A nice little story from a fella named David Lansing about a birthday ukulele. Complete with video.

Aloha doesn't just mean "hello" or "goodbye."

In keeping with a promise President Obama made back in late 2007, Attorney General Eric Holder announced this past Wednesday that the DEA will end medical marijuana raids.

It's a small victory for states rights. A smaller one for the folks who'd like this idiotic and wasteful "war on drugs" to end. But a victory nonetheless and one of the best things I've seen so far from our new president.

I still have issues with the man, but I'm more than happy to give credit where due.

I have somewhat of a thing for mermaids. So when The Agitator posted this link about a double amputee who gets realistic-looking mermaid tail so she can swim, I was thrilled. A quick excerpt from the article:

"Good: double amputee gets prosthetic legs so she can walk. Better: double amputee gets realistic-looking mermaid tail so she can swim. Awesome: it's developed and built by Weta, the special-effects company that did work for the 'Lord of the Rings' movies, as well as 'King Kong' and 'The Chronicles of Narnia' series."

Go check it out and you'll see why I tagged it with "just plain cool."

After a nearly 3 month gap, Snake Suspenderz has just finished a new one for the "rehearsal tapes" series.

This one is the Leon Pober tune, Tiny Bubbles, made (in)famous by the late, lamented Don Ho. I believe that Welk fella had some success with it too. We recorded it yesterday in my living room.

If you're just finding out about our rehearsal tapes series, you can click on the rehearsal_tapes tag on this post and get a listing of all the posts on the subject. We're up to six of them with the new quartet and all are available for free download. And there's more in the pipeline even as I type!

This rehearsal was dedicated to working out some more on the stuff from our latest release, Serpentine, as well as for doing a few "change ups" in older tunes. Wanna know what kind of change ups? Well, for one thing, Thadd was lured over to the dark side for this tune. Check out the credits here...

The band:

• Howlin' Hobbit on sopranino ukulele and vocals
• Thaddeus Spae on soprano ukulele (??? yep, Thadd on uke)
• Andrew "Sketch" Hare on drums and backing vocals (he's a little faint due to placement of the H2)
• salamandir on tuba (he'd never played this tune before)  

I'm playing my Ohana sopranino. Thadd's strumming my Glyph soprano. The weird thing — yes, even weirder than Thadd on ukulele! — is that the two ukes combined sound, at least to me, almost piano-like.

As usual, we'd love to hear what you think about it!

It's been about two months since I made a solo ukulele video so today, while the house was nice and empty — just me, the two cats that live here, and our usual visiting kitty — I got one together. Only took one take for the song itself! And the editing went a lot faster than any of my others. I might actually be getting the hang of it.

Even Red Rose — my eMac — seemed to get into the spirit, only taking about two and a half hours to render it down to a finished QuickTime .mov file.

The tune is It's Only A Paper Moon by Harold Arlen, E.Y. Harburg & Billy Rose. I believe it's from 1933. I'm playing it on my Ohana sopranino ukulele. He's named T.R., and I recorded another video with him not long after I got him. I recently tuned him way up to F tuning. He's really quite happy up there and, providing I don't start seeing evidence of the bridge coming up or other such travesties, I'm going to leave him there.

Anyway, here's the video...

...and here's the obligitory link to the YouTube version if the embed doesn't work for you.

Let me know if you like it! (Or not.)

Drop on over to my friend Tim Hodge's blog, Bald Melon, and take a look at a short film he just posted called Time and Chance.

It's about 10 minutes long and is quite good. Tim wrote and produced it, as well as doing the animated parts, if I'm not mistaken.

I found this in my morning trek through the blogs I follow. It's from Bob Baker's Indie Music Promotion Blog — specifically, this entry — and was video recorded this month at TED.

Yeah, it's nearly 20 minutes out of your busy life to watch it. But if you do anything creative you need to watch this. It's so strong it brought tears to my eyes.

Alas, the embed doesn't seem to be working for me so, this is Elizabeth Gilbert on Genius.

Olé!

I have been mistaken on the amount of time that the ridiculous "war on drugs" has been going on. I was under the impression that it started in 1914 with the Harrison Act, but it was actually five years before that with the passage of the Opium Exclusion Act, which is "celebrating" its 100th birthday this week.

From the above-linked essay:

"This week marks the centennial of a fateful landmark in U.S. history, the nation's first drug prohibition law.  On February 9, 1909, Congress passed the Opium Exclusion Act, barring the importation of opium for smoking as of April 1.  Thus began a hundred-year crusade that has unleashed unprecedented crime, violence and corruption around the world —a war with no victory in sight."

Unix (and therefore Linux as well) keeps track of time by counting the seconds since the start of the "Unix epoch," which is 00:00:00 on January 1, 1970. Tomorrow night, at a bit past 11:30 pm (23:31:30 to be precise) the time count will be 1234567890.

This site is counting the seconds to this momentous occasion.

Break out the champagne.

(Hat Tip to the J-Walk Blog, posted here.)

Sorry to have to do this, but I've added the "gotta answer this dumb question" thing to the comment form. Hopefully it'll at least cut back on the spam bots.

I may have to go even further and *gasp* moderate comments. I hate that but it's better than having to dash in everytime some little bozo makes a bombing run on my entries to clean up the mess they leave.

We'll see.

I'd sure like some way to track the little fuckers down and work them over with garrison belts and bike chains, but that doesn't seem very probable.

Threw away the t-shirt!

Last Saturday was the 5th Annual National Kazoo Day celebration in Portland, OR. We appeared, along with KingniK and Johnny Ward, on the Backgate Stage at Artichoke Music. This is the first video from the event and also the first video to appear on the brand spanky new Snake Suspenderz YouTube channel.

We were especially pleased in that it took place on the first day we had our new CD out.

It's an older Snake's song, written by T. Spae and titled, Get It Right The First Time.

As usual, if you can't see the embed, you can check out the video here.

For my fellow uke-phreaks, I believe I'm strumming my Glyph soprano ukulele on this one.

Comments welcome!

After a bit of exploring on the Snake Suspenderz BandCamp page I found that it's possible to embed a song (or the whole album!) in blogs, MySpace pages, etc. Further, this is something anyone can do, not just the owner of the account.

We'd love to get a little more buzz going on the CD. If you have a place you could embed one of these songs (and it's something you'd do on your blog or whatever!) please do so. Let me know and I'll make sure to blog a link back to you. We could get some nice mutual props going that way.

Meanwhile, here's the final cut on the Serpentine CD, a song written by Thaddeus called Don't Quit The Day Job. He's on the lead vocals as well. Have a listen and let me know what you think!

If the embed doesn't work for you you can check it out on the BandCamp page for it.

I'm ever so happy to announce that the new Snake Suspenderz CD, Serpentine, has been released.

It has 14 original tunes and 2 covers on it. We're pretty proud of it as it was DIY all the way down to the design and manufacture of the packaging.

You can buy the physical CD or you can listen to it stream and/or buy downloads — in a wide variety of audio formats! — of either single songs or the whole album.

There's still some web-work to do on the project (like getting a copy of the cover artwork to post up) but I'm working my way slowly through the largish task list to get all that done. There'll be more about the CD here in the next week or so.

Hope you enjoy it! Feedback always welcome.