Wrigley Gem

So, I'm watching the bottom of the 3rd inning of Cubs-Astros game today on WGN and the Cubs color guy Steve Stone was going on (and on) about pitcher Roy Oswalt, who just came off the D/L today. And that the Astros would be lucky/glad to get 6 innings out of him and then turn it over to their bullpen which has a very good ERA. Then, lead announcer Chip Caray says " so, what your saying is, that Oswalt will not act alone."

I don't think Stone got it...

Well, duh...

Avi Greengart, "Wireless and Consumer Technologies" analyst from JupiterResearch, blogs on this story about the introduction of a new 1-megapixel mobile phone camera in Japan, and breaks down the differences between the US and Japanese markets, including this gem...

Japanese consumers have enthusiastically embraced sending each other Hello Kitty animation, making any comparison to expected U.S. consumer behavior completely speculative.

Cuiver Reserve Château Bottled Nuit St. Wogga Wogga

Spent yesterday at another Wine tasting -- this time for Southcorp's line of Australian wines (Penfolds, Wynn, Lindemans, Rosemount Estate). The highlight was of course, the opportunity to try the '97 and '98 Grange (I like the '97 -- but that's me, the '98 has been fetching $300+ in auctions already). The trend seems to be that the industry is trying to fill the gap in their product line between the introductory wines that are fruit forward and inexpensive (read: Lindemans, Jacob's Creek, Yellowtail, Black Swan) and the high end stuff (Grange, Rosemount, etc) that would fall into the $15+ range.

My favorite of the day (besides the '97 Grange) was the Rosemount Estate Orange Shiraz -- great nose, and real sense of terrior (rather than the attempted predictability of the blends from year to year), and long finish. My opinion of it held up even at the very end of the tasting when I went back and tried it again. very unique -- and that's a plus in my book. Also modestly priced...

Other favorites included the St. Henri (Shiraz) and Penfold Bin series of wines -- 389 (Cab/Shiraz), 407(Cab), and 707(Cab, with a massive back end you could eat off of) and a little tidbit that we picked up from one of the reps -- the fruit that used to make the Bin 389 are the grapes that don't quite make into the Grange -- in other words, really really good fruit on it own. Apparently it will cellar alongside it's big brother very nicely, at a fraction of the cost.

"Cuz I'm An Adult Now...

Yesterday was spent going to the store and buying "work" clothes.

Those of you who know me personally can now pick yourself up off the ground and wipe the spittle from your mouth.

Having been a "work at home" kinda guy for the last, -- oh, who am I kidding. all of my life -- I haven't had the need to actually own a pair of pants (or shirts) that would be considered "casual work" The truth is I've worn either (black) sweatpants or shorts every day of my adult life. And I have no complaints -- they're comfortable, I don't spend time wondering what I'm going to wear, and I keep my clothing overhead down.

So what changed?

Tomorrow I'll be attending a Wine trade show with my friend Bob where there will be 50+ Napa winemakers and reps. We'd like them to come to Bob's store and do a wine tasting (with food, which is where I come in) sometime in the near future. Black sweatpants and Einsturzende Neubauten T-Shirts aren't going to cut it.

So off we went looking for pants. Surprisingly we found them quickly, and --bonus-- they're black. Now do we hedge our bets and buy a second pair that's a litlle bigger, just in case (it's been so long that I'm guessing on the waist -- no, I'm not trying them on in the store, thank you). We decide to go to store number two, where there's a similar pair, a little bigger and on sale. Next up: dress shirt. Rapidly dispatched with two short sleeve shirts: dark blue and black. Then we wander by the shoes -- what the hell, the one pair of dress shoes I own (suitable for weddings and funerals) are 15 years old. Sure enough, there's an all man-made pair that (while clunky looking) will fit. I decide at this point that we best leave before the negative ions in the air of the large store start making me want to buy the hawaiian shirts in the next section....

Industrial Strength Soap Opera

While flipping through the channels waiting for the Weather Channel to show the radar (btw, shouldn't there be a "radar only" channel?), I stumble across "One Life To Live" on ABC. And what's that song in the background -- Nine Inch Nails "Hurt"?!?!

wtf?

Then, as the scene changed to a bar, the song changed to -- Johnny Cash's version of "Hurt"

The mind boggles.

A Wine Tasting...

Saturday night was spent catering a wine tasting for my friend Bob Morson at Riverside Wine and Imports. The wine maker Marshall Stuart from Stuart Cellars in Temcula, CA was in town to premiere his line of wines.

Bob has a house that he owns right next to his store and we use that for sit-down tastings, where we pair food with the wine. This is the second event we've done, and as last time, I learned a great deal of information on getting food to the table in time ;)

There's quite a few parallels between the gig Wednesday and the tasting Saturday... moving equipment around, the prep time (rehearsing, mise-en-place), getting finished late and having to load the equipment back in the car, the aching back ;)

But I had a great time, and the folks who attended were very complimentary afterwards, and all the plates came back clean -- that's the true measure of a successful tasting...

Last Night's Gig

It was a great deal of fun to be up on stage again, but man, I do not miss humping gear out of the club at 1am after jumping around on stage. ;)

The highlight of my set was Chris Foldi joining me for a song which he had written lyrics for a while ago...

Thanks to Jassen, there should be some pictures soon, I'll update as soon as I can get them...

Update: The pictures are in!

Bebop in Cleveland...finally

Bebop, w/ Escaflowne, WXIII: Patlabor The Movie 3 and Spirited Away...

Geek Alert

via the Benders list on Yahoo -- If you have a SK-1 that you're missing the manual to -- try this link

http://www.jwdavies.com/sk1.htm

it's in a .pdf and is about 5.8mb

Fabulous show last night at The Symposium -- All three acts were spot on... Steven K. Smith did his "tribal ambient" set while keeping the beat on his mini-octopad -- Scare Tactic segued nicely between a human beatbox intro and their cover of Big Black's "Kerosene" while Furnace St. proved yet again why they're one of the most succesful acts in NEO right now. Tuneful, powerful and the addition of the live bass really drives the tunes...

Next week, SOB, Subliminal Self and some guy named tofu...

Some of the promo CD's I made for "A Month Full Of Wednesdays" series of shows have started showing up on playlists -- noteably on IPM and Audiotech, two Michigan internet stations that play electronic music -- I mentioned that Subliminal Self (Patrick's new band) had been played on IPM two weeks in a row, and this week, they played In A Cat's Eye (Greyson, who sang on the "Able Bodied" track) and the tofu track "000109"

Mix Tapes, er CD's...

I wrote a piece on Tres Producers last year describing my long-term love of making mix tapes -- or "driving tapes" as we used to call them when they were for the long trips to gigs that Indian Rope Burn used to make...

Now, I make mix CD's for my wife and her daily commute, and while we cook dinner together. Today's mix is called "Girls Gone Wild" and features women who swear and talk about sex (not in that order).

01. Pretenders - Precious
02. Divinyls - All The Boys In Town
03. The Runaways - Cherry Bomb
04. The Donnas - 40 Boys In 40 Nights
05. PJ Harvey - Sheela-na-gig
07. Romeo Void - Never Say Never
06. Liz Phair - Fuck And Run
08. Patti Smith - Dancing Barefoot
09. Continental Drifters - Who We Are, Where We Live
10. Let's Active - Blue Line
11. Romeo Void - A Girl In Trouble Is A Temporary Thing
12. Lita Ford - Kiss Me Deadly

from the "It's a dessert topping! no, it's a floorwax!" school of mp3 discussion on Slashdot:

"You might remember George Ziemann as the musician who found his own music banned from eBay because it was recorded on CD-R. Now he's back with a new rant about the RIAA's statistics, which blame piracy for the dire condition of the music industry... (As an interesting side note, Ziemann says that songs are really just ads for CDs, and thus should be freely traded.)"

If you read down a little bit (filter at level 2), you can see just how easy the line starts to blur between artists copyright protection, their ability to make money form CD sales, the RIAA's incresingly shrill "piracy" legal posturing and the labels inability to see the forest for the trees. Don't get me started on the sins of major labels ;)

BTW, is it me or is the RIAA just unable to react in a way that doesn't make them look like idiots?

Update: this link via Boing Boing from The Daily Princetonian by Fred von Lohmann -- a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Suing college students. Forcing ISPs to rat out customers. Petitioning Congress for unprecedented vigilante powers. Deploying armies of lawyers to sue technology companies. Threatening universities and corporations. Demanding that ISPs disconnect tens of thousands of Internet users. Hiring electronic enforcers to monitor computer users.

None of these efforts by the recording industry has put a single nickel into the pockets of a musician. And none of these efforts has slowed the spread of peer-to-peer ("P2P") file sharing. More Americans have used file-sharing software than voted for the President.

there's more to read...

from the "you knew this was coming" dep't:

http://www.welovetheiraqiinformationminister.com/

see if the site is no longer crushed by traffic...

from Graham on the microsound list

"You've seen the guerilla re-edit of the most recent Lucas?"… "They seem particularly to pick on him. One day we'll need archaeologists to help us guess the original storylines of even classic films."… "Musicians, today, if they're clever, put new compositions out on the web, like pies set to cool on a window ledge, and wait for other people to anonymously rework them. Ten will be all wrong, but the eleventh may be genius. And free. It's as though the creative process is no longer contained within an individual skull, if indeed it ever was. Everything, today, is to some extent the reflection of something else."

pattern recognition, p. 68.

of particular relevance to the virtual electronic music community, i would suspect... not bad stuff coming from a guy who has a soft spot for bruce springteen:)

and if your interested there some follow-up stuff on Gibson's blog that, if you've read "pattern recognition" will be interesting

from Mark over at AHOT

A few months ago Google quietly opened up an interface to a white-pages
lookup service.

If you pound your phone number into Google (separators are optional), then
if the white pages listing is current (and your number is listed) then it will pop up your address along with a link to Yahoo/MapQuest maps and directions.

If this bothers you, you can have the listing blocked.

- Click on the Phone icon to the left of your name
- There's a link on the resulting page to: http://www.google.com/help/pbremoval.html
- Fill out the form on that page

Remember also that Google isn't the only service like this. They suggest that you hit up the others as well, and give you this link:

http://www.google.com/search?&q=reverse%2Bphone%2Bbook%2Blookup&btnG=Google%2BSe

Update:

you know the meme has surfaced when it hits the NYT

Beer and Clothing has my favorite quote of the day:

"Living in Cleveland is like shopping at TJ Maxx. There's really cool stuff here but it happens sporatically and you have to dig to find it."

I just finished a piece that I've been working on -- it's part of the Sound Injury (now Sound Recovery) list.

It's called "Disembodied Two" and you can d/l it here

"Disembodied" can be found here:

Oolong Tea rocks. That's all I need to say.

Oh, and the new issue of Saveur came today -- looks like we'll be having Burmese food this weekend..

Those of you Cleveland (and regional) artists dealing with copyright issues (fair use, sampling, etc) may want to check this conference out. And as a bonus Mark Gunderson from the Evolution Control Committee will be on a panel.

Saturday April 12, 2003 from 9:30am-4pm at the Cleveland Museum of Art.