Archives for posts with tag: Devin
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Ichhhhh bin tä-gliche Le-uuuute

By Devin
October 16, 2010 //
0

My mother sent a link to this image from the BBC News site.

It’s from the article about those German satellites. Sometimes Germany makes me think of a joke from Curb Your Enthusiasm— “It’s nice to be affectionate to something German, you don’t get the opportunity that often, you know.” Tell me about it, Angela Merkel. Here’s another image from the BBC News:

The headline? “Merkel says German multicultural society has failed.”

[At] the beginning of the 60s our country called the foreign workers to come to Germany and now they live in our country… We kidded ourselves a while, we said: ‘They won’t stay, sometime they will be gone,’ but this isn’t reality… And of course, the approach [to build] a multicultural [society] and to live side-by-side and to enjoy each other… has failed, utterly failed.

She also went out of her way to refer to Islam in a bit on the importance of thorough integration. “Anyone who does not immediately speak German is not welcome.”

I knew the 21st century had the potential to be a sack of shit the day Mitch Hedberg died.

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Categories news

“Do you like trip-hop? Yes/No/Maybe”

By Devin
October 16, 2010 //
1

In the last six years, Yo La Tengo has charted a slow, inexorable rise in my esteem— from Band With An Album I Like to Band Serving As A Do-We-Agree-About-Music Litmus Test.

I just saw this for the first time and, yes, those are the Mr. Show guys. I think Dr. Funke’s 100% Natural Good-Time Family Band Solution would have really benefited from that pink wig.

Looking for Yo La Tengo on YouTube led me to this (profoundly “okay”) video about a cred-salvaging iPod that displays hipster music on your screen to cover up your secret pop fetishes. The fact that the “hipster” bands they cite are Yo La Tengo, Sonic Youth, the Velvet Underground and Wilco clues you in to the fact the video’s clearly not a hipster inside job…

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Categories music

Manfred Zink / Manfred Mann

By Devin
October 15, 2010 //
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I just saw Sam’s video from below and obnoxiously au courant-adly thought of the German satellites making their intricate orbital maneuvers to use radars to capture a “most detailed ever 3D map” of the Earth’s topography. I did some back of the envelope calculations and think the close distances these satellites are approaching each other— within 200 meters at an orbit 514 kilometers up— is equivalent to a precision of 1 in 217000 at that orbit. Did I mention they were launched 3 years apart?

Dr. Manfred Zink is a project manager (for the TanDEM-X side). This, obviously, is Manfred Mann:

This was the top comment when I saw that page today:

great song by a proper band i.e. people who could play instruments and perform live not like the manufactured crap of today (i guess i’m getting old a ) still who cares we all get old sometime i suppose
I hope that guy didn’t realize that for the first time during his YouTube comment.
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Categories music, sciencenews

Protodictatorus

By Devin
October 5, 2010 //
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Sam and I tuned in to about thirty-five seconds of Fox Radio News online today and heard, I believe, the Tennessee “home burns down because of unpaid fine” story spun into a “that’s what happens when you have government-run fire departments! If that was a private corporation, they’d have done it— and just left you a bill!”

I can’t wait until they spin the “dinosaurs emerged from the Permian-Triassic extinction!” story into a pro-climate change talking point. “They were the dominant lifeforms for over 150 million years! If humanity can survive the crucible of catastrophic ecological upheaval, the planet is ours for eons! It’s our trial by fire.”

Maybe these new earliest dinosaurs— from only two years after the Permian-Triassic extinction event (“informally known as the Great Dying”)— were also the cause of the big Snuff It party. What if those little hands developed a monkey-like curiosity for the Carboniferous material just scarcely buried yet? We think we’re so creative and cutting edge with our fossilfuel-icide but we’re just the latest technological society eager for a quick energy intensive fix…

At least we’ll leave a beguiling thin smear of plastic.

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Categories sciencenews

Fortunately Godzilla-free

By Devin
October 2, 2010 //
0

One of Sam and I’s favorite things to chuckle at is the odd assortment of search terms that lead errant googlers here; variations on “ocean pout” and “Lake Karachay” are by far the most common. There’s a new flurry of recombinations juggling “October,” “Scorpio” and “horoscope” coming in now.

It reminds me of what sort of convinced me the signal-to-noise ratio on Twitter was too low to be useful to use it as any real cultural bellwether— meme pirates who fill their tweets with a potpourri of whatever the meteorically-rising current trends are. It’s like wearing brand clothing taken to an attention-seeking compulsive extreme. Want to read thoughts from the zeitgeist on the passing of Greg Giraldo? Too bad you have to sift through dozens of messages along the lines of  “Greg Giraldo Grey’s Anatomy Bristol Palin Deuces Remix #OMGTeenQuotes #FollowFriday #whenIwasakid;” garbage spewed for the sake of being noticed spewing garbage.

The preceding sentence could have been an excellent segue into the subject of Tarrare— but I think I’ll close with this adorable deer family I saw instead.

They were eating apples.

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Categories life

Yellow Astrology

By Devin
October 1, 2010 //
1

The intellectual basis for your standard astrology column is pretty threadbare— for example, the idea that all the variety of experience lived through by humans the planet over in a single day could be distilled down to a variation on one of twelve themes. So I’m obviously coming at this from the skeptic perspective.

I’ve always liked Free Will Astrology for being content with bon mots and humane sound advice in place of earth-rattling predictions. You can imagine, then, how this caught my attention yesterday:

SCORPIO: You know me: I hate to sound sensationalistic. But in honor of this dramatic moment in your story, I’ll risk it. So be alert! Heads up! Get real! A pivotal moment is upon you! What you do in the coming days will ultimately determine how you will interpret the entire past year, shaping the contours of your history for better or worse! I advise maximum integrity! I suggest thorough preparation! I urge timely action! Decisions should come from the roots, not the surface! Climaxes should be mediated by the heart and head together, not just one or the other!

… this hot on the heels of one last week admonishing me to surrender one fixation, two habits and three dogmatic beliefs. I don’t know what the Bad Boys of the Zodiac did to engender such portentous prognosticating, but it sure is tough being a Scorpio sometimes. Curse my having been born between October 23rd and November 21st!

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Categories life

Just A Sec More In My Bed

By Devin
September 29, 2010 //
0

One my big kicks for 2010 has been trying to capture a sense of mechanistic order buried in seemingly random noise. This video from March is an example. My hope was to have a whole slew of disparate, seemingly unconnected elements which seem to magically click on occasion— engineered synchronicity. I just barely assembled the pieces before I rendered this rough draft, so I hadn’t really fine tuned it anywhere near as well as I’d like to past the first forty seconds or so; considering that, I’m pretty satisfied with it in this raw state.

Funny to me that for this video’s Copyright Infringement, YouTube just informed me that

No action is required on your part. Your video is still available worldwide. In some cases ads may appear next to your video.

whereas that last one had the audio muted to the public. What’s the argument against a label hawking digital store versions of the offending unlawful reproduction? I wonder if it’s as simple as one label having deals with iTunes and Amazon and the other not.

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Categories video
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