A couple of news stories worth pointing at:
Apparently some marketing weasel at Eli Lilly thought it would be a fine idea to send unsolicited samples of prozac through the mail. The mind reels.
Despite the shrill editorializing in spots, this article has some sobering thoughts about the war in Afghanistan.
Many of you have probably heard the now-old chestnut from John Gilmore that “the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
I’m wondering if we won’t see something similar happen with Internet Radio. As far as I can tell, if a webcaster moved operations offshore, he would pretty much be exempt from the recent CARP ruling unless the new host nation passed similar legislation. Right now I’m listening to Radio Liechtenstein, which I suspect has been unaffected. Perhaps some of the other webcasters I have enjoyed but have now been silenced can take advantage of this. There’s an opportunity here.
Last night was firenight, made extra-special by the fact that the Ringling Bros’ circus train crept past in the middle of it, which was excellent fodder for jokes. Everyone stopped and went to look at the elephants, camels, and Lipizzans. Kristen and Gwen (a different Gwen) both had their first burns, but I forgot my camera. Sage was there, her first firenight since she returned from New Zealand.
And tomorrow, Gwen and I are taking a road trip out west. We may see the McDonald Observatory, we may see the Marfa Lights. Here’s what my Texas road atlas has to say about the Marfa Lights: “These mysterious lights, first reported by settlers in the 1880s, have still not been adequately unexplained.”
What a great weekend.
Some of Gwen’s friends organized a campout at Colorado Bend State Park. I got a few pictures. The park was pretty nice–about 10 miles down a gravel road, 100 miles away from home. Right on the Colorado River, at a point where a stream feeds into it. There’s a hiking trail along the stream, which has a few small waterfalls and some pretty good swimming holes, which were the major attraction for us. A lot of bubbas were attracted by the oppportunity to take their motorboats and personal watercraft out on the river. Oh well.
Gwen and I arrived at about 10:00 PM Friday, hooked up with the few people who had made it out there ahead of us, and set up our tent. Made a fine dinner of tuna steak, mashed potatoes, and curried rice. More people in our group started showing on Saturday, and we had a full day of hanging out, walking the trail, soaking in chilly stream water, eating, hanging out some more, and eating some more. In the course of the day we discovered a secluded group campsite, and Susan decided we should move there. The park office was closed by this time, but Susan found a ranger, who cleared it. So we pulled up stakes (literally) and moved about a fifth of a mile. The new site really was better, and not just for us, as it spared our former campsite neighbors from the group’s late-night singalong of bad 80s music (unfortunately, it did not spare me). A big feast, with lots of very fine food and lots of wine was put on. To derail my campmates’ caterwauling, I did a fire set.
Sunday was another rough day of soaking at the swimming hole; we packed up around 2:00 and hauled ass back to Austin (those country roads seem to have no speed limit).
That would make for a fine weekend right there, but there was plenty more fun to be had. Gwen and I had tickets for the very last show in Austin by the Flaming Idiots, so we got cleaned up and went to that. It was great fun–those guys are really talented as jugglers, but also good comedians and showmen.
But wait, there’s more–Jenny had invited us to meet up with her at Flipnotics to catch Shorty Long. Flipnotics is walking distance from the Zach Scott Theater where we saw the Idiots, so we strolled over and caught the band. Jenny had told us they reminded her a lot of the Asylum Street Spankers (a band we love), and when we got there, it was clear why–Shorty Long has both Pops and Mysterious John from the Spankers. Anyhow, Shorty Long put on an excellent, high-energy show lasting over two hours. I marvelled that we live in a town where talent of that quality is playing for tips at a small coffee shop on a Sunday night. Jenny and Gwen also had a chance to meet, and that was good.
Big, Bigger, Biggest: The Supersize Suburb
Does anyone actually need an 8,500 square-foot house? There’s something vaguely pornographic about a house that big. My own house is somewhere in the range of 1,550 to 1,800 square feet, and families of four have lived in it comfortably. You could fit my house into one of these McMansions four or five times over. When I lived in Japan, I shared an apartment that I generously estimate to have been 240 square feet.
Goodbye, Internet radio. There’s no way the hobbyist-level operators, who are doing this as a labor of love, will be able to pay these royalties (apparently, about $500 a day). Up until today, I barely listened to conventional radio at all; I listened to Internet radio all the time. As of today, most of my favorite streams are dead air, and I have to imagine the others are not long for this earth.
No doubt the big broadcast-radio conglomerates and the RIAA are happy. The RIAA, which has had its collective head stuck up its collective ass for years, shouldn’t be so smug. I’ve bought quite a few albums as a result of music I heard on Internet radio–probably more than I’ve bought because of broadcast radio. In the past, there was a chance they’d get some revenue through record sales. Now, they’re not going to get any royalties from the Internet streams (since they’re disappearing), nor from the album sales spurred by those streams. This is arguably more of a clear-cut win for big radio, since it eliminates real competition. Then again, I’m not going to start listening to broadcast radio more as a result of this.
Since upgrading my Mac to OS X, I’ve been trying to find just the right FTP client. RBrowser isn’t absolutely perfect, but it’s pretty darned good.
Yesterday was Father’s Day, and Gwen and I drove down to Houston in her snazzy new wedgelet to visit her father, who happened to be there on business. He’s even more curmudgeonly than my own dad.
We all visited the Natural Science Museum, specifically the Butterfly Center. This was really wonderful–the exhibit was a little short on education, but is still worthwhile. The un-educational aspect fits perfectly with the rest of the museum, which is among the most commercial I’ve ever seen. One buys tickets (which aren’t cheap) to specific exhibits, not the whole museum. The exhibits are packaged and marketed like movies at a cinemaplex, with promotional displays and posters. That, combined with the fact that the museum also has an imax screen, makes it downright confusing as to whether a given attraction is an exhibit or movie. The museum had two gift shops (that I noticed), plus a McDonald’s right on the premises.
We then ate dinner at Kim Son, a Vietnamese joint that is a Houston institution. I had a really excellent shrimp curry.
And then it was about time to go home, so we did.