Do you remember? Do you remember this morning when you were at the gym, shrugging off the winter blues? Do you remember what you were thinking about? Do you? Really?!

If … this morning, you were thinking about ’60s hippie-rock … and Star Trek … you might be profoundly disturbed to watch this (YouTube).

Clearly this is genius.

Ever get the feeling that food companies employ far too many chemists and not enough nutritionists?

The site Last.fm is a great approach to social music listening. You can create an account on Last, and thereafter your music listens are kept for later dissemination. There are groups devoted to various artists, labels and genres. Last.fm also suggests people whose musical tastes are close to yours. Best of all — Last.fm works with all of your music players, regardless of platform. For example, on Linux you can use Amarok to play your music and send your listens to Last.fm. On Windows or Mac, you can download plug-ins for various players including iTunes and Windows Media Player.

I just signed up for an account a couple of weeks ago, so there’s not that much data to churn through, but after a year or two there would be a great dataset to look at. All of my music is somehow channeled through my computer — either listening while computing or streaming to the stereo via my AirPort Express. So it’s bound to get interesting after a while. I think probably the best approach to Last.fm is to sign up, plug in, and then leave it alone — just let the song plays mount up, and the neatness of the data pile up.

If you’re already on Last.fm or are thinking about it, stop by the Lettuce Iceberg page on Last.fm and say hi.

Tune to KWLC on Sundays in January from 2:00pm–4:30pm (CST) to hear Freeform Faust.

For close listening, I always put on a pair of headphones. There are some advantages to headphones over traditional speakers. For one, there’s a distinctness between the stereo left and right channels. That is, the sound is more obviously stereo. One hears pans of sounds from the left to the right that might otherwise be lost. Also, it is easier to pick out distinct instruments or sounds. Even if I’ve listened to an album many times on my stereo, I always hear new things when I put on headphones.

My headphones of choice are the Grado SR125. This is a good set of headphones. Frequency response is an expected 20Hz to 20KHz. The SR125 models sound far and away better than anything else I’ve tried. The main reason for this I think is the open air architecture.

When it comes to over-the-ear headphones, there are mostly two types — closed back and open air. The closed back ones are the most common and have the advantage of blocking outside noise. The downside of the closed back though is reduced sound response. You don’t get the low lows and the high highs. The sound can be a bit muffled.

Open air headphones have an open back — in the case of Grado, there’s either a plastic or wire mesh. The driver though is allowed to breathe, and thereby has a greater range of motion. It’s the equivalent of putting a port on floorstanding speakers. So open air headphones are great for close listening. You get the greater dynamics of the music. But they’re best for using at home or in a quiet environment as they will allow in more outside sound.

The Grado SR125 sounds great, and they’re comfortable. The fit of Grado headphones is a little bit different, so it may take some getting used to, but once you find the right position for them, they great for comfort.

If you love music and love hearing music, I highly recommend these headphones. The sound is significantly better than anything else in the price range and wildly better than cheaper headphones. The difference is noticeable right away when you put a pair of these on. It’s the “wow!” factor.

The BEAST has their annual roundup of the 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2006. It’s an entertaining read, ranging from Ryan Seacrest to Joe Lieberman to Tony Snow. Each profile includes a brief, incisive commentary on the individual’s crimes against the American people, continuing with an Exhibit A of their bad behavior, and ending with their sentence. My prediction is that Oprah Winfrey will make the list next year.

As an added bonus, the BEASTies talked to Noam Chomsky via email here.

Tune to KWLC on Sundays in January from 2:30pm–4:00pm (CST) to hear Freeform Faust.

For Christmas, I received Madonna’s CD, “Confessions on a Dance Floor.” I am really enjoying it. After her last CD, “American Life” came out, I wondered if Madonna was capable of making a CD that was good all through-out again, and I see that she is. So far, my favorite tracks on “Confessions on a Dance Floor” are Jump (because it has a good beat), I Love New York (because I do), and Isaac (because I enjoy the Arabic singing and music interposed with Madonna’s). The last time Madonna came out with a song as good as Isaac, in the sense of her toying with the music of a different culture, was when she came out with Shanti/Ashtangi on the “Ray of Light” CD. That song was very Indian-inspired and many of the lyrics were in Hindi. I greatly enjoy her songs that have a multi-cultural vibe. I wish she would do more of them. Do you enjoy listening to Madonna as much as I? What is your favorite Madonna CD? Let me know.

When we open a CD in iTunes, iTunes will automatically check an online database for the song and artist information. This database of metadata makes our lives easier by removing the need for a lot of data entry when we’re ripping CDs. Apple’s iTunes uses a service called Gracenote. Gracenote got their metadata database start by buying out CDDB, which used to be a freely available place to get CD track information. Developers were free to use the CDDB API to make their music applications automatically download metadata. Now that information is no longer freely available. Gracenote charges for that information, although it seems to be still largely compiled from user submissions.

Because Gracenote is compiled from user submissions, it contains a lot of errors and mistakes. Of ten we’ll put in a CD only to find that Gracenote has multiple entries for the same CD, and we’re supposed to guess, which one is more accurate. For a commercial service, the quality of the data is uniformly low, in my opinion.

One particular area that Gracenote really fell down is in classical music. We ripped most of my classical CDs into iTunes a couple of years ago, and Gracenote was atrocious. The metadata varied wildly from CD to CD. On some CDs the composer was listed as the artist, on others the performer was. In far too many cases, there was track information in the artist field or some other mix-up of the columns. It was a total mess.

The quality of Gracenote’s classical CD data was horrific. We were ripping some classical CDs last night though, and keen observation indicates that the quality of Gracenote has improved substantially in the classical area. Gone was data in the wrong field. It wasn’t always consistent about whether composer or performer appeared in the artist field, but overall, it was much, much better. CDs such as Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique that had Berlioz’s name nowhere in the metadata now had corrected that error. There were still a number of CDs that had collisions with multiple sets of metadata for the same CD.

Overall, Gracenote is improving. We wish that iTunes offered the option of where to download data from — because we’d rather use the free and open FreeDB.

Second things first tonight as Six Apart announced a slight update of Movable Type. The new version — 3.34 — has some security fixes plus native support for FastCGI. I upgraded ManuEnvi to 3.34 tonight and did the configuration for FastCGI. The application does seem to be running quite a bit faster, but the true test will be if leaving comments is speeded up.

The other thing I wanted to share tonight is that the finished release of Flash Player 9.0 for Linux is now available. It had been in beta up till now. I’ve tested it on a few video intensive sites, and it seems to work nicely.

If you’re running openSUSE just like me, then I’d recommend removing Flash Player 7.0 before installing 9.0. Just go into YaST and select Software Installation. Go to Search and search for “flash.” If that has a check next to it, then it is installed. Click the check until it turns into a trash can (as in, “oh yes, let us delete this foul Flash 7”). You may be prompted that removing flash player violates the prime directive or some bullshit like that but just say ignore the rule and uninstall.

Installing the new Flash Player 9.0 for Linux is very, very easy. Just go to the handy download site:

http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayerlinux

You can grab the tarball if you want, but I’d recommend going with the RPM. Download the RPM to your desktop. If you want to get stupid, you can just double-click the icon and the package will be automagically installed. If you’re into Linux because it’s fun to do things the CLI way, then just frizzle fry up a terminal window and go to the Desktop folder (probably just type ‘cd Desktop’), then type:

rpm -i flash-plugin-9.0.31.0-release.i386.rpm

And one thing to remember about long filenames in the BASH shell is that you can simply start typing the filename then hit the Tab key, and the shell will complete the rest of the name. Handy.

The advantage of the RPM over the .tar.gz file is the ease of install/uninstall. Also it’s easy to probe RPM to find out what version you’re running. Something like this would work:

rpm -qa | grep flash

Tune to KWLC on Sundays in January from 2:30pm–4:00pm (CST) to hear Freeform Faust.

Notes

Hopefully “We’re Desperate” is a better leave for The Revolution (the show on after mine) than “Cinque Sintesi Radiofoniche” was last week.

Christmas

I asked for this:

and I got this:

I even included a picture of album on my list. I am grateful for what I got. Outside the Dream Syndicate Alive is amazing.

On April 13, 2006, Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman signed Legislative Bill 1024 (L.B. 1024) into law. The law is set to take effect in 2008. By its language, this bill only applies to the city of Omaha and allows Omaha to separate into three racially-identifiable school districts. The language of the bill is facially-neutral insofar as it doesn’t specifically require school attendance in the new districts to be contingent on a student’s race. Rather, it requires new district lines to be drawn around existing high school attendance areas, mandates that each district contain only two or three high schools, and requires districts to be comprised of contiguous neighborhoods. Thus, insofar as L.B. 1024 uses race-neutral language, it is able to avoid being directly and immediately struck down under the precedent set forth in Brown v. Board of Education. Because most Omaha neighborhoods are highly racially-segregated, however, this bill will have the effect of causing Omaha’s new school districts to be segregated on the basis of race as well. When application of a facially-neutral statute results in a racially-discriminatory effect, the Supreme Court has deemed such a statute unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. See, e.g., Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 356 (1886).

In addition, there is significant circumstantial evidence that L.B. 1024 was passed for the purpose of creating racially-identifiable school districts. For example, Ernie Chambers, one of L.B. 1024’s key sponsors, stated that he supported the bill, because it would provide minorities with more control over their own schools. This discriminatory purpose in passing L.B. 1024 would also likely cause the statute to fail to pass constitutional muster under the past Supreme Court precedent of Washington v. Davis.

Thus, L.B. 1024 produces an unconstitutional racial classification which violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Nebraska legislature should repeal the bill before it goes into effect in 2008. Many groups have already recognized the potential unconstitutionality of L.B. 1024. Both the NAACP and the Chicano Awareness Center have filed separate lawsuits against Nebraska Governor, Dave Heineman, in federal and state court, respectively.

The NAACP case is still pending; but, in the case of Chicano Awareness Center, et al. v. Dave Heineman as Governor, et al., a Douglas County District Court judge issued a temporary restraining order on September 19, 2006, restraining and enjoining implementation of L.B. 1024. It declared the bill unconstitutional under the Nebraska constitution, because of issues related to the voting structure of the governing board L.B. 1024 creates. Because of the strong feelings on both sides of this debate, the district court’s decision will likely be appealed.

1 legendary r&b singer
+ 2 guitarists
+ 1 bassist
+ 3 horn players
+ 2 backup singers
+ 1 percussionist
+ 1 drummer
+ 1 old school organ player
+ 1 keyboardist
+ 2 dancers
= Al Green’s first time in Iowa!

The party was part of the inaugural festivities for new Democratic Iowa Governor Chet Culver. Other groups performing included local blues virtuoso Joe Price and Pieta Brown.

Chet gets sworn in today. Tom Vilsack is off to bigger things, and Chet is the man now.

Tune to KWLC on Saturdays Sundays in January from 2:30pm–4:00pm (CST) to hear Freeform Faust.

We wrote last year about Best of Bootie 2005, which remains one of our favorite compilation CDs of mashups. It’s fine stuff and comes highly recommended from this reviewer. And guess what? The 2006 edition is now available. You can check it out here. They don’t have a Torrent link, but you can download a 108 MB zipped file containing the 21 tracks from the continuous mix CD. “Perfect for parties!” and we agree. The mashups come from DJs all over the US and the world. Plenty of fine mashup music to be had here.

If 21 of the finest mashup tracks weren’t enough, they’ve included 10 more tracks for individual download, just because. It’s a total of 31 mashups and there’s a lot to enjoy here.

A perfectly legitimate question at this point may be: what is a mashup? It’s simply the melding of two or more songs — preferably by different artists — to create a new song of its own. When it’s done right, it’s fantastic, and believe me, the tracks on Best of Bootie are awesome again this year. So get yourself some free Bootie mashup action and let me know what you think.