Day 12 was exclusively more shingling on the outside. I won’t post pictures of that until it’s done. Day 13 had another unplanned improvement. The sliding glass door has been replaced. We did it for a variety of reasons. First, it was 30 years old and we knew it would need replacing eventually. It would be more expensive and much more difficult to do it later. And although we thought it was working all right, occasionally it got off its track, and it never operated completely smoothly in the nine years we’ve lived here. Once it had been removed it was obvious that one of the wheels was broken.
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I’ve included a picture of the new living room window that’s nine inches narrower than the original. Some of the wallpaper had to be removed to get it ready for the finish work, and the next thing we knew the decision was made to remove ALL of the wallpaper! So I stripped the wall, took down the custom drapes that came with the house, and pulled out all of the mounting hardware. I’ll strip the rest of the living room, wash off the glue, and paint it whatever color Carol wants.
Hallelujah! Bismo has added an entry to his blog. This blog here, by the way, is coming up on its first anniversary. Can’t say I have anything special in particular planned.
Today’s news includes this quote about our cognitively challenged head of state in name, and his boss, the devious and deceptive vice head:
In an hour and a half meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in a secure Pentagon room dubbed “the Tank,” Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney heard from leaders of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, who are worried about strains that are building on the forces — and on troops’ families — as a result of lengthy and repeated tours in Iraq. Bush did not speak in person after the meeting, but he issued a statement saying he is committed to giving the military “all it needs to meet the challenges of this new century.”
What exactly does Bush mean when he says he’s committed to giving the military all it needs?? Ignoring the fact that the troops in Iraq have never been properly equipped with body and vehicle armor, even to maintain the present “surge-level” of ground forces the military needs MORE MEN!
This isn’t Viet Nam, when the Draft assured the war’s continuation. The war ended when the Draft ended, and it’s not coming back to feed Iraq. Bush has run out of options. He can’t leave things as they are, so why don’t we just LEAVE??
The granddaddy of anime is Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy, a TV show that held much fascination for me in childhood. Partially a mixture of Frankenstein and Pinocchio, Astro Boy was often whimsical to the point of being surreal. Here’s Astro wishing he had a mother, in a scene seemingly inspired by Salvador Dali.
That eerie sound is a Theremin, also heard prominently in Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend. A staple of horror and science fiction films, the Theremin was famously used by Brian Wilson in “Good Vibrations.”
Some of the tech blogs recently highlighted an article from the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers called The Future of Sound. This sort of thing is fascinating to me, but the gist of it is that recorded music today is loud and overly compressed so that its volume level changes very little.
There’s nothing new about this, of course. Singles were “cut hot” to sound good on cheap record players and AM radio, and a lot of rock albums had a lot of compression. For example, here’s a track that I had posted back in May, that was unfortunately lost in the Great Database Debacle — Nick Lowe’s production of his song “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding?”, performed by Elvis Costello and the Attractions.
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I transfered this song from the 1979 American version of the “Armed Forces” LP. The audio spectrum shows the recording to be highly compressed, with relatively little variation in loudness. For contrast, next to it is the audio spectrum for the Dan Hicks song “I Scare Myself,” taken from LP and posted back here.
Obviously the Hicks recording is much more dynamic than Costello’s, but that’s to be expected, in part because it’s a recording of acoustic instruments. The problem is, this music is harder to listen to in a car, or on an MP3 player. And that’s the way most music is heard today. The age of the golden-eared audiophile sitting back and listening to the latest equipment while sipping wine and marveling at the “silky highs” and “controlled bass” is over. Was it ever really about the music for these guys anyway, or was it about the gear?
Speaking of MP3 players, The Boston Globe has an article called The Running Debate, about banning headphones in road races. For a long time I thought of running while listening to music the same way as I still think about using a cellphone while driving — NO! The latter I still believe, but I changed my mind about running.
I’ve been running for nearly 35 years, and as much as I enjoy it, the idea of going out for more than, say, 10 miles just listening to my own foot falls is a bore, now that I’ve done it with music. I buy $10 Sony open-ear headphones for my SanDisk player. They let me to hear approaching cars, and I toss them the moment that one channel inevitably starts to cut out. I don’t use sound-isolating earbuds because they’re expensive and I worry they might cut out too much ambient noise.
Having said that, I don’t listen to music when I race, mostly because I want to be as unencumbered as possible. I don’t wear my wedding ring when racing, for that matter. But I think the races banning players is silly because you have to sign a waiver anyway, saying you’re taking full responsibility for yourself. So I assume the ban is nothing more than a way for race officials to cover their bases if there’s an accident while racing. The idea that somebody would actually be disqualified for a music player is ridiculous.
