aubreyturner.org

I caught Live by Request on A&E a couple of weeks ago and after seeing Chicago I had to get my hands on their “Best Of” CD .  It finally arrived this week and I’m listening to it now.

There’s something about their early stuff that just grabs you and pulls you in.  As the host of Live by Request pointed out, they’re one of the few bands where you find yourself singing along with the horn parts.  I’m listening to “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?” as I type this and not only do I find myself singing, but it energizes me at the same time (I’m banging on the keyboard in time to the music ).

But, despite their great early stuff, I have to confess that I’m not much enamored of their later songs.  For example, “Hard Habit To Break” is a pretty good song (at least it was popular), but it just doesn’t have that “something” that pulls you in like the earlier songs.  Maybe it’s because (to me at least), the later songs sound too much like they’ve been tuned for a pop radio market.  They lack the energy of the early songs.

I’m not old enough to have experienced their older songs when they came out (they started as “Chicago Transit Authority” three years before I was born), but I came to like them more through their “oldies” than the contemporary songs that they put out (I came of age during their “pop” era in the ‘80’s).  But good music can transcend generations, and I was glad to see some kids in the audience on A&E.  Let’s hope that their music stays alive for another 35 years.

So now they’re saying that [OU]sama Bin Laden is dead.

I don’t necessarily trust the veracity of the report, but I think the timing of it is very interesting.  It’s just too darned convenient, given the latest lame delaying tactic among the idotarian chattering classes.  One of their pet strategies is that they should shout, “Where’s Bin Laden?” every time the president talks about Iraq.  They think that Bin Laden is somehow relevant to the current efforts against Militant Islam and that if they can bring it up they can derail any attempts at U.S. action.  It’s all a bunch of flummery!

I hope that he’s dead, so he can’t stir up any more trouble.  I just wished that we’d been able to see it, though.

Found via Musicpundit.

I’ve just migrated this site to Movable Type.  I’m still playing with the templates a bit, so there could be some strangeness in the links, etc.

Also, my hosting provider is moving the machine this site is hosted on to a new datacenter on Saturday, September 14, 2002 from 10:00pm until 3:00am PDT.

Capt. Tracy Price of the Airline Pilots’ Security Alliance had this to say today on the issue of arming pilots.

“The concept of arming pilots with firearms to prevent or stop a hijacking is viewed by some as an extreme and intrusive measure, but we think they’ve got it exactly backwards,” he continued. “The policy of sacrificing a civilian airliner with innocent Americans on board to keep terrorists from using it as a weapon – while at the same time refusing to allow the pilots an opportunity to offer a last resort, final line of defense – is the extremist view that should be ridiculed and dismissed.”

To which I say we need more people like him and fewer anti-gun idiots.

So it turns out that the terrorist scare in Florida may have been a joke.

Federal sources involved in the investigation said they believe the three men – all U.S. citizens – were playing a stupid joke on another restaurant patron who gave them a suspicious look.

Well, I guess the joke is on them now.  This really isn’t the kind of climate in which to be joking around like this, especially if you’re of middle eastern descent.  Racial profiling may be forbidden for the police, but people do it all the time on an informal basis and it should be expected as a given.

Enough about their stupid joke.  I found this part of the article somewhat annoying on first glance.

According to police sources, all three men at first were uncooperative – denying consent to search the car.

’‘It was probably not the right time for them to be copping an attitude with police,’’ said one federal law enforcement source who was up all night monitoring the investigation. “But that’s exactly what happened.’‘

I don’t know exactly what happened, but I certainly hope that this “federal law enforcement officer” doesn’t think refusing permission to search a vehicle is “copping an attitude.”  I have great respect for peace officers, but I will never consent to a search just on general principles. 

On a side note, I have very little respect for “law enforcement.”  I treat officers with deference because I respect the peace officers among them.  As for the law enforcers, I do so with great reluctance, but I do so anyway because they are quite dangerous.  There is very little that we can do to protect ourselves from outrageous abuses of power.  To make it worse, the courts are predisposed to believe the police before they believe us.  Consider those people in Houston who pled guilty just to get out of jail after the bogus trespassing arrests.  Or, consider the currently unfolding cases in Haltom City of police and jail guards attempting to rape inmates.

Found via Spleenville: Insult Generator.

Found this post via Samizdata.net.  Here’s the important part:

Now, this griefometer is just a silly game, isn’t it? A bit sick perhaps? Well, consider this: 100 million killed over 80 years is about 3,422 per day.

Or one “World Trade Centre”.

Every day for 80 years.

What’s really sick is that the communists’ ideological soulmates infest almost every academic institution in the western world. And I am still waiting for them to apologise.

Anyone who tries to tell me that communism didn’t work because it just hasn’t been given a good chance is going to get a good swift kick from me.

I saw this and I thought that my head was going to explode.  Between this one and the other radio show that was encouraging its listeners to have sex in public places, I think some of these radio shows are going way too far.  In this case, the host called up a woman early in the morning (while she was sick) and pretended to be a doctor, giving her the news that a previous boyfriend had an STD and that she might have it.  He then proceeded to ask her questions about her sex life.  It was only after he started getting more and more personal with the questions that she caught on that he might not actually be a doctor.  To make matters worse, they used her real name on the air. 

I hadn’t encountered anything this hideous before, but I gave up on morning radio shows a while back.  It was one of the things that drove me to XM Radio.  I got tired of the mean-spirited pranks and the smarmy, snotty “personalities”. 

I’m always a bit wary of lawsuits, given their frequent abuse, but I will definitely assert that this was an evil and stupid thing to do.  I guess in this case if I were on the jury I’d definitely want to punish the show’s host and probably the station for allowing him to do this to an unsuspecting person.  But then that’s just an emotional reaction.  I’m not familiar with the law in this area, although I don’t think I buy the station’s assertion that they should get away with it because it’s protected speech.  They should remember that the First Amendment only goes so far.  Did they have a right to do this?  Probably.  Were they justified in doing it.  Hell, NO!  Just because you can say it, doesn’t mean that you should.  We have the right to say just about anything we like in this country, but that doesn’t shield us from the consequences (i.e. the responsibility that goes with the right).

According to News.com, the labels are backing off on making copy-protected CDs.  Their fear is backlash among customers in the United States, which is their largest market.

The article points out that the use of computers to playback music is more widespread in the US than in other regions.  Further, the futility of these schemes (think black marker), fair use issues, and potential lawsuits have tempered their zeal for copy protection.

However, this doesn’t mean that copy protection has gone away.  It just means that they’re doing more study and planning before trying to ram this down our throats at some time in the future.  I know that I’m going to keep a watchful eye on them.  I don’t trust these bastards at all.

As someone who owns about 300 CDs and who generally purchases 15 or more of them a year, I will just quit buying if I can’t copy the CD.  Let me be clear:  I do not steal content nor do I want to.  I am perfectly willing to pay for the music to which I listen.  However, I absolutely refuse to be treated as a criminal because I want to choose the technology that I use when listening.  If I can’t copy a CD to MP3 files, I will not buy it and I will consider such a CD to be defective.  Further, if copy protection makes a CD unusable in a computer, it’s likely that the CD won’t work in my vehicle either, since I have a combination CD/MP3 player.

I consider the ability to choose how I listen to a CD as a non-negotiable item.  The labels certainly have the right to try to create new technology, but I have the right to take my business elsewhere.  In a capitalist¹ society, the customer is always right, because any business that fails to please the customer will no longer be in business.

¹  This supposes that the market isn’t distorted by non-market forces.  Which is exactly what the big media companies are trying to do by lobbying for atrocities like the DMCA.

It looks like Rachel Lucas has revisited the issue of 88.  In context, it appears that this may indeed be a case of 88 used for hate purposes, given the overall context of the patterns on the clothes in question.

As she correctly notes, sensitivity has gotten out of hand.  However, in this one case, the reaction may not have been inappropriate.