Quartz City

Friends The Lovetones are touring the west with the Brian Jonestown Massacre in May. Known dates are:

May 1 - Los Angeles - Spaceland
May 2 - Sacramento, CA - Old Ironsides
May 3 - San Francisco - Cafe du Nord
May 4 - San Francisco - Cafe du Nord
May 5 - San Jose - Blank Club
May 7 - Portland - Satyricon
May 8 - Seattle - Graceland
May 9 - Vancouver BC - Pat’s Pub
May 10 - Victoria, BC - Thursdays
May 13 - Denver - Larimer Lounge
May 15 - Las Vegas - The Rock
May 16 - Flagstaff, AZ - Monte Vista Lounge
May 17 - San Diego - Casbah

Check ‘em out…

And as they say… hilarity ensues. Well, not too much hilarity, but last week’s episode (April 23) of Off The Hook is well worth the download and listening time if just for some firsthand information on how big business and the government plan to join toegether in the deployment of tech against you in the name of “security”.

Also in last week’s episode:

• An actual recording of the CIA-funded “chili fries” faux Saddam rap song (check out Clandestine Radio.com when you get a chance).
• The details of some obituaries CNN inadvertently placed on their website.
• Details on how to get a free subscription to Homeland Security Solutions Magazine.

So I loaded up iTunes 4 and QuickTime 6.2 and ripped a CD that I’m very familiar with (Spiritualized’s Lazer Guided Melodies) at 128kps AAC encoding and compared it with a 192kps mp3 encoding. I’m not a hard core sound engineer and the only spectrum analyzers I have are my ears and my admittedly rather poor hearing.

Bottom line: I can’t tell the difference between the two encodings. In fact the only difference I could tell is the total file size. 83.9MB for the complete album as mp3s. 56.6MB as AACs.

Might be something to this after all…

Saw Primal Scream at Canes in San Diego last Friday. One hell of a brilliant show of ridiculous over the top rock and roll excess that wound up the relatively small audience into a pack of happy pogo’ers. More shows should be like this. The set list was wisely limited to the last three albums (with a couple of exceptions) and on the whole I preferred the live sound to the studio albums - which isn’t the first time I’ve said this.

No Kevin Shields though - he was out for the US shows this time. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that he’ll be back on the next tour, since I missed seeing My Bloody Valentine out of my own stupidity (”oh I’ll catch them next tour”). However any day you get to hear Mani on bass is a good day indeed.

I love seeing shows at Canes. It’s a little non-descript beach club in San Diego that just gets some amazing shows - Spiritualized and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Mogwai and Bardo Pond. Never really gets crowded and the sound is great.

More photos from the show are up on my .mac site.

It’s only been seven hours since the announcement and already the message boards are filled with people screaming and talking out of their asses.

Folks, AAC encoding does not require new hardware - just run the new iPod firmware updater that was released this morning. AAC is not a proprietary format - it’s part of the MPEG4 standard.

I usually measure the success of an Apple announcement by the level of hysterical screaming, complaints, and foot stamping. Based upon this, it looks like it might just work.

It was only a matter of time before someone came up with a “most wanted” deck of cards for folks who want a regime change in the US.

Cryptome eyeballs the Seal Beach Naval Weapons Center. Only mentioning it here because I drive past it twice a day going to/from work.

Folks… Do not be like this poor schmuck who just paid $81.00 for a bootleg 7″ single of another bootleg that he could have downloaded for free.

The bootleg mash-up mix is of a Beach Boys vocal track of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” over Spacemen 3’s “Ecstacy Symphony”. This mix originated with Lance Lockarm who has nothing to do with this “Sonic Art Union” label. Anyway, you can download the track (along with Lockarm’s other great mash-ups) directly off of his web site.

Lance Lockarm and Sonic Boom have nothing to do with this release - and I am in a position to know. That is all.

While the public is still preoccupied with Iraq, the war at home is getting worse.

The Bush administration is leading the charge with proposed new rules that will erode the 40-hour workweek and affect more than 80 million workers now protected by the Fair Labor Standards Act.

The proposed Bush rules, which the two Republican bills codify and expand, would:

- Exclude previously protected workers who were entitled to overtime by reclassifying them as managers. Companies are already using this ploy where they can get away with it. Say you’re frying burgers on the night shift at McDonald’s, making overtime, and suddenly — congratulations — you’re the assistant night manager, with no raise and no overtime.

-Eliminate certain middle-income workers from overtime protections by adding an income limit, above which workers no longer qualify for overtime. You like that? You make too much to earn overtime.

-Remove overtime protection from large numbers of workers in aerospace, defense, health care, high tech and other industries. Pay attention, this one is coming right out of your paycheck.

Nick Ring points to a news article buried in all the Baghdad looting stories.

Scientists say looters took refrigerators full of the deadly viruses last Friday, but they’re not sure what’s actually missing.

“They are in containers, all of these things taken together, cholera, AIDS and black fever,” chemist Rasa Al-Alaq said. “The viruses that are lost, we have no idea where they went.”

U.S. sources are concerned that polio and hepatitis may have been stolen, in addition to other viruses that may not be reflected in the official records in Baghdad.

The Iraqi scientists say they have no idea who took the material. They don’t know whether it was swept up in the looting rampage or taken by someone who knew what they had.

And if you needed more proof that the entire invasion plan was a modernization of a Keystone Kops plot…

U.S. Marines were sent to guard the facility today after Iraqi scientists reported the dangerous material had been removed by looters.

Er… Oops?!