Using Bees To Effect Vengeance

I get to be as self-indulgent as I want without wasting anyone's time. Guilt-free solipsism -- excellent!

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Thursday, February 28, 2002
 
Make a Blogsticker. Excellent. This could be a lot of fun.

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Wednesday, February 27, 2002
 
The Chicago Tribune has quite a nice story about how the major labels are in deep trouble and how musicians are now storming the barricades. Worth a read. The parts that get me particularly excited are near the end:

""I make a lot more money per record," says Joe Pernice, whose recent self-released Pernice Brothers album outsold six previous releases he had recorded for an established independent label, Sub Pop. "I stand to have financially the best year I've ever had in music. And I own my album! That's an unbelievably good feeling. You get cast away [by labels] if you're not what's happening at the moment. I know that I can have a certain size audience doing the kind of work that I'm happy doing, and don't even think about major label sales levels. I'm in a different league, I'm under the radar. But there's this land under the radar, you know?"


and

"We've come to the point of no return for the major labels," says Just Plain Folks' Whitney. "There will always be a mainstream business that tries to sell lots of albums, but there is so much potential for artists who can figure out how to sell 50,000 to 100,000 albums, instead of 500,000 to a million. There will be a lot more artists, promoted with less money in a far different way than they are now, which is primarily through commercial radio and MTV. They can't squeeze out any more sales going in the present direction. It has to go the opposite way."


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I love New York. (Is this a regular feature in the Times? If so, I'll be a regular reader.)

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A new creature drawn every day [via B3ta, which incidentally is very good today. The picture of Lee Majors' stunt cat is my new wallpaper.]

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Sunday, February 24, 2002
 
A leader of the U.S. Christian right, Pat Robertson, reiterated on Sunday that Islam preached violence and said that Osama bin Laden was a true follower of Islam's founder, the Prophet Mohammed.

Colin Powell: "Mr. President, can you get your friends to shut the hell up, please? I'm trying to cobble together a viable geopolitical strategy here, and your foamy-mouthed Crusader pals keep talking complete crap and making my job 50 times harder. OK, they're organized and they have money, so we have to kiss some ass on domestic policy, but George, I'm not kidding, they need to shut the hell up with that 'Muslims are evil and violent' stuff. And Ashcroft -- you're a Christian recording artiste, so maybe you should get a slot on the 700 Club and then apply the smackdown, because the Justice Department sure doesn't need innocent people being attacked in the street because of their religious beliefs. Rein your boys in."

And what a remarkably restrained and insightful response from the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. How does he stay so calm? I'm get pretty het up every time I think about that smug bastard.

"Calmer 'n you are."


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Wednesday, February 20, 2002
 
"A website displaying a picture of a British woman's stark-naked boyfriend, built in a bid to gently blackmail him into proposing to her, has had to be taken down after attracting huge numbers of hits from internet users around the world."

Hmmm.

Cobblers on display
Gently suggesting that he
Get down on one knee

Civil servant nude
Government brought to standstill
Queen Mother logs on

Mid-recession thought
Pent-up consumer demand
Brit men in the buff







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Early this morning, WBGO -- in an effort to gently coax me out of the Sleep Chamber -- threw on some nicely bracing Thelonious Monk and followed that triumph of crespuscular programming with...George Benson. As Guru says, "That's not keepin' it real. That's keepin' it...wrong."

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Tuesday, February 19, 2002
 
Nader: 2000 run was a building block

Hey it's time for a Using Bees flashback moment. I was disappointed to read this:

Q. What was your biggest campaign mistake?

A. Using too many electronics and not enough foot power. In other words, I wouldn't have spent as much time working through the Internet. I think the Internet failed to get out the vote by all parties. What I would have done was have far more people in the neighborhoods responsible for getting a dozen votes here, two dozen votes there. I should have been much more hands on, and person to person. But that's much more difficult to do. It's a lot easier to get on TV, have a few ads and get on the Internet.


Ralph -- you've got it wrong. Without the Internet, I never would have voted for you -- simple as that. A dozen votes here or there does not scale, as we say in the corporate world...and besides, I don't remember a significant Internet-based get out the vote campaign except to members of your email list. Perhaps if you'd deployed your penultimate weeks more carefully -- fighting for more votes in comparatively liberal areas rather than scrapping for votes in areas you should have been writing off -- you would have seen a better result...especially if the goal was to build a base rather than be a spoiler. Anyway...

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Nick Drake fans -- go and download Tanworth In Arden II, which comprises Nick's demos for songs like Poor Boy, Time Has Told Me (beeeyyoootiful guitar playing), some works in progress, etc. It's so great to hear "new" Nick material....

[You have to refer to him as Nick, don't you? His music is too intimate for him to be called by his last name.]

If you don't have the original Tanworth-in-Arden boot (mainly folk and blues covers recorded before Five Leaves Left), you can download it from there as well.

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Monday, February 18, 2002
 
Congrats to Ariel on his engagement...very cool. All my rowdy friends have settled down....

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OK, after 10 years of intermittent attempts, I just got Joni Mitchell, after listening to an MP3 of "River" from her album Blue. Phew, finally. Hope it wasn't just a one-off.

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Friday, February 15, 2002
 
Which Trainspotting Character Are You?

I'm Tommy..a good mate to my friends, yeah...but it neglects to mention that I also get hooked on skag, contract HIV, and suffer a horrible death from kitty-feces induced myxamtosis or some shit. I'd rather be Begbie, thanks. "No wee wood ah poison mah boadie wi that shite." [via Breath Of God]

Irvine Welsh's latest got scant attention, but it ranks right up there with Trainspotting in my estimation -- hilarious and affecting.

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Thursday, February 14, 2002
 
What happens when you graft "The Wheels On The Bus Go Round And Round" onto Madonna's "Ray Of Light" and then make a flash video for the unholy result? Genius, that's what.

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Wednesday, February 13, 2002
 
Predict the Oscar winners and win a couple of good books. Go Sonnet, go! Make us proud....

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The new single from Pulp -- "Bad Cover Version" -- features a hilarious video parodying the We Are The World/Do They Know Its Christmas-style charity singles. The (looka)likes of Kurt Cobain, Bono, Elvis Costello, Missy Elliott, Phil Collins (naturally), and Macca all take turns singing lines from the song -- sometimes there are remarkable vocal similarities -- and it's all really good fun. That's our Jarvis playing Brian May at the end, and it looks like it might be him doing Costello too (that's definitely him doing Costello's vocal). You can watch the video online here [requires RealPlayer].

Speaking of Elvis Costello, remember the MP3 I put up of Susannah Hoffs doing a song from Costello's new album? Well, now you can hear Elvis's version, because Island are streaming it from their makeshift Elvis Costello website. Elvis can do no wrong as far as I'm concerned, but it's always great to hear him come back to dirty-ass rock and roll.

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Friday, February 08, 2002
 
If you're need of an introduction to Britpop, you could do worse than to hit dooce's MP3s for the week. She's got a really nice cross-section of key tracks from that much-maligned genre.

To The End, Disco 2000, Stutter, Alright (the Cast song, not the Supergrass! extra brownie points for that, although I love the 'Grass), Beautiful Ones (best bridge ever?)...and the keystone, Oasis's Supersonic. Yes yes yes yes and yes. Download all of them, NOW ...

Well, you don't have to download the Bis song, but as far as the rest, I'm afraid I must insist.

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Thursday, February 07, 2002
 
Treasury's O'Neill, Senator Byrd Trade Barbs

"A routine Senate hearing took a strange twist on Thursday when an infuriated Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill traded barbs with Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd, the longest-serving member of U.S. Congress, over who grew up poorer."

After reading this, I can't help but think of Monty Python's brilliant 4 Yorkshiremen sketch.

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Wednesday, February 06, 2002
 
"Do you have stacks of mouldering back copies of the NME and Q Magazine going back to 1984 in a cupboard at home just in case, one day, "you'll need them for something"? Good. Come hither and
have your Rock Bore level well and truly rated. WARNING: this quiz is hard."

Heh. I scored a 27/35.

"You're bordering on the obsessional. Your record collection covers everything from early blues to the latest from Fatboy Slim and you could name the producer on every Bowie album. It is quite likely that you own more than one Yes album."

They got the last bit wrong, but otherwise.... One caveat: some of the quiz is UK-centric.

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Tuesday, February 05, 2002
 
I'm an OperaMan, personally. But for all y'all IE users, check out Nutshell

"The Nutshell Toolbar is a Windows Internet Explorer (5.5 and above) toolbar that makes it easier to access the search engines of Google, Amazon, Dictionary.com, the Internet Movie Database, and Daypop. Instead of having to navigate to the site and type your query into their search engine, you can do it quickly from any IE browser."

Pretty cool (although searching Google and Amazon is standard in the latest version of Opera)....

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The Trouble With Self-Esteem

Haven't had a chance to read it yet (swamped with work this week), but it looks fascinating.... [via metafilter]

"Last year alone there were three withering studies of self-esteem released in the United States, all of which had the same central message: people with high self-esteem pose a greater threat to those around them than people with low self-esteem and feeling bad about yourself is not the cause of our country's biggest, most expensive social problems."

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Monday, February 04, 2002
 
The Case of the Found CDs.

Great insight into how musical taste informs indentity...or rather, the judgments that can be made about you from your CD collection.

Here are 10 of the artists/titles of the 14 CDs in the case discovered by Kathy Summers. (The rest shall remain unnamed, on the chance that the rightful owner might read this and have a way to further prove they are his):

1. Lou Reed, "Transformer"
2. Elvis Costello, "Get Happy"
3. The Beatles, "Revolver"
4. The New York Dolls (eponymous)
5. Mercury Rev, "See You on the Other Side"
6. Talking Heads, "Speaking in Tongues"
7. Guided by Voices, "Isolation Drills"
8. The Clash, "London Calling"
9. Bob Marley and the Wailers, "The Bob Marley Collection"
10. Pete Yorn, "Music for the Morning After"

Kathy thinks the CDs belong to a man.

Kathy thinks the CDs belong to a white man.

What's more, Kathy thinks -- and I will break off from whatever objective goal I may still cling to at this point and heartily agree -- the CDs belong to a man in his mid- to late-thirties who might live around the neighborhood.



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Group Backs Gays Who Seek to Adopt a Partner's Child "The American Academy of Pediatrics, which offers guidance to parents on child-rearing issues from spanking to nutrition, is announcing its support today for the right of gay men and lesbians to adopt their partners' children.

The organization issued its statement after a committee reviewed two decades of studies. Most, it said, found that the children of gay or lesbian parents were as well adjusted socially and psychologically as the children of heterosexual parents."

Of course they are. Anyway, pretty cool.

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Re: the Bush Administration's plan to tie department funding to managerial efficiency -- what he said.

I would only add that this is a clear case of why "let's apply some fundamental business principles to government" does not always work -- these are not independent business units that can simply be shuttered if they underperform. Principles of capitalism do not always map well to government. In fact, let's make the larger point: Capitalism is not The Solution to every problem. Nor are Socialism, Objectivism or Social Darwinism. I am innately suspicious of totalizing ideologies -- the messiness of life belies any attempt to posit a Grand Unified Theory of human behavior.

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