If I had the machinery, I'd totally do this.

Ever go to, say, The Olive Garden at lunchtime, and there's this gigantic parking lot which is nonetheless packed to the gills, because the Olive Garden is for some reason a mecca for people who eat lunch.

Anyways, as you troll up and down, searching for a spot, there's always one or two assholes who have parked their giant-size Hot Wheels diagonally in two spots, because their tricked-out Honda Civic is so very, very precious that they cannot risk someone scratching it.

Now, if I owned a franchise where this happened on a regular basis, I'd have a towing company on the premises every day at noon to help themselves to any car that tried this. Since this never seems to happen, I know some people (no, it wasn't me in my rusty 85 Tercel, no way, no how, never me, uh-uh) who drive 85 Tercels rusty old cars that purposely scrape their shitbox car along the edge of such egomobiles. I would never do such a thing, but it's been known to happen, and I can't say as I feel much sympathy for the owners of the tricked-out shitbox-in-waiting.

But leave it to the geniuses at XKCD to come up with this bit of brilliance. It would take a bit of engineering skill and heavy equipment to pull it off, but we can all dream, can't we?



xkcd - A Webcomic - Parking

R2Dangerfield

Courtesy of The Zeray Gazette, we finally learn exactly what Artoo was saying. He pretty much bleeps for me.

Now, if I could just figure out how to fix this fucking page layout...

Edit: There's a bunch more episodes on youtube, but apparently they're done by other people who have no sense of humour, because they suck.

I can dream...

...of being as serene as Hank the Hermit, brought to us courtesy of Again With The Comics, via the always-interesting Boing Boing.




(click for full size)

On Selling Out

The subject: Iggy Pop's car insurance adverts.

I encountered this by way of Michael Bérubé's blog, and this BBC News article on the subject, and originally wrote what's below as a response to the BBC website. By the time you (all two of you) read this, it may be on their page as a comment, depending on if they let words like "piss" and "arse" through their filters... anyways.

I'm in the jaded and apathetic camp as regards the concept of selling out. Indeed, this is the only rational position to take about it, because what we're really talking about is nonconformity. Nonconformity is great, and I consider myself a nonconformist, but a lot of people seem to mistake ANTIconformity with NONconformity, when in fact anticonformity is indeed simply an inverted form of conformity.

That being said, I did find the "Get @ Life" shot of Iggy's ads both jarring and oddly fascinating, and after reading this article, I figured out why: The "Circle A" is a venerable symbol of the anarchic, punk spirit of true personal and artistic freedom. It is, to people of a certain age and mindset, as sacred an icon as the virgin is to Catholics, a fact which is self-reflexively subverted by the fact that its original association was with pissing on the very idea of the sacred.

And that's what we need to keep in mind here - the punks of Iggy's era, particularly the Raw Power-Sex Pistols-CBGB late 70s, were a raw assault on all mainstream sensibility. When the Pistols rented that boat and blared God Save the Queen from the Thames for all of London to hear, they were going beyond the Do-Your-Own-Thing freedom of the 60s straight to the jugular, in hopes of tasting the blood of mainstream society's fragile (and hypocritical) sensibilities.

Fast Forward to 2009, when Iggy Pop stands in front of the most nakedly cynical and hamfisted attempt to coopt punk, the "Get @ Life" graffiti bomb. Leaving aside the possible textual readings (Get at life, get anarchic life, get a haircut and a job and a "real" life), we have a man whose punk cred is (was?) unassailable standing in front of this banner, this clumsy attempt whose main offense is the abject stupidity of whoever came up with it, and Iggy is trying to SELL US SOMETHING. To people of a certain age and mindset, this is as deep an insult/assault to the sensibilities as was the famous boat ride of the Sex Pistols during the queen's jubilee.

That assault on the sensibilities, friends, is punk. Don't howl in protest, because you know I'm right. Iggy is laughing his ass off, I'm quite certain, because it's been literally decades since he was able to raise more than a sigh of boredom by rolling around in peanut butter and broken glass. But to turn on us, to "sell out" and to do so with people who clearly have no clue? That is provocative, in an age that has become largely immune to artistic provocation.

I wish him well, and hope just as fervently as I did a week ago that I'll be able to catch him live before he's gone, because Iggy rules, and his picking up a few bucks while thumbing his arse at the people who would tell him what he's allowed to do will never change that.

Free comic/cartoon idea:

Howl, The Beatnik Werewolf. Or the werebeatnik. You could work in the curse of Moloch in there somewhere as the cause of his, umm, "lykeruanthropy".

Someday, one guy will read the above and laugh his ass off, and possibly run with it. Just let me know if you do, cause I'd like to read it.

Death to the industry!

This is a repost of a response I made to an entry on Elliott Randall's MySpace blog back in 2006. If you don't know the name, you know the man's work: he played lead guitar on Steely Dan's Reelin' in the Years, which starts with the 11 notes that, when I was a mere toddler, catalyzed my lifelong obsession with music. Mr. Randall is arguably the reason I'm sitting here writing this. Anyways, the entire entry and thread are here, if you want to check it out, but I've always felt that this really comes very close to encapsulating my views on music, so I present it here as well.

Also, I was considering cleaning up some of the text, but I decided to just leave it as is, if only for the amusement you'll feel at the rather quaint idea that I had, waaaay back in 2006, that $80 was an expensive concert ticket... and here we go.

Lots of great replies to this already, and I'm probably gonna echo a couple of them here.

There's a lot of things that have played into bringing us to this spot, but I remember when Napster was still around, people (the RIAA's people, mostly) were sounding the deathknell of the recording industry, and my immediate reaction was "we can only hope."

Now, take that the way I mean it, but as Elliot already pointed out, artists have been getting shafted by the industry for decades already, and while all this file downloading is certain to have a LOT of casualties, I can't help wondering whether, when it all shakes down, artists won't end up being better off.

It's been mentioned that the notion of intellectual property is on the way out, and I tend to agree with this, but there are powerful people who are going to fight hard to keep it. This goes way beyond the recording industry: look at biotech, for instance, who are pushing for the right to patent human DNA, or the pharmaceutical industry, who are pushing doctors to prescribe their expensive, and often unsafe, pills, and who will not budge on things like reducing prices for AIDS medications for victims of the epidemic in Africa. This, too, is intellectual property at work, and I don't think that the eventual death of intellectual property would be all bad either - this debate goes far beyond the borders of the music world.

And just how legitimate is this notion of owning a song, anyways? In fact, this is a very recent phenomenon, placed in the context of the whole history of music, is it not? I don't know exactly how classical music worked, but most of us work in the milieu of popular music, and any folk music fan knows that the idea of authorship is actually quite a hazy one. Traditional folk music draws on a number of key chord progressions, rhythms and lyrical themes, altering them slightly, rearranging them, moving one set of lyrics to a different set of chords - any blues or folk music (which are really the same thing) fan will know exactly what I'm talking about.

One of my favourite albums right now is Richard Thompson's '1000 years of popular music,' which runs the gamut from 'Sumer is Icumen In' all the way to 'Oops! I Did It Again!' - a great concept, though it could easily have filled a box set, or several box sets, and still remained incomplete.

But I digress. Jazz musicians, I am told, draw on 'standards,' which enable them to instinctually know where a jam is going. Similarly, the virtuosity that can be observed in the rhythm section at any blues jam is remarkable - somehow they know when the song is stopping, where it's going. Country musicians have what a friend of mine's musician father called "Nashville tab," a shorthand way for an experienced musician to walk onstage, speak to the band for 30 seconds, and then they all play, flawlessly. From this, I tentatively extrapolate (I know there's a lot of musicians present - feel free to correct me) that all musical forms have a basic vocabulary, a set of giants' shoulders if you will, on which all individual creativity rests, and a big part of becoming proficient in said form is learning this language - to know in a blues song, for instance, when you hear the I chord turn to a 7th, that you're about to go to the IV.

Song ownership really began in earnest, as I understand it, with the Tin Pan Alley era, where every good house was expected to have a piano, and would then, of course, require a collection of sheet music. Later, that paradigm became a phonograph and a collection of disks or cylinders, and then a Hi-Fi and LP records, and then a stereo and CDs, and then...

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Something bad happened in there somewhere: the invention of the phonograph. Previous to that, music was something that you DID, not something you bought. In that era, music could be a profession if you were good - bars with pianos would hire people, for instance - but mostly women just sang while they hung out the washing, farmers practiced the fiddle over the winter (and read books, another activity that's increasingly unpopular these days), kids were given lessons and expected to learn. Music permeated the lives of everyone, not just people to whom the label "musician" was applied.

The death of the recording industry won't bring that era back, as nice a thought as that is, but perhaps along with the many casualties that are coming from this era of shaking things down, some of the more odious aspects of modern music will also die out:

Things like the idea that a musician, as well as being talented, must also serve as eye candy. The primacy of visual beauty has gotten so ridiculous that nowadays, you don't even have to be able to SING - they've got pitch correctors for that. Once upon a time they were trying to make machines sound human, but now they'll settle for making humans sound like machines.

Maybe Clear Channel will croak, and their stranglehold on the airwaves, in which the same damn 500 songs get played over and over on every damn station on the dial, maybe that will end.

Maybe the idea that a live show needs to be a song and dance spectacular, with billion-dollar lighting rigs and ten costume changes and rising platforms and big screens and sattelite feeds, maybe all that can die out, and people will stop going to shows to "Be Entertained" and start going to "Hear Music" again. When that happens, concerts will no longer need to cost $80 for the worst nosebleed tickets.

I'm sorry, I babble and babble. Hopefully y'all get that when I say we can only hope that the industry dies, I actually say that out of my love for music, not my disrespect for musicians. We all, musicians and fans (of which I am both), deserve better than this.

Special bonus Steely Dan oddity for making it this far: a live performance of Do It Again featuring David Palmer instead of Donald Fagen on vocals.



Palmer is an interesting example of the record industry at work - as I recall, Fagen was not originally acceptable as the group's frontman (whether because his vocals were not considered up to snuff or because he was such an ugly bastard is open to debate), so Mr. Palmer was brought in to front the band, and was long gone by the time the second album came out.

That's it, I'm moving to Sweden.

This is the coolest workplace ever. And of course, like all awesome things*, it's in Sweden.



*Except Abba. Abba sucks, they have always sucked, they always will suck, and nothing anyone says can change the fact that Abba is the sucky black hole into which Sweden channelled all of its lame, unleashing it upon an unsuspecting West which was too gullible to realize what was going on. And that's why Sweden today is full of awesome.