Note for ironic hipsters: movie posters for Mel Gibson’s What Women Want should be at the top of your shopping list. Hell, maybe that movie came true while Mel was in the bathtub, only the women’s thoughts never went away and he got so sick of his wife/girlfriend/whatever’s prattish mental mumblings that he went postal. But I bet you never thought of that, since you were already taking HER side.

Isn’t that insensitive? You should take my comments out of context and link to how much of an ass I am, because then I’ll get more hits. Then, maybe my ad revenue will spike. That’s how this stuff works. Think of all the assholes that are making a ton of money by gossiping about this crap. They’re not pissed. They’re thrilled. Look at the bottom of the article I linked at the top paragraph: you’ll find the author hawking her celebrity life-mining book right there. So before you send this article to someone else or discuss it with someone, stop and think: what am I accomplishing here, and whom is it benefitting?

Brandon Boyd (Incubus’ lead singer, for those of you not in my target audience) just released a solo album. In the official press release, Boyd says the music is inspired by weed. The Wild Trapeze sounded uncomfortable to me at first—the instrumentation has a washed out sound that made me think the gain was too high on my end. Nope, that’s just the production style—it’s reminiscent of stoner rock and the intention is that you feel the extra vibration.

So how’s this compare to Incubus? Well, it does and it doesn’t. “A Night Without Cars” is a stoner power ballad with cool breakdowns. Rock? Sure, that’s here, but the beginning of the album is dancier than rock, in a way that I guess I’ll call tribal. “Runaway Train” opens with guitar alternating between stereo channels in a way that makes me feel a bit nauseous, but I’m sure it would sound absolutely nuts if I were high.

I’m no music theorist, but I feel like if you give “Revenge of the Spectral Tiger” a listen it’ll be obvious to you that the lyrical ideas left in Brandon Boyd’s mind are an optimistic blend of bro’d-out stoned clichés—“death by a thousand cuts” is in the chorus and the spectral tiger himself has “porcelain teeth”. Cringe. In the next track, “Courage and Control”, Boyd declares “it’s time to let your hair down”. Thankfully these clichés sound good. If someone who couldn’t sing were belting them, I’d feel insulted.

Boyd feels more fresh when he’s not leaning heavily on his Light Grenades-era singing style. Maybe I’m just excessively biased against that album, but I preferred everything Incubus did prior to it. “All Ears Avow!” is a step in the right direction on this album; it’s concise, urgent, and reminds me of older Incubus with lyrics like “a generation of intellectual amputees / one-winged worker bees”. I can’t help but love when Brandon Boyd gets self-righteous.

Check The Wild Trapeze out. If you’re an Incubus fan you’ll like it. If you’re relatively unimpressed by the simplistic solo instrumentation, which Boyd aptly describes as “the sound of one hand clapping” when compared to his work with Incubus, you might be reassured to know that this album release signifies that Incubus is back in the studio working on their next release. Maybe we’ll see that this winter?

(Source)

Say you’ve got a group of people who continually does things you don’t like. Maybe teenagers. They won’t get off your lawn, right? Right. So, they’re a bunch of brats. There are less jobs available for teenagers now, so they hardly ever do anything useful with themselves. There are very few publicly sanctioned places for teenagers to spend time outside of school. So, they’re mostly careless, directionless overgrown children who often wander their neighborhoods. Sure, the charismatic teenagers end up running a side business while working a part time job and running a club. Sadly, most people aren’t charismatic. In fact, a lot of people are ignorant bigots with uninteresting biases instead of well-developed understanding. You know, like people who hate teenagers.

A lot of people forget that teenagers are future components of our society. Teenagers don’t want to live like terrible people any more than you do. Teenagers who are in your yard might understand that they are invading what you consider your private space, but they are also testing the limits of society to try and come to an understanding of it. As an adult, when you deal with teenagers, you are teaching them by setting an example. The kinds of folks who yell at teenagers and assume the worst of them do not encourage success outside of bootcamp. Some teenagers probably should enlist and won’t, and in that instance if you’ve got Sarge’s chops you might as well consider wearing that hat, however you must consider the weight of your actions upon a fragile teenage psyche. It’s best to privately talk to their parents first.

A neighborhood where yards touch one another along obviously defined boundaries is by nature not private. The very name English gives to the place suggests neighbors. If you dislike having to occasionally interact with other people, live by yourself in a cabin in the woods. If teenagers are in your yard, make sure they know who you are. Go out and talk to them. Be friendly. Get to know them. Then maybe you’ll care enough about what happens to them that you’d rather they leave your yard with a reason to do something else. Give them a better reason other than that you’re a big scary dirtbag.

Yeah, I know you work hard all day. Not everybody has enough charisma to deal with teenagers, right? Right. So don’t assume these teenagers won’t someday work hard all day. If someone motivates them, they certainly will. Find out what inspires them, and send them to it. Or invite over an expert. No, the cops don’t know how to relate to teenagers. Think a little harder. Anyway, whatever inspires them will probably become a lot more interesting to them than your yard pretty quickly. Shouldn’t that inspire you?

The stereotype comparison that led me here was how frats and religion are the same. I realize that’s a huge segue, but so is your mom, and you don’t seem to dislike her. If you do, I’m sorry. If she’s dead, that doesn’t mean you can’t still like her. Just make sure you don’t like your dead mom in inappropriate ways. We were just thinking about being considerate of society, right? Right.

Okay, so you’ve seen the religious fanatic. The one who’s always running around carrying some massive symbol of their religion and using it to bludgeon everyone else with their beliefs. Sometimes these beliefs are xenophobic, homophobic, or just outright incomprehensible. Likewise, you’ve probably seen the frat guy or sorority chick emblazoned with their respective symbols behaving obnoxiously. This is normal, if unfortunate human behavior. People often hold on to a social institution with one hand while they fly their freak flag with the other. You know how some people hold onto the wall while they get into the pool? Not everyone can be totally confident, right? Right. When I was a swim instructor for Montgomery County Parks and Recreation, it was my job to convince people to stop holding on to that wall and swim. If I called those people pussies and insulted them, I’d have reasonably expected to be fired. I’ll agree that extremists should not be permitted to pee everywhere while treading in their neighbors’ lives. However, careful application of reason and leading by an accessible example is a more affective tactic at combating this problem than snobbery. Thankfully when I dealt with this one at the pool, I knew that pee is sterile. It’s the feces you have to worry about.

There are plenty of people who belong to certain religions who are not extremists and who live in a way which isn’t antagonistic or offensive to most people. Likewise, there are plenty of normal, awesome people who are in greek organizations. All of them are people who can think of better things to do than be boisterous and attention seeking. You can either hide from both groups in your house and get upset when they enter your territory, or you can befriend them. Which technique works better? Which results in the kind of life you’d like to live? Remember, if you don’t like the neighborhood, nobody’s stopping you from moving out.

This is because both are usually vapid and bland for uninitiated spectators.

In spite of this, sometimes (albeit rarely) both display elements of sexiness that can be used for the purposes of advertising.

Both are largely used as a social channel to vent hormones and therefore serve an important purpose to society whilst simultaneously declaring their historical value impossible to ascertain from the text/football game alone. Twilight and Football both highlight what’s wrong with New Criticism: context can sometimes be more interesting and relevant than content. If you want to make either Twilight or Football sound their best, make sure to document what they’re doing for illiterate emotionally damaged/stunted people the world over, as well as the economy: especially the halo effect on the book world (See: Harry Potter). Case closed.

P.S. - As an aside for the sensitive I should note that generalizations about both Football and Twilight (and their fans) are not to indicate the illogical pattern–If you like A or B, then you are necessarily C–but rather that most people who like A or B (as in more than half) fit this description. If you are better (as most people think they are) than the stereotypes associated with the object of your interest, then so be it. My point was to draw a comparison: if you feel like your taste is insulted, then bear in mind that we probably shouldn’t talk about books or sports since you can’t accept conflict in your conversation. Seriously, isn’t it okay for us to like different things?

In times when we are wrong, or teach ourselves something which is logically inaccurate and damages us, our thoughts still come to bear: they are simply not our best. Instead of minimizing these mistakes, we must celebrate them with our open scrutiny! This is the essence of learning–if we forget the difficulties which have brought us (and others!) to wisdom, then we have failed to learn the truth: instead we have learned ‘a’ truth.

To be individual, we must retain all of ourselves, and abandon the notion that our sins are something to be purged from our minds and memories. If you are not familiar with the dubious origins and dangers of these practices of repression, there is a great deal of historical material available which sheds light on the matter. Adherence to dogmatic absolute thinking cannot, and will never allow human beings to achieve a higher state of mental existence. The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge is not poison!

As we eat more Apples of Knowledge, we place more of God in ourselves. I agree with those who consider this blasphemous, but was Satan not created by God? Are the first steps of a toddler, whose muscles and reflexes are infirm, not blasphemous to whatever memory it has of its infant state? To dare is to blaspheme as to see is to not see everything else which you are not currently looking at; one connotes positively and the other connotes negatively, but both are core components of the learning process.

When Humanity is at its most base, we lack empathy, logic, and contextual comprehension. We wave standards for our beliefs as though we know infinity on the authority of our ancestors, and murder one another in cold blood: in spite of our stated belief in our mutual origins. If we may learn anything from history, it is that beliefs have masked the greatest tragedies as well as the greatest successes of our species.

Belief in the holiness of celibacy rests for many in direct contradiction with the commandment, the biological impulse, to reproduce: unless marriage is involved. What does marriage connote, beyond the obvious commitments between the partners? Marriage is a statement to Humanity that two minds have met, that they understand one another, and that they believe that their lives will achieve more potential together than apart. If producing a child enters into the equation (1 + 1 = 3, or in Adam and Eve’s case, 1 + 1 = everyone who has ever lived and died), then that new life must be understood by both parents as their responsibility.

Accidental production of children may (and should, and will) occur, but we must remove the primitive blindfold which tells us, “We do not decide who lives and dies.” We make those decisions every day. After thousands of years of struggle with this issue, technology has finally reached a point which allows us to practice population control through mindful use of medicine. Now that we have the means, we must learn to apply wisdom to our reproductive practices with the goal of maximizing our lives’ potential within the limited economic framework which we provide one another, and therefore provide a future to Humanity. In order to accomplish this goal, we must not only plan to have children, but plan for our children. We must teach them all the information that we can, but we must also teach them wisdom, so that their stumbles retread ours as little as possible, and so that they may have plans for themselves beyond ours and fixing our mistakes. The essence of genius is making new mistakes: not repeating clichés for the sake of validation.

No person can accomplish alone what large, organized groups are capable of. A civilization as a whole may arrive at genius, when circumstances are right, and produce gifts to Humanity which may be uniquely identified by their era and culture. The clichéd mistake human civilizations make is to end in war. The financial and human cost of war is now available in concrete figures to us, and accounts of how many trips to Mars (or even Europa) could be afforded if we forsake war are themselves thoughtlessly forsaken for more war. Our allegiance must be to our species and to life itself; murder (and often, life) exclusively for individual gain is pointless and only delays and blocks Humanity’s progress.

No.

I merely mount the frame of those experiences on the windowsill: among the old dust and insect corpses which stand as a macabre, as-yet ineffective ward against live insects. Perhaps if their bodies pile high enough, the bastards will evolve away from trying to be around me.

This is a wonderful time. I am quite happy. The Appalachian mountain bugs sing a melancholy song that drifts pleasantly through the enormous square passageways of my screened windows of six-legged terror. Across the street and to the side, my neighbor in the cluttered house has an enormous bug zapper lantern. It is no wonder that they are not afraid of me: these fuckers are seasoned veterans of a kamikaze world they were designed to conquer.

If there is anything that can be learned from our position in the world (relative to mass), it is that smaller size supplies suffering to larger entities. Whether more have died by the boulder than the bullet, I am unsure–but entropy has certainly won out over them all (although malaria is up there). With nanotechnology and a ripe supply of fissionable nuclear materials, humanity may make a stab at catching up: starting with the most awesome wasp nest destruction (WND) devices ever known.

I am convinced that the collective human unconscious has an ingrained racial bias against bugs. Bug is a synonym for annoyance. Cockroach is an African insult implying racial inferiority. We abhor biological weapons for use against humans, but we will sell them to minors for use against insects in convenience stores. Poison is for bugs. Right? It’s pretty sick.

Robert Heinlein, Orson Scott Card, and Dan O’Bannon have all made serious bank from bug hate. Heinlein addresses our most pathetic fantasy: a world where the bugs are a mortal enemy against whom our entire species militarizes to fight. Watchmen took the philological approach to this concept, but the idea that it’ll take evil bugs to get us to cooperate speaks so optimistically of humanity that I can’t help but be enamoured of it. Card evokes the same images of organized xenocide, but does so with a conscience: after the bugs are slaughtered, they are romanticized like 20th century Native Americans–but not until then. O’Bannon had a goddamn nightmare about killer bugs born to do unspeakable things to human beings. It’s undeniable: in many of our darkest thoughts… there are bugs. Wicked bugs. In District 9 they were popping like popcorn for our conscience. Millions sold.

I hear a cat meowing outside the window. Now that I’m focused on the sounds again, I hear a motorcycle driving down in the valley. I wonder if its rider’s face is getting splattered with bugs. I hope his face ruins them all. Is this evil?

Don’t believe me? The Free Library of Philadelphia has lost its funding. That’s how the death of something starts: the most vulnerable public manifestation will have its funding slashed in a tough time, and even if the economy recovers, the government will not relinquish its grasp on those dollars. Books will stop having their own stores except for little independent shops, and these will persist as a novelty for generations. Unfortunately for them, they will fade in relevance as the pages yellow. Office supply stores are next.

You see, as bound books become less commonplace (and they are already outside of college campuses), they will be replaced by various e-readers. People will realize that reading words over a backlight is agony, and eInk will see a roar in revenue. If not, a competitor offering a similar product based on different patents will emerge and wipe the floor with eInk. The functionality will be the same though, and we’ll see color before long. Long before these devices are inexpensive and ubiquitous, offices will no longer require paper.

Already, digital distribution is streamlined and simple. The Kindle store, RSS, and Facebook are excellent models, but newer, more efficient infrastructure will replace them. Once eInk is at all viable, PDFs will be sitting in people’s hands like magazines, and finally users on the client side will be seeing what we on the publication assembly side have been looking at since Adobe Pagemaker; only at higher resolution.

Pictures on foldable electronic paper will move like those in Harry Potter newspapers. Sound functionality already exists in the Kindle. Adding video only requires an evolution of the display technology, which is simply a matter of time.

With HD Paper around, who needs the old tree kind? One sheet per person lasts for years. On a long enough timeline, digital paper becomes the most cost efficient option for businesses.

Say goodbye to staplers. Say goodbye to reams of 8.5×11. No more hole punchers. Say goodbye to newsprint. No longer will it be a privileged, rich few who have access to the press… It will be everyone. Mourn not these relics: the world will be better off without their resource consumption.

So what do we do in a world where everyone with a camera is potentially press, and everyone has a camera? We teach journalistic rights and responsibilities intelligently in school. We prioritize these things. We enter into a new age of accountability simultaneously with a new age of surveillance. None can say how society will react… except that it will be badly, as always.

It is imperative that we come up with an inexpensive method for backing up data that is not electronic or magnetic, which can be read from both analog and electronic devices. Why? Solar electromagnetic pulses. Recall the burning of the great library of Alexandria, and bear in mind that desperate humans post-EMP will burn what books are left for fuel and fun. Nearly all electronic data will already be completely gone. If you look up the history of solar EMP incidences, we do not know that stronger ones than were experienced in recent times are not likely or possible. When it comes to humanity’s wealth of knowledge, we should not be so callous as to think that we are immune to this potential loss.

The only way to keep electronic data remotely safe from a strong solar EMP event is to store and maintain copies in several disparate portions of the world.

What troubles me the most is that if we do lose everything, no one will be able to look back on these words of mine (and others) and say: “Those idiots knew it was a possibility, and still… they did nothing.”

Officer Hawkins and the State of Arizona should bear in mind that while these cameras are ‘legal’ in Maryland as well (among a few other states), they have yet to be challenged on a Supreme Court level: as they should, because other state courts have determined that their use is in violation of the Fourth Amendment. I realize that Officer Hawkins believes that he is following the letter of the law, but as they say in law school:

Legal is not right. Illegal is not wrong.

You may notice that the Fourth Amendment has been largely shot to pieces by the Supreme Court over the past century. However, it has yet to be established on a national level whether and if so under which circumstances an automated camera can be used as a reasonable means of convicting a person of any violation of the law.

If this use of speed cameras is as illegal according to the Constitution as it appears to be, then it is within the rights and responsibilities of SCOTUS to deliver a clear opinion on this matter. Speed cameras have affected Americans in many states with corrupt taxes, which have been profiteered from by the private industry contractors that build these devices. So, in other words, these cameras are not exactly legal Officer Hawkins; no matter what they’re telling you over at the corporate (or is that state?) headquarters that cuts your paychecks.

Until our courts explicitly state to me that they intend to spit in the face of the Constitution that our soldiers are sworn to defend with their lives, I refuse to pay a single one of these nonsense tickets. I would rather not exercise my licensed privilege to drive if it means that I will continue to have unreasonable fines levied against me for not driving in a way that requires that I brake heavily every time I go downhill, so as to maximize fuel consumption and prevent proper use of momentum.

There is nothing logical, moral or true to the values upon which these United States were established about these devices.

I would also rather not drive if I am to be forced to slam on my brakes whenever I come across an unexpected camera and risk being rear-ended by a less conscious driver. The State of Virginia’s Department of Transportation reports that forced braking caused by automated cameras make injurious accidents more likely.

I don’t need a permanent back injury just because local governments need to find new revenue streams during a recession. If these people need more breathing room in their budget, they should look no further than firing extraneous police officers and reducing their respective departments’ budgets. Each officer is a massive expense, and the fleets of brand new, expensive to maintain cars they require are doing nothing to increase my safety.

Within this past decade, I have been:

- Physically assaulted by a drunk off-duty police officer in downtown Rockville, less than a block from the courthouse. The police report was ‘lost.’

- Told by a DC Metropolitan police officer that my muggers from Metro Center wouldn’t be caught even though they were on CCTV from several angles.

- Pulled over and ticketed for driving the speed limit by two police officers who didn’t understand the parallax illusion of speed created by a car driving the speed limit against a backdrop of significantly slower cars (had to go to court for this, they did not show: they merely wanted to rudely lecture me and make me late to my class at Montgomery College).

- Jailed for two days in Virginia and fined over $1000 for speeding on a practically empty highway at night, during the early AM hours, far from any populated area.

- Detained illegally in July along with two friends on the side of a road barely more than two miles from my parents’ house by four Montgomery County, MD squad cars and a K-9 unit for two hours near midnight. My left tail light went out and I was driving slightly under the speed limit. Under, mind you, and not over. This was used as a pretext to give me a field sobriety test (I volunteered to take a breathalyzer, but they did not issue me the test). According to one officer (among five) who did not even issue me my field sobriety test, “something” about my test results told them that I may have been under the influence of narcotics. When I asked him politely what aspect of my test results gave that impression, I was shouted at for questioning the police’s ability to do their job. They’ve been trained, you see. However, that was not the nature of my question. I wanted to understand why I was being detained for a tail-light. I was never given an explanation beyond this.

I was asked if they had my permission to search my vehicle, and I did not give it. I had my cabin light on, and was clearly cooperative in all other ways, and I had no reason to consent to any unconstitutional searches. The drug dog walked around my car, found nothing, and wagged its tail until I received my tail light repair order and went home exhausted. I lost sleep before work the next day due to this completely uncalled-for imposition. My friends were visibly shaken.

Not once has any compromise of my safety ever been resolved by the intervention of a police officer. Ever. And if it had, just once, that would not compensate for the compromises to my safety, health, and security that have been rendered unto me by police officers. Corruption should not be looked at on a scale: it should be rooted out with an even and just hand.

***

If I am going to be fined and mistreated whether I drive under or over the speed limit, whether I have committed a misdemeanor or not, and whether there is anyone to bear witness against me or not, then I am no longer living in the United States of America that I read about in the history books. Perhaps those will be rewritten soon to fit with the Orwellian enforcement cameras and fascist thugs that have replaced our officers of the peace. I doubt it though: they’ll need that money to put heated seats in the next all-terrain stinger missile-equipped squad cars. Who has no respect for the law? Me, or police officers who have no idea of or interest in the spirit of what the law actually stands for?

Stanford walks up to a mic and a couple pedals, and sequences his voice into amazingly textured, layered music. It’s barely more than his voice. His grooves reek of Bradley Nowell, Sublime’s tragically deceased frontman. But Dub FX is too fast and too smooth to be compared to Brad Nowell. His style is unique.

His album? Diverse. “Everythinks A Ripple” is available from http://dubfx.net and traverses so many genres that categorizing it as pop, hip-hop, dub, a capella, or electronic music would seem narrow… even ignorant. An opinion on this artist cannot be rendered from any single song.

What excites me the most about Dub FX is not necessarily his present offering: it’s his potential. Brad Nowell never had a chance to musically escape his origins and evolve severely as an artist due to his drug problem. Dub FX… he could be an interesting sidenote in musical history, or he could explode across the world like aural pyrotechnics. Only time will tell. Of course, on his track “Future” he says… “We could equal Sublime.”

If he applies himself, I think Mr. Stanford could easily surpass Sublime.

Recommended tracks: Time Will Tell, Made, Flow, Wandering Love, Free My Soul (live in Italy)