From PC Magazine Review… Without so much as registering, you can browse and play the service’s 75-plus genre stations and 10,000-plus artist stations. But the real fun lies in creating custom stations: Unlike Last.fm and Pandora, which try to dish up music you’ll like based on a single selected artist, Slacker lets you build entire stations of favorite artists. So it’s a simple matter to whip up a station with, say, Lily Allen, Amy Winehouse, and other Brit-pop chanteuses; when you search for one, Slacker lists upwards of 50 similar artists you can select to round out your station. You can also search for others to add manually, creating whatever kind of mix you like.
Month: October 2007
Lucky Dube’s murder throws spotlight on to crime in South Africa
Lucky Dube’s murder throws spotlight on to crime in South Africa – Times Online
In a recent interview Lucky Dube, predicted that he would be killed by the current South African government over his vehemnt criticism of their corruption and inability to even attempt to control the rampant drug-based crime wave and rape epidemic. If the shooting was an alleged car jacking, then why did the 3 atackers drive away in their blue VW and not take his Chrysler? 
The issue of ever-worsening crime has cut across race lines and led to unprecedented criticism of the Government of President Mbeki. Last year one government minister provoked outrage when he said in parliament that “white whingers” should leave the country if they did not like it. It was seen as a turning point because many blacks and Coloureds then added their voice to criticisms of the Government’s failure to live up to promises to bring crime under control.
For years the Government maintained that crime was not as bad as wealthy people claimed, but recently the statistics, such as 50 murders a day and one rape every 40 seconds, have begun to damage investment and alarm big business.
Images of US Consumption
This new series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 426,000 cell phones retired every day. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. This image if from 106,000 aluminum cans, the quantity discarded in the US every 30 seconds!
Cops on Steroids
ABC News: Big, Buff and Bad: Police on Steroids
A common side effect of steroid use is violent, aggressive behavior that can contribute to poor judgment and even police brutality, according to medical experts.
Gene Sanders, a Spokane, Wash., police psychologist, estimates that up to 25 percent of all police officers in urban settings with gangs and high crime use steroids — many of them defensively.
“How do I deal with people who are in better shape than me and want to kill me?” said Sanders, who worked as a street cop in Los Angeles in the 1970s and saw steroid use soar in the 1990s.
Where have all the Neocons Gone?
Neo Culpa: Politics & Power: vanityfair.com
I interviewed some of the neocons before the invasion and, like many people, found much to admire in their vision of spreading democracy in the Middle East.
I expect to encounter disappointment. What I find instead is despair, and fury at the incompetence of the Bush administration many neocons once saw as their brightest hope.
Free Daily Show 8 year archive
Viacom opens up Daily Show archive – FierceIPTV – IPTV News, IP Videos, Quadruple Play, Set-top box
Viacom has put online the entire eight year archive of its top rating comedy series, Daily Show with Jon Stewart, in a move which will be closely watched by all the major networks, advertisers, telcos and the burgeoning new media video industry. The LA Times reports producers have being preparing since June 13,000 clips — together with ads — to be placed on the Daily Show’s own site. The archive is searchable and free for all to use.
Viacom’s decision to post its entire archive–while fighting YouTube in the courts–sets the scene for a battle between the established media players and their high profile entertainment brands against the user generated content sites, most notable YouTube.
Also watching closely the Viacom experiment will be the telco IPTV industry which has seen the market place change rapidly as the quality of online video continues to improve, with at least one platform/site, Vimeo, already offering 1280X720 HD quality direct from the browser. Adobe is shortly to release its latest Flash Player software (beta now available), which promises MPEG 4 broadcast like quality and which will significantly improve the quality of online video for all distributors and platforms.
Grandfather Dylan
EASILY SCARED
May 3, 2007 — KINDERGARTEN kids in ritzy L.A. suburb Calabasas have been coming home to their parents and talking about the “weird man” who keeps coming to their class to sing “scary” songs on his guitar. The “weird” one turns out to be Bob Dylan, whose grandson (Jakob Dylan’s son) attends the school. He’s been singing to the kindergarten class just for fun, but the kiddies have no idea they’re being serenaded by a musical legend – to them, he’s just Weird Guitar Guy. Thanks to Maria for finding this one in Reader’s Digest of all places. Picture of Dylan & his kids from Woodstock 1970
Dylan
Blame The Middle East Mess On the Brits & the French?
The Middle East Is Born Again – Forbes.com
“The peace settlements that followed World War I have recently come back into focus as one of the dominant factors shaping the modern world. The Balkans, the Middle East, Iraq, Turkey, and parts of Africa all owe their present-day problems, in part, to these negotiations.” —Ambassador Richard Holbrooke
The French and the British, beginning in 1919 Paris, sought to replace Arab political structures with their own European designs, creating nations in their own Western image. It was hardly a model for peace and prosperity. This template had, after all, led to a succession of bloody wars in Europe over the previous millennium. Still, Europe became the central power in the Middle East. The Western model of nations appeared to the peacemakers in Paris to be more akin to convenient political organizations with which to negotiate and do business than a host of feuding tribes.
The result is a legacy that continues to plague the region. Today, the United States is the region’s dominant power. But do the Iraqi people really want America’s Western-style democracy, or like the British and French before, does the U.S. simply want to create nations that resemble itself? In any case, it’s probably too late. The ethnic amalgams created in Paris in 1919 make any democratic nation as now constituted in a region like the Middle East problematic, as the West has already discovered in Yugoslavia. Continue reading “Blame The Middle East Mess On the Brits & the French?”
Serving Pasta? Forget What You Learned
Serving Pasta? Forget What You Learned – New York Times
Instead of a pound of pasta for two to four people, make a half, or even a third of a pound. Instead of a cup or two of sauce, make it four cups, or more. Turn the proportions around.
What do you wind up with? Pasta more or less overwhelmed by sauce, which you can view as a cardinal sin or as a moist, flavorful one-dish meal of vegetables with the distinctive, lovable chewiness of pasta. (There is, of course, a tradition of this kind of pasta dish in Italy, but it falls more under the category of minestre, which is closer to soup.) It’s also an easy way to significantly increase your intake of vegetables without adding too many refined carbohydrates, and may, if you’ve abandoned it, get you back into pasta again.
Why Men Are Funnier Than Women
Why Women Aren’t Funny: Entertainment & Culture: vanityfair.com
The plain fact is that the physical structure of the human being is a joke in itself: a flat, crude, unanswerable disproof of any nonsense about “intelligent design.” The reproductive and eliminating functions (the closeness of which is the origin of all obscenity) were obviously wired together in hell by some subcommittee that was giggling cruelly as it went about its work. (“Think they’d wear this? Well, they’re gonna have to.”) The resulting confusion is the source of perhaps 50 percent of all humor. Filth. That’s what the customers want, as we occasional stand-up performers all know. Filth, and plenty of it. Filth in lavish, heaping quantities. And there’s another principle that helps exclude the fair sex. “Men obviously like gross stuff,” says Fran Lebowitz. “Why? Because it’s childish.”
For women, reproduction is, if not the only thing, certainly the main thing. Apart from giving them a very different attitude to filth and embarrassment, it also imbues them with the kind of seriousness and solemnity at which men can only goggle.