News You Can Bruise for 1999 July 26

Mon Jul 26 1999 07:01: Wow, everything looks so cosmic! This new lynx is more colorful than a barrel of iMacs! Which I guess would be about two iMacs. Anyway, I got the mixer hookup going, except for this intermittent flickering which I haven't been able to track down yet.

I have a decent little baguette of a song recorded called "Sweet Emulsion". It's basically a joke from high school set to different music and with a funny telemarketer's answering machine message mixed in.

I could do a whole album of such baguettes. I certainly have enough scraps on my tapes which could not be made into whole songs, but which I could stretch out to a minute or so with the clever use of samples.

Mon Jul 26 1999 07:19: Bagatelles, not baguettes.

My mother gave me a shirt she got from a crazy guy in Oregon when she went to visit her aunt. On the front it has a rather unconvincing tsunami collage. On the back it says "STOP THE CASCADIA MEGATHRUST EARTHQUAKE SUBDUCTION EVENT", which reminds me of "STOP CONTINENTAL DRIFT". I am disappointed that there are not seven exclamation marks after "EVENT", but it's a good shirt.

My mother's aunt asked the guy how one goes about STOPping the CASCADIA MEGATHRUST EARTHQUAKE SUBDUCTION EVENT. "Pray!" said the guy. That information should really be on the shirt.

Mon Jul 26 1999 07:42: I keep forgetting things. I'm fairly sure that the guest star on The X-Files last night was the same actor who played Garak on ST:DS9. He had the same voice and mannerisms.

Also, is there a rider in David Duchnovy's contract that requires him to summarize the episode in the fiftieth minute of the hour, just before the conclusion?

I'm watching three hours of television a week (DS9, Simpsons, Futurama, X-Files). I'm not sure how good or bad that is. For comparison, I also listen to three hours of radio a week (Prairie Home Companion, My Word, My Music). I read about six hours yesterday, but that's just because I'm still tearing through Lem like a madman.

Josh tried to get me into listening to the old radio dramas they play nightly on some AM station. I might give that a try again, except I forgot what station they're on.

I'm reading Peace on Earth at the moment. 1987, Lem's last book? It certainly fits the mold of "this is my last book".

Mon Jul 26 1999 19:13: I got rid of the annoying glitches in my recording by setting the BeOS' real-time sound processing checkbox, but that checkbox makes everything I record staticky. I don't know why. Dammit, I have 128M of RAM!

My current project is trying to get a decent recording of "Brandy Waters Will Have Her Revenge On Leonard", the gruesome sequel to Brian Overturf's gruesome "Leonard Shot Everyone Down" (for those of you who didn't hear it the first time, it goes "Leonard shot everyone down/Leonard shot everyone down/He shot down his girlfriend named Brandy Waters/she said "no no no no"; there are people, my sister among them, but me not, who know who Brandy Waters is. I thought it was unfair to have me immortalized in song as killing her, without giving her a chance to kill me back)

It's a do-wop song. I love doing the layered vocals, and if there's one thing I've learned from Frank Zappa, it's that anything is funny when you do it as a do-wop song.

Mon Jul 26 1999 19:55: OK, here is a cheap MP3 of Leonard Shot Everyone Down. I pity the poor sap who comes in on a search for "mp3" and has to content himself with that file.

Mon Jul 26 1999 21:15: Okay, all my electronic strugglings are going on a new album, version 1.1.2pl14, named in parody of the "version 2.0" metaphor. The songs are going on the album in order of creation, so presumably a higher track number will mean better quality. Right now there is Sweet Emulsion and Leonard Shot Everyone Down. I'm not happy about the way Sweet Emulsion got mp3ed. The .wav doesn't have that weird squibbling noise in the background.