Darrin Perry has passed away, notes Boing Boing.
Perry redesigned Wired in 2002, and I took the occasion to snark at the magazine. Perry gently corrected one of my mistakes in the comments, prompting me to look a bit more seriously at what he’d been up to.
RIP, Darrin. That one comment was a highly effective bit of consumer-and-critic management. I’m sure you’re deeply missed by those that knew you.
sweet thunder – tape findings, via MeFi.
For balance, here are some inbound messages. Much to my amazement, I found no widespread incidence of collections of either odd messages, (such as these), or greeting messages (like the first link) as I Googled my way through my morning cuppa. This collection of outbound messages is frequently presented as traffic bait on bottom-trawling commercial sites.
Grover Is Bitter, via MeFi.
Bummer. BlogTorrent is wintel-only, for now.
Last night we went to see Neko Case at Neumo’s.
Click the pic for more blurry pix. I shot a fair amount of video, too. I’ll link to the clips here; they are all in quicktime format.
The show opened with the out-of-place on the bill Dexter Romweber, a true southern madman, who was in fine form. Despite this, his appearance befuddled the crowd, who were not expecting a guitar assault of such intensity. Romweber’s best known project is the Flat Duo Jets, and here is an interview with him about his career.
Here’s a 25-second clip (2.3mb).
The second band (and Neko’s backing band) was Canada’s alt-country brother act, The Sadies. They are technically polished, but the difference in aesthetic between Romweber and their approach was too great, for me, and in Romweber’s favor. The cool precision of the brothers’ vocal harmonies and dual-lead sound is deeply rooted in rock acts of the early seventies.
Here is 47 seconds of a Sadies song (4.4mb).
I shot a lot more video of Neko than of the other bands. We were right up front for the whole show, and it was lovely. I should note that the polish of the Sadies is an appropriate setting for Neko’s towering, transcendant voice.
Here are the clips:
A false start (4.6mb, 48 seconds).
The opening song (22.2mb, 3m54).
Third clip (12.3mb, 2m10).
Fourth clip (.6mb, 7 sec).
Fifth clip (3mb, 32 sec).
First encore (21.5mb, 3m46 ).
Second encore (12.8mb, 2m15).
I haven’t taken the time to track these down by song title, sorry. It took long enough to rotate them and color correct them in Final Cut Express. If one of you lovely interauts wants to, I’ll happily edit the post to add the info.
Say, I should probably look into BlogTorrent for this stuff, eh?
Hopkin came with us to Thanksgiving this year.
Old habits die hard, at the Guardian, via Eric.
I was late to the party, but now the Pogues records are among my very favorites.
Historical Maps of Europe, at Viewropa.
Help the iSight see better in the dark (macosxhints). iGlasses is a more fully-featured descendent of iChatUSBCam which unlocks the QuickTime video-quality controls in iChat and other QuickTime applications that present camera input data.
The Great Indecency Hoax, by Frank Rich in the NYT (and oddly, dated November 28) starteed my morning with as fine a belly laugh as any I’ve had of late.
Rich takes a look at the tempest in a teapot over a Monday Night Football skit involving a cross-promo for the hit show Desperate Housewives. I have been only peripherally aware of the ‘controversy’ this week; now that I work with someone who is a committed sports fan, I hear more about this stuff than I would have in the past.
At any rate, it should come as no surprise that said controversy is a pure media construct, and that apparently no-one was actually offended by the skit until two days after the event, when Rush Limbaugh made it into the center of a segment on his show.
Despite this, the piece only heats up about halfway through:
Again as in the Jackson case, we are also asked to believe that pro football is what Pat Buchanan calls “the family entertainment, the family sports show” rather than what it actually is: a Boschian jamboree of bumping-and-grinding cheerleaders, erectile-dysfunction pageantry and, as Don Imus puts it, “wife-beating drug addicts slamming the hell out of each other” on the field.
Which made me shoot coffee out my nose with laughter, since that more or less summarizes my own disinterest in pro sports. Reading it again still brings the funny.
The next paragraph cites the recent bit of top-notch blogsleuthery by Jeff Jarvis which revealed that an earlier incident which prompted a $1.2 m fine against Fox was based on a total of 3 unique complaints, the first time that I’ve seen this bit of data jump the fence from blogistan to greyladyland.
Jarvis is continuing to file FOIAs, too, so expect some more goodies!