Dubber writes a wonderful blog called New Music Strategies. It's full of terrific advice, interviews, viewpoints and just general good info.

In this entry he talks a bit about RIAA and their strategy (?) of suing their customers. One of the best quotes is this one, regarding the fact that RIAA is not the music industry, it's merely "about a minority of organisations who command the lion's share of the economics of that section of the industry.":

"The fact that they aggressively pretend to be the music industry is kind of laughable. It's like the lion claiming to be the zoo."

King o' the beasts, eh?

The RIAA needs to change -- and pronto -- or they'll be gone in a decade. As Dubber also points out in the article, "80% of the most powerful companies on the planet listed in the Forbes 500 guide 20 years ago simply don't exist anymore."

Why?

Resistance to change.

As my good friend and wise person, Thaddeus Spae says about change... "Look around. You'll notice that it's what the world is made of."

'Nuff said.

This is Yuri a little over a week ago. Dean had come over to play some music and laid his bass down in the living room when he stepped into the kitchen. When we came out, there was this picture. (Click on it for the full sized image in a popup window.)

Apparently it looked like a kitty chair to him.

Luckily my Fallen Angel had her camera immediately available.

I stole this from a posting on the Ubuntu forums by a guy named jclmusic. I've seen something like it before but I can't remember where.

Companies that didn't spend long enough choosing a domain name...

All of these are legitimate companies that didn't spend quite enough time considering how their online names might appear ... and be misread.

These are not made up. Check them out yourself!

1. "Who Represents" is where you can find the name of the agent that represents any celebrity. Their Web site is www.whorepresents.com

2. Experts Exchange is an information and resource portal. Their Web site is www.expertsexchange.com

3. Looking for a custom pen? Look no further than Pen Island at www.penisland.net

4. Need a therapist? Try Therapist Finder at www.therapistfinder.com

5. Then there's the Italian Power Generator company, www.powergenitalia.com

6. And don't forget the Mole Station Native Nursery in New South Wales, www.molestationnursery.com

7. If you're having trouble using remote PC computer software, there's always www.ipanywhere.com

8. The First Cumming Methodist Church Web site is www.cummingfirst.com

9. And finally, the designers at Speed of Art await you at their wacky web site, www.speedofart.com

Here is a blog posting (from the Washington Post) about a man being harassed for taking a picture of an office building that happens to also house offices for DARPA.

Here's a picture of the building, freely available (from several sources) on the web.

DARPA's main site lists the address of that building in several locations.

So just how stupid is that? Just what are they protecting by harassing citizens in such a fashion?

As pointed out in the blog comments, the terrorists have won. Ably abetted by our own gov't.

I meant to post this at least a week ago but since I'm so lazy busy I'm just getting around to it now.

A little while back one of the constantly recurring themes on the uke boards (especially one specific board) reared its ugly head again, to wit, "Tiny Tim, demon or demi-god?"

There's a large population of ukers who believe that Tiny just ruined ukulele in the American conciousness. Made it into a toy. A laughing matter. A certain scoff.

"I don't get no respect!" they wail, "Everybody laughs at me when I try to play ukulele for them, and it's his fault!"

My take on this is not terribly kind. I think, "It might just possibly be because you suck! Go woodshed some more!"

But I digress.

In any event, a very talented fella from the land down under named Arch Larizza pondered all the hoorah and decided it might be fun if a lot of us recorded our own version of Tiny's big hit, a little ditty from 1926 called "Tiptoe Through The Tulips."

I resisted... really I did. But after receiving two different private messages urging me to contribute, I sat down one night and recorded my own take on the tune.

It's not perfect (I really hosed up the "B" part) but it's not too bad either.

As it turns out, it's kind of a nice little "woo the lass" sort of song. Some terrific chord changes too.

But don't take my word for it, you can download my version and decide for yourself.

Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Happy Independence Day to all of my US readers! I'm going to shower and go out to a party at a Market friend's place. It's in Maple Valley, delightfully rural and I'm looking forward to it.

Today Radley Balko at The Agitator posted the best 4th of July entry I've seen. Usually I don't copy a whole blog post from someone else, but I'm going to share it here:

"It is the responsibility of the patriot to protect his country from its government."

--Thomas Paine

Don't drink too much (and don't drive if you do) and try to remember to put the fireworks down before they go off!

I just finished leaving a comment on the MySpace page of my 1000th MySpace friend.

He is a fellow ukephreak in Wales and rejoices in the online moniker of Mr. Moist Bamboo. Does some lovely stuff with a definite Beatles vibe to it.

1000 friends was a benchmark for me in my "better get busy" plan for this year. I need to get busier.

I'm definitely doing less gigs and I don't like it. Hopefully that will change soon. Snake Suspenderz is certainly ready to, at the very least, be a good opening act.

I also have to do something about recording regularly, even if it's only a song a week. That means more writing is needed too. Luckily the latter is less of a problem than I thought. I just need to apply myself to it and stop procrastinating. Probably the same thing would fix the recording problem as well.

I so suck at time management.

Ah well. Onward.

I've already posted these on a couple of the forums, but many of you who read this don't read the ukulele forums. Sooo...

A few weeks back the newly-expanded quartet version of Snake Suspenderz spent a day at Thad's recording three songs for our demo.

Live.

That is, everybody was in the room, miked up and playing at the same time. By everybody I mean me on ukulele, lead and harmony vocals; Thaddeus Spae on bass trombone, acoustic guitar, lead and harmony vocals; Dean Hedges on upright bass, mouth trumpet and harmony vocals; Andrew Hare on drums and harmony vocals.

Thad tweaked this and that in the mix and out of the three songs we got two that we can be happy with, "Get It Right The First Time" by Thaddeus Spae and "Say Hello To Mr. Snake" by me.

"Two out of three," to quote Mr. Loaf, "ain't bad."

Say Hello To Mr. Snake has me singing the lead, Thaddeus on the 'bone with Andrew and Dean doing background vocals.

You can download the hifi copy of Mr. Snake or have it streamed in either HiFi or LoFi versions.

Get It Right The First Time has Thaddeus on lead vocals and acoustic guitar with the rest of us more or less in our assigned roles. Thad and I get our scats inn. Dean also does mouth trumpet here... while keeping that bottom end going on the bass. Wowsa! You'll like it.

As before, you can download the HiFi copy of Get It Right or have it streamed in either HiFi or LoFi versions.

Let me know what you think!

Night before last I decided I had to get off my butt and write another song.

So I did.

And here's how.

I looked through a bunch of fakebook sheets I had around and picked out a song that I didn't know. All I wanted was a reasonably jazzy chord progression and I didn't want my melody to be influenced by whatever song I was cribbing from.

I learned it and came up with a rhythm for it.

I played it over and over, humming to myself until I came up with a melody.

I started humming the melody while just free associating on words and lines until I came up with a first verse. That first verse gave me the title and the idea of what the song is about.

It is an AABA type tune. So now I'm singing the first verse and humming on the second verse, through the B part and third verse as well. Eventually I came up with the second verse (the second A part).

Now I'm singing the first two verses and humming through the B and final A parts. I ended up writing the lyrics for the last A part and then writing the B part.

Took me about an hour and now I have a new tune called "Susie Fraser." I'll try to put together at least a "scratch" recording of it and post it in a week or so.

It is not destined to be number one with a bullet but it's a nice enough, slightly humorous ditty and it has plenty of room for good, juicy, jazzy solos.

I'm going to use the very same method and write one more before the week is out.

In the week immediately following putting Neil down I managed to spill about 3/4 of a shot of bourbon on my laptop's keyboard. Zorched it but good.

It pissed me off no end, not only because of the hassle and expense, but because I'm usually not that clumsy.

After spending a day looking around for quotes to fix it -- said quotes ranging from "I don't generally do that kind of stuff" to "We'll charge you a buttload of money just to look at it and then we'll try to talk you into more services than you need."

Not to put too fine a point on it... fuck that.

So I hit the mighty Google. First entry was for a keyboard on eBay that came to around $30 after adding in shipping. This was less than half of what the one shop wanted to charge me for "looking at it" so I went for it.

It arrived about a week later and then sat around the house while I used (and bitched at) my Windoze box. I think part of me was scared that I'd install it only to find there were more problems. I can't afford to replace this thing, even though it was pretty cheap.

Well, I finally said "enough!" today (actually, yesterday as it seems to be beyond midnight) and, after re-reading the relevant parts of the manual, changed the keyboard.

The only mishap is I broke one of the plastic bits on the machine. It's mainly a coverplate but also holds the power button and the capslock, numlock and (I think) keyboard lock lights.

*sigh*

However, it doesn't stop the computer from working. I just clicked both main pieces back in (there's a chunk about 1/4" long missing between them) and it's booting up fine and working a treat.

Another glance at eBay tells me I can get a replacement for it for about $13 (and that includes shipping) so I'll do that in the next couple days.

Yay! Back on Linux!