ive been waiting for them to pick up on this

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20513656/

has anyone realized that we've had a abnormal amount of storms and rainfall around the midwest? think theres a reason?

oh yeah.

'course, IF global warming is taking place, we should probably just let it run its course right? afterall, God is omnipotent, so we should just let Him run His course yeah? like diseases and death and murder? just sit back and enjoy all the green plants. because after all, the End is only coming sooner.

but i must point out Genesis 1:28 "God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.""

fill the earth and subdue it. personally i dont think subduing the earth means drinking margaritas while watching all this shit going on around us.

project BAM! 3

for the third exploration of project BAM! i want to share something i treasure close to my heart. the one and only live version of Santana's soul sacrifice performed during the 1969 woodstock. being raised by two full time rock stars, i grew up around classic rock and Santana was fed to me at the dinner table. however, when i first rented the documentary on woodstock and saw Santana play this live...i experienced a new level of music enchantment. theres Carlos Santana playing brilliant stuff that to this day i have not idea how he came up with it, Mickaël Shrieve cranking out a genius drum solo, you also have a great organ, sweet back up conga and shaker players, bass, the list goes on. in my opinion this live performance could not be any better. it just stands alone and anyone who knows drums or Santana will probably be familiar with this performance. i think ive watched Shrieve pound away with his sticks a hundred times and i still transcend just about everything with goosebumps when i watch it. but enough words, listen:

(warning: this video contains nudity (it is after all the documentary on woodstock))

project BAM! 2

ive always been a lover of the sound of the steelpan drum. its origin is trinidad. the drum part of the name comes from the oil drums used in their production. the steel drum came into existence from the enslaved africans in trinidad who used discarded material as their only means to make musical instruments. below is the classic moonlight sonata played by steel drums. i cant help but think about slaves playing their hearts out on these drums under the moonlight after a days hard work. tears streaming from their eyes...

project BAM!

for this first installment of project BAM! we have the following.

you feelin it?

strange dreams and shaking windows

i tossed in and out of strange dreams for 2 hours this morning while a helicopter whirled overhead. turns out im not insane.

i thought maybe they were after me for watching this

'course, theres always the other side.

my next project

to keep myself busy while living the single life, i like to do projects.

this one seems promising.

meno meno meno mana

introducing a new favortie: menomena

i will say this about menomena. if i were to create music, would probably do it like menomena and it would probably sound a lot like menomena. these guys record a bunch of sounds into their computer. drum loops, guitar riffs, vocals. the whole gommit. then they mix it all around until they get something magical.

you can listen to 5 selected tracks from the newest album, friend and foe, here:

http://barsukmusic.blaireau.net/menomena/

menomena's myspace...if youre into that kind of thing.

big pimpin

you want competition for move??

i will give you competition for move

no no its called global cooling

49 deaths in the midwest from the chill factor?!?

the aussies are out.

Last month, Prime Minister John Howard announced that every school would be eligible for help to install solar hot water systems and rainwater tanks.

genocide of the 21st century. could it be?

the ice is melting! quick, lets get rich!

still reading the news...

i read this statement this morning on msn:

Microsoft has said disruptive changes in the software industry — a shift away from desktop programs and toward applications delivered over the Internet — will touch every one of the company's products, in ways yet to be determined.

now i dont know what you think about that, but i think its pretty dang big. the really sad part of the whole deal though is that microsoft, pretty much the biggest software co. ever in the history of the universe, is getting into advertising. so not only will we be bombarded with even More adds from even Bigger companies, we will continue to buy useless crap, generating a cyclical sick perpetuating machine.

kind of like deforestation

one piece of advice: get adblock

its summer

there are those folks. whom i love, naturally, that like to get on my case for believing in global warming. now that summer is here, i can add to the drama:

southern heat wave blamed for 33 deaths

global warming is here

Arctic sea ice melting faster: study

"During the first week in July, the Arctic sea ice started to disappear at rates we had never seen before"

oh and i guess that some blogger forced NASA to admit global warming figures error. but they forget to tell you in the headlines that the error was that last year was the 4th warmest year as opposed to the 3rd and that "the corrected figures left evidence of long-term warming intact." right, right.

now if i really wanted to get into it, i could mention that global warming is causing a rise in flesh eating diseases, that its killing elvis fans, that tropical rainforest trees are glowing twice as slow, that its ruining grapes for wine, that its threatening moose and wolves, that its reducing agricultural production by 25%, that it caused the recent new york tornado, its increasing hurricanes, and causing heavy rains. but that would be silly wouldent it?

afterall, its all a hoax...

just like the holocaust.

ratatat ! !

been working way to hard. (aka too much) and in my sleep deprived mind, ive started to hallucinate. that makes things interesting.

none the less. ratatat has been pulling me through. great band. heres a poor vid but cool location for you. the song is lex

i can feel it: upon the seat of a bicycle built for two

to show my support during the "scenes i go back to" saga. id like to share a scene i love. its from 2001: Space Odyessy by Stanley Kubrick. i love the sounds in this movie. i love the images. but the thing i love most in movies is dialog. here is some of the best dialog. spoken true from hal 9000. the computer:

Hal: I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm a... fraid. Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am a HAL 9000 computer. I became operational at the H.A.L. plant in Urbana, Illinois on the 12th of January 1992. My instructor was Mr. Langley, and he taught me to sing a song. If you'd like to hear it I can sing it for you.

Dave: Yes, I'd like to hear it, HAL. Sing it for me.

Hal: It's called "Daisy."
Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do. I'm half crazy all for the love of you. It won't be a stylish marriage, I can't afford a carriage. But you'll look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for two.

i dont understand this

but i think its really cool

River Lewis Maranville

"he will be president."

award for mosts comments in a day

goes to: http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/08/if-you-were-a-terrorist-how-would-you-attack/

over five hundred comments in about a day. 594 to be exact in under 12 hours. no wonder comments were disabled.

looks like too many people are coming up with attack ideas
looks like too many people are coming up with attack ideas

quote of the day

said by famous polar scientist, Artur Chilingarov:

"I don't give a damn what all these foreign politicians there are saying about this, If someone doesn't like this, let them go down themselves ... and then try to put something there. Russia must win. Russia has what it takes to win. The Arctic has always been Russian."

and if your (blank) causes you to stumble...

ive been "starving" lately for random good stuff. (literally) you see, at one point in my life i had this magical thing called google reader. when i went to it, it provided a magical door to many peoples websites. this magical door would allow me to read everything they wrote in real time. and the best part is that i got to decide which peoples websites i wanted to peer into ...in real time of course.

so began the stumbling. i would add more and more useless crap (aka: extremely amusing websites and blogs) to my google reader. it was good in that it provided hours of entertainment, but it was bad in that it was completely useless other than impressing people with useless crap. there were, of course, friend's websites linked to it, but that was by far the minority. so this continued and continued.

now the really bad part about this, and my personality, is that i basically have to read everything in my google reader whenever i look at it. period. so it would take longer and longer to read everything. it made me late for dinner parties and engagements. (neither of which i actually have, but for the purpose of the story lets pretend i do). it made me really depressed when i would get off line at night and realized i just wasted 1.8 hours reading useless crap. basically my whole being suffered.

then one day, one saterday night i believe, it reached a climax: i could only read the content just as fast as it came in. there was no getting ahead. it was not humanly possible for me to read all the content. more would pop up. you see...its in real time. so it was a trap. a terrible one. it was like tv. just sucked into crap. and it never ended.

and so i hope at this point in the story you will have learned the moral.

i did too. and so what i did to remedy it is as follows.

1. create a separate gmail account.
2. copy all useless rss feeds into the account.
3. delete all the useless feeds from main gmail account.
4. make up a really complicated and random password to the second, rss-feed dedicated gmail account.
5. write the password on one little piece of paper. (if you have a photographic memory...dont photo it.)
6. put the piece of paper in a plastic bag.
7. open up the sewer main in basement.
8. attach bag to sewer main wall and close.

and Ta Da! i can only read all the useless crap when i really really really dont have anything better to do.

and as i sit here today over the lunch hour. i miss my rss feed. i miss my sin.

oh the life of a sinner. *sigh*


(sadly...ive been reading the news instead. uuuuugh.)

the Daddy

today:

Case Maranville is a daddy. And Lindsay Maranville is a mommy.

congrats!

people learn from history - when they want to

i appreciated this article on msnbc this morning that discussed bridge deficiency and the need of repair. Here are a few excerpts:

"More than 70,000 bridges across the country are rated structurally deficient like the span that collapsed in Minneapolis and engineers estimate repairing them all would take at least a generation and cost more than $188 billion"

"But with that said, as a result of this catastrophic disaster, we’re going to be looking at the rules and finding out in fact if they should be tightened, made more stringent"

"They are built not to fall down. This is an anomaly and we’re going to try to find out why this is an anomaly and prevent that anomaly from ever happening again"

"We’re not doing what the engineers are saying we need to be doing"

"At least 73,533 of 607,363 bridges in the nation, or about 12 percent, were classified as structurally deficient"

welcome to my job. i encounter this stuff every day. problems on top of problems with all sorts of things from pipes being too small going beneath your grandmas house, to dams that could break, to old brick culverts running beneath "O" Street that are falling apart and too small. (oh yeah, thats right!) and sometimes i see the disaster, the flood, and its not a surprise. and sometimes i hear the city official tell the single mother whose basement is full of water and her children dont have a place to sleep, that it wasent their fault. bla bla bla.

and it pisses me off.

but its also why i like my job, because thats the point i can say something. and i make the best case i can in hopes of convincing that power hungry beast that he needs to fix it. it is his fault.

but it gets weird. and complicated. like most things in life. because, in reality, its that single woman who pays the salary of that man, and pays taxes to fix the broken pipe going through her yard, and its my taxes too. and that tax money goes to other things we need like education and law enforcement. so we either a)pay more taxes for this stuff to be fixed, or b) the govrnmt needs to do a better job with allocating what they got.

oh deer.

so what happens today. a bridge collapses, kills people and someone is actually doing something. a friend made a comment to me this morning that the gov. is already working on a bill for the bridge/highway funds, and he was surprised. like "good for them." well, thats bs. shame on them. shame on them for waiting until six people die, hundreds hurt, and millions freaked out next time they drive their volvo across a bridge. why does it always take a tragedy before someone does anything?

oh and that $188 billion...where do you think thats going to come from?
"we're not doing what the engineers are saying we need to be doing." thats a bold statement. thanks for making it.

then. call me a germaphobe. uncle john.

so. at work, i occasionally go to the bathroom. i don't want to go into any details about the adventure exactly, but i do want to draw attention to an item in the bathroom that i see. i see this item only when i go into the "stall." you know the one. the one with inch thick fiberglass walls, held together with shinny metal connectors. a door, complete with gaps on either side of it.

and most famously, the large gap beneath the walls. the gap that men and women look at each others shoes through. the gap that kids will lean down and look out of. (and other kids will come up to, and lean down to look up into.) this large gap, however most intriguing it is, is not the item i want to draw your attention to though. not today.

what i see when i go into the "stall" is uncle johns bathroom reader. and not just one of them. its always either two or three. and these big shiney colorful books are always stacked at the back of the pot. the johnny. the johnny on the spot. there they are. every time. and ever time i see them i have this thought that runs through my head: do people actually read these?!??

wait what? really?!? you mean, people that are doing the ol johnny spot reading the uncle johns bathroom reader?!? are you serious?!? i know it says "bathroom reader" but does that mean people "read it in the batheroom"? im appalled.

the reason i know people read these is because they are always kind of shuffled around. the pages are worn, maybe even bent, and.... ... discolored. AND they get rotated. about every two weeks one disappears and a new one shows up. wow. incredible. incredulous. inscrumpable. the ol unlcle john on the johnny spot.

one time i even saw it on the floor. oh man. i think i even had a gag reflex. i calmly shoved it with the point of my shoe to the edge of the johnny and tried not to look at, or think about it. (i still try not to think about that)

and so it goes. so the life of public restrooms. so the success of uncle johns bathroom reader. i will admit, it is tempting to read such wonderful useless facts all day long. it really is. but at the risk of getting some sort of viral meningitis, i think ill pass.

sorry john. but thanks for watching my back anyways.