The latest chapter in Andrew Sullivan’s Mad Obsession with Sarah Palin.

I have — I think — said a few things about Sarah Palin in the past, notably right after her nomination. I’ve not said a lot because I don’t figure it’s worth anyone’s time to say things that others have said. And in the case of Mr. Sullivan and Josh Marshall, said it more eloquently and with good sourcing.

But I will say this to the people who, to me, seem otherwise perfectly reasonable: If you give that empty power suit in pumps any credence at all, you’re immune to reason and fact. I can’t even discuss or debate any issue of policy or politics with you, because if you believe in Sarah Palin, you’ll believe in anything. Like Mark Twain said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

And that’s Sarah Palin to a T — the more certain she is about something, the more likely that it just aint so. How can anyone besides the ignorant, the deluded, and the deranged think even for a moment about giving her any power or authority?

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

The song itself I’m not quite sure about, though it is a stylish mash up of its 80s influences. But the video really does it for me, taking me back to when music videos were fun, by assembling a genre-bending cast of impersonators to dance with the Dorothy Gale of Kansas heroine.

Prince and Bill Corgan were a slam dunk, but Roxy Music era Eno, early 70s Peter Gabriel, and Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, all at once? Brilliant.

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

This is just the weirdest usage and a stunningly unfortunate double-entendre. And stunningly it’s at least the second time I’ve seen it used in a way that looks to be innocent of its pornographic connotations:

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

Time rates the best College President

I noticed former Iowa president Mary Sue Coleman made the list, and it crystalized for me a real dissatisfaction about the University of Iowa, my alma mater and current employer. To wit: Why was the last ‘career’ President of the University of Iowa Sandy Boyd? He was here for 12 years, and even came back for 2 years to act as interim president. Virgil Hancher was at Iowa for 24 years!

If you look back, it seems like anyone of actual talent and ability in the job gets hired away by higher-profile Universities after a few years in the job here. James O Friedman? 5 years here and then to Dartmouth, Hunter Rawlngs 7 years, and then on to Cornell U, Mary Sue Coleman 7 years, then on to University of Michigan, David Skorton 3 years, and then to Cornell.

I guess I should be resigned to this happening. In my field, staying 3 years is certainly respectable before moving on. But I wonder why it is that they can’t retain people for longer than that. It’s not a prestige thing, per se. Iowa’s not Harvard, but it’s not a Honduran diploma mill either. I suspect that the real fault comes down to the Iowa Legislature. A significant minority of the people in the legislature actively hate the University, and regard Iowa City as a hotbed of sin and subversion. When it comes time to fund higher education, the University has continually had to make do with less.

I first attended Iowa in 1976, and it was a completely different place. Tuition was dirt cheap — it’s gone up drastically since then, even adjusting for inflation. There were more tenured faculty teaching undergraduates, and there were more tenure track faculty positions, period. It’s depressing to have stayed around for the intervening 33 years, watching things gradually go more and more down-market.

But when it comes to our current president Sally Mason, I think that we may be stuck with her for the long run. Her signature action in the office was failing to agressively manage the official response to the rape of a student athelete, and then throwing two distinguished college administrators under the bus to save her job. That’s not such a resume builder.

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

This is the set more or less as I recorded it — there was one place where I bumped the ‘track stop’ button, and had to restart a track, and I fixed a track’s beat matching problems this morning.

The highlight of the show is that I was announcing tracks for the first half of the show with the microphone turned all the way down. Once I figured that out I gave up announcing tracks entirely.

Track Listing

http://music.cornwarning.com/audio/2009-11-14-KRUI-DJSet.mp3

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Track Listing

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

That is 4AM UCT November 15 — adjust your watches accordingly.

Playing some new Eevolute promos, new dubsteppish stuff & if I get it done a new track of my own. I’ll try and record my mix for posting here later.

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

Boomkat’s “14 Tracks” tribute to DJ International

I’d buy this if I didn’t already have almost all these tracks either on vinyl, CD or digital. A few years after House blew up in Chicago it filtered westward into Iowa City, and the Jack tracks were mind-blowing. To quote myself from many years ago, “House music is 5000 years of dance music collapsed down to the booty-bumping eigenvectors.”

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

So the brother of a friend of ours was killed in an auto accident yesterday morning. This is awful, but the local paper in his area thought the article on their web site needed head on collision CLIP ART as an illustration. What the fucking fuck?

Which made me curious. Is there tragedy clip art for the busy editor on the go? Is there, for example, genocide clip art? Turns out there are stock photos from various genocides, but what came up as the top Google Search result was just so bad I had to share:

This is obviously one of those sites who play tricks to show up at the top of Google search results, but maybe they should rethink this strategy.

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

Lackluster “Portal EP”

This is a collection of tracks that was supposed to come out on another label that closed up shop. I offered to do a Creative Commons release for Lackluster. He located the masters (on backups, and backups of backups!) and I mastered them.

Lackluster has been one of the most well regarded artists in the genre known (controversially) as IDM. With a discography going back 10 years, he has released music on Merck, Monotonik, deFocus and many others.

Graphic design by Matt Seeman

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

From Black Dog Flickr Feed

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Man just wants delicious burrito, gets accused of being a zombie, has nose broken.

Iowa City is home of the Zombified “Resist Evil” Zombie Movie trilogy, an annual Zombie Parade (which benefits charity), and now, a guy who apparently imagines himself a zombie fighter.

Dude fucked up — Zombies eat brains, not burritos.

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All of the original Ub Iwerks “Popeye” cartoons lapsed into Public Domain before the film industry stooges bribed Congress to extend copyright indefinitely. These cartoons were vastly superior to the later Popeye retreads, which are still under copyright. Paul Di Filippo reminded me that a lot of these are available on Youtube these days.

And “Sinbad The Sailor” holds a special place in my heart, because it was a family favorite when my son Sean was very young. And it has everything: Ub’s ‘turntable’ innovation, combining filmed 3D backgrounds with cell animation, plenty of Popeye’s surreal muttered asides, the “Twister Punch,” and Blimpie’s legendary appetite. And it’s a mini-operetta — the Sinbad song sung by Bluto became a car ride favorite. It’s a mark of it’s excellence that it was later quoted in abridged form in a 1952 Paramount Popeye cartoon, with different music. Curiously the “Twister Punch” becomes “The Onesie-Twosie.”

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

I cut my finger cooking last night, and apparently found a nice juicy vein in the process. I was in the middle of something time critical, so when I couldn’t find a band-aid, I did the ol scotch tape + paper towel approximation* and went back to what I was doing until I could reach a good stopping point.

At said stopping point, I looked at my finger, and then the floor, and apparently unbeknownst to me, I’d been bleeding profusely, and there was blood all over the kitchen floor, counter & spattered down my pant leg. At that point, I changed pants and ran to the grocery store for some proper band-aids. Once I got enough pressure on it to stop the bleeding** I mopped up. The place looked like I’d slaughtered a goat, though I couldn’t have lost more than an ounce or so of blood.

*Way back when i worked construction, I worked with a guy who would bind up wounds with any semi-clean absorbent material and duct tape. This works surprisingly well, better sometimes than band-aids or gauze+tape dressings. I suppose it’s preferable to use sterile dressings, but in the real world, a reasonably healthy individual will rarely get an infection in a cut allowed to bleed freely for a few seconds, and then bound tight enough to slow the bleeding down to an ooze. That’s why your blood is at a positive pressure gradient with respect to the outside world — so it comes out instead of letting germs in.

**I have to have a pretty bad cut to consider stitches, having wasted my time and money a couple times with ER visits. If you can stop the bleeding and you can’t see bone, carefully applied clean dressings usually do just as well. My last ER visit about a cut involved a broken olive oil bottle and looked like an improvised mouth 3 inches wide. I drove myself to the hospital with my right hand wrapped in a bloody towel. Good times.

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… all of a sudden, the stuff that’s supposed to be to the right of posts is down at the bottom of the page, and I lost my ‘older/newer’ links to step backwards in the blogs.

Grrr. Like I want to go and edit a bunch of PHP code that’s highly nested and has no comments.

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I had a real adventure last night, installing Windows 7. I ran into a problem so infuriating, and yet so completely boneheaded and ridiculous that I had to laugh. It’s described here. In essence, if you bought the EDU $29.95 Windows 7 Home Premium from Microsoft, the download file won’t actually work on 32-bit Windows XP. It unpacks all the files, and then tries to run a 64-bit
executable. Then it claims it can’t write to the install directory, instead of telling you the real problem — it can’t run the installer program.

Thank Jebus for the Internets — googling the error message turned up the forum discussion linked above and these
instructions on building a bootable Windows 7 Installation Disk.

I ran into another problem then — it might have been my issue, selecting the wrong install option from the menu, but I tried installs onto an existing Windows XP partition, and both ended up in an unbootable disk. Finally I punted — in XP, I deleted the partition on my new Windows 7 boot hard disk, and told it to do a full install. I was concerned this wouldn’t work, since I had the Upgrade and not the Full version, but apparently having a bootable XP disk elsewhere in the system let it do a clean install on an unformatted disk. Huzzah.

So I’ve spent several hours installing hardware drivers and my working set of software. Windows 7 feels faster than XP on the same hardware, but I’m not sure how much is actual performance improvements, and how much is having my main hard drive be a newer, faster hard drive.

The one big boo-hiss goes to M-Audio, who don’t have drivers for the Midisport 2×2 for 64 bit Vista or 7. WTF guys? Everything else seems to work great!

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

This is from the Orphans CD, it’s a really off-hand spoken word piece, but for some ineffable reason, it gave me such a deep feeling of nostalgia it brought tears to my eyes…

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I was looking at Tom Waits in my iTunes and it says I have 13.9 hours of Tom Waits songs. And I’ve heard them all and there isn’t a one I’d say I didn’t like at least a little and most I love.

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

Dust Science, Home of the Black Dog, Sheffield Warriors of Bass, what more do you need to know?

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We wanted to ship a package to my son in India, where he’s doing a term abroad. Amazon says, “sure no problem, it can be there for his birthday, that will be $50.”

It didn’t arrive, and this was my entry into what seems to an American the surreal world of India. Let me enumerate.

1. Where he’s living, there are no street names, or street numbers. You send your mail to a particular post office in a city, and from there it’s identified just by the family name. So apparently mailmen (and DHL couriers) are good when they know the names of everyone and where they live, and fucking useless otherwise.

2. I called DHL and she said she’d contact the DHL office where the package is supposed to be delivered. She also gave me a local number for DHL. But phone #s in India are 10 digits — usually — and she only gave me an 8 digit number, with no indication of a city code. Given that the number of phones in India won’t fit in 8 digits, I don’t have high hopes that it will be very useful. Not only that I can go to the DHL India’s web site and it gives different numbers.

3. In a web-based sort of insanity, on the DHL page, the image where the phone #s are isn’t actually a normal image — it’s a flash application. And until you right click and zoom in, the text below the phone numbers is illegible.

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

God bless those teutonic DSP elves at NI. Guitar Rig is part of Komplete 6, and it’s tons of fun to screw around with.

I of course, went straight for the extreme noise

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<a href='Chaircrusher-GuitarRigTest.mp3">Chaircrusher-GuitarRigTest.mp3</a></p> <p style="border: 1px solid black; padding: 3px;"><strong>Originally published at <a href="http://music.cornwarning.com/2009/10/18/ni-guitar-rig-test/">Do My Eyes Look Scary?</a>. You can comment here or <a href="http://music.cornwarning.com/2009/10/18/ni-guitar-rig-test/#comments">there</a>.</strong></p>

I don’t know if this sound set, called “Art Of Sounds” is any good — I have too many ways to make sounds to feel like I need to buy someone else’s loops. But the copy that went with this sample set release is amazing in the way it manages to mean absolutely nothing:

‘All „Art of Sounds“ material was produced exclusively for Ueberschall using his [Yvat] unique, inventive means to create a new world of soundscape sculptures. Bionically infused rhythms coupled with soft and harmonic ambiences deliver a homogenous sound setting of seemingly simple yet impressive environments. Only the semantic and syntax of each of the 679 sounds are used to propel elemental formations into evolved structures.’

Now I’ll make allowances for this being a translation of something originally written in German. OTOH, I suspect it’s every bit as ridiculous auf Deutsch.

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.