FlaSoxxJim

Welcome home, Nuke! Are you getting in the holiday spirit yet?

You are exactly right, but since I loathe your average wedding dancefloor scene I don't mind. I actually used to DJ school dances and such waaay back, and I think that I could be a kick-ass weekend digital DJ for weddings and such. I'd run two iPods on a Powerbook, with the arrival/early/dinner/dance/special and ending setlists in place but with the play order set only a song in advance based on what the moment calls for. That primary content would be firewire input. The second iPod would be USB input and would hold 40 GB of incidental request music (All legal, mind you) so you could slip in basically anything that gets requested at any time. A week or more before the event the bride and groom can get any special requests and custom event programming hammered out. There's even some pretty good vocal scrubbing software so if need be, you can make any song an ad hoc karaoke track (*shudder*), in case that drunk uncle insists on singing Proud Mary.

The EasyShare software basically turns your All-in-Wonder computer into a multimedia server for your home network. If other computers on a home network have Radeon cards they can get live TV and archived multimedia feeds from the All0in-Wonder/EasyShare computer. Here's more info: http://www.ati.com/products/multimediacenter/eazyshare.html Of coursse, my druthers would be to stop screwing around with the cheap iron and get a dual 2.5 G5 mac ( ), but I'll concede that 80% of the game market is aimed at the cheap iron so you're probably locked into it. I don't like the lack of DVI support on this card for all the other bells and whistles it has (especially with so many homes going HD and plasma, etc.), and I'd like it to be able to drive two monitors and TV-out simultaneously. But it's got a lot of neat features, puts out a deinterlaced TV signal, TV and FM tuners, some nice shaders and renderers and light effects processing... If you're not hung up about the main monitor outputs still being creaky old VGA technology I think it's a good choice. Note: Since you're building this from the ground up it's probbably not an issue, but none of the Multimedia Center software (including EasyShare) is supposed to work very well (if at all) with anything less than a Pentium 4.

It certainly is. And the writing is on the wall for Bonds, with Greg Anderson (his personal trainer) being the guy fingered as giving Giambi the drugs, and being identified on a tape as admitting Bonds was using an undetectable performance-enhancer in 2003. Damn I wish MLB could avoid all of this, but they and MLBPA brought it on themselves by not dealing proactively and aggressively with this 10 years ago. It will be ironic that the big homerun chase years that brought so many people back to baseball and healed some of the lingering 1994 strike anger will probably end up being the biggest scandal in a half-century of baseball.

My Kid Bro and me are throwing a surprise 60th birthday party for my folks next weekend (YES! I get to make a commando Chicago visit). We've already caughed up a couple K to rent a room with dinner and open bar for 100 people, so it's basically on par with a medium-sized weding. So when it came ime to figure out music my Bro asked how much we should shell out for a DJ and I said, screw that, we're going with "DJ iPod." I've spent the last week or so putting together an early set, dinner set, late set, and after hours set of music, with each set being approximately one hour more than is needed. That way when I randomm-play the setlists even I'll be surprised at what comes on next. $30 PA rental, killer tunes custom selected by someone who klnows the tastes of my folks and those in atttendence, plenty of drunk folks to embarrass themselves at the mic making stupid speeches... We're all set.

Didn't more people get real anthrax in their mail in 2001 than bought that album?? Hard to decide which "gift" would be worse.

Keep it Greasy, Greasy!

"Some Animals are More Equal Than Others." --George Orwell

No, that's just it. Simple Man has a nominal refrain only - there are repeated lyric, but there is no accompanying change in the chord progression or tempo, etc. That is what I meant by saying 'no chord change with the refrain. In the later post, I wrote what I thought to be the shorthand equivalent - song with no refrain. The point being there is no contrast or relief from C-G-Am in 2/4 between the verses and the nominal refrain. My apologies if it was misconstrued. To point, a lot of those Neil songs are very much in that same vein. And I think their all quite wonderful - just as I feel Simple Man is - in their simplicity.

The irony is how really Neil-esque a 3-chord, no refrain, no bridge song like Simple Man is. And anyway, Neil is the most southern sounding Kanuk there is, re, Everybody Knows this is Nowhere, Are You Ready For the Country?, Harvest Moon, Love is a Rose, man Needs a Maid, Down By the River, Powderfinger... Crap, now I need me a Neil fix.

Hey, I think you're on to something. And if you can tie Home Depot into Home Security, every new Orange alert becomes a branding opportunity.

Time to start shopping for a new Chief of Homeland Security. Another One Bites the Dust

First and foremost, sympathy and good thoughts for the families of all those killed and wounded in the war, and thanks to those men and women putting themselves in harm's way for something they hopefully still believe in. As for "Is it getting better?", that is a rhetorical question with no need for an answer other than to watch the money flow into the war, the bodies pile up on both sides, and the growing disdain the rest of the world rightly feels toward this country.

I'm a marginal fan. I actually loved them growing up in Chicago, but quickly got overexposed when I moved down south. As for Simple Man, I agree it's a great and under appreciated song. It's general lack of commercial success or familiarity is probably do to the fact that it was on their 1973 debut album ("Pronounced...") that got no national attention. I think that first album was easily the strongest of the first four, with the exception of 'The Ballad Of Curtis Loew' on the second release really picking up that disc IMHO. On an ear-appreciation level, Simple Man is also, well..., too simple. There is no chord change with the refrain - just that same arpeggiated C - G - Am riff, so there's no contrast to the song. From that standpoint the song is musically flat, but I appreciate it in that it doesn't distract from the lyrics. Finally, lack of radio play can't be equated with financial failure - although the payoff for the band came many years later (like, after-half-the-band-was-dead later). Busch Beer used Simple Man and Call Me the Breeze in their "Mountain Man" ad campaign in the late 80s, and I suspect that is the reason Simple Man made the cut for the "greatest hits" rehash compilation that came out around that time. If I recall tthat campaign correctly, the Call Me the Breeze was re-recorded by a session band with the added tag line "Ah'm just lookin' for a Busch... Beer!", while the Simple Man ads were actually the 1973 Skynyrd cut.

I haven't seen Kid Gleason around much lately, but I'm sure he is toasting the success of the King of All Monsters. http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory?id=291274

I'm learning to pick my battles?

This is a really cool network. My favorite coffee house office-away-from-the-office (free wi-fi!) has been promoting and participating this for about a year and it's really done well. And there's always new cool stuff lying around to pick up and read.

I'd like to think the theological issues can be readdressed as moral/ethical issues. It is not unreasonable for scientists to not want theological debate to enter into a scientific decisionmaking process - regardless of the fact that they may be people of faith in their private lives. Ethics on the other hand (as opposed to a cosmic carrot and stick) can and must be considered in secular medical and scientific decisionmaking. And scientists can't consider spiritual mattters in their capacity as scientists. Untestable by definition, it falls outside of the scientist's professional domain. That is not to say ascientists should not strive to respect all theological beliefs and viewpoints, provided those beliefs are not forced down the throats of the unwilling. I can't think of any issues you would describe as 'theological' that can't remain weighty important issues if grounded as ethical issues on this plane of existence, abortion and stem cell research included. If that is not the case, then this is always destined to be an impasse.

That's just it - the science and the scientists don't exist in a vaccuum. There are no findings that are going to leapfrog the regulatory agencies on their way to commercialization. 1 drug out of 5,000 makes it through the development pipeline, and all the rest are abandoned because they are unsafe or don't work. Despite the urban legends, there is no black market organ industry, and we aren't going to all wake up in an icewater bath with our date and one of our kidneys mysteriously missing - even though organ transplants are widespread and established procedures. Why would it be different if science leveraged the capacities of embryonic stem cells or even cloning technology? Not to clone people, of course, but to figure out how to actually grow replacement liver tissue in a nutrient bath in a lab. Doctors know you're right there walking around with a 'spare' kidney, but they're not trying to rip it out of you. Nobody is suggesting medical ethics be abandoned. Quite the contrary in some cases. What is suggested is that people are closing the door on new medical horizons without even having intelligent dialog about the issues first.

We try harder.

Ditto.

Damn I hate the slippery slope argument against conscienscous (sp?) progress in peasful scientific research. ...Let's not entertain the possibility of securely engineering GMO crops that are truly and irreversably infertile to feed teh world because early results have not been altogether successful. ...Let's not leverage the knowledge from the Human Genome Project to develop comprehensive prenatal screens for dread diseases because it may usher in a new era of eugenics thinking. [Curiously, nobody bothered to mention the slippery slope when Celera and Genera and Diversa started patenting critical portions of the human genome for profit potential. Now a scientist cannot legally work on finding cures to certain gene-based diseases because they're not allowed to work on certain genes. Never mind that we all have billions of copies of those very genes in our own cells. The patterns are now corporate patented property, and they may or may not have the expertise or inclination to do anything with that property, and you or your loved ones will likely die of something in the meantime because nobody else is allowed to look for a cure for your condition.] We can apply the slippery slope principal to any potential progress if we cared to. Let's not make faster vehicles because eventually we'll make them too fast and we'll all crash and kill ourselves. The fact is that scientific discovery has always outpaced our ability to easily deal with the ethical ramifications of the discoveries. It doesn't mean we can't deal with those ethical questions, it just means that it isn't always easy. The public mindset is to make biotech scientists out to be Joe Mengelas because it's easy for that kind of comic book caricature to be set aside, mistrusted, and legislated against. Now, there are some places where a slippery slope prudence would have been a good idea. We probably should have considered nuclear weapons research a bit of a slippery slope before we opened that can of worms. Come to think of it, the whol Second Ammendment universal right to bear arms seems like it could have used some slippery slope caution. The Bush Doctrine should have met with a litlle more slippery slope resistence from Congress... Instead, fear of out-of-control Mad Scientists (complete with crazy hair and bad German accents) right out of 1940s Saturday mitinees, developing dysutopian baby farms and clone banks and offspring-optimization home eugenics kits, continues to keep sound, ethical science from advancing.

20 pages?!? Better use big type.

The best in the world, perhaps, but they're not meant for everybody, Tex. Was it Snowball or Napolean who figured it out, "Some are more equal than others?" [but, apparently we are all still animals.]

Per the success of the limited stem cell work going on today, no flame war is intended. The only intent was to suggest what is happening now is just the tip of the iceberg if we throw the appropriate federal resources behind quasi-totipotent (=embryonic) stem cell work. Oh yeah, and taking a jab at the "Values" voters too...