Kent Hovind’s site gives word that
The Supreme Court has recently denied our petition for a rehearing of Dr. Hovind’s case. They gave no reason.
Personally, I like to think that a clerk got the brief about someone who didn’t bother defending himself at the original trial, yet wants to appeal to the Supreme Court, and assumed it was a joke by one of the interns.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gs4MJIcjx8&hl=en_US&fs=1&]
Tones on Tail was a side project started by Daniel Ash of Bauhaus. Their discography is short enough to fit on a double-CD album, but it’s one of my favorites.
I love the way that Rain takes it sweet time building up. It’s a song that refuses to be rushed. It take over four minutes of this 8-minute song before the first word is sung. The Cure only lasted 3:52 in The Kiss, but there, it felt like an extended solo at the beginning of the song, whereas here, it’s more as if the band is setting the mood for the song proper that is yet to come.
I’ve never been one for pictures painted with music, but in the opening part of Rain, I can see the clouds moving in, the first drops starting to fall at 0:58, a lull, and then the keyboard line starts raining in earnest around 3:37. And so, by the time the song actually gets going, you’re ready to settle in for a rainy afternoon indoors.
And when the song ends on a 20-second sustained chord, well, that’s all right, because by then you’re not expecting anything to happen quickly. Note, too, that as each note is released in turn, it dies out with a glissando down that mirrors the glissando up at 0:28. Perhaps that’s the clouds parting and the sun coming out.
All in all, I have no idea what the song is about, but it’s a nice bit of mood music. And I have no earthly idea what Slender Fungus is about either, so I guess that’s okay.
If you’ve been following the ID movement for any time, you know that the group they try to publicly distance themselves from the most, after Darwiniacs, are other creationists, especially young-earthers.
So you’ll understand my surprise when I saw this come in on the ID the Future podcast feed:
On this episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin examines a new peer-reviewed paper that demolishes a very common and very fallacious objection to intelligent design. That objection? “Aren’t there vast eons of time for evolution?”
I haven’t listened to it, so it’s possible that the blurb is misleading (it wouldn’t be the first time a creationist wrote something misleading). But are they so starved for peer-reviewed papers that they’ll even take something that seems to support YECism?
Less than a year ago, I mentioned Guitar Praise, a Guitar Hero knock-off that only plays Christian rock.
Now they’re making the same cheese available to today’s hip devil-hater on the go, with Guitar Praise for the iPhone.
Never before will you think to yourself, “what should I do while my hellbound teacher is trying to brainwash me with Darwinism, Copernicanism, and other satanic dogmas?” Just pop in your earbuds to block the blasphemous blather and pray for your teacher’s salvation — with rock!
Oy.
As far as I can tell, FreeBSD 8 tickled something in the driver for my ethernet card, and caused it to behave unreliably. Rather than muck around with half-tested kernel patches or ifconfig settings, I slapped a $30 Whatevertheyhadontheshelf-3000 (read: common chipset that’s been debugged by a lot of people), and as far as I can tell, things are now working as they should. If the site stays up for a year, I guess we’ll know.
I also took the opportunity to add some memory. So whoo-hoo all around.
And while I’m at it, I should point out that FreeBSD is like a VW Bug: not the prettiest thing to look at, especially compared to various Apple or Linux offerings, but in a crunch it’s nigh-indestructible. Wanna run with a root partition that’s over 100% full? Sure thing. Boot a 7.2 kernel with a 8.0 /usr? No problem.
I’ve just upgraded the OS on the machine that hosts this site, and I’ve developed networking problems. If you see corrupted images or pages, that’s why. I’m working on it, but so far it looks nontrivial. Sorry for any inconvenience.
And happy 2010 to you too.
Onion headline, Dec. 22:
Weed Delivery Guy Saves Christmas
Associated Press headline, today:
Search of car turns up gift-wrapped marijuana
I just happened to notice that that last post was #666, a milestone of sorts. I’d meant to commemorate it with something suitably satanic, but missed it.
Anyway, enjoy post #667, the Neighbor of the Beast.
What with it being late December and all, I’ve been listening to a lot of Christmas music lately. And one thing I’ve decided is that I really need to separate my collection into “Christmas music (straight)” and “Christmas music (ironic)”. It hurts my brain when I put the MP3 player on shuffle and it goes from Bing Crosby’s Silver Bells to William Hung’s version.
Another thing is that I need to purge my collection of such schmalzy glurge as Christmas at the Dentist’s and Stuck in an Elevator for Christmas.
Which brings me to my main point: that playing or singing like you mean it counts for a lot. I just listened to Etta Jones’s Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas. I can’t think of a single objective criterion (tempo, syncopation, inflection, etc.) by which it should be excluded from An Uncool Square’s Treasury of Easy-Listening Christmas Favorites, but I like it. There’s something I can’t define, but basically she sings like she means it, like it gives her joy to be singing this song, rather than singing like “hey, it’s a gig.” (And yes, I hear a lot of the same thing in gospel music, which is why it goes on my list of genres that I respect, even if I don’t enjoy the music itself.)
Mannheim Steamroller could easily have been a novelty act: A Synthpop Christmas. But I think there’s a joy that comes through in his playing, a feeling that he actually likes those songs, and wanted to do them justice in his own style. Ditto Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, though Dean Martin could get a bit too schmalzy for me.
Of course, singing like you mean it isn’t everything. Wing is quite earnest, as is William Hung. But that doesn’t mean I want to listen to more of them than I absolutely have to.
I completely understand people who hate shopping in December because all the malls are playing the same twelve goddamned songs for a solid month. I too put on my iPod to drown out the Extruded Music Product. But if you look, you can find performances of those same twelve songs (and a lot more) that actually sound good. To a large extent, I think it’s simply because the musicians have genuine love for the material.
(PS: for the people who are tired of hearing the same twelve songs over and over, every year I make it a point to listen to Navidades Radioactivas, a Spanish punk Christmas compilation. It’s definitely… different.)