sTmykal

What's this shit with panhandling at the pumps? Holy Christ.

I pulled into the local C-mart/gas station a few weeks ago. The joint was hopping. One guy was going from pump to pump - I could hear the usual refrain "Hey brother, can you help me out? I just need X to Y". This is where X means some sort of cash and Y is getting to some location. I wrote this off as "Whatever".

Last night I stopped to get some of the blood juice and yet fucking again - some guy hitting up everyone there. "Hey brother can you help me out. I don't mean to ask for nuthin'"

This one was pretty good. "I just need to get to my fathers over at 57th and Keystone - can I get a lift?" I looked him square in the eye - "I can't do that."

What the hell? You're asking random strangers for a ride to an address that is arguably a mile away (the station was at the 6200 block - one major street over from Keystone) and expecting someone to give a shit and let you into their car?

Sorry sport - the days of hitchiking went out with bell-bottoms and free love. Paranoid or not, I just don't have a "Please rob and kill me" sign on my back.

LIVINGSTON, Texas - A death-row inmate slit his own throat with a makeshift knife early Thursday, committing suicide less than 18 hours before he was scheduled to be executed, a prison official said.

I love news stories like this. Now, instead of becoming a statistic and receiving the punishment handed down by the court for the slaying of a convenience store clerk, the inmate can be viewed as some sort of victim. But then there's this...

Prison guards had been checking on Johnson's welfare every 15 minutes, as is customary, when they found him unresponsive in a pool of blood in his cell,

Why do we need to check on the welfare of someone that we're just going to kill anyway? Save the tax payers some cash and give them some opportunity is what I say.

One reason why...

http://www.transbuddha.com/mediaHolder.php?id=2261

Sort of.

One of my bandmates is from Thailand. He recently went home for a vacation. You can see that he's having a wonderful time.

We all know that mp3 file sharing is "bad" because it "hurts the artist" (which really means it hurts the record company - don't mean to tell you what you already know, but this is what we call "the set-up"). Lawsuits and fines have been applied, people have been properly scared, so what's next? What now will the record companies want to impose their "creative control" over?

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/21/technology/21ecom.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

I'm too lazy to quote the article but here's the short of it. There exists many sites which provide hundreds and hundreds of files called "tabs". Tablature is how most musicians write music without learning to read music notation. It's very simple for guitarists. A six line bar represents the strings on a guitar and numbers placed on these lines represent the fret where a guitar string is meant to be pressed down. Line up enough of these and you have a melody or chord progression. If this melody produces a popular song, then you know have fodder for burgeoning garage bands every where.

Guitar magazines will often include tabs to popular songs as part of their regular features. Tablature itself is as old as the dickens. Finding massive collections of tabbed songs on the net back in '96 was a godsend for a guitar hack like me, whose ear is not so hot and perfect pitch is a dream.

But these days, it doesn't pay to share. It doesn't pay the record company at all. So now, after years and years of threatening legal action, The Man is getting serious and starting to shut down tab sites. The funny thing is, places like The Online Guitar Archive (which has been around for more than 10 years and remains pretty much unchanged) are community based. People submit *their own interpetation* of the artists work. They aren't posting mp3 files. They aren't scanning in sheet music. They're posting text files of chord progressions as they hear them and helping others to understand what they're hearing in their favorite songs.

So essentially, the record companies are claiming ownership of material created by people who are interpreting another persons work for informational purposes. This is like an art teacher being sued by an artist because they're teaching people to create art using the same tools.

So let's talk about hipocrisy and theft in the music industry...

Firstly, music and song are communicative traditions. Song and melody was something that was passed down - preserving a societies tradition, stories, beliefs and strengthening a community through the knowledge of its past. Most songs were never written down. More often they were memorized and then given to the next generation. Tunes we sing today - melodies that are familiar to everyone - most likely existed hundreds of years ago.

At the turn of the century, when recorded speech was really taking off and music was gaining popularity outside of the concert halls, there was a movement to document much of the tradition that came in the way of folk music. If I was more prepared, I'd have names for ya. But screw it. The short of it is that music publishers would go into the mountains, ask people to relate their long heritage of music to them and the publishers would copyright this music as their own!

Nevermind that these were generation spanning melodies. Forget that no one knows who exactly wrote what. The publishers took it for themselves, put a copryright date on it, and started making money from other peoples oral tradition. We all know June Carter - wife of Johnny Cash. Before she married Johnny, she sang with her family in The Carter Family - the "first family of coutnry music". Right. They were theives who co-opted the spirtual and cultural songs of "mountain folk" and made a buck on it. Their most popular music was probably carried over from Europe hundreds of years ago.

Who stole rock 'n' roll? Elvis? Fuck it. Rock was stolen long before Elvis stumbled into the recording studio looking for a cheap gift for his mother. No one really knows where the fuck blues came from. Shut up about "The Delta", religious "call and response" and field hollers. It's a good start, but consider this - when music publishers originally recorded Big Mama Thornton singing "Hound Dog" in the 1950s or even Mamie Smith singing "Crazy Blues" in the 1920s, the songs, the melodies, the tradition was most likely already 100 years old and evolving.

Which brings up that your basic eight bar blues is always going to be the same four chords no matter how you play it - no matter who sings it - no matter what record company puts its legal fingers around the throat of the artist. And to think - people were really freaked out by player pianos - claiming that they would be the death of the music industry.

God damnit - where's my point? Ownership of traditional art. That might be it. The record industry is really going too far at this point. They were hard on the tab sites ten years ago and it looks like they've ramped up their efforts. We all know that it won't do much good. As long as their are fans of music and musicians interested in learning another persons songs, the tradition of passing on music through instruction - authorized or not - will continue.

I am now no longer in need of knowing just where and what exactly confessed JonBennet killer Jon Mark Karr is doing at this precise moment. "Karr speaks to press" "Karr on plane for the United States" "Karr now in the country" "Karr held in LA Jail".

Jesus.

I bet he didn't do it and is some nut job who is so obsessed that he convinced himself that he did. Everything the press has said has been "he was in contact with the family and seemed to have known them" or something. There's an implied level of familiarity there. So when the police did the whole "is there anyone who may have wanted to hurt your daughter or seemed overly obsessed with her?" the parents MIGHT have said "Gee... I dunno... there's that creepy 30 year old guy who kept sending her letters, you might want to check him out".

But I suppose rational thought might have played a role since these were people who dressed their daughter up like she was a grown woman and made her perform like a trick monkey.

THIS JUST IN FROM ABC NEWS - "Is Karr Lying For Attention" ... gee... I wonder...Someone please wake me when all of this is over and the real story comes out.

The motherfucker who couldn't be bothered to assist with a project that should have been at its current state a MONTH AGO, now feels compelled to stick his grubby little fingers into every aspect of my work.

"Site X" uses a pre-fab web publishing system - something that has so many layers of templates, points of control and style sheet snippets sitting around that I gave myself a headache trying to change a simple font color yesterday. It's my job to skin this thing in a new design and have it ready to go in about a week. I'm designing on the fly because WHO KNOWS how many layers and tid bits need to be touched, given the extreme amount of plug-ins, whizbangs and fucknuts this software has.

And that's not even touching some of the custom mark-up that's in the templates themselves. Things like the "center" tag. And the "font" tag. Fuxkers.

I'm cruising along, meriily editing "the big stuff" when I notice that suddenly all of the table borders have automagically turned on - font sizes are changing and positions of elements which I sweated over shoving into CSS are suddenly changing. A quick email to said idjit garners a response of "Sorry - I'm out of the system now".

YOU DUMBASS - YOU'RE UNDOING MY WORK AS QUICKLY AS I CAN PUT IT UP! GO BACK TO COMPOSING YOUR OUT OF OFFICE REPLIES THAT I SEEM TO GET EVERY OTHER DAY!

I have my rituals just like anyone else. For a long time, my morning work ritual is to grab some strawberry Pop-Tarts and an orange juice from the work vending machines. I liked this ritual. It not only put some food in my empty stomach, but I enjoy strawberry Pop-Tarts.

The key word is *strawberry*. Usually there are cherry Pop-Tarts right next to the strawberry ones, which would do if the former were sold out. But lately...lately our vending machine stocker person has not been so kind. For in place of the red fruit flavored paste filled pre-baked snacks they have.... S'MORE flavored Pop-Tarts. That's right - the great taste of CHOCOLATE and MARSHMALLOWS in a frickin' POP-TART. Perfect for breakfast.

If that weren't bad enough, any other "breakfast-y" choices have been reduced to "honey buns" (whose moisture lined packages of sticky sweet less-than-digestible wads of dough make me vomit a little inside my mouth every time I see them). A variety of honey buns. Sugary glazed cheese cake confections. Mashed and mangled Suzi-Qs and other cream filled crumbly chocolate cake disaters. And now - small slices of "muffin loaf", that taste more like wet bread than muffin.

I probably wouln't be bitching if only the vending machine stocking person would realize that it is not neccessary to fill not one, but TWO rows of S'more Pop-Tarts. Not one but TWO rows of Rasberry Muffin Loaves (not even a single Banna Nut Muffin Loaf, which is the most tolerable). Not one but TWO rows of the CRAP THAT I PASS UP AT ANY OPPORTUNITY.

But damnit. I like to have a spot of something before beginning my day. I could go downstairs and pay $3 for a bagel from the crazy lady behind the counter at the "cafe" (i.e. the broom closet that serves as the food stand for the entire building - did anyone ever think that a full service deli would fly wonderfully in the lobby of an office building whose closest food choice is McDonalds?!?). Or I could get off my lazy ass and go to the store and buy a couple boxes of pop-tarts and send the vending machine companies profits into a sprial.

But. As I said. I like my ritual.

For every American flag stepped on, burned, flung to the ground in anger and in protest, there is a company out there that mass-produces this flag. You have to wonder... what would the protesters think if they finally figured out that they were actually supporting the United States economy by purchasing multitudes of U.S. flags from American companies for protest?

I like irony.

But the reality is that they are probably just supporting third world country sweat shops.

As before with Sadam's sons, we're being pummeled with images of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's bloody shell. "Look" says the media "a corpse worth viewing! This makes us better than Aljazeera and their parading of war torn bodies and headless hostages across the screen on a regular basis." But it's not really enough to say that the bad guy is dead and to give proof of the demise. This little tid-bit shows up on Yahoo's main page as "important news".

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Abu Musab al-Zarqawi lived for 52 minutes after a U.S. warplane bombed his hideout northeast of Baghdad, and he died of extensive internal injuries consistent with those caused by a bomb blast, the U.S. military said Monday.

So... what you're saying is that he died in pain?

"It was very evident he had extremely massive internal injuries," Caldwell said.

Al-Zarqawi died 24 minutes after coalition forces arrived, he said.

Jones said the autopsy conducted Saturday showed that al-Zarqawi died from injuries to his lungs.

"Blast waves from the two bombs caused tearing, bruising of the lungs and bleeding," he said. "There was no evidence of firearm injuries."

So he didn't just die in pain, but probably a tremendous amount of pain. Why is this news? Unless... This is really a "cover our asses" story where they found the man, already incapacitated from the blast, but really wanted to make sure that he was going to die and helped him along his way - hence the "there was no evidence of firearm injuries" line. Hrm... hell - who knows. It just struck me as odd.

The conversation usually goes like this...

Person: Hey Mike - want to do something?
Mike: Sure. What did you have in mind?
Person: I don't know. Can you come up with something for me?
Mike: A fall from a great height would probably do you some good. Let's try that.

Nevermind that this happens on an almost daily basis when people come to linger in my cube around lunch time, knowing neither where they want to go nor who is driving, but the week-end is starting to look like this too. Be it friends or family, all ask for my time but have no idea what they want to do with it. Even worse is when they seem to think the plans hinge on "when it's good for me", when they are the ones with spouses, children and time schedules. I just have me. It's not too hard for me to work up a schedule for myself.

I'm pretty much a "first come first serve" kinda guy. But it doesn't help me when someone asks me to block out time for them a week in advance and then switch their plans at the last minute - especially after I've either turned down other invitations or held off doing something because I'm the responsible one. It seems like common courtesy, but it's lost on some.

New rule - Those who request my presence shall in the future have a written statement of purpose and should be prepared to present this statement along with a Power Point slide presentation detailing how I will benefit from their ill wrought plans for social engagement.

And now, some insights into my personal life angst...

So I've got this birthday thing. Saturday is the actual day. For some incredibly stupid reason which I cannot fathom, my mom insists on having some sort of get together every year for it. "So what are we doing for your birthday?" she will ask. I honestly do not care about the celebration aspect, so I just shrug. We generally have a cook-out and do a two-fer of my birthday with Mother's Day thrown in.

But oh my god, I wish my family could get on the same page. If they INSIST on this shin-dig, then they should maybe TALK TO EACH OTHER about what the plan is.

Is it Saturday? Or is it better for everyone to get together on Sunday? What kind of food do you want? What kind of cake? These are all questions being put to me by my two sisters and my mother - when the details really don't matter to me! It WASN'T my idea! "I'm fine with our normal cook-out menu and whatever day works for everyone." I'll say, "just as long as we have family together - that's all that's important to me."

They just don't get it.

Last week, my eldest sister said "I've got this thing with my daughter on Saturday, can we make it Sunday?" Sure, I said, doesn't matter to me. My second oldest sister told me in an email last Wednesday "Ok, Sunday it is. Let me know what you want to eat - I'm handling the food." Uh... barbecue chicken sounds good. Whatever.

And of course, I just got off the phone with my mom, who was asking what kind of food I wanted and was looking forward to SATURDAY - which she had requested off from work".

...

Do they just not understand that I want nothing special planned for me, mostly because of this very reason? They don't communicate their own plans for whatever it is - insisting that "they have it handled" when they don't! So now there's going to be family drama about this whole deal when really I had planned to spend my birthday doing something I would have enjoyed. Like cleaning the garage.

Nice rant community here...

http://community.livejournal.com/note_to_asshat/

Self-censorship is probably one of the things that your average person does not practice as well as one would hope. But then again - why practice it at all? If you've got something to say, then say it. I've always tried to follow that motto. Indeed, things just come tumbling out of my mouth before I have a chance to stop myself.

And why do I try to stop myself?

Well, ok - for the most part, we bite our tongues in order not to offend those around us. But what if what is offensive is the truth? Do we then duck behind anonymity and hope that no one finds out that we were the one who had the audacity to say what was really on our mind?

Case in point - my web presence spans 10 years. Anyone with some gumption can prolly trace my web trail back to one of my first postings to Usenet or even my first home page. Whatever. I don't care. Or do I?

In the past year or so I've been tracked down by an ex-girlfriend and had my online journal thingamajig pulled into an RSS feed by a co-worker, and then watched regularly by another co-worker. Yeah - well - that's my fault for maintaining some sort of trendy community driven web page. Honestly, it's just so I can keep in touch with some of my various online friends across the country - not so that I can expose myself to the world. It's also nice to have a convenient place where you can write what you think without the annoyance of maintaining a web page.

There comes a time with personal blogs or whatever, where you just say what's on your mind. And damnit - people may not like it. I can't really apologize for that. But I often stop myself from saying anything, because it's not like my most private thoughts need to be posted to the Internet. Just like I'm doing now. You folks really don't give a shit, and I know it. So what's the big deal?

Well here you go. Despite the fact that some people (i.e. people from work - Omi doesn't count because I know he doesn't care one way or the other) are reading my stuff and gaining a personal insight that I really don't want them to have, but there's always the possibility that what I post may get back to the various managers around the office... as in my managers. So I try, at the very least, to not talk about work in my entries. Here's an example as to why...

I'm in my cube, as usual, minding my own business, when in comes a co-worker. We hang out on a site in particular and often make posts to the site. My co-worker informed me that the time stamps of our posts were being tracked within the office to make sure we're not wasting work time making those posts.

I can see the need to keep employees productive, but it's also a little creepy. So if we're being watched on one site, then why not others? Why not this one? As I said, it's pretty easy to track me down through some simple google searches.

And I don't feel like switching nicks. I've had this one for a long time, and really - it's me. People I *want* to know can find me with it. So comes the downside of being recognizable - that those whom I'd rather not be all up in my business are doing just that. Getting up in my business.

And now I've probably gone and offended someone. Well, whatever. If I've somehow ticked someone off over something so simple as being honest, then they need to grow some skin and get over it. Would you rather have me lie to you?

And since this is a web site devoted to bitching, ranting, and talking about what sucks, here's some more truth in response to the "things co-workers do that annoy the piss out of you" post.

At my office I have co-workers who...

• Talk with their mouths full of food.
• Bealch as they stand over your shoulder, without thought to the noxious smelling breath that they're blowing in your face
• Plant their fingers on my monitor, leaving fingerprints all over it. There is no reason for touching a monitor. Just point at the screen, don't stab it.
• Read over your shoulder as you type away on your computer or even still, must take an active inventory of whatever it is that's up on your computer screen the moment they walk into your cube.
• Ceaselessly complain about treatment from other co-workers or gossip about "what's going on" in the company at any given moment, but make no steps to adjust their situation or right what they see is wrong. Do something about, coz I sure can't help you.
• Insist on sitting for 30 minutes in my cube talking about nothing that I'm interested in. Just because you have nothing to do doesn't mean that I have to entertain you.
• Take forever to get to the point, but can't seem to let someone finish their thought, even though we've patiently waited for them to finish their sentence
• Hack up a lung regularly from smoking
• Freak out if you don't do things their specific way
• Cry foul on others mistakes, yet gloss over things when they make the same screw up

Over all I like my office, my co-workers, and how we do things. Though I paint a horrific picture - these are just the things that, after 7 years, have slowly worked their way under my fingernails like so much hot bamboo.

In all the things that suck, this does not. Courtesy of Boing Boing...
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/02/21/video_explains_the_w.html

Video explains the world's most important 6-sec drum loop

This fascinating, brilliant 20-minute video narrates the history of the "Amen Break," a six-second drum sample from the b-side of a chart-topping single from 1969. This sample was used extensively in early hiphop and sample-based music, and became the basis for drum-and-bass and jungle music -- a six-second clip that spawned several entire subcultures. Nate Harrison's 2004 video is a meditation on the ownership of culture, the nature of art and creativity, and the history of a remarkable music clip.

The video, while more of an artsy narrative, is awesome, with fantastic samples and a solid grasp on the evolution of this sample. It is indeed amazing to think about how a six second loop can influence so much and be re-used so offten that it becomes a cultural staple. It's like hearing Big Mama Thornton's recording of Hound Dog, realizing that no, Elvis did not write the song, and in fact, the guys who did prolly stole it from an ancient folk song.

This is why I love being a music geek.

My iPod Photo crapped out. So Apple gave me a new one. I figured I could sell it on eBay and pick up a new iPod video for cheap. Luck went my way and I got the full asking price for the replacement iPod. This was a week ago...

The funds from Pay Pal have YET to show up in my bank account. 5-7 business days... sure... ok... Well - it's been EIGHT. I was hoping they would show up today or tomorrow at the latest. This has been sticking in my craw for a bit.

AND NOW - I get an email from the winner of the auction asking for a refund if he sends the iPod back! His reason? HE LOST HIS LAP TOP AND NOW HE CAN'T USE THE IPOD. Lost... stolen... who knows? HIS ENGLISH SUCKS!

What the hell should I do? I stated on the auction that all sales were final and NO REFUNDS. If I give him his cash back, I'm out 10 bucks because of Pay Pals crappy service charge. I also have to deal with eBay, telling them that the sale didn't go through so that THEY don't charge me. And then - I have to try to sell the frickin thing AGAIN!

Holy Christ. I don't want to be a dick but, SORRY ABOUT YOUR FUCKIN' LIFE! You saw the auction - you sent me money - IT'S YOURS.

Protesters in Pakistan Target West
AP - 2 hours, 2 minutes ago
LAHORE, Pakistan - Thousands of protesters rampaged through two cities Tuesday, storming into a diplomatic district and torching Western businesses and a provincial assembly in Pakistan's worst violence against the Prophet Muhammad drawings, officials said. At least two people were killed and 11 injured. Security forces fired into the air as they struggled to contain the unrest in the eastern city of Lahore, where protesters burned down four buildings housing a hotel, two banks, a KFC restaurant and the office of a Norwegian cell phone company, Telenor.

Warning - Ignorant Knee Jerk Reaction
How long do you think it will be before the world gets sick and tired of the "muslim" community destroying everything in its path over every single offense?

Without knowing every single nuance of the climate and society, my western sensibility tells me that if there wasn't already a "War on Islam" as the propaganda claims, then there will be one soon.

The Pendulum swings both ways. For a long while it seemed like "oh my - we can't do X because it will offend Y". But that just feels like a losing battle. Everything will offend Y no matter what. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. World leaders everywhere will eventually stop caring about your "religion" folks. If not, the western media will.

And damnit - they just went too far! They burned down a KFC! Don't they realize how sacred fast food chicken is to the West? Crispy barn yard fowl lovers everywhere will rise up and smite these chicken-less pig dogs from the face of the earth! Make mine extra spicy, because breaded nuggets of fire will rain down on these infidels! Their destruction of the ediface of the Colonel will be their undoing!

Hrm... The Colonel as Muhammed... now there's an image...

People who get pissy when you try to give them an alternate method for doing something can go right to Hell.

I swear to gob, the real news becomes more and more like satire the longer we crawl this earth. A seventy five year old inmate on death row is now saying that he's "too old to die". The lawyers say that to take a man who is bound to a wheel-chair, nearly deaf and blind, and strap him down for some lethal injection, amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.

How obvious does this need to be? I guess we'll have to spell it out for the nth time.

1) He wasn't in this state of health when he committed his crimes.
2) His victims really didn't have an option when it came to his decision to take their lives.
3) If he's on his way out, let's just give him a hand.

One of the many things I lack compassion for are the dregs who play the part of the victim even though they themselves couldn't empathize with anyone but their own asses.