What is the best beer on planet Earth?
Submitted by Remmy Van Hornie.
Might have to be Big Time's Bhagwans Best IPA. Another contender is the "Contraband IPA" that Rogue does exclusively for the Hopvine in Seattle. Bridgeport IPA will always be my comfort food.
I've grown rather disenchanted with Six Apart, all because of stuff happening with LiveJournal that only minimally effects me, but has definitely driven some of my friends away. That's most of the reason I'm bothered, because it's made it that much more difficult to keep in touch with people through passive-journal reading.
That being said, censorship sucks in general, and people who feel censored have the right to take their toys and find a new place to play. I encourage it, and am quite fond of other blogging tools such as WordPress, which is what I use for my blog at www.quasilaur.net.
I will likely not use this Vox for anything but keeping in touch with the few who will continue to use Six Apart blogging tools. You've been warned.
In the Butthole Surfer's concert/documentary "Blind Eye Sees All" video, there is a scene where a band member takes a bit too gnarly of a bonghit and vomits all over himself. Another bandmember, thinking quickly, grabs a turkey baster, sucks up the juice, and squeezes it into his own mouth. Ick! Not exactly the kind of thing I am into. However, we can find beauty in some very unlikely places.
Much of the work of the Butthole Surfers seems designed specifically to create horrible feelings in reasonable people, and yet behind this are some of the most stunning examples of modern songcraft and truly beautiful sounds. The ring modulator drone in Whirling Hall of Knives rhymes with my neurotransmitter functions in a way that almost no other song I've ever heard does. The rain-smeared chords of "Hey" pull me from side to side in a throbbing rhapsodic stupor that seems more fitting for an old woman being moved by the organ at church than any kind of a punk moment. For whatever reason, from the first time I heard the Butthole Surfers, all of their shock-schlock was lost on me, invisible really, and I was able to penetrate to the core and concentrate solely on the beautiful melodies and evocative lyrics.
I get chills from some songs, especially those on Hairway to Steven. In music appreciation (as a radio major) class in college, we had to write a paper explaining the perception of music and the effects it can have on the listener. I hated this class; the instructor was a very strict old-school opera fiend and almost all of the examples of beautiful music he chose were to me almost unlistenable. He was open in his disdain of all things rock. Almost as a confrontational action, I wrote a detailed dissection of the Butthole Surfers and how I had near spiritual experiences listening to them, even without the (admittedly often added) help of drugs. I was the only student to get a perfect score and the professor embarrassingly made copies of it for the whole class as an example of how to think about music.
Human Cannonball is just another of their songs that has stuck with me*. Its a fairly straight-forward rock song, in fact I've heard it described as a hard rock parody. Perhaps I like hard rock enough that the parody isn't needed and I enjoy it at face value. Anyway its the kind of song I hum in the shower. And recently I had been doing just that. It got to the point that I was singing it in the car, singing it around the house. I had to get it out:
It's usually hard for me to share stuff like this since I don't want to insult my favorite works with my amateurish bumbling. However, I am not really ashamed of loving music so hard that I become a virus-like pawn, forced to replicate and spread it. Its pretty cool actually.
* Embarrassing Bonus Anecdote: In high school I was accusing someone of selling bogus LSD. To demonstrate my conviction that he was selling blank blotter, I ate two pieces at lunch. It was not blank. That afternoon in creative writing class, it was my turn to give an oral presentation on a song with moving lyrics that could be considered creative writing. I had meant to think about it over the afternoon and improvise (as was often my way with schoolwork) but concentrating on not freaking-the-fuck-out pretty much took all my spare cycles and I arrived at class wholly unprepared. Luckily(?) I had Locust Abortion Technician in my backpack, and I recalled that Human Cannonball was fairly listenable as that album goes. So after some struggling I got the tape cued up, stood before the class, watching the reflections and gridlines of the linoleum floor tiles intersect and fold in on themselves as space and time often do. I did not remember the intro to the song being so long. Its about a minute and a half I guess, which really is quite long for a pop song, but really it seemed like about 15 minutes. I kept saying "it starts soon, I'm sure". Finally the teacher stopped the tape and said I should bring my real presentation the following Monday. Woohoo!
What are some charitable causes that you support or would like to support?
There are only two that I give dough to with regularity. I tithe to Erowid, the vast and indespensible library of entheogen data. They rather quietly do a tremendous amount of good work.
I kick down for a membership in EFF. They are fighting many good fights and winning a lot of battles.
I'd love to support some sort of enviro/green/eco cause but I feel pretty cynical about the efficacy of most of the movement. If there were a green advocacy organization as nimble, with the kind of brain trust and proactive tactics of an Electronic Frontier Foundation, I'd be happy.
I made lunch today. Kindof. Hi vox.
On Sunday I retired my trusty old PC and moved pretty much fully back into the Mac universe after an 11 year hiatus. Back in November, I picked up a MacBook Pro 15" and instantly fell in love. Since then I've been living a dual life, using my old PC for some things and the Mac for others. The time has finally come, though, to say goodbye.
The Shuttle is, more precisely, a Shuttle SK41G - a 1.6 gHz Athlon with a gig of ram, cd burner, etc. I loved the hell out of this machine for a long time. When I got it it was fairly beefy, power-wise, but not much bigger than a shoe box so it took up little space and would occasionally go with me to work or a friend's place. Sunday I pulled out the hard drive, put it in an external enclosure and hooked it up to the Mac. There was an initial issue with the fact that OS X, along with pretty much every other non-Microsoft OS, can't write to NTFS partitions, making it less than totally useful as a secondary drive. However, with the power of MacFUSE that has been remedied. MacFUSE has some other itneresting filesystem toys like SpotlightFS:
SpotlightFS is a MacFUSE file system that creates true smart folders, where the folders' contents are dynamically generated by querying Spotlight. This differs from Finder's version of smart folders, which are really plist files with a .savedSearch file extension. Since SpotlightFS smart folders are true folders, they can be used from anywhere--including the command line.
I'm leaving Windows on the drive for the time being just in case there's anything else I might have forgotten about on the old drive. Today a larger internal drive is arriving for the MacBook Pro and its original drive will also go into a USB enclosure. Perversely, once the migration is done the original MacBook Drive will be reformatted wither FAT32 or NTFS to be used as a general purpose can-talk-with-anything portable drive and the old deive from my Shuttle (a 300 gigger) will be reformatted HFS+ to be general-purpose extra storage for the Mac.
I have to say that this Mac is about the slickest thing I've ever owned. I do have to admit, though, that it's set up to dual-boot OS X and XP but this is almost exclusively for gaming purposes. I've also purchased a copy of Parallels so that I can bring up said Windows installation within OS X if I just need to do something quick with some piece of Windows-only software (like the Rhapsody client). That said, I like the whole feel of OS X. It feels clean, smooth and friendly. It makes XP look as harsh as Windows 3.1. There are still some adjustments I'm working on, but they've given me the chance to play with some of the spiffy tools that come with the OS like the Automator. I'm looking forward to deeper exploration still to come.
My inner UNIX Geek is thrilled with the whole thing. I've wanted UNIX in the Mac for a long time. I remember playing with MacMINIX and MachTen more than 10 years ago and neither of them really doing it for me. I've lusted after OS X for a long time but could only recently afford to get into the game. When I bought the MacBook Pro I was in the midst of preparing to try and coax an old Grey G3 (the oldest Mac that can run OS X) into the modern world. The fact that a lot of the core is pulled from FreeBSD is an added plus as it was my UNIX OS of choice for my own personal screwing around. The little NeXTisms like the 3-pane file browser are a nice touch as well. I recall when I was in college playing around in the NeXT lab a lot and thinking that those were the coolest machines ever. Sleek black boxes with matching black keyboards, mice and monitors. They also had, along with maybe IRIX, the closest thing toa real integration of X-Windows with the rest of the OS. I've positively loathed every so-called "desktop environment" I've ever used on Linux, FreeBSD or Solaris. I never understood the gushing about KDE and GNOME. I suppose they made good environments for building applications with reasonable GUIs without having to code widgets from the ground up but they were still crap as far as user experience goes. Windows 2000 got the Microsoft world to the level of having a barely-tolerable UI and XP is actually fairly reasonable. I haven't played with or really even seen Vista so I can't say much to it, but as I'm not in the sort of business enterprise network solution that might benefit from all the spiffy AD/Exchange/WhatNot capabilities, I feel a lot more confident in the under the hood code of OS X.
I am still sticking, for now, with a Microsoft ergo keyboard as Apple's keyboards are a bit too squishy on the keypress for me and the split format is better on my wrists. I tried out the wireless MightyMouse but I don't like it. If it just had a regular 4th button instead of that squeeze crap and a right click that was closer to where my finger actually sits I might have gone for it. Makes me wish I didn't hate iTunes so much. Now if only Real would port the Rhapsody client to OS X so I don't need to pull it up in Parallels, I'd be a lot happier.
Show us the best beach you have visited.
Submitted by Marko.
