Author: Chris Barrus

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…

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?!

Real-time Flash visualization of weblog postings around the world as projected onto a world map.

A Delaware Online article looks at a turn-of-the-last-century era system for transmitting music on demand to telephone users.

The 1910 subscribers called the “music operator” for a transmission and paid 3 cents for each one. Grand opera cost 7 cents, not surprising considering tenor Enrico Caruso did more than any other artist to popularize records. Subscribers had to guarantee $18 a year. Should more than one subscriber request the same record, the telephone exchange could connect many wires to the same phonograph.

Using phone lines to transmit recorded and live music wasn’t that new, said Allan Koenigsberg, a lecturer at Brooklyn College. He has written about the telephone and phonograph and is considered one the most prominent chroniclers of late 19th-century inventions. Yet he had not heard of the Wilmington innovation.

Almost since the invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, concerts in Boston and Cambridge were transmitted over phone lines. Koenigsberg said the telephone and phonographs were considered means to disseminate culture to the masses. In Paris in the 1880s, a “theatrophone” brought subscribers live opera performances. Hotels had coin-operated listening areas as far back as 1882.

It’s funny… I’ve been exchanging email with Talbot from Ochre Records for years now, but I had no idea he was actually in The Land Of Nod until they came through town a couple of weeks ago.

Anyway, they recorded a session for John Peel’s Radio One show and it’s being broadcasted this week. Listen in to it.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf Drinking Game for when you absolutely, positively have to get completely smashed in the shortest period of time.