that other guy’s thoughts

I’m tired of this Mohammad cartoon crap. Thousands of people are randomly destroying stuff because some cleric told them they should be outraged, and some how the international media turns it into a story about how the struggles of free-speech make their jobs difficult.

It’s not about you, you journalistic assholes!

Don’t ponder through your editorial pages about the ethical quandaries of reprinting “controversial” cartoons. If you’re going to print them, do it. If not, don’t omit them because you risk offense, omit them because your looking to take a step back from the self-feeding cycle of hype and don’t feel like trodding the road more traveled.

Either way, make a damn decision and stop playing the victim of circumstance.

And for the life of me, I can’t figure out why the moral dilemma of a danish newspaper is even an issue. Shouldn’t the real story be the thousands of rioters randomly burning their world down and killing people? Why isn’t the story that these people are murdering over an act of expression they took offense to? They’ve killed people! Why isn’t that the end of the discussion.

There is right and their is wrong and as a fully observant adult I understand there are different points of view, but doesn’t intentional murder of the innocent fall pretty squarely in the ‘wrong’ column?

If you do happen to have 24 hours of cable news to fill, how about having your talking head rail about some of these questions:

Where are the denounciations of violence from the ‘moderate’ Arab world?
Why isn’t anyone stopping the riots?
Why weren’t the cartoons drawn by someone with more talent than a 3rd grader?
Why didn’t the cartoons make a point or attempt to be funny?
Just how far from the pack have the Danes wandered that they would consider those interesting at all?
How big is Denmark in comparison to a U.S. State? Are we talking Rhode Island, Delaware, or New Jersey?
About how many times does the average rock get thrown in protest before it’s considered ‘worn in’.
Do rioters have specialized positions during protests? Do they get training?
Whatever happened to setting yourself on fire as a valid form of protest?
What are the odds that many employees lead mobs to burn their own places of employment just so they don’t have to come in to work on Monday morning?
Would the people of the middle-east be eternally peaceful if it were a few degrees cooler on average? (Hey, if people in Seattle and Scandinavia kill themselves because the weather is depressing, this a valid question.)

There you go, that’s like 4 days of yelling already blocked out. No need to thank me, just send a check in the mail.

Today’s hip-hop music is WAY too overproduced. It’s not necessary to sample, mix, and overdub eight different audio clips for every song from every album. The obsessive meddling throttles all spontaneity and purity of voice that the artist may have had.

Great beats, witty rhymes, interesting lyrical cadence, and bare truth in life. That’s what should the bread and butter of hip-hop. That’s what hip-hop brings to the table better than anything else.

The incessant boasting and fixation on living the star life of luxury is a distraction of the worst variety. It�s not just smoke and mirrors; it’s a direct retreat from the possibilities of grandeur open to those who seek to inspire through song.

It�s not about glory, it’s about truth. At a time when rock and roll was still dead, keyboard electronica ruled pop airwaves, and hair bands where the high-flyers of glorified self-destruction; hip-hop had truth. It refused convention and the burgeoning MC crowd dared to blow the minds of a public that ignored them. It was the heir apparent to the spirit of rock, funk, jazz, and rebellion. What the hell happened?

It’s probably whitey’s fault.

“A Probable Impossibility is Preferable to an Improbable Possibility.”

I’m officially playing the powerball on Saturday by way of a lottery pool.

The above quote can be attributed to Aristotle. Or at least the sentiment, who knows what he actually said in Greek. But the idea remains the same, the impossible is preferable to the improbable. I never really got that until told about the office lottery pool. (lottery pool: everybody pools money to buy lottery tickets, if any of them win everybody splits the money)

It’s not the hope of riches that made me throw in the 5 bucks. It was the thought of coming to work on Monday and having 50 shop guys become instant millionaires, knowing they offered me a spot among them. If 50 of them become rich through any other means I wouldn’t care; but the thought of being left out of the bounty of really uncommon frequency just drives me insane.

Here’s to vainly hoping for 1/50th of 365 Million Dollars

I’m all about the potential of renewable fuels as much as the next hippie, but this ethanol obsession has got to go.

It’s not Renewable!

It actually takes more energy to make ethanol than it produces! Ethanol doesn’t produce energy any more than a package of Duracell AA’s do. It’s a liquid battery! It’s only advantage is the small difference in efficiencies between energy produced at your local coal-burning power plant and your car’s engine. And that’s a couple of percent, maybe.

If your looking for an energy revolution, fine. But don’t come to me with some weak-ass medium like ethanol. If you’re looking for something that has any sort of chance to affect the type of change you think we need, then come to me with Hydrogen storage systems and wide-scale adoption of nuclear power. Recognize ethanol for what it is, a well-marketed second source of revenue for already heavily subsidized farms, that only serves to siphon off the research efforts toward actual energy solutions.

“The sky is blue and all the leaves are green.
The sun’s as warm as a baked potato.
I think I know precisely what I mean,
When I say it’s a shpadoinkle day.

…because Quinn Snyder resigned effective immediately”

-The entirety of a message left on my answering machine by The Mooch

My friends rule.

editors note: I wrote this about three months ago when the Grammy nominations were announced and was polishing the language when I decided not to post anything deeper than a tidal pool for the remainder of the year. It got lost in the unorganized mess that is my computer. With the Grammy’s being tomorrow and all, now seems to be as good of time as any for postage.

Five Nominations? Not bad, but being stiffed for record, album, and song of the year? For an album that may be looked back upon as one of the greatest, that’s a crying shame. I’m willing to concede to Kanye West and Gwen Stefani and their excellent exposés; but U2, Mariah Carey, and Paul McCartney are just maudlin favorites. Album of the year is–for some reason–less about honoring the actual album of the year and more about honoring the body of work of the artist, it seems to be about who seems the most deserving, about whose works have been passed over the most. These are the premier awards given in the domain music; it’s not the AMA, Billboard, or People’s Choice awards, this is the Grammys. They should stand for, quality, beauty, and everything that the music that inspires us should aspire to be. Leave the prom night popularity contest to the evening lineup of the WB.

Music is simply more than segmented noise. It’s not everything and everywhere, and the entropy of the world doesn’t pace the splendor of the Ave Maria. It’s the highs and lows; stops and starts; and fusion of rhythm and pitch that distinguish it all as music. It reaches us in ways the spoken word or common picture cannot. True music stirs within us emotions that we only scarcely and subconsciously comprehend. I would expect the members of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences to understand and respect this. To choose such a visceral profession and to treat your highest bestowed honor with the lack of appreciation these men and women have exhibited over the years, is misguided vanity of the worst variety.

Though I suppose the whole premise of my argument is absurd. I’m attempting to speak in a righteous tone about the reckless naiveté of a people who willingly subject themselves to a culture obsessed with the next best thing, but only to the extent that it doesn’t make them seem disrespectful of those to which they bestowed the regal honor of ‘one of the greatest’. The assertion of a crooked line of direction doesn’t mean much in such a non-Euclidian universe. (That’s a theoretical geometry metaphor dedicated to all my fallen math squad homies out there.)

One of the great problems of these cultures, and our society in general, is that there seems to be an irrevocable link between the quality of something to the quantity of its fans. As such, any band, song, or genre with mass appeal must obviously be good. There’s just no accounting for taste. Music, as a form of art, is a more subjective medium, but I’d like to think that the professional musicians understand the disconnect between draw and value. It’s certainly that way in engineering. The merits of any particular design are absolutely independent from the numbers of its champions. Good is good, bad is bad, and failure to acknowledge it as such leads to death, destruction, and a rise in malpractice insurance premiums. It’s not quite so fraught with dire consequences in the world of artistic expression, but fear of consequence is not what makes us seek the truth. Why celebrate the lesser aspects of song, when we can live the dimensions of human experience in the expression of sages?

This wild digression train is becoming a bit of a habit. I apologize for my tendency to start a one-sided conversation with you and steer off and an ill-advised rant about my dreams for the aspiration of man. I seem to get on a roll when thinking about the nature of nature and forget to clue you all in on my immediate concern and how I got there. So, for the sake of today, let me just say, that it’s quite a shame that the Foo Fighters most recent work wasn’t nominated for album of the year.

Once again this year I will keep a running diary of Super Bowl Sunday. For background on how it all goes down, I suggest reading my previous diaries from the Super Bowl and the NBA Draft. I’d like to think they’re amusing to anyone with an interest in sports. However, If you don’t know pass interference from a hole in the ground, it’s best to stay away.

So keep an eye out late Sunday or Monday.

Good Guys, Bad Guys, and Explosions…as far as the eye can see.

The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny

There is a massive block of engineering humanity in the aerospace industry in the 50-60 year old range. Ask any young engineer you know, and they gladly recount the details of being the youngling in their group. Tons of bald and grey haired men in short sleeve shirts and really bad ties populate the ranks of all the large aerospaced companies. These guys have been around since the 70’s and many of them are just a little bit crazy.

I told you that to tell you this: After nearly 8-months on the job, I just meet my first crazy old guy. It a product of the ridiciulous turn-over in the production support group and my working 2nd shift and all, but it’s still odd.

Off to work…with a crazy guy!

Life was fun, life was great
til I made my big mistake
oh no it’ll never happen to me

life was short, and life was sweet
I was thinking as I hit the street
I could hardly beleve
I could scarcely conceive

but I had gone out the window
I had gone out the window
I had gone out the window

she was fine, she looked great
and so we made our big mistake
I swear I swear I swear
it’d never happen to her

but the pavement knocked her head around
when she hit the solid concrete ground
from 30 flights above
and she was thirty something loving nothing

gone out the window
she had gone out the window
she had gone out the window
catch me if I’m falling,
catch me if I’m calling

he was smart he was wise
he’d profoundly philosophize
empathy for all humanity

’til one day by an open window
there’s a note that read
I’ve gone out the window - I’m dead
he said yes to life for all of his life
but then one day he said no

I gotta go out the window
we all go out the window
catch me I am falling
catch me I am calling
catch me we are falling
catch me we are calling

-Violent Femmes, Out the Window