Uther would like to take a moment to thank our friends at Old Shaw Farm for their hospitality and their open door policy.

I see this link from over at the kotkorg :

Artist Jeremiah Palecek has recently been painting pieces inspired by video games

I say to myself, "What a bunch of dorky ballyhoo. Some nerd painting video games. This is like a pack of losers all lubed up with nerd cream and then polished up for the 5th of dorktember."

So I link on over, cause what, am I supposed to do some actual work or sumthin? I scroll down mocking each "painting" more than its predecessor, when what should scroll into view but the Mona Lisa of gaming artwork. I stare dumbfounded at its glory, for I am but a lowly simpleton, a neanderthal attempting to glean some understanding from the grail. I'm enthralled by its glow yet too simple to fully comprehend its beauty, too feeble and inexperienced to understand its grace and history. I am an ignorant thug who chops down the tree of knowledge because I fear what it has to offer. That tree bares beautiful, golden eggs my friends, and flying, jousting ostriches. Fucking awesome.

Interesting Daily Kos article from a data miner on the NSAs database of phone numbers. -via pedro.

All of this brings us to ask who the real targets of all of this spying is . . . In order to identify them [terrorists], you need to know an awful lot about those who are not terrorists. This helps to eliminate false positives. However, the data for terrorists is so sparse, that even if a possible terrorist is identified, the algorithms used will rarely generate a high probability and a high confidence . . . On the other hand, if you want to predict how a person will vote in a given election, you can get an amazingly accurate prediction from the high-quality data from Joe and Jane Sixpack.

These days the news makes me feel as if I am two bit character in a badly made, futuristic movie with an overtly Orwellian bent:

Voice Over:

I crouch in a corner of my living room that is not in the line of sight of the telephone. I scrawl this diary on squares of self rationed toilet paper with a sliver of wood and my own blood as ink. I have a box hidden under a floor board that contains french fries, a small bottle of french wine and a few outlawed texts and pamphlets. Each night I eat one fry, take a small pull from the bottle and read a ragged photocopy of a document titled the United States Constitution. I can't remember the first time I read this document, or what its significance is. I just know it's important somehow, and I read it over and over.

With my superior qualities so obvious, it was an intolerable hardship to have to suffer fools gladly. So I rarely did. All their resistance to my brilliantly conceived and cogently argued views proved was that they possessed an inferior intellect and a weaker character than God had blessed me with, and I felt it was my clear duty to so inform them.

- John McCain (-via nro)

Some have their blogs in a bit of a bunch over McCain's statement. Of course, this is by no means overshadowed by the fact that McCain was speaking at Liberty University, or as I like to call it, "Holy crap, that evil bastard has his own university!"

Mind you, McCain's statement should in no way lead you to the conclusion that my brilliantly conceived and cogently argued views are any less brilliant or cogent, nor should it distract from the fact that Jerry Falwell is indeed the anti-christ.

When you can purchase a fairly decent condenser microphone for under $50.00 dollars, and you can a get a decent multi track recording studio bundled with a software package for under $80.00, and you can get a half way decent USB audio input device for under $100.00, and your mom bought you an electric guitar for christmas after you begged and begged her for one, and you spent most of your formidable high school years trying to reproduce Black Sabbath licks on said guitar, and the world becomes connected by a high speed global network allowing people to share high fidelity audio files with a click of a button, some may call this a convergence. As much as dirty water from all across the city may converge into one main sewer pipe, this song file is the run off for a multitude of converging moments and technologies.

Eskimo Pie.mp3* (2.2M)

Angus and Uther get a bit of the spotlight over at Modern Pooch. Of course, now they both have big heads, and will only eat raw steak for dinner, and will only be walked on the "good" side of the park.

It's been rumored that Angus is fighting an addiction to cocaine, and has been seen around the neighborhood sniffing two different poodles and a shitzu. Page Six opines that he is attempting to hide that fact that he has been neutered by being seen with as many bitches as possible, but also states that one of the poodles may have actually been a male.

• Angus
• Doggy Duel in Brooklyn
• Sleeping Beauty

The first time I saw The Big Lebowski I didn't make the connection between The Dude and Philip Marlowe. This is how the Coen Brothers describe The Dude in an interview on the DVD. The Big Lebowski is a modern day detective story, but the protagonist is a dopey pothead instead of a brilliant detective. Replace The Dude with Sam Spade, and the pieces fall together as a classic film noir, or classic bowling noir if you will.

This leads me to Brick, a film by Rian Johnson. In Brick I foresaw a badly executed noir film in the making, this time in a high school setting with a teenaged protagonist. The trailer intrigued me, and I dared to hope it would live up to its potential. I set my expectations low, but Brick exceeded them. I assumed the setting would detract from the film and nullify the drama. Johnson overcomes this dilemma by poking fun of the fact that these are high school kids. He interjects humor between the tension, and this helps the viewer to accept the setting, and laugh at it at times.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is Brendan, a high school age Sam Spade with a tiny bit of The Dude throw in for good measure. He's a bit of a chump and a recluse, but he leverages his wits to get what he wants. In a scene where he roughs up a drug addled yeg for info, he proceeds to quick slap him back and forth across the face a la Humphrey Bogart. He is a classic Dashiell Hammett figure, and I couldn't help but like him.

Brick is styled as a noir detective story, from the dialog to the cinematography, and it is done well. It wasn't too complex. It didn't try to expend a lot of plot to keep you from guessing the outcome. It's smart enough to keep you intrigued, but not too smart to be implausible. Mind you, you have to suspend your disbelief to accept teenagers in a more mature setting. If you can, it makes for a good film.

Pink Floyd's Dark side of the Moon reached a monumental 1500 weeks on billboard's charts last week. This is impressive, to say the least.

Roger Waters was interviewed about the album's 1500 week landmark at billboard:

I felt a need to include the human voice on the record, so I devised this way of asking people questions in a particular order that would elicit responses that were interesting.

...The first one was, "When was the last time you were violent?" And when you�d answer that one, you�d move on to the next question, "Were you in the right?" And then there were some questions about dark side of the moon...

But the "Were you in the right?" got terrific responses from people...

I was the youngest of four, and my two oldest brothers spun Dark Side of the Moon on the turntable more times than I can count. When I was old enough to understand what cursing was, I would wait for the "don�t give me that do goody good bullshit" line to play on the song Money, and I would giggle to myself because I heard someone say shit. Later, I would bring my friends to the house when no one was home and play the line over and over while we'd laugh at the dirty word.

I'm surprised the song Money hasn't been heralded in libertarian circles. Maybe there is a Pink Floydian subset of the big-L libertarians, but it has been said that Roger Waters detests libertarians. A stagehand at the 1978 Phoenix concert of Animals claims he overhead Waters exclaim to a roadie during a heated political debate regarding the subject of libertarians:

"They are not defenders of capitalism. They�re a group of publicity seekers... most of them are my enemies... I�ve read nothing by a Libertarian (when I read them, in the early years) that wasn�t my ideas badly mishandled--i.e., had the teeth pulled out of them--with no credit given.[1]"

It is unclear what Waters' true political leanings are. It has been rumored that he had a short, tawdry affair with the author Ayn Rand. Though Rand was much older than Waters, and their tryst was brief, it is said that much of the inspiration for Money was derived from their association. What is clear is that libertarians have always had an affinity for acid and rock & roll, and will listen for hours on end to any concept album they can get their hands on.

The first compact disk I ever saw was a copy of Dark Side of The Moon. My friend, Steve Mrozinski (Mr. O.), had received a CD player for his birthday, and Dark Side of the Moon was his first CD. He pulled it out of the CD tray and threw it across the room. We watched it careen off the wall and fall behind his bed. He ran over and grabbed it, held it up in the air smiling, and said, "See, no scratches. It's indestructible." He proceeded to ramble on about broken records and digital recordings and how it's all just ones and zeros on the disk, but I had no idea what the hell he was talking about. I just wanted to get stoned and listen to Dark Side of the Moon.

In the mid to late seventies Johnny Rotten wore a Pink Floyd t-shirt with the words 'I Hate' scrawled in felt-tip pen above their name[2]. This signals the backlash towards Pink Floyd and seventies mainstream rock music from the burgeoning punk scene that followed. As I grew older in the late eighties, Dark Side of the Moon became a cliche, a joke regarding classic rock radio. Money being the second most overplayed song in radio history behind Stairway to Heaven. Yet, I can't deny the hours I spent listening to Dark Side of the Moon. The album has been background music for much of my life, from early childhood until well into my teens. It is hard for me to separate the music and the memories it invokes. If I heard it today for the first time would I appreciate it? Would I find it listenable? As it stands, I am incapable of discerning the musical value from my own historical and emotional context.

After reading the Roger Waters article in Billboard, I cued up the album in iTunes (look Mr. O., no scratches). I sat and listened, attempting to leave the music uncolored by history, to listen with new ears. There were a few points where I thought for a moment of objective clarity that, yes, this is good, this is very good, but it'd be a lot better if I had an eigth ounce of thai-stick.

[1] - Libertarianism and Acid Rock - wikipedia.

[2] - Johnny_Rotten - wikipedia,

Andrea launches keyword cartoons.

All she could think was, "I'm so over me" as her nose bled down her pretty dress. - asbestos cancer

brilliant...