Lyrical
Understandings
Turn Around
January 13, 2012
Economic recovery
as explained by Ratt: Round
and round -- what comes around, goes around. I don't know why.
Writing as explained
by Bob Seger: There I
am up on the stage. Here I go, playing star again. There I go. Turn the
page.
International views
of America explained by Nirvana: Take
a step out of the country, and you turn around. Take a look at
what you are. It is amazing.
The universe
explained by Bonnie Tyler: Turn
around, every now and then, I know there's no one in the universe as
magical and wondrous as you."
Music
Associations: Ratt - Round and Round, Bob Seger - Turn The Page,
Nirvana - Turnaround, & Bonnie Tyler -
Total Eclipse of the Heart
Turn
It Up
January 11, 2012
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) heard too many complaints
about loud commercials last year, so they took a vote. (They vote?!?)
And they unanimously decided that commercials must be at the same
audio level as the rest of the audio program. Congress passed
the Commercial
Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act, the President signed it,
and it will go into effect on
December 13, 2012.
What will we do until
then?
The FCC recommends manual control of volume levels to reduce excessive
loudness using a My Usual Tonal Equilibrium (MUTE) button. A survey has
found the MUTE button missing from the manufacture of most radios.
The Loophole
The FCC neglected to vote (snicker,
snicker) about commercial visuals being larger than the
programs. The Consumer
Electronics show in Las Vegas had an unscheduled lunchtime conference
about expanding images beyond the television frame for commercial
advertising to compensate for lost audio volumes.
Music Association: Lynyrd
Skynyrd - Sweet Home Alabama "Turn It Up"
I Didn't Mean To Turn You On
January 10, 2012
This week's Consumer
Electronics show in Las Vegas features a voice-activated
TV. The TV turns on by greeting it, "Hi TV." Channels can be
changed by flailing your arms around like an idiot.
Thank you-thank you-thank you! That is just what I need.
It's almost spooky how the consumer electronics people are able to
monitor the pulse of the modern consumer.
The voice-activated TV is another device that needs to be unplugged to
be off. It can never fully be off because it is always listening for
the sound of a voice. It's like the modern equivalent of the RCA dog,
Nipper, listening for the sound of its master's voice.
One
of my favorite Christmas presents was a Kill-A-Watt
EZ.
Plug it in and plug something else into it. It will display the wattage
the device is drawing whether the device is on or off. Punch in the
cost of your power from your power bill, and it will tell you how much
it costs to have the device plugged
in-but-off per week, month, or year.
It is very straightforward and easy to use.
Another thing on the TV
drawing board
are TV's made from organic LEDs, which have the advantage -- I kid you
not* -- of making the TVs have to be replaced more often.
How do they do it?!? That is exactly what I wanted -- disposable TVs! I
can't wait.
Music Associations: Robert
Palmer - I Didn't Mean To Turn You On & Genesis - Turn It On
Again
* Okay, I kid
you, just not this time.
Going the Way of Newspapers
Are
Shopping Malls -- Dinosaurs?
January 9, 2012
The tests to determine dinosaur-status are once again being used to
determine the prehistoricalness of a cultural mainstay, as we turn our
attention to the shopping mall.
The shopping malls have been around since hunter-gatherers first over
hunted or over gathered. The surplus of stuff was put on display for
others to admire and purchase. The modern full-enclosed shopping mall
was born on a former gravel pit in snowy Edina, Minnesota in 1956,
giving rise to the mega Mall of America in 1992 in neighboring
Bloomington, Minnesota. Yesterday, one of MoA's four anchoring
department stores, Bloomingdale's, began its closing sale.
Large
Shopping Malls are certainly big and lumbering. The Mall of America has
its own weather.
Fierce
Fights between competing brands and competing consumers break out all
the time. Young people got into a fight at one of the Mall
of America food
courts on December 26th, which took police over an hour to quell.
But largeness and fierceness does not make something a dinosaur. The
Internet is large and not always peaceful, but without that dinosaur
smell.
Dying
Malls
have that dinosaur smell. Bloomingdale's
and its parent company Macy's are shuttering a few stores. So is K-Mart
and its parent company Sears. Borders are all closed. But that's not to
say malls are dying. Sickly? Yes. Dying depends upon how long this
recession will continue.
The
2012 Dinosaur List
♠ newspapers
♠ phone
books
♠
mail
service
♠ malls?
Music Association: Ke$ha -
Dinosaur
The Music Charts
January 6, 2012
This morning, I was eating a basketball-sized grapefruit (no dunking,
some dribbling) and reading the iTunes
top album charts. Adele's 21
is tops for the US, UK, France, Germany, Belgium, Canada, Greece,
Ireland, Norway, Portugal... but number 7 for Italy and Japan. Hmmm...
That got me thinking about cultural differences, the differences of
iTunes vs. physical CDs (I bought a 21 CD for a
Christmas gift), and the Billboard
200 albums (Adele's 21
was at the top).
I started thinking too much about the charts (this was where the
dribbling began) and how One
by The Beatles was number 2 in Japan and the calculations of music
charts and what the charts really mean. My grapefruit became Venn
diagrams and flowcharts.
And then there's all the na na
na
songs (Beatles - Hey
Jude,
Janis Joplin - Me
And Bobby McGee,
J. Geils Band - Angel
is a Centerfold,
Journey - Lovin
Touchin
{154 na's}, My Chemical Romance - Na Na
Na,
Paul Simon - Call
Me Al,
Steam - Hey
Hey Goodbye,
Wilson Pickett - Land
of 1000 Dances,
themes to Batman & Fat Albert... ), represented only partially
by the chart below, but taken to extreme by XKCD.
Music
Associations: Adele - Someone Like You; Beatles - Hey Jude, I am the
Walrus, All You Need Is Love; Prince - When Doves Cry; Bonnie Tyler -
Total Eclipse of the Heart; Steve Miller - Joker; & Devo - Whip
It
From Lighters to LED screens
Rock Concert Audience History
January 5, 2012
Music Association: 2PM - Hands Up
Department of the Obvious
Humane Society Kills Pet
January 4, 2012
I didn't have anything nice to say about the news
that the Arizona
Humane Society killed a kitten that had been left with them
for an hour. Of course they did that. That is what
they do.
They kill healthy animals -- animals that defend themselves -- animals
that might scratch or bite. Mangled or blind pets live (they won't
scratch or bite). Healthy looking pets die.
I'm using the news
as an excuse to post cute pet pictures.
Music Association:
Paul McCartney - Live and Let Die
2' Rain Washes
Southern Thailand
January 3, 2012
On New Year's Eve, my top hat got
wet in the rain -- rain that turned to snow before 11pm.
It was a weird way to end a dry year.
Meanwhile, two feet of rain has
hit southern Thailand over the past two days, causing flooding
and mudslides.
That's worse than a wet top hat.
Music Association: Prince -
Purple Rain
2011
Discoveries
Medical AntiVirus
January 2, 2012
What do the common cold, the flu, AIDS, chickenpox, swine flu (H1N1),
and polio have in common?
They are all viruses.
Modern medicine has handled many bacterial illnesses but hasn't done as
well for viruses, until now.
MIT's
lab coat people have a lead on an answer -- the
Double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) Activated Caspase Oligomerizer (DRACO). DRACO identifies
cells that have been infected by any
type of virus and kills those cells to terminate the
infection.
MIT tested DRACO against 15 viruses and found it effective against all
15. For perspective, there are an estimated
10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 viruses. Five thousand have
been described. (Human viruses are identified by associated
pathologies or by the Baltimore
classification system.)
DRACO is a step in the right direction.
Music Association: Five For
Fighting - Dying
Cartoon Association:
Bedtime for Sniffles
January 1, 2012
2012 -- It's a leap year, and Olympics year, and an election
year.
Oh yeah, and it's the end of time. Right.
The People's Almanac
by David
Wallechinsky and Irving Wallace, published in 1975, started
with a
list of past predictions (right and wrong) and "future" predictions.
I don't want to alarm you, but according to many psychics of the 1970s,
you died a long time ago. Sorry.
►
Jeane Dixon said
the Russians would have started a nuclear war in 1999 that would rain a
nuclear holocaust on the United States and Europe, only to be stopped
by God.
► Criswell
said that the world would end on August 18, 1999 from the magnetic
disturbance of a black rainbow that hurtled the Earth into the Sun.
► David
Bubar said that American and Russian scientists would invent a device
that
would make people invisible. How could he possibly see that
happening?
It's funny how this list
of excerpts from The
People's Almanac left out all these great predictions.
2012 will not be the end of time... except for some.
[NASA
answers 2012 doomsday scenarios]
[hangover cures:
water, potassium, cysteine, fructose, sodium*]
Music Association: Styx - The
Best of Times
