Two Versions of Bones

People uploading to YouTube don't necessarily get the conversions right.

This is too slow:



This is what I remember:



Looped for your listening pleasure. Listen as they go in and out of phase! Exciting!

UPDATE FOR EXTRA DUMBNESS!

In 2005 Fred Frith released a remastered version of Killing Time on CD on his own label, Fred Records with the six extra tracks from the RecRec reissue, plus two previously unreleased tracks, "Third Street" and "F.B.I." (live Paris 1981). This edition includes the following note: "In contrast to previous CD and LP versions, the Killing Time LP cuts are heard here as originally intended, at the correct speed and pitch and without added reverb."

Yeesh. It seems the slower version is "correct". CURSE YOU GEORGE LUCAS FOR STEALING MY CHILDHOOD MEMORIES!

ЗОРБ Deviltry

Goddamn, lining that little bugger up is a pain in the ass so this is as good as you get. Here are a bunch more:

Being Talked About

An entertaining story about a horrible person:

[Vitaly Borker] stumbled upon the upside of rudeness by accident.

“I stopped caring,” he says, and for that he blames customers. They lied and changed their minds in ways that cost him money, he says, and at some point he started telling them off in the bluntest of terms. To his amazement, this seemed to better his standing in certain Google searches, which brought in more sales.

Before this discovery, he’d hired a search optimization company to burnish his site’s reputation by writing positive things about DecorMyEyes online. Odious behavior, he realized, worked much better, and it didn’t cost him a penny.

“Look,” he says, grabbing an iPad off a small table. He types “Christian Audigier,” the name of a French designer, and “glasses” into Google. DecorMyEyes pops up high on the first page.

“Why am I there?” he asks, sounding both peeved and amazed. “I don’t belong there. I actually outrank the designer’s own Web site.”

The only explanation, he figures, is online chatter about his appalling ways. He swears that a vast majority of his transactions are amicable, and he is adamant that all of the customers he verbally attacks deserve it.

Volunteering to Serve Your Community

The NRO interviews John Bolton on the Wikileaks business:

Former ambassador John Bolton tells National Review Online that he would charge Pfc. Bradley Manning with treason for sharing U.S. intelligence with Wikileaks. “I believe treason is still punishable by death and if he were found guilty, I would do it,” Bolton says.

Would he could he with a gun?
Would he find some other fun?
Would he could he with an axe?
Would he pound in carpet tacks?
Would he kill him with a car?
Would he use an iron bar?
Would he could he gas him dead?
Or use a rock to crush his head?
He does not like this Private Manning:
Who can tell what death he's planning?

Shame and Embarrassment

Max Boot on Wikileaks:

OK, that’s not quite fair. There are some genuine revelations in all these documents. I, for one, didn’t realize that Libya’s head kook, Muammar Qaddafi, spends a lot of his time with a “voluptuous blonde” nurse from Ukraine or that he uses Botox. Of course, just because information is new doesn’t make it consequential, and this type of information is of interest primarily to editors and readers of Gawker, the gossip site (where I ran across it).

There was a time when editors and reporters thought of themselves as citizens first and journalists second. There were damaging leaks even during World War II, but when they occurred they were generally denounced by the rest of the press. We now seem to have reached a moment when the West’s major news organizations, working hand in glove with a sleazy website, feel free to throw spitballs at those who make policy and those who execute it. This is journalism as pure vandalism. If I were responsible, I would feel shame and embarrassment. But apparently, those healthy emotions are in short supply these days.

[Note that I beat Tintin to this item. The timestamp on his shows he won't even think of it until this evening.]

The Art of Google Street View

I can't stop scrolling.

Theft of Wood

Opposition to the police in Russia:

In a video, made while they were hiding in the forest, the young men wear army fatigues and hold guns. Stripped to the waist, Alexander Kovtun, the group's leader, directly addresses the police:

"This is not some spontaneous act," he says. "No. We planned it and did it on purpose, to kill you gangsters, because you are the real criminals. You provide cover for drug-trafficking, prostitution and the theft of wood from our forests."

Okay Wiki, Do Your Thing

I Am Such a Whiner

Complain complain complain. It's like I'm Sarah Palin!

Anyway, this was surprisingly easy:



ЗОРБing devil at some point.

God's Wrath

An omnipotent God wreaks havoc again!

A debate over Sunday shopping has led P.E.I.'s transportation minister to suggest God had struck down the leader of the Opposition, who fell and injured herself after introducing a bill to allow Sunday openings year-round.

God also steals socks - JUST ONE MIND YOU - and puts your keys not on the table but ON THE COUNTER.

IT IS GODDAMNED NOVEMBER.

Floyd and Mary Beth Brown write a column with the strength of TWO CONSERVATIVES:

During this Christmas season of cheer and good tidings, a universal message is going forth. They are all united from Barack Obama to Martha Stewart to Wall Street Banks, the Federal Reserve and even your local mall agrees: please borrow to spend more this Christmas.

Okay then, will do.

Americans since 2008 have been tightening their belts, and they have paid down over 150 Billion dollars in consumer debt. This is a remarkable feat and a testimony to the diligence, hard work and frugality of the American citizen. In contrast to the people, we are embarrassed that our government is encouraging irresponsible and spendthrift behavior.

I have no idea what 150 billion (or in Germanic Important English "Billion") they're talking about and will not search for it. But I have this idea that the shape of the economy since 2008 may enforce some diligence and frugality that was not present previously. Here is a graph stolen from Calculated Risk:



In short, I got nothing, but I owe a post. Look! A video! Maybe they know this one at N__B's office.

Fundamentalist Christians = Hate Group

This is interesting. I'm quite happy that the Family Resource Council will be getting more bad press for good reasons. At the same time, the Southern Poverty Law Center is a funny sort of organization. Certainly this opens up other avenues for funding; maybe they can get some of that plentiful Pixar money.

Defining Conservatism

Jonah Goldberg:

From what he could tell, [my father] liked this new pope too. "We need more rocks in the river," my dad explained. What he meant was that change comes so fast, in such a relentless torrent, that we need people and things that stand up to it and offer respite from the current.

I loved the literary quality of the expression "more rocks in the river," even though the imagery doesn't quite convey what my dad really believed. Dad was a conservative, properly understood. By that I mean he didn't think conservatism was merely an act of passive and futile defiance of what Shakespeare called "devouring time." You see, unlike human institutions, the rocks do not fight the devouring river of time, it just seems like they do. My dad believed that conservatism was an affirmative act, a choice of prudence and will. In the cacophonous din of perpetual change, the conservative selects the notes worth savoring and repeats them for others to hear and, hopefully, appreciate.

Below are many ocarinas for Jonah to tootle as he drowns. They kinda look like submarines so it fits the underwater music metaphor.

The Evolution of Comedy

November 16, 2010:



Someone spies with their little eye:



November 22, 2010:



Apparently the image is from here, older site referred to here.

Nattering Nabobs of Negativism

Might this have transcription errors?

Sarah Palin: “As for doing an interview, though, with a reporter who already has such a bias against whatever it is that I would come out and say? Why waste my time? No.”

“I want to help clean up the state that is so sorry today of journalism. And I have a communications degree. I studied journalism, who, what, where, when, and why of reporting. I will speak to reporters who still understand that cornerstone of our democracy, that expectation that the public has for truth to be reported. And then we get to decide our own opinion based on the facts reported to us.”

“So a journalist, a reporter who is so biased and will, no doubt, spin and gin up whatever it is that I have to say to create controversy, I swear to you, I will not my waste my time with her. Or him.”

Probably not. To air in two hours, for those who have the stomach for it.

The Legacy Defined

Via Taegan Goddard, by all means display this:

As former president George W. Bush broke ground Tuesday in Dallas for his presidential library, officials weighed whether or not to display one item that few know is being held in storage there: the "Mission Accomplished" banner.

SOMEBODY evidently treasured it.

More than 3,000 people, including friends, supporters and former administration officials attended Tuesday's ceremony. Outside, there were about 100 protesters joined by a handful of counterprotesters. "It is hard to believe there is this much excitement about shoveling dirt," Bush said.

Dirt?

Let me be moderately fair and acknowledge that Bush said that banner was a mistake in some stupid interview with Matt Lauer, but, you know, he's a big fat liar.

Truth in Labelling

Here is the story of a monster:

TWO dozen cancer patients, including a six-year-old Sydney girl, died after treatment ordered by a doctor who is a convicted fraud.

What is his name?

Hellfried Sartori is the Austrian at the centre of an inquest into the deaths of five people in Perth in 2005.

And the treatment?

Mr Sartori replied that 50 per cent of the cure for cancer was positive thinking by the patient. He conceded he had exaggerated about the efficacy of his treatments, insisted he could cure cancer and admitted lying to Australian authorities. ''If any treatment has proved benefits, it is this treatment,'' he told the court. ''And I have not violated my Hippocratic oath.''

...

In other evidence yesterday, Mr Sartori admitted lying when he applied, unsuccessfully, to register as a doctor in Australia. He also conceded that academic articles about caesium chloride treatment, which he published in 1984 and which had been peer-reviewed, did not include crucial material that about 10 of 50 patients he treated with caesium in 1981-982 had it administered intravenously. Of the 50, 25 died within a year.

His evidence has contained sweeping references to statistics available on the internet, the laws of physics, and his claims that 10,000 people were alive because of his caesium chloride remedies.

Unkind people might want to note here that Australia sanctions all kinds of bullshit in accredited health education.

I'm Interested in Eating My Cookie

Somehow Albertans hired an Australian to do something and did not understand the importance of the cookie to the life cycle of kangaroofuckers.

Schrödinger's Cattiness

What I think I know about theoretical physics is a teensy tiny fraction of what an interested reader of pop science books must know, and what I actually know is of course a more embarrassing subset of that.

But I think I know mean gossip.

Prima Donna and Child

Here is a presidential portrait:



Christ what an asshole. Who does he think is gonna be sitting in those chairs back there? Angela Merkel maybe?

Wait, what's this?



Okay then.