Author: Chris Barrus

Buy Bush a PlayStation 2

OMG, this is so totally brilliant:

As I sat pondering the President’s motives one day, it suddenly dawned on me that it is entirely likely our Commander in Chief has never played a single video game in his life. “Of course!” I exclaimed, startling my girlfriend, who was driving at the time. “Without the catharsis that video games provide, Bush has no way of fulfilling his militaristic fantasies other than actually fighting wars.”

Our course of action is clear, my friends: We must help this man, and in so doing, help those whose lives will be affected by a full-scale invasion.

We of course cannot trust that Bush will eventually discover video games himself. They are not of his generation, and he is an extremely busy man besides. It is up to us, America, and so I propose the following: We must pool our funds and buy Bush a PlayStation 2.

The “Buy Bush a PlayStation 2” campaign was posted to Fark and within a couple of hours the goal was reached. Stay tuned!

For Richer: The New Gilded Age

Excellent Paul Krugman analysis of US wealth-disparity in the New York Times.

Kevin Phillips concludes his book “Wealth and Democracy” with a grim warning: “Either democracy must be renewed, with politics brought back to life, or wealth is likely to cement a new and less democratic regime — plutocracy by some other name.” It’s a pretty extreme line, but we live in extreme times. Even if the forms of democracy remain, they may become meaningless. It’s all too easy to see how we may become a country in which the big rewards are reserved for people with the right connections; in which ordinary people see little hope of advancement; in which political involvement seems pointless, because in the end the interests of the elite always get served.

Am I being too pessimistic? Even my liberal friends tell me not to worry, that our system has great resilience, that the center will hold. I hope they’re right, but they may be looking in the rearview mirror. Our optimism about America, our belief that in the end our nation always finds its way, comes from the past — a past in which we were a middle-class society. But that was another country.

[via Robot Wisdom]

Senator Paul Wellstone dies in Minnesota plane crash

Let the conspiracy theories fly fast and wide on this one. Wellstone was one of the few good guys left in the Senate who supported organized labor, living wages, affordable housing, human rights, and wasand (to the extent that a major party politician can be) a friend to hippies and intellectuals in general. More importantly, he was one of the few congressman to vote against the use of force in Iraq.

Patrick Leahy is basically the only guy left.

The reason why UCI was knocked off the net yesterday

From today’s inbox…

At around 4:20pm Wednesday Oct 23, campus connectivity to the Internet was lost. After some work tracking it down, it was determined that a host on campus was attacking random hosts on the Internet, which caused the campus firewall to slow down to the point that it was no longer passing packets. The network with the offending host was located around 6:30pm and turned off, and the problem went away.

Non-obvious OS X performance hint?

Patrick over at Forwarding Address: OS X notes:

Maybe I’m the last person on the planet to know about this, but on a recommendation from macosxhints.com, I went into Finder Preferences and unchecked every language, even English, under “Languages for searching file contents.” All of a sudden the Finder’s performance sucks much, much less. (I’m using a 500mhz iBook with only 320 MB of RAM, not one of them dang hot-rods like you kids have.) I think I’ve asked the Finder to search within a range of files perhaps twice since adopting OS X; I’m much more liable to use grep. So this is a feature-for-performance trade-off I’m happy to make.

I just tried this on both my 800MHz Titanium and 867MHz Quicksilver (both with 1GB RAM) and seem to notice a difference, but it might just be my own projected hope.

Sort of stream of consciousness Terrastock 5 review

I posted this to DroneOn a couple of days ago and more or less sums up what I thought of Terrastock 5.

It’s been a week but I still feel like I’ve eaten a ridiculously extensive and rich meal. BURP!

This was my third Terrastock and going into it I was kinda non-committal about the line-up. A good chunk of the bands playing I’d seen before – either at previous Terrastocks or on their west coast gigs. However, the one thing that I noticed more than at any of the other fests was how, well, “psyched up” all of the bands were. Sure I’ve seen Windy & Carl, Damon & Naomi, Subarachnoid, Bardo, etc. multiple times over the years, but I was floored at just how keyed up everyone was, and not just during the Sunday night juggernaut of Lockgroove / Subarachnoid Space / Bardo Pond / Spacious Mind / Kinski / AMT, but throughout the three days.

Anyway, several random observations not in any particular order of chronology or relevance…

For the first two nights, “stage 2” was a neighboring dance club with a big stage and some acoustical room for sound to rattle around in. Nice set up for the Charalambides for which half of the audience basically passed out flat on the floor in various states of consciousness. Supposedly there was a weird event during their set when the video projections switched (mistakenly?) to a CNN Iraq segment showing multiple missile launches, but I was part of the half that was peacefully conked out on the floor.

Windy & Carl was Windy & Carl & Paik drummer Ryan which gave W&C some much needed power with all the unstoppability of a rotating planet – one long 45 minute piece. Terrific, terrific set and I couldn’t help but babble to Carl that they immediately needed to record it. Sadly, the CDs for their 3-CD box set compilation didn’t make it to Boston, but it should be available now from Stormy Records directly.

Paik was one of the bands I was looking forward to, even though I’d only heard the one track on the PT32 disc. Someone else here namechecked Mogwai, and for lack of a better shorthand I’d agree, but there’s more guitar delay/reverb going on in front a la Loop or Cure backing tracks. Either way, I liked them enough to buy both CDs on the spot. But as long time DroneOn’ers have known I’m genetically programmed to like that sort of stuff.

What I do want to know is what the hell is in the Scandinavian water supply (and I’m not talking about the Hives, etc.)? Is there some insane scene up there that we’re missing out on? Words entirely fail me to adequately describe the Dipsomaniacs, Motorpsycho, and Spacious Mind other than “shit man, they fucking rocked!”. Like I said earlier, the Dipso’s played like they were in Wembley Stadium. Motorpsycho beats the tar out of any latter day MC5/Sabbath imitators out there. And Spacious Mind? Call ’em Amon Duul Zero – mapping out their own heroic territory in the psych/prog omniverse. I can’t remember the last time I’d seen this happen at a club gig, but each Mind got a much-deserved ovation as he walked off stage.

I think we’re in desperate need of a Major Stars drinking game. You know, drink once when Wayne rolls around on the floor, drink twice if he knocks something over.

The posted schedule on the wall of the Axis went something like “band name, band name, Break (this is not a band named Break), band name, etc”. For some reason I found this incredibly funny.

The two big question marks going into T5 were The Lilys and Sonic Youth. I’ll always defend those first three Lilys albums, but no one seemed to know if we were going to get the MBV Lilys, the Kinks Lilys, the krautrock Lilys, or some hybrid of all three. Instead, Kurt discovered his inner Anton Newcombe and we got the seven-piece strong Brian Jonestown Lilys. Not a bad thing really, and they did play that one pop song from In The Presence Of Nothing.

Sonic Youth played Murray Street in order, in its entirety. I freely admit that I would have rather heard (and enjoyed) 45 minutes of Lee Renaldo guitar squonk, so I’m disqualifying myself from commenting – especially since Thurston was in the middle of eye surgery and was playing amidst a lot of pain. FWIW, SY easily had the biggest crowd of all of Terrastock. Couldn’t help but laugh at whoever it was that hollered “Ca Plane Pour Moi” at them.

I’ve freely admitted my unconditional love of both Landing and Kinski. Landing playing a set that was as compelling as it was dreamy. And Great Cthulhu, about the only thing you could do during Kinski’s set was to hang on to the stage and start banging your head. Yes, they’re playing at that level, and yes go out of way to see them on their way back to Seattle. You won’t be disappointed.

Bardo Pond’s set: I’m pretty sure all the songs were new (except for the first one) and out of a half-dozen or so times I’ve seen them this one was utterly apocalyptic and funereal. Quite different from the usual sludge-n-purge set I’d seen before.

Nice to see Lockgroove finally after reading about them on the list for so long. Just realized what I had been missing. And all those comments about Blue Cheer turning the air into cottage cheese and inducing spontaneous canine combustion? They all apply to Subarachnoid Space who’s set was calculated to BLOW YOU THROUGH THE BACK WALL OF THE CLUB. The word “monstrous” came to mind.

And Acid Mothers Temple? The video clips I posted earlier kinda give you an idea. I think there was a subconscious betting pool in the audience as to whether or not Cotton Casino would spill her beer into her synth. Nothing spilled despite the on-stage maelstrom.

Thanks and shout-outs to everyone who participated – audience or artist. If I had my act together, I would have organized another DroneOn family photograph/dinner/whatever, but there’s always T6.