I saw two minutes of an infomercial back in the day about installing copper tubing or plastic tubing for your automatic ice maker.
“If you don’t like that skunky taste your ice cubes might give off you can buy one of our in-line filters…”
My response is if you really don’t like the skunky ice cubes you can finish off all the meats in your freezer and stop buying more meat than you can eat in 2 or 3 meals!
Hi all, Last year I engineered and mastered a Christmas record that I was quite happy with. I printed my own jewelcases, and mass produced hundreds of copies and passed them out to everyone I knew personally the weeks leading up to Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa.
I thought of doing the same thing this year; but suddenly decided, “maybe instead I’ll just print up download cards.”
So I’ve placed the entire CD, 18 songs and color .PDF album cover as one big .zip file.
Here’s where you can get it for free:
http://www.frucht.org/christmas.zip
You simply download the file, unzip/unpack and burn to a blank cdr, print out the artwork and fold it into a holder for your CD. Then play the thing in your car, media center or stereo or right there on your laptop.
And of course these days if you don’t even feel like printing a CDR you can just make a playlist on your phone or ipod with the MP3′s themself.
Cheers, marco
Boehner told Harry Reid to “Go F___ yourself” when Reid said he was behaving dictatorially.
Somewhere back near 1998 Boehner walked right in and bumped me for a haircut and shave in the Rayburn building basement barber shop and I said to both him and the barber that I learned on grade school field trips that since I was ahead of him in line I should get my haircut first.
The barber was very apologetic, but truly feared for his career. I could see in his eyes that he knew I was right.
For hundreds of years those barbers told little kids how important it was that there be places like Washington DC where everything is absolutely fair.
So John Boehner told me to go F— myself when Reid said he was behaving dictatorially.
John Boehner told me to go F— myself at that moment as well. He also said he could buy and sell me in a minute’s time. All I could think to say quickly was to suggest he die trying.
A lot of people believe that he is just fronting for the Teaparty, cowed by them, and he’s trying his hardest to rein them in but the one fact I know from first person experience is that he is a very mean-spirited man.
…………………./´¯/) ………………..,/¯../ ………………./…./ …………./´¯/’…’/´¯¯`·¸ ………./’/…/…./……./¨¯\ ……..(‘(…´…´…. ¯~/’…’) ………\……………..’…../ ……….”…\………. _.·´ …………\…………..( …………..\………….\…
My dear Telemachus, The Trojan War is over now; I don’t recall who won it. The Greeks, no doubt, for only they would leave so many dead so far from their own homeland. But still, my homeward way has proved too long. While we were wasting time there, old Poseidon, it almost seems, stretched and extended space.
I don’t know where I am or what this place can be. It would appear some filthy island, with bushes, clintons, and great grunting pigs. A garden choked with weeds; some queen or other. Grass and huge stones . . . Telemachus, my son! To a wanderer the faces of all islands resemble one another. And the mind trips, numbering waves; eyes, sore from sea horizons, run; and the flesh of water stuffs the ears. I can’t remember how the war came out; even how old you are–I can’t remember.
Grow up, then, my Telemachus, grow strong. Only the gods know if we’ll see each other again. You’ve long since ceased to be that babe before whom I reined in the plowing bullocks. Had it not been for Palamedes’ trick we two would still be living in one household. But maybe grampa was right; away from me you are quite safe from all Oedipal passions, and your dreams, my Telemachus, are blameless. - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15205#sthash.gvPZxcV2.dpuf
ANNOTATION:
Laertes is Richard Milhous Nixxon and through Odysseus he sends this message to Telemachus who is Barack Obama.
Who remembers that kick I was on to use less than-a-dollar reinventing overpriced things such as the 29.99 ipod/cellfone charger wallsocket holder out of a piece of cereal box cardboard?
http://muffinbottoms.org/?p=223
Or the 16$ iPod sock made out of an actual used sock from just needle, thread and scissors!
Well it’s refreshing to know someone else out there who I’ve never even met is thinking along the same lines.
I usually just link to an image someone else took so much trouble to make but I can only find it on facebook so I’ll download/upload here and give link back to THEIR facebook. I think you want to click /like/ on theirs for sure and see what ideas they come up with next, the really have it going on.
http://www.facebook.com/ImaginationF4U
OK,
Beyonce LipSync’d the National Anthem and she sang her medley of perishable non-memorable hits “LIVE.”
Anyone hardly even know what LIVE means anymore??? Yes, she cranked up the mains and left her full-on backing track pumping loudly in her monitors so you mostly heard her, and faintly heard everything she prepared. She really could have just skyped the entire show in but she had something to prove. Back when she was young, she sang a capella on late night shows. She was one of the few artists who didn’t put a rider in their contract refusing all a capella songs, even Happy Birthday. Many artists resented her that. She was very talented. She can sing like a bird, and she often does, but she isn’t very courageous and she most likely never wrote a real song in her life.
Flash forward to the present. She has been singing more and more with the Backing Track dialed in and cranked up to… well to 11. Yupper, she can’t dance OR sing live as well as Madonna. (and that’s not saying much.) Should we compare/contrast her voice with Odetta’s? Aretha? Mario Lanza? Nina Simone. South Park’s Chef even… OK I’ll stop there. As for dancing, right! She’s no madonna, she’s not even a Paula Abdul or a Janet Jackson. In fact can I complain about something as far as dance moves go? Janet and Paula already did all that. I rarely see anything done by anyone that hasn’t already been regimented 15 times already the past 50 years! (except maybe Pink but that’s different)
Who’s going to be the next James Brown, Little Richard, Madonna or MJ? It’s not Nicky Minaj and it’s not Lady Gaga and it darned sure isn’t Ms. Knowles.
So OK, she admitted publicly she lip sync’d the National Anthem, and then belted it out a capella to show the world that she can carry a tune if asked. And then she proceeded to lip sync a medley of potent soundbytes during the Superbowl’s halftime that was so stunningly flawless that she can now forever say she did it “live.” Yup, virtually live. What’s the truth-in-advertising quotient on that one, does it have to be 26% live to call it “live?” Well she nailed it at something like 66% or more. Yay. Happy for her.
Songs that are “not worth lip-syncing!” as many of my friends keep suggesting, I’m serious people. We’re going to remember “Yesterday,” and “Summertime,” “Johnny B Goode” and “Follow The Drinking Gourd” forever, trust me. “Wipe Out,” yes, and the “Hawaii 5-0 Theme song;” but “put a ring on it?” “If I were a boy?” “Me myself and I???” Oh come on. I already attribute “If I were a boy” to little Mimi Sledge of the Sledge Grits band because she does it with just vocals and an acoustic guitar better than Beyonce EVER could.
Well, Pete Seeger, his Grandson Tao and Bruce Springsteen led a civic choir of hundreds in This Land is Your Land. 100% live with a very meaningful song. All the verses to boot! Not a backing track to be found for miles. I would challenge people like Beyonce to write a real song for once or get out of the way so people like Beyonce’s little sister Solange, Frank Waln, Kinnie Starr, Crystal Crow Dog, Wab Kinew and I can make our way up there where we belong.
Idle No More.
That’s all I can say for now.
Pete Seeger sings “This Land Is Your Land” for President Obama’s Inauguration
follow the drinking gourd: (Audio)
Immortalized song Summertime from Porgy and Bess.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_db7zHR7cc
Same for Johnny B Goode
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BG7UL9NfP8c
Here’s a humble little C&C (compare & contrast) of Tarantino’s movie and script for “Django Unchained.”
http://twcguilds.com/assets/screenplay/django/screenplay.pdf
These are raw notes and I’m not going to bother editing. You get me thinking out loud on many levels from the straight up, straight forward, straight and true, to the anthropological, mythophilosophical and metaforical too. Enjoy!
Carrucan Plantation. My mind wanders to Caracas pretty quickly.
I believe “Field N____” on page 8 of the script is the first use of the ‘N’ word. Spike Lee and others are bothered by what they’re calling overuse of this word but of course the entire movie is about plantation life in the early moments before and after Lincoln’s ever so famous “Emancipation Proclamation.”
It was never clear to me that it was a $20 gold piece to purchase the horse, just a large looking coin. Too easy in today’s society to think maybe it was a Quarter or a Silver Dollar maybe.
Pg 10: King Shultz insists Django name his acquired horse. He has great difficulty agreeing to accept ownership. I wish they would have kept that in the movie. Could have been a great treatment of Indigenous thought versus anglo philosophy.
17: Love the smalll derringer extended from a handshake. Early foreshadowing maybe, of the Three Musketeers references to come.
Umm, afraid to say this out loud but I noticed Quentin Tarantino is not good at a/an with words starting in vowels. “a onion,” “a honest person,” etc. hehehehe
I tend to overthink things now and then, but Town of Daughtry makes the word Husbandry come to mind, like marriage but also animal husbandry, like chattel slavery as well.
THINGS WE MISS in movies that stay in a script:
20: “don’t make any quick movements and let me do the talking,” Django looks at him like, “as if…”
The movie’s signage specified Servant Uniforms I think but I don’t remember seeing “House Negruh,” or “House N___” whereas the script calls for it.
27: A little bit of cognitive dissonance for me in both the movie and the script. Jerry the boy who works with glass. His mama works at the lumber yard. I can’t tell if he’s a white or mixed indentured servant or a kid of a freed slave or what.
Oh Betina ribs Django for wanting to dress in blue Flauntleroy. In the movie he picked it. In the script Shultz made him wear it.
Spyglass the type a Sea Captain might use. Shades of Frederick Douglass maybe.
So “I’m sure he dead,” was an ad lib? Go Jamie Foxx!”
47: “Frankly I’ve never given anybody their freedom before. And now that I have, I feel vaguely responsible for you.” Wow. I ponder that when looking back at my marriage and divorce. I’ll say no more about that, just that I truly feel like I freed someone who just couldn’t consider herself free and stay married.
54: Django finds Broomhilda, I think in the movie Shultz found out from rumormill or word on the street.
Not sure why the auction complete with bidding was cut out of the film, maybe time constraints?
“A seventy-five year old Indian on a mule makes a bid.” I would’ve wanted Tarantino, someone part Cherokee to expound on that one, that’s for sure.
57: “She climbs into the driver’s seat in more ways than one.” If it can be done, without being too preachy, I would have loved more documentary stuff about free/slave sexuality and also the dynamics and power differentials exploited using ones’ body or someone elses’ body, etc. Is “pony” legit from history? I never read about that before. That’s new to me for sure.
70: “You want me to play a black slaver?? There ain’t nothing lower than a black slaver. Black slavers are even lower than head house N___’s, and buddy that’s pretty F___ing low.”
Mandingo fighting pretty much lines up script and movie both. Even, “He’s just being cheeky…”
Confirmation of Broomhilda’s presence is about the same too.
“Candie gives Django a creepy smile.” I don’t remember seeing that in the film.
86: “I pay 500 dollars I want 500 fights. So what about my 500 dollars? You gonna reimburse me?” The whites (except for Schultz) laugh. He’s comfortable with the wider economy of the deep south in Chattel Slavery but not supportive of it ethically or morally. The script shows that well. I’m not sure the movie does. Only mention I remember is in the saloon while asking Django to hire on as his sidekick.
I didn’t catch in the movie that getting emotional and wanting to pay the 500 was a break in character. In the script I see that.
That Django has seen worse doesn’t come to me in the movie either. I think Tarantino expected both Schultz’s and Django’s characters to be more developed at this point than they already are. Time probably didn’t permit but maybe more could’ve been done in the soundtrack or with visuals maybe.
Calvin blinks. Django wins a staring contest I didn’t notice. I’ll want to see the movie again just to see if it happened and I just didn’t see it.
I think a lot about the fact that all this was just 120 years ago or so. Someone alive today could have a grandparent or four who would be children of recently freed slaves. This is not ancient history, and I feel that many of the attacks on Tarantino’s use of the N word or the very mention of slavery in a comprehensive way for that matter, might be misplacing a defensiveness over their own family name. Or guilt by neutrality maybe.
Similar to issues over Native American genocide if you ask me.
I wonder if Tarantino’s treatment of Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson) comes along from a desire to get the subject of “house N____” back on the table for discussion; it’s been hushed since whatever year Harry Belafonte called Colin Powell one for his “step n fetchit” obedience to Bush’s Iraq war.
Hahahaha. Stephen only misses Calvin Candie like a rock in his shoe in the script. All the other descriptives must be Samuel L. Jackson ad libbing. Script characters that didn’t make it to the movie, but I won’t belabor those details.
The cruelty to mandingos in the script wasn’t something I particularly missed in the film. Good choice not overdoing that I think.
The interaction between Stephen and Django in the Big House might have been illuminating. Freedmen treating a House N___ as if he’s his owner. Shows a lot of deep south dynamics including contemporary emotional issues I bet. Which brings me back to Harry Belafonte and Colin Powell jousting again.
114: The two weeks in boston joke worked much better in the movie than in the script for me. The southern accent probably did it.
Stephen calling Candie’s Boston joke unfunny shows a closeness between the two of them that’s only shown a little bit in the moive. That could’ve helped develop that relationship I think.
Ace Woody telling Django that with Calvin dead Lara probably won’t care much about Mandingo fighting could get into some dynamics too but was probably superfluous to the film. Quite a bit more torture in the script than the movie. Maybe discussed in group was how to imply it without showing everything. Or even just showing a little and not having to belabor the point.
“Seemed like folks never had a bright idea in their life,” says the script but I’m pretty sure Stephen says “white folks” in the film.
146: “Django is damn convincing.”
Damned straight this inner piece of Tarantino writing is a Tall Tale within a Tall Tale that would make Mark Twain proud.
“Instead of [Gambling] chips they play with “N____ ears,” yes the ears of slaves.” Where on earth did you find this?
162 Closeup of Broomhilda as she watches this.
I would’ve liked this kept in the film. Don’t want to give any spoilers but I’ve wanted four characters developed from beginning to end. Django, Hilda, Stephen, and King Schultz.
A lot can be done with eyes and hands.
Last comment for now. I would’ve wanted the song “Follow The Drinking Gourd.” Maybe Richie Havens’ version, maybe mine, hint, hint…
In two places in this movie, maybe a few other places.
Especially whenever the North Star is mentioned.
More about Django?
http://muffinbottoms.org/?p=990
Comparing Navajo Joe with Django.
Earlier I did a compare and contrast between Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” and one of his favorite Spaghetti Westerns ever, ”Navajo Joe.”
Title: ‘Inglourious Basterds’ Was ‘Navajo Joe??’
Well here I’ll do the same, essentially some raw notes after seeing ‘Django’ (the d is silent) twice and then sitting myself down and watching Navajo Joe again.
Navajo Joe callbacks to/from Django Unchained
by Marc Frucht
7:47 Tips over a horse with rider falling to the ground.
of course scalping, letter R on cheek for runaway slave
10:18 Wanted posters. Bounties. Scalps. Corpses
13:11 “no sale.” Arresting you for murder.
15:10 “you won’t have to run around chasing stinking indians just for a few dollars…”
17:21 the music is very very similar, thank you Ennio Morricone
A lot more hand to hand combat in Navajo Joe than Django, but shooting and shooting into dynomite is similar.
21:35 Posse horseriding up over the crest of the hill has the same feel as the klan riders before they start their argument.
24:06 shoot em ups are much looser in Navajo Joe than anything Tarantino does. Everything seems more calculated and direct in Django Unchained
26:17 rosepetals in the wind. Note the blood spatterings on the cotton in the fields early in Django
Burt Reynolds is a one man vengeance machine killing everyone on his way to doing his nemesis Duncan in; whereas Django is helping a bounty hunter go after a new person each scene. Although there is the focus on freeing Broomhilda for the entire back 2/3′s of Unchained.
29:30 whistling for the horse to follow a command. Kind of parallel to the victory dance at the end when all of Candyland was destroyed.
31:00 Estella interrupting something important. I’ve forgotten where there were interruptions of conversations throughout Django but I’m pretty sure there are some parallels there too. The womens’ characters are better developed in Navajo Joe than in Django I think. Tarantino kind of makes everyone besides Uma Thurman kind of “flat.”
34:55 I don’t think Navajo Joe has said a word yet, just killed and killed.
35:19 “I brought you a train.” He speaks simple words, but never in an accent making fun of NDNs perhaps because Burt Reynolds is part Cherokee and fought against that.
38:26 “plus the reward that’s posted for Duncan” there’s the bounty hunter.
44:57 ”and one more thing. I’ll need some dynomite.”
49:50 “and his father before him, and his father before him… now which one’s American…”
55:07 No tricks Duncan. Don’t worry you’ll get your half. Safes. Remember the tooth at the top of the Dentist wagon?
56:12 Chester, the NDN has it all. He tricked you.
Dynomite thrown.
Empty rolls to look like sleeping people under the dental wagon?
57:16 Hostage. “I’m gonna kill this woman.” ‘Hilda? “she’s an NDN just like you
58:01 torturing Joe… parallel to the castration scene maybe. (close to the end of Django so I don’t want to give away too much there)
59:10 Spurrs on boots. again at 59:30 on Navajo Joe’s neck. I think in Django they were 5 pointed stars or something, and looked more for show than poking horses’ bodies.
59:47 horsewhip and something resembling eaglebone whistle sounds. very high pitched, maybe piccolo.
1:00:47 String him up by his feet.
1:05:22 gets out of the “string.” I don’t remember how Django gets out of his mask and shackles.
1:14:09 “my revenge” — Duncan.
1L17:05 “navajo joe” on the horse. foiled. it’s Jeffrey symbol carved in his forehead with a longknife.
1:18:10 Dynamite in the saddlebags.
1:25:29 “you won’t escape now, redskin” — reminds me of “I count 6 shots, nigguh; I count two guns nigguh…”
1:27:32 ”I know you’re a bounty killer, you want to have my bounty.”
this belonged to my woman. do you remember her?
OK, the tomahawk flying through the air into someone’s head has a similar feel to someone flying from one room to the next being shot. I’m avoiding two spoilers there, or I’d say more.
The horse delivering the town their money all by his/her self. Humanizing horses shows up in lots of westerns, not least of which is Django.
I’ll end this essay with a question that’s not rhetorical. I’d love an answer some day. Is Quentin Tarantino a guitarist? I know his stepdad played guitar and piano. But it doesn’t say he plays anywhere. But not only does he have writer credits in many of the songs to the Django soundtrack but I’m noticing that the whole soundtrack is very very guitar driven. Lots of Dm, Gm and Am pieces.