Here’s a cool article by patient/survivor Eva Skoch – A Malignant Melanoma Walks Into A Bar…
Cancertainement – such a strange concept
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The Blame Game
I guess it started this spring, when Andrew Olanoff was diagnosed with Hodgkins Lymphoma. Well, he’s a Philly guy with plenty of attytood, so he started to lay the rap on cancer for everything, inventing the ubiquitous Twitter hashmark #blamedrewscancer. Needless to say, it caught on, as it’s f-ing brilliant. Today was the Blame-a-thon: a 24-hour party at the North Star Bar with co-sponsorship by Taco Bell who sent the taco truck to serve chow to the revelers. There was also an auction every hour for those tweeting and blaming. If you follow my Twitter feed, I blamed quite a few things on Drews cancer today. Strangely enough, I was the winner of the most bizarre prize of the day – a $99 at-home DNA test. Hey, how about a nice t-shirt or something?!
Anyway, it was incredibly fun Getting swept up in the blame-a-thon. Everything was the faultof Drew’s cancer, from the fact that the new iPod touch has no camera, to the loss of loved ones taken by cancer. Over 12,000 different people got in on the act and all the proceeds (raffle tix were $9 and there a cover charge to see bands and party at the North Star) benefit the Lance Armstrong Foundation. I didn’t make it to the party (busy listening to Obama’s speech), but based on the tweet, there was a lot of fun had by all – in fact, it’s still going on.
Steve Hackett is getting crushed
(I don’t know how I let this one slip by last month. For those of you to whom this is old news – sorry)
Poor old Steve Hackett. When he was in Genesis, he could never get enough of his ideas across to the other band members. One day, he threatened to quit, they mixed him out of the record, and went on to become multi-gazillionaires. Steve managed to maintain a lot of artistic integrity by keeping all his solo stuff in-house. in other words, no major labels were used to get his prodigious and extraordinary solo material to the streets.
And while said material is all pretty good (very good, in fact), old Steve has never gotten the kind of economic remuneration that has been showered on all four of his former bandmates Peter Gabriel, Tony Banks, Michael Rutherford and Phil Collins, although it should be noted that Collins has three ex-wives.
And now, as Hackett approaches his 60th birthday, he’s being sued for everything he has by his ex-wife. According to the TimesOnline, Kim Poor is making a play for EVERYTHING – including Hackett’s share of his royalties from old Genesis music. Ouch!
Apparently things are so bad that Hackett is working on his new album in the living room of his flat. Double ouch!!
But even with all this adversity, his new record will still be coming out on October 5, and I’ll bet it will be ten times more amazing than anything we’ve heard from Tony Banks in the past ten years!
A few tasty looking trailers
Philadelphia’s doomsday budget scenario makes me think about escaping and/or being very frightened. Here’s a few upcoming movies that may take care of both:
‘The Box’ is due out on October 30, 2009. A mangled Frank Langella offers struggling young couple Cameron Diaz and James Marsden a deal. If they push the button on the box someone will die and they will get a million dollars. Based on the trailer, this could be a 70’s period piece, in addition to some kind of super-natural thriller.
I already tweeted about The Men Who Stare at Goats, but it looks so good, it’s worth mentioning again. Release date is November 6, 2009.
Christopher Nolan’s Inception is not due for release until July 16, 2010, but the trailer looks good enough for me to already be on board. This movie appears to be corporate blackmail meets “Dreamscape“.
Should labor bear the cost of Philadelphia’s financial crisis?
Philadelphia, like many other cities, is going through a financial crisis. As I’ve mentioned before, Mayor Michael Nutter has prepared a doomsday budget, ominously designated as ‘Plan C.’ This has been described as the dismantling of city government. And while I can picture the nightmare that would follow the closing of all public libraries, the closing of the Fairmount Park Commission, the firing of about 1000 police officers, I can’t even begin to understand what is meant by the provision that states there will be no more funding for the city courts, no more funding for the District Attorney’s office and no more funding for the public defender. How can a city function like that?
There is a remedy out there, but it has me scared in a different way. The first aspect of the Mayor’s plan, which has to pass through the legislature in Harrisburg, is to raise the city sales tax by 1% (from 7% to 8%). That’s a no-brainer from where I sit. We need to do this to increase revenue so that the city can pay its bills as they come due. Will there be a problem down the road with business development? I’m willing to tough it out for the time being if it means that our streets will be safe and our courts will operate.
The second aspect of the Mayor’s remedy is a bit more troublesome. Besides raising sales tax, the Mayor proposes to “restructure” the way that city pensions are managed. Since it is still labor day, it seems like this is a good time to meditate on the proposal.
The current plan establishes a much lower cost approach to funding pensions of newer city employees (via 401k’s). The new employees would get no choice in the matter; they’d simply be stuck with a crappier retirement package.
My initial feeling was that Plan C must be avoided, pretty much at all costs. If new hires get screwed now, we’ll work on making it up to them later, right? But today I met a guy who works for the city. He’s in Behavioral Health, which means that he’s working to save certain of our city’s residents from the tragedy of addiction. And since Philadelphia recently legalized gambling (slots ‘parlors’ now, but there is clearly more to come), a new wave of addicts is expected by this guy’s department.
This man has 30-plus years in. His pension is secure. No one is proposing any changes that will harm the retirement he has worked so hard for and so richly deserves. I asked him what he thought of the proposals coming out of the state legislature in comparison with the horror of Plan C. He said that it shouldn’t pass because it kills collective bargaining. This guy is a city resident, just like me. The downside of the Mayor’s doomsday plan is going to hit him as hard as anyone else. We live in a neighborhood where, in the last ten years, property values have gone way up – and he could lose all of that. But on labor day (and I’m sure on every other day), he said that you can’t have two different sets of rules. The new guys should get the same thing that he got and he’s ready to fight for it.
I don’t know what’s going to happen. Plan C goes into effect on September 18, and the remedial measures have to be passed by both houses of the state legislature. The version we have now – with the much desired sales tax increase and the much despised pension restructuring, has passed the Senate. It will be opposed vigorously in the House – in the name of fairness to workers.
The Mayor says we are at a major crossroads and that hard choices and sacrifice are necessary. Should labor be forced to bear the burden?
Hey, Republicans! Why can’t you get trial lawyers on your side like you did with Jews?
A long time ago, back when Karl Rove was in charge, I heard from another lawyer that Rove’s concept of the permanent majority was to undermine the three-legged stool that supported Democratic funding: (1) labor, (2) Jews and (3) trial lawyers.
Back then, it seemed that the Jewish vote could be co-opted by people like Lieberman and Dershowitz, who appeared to be nice Jewish boys to people like my grandparents, but espoused views of inequality and hatred towards Palestinians (Ay-rabs) that was not unlike the hatred expressed towards black people in this country. The irony was that so many Jew of my grandparents generation lined up on the right side of civil rights back in the 60’s. But today, it seems like the Jewish vote is precariously balanced on the fence, probably out of hatred, fear and racism. To a great extent, Rove has succeeded in eroding one of the traditional blocks of Democratic voters and funding.
In the case of labor, it seems like the unions have helped Rove create a cloud of suspicion over what they do. Up until the recent introduction of the Employee Free Choice Act (H.R. 1409, S. 560), it has seemed that there has been fear, inspired perhaps by eight years of Rove/Bush, about increasing the ranks of organized labor and, thus, Democratic voters. But the trend is encouraging. Yes, there is virulent opposition. I hear the fear-mongering ads on sportstalk radio (not just on Rush and Hannity) telling Joe Contractor, as he drives from home to his job in the pre-dawn hours, telling him that EFCA is about taking away the working man’s right to a secret ballot. That’s a powerful argument, because it plays on the fear that we’ll have no choices under the fascist Obama regime. At the same time, it’s not catching on. Republicans just don’t seem to be winning to many points on this issue.
Which brings us back to my job. I don’t sue doctors for a living; I enforce a patient’s rights, or more often the rights of a patient’s family because the patient is deceased. In Pennsylvania and New Jersey, I have to go through hoops galore before I can even file a malpractice case – whether against a hospital, doctor, lawyer, accountant or any other certified professional. These cases are incredibly expensive for the attorney, and if we make a single misstep I can be sued personally. This is the system that people seek to reform.
Now, take a step back. Before Cheney decided that Iraq could be overthrown and occupied for oil production under the false pretense that Hussein was somehow responsible for 9/11, in fact before 9/11 itself, this issue of ‘tort reform’ was a big concern of mine and many of my colleagues. The lies back then were told about the woman who spilled her hot coffee from McDonalds, and how people wanted get rich quick whenever a doctor couldn’t save someone’s life, despite heroic efforts. You were going to have to cross state lines to have your baby because the trial lawyers had chased all the doctors away.
Now a lot of these old stories are getting dusted off again. It’s amazing. After just a few weeks of winning the public opinion war, it seems that the goal of killing off the trial lawyers is starting to bubble back to the surface. Any link to the current debate about essential healthcare reform is tenuous, but that should be no surprise. We’re talking about the same people who brought you the ‘death panel’.
Remember, the last time around, the evil that needed to be cured was the exodus of doctors who couldn’t afford high malpractice insurance premiums. This time, the same cure (‘tort reform’) is being presented as a remedy to the malicious plan that Obama has hatched to simply bail out trial lawyers (we don’t need a bailout!) and harm the American public. See if you can make sense of this article by Hugh Hewitt. All our problems with health care and the uninsured would just go away if it wasn’t for those damn trial lawyers!
It’s one thing if Hugh Hewitt is blowing steam over at Townhall, but I think this is being picked up as a talking point. Apparently Giuliani was pushing this same garbage on Meet The Press today. This guy is supposed to be a moderate. This is a guy who is supposed to be socially progressive.
So the Conservatives have their pound of flesh with Van Jones. They have their month of madness with death panels and guns at town hall meetings. I knew Congress should not have taken that summer break! And what I see is that they’re getting greedy. But here’s an idea – why not come up with an agenda that favors social justice to the extent that the trial lawyer money, like the Jewish money, starts to get diverted to you – what about trying to win trial lawyers over? Do you think you can do it?
It takes a long weekend to…
It takes a long weekend to make a short movie, see some great music, enjoy the country with narrow dogs, and turn congressional hearings into a nationally acclaimed opera. Let me explain.
Em is now back from her First Descents excursion. As predicted, this was an intense time and I have no doubt the reverberations will continue for quite some time to come while they’re being worked into her general psyche and identity. Basically, take about fourteen young adult cancer survivors to Jackson Wyoming (scene, coincidentally, of the Beckerantz honeymoon) and take them rock climbing, out of their comfort zone and let everybody feel alive in a way they never have before. The results are hard to put into words, especially for someone who wasn’t even there, but I’m sure she’ll be reporting at length on Seeemilyplay. But tonight, it’s all about iMovie. I’ve supplied this girl with what little knowledge I have and she’s running hog wild. The results are already tremendous, and she’s only up to about the three minute mark. Hopefully, by the end of this long weekend, I’ll link to an audio-visual document that will give you some idea of what she has experienced over the past week.
ProsaicParadise is soaking in the groovy sounds at ProgDay 2009 down in Chapel Hill. She’ll be seeing Ozric Tentacles and some other cool acts over two days. Kudos to her for making the trek in the name of great prog!
FBdN is in the country with his family and the greyhounds. Bucolic and calming pictures are already starting to emerge, and I urge you to check them out.
It’s Fringe Festival time here in Philadelphia and one of the local acts is an opera based on the Senate Judiciary Committee Hearings and Alberto Gonzalez’s extraordinarily humorous performance. The thing itself was outrageous, but the The Gonzales Cantata is swiftly becoming a national craze, especially thanks to Rachel Maddow.
Aliette de Bodard is catching up on her Battlestar Galactica and has a few choice thoughts as she gets into season 4. This woman is an exceptional writer of sci-fi and fantasy and her career is just starting to take off, so it’s exciting to get her sincere thoughts on BSG and everything else. Her blog and fiction are highly recommended.
Finally, there is a great Dylan bootleg from July 5, 2009, that has just surfaced at T.U.B.E. There’s always great audience tapes of Bob’s shows, but this one is from the soundboard, which gives it a little more clarity. Great setlist, including my favorite from the new record, a lil ol’ blues number called Jolene.
Play it like it’s an instrument!
Propellerheads Reason 4.0 continues to fascinate me. It is a synthesizer and a sequencer and it can do a fistful of other tasks, but it is not a DAW – digital audio workstation. It can’t record sound from a microphone (as far as I know) and it doesn’t want you to hook up a guitar to try and control it’s various sound generating faculties that way. And if you want to make a recording that uses Reason with live instruments (which is exactly what I’m trying to do), then you have to hook Reason up through a DAW (I use Apple Logic Eight) and that adds a layer of complication.
I have previously mentioned that I want to be able to use this software with the same ease and enjoyment that I bring to guitar, with all its effects, and pedals and signal processors. The problem has been that I’ve been hung up with the recording aspect and connecting Reason to Logic. For some reason (no pun intended), it has taken a little while to get my head around the aux channel strip and the way it doesn’t record onto the editing window of the DAW, but it’s still there nonetheless. These are important concepts for me to become familiar with, but I was not having the joy.
Last night I decided to move in a different direction. I started listening to some music in iTunes and, with the music still playing, I started reason, with the Axiom 25 keyboard attached, and just started to try and play along, fiddling to find the right sound in Reason. Then it hit me – this is how I learned how to play guitar! Not by looking at books or videos, but by putting on the music that I love and trying to imitate melody and tone as best I can. Now, the problem is that I don’t have any skills on keyboard/piano AND I’m playing a instrument that has 25 keys, instead of the preferred 88. But even with those issues, I still felt like I was able to move forward.
Until I tried to do something with drums. Reason was first recommended to me as a great source of loops and percussion potential. Now, I may be worse on a drum kit than I am on a piano, but I’m not above tapping pads to get something like a usable rhythm. And, Reason, like any sequencer, has a quantize function which puts the notes you play in the right spot. You still have to play the right notes. The problem is that the Axiom 25 doesn’t work for Reason’s drum computer. I don’t know why this is, but I’ve confirmed with some research that this controller is not going to let me do what I want to do in Reason.
So, what does this mean? Time to go shopping! If I can get an Akai MPD 24 or 32 for $100 – $125, I’m just going to go for it. Craigslist showed some potential for both items and they’re both supposed to work with Reason 4.0, although I may need some driver updates from Akai. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens next.
If there are four stories about Obama’s school speech on Townhall, does that count as traction?
I keep hearing about this bizarre story, and I can’t believe it won’t go away. Obama plans to welcome students back to school with a speech that will be show in public schools on September 8, 2009. After a month of fear mongering and threats surrounding the healthcare debate, it seems that a few activists on the Right have overshot the mark by claiming that Obama’s pep talk to returning students is, in fact, and indoctrination effort aimed at engineering the latest version of Hitler Youth. This is an especially crazy premise given the fact that President did the same thing in 1988.
There’s enough different ways to attack the current administration (from both sides), that I would think his enemies would let this one go like they seem to have let go of the bizarre and untrue allegation that Obama is not an American citizen. I’m not about to put Rush Limbaugh on the radio here at work – it’s one thing to check in with that stuff when it’s just me in the car, but I’m not going to subject my co-workers to such madness in the name of “know thine enemy.”
But I did decide to look at Townhall.com, which is no less nutty. And, to my surprise, there are 4 stories and/or columns addressing the acute danger presented by Obama telling kids to study hard and stay in school.
IOKIYAR!
Opera 10 for Mac OS X
Somehow, many years ago, I became dissatisfied with my old Netscape browser and had no desire to support Windows in any way, shape or form. I was stuck with a Gateway laptop running Windows, but that didn’t mean that I had to succumb to Internet Explorer. At the time, I was already worried about how much RAM browsers ate up and I couldn’t bear to have the computer running any slower than it already was. Firefox, as you may recall, didn’t exist yet.
And so I discovered a plucky Scandanavian company making a free browser that advertised the smallest RAM footprint. It also offered something called tabbed browsing years before any of the big boys even knew what that was. I loved my old Opera 6 browser and stuck with them right up until the beginning of this year, when I was finally able to switch to from Windows to Mac.
At that momentous occasion, I remember looking into Opera and finding that it wasn’t really up-to-date for the Mac platform. Today, that changed. Opera 10 is now available for Mac. I have downloaded it and done some test browsing and it looks like my plucky little friends from Norway have got it right. I am very excited. The Fightins does not crash and Fretbuzz.net is no problem. I read both of these sites regularly and they both crash Firefox. On Opera, it’s no problem. Legal research on Lexis will still need to be done on Safari because I can not see the tables of contents on Opera or Firefox, but I’m still better off than I was. Firefox is going to be retired and Opera will become the default browser as soon as I can learn to export bookmarks.