on my ride home tonight i saw something interesting. road rage at its best. fortunately, no one was hurt, but it provided some entertaining moments (for me at least).
at one point in my ride, a car was behind me and flashed their highbeams at me. i didn't think much of it as i had cars to my left, right and in front of me so there wasn't anywhere i could go, so i just ignored it. that is until i was in the left center lane, there is a car in the left lane, and he gets highbeamed by the same car. rather than ignore it, he slammed on his brakes. which got the highbeam guy to back off.
for a moment. he sped back up and so did highbeam which again flashed his highbeams and again, the guy slams on his brakes and slows the entire lane down to much less than it was. i had to laugh, but i was glad no one got into an accident.
then when i was at the supermarket, one of the kids who packs the bags correctly identified the eyeball on my shirt as The Residents. he thought they were pretty cool, but had never heard anything by them.
at least there is some recognition, even if people have no idea what it is they have an idea of.
Friday, December 29, 2006
Sunday, December 24, 2006
swiped from TK, who swiped it from...who swiped it from...and because i feel like wasting some time because i really don't have anything else to do: Post the first sentence from the first post from every month of 2006.
January: another day, another year, so let's start off with some odd factoids courtesy of the BBC (whatta ya know...the link is still good!)
February: sunday night headliners?
March: i'm watching 24 right now (the following happens between 5pm and 6pm) and they are looking for (well, just killed) a terrorist in the basement of a hospital and i was reminded of something i think of from time to time.
April: work continues to be busy.
May: not like many people care who read this, but i thought this was funny.
June: damn
July: i thought that i, like everyone else in this world (at least those who live under the umbrella of human rights), had the right to be bored.
August: it's hot hot hot out there.
September: Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin was killed today by a sting ray.
October: T-Minus 24 Days
November: whoa.
December: TK told me this a while back so i was excited then, but seeing this has me excited now.
Friday, December 22, 2006
on a Tool board, someone posted a link to the following article (Most Americans have had premarital sex, added below because it will be lost shortly by yahoo)
someone then posted the following:
dude, premarital sex is awesome. there's nothing like laying pipe knowing that every time you do it, an angel loses its wings.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA...
here's the article for posterity
Most Americans have had premarital sex
By DAVID CRARY, AP National Writer
Tue Dec 19, 6:44 PM ET
NEW YORK - More than nine out of 10 Americans, men and women alike, have had premarital sex, according to a new study. The high rates extend even to women born in the 1940s, challenging perceptions that people were more chaste in the past.
"This is reality-check research," said the study's author, Lawrence Finer. "Premarital sex is normal behavior for the vast majority of Americans, and has been for decades."
Finer is a research director at the Guttmacher Institute, a private New York-based think tank that studies sexual and reproductive issues and which disagrees with government-funded programs that rely primarily on abstinence-only teachings. The study, released Tuesday, appears in the new issue of Public Health Reports.
The study, examining how sexual behavior before marriage has changed over time, was based on interviews conducted with more than 38,000 people — about 33,000 of them women — in 1982, 1988, 1995 and 2002 for the federal National Survey of Family Growth. According to Finer's analysis, 99 percent of the respondents had had sex by age 44, and 95 percent had done so before marriage.
Even among a subgroup of those who abstained from sex until at least age 20, four-fifths had had premarital sex by age 44, the study found.
Finer said the likelihood of Americans having sex before marriage has remained stable since the 1950s, though people now wait longer to get married and thus are sexually active as singles for extensive periods.
The study found women virtually as likely as men to engage in premarital sex, even those born decades ago. Among women born between 1950 and 1978, at least 91 percent had had premarital sex by age 30, he said, while among those born in the 1940s, 88 percent had done so by age 44.
"The data clearly show that the majority of older teens and adults have already had sex before marriage, which calls into question the federal government's funding of abstinence-only-until-marriage programs for 12- to 29-year-olds," Finer said.
Under the Bush administration, such programs have received hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding.
"It would be more effective," Finer said, "to provide young people with the skills and information they need to be safe once they become sexually active — which nearly everyone eventually will."
Wade Horn, assistant secretary for children and families at the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services, defended the abstinence-only approach for teenagers.
"One of its values is to help young people delay the onset of sexual activity," he said. "The longer one delays, the fewer lifetime sex partners they have, and the less the risk of contracting a sexually transmitted disease."
He insisted there was no federal mission against premarital sex among adults.
"Absolutely not," Horn said. "The Bush administration does not believe the government should be regulating or stigmatizing the behavior of adults."
Horn said he found the high percentages of premarital sex cited in the study to be plausible, and expressed hope that society would not look askance at the small minority that chooses to remain abstinent before marriage.
However, Janice Crouse of Concerned Women for America, a conservative group which strongly supports abstinence-only education, said she was skeptical of the findings.
"Any time I see numbers that high, I'm a little suspicious," she said. "The numbers are too pat."
Leslee Unruh, who runs a South Dakota-based organization promoting abstinence-only education, contended that increasing numbers of young people were open to remaining chaste until marriage.
Thursday, December 21, 2006
and it's official. at least as of tomorrow afternoon. no longer shall i be desktop & infrastructure specialist molius, but you shall now refer to me as network administrator molius (with all rights and respect that is befitting my new title).
Read More......and to add insult to injury, there's an accident right AFTER the exit i use to get on to the highway.
YOU FUCKING IDIOTS!
and to hell with the good thing now. now i'm just pissed at the 10 FUCKING IDIOTS who don't know how to drive.
MERRY FUCKING X-MAS YOU STUPID FUCKING DRIVERS!
oh goody...
i turn on the news and the top story is:
8 CAR PILE UP
where i'm going to have to drive. it's now backed up for some 10-15 miles they say, and i get on around mile 11 from the accident.
you FUCKERS.
WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU THINKING?
enjoy your merry fucking christmas you 8 FUCKING IDIOTS!
in other news, M bought me this for x-mas. thank you M.
Sunday, December 17, 2006
i've been asked more questions this morning than i have on many previous sunday mornings. struck me as odd, as usually the only words i speak pertain to my bag choice (paper, plastic or none) when i get my paper, and the dunkin' order (may i help you, would you like anything else, which today was asked twice, usually just once)
but on my way into get the paper, someone stopped and asked me if i knew when the liquor store was opening. (i believe state law says noon on sundays, but could be earlier as this is the holiday season) so i told him noon, he thanked me and off we went in separate directions. but i was wondering why he would ask me what time the liquor store opened, particularly as i was clearly headed towards the supermarket. and what made me look like an authority for when the liquor store was going to open? i dunno. stuck me funny.
then when i got home, KO asked me if i had heard any mice in my apartment. no mice, i did in my last apartment, but that was in part a house in need of updating, living in the woods, and it being a basement apartment. accoring to batlady, there were more cats in the neighborhood, there was less of a mouse problem, but there were less cats to help control the population. apparently, one of the ladies that lived here before i did had a gerbil, and for whatever reason one day let it roam around the apartment. only it found some way down into the basement where it lived for a little while and has since presumably died (stuck in the walls). KO was looking at one of the holes in the walls (the basement is finished, but has access to various cleanout traps) and saw what looked to be more recent rodent droppings. so he thought he'd ask. (i'm thinking greybelly seed snatcher.)
he also asked me about the hot water - the old hot water heater had a fatal leak, so he replaced it a few months ago. told him not a problem, and i've had hot water. the only time i ever ran out of hot water was usually on weekends when KO would do laundry, i'd do my dishes and then expect to take a hot shower. (i figured out shower then dishes to avoid that.) but post-install, things have been fine. plus the new tank is 10gal bigger and has a faster recharge. very nice for those days when i want to take an extra long hot shower. now i don't feel so bad.
Thursday, December 14, 2006
thank you.
Music pioneer Ahmet Ertegun dies at 83
By NEKESA MUMBI MOODY, AP Music Writer
NEW YORK - Ahmet Ertegun, who helped define American music as the founder of Atlantic Records, a label that popularized the gritty R&B of Ray Charles, the classic soul of Aretha Franklin and the British rock of the Rolling Stones, died Tuesday at 83, his spokesman said.
Ertegun remained connected to the music scene until his last days — it was at an Oct. 29 concert by the Rolling Stones at the Beacon Theatre in New York where Ertegun fell, suffered a head injury and was hospitalized. He later slipped into a coma.
"He was in a coma and expired today with his family at his bedside," said Dr. Howard A. Riina, Ertegun's neurosurgeon at New York Presbyterian Hospital-Weill Cornell Medical Center.
Ertegun will be buried in a private ceremony in his native Turkey, said Bob Kaus, a spokesman for Ertegun and Atlantic Records. A memorial service will be conducted in New York after New Year's.
Ertegun, a Turkish ambassador's son, started collecting records for fun, but would later became one of the music industry's most powerful figures with Atlantic, which he founded in 1947.
The label first made its name with rhythm and blues by Charles and Big Joe Turner, but later diversified, making Franklin the Queen of Soul as well as carrying the banner of British rock (with the Rolling Stones, Cream, Led Zeppelin) and American pop (with Sonny and Cher, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and others).
Today, the company, part of Warner Music Group, is the home to artists including Kid Rock, James Blunt, T.I., and Missy Elliott.
Ertegun's love of music began with jazz, back when he and his late brother Nesuhi (an esteemed producer of such jazz acts as Charles Mingus and Ornette Coleman) used to hang around with Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington in the clubs of Washington, D.C.
"My father was a diplomat who was ambassador to Switzerland, France and England before he became ambassador to the United States, and we lived in all those countries and we always had music in the house, and a lot of it was a kind of popular music, and we heard a lot of jazz," Ertegun recalled in an interview with The Associated Press. "By the time we came to Washington, we were collecting records and we amassed a collection of some 25,000 blues and jazz records."
Ertegun parlayed his love of music into a career when he founded Atlantic with partner Herb Abramson and a $10,000 loan. When the label first started, it made its name with blues- edged recordings by acts such as Ruth Brown.
Despite his privileged background, which included attending prep school and socializing with Washington's elite, Ertegun was able to mix with all kinds of people — an attribute that made him not just a marketer of black music, but a part of it, said Jerry Wexler.
"The transition between these two worlds is one of Ahmet's most distinguishing characteristics," Wexler said.
Black music was the backbone of the label for years — it was Atlantic, under Wexler's production genius, that helped make Franklin the top black female singer of her day.
"We had some pop music — we had Bobby Darin ... and we developed other pop artists such as Sonny and Cher and Bette Midler and so on," said Ertegun. "But we had been most effective that set a style as purveyors of African-American music. And we were the kings of that until the arrival of Motown Records, which was long after we started."
But once music tastes changed, Ertegun switched gears and helped bring on the British invasion in the '60s.
"If Atlantic had restricted itself to R&B music, I have no doubt that it would be extinct today," Wexler said.
Instead, it became even bigger.
In later years, Ertegun signed Midler, Roberta Flack and ABBA. He had a gift for being able to pick out what would be a commercial smash, said the late producer Arif Mardin, who remembered one session where he was working with the Bee Gees on an album — but was unsure of what he had produced.
"Then Ahmet came and listened to it, and said, `You've got hits here, you've got dance hits,'" Mardin once told the AP. "I was involved in such a way that I didn't see the forest for the trees. ... He was like the steadying influence."
One strength of the company was Ertegun's close relationships with many of the artists — relationships that continued even after they left his label. Midler still called for advice, and he visited Franklin's home when he dropped into Detroit.
His friendships extended to the younger generation, too, including Kid Rock and Lil' Kim.
Besides his love of music, Ertegun was also known for his love of art, and socializing. It was not uncommon to find him at a party with his wife, Mica, hanging out until all hours with friends.
Although he was slowed by triple-bypass surgery in 2001, he still went into his office almost daily to listen for his next hit.
Finding those hits were among the most wonderful moments in his life, he said.
"I've been in the studio when you go through a track and you run down a track and you know even before the singer starts singing, you know the track is swinging ... you know you have a multimillion-seller hit — and what you're working on suddenly has magic," he said. "That's the biggest."
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
Tuesday, December 05, 2006
heeheehee...
TK told me this a while back so i was excited then, but seeing this has me excited now.
i figured out the other day that when it comes to music, the music that i like is generally linked to one song. that one song opens my eyes to them and from that point on, i'm a fan. (and as i'm sure M would attest, it's all downhill from there.) but for me, what blew my mind for The Residents, was High Horses. 20 minutes of carousel music that when listened to thru headphones is just mindblowing (for me at least). only it isn't always the cheerful happy music, only twisted as only the mighty eyeballed ones can. fucking beautiful.
so, some insight to my musical tastes and why.
the first time i heard this transition from a calm, beautiful, relaxing moment into the chaos that erupts when everyone crashes into the opening chords of Kashmir, i had chills run up my spine. i can count the number of times on my hand, that this transition didn't send chills up my spine. they started doing this in 1977, and did it in 1979 and 1980 and each time, chills. from there, it was all downhill.
when i bought Ænima, it was after seeing A Perfect Circle open for Nine Inch Nails. i hadn't realized just how much Tool i had heard on the radio (Stinkfist, Eulogy, Sober, Prison Sex, Opiate) because i had always liked what i heard. but listening to Ænima, i realized it was good and then came Hooker. 4 1/2 minutes of venom, bile, hatred, and mocking. i loved it. Undertow and Opiate followed and i discovered what i had been missing. random trivia: when i bought my current vee-hick-le, Ænima was the first cd i listened to in it. while on the test drive.
back in the day when MTV actually showed videos (or at least more than they do currently, i suppose it was a semi-tranisitional period for them), they showed the video for Comfy Numb off Delicate Sound of Thunder and something about it drew me in. i've since heard umpteen versions which are vastly superior, but this version always holds a special place as the song that woke me up to Pink Floyd. i had a copy of Collection of Dance Songs, but it never hooked me (outside of the Dr. Who theme in One of These Days), but post-Comfy Numb, i listened to Collection with different ears and realized just how good it is.
well, here are 4 bands and some pathetic attempt at explaining why i love them. other bands/songs include:
.jpg){kind=avatar}
