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Songs for the 21st Century

As if it weren’t enough to have written the theme song to Superchicken (“You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred”), Sheldon Allman also wrote the theme songs to George of the Jungle and Tom Slick, all in the same afternoon at Jay Ward Studios. He also wrote the theme music for Let’s Make a Deal, and was the voice of Mr. Ed the Talking Horse. Sometime in the late 50s, Allman released an album of songs he thought might be appropriate for modern living in the 21st century, all sung in an overly sincere baritone and accompanied by Spanish pop guitar. Apparently, Allman thought we would be dating humanoid androids, doing a lot of math, dealing with schizophrenia, and crawling out from under space junk by now. The MP3s will be taken down April 30th – get ’em while they’re still irrelevant.

We met once as I recall
I gave her my close attention
When she came walking through my wall
She’s the girl from the fourth dimension
One kiss and my toes were curled.

Thanks mneptok

Music: Sheldon Allman :: Univac and the Humanoid
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You Shoot Like a Goat Herder

Reprising the military’s 1989 attempt to rouse Manuel Noriega by blasting rock music at his encampment, and the FBI’s 1993 attempt to get the Branch Davidians to emerge from their Waco compound, U.S. forces are pumping AC/DC and Jimi Hendrix into Fallujah streets to goad Iraqi gunmen into attacking… so they can be mowed down. They’re not stopping with rock, either – insults are being used as well: “You shoot like a goat herder.”

Thanks Roger.

Music: Air :: Dark Messages
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The Fuss About Gmail

Many well-articulated and legitimate criticisms of gmail’s implications for privacy are circulating, and 28 privacy groups have co-written a letter to Google asking them to reconsider the plan. In a brilliant rebuttal, always level-headed Tim O’Reilly writes The Fuss About Gmail and Privacy: Nine Reasons Why It’s Bogus.

There are already hundreds of millions of users of hosted mail services at AOL, Hotmail, MSN, and Yahoo! These services routinely scan all mail for viruses and spam. Despite the claims of critics, I don’t see that the kind of automated text scanning that Google would need to do to insert context-sensitive ads is all that different from the kind of automated text scanning that is used to detect spam. (And in fact, those oppressed by spam should look forward to having Google’s brilliant search experts tackle spam detection as part of their problem set!)

Music: The Three Suns :: Danny’s Inferno
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Mending a Fence

Our side fence was sagging into the yard, looking sad. Removing the original posts was going to be impossible without renting a jackhammer. Decided to put new posts in between the old ones. Project started last weekend, finished up this morning. Like most home improvement projects, hidden variables got in the way, things didn’t turn out as planned. This time they turned out better.

Music: Stina Nordenstam :: Reason To Believe
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Why Cell Phone Conversations Are Annoying

Why is it annoying to be in the presence of someone else’s cell phone conversation, especially on a train or other confined area? If pressed, most of us would probably say that “people talk too loud” on cell phones, which makes the calls more annoying than being in the proximity of a two-person conversation.

But the affect is actually more subtle than that. Andrew Monk and colleagues from the University of York did a pretty careful study, rating the impressions of standers-by after they had been surreptitiously exposed to cell phone and normal conversations at both normal and loud volumes.

Turns out it’s not so much the volume of cell phone conversations (though that’s certainly a factor) but the fact that a person is standing there talking apparently to no one. Psychologically, we just can’t filter this into the background as easily as we can a two-person conversation, which we (I’m surmising here) have evolved for millions of years to be in the proximity of. This of course raises the question of how many millions of years it will take for us to regard nearby cell conversations as perfectly normal.

Clearly, mobile phones score far worse than face-to-face conversations, confirming much anecdotal evidence. As we might expect, loud conversations score worse than quieter conversations. It’s striking, however, that mobile-phone conversations are judged more negatively than loud conversations. Participants even said that the volume of the mobile-phone conversations was more annoying than those that occurred face-to-face, even though the volume was the same, and was controlled by objective measures.

Music: David Byrne :: Wheezing
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Patent Overload

patent_overload

A little late to the party with this — massive online protest currently in process to counter the proposed European software patents directive. Absurd examples of already patented (!) widgets, the patents of which would become enforceable if the Council of Ministers has its way. Build a shopping cart, go to prison. Templates you can slap over your homepage to join the protest.

The only technology on this list that I take exception to is the MP3 codec, which represents thousands of person-hours of intensive R&D.

Thanks Rob.

Music: New York Dolls :: Frankenstein
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QuickCrete

Note to self: Next time you need to stir mix-in-hole concrete with your hands, put on a pair of gloves first. The lime in the concrete does a number on your skin, even though the gravel has a way of diminishing the profile of raised blemishes. Two days after replacing fenceposts, hands are sorry. Seemed innocuous enough at the time.

Music: John Kevin Fabiani :: Mother
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xScope

One of the most genuinely useful applications of OS X’s native PDF-based transparency engine that I’ve encountered: iconfactory’s xScope — a set of tools for designers and web developers that rides on top of your open apps and lets you instantly see what viewport would remain if you were to be working at a different resolution, or were using a different browser with different amounts of chrome. Also includes tools for measuring on-screen X-Y coordinates, for precisely measuring the pixel dimensions of any onscreen object, and so on. It’s been a while since I’ve encountered a piece of must-have shareware.

Music: Kristin Hersh :: Vitamin V
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Here’s to the Session Musician

LA Weekly has a very good tribute to the forgotten session musician — the fellow (usually) who is not part of any band per se’ but who has played with hundreds of them, with amazing flexibility and total professionalism. From ABBA to Zappa, the session musician is the opposite of the rock god — ego is probably not why he’s playing, and he will never have groupies.

“Most of the music you will ever hear will be played by people you will never see and whose names you will neither know nor think to ask. It will be recorded in windowless rooms, witnessed sometimes only by an engineer or producer, the now-ancient technology of the overdub making the presence even of other musicians unnecessary. For every superstar singer or guitar heroine whose name adorns a T-shirt or tattoo, there are hundreds whose work is done anonymously, or as good as. Who play their part, collect their pay and go home.”

Music: James Blood Ulmer :: Moons Shine
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Baby Monitor

I’m always amazed by the extreme sensitivity of our cheapo baby monitor. From across the house we can hear Miles’ every sleeping breath, a rumble when he turns over or pulls a blanket closer. If a cat is in the room with him, we can hear every smack of its tongue as it bathes. I’ve even gotten feedback loops passing through two closed doors, just from room tone.

Last night we were bugged by a mosquito in our room. Then this afternoon we were gardening outside, Miles was asleep inside, and the monitor was with us, competing with traffic noise. And then suddenly we could hear that damned mosquito buzzing around in his bedroom, clear as day.

Hearing an indoor mosquito from outside makes you realize what it must feel like to be to a dog or other animal with super-hearing — and how little information our ears usually give us. Kind of spooky.

Music: Andrew Sisters :: Six Jerks In A Jeep