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Friday, April 29, 2005
Caught part of Bush's speech on energy the other day. O.K. A few problems. First off he speaks of the need for more nuclear plants. Clean diesel vehicles, and hydrogen cell cars are fine ideas but do you notice how no one talks about solar energy anymore. The biggest problem with solar energy is in fact the converting of it. As it stands now, current solar panels allow us to convert less than one percent of the light they collect. If we would sink some money into R&D for conversion and accumulation technology life would be like Star Trek. If we could efficiently convert solar energy to electricity we could run the entire planet on less than a days worth of light. And it is deadly cheap and abundant. And if not just one thing goes wrong but if everything goes wrong that's OK. No meltdowns.
Bush also talked about America becoming fuel independent. Not gonna happen if we are talking fossil fuels. America on a daily consumption basis uses about twenty five percent of the world's oil.
North America sits on about three percent of the world's oil. Talking fuel independence? Not gonna happen.
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Tuesday, April 26, 2005
CHECKING IN
I just put the latest issue of the comic I am working on to bed. Just in time to be handed the script for a different comic. Good timing. I am also wrapping up a web based logo gig and trying to come up with the perfect photshop flame fx. I have read enough tutorials that my eyes want to quit but it is still not just right. Soon. That is not so bad. I did another logo for a client that has an iconic happy face. In the first meeting he said "no laughing". I did some prelims and the client kept saying "happier, make the face happier."
I did another batch and again "happier". I must have exaggerated the smile until it no longer looked like a happy face. Each time the client said "happier". I finally did a simple laughing face and he says "that's it. Why didn't you do that in the first place?"
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Saturday, April 23, 2005
GRRRR.
I taught an art class today and one of my students did something that made me both angy and proud. Angry because I generally hate stupid people. Which unfortunately seems to be a majority nowadays. Angry because I couldn't sustain my hatred. My student, a girl all of twelve years old, tells me something that blows my hatred for humanity away. Something that makes me stop and smile. Inside, where it counts.
She tells me that she is going after class to have her long and very pretty looking hair cut off in order to give it to children with cancer. She read about the cut-a-thon for cancer in school.
God. Damn. It.
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Sunday, April 17, 2005
ATOMIC WASTELAND
Los Angeles California is a media town. It is home to so many television and movie studios. We have literally hundreds of radio stations. Some of which are in English. This is significant when it comes to radio listening pleasure. (I used to live in a small town in South Dakota. The kind of small town that had a small town radio station. The kind of small town radio station that if you drove down to their studios and plugged your radio into their broadcast equipment you might pick them up clearly.) And yet radio sucks so badly in this town. Dear God!
And if, like myself you are partial to oldies or good R&B then you are doomed. There is a handful of "oldies" station here in town. But every last mother's son of them stinks on ice. And it is not because "oldies only has a finite number of songs to choose from" as some people have had the unfathomable ignorance to tell me. It is because 90 percent of radio stations in this (and much of the rest of the country) are owned by one of three "media groups" i.e. holding companies. Due to FCC regs trying to obviate monopolies, no company can own more than one type of radio station in a single market. Tell me you can't see the obvious ways a large company can move around such a device. The different ways of classifying a "market", broadcast modulations, types, etc. it would be easy to outfox the FCC.
Therein lays the problem. Station programmers. When I was a kid dj's had a fair share of input into the playlists. I am not saying that programmers didn't exist nor that they didn't exert control over dj's. But in the day to day spinning of records, as long as a dj included whatever minimum of new songs were being promoted by the station per hour the rest was filler at the dj's discretion. I remember hearing over the radio that a dj wanted to play a certain b-side, went to the station's stacks and found out that they didn't have one so he brought in his copy from home to play it. For no other reason than it was a good song.
Infinity, Clear Channel, and Westwood One. Apparently these are the three giants in LA radio station ownership. I am assuming from the repetitious play of the same songs that station programmers are not in a big hurry to play what people like to listen to but to move paper off of their desk. I am also assuming from listening to them that the oldies stations in this town are being programmed by guys born in the seventies who have a few dozen stations to program for and thusly don't have the time, inclination or appreciation to go through a large list of songs. There is a certain radio station here, KLOS that you could set your watch to. They must have a playlist that could fill a matchbook.
Think I am kidding? How many top forty songs has the, oh let's see, the Rolling Stones had in their career? A few dozen? And yet I can listen to the same three goodamn Stones songs over and over. There is some bizarre idea that people will change stations if they hear a song that they don't immediately recognize. Hell, it seems that most people act like idiots so maybe that is true. But I wouldn't, I would probably say "Hey, I haven't heard that song for a long time". Station managers can assure their advertisers that "No, we won't be playing anything that people don't immediately recognize. The same songs over and over so that listeners won't change stations." That way they can justify their advertising rates to clients. Exaggerating am I? Try calling in a request to the station. Good luck. Unless it is specifically a request show you won't get very far. When I was younger most stations didn't mind call-ins and even tried to accommodate a few of them. Nowadays you would have as much luck calling your local broadcast television station and requesting your favorite rerun.
This became abundantly clear to me after I had listened to a syndicated oldies show. Every Saturday night this dj plays oldies. And you listen and start saying, "Oh yeah. I haven't heard that in a long time. Man, they used to play that song all the time. Why don't I hear that on my day to day oldies station?" Because out of ear out of mind. While listening you start to realize just how pared down your radio enjoyment has become.
However recently here in southern California, there has been an oldies station that has reformatted to play a little more of everything. Not exactly free form radio but a heck of a lot more variety. I can stand listening to about half of what they play. As opposed to one in five for other stations. And the other half that I don't care for is at least not the same old stuff that the other stations in town are playing. This is like giving some water to a man dying of thirst.
This leads us up to pay-per-radio. Satellite radio, such as XFM. I have had the opportunity to listen to several of these pay radio stations on several occasions. Huzzah! Variety, even amongst the same genre stations they have enough material to keep you satisfied. My problems with such a set up are that I can't afford paying to listen to the radio and that I am somewhat opposed to having to pay for radio. Free radio is a privilege not a right I understand. Yet somehow I feel somehow ripped off having to pump money into the radio to listen.
So what is the solution? Devil if I know. Yet it seems that everybody agrees how bad radio is. Should we rise up in revolution against tyrannical radio ennui? Exclusive CD playing? Boycott? Letter writing campaign demanding variety? Go out and form your own pirate radio?
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Thursday, April 14, 2005
CURIOUS
I am asking any artists out there, has anyone been having trouble with Black Magic lately? I bought a bottle from a local source lately. The only local source that still carries it by the way. Thanks again gang-members-who-learn-how-to-make-homemade-tattoos-in-jail-and-steal-ink-from-stores-so-the-stores-either-lock-it-up-or-quit-carrying-it-altogether. Thanks again.
Sorry. This is not a rant. You know what, I am not sorry. It's called being civilized, assholes. Look it up.
Anyway, I bought the ink and when I went to use it, it was all gray and looking watered down. It was completely unusable. Shaking and stirring did nothing to help. I actually had to take it back and exchange it for another bottle. The exchanged bottle was also rather grayish and light but not as bad as the first. Has Higgins changed their formula? Was the shelf life of my bottles expired? Has anybody else been having problems with this? All input is appreciated.
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I SING THE BODY ELECTRO-MAGNETIC
I had my first MRI today. Well three MRI's actually. My first time. If you have never had one, it is kind of like being inserted into a giant pencil sharpener and being subjected to a symphonic orchestra of jackhammers, bad East German techno music and enormous dot matrix printers.
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Sunday, April 10, 2005
PONTIFICUS EX POPULUS? EXCREMENTUM!
Having tuned in to both television and radio stations for the last three days, I get it. Ok? I get it! The Pope died and a bunch of people showed up. I get it!
However, on one show they referred to the late pontificus maximus as "the Pope of the people".
Hmmm. "The Pope of the people"? I am pretty sure that every pope has been a "pope of the people". There just haven't been too many Popes of singles celled organisms. The other part that makes this infuriating is that it is derivative. When Princess Di died she was given the honorific of "Princess of the people". And after seeing the turnout for her services I believe that to be an accurate and apt description. The streets of London were choked with flowers for her. Remember this was after she was actually no longer a princess. And yet she spent much of her time and energy really trying to help people that needed it. When she didn't have to.
So to say that the Pope should be called "Pope of the people" because he too helped some people is asinine. I am sure that trying to help people is part of the job description of pope. He knew that going in. Don't get me wrong, I think John Paul II helped a lot of people. Catholic people. And people he was hoping to make Catholic.
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Sunday, April 03, 2005
THAT COLD THING IN MY GUTS
Got up today to go out and see a matinee of Sin City with some friends. Holy crap! This is easily far and away the first time they have made a comic book movie that looks just like the book. I mean, hold up the page from the book while looking at the screen and you will see what I mean. It is like they picked actors who resembled Miller's drawings and used makeup to finish up the difference. Then shot scenes blocked right out of the books. I mean right out of the books.
The only bad part is that they also include all the over the top hard boiled dialogue from the books. I realized part way through the movie that perhaps hearing faux Hammett and Chandler in your head while reading gives it a little better sound than actually hearing it spoken aloud.
I still recommend this movie whether you are a Miller, comic, action or noir fan.
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Saturday, April 02, 2005
HMMM
The identity of "Deep Throat", the secret source of Woodward and Bernstein's inside info on Nixon's government is apparently known only to four people. Woodward, Bernstein, Ben Bradlee, and the informant himself. The reporters have sworn to keep his identity secret until his demise. However, they have recently admitted that he has been having throat problems of a medical nature. This was right around the time that the Pope started having throat problems. Hmmm. Could the holy pontiff in fact have been the inside source helpful in breaking the Watergate scandel wide? Did he in fact have some grudge against Dick Nixon's administration? Only time will tell.
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