Yes, that's what I thought I said (although I admit I've been waiting for you show up, because I realized I could have said it better), although there are some who don't believe it in their heart and soul and have created alternative models, mostly because viewing gravity as nothing but geometry doesn't bode well for a Grand Unified Theory.
Nah, just ignorant. He's heard stuff he doesn't understand. Ignorance is curable. Stupid is in the bones.
Note that he was smart enough to phrase his post as a question asking for clarification, which, given the nature of this forum, also implies a certain amount of self worth without lapsing into egotism.
I'm the damed fool who was stupid enough to make statements. That sort of behaviour can get you garotted around these parts.
No, no, no. Mass causes the warping of space which causes gravity, not gravitational "distortions" and the inverse square law still holds just as it does for the Newtonian model; relativistic gravity "looks" the same as Newtonian from any dirction.
As it must, because we can see that gravity does and one expects, in the absence of other forces, for phenomenon such as planetary nebulae to be symetrical.
By the way, you might be interested to know that the density of material in a such a nebula may well be lower than in an earth bound, artificial vacuum chamber. They may look massive from here, but that's because we see the entire mass of the florescing gases from a distance. If we were in the middle of it it might well look like empty space.
Think of a hazy day. You're not in a fog at all and it's only when you try to look across great distances that you realize the air isn't "empty."
Funny that people don't usually pick rivers or alcohol abuse as boogeymen.
Actually, I, at least do. I live on a river. Several of our bars are situated on the river and people put their car in the wrong gear and "back" into the river instead of out their parking space on a fairly regular basis. My sister in law's younger brother drowned when he thought it would be a good idea to get drunk and then go tubing. He was only 15.
Anyway, good luck with your perilous quest.
Ah, I wasn't being entirely serious about that whole thing, and the worst thing that happened while I was down there was turning into something of a major tourist attraction for the day. A few dozen people people just had to take my picture, several of them doing the "Will you pose with us" thingy. One guy spent a half hour doing a really nice pencil drawing of me.
Ah well, "Girl's gotta make a living" and it put rice in my bowl for the week, so everything I do for the rest of the week will be gravy.
Hey, I'm just glad you're not dead yourself... It's been a while since your last post.
My time and attention have been diverted in a manner that has largely kept me away from being chained to the computer. It happens.
As it happens I'm going to disappear for at least a few days again, as my time and attention are being drawn to NYC. Pray for me.
It's funny, but if I told you I was about to disappear into uncharted wilderness with nothing but the clothes on my back and a knife and box of matches in my pocket, or striking out from Cape Cod bound for the Azores in a Coleman Scanoe, I'd also tell you that if you don't see me post again for a few months there's nothing really to worry about, I'm in no real danger and probably just enjoying myself too much to be ready to come back. As it is, journeying into the "Heart of Civilization" as we know it for day or too, I'd say if I don't post again in a week or two you might have reason to fear the worst.
Despite being a native Manhattenite by birth, which is an unfortunate accident, I really have no means of expressiong how much I detest the place, and even though experience tells me I'm just as capable of handling the rigors of the concrete jungle as I am the forested one, I always half expect to come home dead anyway, but a conjunction of both personal and professional interests compels me to lace up the combat boots, dust off the black trench coat, put on my most weathered safari hat, and enjoin with the land where there be dragons.
I have a female musician friend who knows that I've done things like walk across Harlem in the middle of the night without anyone saying so much as boo to me who was bemoaning the fact that she had to go do a city gig alone and she didn't look intimidating. It took a bit more conversation to get that what she was saying was that she wished I could come along because I never had any trouble because I did look intimidating, which came as a complete surprise to me.
Tourists are advised to walk quickly and never make eye contact, because eye contact marks you as prey. The exception is for the person who can walk firmly but not overfast, and make contact with everyone as if you are one of the predators scoping for your next meal. The other predators will have to at least think twice about whether you're really worth trying to eat, and even if they decide in the affirmative in that enviroment the initiative is lost in that second thought. Done right eye contact says "I know you're there, you can't sneak up on me and you look a bit tasty yourself. Try me, motherfucker."
She says I do that like I was born to it, which I guess I was. Go figure.
In any case, I'd still rather face a bear or a cougar than NYC. Ironically, the rules of engagement are more civilized with "wild" animals. The exception is feral animals ( and you can pretty much bet that a cougar in the northeastern forest is feral). They're pretty much fucked in the head and don't know what rules of engagement to use when, so they just go beserk at the drop of a hat.
A lot of the people in NYC are feral humans, and thus there are no rules of engagement you can count on with them, whether you look intimidating or not. They'll just go fucking berserker on you anyway, just because they don't know what else to do.
I know you have about a million stalkers here. ..
Some of them a bit less well intentioned than yourself.
. . and the comment was more for them than you. ..
Yeah, I understand that one, and you may note that many of my response posts are often more intended for "the peanut gallery", rather than to the person I'm overtly "responding" to. It's an old trick. Swift, Paine and Twain were masters of it.
. ..though I'm pleased to see you took the time to respond.
Maybe it's just an old BBS/usenet reflex, but I generally try to engage, rather than just pontificate and wa
I know this is all obvious to you but again, you didn't bring it up and I thought it was worth saying.
I suppose I'll include that in the book version, as this post was only about people, not humanity, although I think Carl and few others have already done it better, or at least as well, as I possibly could.
Which is why I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the book.
Not that it matters, the asteroid is going to destroy the entire earth first. Or the mega volcano , or maybe the giant Staypuft Marshmallow Man.
Don't get me wrong, I'm appreciative of things like the Tsunami early warning system, what with my entire financial future being wrapped up in one of those expensive, east coast seaside homes (so seaside it has a private dock in one of the most desirable harbors in the east). So expensive I can't afford to live in the thing myself. Without godzillionaires who like to rent a "summer cottage" in such exclusive neighborhoods I couldn't afford to even pay the taxes on the thing.
Which means I'm at no particular personal risk of loss of life due to a Tsunami, since I actually live a couple hundred miles inland behind a mountain range, but possesion of that property means dying relatively well off, and the loss of it will mean dying in a state home.
Of course, I'll still be dead at the time, and something's going to get me sooner or later, whether it be a mega-this or mega-that, or just having a "mega" slip in the shower.
I'm just getting a little tired of all the "mega" disasters lurking under the bed with the boogeyman just waiting to grab our ankles and drag us under.
The universe is a nasty, violent place and it's a wonder that you even lived long enough to be potty trained. We're all going to die! Many of us violently. We are fragile little globs of water in a membrane, and it doesn't take much on the scale of forces in the universe to make us go "Pop!"
That's a damned good reason to take all reasonable precautions, but it's also a damned good reason to simply get used to the idea and take all reasonable opportunities to not worry about it overmuch.
Wait'll you see what it's like for a drummer. Drives the neighbors crazy, it does.
One of my oldest friends is a drummer. I get to hear him complain all the time about trying to find a place to practice. In fact, the whole "where to practice" issue is one of the main reasons I've never taken a crack at drums myself (I've played nearly everything else except double reeds. I imagine the Tibetan prayer horn drives the upstairs guy nearly as nuts as drums would though).
Also known as the "Drummer could use some work on his time" method of playing.
How do you know it's a drummer at your door?
The knocking speeds up, slows down, then speeds up again.
A couple of months ago I got to hear Adrian Legg telling funny stories about his bad relationships with drummers. He hit his humorous peak when he started complaining about this one drummer who kept an absolutely perfect beat, and how the hell was a guitar player supposed to cope with that?
I've given up being surprised that most guitar players have never, ever worked with a metronome, but it still suprises the hell out of when I meet a drummer who hasn't.
The "Ahhhhhh!" in this case being the screams of the audience at having to listen to another terrible bar band.
Oh yeah. Been there. Done that. Tore up my T-shirt to stuff my ears. Didn't help.
Say, got any clips of your compositions? I'd love to hear them. I'll show you mine if you show me yours.
I'd actually like to oblige, but I'll have to beg for time. I'm experiencing technical difficulties in the analog to digital conversion process (including the breakdown of both of my tape decks and the sudden refusal of my box record.wavs anyway, so when I tried to rip off a quick and dirty of the etude I came up empty.)
If you're still thinking about that in a couple of weeks hit me in another thread again and see whether I've made any progress or just decided it would be quicker to slit my wrists and be done with it.
My former phone line was only plugged into a phone. I got tired of running to look at the caller ID screen 10 times a day only to find out it was a telemarketer, so I had it turned off.
That was pre Do Not Call List. I may reconsider. I'm in no hurry. I'm enjoying the quiet.
As for security I have a "vicious" guard cat who will lick and shed on any burgler to death. If that doesn't work I suppose she'll just help them carry my TV out to the van. It's worth a lot less than any security system that actually might do something useful would cost me.
Ah, so you're just doing the whole music thing for the chicks. Say no more, say no more.
Yeah, that's why I've shut myself up in a dungeon locked to a metronome for several hours a day the past couple of weeks and hope to keep it up until the grass is green again.
'Cause chicks really go for that sort of thing:
"Not now honey. Just another hour and I think I can get Ragtime Annie up to the top level of the metronome, and then I'll have to fight the boss monster. After that I have try to do it armed with a flute, and then I get to start all over again, only this time in F!"
Just drives the women crazy, that does.
I think I'll call it the "Ooh, Shiny" method of composition.
No, no, no. Not "Ooh," "Ooooooooo." Get it right.
Now, when performing the piece if you start out slow and pretty and get the audience to say "Ooooooo," and then play it faster and faster until they say "Ahhhhhh!", that, of course, is the "Fireworks" method of playing. Pretty common fare for the Bluegrass and Speed Metal dudes.
Me, I like to "take the cork out of the bottle" once a set, about a third of the way through, just to let them know I can do it, and then, for some reason, they're far more content to spend the rest of the evening listening to the pretty ballads and slow airs which are really my favorites. Always finish up with a "crowd pleaser" though. A rollicking blues or sing along always works well. Sing alongs are the biggest producer of standing ovations and encores, because subconciously they're really clapping for themselves.
Kinda hard to pull off when doing a purely instrumental program though, so then you just have to fall back on fireworks again.
A few years after Hancock payed taxes on 45,000 pounds of tea British tea imports in America had dwindled to a few hundred pounds.
Most people just bought tea smuggled in from Holland, making the Tea Party itself really nothing more than an excuse for Sam Adams to get some hot heads riled up and moving toward revolution.
I am now extremely cynical about anyone talking about the "obvious symbolism" in a work. ..
I've recently written a little classical guitar etude. Nothing special really, but I felt the need to tune up my classical technique . ..and I felt the urge to write something pretty for someone pretty.
There's all sorts of quite intentional symbolism around the piece, even down to the speed it's played at, andante (at a walk), the title and secondary inspiration being a line from Tennyson (which has personal significance), "If I had a flower for everytime I thought of you, I could walk in my garden forever," (which, go figure, has personal significance), leading to the fact that it repeats endlessly and has no musical resolution. Sooner of later you just get tired of playing it, stop, and think "and so on, and so on, and so on. .."
Hell, it takes far longer just to "explain" the damn thing than it does to play it one time through (36 seconds at 92 bpm).
So how did I pack so much meaning into so little music? Well, I didn't. The symbolism is all around the piece, in its literature as it were, stuff I made up to to serve no other purpose than to be a blindingly obvious symbol, but when it comes to the music itself I just twiddled some arpeggios on a G chord until I thought, "Oooooooooo, that's pretty" (the musical equivalent of "shiney"), " I guess we go the C chord from here, huh? Ok, how about to the minor for a touch of that 'whistful' feeling. Back to G. Done."
And it doesn't mean a goddamned thing. If I didn't "explain" it to you you'd have no way of figuring it out. It's just a bunch of notes that sound kinda nice if you play them one after the other that I derived by relying on standard practice and accident.
The Boston Tea Party took place because the East India Company was absolved of the tea tax for tea imported into England.
Americans had been grumbling about, but paying, the tax (at least those that didn't simply buy smuggled tea) for years before the "Tea Party" took place.
In 1771 John Hancock, hisself, payed duties on 45,000 pounds of tea.
A "Tea Party" will be called for when ICANN imposes the tax across the board, but then absolves Verisign from it.
This is one of the silliest damned things I've seen on Slashdot (to be superceded only by my response to it).
Have you never heard of art galleries and their attendant review panels? I also know for a fact that the buyer has several friends who are not stone blind. Anyone who wants to see my stuff is perfectly free to stay from gallery opening to closing, as far as I'm concerned, and gawk and interpret all they want.
Are you supposing I sell them sight unseen?
All I don't do is go out of my way to achieve popular recognition. I neither need nor desire it and I end up selling everything I offer without doing so ( and a few things I don't offer, which is always a bit painful). The vast majority of my shows and performances are done at the request of the promoter and I only rarely solicit work myself.
They are able to make such requests specifically because they have been able to see or hear my stuff someplace or other.
In this specific case I am physically incapable of complying with the request for a viewing since I do not own the work and am not in direct contact with the person who does.
In about three hours I shall be before a live audience. From past experience with the venue I'd say I can count on about 100 people and can guarundamntee you that not one of those people will leave the club complaining that I don't let them listen to my music. If you show up you can listen too, and join the small and homogenous group of some tens of thousands of people who have heard me perform at some time or another ( I have no idea what that number might extend to if you include television and radio audiences).
It is true that my recordings are limited and highly obscure (and entirely on anthology albums), as I prefer to work live ( I don't consider myself a recording artist, or even a musician really. I'm just an entertainer), but they exist, although they do not exist on the web. It may come as a shock to you, but things that don't exist on the web still really exist.
In future I expect I'll release a solo CD mixing public domain and original works, but I'm no particular hurry. I also expect I'll release a number of performances of traditional and classical music to the web under the Creative Commons License, but again, I'm in no hurry, and these are already available as performed by people who can do so much better than myself. They'll only be of interest to people who want to hear me play them for some silly reason or other.
Such people seem to exist. I haven't the foggiest notion why.
Ah, well, the request raises some issues I'm afraid.
The first is that, other than Slashdot and one other forum, I have very little "web presence." Although I have the space available I have no personal website, no blog, no newsletter, no nothin'. This is intentional. Although I always post under my real name or monogram, have nearly 6000 posts here, a similar number in that other forum, probably rather more on usenet, in RL spend at least a few hours a week in front of an audience lecturing or performing, have been recently described as "gregarious" and at least don't exactly come across as the retiring sort, well, I am really.
I'm a bit jealous of my privacy and solitude.
I'm the guy out at a club sitting in a dark, back corner by himself reading a book. At least the first time I show up at that particular club. The second time I show up the waitrons are already calling me by my first name and giving me special treatment. By the third time I find myself "holding court" in my dark corner. I gather flocks wherever I go. I'm not really sure how it happens, and I'm always a bit uncomfortable about the whole thing, especially as some of the flock always seem to end up thinking I'm the goddamn Messiah or something.
I'm not making that last bit up, or even applying hyperbole. While chatting with some people outside of a jazz club recently where I like to attend open mike to practice new pieces in front of a nonpaying audience a woman I had just met started gushing about how wonderful I was and one of the other guys in the group said to her, "Yeah, he really is a fantastic and there are people inside right now who think he's Jesus or something."
I know it seems odd for someone who could easily be described as a "public personage" to complain about people not leaving him alone, and particularly odd for a Slashdotter to complain (as I have in a couple of other posts) that women won't stop following me around like lost puppies, but there you have it.
So I don't have a website and the picture does not exist online.
I've recently been reconsidering this stance, as I recognize even a small bit of selfpromotion might be an actual asset to my "followers." At least a listing of club dates or something so people who are out of personal touch can find out where I'm appearing, but I'm intensely distrustful of selfpromotion in others, and quadruplely so of my own. I'm not in that class of people who think my own farts smell good. Still, while I'm perfectly happy gathering a small crowd on a street corner, playing the odd sold out house can be nice and keeps the club owners happy. Puts a bit of money in my pocket too, which is not to be entirely discounted as a motivation.
Then there's the other issue. As an art photographer the monetary value of my work lies in it's exclusivity. This rubs up against all sorts of "information wants to be free" issues that I'm quite vocal about here on Slahsdot, and I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is, but the people who buy my photos also depend upon that exclusivity to maintain the value of what they have given me money for, and I feel I owe some responsibility to them as well.
Yeah, there isn't really that big an issue there, as well as various ways to deal with it, and I seriously doubt counterfeiters are lining up to pump out fakes, but. ..I sometimes do something a little unusual -- I treat a photo as an orginal painting, and prints are "1/1." This photo happens to be one that I so treated. The negative no longer exists and I do not have physical possession of the only proper print ever made from it. I can't even look at it myself, which is a shame, because it's my all time favorite shot. I don't know that it's great art, but it is a bit sparkly and shit.
I keep meaning to track down the owner (who I haven't seen in about 15 years) and ask if I can make a scan of it for my own enjoyment, but have never considered the issue pressing enough to actually do it (although I might
Dumbass legislators have, on many occassions, tried to pass these Strict Liability Statutes with long jail sentences, and almost always, they've been overturned.
The one place they have generally been sucessful, however, is when the strict liability concerns "sex and violence," to the extent that what would otherwise be an act of consensual sex is legally defined as a violent act.
People get funny about some issues.
In this case, however, I think you're right, as the issue rubs hard against the First Ammendment and there is already an extensive body of statute and case law brought up by other media such as books and movies.
Of course, as with all such laws, if passed, it will likely require the utter ruination of at least one person's life to get it overturned.
As a minor composer and art photographer who has done both in an academic setting I have had occasion to hear my works "interpreted."
The one that comes most to mind is a photo I took of some broken glass lying on a stone floor beside the window it formerly comprised.
I put the camera on the floor at the level of the glass and shot toward the window. The end result looks something like a fantasy spiral galaxy shot edge on, only with deep black underneath and bright white above caused by exposing for the glass while shooting from a shadowed interior slate floor toward daylight.
I've heard all sorts of interpretations of what I was trying to "say" with this picture, from Taoist/Buddhist philosophy to Jungian symbolism.
The thing is, I know damned well that the only thing in the artist's mind, subconcious as well as concious, at the time the picture was taken was, "Oooooooooooo, shiney!"
Where do these interpretations come from?
The same place alien abductions and fairies in the garden come from. Purely from the mind of the observer. They're made up fantasies, but fantasies you can get a doctorate for describing.
If countries respect people in other countries, and don't exploit them, don't take advantage of them, then really where is the animosity going to come from?
Forgive me for being an old cynic, but I have faith in humanity.
Yes, yes it does. That's the thing with all this suing everyone for everything. There comes a time when you might need to put up a defense that is counter to what you yourself have actually been doing.
That is a nice touch. I can't honestly say whether anyone else is doing that or not, because the first thing I do with a distro that boots in graphical mode is edit inittab to start in run level 3.:)
But then I usually start my day doing work at the command line for an hour or so, and only start X when I actually have something important and inherently graphical to do, like play Asteroids.
YMMV, I'm not a command line Nazi, just a proponant.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, that's what I thought I said (although I admit I've been waiting for you show up, because I realized I could have said it better), although there are some who don't believe it in their heart and soul and have created alternative models, mostly because viewing gravity as nothing but geometry doesn't bode well for a Grand Unified Theory.
KFG
dude, this guy is dumb.
Nah, just ignorant. He's heard stuff he doesn't understand. Ignorance is curable. Stupid is in the bones.
Note that he was smart enough to phrase his post as a question asking for clarification, which, given the nature of this forum, also implies a certain amount of self worth without lapsing into egotism.
I'm the damed fool who was stupid enough to make statements. That sort of behaviour can get you garotted around these parts.
KFG
No, no, no. Mass causes the warping of space which causes gravity, not gravitational "distortions" and the inverse square law still holds just as it does for the Newtonian model; relativistic gravity "looks" the same as Newtonian from any dirction.
As it must, because we can see that gravity does and one expects, in the absence of other forces, for phenomenon such as planetary nebulae to be symetrical.
By the way, you might be interested to know that the density of material in a such a nebula may well be lower than in an earth bound, artificial vacuum chamber. They may look massive from here, but that's because we see the entire mass of the florescing gases from a distance. If we were in the middle of it it might well look like empty space.
Think of a hazy day. You're not in a fog at all and it's only when you try to look across great distances that you realize the air isn't "empty."
KFG
Look for people walking around with pizza boxes tucked under their arms...
"Dude. What the hell's wrong with your laptop? It's acting pretty weird."
"Ah, all the damned "1s" got mooshed over to the bottom of the box when I was carrying it over here."
KFG
He's baaaaaaaack!
Funny that people don't usually pick rivers or alcohol abuse as boogeymen.
Actually, I, at least do. I live on a river. Several of our bars are situated on the river and people put their car in the wrong gear and "back" into the river instead of out their parking space on a fairly regular basis. My sister in law's younger brother drowned when he thought it would be a good idea to get drunk and then go tubing. He was only 15.
Anyway, good luck with your perilous quest.
Ah, I wasn't being entirely serious about that whole thing, and the worst thing that happened while I was down there was turning into something of a major tourist attraction for the day. A few dozen people people just had to take my picture, several of them doing the "Will you pose with us" thingy. One guy spent a half hour doing a really nice pencil drawing of me.
Ah well, "Girl's gotta make a living" and it put rice in my bowl for the week, so everything I do for the rest of the week will be gravy.
KFG
Hey, I'm just glad you're not dead yourself... It's been a while since your last post.
.
.
.though I'm pleased to see you took the time to respond.
My time and attention have been diverted in a manner that has largely kept me away from being chained to the computer. It happens.
As it happens I'm going to disappear for at least a few days again, as my time and attention are being drawn to NYC. Pray for me.
It's funny, but if I told you I was about to disappear into uncharted wilderness with nothing but the clothes on my back and a knife and box of matches in my pocket, or striking out from Cape Cod bound for the Azores in a Coleman Scanoe, I'd also tell you that if you don't see me post again for a few months there's nothing really to worry about, I'm in no real danger and probably just enjoying myself too much to be ready to come back. As it is, journeying into the "Heart of Civilization" as we know it for day or too, I'd say if I don't post again in a week or two you might have reason to fear the worst.
Despite being a native Manhattenite by birth, which is an unfortunate accident, I really have no means of expressiong how much I detest the place, and even though experience tells me I'm just as capable of handling the rigors of the concrete jungle as I am the forested one, I always half expect to come home dead anyway, but a conjunction of both personal and professional interests compels me to lace up the combat boots, dust off the black trench coat, put on my most weathered safari hat, and enjoin with the land where there be dragons.
I have a female musician friend who knows that I've done things like walk across Harlem in the middle of the night without anyone saying so much as boo to me who was bemoaning the fact that she had to go do a city gig alone and she didn't look intimidating. It took a bit more conversation to get that what she was saying was that she wished I could come along because I never had any trouble because I did look intimidating, which came as a complete surprise to me.
Tourists are advised to walk quickly and never make eye contact, because eye contact marks you as prey. The exception is for the person who can walk firmly but not overfast, and make contact with everyone as if you are one of the predators scoping for your next meal. The other predators will have to at least think twice about whether you're really worth trying to eat, and even if they decide in the affirmative in that enviroment the initiative is lost in that second thought. Done right eye contact says "I know you're there, you can't sneak up on me and you look a bit tasty yourself. Try me, motherfucker."
She says I do that like I was born to it, which I guess I was. Go figure.
In any case, I'd still rather face a bear or a cougar than NYC. Ironically, the rules of engagement are more civilized with "wild" animals. The exception is feral animals ( and you can pretty much bet that a cougar in the northeastern forest is feral). They're pretty much fucked in the head and don't know what rules of engagement to use when, so they just go beserk at the drop of a hat.
A lot of the people in NYC are feral humans, and thus there are no rules of engagement you can count on with them, whether you look intimidating or not. They'll just go fucking berserker on you anyway, just because they don't know what else to do.
I know you have about a million stalkers here. .
Some of them a bit less well intentioned than yourself.
. . and the comment was more for them than you. .
Yeah, I understand that one, and you may note that many of my response posts are often more intended for "the peanut gallery", rather than to the person I'm overtly "responding" to. It's an old trick. Swift, Paine and Twain were masters of it.
. .
Maybe it's just an old BBS/usenet reflex, but I generally try to engage, rather than just pontificate and wa
I know this is all obvious to you but again, you didn't bring it up and I thought it was worth saying.
I suppose I'll include that in the book version, as this post was only about people, not humanity, although I think Carl and few others have already done it better, or at least as well, as I possibly could.
Which is why I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the book.
KFG
Not that it matters, the asteroid is going to destroy the entire earth first. Or the mega volcano , or maybe the giant Staypuft Marshmallow Man.
Don't get me wrong, I'm appreciative of things like the Tsunami early warning system, what with my entire financial future being wrapped up in one of those expensive, east coast seaside homes (so seaside it has a private dock in one of the most desirable harbors in the east). So expensive I can't afford to live in the thing myself. Without godzillionaires who like to rent a "summer cottage" in such exclusive neighborhoods I couldn't afford to even pay the taxes on the thing.
Which means I'm at no particular personal risk of loss of life due to a Tsunami, since I actually live a couple hundred miles inland behind a mountain range, but possesion of that property means dying relatively well off, and the loss of it will mean dying in a state home.
Of course, I'll still be dead at the time, and something's going to get me sooner or later, whether it be a mega-this or mega-that, or just having a "mega" slip in the shower.
I'm just getting a little tired of all the "mega" disasters lurking under the bed with the boogeyman just waiting to grab our ankles and drag us under.
The universe is a nasty, violent place and it's a wonder that you even lived long enough to be potty trained. We're all going to die! Many of us violently. We are fragile little globs of water in a membrane, and it doesn't take much on the scale of forces in the universe to make us go "Pop!"
That's a damned good reason to take all reasonable precautions, but it's also a damned good reason to simply get used to the idea and take all reasonable opportunities to not worry about it overmuch.
KFG
Wait'll you see what it's like for a drummer. Drives the neighbors crazy, it does.
.wavs anyway, so when I tried to rip off a quick and dirty of the etude I came up empty.)
One of my oldest friends is a drummer. I get to hear him complain all the time about trying to find a place to practice. In fact, the whole "where to practice" issue is one of the main reasons I've never taken a crack at drums myself (I've played nearly everything else except double reeds. I imagine the Tibetan prayer horn drives the upstairs guy nearly as nuts as drums would though).
Also known as the "Drummer could use some work on his time" method of playing.
How do you know it's a drummer at your door?
The knocking speeds up, slows down, then speeds up again.
A couple of months ago I got to hear Adrian Legg telling funny stories about his bad relationships with drummers. He hit his humorous peak when he started complaining about this one drummer who kept an absolutely perfect beat, and how the hell was a guitar player supposed to cope with that?
I've given up being surprised that most guitar players have never, ever worked with a metronome, but it still suprises the hell out of when I meet a drummer who hasn't.
The "Ahhhhhh!" in this case being the screams of the audience at having to listen to another terrible bar band.
Oh yeah. Been there. Done that. Tore up my T-shirt to stuff my ears. Didn't help.
Say, got any clips of your compositions? I'd love to hear them. I'll show you mine if you show me yours.
I'd actually like to oblige, but I'll have to beg for time. I'm experiencing technical difficulties in the analog to digital conversion process (including the breakdown of both of my tape decks and the sudden refusal of my box record
If you're still thinking about that in a couple of weeks hit me in another thread again and see whether I've made any progress or just decided it would be quicker to slit my wrists and be done with it.
KFG
My former phone line was only plugged into a phone. I got tired of running to look at the caller ID screen 10 times a day only to find out it was a telemarketer, so I had it turned off.
That was pre Do Not Call List. I may reconsider. I'm in no hurry. I'm enjoying the quiet.
As for security I have a "vicious" guard cat who will lick and shed on any burgler to death. If that doesn't work I suppose she'll just help them carry my TV out to the van. It's worth a lot less than any security system that actually might do something useful would cost me.
KFG
. . .then dont answer unless you know the caller...
The pain in the ass is then not the answering, but the getting out of the shower to see if you should.
Caller ID solves the problem of talking to people you don't want to, but it doesn't solve the problem of having to answer to the phone.
KFG
Ah, so you're just doing the whole music thing for the chicks. Say no more, say no more.
Yeah, that's why I've shut myself up in a dungeon locked to a metronome for several hours a day the past couple of weeks and hope to keep it up until the grass is green again.
'Cause chicks really go for that sort of thing:
"Not now honey. Just another hour and I think I can get Ragtime Annie up to the top level of the metronome, and then I'll have to fight the boss monster. After that I have try to do it armed with a flute, and then I get to start all over again, only this time in F!"
Just drives the women crazy, that does.
I think I'll call it the "Ooh, Shiny" method of composition.
No, no, no. Not "Ooh," "Ooooooooo." Get it right.
Now, when performing the piece if you start out slow and pretty and get the audience to say "Ooooooo," and then play it faster and faster until they say "Ahhhhhh!", that, of course, is the "Fireworks" method of playing. Pretty common fare for the Bluegrass and Speed Metal dudes.
Me, I like to "take the cork out of the bottle" once a set, about a third of the way through, just to let them know I can do it, and then, for some reason, they're far more content to spend the rest of the evening listening to the pretty ballads and slow airs which are really my favorites. Always finish up with a "crowd pleaser" though. A rollicking blues or sing along always works well. Sing alongs are the biggest producer of standing ovations and encores, because subconciously they're really clapping for themselves.
Kinda hard to pull off when doing a purely instrumental program though, so then you just have to fall back on fireworks again.
KFG
A few years after Hancock payed taxes on 45,000 pounds of tea British tea imports in America had dwindled to a few hundred pounds.
Most people just bought tea smuggled in from Holland, making the Tea Party itself really nothing more than an excuse for Sam Adams to get some hot heads riled up and moving toward revolution.
But yeah, it's still a twisted stretch.
KFG
I am now extremely cynical about anyone talking about the "obvious symbolism" in a work. . .
.and I felt the urge to write something pretty for someone pretty.
."
I've recently written a little classical guitar etude. Nothing special really, but I felt the need to tune up my classical technique . .
There's all sorts of quite intentional symbolism around the piece, even down to the speed it's played at, andante (at a walk), the title and secondary inspiration being a line from Tennyson (which has personal significance), "If I had a flower for everytime I thought of you, I could walk in my garden forever," (which, go figure, has personal significance), leading to the fact that it repeats endlessly and has no musical resolution. Sooner of later you just get tired of playing it, stop, and think "and so on, and so on, and so on. .
Hell, it takes far longer just to "explain" the damn thing than it does to play it one time through (36 seconds at 92 bpm).
So how did I pack so much meaning into so little music? Well, I didn't. The symbolism is all around the piece, in its literature as it were, stuff I made up to to serve no other purpose than to be a blindingly obvious symbol, but when it comes to the music itself I just twiddled some arpeggios on a G chord until I thought, "Oooooooooo, that's pretty" (the musical equivalent of "shiney"), " I guess we go the C chord from here, huh? Ok, how about to the minor for a touch of that 'whistful' feeling. Back to G. Done."
And it doesn't mean a goddamned thing. If I didn't "explain" it to you you'd have no way of figuring it out. It's just a bunch of notes that sound kinda nice if you play them one after the other that I derived by relying on standard practice and accident.
It's a complete fraud symbolically.
I hope she likes it.
KFG
. . .internet tea party anyone?
The Boston Tea Party took place because the East India Company was absolved of the tea tax for tea imported into England.
Americans had been grumbling about, but paying, the tax (at least those that didn't simply buy smuggled tea) for years before the "Tea Party" took place.
In 1771 John Hancock, hisself, payed duties on 45,000 pounds of tea.
A "Tea Party" will be called for when ICANN imposes the tax across the board, but then absolves Verisign from it.
KFG
So you don't let people see your work?
This is one of the silliest damned things I've seen on Slashdot (to be superceded only by my response to it).
Have you never heard of art galleries and their attendant review panels? I also know for a fact that the buyer has several friends who are not stone blind. Anyone who wants to see my stuff is perfectly free to stay from gallery opening to closing, as far as I'm concerned, and gawk and interpret all they want.
Are you supposing I sell them sight unseen?
All I don't do is go out of my way to achieve popular recognition. I neither need nor desire it and I end up selling everything I offer without doing so ( and a few things I don't offer, which is always a bit painful). The vast majority of my shows and performances are done at the request of the promoter and I only rarely solicit work myself.
They are able to make such requests specifically because they have been able to see or hear my stuff someplace or other.
In this specific case I am physically incapable of complying with the request for a viewing since I do not own the work and am not in direct contact with the person who does.
In about three hours I shall be before a live audience. From past experience with the venue I'd say I can count on about 100 people and can guarundamntee you that not one of those people will leave the club complaining that I don't let them listen to my music. If you show up you can listen too, and join the small and homogenous group of some tens of thousands of people who have heard me perform at some time or another ( I have no idea what that number might extend to if you include television and radio audiences).
It is true that my recordings are limited and highly obscure (and entirely on anthology albums), as I prefer to work live ( I don't consider myself a recording artist, or even a musician really. I'm just an entertainer), but they exist, although they do not exist on the web. It may come as a shock to you, but things that don't exist on the web still really exist.
In future I expect I'll release a solo CD mixing public domain and original works, but I'm no particular hurry. I also expect I'll release a number of performances of traditional and classical music to the web under the Creative Commons License, but again, I'm in no hurry, and these are already available as performed by people who can do so much better than myself. They'll only be of interest to people who want to hear me play them for some silly reason or other.
Such people seem to exist. I haven't the foggiest notion why.
KFG
See my response to the other AC.
KFG
Ah, well, the request raises some issues I'm afraid.
.I sometimes do something a little unusual -- I treat a photo as an orginal painting, and prints are "1/1." This photo happens to be one that I so treated. The negative no longer exists and I do not have physical possession of the only proper print ever made from it. I can't even look at it myself, which is a shame, because it's my all time favorite shot. I don't know that it's great art, but it is a bit sparkly and shit.
The first is that, other than Slashdot and one other forum, I have very little "web presence." Although I have the space available I have no personal website, no blog, no newsletter, no nothin'. This is intentional. Although I always post under my real name or monogram, have nearly 6000 posts here, a similar number in that other forum, probably rather more on usenet, in RL spend at least a few hours a week in front of an audience lecturing or performing, have been recently described as "gregarious" and at least don't exactly come across as the retiring sort, well, I am really.
I'm a bit jealous of my privacy and solitude.
I'm the guy out at a club sitting in a dark, back corner by himself reading a book. At least the first time I show up at that particular club. The second time I show up the waitrons are already calling me by my first name and giving me special treatment. By the third time I find myself "holding court" in my dark corner. I gather flocks wherever I go. I'm not really sure how it happens, and I'm always a bit uncomfortable about the whole thing, especially as some of the flock always seem to end up thinking I'm the goddamn Messiah or something.
I'm not making that last bit up, or even applying hyperbole. While chatting with some people outside of a jazz club recently where I like to attend open mike to practice new pieces in front of a nonpaying audience a woman I had just met started gushing about how wonderful I was and one of the other guys in the group said to her, "Yeah, he really is a fantastic and there are people inside right now who think he's Jesus or something."
I know it seems odd for someone who could easily be described as a "public personage" to complain about people not leaving him alone, and particularly odd for a Slashdotter to complain (as I have in a couple of other posts) that women won't stop following me around like lost puppies, but there you have it.
So I don't have a website and the picture does not exist online.
I've recently been reconsidering this stance, as I recognize even a small bit of selfpromotion might be an actual asset to my "followers." At least a listing of club dates or something so people who are out of personal touch can find out where I'm appearing, but I'm intensely distrustful of selfpromotion in others, and quadruplely so of my own. I'm not in that class of people who think my own farts smell good. Still, while I'm perfectly happy gathering a small crowd on a street corner, playing the odd sold out house can be nice and keeps the club owners happy. Puts a bit of money in my pocket too, which is not to be entirely discounted as a motivation.
Then there's the other issue. As an art photographer the monetary value of my work lies in it's exclusivity. This rubs up against all sorts of "information wants to be free" issues that I'm quite vocal about here on Slahsdot, and I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is, but the people who buy my photos also depend upon that exclusivity to maintain the value of what they have given me money for, and I feel I owe some responsibility to them as well.
Yeah, there isn't really that big an issue there, as well as various ways to deal with it, and I seriously doubt counterfeiters are lining up to pump out fakes, but. .
I keep meaning to track down the owner (who I haven't seen in about 15 years) and ask if I can make a scan of it for my own enjoyment, but have never considered the issue pressing enough to actually do it (although I might
Dumbass legislators have, on many occassions, tried to pass these Strict Liability Statutes with long jail sentences, and almost always, they've been overturned.
The one place they have generally been sucessful, however, is when the strict liability concerns "sex and violence," to the extent that what would otherwise be an act of consensual sex is legally defined as a violent act.
People get funny about some issues.
In this case, however, I think you're right, as the issue rubs hard against the First Ammendment and there is already an extensive body of statute and case law brought up by other media such as books and movies.
Of course, as with all such laws, if passed, it will likely require the utter ruination of at least one person's life to get it overturned.
KFG
As a minor composer and art photographer who has done both in an academic setting I have had occasion to hear my works "interpreted."
The one that comes most to mind is a photo I took of some broken glass lying on a stone floor beside the window it formerly comprised.
I put the camera on the floor at the level of the glass and shot toward the window. The end result looks something like a fantasy spiral galaxy shot edge on, only with deep black underneath and bright white above caused by exposing for the glass while shooting from a shadowed interior slate floor toward daylight.
I've heard all sorts of interpretations of what I was trying to "say" with this picture, from Taoist/Buddhist philosophy to Jungian symbolism.
The thing is, I know damned well that the only thing in the artist's mind, subconcious as well as concious, at the time the picture was taken was, "Oooooooooooo, shiney!"
Where do these interpretations come from?
The same place alien abductions and fairies in the garden come from. Purely from the mind of the observer. They're made up fantasies, but fantasies you can get a doctorate for describing.
KFG
If countries respect people in other countries, and don't exploit them, don't take advantage of them, then really where is the animosity going to come from?
Forgive me for being an old cynic, but I have faith in humanity.
KFG
Yes, yes it does. That's the thing with all this suing everyone for everything. There comes a time when you might need to put up a defense that is counter to what you yourself have actually been doing.
The sword of justice has two edges.
KFG
That is a nice touch. I can't honestly say whether anyone else is doing that or not, because the first thing I do with a distro that boots in graphical mode is edit inittab to start in run level 3. :)
But then I usually start my day doing work at the command line for an hour or so, and only start X when I actually have something important and inherently graphical to do, like play Asteroids.
YMMV, I'm not a command line Nazi, just a proponant.
KFG
Personally, I don't see the big deal. With >6 months uptime, boot time is the least of my worries.
To be fair, most desktop machines are shutdown at night and restarted in the morning.
Some people thus complain about the bootup time. They can't get right to work and have to go get a cup of coffee or something until it's done.
Personally, I don't see the big deal. To me that has always seemed like the ideal time to. . . go get a cup of coffee.
KFG
I'd like to see other distros do what Red Hat is doing to Fedora's boot screen: Using X resolutions for the startup.
The desktop oriented distros have been doing that since before Fedora existed.
KFG