The Family Guy Blog is the newest susbscription in my news reader. The show that wouldn’t die has a blog, written by people and not PR flacks, how cool is that?
I was actually thinking of going to the live performance of Family Guy…until I saw the $50 price tag.
[via Micropersuasion]
On Saturday, Sarah and I went to see Desmond Dekker at the Knitting Factory. I had a really good time despite the heat in the club, the pushy crowd, the rainy conditions, and the pretty lackluster performance.
It was great getting to see some faces I haven’t seen in a while, and awesome to add another legendary name to the list of musicians I’ve seen live…even if the actual performance wasn’t so great. Desmond didn’t really wow me with his voice, and he seemed to be rushing through the songs. “A It Mek” was a stormer as expected, but most of the other tracks flew by…and including “Hippopatomus” in a medley didn’t due the song justice. That said, I’m sure it’s hard to be singing the Ska hits when you’re a septuagenarian…I guess I just expected more from one of the top names in Ska history.
I don’t have much more to say, so I’ll turn the mic over to Mellow Yellow:
Honestly, i was a bit disappointed. I think we’ve all been duped by an imposter. I really don’t think that the man on stage singing Desmond Dekker’s songs was really HIM. For starters, his voice was completely different. Anyone who listens to him knows that his voice is VERY distinct. That dude sounded nothing like the King of Ska. Of course I’ve taken into consideration that Desmond is like 70 years old or something, however, this is where i raise my second point. The “Desmond Dekker” that WE saw appeared a bit tooooo young to be the real deal. I’d say he was maybe late 40′s or early 50′s. I was more or less expecting a skeleton to be on stage, a skeleton that sounded like desmond dekker at least.
In any event, i did have an awesome time seeing some old faces and meeting new ones as always. I shook my shoulders and sweated off about 15 pounds. It wasn’t a horrible night… I just have my suspicions.
I took some pictures, but none came out. Keep reading for the best of the pretty crappy bunch…
From The Death of Dynamic Range:
The sad part is that when these peaks are clipped, or “hacked off” as I like to call it, the original content and quality of the sound is lost forever. Although there are techniques to “guess” at the missing part of the waveform and “re-draw” a curved wave out of the part that was formerly a flat line, this is not accurate to the original sound; it is merely an “artist’s reconstruction”, so to speak. Thus, when aggressive peak clipping is used, the record company is DESTROYING part of the music.
[Via Music Thing]
I don’t watch much pre-season baseball, and the first game of the year was during work hours, so last night was my first experience suffering under the current MSG-Time Warner brouhaha.
For those of you not in the know, MSG (which owns the local rights to Mets games) and Time Warner (who I receive most of my digital content from) haven’t been able to settle on a price for TW to carry MSG’s channels on it’s cable service. The underlying reason is that the Mets will be moving to their owns sports network in 2006, making MSG’s channel a lot less attractive to TW.
We listened to the radio broadcast on WFAN, but it just wasn’t the same. I loved listening to games on the radio when I used to have a 2 1/2 hour drive home from work, and it’s always fun listening at work, but for some reason the lack of a picture really bothered me in my own apartment. I just kept thinking, “Wow, it sounds like they are watching a great game”. The worst part is, things don’t look to get better any time soon.
Maybe it was for the best, since the Mets fumbled, stumbled and finally collapsed. Willie Randolph’s double switch gaffe will probably get a lot of the attention, but what really stood out for me is how thin our bullpen really is. With five or six relievers being used just in yesterday’s game, the next few games are going to be interesting…
Soul Sides is one of my favorite mp3 blogs. The recent Liquid Motion post links to a Freddy Robinson track that you really need. Kind of a funkier BB in a way. I think I need to go practice…
p.s. This is why mp3 blogs, hell most forms of music sharing are good in the long term for the artists. I would probably never have heard of Freddie Robinson if his name (and a link to a track) didn’t flow through my aggregator. Amazon should have an mp3 blog…
Still on December 19th…
We were a bit tired by the time we got home from our trip to Liseberg, and more than ready to hit the sheets. As we were getting ready for bed, the snow started to fall. Finally, some real Swedish winter! The flakes energized both of us, so we bundled up and headed out to the park behind Sara’s apartment building, and wound up walking all over her neighborhood.
I’m not sure if it was the moist weather, but the snow that night was the best snowball making snow I’d ever experienced. You could scoop your hand onto the ground and make whatever size snowball you wanted without packing it at all. I only wish I’d had better competition!
Next stop on our nostalgia tour, Uppsala!
Sometimes someone puts things so perfectly that reading their words feels like reading something you’d written previously and forgotten about.
As my students know, the checkpoint in Hartford is laughably unlikely to catch any Al Qaeda terrorists. And it’s hardly an efficient use of Homeland Security money — not when New York City has fewer cops and first responders than on 9/11.
But the checkpoint is a highly visible propaganda tool. It reminds us to be afraid. Everywhere and — as they say in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and even jails on US soil — “indefinitely.”