I was listening to the latest Bob Dylan live release, and, like many live albums, the between-song patter is placed at the end of the track - when you listen to it shuffled, he'll say a few words to introduce a song, but it's not the one that comes up next. Very strange...
This is also true of any art-rock album with intersong sound-effects and transitions.
Very true - I was shocked when I got the SACD version of Peter Gabriel's So - I had listened to that album since 1986, and "In Your Eyes" was song #5, and the album closed with the Laurie Anderson collaboration, "This Is the Picture (Excellent Birds)".
Now, I find out that was originally put like that because of vinyl limitations, and he's now moved "In Your Eyes" to the end. After 16.5 years of one track order, I can't quite get into the album as much with the new track order - it doesn't feel right to me. I'd have better enjoyment putting it on shuffle!
I usually use a Smart Playlist that takes all the 4 and 5 star songs I haven't heard recently, and plays them in shuffled order. That makes it like a radio station that only plays my favorite songs, with no repeats (albeit one that only plays songs I've actually heard before).
Sometimes there's no substitute for listening to an actual album in order, but shuffle is a nice way to introduce some serious variety - there's nothing like hearing Coltrane followed by Queens of the Stone Age...
At this point? Nothing. Principal photography is done, so all the hokey dialogue and wooden performances are firmly locked in place.
What he could have done was write his script, then give it to a talented (read: not Akiva Goldsman or Joe Esterhaz) writer for a complete re-write, then hand the new script over to a real director - you know, someone who understands that it is the director's job to get good performances out of his cast members (just because a take has no flubs, it doesn't mean it feels emotionally genuine). That director would turn the footage over to Lucas who would then give it to his ex-wife, Marcia, to edit into a final film while he merely "advised".
I suppose it's remotely possible that he really has learned his lesson and is making this one into what everyone hoped, but I don't know if it even matters.
I thought "Planet Bob" was pretty typical Ben Edlund humor myself, but other than last week's Angel episode, Joss's writing is generally much better than average
Not so much rogue entities, but cities that are also counties apparently can decide to follow the actual Constitution of the State of California, rather than an unconstitutional act that takes away rights of California citizens based on sexual orientation.
... and good for SF! It's about time that somebody stands up to the people who want to establish Christianity as the Official Religion of the United States of America.
Hey, if an F chord is that hard for you, why don't you use drop-D tuning?
Just [333xxx], a simple, one finger barre, and you've got your F (mind, that totally screws up your E and G open chord forms, but you could work around that, and D will sound fuller since you can use the open 5th and 6th string...)
How many of you music buyers out there look at that latest CD from your favorite artist and say, "Hey, this is from my Vivendi, my favorite music studio! Cool!" Not many I'd wager. How many of you have ever made a purchasing decision based upon the name of the music company that released it? Does the fact that you got a cool disc from BMG make you look more closely at BMG releases in the future? How many of you are loyal to a specific company? Artists regularly switch from one label to another.
OK, that's a fair point now, but it wasn't always that way. Back in the before-time, in the long, long ago, when there were a bunch of different record companies; there were brand loyalties to a record label, often because some of them were dominated by a certain visionary A&R guy, but the end result was that you could pick up a bunch of different albums from, say 1978 Asylum Records, and be able to hear a similar kind of sound or type of music - if you liked The Eagles (on Asylum), you might also like another Asylum recording artist like Jackson Browne, for instance. The same was true of many boutique jazz labels, even during the 50's, and of 1980's ECM or Windham Hill.
Even today, there are still record labels that keep that spirit alive, even if they are distributed by one of the giants. Blue Note and Artemis are two of the more notable examples - if you really like one artist on the label, there's a good chance you'd like others on that label, too.
That's not terribly new for software, either. In the gaming world, Activision was one of the first software companies to have a fan base, and early EA titles were also at that level of extremely high quality - when a new EA title was released, you didn't have to know anything about it to know it was going to be a great game.
Putting aside for the moment the fallacy that this thread is based on (Apple doesn't have a patent on the scroll wheel/jog dial, neither the moving parts kind or the solid-state), many Sony products, including their early CDMA telephones, used a scroll wheel/jog dial to navigate through menus, in a fashion very similar to the iPod, circa 1998.
I love my iPod, and the interface is great, but that part of it is definitely not innovative.
I read it in High School (back when it was a stand-alone book), and I understood the Ford Prefect joke, even if I knew I'd have appreciated it more had his last name been "Pinto" or something. I had to look up "Zebra Crossing", but those do exist in the States, even if they don't have the same name (and yes, I get the pun), and I would argue that petty bureacrats are the same everywhere.
Trillian (Sandra Dickinson) was sexy, but she wasn't a bimbo, squeaky voice to the contrary. Even on the BBC TV version, she was still the most competent being on the Heart of Gold.
It's just common sense - Ringo trashed his liver in the 70's, and probably did more blow than the late Andy Gibb, but Paul kept his blood pressure low with the sweet green stuff.
As long as he doesn't have a heart attack trying to keep his one-legged wife constantly preggers, he should be fine for some time.
I have done that - voting Republican - so I can have some say during the Primary cycle about who will represent me in an overwhelmingly Republican district, but it hasn't worked for me.
If I vote for the candidate I find least objectionable, he loses, and the psycho gets the office. If I vote for the psycho, figuring, "Surely everyone can see this man is not fit for holding the office of dogcatcher, let alone Governor," he wins anyway. It's very demoralizing, I have to say.
Did you even read the article? It clearly mentions an incident where Democrats gerrymandered in this way in California, and it clearly discussed the issue of Democratic party racism in the 60's.
The issue isn't that the Dems are right and the Reps are wrong, it's that this is a tool being used by the dominant parties to unfairly shut out the minority party voters, who may end up being a larger voting bloc than those represented by the party in power.
That's why I think districts should be created by a non-partisan commision, and not by either party. They're both too power-mad to be trusted. Power to the people!
This is to say nothing about the fact that the pledge is declaration of devotion to a piece of cloth (idolitory?), and a nation without any reference to the principles upon which this great nation was founded.
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands. One nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
I think that includes at least one of those principles, but I also think that principle is why the "under God" addition needs to go.
Forcing non-Christian schoolchildren to be reminded every morning that their religious beliefs are unimportant to the pseudo-Christian Pharisees in power, and always will be, doesn't exactly show a commitment to equality of liberty and justice.
Well, yeah, they're supposed to, but it doesn't work that way anymore. It's the "Gold Rule" - those with the gold make the rules.
Don't believe me? Ask Alice Randall, author of The Wind Done Gone, a work which was not at all likely to be confused with Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, but was a legitimate parody. Unfortunately, part of the parody was deconstructing the romanticized view of the antebellum South that was such an intrinsic part of the older work, and showing the blatant racism behind it, infuriating the Mitchell family that still holds the copyrights, so they sued.
The courts, as is usual when big money is involved, threw out the right of Fair Use, and sided with the Mitchell trusts.
Moral of the story? In today's "justice" system, you're not likely to lose money betting that corporate interests will trump fair use rights.
It isn't just old Linux systems that have problems with Java - in fact, Java applets are one of two issues that cause Mozilla to crash. The other is viewing too many images in tabs - even if you close tabs after you've viewed the pics, and try not to keep more than a half-dozen open at once, eventually it will die, and the Netscape Quality Agent pops up...
Re:If I had to buy a PDA right now...
on
Palm to Buy Handspring
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
A bigger screen is a mixed blessing - on the one hand you can view more information, or run at a larger font size without only being able to read a dozen words on the screen, but on the other hand, it could make the PDA too bulky to fit in a pocket.
I find my Clie's screen (320x320) to be pretty close to a perfect compromise, but I admit I'm used to very small text sizes.
Well, "Pastime Paradise" (from Songs in the Key of Life) is the Stevie Wonder song Coolio sampled* to make "Gangsta's Paradise", but yes, the irony is obvious.
* By "sampled", I mean "took the song and changed some words", but I will admit Coolio's alterations are not without their own artistic merit.
The dub also stuck dialog in where none was needed. It seemed as though any time a character was facing away from the camera, that became license to give them a line, even if there wasn't a good reason to do so.
My biggest cringe moment came during a scene where Kiki is approaching the city for the first time - on the dub, she's making all these stupid "whee! whee!" sounds, but in the original soundtrack, she's mostly silent, just taking it all in.
Princess Mononoke's dub track was a much better effort, thanks to Neil Gaiman.
Re:DVD-A and SACD aren't much better anyway
on
The Future of the CD
·
· Score: 1
Two points.
One: The major advantage of the new hi-rez formats that will entice even non-audiophiles is not the additional resolution of the two formats, but rather the surround capability. Listen to a well-mastered DVD-Audio disc, and you'll see the surround functions add more to the enjoyment of the music than the higher resolution does.
Two: the higher resolution does, nevertheless, make a difference. The bandwidth of CDs is good, but it is not perfect.
Recent trends in mastering techniques cause newer CDs to be overly compressed, with many transients clipped. The extended dynamic range of the new formats allows them to be as loud as the compressed CDs without the fatiguing levels of compression.
Also, although the theoretical limit of human hearing is 20kHz, a sufficiently high pitched sound that is not a sine wave will have many harmonics that are above the 20 (or 22.05) kHx limit - these do color the sound, and their unnatural filtering contributes to the often-commented harshness of digital.
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That's a good point --
I was listening to the latest Bob Dylan live release, and, like many live albums, the between-song patter is placed at the end of the track - when you listen to it shuffled, he'll say a few words to introduce a song, but it's not the one that comes up next. Very strange...
This is also true of any art-rock album with intersong sound-effects and transitions.
I agree - more options over Shuffle would be terrific - maybe with the next f/w?
Very true - I was shocked when I got the SACD version of Peter Gabriel's So - I had listened to that album since 1986, and "In Your Eyes" was song #5, and the album closed with the Laurie Anderson collaboration, "This Is the Picture (Excellent Birds)".
Now, I find out that was originally put like that because of vinyl limitations, and he's now moved "In Your Eyes" to the end. After 16.5 years of one track order, I can't quite get into the album as much with the new track order - it doesn't feel right to me. I'd have better enjoyment putting it on shuffle!
I usually use a Smart Playlist that takes all the 4 and 5 star songs I haven't heard recently, and plays them in shuffled order. That makes it like a radio station that only plays my favorite songs, with no repeats (albeit one that only plays songs I've actually heard before).
Sometimes there's no substitute for listening to an actual album in order, but shuffle is a nice way to introduce some serious variety - there's nothing like hearing Coltrane followed by Queens of the Stone Age...
At this point? Nothing. Principal photography is done, so all the hokey dialogue and wooden performances are firmly locked in place.
What he could have done was write his script, then give it to a talented (read: not Akiva Goldsman or Joe Esterhaz) writer for a complete re-write, then hand the new script over to a real director - you know, someone who understands that it is the director's job to get good performances out of his cast members (just because a take has no flubs, it doesn't mean it feels emotionally genuine). That director would turn the footage over to Lucas who would then give it to his ex-wife, Marcia, to edit into a final film while he merely "advised".
I suppose it's remotely possible that he really has learned his lesson and is making this one into what everyone hoped, but I don't know if it even matters.
I actually enjoyed Howard the Duck, although I haven't seen it since the 80's, and I'm fairly certain it wouldn't be as fun as I remembered...
And a pic of my Howard the Duck figurine included with the Silver Surfer figure...
I thought "Planet Bob" was pretty typical Ben Edlund humor myself, but other than last week's Angel episode, Joss's writing is generally much better than average
Not so much rogue entities, but cities that are also counties apparently can decide to follow the actual Constitution of the State of California, rather than an unconstitutional act that takes away rights of California citizens based on sexual orientation.
... and good for SF! It's about time that somebody stands up to the people who want to establish Christianity as the Official Religion of the United States of America.
Hey, if an F chord is that hard for you, why don't you use drop-D tuning?
Just [333xxx], a simple, one finger barre, and you've got your F (mind, that totally screws up your E and G open chord forms, but you could work around that, and D will sound fuller since you can use the open 5th and 6th string...)
OK, that's a fair point now, but it wasn't always that way. Back in the before-time, in the long, long ago, when there were a bunch of different record companies; there were brand loyalties to a record label, often because some of them were dominated by a certain visionary A&R guy, but the end result was that you could pick up a bunch of different albums from, say 1978 Asylum Records, and be able to hear a similar kind of sound or type of music - if you liked The Eagles (on Asylum), you might also like another Asylum recording artist like Jackson Browne, for instance. The same was true of many boutique jazz labels, even during the 50's, and of 1980's ECM or Windham Hill.
Even today, there are still record labels that keep that spirit alive, even if they are distributed by one of the giants. Blue Note and Artemis are two of the more notable examples - if you really like one artist on the label, there's a good chance you'd like others on that label, too.
That's not terribly new for software, either. In the gaming world, Activision was one of the first software companies to have a fan base, and early EA titles were also at that level of extremely high quality - when a new EA title was released, you didn't have to know anything about it to know it was going to be a great game.
-- Yes, I am an old fart
Sorry, but that's not accurate.
Putting aside for the moment the fallacy that this thread is based on (Apple doesn't have a patent on the scroll wheel/jog dial, neither the moving parts kind or the solid-state), many Sony products, including their early CDMA telephones, used a scroll wheel/jog dial to navigate through menus, in a fashion very similar to the iPod, circa 1998.
I love my iPod, and the interface is great, but that part of it is definitely not innovative.
I read it in High School (back when it was a stand-alone book), and I understood the Ford Prefect joke, even if I knew I'd have appreciated it more had his last name been "Pinto" or something. I had to look up "Zebra Crossing", but those do exist in the States, even if they don't have the same name (and yes, I get the pun), and I would argue that petty bureacrats are the same everywhere.
"...bimbo again"?
Trillian (Sandra Dickinson) was sexy, but she wasn't a bimbo, squeaky voice to the contrary. Even on the BBC TV version, she was still the most competent being on the Heart of Gold.
It's just common sense - Ringo trashed his liver in the 70's, and probably did more blow than the late Andy Gibb, but Paul kept his blood pressure low with the sweet green stuff.
As long as he doesn't have a heart attack trying to keep his one-legged wife constantly preggers, he should be fine for some time.
I have done that - voting Republican - so I can have some say during the Primary cycle about who will represent me in an overwhelmingly Republican district, but it hasn't worked for me.
If I vote for the candidate I find least objectionable, he loses, and the psycho gets the office. If I vote for the psycho, figuring, "Surely everyone can see this man is not fit for holding the office of dogcatcher, let alone Governor," he wins anyway. It's very demoralizing, I have to say.
Did you even read the article? It clearly mentions an incident where Democrats gerrymandered in this way in California, and it clearly discussed the issue of Democratic party racism in the 60's.
The issue isn't that the Dems are right and the Reps are wrong, it's that this is a tool being used by the dominant parties to unfairly shut out the minority party voters, who may end up being a larger voting bloc than those represented by the party in power.
That's why I think districts should be created by a non-partisan commision, and not by either party. They're both too power-mad to be trusted. Power to the people!
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands. One nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
I think that includes at least one of those principles, but I also think that principle is why the "under God" addition needs to go.
Forcing non-Christian schoolchildren to be reminded every morning that their religious beliefs are unimportant to the pseudo-Christian Pharisees in power, and always will be, doesn't exactly show a commitment to equality of liberty and justice.
Yeah, and Rogue already makes a beer for Microsoft Ineternet Explorer - I think it's called "Arrogant Bastard Ale"
I couldn't help myself...
" 'FitzRoy' (Son of the King)"
----
Well, yes, but "Fitz" was pretty much exclusively used to denote illegitimate sons.
Well, yeah, they're supposed to, but it doesn't work that way anymore. It's the "Gold Rule" - those with the gold make the rules.
Don't believe me? Ask Alice Randall, author of The Wind Done Gone , a work which was not at all likely to be confused with Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, but was a legitimate parody. Unfortunately, part of the parody was deconstructing the romanticized view of the antebellum South that was such an intrinsic part of the older work, and showing the blatant racism behind it, infuriating the Mitchell family that still holds the copyrights, so they sued.
The courts, as is usual when big money is involved, threw out the right of Fair Use, and sided with the Mitchell trusts.
Moral of the story? In today's "justice" system, you're not likely to lose money betting that corporate interests will trump fair use rights.
It isn't just old Linux systems that have problems with Java - in fact, Java applets are one of two issues that cause Mozilla to crash. The other is viewing too many images in tabs - even if you close tabs after you've viewed the pics, and try not to keep more than a half-dozen open at once, eventually it will die, and the Netscape Quality Agent pops up...
A bigger screen is a mixed blessing - on the one hand you can view more information, or run at a larger font size without only being able to read a dozen words on the screen, but on the other hand, it could make the PDA too bulky to fit in a pocket.
I find my Clie's screen (320x320) to be pretty close to a perfect compromise, but I admit I'm used to very small text sizes.
Well, "Pastime Paradise" (from Songs in the Key of Life) is the Stevie Wonder song Coolio sampled* to make "Gangsta's Paradise", but yes, the irony is obvious.
* By "sampled", I mean "took the song and changed some words", but I will admit Coolio's alterations are not without their own artistic merit.
The dub also stuck dialog in where none was needed. It seemed as though any time a character was facing away from the camera, that became license to give them a line, even if there wasn't a good reason to do so.
My biggest cringe moment came during a scene where Kiki is approaching the city for the first time - on the dub, she's making all these stupid "whee! whee!" sounds, but in the original soundtrack, she's mostly silent, just taking it all in.
Princess Mononoke's dub track was a much better effort, thanks to Neil Gaiman.
One: The major advantage of the new hi-rez formats that will entice even non-audiophiles is not the additional resolution of the two formats, but rather the surround capability. Listen to a well-mastered DVD-Audio disc, and you'll see the surround functions add more to the enjoyment of the music than the higher resolution does.
Two: the higher resolution does, nevertheless, make a difference. The bandwidth of CDs is good, but it is not perfect.
Recent trends in mastering techniques cause newer CDs to be overly compressed, with many transients clipped. The extended dynamic range of the new formats allows them to be as loud as the compressed CDs without the fatiguing levels of compression.
Also, although the theoretical limit of human hearing is 20kHz, a sufficiently high pitched sound that is not a sine wave will have many harmonics that are above the 20 (or 22.05) kHx limit - these do color the sound, and their unnatural filtering contributes to the often-commented harshness of digital.