One of our local TV channels KPLR 11 did a feature on this guys ultimate man cave:

Check out a photo gallery of it, it’s an amazing 3 stories and 17,000 square foot dwelling in a limestone cave:

Photo gallery of the cave house

Time and time again I hear this complaint from people trying to download my music: “i can listen to it but i cant seem to download it just opens as quick player i cant download …” (*this is an actual comment left yesterday on my blog – read it if you like).

Try doing this FIRST: To save an Mp3 using Internet Explorer, right-click the song title and choose “Save Target As”. Firefox users right-click and choose “Save Link As”.

If you can’t do that (because those options are “grayed out”) then you are probably being stymied by Apple’s Quicktime.

Quicktime’s fix? Buy Quicktime Pro for $29.99!

That is bullshit as far as I’m concerned – it’s a dirty fucking trick. My first advice is UNINSTALL QUICKTIME FROM YOUR COMPUTER. But inevitably people re-install it because there is some page that will only display some video or music with Quicktime that they want to see, and then the fucking-of-the-consumer begins again.

Here is a great winamp forum article for fixing the problem of APPLE QUICKTIME HIJACKS MY BROWSER AND ONLY ALLOWS ME TO STREAM MP3S – I CAN’T DOWNLOAD THE MP3:

http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?threadid=235714

Some members of the forum suggest using QuickTime Alternative:
http://www.free-codecs.com/download/QuickTime_Alternative.htm

So there you have it, a fix to a problem that should never have arisen in the first place but for the corporate greed of Apple, and I’ll bet thousands of people have shelled out for QT Pro. So next time you see this “I’m a Mac” guy (and yeah, maybe identify with him a little bit):

What you are really seeing is this:

Don’t believe me? Let’s look at some numbers: As of September 26, 2009, Apple had 34,300 full time employees and 2,500 temporary full time employees worldwide and had worldwide annual sales of $42.91 billion in its fiscal year ending September 26, 2009. Yeah, I know a lot of blue jean, hoodie wearin’ guys with a few billion in their piggy banks, yeah sure.

I actually like Ditka’s view:

This pic from Soichi Noguchi, an astronaut who tweets live from the space station. Full story at Discovery.com:

Images: Earthly auroras in Skitland, Alaska (top) and viewed from 220 miles above the planet aboard the space station. Credit: Lance Parrish, Spaceweather.com; JAXA astronaut Soichi Noguchi via Twitter.

“Stare With Your Ears“.

When I was a callow youth a buddy of mine turned me on to an NPR program called Wordjazz. It was unlike anything I’d ever heard before (or since) and the genius behind it is “the man with the golden baritone voice”: Ken Nordine.

Using a unique technique of overdubbing a tinny sounding voice I always thought of as his subconscious, it was like he was having conversations with himself while pursuing stream-of-consciousness ramblings that usually culminated with a clever twist.

He recorded his Beat-like spoken word and poetry over diverse backdrops of jazz, rock and electronic music performed by some heavy rollers: He has collaborated with an incredible cast of musicians during his career including The Grateful Dead, David Sanborn, Smokey Robinson, and Fred Astaire to name just a few.

Coolest of the cool, hippest of the hip, Nordine is the undisputed King of the Beatniks. His rich, golden baritone entrances you as he takes you on audio journeys charged with heavy psychedelic visual imagery, sometimes raising the tension to nearly unbearable levels before dissolving into quirky silliness.

His instantly recognizable voice has been featured in many commercial advertisements and movie trailers. One critic wrote that “you may not know Ken Nordine by name or face, but you’ll almost certainly recognize his voice”. The recordings of Colors are brief Beat-inspired explorations of the meanings of different colors (some of which were used in ads for The Fuller Paint Co.). Unique and innovative, these audio head-trips are difficult to describe, but you’ll never forget them once you experience the genius of Ken Nordine.

I was inspired by Ken’s Wordjazz to write a song in his honor a few years back called Kilroy Was Here. While it isn’t as cool as his stuff, it’s still kind of interesting, so if you want to hear it click here.

I’ve always had a fascination with the little Kilroy graffiti, which is why I wrote the song, and use it on my contact page:

Here are the lyrics and some ascii art

Ken Nordine at Allmusic
Ken Nordine’s “My Baby” (MP3)
Ken Nordine at Last.fm

The thought struck me the other night while recording vocals: how many times have I looked at this view, or one similar to it? A mic, popper stopper and some wires and gear? thousands of times.

I followed this guy on twitter the other day @brandonrofl, and checked out his blog Brandon Writes The Wrongs.

Turns out he writes poetry, and when I read one of his poems called The Dream I thought to myself, “that could be turned into a pretty cool song”. I was sitting by my Korg at the time that had an eerie piano with an arp patch happening, and hit a couple of chords and sang the first line of the poem and went, “whoa” – it happened that easily and that fast.

6 hours later (at 4am!) I was mostly done, and today I polished it up and sent it to him. He liked it and blogged about it, so I thought I would too, cos it’s actually a groovus laid back tune that I digs quite a lot:

Download it: The Dream (mp3, 320kbps, 4:25 duration, 10.1MB)

Here is a pic I took while recording it, with a little more info in the margins (click it to see full size):

Oh yeah, he turned the song and his lyrics into a video, too (did I mention how talented this guy is?):

When I was a kid, I loved watching Jacques Cousteau on National Geographic, I thought he was maybe the coolest guy that ever lived. So much so, that when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up (a question which is still asked of me to this day) I would answer, “I want to be a marine biologist when I grow up”. I actually wanted to be an oceanographer, but I thought saying marine biologist sounded cooler.

Well, like many of my dreams, that occupation was never to show up on my resume, but I still get to watch and feed my fish in my 60 gallon aquarium, which has an Oscar

Astronotus Ocellatus

Plecostomus (genus Pterygoplichthys)

So then I saw one of my favorite all-time movies: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and a little germ of an idea grew in my head until finally I created this mini documentary of my aquarium of terror starring Tony the Oscar, Bob the Plecostamus and the carnivorous, motionless stone octopus (who, through his understated performance, nearly steals the show). In honor of Jacques and Bill Murray, I used my best phony french accent during the narration, I hope you enjoy watching it as much as I did making it

PETA wants to replace Punxsutawney Phil with a robot. Phil expresses his displeasure with the idea.

1st off is new Radiohead (this could have been on Led Zeppelin’s Zoso AND/OR Jeff Buckley’s Grace and fit right in, at least to my ears…and that’s a very good thing.) And since I am always forgetting to provide an actual link to videos in my post, I humbly apologize to my RSS via email readers, and promise to not do it no more (no mo no mo):

And the 2nd video juxtaposes my well-known love of two things: Hockey and Rush! (Hey! you got your Peart on my St. Louis Blues – no, you got your Blues on my Peart! It’s….wonderful cheesy grins). It’s Neil Pearts take of “The Hockey Theme”, the music that has been used during the opening of “Hockey Night in Canada” on Canadian TV for the last four decades:

He shoots – He SCORES! (get it, like a musical score? I’m sorry, that was really weak).

I. WANT. THIS. (misa digital guitar running linux kernel 2.6.31.)