I took pictures while on vacation.

This is the hot video of the moment. I’m hoping it’s tied into a movie because that seems like a lot of original footage for just a music video.

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Gag gift but the best jokes are in the comments.

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Regretsy’s been outed, and already has a book deal.

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LINKS:

Bits

Sad to say, my people eat this stuff too

Mystery Google (be nice, the next user could be a kid — I searched for “sarah palin” and got “do jumping jacks for five minutes”)

Bacon quesadillaburger flavored popcorn?

Nordic Music Week

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DJ’s phone pic of my Mitch Berg artwork.

Yes, I briefly forgot how to spell “poopyhead.”

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R.I.P.

The Netroots panel on trolls went OK although the audience was more diffuse than the panel, adding to a fairly vague and underpopulated hour. DJ Danielson was in the second row and says he put a phone pic of my Mitch Berg caricature on his Facebook page.

I didn’t say we didn’t have any fun.

But I think my panel days are best left behind me. I didn’t lay awake last night worrying about what I was going to say. I didn’t bother to prepare any notes (altho I did have a file folder with some scrap paper in it). Minnesota Observer had notes. Typed notes. Flash brought a laptop and actually used it like a teleprompter.

I just showed wondering if anyone else would and, if so, whether they had problems with trolls or if maybe they were in the wrong room. What I figured out was that AFSCME sent lots of folks and our content wasn’t really relevant to their needs.

Everyone survived and the corporate pr flack on the other end of the second row from DJ seemed to have gotten some usable notes out of the experience. I talked to her thinking she was a reporter but I should have known she wasn’t. Reporters don’t take that many notes.

Stayed for one beer but I fear my schmoozing days are over. Kept talking about getting up and working the room but I didn’t, mostly because most of the people I wanted to see were already sitting at my table.

Old, I am. Getting used to it, more so.

African jazz/jazz/etc tonight. Maybe not what you were expecting but (more or less) it’s what the iGods served up.

I write these posts as I listen to and edit the set. At this moment I have to lose 19MB but I’m not having any luck. Good flow and no shortage of surprises for folks who take the illo too seriously (it used to be a Les Baxter cover). Jazz fusion as I define it is a good thing.

Besides, I have no idea what to call Manu Dibango’s movie music other than jazz fusion. And I see no reason why Santana can’t make an appearance in a jazz set, bearing in mind that Carlos doesn’t do cool. Peter King is someone no one in this country has heard nearly enough of, and how do you argue with Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton when it’s coming from a guy who only keeps their stuff if it fits into a jazz folder?

Link.

Figure 200MB and two hours of music. A deal at half the steal.

No tunes next week as I’ll be out and about for the holidays. Hence the drinking tonight. Pommedrivers again. It’s what I have so it’s what I’m drinking, but I’m sure the variety will be a bit more varietized on the road. I’m not drinking tonight so much as training for the holidays. I may not have mentioned it before, but I have wicked, wicked friends.

Bordering on sick with noticeable pathologies and easily implied anomalies.

I would be a better person had I never met them. A church going member of the Chamber of Commerce mayhaps. Our friendships endure mostly because no one else would put up with them, and me by association. I am without a doubt the most innocent of all passersby in this most abject of sordid companies.

These gentlemen have at various times been lewd, screwed and sued, and not always in that order. Each is in his own right notorious, but sometimes in good ways.

Er, what I meant to say is that you can be notorious for good reasons. I did not mean to suggest that any affirmative interpretation would in any way apply to any of the people I’m visiting, all of whom have a well oiled spade in the toolshed and unlabeled veterinary products in their medicine chests.

In their defense and to the best of my knowledge none of them have ever eaten human flesh. Brains maybe, but not flesh.

And they all acquire their music legally, a practice I cannot understand, condone or defend.

I’ll admit to not being like other people (as opposed to simply not liking other people — also true). Most folks wouldn’t have just spent twenty minutes trying to remember who Michael Dukakis’s running mate was in ‘88, or at least would have turned to Wikipedia faster than I did.

Then again, most folks don’t live in the Twin Cities where Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak recently proclaimed Nov. 7 to be Suicide Commandos Day. And most people don’t hang out with folks who put Russian rock videos on their websites. [WINston and I drove to Chicago back in the late '90s to see Tequilajazzz tear up the Elbo Room.]

Not quite so far away as Russia, but in Norway there’s a Gisleson who’s somehow connected to BigBang, a Scandi metal band with some chops and who by all rights should be on the soundtrack to the made for TV movie that should be made about Elizabeth Lambert, the worlds’ dirtiest female soccer player.

None of which has anything to do with Neil McCormick’s interview with the remaining BeeGees, or Wikipedia’s page devoted to The Beatles’ Twelfth Album.

Will and Jada Pinkett Smith are not people I think of when I think of Fela Anikulapo Kuti, but they’ve both just signed on as producers for Fela!, a musical I’d love to see someday. Fela was Nigeria’s John Lennon to King Sunny Adé’s Elvis, and I was lucky enough to see him twice thanks to First Avenue making a serious effort to bring top African artists to the Cities back in the ’90s.

And Jello Biafra says major labels deserve to be ripped off, but we should pay for his CDs.

Oh, and Media Blitz 189 is up.

So endeth the music portion of this post, unless you count this as music-related.

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Books:

D.G. Myers rips on Beloved, and then revisits it to rip some more a week later. Before thinking unkindly of Myers for hating on Tony Morrison, read his Middle Passage post. The dude knows from whereof he speaks. Jean Toomer, btw, is one of the most significant writers I’ve read who no one else ever seems to have heard of.

McSweeney’s latest project, a one-shot Sunday newspaper, keeps getting rave ups.

Of more general interest, FDL book club checks out David Kessler’s The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite. Jacob Sullum at Reason has more.

Taking that cue to segué to food:

Heavy Table looks at Somali cooking

The LATimes biannual report on blowfish

A very hard food quiz (they cheated on the camera angles)

My favorite restaurant gets a blog review but in the process is subjected to some fairly inaccurate drive-by gossip

Rogue Smoke Ale (of which The Happy Gnome still has one bottle left!)

Unrelated to food but yeah, this is very much related: Twittified bathroom scale shares your weight with the world. I could see how that might work very well for some people. People more easily shamed than me, that is. I suspect I’d react to that scale like I do radar speed signs: by speeding up!

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Parenting done well.

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TV/movies:

The douching of the airwaves

The new The Prisoner

New Da Vinci Code movie to look at Opus Dei’s founder

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Johnny Ive video on design.

You’re a Mac person, or you’re not.

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Art:

Aminah Robinson

Going as yourself: greatest Halloween mask ever! (and some serious competition)

Tongue-IDed [scroll down, you'll know when you get there]

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Dave Trott still writes the world’s greatest blog, and the world’s greatest Tenth Blogiversary is still tomorrow night at The Happy Gnome!

More than once my self-deprecating humor has been confused with low self-esteem. This situation is compounded by the fact the things I’m proudest of are intangible which is another way of saying I don’t make any money from them.

I’m proud I’m on this list:

Not because I’m TBogg’s biggest fanboy. Granted he’s more concise, better organized, usually funnier and almost always more on target than me, but those are all things I could fix by putting more time and talent into this and the other blog. Mostly talent.

I like it because it’s the highest ranking blog roll I’m on. I think. Hell I don’t know. As many times as I’ve changed my URL and anonymized my tracks, I’m amazed anyone can find my stuff at all. The fact is you don’t work very hard to drive readers to what you’re doing because you’re not doing what you were going to do but haven’t started yet because you’re thinking about something else now and that tends always be the case and by now you’re probably getting my gist.

A long and overly meandering intro into what I was planning to write about when I started this post: a music set for TBogg. And no, he doesn’t have to download it if he doesn’t want to, point being I put this list together for his last Random 10 post and liked it so much I thought I should share.

No #13, btw. Reiko Ike is kind of a running joke with me, she being a Japanese pink film actor who cut one album from which 経験 is from.

Tom apparently had just enough room left on his iPod for 20 songs so the usual Random 10 gang was giving him nominations over which he will now be judge and jury with a post to be written later in which he will attempt to justify his choices for which he will be graded harshly in the comment thread.

#1 on this list, btw, is my all time favorite song/arrangement from this century. I love it so much I misspelled Kieran Hebden’s name in my comment to Tom.

I am such a lousy fanboy.

Download this one if only for that one song. But I also think you’ll appreciate Syysaika for what it is, will wist out with Koushik, flip over Gene Autrey, tap your toes to Tommy McCook not to mention the Surf Champlers before being amazed by Medeski Martin & Wood, blown away by Ernest Ranglin and then bowing to the infuckingeffable cool of Dr. I-Bolit.

I know damned well you can’t get Dr. I-Bolit & Tribal Roots from iTunes.

Steal or be clueless. Theft is knowledge. The law is an ass. Support local music.

And help elect uncorrupt politicians who will legislate us into the digital age so we can get on with figuring out how to compensate musicians and composers. Technology has barely begun to fuck up our shit and we’re still trying to figure who to invoice for the cleanup. Getting rid of the rich and over-compensated won’t be easy but the future sorta depends on it.

Oh, and fuck Ohio State very much.

Went to upload tunes to 4Shared and discovered they’ve boosted the file limit to 200MB. Having put some time and thought into this Alaskan-requested Latin set last night, I’m uploading the original 97MB set and that’s that.

Maybe I’ll do a 200MB set next week to make up for my annual vacation the week after that.

This one was hard. I don’t have a huge amount of Spanish and Portuguese language music. This week’s playlist:

And this is the link you can download it from.

As gangster as I could make it without going all reggaeton all the time. I really like the Caracas-based KP9000 as they’re as metal as I care to get in my dotage.

The request was for angry but my music database is geared more for ominous. Here’s the request in full:

Putting a possible bud in your Pyrex for next weeks consideration…a request for a completely angry urban mix exclusively from the southern hemisphere.

First off there was no bud in my pyrex. I checked again just five minutes ago but still no bud, kind, ganja, hemp, weed or even shake. I know, I know. Alaska’s a long ways away but ever since the first season of Heroes concluded there’s really been no excuse for not bending the time-space continuum and just doing it.

Anyhoo this set is, imho, mixed urban music from south of the border. Hemisphere? Wtf?! Mind counting for me just how many cities there are south of the equator in this hemisphere? By saying hemisphere you just counted out Bogota, San José, Managua, Mexico and the entire Caribbean including Cuba and Jamaica mon!

What’s left? Quito, Lima, La Paz, Asuncion, Montevideo, Buenos Aires and — thank god — Brazil. But rather than do an all Rio-São Paulo-Tango set, I worked from all of Latin America.

I cheated. I admit it. But I did it for you, my readers. And your sanity. Brazilian and Argentinian music seems to have been composed each with not being the other in mind. You just don’t segué from Tom Jobim to Astor Piazzolla, Dios to Suba. Not in my sets you don’t.

Shit like that’ll make you car sick.

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Dept. of Unholy Coincidences.

Got this in my email while writing this post.

OK, well, interesting to me anyhow. I never get Spanish language spam.

R&BsoulViennabasedMongolianCowboyBeBopcountryjazzfunkhoprockhopTomwaits, actually.

After you listen to #4 you’ll better understand why I ruthlessly purged most of what iTunes offered up and broke all my rules by cherrypicking the crap out of this set. Sequentially all iTunes but over 40 songs got deleted before I was happy with the premiere all new brand spanking 100MB/onehour Friday Set (OMBOHFS for short).

4Share’s 100MB limitation is, I think, a good thing.

Downfunk.

PBS is airing Bill Cosby’s Mark Twain Prize opposite the World Serious and the Celtics-Timberwolves game.

Maybe the first time in a decade I’ve wished I had a DVR.

Luckily the Cosby tribute will air again late Saturday night (opposite SNL in a bit of in-your-face public programming).

But I’m not sure what the point of showing this special twice tonight is, unless it would be to force baseball fans to pick which half of the last game of the Series to watch.

I actually turned on the TV for something other than live sports or news tonight.

.

Yeah, it’s weird even thinking about it but ABC was premiering V. It’s not based on the movie (which I liked) but on a ’90s TV show (that I never saw). They promoed an anorexic Morena Baccarin. I was hoping Photoshop but I’m sadly reporting that it was in fact a very skinny Baccarin.

If you clicked the link I hope you were as impressed as I was that Baccarin did the voice for Justice League Unlimited’s Black Canary.

Black Canary is sooo hot. I have no idea what planet comic book women come from, but obviously it’s one with less gravity than ours. Or more?

As for V, not bad. Much higher production quality than I’d expected. I’ll definitely watch this one. In a couple of years from a stream or download. No fucking way am I again subjecting myself to so many LOUD commercials.

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Bits.

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Video:

Charlize Theron kissing woman for charity

Supermodels stripping for climate change

We Are Douchebags (OK, maybe it is one word after all)

MPAAprop

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Potlinks:

Hayfork

Breckenridge decided today whether or not to legalize paraphernalia

LA in the ”60s

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No duh:

Digital books will hurt bookstores

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Duh:

Built-in GPS

Your brain on drugs…literally

$75,000 mystery

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Foody:

Umami burgers

Where the commune meets the kale

The Lexicographer’s Dilemma

Pomegranates

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Tunez:

Sting/Obama/Uzbekistan

Media Blitz Radio 188

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R.I.P.$

Since only one person signed up for Pandos, it seems privacy is an issue. I don’t blame you, I wouldn’t want my email address stored on my computer if the RIAA comes knocking.

The new solution is 4shared.com.

Better than Rapidshare.de (100% less porn) and because the files stay there until I delete them. Feel free to grab anything I’ve uploaded. Like with Rapidshare.de you’ll have to wait for the timer to start your download.

One catch: the green download signs aren’t what you want to click on. The one that counts is blue.

Oh, and this set is — if you grab all four parts — three hours of music (45 songs) and very definitely themed for Halloween. You can peek at the entire playlist here. I’m still uploading as I post this, but there’s no reason why you can’t start downloading the first part of the set now.

Probably a lot of new bands to you. Everything I could find that was dark and Halloweenish and pulled from my recent downloads folder so this is all new music to me, nothing I’ve loaded into iTunes yet (except for this set).

Familiar names for some would include DJ Shadow, David Sylvian, The Mount Fuji Doomjazz Corporation, National Philharmonic Orchestra, Melvins, The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble, Vampire Hands, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Holger Czukay.

Less familiar names? Hanggai, Converge, Oh No, Glenn Danzig, Hauschka, Tomas Dvorak, Mapstation, Jazkamer, Paul Schutz, Asher, Kazi Ploae, Nommo Ogo, Unlearn, Random Inc., Acid Witch, Talibam!, and Odd Clouds.

Creepy, ambient, dark jazz, metal, soundtracks (including unreleased music from The Exorcist), noise, and radio promo spots for cheesy horror movies.

Leave a comment if you have any problems with 4shared.com. If this outfit works out well, I may upload some previous weeks’ sets for any of you who are interested in expanding your musical horizons.

iTunes, btw, is up to 76,100 songs exactly. I think I’ve got almost half my library in there now.

Got tired of TMiss and realized that TheM was a perfectly good posting handle for this blog. All beside the point, the point being that IT’S PARTY TIME.

Er, not yet. Just giving you advance warning so you can schedule your other partying accordingly.

The Happy Gnome doesn’t usually allow patio reservations but because it’s a special occasion, and because it’s mid-November and no one in their right mind wants to be outside…we have the entire patio to ourselves from 7-10 pm, Tuesday, November 17.

It is in fact the tenth anniversary of my very first blog but that’s just a ruse to get people to come out and buy me a beer. The Happy Gnome has some of the best beer in town — including a $50 bottle of some very special stuff from Rogue Brewery. Buy me that one and I’ll seriously consider letting you take me home. Or, more likely, driving me to my home and then helping to pour me up the stairs.

Ten years of intertubular hells. Radio, b2evolution, Nucleus, Textpattern, WordPress, Blogger and a few other platforms that crashed on me more than once. Tons of tech support, design and development from Mark Franaszek, hosting from Sound Internet, James Scherber, and now IPHouse. Guest posts from Minnesota Observer. The opportunity to work with such delightful personages as Tild, Steve Monaco, Brad Zellar, Paul Demko, Pete Scholtes, Britt Robson and I’m drawing a blank on many other names most of whom have asked me to stop emailing them.

We will be drinking in accordance with the 12-step program:

1. Have a drink.

2. Have a drink.

3. Have a drink

Show up and we’ll tell you what steps 4-12 are. Don’t show up and we’ll talk about you.

Feel free to forward this to any blog-reading, lefty Twin Citians of your acquaintance. They don’t need to know me or have read my blog. All that really matters is that they buy me a drink.

Seriously. It’s just that simple. 7,000,000 words posted online and all I ask in return is a lil’ sumpthin’ sumpthin’. In a glass. (This is a classy bar.)

Mark Gisleson
aka The Wege
aka The Mississippifarian

Yeah, taking my own sweet time updating TheM but I’ve also been busy and my reading hasn’t been quite as well rounded as I’d like. Still, some pop stuck to my browser so if you’re interested:

Clips from the Michael Jackson movie

Jon Bream on MJ flick

Prince’s late night Paisley Park gig

Prince showed more versatility and musicality in his first hour onstage than Michael Jackson did in his entire career.

It pains me to say that I missed this

Opinionated crap about Shepard Fairey

Zombie sock hop [scroll down to video]

The Facebook games play

>>>>

>>>

>>

>

UDPATE:

Whoopi at Mystic Lake for New Year’s.

Suddenly the casino lounge act jokes aren’t so funny. Otoh, I can’t remember the last time I took a free bus to get to a concert.

UPDATE: Sorry, I just checked again and Rapidshare seems to be permanently redirected to porn site ads. Time to find a new site OR maybe we should just go with Pando. Email me to be put on the list and I’ll notify you each week when new stuff is up. This way I can do up to 1GB which is one heck of a set. Maybe some videos?

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Funny. I threw a lot of dark and funky jazz into a folder and out came a sad rainy day set that has me wondering if iTunes doesn’t check out my weather widget.

Playlist.

Music. [Playlist included in the zipped file] [scroll down to Free, click, wait and then download]

Despite what I said in the previous post’s comments, I don’t think there’s really any Pat Metheny style stuff in here. A few surprises but mostly jazz, some Metheney congruent after a sort.

Man up AK dude and settle for something other than what you wanted. Chinese plastics workers get drunk on less than you piss away on ice scrapers.

^*^

Yes. Abrupt that was.

What can I say?

I’m efficient. I tend to streamline repetitive tasks and already I’m slamming three-hour sets together so quickly the booze doesn’t have time to catch up.

But it does.

Catch up.

Fortunately, posting space being somewhat infinite (and Friday night readers somewhat scattered), stealth updating is always an option.

As is blabbing away the game.

^*^

So as I was saying before I so rudely dividered myself, what goes in does catch up to you and in all honesty I have to say that I think I’m drinking entirely too much fruit juice and not nearly enough vodka. And this whole handpressing of the pomegranate fruit thing is time-consuming, as in time not spent drinking is time not spent drinking.

If you catch my drift.

Then again, if you really caught my drift you would have wandered away from this page long ago.

Music soon come. It took an hour to upload, you should have it faster than that and by now I’m guessing a three-hour set will end the day for most of you, circadianly challenged ultra northernists exluded.

The Bugge Wesseltoft, btw, is a must listen for anyone who’s ever been anything like, partial to or resembling a Lutheran. Kimer, I Klokker is a very literate, inventive and revealing jazz deconstruction of some hymn I grew up with, but which I’ve never heard played anywhere near this well. If you know Garrison Keillor well enough to give him gifts, There’s Snow On My Piano would earn you points.

Yes, that’s a very manipulative thing to say but my thoughts have been trending that way of late. Comes from being forced to work on a client’s Facebook account.

GodbutIhateFacebook.

Also. People have taken to picking up one of my clients. I’ve advised her not to let them do so.

I get paid for insights even less profound.

It’s all in the billing.

And not, thereof.

Or not of.

Of.

Symmetry demanded a conclusion just now but I had something else to say.

And I’ll be goddamned if I can remember what it was.

Eating lots of shiitake mushrooms lately, but my big culinary find of the fall continues to be Lucky Lily brand Bouakham Nam Sausage with a chili pepper. Together with raw fried potatoes and eggs, it’s my new favorite breakfast.

Click to blow up the picture and then squint and you should be able to see the tiny Thai chili pepper that comes with each wrapped sausage (green chili on top, red chili with the bottom sausage).

Remember, the earlier in the day you start eating garlic, the more people you get to share it with.

FOOD:

Oyster sauce

Make your own sausage

ARTS & GRAFT:

Thai Heil Hitler billboards pulled

Fuck you for even thinking about reselling an alarm clock on eBay!

Bits, Bits, and Bits

Is it a miracle if it happens to Muslims?

CELEBS:

Lloyd Grove interviews Gore Vidal

Sex Pistols claim trademark infringement

Vin Vericose: City Pages interviews local boy gone porn (interesting, even w/out the titillation)

VIDEOS:

FDL late late night with videos from Meaghan Smith and live Moby [kudos to Chuck Olsen for the Moby shoot]

Pixar’s Luxo Jr. Gets the Chair [this and the next link via Denny from CR]

Chris Burden’s Flying Steamroller

Mike Masnick explains The Economics of Abundance

MOVIES:

NYTimes on Antichrist

TBogg on Erik Erickson on Antichrist

Killing Kasztner

INTERTUBULAR SMELLS:

Glenn Beck shilling against Net Neutrality

Masnick on “the death of file sharing”

Swedes: what file sharing?

YouTube’s bandwidth bill

MUSIC:

Media Blitz 187

Groove Armada pops out

Sing out loud at work and get sued for royalties

One critic’s 10 Greatest Albums of the 2000s (videos)

Amy Farris, R.I.P.

DRUGS:

Glenn Greenwald on Obama’s new federal pot policy

Rice in beer? (I’d think I’d rather have ricin beer)

BOOKS:

Jung’s Red Book

ebooks

The Nook

HALLOWEEN:

Way cool electronic zombie head

Realityween

Stitched skull

Top Wingnut fright flicks

And yes, another random set of tunes tonight, albeit a bit more focused. I’m thinking jazz/jazz fusion, but I haven’t started drinking yet so it’s hard to say.

Why bother having public television if it’s just an excuse to run old B movies? Yes, Thelma & Louise is a fun movie but c’mon, under no circumstances is it a quality movie that belongs on public TV.

I think of public TV as a place where language doesn’t get bleeped because even cuss words can be revelatory when used by a skilled playwright or screenwriter. Not true of Thelma & Louise, a movie in which characters swear for entertainment’s sake. But I’m sure any excessive nudity will still get snipped in the pud.

Wrong. Wrong on all counts. Instead of Thelma & Louise, show us Equus. Dedicate a night of the week to Shakespeare, move public affairs shows like Bill Moyers Journal to Sunday morning to compete with the idiot pundits, and use those extra digital channels to bring us more high school and local college sports, plays, band concerts, etc.

Congress needs to revise copyright laws, freeing up movies over 25 years old so PBS can get back to the business of showing us quality stuff we might not have heard of before instead of pandering to their audience in the desperate hope that we might pledge some money.

☯☮☯

Jordan Bass brings back the broadsheet for McSweeney’s No. 33.

☯☮☯

Zombie strippers?

Start the countdown. I predict that by the time Halloween actually rolls around, we’ll see a Zombie Pimp ‘n’ Ho Crawl because nothing entertains the offspring of the overpaid and heartless like dressing up like dead sex workers.

☯☮☯

Charles Bukowski’s 16-bit Intel 8088 chip.

☯☮☯

Hmm. That URL may not open in all browsers.

Think of it as an anti-RIAA hack.

Back to random, but not the piteous, mewling, I-cannot-believe-it’s-still-around Friday Random Ten. And no, I’m not going to call this new thing of ours the Friday Random Forty-Two. I’m playing by Rapidshare.de file size rules so the number of tunes may vary.

New rules and not just because I’m a quarter-German (I’m also 1/64th French prescriptive grammarian). What you get is the first 50 songs iTunes randomly mixes from my music collection. [As of this set iTunes is mixing from a pool of 74,991 songs]

If the random set is hopelessly not what anyone would ever want to listen to, I’ll take a screenshot to so you can judge for yourself. Tonight’s set is a first take.

Because 50 songs is usually more than 300MB, I will edit to fit, using my discretion to eliminate some clunkers. Tonight you were spared a second live Sun Ra meltdown and several avant hard-to-listen to experiments in distractive anarchy.

Just like it says. iTunes hath delivered unto you a set that really doesn’t make sense. Not, at least, until you listen to it. Taken on its own terms, it works, but it works best if you’re drinking and were driven to do so.

Some smiles, occasional soul patches, a few less than challenging moments. Mostly some outlets for whiskey tango foxtrotting your inner most thoughts into a damnit-time-for-another-refill glass of blessedly obstructed thoughts.

Pommedrivers for me tonight. Still working away my “free” case of pomegranates.  (Bought ‘em too early in the season so I got to keep ‘em.) A pommedriver is a shot of fresh pomegranate juice, ice and orange juice. More potent than you’d think. after three of them I find msyelf having to edit.

Oh, and a shot and a half of vodka. Helps take the edge off the green pomegranate juice.

24 songs into this set and it’s definitely Republican friendly and homo sapiens adverse. Fuckingyayyeah moody angry drinking music.

Thinking about Cheney drinking music.

Shots in your face drinking music:

Drunkenmusiken

And this is its set:

Click on the image to enlarge.

Click here to download. 284Mb, 42 songs. 2:56:31 playing time. That’s nine pommedrivers if you’re keeping count.

Music to watch Yankees v Angels baseball to with the sound off while I follow NBA exhibition season basketball online.

Republican heaven.

With Sammy Davis Jr. sprinkles.

.

OK. I didn’t know there was opera in here. Worse, Schönberg.

Still worse:

it works

Really well, actually.

Reaffirms my commitment to random. Even though I would have put the Robeson next altho the Bollypop did turn out to be fairly inspired, timing wise at least.

UPDATE: Checking to make sure the links were good I noticed that Rapidshare seems to be having a bit of pornsite redirect problem tonight. Not threatening to my Mac but Windoze users might want to have their fingers ready to close the browser. But it worked fine for me the second time I tried.

Repeated attempts might work as I’m sure it’s an ongoing battle between evil Byelorusski hackers and valiant east German porno/piracy site hosts.

The rock’em sock’em world of intertubular bells and thistles.

UPDATE to UPSTATE”

OK, there was something I was going to say. Almost got it. No? Slipped away.

Gosh shuckey darn.

UPDATE TO THE UPSTATE OF UPDATES:

Left the orange juice out of teh last pommedriver. Holy fucking Jesus Mary God of Mother! Green pomegranate juice is a mix to be reckoned with. The vodka practically crawled out of the glass.

But not an enabling drunk. More like an each-breath-I-take-the-Reaper-I-snake dick-waggling exeunt proclamation than a war cry, in my informed and subsequently humbled opinion.

Damn. Forgot about the second half of the last payment arrangement and went almost 150 minutes without the internet.

Then, just as I was taking off my boot to start gnawing on my foot, it came back on.

In the far off distance I heard a bell ring. (Tinkle, actually.)

It’s good to be home.

[kisses monitor]

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When I see stipple art, I think Wall Street Journal. Talk about a world class brand reinforcer. You’d expect them to defend their copyright vigorously. Otoh, before they did I had no idea who Jose Maria Cano was.

David Hockney

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

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VIDEOS/TUNES:

From Koski in the comments the must see: The Penguins Who Make The Cigarettes

Paranormal Activity gets 800 screens — Blair Witch or box office bust? (I’m betting Blair Witch, tis the season)

Girl Talk

I’m starting to think I like Scarlett Johansson better as a singer

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ETC.:

Vintage slash’n'burn on The Economist from The eXiled

SCA photos in LATimes

TBogg is back

Garth who?

227,026 on Amazon with a bullet!

Finland makes broadband access a legal right (sparing their citizens the cruel deprivation just perpetuated upon me) (via Denny from CR)

Leveraging a monopoly while delivering a shoddy product

Does the Brain Like E-Books?

Cider Doughnuts?

So do Trojans

Don’t be afraid, the rest of them are better (but only a few are really worth the click)

French Toast of the Dead [see also French Zombie movies (scroll down)]

If the illuminated pumpkins and French zombies are too far ahead of the season for you, maybe you won’t be up for reading the first liberals are going to ban Christmas chain email of the season. Just in time for the first retail sales prediction of the season.

No clue why, but I love stuff like this. I’m jealous of people who have the talent and inspiration to just knock off pieces of art. It reminds me a bit of the Thai spirit house I have in my bedroom, roofless, lacquered in guilt with engraved envy.

OK, not a lot. Just a bit. And knock off is a loose term for what was a day’s work for the artist. If I ever spent an entire day on one post I’d illuminate it with gold sprinkled animated GIFs and iridescent hypertext links.

The artist who made the “Gothic Shrine Box,” Corrine Bayraktaroglu (aka Jafabrit) is a notorious yarn bomber and chamberpotterer who presently resides in Yellow Springs, my favorite holiday waystation.

I definitely hope to meet her one of these years. I’m rather curious as to what she looks like with her tongue retracted.

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Interesting. I grabbed a link to a post about Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize at Putumayo’s World Music Blog, and now that post is gone.

I have to suspect that whoever’s in charge decided that was a bit too political for a commercial site. That’s a shame as it was a nice post that tied Obama in with world music in a very positive way.

Art and music are political. Take issue #2 of The Bachmann Comic, for example. (Or don’t. Bachmann’s easy to max out on.)

–|–

Maurice Sendak surfaces at MOMA for an advance screening of Spike Jonze’s film version of Where The Wild Things Are.

Nice review/story by Jeffrey Podolsky. At times I almost forget that Speakeasy is a Wall Street Journal blog. Conservatives make better critics, imho. Liberals tend to gush whereas cons riposte, dissect and sniff. Art you like is always better when you’re right and the critics are wrong.

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Moviefill.com has taken the time to create the SNL Alums: By The Numbers chart.

Worth a click if for no other reason than to see David Spade get thoroughly humbled.

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Videos:

Cornball schtick from Mel Blanc and Jack Benny

The soothing sounds of All India Radio: Four Three

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Cusine, haute and otherwise:

NYTimes on chicken wings: Charlieq’s take, and Anna’s take

Trader Joe’s shrooms (quality control and less so)

The world does not respect American fine dining

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Snark.

Backstory.

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It’s been a while so here again are some blogs that post music I find interesting:

Awesome Tapes from Africa

Sácate un Disco (Rapidshare site!)

Radiodiffusion Internasionaal Annexe

African Hip Hop

มนต์รักเพลงไทย

Whoops. Just lost about an hour at Awesome Tapes from Africa thanks to some remarkable sides Thursdayborn has posted. The Oum Koulsoum is especially nab-worthy.

Music blogging will never replace torrents for serious pirates, but for casual music lovers who love to browse, it’s a great way to go. This is how I got a lot of my music before I went six-hard drives wild on torrents.

–∞–

EtC:

Beauty and Brazil

Concept of the unified text (I may have taken Myer’s previous post a bit too seriously. Pity. The notion that Nabokov’s page breaks were deliberate was choicean.)

Magic bus

Heaviest metal videogame ever

This post is exactly 4 shots long.

I’m not sure what that would be in bong hits.

I’ll have to remember to watch the arts and culture links a bit more closely going into the weekends when they tend to pile up pretty quickly.

MOVIES:

A Serious Man: The Exiled, Hullabaloo

Paranormal Activity

WRITING:

The genius of page breaks

James Ellroy interview

CULINARY:

New book on cooking from Aquavit’s Marcus Samuelsson

The Magic Bus Cafe

ART:

Literate response to Michelle Malkin’s know-nothing art criticism of Alma Thomas

A Cthulhic response to the fascist kitsch klassic, One Nation Under God

Alabama donates statue of feminist socialist to nation’s capitol

MUSIC:

Bernard Chazelle on Bach’s Cantata BWV 13 (Bass Aria)

Very cool embedded music (and the music ain’t bad either) [via Kip]

VIDEOS:

Amadou & Mariam

Molly Ivors found a very entertaining YouTube that helped even me to better understand the mathematical nature of music

PHOTOGRAPHY:

NFL control freakery

Microscope photography

From a Newseum exhibit on sports photography:

“[Walter Iooss]…recalls the emotional day he photographed his boyhood hero, Johnny Unitas, whose hand was so damaged by football that he couldn’t hold a cup of coffee.”

Click here to learn the name of this river

BLOGS:

Boing Boing redesigned

Wolcott attends a shrimp ball symposium

Pharyngula on real world Bernie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans

HENTAI:

Nude Marge Simpson to grace Playboy’s cover (and the interesting thing is that the ChiTrib story encourages readers to google “Family Guy Lois Griffin” which takes you to scores of hentai links that are, I’m pretty sure, incredibly illegal under U.S. porn laws: this one for example, and especially this one)

You can violate copyright without committing hentai

TECHNO:

Ballmer: Free is not a business model (except when Microsoft does it)

ETC.:

Bits

The Zombie Zeitgeist

How Mad Ave types stay married :

Every year on my wife’s birthday, and our anniversary, I send flowers to her office.

But I always send them to the wrong address.

Either the office next door, or the one across the road.

This means that the receptionist very kindly has to carry them round to the correct office and the women all discuss it as she does.

“Ooh. aren’t they lovely.”

“I wish someone would send me flowers like that.”

“Aren’t you a lucky girl.”

“Can I have your husband when you’re finished with him.”

And of course, the value of the flowers is doubled.

Because, for a woman, it isn’t really just the flowers she wants.

She wants the approval of other women.

So once you know that’s the real value of the flowers, then the brief changes. It becomes more about the delivery than just the flowers.

Of course I could just bring the flowers home.

But where would be the value in that?

No one else would see them and tell my wife what a lucky girl she is.

Sexist? Maybe, but I found it to be an interesting insight into gift giving.

Fell asleep waiting on the upload but yes, I’ve got another music set for you to download from Rapidshare. Not exactly what I promised. I think the list of artists is all you really need to know:

Yes,  a little more monotunistic than usual, but within this one artist there is a lot of diversity, and some interesting variations on various themes.

I didn’t quite intend for this, but while I’ve loaded this guy’s discography into iTunes, apparently I’ve never gotten around to doing likewise with his old band. I call this set, Live from My Life in the Knee of Momo.

Just shy of three hours of music. 42 songs, about 275MB.

Click here

scroll down to Free, click, wait, then download.

Good to listen to any time of day.