TMNT

Whoa!

Where did this come from?

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Are you smarter than a fifth-grader?

1) Terrible, awful theme song. This just feels like spinning plates...of ugly screaming children...in the middle of a Turd Circus...in Minnesota...in a blizzard.

2) So far, the answer to the question is universally "no".

(what's a Turd Circus?)

In Soviet Russia, baby Jesus makes YOU cry.

Check out K-os. He's a Canadian by way of Trinidad, and his music is pretty sweet. (Bonus cover of "The Bed's Too Big Without You", one of the finer songs in the Police repertoire.)

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meh.

Why does Mr Flowers sound so warbly these days? I can't tell if he's trying to do some kind of weird vibrato, or if he just has no idea how to sing a plain line. Lots of singers these days have no idea how to sing a line without any stupid warbly crap on it. Listen to Achtung Baby, for crying out loud.

The Killers - Romeo and Juliet

MARILYN: "How do we know he won't betray us?"

JACK: (glancing over shoulder) "He wants to live."

(I kept wondering who the evil aide was, thinking he looked just like a young Rob Lowe. Well...he is.)

On becoming an mp3 blog.

...why not?

A special present to all of you beautiful people on this national day of crap.

Yours Truly,
Me

Did anyone see this? It looks...interesting.

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I've said it before and I'll say it again: this is the scariest animal ever.

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So Steve Jobs seems to think that DRM is dying, and while I would much prefer that people and businesses would overcome their outdated morals regarding free content on the Internet, this is a huge step forward. There's speculation about whether Jobs's intentions are pure, but who cares? His points are valid, and the end result he describes is beneficial to literally everyone. (Except for hackers working to decrypt current DRM - they'd be out of luck.)

In this case, if the pressure from the European community can be directed where it belongs - on the record labels and their draconian insistence upon DRM - then it could be the dawn of a new and glorious era, an era that the original MP3.com, AudioGalaxy, and Napster 1.0 promised us. Not an era of rampant piracy, but of profitable file-sharing.

TV networks are light years ahead of the game. You can already watch most of Fox's shows on demand with minimal commercial interruption. It's amazing how this is in place in addition to selling the shows on iTunes - and as a consumer I've taken advantage of both. It's freaking cool. The potential for the rest of the entertainment industry to follow this example is worth looking forward to.

READ THIS NOW

It's a very good sign of things to come.

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Thanks to the podcasts at indiefeed.com, I really like KRS-ONE. I also like Edgar Allen Floe. Have I said this already?

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This is going to be a great big fight of an election.

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why kingdom of loathing is awesome.

You come upon two curly-haired guys sitting beside the road to the White Citadel, flipping a piece of meat in the air and betting on which way up it will land. They introduce themselves as Rosenthal and Goldstern (though you didn't catch which was which), and explain that they were on their way to Hot Dog Heaven when they got distracted by the laws of probability, which have somehow caused this piece of meat to land on the same side seventy-eight times in a row. ("Seventy-nine," says Goldstern, or possibly Rosenthal.) Obviously it must be indicative of something besides the redistribution of wealth.

You spend a few minutes discussing philosophy and Katie Holmes with them, nearly discovering several principles of physics and engineering, and then continue on your way.

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So, for a long time I've known about the standard pentatonic scale that just about everybody uses on guitar. For all you kids out there that may not know what I'm talking about, here it is:

1   4
1   4
1  3
1  3
1  3
1   4

That's a guitar fretboard with the fingerings for this particular scale.

The problem I've always had is how to go beyond this scale the way the really great players do. I've put about as many different ideas into it as I can. But there was a breakthrough today when I realized what the lower extension of this scale is:

 2  4(1   4)
 2  4(1   4)
1   4(1  3)
1   4(1  3)
 2  4(1  3)
 2  4(1   4)

In this case, the 4 and 1 in the middle are the same note. It makes so much delicious symmetrical sense. So I wailed on it for a while today using G (3rd fret) as the base, which means a lot of the lower notes are open strings. This might seem like stupid introductory stuff to some, but it was a major epiphany for me. I can't believe I went this long without knowing the stupid lower extension. And now the upper extension makes more sense. So that's my post for Super Bowl Sunday, which I just realized is playing out like some kind of professional SEC championship.