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The Wrath of Katrine

So Katrine's landed right in the midst of the Gulf Coast oil platforms and taken a decent chunk of the US's oil infrastructure and shipping offline during peak season. Combined with the instability in Iraq, Saudi and Venezuela, and the largest global demand in history, the price of oil has now rocketed over USD 70 a barrel for the first time ever. It's funny because one of the books I was reading a while ago--a cheap thriller I can't remember the name of--had the US and EU almost end up in a war over oil prices that were over 40 bucks a barrel. But it was written in the mid-90s when people wouldn't have believed the global economy could still function with prices like this.

Kinda makes me wish we were spending more money getting that big experimental fusion reactor online in France, and less on military action to protect an oil supply that's dwindling away anyway. But that's just me.

(Hi Katrine- thought the title would get your attention.)

Alas, Moog

I've been wanting to get something on paper about this all week but have just been crazy busy. I was sad to read that Robert Moog, inventor of the Moog Modular Synthesizer and one of the early enablers of electronic music, had just died. Ironically, I'd just gotten the documentary about him from Amazon UK on Monday, and had been looking forward to watching it. From what I've heard, he seemed like a really great guy, a real innovator. Turns out he grew up in Flushing, Queens, like two miles away from where I grew up in Whitestone.

Here's a story on New York Times about his life, which includes links to an audio slideshow.

By the way, thanks Deborah for letting me know that the Christopher Walken for President story was, as I feared, utter bollocks.

Joy Division-Easy

Oh no! I don't know whether to be charmed or deeply unsettled by this one-- Here is Nouvelles Vagues, a French easy listening band that has some covers of Eighties New Wave and Punk favorites like Love will Tear Us Apart by Joy Division and Guns of Brixton by The Clash. Watch the video to catch part of a live performance of "Too Drunk to Fuck." Never thought I'd hear these tracks quite like this...

Thanks to the Slanderbox Quality Control podcast for the heads-up on this one.

Someone Tell the President the War Is Over

Good op-ed piece from Frank Rich on the state of the nation--both Iraq and the US. I've been so burned out with each new Bush-inspired atrocity that I've barely had the energy to feel righteous indignation for years now, but this editorial brought back a little bit of that feeling nicely.

One interesting parallel: the approval rate for Bush's handling of Iraq plunged to 34 percent in the latest Newsweek poll--a match for the 32 percent that approved of Lyndon Johnson's handling of Vietnam in early March 1968.

It makes me kinda wonder about the 34 percent that still think the Iraq War was a good idea... who are these people and what rock are they living under?

Christopher Walken for President 2008

Does anyone know if this is for real?

I know it'll never happen, but it would be great if we finally had a president that could go head-to-head against Putin in the "most badass stare-down" contest.

Hang the DJ

My friend Shanti asked me to DJ her wedding party, which is a real honor. The trick is I haven't DJ'd anything since my old Art Damage show on WMNF like 10 years ago, so I'm trying to get myself back into the mindset. The cool thing is that the technology has gotten a lot better in the last 10 years. I was worried that I'd need two audio input sources, like an iBook and a CD player, and then have to hook those to an external mixer and amp to make it work. But now there's software that lets you run the whole thing, multiple virtual CD players, off playlists from iTunes.

I've been playing around with DJ-1800 for the last couple of days, and it's really amazing. It acts exactly like the rack we used to have at WMNF. It has four virtual CDs, but I turn two of them off because I only need two. You build a playlist into iTunes, and load that playlist into both virtual CDs. Then you can cue up each song individually, loading track 1 into CD 1, track 2 into CD 2, then when track 1 has finished playing and you're on to CD 2, you cue track 3 into CD 1 and so on. There's in integral mixer that lets you transition from one CD to the other. Then if you hook up a Griffin iMic, you can run the master output to an external amp and speakers, and run a cue feed through the iBook's internal jack to a headset so you can cue up the next track. It's really cool, and relatively cheap (USD60 for the DJ-1800 software, and USD30 for the iMic. You still need to rent an amp and speakers though).

So I have a new hobby now.

EDF?

Brussels has been kicking around the idea of a NATO-independent European Union Rapid Deployment Force for five years now, but it's going to be really hard to put any kind of credible force together under EU leadership for pretty much the foreseeable future. There's just not enough political will to overcome the rivalries in the different countries' command structures, no real intelligence capabilities that are independent from the Americans, no real airlift capability... I don't know, some Europeans I talk to equate deployable, projectable, military power with increased international political credibility. I think that could be somewhat true, depending on who you're dealing with (the Russians and Americans would certainly agree, though I'm not sure the Chinese and Indians would, at least when referring to the EU).

So I just read this article about a high tech wargame that's been developed in the US. They got some senior leadership from the military and a few corporations together in a hotel in Rhode Island for a weekend, and then had a team of political scientists and mathematicians bounce global crisis scenarios off these guys, in the 2012-2012 timeframe. Here's one interesting line--at one point, the Control team threw in the idea of a European Defence Force being deployed to a crisis in the Middle East...

I think the whole concept of the EDF is in serious trouble if people are actually laughing at the idea of it. I hate to say it though, but I think I agree with that general.

Wanted: Tivo for videoblogs

I'm watching the last of the Frontline episodes that I haven't seen before on the PBS website, and now I'm scrambling around to find some more good online documentary content. The Frontline site is great, especially for people who live overseas or ouside the range of a PBS broadcast station--it gives you good, free documentaries, and the only downside is that each show is chopped into six or eight pieces, I'm guessing because the smaller files are easier for them to manage on their servers.

But even more cool than just finding another site with some good content, would be to find an online service or intelligent agent that would compile content from a lot of different sources based on your preferences, and then deliver a menu of stuff for you to watch every day. Just like Tivo, except it would be scouring the web instead of a cable subscription.

With RSS, it wouldn't even have to be that technically elegant. Imagine if you could subscribe to a website that displayed a bunch of check boxes for all different kinds of content: international politics, local politics, sciences broken down into different disciplines, comedy, sports, Japanese ko-gals, whatever. Then that website could have subscriptions to thousands of RSS feeds, and deliver the content to you daily based on whichever checkboxes you've enabled in your preference file. It would be low overhead from the point of view of the content delivery service, and would be dead easy from a user perspective. Just input preferences once and watch the specialized content roll in night after night. If you wanted to get really fancy, you could use cookies to track which feeds were being watched by each user, to refine which feeds each user wants to see more or less of in the future.

Warren Ellis probably wrote about the need for this months ago, but I'm just making the connection now. If anyone wants to send me a few wheelbarrows full of Ben Franklins to use as startup capital, I'll get to work on it right away.

Jack the Ripper

While I was making dinner I just heard an interview on the Democracy Now! podcast, in which Ian Williams, UN correspondent for The Nation, said that "John Bolton is to diplomacy what Jack the Ripper was to surgery."

Ha ha, great line.

Python FCC song

Funny Monty Python track that covers the FCC, Ashcroft, the Monkey, Cheney, Condi, Enron and much else... http://www.pythonline.com/plugs/idle/FCCSong.mp3