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A Trio Of Music Videos

By Brian Filed in Music, Videos Tagged with , , , , , October 24th, 2011 @ 11:30 am

As I was hanging out online Saturday evening, I kept bumping into all kinds of excellent music clips, and after I had listened to a handful, I figured there was probably a post in it.

This first one features a cellist named Zoë Keating. You might have heard this recent piece about her on NPR’s “All Things Considered”. She uses a computer to sample and loop bits and pieces of music as she plays them, and then layers the elements into complex compositions as you see in the video. She’s not the only artist I’ve ever seen who does this; years ago, Bridget and I went to see the folk artist Christine Lavin in concert, and she had the same setup and used it live on stage. But on to the video:

This next one is actually not much to look at. In fact, there is no visual at all. Sometimes people make YouTube “videos” for songs by clipping together some random images, album cover art, whatever they can find, but this clip just features a black screen with the name of the artist and the title of the song. Which is okay, because it’s a great song. It’s a song from “The Music Man” called “The Sadder But Wiser Girl”, and it is sung by, get this, Seth MacFarlane, the guy who writes and produces “Family Guy”. He recently released an album of American Songbook tunes in the vocal style of singers like Frank Sinatra called “Music Is Better Than Words”. And you know how much I love crooners and old standards. Again, I have to give credit to NPR for turning me on to this; I happened to tune into “Fresh Air” last week, and he was on the show plugging the record. So, close your eyes and imagine Stewie from Family Guy as you listen to this song:

And our third clip is from a group called DeVotchKa. Unlike the last clip, you might actually like watching this video, as I did. It’s all video shot at night from a moving car, so it has a sleepy/creepy vibe to it that goes along very well with the song, “How It Ends”. I found the clip via MetaFilter, but am led to believe that the beginning of this particular song is used a lot as one of those musical bumpers in between stories on NPR, and it looks like they get featured on various NPR shows quite a bit, so I guess it’s an NPR trifecta post.

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Two Feel-Good Hitler Stories

By Brian Filed in Links, Misc Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , August 5th, 2011 @ 11:34 am

Totally unrelated links, except that both involve the Nazis:

NPR’s Morning Edition featured a story earlier this week about a little-known facet of the otherwise well-known legend of Jesse Owens and his victories in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Apparently, as part of the pageantry of the Games, the Germans gave each athlete an oak sapling for every gold medal won. Owens brought home four saplings, and a couple of them became famous legacies for the schools where they were planted. One of the four was never accurately accounted for, but now researcher think a tree near the library on the campus of Ohio State University may be that tree and will do genetic testing on it to compare it to the other known trees.

Equally Hitlerrific is this review in the Wall Street Journal by Barton Swaim of a new biography of journalist William L. Shirer by Steve Wick, “The Long Night: William L. Shirer and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”. Wick focuses on Shirer’s personal story of mixed professional fortunes but ideal vantage point of the unfolding crisis in Germany, which would become the source material for Shirer’s milestone book “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”. The review is a good precis of what promises to be an interesting book.

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Hey Click And Clack, Cancel The Bake Sale!

By Brian Filed in Links, Media, News Tagged with , , , , , April 14th, 2011 @ 12:38 pm

Gawker took a moment yesterday to remind us that NPR and PBS got their normal funding after all. So I guess all those Facebook status messages really helped, right?

Among the factoids that were tossed around during all the huffing and puffing, the one I got the biggest kick out of was the revelation that Liberty University, the ultra-right indoctrination camp college founded by the late Jerry Falwell (and it makes me so happy to use the word “late”), receives even more money in federal aid than the CPB in the form of the various aid packages that students receive to pay to attend the school. Since it’s indirect, you can’t really take the money away from them specifically, except as the Republicans try to defund federal student aid in general, but that doesn’t seem to matter as much to them as gutting Medicare at the moment.

Another factoid I thought was interesting came from this Wall Street Journal article by NPR’s own Steve Inskeep, the co-host of Morning Edition. Righties like to portray NPR and PBS as prime examples of “liberal elitism”, but NPRs own audience research shows that a majority of NPR listeners self-identify as “conservative” or “middle-of-the-road” (which is like the people who make $250,000 who call themselves “middle-class” — they’re not). Inskeep argues that NPR makes a scrupulous effort to stay balanced, but part of “staying balanced” inevitably means pandering to both sides one way or another.

I stopped listening to NPR right around the time of the start of the Iraq War, and about the only things I watch on PBS anymore are “Independent Lens” and “POV” and perhaps the occasional episode of “Nova”, but I thought this critique of PBS by Michael Blim at 3Quarks Daily was pretty on the money. It actually borrows the conservative “liberal elite” argument but, since we can clearly see that it’s not so much liberal elitism as just elitism in general, the pandering to the wealthy donors is pretty broad-based. Needless to say, I am one of those Evil Lefties who actually agrees that public broadcasting should find a way to walk away from sucking on the government tit. Fast Company had a story on Tuesday about the launch of a centralized media buying network at NPR that would let member stations participate in national-level underwriting, hopefully giving some of the underfunded member stations a way to make up for the lost revenue should the Republicans ever actually go through with their threats.

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Last Chopper Out

By Brian Filed in Life, Links Tagged with , , , , , , September 8th, 2010 @ 2:40 pm

I like to think that Bridget and I are not “Helicopter Parents”. Faced with the double-whammy of Charlotte being an only child AND having parents who started late, the odds are against her, but for the most part I think we try to resist succumbing to the modern urge to control every moment of our special snowflake’s existence. I say this because we had to go review Charlotte’s 504 plan at her school this morning, and the very idea that she even HAS a 504 plan makes me feel like we’re too overbearing. Schools use 504 plans for kids with all sorts of issues (in our case, ADHD), but it’s also a way for them to get meddling parents out of their hair by dazzling them with bureaucratic bullshit. The line between the two conditions is a little fuzzy, hence my own uncertainty.

So, this NPR blog post made me feel a whole lot better. It lists the five most common worries of modern parents,of which are completely and utterly ludicrous. They are:

  1. Kidnapping
  2. Snipers
  3. Terrorists
  4. Dangerous Strangers
  5. Drugs

The post also lists the five ACTUAL most-common ways children are hurt or killed:

  1. Car accidents
  2. Homicide by a known individual
  3. Abuse
  4. Suicide
  5. Drowning

The disconnect between the real and imagined dangers could scarcely be bigger. I presume that you, like I, see the giant hand of media manipulation here, but if not, let me suggest that to you. Our society as a whole has completely lost sense of perspective of the difference between real and imagined threats to our daily safety, and our willingness to credulously accept whatever story the media would like us to believe is far too great. The latest strip from Tom Tomorrow sums it up neatly:

He’s a little more focused on the recent insistence by the media that a certain President of the United States is a Scary Black Muslim Terrorist, but on any given day the same narrative is routinely applied to schools, bedbugs, lawn chemicals, unscrupulous dry cleaners, and Justin Bieber.

With so much random fear-mongering, it’s really no wonder that the current model for parenting is the “helicopter parent”. Sadly, you can’t get rid of so much misplaced fear with status meetings and classroom modifications, so it’s no wonder there’s so much mutual frustration between schools and parents.

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My Favorite: The Nina Totenbag

By Brian Filed in Media Tagged with , , , , March 2nd, 2009 @ 2:22 pm

In today’s Slate, June Thomas lists the 10 most successful fundraising gimmicks used by NPR to get you to donate.

Apparently, the latest one is the NPR-logoed reusable grocery bag, supplanting what seemed like an endless parade of tote bags, coffee mugs, and Garrison Keillor cassette tapes. Even though I officially stopped listening to NPR on a regular basis almost five years ago, I recognize each and every one of these stratagems as used by the various NPR stations I have known and loved over the years. I used to be a pretty consistent donator, especially once we settled here in Massachusetts and listening to NPR became an integral part of my daily commuting ritual. Now, I can hardly stand to listen to anything they have to say because the “NPR Style” of production is so smarmy and self-important. I also stopped watching public television for the most part. While PBS is much less obnoxious than NPR, the pledge breaks make me want to tear my eyes out of their sockets. Pledge breaks are the REAL reason for TiVo, my friends, not commercials.

I don’t donate to public broadcasting any more, and, I hate to say it, I more or less agree with the conservatives who say the government shouldn’t subsidize it anymore. I don’t agree with them about their desire to choke it dead or their unrelenting ignoramus act over the “liberal” content, I just feel that public television in particular is an idea that has come and gone, and that there would be ways to support an NPR-like entity commercially without having to bribe people with “Car Talk” CDs and more effing totebags. I suppose that’s nothing shy of heresy among my SNAGgy liberal compadres, but there you have it.

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Linkapalooza – Tech

By Brian Filed in Tech Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , September 9th, 2008 @ 3:26 pm

Take a look at your next laptop’s 80GB hard drive. Yes, I said hard drive. Intel has just announced their solid-state hard drive product line beginning with this drive, called the X25-M. You can’t quite tell from this photo, but the form factor is designed around the 2.5-inch width that current laptop arm-and-platter disk drives use. However, it’s only as thick and as heavy as a typical chip-bearing circuit board, which is to say significantly less than traditional disk drives. This model has 80GB of storage, but Intel’s roadmap has 160GB models in the marketplace by early 2009, and smaller models available even sooner. The throughput performance of this drive is better than most current shipping 80GB laptop drives, and Intel claims that the lifespan of the drive should be five years (a complaint about flash-based drives to date has been the relatively small number of read-write cycles, but they claim to have worked around that). Because they are so efficient on I/O, solid-state drives are likely to be very quickly adopted for use in servers, enabling server hardware to shrink even more and reducing the likelihood of server downtime due to mechanical failures.

Now that the XM-Sirius merger is a done deal, the next thing to think about with regard to satellite radio is interoperability. In other words, making it possible for XM radios to receive Sirius signals and vice versa without making all their customers go out and buy new hardware. The FCC has already ruled that any new satellite radio receivers must be interoperable, but now they’ve put out a Notice Of Inquiry to decide whether or not satellite radios must also be interoperable with terrestrial HD radio. Ibiquity, Clear Channel, and NPR have all lobbied the FCC to mandate including HD Radio interoperability, but the FCC would only go so far as to launch the NOI, which starts a somewhat lengthy review process. This is not unlike the deliberations in the 1970s to compel radio makers to include the FM band on every radio; FM radio was the bald-headed stepchild of radio for decades because no one had FM receivers. Once FM popped up alongside AM on car radios, FM stations finally caught on, eventually pushing AM radio into obsolescence. A lesson no doubt everyone involved in this melodrama remembers all too well.

The idea of using bar-code technology with your hand-held communication device has been around for a while, but has only just now turned into an actual service of some kind. USA Today reports that Air France will start letting passengers travelling from Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris to Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam opt to receive their boarding passes as bar-code images or as text messages on their smartphones. Quite honestly, I don’t think this is such a great idea for airline boarding passes because of the ENORMOUS security risks it poses. Far better that this had been introduced as a service for something with a lot less inherent risk like movie tickets or supermarket deli waiting line numbers. It’s somewhat telling that Air France is only testing it on one route rather than their entire system, and I suspect that this will be slow to roll out, particularly with U.S. air carriers.

DSL Reports says that the number of consumers signing up for DSL service continues to free fall into nothingness. “DSL is the new dial-up” is the catchphrase du-jour in the broadband business as Verizon’s FiOS fiber-optical service has pushed cable companies to be more aggressive with their speed enhancements, leaving pokey ol’ DSL in the dust. According to that linked story, Verizon and AT&T together had a net LOSS of about 120,000 DSL customers in the second fiscal quarter. Anything that keeps the broadband market in the U.S. aiming toward the 100Mbps speed that’s standard in Korea and Japan is okay with me.

I’m not holding my breath, but this story from MuniWireless.com says that Boston is one of the cities where Sprint expects to rollout WiMax as municipal wireless service maybe even before the end of 2008. The rollout is underway right now in Baltimore, with over 1000 wireless access points in the city. Chicago and Washington DC are expected to be launched before the end of the year, and then the next tier of cities includes Philadelphia, Dallas, and The Hub Of The Universe itself. Seems they’ve figured out how to speed up the process of getting the WAPs out into the field so that they can place up to 25 per day, making the rollouts go much faster than originally projected.

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Wait, Wait..

By Brian Filed in Links Tagged with , , , , , , , , , April 4th, 2008 @ 2:54 pm

Back when I was a regular listener of NPR, I used to really enjoy the news quiz show “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me…”. In fact, I almost got to be one of the call-in contestants on the show one time; I submitted my name and got a call from the producer who sets up the calls, but I wasn’t able to be available during their taping that week, and there was no chance to be rescheduled for a different week. Oh,well.

A couple of years after that let-down, our paths crossed again when the show came to Boston to do a live production of an episode. It was held in some auditorium at Boston University, since the local NPR station WBUR is still somewhat affiliated with the school, and the place was packed. People tend to think of NPR as being sort of a niche thing that’s only listened to by a few people, but whenver we’ve attended a live taping of a public radio program (and we’ve been to a number of them), there’s always a big crowd. I’ll grant you that in a place like Boston there’s probably a higher perecentage of radio listeners who tune in to NPR than some other more typical American metropolis, but still…Anyway, that evening was a lot of fun. Carl Kasell was there in person (he usually does his part in the show from Washington), and they had the Car Talk Guys as their special guests. In between taping segments of the show, Peter Sagal, the host, talked about his years in Boston as a Harvard student and about working at a neighborhood grocery in Cambridge that his aunt and uncle used to own. They were much more interactive with the crowd than the “This American Life” cast were when we saw them a couple of years after that.

Yesterday, linky-blog Mental Floss had an interview with Peter Sagal, wherein he talks about how he got the hosting job and how they put the show together each week. He’s also apparently plugging a new book he’s written, although it seems to have nothing whatsoever to do with the radio show…PLUS he tells the story of how he is responsible for that paragon of cinematic excellence, “Dirty Dancing 2″.

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National Podcast Radio

By Brian Filed in Links, Media, Tech Tagged with , , , , , , , , , February 20th, 2007 @ 1:43 pm

I have been an iPod owner for almost three years, and since I started listening to it in the car, I have largely stopped listening to radio. Since sometime in the late 1980s, though, I had always been a devotee of public radio — not just the news programs, but also many of their other regular weekly shows from “Car Talk” to “Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me”.

Very honestly, I needed a break from “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered”, and so I don’t miss those shows at all. But all those other programs still appeal to me. There’s no reason I *can’t* listen to them on the radio, I just don’t. A lot of them are aired on Saturdays in our area, and I’m not in the car at those times like I used to be in the Time Before Charlotte.

Ditto for streaming radio. Both of the two major public radio stations in Boston offer live streams, but it’s just not meant to be for me.

So enter the podcasts. It’s old news to a lot of people, I’m sure, but NPR makes a ton of their programming available in downloadable form and has a comprehensive listing of them at their website. Their listing includes many programs produced by local public radio stations that are intended mostly for their own listening area, such as Maine Public Radio’s “Maine Things Considered” or KQED’s “The California Report”.

Skimming through the listings the other day, I was tickled to find that several of my favorites offer their entire weekly broadcast in podcast format, such as the news quiz “Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me”, Fresh Air and “This American Life” (you can get the current week’s show as a free podcast, but you have to pay $0.95 per episode to download older shows…or go find them via BitTorrent…shhhh).

Others only give you snippets: While you can listen to “A Prairie Home Companion” as streaming audio on the show’s own site, the podcasts are limited to Keillor’s “Lake Wobegon” monologues from the previous Saturday night’s show. And the Car Talk guys only post their “favorite question” of the week.

My biggest disappointment, though, was to discover that “Says You”, which is a word quiz panel show produced here in Boston, is only available via Audible.com, and they charge four bucks an episode if you’re not an Audible member ($2.95 if you are a member). Sorry, but that’s way too much per episode when other national-caliber programming is available for free.

If you’ve never listened to a podcast, don’t be intimidated by the “pod” part. You don’t have to have an iPod or any other music player to listen to them. You can just download the files to your computer and listen to them that way. If you’re really clever, you can even fiddle around with an RSS feeder to automatically download the latest ones for you, so you don’t even have to be bothered to remember to do it (although you do need to remember to LISTEN to them…).

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