Posted on by mwhybark

Tick and sizzle

The snow is mking tiny, sharp noises against the window for the second night in a row. I’m not stressed, exactly – we have a plan, it worked today and it should work tomorrow. The snow from last night didn’t even last, but by the time we were headed home, it had started up.

Man, I left the Midwest to get the fuck away from this kind of weather. I mean, these snowfalls this winter still have amounted to a mere gesture in the direction of the kind of shit I lived through as a kid, but the high points are there. Municipal incompetence and unpreparedness. Prolonged personal discomfort. Et cetera.

I have made light of false winter and true winter over the past year. Turns out I hate true winter as bad as false winter.

Posted on by mwhybark

Lux Extinguere

RIP, Lux Interior

Roll on, rock on, raw bones
Well there’s still a lot of rythm in these
Rockin’ Bones

I wanna leave a happy memory when I go,
I wanna leave something to let the whole world know,
that the rock n roll daddy has a done passed on,
but my bones will keep a rockin’ long after I’ve gone

Roll on, rock on, raw bones
Well there’s still a lot of rythm in these
Rockin’ Bones

Well when I die don’t you bury me at all
Just nail my bones up on the wall
Beneath these bones let these words be seen,
“This is the bloody gears of a boppin’ machine”

Roll on, rock on, raw bones
Well there’s still a lot of rythm in these
Rockin’ Bones

I don’t worry about tomorrow just thinkin’ about tonight
My bones are getting restless and I do it up right
A few more times around a hardwood floor
Before we turn off the lights and close the door

Roll on, rock on, raw bones
Well there’s still a lot of rythm in these
Rockin’ Bones

Posted on by mwhybark

Mighty Arrow

Picked up the new Belgium seasonal this weekend. It’s a nice hoppy pale called Mighty Arrow, memorializing a brewery dog it seems. I LOVE THE BEER. The tiny picture of the dog on the label seems to resemble Rocket, too. It’s the first New Belgium product that immediately led me to desire a tee shirt or some such.

Posted on by mwhybark

DTV idiocy update

Andy Inahtko has taken the time to scrape the inside of my skull on the great upcoming digital leap forward. It’s a swindle, a ripoff, and a bad idea poorly implemented. I sure hope there’s a giant shitstorm of angry consumers come February. I want to see pitchforks and torches and rails!

“ATSC is a badly bungled standard, badly implemented. It puts a hell of a tax on the poorest Americans.

Why is broadcast analog TV being shut down? Because those frequencies were auctioned off for private use. Rights to that bandwidth were sold to AT&T and Verizon last year for $19.6 billion.

There are some benefits to general consumers. Like real estate, the laws of physics aren’t manufacturing any additional usable bandwidth and occasionally, existing property must be “redeveloped.” The biggest chunk of the former analog-TV spectrum (termed “Block C” in the auction) was sold to Verizon with the proviso that it has to be used for an “open” network which can be joined and exploited by any compatible device from any maker.”