Archives for posts with tag: Devin
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Summer Jam

By Devin
July 16, 2010 //
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A guy told me really excitedly this winter that the solo album from the Sigur Rós lead singer was going to be the album of the summer— that you’d hear it blasting from the car of anyone who’s cool. He was so excited and it made me really happy to hear someone evangelizing a current album instead of just slamming the incessant cesspool that pop music has become. I went ahead and bought it when I saw it in a store a few weeks later and— I don’t know. It’s pretty structurally clever in some places but that never really means anything for listenability; just ask Captain Beefheart. Obviously, Go is a lot nicer to listen to than Trout Mask Replica— some of the operatic swells have a great galloping panchromatic beauty to them— but then you realize it’s because you’re riding astride an armored unicorn, straight for the heart of Care-a-Lot. It’s music I feel like I’m going to get beaten up for listening to— which makes it kind of hard to listen to.

Anyway. My Auditory Enjoyment Index has been out of commission since I accidentally listened to that new LCD Soundsystem album grading lab finals. Confidential to James Murphy— making it sound like you sampled “This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)” is not a blank check for lines like

As night has such a local ring

And love and rock are pickup things

And you know it, yeah, you know it

Yeah, you know, take

People are paying attention, man. We haven’t all had enough Pabst to get lost in the handclaps.

Here’s my Summer Jam:

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Categories music

Best Dog Ever

By Devin
July 14, 2010 //
1

One of the first things I ever put on the Internet was an America Online-hosted memorial marking the passing of Wee Willie Wolfman. I once saw Willie vivisect a pigeon in the time it took you to read the word “vivisect.” My Dad bought him specifically for his breed’s rodent murdering proficiency. He developed a gimp walk but stubbornly lived on as his rear third seemed to develop leprosy. He was awesome-
but not beyond compare. There are truly singular dogs out there and- on occasion- we talking monkeys are fortunate enough to share our lives with that of an exceptional canine. Here’s to Shillelagh and those of us lucky enough to have known the furriest Clint Eastwood warrior monk street urchin out there.

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Categories life

21 Lutetia

By Devin
July 11, 2010 //
0

An ESA mission made a flyby of the largest asteroid yet visited by human spacecraft.

There’s some pretty cool pictures on the ESA website— but I wanted to show off something that caught even my sleepy eye. Check out these subparallel grooves from another set of Rosetta images:

It took some looking, but I eventually figured out where I’d seen those grooves before.

That’s Phobos— one of the moons of Mars. (It’s mostly visible light, if you’re wondering; some near-infrared as well). You can see those same sorts of grooves, which used to be blamed on Stickney Crater, which the big dimple near the bottom right— those are landslides on its crater rim! A 2006 paper mapped them to show the grooves fall into 12 general age groups and hypothesized they could represent scoring from regular deliveries of ejecta from impacts next door. But Lutetia is a wandering asteroid… what would score it with crater chains on a regular basis? The main belt is far too capricious a place to expect such precision. It’s not like the Empire Strikes Back in there.

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Categories sciencenews

“…It was just coincidence that the sheriff benefited when the story was leaked to the press.”

By Devin
July 9, 2010 //
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Sam and I are hitting in the streets to patronize a local establishment but, man, were we happy to read this story before leaving the house—

(Sheriff Joe) Arpaio has launched — either on his own or in conjunction with the county attorney — high-profile criminal investigations against a who’s who of Maricopa County politicians and officials. The list includes the mayor of Phoenix, a former police chief, two members of the board of supervisors, Superior Court judges, and even a former state attorney general.

The charges have included public corruption, misuse of taxpayers’ dollars, bribery, rape and even child molestation. What all these investigations hold in common is that they were launched with great public fanfare, but rarely resulted in convictions. Among the investigations recounted in this report, the only conviction has been on the misdemeanor charge against Dowling.

Nail him to the wall, federal grand jury! What an asshole.

(Phoenix Mayor Phil) Gordon came under Arpaio’s scrutiny, he says, after speaking out against the sheriff’s neighborhood sweeps to round up illegal immigrants.

The mayor says he received a torrent of records requests from sheriff’s investigators, and he was later told that he was under investigation on possible child molestation charges. Gordon says the sheriff “bragged that he was watching my office from his office with a telescope.”

Meanwhile— have you ever seen a cross-section of what the Seattle deep-bore tunnel would look like? What a beast!

The picture’s from the WSDOT geotechnical report. Thanks to Dominic for the link!

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Categories news

This’ll Go Down About As Smooth As An Ipecac-Alka Seltzer Long Island Ice Tea

By Devin
July 5, 2010 //
0

Remember how Republicans were so happy to use that Dubai Ports thing a few years ago to make themselves look meaningfully different from the Bush administration line? From yesterday’s newspaper:

Institutions in Abu Dhabi and Qatar are understood to have been sounded out about the prospect of taking a strategic shareholding (of BP) to support the ailing share price and deter potential bidders.

BP being bought, mid-cleanup, by a Middle Eastern company? Tell the Tea Partiers that and you could almost just as soon tell them that, week after that, you’ll be issued your Subdermal Identity eXchange 66 Model Federal RFID chip week after that.

Poor Obama. I read another editorial today about liberal fantasy projections onto him versus the reality of him running as a centrist. I wouldn’t blame him if he wishes he wasn’t the president for this particular stretch of American history but, well, “so do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” So chin up— and hope the Republicans continue their unrelenting war on the Middle Class.

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Categories news

“Bu Hao”

By Devin
July 4, 2010 //
0

…means “no good” if you’re wondering at home, relatives also reading Brendan’s fantastic travel blog — aka the best blog on the Internet from the author of the critically self-acclaimed author of the “most important book of the twenty-first century.” Please, buy the app and support an itinerant scholar and unofficial American ambassador.

Remember— only the United States of America could bring you both Little Boy and Vince McMahon in the same month. Happy Fourth— please do not blow off your fingers.

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Boehnhead

By Devin
June 29, 2010 //
2

The Boehner Bungle reminds me of an effort to lose as many elections as possible for the Republicans. Everybody’s harping on the “killing an ant with a nuclear weapon” line which, yes, minimizes the economic collapse (“ant”) while wildly overstating the financial reform bill (“nuclear weapon”). Reminds me more of a Band-aid on cancer.

Anyway. I think the Dems are missing a great opportunity by not focusing on the rest of that original interview. As Boehner has it, the retirement age should be raised to 70— and means-testing should be employed to weed out the older folks with “substantial” income— to make sure we have enough money for our wars. Compound that with the sentiment that Obama overreacted to the spill and you’ve got a political sludge gold mine.

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