Work commitments kept us from doing a full weekend jaunt, but Prairie and I went out to wander around the Folklife festival on Saturday afternoon and evening. Here’s the rest of my shots from the day.
Michael Hanscom
Happy Birthday…Star Wars?
It seems that Star Wars turns 30 today. Does that mean that we can’t trust it anymore?
Happy Birthday Hope!
Today’s Prairie’s sister’s birthday — happy day, Hope!
(Prairie told me that this was the perfect picture to use. Blame your sister. I’m just the messenger.)
Life imitating Satire
Five years ago, in the Onion:
“It’s criminal,” RIAA president Hilary Rosen said. “Anyone at any time can simply turn on a radio and hear a copyrighted song. Making matters worse, these radio stations often play the best, catchiest song off the album over and over until people get sick of it. Where is the incentive for people to go out and buy the album?”
[…]
RIAA attorney Russell Frackman said the lawsuit is intended to protect the artists.
“If this radio trend continues, it will severely damage a musician’s ability to earn a living off his music,” Frackman said. “[Metallica drummer] Lars Ulrich stopped in the other day wondering why his last royalty check was so small, and I didn’t know what to say. How do you tell a man who’s devoted his whole life to his music that someone is able to just give it away for free? That pirates are taking away his right to support himself with his craft?”
Yesterday, in the Los Angeles Times:
With CD sales tumbling, record companies and musicians are looking at a new potential pot of money: royalties from broadcast radio stations.
For years, stations have paid royalties to composers and publishers when they played their songs. But they enjoy a federal exemption when paying the performers and record labels because, they argue, the airplay sells music.
Now, the Recording Industry Assn. of America and several artists’ groups are getting ready to push Congress to repeal the exemption, a move that could generate hundreds of millions of dollars annually in new royalties.
Mary Wilson, who with Diana Ross and Florence Ballard formed the original Supremes, said the exemption was unfair and forced older musicians to continue touring to pay their bills.
“After so many years of not being compensated, it would be nice now at this late date to at least start,” the 63-year-old Las Vegas resident said in Milwaukee, where she was performing at the Potawatomi Bingo Casino. “They’ve gotten 50-some years of free play. Now maybe it’s time to pay up.”
Rather sadly, the Onion is becoming the new Nostradamus — only a lot more accurate.
Wamu Sees All!
Last September, I put these eyes on a small sign at the driveway in to the Northgate Washington Mutual bank.
Last night, as I was walking home from work, I noticed that eight months later, they’re still there.
This makes me rather ridiculously pleased with the universe.
The most foul, cruel, and bad-tempered rodent you ever set eyes on!
I love the internet.
I’ve been working my way through reading the archives of xkcd (“Warning: this comic occasionally contains strong language [which may be unsuitable for children], unusual humor [which may be unsuitable for adults], and advanced mathematics [which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors].”), which just catapulted into the ranks of ‘favorite web comic’ after I stumbled across the Map of Online Communities yesterday. I just came across this strip…
Embedded as a tooltip (the little pop-up text that shows when you hover over an image) was the text, “The younger folk in the audience think this is a joke.”
Curious, a quick Google search led me to this story:
On a fishing trip in Plains, Georgia, President Carter had an encounter with a “swamp rabbit”. This seemingly trivial event was seized upon by the press and became a sort of Rorschach test of the Carter presidency: reporters and commentators saw in this story whatever they wanted to see in Carter’s administration. Jody Powell, Carter’s press secretary, described the affair in his 1986 book The Other Side of the Story:
It began late one afternoon in the spring of 1979. The President was sitting with a few of us on the Truman Balcony. He had recently returned from a visit to Plains, and we were talking about homefolks and how the quail were nesting and similar matters of international import.
Suddenly, for no apparent reason — he was drinking lemonade, as I recall — the President volunteered the information that while fishing in a pond on his farm he had sighted a large animal swimming toward him. Upon closer inspection, the animal turned out to be a rabbit. Not one of your cutesy, Easter Bunny-type rabbits, but one of those big splay-footed things that we called swamp rabbits when I was growing up.
The animal was clearly in distress, or perhaps berserk. The President confessed to having had limited experience with enraged rabbits. He was unable to reach a definite conclusion about its state of mind. What was obvious, however, was that this large, wet animal, making strange hissing noises and gnashing its teeth, was intent upon climbing into the Presidential boat.
The President then evidently shooed the critter away from his boat with a paddle.
(Photo in the public domain, courtesy the Jimmy Carter Library.)
Overheard in Seattle
Not overheard by me, unfortunately, just too bizarre and funny not to share. This is ganked directly from overheardsea on LiveJournal:
Select lines from a guy having a very long conversation with what I believe was his significant other on his cell phone sitting directly behind me [on the #26 bus]:
“I’m on my way to my brother’s to pick up weed, and them I’m going to get a cat at the Humane Shelter.”
“So last night I went to meet up with that couple I told you about. They’re a gay guy and a tranny girl. The interview went real well. They called me back later that same night and said I was their favorite, so things are looking good there.”
“I’m making dinner tonight with my housemates. No, honey! Honey! I told you I was doing this tonight! Well, we’ll have to play really quickly in the bathroom tonight because I have to be there for the dinner. I love you, too.”
Photo Drop
Photo Drop is a slick little Dashboard widget — actually, one of the first that was slick and potentially useful enough for me to download and toss in to my Dashboard, which isn’t exactly the most-used OS X feature on my system. It’s a nice, simple one-trick pony: drag a photo to Photo Drop, set a few quick options for the final look (size, effects, etc.), and you’re done. Plus, it’s free. Not bad!
Happy Mother’s Day!
To my mum…
…Prairie’s mum…
…Noah’s mum (my sister-in-law)…
…and all the other mums out there!
Happy Birthday Lon!
It’s Prairie’s dad’s birthday today — happy birthday to him from Prairie and me!