Bits of Keep It Greasey, Carolina Hardcore Ecstasy, and some solos I can't quite place offhand but that sure sound great. 2009; uploaded by ZappaIrl.
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If You Can Read This, You Can Read This
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If You Can Read This, You Can Read This
Hi, I'm Thad. I build websites.
This blog's been up in one form or another since 1999. In that time I've written about topics ranging from comic books to video games to copyright law to creators' rights to Frank Zappa.
I also write eBooks and narrate audiobooks. Here's where you can find them:
Got an E-Mail about a Win7 update needs doin'. Only a four-day job but it'd still be nice to get.
Dizzy again today. It had been awhile. Don't know what caused it; did not like it.
Those Threadless shirts came in, and so far they seem like quality merchandise! I am happy with them. The Groupon deal still appears to be going on; it's worth checking out. (Though I now find that both shirts have been marked down to about the price I paid with the coupon since I ordered -- oh well, it happens.)
Ate dinner at Cornish Pasty. Good food, good beer.
Arrow has turned out to be a surprisingly good show, but man the dialogue on tonight's was overwrought. Geoff Johns? Oh.
Egg, sunny-side-up, on toast, with feta, sour cream, and Arizona Gunslinger sauce.
Zappa's legendary 1986 appearance on Crossfire -- pardon the audio quality.
I'd read a (maybe partial?) transcipt before but never actually sat down and watched it in its entirety. It really is quite astounding just how aggressively ignorant John Lofton is -- incest is a major problem in America because of Prince? Seriously? Jesus Christ. Good thing conservatives had their priorities straight -- not like there was anything more important going on in early 1986.
Douchebag of Liberty Bob Novak seems downright moderate by comparison.
Judging by the E-Mails I routinely get from the Washington Times (thanks to foolishly signing up for a mailing list from a local Republican politician I knew professionally in 2006), they have roughly the same journalistic standards today as they did then. But that's a story for another day. (A story titled Is Obama Ruled by Demons?)
The parallels to recent debates about adult content in video games should, of course, go without saying.
Not sure if I'll stick with OpenSUSE for the long haul or not.
I quite like YAST but it doesn't have the level of package support that any given apt-based distro does.
And it's slow. I heard OpenSUSE was faster than other KDE-based desktops, but that hasn't been my experience, even switching from HDD to SSD. Firefox routinely pegs the CPU. So does Xorg (which I think is down to my keeping LibreOffice open most of the time). RSSOwl -- which does not have an OpenSUSE package and was a straight-up bitch to set up -- is frequently slow and unresponsive (good ol' Java).
So why RSSOwl, anyway? Well, I like to keep my RSS feeds synced across my desktop, my laptop, my phone -- wherever. At the moment I'm using Google Reader for that.
I used to use Akregator, but it doesn't sync with Google Reader.
I tried Liferea, but...well, it's coded by a guy like me. A power-user who wanted specific network functionality and isn't very good at UI design. It's missing such basic functionality as being able to rename a feed (a necessity when it chokes on as simple a thing as an apostrophe -- my feed list contains "Kurt Busiek's Formspring answers" followed by "Neil Gaiman's Journal"), and its syncing with Google Reader is spotty as well.
Also its name resembles "diarrhea".
So I tried RSSOwl.
Under Ubuntu, it was simple enough to set up RSSOwl -- had to add an external repo, but that was it.
There's no repo for OpenSUSE. There's a binary download, but here's the rub: it doesn't work out of the box. It requires xulrunner 1.x -- 2.x does not work. And OpenSUSE 12.2 doesn't have a package for xulrunner 1.x.
It took me ages to find, but I found a good RPM package of xulrunner 1.9. It's for Scientific Linux, but it installed fine under OpenSUSE, and worked once I symlinked libhunspell-1.3.so.0 to libhunspell-1.2.so.0 . It throws the occasional warning when I run updates, but I've been able to navigate those just fine.
And that's another thing about OpenSUSE: YAST's options, when it runs across a version conflict on a dependency, are pretty opaque and incomprehensible (and it frequently lists the same option multiple times), but at least it gives you options. Ubuntu's package management, in my experience, just throws an error and quits when it runs across that kind of conflict. So score one for OpenSUSE there. Sort of.
Still and all, for all I like about its configuration center/package management system, I'm having a hard time seeing OpenSUSE as Worth It. Maybe when I've got some time to do yet another damn reinstall, I'll give Mint a shot, or something.
Playing: Got in some good Arkham City and Mass Effect 2 time today -- after my job interview. Working my way down that list...
The uploader has disabled embedding, but click on over for a brief Terry Bozzio interview about Zappa Plays Zappa.
Originally posted brontoforum.us, 2008-12-03.
The Green Death is pretty good. By-the-numbers story, with too much wandering around in caves and futuristic businesses, but the Third Doctor and the Brigadier are in top form, and the villains are pretty awesome too.
The environmentalist bent to the story is obvious but still takes a backseat to rubber monsters and an evil computer. It does do a decently fair job of setting out the green-versus-labor dilemma and pit the down-to-Earth miners against eccentric hippie scientists, with the Brigadier somewhere in the middle, ever the pragmatist. It also strikes a chord in that the evil polluting corporation is so powerful that it has the full support of the PM, and in one scene the villain threatens to have the Doctor (I think it was the Doctor) arrested under the Emergency Powers Act.
There are some problems with the transfer in places -- I streamed it, so I'm going to chalk all the artifacting up to that, but there are bits where there's flickering light at the bottom of the picture and a couple of places where it looks like the master tape was crinkled. Nothing deal-breaking.
Anyway, it's become one of my two favorite Pertwee serials (the other is Inferno); must-see (streaming on Netflix!) and worth buying.
Uploader StAlfonzosPancakes1 describes it as:
"Stockholm In Bondage"
Opopoppa Special
Stockholm, Sweden 08 21, 1973
and says that this is from the warmup.
That's GTK the Australian music show, not GTK the GIMP Toolkit.
June, '73. Yet another fine upload by tomtiddler1.
Many of the commenters observe, and I'm inclined to agree, that Frank seems to loosen up once he realizes the interviewer actually knows his music.
His comment on censorship in Australia is on the money -- that's still a real problem down there. Last I heard they had banned porn involving women with A-cup breasts, and still didn't allow an adults-only rating for video games.
Okay, I am running out of today, so phoning this in a bit with another interview posted on afka.net -- though the last one was from early in Frank's career and this one is nearer the end:
Frank Zappa Has a Tip for Serious Musicians: Get a Real-Estate License, by Laurence Vittes, Los Angeles Reader, October 13, 1989.
You're clearly concerned with the state of society today. Is it as bad as the sixties?
Much worse. The major challenge for every American today is to imagine a U.S.A. where the government worked, where you got bang for your buck, where everything they said was fabulous actually was. Probably more difficult than sticking a man on Mars.