Author Archives: Tape

Hum – You’d Prefer an Astronaut

A couple of months ago, Shop Radio Cast announced that they were pressing Hum’s classic second album You’d Prefer an Astronaut. Being as this album is probably the most important album in my life, autobiographically speaking, I rather expectedly lost my shit immediately and plunked down for the pre-orders of both colors as soon as possible. The original vinyl pressing(s) from 1995 are extremely rare and regularly fetch multiple hundreds of dollars.

Hum - You'd Prefer an Astronaut - green vinyl

Hum - You'd Prefer an Astronaut - black vinyl

They arrived today and it’s glorious. It comes in a nice gatefold jacket, with an especially nice touch: on the front and rear covers, the text and the zebra graphic are printed in a glossy UV coating, glossier than the rest of the cover. The effect is subtle but very obvious when you look at it.

Each color is /500. The black is 180g vinyl, the green is not.

Link

Letter: How Newtown killings changed this gun owner’s mind:

I deployed to the Iraq War in 2004 as a Marine. I came to see my experience in Iraq as that of a pawn doing the work of liars, profiteers and chickenhawks. I say this to illustrate that my outlook on gun control is influenced both from the standpoint of a Constitution-observing public servant and as a person who came to question the integrity of our system of governance to the very core. In short, I was reverent of the Second Amendment’s freedom-guarding intent. I still am.

But my reverence is irrelevant. The Second Amendment stopped giving the insurrectionists among us a chance as soon as military technology advanced beyond the rifle. No modern Shays’ Rebellion is viable, militarily speaking, unless the Second Amendment is read to protect an individual’s right to bear surface-to-air missiles, Abrams tanks and depleted-uranium artillery. Who in their right mind would want to live where these things are available to any person, no matter how law-abiding or responsible?

[Jamaica Plain Gazette]

Link

Below the Boat: Stupendously gorgeous carved-wood bathymetric charts of various American bodies of water.

I want them so badly.

Atlantic Drone

Now That’s What I Call Drone: Vol. 1 got featured in The Atlantic today, which is mindboggling.

The title of the piece might be a bit much. “The History of Drone Music Culminates in ‘Now That’s What I Call Drone’”. Culminates? Let me look that up in the dictionary just to be sure:

the definition of culminate: reach a climax or point of highest development

Hyperbole, sure. Obviously I think it’s a really good compilation and worth of your listening time, but that might be a bit much.

I certainly appreciate it, anyway.

Now That’s What I Call Drone: Vol. 1

Now That's What I Call Drone: Vol. 1

A couple of months back, a small group of people, myself included, were joking around on Twitter about doing drone covers of Top 40 hits. We took the joke so far that it became a real, actual, ontological thing called Now That’s What I Call Drone: Vol. 1 complete with twelve tracks, which has been released to an unsuspecting public today. It’s actually really awesome. If you like drone or ambient music, you will probably like it, because it’s got twelve really excellent drone/ambient re-imaginings of recent Billboard Hot 100 chart-toppers.

I really like my track, I’m proud of it, and I also think every other song on the compilation is far superior to mine.

Please feel free to download the compilation for free. You have the option to pay an amount of your liking if you really feel some kind of need, but you should feel no pressure to do so. All we care about is you having a nice musical experience for about an hour and a quarter.

[link to the compilation, in case you missed it above.]

On The Olympics

A lunch counter in Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal Market named Olympic Gyro received a cease-and-desist notice from the United States Olympic Committee and will have to change its name. Nevermind that the owner is Greek.

One one hand, yeah ok, they were using the Olympic rings logo and I’m fine with saying you can’t do that, but saying a Greek guy can’t use the name Olympic for his restaurant is like saying an American couldn’t name their business Liberty Real Estate or Rushmore Pizza.

The Olympics have turned into a bizarro-land of corporatism gone amok, where you have to get a special dispensation to sell fish and chips (sort of an English staple, yeah?) anywhere near the London Olympics because McDonald’s is the Official Restaurant Sponsor of the 2012 London Olympics and as such has the Exclusive Right to Sell French Fries (or “chips” in the local parlance). McDonald’s was kind enough to allow this only for the combination “fish and chips”, but otherwise, try to sell just the chips without fish and well you’re gonna be in some kind of Big Trouble.

There was a time where the Olympics were about sports at their most awesome1. Those days are long gone, and now the Olympics are merely another tactic mega-corporations to squeeze every last dime out of the populace.

The USOC should get bent, and bring the IOC along.

1 Now that I’m thinking about it, this time was probably before I was born.

Day Three

After two days of biking to work, I took a break today. My whole body is tired – especially my legs. This probably shouldn’t come as a huge surprise as I’ve become a little 1 out of shape in the last few years and my body isn’t used to doing so much, and doing it every day oh god come on make it stop.

1 moderate understatement 2.
2 ok, massive understatement.

Link

Erin Kissane, speaking on the Anita Sarkeesian situation, but also about so much more:

Civility isn’t fancy-talk for “being nice.” It’s the essential quality we require to live together in complex social structures built on our jumpy, irrational primate brains. Online, where we increasingly live, we need it more than ever.

The essential, crucial, must-read piece of the week. Gordon Withers calls it Required Reading, and I’m inclined to agree.

Link

Randall Munroe of XKCD has started a new delightful new sidelog of weekly answers to hypothetical reader questions called What If. The first two entries regard guessing on every multiple-choice SAT question and trying to hit a baseball going 90% the speed of light.

The answer turns out to be “a lot of things”, and they all happen very quickly, and it doesn’t end well for the batter (or the pitcher).

My favorite part so far is this bit, which clearly would have been an XKCD alt-text if it had been a regular comic:

A careful reading of official Major League Baseball Rule 6.08(b) suggests that in this situation, the batter would be considered “hit by pitch”, and would be eligible to advance to first base.

Link

Kit Chellel, Bloomberg:

The design for three Galaxy tablets doesn’t infringe Apple’s registered design, Judge Colin Birss said today in London in a court fight between the world’s two biggest makers of smartphones. Consumers aren’t likely to get the tablet computers mixed up, he said.

The Galaxy tablets “do not have the same understated and extreme simplicity which is possessed by the Apple design,” Birss said. “They are not as cool.”

Well I guess that settles it.

On Bike Commuting

A few weeks ago I bought a bike. Today was my first time riding it to work (I took my time researching/buying locks). All in all, not a bad ride – about 3.5 miles, little under a half hour and that was taking it pretty easy. I could probably knock that down to 20 minutes whenever it is that I actually get in some kind of shape besides round.

Link

The fall and rise of the baguette:

“For years I had watched the sensorial quality of French bread palpably deteriorate,” he told me. The decline first set in, he said, when bakers switched from levain to commercial yeast in order to shorten the bread-making process. Yeast could work as an acceptable substitute for levain, but instead of relying on minute amounts of yeast and letting the dough ferment over 24 hours— as Delmontel does with his baguettes—bakers added more yeast and cut the rise period to as little as one hour, “suppressing the first fermentation that is the source of all taste,” Kaplan said.

The situation worsened in the 1950s, when bakers started using intensive kneading machines that satisfied consumer desire for an ever-whiter crumb. They started sprinkling in additives such as vitamin C to spike fermentation, and heaps of salt to mask the absence of flavor. In short, while pursuing the promises of modernity—efficiency, speed, and whiter bread—what French bakers lost was the one indispensable ingredient: time.

[via kottke]