The Real Reason Most Musicians Lose "It" as they Age

Sick Boy: It's certainly a phenomenon in all walks of life.
Mark: What do you mean?
Sick Boy: Well, at one time, you've got it, and then you lose it, and it's gone forever. All walks of life: George Best, for example. Had it, lost it. Or David Bowie, or Lou Reed...
Mark: Some of his solo stuff's not bad.
Sick Boy: No, it's not bad, but it's not great either. And in your heart you kind of know that although it sounds all right, it's actually just shite.

-From Trainspotting

As a rule people in many other walks of life tend to age better, but as far music goes, we all know it's true- after a certain point, most musicians seem to lose "it", that magical quality that made their earlier recordings so good and vibrant. Just look at everything Paul McCartney did after he left the Beatles. If you're in your late 20's or early 30's, look at what happened to the Smashing Pumpkins. If you're in your teens and your favorite musicians are still good, just wait- it'll happen to them too.

Usually, we tend to measure this in terms of the quality of their melodies, as if writing pop tunes is a technical exercise that older songwriters somehow lose proficiency in. But that doesn't explain everything- even former fans of U2 that have soured on everything they did after the band hit it big will admit that newer songs like "Beautiful Day" are catchy.

And let's face it, technical ability doesn't count for much in pop music. That's why some enthusiastic kids with 3 chords and some energy consistently outdo more skilled musicians. If technical chops were really what mattered, those guys that write infectiously catchy songs for Disney musicals and TV themes would have millions of fans.

I have a simpler proposition- regardless of the genre, what music communicates primarily is emotions, and it's power is in the way it can change the mood of its listeners. That's why songs follow the themes of our most powerful feelings (usually love, sometimes anger).

Pop groups make it big expressing the emotions of people their own age. The feelings they express are those of people 25 or under. Some older musicians remain eternal teenagers that never fully grow up (Iggy Pop is a good example), and so in some rare cases, these singers are still seen as having "it" to greater or lesser extents.

But in most cases, they age and mature, and begin to lose touch with those feelings that their early music embodied, and they can no longer express them as powerfully or effectively. At that point, they have two options- grow up a little, and start making music aimed at an older, more mature audience (though many of the fans of the older albums will hate it), or continue trying to act like a teenager, looking more and more pathetic.

Styles of music that skew toward older audiences see the lowest attrition of "it". Look at Country, for example- Most fans will tell you Johnny Cash had it to his dying day. Literally, if you listen to his posthumous last album.

Meanwhile, styles of music skewed toward younger audiences see stars losing "it" as shortly as a year or two after their debuts. Perhaps no genre exemplifies this better than rap. The emotions communicated in rap might not appeal to you personally, and you might not even consider it "real" music to begin with. But in a way that helps prove the point- other people are roused by the emotions expressed in rap and enjoy it for that reason, despite the fact that it requires so little (essentially irrelevant) technical skill.

Most rappers have a creative lifespan of about 3 years, during the most arrogant moments of their youth, and spend their remaining days grabbing at movie roles, and putting out half-hearted albums that try to ape the latest trends of kids now 10-20 years their juniors.

The worst career move a rapper can make is growing up. Observe Method Man, once the standout star of the famed rap group the Wu Tang Clan. His solo album, named after a slang word for marijuana, was one of the group's bestselling efforts.

But shortly after Method Man made a huge blunder- he matured. He married the same girl that loved him before he was famous, bought a house, had kids, and told MTV that he would rather put money in their trust funds than buy another gold chain to put around his neck.

He landed roles on several critically acclaimed TV shows, including Oz and The Wire, but his rapping was never the same. Technically, he does more or less the same thing he did on his first album, but the spirit and energy just aren't there. As hard as he tries, you can't shake the feeling that there's something else he'd rather be doing. His last two albums flopped, and he's now on the verge of being dropped by his label.

In contrast, consider the career of fellow Wu-Tang member Ghostface Killah, who used to be considered second-tier within in the groups's ranks. Ghostface went to prison for a while for beating up and robbing a parking lot attendant (after he had become a rap star, mind you), as far as I know never married, and basically kept on living the same lifestyle he'd had when he was 20. Today, he's the only surviving member of the Clan most fans or critics take seriously.

Look at career rappers like LL Cool J (whose last album tanked), that follow the trends, and more humble rappers like Redman, that continue to walk the walk by never marrying and continuing to smoke dope every day- those are the ones that continue to remain popular with fans.

Confrontation with Angry Scientologists on Street

From what I can gather, this guy said something critical about Scientology, and members angrily picketed his home and distributed fliers in his neighborhood "exposing" him of attacking religion.

So he goes to a Scientology-sponsored Fourth of July festival with a camera. After a spat with a security guy that won't let him in (It's being hosted on a public street), some Scientologists surround him and try to shame him down with all the tactics they learn from the church. A really interesting look into their psychology.




All the related videos about Scientology you can possibly handle here, including cameos by famed scientologist Tom Cruise and TV interviews with the church's leader.

I actually took a couple Scientology classes in Halifax back in College just to see what it was all about. Overall good people, but a little brainwashed. They fork over a third of their income for Scientology classes...that's a hell of an income tax for joining Scientology country.

One thing I noticed about them, from the lowest member handing out fliers on the street all the way up to big name members like Tom Cruise and John Travolta- they all have the same look in their eyes, this fixed, glassy, almost unblinking stare. At first it comes off as confidence, but after a while it just looks creepy.

While I don't know if it always compensates for the money they fork over, they do get results, though...I met a guy at the church who I later found out had been a bit of a mess..drugs, rumors that he prostituted himself at the local gay pick-up spot...years later I went to my first day of work at a major Canadian bank, and the trainer introduced us to our new boss, an excellent loan salesman that had worked his way up the corporate ranks. It was him! DUN-DUH-DUHH!!!!

Emerging Republican Minority by Paul Krugman

Emerging Republican Minority
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times

Monday 26 March 2007

Remember how the 2004 election was supposed to have demonstrated, once and for all, that conservatism was the future of American politics? I do: early in 2005, some colleagues in the news media urged me, in effect, to give up. "The election settled some things," I was told.

But at this point 2004 looks like an aberration, an election won with fear-and-smear tactics that have passed their sell-by date. Republicans no longer have a perceived edge over Democrats on national security - and without that edge, they stand revealed as ideologues out of step with an increasingly liberal American public.

Right now the talk of the political chattering classes is a report from the Pew Research Center showing a precipitous decline in Republican support. In 2002 equal numbers of Americans identified themselves as Republicans and Democrats, but since then the Democrats have opened up a 15-point advantage.

Part of the Republican collapse surely reflects public disgust with the Bush administration. The gap between the parties will probably get even wider when - not if - more and worse tales of corruption and abuse of power emerge.

But polling data on the issues, from Pew and elsewhere, suggest that the G.O.P.'s problems lie as much with its ideology as with one man's disastrous reign.

For the conservatives who run today's Republican Party are devoted, above all, to the proposition that government is always the problem, never the solution. For a while the American people seemed to agree; but lately they've concluded that sometimes government is the solution, after all, and they'd like to see more of it.

Consider, for example, the question of whether the government should provide fewer services in order to cut spending, or provide more services even if this requires higher spending. According to the American National Election Studies, in 1994, the year the Republicans began their 12-year control of Congress, those who favored smaller government had the edge, by 36 to 27. By 2004, however, those in favor of bigger government had a 43-to-20 lead.

And public opinion seems to have taken a particularly strong turn in favor of universal health care. Gallup reports that 69 percent of the public believes that "it is the responsibility of the federal government to make sure all Americans have health care coverage," up from 59 percent in 2000.

The main force driving this shift to the left is probably rising income inequality. According to Pew, there has recently been a sharp increase in the percentage of Americans who agree with the statement that "the rich get richer while the poor get poorer." Interestingly, the big increase in disgruntlement over rising inequality has come among the relatively well off - those making more than $75,000 a year.

Indeed, even the relatively well off have good reason to feel left behind in today's economy, because the big income gains have been going to a tiny, super-rich minority. It's not surprising, under those circumstances, that most people favor a stronger safety net - which they might need - even at the expense of higher taxes, much of which could be paid by the ever-richer elite.

And in the case of health care, there's also the fact that the traditional system of employer-based coverage is gradually disintegrating. It's no wonder, then, that a bit of socialized medicine is looking good to most Americans.

So what does this say about the political outlook? It's difficult to make predictions, especially about the future. But at this point it looks as if we're seeing an emerging Republican minority.

After all, Democratic priorities - in particular, on health care, where John Edwards has set the standard for all the candidates with a specific proposal to finance universal coverage with higher taxes on the rich - seem to be more or less in line with what the public wants.

Republicans, on the other hand, are still wallowing in nostalgia - nostalgia for the days when people thought they were heroic terrorism-fighters, nostalgia for the days when lots of Americans hated Big Government.

Many Republicans still imagine that what their party needs is a return to the conservative legacy of Ronald Reagan. It will probably take quite a while in the political wilderness before they take on board the message of Arnold Schwarzenegger's comeback in California - which is that what they really need is a return to the moderate legacy of Dwight Eisenhower.

Driving in India

Check out the first video to see what the traffic is like in India. No traffic lights or anything, you just sort of drive and deal with oncoming cars as you see them.



Now check out how you cross the road under conditions like this. Dude with the camera is deliberately showing off by stopping for effect, but aside from that this isn't a daredevil stunt, it's just everyday life.



When I first went there I was mortified trying to cross the road, because people literally don't stop or even slow down, they just honk the horn as they come at you. But after a while I got used to it. It's just social conditioning that makes the traffic laws in other countries seem so important.

Indias nuts...as you can hear, the horn is an important part of the car, you use it every few seconds to alert pedestrians and goats that you're about to run them over unless they move.

You might wonder if they have a lot of accidents. Damn right they do! But people are easygoing about that, too. I was in a taxi and it bumped into another car. The drivers got out, had a look, saw it was just a "little" dent, and they shrugged it off and got back in their cars to keep driving. Might have slowed us down 10-15 seconds.

There is one thing that driver in India fear though...cats. If a black cat crosses the road in front of a driver, he screeches to a halt, often at the risk of getting rear ended, and stays stopped until the car from behind passes him. According to the superstition, only then is it safe for to go on. They'll stop faster for a cat than they will for a human being!

Mango Cream Soda!

Not my computer by the way...

If you've got an even passing interest in Japan, you've probably heard about Calpis Water, the white soda made out of fermented milk (worth following that link if you haven't). Basically, it's a type of cream soda, and actually quite good, once you get over the strangeness of it and murky white color. My favorite variety though is Skal, which claims to be based on a Scandinavian formula. It was really popular at my supermarket when it was sold in big bottles. When the manufacturers stopped selling the big size everyone rushed to stockpile it in the final days.

Anyway, Skal has just released a new flavor- Mango Cream Soda! It's great! No Japanese weirdness here, just a good product. Why didn't anyone think of this sooner?



In other beverage news, I've got a milkman now, makes me feel awfully adult. As you can see from the photo at the bottom of the page I live way up in the hills. There are no stores up here, and it's a pain going all the way down and back up for milk, so I enjoy finding it at my doorstep early in the morning. It's good too...fresh.

The only problem? They give it in little 200ml bottles (about 1 cup), and they run 126 yen each ($1.20). Thats work out to something like $6.30 a liter...and common milk costs $1.50-$2.00 a liter if I drag myself to the store. It's good, but not that good. Gonna have to cancel, unless they start selling bigger bottles for better prices.

Book Review: "The Language Instinct" by Steven Pinker and "Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development by Jeffrey Elman et al.

Don't talk about my day job so much on this blog...but here's the big debate at graduate school- Is language nature or nurture? Noam Chomsky says that language is too complex for anyone to master through general cognitive abilities. He believes that there is a specific "language gene" that determines how we speak. In the other camp are Connectionists, who say that while we are hard-wired to acquire language as infants, the actual acquisition is a natural gestation of the human mind, worked out in interaction with the environment. And they use neural network models to demonstrate how it could happen. Here are reviews of books championing both camps:




The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker

This book argues that human language is too complex to be something we learn after birth, like swimming or driving a car. Pinker believes that language is innate, the result of complex rules that we are born with and that are generated from a specific part of the brain. It's even suggested that there is a specific "language gene" in our DNA.

After over 3 decades after the popularization of Noam Chomsky's nativist theory that language is innate, someone finally wrote a book that explains it in simple, easy-to-understand terms. The problem is, its beginning to look like this book came at the twilight of the nativist theory's existence.

Language might look like a unique, one-of-a-kind ability. It may seem strange that we can speak our native language so well, yet have so much trouble with foreign languages as adults.

But actually, childhood is a time when we learn a great deal of mind-bogglingly complex mental tasks that are difficult to learn as adults.

Take vision, for example- we often take our ability to see and gauge angles and depth as a given, but rather than being genetic, its actually a complex mental process that we learn after birth. There are cases of blind people that receive their sight in adulthood through breakthrough surgery. But rather than simply gazing at their wife for the first time, they often don't know how to comprehend what they're seeing. They have to conciously learn that objects that enlarge in their field of vision are actually getting closer. And they often have to re-learn, for examples, what their dog looks like from several angles. At first, it appears to be shrinking on either side when it turns to face them. In the book An Anthropologist on Mars, Oliver Sacks reported that one such patient simply gave up on trying to understand what his eyes were telling him and went back to being blind.

By the same token, language could be something we acquire during a critical period in childhood. As amazingly complex as it is mentally, so is learning to see, and the balancing act of walking on two legs. With time these processes look so natural it looks genetic. Of course, our DNA dictates that we have a larnyx to speak with, and we seem instinctively wired to pick out and learn speech (barring a disorder such as autism). But still, there's an acquisition period after birth where our minds hashed out the details. It's called an acquisition period because it's acquired, not because its handed down letter-by-letter and rule-by-rule in the DNA. That's why language differs so drastically in grammar and phonology from language to language, because so much of it -not so little of it- is worked out in the environment beyond the womb.

As far as giving a well-written, entertaining and easy-to-understand breakdown of Chomsky's theories, this book is great. If you want to understand the nativist approach, give it a chance. But take it with a grain of salt. As entertaining as it is, it's basically the infomercial view of how language works, and it's hard for me to give it a good rating when it's beginning to look more and more like this theory is wrong about language.

Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development by Jeffrey L. Elman, Elizabeth A. Bates, Mark H. Johnson, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Domenico Parisi, and Kim Plunkett.

I came across this book while studying applied linguistics, and was curious about what Connectionist theory had to say against Noam Chomsky's nativist approach, which is that language is too complex a thing to be learned in the same way that we learn to swim or drive a car, and that it must be genetically ingrained, with a specific "language gene" that determines the fundamental parameters of how all human languages work.

Until reading this, I had heard all the conventional arguments against connectionsim -it was all computers and had nothing to do with the human mind, no computer simulation could ever come close to mimicing the complexity of the human mind, etc.

This book, mostly concerned with human development, has some fascinating and paradigm-changing ideas to add to the debate. If genes are so important, the authors argue, why don't we come out of the womb as fully formed adults with everything we need to know hardwired into us, as some lower species are? The authors show that there are simple flowers that have more genes than we do, demonstrating that gene count isn't the last word on an organism's complexity.

The authors make a powerful case that the state of childhood , and the complex development our minds experience during this time, is the reason that genes with specific codings don't have to do all the work- we are formed in interaction with our environments.

Rather than explaining everything, connectionist models simply demonstrate how, on the simplest level, our minds COULD work. While the models are simple, the results are fascinating. While obviously far less complex, the models really do demonstrate some of the quirks of human learning and acquisition in ways that more rigid, rule-based artificial intelligence doesn't.

I could write more, but this is a sprawling book packed with countless ideas, and even a brief summary would cover several pages. I admit that it can get technical at times, and I had to limit my reading of it to a few pages a day to fully digest it. But if you want to learn about this subject and have the dedication to get through it, it's an extremely worthwhile and rewarding investment of your time.


Further Reading: Here's a general overview on Connectionism.

Here's a fascinating article on Connectionism and Emergentism by Jeffry Elman. Long, but totally worth it!

Japan, Music, Politics...What's this Blog About, Anyway?

I started this site as a "Personal Blog"...you know, photos of my neighborhood, funny stories about stuff going on in my life, that kind of thing.

Then that got old...but then I realized I could write about anything I want, and so I did. Once the focus of the blog went off me, personally, and more about whatever I'm thinking about and what's on my mind, it started to get a lot more fun to write, and started looking like a hobby I could keep up regularly without tiring of it.

The only thing is, after a while this blog actually started getting some pretty decent traffic, and the number of returning visitors started to rise steadily. And I began to wonder if people coming back really wanted to read my latest tangent, or if they just wanted more about whatever topic happened to catch their interest when they first checked the blog out, and decided it was worth coming back to.

Writing about Music seems to be the biggest draw for blog traffic overall (that article on Downloading got something like 6000 hits)...and Japan and Japanese culture seem to be the most appealing things for return visitors, people that make a habit of coming back regularly. I see a dip in return visitors when I switch topics suddenly, for example, from a 7-post long Japan kick to a Science binge.

If you're mostly interested in a single topic, check out the "Contents by Topics" sidebar, especially the top 5 headings. That'll take you to whatever you're interested in. I can't promise a new post in each topic per day, but there should be at least one new post in each of them per week, because those topics interest me enough that I touch on each of them pretty regularly without even trying.

If you've got any requests for topics, let me know, and I'll try to work it in more often when I can...But overall I'm not super interested in making the blog about a single subject, and sticking to it full steam to keep traffic steady. While I don't write about it much, I've already got a day job that takes up most of my time (at least when I'm not on Spring Break like I've been the past couple months). This is a hobby, and I've got to keep it fun for myself.

Timbaland "Shock Value" Album Review

Timbaland is now considered one of the greatest hip-hop producers of all time, though you wouldn't know it from his recent output. He got his start producing albums for Missy Elliot, Aaliyah and Jay-z, though he's now best known as the man behind the music to Nelly Furtado's hits "Promiscuous Girl" and "Maneater", and more or less every song on Justin Timberlake's new album, including "My Love" and "What Goes Around Comes Around".

Musically, Timbaland is the Prince of the Hip-Hop Generation, though it took a while for people to realize it. 10 years ago, he was just a particularly interesting cog in the hip-hop/R&B machine. He layered and blended beats to form complex rhythms not unlike Indian tabla music, and scored a big hit sampling Egyptian music for a Jay-Z track ("Big Pimpin')- cool stuff, but not something you would have expected to catch on in a big way. But it's funny how the cutting edge of today can wind up becoming the norm of tomorrow- I guess that even if you're ahead of your time, if you stay around long enough other people will eventually catch up with you. Timbaland has moved from the sidelines to the center of pop music, and the cutting edge of yesteryear has become the norm. Hats off to him- he deserves the limelight.

Over the years Timbaland has become increasingly tired of the cliches of hip-hop, and worked to expand his palette. Recorded under the encouragement of client Justin Timberlake, the solo album "Shock Value" is an attempt to expand Timbaland's musical horizons. It includes appearances from Fall Out Boy, Dr.Dre, She Wants Revenge, The Hives, Justin Timberake, 50 Cent, Nelly Furtado, Missy Elliot, One Republic and even Elton John. It shifts from 80's synth pop to Indian music to Indie Rock to Club bangers at a dizzying speed.

18 tracks deep (19 including a reported bonus track with MIA), "Shock Value" is essentially a double album, and is somewhat hard to navigate. This is usually a bad sign for an album- often, when an artist knows they don't have a hit, they load up the album with as many songs as possible, hoping that if they just throw enough material at people that eventually something will stick.

Aside from the lead single "Give it to Me" Featuring Timberlake and Nelly Furtado, that seems to be the case here "Give it to Me" still sounds great (better, actually- the album has a new mix with extra touches added). But most of the album doesn't work quite so well, and "Give it to Me" is the closest you'll get to any of Timbaland's hits for other artists.

While not technically a particularly good singer or rapper, few people understand music as well as Timbaland (let alone his own beats), and his enthusiasm for what he does has allowed him to hold his own with Timberlake and Furtado during duets and collaborations. But it's another story trying to center an entire album around his vocals and personality, let alone a 19-track one. Timbaland is a hell of a producer, but if you've seen him make an ass of himself on TV (His embarrassingly arrogant MTV Diary being a prime example), you know that he isn't always a hell of a person. As much as he enjoys his own music, the only other thing he's willing to get worked up about is himself, and that doesn't make for very compelling listening.

The guest stars help, but since they change with every track there isn't much continuity. The genres change with every song too, which means that most of the time "Shock Value" doesn't even sound like a real album, just a compilation.

Most of the collaborations with alternative artists are disappointing. It's not that they're terrible. It's just that they aren't all that good either. Most of them have been designated to the B-side of the album, tucked behind Timbaland's more standard stuff with the usual rap crowd.

Don't get me wrong- it's not that this album is bad...even on his worst day, Timbaland has his act together too much to foul up even the worst of ideas. And it's several notches above his last attempt at a solo record (Under Construction II with Magoo).

But it just doesn't work as well as it could have. It's a disjointed affair that crams several artists from different genres onto an assortment of tracks that don't have much to connection to one another. If you're a Timbaland fan you'll want this for the beats alone...but I suspect that that won't be enough for most people.

Songs to Check out: "Give it to Me", "Release", "Bounce(Featuring Dr.Dre, Missy Elliot and Justin Timberlake)", "Come Get Me (featuring 50 Cent and Tony Yayo)"

Here are scans of an Entertainment Weekly article on Tim, courtesy of Nah Right.

Unintentionally Funny Comic Strips

Okay, just to balance out the last couple posts with something fun, here are some unintentionally funny comic book panels. Who knew that what made Joker such a maniac was the shame and humiliation of being seen with an erection in public?







Full list here. Or you can go here, and get all the cheesy old comic book related-humor you can handle, including a whole section of gay innuendo.

Bush Paves the Way for Martial Law: 2007 National Defense Authorization Act overturns Posse Comitatus Act

"Paradoxically, preserving liberty may require the rule of a single leader--a dictator--willing to use those dreaded 'extraordinary measures,' which few know how, or are willing, to employ." -- Michael Ledeen, White House advisor and fellow of the American Enterprise Institute

"Gen. Tommy Franks says that if the United States is hit with a weapon of mass destruction that inflicts large casualties, the Constitution will likely be discarded in favor of a military form of government." -- NewsMax, November 21, 2003

Bush has enacted the legislation to make the above a reality, overturning legislation that is hundreds of years old and fundamental to America as a democratic society.

I remember just a few years ago some people would angrily compare Bush to Hitler, and right-minded people would roll their eyes at the ridiculous exaggeration. I'm as liberal as you get, and even I thought it was an absurd overstatement.

But lately, I find myself thinking about how Hitler came to power. I did a project on it in seventh grade, and even at that tender age, it was fascinating and a little scary to see how a democratic society could turn itself over to a totalitarian regime. We like to think that Hitler seized power like a ruthless dictator, fighting his own people. But the truth is, most people wanted him there. They supported what he did until it was too late to turn back. We tend to demonize those events until they're completely removed from our own reality, like these things could never happen to us. But they're not, and they could.

We tend to take our environment for granted, and consider it permanent and not worth thinking about. Democracy and civil liberties seem as firm and forever as the very ground we stand on. It seems ridiculous that that could ever change. It's unthinkable.

But even more than a coast hit by a Tsunami or a town ravaged by earthquakes, democracy and free society is temporal and fragile. And if you turn your back on what's happening, it could be whisked away.

Full story here.

Paul Krugman: "Don't Cry for Reagan"

Recently Time Magazine ran a cover with a teary-eyed Ronald Reagan, suggesting that Bush had betrayed the Reagan Legacy. See, Reagan's Conservative values work great- it's just this younger Bush that's making a mess of things. Put a "real" Reaganite back in office, and things will be great.

But as Paul Krugman explains, Bush's Administration is one and the same with Reaganism. In many cases, the senior advisers are literally the same people, like Dick Cheney. What has made the difference in the past few years is that with the Carte Blanche of 9/11, an all-Republican House and Senate, and the lack of another Superpower to keep military ambitions in check, Bush got the power needed to carry out all of those ideas in a way Reagan never did. Bush isn't a betrayal of the Reagan legacy...he's the inevitable result of it. Here's the entire article, from under the Times Select barrier-




Don't Cry for Reagan
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times
Monday 19 March 2007


As the Bush administration sinks deeper into its multiple quagmires, the personality cult the G.O.P. once built around President Bush has given way to nostalgia for the good old days. The current cover of Time magazine shows a weeping Ronald Reagan, and declares that Republicans "need to reclaim the Reagan legacy."

But Republicans shouldn't cry for Ronald Reagan; the truth is, he never left them. There's no need to reclaim the Reagan legacy: Mr. Bush is what Mr. Reagan would have been given the opportunity.

In 1993 Jonathan Cohn - the author, by the way, of a terrific new book on our dysfunctional health care system - published an article in The American Prospect describing the dire state of the federal government. Changing just a few words in that article makes it read as if it were written in 2007.

Thus, Mr. Cohn described how the Interior Department had been packed with opponents of environmental protection, who "presided over a massive sell-off of federal lands to industry and developers" that "deprived the department of several billion dollars in annual revenue." Oil leases, anyone?

Meanwhile, privatization had run amok, because "the ranks of public officials necessary to supervise contractors have been so thinned that the putative gains of contracting out have evaporated. Agencies have been left with the worst of both worlds - demoralized and disorganized public officials and unaccountable private contractors." Holy Halliburton!

Not mentioned in Mr. Cohn's article, but equally reminiscent of current events, was the state of the Justice Department under Ed Meese, a man who gives Alberto Gonzales and John Mitchell serious competition for the title of worst attorney general ever. The politicization of Justice got so bad that in 1988 six senior officials, all Republicans, including the deputy attorney general and the chief of the criminal division, resigned in protest.

Why is there such a strong family resemblance between the Reagan years and recent events? Mr. Reagan's administration, like Mr. Bush's, was run by movement conservatives - people who built their careers by serving the alliance of wealthy individuals, corporate interests and the religious right that took shape in the 1960s and 1970s. And both cronyism and abuse of power are part of the movement conservative package.

In part this is because people whose ideology says that government is always the problem, never the solution, see no point in governing well. So they use political power to reward their friends, rather than find people who will actually do their jobs.

If expertise is irrelevant, who gets the jobs? No problem: the interlocking, lavishly financed institutions of movement conservatism, which range from K Street to Fox News, create a vast class of apparatchiks who can be counted on to be "loyal Bushies."

The movement's apparatchik culture, in turn, explains much of its contempt for the rule of law. Someone who has risen through the ranks of a movement that prizes political loyalty above all isn't likely to balk at, say, using bogus claims of voter fraud to disenfranchise Democrats, or suppressing potentially damaging investigations of Republicans. As Franklin Foer of The New Republic has pointed out, in College Republican elections, dirty tricks and double crosses are considered acceptable, even praiseworthy.

Still, Mr. Reagan's misgovernment never went as far as Mr. Bush's. As a result, he managed to leave office with an approval rating about as high as that of Bill Clinton, who, as we now realize with the benefit of hindsight, governed very well. But the key to Reagan's relative success, I believe, is that he was lucky in his limitations.

Unlike Mr. Bush, Mr. Reagan never controlled both houses of Congress - and the pre-Gingrich Republican Party still contained moderates who imposed limits on his ability to govern badly. Also, there was no Reagan-era equivalent of the rush, after 9/11, to give the Bush administration whatever it wanted in the name of fighting terrorism.

Mr. Reagan may even have been helped, perversely, by the fact that in the 1980s there were still two superpowers. This helped prevent the hubris, the delusions of grandeur, that led the Bush administration to believe that a splendid little war in Iraq was just the thing to secure its position.

But what this tells us is that Mr. Bush, not Mr. Reagan, is the true representative of what modern conservatism is all about. And it's the movement, not just one man, that has failed.

Top 3 Mash-Up Albums, and The revival of Sample-Based Music

Back in the late 80's the rap group Public Enemy released two seminal albums, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and Fear of a Black Planet, that forged a new path in music by blending hundreds of samples of other people's music to form new compositions. The result was a musical collage of funk, heavy metal, break beats and snippets of speeches by black militants. It was a glorious mess, but hit or miss, it brought on the kind of noise that parents are bound to hate, and kids loved it. It was the start of a new form of music.

In it's early days rap was defined by samples (the whole idea was that rappers used breakbeats on old records for instrumentals because in the early days they were too poor to buy all the real instruments needed for a band), but the party was short lived. Lawsuits began, and the law determined that any sample of another recording, even a single second, warrants full payments to the recording's proprietors.

The rulings killed Public Enemy creatively- their first albums were made on a shoe string, but by their producer's own estimates, if the same albums were made today they would cost millions of dollars in sample fees. And in an interesting development, entire corporations were set up to capitalize on the law. Their sole source of income? Buying the rights to reams of old soul records...and then going through every major rap release with a fine-toothed comb looking for a single bar of sampled music, however brief or barely recognizable- to sue over. An entire style of hip-hop came screeching to a halt. Buck 65, a promising rapper from my home province in Canada, had to change his whole style once he moved to a major label, just to avoid going into debt over samples.

There were two outcomes- one was that rap started to move toward original music composed on keyboards and computers. But two, when rap producers do sample another recording, they tend to sample several bars of a single record in order to get their money's worth. Remember, you pay the same money no matter how much or how little you take, so you might as well use as much as possible from a single source. The result was songs that didn't blend old records together to form new compositions so much as wholesale remakes of single old songs set to rap beats (see most of Puff Daddy's back catalog)

So it became almost impossible to make a dime off music that blended multiple samples. It looked like that would be the end of it.

But there were a few developments. The technology got much better. A computer program called Acid allows anyone with a PC to match together any two songs, (it can change the key of a song so that it harmonizes with another one without altering the song's tempo, and vice versa). And more importantly, a new generation of kids using that program on their home computers just didn't care about the law.

The past few years have seen plenty of "mash-ups" -blends of two or more popular songs- hit the internet. At first, they were often knock-offs and gimmicks (Hey, let's mix Britney Spears with Eminem!), but gradually, some real artists have emerged from the mash-up scene, and put out music that holds up on it's own merits. Here's a few of my favorites, all available on mininova.org -

Danger Mouse- The Grey Album
Probably more than any other release, the Grey Album by DJ Danger Mouse helped establish the mash-up as an art-form in it's own right. It puts the raps from Jay-Z's Black Album to the music from the Beatle's White Album, stripping the guitar licks and beats to their most fundamental elements and re-working them into original compositions. A relatively small number of copies were independently distributed to stores, until the Beatles lawyers screamed cease and desist. In protest, bloggers staged "Grey Tuesday", on which websites across the internet offered the album for download simultaneously.

If a download counted as a sale, the Grey album would have gone platinum several times over. It established Danger Mouse as an important new artist. He went on to produce the multi-platinum Gorillaz album "Demon Days" (an excellent mix of indie rock and hip hop beats...though all the music is original) and the Gnarles Barkley debut, including their runaway hit "Crazy".

Girl Talk- Unstoppable and Night Ripper
With his energized live shows, Greg Gillis, aka Girl Talk , is the poster-boy of the mash-up scene at the moment. His albums are A.D.D-addled mix-ups of the pop music of the last 20 years. In some ways, the Grey Album was as much something to be admired as enjoyed, because it did so much with so little source material (2 albums). In contrast, Girl Talk will do anything to keep the party going, mixing dozens of records together in a very short span of time. Rappers spit over cheesy late 80's synth pop, a second later a pop singer wails over heavy metal. No single match up seems to last more than 15-30 seconds; it's an unending barrage of pop-culture, and excellent dance music in it's own right.

Recently, a Congressman brought up Gillis, and held up his music as an example as why we should change our copyright laws to allow for "fair use" of small snippets of other recordings used creatively. The music industry doesn't quite know what to make of him- with one hand, they "cease and desist" him to death...with the other, they offer him big bucks. Gillis estimates that once he traces smaller labels to their parent corporations, he's received offers from every major record label.

2004's Unstoppable puts aside the noise of some of Girl Talk's earlier releases and dedicates itself to sheer pop music. Check out "Touch 2 Feel", "Non-Stop Party Now" and "Pump it Up". The excellent closer "Can't Stop", shows that Gills can go head-to-head with Chemical Brothers and more typical dance music if he needs to.

Vocally, 2006's Night Ripper has a strong bias toward rap, particularly new Southern artists, but musically it's as varied as ever. By this album, Girl Talk seemed to realize that as much as he likes hacking bits and pieces of music into unrecognizable forms, what kept people coming back were the innovative and strikingly good match-ups he dreamed up. Night Ripper keeps most of the mixes simpler- usually just one rapper or singer matched with one new instrumental at at time, for maximum effect. Ripper is a lot more consistent than Unstoppable though- while I had to give highlights for the last album, Ripper has so many great moments it's hard to isolate a single track. Try out "Ask About Me" , in which Jay-Z repeatedly demands others learn his name over ominous bass lines and apocalyptic metal.

Dean Gray- American Edit

American Edit mixes the songs from Green Day's huge American Idiot album with its wide variety of "influences". By this, their seventh album, Green Day had realized that pop music just repeats itself anyway, and so most of the chord progressions on Idiot are just retreads of hits from the past. Dean Grey blends Green Day's punk-rock back beat to the original tunes seamlessly, so you can hear Billie Joe duet with everyone from Bryan Adams to Johnny Cash, sometimes cutting back and forth from the Green Day song to the original so you can hear the similarity for yourself.

I'm a Green Day fan, but the surprise is that American Edit is superior to the album it sends up, actually enhancing it as it spoofs it. Idiot is worn out for me by now, but Edit still bumps on my ipod all the time.

My appreciation for Girl Talk's Night Ripper continues to rise, but while he isn't nearly as cool or original as either Danger Mouse or Girl Talk, In some ways, Dean Grey (aka Party Ben), might be my favorite mash-up artist at the end of the day, because he creates whole songs that work in their own right rather than just a mix. Check out this excellent mix-up of the Gorillaz with No Doubt and Deep Purple -I enjoy it more than any of the originals (In an interesting twist, Danger Mouse produced the Gorillaz track here, meaning Mash-Up artists are already beginning to use each other as influences). More mixes available on his homepage.

More Japanese Anti-smoking Ads -Shame and Responsibility

Gosh, I suppose I wouldn't...



He knows what he did...and he knows it was WRONG.

Smoker sneak-attack of neglect

Entire Gallery Here. Props to Cleanskies.

One more- this one is awesome!
...Courtesy of Japan Newbie

It seems like just a few years ago everyone in Japan smoked. There were literally ashtrays built into bus stop posts, so you could puff away while you waited. But all of the sudden, things changed. There are ads like these everywhere, and just yesterday in Tenjin I saw an anti-smoker patrol roaming the streets, haranguing smokers for their lack of etiquette.

The funny thing in Japan is that it's not enough to just tell you not to do something- they have to shame you into it. At the hot baths at my gym there's a sign that lists etiquette...but instead of using words like "not allowed", it gives simple suggestions, followed by "This notice is directed toward Customers who do not wish to be troublesome to others". Sounds polite...but underneath the decorum there's a withering contempt for the other type of customer.

When I took my driving test for my motorbike in the summer, there were all sorts of questions that centered on consideration for others and personal responsibility. For example: "True or False: There are children playing by the side of the road. However, it is their own responsibility to look after themselves. Therefore, I will continue to drive as fast as I can". And, "True or False: The road is empty, therefore, it is acceptable to drive recklessly like a fool". That's FALSE, just in case you ever take it.

Japanese Anti-Smoking Ads

These odd anti-smoking ads are all over the JR train stations here, but this has got to be the best one ever. Props to Plastic Bamboo and Jonathan.

Muse Comes to Fukuoka- Why Aren't These Guys Huge in the U.S?

Went and saw the British band Muse last night. Effin' fantastic. With most bands, I like the CD, but wind up wishing they could sound as good live as they do in the studio when I see them in concert. Not Muse. They smashed the living hell out of their own songs with ruthless efficiency, a tornado of sonic energy that threw airplanes in the sky above veering off course.

Muse has gradually but surely gained respect in their native country England, and become bona-fide superstars there, grazing the cover of NME every other month and selling millions of CDs.

But weirdly, no-one in America could give a damn about them. The Onion AV Club called their new album "kind of shitty", and that's just the opinion of people in America that have even heard of them in the first place, which is hardly anyone. Their last album sold 14,000 copies in America. In comparison, the last Weezer album (The one with "Beverly Hills" on it) sold 1,000,000. That means that for every copy or two of the new Muse album, there are 100 copies of the Weezer album. Even if you're of the opinion that Weezer is better for whatever reason...does anyone actually think that they're a hundred times better?

It's weird how big the schism of popular music is between England and the US. They look just like us and speak the same language..but for all the attention some of their biggest bands get, you'd think they were playing Cambodian lute music and reciting haikus in Hungarian.

Photo courtesy of Bloggering Away

Good Charlotte "Good Morning Revival" Album Review

There was always something a little off about the rock band Good Charlotte. As you can see from the picture above, they have all the requisite tattoos, black sleeveless shirts and grim expressions that a band requires, but they seemed a little too polished for their own good. I remember seeing them on an MTV "Making the Video" special, up at 4 AM for the video shoot, mugging not just for their own camera crew but for MTV's as well, chipper, professional and hardworking. You got the impression they could just as easily have been stock brokers or lawyers, but chose to start a rock band because it seemed like an adventurous and challenging career option. Admirable...but not very rock and roll.

The same vibe came out in their music. Polished, slick and well-crafted, but never with quite the same energy as their contemporaries Sum 41. Their last album, the rock-opera "The Chronicles of Life and Death", seemed good enough when it spent time in my ipod as one of the 12 or so new albums I listen to every month. But today I can't recall a single tune.

It didn't come as a huge surprise then, to see that they've taken a new direction on their new album "Good Morning Revival", due to be released March 27. "Good Morning"'s biggest influence is 80's synth pop- in contemporary terms, think Plus 41, or The Killers.

When Good Charlotte goes all-out with the new style, the results are pretty mixed. "Get Your Hands Off My Girl" is a dreadful attempt at rap backed by club music inspired by Junior Sanchez. "Victims of Love" is a pretty transparent rip-off of the t.a.t.u song "Not Gonna Get Us", and the ballad "March On" is so tepid you'll forget it before it finishes playing.

But when they mix the synthesizers with their old guitar sound, it results in some pretty good pop music. "Dance Floor Anthem" is a pretty good knock-off of The Killer's hit "Mr.Brightside". The mournful "Misery Loves Company" would sound like a cliche backed by the usual metal-grind, but accompanied with bright keyboards it balances out into a solid radio song. And with "The River", Good Charlotte strikes onto a genuinely catchy tune.

It's funny seeing how much this band has changed. 5 years ago, Good Charlotte and Sum 41 could play the same bill. Today, with Sum 41 going harder and Good Charlotte going softer, they couldn't be much more different. G.C has finally shown their true colors musically, and they're better for doing it. Synthesizer pop/rock might not be the best kind of music out there, but it's the best music Good Charlotte is capable of making. So all power to them for making the leap.

Why we Laugh -A Scientific Explanation

Here's a really interesting New York Times article on the reason we laugh. Most psychologists and scientists have focused on what's "funny" when they study humor, but it differs so much between people that that avenue doesn't lead anywhere.

According to this theory, abstract, high-level humor that makes you laugh when you're alone in front of the TV came later in evolution and isn't that important. Humor started as a form of social bonding, a way of making us more sociable by making social interaction more pleasurable.

It's a big paradigm shift, but it makes a lot of sense. Think how boring and joyless hanging out with your friends would be if you couldn't share a joke or laugh. We even have the expression "shared some laughs" for when people have a good time together and meld socially.

I think this article overstates it when they say that most jokes "aren't really funny", though. Who's to say what's funny, anyway? If you really laughed when it happened, a quaint thing your friend says is just as good as a "real" joke.

Here's the whole story reprinted, so that it'll last beyond the 7-Day limit at NYT:


What's So Funny? Well, Maybe Nothing.

By JOHN TIERNEY Published: March 13, 2007

So there are these two muffins baking in an oven. One of them yells, “Wow, it’s hot in here!”

And the other muffin replies: “Holy cow! A talking muffin!”

Did that alleged joke make you laugh? I would guess (and hope) not. But under different circumstances, you would be chuckling softly, maybe giggling, possibly guffawing. I know that’s hard to believe, but trust me. The results are just in on a laboratory test of the muffin joke.

Laughter, a topic that stymied philosophers for 2,000 years, is finally yielding to science. Researchers have scanned brains and tickled babies, chimpanzees and rats. They’ve traced the evolution of laughter back to what looks like the primal joke — or, to be precise, the first stand-up routine to kill with an audience of primates.

It wasn’t any funnier than the muffin joke, but that’s not surprising, at least not to the researchers. They’ve discovered something that eluded Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Kant, Schopenhauer, Freud and the many theorists who have tried to explain laughter based on the mistaken premise that they’re explaining humor.

Occasionally we’re surprised into laughing at something funny, but most laughter has little to do with humor. It’s an instinctual survival tool for social animals, not an intellectual response to wit. It’s not about getting the joke. It’s about getting along.

When Robert R. Provine tried applying his training in neuroscience to laughter 20 years ago, he naïvely began by dragging people into his laboratory at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, to watch episodes of “Saturday Night Live” and a George Carlin routine. They didn’t laugh much. It was what a stand-up comic would call a bad room.

So he went out into natural habitats — city sidewalks, suburban malls — and carefully observed thousands of “laugh episodes.” He found that 80 percent to 90 percent of them came after straight lines like “I know” or “I’ll see you guys later.” The witticisms that induced laughter rarely rose above the level of “You smell like you had a good workout.”

“Most prelaugh dialogue,” Professor Provine concluded in “Laughter,” his 2000 book, “is like that of an interminable television situation comedy scripted by an extremely ungifted writer.”

He found that most speakers, particularly women, did more laughing than their listeners, using the laughs as punctuation for their sentences. It’s a largely involuntary process. People can consciously suppress laughs, but few can make themselves laugh convincingly.

“Laughter is an honest social signal because it’s hard to fake,” Professor Provine says. “We’re dealing with something powerful, ancient and crude. It’s a kind of behavioral fossil showing the roots that all human beings, maybe all mammals, have in common.”

The human ha-ha evolved from the rhythmic sound — pant-pant — made by primates like chimpanzees when they tickle and chase one other while playing. Jaak Panksepp, a neuroscientist and psychologist at Washington State University, discovered that rats emit an ultrasonic chirp (inaudible to humans without special equipment) when they’re tickled, and they like the sensation so much they keep coming back for more tickling.

He and Professor Provine figure that the first primate joke — that is, the first action to produce a laugh without physical contact — was the feigned tickle, the same kind of coo-chi-coo move parents make when they thrust their wiggling fingers at a baby. Professor Panksepp thinks the brain has ancient wiring to produce laughter so that young animals learn to play with one another. The laughter stimulates euphoria circuits in the brain and also reassures the other animals that they’re playing, not fighting.

“Primal laughter evolved as a signaling device to highlight readiness for friendly interaction,” Professor Panksepp says. “Sophisticated social animals such as mammals need an emotionally positive mechanism to help create social brains and to weave organisms effectively into the social fabric.”

Humans are laughing by the age of four months and then progress from tickling to the Three Stooges to more sophisticated triggers for laughter (or, in some inexplicable cases, to Jim Carrey movies). Laughter can be used cruelly to reinforce a group’s solidarity and pride by mocking deviants and insulting outsiders, but mainly it’s a subtle social lubricant. It’s a way to make friends and also make clear who belongs where in the status hierarchy.

Which brings us back to the muffin joke. It was inflicted by social psychologists at Florida State University on undergraduate women last year, during interviews for what was ostensibly a study of their spending habits. Some of the women were told the interviewer would be awarding a substantial cash prize to a few of the participants, like a boss deciding which underling deserved a bonus.

The women put in the underling position were a lot more likely to laugh at the muffin joke (and others almost as lame) than were women in the control group. But it wasn’t just because these underlings were trying to manipulate the boss, as was demonstrated in a follow-up experiment.

This time each of the women watched the muffin joke being told on videotape by a person who was ostensibly going to be working with her on a task. There was supposed to be a cash reward afterward to be allocated by a designated boss. In some cases the woman watching was designated the boss; in other cases she was the underling or a co-worker of the person on the videotape.

When the woman watching was the boss, she didn’t laugh much at the muffin joke. But when she was the underling or a co-worker, she laughed much more, even though the joke-teller wasn’t in the room to see her. When you’re low in the status hierarchy, you need all the allies you can find, so apparently you’re primed to chuckle at anything even if it doesn’t do you any immediate good.

“Laughter seems to be an automatic response to your situation rather than a conscious strategy,” says Tyler F. Stillman, who did the experiments along with Roy Baumeister and Nathan DeWall. “When I tell the muffin joke to my undergraduate classes, they laugh out loud.”

Mr. Stillman says he got so used to the laughs that he wasn’t quite prepared for the response at a conference in January, although he realizes he should have expected it.
“It was a small conference attended by some of the most senior researchers in the field,” he recalls. “When they heard me, a lowly graduate student, tell the muffin joke, there was a really uncomfortable silence. You could hear crickets.”

Cloaks of Invisibility, Telexistence and Xray cloth- The inventions of Susumu Tachi

This story first broke in 2003. An inventor called Sususmu Tachi made a cloth that reflects light and projects what's behind it via tiny little cameras.

The speculation is it could be used for surgeon's gloves, so they could have a full view of what they're doing, or it could be used to line airplane cockpits so that pilots could have a full view from all sides. Hell...cover the entire interior of a car with it.

It definitely isn't clear enough to actually make anyone truly invisible...but a hell of a camouflage nontheless. You can see videos of it here.

It turns out that Tachi has all kinds of interesting inventions. Technically, I'm not sure how hard any of this stuff is to do...it's quite possible most of the technology was already available, and just not applied to these types of things. But Susumu Tachi makes a point of making really cool inventions, the kind of stuff you normally see in science fiction movies.

X ray paper-

Telexistence- Okay, this is really weird- Say there's a something going on on the other side of the world that you should really be there for in person, right? How about you hook yourself up to sensors at home, and talk and move around like you normally would, and a robot that looks just like you does the same thing on the other side of the planet? It even looks like you, thanks to projections made by the same type of magic cloth described above.

But what about your end? How can you enjoy the experience of being there? Simple- enter a virtual chamber that'll allow you to see the environment in 3D. I'm actually less sold on this one..his homepage has tons of explanations on how it works, little by way of how real it actually is once you're in there.


Too much for me to cover, man. Check out his projects page for all this and more here.

Outsiders- The Isolation of People with High IQs

Check out this great story about the burnout rate of child prodigies. I submitted it to reddit yesterday and it climbed to #2 on their main page and got almost 300 points.

Basically, it details how disproportionately maladjusted people with very high IQs (over 160) are statistically. The author says that the world is set up for people with average IQs, maybe people with IQs of say 140, tops.

But after that point, being any smarter just distances you from your fellow man- most people aren't smart enough to have any idea what they're talking about, and just consider them weirdos. And since there are so few other people as smart, as children they have no-one similar to play with, so they grow up backwards and become loners.

There are geniuses that grow up in good homes with almost-as-smart-parents, have lessons on how to interact with others drilled into them, and go onto good jobs, but many others don't get the footing they need early in life to adjust to the world well.

This matches up with my personal experience. People I've known growing up with moderately high iqs get great jobs. people with IQs around 140 can do well in academia or as diplomats.

But above that? They're just as likely to work as clerks at cigar shops.

My prof told me about a brilliant student that had graduated from Japan's most elite university. He gave it all up to become a train conductor.

Almost 2 Months in, 10,000 Visits

Almost a month ago, I did a post for the 1-month anniversary of this blog. I had had 1000 visits to it at that point, and I speculated that at the rate traffic was increasing it could be more the next month. I thought I might hit 3000 by this point, maybe 4 or even 5. About an hour ago I just hit 10,000.

It's humbling checking the stats of some of my favorite blogs and seeing that they get that many visits in a single day...but still, the scale of the internet continues to surprise me.

I remember in high school people used to work hard to put together zines. They put their heart and soul into getting them all printed up, distributed them around town so they could give them away for free in front of record shops in Halifax...and if they were lucky, maybe 50 people would pick them up. It was a lot of work and even money, when you consider the paper and photocopying costs.

These days, you can write an opinion on your computer, hit "post", and thousands of people from all over the world could wind up reading it. Fast, free, and once it's up there it lasts forever. It's that easy, and anyone can do it.

Science and Technology in Japan

A lot of attention goes to pop culture and goofy products coming out of Japan, but there isn't always as much focus on the science and technology of this country, which can be amazing. Here's some fascinating stuff from Pink Tentacle, a great blog which is officially about Japan in general, but puts a big focus on science. I thought I would just post one thing as an example, but there's so much to choose from..


Machine that lets you write on water.



3-Dimensional (Holographic) image projector. Eventually, there could be 3 dimensional figures moving around in the sky at night as advertisements.



A GPS-controlled robot snowplow that plows your driveway by itself automatically, compresses the snow it gathers into compact cubes and dumps them out of it's rear end


Jellyfish invasion in the sea of Japan- notice the diver in the middle of it. SOme of the grow up to 2 metres in diameter.

Everyone who swims in the Sea of Japan eventually gets stung by a Jellyfish. You can see why.



Fembot- a little creepy.


A mechanism that lets you control machines with your mind. The wiring detects brain activity, which activates an on switch for a toy train.

As understanding of different types of brain activity increases (and hopefully, as the necessary wiring becomes more compact and less noticeable), this technology could allow people paralyzed by spinal cord injuries to move around in motorized wheelchairs just by thinking about it.

In the long, long term, it could set the stage for what amounts to telekinesis. If we can learn to differentiate different types of brain output, in theory the day could do all kinds of things without your hands- type a letter, drive a car...


And finally, big neon trucks!

Review: The Half Hour News Hour on Fox, Episode 2

[May 1st, 2009- Rush Limbaugh has become President of the United States, with Ann Coulter serving as VP]

RUSH: "We have just completed the first 100 days of our administration executing the office flawlessly. 0 mistakes. Let's take a look at our report card so far, I have it right here...heh heh, what do you know, Straight A's! We've excelled in EVERY conceivable area. Employment- 100%. Inflation- 0.

COULTER: And tell them about that "foreign" stuff

RUSH: Yeah. Peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. Bin Ladin- Dead. Al Quaeda- rolled up. North Korea- No more nukes.

This is comedy from the second episode of the 1/2 Hour News Hour, Fox News Channel's conservative response to the Daily Show. The material above really kills the audience, or at least the laugh track. Even in the name of comedy, there's a touch of delusion to it though. It's pretty funny to think that a vicodin-addicted talking head like Limbaugh could solve any problems in office, let alone get "straight A's". But I'm guessing that's not the joke they were going for.

If a Democrat was in office, at least the joke could be that a conservative would have solved all these problems by now. But with George Bush in office for his second term, and up until a few months ago a Republican House and Senate, it's hard to see the gag. People like Limbaugh and Coulter usually defend Bush no matter what, saying he's doing a great job, at least under the circumstances, and call critics Bush-bashers. Does this mean they now see what a bad job he's done, and want to step in to solve his mess?

Probably not. Any comedy that Limbaugh participates in has to involve him and his conservative ideals being right and opponents, real or imagined, being wrong. If that's hard to do under the present circumstances, that just means wilder leaps have to be made over common sense.

That's the problem with doing humor with a conservative agenda. It calls for straw men on the other side to wail on and laugh at. You need to make it out as if the simple tenets of conservatism would solve all the world's problems, if only these stupid liberal types would listen to common sense. Now the "grown ups" are in charge and the Clinton presidency is too far in the past to keep on blaming for current events, and the U.S is dealing with a 4 year quagmire that's killed more Americans than 9/11 did, an administration that can't even get water to hurricane victims, Wounded US troops lying in their own urine in mold-infected hospitals...it takes a special kind of conviction to keep on believing the conservative side is right.

There's mountains of great material for a comedy in the news today, all kinds of government scandals to take aim at. The problem is, all of them involve Republicans. So instead, the 1/2 Hour News Hour blocks out most of what's going on in the world, and takes aim at fictional liberal bad guys.

Actors pretending to be liberal types work a lot better than real people would. One, because if there was any real debate, like there is on the Daily Show when people like Bill O'Reilly appear, the hosts wouldn't be able to pull off any comedy. But two, because usually the liberal types they "Interview" don't even exist in real life.

The hosts interview a "liberal type" that wants to ban games from school playgrounds, because losing might hurt kid's self-esteem, and a terrorist expert that can't (or won't) accept that the common ground between groups of terrorists is that they're all Muslim. Basically, stupid opinions that anyone would disagree with.

FOX believes, or at least wants you to believe, that they're crusading against people that are harming America. But meanwhile, all the real problems in America go untouched on on this show- no mention of Walter Reed, no mention of Scooter Libby, not a word on Iraq. The show remains comfortably removed from reality, sticking to stupid "cultural" issues about games on playgrounds, and using fake opponents to ensure FOX viewers that no matter what happens out there, and no matter how bad things get, the liberals are still wrong and the conservatives are still right. What a relief that must be.

More Japanese Graffiti

Been looking for examples of graffiti in Japan. Here's some good ones-






From this Hall of Fame.

If you're in the mood for some graffiti, check out this link Some great stuff, too much to post.

Japanese Sake Commercial

There's a whole series of ads like this for Kizakura Sake that span at least 4 decades.

Japanese people love their sake. There's no open liquor laws here, so you can drink anywhere within reason. In the spring people have cherry blossom viewing parties, where everyone sits on a mat under the cherry trees all day and just gets tanked.

Traditionally it's the woman who pours the liquor. Your cup is never supposed to be empty. Which can be a problem, because that way you never know how much you've drank!

Awesome Japanese Anime

Popee the Performer- 4 minute silent CG animated shorts that came on on Japanese Satellite TV about 5 years ago.

This was technically a Kid's show, but it's great for all ages. Defies description, it has to be seen to be believed. There used to be a Taco lunch truck that parked near my house that played these on a TV, and instead of moving on I'd just stand there and watch it while I ate my Taco. I was really happy to run into it again.

If you dig this, check out these other episodes.

Creepy Pedophile Freaks Out On Camera

Warning: Pretty sick. You might want to skip the video.

I deliberated posting this a bit...An Australian TV show tracks down a pedophile who isn't listed under the sex offenders register because it came in effect after he was convicted. The interviewer just keeps on badgering him until he freaks out and you see how unspeakably screwed up he really is.

I'm of two minds about this. On one hand, he's one of the sickest, most disturbed people I've ever seen. He might be crazy and not in control of himself...but as sad as that is, a fat lot of good it does to kids in his neighborhood that are put in danger just by living near him. If the two come into conflict, I put their right to safety above his right to privacy hands down.

But on the other hand, I don't see the point of following him around harassing him and deliberately trying to rile him up and get him to freak out. They could have just shown his face for a few seconds so people know what he looks like and left it at that. All the lurid footage of him yelling is just opportunism for ratings. For all the high-minded commentary and indignant moral outrage, it's one step above harassing a schizophrenic homeless person, or bullying a rabid dog with a sharp stick.

The problem with Digg- Too many submissions, not enough voters

If you’re not already familiar with it, Digg.com is a user-generated news site. Members submit URLs to interesting news stories they find on the web, and other members vote on those stories. The most popular make it to a front page, giving readers an aggregation of news tailored to the interests of the user community.

While Digg is the first site of its kind and has the most stories and users, more and more I find myself drawn to it’s main competitor, Reddit. Here’s why-

There seem to be more people submitting stories than there are voting on them, which means the vital process of cherry-picking the news goes undone.

A user –generated news service requires users to dig up good stories. But almost as importantly, it needs even more users to sift through them all, and separate the wheat from the chaff. Increasingly, that doesn’t seem to be happening.

If you look at the upcoming stories on Reddit, there’s a clear variation in the stories, as votes take place and preferences are formed. Here are the vote counts for the first ten stories on page 2 of Reddit’s new stories list as of this writing on March 5, at approximately 9:05 PM Japan Time-

7, 5, 13, 36, 8, 0, 11, 52, 25, 25

Here’s the vote counts for the first ten stories on page 2 of Digg’s upcoming list, minutes later:

1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1

Check yourself- pages and pages of stories with only one (submitter generated) vote. There simply aren’t enough people reading and voting on all of those stories, and that hurts the sites ability to find good content in a big way.

Go to the upcoming stories section of Digg, and take note of the stories at the top. In all likelihood they only have 1 or 2 Diggs each, one of which was given by the submitter. Hit refresh every few minutes, to see how they do.

Within a minute or two, the top story on page 1 will be bumped down to page 2, then 3, then 4. In an hour it’ll be on page 15. Every hour reams of stories come into Digg, and most only get a couple votes. Of course, there’s a lot of crap in there, and many probably don’t deserve votes. But it’s just as likely that many of them are barely getting read.

I used to check the upcoming stories, and often found that the ones I found on that list were just as interesting as the ones on the main page. But as more and more stories come into Digg, I find it harder to sift through it all- most only have a couple votes each, so I don’t have much advice on what to give priority to.

There seems to be a divide between the most voted on- More and more, I find myself relying on the main page to pre-filter what’s worth reading. But that leads to the next a question- what stories manage to get to the front page, and how.

More Japanese Commercials- Milk and NOVA English School

These Milk Commercials are stupid, but really funny. Translations:

Commercial 1:
Boy 1: Wow, you really like milk, don't you?
Boy 2: Milk makes you strong dude.
Boy 1: Makes you strong...[Begins to fantasize]

Commercial 2:
Girl 1: Wow, you sure are drinking a lot of milk.
Girl 2: Milk makes you beautiful
Girl 1: Makes you beautiful...(start]

Commercial 3:
Same, but "milk improves your concentration"
Last line: Why don't we get on with the class?

...and yeah, a teacher here really will throw a piece of chalk at you if you're goofing off

Bonus: Milk does one more thing to your body...



More commercials here at www.gyunyu.com , though the interface is Japanese. Click skip on the intro, and "TVCM" on the bottom for commercials. My Japanese friend thinks the synchronized swimming one is hilarious, though I'm not seeing it..

NOVA Commercials

Nova is a big English conversation school chain in Japan. Also known as "The McDonald's of English Schools". They work you about twice as hard as most schools, and pay you half as much. They creep me out a bit, because their commercials usually have this, "as much as we try to speak their language, we all know with a wink and a nudge that foreigners are really just a bunch of retards" undertone to them. But it's worth having a look at them.

Most of the teachers have just graduated from college and are only in Japan for about a year to pay off student loans. Some students may suspect (pretty accurately) that the foreigner teachers are just their for show, and are just reading from the textbook and saying stuff like "good job!"

This commercial is saying, "no, they're not just for show! They train pronouncing words and turning pages in textbooks in special sweatshops!"

I don't know about you, but to me their super tough sweatshop looks suspiciously like a gay strip club.



Bonus: If you haven't taught business classes in Japan this probably won't make a lot of sense. In the off chance you have here's the translation.

Boss: Yamashita, you made the same mistake again.
Employee: I'm sorry...
Boss: What is it about this you don't understand?
Employee: I'm sorry...
Boss: I'M SORRY WON'T CUT IT ANYMORE!!

Toilet Commercial

A commercial about how easy it is to change your regular toilet seat with an enchanted one that warms your butt. A commercial with an old man enjoying the seats benefits would just be kind of gross. But if claymation frogs and chickens enjoy a more pleasant dump...well, I think you'll agree that that's just adorable.

Another Japanese McDonald's Commercial

Dear Lord...

Downloading and Record Sales- Not all Genres are Equal

Selling just under 4 million, the bestselling CD of 2006 sold 20% less than the bestselling CD of 2005. Proportionate to it's popularity, it was likely also one of the least downloaded. High School Musical is aimed at 9-14 year olds, and many copies were bought by parents.


[NOTE: Some people seem to take this post as a sign that I support the RIAA, and their various attacks on consumers. Just because I think they're essentially right about downloading hurting CD sales doesn't mean I agree with their "solutions", such as lobbying to strike down Fair Use bills, or absurd lawsuits on little old ladies. I think the current situation calls for a change in their business model, such as a digital subscription service. ]


Music sales were down sharply this past year, reinforcing the RIAA's contention that illegal downloading is killing the industry. But some genres were hit harder than others. Once one of the biggest moneymakers in the American music industry, sales of Rap music dropped a staggering 21% last year, making 2006 the first time in 12 years that a rap album has not graced the top ten best-selling album list

In light of this, others have argued that rap music's lack of originality has finally caught up to it, and fans are beginning to realize it's the same thing over and over.

But 50 Cent's top album sold over 5 million copies of his last album in 2005, almost 200% more than the top rap album of 2006- that's an awfully fast realization on the part of rap fans, who have been driving big sales since for rap without complaint since the 1980's. The Oscar win of Three Six Mafia last year and rap's influence on mainstream pop acts such as Justin Timberlake (whose new album is produced by hip-hop producer Timbaland) shows that rap remains popular in the publics' consciousness.

I offer a third possibility- rap fans pirate, bootleg and download music more than fans of any other musical genre.

Looking at the health of rap music torrents on popular torrent downloading sites such as Pirate Bay and Mininova, rap fans aren't so much tired of listening to rap as they are tired of paying for it. And some of the hottest products in rap include mixtapes such as DJ Drama's "Gangsta Grillz" series, which the record labels don't make a dime off of. A good promotional strategy? Not if you look at the sales figures.

Other genres, such as country and pop, have been hit less hard because their fans download less, and the genres that suffer the least from downloading are thriving in today's climate. More resilient genres such as Country are less popular on torrent downloading sites. And increasingly, the most popular and healthy genres of music are the ones that see the least downloading of all.

Selling just under 4 million copies as of this writing, the bestselling album of 2006 was Disney's "High School Musical", which caters to a demographic of 9-14 year old children. In many cases, these albums are being bought for the kids by their parents.

And there actually is one genre of music that saw a sales increase last year- Christian music, by more than 5%. Who wants to bet that Christian music has the lowest rate of downloading and bootlegging of any genre?

Cab Driver Taking a Leak Outside My House

This happens all the time. Delivery men dropping off packages in the neighborhood, old men on walks, lots of cabdrivers...in broad daylight, in a residential area with houses to either side, they take leaks on this vacant lot across from my house. They look around to see if anyone's around first, but when they spot me they don't seem super embarrassed.

I can't figure out why. In an emergency maybe, but they're just so "doop-de-doo" about it..."ah, a vacant lot, might as well drop everything and take a piss".

Right after this cabdriver finished, he got back in his taxi and drove off. I wondered why he hadn't just gone to the public toilet at the park just down the hill, it's not very far at all. And it has the added benefits of being able to wash your hands afterward.

Then it occurred to me. Maybe this vacant lot IS his public toilet. He didn't seem to have any passengers or anyone to pick up here- maybe he drives to this vacant lot for the specific purpose of taking a piss.