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Great internet radio

www.pandora.com is a great internet radio site. A friend steered me towards it (thanks Galen!) and I love it. What you do is tell it a group or song that you really like. It will then select songs that are actually what you requested or similar to them. I think they only play indie bands, so there’s a good chance that you haven’t heard of the people that come up, but that’s a good thing! I put in Bratmobile, Southern Culture on the Skids, Fugazi, and Billy Bragg and I love what they’ve done so far. You can also set up different “stations” that play different types of music. You gotta have broadband, but it’s a quick way to get an injection of coolness and bands you’ve never heard of.

Isaac

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The Aristocrats

Finally saw the movie today. It’s really more of a documentary than a performance film, there’s only a couple of examples of the joke being told the whole way through. It’s mostly comics talking about the joke and snippets of them performing it. There are a couple of standouts. Sarah Silverman is amazing, and there’s another woman who does an art school inspired one that is pretty good as well. George Carlin does a good job of giving insight into the joke. The joke was seemingly written for Gilbert Gotfreid, his rendition has forever changed my associations to the words Popeye and longshoremen.

At first, the joke operates purely on shock value. The acts described are beyond horrible and you can’t believe the images that they conjure up. The mediocre comics stay in the shock realm, the punch-line is anticlimactic and what is funny is the shocking acts that he thought of. The better comics take it beyond that. They too start off with shock, but as they go along, something changes. You can get anesthetized to descriptions of incest, bestiality, necrophilia, etc. What comes to the fore is the comics ability to string you along and tell a story. The key is to tell it in a way such that the comic doesn’t see what the big deal is about the acts. He can’t be offended, or even excited by these things. If it is delivered properly, the only indication that the comic knows how terrible the acts are is in the irony of the name of the act. In some ways, it tests the comic’s joke telling abilities to the max.

My favorite thing on the DVD is a variation on the joke. I don’t know the comedienne’s name, but she showed what a great delivery she has with jokes. She looks and sounds as sweet and nice as can be, and tells the entire thing in a soothing, wondrous voice.
“A man walks into a talent agent’s office and says, “I have a great act for you, you’ll love it!”
“What kind of act is it?”
“It’s a family act, there’s a mother, a father, Timmy an 11 year old son, and Suzie the 8 year old daughter eating dinner together. It’s a wonderful dinner and they all enjoy it very much. The maid comes out and starts to clear the dishes and the mother suggests that they retire into the drawing room for some after dinner fun.
In the drawing room, the mother braids Suzie’s beautiful blonde hair while the father and Timmy play chess. The maid comes out with strawberries and cream and they all have a wonderful dessert.”
“That sounds wonderful! What a nice act. What do you call it?
“The motherfucking cocksuckers.”

Obviously it’s a lame joke, but with the right delivery it’s laugh out loud funny. I don’t think a guy would ever get the same reaction as a sweet natured woman telling the joke. If you want to get a feel for the actual aristocrats joke, google south park aristocrats and see the clip from the movie. It’s actually pretty good, the funny part not so much being the joke itself but the reaction to it. Even the reaction of Cartman telling it is pretty funny. None of this is for the faint of heart or the easily offended, but if you want a glimpse into how a comic’s mind works and how a joke works, check out The Aristocrats.

Isaac

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Went to the dentist

Looks like I have the classic symptoms of developing a crack in one of my molars. He suggests crowning it before it cracks up. It’ll only run a cool $1200 bucks… ouch. Luckily I have dental insurance. It’ll only pay a little more than half, but that’s still a lot. I’m not a 100% sure, but i think I can write medical expenses off of my taxes too. The important thing is that I take care of this now so that I don’t have to have my teeth worked on in a third world country like Yemen. SHIVER, that’s a scary thought…

Isaac

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Vacuum Tubes!!!

Yes, I won the auctions and the tubes have started to roll in. I got a bunch from a guy in Australia, turns out he had a bunch of other audio tubes that he’s having trouble getting rid of, so I helped him out:-) I also got a bunch of 16gk6 tubes, a 16 volt(!) rebased 6bq5. They were only a buck a piece, so how could I lose? I now have more small signal tubes than I know what to do with, so you’d figure I’d stop right? Why stop now?:-) They don’t make them like they used to and the prices keep going up. I figure that these will continue to accrue value as time goes by. In the meantime, I can build some pretty nice amps with them!

Isaac

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Got the cameras

Woohoo! I got the cameras, and after some initial confusion over little things like how to focus them and how to open them up and load film, I got pretty comfortable with them. I’ll say this, this is the lightest 4×5 camera I have ever held, and it’s rangefinder coupled too!!! The 6×12 finder will take some getting used to, but it’s also a real winner, I’m really excited about these, should be lots of fun! Now I gotta get a meter and do some tests!

Isaac

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Update to web page

I’ve changed the sizing of the site. let me know how it looks and if there’s any particular problems. Thanks!

My Site

Isaac

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Cezanne and a better exhibition

Went to the Cezanne exhibit at the National Gallery yesterday. Overall I’d say “eh…” He’s not really my cup of tea. His stuff shows a great use of gesture and he was very concerned with color as well. Unfortunately, gesture doesn’t mean much to me and I don’t really care for his use of color either. Overall I think his paintings are rather flat. It’s as though he didn’t pay much attention to light which seems odd since he was predominantly a landscape painter. Many of his paintings have the same brightness range across the frame, there is no change from light to dark. This kills any potential interest I might of had. Not surprisingly, I consider Renoir my favorite of the impressionists because of his acute sense of light.

I think the better exhibition is over in the east wing. They have a collection of “Small French Paintings” that are very very nice. Plus it isn’t a mob scene like the Cezanne show is. One of my favorites is in there, by Tissot I believe called “Hide and Seek”, Check it out

There’s also one by Villard entitled “Woman in a Red Dress” that is quite interesting in person.

There’s a bunch of others too, go see them!

Isaac

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Great week end!

In a rather bizarre twist, both parents were up in the DC area this weekend. Mom took me out for a birthday dinner on Sat. night and on Sunday Dad, Butler and I went to the Cezanne exhibit down at the national gallery. I’ve been eating nonstop, a great Indian meal on sat. and my favorite Afghan place on sun. I still have leftovers too:-) That includes a birthday cake, perhaps the most important part of the birthday! Mom got me some pretty nice Ray Ban sunglasses in anticipation for my trip to Yemen. I think I’ll have to take them back though. I haven’t worn sunglasses in 15 years or so but I thought I’d give these a try. They are a swept back sort of style, but they are far too small on my head, I’ll need something with larger frames if I’m going to not look silly wearing them. I have the same problem with hats, my head is so big (literally thank you very much) that most hats look odd on me. I’ll go see what they have as substitutes, the last pair that I bought were wayfarers back in 1987 or so. Not sure how kind the years have been to that design, I’ll see what they look like…

Isaac

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Carbondale Illinois?

I’m curious who you are. I see that someone from Carbondale checks up on my blog pretty regularly, drop me a line sometime and introduce yourself:-)

Isaac

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Coherent dreams…

I’ve had two very coherent dreams the last couple of nights. That’s a rarity for me, usually my dreams are jumbles of stuff that don’t make much sense. I had hoped that I would get a message from God or something but what I got instead was a Dr. Who episode and a fantasy/horror story (although it wasn’t scary to me).

The Dr. Who episode was rather good I think, but it had all the trademarks, goofy acting and dialogue, a ridiculous villain, and even mini cliff hangers between each installment. The other one was a little looser but it involved a main character that had the ability to move between host bodies. He discovered this ability when he was trapped by a bunch of vampires on a cruise ship that was very TARDIS-like now that I think of it. It was larger on the inside than on the outside and there wasn’t any consistency to the internal layout, it would change on you as you walked through it. The vampires were using it as a floating feast and recruitment center. The main character managed to get out of his body and into another before being made into a vampire, he then proceeded to go into space and under water with various adventures. There were several instances where he didn’t know how he lived through the experience and started to wonder if he had escaped being a vampire after all, or if he had already died, etc.

The last time I had dreams this cinematic is when I was in film school. I got a kick out of identifying the various editing techniques (gaze-object-gaze was a favorite of mine), lighting, and even camera angles… It was a little weird, but in a good way, if I’m going to do the equivalent of watching TV, it might as well be in my sleep:-)

Isaac