11.06.12
Once upon a time …
We’ll make some films about people white and crazy.
Not too long ago you could gently laugh at it. Then it came true and now there’s only fury.
11.05.12
Old gear for new jobs
It’s a close to twenty year old SansAmp Classic, an analog micro-circuitry box used to do the guitars on Guns, Booze & Jesus.
It was designed to produce the three basic guitar amplifier tones — Marshall, Mesa Boogie and Fender — and all the variations in distortion, clean timbre and in-betweens one can get from them so that they could be piped directly to a recording console without the need of miking an amplifier.
About a decade after I bought the SansAmp digital guitar amp modeling hit the marketplace. The SansAmp, however, is not a computer.
Years on, I’m convinced the standard listener (and almost everyone else) simply can’t tell the difference in a recording, whether the guitar is laid down from a standing amp, a digital direct injection amp emulator, or the SansAmp. If enough time has elapsed so I don’t remember what I used, even I can’t tell.
Here are some for comparison. Can you tell? Bet not.
Guns, Booze & Jesus — SansAmp, set to sound like a cranked Fender Bassman.
The National Anthem — live miked Fender Super Champ.
Hooray for the Salvation Army Band — Adrenalin III digital emulator set to sound like a fairly clean Marshall.
Rich Man’s Burden — the live miked small Fender.
Act Naturally — SansAmp made to sound like a Vox amp.
The Stench — SansAmp front-ended with Static Egg fuzz.
GE & Jeff — can’t remember and can’t tell from listening to it.
And, appropriately, today and tomorrow, Don’t Vote for Dicks, which was trying for a country-ish sound, done by a made-in-China Line6 PocketPod, a guitar computer that’s a palm-sized kidney bean. Which I hardly use at all but which, on the spur of the moment, sounded right.
Use an app to plug your guitar into your smartphone? Eat shit. I can make something sound better with an old thing put on the market thirty years ago that’s the same size.
Snark aside, the biggest help in getting a guitar track to sound like something on a favorite record is a knowledge of what was used and what the tonal characteristics of the particular guitar/amp combination were. The rest is equalization and your hands. Specific gear made for that makes it easier to accomplish.
Would I use big old vintage amps if I were in a high end old school studio? Well, it sure would be fun.
But you’ll never convince me it would make much difference. In the end, it’s a few millivolts of signal crammed down into one song, a part among others.
Translation imperfect: ‘Hot Words’
From Jiefangjun Bao Online, the English website edition of the Central Military Commission of the People’s Liberation Army of China:
16,400 New Entries Added To Military Encyclopedia of China
The compilation of the second version of the Military Encyclopedia of China is drawing to an end with as many as 16,400 new entries added compared to the first version a decade ago, the reporters learnt from the Academy of Military Sciences (AMS) on November 1, 2012. The large number of hot words reflects the leap forward that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has made in its transformation construction.
“Adding such a lot of new entries in only ten years is rarely seen in dictionary compilation,” said Feng Dinghan, head of the Military Encyclopedia Institute of the AMS. “This demonstrates the great strength and fast pace of the transformation construction of the PLA,” he added.
The newly-added entries such as “Military Information Technology”, “Information Grid Technology”, “Satellite Network Technology”, “Accurate Guidance Technology” and “Cloud Computing” in the fascicule on military technology categories are eye-catching. These intensively-added new entries mark the breakthrough and leap forward achieved in various fields of Chinese military technology in the past decade,” said Sun Xiaowen, editor of the fascicule on military technology categories.
“If the new words in the 16,400 entries reflect the speed of the transformation construction of the PLA, while the hot words we are familiar with can be said to reflect the wide range and depth of the transformation.” Feng Dinghan cited several examples, “The frequent appearance of key words such as “joint”, “integration”, “information”, “network” and “combat power generation mode” in the second version of the Military Encyclopedia of China clearly records the footfalls of the PLA during its striding ahead with the transformation progress.
Clearly recording the footfalls during the striding ahead.
Hat tip to Steve.
Permalink Comments off
Flabbergasting
Good news, lads, good news! Walmart is the best agency to respond to superstorms, calamitous climate brought on by global warming, and earthquakes, too, probably.
Recitation of William L. Shirer needed:
Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a cafe, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was to try to even make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were.
There can be no reasoning with people who cannot accept any truth in the world when it goes against their ideologies.
From today’s WaTimes, Big government intervention not needed for natural disasters:
While it is true that FEMA under President George W. Bush responded to Katrina with, to borrow a term from Mr. Obama, a “suboptimal??? performance, the burden of first response should have been shouldered by Louisiana. The media obsessively scrutinized FEMA’s sclerotic emergency management, neglecting the unheralded heroes of that crisis: Gov. Rick Perry of Texas and Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi …
Similarly, the unsung protagonist of the Hurricane Irene disaster was the private sector: Retailers like Walmart and Home Depot reapportioned their resources, at considerable cost to themselves, to funnel supplies to those who needed them most. Let’s lob a rhetorical question back at the editors of the Times: Does anybody really think the federal government would be more efficient in responding to a natural disaster than a local Walmart?
Walmart? One is rendered speechless.
How do you even pitch that idea to an opinion page unless every one of the editors and all the readers are insane?
“I’m going to argue that Walmart is better for dealing with catastrophic acts of God than government!” Wild applause.
“Emergency budgets,” the writer opines, “predictably expand like a rising yeast.” The “collective vigilance” of the people is needed to stop it.
The enemy, and why the result tomorrow is utterly critical.
Permalink Comments off
11.03.12
Reading the enemy’s fan pages
I try to read the WaTimes opinion page a few times a week. It gives you a comprehensive grasp of the extremists and their audience built on hate speech. It is the DC Republican power structure’s newspaper, where they go first to get their severe philosophies top billing. So if Guns, Booze & Jesus maddens, it is the place for your comfort.
From “Re-election will result in the Socialist States of America:”
President Obama must be defeated on Tuesday. Our republic hangs in the balance. A second term would enable him to achieve his seminal goal: the transformation of America into a European social democracy. The nation of our Founding Fathers will cease to exist. Our constitutional system will be replaced by a corporatist superstate based on arbitrary, centralized power and the fusion of big government, big business and big labor …
We are becoming a nation of economic deadbeats and social parasites. Mr. Obama has forged a new redistributionist order: Tax consumers are devouring the wealth of taxpaying producers. In the process, he is breeding an army — a vast electoral pool — of government dependents. Soon, America will hit the tipping point at which the productive classes are outnumbered — and outvoted — by the nonproductive ones …
While it did not take long it was expected. Former vice president Al Gore put out a statement on his blog on Tuesday and blamed the intensity of Hurricane Sandy on “global warming pollution.”
New York and New England were hit with powerful hurricanes in 1821 and 1938. In 1821, the hurricane was called, The Great September Gale. In 1938, the hurricane, aptly named the Long Island Express, slammed New York and New England with winds of up to 120 MPH. The Berkshire Eagle lists other hurricanes and tropical storms dating back to 1635 that have hit the east coast.
Is Mr. Gore saying that these massive hurricanes were caused by some form of man-made global warming…really? Please.
Occasionally you will see something entirely out of character at the WaTimes. Matt Taibbi, in a blog post, pointed to “FEMA to the rescue: why Obama is right and Romney was wrong” by Catherine Poe.
But it’s not actually in or on the Opinion page. Instead, shuffled off to “Communities.”
However, early in the week the Opinion page did feature Cult of EMP Crazy chieftain, birther and Islam-o-phobe Frank Gaffney explaining that Sandy would be a fortuitous distraction for the Obama administration, the calamity of it deflecting attention from the the real issue, Benghazigate:
The president could nonetheless see a silver lining in this horrific “weather event.??? For one thing, he gets to posture as the leader of the nation in a terrible time of testing, the one to dole out federal emergency assistance and the great consoler around whom we instinctively rally in such circumstances.
Perhaps more importantly for Team Obama, many voters are going to have many other things on their minds for the next few, critical days instead of thinking about the evidence that their commander in chief was seriously derelict regarding the murderous attack in Benghazi, Libya …
11.02.12
Guns, Booze & Jesus
2012 Election Boogie. Rock. Rise up to kill the Commies, science men and fluoride. There was no way to sing such a song without toggling the “mean vocal” effect on the recording console.
Permalink Comments off
Fiore: Emergency Private Sector Alert System
The Romney/Ryan Administration has activated the Emergency Private Sector Alert System.
This is not a test.
This alert applies to the entire Eastern Seaboard and inland Northeast.
Due to necessary and moral cuts to the National Weather Service, we were notified of an impending hurricane after it made landfall at Trump’s casino in Atlantic City.
The storm is producing rain, wind and storm surge that is in no way related to science or global warming. These things happen.
Residents are urged to climb on their rooftops and await state funding.
Better still, await assistance from:
. . . which will be arriving soon.
You can further prepare and ride out the storm by reading Ayn Rand’s Guide to Disaster Assistance and Squirrel Cuisine.
Related:
This post at Driftglass shows three familiar photos from Sandy, slightly dressed up with Photoshopped ads for GOP Ayn Randism. Look closely, particularly for “Rearden Steel.”
Permalink Comments off
11.01.12
Ask the Heevahava
The reporter who solicits the views of the undecided voter in e-mail, or in person at hinterland rallies, never thinks they’re heevahavas. No, his or her undecided voters are always the most thoughtful of citizens.
In this manner, John Dickerson, a box of rocks looking for eyeballs at Slate, does his bit on the cliche, choosing to believe that someone who admires Mitt Romney because he is an “Etch-a-Sketch” is being more of a critical thinker than the rest of us.
This exercise was refreshing and faith restoring. That isn’t a knock against partisans. They care about the country enough to donate their time and energy to the cause. That makes them a necessary treasure to democracy. I spend a lot of time with partisans at rallies listening to their worries and hopes. But in the digital world, partisans are often full of certainties, snap judgments, and insults. The passion overwhelms illumination. These correspondents are undecided—or “still deciding,” as one put it in an effort to lessen the stigma—because they weigh the duty so heavily. More important, they all have a quality that has all but disappeared in this election: They pause long enough to hear the other side’s arguments. Not once in these emails did a voter write about one of the candidates’ supposed gaffes. They are the perfect combination: skeptical and thoughtful. They don’t trust politicians, the press, or pundits, but they treat the ideas of all of those players seriously enough to formulate an opinion of their own. If only the politicians trying to get their vote behaved the same way.
An academic brushes him off:
Political scientists tell us my respondents are not your typical undecided voters. In fact, according to Lynn Vavreck, a political scientist at UCLA, the undecided voters are the exact opposite of those who responded to my request. They are not that involved in politics, they’re not reading up on the issues—or any issue since they tend not to follow the news—they’re not sure that their vote will matter, or they’re sick of the whole business. “When I look at the data, what I see is that the majority of [undecided voters] have a hard time making sense of the political world,??? says Vavreck. “The normal cues—party, ideology—that early voters use are like a foreign language to them.???
Another argument can be made. When you invite e-mails from a name organization your are bound to get replies from people who would like to see their words in print. And, it being e-mail, not off-the-cuff and face to face, you will get a certain amount of faux sincerity, massaged and rewritten to sound good. Which, of course, you will be inclined to pick for a superficial quality of “thoughtfulness.”
The Slate article uses a picture of someone not included in the story, that of Mr. Kelly Cox, a trucker from California, who appeared as the lede undecided voter in an AP story last week.
That’s lame. I guess Dickerson’s e-mail respondents just didn’t send in good head shots.
Permalink Comments off
Roscoe’s last ride (continued)
Roscoe Bartlett, and others, in the trailer of a straight to Internet movie about the end of US civilization.
Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy eminence grise Roscoe Bartlett is approaching an election which the odds-makers say will end his political career.
Incumbent Republican Roscoe Bartlett, who’s held the seat since 1993, faces Democrat John Delaney, a financier from Potomac making his first run for public office. Libertarian Nickolaus Mueller also is on the ballot.
Kurtz gives Delaney the edge.
“Polls have it pretty close. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find any Democrat in the state who thinks Bartlett’s going to win, and probably privately, most Republicans don’t think he’s going to win either.”
Kurtz says it’s telling that “the political arm of the House Republicans hasn’t given Bartlett a dime.” Yet it has given other vulnerable caucus members money.
“I think they see (Bartlett’s campaign) as a lost cause,” Kurtz says.
And from Bartlett’s district newspaper in Frederick, MD:
A recent poll shows that the race between Republican Rep. Roscoe Bartlett and Democratic challenger John Delaney for Maryland’s 6th District congressional seat is a dead heat.
The (Baltimore) Sun commissioned OpinionWorks to conduct the telephone survey of 610 likely voters. The survey took place from Oct. 20 to Oct. 25.
This may come as a surprise to all those who believed the 10-term Buckeystown congressman’s political career was on its last legs.
According to The Sun, however, this new poll may not reflect the voting on Election Day. Delaney, the story says, is coming on strong in the homestretch, while Bartlett “is not performing as well in the district” as GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney.
Frederick, incidentally, is where the center of US bioterror defense, Ft. Detrick (and now the NBACC), is located.
This is where and scientist Bruce Ivins made his anthrax and a homemade country single as Creepy Bruce & the Country Boys.
Since the anthrax mailings besmirched the reputation of Ft. Detrick, many in the Frederick area refused to believe Ivins did the deed. This turned the politically savvy Bartlett into an anthrax-denier, one in a small but vocal cult which lobbied, and still lobbies, for a re-opening of the FBI case.
The many tales of Roscoe Bartlett — from the archives.
Permalink Comments off
10.31.12
The enemy
Nothing has changed, except they’ve become louder and much worse since the primaries.
The enemy in music for the election countdown.
Global warming and evolution as hoaxes, hound gays, hoard a big pile of gold, put people to death — as many as you can and as quickly as possible, scary Ted Nugent. I got to the screw with the reproductive rights of women bits later.
It’s a lot to stick in one tune.
And I’ll have one later this week, another in the string of ZZ Top-styled satires of the state of that part of the country that dearly wants to redo the Civil War.
Permalink Comments off
« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »