some of the just wonderful bits of the homeland security act; Explosive Regulations Threaten to Kill Model Rocketry

"It makes no more sense to restrict aerospace modeling than it would have to ban rental trucks after they were misused in Oklahoma and New York."

first the bongs, then the model rockets. the world just seems so much better than four years ago.

Generals gathered in their masses
just like witches at black masses
evil minds that plot destruction
sorcerers of death's construction
in the fields the bodies burning
as the war machine keeps turning
death and hatred to mankind
poisoning their brainwashed minds,
oh lord Yeah!

Politicians hide themselves away
they only started the war
Why should they go out to fight?
They leave that role to the poor
Time will tell on their power minds
Making war just for fun
Treating people just like pawns in chess
Wait 'till their judgement day comes, yeah!

Now in darkness, world stops turning
as the war machine keeps burning
No more war pigs of the power
Hand of god has struck the hour
Day of judgement, god is calling
on their knees, the war pigs crawling
Begging mercy for their sins
Satan, laughing, spreads his wings ALL RIGHT NOW!"

fingers croxxed, deep breaths taken and nerves a-tingling: today i dropped off my claim form for my damaged car to south pasadena city hall.
saskia van der veen, deputy city clerk, was the nice young lady who accepted the forms and promised to send them off to the city's insurance company later today.
she's just being nice or making conversation or both when she says "still riding your bike?" but part of me is ready to snap and answer back, "well, it's either that, or walk or crawl."

she mentioned that this could a take a while, but a while to her was a month or so rather than multiple months. i suppose all i can do is wait. she did give me her card and a contact phone number when i asked how i could find out what was going on with the claim.
"so i can call you in 10 days and find out what is happening?"
"yes." she said.

then there was the statement, "well, we usually tell people to go ahead and have the work done on the car." i explained that i couldn't afford that. but, i suppose that is speculation in the direction that i could recieve some compensation, at least in her mind.

not knowing what will happen is beginning to wear on me.

welp, i'm of the mind that dreamweaver mx is no joke.
we could start a pissing contest between macho html-guys just like we could have a contest between a couple of tgifridays bartender lookin' guys. all i'm saying is that it makes the chit a snap.
just finished my book from lynda weinman, the one who is really making a living off this inter-web.
next stop, flash.

lately - d/l'ing desktops from pixel girl presents.

listening - metro area

as for the car, i'm getting the second body shop estimate done, should be finished tomorrow, before i submit my paperwork to the city. chatting with a woman at the city clerk desk hipped me to the notion that "...this could take months." and that in someones mind, at least technically, there is the possibility that it wouldn't be the city's fault. all of this is speculation of course, but not the kind of speculation that makes for deep sleep.

oh, and some more comforting news:

One fax to eBay from a lawman - police investigator, NSA, FBI or CIA employee, National Park ranger - and eBay sends back the user's full name, email address, home address, mailing address, home telephone number, name of company where seller is employed and user nickname. What's more, eBay will send the history of items he has browsed, feedbacks received, bids he has made, prices he has paid, and even messages sent in the site's various discussion groups.

hah, missed this one at mcsweeney's:

...Angus: Excellent work. A final reminder: we've scheduled a meeting tomorrow at 3 p.m., to commence the songwriting process. If you'd like, we can also hold an informal session this evening at my house.

Brian: Sounds great. I move we adjourn.

Cliff: Second.

Malcolm: All in favor?

All: Aye.

"In general, the concept and imagination involved is stunning. However, much more work, refinement, and especially regulation and simplification is necessary before the game is managable. The scope is just too grand, while the referee is expected to do too much in relation to the players. If you need ideas to help you along into your own fantasy adventure games, these booklets will be of use; otherwise your ten dollars will be wasted. I do not suggest these to the average wargamer."

got out of town on a suprise weekend get-away via jennifer.
seemed like no matter where i looked there were ford mustangs (bang), either driving around, or on the television.
so today i had the car hauled up to a recommended body shop up in pasadena. lo and behold, it the estimate wasn't as gnarly as i imagined; only $4500.
i have a few questions as to what this covers - i have plans to roll up to the shop tomorrow and check things out in more detail. i was told that the fender was the most expensive part, at $400, and that he found a new roof to put on it (straight chop off the old one) and a new headliner. i have to admit that the orig headliner was a little pride and joy - almost perfect save for one hole.

there is some scuttle-butt around the house re: how much of the car would be painted under this estimate. some say all of it, others say just the replaced parts. we'll see.
not knowing what was going to happen, still don't i guess, i began looking at bmw motorcycles.

today has been a hell of a day.
it has been raining non-stop for a few days. that is winter in los angeles, a rainy "season" for a couple of weeks in january or feb. most people deal well enough, besides traffic being worse, because most people i know enjoy rain and we don't get much of it here.

i was working at the computer when i heard a loud and very deep and solid >BOOM< from out of doors. "what the hell?"
turns out a tree on the other side of the street uprooted itself and fell across the street. the branches and greenery caught this one dude while he was driving along but the worst part, for anybody was the fact that the trunk and major branches fell right across my car; diagonally from front passenger headlight (shattered and casing crushed) across the front pass fender (sqooshed into a different shape) striking the windshield on the passenger side (shattered up near where the glass meets the roofline, and across the length of the roof from pass front to driver rear (creating a back and forth of grooves, creases and troughs).

the weight of the tree sank the car down a good six or eight inches - so much that through the deep gutter of water i thought that the front pass tire was flat.

before long our sleepy street was blocked off - there were a few cops, a fire truck, a front loader, a cherry picker, a chipper and a truck to haul off the debris along with about 8 dudes in yellow foul weather gear holding chainsaws.

i wore my own yellow slicker and pant set and took a lot of pictures.

the driver of the other car was eventually freed of the branches and downed cable/phone lines. he said he had been in a previous accident the day before!

a few hours later, there are some leaves and sawdust swirling through the white-water in the gutters and i think my car is destroyed. the driver side doors sticks slightly, but i could get in except the inside is covered with broken glass. the passenger side door is stuck shut because the front fender has changed shape enough not to let the door have its normal range of motion.

i have liability insurance, which takes care of anybody i would ever hit - no wrecks 'natch. which means its up to me to deal with the city since it was their tree.
i reckon everything will come out in the wash - i have a reference to a lawyer if i should need one but i doubt i will besides advice. the real empty feeling comes more from thinking that this beautiful old piece of machinery - and everything its been through - could soon end up in the junkyard or in the ground.

driving around this evening we saw premium gas prices over two dollars a gallon. another way to make money out of scaring people i suppose.

i wonder if the president or his handlers have listened to any of the records or read any of the books that i own. i don't read, or pretend to preach the bible, so we don't have that in common. i'm sure they've heard some songs - i have plenty of lp's that contain major hits - but i'd like to know if there is any love for music or books shared. we already know that the president doesn't like to read. his sub-par showing at yale shouldn't really be an indicator, i was a high C student until i found something that i enjoyed doing and i like to read.

i'm sitting here tonight, listening to The Wall by floyd.
when i was sixteen, three of us raced each other down blankenbaker lane. i was driving my mom's MG, my friends where in a Fiat X19 and an RX-7. about 100 yards from river road we were pulled over by a cop, all scared shitless, talked to one at a time in the patrol car and given tickets: $72.50. one friend had an actual job as a grounds-keeper for an estate of four houses off of river road, so he offered to pay for all the tickets and the other two of us would mow lawns or whatever to pay him back. that way, our folks would never know.
that night we went to see the movie, The Wall at midnight.

i felt so guilty for the ticket and our plan to never tell, that by the time left the theatre, after watching that gloomy ass picture - i'm not sure if i could have felt lower.

as it turns out, we all woke up the next morning and told our parents what had happened independantly of each other. i still remember my mom having brunch - maybe she had gone to st. francis that morning - looking at the ticket and stressing to me more careful in the future.

that was it.

so to this day i haven't watched that movie, a few scenes i admit, but not the whole film. and no way, no how would i have while altered in any way.

as i listen to it now i'm reminded of a conversation this last weekend. we talked about the gloom that pervades these days. from four years ago when the future looked, for the most part, bright, friends are noticing edgyness wherever they turn, as if a subtle paranoia flows all around. how simple day-to-day endeavors like going to the laundramat or the supermarket reveal signs of people wary to interact with other people, or anticipating some sort of conflict.

and why shouldn't they? i know a number of people who are out of werk, including me and if i only had a nickel for everytime someone said "i've never seen it so bad."
bob brinker described the change in the economy these last couple of years to be second only to the great depression in severity. i found a suitably dreary re-counting of the fuck up that was and still is the market. how we ever were fooled into believing again that buisnessmen were a tribe worthy of respect is beyond me.
all this talk about war and killing people won't end anytime soon, meanwhile it seems like bottoms have dropped out and walls have gone up all over. glad i'm not bringing a child up in this mess.

Through d.g. and jay babcock's site, i've learned about ASPEN, a "magazine" that was published between 1965 to 1971. The magazine was a bit of a hodge-podge of creative-culture-art that often included records and even a super 8 reel. One of my personal faves from the introduction:

If Aspen was an art director's dream, it was also an advertiser's nightmare. The ads, stashed at the bottom of the box, were easily ignored. And although Aspen was supposed to publish quarterly, in reality the publication date of each issue was as much of a surprise as the contents. “All the artists are such shadowy characters,” publisher Johnson said, “that it takes months to track them down.” After issue 5+6, there were no more ads in the magazine.

The contents of the various issues are represented on the web-site, as a preservative act. Apparently the "magazine" is very rare.

the orange strip above is a reminder to please be on high alert.

got the itch, changed the design.
i wouldn't bother looking under the hood if i were you, coding was never my strong suit, just ask tanaka.

its much trickier than i'd imagined to find replacement filter cartridges for my 3M brand respirator, the second one down at this online shop, locally here in L.A. (the online joint is in MAINE!)
a handful of phone calls are fielded by ernest help (auto paint shops typically deal with the particle filters, not the organic vapour types) and slacked jawed ignorance until i get in touch with Raven Industrial Supply. They do not deal with the public but send me to AirGas Supply in Whittier. They can't sell me a pair of replacement filters for $20, but can sell me a box of 10 for $45 - and ship it to me by tomorrow for a few more bucks - so make it five times the filtering for a bit over twice the cost. The helpful woman at AirGas had a wonderful name: Uraca, pronouced "U rock-a".

soundcommons a blog by cindy and joe. dig it.

By Joel Bleifuss | 1.27.03
Kurt Vonnegut vs. the !&#*!@

In November, Kurt Vonnegut turned 80. He published his first novel, Player Piano, in 1952 at the age of 29. Since then he has written 13 others, including Slaughterhouse Five, which stands as one of the pre-eminent anti-war novels of the 20th century.

As war against Iraq looms, I asked Vonnegut, a reader and supporter of this magazine, to weigh in. Vonnegut is an American socialist in the tradition of Eugene Victor Debs, a fellow Hoosier whom he likes to quote: “As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

—Joel Bleifuss

You have lived through World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Reagan wars, Desert Storm, the Balkan wars and now this coming war in Iraq. What has changed, and what has remained the same?

One thing which has not changed is that none of us, no matter what continent or island or ice cap, asked to be born in the first place, and that even somebody as old as I am, which is 80, only just got here. There were already all these games going on when I got here. … An apt motto for any polity anywhere, to put on its state seal or currency or whatever, might be this quotation from the late baseball manager Casey Stengel, who was addressing a team of losing professional athletes: “Can’t anybody here play this game?”

My daughter Lily, for an example close to home, who has just turned 20, finds herself—as does George W. Bush, himself a kid—an heir to a shockingly recent history of human slavery, to an AIDS epidemic and to nuclear submarines slumbering on the floors of fjords in Iceland and elsewhere, crews prepared at a moment’s notice to turn industrial quantities of men, women and children into radioactive soot and bone meal by means of rockets and H-bomb warheads. And to the choice between liberalism or conservatism and on and on.

What is radically new in 2003 is that my daughter, along with our president and Saddam Hussein and on and on, has inherited technologies whose byproducts, whether in war or peace, are rapidly destroying the whole planet as a breathable, drinkable system for supporting life of any kind. Human beings, past and present, have trashed the joint.

Based on what you’ve read and seen in the media, what is not being said in the mainstream press about President Bush’s policies and the impending war in Iraq?

That they are nonsense.

My feeling from talking to readers and friends is that many people are beginning to despair. Do you think that we’ve lost reason to hope?

I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’etat imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka “Christians,” and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or “PPs.”

To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable medical diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete’s foot. The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr. Hervey Cleckley. Read it! PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!

And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country, and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? And so many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick.

What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they cannot care what happens next. Simply can’t. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody’s telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!

How have you gotten involved in the anti-war movement? And how would you compare the movement against a war in Iraq with the anti-war movement of the Vietnam era?

When it became obvious what a dumb and cruel and spiritually and financially and militarily ruinous mistake our war in Vietnam was, every artist worth a damn in this country, every serious writer, painter, stand-up comedian, musician, actor and actress, you name it, came out against the thing. We formed what might be described as a laser beam of protest, with everybody aimed in the same direction, focused and intense. This weapon proved to have the power of a banana-cream pie three feet in diameter when dropped from a stepladder five-feet high.

And so it is with anti-war protests in the present day. Then as now, TV did not like anti-war protesters, nor any other sort of protesters, unless they rioted. Now, as then, on account of TV, the right of citizens to peaceably assemble, and petition their government for a redress of grievances, “ain’t worth a pitcher of warm spit,” as the saying goes.

As a writer and artist, have you noticed any difference between how the cultural leaders of the past and the cultural leaders of today view their responsibility to society?

Responsibility to which society? To Nazi Germany? To the Stalinist Soviet Union? What about responsibility to humanity in general? And leaders in what particular cultural activity? I guess you mean the fine arts. I hope you mean the fine arts. ... Anybody practicing the fine art of composing music, no matter how cynical or greedy or scared, still can’t help serving all humanity. Music makes practically everybody fonder of life than he or she would be without it. Even military bands, although I am a pacifist, always cheer me up.

But that is the power of ear candy. The creation of such a universal confection for the eye, by means of printed poetry or fiction or history or essays or memoirs and so on, isn’t possible. Literature is by definition opinionated. It is bound to provoke the arguments in many quarters, not excluding the hometown or even the family of the author. Any ink-on-paper author can only hope at best to seem responsible to small groups or like-minded people somewhere. He or she might as well have given an interview to the editor of a small-circulation publication.

Maybe we can talk about the responsibilities to their societies of architects and sculptors and painters another time. And I will say this: TV drama, although not yet classified as fine art, has on occasion performed marvelous services for Americans who want us to be less paranoid, to be fairer and more merciful. M.A.S.H. and Law and Order, to name only two shows, have been stunning masterpieces in that regard.

That said, do you have any ideas for a really scary reality TV show?

“C students from Yale.” It would stand your hair on end.

What targets would you consider fair game for a satirist today?

Assholes.

from the nyt:

February 3, 2003
Turning a Digital Database Into Local Radio
By DAVID F. GALLAGHER

Carson Daly rose to fame as the host of "Total Request Live" on Viacom's MTV. Less well known is his side gig as a superhuman D. J. With a little help from digital editing, Mr. Daly can do a top-10 countdown show tailored to the phoned-in requests of radio listeners in 11 different cities without actually knowing which songs he is counting down.

Mr. Daly's syndicated radio show, "Carson Daly Most Requested," is produced by Premiere Radio Networks, a unit of the broadcasting giant Clear Channel Communications. The program runs each weekday on 140 stations — most of them owned by Clear Channel — although only 11 receive the digitally customized version that seeks to simulate a local program.

"Most Requested" has been on the air for nearly two years, but only recently have people not directly involved in the program become aware of the extent to which technology is allowing Mr. Daly to cozy up to local listeners. Radio experts say the program involves perhaps the most extensive use yet of digital audio processing to offer localized shows from a central location. And members of a major broadcasting union are investigating to determine whether the techniques violate local labor agreements.

Clear Channel executives and Mr. Daly declined to discuss the program and the technology. But according to former Clear Channel employees, Mr. Daly spends several hours a week in a studio in his Manhattan apartment, reading scripts with short song introductions and longer segments of D. J. patter. His audio feed is transmitted to Los Angeles, where the show's engineers turn the segments into digital files and drop them into a database.

With a lot of cutting and pasting, the engineers create 11 customized hourlong countdown shows for cities like New York, Philadelphia and Detroit, and two national pop and rhythm-and-blues countdowns for other markets. The customization means Mr. Daly can seem to be telling listeners in a particular city their most-requested songs for that day — without ever seeing the city's top-10 list.

Clear Channel has been widely criticized for its use of so-called voice-tracking technology, which enables prerecorded D. J.'s to sound to listeners in a distant city as if they were both local and live.

Opponents of media consolidation say the technology allows Clear Channel to ignore its regulatory mandate requiring the company to have local stations serve local audiences.

In a case that will go to trial this week, the National Labor Relations Board is charging that Clear Channel violated the contracts of the staff at WWPR-FM in New York, a hip-hop and rhythm-and-blues station known as Power 105.1. The suit argues that the station began using a voice-tracked Los Angeles D. J. without union authorization.

The company has said that the show, "Power After Hours," was a syndicated program, which the contract allows.

Mr. Daly's show uses technology that is similar to voice tracking, but industry experts said that the digital manipulation of the host's words and phrases is so extensive as to put the show in a league of its own.

"This tells you that Carson Daly, as a brand and a personality, is worth the extra studio effort," said Tom Taylor, the editor of Inside Radio, an industry newsletter. "The technology has been advancing to the point where you can do that and make it sound really good."

Steven Dunston, a sound designer and editor in Los Angeles who worked at Clear Channel's Premiere Radio unit when the Daly show began in early 2001, said he helped build its innovative database, which had tens of thousands of audio samples in it.

He said that because Mr. Daly had only a few hours a week to devote to the program, phrases like "coming in at No. 4" were recorded once and stored in the database for reuse. The call letters and phone numbers of the 11 stations, in Mr. Daly's voice, were inserted throughout.

"It really was fascinating from a technological angle," Mr. Dunston said. "Nothing had been done to that extent before."

People close to the current show said its operations had changed little since it began. A spokeswoman for Premiere declined to answer questions about the production of Mr. Daly's show, saying that was proprietary information. She said Mr. Daly was unavailable for comment.

Not all of Mr. Daly's sentences are digitally constructed. The show's writers give him longer segments, like gossip roundups and customized introductions for New York and Los Angeles. But much of the material is written with recycling in mind, so a joke about Christina Aguilera that is used to introduce the No. 3 song in Boston can be used on another day when the song is, say, No. 6 in Atlanta.

Mr. Daly's unconventional countdown only recently caught the attention of the New York chapter of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, which represents broadcast personnel and opposes voice tracking. Peter Fuster, the chapter's assistant executive director, said the union had previously thought that the show was just a national countdown with local branding.

Mr. Fuster said, "We're looking into whether the customized package that they are preparing for New York violates our collective bargaining agreement" at Z-100 (WHTZ-FM), the station that carries the show in New York. If the station is giving Mr. Daly's show a list of songs to play, that would essentially be voice tracking, which is not allowed under the contract, Mr. Fuster said.

Mr. Daly is likely to be even more pressed for time now that he has his own late-night television talk show on NBC, "Last Call With Carson Daly." But when he needs some time off from his radio work, the database lets the countdown roll on. Before he goes on vacation, the show's producers try to make sure they have enough sound clips so his voice can introduce top-10 lists that have yet to be compiled.

That has not always gone smoothly. Mr. Dunston, the sound designer, said that at one point a new Michael Jackson song, "You Rock My World," unexpectedly showed up on the charts. Mr. Daly was unavailable that day, and because he had never introduced a song by Mr. Jackson, the engineers had to dig through old recordings to find a segment in which he made an offhand reference to the singer. Then they hunted down bits of the song title and assembled all the pieces.

"We had to cobble things together," Mr. Dunston said.

QUINTANA: Are you ready to be fucked, man? I see you rolled your way into the semis. Deos mio, man. Liam and me, we're gonna fuck you up.

DUDE: Yeah well, that's just, ya know, like, your opinion, man.

QUINTANA: Let me tell you something, bendeco. You pull any your crazy shit with us, you flash a piece out on the lanes, I'll take it away from you and stick it up your ass and pull the fucking trigger til it goes "click".

DUDE: Jesus.

QUINTANA: You said it, man. Nobody fucks with the Jesus.

a clever lil' flash based typing game. (via mefi)