I know it lacks any sense of logic, but having presented you with Würzburg ’88 Part One last week, we now give you Part Two of the same concert. “That Barry,” people often say, “he’s such an eccentric!”
Month: February 2006
Zappa Plays Zappa: European Tourdates
I’m probably the last to find out — blame it on too much work and a faulty car-battery at 7pm out in the freezing cold — but the ZFT now has a page up with all the (European) tourdates for Zappa Plays Zappa.
Sidenote: am I the only one who thinks the “Accept No Substitute” slogan is a bit of a snide remark at the address of all the “unofficial” tribute bands that have been keeping Frank’s music alive all these years? Maybe that car-battery just got me in a bad mood…
You Go Girl!
Willie Nelson released a gay-themed cowboy-song yesterday entitled “Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly (Fond of Each Other)”. What is it with closet cowboys these days? Massive outings from the prairie! As Roger Bourland puts it: “Wow Willy! You go girl!”
If You’re About To Get Sick
…from watching your TV (or ANYONE’S: friends, airports, bars, restaurants, laundromats…), simply turn it off.
Just touch that dial! One size fits ALL!
Two Million Gig
So there’s this bunch of old men who call themselves “The Rolling Stones”, and they’re doing this cozy little gig in Rio de Janeiro next Saturday. Two million people expected to attend! Let’s just hope they haven’t enlisted the Hell’s Angels to handle security.
Perfect Major
Take this for what it’s worth, but…
You scored as Art.
You should be an Art major! How bohemian!Art 92%
Linguistics 83%
Dance 75%
Mathematics 75%
Philosophy 67%
Theater 67%
Engineering 67%
Psychology 58%
English 58%
Sociology 50%
Anthropology 50%
Journalism 42%
Chemistry 42%
Biology 17%
75% Dance? What’s up with that? (Take the test here)
Neverland
Bizarre and slightly unnerving: Neverland, Amerika, a Flickr photoset with a twist. (last two via Exploding Aardvark)
Be A Loafer, It’s Good For You!
May I suggest you print this out and show it to your boss the next time he complains about that absent stare into infinity of yours:
Idlers, loafers and layabouts, listen up. A new study suggests that the times when we sit around twiddling our thumbs could in fact be vital for learning.
Tap That Song
And another fun diversion: Song Tapper! Use your keyboard’s spacebar to tap the (lyrical) rhythm of a song, and have the site guess that song. Amazingly accurate, I might add — I tapped “Close To You” by B. Bacharach and the site got it right from the first time (as you might’ve guessed, tapping “The Black Page” will not return any results).
Live Plasma
Fun little diversion: Live Plasma. Feed it with the name of a band or musician and it’ll show you their relationship with other bands/musicians. The results for Frank Zappa were a bit weird though, as Neil Young appears right next to him…
Dear Idiot Bastard
Okay, well, somebody has to say it.
Dear Idiot Bastard Son,
For years I have been reading your excellent Zappa newspage. Navigating around your place was never easy (Powered by Lotus? Ody-frames?), but I hung around anyway because I’m not the type to judge a book by its cover. However, your recent move to bravehost.com (I refuse to make this a link) has turned your highly esteemed homepage into a pop-up, pop-under, iframe-enforced nightmare. It makes my eyes bleed and it wants me to click on way too many “Click Here” buttons. Tell you what: professional website hosting is pretty cheap these days. And look: the idiotbastard.com domain is still free! I’ll go one further and offer you free webspace over here at KUR, if you so wish. But please, get out of bravehost hosting, asap, if you can.
Stay in touch,
Kind regards,
Barry’s Imaginary Publisher.
Get Smart
The US government is developing a massive computer system that can collect huge amounts of data and, by linking far-flung information from blogs and e-mail to government records and intelligence reports, search for patterns of terrorist activity.
Calling Agent 86: the moon over Kentucky is blue. Please confirm.
The Wisdom Of Crowds
As with many things, our appreciation of a given piece of music is largely influenced by what others think of it, New Scientist reports:
…participants [in the study] who could see how often a song had been downloaded tended to give higher ratings to songs that had been downloaded often, and were more likely to download those songs themselves. That created a snowball effect, catapulting a few songs to the top of the charts and leaving others languishing.
Würzburg ’88 (1)
Need I say anything more? Head overthere and get it!
The Idea Of The North
Reading some writings of Glenn Gould, I realised that he did not only made musical recordings, but some documentaries, too. Now finally I’ve found some: The Idea of North (1967) The Latecomers (1969) The Quiet In The Land – that can be listened here, in RealAudio. All composed like a musical piece – just listen to the editing technique, the structure, etc.
I wish I could download those somehow…
(Interesting: “Did Glenn Gould have a form of autism?” )