There's Always USENET

When I need a good dose of morons, mentally ill savants, and people with direct brain-rectum connections, I lurk on high-traffic usenet newsgroups. In this nook of cyberspace, most if not all NG subscribers form virtual communities, that is, they do not know each other personally (as opposed to low traffic niche interest-based NGs populated by festival goers, etc...these groups contain cyber-messaging emanating from real communities).

One group I enjoy in particular (in the rec. domain) is dedicated to discussion of classical music recordings. Much bandwidth is devoted to the statement of unshakable opinions and personal insults. When flame wars reach the sub-e.coli level, I post a parody of the discusion in the form of a satire employing the stilted, faux-academic prose found in "serious" music reference works or classical/jazz/audiophile aficionado magazines.

WHO WAS THE MOST INFLUENTIAL WIND PLAYER OF THE 20th CENTURY?
from Grove's...

Ivan Ivanovich Gletkin (Hero of the Soviet Union, Kennedy Center Awardee) is universally considered the most influential piccolo player of the 20th century. Although he had no students (ed. note: the remains of 311 bodies unearthed at his dacha near Odessa await identification), he has won great accolades as both a Soviet and American orchestral musician. After study at the Third Smolensk Institute for Piccolo Pedagogy, his first professional appointment was Domra Primo with the Samarkand Folkloric Ensemble. Upon auditioning for Mravinsky, he became a member of the Leningrad PO at the start of the Nazi siege. After Gletkin's first performance with the LPO (unedited Ilya Murometz Symphony by Gliere), Mravinsky convinced him to walk up and down Nevsky Prospect playing double high Db 24 hours a day at ffff for 900 days. His action broke the Nazi siege. After the war, he defected to the US ("more freedom...sex...turnips...play precious Bundy piccolo") and joined the National Symphony (DC) under Kindler. He served as associate principal off-stage flute and Union shop representative ("all-union", he liked to point out). Gletkin was a Kennedy Center Awardee, primarily for his annual ritual of piping the mice out of the Kennedy Center basement into the Potomac. Upon retirement, he became a Selmer clinician, and was featured soloist with numerous school bands playing "Flight of Bum Bee" on the "parallel tritone double piccolo", an instrument of his own design. He is buried in Brooklyn, near Sheepshead Bay. An inscription on his tombstone (in Russian) may be translated as "Death to Spies!" or "Why not pretty oboe player sit on face?"


WHY I DESIGNED THE BEST SAXOPHONE MOUTHPIECE
Interview from "jazz or jizz", New York, August 1991

joj: Tell us about your set-up.
Idris Abdul bin-Ahmed bin-Felaffel: Man, I used to use this old Brilhart on the alto...Bird's...there was enough smack in it that after two gigs, I was hooked...on the bari, Mattson refaced an old Ford exhaust manifold for me. Reeds were always Vandoren #5s. On the tenor, this dude named Porter machined a metal mouthpiece that he said was a control rod off a nuclear reactor at Brookhaven...man, my tone glowed...

Hmmmmm.....

One of the unusual things that living with a fatal, incurable neurodegenerative disease like ALS does is affect your brain in weird ways. Yes, your motor neurons die, and lurking in the background is the certain knowledge that final wishes will be communicated with eye blinks, but lighter stuff happens. Your entire world view morphs into something people try for a lifetime to achieve. Memories become a source of comfort. Friends and loved ones become central. A lifetime of career achievements become peripheral. Pains in the ass become pinpricks, with the emphasis on "pricks". All food tastes great. Traffic jams are meaningless. Very few things truly suck.


But for me, my bullshit detector/surrealistic humor generator went on overdrive!!


Here are some gleanings from today's inet:



TECHNOLOGY
Rohawk - "Software by Church Leaders, for Church Leaders"
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All of our software is absolutely free and supports Windows XP and Windows Vista.


Vision Statement Mentor
This is free church software which helps you to develop a compelling vision statement to communicate God's vision for your church or ministry.


StaffAppraise 1.00
Performance appraisals are frequently neglected in our churches. This may be because the pastor does not feel he has time, does not know how to give effective evaluations, or does not understand their importance. StaffAppraise is designed to make it easy for pastors to give their staff performance appraisals which truly benefit them.




NEWS
Teacher accused of sex crime writes to Hogan's son
International Herald Tribune - 20 hours ago
AP ST. PETERSBURG, Fla.: A former teacher accused of having sex with students sent a letter of support to the jailed son of Hulk Hogan, authorities said.
Nick Hogan Gives Up Solitaire E! Online
Teacher -- Hot for Hogan? TMZ.com
ABC News - Reality TV World - The Associated Press - ProWrestling.net
see all 1,036 news articles » (ed. note: 1,036?)




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So Long, U. Utah Phillips

I'll see you up north. We'll sing "Starlight on the Rails".

"Oh, I will go up and down the country and back and forth across the country. I will go out West where the states are square. I will go to Boise and Helena, Albuquerque and the two Dakotas and all the unknown places. Say brother, have you heard the roar of the fast express? Have you seen starlight on the rails?"
-Thomas Wolfe

I Hope My Pony Knows the Way Home

It has been long haul, but we covered a lot of ground. Worked everywhere from night shift factory assembly lines to the most advanced and productive research labs in the world. Went through the entire American educational system, K-PhD. Learned a lot of valuable lessons face down drunk in the gutter of the streets of Midwestern towns deserving no name. Learned to defend myself with my brain and my fists. Became adept at disappearing like a faint wisp of smoke, and staying that way. Played music all over the world, from European concert halls to the woods of West Virginia. Slept with a multi-orgasmic woman, got punched out by a Birthright Quaker girl, played banjo for a one-legged tap dancer, been married for 15 years. Shook off a lot of curable diseases, got nailed by a certified, incurable 100% fatal one. Forgot more than most people have experienced.


This song is written and played by Tom Waits.


This song is played by me.

Gold Label "ultra-Dino": Cigars of the '60s

Have you ever had a memory resurface like disagreeable, unwanted flotsam? Like when you're bobbing in warm ocean water at the Jersey shore, relaxed and fully happy, then suddenly, an air-filled (or gas-filled?) bag of medical waste surfaces at your side? You see the black and red bio hazard label, and then the bag's contents: used syringes, knotted condoms, deflated IV bags, deformed enema bottles, all surrounded by a brownish-red muck? You swim in with your head above water, stop at the van for the Clorox bottle, and take a long shower? And when you return to the beach, the bag is still visible, but slowly retreating? My recent flotsam-memory concerned a comment made by a young classmate about the 1968 Presidential Primaries. This event occurred in the spring during a junior high school civics class. The Diggers had proclaimed the counterculture dead by fall 1967. In the southwest suburbia of Cleveland, we young students were shamefully unaware of its life or death or significance. Most student comment reflected the attitudes of parents, which ranged, in my socioeconomically and racially homogeneous but intellectually diverse bedroom community from hostile apathy to the strange beginnings of MOR commercial counterculturalism (which later gave rise to Frank Zappa's "consumer-amoeba" construct, and President George W. Bush, crackhead). A student comment connected RFK's hairstyle to a fear that he might be part of the "LSD for lunch bunch". This comment reflected the "METRACAL for lunch bunch" advertising campaign. Metracal was one of the early meal-replacement liquid diet adjuncts. It was developed from baby formula by food scientists at Mead-Johnson to deliver, upon drinking, the feeling of "fullness" after a meal without caloric intake. The desired result was severe and rapid weight loss.

"The Metracal system consisted of flavoured powders
which were to be added to water and
shaken vigorously in a specially designed
Metracal container until they frothed up
into an appetisingly dense foam, just
like a thick shake. Except the flavour,
whether it were vanilla or chocolate
or strawberry, tasted of dust."


Weight loss was seen as the route to fuck-at-the-drop-of-a-hat, which was how "The Greatest Generation" and their younger siblings misinterpreted the message of the counterculture (see Crumb, R: "Whiteman"), until Kent State and Charles Manson rendered the message moot, and Nixon rendered the message irrelevant. The "METRACAL for lunch bunch" appeared on TV as intelligent, anorexic, and eminently fuckable. The student making the anti-RFK statement is now an architect who designs hospital renovations.

Flower Day

Studio

Finally got the new studio set up. It's on a wide L-shaped bench fully accessible to my power wheelchair, and everything that I can still do hands-on is Right There. It's set up for a/d transfers, mastering, composition, voice-over, and Ken Burns-style multimedia content creation. Two work stations (one dedicated to weird computer based composition using flakey apps that won't even run on XP or modern hardware), a rack with outboard gear, a small quiet 10/2 hardware mixer, three monitor systems (great, fair, and real world), XP/Linux dual boot laptop with basic field apps on the XP side and Pd on the Linux side...the main workstation is a 3.4 GHz screamer w/ 1 gig memory and 1 TB HD space running dual 19" monitors and MAudio PCI hardware at all rates and depths...noise (unbalanced) from line in to Reaper is a respectable -85db, nothing I can't clean up to -104db at 0% DC offset with gentle FFT based NR...clean, filtered 20 amp AC...does what I want.