"I mean the very idea that in a country of our wealth and our prosperity, we have children going to bed hungry.  We have children who don't have the clothes to keep them warm.  We have millions of Americans who work full-time every day for minimum wage to support their family and still live in poverty—it’s wrong.

 

These are men and women who are living up to their part of the bargain: working hard and taking care of their families.  Those families are doing their part; it’s time we did ours. 

 

We will do that when John is in the White House.  We will raise the minimum wage, finish the job on Welfare Reform, and bring good paying jobs to the places that need them.  And we will say no forever to any American working full-time and living in poverty—not in our America, not in our America."

That is some fine damn speechifying!  I'm sorry I missed Barak Obama - I haven't had the time to check out any of the streaming video - but I understand he was pretty electrifying.

Naturally we're watching this on CSPAN, because the coverage from the "liberal media" is enough to make one puke.  TV media seems to be broken down into the ones that are openly shills for the Repuglican Party, those that are so afraid of being labeled "liberal" that they purposely slant their coverage to the right and those too stupid and/or too lazy to do anything other than regurgitate RNC talking points.  If fucking ABC News doesn't do the same kind of "buying influence" coverage of the RNC during their convention, I'm screaming bloody murder.

I do have to add one humorous/ironic comment, though.  Edwards' speech last contained the following:

"We shouldn't have two public school systems in this country: one for the most affluent communities, and one for everybody else.

None of us believe that the quality of a child’s education should be controlled by where they live or the affluence of their community."

This just a few days after John and Elizabeth closed on a deal for 100 acres off of Old Greensboro Road conveniently within the Chapel Hill-Carrboro school district, which of course is one of the highest-rated in the country.  Ok, so he said we "shouldn't" have two public school systems, not that we didn't...

Tuesday, July 27, 2004

From the apostropher, the job that every red-blooded Canadian male wants - checking nekkid pictures of women trying to enter Canada to work in the strip clubs.  Partially nekkid won't do if you want to dance at Runway 66!

Fafnir's "interview" with Dr. James Dobson of the Family Research Council on the fallout of the failure of the Senate to pass the Gay-Marry Ban Amendment:

JAMES DOBSON: Just terrible, Fafnir. Because of the weakness and corruption of the United States Senate, I have been forced to become gay.

FB: Oh no!

JD: I'm afraid it's true, Fafnir. I now spend my nights in a ball gag and a chastity cage while Gary Bauer whips me from behind in his skintight leather bodice.

Cool urban photoblogging at Satan's Laundromat

Via Boingboing, the guys at Jibjab have been threatened with a copyright lawsuit for their use of "This Land is Your Land" without permission.  Pretty weird, since Woody Guthrie once used the following as his copyright notice:

"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."

Monday, July 26, 2004

Posted by Tony @ 09:41:00 pm |

 

Jingles or Earworms?

"Marvel the Mustang, he's almost for real

Just saddle him up, with spurs on your heels

No winding, no batteries

Marvel the Mustang, oh we love you! (by Marx!)"

Damn jingle's been going through my head for 48 hours now - maybe having written it down it will go away!  Now if I could shake the early 70's jingle for Earl Dunn Pontiac in Madison, Tennessee, maybe I could get some sleep tonight...

"That's what I said -

Bunny Bread"

 

Posted by Tony @ 03:38:00 pm |

Sunday, July 25, 2004

 

Whatever Happened to Audiophiles?

Occasionally I'll leaf through articles about home entertainment PCs and using wireless connectivity to pipe your massive collection of MP3s throughout the house, all of this costing pretty big bucks even if you do it yourself.  Yet I've got younger friends from work that listen to little other than MP3s.  I guess if you grew up listening to music either through tinny little Sony Walkman headphones or through the speakers in boom cars that are designed for volume instead of fidelity, you probably a) have no hearing to speak of anyway and b) wouldn't recognize superior audio quality if it jumped up and bit you in the ass.  Now I know I've suffered severe hearing loss at the high and low ends over the years from too many rock concerts, from owning a club, from listening to auto stereo systems at high volumes, etc.  But believe you me, I can tell the difference between an MP3 encoded at 128 kbps and a WAV file ripped from a CD and you probably can too if you try.  So I wonder if the kids in college today have the same kinds of conversations that we did when I was in school.

There was the audio equipment that you dreamed of and the audio equipment that you might actually be able to afford.  We'd dream and drool over Bang and Olufsen component systems and Klipschorn loudspeakers that we knew we'd never be able to buy and then discuss more seriously the various merits of stuff we could actually aspire to.  We'd talk about signal-to-noise ratios and frequency response and stuff like we actually understood it.  I started school with the DYN Service-Merchandise-special all-in-one system with receiver, turntable, 8-track and a couple of anemic speakers and each year for Christmas wheedled my folks into replacing a component.  Christmas my freshman year it was the speakers, replaced by the Pioneer HPM-40's that are still hooked up to the stereo in my office even today.  Most of the guys I knew either had Pioneer HPM-40s or HPM-60s, Bose 301s or Advent 1 loudspeakers.  I never particularly cared for the sound from the Advent 1s but the Bose were sweet!  If you really had the bucks, you had the big-ass Bose 901s that were about the size of a television (they still make those puppies and they're still about $1400 a pair).  For some reason, every girl I knew in college had Panasonic Thrusters.  Every single one.  I guess that was the only thing it was legal to play Heart's Dog and Butterfly through, 'cause Lord knows every damn one of them owned that album as well.

Sophomore year it was the Pioneer SX-780 receiver, which gave up the ghost around 4 or 5 years later.  Junior year it was the Pioneer PL-100 belt-drive turntable, which I also still own and use.  I've got a couple of extra belts for when this one wears out and only hope I'll still be able to find a cartridge for it when that time comes again.  Finally senior year I got a tape deck (can't remember the model now) that lasted about as long as the receiver but not much longer.

We put all this money into home theater systems to get pristine sound from DVDs, but whatever happened to just good musical reproduction?  No question that I listen to music more often either on a little MP3 player with earphone or in the XTerra, which has pretty darn good sound but, hey, it's still a car.  But when I want to really hear music, I turn to the Sennheiser headphones that I got from Mom for Christmas a couple of years ago (hey, some ideas are good for a long time!) or the Klipsch ProMedia 2.1s on the audio PC I built with the Soundblaster Audigy soundcard.  No, they're not quite Klipschorn loudspeakers, but I do grin a little every time I crank up some Led Zep through them and remember those days sitting with the guys on the 4th floor of Mangum Dorm dreaming about the speakers we'd do anything for.

Posted by Tony @ 03:10:00 pm |