Well, I guess my blog has hit the big-time. Regular, observant visitors may have noticed some “SPAM” comments showing up recently on the “recent comments” over there to the right. Bankruptcy loans and Texas Hold-Em poker are the subjects du jour. Having done a little reasearch, I believe these comments to have been placed not by humans, but by robots. The mechanical bane of mankind, I say! Well, in an attempt to “nip [this problem] in the bud”, I have implemented ANTI-ROBOT MEASURES on the comment system. This system is know in the industry as a “CAPTCHA“.
What does CAPTCHA mean? Well, it stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart”. You know those little boxes with the squiggly letters and numbers you are asked to fill in before you can proceed with a form on the internet? That is a captcha. It’s used to prevent robots from crawling through, say, lists of available tickets on TicketMaster. The term “Turing Test” is a generic name for any test that is capable of determining if the subject being tested has the presence of mind or intelligence. (“Intelligence” in this case means being able to think on its own, and not have to follow a set of logic rules, as robots do).
Please give the comments system a run-through, and feel free to email me if you have any problems.
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For you, gentle reader, I bring recommendations of rock…
- …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, Worlds Apart
They got my unpublished “Best Name in Rock” award back in 2004, and yeah, so I gave their prior album “Source Tags & Codes” about 2 minutes of attention back in 2003(?), and never listened to it again. Looks like I’m making another of my apologies to rock bands again… Worlds Apart rules in so many varied ways. They’ve got a sorta nerdy thing going on, but they bring the rock right along with it. Archaeology + sociology + rockology = AYWKUBTTOD?
- Death From Above 1979, You’re A Woman, I’m a Machine
DFA 1979 is two Canadian guys with a synthesizer and a bass guitar. Now, normally, that is usually just spelled out D-I-S-A-S-T-E-R, but not this time, oh no! I think I described it to Najati as “dance-inspired noise rawk”, and I think that just about sums it up. Like 75% noise rawk, 25% ass-shakery. It’s all good.
- Sleater-Kinney, The Woods (Advance Copy)
Yeah, so I got a copy of this via a lil’ birdie. The girls of Sleater-Kinney have asked very nicely for those folks who are currently dealing it over the intarweb to kindly cut it out. However, since my deed has already been done, and I have listened to it in its entirety — I’ll say this: It rules. In their letter to the pirates, they mentioned that the record “is a response to the deadening and watering down of music”, and I can’t agree more. It’s noisy, loud and far more thrashing as any of their previous records. We likes it very much.
- Sunday Nights – The Songs of Junior Kimbrough
Junior Kimbrough is credited by Dan Auerbach of the Blakc Keys as “his first record purchase”, and he has created a number of contemporary blues classics that inspired many, from Iggy Pop (who appears on the album with The Stooges) to the White Stripes (not to mention the Black Keys). This various-artists tribute lines up like a hipster funeral wake for Kimbrough. Cat Power, Iggy Pop & The Stooges, Mark Lanegan, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, etc. Some really fantastic tracks on here, especially from The Stooges, Cat Power and The Black Keys.
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…I am in no way a white supremacist or a member of any Aryan group. Further, I would like to thank the intarweb at large for making me have to make statements like that.
It would seem that someone from the intarweb took my posting entitled “the pride of the species” to mean that I endorse Aryanism. Long story short on that posting was that the The Smoking Gun had posted a photo about the “scariest con ever”, and I had related that to my own overly-elaborate plan for the now-legendary “Goat House“, which is (of course) a reality TV-show wherein Death Row inmates battle it out each week in a bleek, unadorned house for a goat which is inserted (dropped through the ceiling) weekly.
You may notice comments from a “Callie” on the sidebar over there. Well, I also received a strange email from a one Calista Alvaraz, the contents are here exposed:
From: Calista Alvaraz
Date: 3/8/2005 5:42 PM
To: ben@XXXXXX
are you proud to be who you are?? i am in jail rite now… doin time for hate crimes are you about you skin as you put out???? let me know what is your deal.. pride power justice supremacy or what?? i am skin for life from a orginization called save our skins or S.O.S hit me up …
So – for the record – I don’t endorse such things, and frankly I don’t see how you could assume that I endorse Aryanism or any sort of white-power credo. I talked about putting him on a show called “Goat House” wherein death-row inmates battled it out for a goat a week for chrissakes. So, sorry, I gave at the office.
P.S. – If you should happen to make it to Death Row, please do contact me regarding “Ladies Goat House”
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Man — not a month goes by that I don’t find myself apologizing to one band or another for not listening. I’ve publically acknowledged this before, but now I’ve got to do it again. This time, it’s Death from Above 1979. I had seen their music being bandied about with furious intensity over on IndieTorrents, and I had read the Pitchfork review of You’re a woman, I’m a machine a while back. I thought that it was probably just a bunch of indie-hipster saber-rattling, but o’ how I was wrong. These pair of canucks throw down the beat-infused noise rawk! Go and find yourself a show or a file on their website.
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A couple of years ago, at the urging of Najati, I read Joe Sacco’s account of life in the Palestinian state, aptly entitled “Palestine”. Sacco is an award-winning journalist, which is kind of odd because his medium is not newspaper or television or even radio, but rather the graphic novel. “Comm-ick books” you might say, but if you’d give over an hour or two to read “Palestine,” you’d think differently. “Palestine” details the day-to-day struggles of the ordinary people in the Palestinian state in the early 1990′s (before the most recent intifada) with unusual detail — gritty, gruesome, and often comic.
This time, he has published a short 8-page report from Iraq alongside American troops, entitled
Complacency Kills (32meg PDF). Again, he manages to detail the real-life details of war and its effects on the average person with stark detail and wry humor. Well worth the read.
If you are interested in any of Sacco’s stuff, I highly suggest good ol’ Fantagraphics. Also, here is a good interview with Joe Sacco.
“Comics are just words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures.” — Harvey Pekar.
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