You speak like an anime snob, yet fess up to watching Metropolis with the dub track. The cognative dissonance is a little much to overcome.
Metropolis was the shit, by the way. A little slow to get started, but worth it in the end. Everybody go rent it, and be sure to watch it in Japanese.
Back to your point: I could not disagree more. Big distributors selling anime is good news. For all your ADV snobbery, I am compelled to point out that some of these small distributors are doing a half-assed job at best. A friend of mine has had to return his Slayers DVD boxed set three times now because the audio track was all fucked up.
My only real problem with Apple (yes, I am currently drooling over 700MHz 12" iBook), is that they upgrade the OS to force people to buy more of their hardware. It is not a easy thing to upgrade a CPU in a Mac and get much more than 10 or 20% gain in performance.
But that's changing the subject, isn't it? Pretty much nobody upgrades the CPU in their laptop computer, Mac or PC, so it has nothing to do with it.
I could get into the "desktop Macs are too hard to upgrade" debate with you, but it's way off the topic of the thread.
Getting back on topic, you simply will not get more ! for your $ in a laptop than buying a Mac. Their CPU's run cooler (and on less power) than either AMD or Intel chips, which allows them to run full-speed and fanless for hours on a single battery. They've got pretty much every feature you need already built in (modem, Ethernet, external video, USB, firewire) and an antenna for adding 802.11b wireless networking for a mere C-note. They are built rugged, have nice screens, and are reasonably priced.
Apple may never be able to compete on raw cost-for-hardware in the destop arena, where a home-built PC remains the ideal choice for penny pinchers (unless a Mac OS machine is worth the slight premium to you)... But their laptops take a back seat to nobody.
Another thing I found interesting was when I was watching some of the interview clips from the American voice cast from Magic Knight Rayearth (don't ask why). The actors talked a lot about synching with the "mouth flaps" of the animated characters. Dubbers are very careful to do that now, and will radically change dialog to make it look right. I think this is probably party due to the heaps of scorn that was once piled upon the old TV show "Speed Racer", where the dub synch was notoriously bad.
However, if you watch with the Japanese tracks, a lot of those shows didn't synch up in the original language in the first place, so one could argue that they are fixing a problem that they could just as easilly ignore.
One of my least favorite dubs comes from "Martian Successor Nadesico". There's a character on that show who frequently cusses "Baka" in the Japanese track. Baka loosely translates to fool or dumbass, both as a plural and singular form, but is also sometimes used as a catch-all explative. The sub tends to use the word "fools" most of the time, but (again, probably due to the "mouth-flap" issue) the dub falls back on "idiots". It probably gets especially confusing for english-dub watchers when the word "baka" is actually printed in english letters on computer displays a couple times. Personally, if I were in charge of dubbing (or subbing) that show, I would have left the word "baka" untranslated. It is used so heavilly that any English-speaking viewer would be able to grasp the meaning from the context after watching two or three episodes.
A best selling Mac game shifts around 30K units - this isn't even on the radar for a PC title, which would be considered a flop if it sells less than 200K.
Yess, but a game that sells 230K is considered much, much more successful than a game that sells 200K. That's what simultaneous development can do for you.
Of course, if you port Mac games for a living, I'm sure you would rather that the game companies did not do it that way.
This seems like a good time to put a plug in for good ol' "pencil and dice" role-playing. Rather than jump into Star Wars Galaxies or whatever, consider giving that new 3rd Edition of D&D a try (or some other RPG if you prefer). There are many advantages:
1. Lower startup cost. A $60 set of three books and a handful of dice is all you really need for a group of 5 or 6 friends to start playing. (Others are available, but ya don't really need 'em.)
2. You get to actually talk to the people you are gaming with, face to face. This allows you to beat the living crap out of anybody who is being a jerk, a feature which MMORPG's sadly lack. Also, you never need to look at the fucked-up hybrid shorthand that all the shitty typists on EQ inevitably resort to. If you were never an EQ player, you have no idea how annoying it got to see "r u cleric? heal plz." every time some Iksar monk saw you carrying a hammer.
3. More room for creativity.
4. No monthly fees.
5. If you were one of those geeks who played the original D&D back when you were in Junior High School, there's the spiffy nostalgia value.
6. No spawn points, no camping, no repetitive quests, no worries about 250 other players going on the exact same "epic" quest as you at any given time.
7. The originality of the stories are limited only by the imagination of the cleverest person in your group.
Neverwinter Nights looks like it might emulate the DM-run roleplay experience fairly well in some ways, and I'm sure I will waste a little time playing it, but it can't completely replace the fun you can have with a weekly or bi-weekly gaming group. Anyway, that's just my opinion. YMMV.
As for EQ, I had an account active for quite some time, because of the low-ish system requirements that allowed me to game on an old AMD K-6 333 with a cheap Voodoo3 card. (I prefer to keep my Mac free for doing other things, and the gaming PC sat next to it for when I felt like wasting some time.)
When the Shadows of Luclin expansion came out, they upped the requirements for all users, not just the ones who bought the expansion, so I chose to close my account rather than buy a new gaming PC.
My guess is that the Mac version's system requirements will be so rigid that it would probably demand tieing up my main G4 workstation (even though a well-coded port of that game really should be able to run fine on an old iMac G3-400... we all know that it won't though, eh?)
I'll pass, thanks. Neverwinter Nights for Mac will probably blow it out of the water anyway. If the Mac port of EQ came out two years ago, I would have been all over it... now I just don't care.
There's a lesson here for game design shops, though. Simultanious development efforts == Loyal Mac customer base. Bungie knew it, Blizzard has learned it. Even if your releases are a month or three apart (as with NWN), it will still profit you much more than porting a long-obsolete game and trying to sell it at new-release prices. Macs may be only 5% of the overall computer market, but keep in mind that over half of that other 95% is made up of office PC's that will never, ever be used as gaming stations, so efforts to build a simultanious Mac port actually reaches a proportionally larger unrealized market than you may have considered.
The driver's license has long ago ceased to be a certification of a driver's ability to operate a motor vehicle.
You still can't get one without first passing a test to show you know the traffic laws, and then demonstrate your ability to drive to the satisfaction of the state. So it is still a certification of your ability to operate a motor vehicle.
Perhaps he is not interested in participating in sectarian debate between those who identify themselves a "Christian" and just wants to stand up and be counted as "not an athiest or agnostic" (which appears to be a rather bold and rare position to take among the crowd on Slashdot, because it seems that the majority of those here who chose to talk about religion describe themselves as not being religious.)
On the other hand, he could just be a troll, hoping people will get all heated up about the confrontational tone of his sig file, in which case, YHBT YHL HAND.
The question every American should have been asking in the case you used as an example, is what the fuck is the federal congress doing holding the purse-strings of your local school in the first place. This problem never would have come up if all federal funding of local education facilities was abolished in favor of state & local funding. I mean, if your state is denied that federal funding for some reason, you still must pay the same federal taxes as the states who get it, so your local ability to generate education revenue is then hindered by your requirement to subsidize the other 50 states. Sorry for getting off-topic, but that sort of thing chaps my libertarian ass.
And there were no carriage operator licenses that I'm aware of.
And there still aren't, as far as I am aware. If you want to drive a carriage from Iowa to Missouri (while staying off I-35 and not trespassing on private property), feel free. If you want to drive a mororized vehicle, capable of speeds in excess of 30 MPH, you need to be certified to operate it (a driver's license). Looks like you can get around just as well now as you could then without a license. (Perhaps even more, because you are less likely to have your carriage attacked by bandits or hostile "injuns" these days.)
You chance of getting killed in a plane crash is less than your chance of getting killed in a car crash, yes... But most of us in our cars every day for 1-2 hours a day (some of us even more).
Let's look at a statistical sample of people who fly at least twice a week (touring rock stars). Lets use the list of those who made the Rock-n-Roll Hall Of Fame as out sample group... Holy shit, a lot of them died in plane crashes, didn't they?
Now take a random sample of a thoudand or so pizza delivery guys (people who drive all day, five or six days a week). Out of that sample, there might be a couple deaths, but probably more were killed by muggers than accidents.
To carry Mark Twain's series one step farther: there are lies, damn lies, statistics, and then there are people trying to sell you on air travel by telling you flying is safer than driving.
police profiling of drug couriers (hope you're not DWB- Driving While Black)
Actually, the profile for a drug courier is a white woman driving alone in a rented car, because zero-tollerance laws have led smugglers to use rentals more, and most of the mules they use are white women. Also, women rarely travel alone for long distances in rental cars, so a woman in a Taurus that says "Avis" on the back, by herself, in the middle of nowhere, crusing down the highway at exactly the speed limit, tends to stand out like a sore thumb as a possible courier.
The "DWB" thing is a result of car-theft profiling (and/or redneck cops pulling blacks over for the hell of it), not drug smuggler profiling.
Many parts of the government (especially law enforcement) have a certain, very consistent agenda which doesn't change much.
Preservation of government jobs?
Seriously, though... The agenda of those who oppose strident regulation doesn't change very much either, so the pendulum tends to swing back and forth until it finally settles somewhere that almost everybody feels they can live with. Radical changes (even ones with obvious moral high ground, such as the abolition of slavery) typically require decades, if not centuries to implement. It took about 3 quarters of the 20th Century for pro-abortionists to make it leagal in all 50 states, and their opposition has been trying to overturn Roe v. Wade for three decades since then without success.
Changes are slow in a democracy because there are a lot of sides to such debates, and the one that feels the most shafted at any given moment tends to be the loudest. I call that a strength of the system.
So to the community - what is it about David Bowie that fascinates you?
Fascinates me? Well, let's see...
His eyes are two different colors, like you see on some wolves. That's just freaky.
In spite of being the first major rock superstar to declare his homosexuality, he's married to a supermodel. What's up with that?
Brian Eno solo works are all self-indulgent shit. David Bowie used him as a producer and not only created great albums, but launced Eno's career as a studio knob-turner, allowing him to produce some of the best works by Talking Heads and U2, among others.
Like Leonard Cohen, his singing voice gets both lower and cooler as he ages.
That pretty much covers what "fascinates" me about Bowie. As for what makes him "stand out from all the others,"? I would start with his ability to both stay on the cutting edge and make great music for about 35 years (so far). How many 60's psychedelic acts (which is how he started) made good 70's rock albums? I can think of 3: Bowie, The Doors, and Pink Floyd. How many 70's rockers made 80's pop albums that got played in the clubs. A few, including Bowie. How many acts made the transition from pop to punk, or from there to goth, or from there to adult contemporary? You might be able to come up with examples. But now the big question: How many artists have made great, enduring, landmark albums in each and every one of these rock sub-genre's, and can hold his head high among the best bands from each? Only one. Only David Bowie.
He pretty much invented Glam (both as a musician and a producer for Lou Reed and Mott The Hoople), without which there would have been no funk as we know it.
His breakaway hit "Let's Dance" rescued 80's dance music from the soulless synth-pop that was beginning to dominate it.
I am clearly in the minority in my high opinion of his more recent work. I thought "Tin Machine II" was a masterpiece, and their live album was even better... but you can now find both of them in the $3 bin of most used CD stores, along with the very groovy "Buddha Of Suburbia" and the freakish nightmare soundrack "Outside".
And on lots of Beatle albums, the guitar playing, etc. isn't any of the Beatles, either.
Um. No.
A studio drummer was used on one of The Beatles' first singles, Eric Clapton played the solo on "While My Guitar Gently Weeps", and Billy Preston sat in on keys for their famous rooftop concert while recording "Let It Be", but all the guitars, with the exception of that Clapton solo and the occation lick played by Paul, was done by John Lennon & George Harrison.
I prefer the Bowie Albums that featured Robert Fripp the most.
Robert Fripp is good (and still doing interesting stuff with King Crimson), but I'll take both Stevie Ray Vaughn ("Let's Dance") and Reeves Gabriels (pretty much everything from "Tin Machine" up to "EART HL I NG"), as well as Mick Ronson over Fripp... That's really just a matter of personal tastes, though.
I find the whole evolution of Rock music fascinating, but my fascination doesn't go back past the late 60s because before that it wasn't really "rock" in the current sense at all.
Allow me to advise you towards a satisfying path to continue your musical odyssey. Look towards the mid-50's recordings by Muddy Waters. I think that there you will find the true river of inspiration behind what Jimmys Page and Hendrix were doing. While you are at it, check out the team of Junior Wells and Buddy Guy (one of many great spin-offs from Muddy's band), and the early-50's recordings of Ray Charles (basically anything before "Modern Sounds In Country Music, which was his "cross-over" album to get cracker DJ's to play his stuff). These men, and not the Ricky Nelsons and Bill Haleys of the world, were the pre-"British Invasion" bearers of the sound you are looking for.
Imagine that in the 60's and 70's the 20 year olds were getting exited about the music from the 1930's or the 1940's.
John Lennon & Paul McCartney both dug 40's showtunes like Rogers & Hammerstein. They also were heavy into depression-era blues like Robert Johnson and Elmore James.
70's glam-rock like David Bowie and Lou Reed was positively dripping with jazz influences. This makes your comment "The truth is, the 20 year olds of today should not be listening to Ziggy Stardust. Its as relevant to them as Fats Waller was to listeners of the Velvet Underground in the 1960's" particularilly funny. Listen to some Fats Waller, then listent to "Goodnight Ladies", the last track on Lou Reed's "Transformer". Then come back and tell us how poorly informed you really were.
It was almost impossible to find a bio of the 80's band XTC that did not contain the words "Beatle-based pop".
Nearly every musician who has ever played a solo worth a shit will count Louis Armstrong as one of his main influences.
To put it bluntly, you are unlikely to ever do anything that matters as an artist unless you have knowledge and command of what has been before.
It is a sad indication of how pathetic these 20 somethings are, that they have to look back to music made ten years before they were born.
This has always been the case. A band called "10 Years After", who played decade-old covers, performed at Woodstock fer crisakes!
I know people who will swear up and down that "Sgt. Pepper's" is way better in mono, but I refuse to believe that.
The Beatles were notorious for the use of "Popcorn Stereo" (a term used for when an entire instrument is layed directly onto the left or right signal only... the result of which is that, rather than a realistic stereo illusion of sound coming from one side of a performace stage, you hear it coming directly from the center of your loudspeaker). In the case of "Sgt. Pepper's", I would argue that The Beatles were not trying to create correct stereo imaging, and were intentionally using popcorn stereo for dramatic, cartoony effect. (They also recorded violins using headphones as microphones, and did a lot of other weird crap, like multiple layers of the same orchestra recording to make the string section sound bigger than it was, messing with tape speeds, etc. John Lennon wanted to do a lot of stuff different just to be different when they were making that album.)
The best rock album that I know of for good use of stereo sound was not intended to be stereo, but quadrophonic. Those cash sounds at the beginning of "Money" on Pink Floyd's "Dar Side of the Moon" were supposed to surround you. While the band was still working on recording "Dark Side" as a quad record, the quadrophonic fad fizzled out. Alan Parsons and the other engineers took the original material (which was intened to go to four tracks), and did their best to create a similar feel on two tracks. The result was probably the most meticulous stereo imaging you will ever hear on a rock album, and it's the reason why I include track 1: "Breathe" with my list of material I insist on using to test out speakers that I am thinking of buying.
I'm right there with you on the Regas & Linns... But those who turn their noses at Technics as "DJ Tables" are not really giving them enough credit. Very steady, very quiet, good motors, decent arms, easy to maintain. There's a reason why so many radio broadcasters buy them. The Rega is a better deal, but Technics does make decent equipment.
Now we have returned to the style that existed prior to 1967. Most CDs are just a collection of songs with no unifiying theme, and often the quality is so spotty that there is only a track or two worth listening to.
Actually, the lack of depth in albums has always been a problem in dance music, as well as some rock. Two pre-selected songs are carefully produced and groomed as singles, and anything else that good is shelved for the next album because two singles are enough to drive album sales. Then you quickly record a lot of filler.
However, it was not MP3 that killed the concept album, but MTV. The expense of putting out video's resulted in greater pressure on AOR bands to select a couple of "radio friendly" singles and put 90% of their effort into perfecting them (and executives didn't give a crap about the other 30 minutes on the album). David Bowie, champion of the LP that he is, attempted to buck this trend when his band, Tin Machine, released a video of a medley that contained all the songs on their first album. It hardly ever got played though.... First of all, it was over 10 minutes, which MTV hated. Secondly, a medley doesn't grind musical themes into the listener's heads the way the typical verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus song does. Most importantly, the world was simply not ready to hear the dance-pop titan (who recorded "Let's Dance" a few years earlier) playing speed-punk with a bizarrely atonal melodic guitar player and a rhythm section made up of Soupy Sales's two sons.
Prince also tried to defy the single-pushing machine the MTV had created, by releasing the entire album "Lovesexy" on one 40-minute CD track. All that did was piss off his fans. Besides, he had not really done a concept album that stayed on-concept since "Controversy", which was before anybody outside of Minneapolis knew who the hell he was. These days TAFKATAFKAP (The Artist Formerly Known As The Artist Formerly Known As Prince) is an internet-only musician, still making piles of money even though he sells fewer albums, because these days he keeps it all.
Bowie, meanwhile, continues to crank out cool and interesting music, even though nobody is listening any more. Somebody correct me if I am wrong, but I believe that he has not gone platinum with an album since the mid 80's. (unless you count greatest hits collections).
As it turns out, The Buggles were quite prophetic. Video really did the radio star... and MP3 burried it. Rest In Peace, Ziggy.
I see what you're saying, but I'm talking about figuring out whether or not the experience is worth the money.
That's a wise decision in most cases, although I am also of the opinion that if you don't listen to some of those classic albums in their entirety, or at the very least a side at a time, you are not really experincing them in the ideal manner. Sampling singles could slightly diminish your enjoyment.
Personally, I consider the times I bought and listened to an album, only to be badly disapointed (the Yes album "Big Generator" comes to mind, as does ELP's "Black Moon") to be money well spent, because without risking the occational dud, I would have not experienced the joy of encountering great albums like "Ziggy Stardust" or Jethro Tull's "Thick As A Brick" in their entirety on first encounter. I consider the discovery of a new treasuered album to be every bit as memorable as seeing a great movie on the big screen
However, unless you already are familiar with the artist in question, buying an album without sampling it first can be quite a gamble. I reccomend asking for informed opinions from people who you know and respect. Everybody knows at least one album junkie... go talk to that guy, and one or two others. Hell, maybe they will even loan (or burn) you a copy of "Ziggy Stardust" (and perhaps Lou Reed's "Transformer" & Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" while they're at it). While you can sometimes find some interesting bands by grabbing an MP3 or two from an indie band that has a lot of buzz at the moment, IMHO you will miss out on a great deal of awesome pre-1990 rock, blues, jazz, etc. if you solely rely on what the Kazaa Kiddies decide to put in their file-sharing menu.
Slashdot Mirror
Metropolis was the shit, by the way. A little slow to get started, but worth it in the end. Everybody go rent it, and be sure to watch it in Japanese.
Back to your point: I could not disagree more. Big distributors selling anime is good news. For all your ADV snobbery, I am compelled to point out that some of these small distributors are doing a half-assed job at best. A friend of mine has had to return his Slayers DVD boxed set three times now because the audio track was all fucked up.
But that's changing the subject, isn't it? Pretty much nobody upgrades the CPU in their laptop computer, Mac or PC, so it has nothing to do with it.
I could get into the "desktop Macs are too hard to upgrade" debate with you, but it's way off the topic of the thread.
Getting back on topic, you simply will not get more ! for your $ in a laptop than buying a Mac. Their CPU's run cooler (and on less power) than either AMD or Intel chips, which allows them to run full-speed and fanless for hours on a single battery. They've got pretty much every feature you need already built in (modem, Ethernet, external video, USB, firewire) and an antenna for adding 802.11b wireless networking for a mere C-note. They are built rugged, have nice screens, and are reasonably priced.
Apple may never be able to compete on raw cost-for-hardware in the destop arena, where a home-built PC remains the ideal choice for penny pinchers (unless a Mac OS machine is worth the slight premium to you)... But their laptops take a back seat to nobody.
Does every new kind of fraud require a new law? Isn't it enough to say that they are deceiving consumers and shut them down?
These sorts of scams look to me something for enforcement agents and courts to worry about, not lawmakers.
However, if you watch with the Japanese tracks, a lot of those shows didn't synch up in the original language in the first place, so one could argue that they are fixing a problem that they could just as easilly ignore.
One of my least favorite dubs comes from "Martian Successor Nadesico". There's a character on that show who frequently cusses "Baka" in the Japanese track. Baka loosely translates to fool or dumbass, both as a plural and singular form, but is also sometimes used as a catch-all explative. The sub tends to use the word "fools" most of the time, but (again, probably due to the "mouth-flap" issue) the dub falls back on "idiots". It probably gets especially confusing for english-dub watchers when the word "baka" is actually printed in english letters on computer displays a couple times. Personally, if I were in charge of dubbing (or subbing) that show, I would have left the word "baka" untranslated. It is used so heavilly that any English-speaking viewer would be able to grasp the meaning from the context after watching two or three episodes.
You didn't even finish reading my post, did you?
Yess, but a game that sells 230K is considered much, much more successful than a game that sells 200K. That's what simultaneous development can do for you.
Of course, if you port Mac games for a living, I'm sure you would rather that the game companies did not do it that way.
1. Lower startup cost. A $60 set of three books and a handful of dice is all you really need for a group of 5 or 6 friends to start playing. (Others are available, but ya don't really need 'em.)
2. You get to actually talk to the people you are gaming with, face to face. This allows you to beat the living crap out of anybody who is being a jerk, a feature which MMORPG's sadly lack. Also, you never need to look at the fucked-up hybrid shorthand that all the shitty typists on EQ inevitably resort to. If you were never an EQ player, you have no idea how annoying it got to see "r u cleric? heal plz." every time some Iksar monk saw you carrying a hammer.
3. More room for creativity.
4. No monthly fees.
5. If you were one of those geeks who played the original D&D back when you were in Junior High School, there's the spiffy nostalgia value.
6. No spawn points, no camping, no repetitive quests, no worries about 250 other players going on the exact same "epic" quest as you at any given time.
7. The originality of the stories are limited only by the imagination of the cleverest person in your group.
Neverwinter Nights looks like it might emulate the DM-run roleplay experience fairly well in some ways, and I'm sure I will waste a little time playing it, but it can't completely replace the fun you can have with a weekly or bi-weekly gaming group. Anyway, that's just my opinion. YMMV.
Among the crowd I ran with, it was known as DivorceQuest.
As for EQ, I had an account active for quite some time, because of the low-ish system requirements that allowed me to game on an old AMD K-6 333 with a cheap Voodoo3 card. (I prefer to keep my Mac free for doing other things, and the gaming PC sat next to it for when I felt like wasting some time.)
When the Shadows of Luclin expansion came out, they upped the requirements for all users, not just the ones who bought the expansion, so I chose to close my account rather than buy a new gaming PC.
My guess is that the Mac version's system requirements will be so rigid that it would probably demand tieing up my main G4 workstation (even though a well-coded port of that game really should be able to run fine on an old iMac G3-400... we all know that it won't though, eh?)
I'll pass, thanks. Neverwinter Nights for Mac will probably blow it out of the water anyway. If the Mac port of EQ came out two years ago, I would have been all over it... now I just don't care.
There's a lesson here for game design shops, though. Simultanious development efforts == Loyal Mac customer base. Bungie knew it, Blizzard has learned it. Even if your releases are a month or three apart (as with NWN), it will still profit you much more than porting a long-obsolete game and trying to sell it at new-release prices. Macs may be only 5% of the overall computer market, but keep in mind that over half of that other 95% is made up of office PC's that will never, ever be used as gaming stations, so efforts to build a simultanious Mac port actually reaches a proportionally larger unrealized market than you may have considered.
You still can't get one without first passing a test to show you know the traffic laws, and then demonstrate your ability to drive to the satisfaction of the state. So it is still a certification of your ability to operate a motor vehicle.
On the other hand, he could just be a troll, hoping people will get all heated up about the confrontational tone of his sig file, in which case, YHBT YHL HAND.
The question every American should have been asking in the case you used as an example, is what the fuck is the federal congress doing holding the purse-strings of your local school in the first place. This problem never would have come up if all federal funding of local education facilities was abolished in favor of state & local funding. I mean, if your state is denied that federal funding for some reason, you still must pay the same federal taxes as the states who get it, so your local ability to generate education revenue is then hindered by your requirement to subsidize the other 50 states. Sorry for getting off-topic, but that sort of thing chaps my libertarian ass.
And there still aren't, as far as I am aware. If you want to drive a carriage from Iowa to Missouri (while staying off I-35 and not trespassing on private property), feel free. If you want to drive a mororized vehicle, capable of speeds in excess of 30 MPH, you need to be certified to operate it (a driver's license). Looks like you can get around just as well now as you could then without a license. (Perhaps even more, because you are less likely to have your carriage attacked by bandits or hostile "injuns" these days.)
Let's look at a statistical sample of people who fly at least twice a week (touring rock stars). Lets use the list of those who made the Rock-n-Roll Hall Of Fame as out sample group... Holy shit, a lot of them died in plane crashes, didn't they?
Now take a random sample of a thoudand or so pizza delivery guys (people who drive all day, five or six days a week). Out of that sample, there might be a couple deaths, but probably more were killed by muggers than accidents.
To carry Mark Twain's series one step farther: there are lies, damn lies, statistics, and then there are people trying to sell you on air travel by telling you flying is safer than driving.
Actually, the profile for a drug courier is a white woman driving alone in a rented car, because zero-tollerance laws have led smugglers to use rentals more, and most of the mules they use are white women. Also, women rarely travel alone for long distances in rental cars, so a woman in a Taurus that says "Avis" on the back, by herself, in the middle of nowhere, crusing down the highway at exactly the speed limit, tends to stand out like a sore thumb as a possible courier.
The "DWB" thing is a result of car-theft profiling (and/or redneck cops pulling blacks over for the hell of it), not drug smuggler profiling.
Preservation of government jobs?
Seriously, though... The agenda of those who oppose strident regulation doesn't change very much either, so the pendulum tends to swing back and forth until it finally settles somewhere that almost everybody feels they can live with. Radical changes (even ones with obvious moral high ground, such as the abolition of slavery) typically require decades, if not centuries to implement. It took about 3 quarters of the 20th Century for pro-abortionists to make it leagal in all 50 states, and their opposition has been trying to overturn Roe v. Wade for three decades since then without success.
Changes are slow in a democracy because there are a lot of sides to such debates, and the one that feels the most shafted at any given moment tends to be the loudest. I call that a strength of the system.
Fascinates me? Well, let's see...
His eyes are two different colors, like you see on some wolves. That's just freaky.
In spite of being the first major rock superstar to declare his homosexuality, he's married to a supermodel. What's up with that?
Brian Eno solo works are all self-indulgent shit. David Bowie used him as a producer and not only created great albums, but launced Eno's career as a studio knob-turner, allowing him to produce some of the best works by Talking Heads and U2, among others.
Like Leonard Cohen, his singing voice gets both lower and cooler as he ages.
That pretty much covers what "fascinates" me about Bowie. As for what makes him "stand out from all the others,"? I would start with his ability to both stay on the cutting edge and make great music for about 35 years (so far). How many 60's psychedelic acts (which is how he started) made good 70's rock albums? I can think of 3: Bowie, The Doors, and Pink Floyd. How many 70's rockers made 80's pop albums that got played in the clubs. A few, including Bowie. How many acts made the transition from pop to punk, or from there to goth, or from there to adult contemporary? You might be able to come up with examples. But now the big question: How many artists have made great, enduring, landmark albums in each and every one of these rock sub-genre's, and can hold his head high among the best bands from each? Only one. Only David Bowie.
He pretty much invented Glam (both as a musician and a producer for Lou Reed and Mott The Hoople), without which there would have been no funk as we know it.
His breakaway hit "Let's Dance" rescued 80's dance music from the soulless synth-pop that was beginning to dominate it.
I am clearly in the minority in my high opinion of his more recent work. I thought "Tin Machine II" was a masterpiece, and their live album was even better... but you can now find both of them in the $3 bin of most used CD stores, along with the very groovy "Buddha Of Suburbia" and the freakish nightmare soundrack "Outside".
Um. No.
A studio drummer was used on one of The Beatles' first singles, Eric Clapton played the solo on "While My Guitar Gently Weeps", and Billy Preston sat in on keys for their famous rooftop concert while recording "Let It Be", but all the guitars, with the exception of that Clapton solo and the occation lick played by Paul, was done by John Lennon & George Harrison.
I prefer the Bowie Albums that featured Robert Fripp the most.
Robert Fripp is good (and still doing interesting stuff with King Crimson), but I'll take both Stevie Ray Vaughn ("Let's Dance") and Reeves Gabriels (pretty much everything from "Tin Machine" up to "EART HL I NG"), as well as Mick Ronson over Fripp... That's really just a matter of personal tastes, though.
Allow me to advise you towards a satisfying path to continue your musical odyssey. Look towards the mid-50's recordings by Muddy Waters. I think that there you will find the true river of inspiration behind what Jimmys Page and Hendrix were doing. While you are at it, check out the team of Junior Wells and Buddy Guy (one of many great spin-offs from Muddy's band), and the early-50's recordings of Ray Charles (basically anything before "Modern Sounds In Country Music, which was his "cross-over" album to get cracker DJ's to play his stuff). These men, and not the Ricky Nelsons and Bill Haleys of the world, were the pre-"British Invasion" bearers of the sound you are looking for.
John Lennon & Paul McCartney both dug 40's showtunes like Rogers & Hammerstein. They also were heavy into depression-era blues like Robert Johnson and Elmore James.
70's glam-rock like David Bowie and Lou Reed was positively dripping with jazz influences. This makes your comment "The truth is, the 20 year olds of today should not be listening to Ziggy Stardust. Its as relevant to them as Fats Waller was to listeners of the Velvet Underground in the 1960's" particularilly funny. Listen to some Fats Waller, then listent to "Goodnight Ladies", the last track on Lou Reed's "Transformer". Then come back and tell us how poorly informed you really were.
It was almost impossible to find a bio of the 80's band XTC that did not contain the words "Beatle-based pop".
Nearly every musician who has ever played a solo worth a shit will count Louis Armstrong as one of his main influences.
To put it bluntly, you are unlikely to ever do anything that matters as an artist unless you have knowledge and command of what has been before.
It is a sad indication of how pathetic these 20 somethings are, that they have to look back to music made ten years before they were born.
This has always been the case. A band called "10 Years After", who played decade-old covers, performed at Woodstock fer crisakes!
The Beatles were notorious for the use of "Popcorn Stereo" (a term used for when an entire instrument is layed directly onto the left or right signal only... the result of which is that, rather than a realistic stereo illusion of sound coming from one side of a performace stage, you hear it coming directly from the center of your loudspeaker). In the case of "Sgt. Pepper's", I would argue that The Beatles were not trying to create correct stereo imaging, and were intentionally using popcorn stereo for dramatic, cartoony effect. (They also recorded violins using headphones as microphones, and did a lot of other weird crap, like multiple layers of the same orchestra recording to make the string section sound bigger than it was, messing with tape speeds, etc. John Lennon wanted to do a lot of stuff different just to be different when they were making that album.)
The best rock album that I know of for good use of stereo sound was not intended to be stereo, but quadrophonic. Those cash sounds at the beginning of "Money" on Pink Floyd's "Dar Side of the Moon" were supposed to surround you. While the band was still working on recording "Dark Side" as a quad record, the quadrophonic fad fizzled out. Alan Parsons and the other engineers took the original material (which was intened to go to four tracks), and did their best to create a similar feel on two tracks. The result was probably the most meticulous stereo imaging you will ever hear on a rock album, and it's the reason why I include track 1: "Breathe" with my list of material I insist on using to test out speakers that I am thinking of buying.
I'm right there with you on the Regas & Linns... But those who turn their noses at Technics as "DJ Tables" are not really giving them enough credit. Very steady, very quiet, good motors, decent arms, easy to maintain. There's a reason why so many radio broadcasters buy them. The Rega is a better deal, but Technics does make decent equipment.
His future albums are commodities, not stocks. Sorry if I'm nitpicking.
Actually, the lack of depth in albums has always been a problem in dance music, as well as some rock. Two pre-selected songs are carefully produced and groomed as singles, and anything else that good is shelved for the next album because two singles are enough to drive album sales. Then you quickly record a lot of filler.
However, it was not MP3 that killed the concept album, but MTV. The expense of putting out video's resulted in greater pressure on AOR bands to select a couple of "radio friendly" singles and put 90% of their effort into perfecting them (and executives didn't give a crap about the other 30 minutes on the album). David Bowie, champion of the LP that he is, attempted to buck this trend when his band, Tin Machine, released a video of a medley that contained all the songs on their first album. It hardly ever got played though.... First of all, it was over 10 minutes, which MTV hated. Secondly, a medley doesn't grind musical themes into the listener's heads the way the typical verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus song does. Most importantly, the world was simply not ready to hear the dance-pop titan (who recorded "Let's Dance" a few years earlier) playing speed-punk with a bizarrely atonal melodic guitar player and a rhythm section made up of Soupy Sales's two sons.
Prince also tried to defy the single-pushing machine the MTV had created, by releasing the entire album "Lovesexy" on one 40-minute CD track. All that did was piss off his fans. Besides, he had not really done a concept album that stayed on-concept since "Controversy", which was before anybody outside of Minneapolis knew who the hell he was. These days TAFKATAFKAP (The Artist Formerly Known As The Artist Formerly Known As Prince) is an internet-only musician, still making piles of money even though he sells fewer albums, because these days he keeps it all.
Bowie, meanwhile, continues to crank out cool and interesting music, even though nobody is listening any more. Somebody correct me if I am wrong, but I believe that he has not gone platinum with an album since the mid 80's. (unless you count greatest hits collections).
As it turns out, The Buggles were quite prophetic. Video really did the radio star... and MP3 burried it. Rest In Peace, Ziggy.
That's a wise decision in most cases, although I am also of the opinion that if you don't listen to some of those classic albums in their entirety, or at the very least a side at a time, you are not really experincing them in the ideal manner. Sampling singles could slightly diminish your enjoyment.
Personally, I consider the times I bought and listened to an album, only to be badly disapointed (the Yes album "Big Generator" comes to mind, as does ELP's "Black Moon") to be money well spent, because without risking the occational dud, I would have not experienced the joy of encountering great albums like "Ziggy Stardust" or Jethro Tull's "Thick As A Brick" in their entirety on first encounter. I consider the discovery of a new treasuered album to be every bit as memorable as seeing a great movie on the big screen
However, unless you already are familiar with the artist in question, buying an album without sampling it first can be quite a gamble. I reccomend asking for informed opinions from people who you know and respect. Everybody knows at least one album junkie... go talk to that guy, and one or two others. Hell, maybe they will even loan (or burn) you a copy of "Ziggy Stardust" (and perhaps Lou Reed's "Transformer" & Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" while they're at it). While you can sometimes find some interesting bands by grabbing an MP3 or two from an indie band that has a lot of buzz at the moment, IMHO you will miss out on a great deal of awesome pre-1990 rock, blues, jazz, etc. if you solely rely on what the Kazaa Kiddies decide to put in their file-sharing menu.