The Bark Blog

WFMU presents The Giant Stringed Instruments of The Yi People. If you thought Clamtar was intimidating, behold The Son of Clamtar:

John Oliver is one of the funniest “correspondents” on The Daily Show, which is in turn one of the funniest shows on television. Last week, Jon Stewart was fretting that no matter what we do, the Bush Administration still claims we’re emboldening the enemy. Questioning the war policies? Emboldening the enemy. Sending a mixed message? Emboldening the enemy.

Thankfully, John Oliver was there to explain what the behoovus is engoing on:

Well, this is an odd, unconventional war. This isn’t like World War II where there were “winners” and “losers”. It’s a new kind of war where enemies can either be emboldened or beweakened. So we have to enscare them to the point where they rebecave themselves. We must disimagine the very figment of misunsuccessiveness. That is what we have to bedo.

Apparently the problem is that too few of us are fluent lectors of Newspeak.

The Sci-Fi channel’s reconstituted Battlestar Galactica show has apparently inspired a gaggle of Conservative fans to compare it fancifully with the current US War on Terror. The first two seasons fit the metaphor pretty well, with the Cylons (Extremist Muslims) invoking a surprise genocidal war against the innocent Human Race (Americans) and harassing them with sleeper agents and terror strikes. Unfortunately, for the metaphorists, the writers broke the perfect picture:

In its third season, the show has morphed into a stinging allegorical critique of America’s three-year occupation of Iraq. The trouble started at the end of the second season, when humanity briefly escaped the Cylons and settled down on the tiny planet of New Caprica. The Cylons soon returned and quickly conquered the defenseless humans. But instead of slaughtering everyone, the Cylons decided to take a more enlightened path by “benevolently occupying” the planet and imposing their preferred way of life by gunpoint. The humans were predictably not enthused about their allegedly altruistic rulers, and they immediately launched an insurgency against them using improvised explosive devices and suicide bombers.

It’s so frustrating when you can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys.

Former Secretary of State for Bush Sr., James Baker, is hard at work on a bipartisan commission to create an alternative Iraq policy to sell to the current Bush Administration.

Since April, operating almost entirely under the radar, the task force has spawned four working groups, recruiting scores of U.S. experts on Iraq and the Middle East to look at military and security issues, Iraqi politics, reconstruction, and the regional and strategic environment surrounding the war.

Although it’s nice to see some serious effort to design a bipartisan policy for Iraq — and some would say that Baker is one of the few heavyweights with enough leverage to change the President’s mind — it’s still a shame that the process is being so methodically buried in secrecy:

It’s hard to know what the commission is really up to because its inner workings are nearly as secretive as those of the White House. Baker has imposed an ironclad gag order on all of its participants. … “[Baker is] very secretive, he keeps his distance, and he compartmentalizes everything, which is not a bad way to organize a political conspiracy,” says another member of one of the working groups.

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A recent Vanity Fair article brings to light some troublingly fascinating 9/11 recordings culled from ancient reel-to-reel recorders at hte Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS) airbase in Rome, New York. The Pentagon released them to Vanity Fair after much deliberation. Kos at Daily Kos lays it out nicely in a post yesterday: “Cheney lied about issuing 9-11 command”, highlighting the political angle.

The Vanity Fair article goes into great detail about the ongoing NEADS chatter throughout the 100 minutes of the actual attack. The article provides written and audio transcripts of the critical parts, and portrays a situation much different than was commonly reported:

For the NEADS crew, 9/11 was not a story of four hijacked airplanes, but one of a heated chase after more than a dozen potential hijackings—some real, some phantom—that emerged from the turbulence of misinformation that spiked in the first 100 minutes of the attack and continued well into the afternoon and evening.

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Here is a nice long ABC News interview on Markos Moulitsas the guy behind the hugely popular liberal blog Daily Kos, and author of the book Crashing the Gate. There’s also an abridged online video of the interview, but the transcript contains the full interview. Highly recommended for people-powered political populists!

First there were Music Mashups, collages of existing songs spliced together to make “new” music. You got chocolate in my peanut butter! Now there’s Video Mashups. Except this effort is more deliberate. They are making blue-screened films for the explicit purpose of handing it over to amateur mashers, whereas music mashers tend to yoink commercially released songs without the express written permission of said artists. I think it’s a great idea (both mashers, actually). Give amateur filmmakers a chance to experiment with special effects and compositing techniques.

What’s next, real-life mashups? Reorganizing someone’s life for your personal amusement? Oh wait, that’s The Game.

Or is that healthily insane? We just dropped a pretty penny on a top-of-the-line Hoist home gym. Looks pretty simple, but it’s solid as a rock, easy to use, and as flexible as we’d ever need. We’ll still keep our Gold’s Gym memberships (what are we, insane?) for the kickin’ cardio equipment. But what was I thinking? There goes my handy list of excuses for not exercising, right out the window. Yeah, it’s a pain to drive the two miles to the gym and back, to brave the cold, to get all sweaty and have to take another shower, to have to touch all the icky, sweaty gym equipment. I’ll have to invent a whole new class of excuses…my shoulder hurts, I’m feeling lightheaded today, my cholesterol is fiiiiiine. I’ll have a week and a half to generate a new list before they deliver the monster. No problem!

Finally got around to transferring the blog to a standalone domain. This makes it much easier to manage the graphics, and possible to maintain the stylesheet in a separate file. No more CSS hackery inside a browser text box, right on! I’m really diggin’ DreamHost. Was a snap to add a new shell account for the SFTP Blogger.com connection (not about to give blogger.com my main account password!).

Saw Lowen & Navarro last night at the Fine Line. It was a great show in its own right, but was also a sadly poignant event. Eric Lowen has been battling with ALS, which doesn’t mix well with the hard life of touring. This tour will probably be their last. On the up-side, Eric seems to be in good spirits and still has excellent guitar chops.

But speaking of Art and Science, I was very surprised and impressed by the tech setup they have. You can toss down $15 before the show, and they will burn you a copy (Science) of the entire show (Art) to take home that night. Simple and obvious in hindsight, yet still cutting edge. Haven’t listened to the CDs yet, so I don’t know how good the sound quality is (nor if it includes their traditional unplugged encore). I expect good things, though.