Archive for January, 2010
« Older Entries | Newer Entries »Two Tuned Tablas And A Microphone – Part I
[ 4 Comments ]Posted on January 11, 2010 by admin in Music
Monday, January 11th, 2010I went looking for some desi music, and got more than I bargained for. Part one of a look at Bollywood, bhangra, urban desi, hindi hip hop, and punjabi pop.
The clip that started my search |
The Internet can be a very dangerous place. Any of you who suffer – as I do – from the probably incurable malady known as Wikiphilia will know what I mean. You find an interesting video, article, or some other piece of pop cultural flotsam & jetsam, and before you know it, several hours are gone, and you know a lot about something that probably matters very little. This happened to me recently when I ran across the video Horizons by the Bay Area desi act Karmacy. The clip itself is – like a lot of desi songs and videos – a peculiar mix of brilliant and cheesy, at least when viewed with a more western eye. Yes, the guys in the video look sort of like they took a long lunch hour from their ad agency or tech startup jobs to do the shoot, but they’re rapping in five languages: English, Spanish, Hindi, Gujarati and Punjabi, and the song is actually is kind of hooky. In any case, the tune gave me flashbacks of 90′s club bhangra, and got me wondering if any kind of durable genre evolved out of it. The only artists I could remember by name from the era were Apache Indian, Diamond & Simon, and Bally Sagoo; a LOT of the music was remixes and mashups of traditional Indian music or Bollywood tunes, and kind of blurred together in the techno/rave haze of my memory. So my search was on, and… it was mind-numbingly frustrating! There’s an INCREDIBLE amount of desi pop music out there, but there are a few obstacles to finding the good stuff. First of all, there’s just SO MUCH to sift through. If you take all the style fusions that are possible with just the sources available on the Indian sub-continent, and combine that with the fact that the people from the area have moved all over the world, you begin to get the picture. There are two other obstacles to finding the best material; one is that the bulk of the Read the rest of this entry »
Is That A Bomb In Your Underpants? Or Are You Just Happy To See Me?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 10, 2010 by admin in Politics
Sunday, January 10th, 2010Whether or not you think the underpants bomber was a terrorist Depends™ on your point of view, I guess. Although his crime was Hane™-ous, we felt no Fruit of the Boom™.
  Oddly, this book was NOT authored by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s children. |
I haven’t found terrorism and politics this much fun since 2006, when prankster John Hargrave stuffed a dildo in his pants before boarding a flight, just to see what would happen. As someone who – every single day – is finding himself a little further outside the value system of either political party in America, I’ve been finding it easier and easier to be amused rather than angered by what’s going down in this country. Especially things like paid dillweed Larry Kudlow of Politico ranting about how Obama should ix-nay the ending-spay, as if the Bush gang didn’t do anything to start the biggest spending spree in US history. Or Rudy Giuliani claiming that the date September 11, 2001 was magically not a date that was on the calendar during the Bush administration. It’s Rudy’s gaffe that I find most amusing, and I don’t care that he admitted his error later. The original statement is what most xenophobic hillbillies with cable will remember. But the thing that I find really funny about it was that he was suggesting that a lone looney with fireworks in his undies was a terrorist. C’mon people. The serious press is already calling him the “Underpants Bomber”. And if you don’t believe he was a confused and inept individual acting on his own, I suggest you download and read his collected rantings that had been posted on Islamic Forum Gawaher.com; Wired has graciously provided them with a link to a zip file in their recent piece Analyze This: The Mind of the Underpants Bomber. And never mind all that. Let’s not forget he was flying into DETROIT, for cryin’ out loud. Obviously Rudy’s never been to “The Big D”, or he’d know that the nation has nothing to worry about from an undies bomber entering HERE. We’d shut that sh– down in NO time.
Apple In Wonderland: iSlate Is Late For A Very Important Date
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on January 9, 2010 by admin in Technology
Saturday, January 9th, 2010If nothing else, the Apple iSlate is aptly named. It iS late arriving, and other vendors are cashing in on that fact at the 2010 Consumer Electronics show.
Why have the computer manufacturers of the world initiated a campaign of torture against me? First, there have been these endless Apple Tablet rumours, then the CrunchPad gets ready for launch, but immediately gets hijacked by its Indian partners, then the HP Slate and Microsoft Courier rumours start floating, only to have Steve Ballmer parade around with what I’m dubbing the “HP Brick” (if it’s anything like an HP laptop, that’s what it’ll be soon after you buy it) at the 2010 CES…please, SOMEONE HELP ME. All I want is a thin and durable multitouch device the size of a clipboard that does everything that my laptop and phone do in one inexpensive device. Is that so much to ask? Apparently so. So while we ponder all the devices that could be, lets add some to the list. First up: the Skiff. Formerly called “FirstPaper”, they obviously got some startup loot and hired someone to re-brand them. It’s not really a tablet device per se, its more like a publishing platform similar to Kindle. See the Engadget hands-on here. To me, the coolest thing about the device is that it’s bendable. But you know what? It’s 2010, and this kind of thing was in the movie 2001 (see below), which was made in 1968! And you could watch the BBC from Jupiter on the thing in the movie! Also kind of cool, but not floating my boat too much, is the Freescale Smartbook, which, in spite of some of the early concepts being almost scary, turned out to be surprisingly appealing in some ways, especially if they hit the $200 price point they’ve been pitching. Engadget has a hands-on with the dockable tablet, and I’m sorry to say it looks like it has a slightly toy-like level of engineering quality. It’ll be interesting to see what comes of it. In the meantime, I guess iWait. Read the rest of this entry »
Food Stamps Feel A Lot Classier On A Credit Card
[ 4 Comments ]Posted on January 8, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Friday, January 8th, 2010One in eight Americans is benefitting from food stamps. Are you one of them? Would you be if you had to?
I joke sometimes about being a socialist, but in reality, I’m the type of person who’s more inclined to work within the system I’m born into. Since I was born in one of the most capitalism-obsessed nations on Earth, and raised in an intellectual, bleeding heart liberal college community, I’ve always had an odd mix of values. I’ve never applied for “welfare” of any kind, including unemployment (okay, 3 months when I was 18!), food stamps, or other kinds of assistance, but I think “the poor” are entitled to such help. In the past, I’ve always found it easy to balance these vaguely conflicted values, mainly because the overall economic situation in the states made it possible for me to go get some kind of work in thin times. I think a lot of “average” Americans feel the same way, but recently I was surprised to find that several “average” friends of mine were using something I’d never heard of to defray expenses: a Michigan Bridge Card. Suddenly being broke seemed a lot less shameful to me. Somehow “defraying expenses with a bridge card” sounds a lot better than “buying hot dogs with food stamps“. And apparently this is a national trend; the New York Times has a whole series called The Safety Net, where I ran across this interactive map that made me realize that in the county I live in (home to the relatively prestigious University of Michigan), one in ten people are collecting food stamps. This kind of blew me away, and when I add that to my ongoing ire over the secretive bailouts of billionaire bankers and the impending commercial real estate crash , I start thinking a little differently. As a self-employed person, I made some financial mis-steps over the last couple of years that I’ve struggled to bounce back from. I’m sure this is the basis for my anger about bank bailouts; no one came along to bail ME out and wipe the credit slate clean. But maybe it’s time to revise my strategy. I mean the NYT is literally advising us that walking away from our mortgages is okay. So why shouldn’t we “strategically default” and go on government support? How about you? Are you struggling? Would you accept government assistance if you were? Let’s not forget that the banking industry did, and they’re money experts!
TV Commercial Withdrawal: Why I’m A Trunk Monkey Junky
[ 3 Comments ]Posted on January 7, 2010 by admin in Popular Media
Thursday, January 7th, 2010It’s odd that the only thing I miss since cancelling my cable service is the commercials, and now I can’t find any good ones. Have a fave you’d care to share?
This spot for Cullman Liquidation is hands-down a fave for me |
With the annual hubbub about the Superbowl ad spots starting to simmer (here are last year’s top 10), I’m reminded of the only thing I miss about television since shutting off my cable service back in 2003: the commercials. It’s more than a little odd that I miss them; when I was exposed to them on a regular basis, I had two PTSD-like reflexes to their sudden appearance: 1.) Hit the mute button and pointedly avoid looking at them, or 2.) Play a game of “distill the message”, in which my friends and I would take a beer commercial for instance, and distill it down to the message it was conveying. An example being “although you’re male and act like an idiot, chicks will dig you if you drink our beer“. So in my pining for a commercial to watch, I figured that with the advent of YouTube and the fact that even grandma has a blog these days, it would be easy to find a roundup of the best commercials of the last few years. How wrong I was. Try searching yourself; this tends to be a heavily-targeted keyword, so you’ll keep encountering things like this old European condom commercial, and the title on the clip is almost always something like “FUNNIEST COMMERCIAL EV-AR”. There’s also the added weird “meta” effect of TV programs that are actually devoted to filling the spaces between the commercials with commercials. So although I found some interesting clips to share, I realized I’ll have to come back with a “Part II” after doing a more themed, focused search. Something like the offensive car ads we rounded up last year. Below is a quick roundup of some of the quirkier things I found; feel free to share any goodies of your own. Read the rest of this entry »