Carrie Prejean says the Bible does not forbid breast implants. But don't they qualify as false idols? After all, coming in pairs, they are an affront to monotheism. Have you heard about Sarah Palin's treatise on her values system? It's called "Gouging Roe."
Did you hear about Sarah Palin's writing process? She loves going Roget just to prove that humans can coexist with dinosaurs.
Once we empowered jihadists to fight communism. Now we've gone into debt to a communist country to combat jihadism. Boogie Boarding is like the real estate business. Catching the right wave is all about "Location, location, location."
Boogie Boarding like playing the stock market. Don't chase the waves. If you go where a wave has broken, you won't catch another there. Stay put, be ready, and seize the one that comes for you.
Torture is like oral sex. It makes men babble whatever they think you want to hear.
When are Greeks like sperm? When they are repelled by Trojans, Honk! (Take a horse to get through that . . .)
All my "X's" fled Texas and left me just with tea.
I gave her my heart, with all that entails; all I got were her liberal-activist bulk emails. Nuclear weapons are like cigarettes. Kids want them so they can feel grown up; adults want to keep them while preventing kids from having them.
Writing is like sculpting, except first you have to write the block of marble into existence before you can begin taking away what doesn't belong.
Overheard at the convention of Catholic basketball coaches: "Better a Christian Laettner than a Christian Never-ner!"
I remember when this photo was taken. Something funny had happened in the audience, and Byrne seemed to really enjoy it. Then again, from the way he talks about the dancers on his tour, it’s clear that his threshold for enjoyment is kind of low. lt’s like, all that meditation and worldliness he’s known for has made him so unjudgmental that he can hardly tell what’s stage worthy. Which is a shame, since for the most part, in the old Stop Making Sense deal, everyone seems pretty much on top of his/her game. Rhythms are tight there and that sharp bass guitar often seems to be leading the whole thing. You can’t go flopping around like a marionette tennis player. But that’s what his dancers, some of which are in the picture, looked like on this tour. Their backs were hunched as if they were suspended by a string from between their shoulder blades, with other strings mostly slack. Their chests were sort of caved in. A lot of what they did was to run in place, or run fake football plays, dodging around Byrne. They got really sweaty, but it was hardly worth it. It was as if some ADF student, deluded that he had a choreographic vision worthy of other people’s attention, had gotten a couple of other students together to give a performance at 11pm in a practice room, and forced his friends to come watch.
I can only justify Byrne’s keeping these “professional” dancers on stage as representing the geek dancing that, I suppose, his fans have done all their lives to the “white people’s funk” sound of the Talking Heads. Byrne himself has practically built his stage presence out of his own geek dancing. But proliferated out from his body into those others, the geek dancing lost its soul.
Even the backup singers danced a little, and they were even worse. And as backup singers, they were just okay. The very last song in the last encore, the title song of the album Everything that Happens Happens Today, had intonation problems in its final notes. I had to leave the auditorium with that on my mind.
The audience, for its part, also danced the whole time. Audience dancing was not so inspired for the first part of the concert, which was the newer stuff, seeming to be trying to be melodic and deep, mature and middle-aged. My man could sing it pretty well, don’t get me wrong. He’s got a pretty rich, commanding voice as pop singers go. But I can’t listen to words in songs. I just don’t discern them. So whether they actually are deep or not I don’t know. And to me, the melodies were not memorable, and the percussion was merely going through the motions. Svetx had said Byrne has a tremendous Brasilain percussionist, and he was there, but it could have been anyone. Asheville is full of drummers. Byrne would have done just as well with one of them. Where was the distinctiveness of the Talking Heads?
Whenever I hear Talking Heads, I want to hear Slippery People. The live version more than the original recording. It has a great cruising groove which I used to love to blast all over an aluminum warehouse building where I once worked, flicking lights on and off and loading trucks and checking of items on lists. And it has virtually no melody, but it works great with its focus on rhythm and bass. And those old Talking Heads lyrics were kind of cryptic and kitchy and maybe philosophical, but were saved from being taken too seriously by the overall quirky presentation.
After the amorphous Byrne/Eno collaborations there did come a song with the old Talking Heads aspects: true funkiness in the percussion and bass, rhythmic chanting from Byrne and the backup singers, call and response. Byrne is trying to be all worldly and do world music nowadays, but I say he and the Talking Heads were doing world music before world music knew of itself, and it was pretty good.
Now the audience clicked into its groove, and Thomas Wolfe Auditorium was truly rocked. It was like all these old Talking Heads fans, Svetx included, had been doing body rolls all their lives in front of MTV. I happened to look behind me and saw a couple of rows of people, the last in the standing room behind the rearmost seats, stepping and writhing to one side and then the other, singing all the words too. It was like a synchronized choppy sea around me, and this was the most impressive thing of the concert.
They did the “This ain’t no disco” song, and on the chorus the backup singers did and Byrne did harmonize pretty well with each other. They did the “Same as it ever was" song and “Take Me To the River.” I always like river songs. I heard “Down By the Riverside” in a jazz club in Prague once. It was played by a wonderful Dixieland jazz band that seemed to have a regular gig at that club, and when they got to “Riverside,” the whole audience shouted the words along with them, in English. Svetx and I also heard a great “Wade in the Water” played as accompaniment to the Alvin Ailey dance company’s Revelations recently in NYC. That was slammin’.
Leaving the Thomas Wolfe auditorium, folks around us were complaining that we had not heard "Burning Down the House." They felt like I had after Duran Duran this summer, when they had not played "Please Please Tell Me Now," the scheisters. And I felt gypped because I didn’t think I had heard "Slippery."
It has been 10 years since I worked in that warehouse and last heard it. Just now, before writing this, I went online to see if I would still like it. Yep, the live version is still pretty rockin’. I like the percussion less, maybe because I’ve listened to so much Latin music lately; but I like the bass guitar more. And playing it on YouTube, I think I recognize it as the Talking Heads song they did in the Asheville concert that first got the audience truly down with its bad self. So yes, I think I did hear "Slippery People," and I think it was pretty much the best song of that night.
I've been cheerleading for algae as my favorite alternative fuel source for over a year. Of all plants, certain strains of algae are the best producers of vegetable oil well suited for making Diesel and jet fuel. It can be grown in artificial containers on non-arable land and does not necessarily need fresh water -- or, if using fresh water, growing algae in enclosed incubators means the water can be reused. Either way, unlike all other biofuel crops, algae would not compete with food crops for farmland and could possibly use salt water, wastewater, or comparatively little fresh water. This posting is a survey of several private companies and their progress on various ways to grow algae. I have raved about several of these companies before. My favorite way of growing algae on any land using CO2 from plain old air (not artificially concentrated sources) is this invention by Glenn Kertz at Valcent Products. You can view it if you go to this page and click the link to the HDVB video on the right.
In the Valcent design, water is circulated through plastic bags hanging in basic greenhouses. It looks like the drycleaner if all the clothes were green dresses. Since the bags hang vertically, more algae per land area is exposed to sunlight. Also, most of the water is reclaimed. While any type of algae farm would be very expensive to set up initially, I like the apparent simplicity of this design. Note that he talks about breeding algae to make oil suitable for making jet fuel.
Another great place for an algae farm is near a natural gas power plant, where smokestack emissions are diverted into algae incubators. Here is one such facility at the Redhawk power plant in Arizona, run by Arizona Public Service. The algae company is Greenfuels Technologies, started by an MIT researcher who was looking into using algae to recycle air on space stations.
One problem with the facility is that lots of water is being used in a desert. The power plant folks say they get some water from burning the natural gas, but I'm not sure the plant produces enough of its own water to run these algae farms on a large scale. On the other hand, if this water can be reclaimed, since it's being used in closed containers, maybe it would make sense to bring in a trainload of water every now and then, just to replenish the supply.
And here's an Israeli company called Seambiotic that is also reclaiming smokestack emissions, but from a coal burning plant. They are using water from the Mediterranean Sea, readily available. Also note the use of a Wagner soundtrack on the video, strange for an Israeli company!
Solazyme is a company making great headway on algae, apparently. They use enclosed algae incubators not open to sunlight. Maybe they use fiber optics to deliver light to the inside of the incubators. There's no video at that link, just company information.
And here is where Solazyme announces it has produced jet fuel from algae that meets all official standards for jet fuel.
This means that Solazyme might be beating Petrosun for selling the first algae jet fuel in this country. Petrosun is a feisty oil-drilling company that has been trying to take the lead in algae, setting up inexpensive open-air ponds on the gulf coast of Texas and growing indigenous algae species in them. In the long term, I don't think this is a good way to grow algae because they lose water to evaporation, and you can't grow a genetically altered strain in them. Also, given the location of their algae ponds, it looks like they are using estuary water. I'm not sure we want to be fussing with estuaries.
Also note Algenol, a company that wants to make ethanol from algae. While ethanol has a bad rap because we think of it coming from food crops like corn or sugarcane, these folks say that some types of algae secrete ethanol, and the gas can be pumped out of the top of an enclosed algae incubator. With this method, there would not be harvesting of algae -- just keep it growing, and keep pumping out the ethanol. They are talking about building plants in Mexico.
And, last but not least, is Synthetic Genomics which is Craig Venter’s company. He’s the guy who beat the U.S. government in mapping the human genome. Now he says he has developed a strain of algae that secretes is oil outside of its own cells, so that the oil does not need to be separated from the algae by a mechanical process. So, this saves an energy intensive step in the algae oil process. Also, this means that, as with Algenol above, the algae does not need to be harvested. You just keep skimming the oil off the top.
I remember when this photo was taken. Something funny had happened in the audience, and Byrne seemed to really enjoy it. Then again, from the way he talks about the dancers on his tour, it’s clear that his threshold for enjoyment is kind of low. lt’s like, all that meditation and worldliness he’s known for has made him so unjudgmental that he can hardly tell what’s stage worthy. Which is a shame, since for the most part, in the old Stop Making Sense deal, everyone seems pretty much on top of his/her game. Rhythms are tight there and that sharp bass guitar often seems to be leading the whole thing. You can’t go flopping around like a marionette tennis player. But that’s what his dancers, some of which are in the picture, looked like on this tour.