canadian copyright crapination

damn you “New” Government:

http://excesscopyright.blogspot.com/2007/11/canadas-copyright-law-is-stronger-and.html


http://www.cbc.ca/searchengine/blog/2007/11/last_chance_to_ask_the_industr.html

heatwave mix: an england story

Heatwave do up a big mix of UK carribbean-influenced dancehall, reggae, ragga, and garage, reaching back to 1984. For the bloggaridims mix series.

Grab it here.

“Isold X. Villarreal” or machine angst

Why does randomly generated Markov-chain spam make so much (poetic) sense?

From jxerdt@sibername.biz Thu Nov 23 02:15:30 2006
From: “Isold X. Villarreal” <jxerdt@sibername.biz>
Subject: stockpile part
Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2006 11:13:36 +0200
X-Spam-Status: No, hits=4.4 tagged_above=-200.0 required=6.3 tests=BAYES_00,
HELO_DYNAMIC_DHCP, HELO_DYNAMIC_HCC, HTML_30_40, HTML_MESSAGE, RCVD_IN_SORBS_DUL
X-Spam-Level: ****

It smells like roasting corn, raw sewage, fish sauce, frying hamburgers and exhaust. Hell of a night all around.
It’s ugly, preposterous and inhuman, interspersed with all-too-rare pockets of serenity and beauty.
” All this nonsense about “the violence is getting worse because they’re trying to influence our election. It sounds like the whooshing of cars, and if you close your eyes, you can delude yourself into believing they’re waves lapping at a beach.

Scratch

What’s wrong with Lee Perry? +)

Apparently, he’s blessing the good studio with ganja while they play back the tape.

dinosaur jr.

a long time since one of my friends first got ahold of a dinosaur jr. lp – you’re living all over me. i spun the crap out of that record. it still pops into my head sometimes even without hearing it. brings back the best memories of lazy, hazy days of school’s-out summers, outdoor festivals at thunderbird stadium. ahh.. there’s just something about the thrashy noise wash put right up against the quiet vocals sung for the singer alone.

we didn’t know at the time (we didn’t know much, really), but apparently dj are seen as originators to indie rock.

mp3s of Little Furry Things and The Lung are up on Press Random at the moment.

listening to these now, i can hear the loud instruments being held back in the mix, so the vocals don’t have to be compressed at all, they can just exist in their own quiet little bedroom. there’s a really lo-fi sound overall, leaving lots of gaps in frequencies, and a general fuzziness. i get a melancolic twinge, but a happy one, everytime i listen to it. i’ve been humming this stuff for three days straight now, even the wah-wah’ed guitar wash parts. And that scream!

there is also a huge archive of live shows/bootlegs at freesofree.net. the sound on most of the older recordings is terrible, but there is a load of stuff on there to peruse, and i’ve only just started to poke around.

Electric Skin

check out this project by the wonderful Suzi Webster, Electric Skin

a breath activated pulsing light clothing, at the royal institute of british architects, Fri Aug 15.

flash video.

[via we-make-money]

Francis Bacon
Three studies for a Crucifixion
1962

religion and the brain

the neurophilosopher posts Andrew Newberg on religion and the brain (video) via Bicyclefish
the most interesting part of the video was the point that if we have only the subjective reports saying the mystical experiences felt more real than everyday reality (and the neuroscience only shows that dreams, everyday reality, and the mystical experience all have similar effects in the brain), then the possibility opens up that the mystical experience is the most real, and everyday reality is perhaps derived from that, and if so, all the subjective/objective “science” doesn’t really prove that the everyday reality is “real”, since it is based in that same everyday reality.

…

upon reflection, that leads into a bit of a catch-22, since the subjective reports of the mystical experience exist in the everyday reality to begin with.

Wacom Tablet + Redhat = Pain

i’ve been trying to get wacom support working in redhat linux (cgc likes to call it ‘deadrat’). I’ve been following the linux wacom project howto. a word of warning: you may have to re-compile your kernel if your kernel wasn’t compiled with module support for hid-core. on fedora core 4, and probably others, it isn’t. this i only learned after compiling the wacom driver and trying to compile hid-core (against the kernel sources, no less).

also, there is a wacom driver that ships with fc4, but it doesn’t work and isn’t set up to be recognised even if it did work.

maybe one day i’ll head down the craggy road to re-compiling the kernel, but not today. i’ve actually got work to do.