Month: May 2006

from the stars to Earth and back again

This just in . . .

32-HOUR RADIO MARATHON
MONDAY, MAY 22nd at midnight to TUESDAY, MAY 23rd, 8:20 AM
89.9 FM NYC & WWW.WKCR.ORG streaming live across the galaxies
The Sun Ra Institute and WKCR-FM are proud to announce the Sun Ra Arrival Day Celebration, a 32-hour radio marathon featuring work of the innovative and iconoclastic composer, bandleader, and keyboardist Sun Ra. Each segment of the festival will focus on a specific feature of Ra’s musical legacy:

  • Standards and Ballads
  • The Swing Tradition
  • Solo Piano and Poetry
  • Late 1950’s and Early Rarities
  • Tone Science
  • Singers
  • and more.

The Arrival Day Celebration will include exclusive recordings from WKCR’s archives as well as live special guest interviews with Marshall Allen, Director of the Sun Ra Arkestra, and Arkestra members of the past, present and future.

Don’t know all that much about him, but I like what I have heard. A good chance to hear more.

greed

Apple Beats the Beatles, d/b/a Apple Corps

Bloomberg Columnists:

Why would the Beatles, who long ago escaped their humble Liverpool origins, hold the world’s most successful digital music store to ransom? Why would bassist and songwriter McCartney, who regularly figures in lists of the world’s richest musicians, care about adding to his pile of dough?

My guess is that it’s all part of a bigger strategy. The Beatles catalog is the biggest hole in the digital download arena. Anyone who wants “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” or “I Am the Walrus” on their headphones has to buy an old-fashioned compact disc and download it themselves. That’s set to change.

Apple Polishing
During the proceedings, Apple Corps Managing Director Neil Aspinall said the company was polishing the collection of Beatles recordings to prepare it for downloading. Digital sales tripled last year to $1.1 billion; while that’s still just a fraction of the $33 billion of total music sales, it’s growing rapidly.

While the Beatles want to make their songs available through iTunes, they’d prefer to bust the 99 cents-per-song rate that Apple has imposed on everyone else seeking to add to the 1 billion songs sold through iTunes in the past three years.

Never mind that the Rolling Stones are still twanging away, or that Elvis Presley’s 21 No. 1 U.K. singles outscore the 17 notched by the Beatles; there’s no doubt that McCartney regards the Beatles as the most important band that ever strung together a couple of chords.

So the lawsuit, which seemed frivolous at best, may have been no more than a negotiating tactic. Now that it has failed, expect to see “All You Need Is Love” appearing on iTunes in the not-too-distant future — and at the standard price of 99 cents.

Wow. This may have been about opening their own “Apple Corps Music Store” so they could break the 99¢ price point?

The Beatles 1 compilation — 27 tracks — sells at Amazon for $13. Figure iTunes would list the whole collection for $19.99, 99¢ per track, with some tracks restricted to Album Only (as is I would pay anything like 99¢ for Eleanor Rigby). It looks to me like the per track revenue might be better through iTunes.

All you need is love and a pocketful of folding money is more like it.

the truth is in between

Power and learning:

Since power means being able to conform the world to your ideas, while learning consists of conforming your ideas to the world, power is the ability not to learn from your mistakes.

— Karl Deutsch

Contrast with GB Shaw’s view:

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him… The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself… All progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

Now playing: Erase-Rewind by The Cardigans from the album “Gran Turismo” | Get it

experiments in food preservation

Chutney seems harder to find in stores than usual, but mangos are cheap and plentiful right now. A solution is at hand.

My usual technique is to review as many recipes as I can find, sift out the common steps/ingredients, and use the result as a base.

  • 2 mangos (one ripe, one not so)
  • 1 cup brown sugar
  • 1 cup cider vinegar
  • 1 cup Thompson raisins
  • 1 cup golden raisins
  • Several cloves of garlic, the little bitty ones that are too small for anything else, crushed and diced
  • 1 inch peeled ginger root
  • 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper

Peel and cut mangoes into as small pieces as you want: I recommend using ripe ones and cutting them in 1/2 inch dice.
Add the mango to a large bowl with the sugar and raisins and mix.
If you have a food processor, I recommend smashing up the garlic, ginger, and cayenne with the vinegar in that. But if you don’t, just grate the ginger as best you can.
Add this to the bowl, stir well, and cover overnight. Stir occasionally, if you like or can’t resist the smell.

The following day, dice two medium onions, and saute them in some oil, til soft and golden, in a large saucepan.

Add the other goodness and bring to a boil, keeping it going until it thickens. The sauce should turn a rich brown and thicken quite a bit. The mango should soften quite a bit as well.

Take off the heat and can it up. This only made 2 1/2 pint jars.

I would probably double it if I were to do it again. I’m going to let it mature for a couple of weeks to a month before sampling.

Now playing: Sunday by The Cranberries from the album “Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We?”

rewriting history

Pharyngula: Uninvention:

“if you could cause one invention from the last hundred years never to have been made at all, which would it be, and why?”

PZ questions the question — not cricket, in my opinion — but draws some interesting responses.

Leave your comments there. What’ll be? I think 100 years is too short: I’d like to uninvent gasoline as a motor fuel but that predates the cutoff.

<update>I am going with television. A close second is landmines, as a couple of the hosts over at Scienceblogs have chosen. Tells me they get out more than I do, and have a less parochial view of the world than I do.

Now playing: Soul For Hire by Elvis Costello from the album “When I Was Cruel” | Get it

wildlife status

As best I can tell, raccoons don’t like crystallized coyote weewee any more than tiggers like haycorns. I haven’t seen any repeat visits from the little attractive nuisances.

It looks like they may have overwintered in a disused playhouse on my neighbor’s property, but overhanging mine: it’s a two-story structure and the upper floor is carpeted with raccoon deposits. Yuck.

It doesn’t seem terribly effective on squirrels but they weren’t my primary target. I can now turn my attention to them and see if I can find something that will work on them.

Now playing: Galang (Radio Edit) by M.I.A. from the album “Galang – Single” | Get it

simple ideas, great results

This came in the other day:

HAPPY THIRD BIRTHDAY, FREECYCLE, AND HAPPY MAY DAY TO
ALL!

On May First, 2003, the first email was sent out to 30
or 40 friends and a handful of nonprofits in Tucson,
Arizona announcing the birth of a crazy idea.

Now as there are groups in some 67 countries and
growing, it’s beautiful to see how this grassroots
wildfire has spread and continues to spread.

Three cheers for us all. There are literally millions
of us changing the world one gift at time, every day!

Anyway, at three, I’m glad to say we’ve already left
the diaper phase with 2,180,000 members and over 200
tons a day not going to landfills.

Way to go, everyone! So, make a wish and blow out the
candles, or maybe light a candle or two for the
upcoming years…

Warmly,

Deron
Founder, The Freecycle Network (TM)

Just three years? Amazing.

Now playing: Helpless by k.d. lang from the album “Hymns of the 49th Parallel” | Get it

what libertarian shares with communism

A friend suggested I read this: Seven Principles of Sound Public Policy [Mackinac Center for Public Policy]:

The “Seven Principles of Sound Public Policy” that I want to share with you today are pillars of a free economy. We can differ on exactly how any one of them may apply to a given issue of the day, but the principles themselves, I believe, are settled truths. They are not original with me; I’ve simply collected them in one place. They are not the only pillars of a free economy or the only settled truths, but they do comprise a pretty powerful package. In my belief, if every cornerstone of every state and federal building were emblazoned with these principles-and more importantly, if every legislator understood and attempted to be faithful to them-we’d be a much stronger, much freer, more prosperous, and far better governed people.

Read the whole thing, as the worthies say. The précis is:

  1. Free people are not equal, and equal people are not free.
  2. What belongs to you, you tend to take care of; what belongs to no one or everyone tends to fall into disrepair.
  3. Sound policy requires that we consider long-run effects and all people, not simply short-run effects and a few people
  4. If you encourage something, you get more of it; if you discourage something, you get less of it.
  5. Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own.
  6. Government has nothing to give anybody except what it first takes from somebody, and a government that’s big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you’ve got.
  7. Liberty makes all the difference in the world.

Continue reading “what libertarian shares with communism”

post-op

Had a tooth extracted this morning. I had walked in with a glimmer, a flicker, of hope that upon further review, the tooth would be seen as salvageable.

Not so. It was out in 30 minutes and when I saw what was left of it, I realized I was lucky to get off a lightly as I did. It was the next to last molar on the top right: the roots spread fore and aft to anchor it, generally making extractions problematic — like pulling a toggle bolt through a brick wall. But since the visible tooth was cracked all the way to to the gumline, it broke into two chunks under some persuasion and came out in stages.

Yuck. Now to sit around with gauze in my trap and wait for things to calm down.

There are lots of things I’d rather do right now.