Rounding it off.
Uploader koolstrike notes that he had to remove a couple of song cuts for copyright reasons, but the interview itself is intact.
Month: February 2013
Channel 68 Interview, Part 2
Bit of a weird cut on this one; picks up some of the end of the previous video and cuts off mid-sentence. Ah well -- should finish up tomorrow.
Channel 68 Interview, Part 1
Uploaded by koolstrike; the interviewer is Bill Roller, and it's from 1985.
I posted Zappa's Senate testimony last June; it's worth watching (or at least reading) if you haven't yet.
Software RAID 10 on OSX
Well, as mentioned, after several years and many a misadventure, I've given up on RAIDZ for Mac and decided on good ol' dependable RAID 10. Today I finally got around to building the array...and realized I'd forgotten how to do it.
Fortunately, it's well-documented on Apple's site. The trick is that you build all 3 RAID sets (two RAID 1/mirrored, one RAID 0/striped) at once; you can't build the two RAID 1 sets and then add them both to a RAID 0 set afterward.
Course, the next step is to copy all the files off her old drives onto the new array, and that is going to take a lot longer -- especially since I don't have a spare FireWire 800 (or even 400) enclosure and I have to use USB 2. It'll be at that copy all night, and that's just the first drive. Which means no rebooting to play The Walking Dead like I'd hoped.
So it goes -- my wedding's in three weeks and I need to get this done so Gran can put a video together for it.
Honey Don't You Want A Man Like Me/Carol You Fool
Hollywood, '84; another upload by Steve Sparx.
Molé Stout
There's not really anything I could say about Valentine's Day that wouldn't be either a cliché banality or a banal cliché. So instead I'm going to talk about this Ska Brewing Molé Stout I bought at Top's yesterday.
It's good! It's dark, it's chocolatey, it's got a hint of peppers. And it's four bucks a six-pack at Top's! I will probably buy more.
Guess that's it. Off to dinner and Die Hard 5: Son of Die Hard.
Pick Me I'm Clean
Another piece of the Vancouver concert in 1980, uploaded by Steve Sparx -- as with my Jumbo Go Away/If Only She Woulda post a few weeks back.
I suppose it is a bit ironic, given my recent post of Dweezil discussing inferior music formats and flawed concert recordings, that I post so many of them here. But there is a value to them -- there will never again be a new Frank Zappa recording, and the ones that exist are precious even if they're flawed.
Though if you really want a high-quality Zappa recording, by all means buy a CD or FLAC release. (Or vinyl, if that's your thing.) His old albums are currently being reissued, and there are some rarities available at Barfko-Swill. And if you've still got a local record store, that's a great option too. (I was tempted by a copy of Thing-Fish and a ZPZ DVD at my local record store today, but money's tight and I still haven't finished listening to the last Zappa album I bought there -- maybe next time.)
Snyder's Batman
I'm increasingly of the opinion that Scott Snyder has some great ideas about Batman but his stuff's just not for me. That one-off issue with Becky Cloonan on art was the best Batman story I've read all year, but Death of the Family was some good ideas wrapped around a needlessly violent and decompressed story. (My favorite part: you can show people dancing until their feet bleed, you can show a tapestry made of sewn-together still-living people -- but if you want to say "ass", you'd better use comic-book symbols to bleep it out.) I think both the setup and the resolution were solid. I just think there was too much dithering in-between. Even without the half-dozen tie-in books.
Gail Simone recently responded to a reader who was put off by the grimness of Death of the Family by saying, "The bat-verse in general IS in a pretty dark place right now, but I do believe some lighter stories are coming." Here's hoping. Snyder's already done some great work -- but great work where Batman smiles now and again would be more to my tastes.
Lakshi's Delight
Via YourArf, who explains:
Frank Zappa's tribute to Lakshminarayana Shankar. Composed and recorded sometime around 1987-89.
Doctor Who: Mark of the Rani
Originally posted on Brontoforumus, 2009-01-11, following up on my preceding review of Revelation of the Daleks:
You know, I thought Revelation of the Daleks was pretty good -- good enough that it makes me want to check out more Sixth Doctor episodes, which I hear is an emotion most people rarely feel.
Aaaaand Mark of the Rani has cured me of it.
The setting is interesting, and it's got the Master, and the Rani is a character with potential, but...it's pretty much terrible. At this point I want to punch Peri in the mouth every time she opens it (though this actually makes me kind of want to check out Trial of a Time Lord just to see her die).
The fact that this is regarded as one of the better Sixth Doctor serials goes a long way toward explaining why everyone hates the Sixth Doctor. Not worth buying, not worth renting, not even worth watching while drunk.