Web Log, December 25th, 2005 to January 7th, 2006
Saturday, January 7th, 2006
"The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them knows
anything about the subject." – Marcus
Aurelius
"...board and lodging in return
for frugal displays of affection."
Friday, January 6th, 2005
...spokeswoman Angell Watts said of people who criticized the comments: "What they're basically saying is, 'How dare Pat Robertson quote the Bible?' This is what the word of God says. This is nothing new to the Christian community."
Thursday, January 5th, 2006
Researchers at Cambridge
University have discovered sheep prefer smiling or relaxed human faces, over
angry or stressed ones. 
Wednesday, January 4th, 2005
"We was lied to! We might be dumb, but we love our
families! Some of us is right down to saying we don't know if there is a
Lord anymore!"
Anna
Casto
Tuesday, January 3rd, 2006
Where
it's dark as a dungeon and damp as the dew
Where the dangers are double and the pleasures are few
Where the rain never falls and the sun never shines
It's dark as a dungeon way down in the mines
Monday, January 2nd, 2006
"The same passions in man and woman nonetheless differ in tempo; hence man and woman do not cease misunderstanding one another." Fred
"The real traditions of the British Navy are rum, buggery and the lash." Winston Churchill
This just in from the "If You Believe That" Department: Tommy calls 911.
Sunday, January 1st, 2006
If you are in need of a word to describe Click
Dark's appearance last night on ABC (and your first word, 'macabre',
seems cruel)...then may I suggest 'sobering'?
Self-centered jerk that I am, my first reaction to hearing his slurred
(and, by turns, unintelligible) speech was to question the very motives of those
(including Clark himself---it is, after all, his production company) who
would place him (though at a distance---and for only fleeting intervals) before
the camera in his shattered condition. The corporate conclusion that his
'return' would jack up ABC's ratings (vs. schoolboy Anderson Cooper on CNN and
robustly-74 Regis Philbin on Fox) was surely foregone but...thinking a little
deeper now (while not abandoning any cynicism): isn't it a 'good thing'
that we are not spared the sight of this (fwoabw)
"fallen icon"? [OK...that's two words.]
For too many of us over-55'ers, the term 'stroke' is just that:
a 'term'. We are usually spared the sight of its devastating aftermath.
Rising
blood pressure (a strong risk factor for stroke) is easy to ignore. Most
men (but women, too) are vain. We don't like to admit our vulnerabilities and
are all-the-way-to-ashamed of any-and-all symptoms of mortality. We, most of us,
consider the public display of sickness and disability to be in 'poor taste'.
Dick was diagnosed in 1994
with adult-onset (or type
2) diabetes and kept his condition from the public. In April of
2004, however, he did go public, becoming part of a campaign to alert
people to a link between uncontrolled blood sugar and the incidence of heart
attack and stroke. Whatever Dick's motives for his New Year's Eve
appearance, let our reactions to it be contemplative: Eat
right, stay fit, die anyway.
"Always set high value on spontaneous kindness. He whose inclination prompts him to cultivate your friendship of his own accord will love you more than one whom you have been at pains to attach to you...." Samuel Johnson (1709-1784).
Saturday, December 31st, 2005
When asked the 'secret' of her long life, she said, "I mind my own business."
There
he is, at left...but even his publicist now admits that he isn't,
after all, really there! Yes! Seeing
is not believing.
Who among is so un-ghoulish as to not want to (need to)
tune in tonight to ABC to view whatever
might be left of
Friday, December 30th, 2005
For the many who might still believe that stomach ulcers are caused by 'stress', this article by Dr. Dean Edell is worth the two minutes it will take to read it. I have long wondered why anyone thinks it makes sense to (any more than occasionally) take antacid medications. But, judging from the slick (and expensive) national advertising campaigns waged for products like Prevacid and Nexium, it's clear that there is a widespread belief (of which the pharmaceutical industry does not wish to disabuse anyone) that indigestion is a 'normal' aspect of modern life. Some of these pills even offer all-day relief (and protection) from acid indigestion...as in, you take the pill before you eat!
Thursday, December 29th, 2005
Just posted a new and more sophisticated remix (using Pro Tools
automation and gated compression) of Stone Alone (stream
or download).
I also added some new tracks to it. Check out the fade, which starts about three
minutes in. Incidentally, this MP3 post is encoded at 256 Kb/sec, so the
fidelity is (audibly, of course) better than if I had
posted it at (the more common) 128 Kb/sec encoding rate. The trade-off is that
the file is twice as large and so takes longer to download. But in principle
(i.e., with proper buffering), it should stream just as well as the smaller
file...though it might take slightly longer to start playing.
The term 'gated compression' (or 'gated
limiting') refers to the technique of tying the processing of a given track (or
set of tracks) to the presence of a signal on another track in the mix.
This might seem like an eyes-glaze-over esoteric idea but it's quite
simple (and frankly ubiquitous in commercial audio). We 'experience' this effect
dozens of times daily in TV and radio broadcasts. To take a simple example:
let's say someone is reading a weather report and there is background theme
music which starts before any words are spoken about the weather. The background
music track is configured such that every time the announcer speaks, the volume
(of the background music) is reduced. This makes it easier, of course, for a
listener to hear the voice-over. When the announcer pauses, the background music
returns to the (higher) level at which it was playing before the voice
started. So, we say that the background music is 'keyed' (or 'gated')
such that it will automatically become softer in the presence of a voice-over.
How fast the background is reduced in the presence
of the voice-over is a settable parameter (called the 'attack').
How fast the music returns to the no-voice-over
level is also a settable parameter (called the 'release').
The art of it all is (through judicious adjustments of these and other
parameters), to make the gated effect 'invisible' to the listener, who only
experiences an intelligible weather report with unobtrusive background music.
Next time you're riding along in your wreck and some dumb commercial comes on
the radio, listen to 'see' if you can discern the gated volume control of the
ad's background music.
Wednesday, December 28th, 2005
People who have never 'gotten into' running ('jogging') likely
do not understand its allure. It's addictive in the sense that, once one has
established the 'habit' of doing it, one never quite feels 'right' on the days
when (for any reason) one is not able to. I know people (younger than I
am, of course ^_^) who run several miles each
day. But mine is a modest habit...ordinarily no more than a mile of run
followed by that same mile of walking back. My favorite time to run is
late afternoon or early evening...just before dinner. That's when these supposed
things (called 'endorphins')
responsible for 'runner's high' seem most poised to present themselves to
(what's left of) my brain. But, as a practical matter, I usually run in the
mid-morning: post-breakfast, post-bowel movement. The reason is that my
days are not predictable enough that I can be sure that I will
always get to run at my 'favorite time'.
A touching
'tribute' to running, comes from Darcy Wakefield, a writer who died
on December 10th, at age 35, of ALS.
Diagnosed in 2003, she soon found herself unable to run...as some day,
will we all: "I remember running like I
remember the sun-filled beach days of my childhood. Even though I no longer run,
I still have a runner's soul. It's trapped in a runner's body that won't run.
These days I try to take pleasure in what now substitutes for running in my
life. The other night, something told me to go down to the beach, and I did,
even though it was late and dark. The beach was hard and smooth because the tide
was out, and something told me to run. I ran around and around in circles. If
you'd seen me, you wouldn't have called what I was doing running, but it was
good enough for me. This is what I thought that night as I gave thanks: We are
so lucky to be able to do this, all of our nerves and muscles working together,
as we move ourselves forward to do this thing we call running."
Tuesday, December 27th, 2005
I was surprised to read that Massachusetts still has (and even enforces) some so-called 'Blue Laws'
If you're looking for a mighty
concise piece of writing by an 85 year-old woman...
Monday, December 26th, 2005
" 'Compassion for all' would amount to rigor and tyranny for you, my dear neighbor! " Fred
Sunday, December 25th, 2005 Things can only get better!
Merry Christmas to my fellow Pinkos!
"Spare a thought for the First Lady, who has to
endure his demented and...drunken harangues over supper.
At this rate he'll be shooting the dog and ordering
[her] to take poison,
which I'm sure she'll [take] great pleasure in forwarding to her mother in law."
Alexander Cockburn
There are, perhaps, five people...among them, my dear big sister...to whom I have promised to send a CD of the songs on this site. It isn't that I've forgotten...it's just that, every time I start to 'burn' a CD for them (the 'perhaps five', that is), I wrestle over what (and whether) to include...what to 'settle for', as it were. It's been a bit more than a year since I migrated to computer-based recording from an ADAT but only a bit more than a month since I've felt that I might know what I'm doing. And so, I feel now as if I must re-record everything I've recorded so far! Last night, for example, I put together a quick new recording of 'Stone Alone' (Stream or Download). 'Quick' because not only am I now able to work the software (almost) fluently, but I have learned to import tracks (usually percussion) from earlier sessions of the tune...and 'quick' because I didn't spend any time (yet) refining the mix. I've also gotten a new vocal microphone (MXL990) since I last recorded this tune. This session has three guitar tracks, three percussion tracks, a bass, a piano and two vocals.
All that remains of the once-proud Ocean Springs Yacht
Club
in Ocean Springs, Mississippi.