Peep Research documents the effects of cold, heat, solubility and low pressure on marshmallow peeps. (Also smoking and alcohol.) Here, after 30 seconds in a 600-watt microwave, "our subject did indeed demonstrate a marked increase in size consistent with fear responses described in other species."
|W|P|93558611|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comCallooh! Callay! After untold months of suffering, and after 50 minutes on the phone with Intuit and my bank, I have burst the rusty shackles of the Unaccepted Transaction Popup! No more must I click No when I would prefer to click What On Earth Are You Talking About?! It wasn't even a CCB problem, after all my endless grousing—it was a couple of Vanguard IRAs that I never even update online. Pah!
|W|P|93495975|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death."—Francis Bacon, "An Essay on Death"
"I would rather live in a world where life is surrounded by mystery, than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it."—Harry Emerson Fosdick, D.D.
|W|P|93426312|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comSpamgourmet creates self-destructing disposable email addresses. Just give them your "real" forwarding address and create a new one, like me@spamgourmet.com. Then you can give out any number of fake addresses of the form someword.x.me@spamgourmet.com, where someword is any word and x tells the system how many messages to accept at this temporary address (that is, how many real messages you expect to get before the flood of crap begins). "The rest will be indelicately consumed."
|W|P|93292390|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comI see that Spock's Beard is working on a new album. I hope it's good; I can't find any music really worth listening to. Here's a bunch of candidates that suck: Rammstein, Apples in Stereo, Deep Dish, Teenage Fanclub, Blues Saraceno, Atomic Opera, Big Star, Glassjaw, Greg Howe, Richie Kotzen, King Tubby, Queens of the Stone Age. I've been looking all over. Some of these don't really suck, but they're just not very good. It's amazing how much music is just not very good. Not written intelligently, or too self-conscious and posey, or thin on ideas, or just technically bad and off-key.
Spock's Beard is in kind of a tricky spot right now, since Neil Morse announced his departure earlier this year. They have a good singer in Nick D'Virgilio, but I think everyone's watching to see whether they start to drift into commercialism now that the main prog writer is gone. The parallels with post-Gabriel Genesis are inescapable. I think the smartest thing they could do is release an instrumental album. That would play to the strengths of the remaining members, and avoid spotlighting the loss of Morse's voice and lyrics. They could introduce singing in a later album, once the fans bought in. There's precedent for an all-instrumental prog album—Camel's The Snow Goose was among their most successful albums.
|W|P|93233501|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comGeorge Martin in The Songwriting Newsletter:
When people say to me, "I can't believe that you made that record on a four-track," I say that it was an advantage because, having the constraints that you had, you had to work through it, you had to work harder, you had to think more to get the effects you wanted. I feel that having the constraints really helped me in many ways.|W|P|93213174|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
An article in Asia Times suggests that online journalism might finally be viable. Most of the data they cite are from eMarketer, which is understandably biased, but there's enough other info to support the point convincingly. Some high points:
- 60 percent of the 53 billion annual online consumer dollars are spent at the workplace. Of these at-work users, 45 percent notice ads online and say the ads influence them. "The average total time spent online at the office per Internet visitor last November was an amazing 35.5 hours." So advertisers want a medium that employees can use at work—and the web is about the only choice there, certainly not television, radio, or print media.
- Those who use the web, particularly at work, have cut their television viewing time by 28.8 percent, their magazine reading time by 22.5 percent and newspaper reading by 23 percent.
- Conventional newspapers are dying. 70 percent of people born before 1946 read a newspaper on a typical weekday. For baby boomers, that has dropped to about 58 percent. For the so-called Generation X, it is only 46 percent. The average newspaper reader in the United States is now about 46 years old.
Most telling: One survey found that 46 percent of all trade title journalists believe their publication will be available only online within the next 15 years. Some 25 percent of those working for consumer magazines believe the same. Overall, 12 percent of journalists believe their publication will exist solely online within the next five years, while 20 percent expect their publication to go this way in the next 10 years.
|W|P|93074871|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
See the history of rock and roll enacted by marshmallow peeps.
|W|P|92926991|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comBrilliant quote this morning on rec.music.progressive:
Pretending there is any difference between "getting it" and "liking it" is the sort of pretentious bullshit that gives fans of classical music (and prog) a bad name.|W|P|92884235|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
I've been playing a lot of my chess on Yahoo, just because it's easier to get a game there. But I'm going to try to spend more time on FICS. The interface is more arcane, but the players are generally stronger. I think I can learn more there.
This game pushed my rating up to 1701, which is within 2 points of my all-time high. Only two tactical errors, which is not bad for such a sharp game.
|W|P|92808217|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comUlli's Roy Orbison in Cling-Film Site: "Hello, and welcome to my homepage. My name is Ulrich Haarburste and I like to write stories about Roy Orbison being wrapped up in cling-film."
|W|P|92804167|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comBoing Boing reports that the March 2, 1998, issue of Time ran a piece by George Bush and Brent Scowcroft titled "Why We Didn't Remove Saddam." Excerpt:
We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-cold war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.'s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different—and perhaps barren—outcome.|W|P|92722826|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Jesus. Jesus. Larry Carlton says he doesn't know what a pentatonic scale is. He "couldn't name one" mode. He doesn't think in terms of scales, just the chord-upon-chord idea that he came up with in the '70s.
Jesus.
Jesus.
|W|P|92679023|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comHe was cut off almost immediately, but Fareed Zakaria made an interesting point on This Week yesterday. No oil state is a liberal democracy, except Norway, and Norway discovered its oil after writing its constitution. Zakaria says that the colossal wealth that comes with oil begets repressive, feudal dictatorships, precisely because these states don't have to go through the trouble of evolving.
I always wondered why those nations hate us so much when we're exactly the ones who have made them so spectacularly wealthy. I'm sure they themselves don't see it that way, but I'm also sure Zakaria's point is true. And it's not just the Middle East—it's also true in South America and Africa.
|W|P|92614118|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comAn Unimaginative Haiku
First, five syllables.
Second, seven syllables.
Third, five syllables.
"What's going to happen the first time we hold an election in Iraq and it turns out the radicals win? What do you do? We're surely not going to let them take over."—Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to George Bush I
|W|P|92390582|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comGoogle Labs is working on Google Sets, a creepy but useful application of the slumbering knowledge base that their search engine creates.
"Enter a few items from a set of things ... and we'll try to predict other items in the set."
Desperate for new music, I enter "Spock's Beard Echolyn King Crimson" and I get "Echolyn Spock's Beard King Crimson Marillion Dream Theater Genesis Rush Yes Shadow Gallery Savatage Porcupine Tree TransAtlantic Vanden Plas Jethro Tull Vanishing Point Pink Floyd Gentle Giant Camel IQ Led Zeppelin Moody Blues Angra Nightwish Rhapsody Ayreon UK QUEENSRYCHE Ozric Tentacles Kansas Frank Zappa Tangerine Dream Mike Oldfield," which is pretty damn good for only three terms. I haven't even heard of some of these bands—I'll have to check them out:
Symphony X
Threshold
Kamelot
Superior
Peter Gabriel
Caravan
Kate Bush
Hawkwind
PENDRAGON
ELP
Ice Age
Lemur Voice
Genesis 3
Magnitude 9
Fates Warning
Celebdaq bills itself as a celebrity share-trading game. It's played on the web and monitored via a weekly TV show on BBC3. When you sign up they give you 10,000 pounds, and you buy and sell "shares" in listed celebrities. Every week, the shares you own pay out a dividend, depending on how much press coverage those celebrities received. So if you buy low and sell high, you can become eligible for a weekly cash prize of 100 pounds.
As I write this, the top shares over the last week are Christine Hamilton, J.K. Rowling, Colin Farrell, Daniella Westbrook, and Jude Law. (The thing is understandably Anglophile.) It's an interesting idea—the very fact that the whole thing works is an ironic commentary on fame.
|W|P|92319905|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comEeeeugh. It's a wet, dark Monday morning, immediately after daylight savings time. I've lived the last five years in Indiana, which eschews this barbaric practice. Now I remember why.
|W|P|92145922|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comI can't decide whether to like Borges' fiction. His ideas are clever, but they're sort of antiseptic, and the stories as stories are clumsy and unaffecting. And, of course, in translation the language can be awkward, opaque or pedestrian. Maybe I'm not smart enough? I'm getting tired of deciding that I'm not smart enough to appreciate what is widely admired. I'm kind of smart. A work that won't give up its secrets to an earnest reader who is kind of smart is maybe not deserving of wide admiration. I'll keep trying, but at what point am I entitled to decide that it's just overrated? Maybe I should try his nonfiction instead.
|W|P|92062513|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comWell, well, well. In The Road Less Traveled, Scott Peck wrote that discipline is the key to mental health. But he also spoke of "disciplined discipline," by which he meant that you shouldn't slavishly follow a plan if the broader circumstances indicate otherwise. "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds," Emerson wrote.
Well, apparently both of those guys are more mature than I am, because I just worked a 10-hour day and now I'm going to lift weights. I haven't missed a workout this year, and I don't want to miss one now.
Does that make me a sick person?
|W|P|92012788|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comAphorisms Galore! is just that.
|W|P|91881972|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comI should start playing the piano again. It's been weeks since I've touched it, and it just sits in the guest bedroom, reproaching me. I played it for a few minutes this evening, and my fingers seem to remember most of what I've learned. Back when I was playing regularly I seemed to be making progress—I could feel my intuition becoming more accurate.
It's been many years since I've played guitar regularly, but I still play it all the time in my head. Probably every day. With guitar I got to the point where I didn't have to think about technique, and could focus on note choice and phrasing. I'd like to get to that point with piano—from the start it struck me as a more intuitive instrument. I think it would be much easier to play the piano by ear.
|W|P|91812857|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com