Steve Guns

A friend of mine recently sent me this article from Der Spiegel:
Life Insurance for Palestinian Suicide Bombers

As the bus began to pull away, a man ran up to the side and the bus driver stopped and opened the door. The man was wearing the black suit and skullcap of an observant Jew. But his beard was too thin. Seeing a bulge underneath the man's jacket, Averbach quickly stood up and headed toward the stranger. But Bassam, disguised as a devout Jew, was quicker than Averbach and he ignited his belt of explosives.

Bassam died and Averbach survived seriously injured for life.

The article is about the trail of money that pays the families of suicide bombers. They incorrectly refer to Steve as "Weapon Steve" instead of "Steve Guns." I suppose it has something to do with the translation to or from German. It's four years after the incident and Steve remains paralyzed.

One of these days I will edit my original story about Steve so that it's more coherent, but you can download the story here.

Two Stevens Make Bold Statements

Interested in stimulating your mind? Looking for some good topics to discuss over dinner or drinks this weekend. Look no further. Here's my suggestions:

Steve Jobs: Thoughts on Music

I couldn't beleive it when I read this one. It seems that the company that sells the most mp3 players and has the most popular digital music store would prefer to remove the Digital Rights Management (DRM) system from the music they sell in their store. It's a rational approach to a problem created either out of the greed or ignorance of the four big record companies that own 70% of the music distributed in the world today. Here's a quote from the article:

So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free,what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system? There appear to be none. If anything, the technical expertise and overhead required to create, operate and update a DRM system has limited the number of participants selling DRM protected music. If such requirements were removed, the music industry might experience an influx of new companies willing to invest in innovative new stores and players. This can only be seen as a positive by the music companies.

Read the rest of the article here.

Steven M. Cohen: A Tale of Two Jewries: The "Inconvenient Truth" for American Jews

As usual, there's a ton of controversy when Steven M. Cohen writes an analysis of the state of American Jewry, and then makes some recommendations. What's the crisis all about? Here's an excerpt:

Responses to the statement “I have a strong sense of belonging to the Jewish people” are especially relevant here. The proportions who strongly agree drop from a maximum of 72% among those 65+, to 62% for those 55-64, to 58% for the 45-54 year olds, to 52% among those 35-44, and down to a low point of 47% for adults under 35.

Read the whole report here.
Read some articles about it here. And even more here.

Shabbos Machvis

• Q: What is this? When is this holiday? Are you having Pessach in Jersey? Oh my....
• A: It's this shabbos. You wanna come to NJ?
• Q: Sorry, I can't. So whats machvis about?
• A: When The Chairman was growing up in Milwaukee, he and another kid were the only Jewish kids in their class. Whenever they cut school, and the teacher would ask why they were absent, they would tell the teacher that it was a Jewish holiday: machvis. So machvis is a made up holiday from The Chairman's childhood in Milwaukee, or as we call it, "the good land."

We're taking it seriously, with a spreadsheet and everything:

Brined Turkey Breast With Googly Eyes

A friend called me and said that there was a contest on The Leonard Lopate Show which involves putting googly eyes on food. Luckily, I work in a place where they keep googly eyes handy. I asked a colleague where I might find googly eyes. She took me to a closet which had a whole bunch of drawers, one of which was clearly labeled "googly eyes."

"What size do you want?"

"Big, I guess."

In retrospect, I probably should have taken an assortment of sizes. I also should have brined the turkey for less than five days: it came out a bit on the salty side. Well, not a bit, quite a lot really. I think it was salt cured. I could have sliced it raw and served it as sashimi, or carpaccio.

Space 2007

I've been working on a space mix for about three years now. I finally feel that it's getting closer to be worthy of a release. I'm going to take my time on this though. I think that I might do a storyline to go with the mix.

Chapter One: The protagonist decides to leave the earth in order to explore space. He takes a rocket to the moon which is a staging ground for further exploration.

Chapter Two: While on the moon, the protagonist sees the sites, visits the Moon Landing Museum and stops off at the Lunar Cantina for dinner, drinks and a show.

Chapter Three: The protagonist boards the spaceship and heads out on an exploration.

Chapter Four: After a wrong turn at a nebula, the ship is lost, the protagonist must deal with the possibility of being lost in space...forever!

Chapter Five: The return to earth.

All that goes together with the following tentative playlist:

• 01 - Zero 7 - Today
• 02 - Smashing Pumpkins - Rocket
• 03 - Stewie Griffin - Rocket Man
• 04 - The Herbaliser - Moon Sequence
• 05 - Apollo 11 - Landing
• 06 - Papa Project - Can You Feel?
• 07 - Neil Armstrong - One Small Step For Man
• 08 - Tim Motzer - Starship
• 09 - Jan Turkenburg and his pupils of the Geert Grote School - In My Spaceship
• 10 - Steve Miller Band - Fly Like an Eagle (original version)
• 11 - A Space Odyssey - The Blue Danube
• 12 - Mo´ Horizons - Walk Into Space
• 13 - David Bowie - Life On Mars?
• 14 - The Karminsky Experience Inc. - Exploration
• 15 - Radio Trip - Lost In Space
• 16 - Say Hi To Your Mom - Let's Talk About Spaceships
• 17 - Chaser - Blue Planet

It would be ideal if I could find an illustrator to make a comic book of some kind to accompany the mix. Another option may be to work with a blue screen and photo shop.

The story can get more fleshed out, and I can still play with the track list. I have been thinking about some kind of space battle scene (which would have "Battle" by Ben Onono as the fight scene track: but the connection to space seems far too tenuous), but this mix is about space and exploration, not necessarily science-fiction.

The Vastater

• 1-Beck-Missing
• 2-Gomez-Hamoa Beach
• 3-Scissor Sisters-The Other Side
• 4-West Indian Girl-What Are You Afraid Of (Dert Remix)
• 5-Belle & Sebastian-Sukie In The Graveyard
• 6-Professor Frink-The Sound of Professor Frink Flinging a Microscope
• 7-Clap Your Hands Say Yeah-In This Home On Ice
• 8-Built To Spill-The Plan
• 9-Say Hi To Your Mom-Blah Blah Blah
• 10-Bow Wow Wow-Fools Rush In (Kevin Shields Remix)
• 11-The Radio Dept.-The Worst Taste In Music (Extended)
• 12-Cornelius-Chapter 8 - Seashore and Horizon
• 13-Caribou-Hello Hammerheads
• 14-The Polyphonic Spree-The Beginning Stages, Part 9 (Reach for the Sun)
• 15-America/Deepsky-Ventura Highway [Deepsky's Blizzard in L.A. Remix]
• 16-The Flaming Lips-The Sound of Failure
• 17-Ryuichi Sakamoto-War & Peace (Cornelius Remix)
• 18-Mathis from the Bronx-You gonna vastate me with those yankee tickets?
• 19-Nouvelle Vague-This Is Not A Love Song (Thievery Corporation Mix)

...and now you can download the mix as a zip file.

The War Room

This is me at work.

I turned my office into a war room.

More Cover Art

I took this picture on my way into work today. I was thinking that maybe the CD cover could have a bare winter tree with an overcast sky in the background as a cover.
I took three pictures, this is one of them.
The other two look pretty similar.
Alright. Now I need to do some work-style work.

Deciding on Cover Art

I need to decide on the cover art. I just designed two covers based on the concept I had. Here's the idea, or perhaps I should say, here was the idea. I wanted a picture where both my arms were up, my right hand forming a "V" and my left hand clutching a few CDs. The "V" would form the first letter of the word Vastater. The image of me would be warholized in some way, and my arms would go up either side of the hole on the CD. Like I said: that was the concept.

This weekend I was out on a balcony in midtown Manhattan with the whole city beneath me. It would have been a great background for the picture I wanted to get. The only problem was finding someone who could take the picture. I ended up with a lot of bad, blurry, or otherwise poor-looking photos. There was only one picture that I thought I could salvage.

Here's the original picture:

Graphics are the bane of my existance. I don't have any real graphic programs other than Picasa, Paint, a picture resizer and the CD cover maker program. I can't ever seem to do the things I want to do. Here's what I would have prefered to do with the picture below. I wanted to invert the background so that it's white instead of black, and distort my own colors so I look orange. I got the orange part to work, but not the rest. This cover is going to suck for a number of reasons: black backgrounds never come up good. Also, the Astron Boy font is too delicate to show up well on a CD label printed on an inkjet printer. But here's what it looks like.

I removed the "The" in "The Vastater" because I didn't like the way it looked near "The Mennu Method." Then I tried to invert the colors, but instead I got an embossed image.

Again, if I could figure out how to make the backgound white instead of grey, I'd be in much better shape. If I could find a font that would look more embossed it would be cooler. Wait, I think I have one. Let's have a look:

It still looks like crap but I need to do a little work on the mixing, and really, I just want to go to sleep. Maybe I can get another photo tomorrow. Maybe I should turn off the computer and watch the end of the football game.

Incidental Poetry

We'll take notes
to the place
where taking notes
is taking place 

The Making of a Mix

I wanted to have a new mix ready for “the holiday season.” I made my first CD mix in three years this past summer. It was very well received. In the three years between proper CD releases, I’ve handed out four hour archive mp3 CDs. While those CDs had limited distribution, the people who received them were always more than happy to sift though them and cut them down to a size and a composition more to their liking. I’ve also made some mixes that are available either as huge hour long .wma files, or even better, as web-only mixes. You can check many of those out at mennu.com/extras.

People like CD mixes and they make great gifts. There’s a lot that goes into a CD mix and I’m a perfectionist when it comes to these things. I don’t want to release it until I’m completely satisfied with it: which is almost never. But this time, I’m determined. I’m going to have the mix ready to roll in a week. I have some ideas for the cover art: it’s going to take a camera, someone to use it, some digital photo effects, CD envelopes (preferably blue), labels of various shapes and sizes and lots of printer ink.

In order to get the process started, I threw a bunch of the songs that I’ve been listening to into a playlist in some kind of order. Version 0.5 is the first version: I won’t go into the song selection in too much detail, but here’s a general idea:

Version 0.5

• 1-Pet Grief-The Radio Dept. (I discovered The Radio Dept. on the Marie Antoinette soundtrack which my nephew Yonadav sent me. I got hooked instantly and downloaded their album so I tried two tracks out on this proto-mix. I didn’t want to use anything from the soundtrack, since I was already going to use the Bow Wow Wow track.)
• 2-Missing-Beck (In 2005 Beck released two albums, Guero and it’s mutated brother Guerolito, the remix of the former. The remix version of this track was called Heaven Hammer and was done by Air, one of my all time favorites. I was infatuated by it, particularly in the summer of 05. This year, Beck released a new album called The Information, which my father (!) bought. I did a little revisit of the recent beck corpus and decided that I like this version of this song better than the remake.)
• 3-Hamoa Beach-Gomez
• 4-Oh Shoplifter-The Stills (A risk. I’m not really sure if this fits, but I like it.)
• 5-The Worst Taste In Music (Extended)-The Radio Dept.
• 6-Blah Blah Blah-Say Hi To Your Mom (When I tell a friend of mine that I’m putting Say Hi To Your Mom on my mix, he’s instantly disappointed that I’m not using Let’s Talk About Space Ships. I remind him that I’m ostensibly saving that for my Space Mix. This offers my friend no comfort since I’ve been working on the Space Mix for three years now. I just feel that for a topic that awesome, I need to make sure all the tracks are perfect. I also think this track goes well with the next one.)
• 7-In This Home On Ice-Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
• 8-The Other Side-Scissor Sisters (Been listening to a lot of Scissor Sisters: particularly their remake of Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb. This track has a smooth feel that, like a seedless grape, is hard to refuse.)
• 9-What Are you Afraid Of (Dert Remix)-West Indian Girl (The regular mix of this is pretty good too, but I like the upbeat feel of this one.)
• 10-Friendship Update-The Go! Team (Yes, I know I put this on the online playlist, but it’s so good!)
• 11-Chapter 8 - Seashore an-Cornelius (An acoustic sounding pop track by a Japanese DJ.)
• 12-Moonlight Feels Right-Starbuck (Dreaded Midnight Oldie. I remember hearing this song on the AM radio when I was a kid. What does that make me, 100? I’ve also been watching the new Battlestar Galactica on Netflix, and there’s a Starbuck, but she’s a woman.)
• 13-Joy-Apollo 100 (Heard this one in an underground grotto called Double Happiness in Chinatown. It made me crazy that I couldn’t quite spot the song even though it sounded so familiar. I sought out the DJ and when he told me who it was I wrote it down on a cocktail napkin. Turns out I had it on the Boogie Nights soundtrack. I’ve been told it was also used on the 40 Year Old Virgin soundtrack.)
• 14-The Wait-Built to Spill (Slow but good like carmel.)
• 15-The Sound of Failure-The Flaming Lips (I used The Flaming Lips on my Wednesday mix.)
• 16-Hello Hammerheads-Caribou (See #10)
• 17-Fools Rush In (Kevin Shields Remix)-Bow Wow Wow
• 18-War & Peace (Cornelius Remix)-Ryuichi Sakamoto (Listen to this with headphones.)
• 19-This Is Not A Love Song (Thievery Corporation Mix)-Nouvelle Vague (Nouvelle Vague and Thievery? Like a peanut butter cup: two great tastes in one candy track.)

Before the above version could make it to CD it needed some changes. One of the Radio Dept. tracks had to go. I also added in some sound clips, which were, as in Belmar, taken from Patricia T. O’Connor’s monthly visit to The Leonard Lopate Show.

Version 0.8

• 1-Missing-Beck
• 2-Hamoa Beach-Gomez
• 3-The Other Side-Scissor Sisters
• 4-What Are you Afraid Of (Dert Remix)-West Indian Girl
• 5-to vastate-The Leonard Lopate Show
• 6-Blah Blah Blah-Say Hi To Your Mom
• 7-In This Home On Ice-Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
• 8-Oh Shoplifter-The Stills
• 9-The Worst Taste In Music (Extended)-The Radio Dept.
• 10-Friendship Update-The Go! Team
• 11-Chapter 8 - Seashore an-Cornelius
• 12-Joy-Apollo 100
• 13-Moonlight Feels Right-Starbuck
• 14-Hello Hammerheads-Caribou
• 15-Fools Rush In (Kevin Shields Remix)-Bow Wow Wow
• 16-The Wait-Built to Spill
• 17-The Sound of Failure-The Flaming Lips
• 18-War & Peace (Cornelius Remix)-Ryuichi Sakamoto
• 19-You gonna vastate me with those yankee tickets?-The Leonard Lopate Show
• 20-This Is Not A Love Song (Thievery Corporation Mix)-Nouvelle Vague

I handed out a number of copies, and have asked for feedback by tomorrow. I only got a little quality feedback. I also made a few decisions about the order, flow and song selection. It’s always a shame when you have to remove a song because of some kind of skip in the track. It’s like putting your beloved pet down because you can’t afford the cure. That was the fate of The Go! Team. See more notes near the track listings.

Version 0.82

• 1-Missing-Beck
• 2-Hamoa Beach-Gomez
• 3-The Other Side-Scissor Sisters
• 4-What Are you Afraid Of (Dert Remix)-West Indian Girl
• 5-to vastate-The Leonard Lopate Show
• 6-Manitoba-Tapes 'N Tapes (I wanted to put another track, called Insistor on this mix, but it’s got too much oomph for this setlist. Manitoba starts gently and then works its way up.)
• 7-Sukie In The Graveyard-Belle & Sebastian (I can’t believe that this wasn’t on the previous versions. I sent myself an email from work to remind me to put this track on.)
• 8-the sound of frink flinging-professor frink (I needed something to ease the transitions between these two songs. This one second clip does that nicely.)
• 9-In This Home On Ice-Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
• 10-Oh Shoplifter-The Stills
• 11-The Wait-Built to Spill (Moved up.)
• 12-Blah Blah Blah-Say Hi To Your Mom (Now separated from Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. I may drop it entirely.)
• 13-Fools Rush In (Kevin Shields Remix)-Bow Wow Wow
• 14-The Worst Taste In Music (Extended)-The Radio Dept.
• 15-Chapter 8 - Seashore an-Cornelius
• 16-Joy-Apollo 100
• 17-Hello Hammerheads-Caribou
• 18-The Beginning Stages, Part 9 (Reach for the Sun)-The Polyphonic Spree (Glad I could squeeze this one in. I was going to use The Beginning Stages, Part 7 (Hangin’ Around), but I decided on this one.
• 19-Ventura Highway [Deepsky's Blizzard in L.A. Remix]-America/Deepsky (Replaces Starbuck as the Dreaded Midnight Oldie, except this has more modern production in this remix version.)
• 20-The Sound of Failure-The Flaming Lips
• 21-War & Peace (Cornelius Remix)-Ryuichi Sakamoto
• 22-You gonna vastate me with those yankee tickets?-The Leonard Lopate Show
• 23-This Is Not A Love Song (Thievery Corporation Mix)-Nouvelle Vague

And I’ve been thinking about adding a track by The Decemberists. Cool bands have names that start with “The.” An 80’s band capitalized on this by naming themselves “The The.” Anyhow, I’ve been listening to the new Decemberists album called “The Crane Wife” and I can’t decide which track stands out on its own. It’s a concept album that I think sounds good as a straight listen-through. On the other hand, there’s a track called “On The Bus Mall” from their 2005 album, Picaresque. I think I can squeeze it onto this mix. But I also want to put on “Casimir Pulaski Day” by Sufjan Stevens. If I add those two tracks it would create a whole new mix. Maybe that one can have The Acid House Kings on it. I don’t know if I can make a whole acoustic sounding mix. I would definitely put on “Real Love” by Mike Doughty and “Getaway” by Danny Golub if I were to make an acoustic mix. But I fear that I would be picking up stuff that I should have put on a mix two years ago. Ah the deliberation! But this is why some mixes never get made and I end up with a huge 4 hour archive.

I’ll deal with these thoughts on another occasion. This mix has a definite deadline: it needs to be done in a week so I’ll have enough post-production time before Chanukah. So I’ll leave it for now.

The acoustic mix should also have Jenny Lewis and The Watson Twins on it. But should it have Happy or Rabbit Fur Coat? (Oh, here I go again!)

Now I’m really leaving it.

(How about something from Thom Yorke’s album?)

Halfway There

I'm working on a new mix. I would like to have it done in the next week or so while I have a few free evenings. It's starting to take some kind of form. At this point I have about half an hour of music; about half of a mix. That's where making a mix starts getting difficult. I have some choices to make:

• keep it poppy?
• make it more rocking?
• be more spaced out?
• mellow?
• 80's redux sound?
• some slick 70's?

Well, whatever. I'm sure my desicion will be the right one, or at least I would prefer that it seems that way.

I reorganized my "extras" page. Now it has all my downloadable mixes in one place. Some are zipped folders of mp3s and others are wma files. I should probably clarify which is which on the page. Ach. Alright, here goes:

• Belmar (zip)
• Darkside of the Covers (zip)
• Under the Covers...(zip)
• Wednesday(zip)
• The Future (wma)
• Yonadude (wma)
• Taxday (wma)
• Nordic Invasion (wma)

So, enjoy the music, and stay tuned for my forthcoming half done mix.

I've Been Warholized

Gibberish!

So this morning I was thinking about an old Saturday Night Live sketch from 1976 with Dan Ackroyd and Eric Idle called "Plain Talk." I lost my videotape of it but still have it committed to memory. Since the web now has all things ever seen or spoken, I was able to find a transcript of it. The delivery of gibberish is priceless and has resulted in decades of smirks for myself and select group of python-minded geeks.

I suggested the link to a group of my friends who have been trying to develop an International Talk Like a Lunatic Day. Well, needless to say, the looney gibberish began to flow. But coming up with gibberish can sometimes be a chore. So here's what I found:

• The Corporate Gibberish Generator™ by Andrew Davidson: This handy site will create the kind of gibberish you see on company websites. It's a robust offering!
• Blippity Fling-Flang: This generator takes your actual words and turns them into cutesy sounding nonsense. You can run entire websites through it. See what it does to this blog.
• E-Learning Gibberish Generator: Not as hilarious as the others, it will create internet gibberish. I've included it here to be thorough. If anything I try to be thoroughly silly.
• The Generator Blog: Talk about robust, this thing is off the hook! It's a blog of generators. I made this cassette with it...

Open Claw Speaking

Yesterday I sat in a seminar for much of the day.

By the afternoon I had grown weary of the subject matter, and was instead fascinated by the gesticulations of the speaker.

I noted her techniques of "Open Claw Speaking," and made a list of her many styles:

• Open Claw Speaking giving way to Finger Mesh
• Claw Rotator
• Open Palm "Wax On"
• Two Finger Windshield Wiper
• Invisible Inverted Longhorn Outline
• Progressive Chop
• Orb Polisher
• Wafter
• Alternating Flipper

And then I wondered what would happen were she to battle Donald Rumsfeld with his 1000 Styles.

One can only wonder...

Panic!

Another mennu method wednesday at the loop lounge.Wednesday, September 27, 2006
11:00PM
In the front.
Be there.

Happy 5767

"...and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more."

-Isaiah 2:4

May we all be inscribed in the book of life and good deeds.

Speaking of Revolutions

It cracks me up.

Just yesterday I was musing on peaceful revolutions with colors, fragrances, petals, etc.

And today, on my way to work I hear about a peaceful coup in Thailand.

Now all they need is a catchy name...

Revolutions

While listening to the news this morning, I heard about the current crisis going on in Hungary. There's a scandal over comments the Hungarian prime minister, Ferenc Gyurcsany, made in a private address to his party. Here's the excerpt:

They can understand that it is worth being a politician here at the beginning of the 21st Century because we can create a different world. Only for this. Livelihood can be found in many other ways.

I know that this is easy for me to say. I know. Do not keep bringing it up against me. But this is the only reason it is worth doing it. I almost perished because I had to pretend for 18 months that we were governing.

Instead, we lied morning, noon and night. I do not want to carry on with this. Either we do it and have the personnel for it, or others will do it. I will never give an interview at the end of which we part with each other in argument. Never. I will never hurt the Hungarian left. Never.

I shouldn't pretend to understand anything about the situation there, but when the BBC broadcaster mentioned that it is the most significant event in Hungary since the end of communism, it made me think about revolutions.

I prefer my revolutions to be non-violent and brightly colored, otherwise I like them to have a nice soft feel and a pleasant aroma:

• The Rose Revolution of Georgia in 2003 to depose their corrupt government.*
• The Orange Revolution in the Ukraine in 2004 over election fraud.
• The Tulip Revolution of 2005 in Kyrgyzstan which deposed Askar Akayev. (Interesting note: In the early stages of the revolution, the media variously referred to the unrest as the "Pink," "Lemon", "Silk", "Daffodil", or "Sandpaper" Revolution. But it was "Tulip Revolution," a term that Akayev himself used in a speech warning that no such Color Revolution should happen in Kyrgyzstan, which stuck in the end. )
• The Cedar Revolution of 2005 in Lebanon to get rid of Syrian troops from that country.
• The Velvet Revolution of Czechoslovakia in 1989 to get rid of communism.
• The Singing Revolution of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania of 1988-1990 which led to those countries becoming independant from the Soviet Union.
• I think all of these can be personified in Prince.

*Many of the European revolutions were due to the efforts of George Soros.

September 11, 2006

Some people went to solemn assemblies on September 11. I stood up to the terrorists by continuing with my way of life. And that involves Monday Night Football. But I didn't want to miss the president's address. So I decided to put a splitter on my cable wire and hook up a second television. And then, just to gratuitously emulate Elvis, I hooked up a third.

So I had Bush speaking right in front of me, the football game on the right, and, Star Trek, why not, on the left.

I have an equal distaste for both Bush and Gowron.