Remiss

I have been remiss in my duties as purveyor of fine funny to the masses. In fact, I have bee doing this a lot, but it has been in person (gads!), to individuals, in real life, adn by “it” I mean many things that have nothignt o do with writing imn my blog.

My life has, actually, been a veritable cornucopia of craziness. It mostly started last week with my going to the Justice concert, sponsored by that bastion of social networking, Myspace. For those of you who do not know, Justice is a group from France (I know, I know… bear with me) that plays a kind of Techno-Punk house-ish music. Like this:

Now that you have been introduced, let me tell you about something that I did not know, and am thus assuming that you don’t know either: the French are blind.

Or at least their musicians are.

It’s true! I gathered this useful tidbit of information through the fact that these people brought enough candlepower to light up a pro-football arena with highly choreographed, rapidly moving, heavily strobing light. There was enough lighting in this venue to sear the retinas of even the most hardened party-goer, all while inducing seizures in Japanese children in Japan.  One can only imagine the shafts of pulsing white light blasting out of the windows of the Roseland Theater etching shadows of walkers-by onto the buildings across the street and surprising those who could not hear the thrumming bass two blocks away (though this is not really a fair statement, since I have been told that career partiers are keenly attuned to the faint sound of distant bass).

So I guess the point, newly beleaguered, is that the show was overly bright and could have used about half as much of the “fun” as they brought. Other than that, it was fun.

To the producers:

This is the first of what are sure to be many posts venting my frustration at the music community (read: “fueling my own ego about my taste in music,” Jeremy Mills, Dance Hall press: 2008).  Deal with it.

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Okay you guys.  Seriously.

There is a tendancy these days to take a song and slap the word “electro” on it and sell it to masses of undeserving and ignorant kids.  This is wrong.  You guys need to stop putting out massive amounts of dull and non-musical crud and put a little of the artistry and fun into house music.

Taking what is basically a fuky techno song, filling the bridges with a bleeped and chopped vocal of someone exhaling like they got punched in the chest, putting the bassline through your “make a baseline sound like someone forgot to ground the mixing board” fuzz box (known in amateur circles as the “my moms basement is 70 years old and was not wired properly to handle all of my drum machines AND my world-of-warcraft box” box), and then repeating the first part of the song for 4 more minutes does not consist of musical talent.  If I wanted that I’d screw around with Fruity Loops while holding a bullhorn to my computer speaker.

What happened to the days of IHR, Moonshine red and so many other funky, fun labels? The days of funky, bass line heavy, jump-up house that made you want to shake your ass and put a huge smile on your face?  Is it so bad to have music that is accessible to the mainstream public instead of those die-hard ‘heads who want to go stomp around on a dance floor?

I say no!

And to those of you who used to make music like that, start again!

I am not saying that there is no place for the music that we now call Electro.  I actually enjoy some of it, truth be told.  Despite this, however, I believe that calling this fuzzy, overly filtered Techno “Electro House” waters down the musical aspects of both the Electro and House genres, and leads to a watering down of the experience as well.  I can put it like this: take Joey Mazzola, DJ Dan, Donald Glaude, RHV and BBB.  These were the people that I would have killed to see when I was younger, the ones that were guaranteed to make me shake my ass all night long.  The last time I saw ANY of them, they all played the same thing, the same way.  The records all sounded the same, the sets all sounded the same, the energy was always the same: “meh.”

Last time I saw RHV I was actually BORED with his set.  How the hell does that happen!?!  He plays “Electro House,” thats how.

So there it is.  My plea.  Give me some old school IHR Disco funk.  Some old school Blow Media, Funktek, Soul Fusion, etc.  Make mshake my ass instead of bombarding me with digital fuzz.

Pwease?

My Obligatory Blog

Today is the day.  The fifth year of this war that we find ourselves in.  Five years ago today, The Bushinator ordered American Aircraft to begin bombing strategic targets in Baghdad and all over Iraq in a prelude to the most efficient military action in history.

Then the rest of the war hapened, the war that we werenot told would happen, but which we knew probably would.

I am not going into any kind of political diatribe or useless rambling about the evils of the Bushies and the lies perpetrated upon the people of both the US and the world.  Everyone knows that stuff, and repeatedly hammering it out into the blogosphere along with pedantic ranting about how we must change this now (despite the physical impossibility of such an action) is doing nothing but desensitizing us to the realities of the arguments surrouding this very divisive issue.

I will, however, put this out there:

To the troops:  I am very proud of you and want to pass on my best wishes to you all.  As a memebr of a military family and someone who is blown away by the sacrifices that you make to follow what you believe, my kudos to you are not countable and I deeply appreciate all that you do.  I send you all the best of wishes today and thank you for your continued service in the face of all the crap that you have to face, both foreign and domestic.  Please stay strong and come home safely.

To those who think that we should pull out of Iraq immediately: Please read your history books, and brush up on political theory.  To rapidly pull the United States out of the quagmire that we not only created but must now fix would be a disaster of epic proportions.  The rapid development of a power vacuum in the Middle east would destabilize the entire region, a region that is important to the economies of most of the world, and leave the entire region susceptible to the influences of peope who would do harm to and destabilize the entire world..  Not only that, but the failure of the United States to clean up it’s mess would devalue the young lives lost in this conflict.  Please understand that there are far better and less damaging was for the US to pull out of Iraq, and that the continued calls for an immediate withdrawal are only going to incense those who think that we should stay in the area (and who are still in power in the government).

Now don’t get me wrong.  I have been against this war from the very beginning.  I am one of those who believes that the public was lied to from the beginning about Iraq and it’s danger (though I  was not one of those who believed that Iraq had anything whatsoever to do with 9/11), and I believe, through research into RAND and some of the staffers who ahve been together since the Nixon administration, that the Bushies have been planing this since before he was elected.

That being said, I am not one of those who equates the wrongs of the governemtn with the troops.  They are not connected, as the US military is a professional, volunteer force.  Those men are doing their job, nothing more or less, and doing so regardless of their ideas about its leadership or the war that they are fighting.

Please don’t confuse the two, as doing so takes away from the sacrifices made and the lives both lost and broken by this war.

-Jeremy-

PS: Please make any coments on this post intelligent and researched, as well as specific to what I have written and leave out any overt political or reactionary bull.  I don’t need to be flamed for my opinion and am not looking for an argument, nor does anyone else need to read inflammatory statements.  Thank you.

bah!

A travesty has been perpetrated against the masculinity of one of the burliest looking cars being made today, and I saw it with my own eyes.

Imagine this:

with white Hawaiian flower stickers across the back windows, a white sea-turtle sticker and “diva” license plates.

D     I     V      A      .

Why is it that people exhibit such a lack of impulse control when their brains  tell them to desacrate a triumph of automotive engineering?   They take this

and turned it into this:

WHY???!

neat-o frit-o

Who says that science and technology can’t be pretty?  The rare night launch blasted the night sky all around Florida and could be seen (as the light from the OMS, RCS and Main Engines) as far away as Massachusetts.  For those lucky enough to be anywhere near Pad 39-A, the spectacle was one for the history books:

neat, huh?

And so it begins.

It is beginning.

Today marked yet another successful launch of that overly complex yet hugely useful piece of American technological sophistication the Space Shuttle. Yes, the Endeavor blasted through low cloud cover in a night launch to bring the first piece of the Japanese Space Station Module Kibo into orbit and attach it to that other piece of scientific bondoggle the ISS. Unfortunately for us, however, this is not the only thing aboard the Shuttle.

No, NASA could not leave well enough alone, and this time they got the Canadians in on it. Indeed, aboard the Shuttle is a piece of equipment so insidious that they didn’t press-release it until very soon before the launch. This item is called DEXTRE, and it is a robot.

A

ROBOT

Now many people will assume that it was an inevitability that a robot would be launched into orbit, and many people would be correct. That being said, I feel that not enough is being made of the fact that the precursor to our future titanium-skinned overlords will soon be floating through space, its gleaming robot eye looking downward on our cities and weeping oily robot tears at the possibilities presented by its situation. Yes, this cybernetic monstrosity is connected to the space station. True, it is not an intelligent automaton, instead existing as a remotely operated tool of the NASA space station maintenance team.

That is not the point. Look at this thing!

“Force moment sensor?” “Power data grapple fixture?” “Latching End Effector?” “Electronics Platform?!” This thing has more acronyms than Devo has crappy songs.

Despite this things fairly innocuous purported uses, it looks like a bastard lovechild between HAL 9000 and V.I.N.C.E.N.T. from Disney’s The Black Hole. Despite that, who is to say that a rogue cosmonaut could not switch out one of his arms with a giant laser, beginning a cycle of orbital doom that culminates in our ultimate enslavement by the robot army? No one, that’s who.

Now there are going to be neigh-sayers out there who think that I am over-reacting. Likewise there is at least one person who is going to agree that this is going to happen, but is okay with it due to his continuous kowtowing and pandering to the forces of mechanized doom (you know who you are).

You are all in the wrong… Im just saying; when bolts of maple syrup flavored high energy plasma (it’s a Canadian robot, remember?) start raining down on your heads from above and your radio starts emitting the ever-so-faint sound of synthesized laughter through the static, you will look to me for guidance and wont get any, because I will be hiding in a bunker, shaking my head in disbelief that more people didn’t listen.

A shift in perception: part two.

I’n my last post I laid out the idea that my perception of how I looka t both science and history is changing.  I don’t necessarily think that is true.  I think that it is more that I am coming to realize more and more exactly how it is that I see thee things.  Ill explain in more detail.

Science:  Science is the thing that we are trying to use to replace religion.  Don’t get me wrong here, I am not trying to defame religion (personal beliefs notwithstanding.  What I am saying is that Science is touted by many people as the thing that brought us out of the dark ages, when man had to turn to supernatural explanations and religious creation to explain even the simplest things in life.  Unfortunately this isn’t exactly the case.  Science for many people has become the new religion.  I find that I have fallen into this trap for a long time now; the trap of absolute and unerring belief in the infallability of science, and that realization and the subsequent shift in my personal ideas has been kind of jarring.  I have come to uinderstand that, for myeslf, there has to be a mixture of the two.

Science is still my “religion” if you want to call it that.  I have a true belief that it will some day have questions for most of the questions that we as a species have.  Nay-sayers have told me that this will never be; that with our level of technological and scientific sophistication we should, by all rights, know the things that we need to know.  They are wrong.  We don’t even know everything there is to know about water, the most abundant and arguably the most important element on our planet.  All of this being said,  I think that while I lean heavily on science for my personal explanation of my place in the world, a healthy sense of wonder and awe at the universe and all of its little questions and intricacies is important.  Believing that our systems of exploration and knowledge-gaining are infallible and absolute is to set oneself up for a large fall.

Time and time again things that humans had held as absolutes in their world have fallen:  the world is round, the universe is expanding and accelerating while it is doing so, light does not come from the “ether” but is a wave (and a particle), etc.  This is not evidence of science failing in light of other exterior influences (like religion), but proof that we have much to learn and that believing that we know it all or that we can is not only unrealistic, but arrogant at the same time.

Anyway, I have gone off on a diatribe again.  Sorry.  My basic understanding of my perception of science as it stands now is that it is not, as I previously had believed,  an absolute, but something that we need to work at and continuously refine.  It can be seen as people as the “new magic” (thanks Duncan) and still be a legitimate thing.

History:  I see history in much the same light.  I wont put it all own here now because I am exhausted and need to go to bed, but I will say that anyone who believes taht tehy know the entire story of history is someone who need to have their head examined.  As I have finally fallen into a deep love of history and done some major research on my own, I have come to a couple of realizations:

a) There are far, far to many thread leading into events in history to ever be able to pull them all apart and know the true cause of something.  I have tried this, and one can become so hopelessly bogged down in the details that they lose sight of the origional content of their idea.

b) Anyone who says that they know something for a fact about the past that they did not personally witness is wrong.  While this obviously leaves out primary document evidence, it does not leave out things like “friend of a friend” info or oral tradition.  I have realized exaclty how many different portraits of a person or event there can be, and none of them are entirely right, despite the protestations of the authors.  Bias is inherent and must be acknowledged in order fo history to continue to refine itself as it has in the last couple of decades.

What does this have to do with my perception shift?  Not alot.  It was another tangent that my tired mind went on.  I will probably read this and not know what the heck I was even writing.

It boils down to the idea, stated in my previous post, that there is no way that we can truly know histroy, and while that is the fun part for me, alot of people say that they “know” history, but aren’t willing to go through the process of proving that they know it, and that frustrates me.

Ok.  I’m done.  I have ceased to make sense and lost the flow of my thoughts, so I’m going to bed.  I promise the next post will be funnier….

A shift in perception, part one.

Disclaimer: Please take this post in the spirit it was written. I am not making any conclusive statements nor presenting any evidence as absolute. I am merely thinking through something and inviting you along for the ride. Thank you.

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So I have been reading lately stuff on Atlantis. Not the Space Shuttle, not the sculpture, but the lost civilization that Plato claimed to have existed and many a person throughout history have dedicated (and occasionally destroyed) their lives to. While I have been reading this stuff, a strange thing began to happen and I wanted to share it with you.

Much of the information and theories taht have been laid down about Atlantis are very hard for people to swallow. As a scientifically minded person, I have trouble believing that within the last, say, 2,000 years an entire, highly advanced civilization has existed, spread it’s influence among the lower cultures of the Greeks, Egyptians and Maya, and been destroyed, either by some natural catastrophe or by themselves. That being said, much of the evidence has had me chaging the way that I look at not only this specific phenomena, but science in general.

Much of the evidence given for Atlantis’ existence is compelling. 2,000 year old hiroglyphics that look identical to a helicopter and aircraft. White, bearded figures carved on Maya temples long, long before the Spanish showed up. The bizarre and sudden appearence of highly complex engineering projects by several cultures at the same time. Inexplicable underwater structures all over the place in the Caribbean. The list goes on and on as to many of the compelling things that give some semblance of legitimacy to theories of Atlantis. The problem with these theories is this: They fl in the face of conventional thinking, science, and myth (kinda). Likewise they are usually presented by people who are, lets say, less than reputable. Religious zealots, alien conspiracy theorists and the ilk are not groups who are prone to sway the common beliefs.

Here is why something strange has happened to me. I was talking with Duncfoo about the way that science is the new magic and something clicked in my head. I once read a quote which said something to the effect of “sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The idea that so many of the ancient, classical cultures had concurrent and often overlapping myths about a magic culture of gods who lived in the ocean who could do all kinds of crazy things. things crazy enough for them to be placed as gods in the pantheons of their religious institutions, lends credibility to the idea that there was something out there that we know nothing of.

I am rambling now, let me get back to my original point. The strange thing that happened to me is that My fundamental faith in science has been shaken somewhat. Now don’t freak out, I’m not joining a monestary or anything, I just have had a bit of an epiphany. How do we know, for sure, that there was not a fairly advanced civilization that we don’t know about? Santorini, Easter Island, The Anasazi, Helos; these are all civilizations that disappeared pretty much overnight, often because of natural disasters. The island of Thera was entirely destroyed in 4 minutes, for goodness sake.

So much of what we know about science and history (especially the fusion of the two) is conjecture based on small threads of information which have been spun together based on a modern frame of reference and belief in the progression of history. I don’t know, any more, that this reference or belief is as we know it. That kind of gives me a weird feeling.

Look at it this way. It has been 150-ish years since the industrial revolution fundamentally changed the way that human beings looked at the world. In 150 years, a blink of an eye even on the clock of the classical civilizations, and we already have several different ways that we could practically wipe our own existence off the map. Likewise a super volcano eruption could go a long way toward destroying any cultures near it. Who is to say that if the highly advanced cultures on the planet were destroyed tomorrow, 2,000 years from now we would not be only a legend written in the history books of the cultures that rose up to take our place? They would occasionally find weird things that they could not explain buried in the ground, things which fit nicely into their legends. They would then do what we are doing and wonder about the great lost cultures who gave their knowledge to them and disappeared in a giant mushroom-shaped apocalypse.

My perception has shifted, and I’m still trying to figure this out, so there will probably be more rambling diatribes about my own shake-up in the brain box.  I am simply using the story of Atlantis as an example of something that is actually a much larger and I think problematic issue for me.  I dont understandhow or why this is happening, but it would seem that whatever I felt to be absolute in my thoughts about science and history has been not wrong, but partially incorrect.

I’ve been doing it all wrong.

It has come to my attention (through the lens of the highly accurate and thoroughly researched 1996 Warner Brothers documentary Twister) that I have been going about the issue of chasing tornadoes all wrong. In light of this, I have compiled a short list of things that I am going to change.

-When chasing tornadoes, I wil always hang with the sorely underfunded and ragtag group of “city college of nowheresville Kansas” storm scientists as opposed to the highly experienced, well equipped and scientifically advanced group of government NOAA scientists. Moral victories against the forces of meteorological evil are always better with a winnebago and a TV playing Twisted Sister, things the ‘other’ scientists don’t have.

-Wind powerful enough to throw cows and tractors around are not, apparently,powerful enough to lift the mighty heft of the Dodge Ram. I can only assume that they are made from some exotic superdense metal (forged in the heart of a super-collider) which makes them heavier than a combine that is three times its size. I will henceforth be using one of these as opposed to the tractor that I was using.

-Barns, drainage ditches, culverts, small rises in hills, completely exposed roads with no exits, open fields, hilltops and the home of a laughably homey aunt are all legitimate places to hide from wind. These places are where I will be hiding my rowdy bunch of storm-chasers instead of where we have been hiding; namely anywhere that there is not a tornado.

-If ever actually faced with the threat of being a victim of a tornado strike, pipes sticking out of the ground have been certified as the proper objects to connect oneself to in order to avoid being sucked into the sky. I will thus never stray far from a center-pivot pump-house or farm well. Likewise I will forever keep a leather belt to use when strapping myself to said pipes. This is in direct opposition to my prior plan when confronted with such a situation: running like a little girl.

-Bad guy storm chasers drive black cars. My cars will be painted “bought in 1973 and left in a field to rust for 15 years before being bought by poor storm chasers and driven 60,000 miles a year for 2 decades red”. It brings an air of legitimacy.

These are the things that I will be changing in my habits when putting myself on death’s very doorstep. Just thought you should all know of these changes so that you might be able to implement them in your routine.

You’re welcome.