Something for your ears at the bottom »

Good evening.
Do not attempt to adjust your radio, there is nothing wrong.
We have taken control as to bring you this special show.
We will return it to you as soon as you are grooving.

Welcome to station W. E. F. U. N. K., better known as We-Funk,
Or deeper still, the Mothership Connection.
Home of the extraterrestrial brothers,
Dealers of funky music.
P-Funk, uncut funk, The Bomb.

Parliament Funkadelic - P-Funk

Welcome to Station K.D.R.D… better known as…

Well, at the moment, it’s not known as anything. for a reason: I just made it up.

The concept is quite simple, really.

I have tons of these small tracks, pseudo-remixes, work-in-progress and all around occasional hour spent screwing around on decks with good ole music on wax. Every once in a while, I go through the length of packaging one hour of these into a nice and somewhat clean format for the enjoyment of the masses. Sometimes I even go one step shorter and only release a half-assed half-hour long mix with aforementioned musical goofing around.

All these mixes are available for your aural pleasure on the Dr Dave’s Insanely Cool Mixes Collection Page.

But this somewhat formal release scheme was still not cutting it. Three main reasons:

• Quality: Let’s face it, while I’ve gotten to a point I’d deem “fair” as a professional producer, I am still, for all purposes, a hobbyist DJ. Both in terms of skills and commitment.

  Which means that, to an overwhelming majority, times where I get on the decks and toy around with either records or computers, yield sub-par results in terms of overall mixing quality. What with the constant drinking and abusing substance while playing (OK, not this month, but I have still many ways to take my attention off whatever I’m supposed to mix). Even the Mini Mix collection requires a bit of effort, and I am a lazy person.

  Hence the need for an even cheaper/easier way to share some cool tunes without inflicting unfair damages to your eardrums nor spend every waking minutes doing so.

• Live Audience: this point kinda goes against the one just above, but the idea is that having an audience is good.

  Let me explain… These mixes I upload most definitely have an audience. They are downloaded, and listened to, by cool people, the world over. some of these people even send me nice notes or thank you gifts, which is really a testament to how awesome this Intarweb thingie is. But a live audience, it ain’t.

  If you’ve ever done any sort of art or music live, then you know, otherwise, it shouldn’t be hard to imagine: with the right mindset, there is a sort of pressure that drives you to expand on your usual practices and break the mold. Play/act/do whatever you would be doing in a studio, in a way that you would never have thought of doing before. The live audience is a major catalyst there.

  I hardly ever play clubs these days, and for the most part, I’m quite fine with this. But I do miss the crazy-spur-of-the-moment wild experimentations with vinyl, keyboards, sequencer, chopsticks (yea, I really did it once) and anything an adrenalin-fueled brain can summon.

• Technical Reasons: as mentioned last time, I am nearing the ceiling of my hosting quota. Each new mix I upload now requires difficult choices, moving around, shuffling of files etc. No fun. Especially for me, whose sleeping pattern is deeply perturbed by the mere thought of link rot at night.

The semi-answer to all these problems being…

KDRD: Dr Dave’s Very Own MP3 Radio Station

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I cannot possibly be the only one to have noticed that the girl basically has one. single. pose.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m sure she has potential to make it into every college fratboy top ten shaggable. when she gets the coke-induced twitching under control.

But the fact this ridiculously cheap 20 degrees left, 30 degrees down, naughty-girl-with-malicious-eye-and-mischievous-smile is what nowadays passes for a paragon of charm, or even plain basic sex-appeal, is a sad testament to that pathetic MTV culture we live in.

And the fact I just took the time to write this, an even sadder testament to the very low level of productivity of my afternoon.

Solving math equations might not be the best thing for my manic-depressive tendencies.

Don’t know what’s more pathetic: that I will lose sleep over an unsolved problem, or that, each time I finally solve one, I start jumping around the room like a maniac for the next 20 minutes (Eriko still refuses to let me carve victory marks on the table).

Found this awesomely dorky time-waster through Cosmic Buddha and here is what it’s got to say about Spam Karma:

This new pizzle is destined ta become tha permanent news repository fo’ all th’n Spam Karma
[...]
Spizzay Karma in tha dogg pound.
[...]
Spam Karma cuz this is how we do it.
[...]
Spizzam Karma . Ya fuck with us, we gots to fuck you up.
[...]
You can leave a response, or trackback fizzy yo own site fo gettin yo pimp on.
[...]
S-P-to-tha-izzam Karma has gizzle nuts . Relax, cus I’m bout to take my respect!
Chosen excerpts from search results

Now I ask all the spammer beeatch out there, you sure you wanna fuck with my homies?

A while back, Jeremy, at Antipixel, commented on the deceitfully symmetrical appearance of the human body after stumbling upon the frightening realization that he was a freak of nature whose eyes and ears were both uneven.

His findings on feet sizes are perfectly accurate too: as any shoe store clerk will gladly confirm, it is no secret that practically everyone has got one foot a tad bigger than the other. It took me many years to finally remember how crucial it is that I try both shoes before buying, no matter how great the right side fits. My left foot’s big toe, permanently traumatized by years of dancing in undersized sneakers, is a sore reminder of the dangers of impulsive shopping.

Jeremy is too much of a gentleman to allude to another famous occurrence of body asymmetry. One that only members of the feminine gent usually worry about (although they certainly shouldn’t: I think it’s awfully cute).

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The Japanese language has no future.

Literally.

It has got a present tense, a past tense, many inflections for each, but absolutely nothing to accentuate a verb in a way that shows it is taking place in the future.

This is not as inconvenient as one might think at first: present tense is used instead, and, when the lack of context calls for it, precisions such as “tomorrow”, “later”, “after” clear up ambiguities.

Sometimes, though, it gives strange results.

in Japanese, “I will miss you” becomes “I miss you”.

In fact, because the closest equivalent in Japanese is 寂しい (samishii: lonely, desolate), instead of saying “I will miss you” or even “I will be lonely”, you say “I am lonely”…

In other news, arguing all day long while walking aimlessly in a city taken over by muddy snow and icy wind chills is about as fun as it sounds.

You know these little gel pads that you heat up in the microwave and then apply to your body to relieve topical pains.

Well, when they say not to heat them for more than 50 seconds, they are not kidding.

In BoingBoing tonight: “Cubase plugin makes music sound like it’s played by cellphone”

60 years after everybody else, Nokia (and Xeni Jardin) discover the breakthrough concept of… Vocoder…

Congratulations!

What’s next? some crazy device to make your music sound like it’s being played in a concert hall?

And do not come telling me this is news because it is being brought to the public at large: for chrissake, it is a Cubase plugin.

I was gonna post a deep and insightful post about life, death and the pursuit of happiness.

Then, I realized that the brand new Suntory winter-edition homebrew was on sale at Lawsons…

Few people know that the natural color of the Japanese tatami is, in fact, green.

It is only with wear and sunlight that it becomes its trademark straw-yellow color.

All right, everybody knows that. Especially around here, where Eriko gave me her usual demeaning laugh when, upon my discovery that every patch of tatami that had remained covered by furniture so far, was much greener than the rest, I suggested mould.

Crazy stuff, I know…

Oh, and the free-falling posting rate? What can I say, critical sense is a bitch.

Seriously: once you start actually wondering twice whether what you are about to type is worth the time, or if you shouldn’t instead run to the local combini to see if they got any new seasonal flavored beer… that’s the end of it all.

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So, I thought I could keep it like that for a while: avoiding updates and ignoring my blog as much as possible. However I was just contacted by the Technorati Top 100 Blogger Consortium’s lawyers, threatening to sue on the ground that I am currently infringing on the “blog” trademark by misleadingly labeling this pathetic excuse for a website as such.

According to their cease and desist letter, I am failing to qualify for the Blog©®™ appellation by not complying with Article 1 of the International Blogging Treaty which stipulates that:

Posting rate must be above 6 posts per day. Of which at least:

• Two must contain pictures of the household pet (can be replaced by household baby or infant if pet unavailable).
• One must discuss extensively local weather condition and give poorly supported previsions regarding upcoming season change.
• Two must give a detailed recount of daily office job routine as well as minutiae of every meal ingested during day.
• Three must contain more than 5 words (though a maximum of two monosyllabic entries is allowed).

International Blogging Treaty, article 1

The fact that I happened to comply with alinea 2 of Article 1, they added, was no excuse for the shortcomings of this site in the other areas: I had to rectify this situation or face the legal consequences.

Not one to be intimidated by such threats, I immediately contacted the dissident United Blogger Syndicate for advice. They assured me that the requirements enounced in Article 1 were absolutely not mandatory.
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I usually do avoid the whole party report thing, hope you do realize that…
Mostly because I know that, unless you have been drinking free booze all night long, it just isn’t that interesting to hear. Beside, we all have too many snorting-blow-off-hooker’s-tits stories to go around… don’t need any more, do we?

However, tonight was particularly fun, as we were joined for the evening by Jus’ new beau and his friend/colleague, both professional Pride fighters. Following the stereotypical anti-stereotype that wants all massive professional killers to be cuddly huggy-bears in private life, they were absolutely adorable, and quite fun to be around…

So we had Andre the Giant (and in case you are wondering, all the other people on the above picture were already fairly tall) and Justine’s very own Shrek the peaceful ogre.

I must say having them around made the whole Metropolis gaijin meat-market shindig much less boring…
Oh and by the way: that chick, let me venture she didn’t exactly win the prize on the research and effort put into her costume… then again, I can only guess: by the time we made it there, she was merely strutting around the vip lounge in a mini-bra and a glittery piece of fabric that barely managed to hide her g-string….

If I tell you “Milk Chocolate-Coated Potato Chips”… the first thing coming to your mind might be: “Japan!“…
(a close second being “gross!”, if you are not into experimental gastronomy).

And you’d be dead wrong. On both counts.

Come on now, I hope this is not the kind of low standards you’ve grown to expect from this blog: if it was indeed made in Japan, it would at the very least be peppered with nori shreds or sold in giant heart-shaped boxes covered in pictures of sickeningly cute bunnies and atomic vampire robots (yea. both)…

Not in this quaint, sober, nearly tasteful, two-tone, Pringle-style, cylinder box.

No. Let’s be serious: Japanese researchers probably stumbled upon some variation of the Milk Chocolate-Coated Potato Chip (with extra wasabi flavor as an option) decades ago and quickly canned it as way too tame for the domestic market.

American researchers, on the other hand, immediately saw the full potential of such a symbiosis…

All conspiracy theories apart, one cannot help but wonder about the hidden motives of a corporation whose food product combines, in one single ingredient, the two most addictive substances known to Man: Chocolate and Pringles.

Quite obviously somebody has been greasing a few hands at the FDA to slip that one through…

And the kicker? Masako brought this back from SF as a typical sample of them wacky American foodstuff…

The Japanese word for “fountain pen” is 万年筆 (まんねんひつ: man-nen-hitsu) which literally translates to “ten thousand year brush”…
I’m not sure why, but I find that awesome.

The French tend to consider that, in order to become a talented writer, one has to spend his days in smoke-filled cafés, possibly while drinking oneself blind on exotic liquors.
Americans think the secret to becoming a good author lies in bullet lists of writing techniques and prestigious writing classes.

I am no writer (understatement if there ever was one), but something tells me they are both dead wrong.

Then again, I do not think Dan Brown is much of an author, to say nothing of the hordes of navel-gazing, bored & boring, Parisian writers who persists in trying to give their worst second-class Bret Easton Ellis rendition every single year… So what do I know…