the moon. It may not be in this film but in some of the other media regarding this topic there are camera engineers interviewed. Why the mystery surrounding the loss of quality? Ive got a Wired article where the guy in charge of the monitors in Houston was told he was out of a job if he corrected the live footage.

DEAD SEA SCROLLS

the devil is in the details

yesterday

edit: whats the difference between a kook and a clock keeper?

following pages can be found at 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

what is up?

as the frustration nears a breaking point dissolve into the cool winds of autumn. ahhh. AHHHH! kill it.

well how have we been. My body and mind feel unalterably changed after recently visiting the cape town of nj. on this trip i was able to read some of a book titled "intoxication" along with another book titled "gods of eden." Both of these books have been very, very, very entertaining.

Intoxication is about the urge in living things to get fucked up. It is really that simple. We have mountain goats in yemen to thank for coffee, in case you did not know. I have read two chapters and the author does the kind of research I can get behind. Experience. He is talking about getting crickets and snails fucked up on Datura. That is some impressive shit right there. He talks about cows getting fucked up on some toxic plants and becoming dependent on them then passing the dependency to their children. He says when they get hooked on the plant they tend to remove themselves from the pack, ignore crys of hunger from their children and neglect any responsibilities they might have had for the day. Weeeeooo

Gods of Eden. I do not recommend this book for anyone who is comfortable. There are certain truths in this book, one that I hacked up and spit on here about comets, that will rape your soul. Do you want that? Lets just smash you with the basic idea. Since the beginning of organized time there are forces involved in our universe undermining the fundamental purpose of life. These forces are manifest in every aspect of being and manipulate good forces and entities to accomplish bad things. Do you understand that? Do you understand that we have or have had good and humanity loving forces at work only for them to be hijacked for nefarity while still appearing benevolent. Let that sink down. This force is precise and has no name but is very much a sum of our beings.

ANNNNNYWAYS. I also had the opportunity to watch Memoirs of a Geisha. Something about being in cape may softened my defenses to this film. I watched it twice in two days. I do not consider that normal behavior. There is just something captured in that movie and something in the main actress and her satellites that burned my insides.

Fuckem.

here is the rest of that cow article if your into it.

Best song I've heard in at least two years:

Incinerate - Sonic Youth

I'm thinking of posting here 1-2 times per week in an MP3 blog fashion. Good / bad idea?

Yesterday was the anniversary of the London fire of 1666. A century or two earlier were the plagues where there exist more than one account of people saying "lights appeared in the sky" or "great comets with trails of mist" occurred before outbreaks. Johannes Nohl wrote a book chronicles of the plague where he goes into these comets. Nohl makes it a point to draw a connection between comets and the appearance of plagues.

When in sun and moonlight a beautiful rainbow and a fiery beam were seen hovering above the church of St. Stephanie, which was followed by a violent epidemic in Austria, Swabia, Augsberg, Wuetemberg, Nuremburg, and other places, carrying off human beings and cattle.

Then you have Walter George Bell, an English Historian, reporting from 1664.

Late into dark December nights of the year 1664 London citizens sat up to watch a new blazing star, with "mighty talk" thereupon. King Charles II and his Queen gazed out of the windows at Whitehall...In March there came into the heavens a yet brighter comet visible two hours after midnight, and so continuing till daylight. With such ominous portents the Great Plague in London was ushered in.

After looking at some of this information about the plagues I am scratching my head. Bubonic plague needs a carrier like fleas or rats to spread and is not contagious. However reports from the time show that there was no real rat problem. But what do I know I am not alive then nor am I the one manipulating history.

this is in.circles post #501, congrats

ps, this is an old ass article, do not go looking for perseids tonight

this one is all sorts of happy :P

the fuck is stone soup

love this chick

where time and life shake hands and say goodbye

i love you but enough is enough.

hallo. how have you been? I am really concerned about you. Well I hope you work it out.

I will burn your motherfuckin' house down. How pathetic can we get. How many lives do we have to take before we are satisfied, before we feel safe? I am convinced these are ritualistic killings, sacrifices. Sick, ill motherfucker when powers that be have us bamboozled into thinking murder is equivalent to democracy.


You reap what you sow. We want the sweet meats. They have you but they really want the young ones.

Gaze at the moon and beg the waffle for severance. Troll the bait of ignorance over the dry riverbed of denial. Weird fishes.

And speaking of stupid, how about this Obama. I have never seen anything more deranged in my life. People, can we please get a grip. I will let you in on a Little Secret. Any vote for one of the two major parties will bind your soul to unforgiving pain. Pain that I personally will impose on you.

The ruling elite are salivating at the following Obama has garnered. Buzzwords like change and hope. You sick silly demented motherfuckers. This is not even a well executed deception.

I apologize, if i had it all to do over again, i promise it would be different. They threw bags of money at me. Anyone would do the same thing. You cant condemn me for something any human would do. What about my family? Am I so bad for wanting the best for my family.

I will MASH you up.

Everybody leaves if they get a chance, and this is my chance.

this will not end well.

he was a skater boi, said see you later boi

Ahh, now this is more like it.

as long as your inside my blue veins

I got a flickr account for my new cell phone. Filling that with pictures here.

I overheard two conversations at Sweet & Vicious on Spring St. last night in which individuals were talking about website investment opportunities. One was a site for "financial management social networking" and the other for "music sharing social networking". For the love of God people. Please shut up. Stringing together the buzz-words of three years ago, purchasing a domain, and hiring an outsourced Indian developer to build you a flash(har)y website doesn't mean that anyone is going to give a shite. I'm pretty sure that the future of innovation doesn't begin in bars filled with privileged 20-somethings looking to make a quick buck, however - so I won't take what I overheard to represent the future of technology. --

I've spent a lot of time listening to sleepy southern/alt-country type stuff so far this summer. Lots of Wilco, My Morning Jacket, Mojave 3, Iron & Wine, Drag The River, Crooked Fingers, Sun Kil Moon, Centro-matic, etc. etc. Strange that it comes at a time in which I'm missing my first Insubordination Records Fest in four years. Am I really getting old?

blue veins at bonnaroo. check out the intro to steady as she goes.

Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen.
- John le Carre

good read

My car was parked about 25 yards from where the old Westinghouse building in Newark collapsed this morning. It was a rare display of luck on my part to have not been closer at the time. My office is on the opposite corner of the building, and up here on the 16th floor we've had a pretty excellent view of the rubble and crushed cars. Wish I had my camera handy.

Seth does a good job of putting all of the issues with the music industry into one, (mostly) concise speech and Nine Inch Nails releases an instrumental album using a slightly altered version of the Radiohead model. I haven't been able to stomach the last three Nine Inch Nails albums, but this instrumental stuff isn't half-bad. Track 4 on Ghosts I sounds like My Bloody Valentine on acid, which works for me this morning.

Last night, as I struggled through my birthday hangover to finish my homework I overheard quite a bit of the Oscars as Marissa watched in the other room. I'd occasionally get up, frustrated by the annoying online homework system that my professor uses, to watch an acceptance speech or performance. During one of these breaks I was lucky enough to catch Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova perform their song from their movie Once. I hadn't heard anything about this movie, or much about The Frames in quite some time, so it was great to see such a great guy getting the acclaim he deserves. In his honor I'm pulling out an old myspace blog entry that I wrote about The Frames in 2006

---
Thursday, March 16, 2006


In 2000 I went to go see The Gloria Record, the band that was made up of some of the dudes from Mineral, at The Middle East, in Boston. I went by myself, as I did to most shows around that time, and took my place on the back wall to watch the opening bands. Around that time the local openers in Boston at these types of shows were beyond bad, so I wasn't expecting much. The singer from TGR came out and introduced his "friend Glen Hansard, of The Frames" and urged everyone to listen closely. Just a dude with an acoustic guitar and a microphone, humbly dressed in poor fitting jeans and a blank gray t-shirt, the crowd seemed unimpressed. As he began to play the crowd seemed to grow obnoxiously loud and more engrossed in their conversations about... well, whatever the fuck it is that people at emo shows in 2000 talked about.

I could immediately tell that this guy wasn't some rich trust fund asshole from BC or BU, though. It was hard to hear over the jerks in the crowd, but it was plain to see that he was the real deal. He started with What Happens When the Heart Stops and by the time it was finished I'd made my way to the front and was up against the stage. A bit bugged by the conversations, he announced in a thick irish accent "hey, you know... i've got these songs and i came here to play them for you. it doesn't bother me if you're not interested in listening to them. but if that's the case, can you please step the fuck outside into the other room?"

Some people left, some people stayed. But it definitely got quieter. From there, in order from "For The Birds" he followed up with Headlong and then Fighting on the Stairs. I can't remember what he played after that. But I know that by the time he'd finished his set, the people that stayed were all in shocked silence during the songs, and in unified applause in between. He was egged on for an encore and was only the second of four bands playing. He never came back out. Two songs into The Gloria Record I opted to head back home before the Mass Ave (#1) bus stopped running.

I forget about The Frames from time to time but when I'm reminded of their existence I'm always reminded of that great night and throw on For The Birds and am still in awe at how great it is. Glen's playing solo in New York this weekend. I think I'm going to go. Maybe I'll even go by myself, you know, just for old time's sake.

--

(I never did go to that New York show...)

I proposed this idea as part of a paper I wrote on digital music in 2002. Six years later, I think it's a lousy idea. I can't imagine why anyone would choose to purchase music this way on a regular basis. Why on earth would you want to drag yourself to the mall to plug into a machine that's no more capable than your home PC w/ iTunes installed to buy music? I can understand why a handful of Borders marketing execs sitting in a conference room would think that this is a good idea. After all, the business of selling plastic discs is dying and they still have revenue numbers to hit. However, if they have illusions of this type of music selling becoming a new norm and making up for what they're missing in the modern era of music sales, they'll be in for a rude awakening. This is a glossier version of the impulse candy rack at the supermarket, at best.

They're onto an idea, but unfortunately boring hell...

Weather.com tells me that it’s 32 degrees outside, but I can still feel spring in the air. There are pitchers, catchers, and the rest reporting to Florida. Fantasy leagues are, ahem, springing up. It’s certainly sunnier. This excites me. The winters in which I don’t get to ski are just something for me to get through. It’s the subsequent nine months of the year that make me feel like a human being. Here’s to hoping that our PA groundhog was wrong this year and that we’ll find ourselves with an early spring.

I’ve stumbled upon quite a few free eMusic downloads lately and have been checking out some stuff. Here’s what I’ve found…



Astrobrite – Crush

In anticipation of my Loveless 180g LP arriving in the mail I was hurtin’ for some new shoegaze stuff. I wasn’t familiar with Loveliescrushing, the band that spawned this side project, but the few samples I heard didn’t excite me as much as Astrobrite. It’s noisy as hell. Certainly less melodic and than MBV or Slowdive, but worth a listen for anyone into that type of stuff. Notable is the fact that it was all recorded to a 4-track machine without the use of keyboards… which is surprising given the overall sound. Also worth noting is that Astrobrite is a great band name in theory, but sounds much too much like Astroglide for my liking.



The Raveonettes – Lust Lust Lust

I thought the last Raveonettes record sucked. They took away the fuzz and uncovered that without it they were a horribly boring band. Luckily the fuzz is back, and although it’s not as prominent as it was on Whip It On or Chain Gang of Love, it’s for the better. A bit of filler, but if you’ve dug stuff by them in the past, you’ll be excited to hear this one.



Mojave 3 – Puzzles Like You

The fact that I’d never stumbled across this band makes me realize that I know even less about music than I thought I did. After obsessing over Slowdive’s Souvlaki for the last few weeks, I decided to wiki search the band to see what the members were up to. Luckily, they’ve been prolific and remain excellent. To Hold Your Tiny Toes and Breaking The Ice are two of the best new songs I’ve heard in a long, long time. It’s nothing like Slowdive, but that’s ok.

Maybe more of this blogging in the future. I miss it.

life is minty with you around.

I think I just got someone put in the slammer. Got a call from a bail bonds lady(sounded fierce). Las Vegas Bail Bonds. Looking for someone who's not me asking about paying a bond for someone I don't know. "...need to call me back immediately or I have no choice but to put him back in jail".

I thought about calling the number back to explain the mix up...but it was a 973 number, why would a Las Vegas bail bonds-lady have a 973 area code? I'm not walking into that trap. Sorry Hector, tonight I raise my glass to you.

But anyway. I came back from the dead to give you this, RPM '08 So sign up and spread word, only two days left!

I'll leave you with some quotes:

"Few will have the greatness to bend history; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation ... It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is thus shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance." ~Bobby Kennedy

"Anyone who says he can see through women is missing a lot." ~Groucho Marx

"Wisdom comes with winters" ~Oscar Wilde