Archive for 2010

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Do You Have To Be A Matzochist To Celebrate Passover?

[ 3 Comments ]Posted on March 20, 2010 by admin in Holidays

Saturday, March 20th, 2010

In spite of having tons of Jewish friends, they never invite me to Passover dinner. Maybe I shouldn’t complain. The “bread of affliction” doesn’t sound very tasty.


Be your own wrathful old testament
deity with the 10 Plagues Toy Set

I have a strange tendency to get things backwards. As a white Anglo Saxon male, I should be all set. I should just go get my MBA and take the position I don’t deserve at the “rich white guy club” that I could have just for not being black, Mexican, a lesbian, or whatever. But no. I have to go through life shunning my entitlement and wallowing in my fascination with other cultures. Which has been fun, for the record. As a result of my open-mindedness and rejection of my glass ceilingless birthright, I’ve been the manager and only white guy at a Chinese restaurant, been awarded “honorary gay person” status by both genders, and been the only white guy in a funk trio briefly. But one thing that has passed me over repeatedly is – ironically – Passover dinner. I have lots of Jewish friends, but only one of them has invited me to Seder, and she was only Jewish because her mom converted, so things felt a little “by the booky”, more like a Sesame Street “hey kids, let’s look at how the Jewish people live” evening instead of a natural holiday experience. So Passover remains a mystery to me. If you read the rather dryly factual Wikipedia entry, it sounds like a grisly, depressive event to celebrate. Slavery, a wrathful, old testament deity inflicting plagues and killing firstborn children, and lambs’ blood being smeared on doorways. Scary stuff. So hey, if you’re Jewish, give me a ring this year. I’m keeping the evening open. I don’t think I’ll be hanging around for all seven days though. Read the rest of this entry »

Cam McAzie, Punk Rock Bagpiper – Video Kilt The Radio Star

[ 1 Comment ]Posted on March 19, 2010 by admin in Music

Friday, March 19th, 2010

Aussie punk rock buskering bagpiper gives new meaning to “down under” when he dons his kilt and combat boots


Excuse me mate, I believe
your bagpipes are on fire.

When I was a kid my father used to terrorize me by putting on the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards bagpipe album that featured the hit single Amazing Grace. The odd thing was that it wasn’t the bagpipe music that terrorized me, it was my poor tone-deaf dad’s quarter-step-flat droning voice as he sang along. The bagpipe music I loved. Yes, in spite of jokes like “Why do bagpipers walk when they play? To get away from the sound“, and the fact that the original purpose of bagpipes was to scare the enemy off the battlefield when conventional weapons weren’t doing the trick, I’ve always felt a certain connection with the reedy drone of the instrument. At the same time I’ve never found true gratification with its use; in spite of a lengthy list of bands that have put the pipes to use, no-one’s quite hit the mark for me. You’ve probably heard the more familiar examples like Peter Gabriel’s Come Talk to Me (that link is an awesome stage clip by the way), half the catalog of Afro Celt Sound System, or more recently Eminem’s Bagpipes From Baghdad, but I bet you’ve never heard of Cam McAzie, the BadPiper. Leave it to a country founded by criminals and scoundrels to produce the world’s most rebellious player of the world’s most outcast instrument. McAzie brings new meaning to the term “down under” when he dons his kilt and combat boots, preens his mohawk, and starts pumping his punk rock pipes. Check out the vids below, and another one I threw in for fun, by the Mudmen. Know of any cool uses of bagpipe you’d care to share? Read the rest of this entry »

Does Government Control The Media Or Is It The Other Way Around?

[ Comments Off ]Posted on March 18, 2010 by admin in Popular Media

Thursday, March 18th, 2010

I think we’ve been worrying about the wrong Big Brother.


I think this poster has it backwards

Quite some time ago, San Francisco radio figure Wes Nisker said If You Don’t Like the News, Go Out and Make Some of Your Own. Apparently Rupert Murdoch, Jack Welch, and other media moguls took his advice. I’ve been fascinated with the literally Orwellian evolution of media control in America over the past decade or two that began in earnest with the deregulation of the Reagan years and has resulted in ten or fewer media companies owning everything. Which is a bad enough thing in itself, but gets really bad when those same companies control the government as well. As a well-conditioned media consumer, I was so busy Facebooking about my emotional knee-jerk reactions to liberal and conservative media pundits that I had forgotten that this behavior of mine was all part of a vast Orwellian 21st century robber baron plan. That is, until I was reminded of this fact last week when I finally saw the 2005 documentary Orwell Rolls in His Grave. It’s a shame that the makers of the film didn’t package the product a little differently; the title gives off a paranoid post 9/11 vibe that detracts from the substance of the film, which is an insightful exploration of the corporate media dominance of what you see, read and hear as a result of influence peddling and Washington’s unprecedented revolving door policies of late. Much like Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, the film wallows a bit too much in what seems like academic hand-wringing, and plays the Orwell angle a little too hard. The fact is that Orwell wouldn’t be rolling in his grave, because the film effectively makes the case that we’re living exactly the way Orwell envisioned things. I’d still recommend the film, and if you’re interested in this topic, the totally unrelated book The The Elements of Journalism, which explores a similar topic, i.e.: the failure of journalism as a result of the purely profit-driven decision making that has replaced “real” news with entertainment. I sometimes lament that most whistleblower-oriented documentaries – like Food, Inc., Outfoxed, and virtually anything by Michael Moore – end up coming across as liberal whining in the end. It would be inspiring if someone managed to produce a less partisan documentary that just looked at the apalling truth of it all. Yes, the Bush White House that was brought to us by Project For A New American Century was indeed Orwellian in its lies and doublespeak, but the real evil is not the party they claimed to represent, it’s the pathological behavior of the media companies that seek control of government through agency capture. America *needs investigative journalism, hard hitting documentaries, and gutsy exposés more than ever right now. But don’t expect to see them in a major theater in an era when Disney blocks the distribution of a Michael Moore film for telling too much of the truth about George Bush. Fortunately, at least for now, we have the Internet, so you can watch entire films like Orwell Rolls in His Grave on line . Read the rest of this entry »

How The Personal Computer Will Bring The Apocalypse

[ 1 Comment ]Posted on March 17, 2010 by admin in Technology

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

In the end, it won’t be terrorists or a nuclear holocaust that do us in, it’ll be some dumb e-mail that YOU opened.

Imagine if you could take control of every Windows-based computer in America. Even if your control were limited to something simple like turning them off or blocking basic web access, you would be wielding remarkable power. Everything from air traffic control to communications networks to emergency services and military operations rely in some way on Windows. This may sound like a hackneyed plot for an 80′s “cyberwar” movie, but is it? You’ve almost certainly heard about how Chinese hackers managed to hack Google because of security flaws caused by the US government, and more recently about how the Iranian government claimed to crack down on US-backed cyber activists. Or how the hilariously named Russian hacker group the Russian Business Network is back in business, allegedly nailing Citigroup for millions of dollars. Or how last year’s Conficker worm created a 12 million computer botnet. Maybe you think this sort of thing won’t happen to you because you keep your anti-virus updated, or that if there were really something to be paranoid about, it would make the news. Well, the fact is, it’s estimated that 89% of corporate security breaches go unreported, and it’s fairly common (but under-reported) knowledge that financial institutions are routinely blackmailed by hackers, based on the idea that the payout is cheaper than a consumer “run” on the bank. I have to admit I felt fairly safe until just recently, when I found my system was compromised by Conficker payloads. This little worm supposedly died out last year, but is still apparently on the loose, doing who-knows-what. I was especially stunned by getting it; my system runs AVG Antivirus, MalwareBytes, Spybot, and Ad-Aware, is behind a firewall, and I NEVER open unknown attachments or files without first scanning them. So how did it happen? My best guess is that when I helped a client with their malware-infected, internet-disabled laptop, it hopped on a thumb drive on its own, and jumped onto *my computer on its own. Who knows; the fact is that none of my existing protection caught it, and I had to resort to some pretty savvy rootkit detectors to reclaim my system. After spending hours researching and fixing the problem, I’m utterly unconvinced that I’m in the clear; I still have to do a huge backup, reinstall, and make sure my backup files aren’t infected. Why? Because as Microsoft itself put it way back in 2005, when it comes to rootkit infections: Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid. So what can you do? Well, if you’re an idiot, you could argue that one should switch to a Mac (don’t get me wrong, I use both, and love my Mac), but that is simply not true. The fact is, we’re doomed. You may as well kick back and watch the tech apocalypse unfold.

A Pronoia Refresher – Every Little Thing Is Gonna Be All Right

[ Comments Off ]Posted on March 16, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

The suspicion that the universe is conspiring on your behalf can be pretty helpful at times.


Of course there are other
ways to achieve this state

The other day, a friend was lamenting the sad state of affairs in the world. War, poverty, hunger, crime, environmental catastrophes, the shameful state of our government and its duopolistic party system…they were really digging in. I ordinarily would be the source of this kind of lamenting myself, but whenever some else does it, the rebel in me starts acting up, and I drag out my favorite toolbox for dismantling this kind of gloomy thinking. I start by pointing out that if you take a city like Los Angeles – which has a population of about 4 million people – you’ll find that every day a person is murdered, there are about 45 robberies, 80 cases of aggravated assault, 70 burglaries, and 90 cars stolen. That means that out of a city of 4,000,000 people, 3,999,714 of them were pretty much behaving. Which actually is pretty remarkable. I then introduce the idea of Pronoia, the suspicion that the universe is conspiring to work in your favor. For “Pronoia 101″, I always point people to Rob Brezsny’s Glory in the Highest, an excerpt from his book Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia. In it, he walks you through the beginning of an average person’s day, pointing out just how many more things are working than not working. Getting your mind adapted to this kind of thing is pretty useful. It doesn’t mean your life will then be all serene and gloriously comforting; on the contrary, life always seems to dish out as much as you can take, so one of the dangers of taking joy in all this finely-tuned universe stuff is that as soon as you’re ready for it, more crap is probably on the way. Which is why I then suggest that if you can’t take the buddha-like approach of living in perfect acceptance in the present, you at least take the Mel Brooks approach of “hope for the best, expect the worst” because as he then adds: “the world’s a stage, we’re unrehearsed”. Improvise. It’ll probably work out. Read the rest of this entry »

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