I agree with all your points. I'm no fan of the show (unless they manage to get a whole lot better), but I'm reminded of the Troy McClure hosted Simpsons flashback epidode. They showed one of the original pieces from the Tracy Ullman show where Bart pontificates about the nature of reality or something and cut back to Troy with a strained smile on his face saying "Ha ha! They haven't changed a bit, have they?"
There's a hint of cleverness in the show which is more than you see in most sitcoms.
I'd never heard of this show til I saw an ad for it right before it came on. I don't watch much TV, but it looked like it might be decent, so I watched it.
Overall it feels like it was well written, then attacked by a commitee of executives. There are moments that are really funny and well animated, but there are clunkers, too. The fact that there ARE actually good jokes and references give me hope that it could become a good show if it gets time to mature. Seinfeld, and even the Simpsons didn't find their stride until a few seasons in, I'd like to see this show get that same chance.
A few game references I spotted:
-A guy comes out of nowhere and punches the dad while they're at a mall and he says, "What is this, Vice City?"
-The mom is an obvious Lara Croft wannabe, always raiding tombs looking for sacred artifacts to decorate her home with, she even has the dual pistols. Her daughter starts picketing outside the tombs for desecrating them.
-A sort of old, fat, and bitter Sonic knockoff named Turbo who they adopt as a pet and who encourages the kids to smoke and rob stores
-The oddworld cast, of course, (we even see Abe do his "sneak-by" move), which attacks Turbo at the end. They even got the names for a few of them right;
-The son skates through the mall, grinding on escaltors just like Tony Hawk games.
As another poster mentioned they seem to be flipping between standard sitcom stuff (the dad has to take his daughter to buy her first bra) and video-game-characters-as-a-family humor (their neighbors are kung-fu fighters who are constantly fighting off ninjas that are attacking their house). They need to find their balance between these. Some of the jokes are less than hilarious (the father brings all the manly stuff he can carry when they go to the ligere (sp?) shop), but there's some really funny stuff like when the daughters yelling over the cell phone wakes up the monsters the mom is trying to creep by, and the dad can't figure out how to drive the moms high-tech minivan ("Don't you drive a car for a living, dad?" "Shut up!").
The animation can be a little weak at times, but I can forgive that on a weekly show. I even saw a texturing problem when the mom was fighting the big rock monster at the end. The Turbo character annoys me for some reason.
Overall I'm willing to watch the show to see if they can iron out these problems. There's lots of good stuff they could do, there's always new games coming out. Think if Penny Arcade-style humor was made into a show, like this recent comic.
It works well. Thanks to They Might Be Giants the facts of James K. Polk's presidency are forever burned into my brain. And whenever someone askes how far the sun is from the earth I can say "about 93 million miles away, that's why it looks so small."
Okay, let's bring the analogy back to music. Would you be okay if you went to see your favorite band and they simply inserted their CD and pretended to play and sing? What if they didn't even record the original CD (a la Milli Vanilli), would you still pay to see the show?
I've never been big on seeing live orchestas (though I've been to a few musicals with live orchestras), but I've see plenty of live music and you get something you don't from a CD. There's something very impressive about seeing a skilled artist (or group of artists) perform right in front of you. They may screw up. They may get off sync with the action on stage and have to get back on track. They may have to compensate for some technical problem, or being tired, or hung over. The amazing thing is when they do it all right, and you've witnessed a wonderful performance that won't be heard ever again. If all you're interested in is the sounds, why see a live performace at all?
You don't enjoy it just because it was difficult, but because that guy on stage or down in the orchesta pit just entertained you for a few hours doing what he's been training his whole life to do.
If it was the design of the car you liked, have you ever seen a Honda del Sol? I bought a low-mileage '95 del Sol a few years ago and I love it. It's a two-seater like the Fiero, but I've had 0 problems with it after 60,000 miles except for the roof squeeking occasionally and recently the fan speed dial on the A/C came loose. It's a great little car and the top comes off! (It stores in the trunk.)
Hey, I don't need any company out here! All the statues Salo made are more than enough for me. Haven't you bastards done enough? Leave me alone! And they better stay away from my son Chrono, he can be a bit violent at times.
(If you don't recognize my handle this joke will make no sense. Carry on.)
If I'm going to a network party, and I show up with a Mac, I'm going to be left out unless we're playing Unreal or something.
Are you trolling, or do you not know much about macs? How about:
C&C Generals
Quake III
Starcraft
Diablo II
Halo
SimCity
Age of Empires II
Civilization III
Age Of Mythology
Alien Vs. Predator II
Baldur's Gate II
Harry Potter Games
Max Payne
Medal Of Honor games
Neverwinter Nights
No One Lives Forever 1 & 2
Return To Castle Wolfenstein
Jedi Knight II
Tony Hawk Games
Warcraft III
Lineage
Everquest
True, PCs get more games, and sometimes the Mac releases come later, but quite a lot of the games I buy ship with Mac and PC versions on the same disk.
The armor looks great, I love the deepeyes set, but for the love of god someone buy these boys a decent digital camera and some web design skills.
No offense to those guys, but that weak website looks like someone on geocities made it. Hire a studio photographer to get some good shots of someone wearing the armor, how much could it cost?
While I have a generally low tolerance for "experimental" music, there's a band that used this kind of video mixing to make great music.
A couple of years ago a friend of mine went to a weird multimedia show at a club where they hung sheets up on the wall and did live video/music mixing. He bought their CD which had video mixes on it for about half the songs, I think.
Anyway they were called Emergency Broadcast Network. The album was Telecommunications Breakdown and it used clips from news broadcasts and infomercials. There's a very small clip from one of the songs one that album here. There also some better resolution clips of some of their other songs here, and a better resolution download of "Rock This Base" here. I don't think any of those sons are as good as the stuff on Telecommunications Breakdown, but check it out, I'm not sure if that album is still available anywhere right now.
It's just a jump to the left and then a step to the right, dammmit!
/me adjusts his wig and tightens his bustier
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of
on
What You Can't Say
·
· Score: 1
I don't agree with everything you say here, but I hope this will stay civil.
Blacks are more racist than whites
That's kind of hard to define I think. Are you saying the average black person is more racist than the average white person? Or that "black culture" is more racist than "white culture"? Any kind of gross generalization like this is bound to be argued about, but I'd say the average black person is about as racist as the average white while black culture is a bit more racist due to prominent blacks who still equate any slight against them as a return to the jim crow days.
Homosexuality IS NOT NORMAL - That's why the work "queer" was used to describe it, becuase it's not normal.
Again, what exactly to you mean by "normal"? if you mean unusual, you're certainly right. The vast majority of people are straight. Apart from the modern meaning of the word it would be just as correct to call a black person living in japan "queer" as it would be to call a gay person in America that. If you mean freakish or something-is-not-right-with-those-people I'd have to disagree. From my personal experience the gay people that I've known have been (on average) more intelligent and sucessful than straight people. But as for calling it "wrong" I don't think we know enough about why some people are gay and some are straight to say that it's something that needs to be fixed. In my mind it's like saying left-handed people are "wrong" and need to be corrected.
"Tolerace" means tolerate
I agree completely, but there's a fine line between grudging tolerance and suppression.
Prayer is schools is harmless
This also depends on what you mean. If you're saying school directed prayer where everyone is expected to pray I'd say that can be very harmful if it conflicts with what the kids are brought up to believe. It's a way of enforcing a religion by making anyone who doesn't participate into an outcast. But I think there are ways to allow prayer without forcing it on people who don't want to.
The Democratic party hates Blacks
I have no opinion on this except to say that hate is a rather stong word here. The KKK and Hitler hated blacks.
Black is not a racial slurr - African-american is offensive to me, because you think that you're BLACK first, then American when you say that.
I think this is a confusion of grammar. "American" is the noun, "African" is the modifier. "What kind of American?" "African-American". I agree that black isn't a racial slur, but it seems like even noticing that someone is not white can be taken as a slur these days. I always remember some comedy bit I saw a while ago where someone was trying to point out a black guy in a room full of white people while avoiding mentioning he was black.
"That guy over there. In the red shirt."
"The guy wearing jeans?"
"No, the guy talking to Bob."
"That's Ed."
"No, the other guy, with the... with the... THE BLACK GUY"
(whole room turns to look at him scornfully)
I can understand things like the N* word, but this is rediciulous.
This is actually something that annoys me. I don't see why rap videos have to censor "the N word". It's no different than the way that gay people adopted the word queer. Let them appropriate it and thus render it harmless.
I remember a game a friend of mine had for his SNES, which sat somewhere between Wolf3d and Doom in its 2.5D quality... You played Noah, and you had to go around shooting your animals and some evil demons who were trying to prevent you from rounding up your animals. Of course, it wasn't real shooting; you were using a slingshot and you shot out pellets of food with a bit of tranq in them.
Um... a single drive keeps the contents of your ENTIRE business at any given time?
1. raid5 a few drives together, you get >= the hdd space, plus, you have redundency!
2. dvd burner/tape backup that drive, and store offsite(in a corner closet of your house)
As for #2, we already make backups on DVD. The harddrive only contains active projects. As for #1 I agree completely.
I came on board after the equipment was purchased, the other two partners know very little about computers (which was part of the reason I was brought in). For various reasons the commerical market here went downhill, and the show got picked up by the local WB affiliate (it was on PBS for 5 years before that). So we've been waiting for our ratings and the advertisers to come on board. When that happens I'll be setting up the system the way it should be.
I''m the editor in a small (3 people total) production company. I think you need to look at how much aggravation you're willing to put up with and how "Professional" you want to be. Are you okay with telling your clients "we can't do that" if they ask for some particualr effect or style the OS software can't do? Are you willing to spend the time and effort an OS solution is going to take?
I think you may be overestimating the need for massive hard drives at the expense of ease-of-use, hardware availability and cost. We use a single 120 gig hard drive for all our editing. We edit an hour-long show each week as well as commercials, some corporate videos and a twice-a-year dance show that runs at about 5 hours of footage without having too many space problems. A second 120 gig drive would be more than enough. The video is compressed when captured to about 1 gig every 5 minutes, but it looks so good the viewers won't notice it.
The two main expenses for us are the BetaSP deck (about $10,000) and the computer itself (about $5000 with capture card). Final Cut Pro is $1000, but you may be able to buy an older version for less. Version 2 is fine, version 3 adds some better titling software, and version 4 has lots of bells and whistles you may not need.
If you're shooting on MiniDV you can cut about $10000 off the cost right there. MiniDV decks are cheap and you can capture over firewire so you don't even need an expensive capture card. You can even use iMovie if all you need are basic transitions and titling, but I think you can only use one video track (plus titling) and two audio tracks.
For editing graphics we use The GIMP until we can afford photoshop, but all titling is done in FCP.
Basically if you're going to be making money at this the up-front costs are well worth it. Especially on something as complex as video-editing software I'm happy to pay for a solution that "just works" instead of having to worry about computer problems when I'm working.
Compare it to 3D modeling. If you're going to spend 40 hours a week doing paid work would you rather use Blender for free and accept the limitations it has, or pay for Maya or 3DS Max and get your work done?
When most of the cost is the hardware (camera, computer, VTR), it may be worth it to pay the $1000 for software that will do what you want with minimal fuss.
I'm increasingly convinced that the people we're trying desperately not to piss off are not minorities, but liberal white jackasses who think they're under some sort of obligation to rescue all those poor defenseless minorities from oppressive words.
I have to agree with that. I edit a local hip-hop interview/video show and it always baffles me that I have to edit the word nigger out of the interviews. The record companies already take it out of the videos.
I mean, clearly the people saying it aren't offended by it. We have a show called Queer Eye For The Straight Guy, why not a hip-hop show called Nigga Beats produced by black people? Because all the suburban white mothers would be shocked and offended. Context is what matters with words like this, not the words themselves.
I think you hit the nail on the head. I'm always wary of any kind of "it must be all or nothing" claims like this. Two examples:
1) I used to work at a pre-press shop, mostly with 30-40 year olds (I was about 20). Since I knew a bit more about networking and computers in general I was usually able to troubleshoot quicker than my coworkers who had been doing it longer than me. I've never been able to wrap my head around programming, but I knew what to check when a print job wasn't going through.
2) In Arthur C. Clarke's 3001 Frank Poole (an astronaut from our time) is surprised to learn that his fellow astronauts in 3001 don't know much about the guts of their ship, just how to make it work and what to do when it doesn't work right. The ships were so complex by that point that only specialists understood them on a basic level.
We passed the point a long time ago when the computer as a whole could be understood by a non-specialist. Then add in various operating systems and programming languages and see how many non-specialsts really understand it all at a fundamental level.
I'm sure there are people here how could speak intelligently about processor arcitecture, linux kernal code, and router programming, but there's no way a secretary who gets paid $10 an hour is going to know all of that. Or even someone like me who works with computers all the time but doesn't have the hacker's mindset to learn all the minutae.
Well this story is dead, but maybe you'll see this.
Yeah, I've heard of them, but not that particular song. I edit a video show in Houston, and we aired their "Ridin' Spinners" video a while ago.
The whole cough-syrup thing is big in Houston. We spent a weekend with Lil Flip last summer and they were mixing it with orange soda. Big Moe is also big on it. He released an album called "City of Syrup" and did a song (and a really excellent video) called "Purple Stuff" (the video had oompah-loompahs from Willy Wonka wearing purple wigs). From the few times I've seen him I can believe he indulges in it quite often.
It's just one of those odd sub-culture things most people have never heard of, I guess.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, there is the mythical American Express Black Card for the superrich. Is that swanky enough?
There's a hint of cleverness in the show which is more than you see in most sitcoms.
Overall it feels like it was well written, then attacked by a commitee of executives. There are moments that are really funny and well animated, but there are clunkers, too. The fact that there ARE actually good jokes and references give me hope that it could become a good show if it gets time to mature. Seinfeld, and even the Simpsons didn't find their stride until a few seasons in, I'd like to see this show get that same chance.
A few game references I spotted:
-A guy comes out of nowhere and punches the dad while they're at a mall and he says, "What is this, Vice City?"
-The mom is an obvious Lara Croft wannabe, always raiding tombs looking for sacred artifacts to decorate her home with, she even has the dual pistols. Her daughter starts picketing outside the tombs for desecrating them.
-A sort of old, fat, and bitter Sonic knockoff named Turbo who they adopt as a pet and who encourages the kids to smoke and rob stores
-The oddworld cast, of course, (we even see Abe do his "sneak-by" move), which attacks Turbo at the end. They even got the names for a few of them right;
-The son skates through the mall, grinding on escaltors just like Tony Hawk games.
As another poster mentioned they seem to be flipping between standard sitcom stuff (the dad has to take his daughter to buy her first bra) and video-game-characters-as-a-family humor (their neighbors are kung-fu fighters who are constantly fighting off ninjas that are attacking their house). They need to find their balance between these. Some of the jokes are less than hilarious (the father brings all the manly stuff he can carry when they go to the ligere (sp?) shop), but there's some really funny stuff like when the daughters yelling over the cell phone wakes up the monsters the mom is trying to creep by, and the dad can't figure out how to drive the moms high-tech minivan ("Don't you drive a car for a living, dad?" "Shut up!").
The animation can be a little weak at times, but I can forgive that on a weekly show. I even saw a texturing problem when the mom was fighting the big rock monster at the end. The Turbo character annoys me for some reason.
Overall I'm willing to watch the show to see if they can iron out these problems. There's lots of good stuff they could do, there's always new games coming out. Think if Penny Arcade-style humor was made into a show, like this recent comic.
It works well. Thanks to They Might Be Giants the facts of James K. Polk's presidency are forever burned into my brain. And whenever someone askes how far the sun is from the earth I can say "about 93 million miles away, that's why it looks so small."
I've never been big on seeing live orchestas (though I've been to a few musicals with live orchestras), but I've see plenty of live music and you get something you don't from a CD. There's something very impressive about seeing a skilled artist (or group of artists) perform right in front of you. They may screw up. They may get off sync with the action on stage and have to get back on track. They may have to compensate for some technical problem, or being tired, or hung over. The amazing thing is when they do it all right, and you've witnessed a wonderful performance that won't be heard ever again. If all you're interested in is the sounds, why see a live performace at all?
You don't enjoy it just because it was difficult, but because that guy on stage or down in the orchesta pit just entertained you for a few hours doing what he's been training his whole life to do.
They describe themselves as "progressive electronic trip-rock" on their website.
If it was the design of the car you liked, have you ever seen a Honda del Sol? I bought a low-mileage '95 del Sol a few years ago and I love it. It's a two-seater like the Fiero, but I've had 0 problems with it after 60,000 miles except for the roof squeeking occasionally and recently the fan speed dial on the A/C came loose. It's a great little car and the top comes off! (It stores in the trunk.)
(If you don't recognize my handle this joke will make no sense. Carry on.)
If I'm going to a network party, and I show up with a Mac, I'm going to be left out unless we're playing Unreal or something.
Are you trolling, or do you not know much about macs? How about:
C&C Generals
Quake III
Starcraft
Diablo II
Halo
SimCity
Age of Empires II
Civilization III
Age Of Mythology
Alien Vs. Predator II
Baldur's Gate II
Harry Potter Games
Max Payne
Medal Of Honor games
Neverwinter Nights
No One Lives Forever 1 & 2
Return To Castle Wolfenstein
Jedi Knight II
Tony Hawk Games
Warcraft III
Lineage
Everquest
True, PCs get more games, and sometimes the Mac releases come later, but quite a lot of the games I buy ship with Mac and PC versions on the same disk.
Don't forget they also included No Tea! I've still got mine to this day, right here in my pocket.
I think you forgot to title your post "A Modest Proposal" ;)
No offense to those guys, but that weak website looks like someone on geocities made it. Hire a studio photographer to get some good shots of someone wearing the armor, how much could it cost?
A couple of years ago a friend of mine went to a weird multimedia show at a club where they hung sheets up on the wall and did live video/music mixing. He bought their CD which had video mixes on it for about half the songs, I think.
Anyway they were called Emergency Broadcast Network. The album was Telecommunications Breakdown and it used clips from news broadcasts and infomercials. There's a very small clip from one of the songs one that album here. There also some better resolution clips of some of their other songs here, and a better resolution download of "Rock This Base" here. I don't think any of those sons are as good as the stuff on Telecommunications Breakdown, but check it out, I'm not sure if that album is still available anywhere right now.
Blacks are more racist than whites
That's kind of hard to define I think. Are you saying the average black person is more racist than the average white person? Or that "black culture" is more racist than "white culture"? Any kind of gross generalization like this is bound to be argued about, but I'd say the average black person is about as racist as the average white while black culture is a bit more racist due to prominent blacks who still equate any slight against them as a return to the jim crow days.
Homosexuality IS NOT NORMAL - That's why the work "queer" was used to describe it, becuase it's not normal.
Again, what exactly to you mean by "normal"? if you mean unusual, you're certainly right. The vast majority of people are straight. Apart from the modern meaning of the word it would be just as correct to call a black person living in japan "queer" as it would be to call a gay person in America that. If you mean freakish or something-is-not-right-with-those-people I'd have to disagree. From my personal experience the gay people that I've known have been (on average) more intelligent and sucessful than straight people. But as for calling it "wrong" I don't think we know enough about why some people are gay and some are straight to say that it's something that needs to be fixed. In my mind it's like saying left-handed people are "wrong" and need to be corrected.
"Tolerace" means tolerate
I agree completely, but there's a fine line between grudging tolerance and suppression.
Prayer is schools is harmless
This also depends on what you mean. If you're saying school directed prayer where everyone is expected to pray I'd say that can be very harmful if it conflicts with what the kids are brought up to believe. It's a way of enforcing a religion by making anyone who doesn't participate into an outcast. But I think there are ways to allow prayer without forcing it on people who don't want to.
The Democratic party hates Blacks
I have no opinion on this except to say that hate is a rather stong word here. The KKK and Hitler hated blacks.
Black is not a racial slurr - African-american is offensive to me, because you think that you're BLACK first, then American when you say that.
I think this is a confusion of grammar. "American" is the noun, "African" is the modifier. "What kind of American?" "African-American". I agree that black isn't a racial slur, but it seems like even noticing that someone is not white can be taken as a slur these days. I always remember some comedy bit I saw a while ago where someone was trying to point out a black guy in a room full of white people while avoiding mentioning he was black.
"That guy over there. In the red shirt."
"The guy wearing jeans?"
"No, the guy talking to Bob."
"That's Ed."
"No, the other guy, with the ... with the ... THE BLACK GUY"
(whole room turns to look at him scornfully)
I can understand things like the N* word, but this is rediciulous.
This is actually something that annoys me. I don't see why rap videos have to censor "the N word". It's no different than the way that gay people adopted the word queer. Let them appropriate it and thus render it harmless.
That would be Super 3D Noah's Ark.
See also: Forgiveness, Saints of Virtue, and Life's Battle.
1. raid5 a few drives together, you get >= the hdd space, plus, you have redundency!
2. dvd burner/tape backup that drive, and store offsite(in a corner closet of your house)
As for #2, we already make backups on DVD. The harddrive only contains active projects. As for #1 I agree completely.
I came on board after the equipment was purchased, the other two partners know very little about computers (which was part of the reason I was brought in). For various reasons the commerical market here went downhill, and the show got picked up by the local WB affiliate (it was on PBS for 5 years before that). So we've been waiting for our ratings and the advertisers to come on board. When that happens I'll be setting up the system the way it should be.
I''m the editor in a small (3 people total) production company. I think you need to look at how much aggravation you're willing to put up with and how "Professional" you want to be. Are you okay with telling your clients "we can't do that" if they ask for some particualr effect or style the OS software can't do? Are you willing to spend the time and effort an OS solution is going to take?
I think you may be overestimating the need for massive hard drives at the expense of ease-of-use, hardware availability and cost. We use a single 120 gig hard drive for all our editing. We edit an hour-long show each week as well as commercials, some corporate videos and a twice-a-year dance show that runs at about 5 hours of footage without having too many space problems. A second 120 gig drive would be more than enough. The video is compressed when captured to about 1 gig every 5 minutes, but it looks so good the viewers won't notice it.
The two main expenses for us are the BetaSP deck (about $10,000) and the computer itself (about $5000 with capture card). Final Cut Pro is $1000, but you may be able to buy an older version for less. Version 2 is fine, version 3 adds some better titling software, and version 4 has lots of bells and whistles you may not need.
If you're shooting on MiniDV you can cut about $10000 off the cost right there. MiniDV decks are cheap and you can capture over firewire so you don't even need an expensive capture card. You can even use iMovie if all you need are basic transitions and titling, but I think you can only use one video track (plus titling) and two audio tracks.
For editing graphics we use The GIMP until we can afford photoshop, but all titling is done in FCP.
Basically if you're going to be making money at this the up-front costs are well worth it. Especially on something as complex as video-editing software I'm happy to pay for a solution that "just works" instead of having to worry about computer problems when I'm working.
Compare it to 3D modeling. If you're going to spend 40 hours a week doing paid work would you rather use Blender for free and accept the limitations it has, or pay for Maya or 3DS Max and get your work done?
When most of the cost is the hardware (camera, computer, VTR), it may be worth it to pay the $1000 for software that will do what you want with minimal fuss.
That scene is where most people get the mistaken impression that the handwriting recognition on the Newton sucked. It was actually pretty impressive.
I have to agree with that. I edit a local hip-hop interview/video show and it always baffles me that I have to edit the word nigger out of the interviews. The record companies already take it out of the videos.
I mean, clearly the people saying it aren't offended by it. We have a show called Queer Eye For The Straight Guy, why not a hip-hop show called Nigga Beats produced by black people? Because all the suburban white mothers would be shocked and offended. Context is what matters with words like this, not the words themselves.
Here's all the info about it a Snopes.
1) I used to work at a pre-press shop, mostly with 30-40 year olds (I was about 20). Since I knew a bit more about networking and computers in general I was usually able to troubleshoot quicker than my coworkers who had been doing it longer than me. I've never been able to wrap my head around programming, but I knew what to check when a print job wasn't going through.
2) In Arthur C. Clarke's 3001 Frank Poole (an astronaut from our time) is surprised to learn that his fellow astronauts in 3001 don't know much about the guts of their ship, just how to make it work and what to do when it doesn't work right. The ships were so complex by that point that only specialists understood them on a basic level.
We passed the point a long time ago when the computer as a whole could be understood by a non-specialist. Then add in various operating systems and programming languages and see how many non-specialsts really understand it all at a fundamental level.
I'm sure there are people here how could speak intelligently about processor arcitecture, linux kernal code, and router programming, but there's no way a secretary who gets paid $10 an hour is going to know all of that. Or even someone like me who works with computers all the time but doesn't have the hacker's mindset to learn all the minutae.
I downloaded it, it's legit. And not really very funny either.
Yeah, I've heard of them, but not that particular song. I edit a video show in Houston, and we aired their "Ridin' Spinners" video a while ago.
The whole cough-syrup thing is big in Houston. We spent a weekend with Lil Flip last summer and they were mixing it with orange soda. Big Moe is also big on it. He released an album called "City of Syrup" and did a song (and a really excellent video) called "Purple Stuff" (the video had oompah-loompahs from Willy Wonka wearing purple wigs). From the few times I've seen him I can believe he indulges in it quite often.
It's just one of those odd sub-culture things most people have never heard of, I guess.
Thanks a lot for putting that up. I hit all the mirrors they had listed and couldn't find the 1.5 release. I'll leave my window open all day.