Mile Zero
no matter where you go, there you are
Mile Zero is the personal website of Thomas Wilburn. All statements and opinions here are my own, and do not represent the views or policies of my employers at Congressional Quarterly, Ars Technica, or other publications.
Musical Sketchpad, Session Five
Belle hates it when I do covers. She says it's because I pick the worst covers ever, and she's probably right. I tend to make really obvious choices, the songs that were overplayed on the radio about 5-10 years ago. And I see her point, but I like doing them anyway.
Today's sketchpad, however, is not a well-worn cover. It's a very rough version of "Into the Void" from Nine Inch Nail's The Fragile. Since only three or four people seem to have actually bought and enjoyed Reznor's double-album, you may not know it. It's one of my favorites. I played this through three or four times to get the arrangement worked out, and then recorded it in one pass while it was still fresh, which will explain some of the... looser rhythms in the first half. For most of the song, the looper is in record mode, overdubbing whatever I feed in, and I wipe it clean halfway through (where the bridge begins in the original). The only editing I've done is to run the vocals through the grungelizer plugin (although it could use some cuts to tighten up the arrangement).
On covers in general: let's start with the words of my good friend, the Madmunk...
I like cover songs - not mash-ups or remixes or sampling (although come to think of it I like these for the same reasons) but covers. For one reason or another, they have tremendous power for me. I had trouble articulating why exactly I like the idea of covers so much until I remembered the above passage from Nietzsche.
So what follows is a quick and dirty examination of the function of cover songs:
These are all good reasons, and I'll claim guilty as charged to at least a couple of them. But while the 'munk is many things--a philosopher, a man of principle, and a fine poker player--he is not a musician, and I think his list is therefore missing a motivation. To me, the real value of a cover song is that it is an instant connection, with yourself and with the people around you. Original material, don't get me wrong, is fantastic--but it probably has to build an audience. Nobody can sing along with it the first time. But for the average bar band, unlikely to find (or often uninterested in) commercial success, it can be nice to toss out a song and hear the audience's approval as they recognize the first few chords.
Covers, like bad fiction, are about the conversation, not the actual quality. With an audience it means making a connection based on the shared emotional response to the original song. For the artist themself, the point may be to take part in the song, to metaphorically wrap yourself in it and take ownership, even in some small way.
Unless, you know, you're playing Sweet Home Alabama and Cocaine to a bunch of drunken rednecks and fratboys, praying that lightning strike the next submoron to yell "Freebird!" In which case you ought to be ashamed.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/recording/sketchpad x link x 0 comments
...or is it just global warming? (for my own reference, and for a few "skeptics" that I've seen, who don't seem to understand that this is a real, man-made problem)
00:00 x Thomas x /science/environment x link x 0 comments
I see that the One Laptop Per Child program has been revealed. Since I didn't get any takers for the op-ed I wrote a few months back, here's my perspective on it:
Let Them Eat Cake
By Thomas Wilburn
Before the guillotine gave Marie Antoinette her final haircut and took a bit too much off the top, the legend says that she responded to news of a bread shortage with the words "If they have no bread, let them eat cake." There is, in truth, no evidence that Antoinette actually said any such thing, but the line is too good to pass up. It's the perfect encapsulation of the rich who do not understand--nor want to understand--the poor.
At the recent Microsoft Government Leaders Forum in March this year, Bill Gates made disparaging comments about the One Laptop Per Child program, which aims to create a cheap laptop for third-world schoolchildren as an educational tool. He noted that its screen would be difficult to share, that there is no money allocated for support or networking, and that the applications were not yet developed. Since he is Bill Gates, despite his own substantial work in fighting malaria and other diseases, he was immediately set upon by the tech-savvy. How dare he try to disparage the work of the project's leader, former Wired columnist and venture capitalist Nick Negroponte?
But Gates was right: "Let them eat cake" should be the motto of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program. It's a selfish bit of techno-utopianism that will do more harm than good. To understand why, we are going to have to spend some time with some basic development economics.
When organizations like the World Bank talk about learning programs for developing countries, they often use the term "capacity development." That's a fancy way of saying that communities should be taught how to develop themselves so that they're not reliant on outside parties for knowledge and technology. Before the problem of capacity became clear, development projects often failed as soon as the sponsor left, because they took knowledgeable personnel away with them, like a miniature brain drain. Development efforts still struggle to train workers and initiate a sustainable process--one that will continue after the rich sponsor has moved on.
The OLPC program, in theory, is designed as an educational tool. Of course, the project itself has not always been clear on what kind of education it plans to offer. Although originally pitched as a way for students to learn about technology, the primary justification now being offered is as a textbook replacement, most likely in a Wiki-style format. Putting aside worries about the mutability of electronic textbooks in the hands of potentially corrupt governments or corporations, what happens to the existing textbook industries for those countries?
Or even the existing IT industries, which are probably struggling already? Negroponte's plan won't employ labor, manufacturing, or software from the host countries. It simply dumps technology into the market, without taking into account the harm that could do to local companies. Instead of working within local markets to build a telecommunication infrastructure, the OLPC program calls for a spontaneously-generated, non-standard "mesh network" that will join the laptops to each other, and eventually to the Internet. Even assuming that this mesh network can overcome its technical problems and actually introduce students to the World Wide Web, it bypasses the wider population completely. It ignores the opportunity to build a real IT infrastructure, and the capacity to use it.
Finally, the problem of energy. OLPC has given up on hand-cranked laptops, because it's impossible for a child to generate enough power. That means that the machines must run on the local power grid. To most developed countries, that still sounds satisfactory because we have access to electricity 24/7. Yet there are 1.6 billion people out there who have no electricity at all, anywhere. Of the rest, many don't have constant access--they might have it for a few hours a day, or there might be regular rolling brownouts. Again, the laptop does nothing to address the problem of building electrical capacity. In fact, it completely skips over the problem--and treats that as a selling point, instead of the missed opportunity it really represents.
As with the other criticisms of the project, the real question becomes: isn't there a better place for that money to be spent? Wouldn't Negroponte be doing more for the developing world if he helped to build an electrical and information infrastructure with cheap recycled computers? Or even, as the Gates Foundation has done, poured money into disease research and vaccination programs? Let's not forget that the eventual target of the OLPC project is the very poor--people who, in many cases, live on less than a dollar a day. $100 spent on a laptop is money not spent on food, clean water, clothes, and medical care.
But then, money becomes an uncomfortable question when the project's organizers state that they will not be providing these for free, but will be asking host governments to buy the laptops with a minimum commitment of 1 million machines. $100 million dollars, to be spent on an unproven and so far unseen technology, in the developing world where more pressing problems abound, may go beyond foolish. The money being used, once it becomes a matter of large-scale government funding, is not Nick Negroponte's to waste. It is being taken from the poor themselves. It is difficult to believe, given the choice, that this is how they would choose to spend it--on cake, rather than the bread and essential services that they really need.
17:07 x Thomas x /bank/analysis/development/technology x link x 1 comment
CDM has a couple of really good posts about online music promotion this week: one on becoming a Web Rock Star and another on a death metal parrot. If I worked harder at this kind of thing, instead of half-heartedly throwing together a website as a substitute for the hassle of real gigs, I'd probably have more to say about it.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/business/promotion x link x 0 comments
Seems to me that the only prerequisite for being a writer is to tell people that you are one.
I can't tell if this is profoundly depressing or oddly hopeful.
16:52 x Thomas x /random/personal x link x 1 comment
From Tim Besley, professor at the London School of Economics:
It has to do with competition improving efficiency, he says. This is apparently also true for companies--a CEO killed in office improves corporate performance. It's a real-world Dead Roommate Rule!
00:00 x Thomas x /bank/events/bspan x link x 0 comments
Has a Good Home, by Final Fantasy
I really, really wanted to like Has a Good Home, an album by Owen Pallett, who plays violin for the Arcade Fire and calls his solo work Final Fantasy (yes, after the games). He's a looping artist from an indie-pop background, which is (to my mind) much preferred to the jazz background of a lot of loopers. And he plays a fairly non-traditional instrument (violin) for that kind of music.
But I've had this CD for a couple of months now, and I just can't think that I would recommend it. I've got a notepad file here that I made one day while I was listening to it. Here are a few excerpts:
back to preciousness. interesting plucking technique. sounds almost like a slow banjo roll.
good imagery. a bit creepy. maybe this makes more sense to people in montreal.
slow. kinda unlistenable.
this song is a transition, basically. very strange. why?
It's a mixed bag, overall. There are a few songs that I really like, such as "This is the Dream of Win and Regine" and "Furniture," both of which feature percussion along with the studio-based loops of Pallett's violin playing. He's got an undeniable skill behind the mixing desk, and his playing is often very inventive. I also like some of his lyrics, such as the lines from "Your Light is Spent"
I think the problem is that the preciousness and nonconformism gets out of hand too often. There are fifteen songs on the CD, but many of them are very short--barely even songs, really. It feels like Pallett was too lazy to develop them. And on the best songs here, there's always a glaring flaw that shouldn't have been hard to fix. For example, "Furniture" sounds great until 1:25, when the vocals go severely and unmistakeably off-key. I wince every time I hear it, and I can't think of any reason that it made it into the final version, except that Pallett just didn't care that it sounded terrible. His singing is likewise weaker than it needs to be, seemingly an affectation.
Which is fine, honestly. People are free to make pretentious and out of tune music all they want (I certainly do!), but I don't have to listen to it, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone else.
12:23 x Thomas x /music/artists/pallett x link x 1 comment
The Internet preserves many embarrassing things. For example, this review of my old band in GMU's school newspaper.
Although I am a fan of covers, this was an example of how to do them badly. John Mayer? All I can say is, blame the drummer.
11:11 x Thomas x /music/management x link x 1 comment
The Escapist article is basically done, with only some proofreading to finish it. This is why you've had to put up with my travel anecdotes all this month.
I like to think of myself as a reasonably ethical person. But deep down inside, I knew I probably wasn't buying a legitimate piece of software--and somehow, I just didn't care. For visitors to the People's Republic of China (PRC), the temptation is hard to resist. Piracy is everywhere, and not just for software. Clothing labels, music, movies, books--they're all fair game for low-cost counterfeiting. For the Chinese, caught in a developing economic mashup between Maoist philosophy and capitalism run rampant, it's basically a way of life.
More of an op-ed than straight journalism, I'm afraid. It's due out on June 6th for the "New China" theme issue. Let's say no more of it until then.
And now for something completely different.
00:00 x Thomas x /gaming/media/online x link x 0 comments
Just a quick reminder for myself of topics to be explored once I have time next week:
So stay tuned! Also, check out this unintentional comedy via Metacritic:
Talk about damning with faint praise.
14:26 x Thomas x /random/note_to_self x link x 1 comment
Once Upon a Time in China, Part 3
500 words down so far on the China article for the Escapist, and I feel pretty good about it. So here's one last annoying anecdote from my trip to the Middle Kingdom three years ago. If only I had a slide projector and a monotone, I could do this properly.
I spent most of my trip hanging out with a couple of students with family in Guangzhou. They were American-born Cantonese speakers, so they made good intermediaries between the three languages and cultures. And since it didn't make any sense to me to travel halfway around the world just to hang out in a dorm room, we spent a pretty fair amount of time wandering the city. That's how I ended up playing DDR for the first time--although that's not the story I want to tell today.
This story is about going to dinner. Keep in mind that when I went to China, I had been at one of the most diverse universities in the country for a couple years--but I didn't own a car, so I didn't eat out much. I'd missed out on many of the great cultural foods located around the Northern Virginia area, a deficiency that was only exaggerated by differences between American Chinese food and actual Chinese food.
So here I was in Xi'an, a Kentucky Yankee in Qin Shi Huang's court, and we decided to go out for food and karaoke (read: drinking) with some local students. They knew a great place, they said, and led us through back alleys away from the university. It was starting to look a little shady, but the restaurant was well-lit, and the food--meat strips with a spicy rub, grilled on skewers--was tasty. I had about four before I saw that my Cantonese friend was watching me closely and smiling a bit too widely. She asked if I knew what kind of meat was on those skewers. Horror stories of rodents and pets flickered through my mind. Beef? I asked.
Kind of, she said. Beef stomach. Which, looking back on it after many bowls of questionable pho meats, seems pretty tame. But at the time, it was a big step. I had two more.
Nowadays, the beef stomach incident also serves not just as an amusing cultural incident, but also a reminder of China's diversity. The skewered meats are a snack native to Xi'an's local Muslim population, called the Hui. The Hui Mingjie, or "Muslim Street," may be a tourist trap within the walls of the old city, but it's also home to the Great Mosque, where the Hui still worship as one of the nation's non-Han minorities. Arabic and Chinese mix in the carvings there.
Which is not to say that China is filled with well-integrated but conveniently-costumed cultural groups--to an outsider it still looks pretty homogenous. But it's such a big country, and communications were so slow for so long, that visitors eventually see the fierce regionalism that exists within it. It emerges with the mutually unintelligible local dialects. It manifests in the inequality between rural and urban areas. And you can taste it in the wildly different cuisines between the North and South. While for policy purposes it may be possible to imagine a simplified "China," those who don't realize that the PRC encompasses differences even wider than our own local subcultures will find the reality (pardon the pun) hard to stomach.
10:58 x Thomas x /culture/asia/china/travel x link x 1 comment
What a crazy month, and the backlog is still not entirely clear. My pick for May as our best work would be the 29-presentation PREM Conference 2006. There's a little something for everyone there, ranging from the very technical (conditional cash transfers, social welfare models) to the more interesting and accessible (immigration, gender inclusion, drugs and security).
00:00 x Thomas x /bank/events/bspan x link x 0 comments
B-SPAN has been taken over by a frenzy of conferences and seminars, all of which were apparently promised to be done last week. E3 seems to have derailed all communication with anyone in any kind of tech-related industry. And the NoVA Mag DUI story hangs over my head like a DC Damocles. This week can only get better, one would hope.
Posting will be light for a little while.
00:00 x Thomas x /meta/announce/delays x link x 0 comments
You are the best. Please sit at my table at lunch.
Sincerely,
Thomas
00:00 x Thomas x /random/letters x link x 0 comments
I don't think I like William Saletan very much. He writes for Slate, and he's constantly trying to tell leftists how, if they would just calm down, the conservative movement doesn't really want to hurt us. They just don't know how to express their love. Why do we have to make them hurt us, baby? They didn't mean to use that frying pan. Today he's writing about Kansas and Intelligent Design:
In politics, Saletan can get away with this kind of thing. He can complain that we're just too far left, and since politics is a fuzzy field at best, no-one can really nail him down. But in science? As my friend MC Hawking says, "Look, I ain't Thomas Dolby, science doesn't blind me." Saletan's article is worthless.
His thesis is that ID embraces the testing and falsifiability aspects of scientific progress, and so we should embrace it as a "harmless" creationism. Saletan wants to believe that creationism will fall on its own if we give it equal time in a scientific arena. But the problem with ID is not that it's weak scientifically--we've already shown that it is, and that the men who champion its work are intellectually bankrupt liars. The threat from ID is the possibility of turning science into just another debate where the facts must be "balanced" instead of being correct. ID is the Fox News of scientific thought.
The role of Intelligent Design in the classroom is to teach kids that scientific facts are not immutable, and continue the process of teaching "the controversy" but not the thought process that led to the controversy. Teach them anything you want, says ID, just don't teach them to be critical about it. If Saletan thinks that ID has anything to worry about from the scientific method after indoctrinating students to be uninquisitive and uninterested in truth, as opposed to spin, he needs to spend some more time in the classroom himself.
And note: once ID is in the class, whether or not someone like Michael Behe will admit it or not, it's only a short step to say "well, part of the controversy is Creationism. Why aren't we teaching that 'theory,' also?" And then we're back to the middle ages, telling our kids to set out milk for the brownies and watching out for the evil eye.
00:00 x Thomas x /science/creationism/design x link x 0 comments
Pictured: a display from the United Food and Commercial Workers on the corner of K St and 17th. The number on the left is the total number of US casualties since the beginning of the war in Iraq. On the right, the number of wounded.
13:06 x Thomas x /dc/photos x link x 1 comment
I used to have a girlfriend who was a very smart accountant for Freddie Mac. Getting her masters, she'd made a few connections at big institutions around the area. When I first told her that I was considering working for the World Bank after a post-college job fell through, she mentioned a friend who worked here and really enjoyed it. And, she said, because the Bank is an international organization you don't have to pay taxes.
Ha! The folly of youth! We forgot to factor in that the friend in question was Chinese, a foreign national. Of course she didn't pay taxes--not here, at least. Oh treacherous jump to conclusions, you have foiled me again!
The truth is that Bank employees pay taxes, just like every other American citizen. The difference, as I have found while trudging through the paperwork and misinformation, is that we have to pay it ourselves. International organizations (I'm told IBM shares this designation) don't withold taxes for you. As a result, I've had to drop a chunk of cash into a savings account every paycheck, and every quarter I pay it as an estimated tax payment. The grand wits at the IRS make it especially interesting by changing the schedule so that one "quarter" is four months long, and the next is two. When I feel charitable, I recognize that this is to reconcile the April 15th due day for all taxes with the January end of the fiscal year, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.
The quarterly payment includes my Social Security, theoretically. I say theoretically, because when the time comes for me to actually file the 1040 all of this will show up under a self-employment tax, even though I'm not self employed. I'm not really clear on why, when DC is surely filled with international organizations, those who are employed by them are partially self-employed for tax purposes, but I am not an accountant. I accept it and move on. Moral of the story: The World Bank is a really bad tax shelter.
Next time, I'll try to write about how the Bank reflects its constituency. It's much more important than whining about my taxes, I promise.
00:00 x Thomas x /bank/experience/hr x link x 0 comments
Thomas: So the lead actress from this movie that I just watched, 6ixtynin9, looks a lot like a tall, super-skinny version of you.
Belle: Oh yeah? What's her name?
Thomas: Lalita Panyopas.
Belle: And where's the movie from again?
Thomas: Thailand.
Belle: So why don't you just go to Thailand and date this Lalita chick if you like her so much?
Thomas: What? Fine! Maybe I will!
Belle: BAAAAAABE! NOOOO!
Freeze, curtain falls, audience applauds.
We are nothing if not consistent in our shtick.
14:38 x Thomas x /random/personal x link x 2 comments
Last night, prompted by some strange chain of links, I found myself watching MTV's short-lived adaptation of The Maxx, which you can find on YouTube here. I remember when my family first moved to Virginia and we were living in an apartment temporarily until we could find a real house, I sometimes stayed up late and watched the bizarre animations that MTV was playing (anyone else remember Liquid Television?). The Maxx is one of the more intriguing examples. Theoretically it's about a big, purple, Tick-like superhero named the Maxx--but since he's actually a big, purple, Tick-like homeless guy who involuntarily finds himself in a dream-world (or hallucinates the whole thing), there's not a lot of classic superhero-ing taking place. The Maxx is mixed up with a freelance social worker named Julie and a serial killer named Mr. Gone, all three of whom begin to increasingly blur the line between the dream and reality.
It's pretty strange, but oddly affecting. Whether or not it eventually makes any sense, I found it captivating due largely to the stellar voice acting. The animation is also surprisingly well-done, combining traditional cell art with mattes and limited CG, mixing art styles as it moves through different story arcs--a bit like Furi Kuri. Until it comes out on DVD, it looks like YouTube is the only place to watch it.
12:09 x Thomas x /movies/commentary/cult x link x 1 comment
Shorter M. John Harrison:
Or, for those of you who still remember calculus fondly:
00:00 x Thomas x /fiction/reviews/harrison_mj x link x 0 comments
Every now and then I reluctantly dip a toe into the GameFAQs Message Board for Metroid Hunters. I say reluctantly because it's a seething hive of vicious junior high students in there, and the air is thick with ignorance and bile. But I persist because I am the only one who cares about you. And that's why I can mention this little tidbit: over the weekend, the kids figured out a glitch in the nickname code. Using the % character, followed by random characters, produces random strings of code with the possibility of crashing and corrupting not only your game, but likewise anyone who connects to you and sees the nickname. The message board monsters were mystified. Having a bit more background in coding, it sounds like a kind of memory leak to me, where using % is somehow directing a pointer to another place in the ROM. I'm guessing this because people not only get random gibberish, but also strings from the game like "Alt Form: Halfturret."
It's a Bad Thing, and Nintendo almost immediately fixed it by banning anyone from logging on if their nickname contains the bug-inducing character. So you are safe for now. Regardless, I don't want to fear-monger, but let's point out once again that the Internet is a wild place, and increasingly consoles are connected to it. It's not like games self-select for a mature and considerate population.
00:00 x Thomas x /gaming/software/metroid_hunters x link x 0 comments
Once Upon A Time in China, Part 2
My parents gave me the notebook while I was in high school, I think as a Christmas gift. It's a small leatherbound volume with sheets of yellow paper, bolted together with wood and held shut by a pair of leather straps. It's kind of impressive, like something Indiana Jones would open to find the location of Tikt'Chuatl. And that was problematic for me, because I wasn't about to fill it with just anything. It had to be something worth reading.
It stayed empty until I went to China since I figured, screw it, I'm probably not going to get an opportunity more interesting than that. I sketched and took notes in the notebook, and also wedged different tickets and brochures into it for safekeeping. I did the same thing when I went to France, although I only managed four pages or so that trip. It takes a lot of time to sketch something and write about it longhand. And I don't have a lot of patience.
While I was in Xi'An, where I spent most of my time in the PRC, we took a side trip to see the Terra Cotta warriors. If you ever find yourself in the country, I highly recommend it. The warriors are the last tribute to Qin Shi Huang, the emperor who united China and then started work on the Great Wall. Not content to grind his subjects to death constructing the wall, Qin Shi Huang also wanted servants in the afterlife, and ordered the creation of thousands of life-sized soldier statues, many with different features and weapons. It was a massive undertaking--and one that was buried with him when he died. In 1974, farmers who were digging in the area found the tomb and its clay army. Researchers are still digging it up today.
At least one of the farmers is now employed full time by the PRC at the visitor's center for the terracotta warriors. He signed my notebook (as well as dating it 2003--guess I had the year wrong). According to my professor, that's all he knows how to write. I guess it's a living.
As I was saying, I did a few sketches in the notebook and the terracotta warriors got several pages' worth. I'll have to scan it some other time. But as I was standing at one of the display cases, finishing up a sketch of a warrior leading a large clay horse, a short Chinese woman walked up next to me and started to look at the drawing. "Very nice," she said, and then added something I couldn't understand. Amanda Laoshi, the graduate student from Xi'An Jiaotong Daxue who accompanied us, wandered up and asked her to repeat herself. She laughed.
"What did she say?" I asked.
Amanda Laoshi looked at the drawing and grinned. "She says you made the eyes too round," she said. "She says it looks like a Westerner."
I looked at the woman. She looked at me. I shrugged, apologized, and added some lines to the sketch, trying to correct the "mistake." The woman examined the drawing again, and made the universal face for "hmph." And at that point, deciding that I was not going to improve the situation markedly, I shut the notebook and wandered off, as tactfully as possible, to sketch something a little bit less subjective.
00:00 x Thomas x /culture/asia/china/travel x link x 0 comments
Lunch in the Golden Triangle: Java Green Cafe
The key to eating fake meat is to not expect it to taste like meat. It's probably not going to. If you keep your expectations at a reasonable level, you won't be too disappointed by the differences, and you'll be pleasantly surprised by the similarities. Java Green, on 19th between K and L, is a good introduction to these quirks of vegetarian cuisine.
I tried a "chicken" sandwich last week, and a boolgogi (Korean beef, I think) panini this week. In both cases, the soy substitutes are not completely convincing, although the beef is surprisingly close. It helps that there's real cheese on many of the offerings, so for non-vegans that adds body to the taste. The other toppings, like mushrooms, tomato, and lettuce, were fresh but not particularly noteworthy. Be warned that these sandwiches use sauces for much of their meat flavor, so you will want to keep a napkin handy. The bread is very good, and absorbs the juices without becoming soggy or falling apart.
I went with a co-worker on my second visit, and she had the boolgogi as a platter. It's served in a compartmentalized dish that reminded me of a Korean barbecue, and included rice, kimchi, beef, and soy noodles. She was ambivalent to the rice (it's flavored and not as sticky as Chinese-style white rice) and didn't touch the kimchi. She said the noodles were actually excellent, and the soy beef was a little strange, but not bad--an understandable reaction for someone eating vegetarian meats for the first time.
Java Green also features a wide variety of teas and coffees available, which I haven't tried. Their packaged drinks tend to be Whole Foods-ish arrangements of lightly- or unsweetened teas and juices--I don't remember seeing any sodas. It's a health food store, you'll just have to bring your own sugary junk. Of course, you pay a bit more for the low-fat offerings: the sandwiches start at $6.50, and with a drink the bill might reach $10 after tax. But look at it this way: this is pretty tasty food, it's fun and different, and it's better for you than running to the Potbelly's down the block. That's worth an extra couple bucks every now and then, right?
00:00 x Thomas x /dc/golden_triangle x link x 0 comments
I've been meaning to mention this for a while: If you're interested in learning bass, or maybe even guitar, I've heard very good things about Rondo Music, which makes the SX and Brice sub-brands. People on the TalkBass forums rant and rave about these instruments. They're less than $200 (some of the guitars are less than $100), and although the build quality is sometimes rough (uneven frets, mostly) they are supposed to sound great and play like much more expensive basses.
They apparently keep costs down by making only a few set models, no customization or different paint jobs. And the interesting thing, to me, is that they're like the Costco of basses: in order to keep variety up, they change the lineup around constantly according to user demand. You never know what they'll be offering any given month--although the Fender imitations are pretty constant. They're a small operation, with a very attentive customer service rep.
I also love the way the photographer shows up in the chrome bridge cover of the classic J-bass here
17:11 x Thomas x /music/tools/bass x link x 1 comment
I met Brinstar, author of the acclaimed Acid for Blood, for lunch, and I feel that there's something that I have to tell you. My journalist's pride demands it. She is not, as she has claimed, a female gamer obsessed with Metroid. She is actually a 300lb elderly man from Minnesota, and she plays Scrabble. Now you know.
Photo* proof** soon forthcoming***.
*Not photos of Brinstar. Probably more photos of the
hamster, knowing me.
**Not actual proof. Void where prohibited.
***Not actually forthcoming. Much like the Iraqi WMDs. BaZING!
14:06 x Thomas x /gaming/media/online x link x 1 comment
I've seen several pop culture blogs commenting lately on the tritone, also known as an augmented fourth. Because of its sinister sound, the tritone was at one time banned by the church, and was called the "diabolus in musica"--the Devil's Note.
This might be a good time to point out that the song in Sketchpads 3 and 3b, Voodoo Doll, is based on the tritone. The verse bass riff is just a shuffle from A to its tritone, D#. When I first started learning the bass, the topic came up on the Lowdown, and it just seemed too cool not to do something with it. So now if you need an example, you know where to go.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/theory x link x 0 comments
In the summer of 2002, after four semesters of Mandarin, I went on a school-sponsored trip to the PRC with a few of my classmates. Going back over my notes from that trip as transition devices for a piece on software piracy in China, I'm reminded of so many great stories that unfortunately won't fit there.
But they'll fit here. And if self-indulgent tales of my cultural tourism can't drive everyone away, I don't know what will.
Right now, I speak Mandarin badly, but back then I was merely very, very awkward. It didn't matter. Almost everyone I met in China was tickled pink by the white boy mangling his sentences. Sometimes to excess. I used to wander around on my own, practicing. One pair of elderly women in Xi'an couldn't stop laughing long enough to give me directions to the bank.
My sugar fixation was also a source of much linguistic amusement. In China, as in much of Asia, the American and European habit of adding sugar to tea is viewed as something between freakish and offensive. And I like a lot of sugar. The cook at Xi'an Jiaotong University treated my habit with amused condescension, pointing me to a box of cube sugar off the side, where I would guiltily scoop up six or seven cubes and take them back to my room in case I wanted tea at night.
I learned how to ask, clumsily, if the waiter had sugar available--"Qing ni, you mei you tang?" I would ask, carefully pronouncing the rising tone on the last word, in case I might accidentally ask for soup or a hallway instead. The servers often ignored me anyway. I would turn to Zhang Laoshi, my professor, to confirm my pronunciation, and he would agree that I'd asked correctly. Looking back now, I wonder if they just didn't make the connection. "Why would he want sugar?" "Who knows? He was asking how to get to the bank earlier. It was hilarious!"
Before we left the country, I remember trying to buy a candy bar from the hotel gift shop. Using a system of cunning gestures, pantomime, broken Mandarin, and panicked grins, the girl behind the counter and I managed to negotiate the actual transaction, up until the point where I would have to pay. "How much?" I asked in Chinese--one phrase with which I'd become quite fluent. She replied with a couple of syllables, but I couldn't quite follow her. "Shenma?" She repeated herself, but I still couldn't understand it. Was this a Beijing dialect I didn't know? We went back and forth four or five times, until finally one of the American-born Chinese in my group took pity and told her to use Mandarin. She'd been trying to say "seven" in English, and we'd just been talking right past each other.
When people start freaking out about translated versions of the Star Spangled Banner, or other nationalistic cultural detritus, I like to imagine those people trying to buy a candy bar in Beijing. Who cares about the language barrier, about different cultures? These aren't insurmountable obstacles, they won't kill you. It's the national anthem being translated, an ode to a flag flying over the land of the free and the home of the brave. It's the thought that counts. Translate it all. Take it. Make it yours. Above all, don't hesitate to laugh about it. A sense of humor will get you far, in this country or in another.
Now what's a guy got to do around here to get some sugar for his tea?
00:00 x Thomas x /culture/asia/china/travel x link x 1 comment
This month the "best" presentation in the World Bank's streaming video archive will depend on your opinion on Tom Friedman. If you're a fan of Mr. Friedman, his lecture at the Private Sector Development forum (which basically covers his book The World Is Flat) may pique your interest. He gets a lot of screen time, and you can watch it here
If, like me, you think that Tom Friedman is highly overrated, you may instead want to turn to the Independent Evaluation Group's report on Bank work following natural disasters. With the year mark on Katrina approaching, and already a year past on the 2006 tsunami, I thought it was interesting to see what the Bank sees in the future. I especially enjoyed the second presentation, here, since it includes testimony from the country directors of Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and Pakistan.
13:04 x Thomas x /bank/events/bspan x link x 1 comment
Writing (and playing music) here basically serves two goals: A) practice, and B) steadily lowering the number of people who take me seriously. I count it tremendously successful on both counts. But to accelerate the process, I created a MySpace page for the pretentious solo project* as an experiment. You can find it here.
If you ever needed evidence that the best product is not necessarily the winner, try MySpace. I don't know anything about creating a social networking site, but I know that it's got to be better than that. Comments are handled in a very clumsy way. No-one tells you this, but bands need to sign up in a completely different section from the rest of the site. The default layout is hideous. All in all, it frightens me.
*Please, please, please do not ever take this seriously. People who take themselves seriously on the Internet are rapidly becoming one of my pet peeves. I would like to issue a disclaimer right now that almost all of the Internet, including the parts I didn't write, is most likely a colossal joke.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/tools/internet x link x 2 comments
I'm waiting on a final editing revision back before I post this month's Best of B-SPAN. In the meantime, here is a picture of a very pretty bass:
Of course, I have car problems and tuition to pay off before I can even think about picking up another bass (not to mention the bad luck that I've had with them). But: I played the single-cutaway version of this on Sunday, and it's got a very nice sound to it. The hollow body gives it an acoustic clarity that's rare, and it sounded pretty good with chords.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/tools/bass x link x 0 comments
