Aluminium

Danger!

Steven — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 00:59:38 +0000

So this blog is in danger of going under. I don’t update it with any regularity and I know of only two (maybe three) who read it on occasion.

That written, here are a few things I hope when it comes to my future son:

1. That he can see perform (phone it in) before he dies. Dylan is still going strong at 66, but his years, I’d assume, are limited. Then again, Keith Richards is by some devine or devilish intervention, still vertical. Let’s say, conservatively, that I get married on March 21, 2009. After that, I’m sure we’ll start trying to have kids within a year. That puts Dylan pushing 70 once Jr. pops out. A 70-year-old on stage? Not exactly a show, more a spoken word exhibit. They’ll have to prop him up, but at least he’ll be there – and hopefully – so will junior and I.

When I say junior, don’t take me at my word. If I do have the luxury of successfully procreating, the whole “Steve” line will end with me. For years I was leaning towards Austin, and then Austin Powers came out. Nixed. Then it was David Matthews Pease in high school, for obvi reso. Now, I’m not so sure, but I do like my dad’s rationale of “men get to name boys, women girls.” That barbaric rite sounds about right to me.

2. I want my kid to be a long-snapper. Yes, folks, that’s right. A long-snapper. Note the hyphen – it’s that important of a job. The GBP’s recently retired long-snapper Rob Davis was the last remaining player from the 96-97 Super Bowl champs, and even he walked on to the fucking team! And then played, what 16 years? Sure, you’re required to show up for every practice, and – if you’re really, really lucky – make a tackle every once in a while. Davis, in fact, made one fumble recovery. Week 11. 2000. Recoveries are so rare that Kevin Gold, of Longsnap.com, noted that Davis ALMOST made his second recovery. God bless the man, though. It’s a thankless job and he’s been a rock for the Pack for a decade. He’s the man, did local commercials, saw primadonnas (and hall-of-famers) come and go. But he just kept on long-snappin’.

Davis’ final salary was in the 480,000 range, however in 2004 he made well over a half mill, plus $5,800 in bonus money for God knows what. We’ll miss ya Rob ol’ buddy. And rest assured we’ll be keeping a close eye on the next walk on long-snapper for the Packers: Thomas Gafford.

One Love.

40 years ago today, an assassin taught the world to hate

Steven — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 19:01:56 +0000

40 years ago today (DTJ Blog)

Yesterday marked the 40th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s last speech. Certainly one of his most well known and rousing oratory masterpieces in which he prophetically predicted his own death. He was killed by an assassin’s bullet 40 years ago today.
He wasn’t even supposed to speak that day. His best friend Ralph Abernathy was to take his place because, King thought, there would be a small turnout due to Memphis storms. In the end, the people wouldn’t leave until King spoke. No one, seemingly, knew it would be his last appearance, except for him.

Old School

Steven — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 16:22:58 +0000

story

Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison

By JODY ROSEN

Published: March 27, 2008

For more than a century, since he captured the spoken words “Mary had a little lamb” on a sheet of tinfoil, Thomas Edison has been considered the father of recorded sound. But researchers say they have unearthed a recording of the human voice, made by a little-known Frenchman, that predates Edison’s invention of the phonograph by nearly two decades.

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Isabelle Trocheris

The audio historian David Giovannoni with a recently discovered phonautogram that is among the earliest sound recordings.

Audio: 1860 recording: “The Phonautograph Recording from 1860 of ‘Au Clair de la Lune’”

The Phonautograph Recording from 1860 of ‘Au Clair de la Lune’ (mp3)

An Audio Excerpt from a 1931 Recording of the Same Song (mp3)

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Courtesy of David Giovannoni

The 19th-century phonautograph, which captured sounds visually but did not play them back, has yielded a discovery with help from modern technology.

The 10-second recording of a singer crooning the folk song “Au Clair de la Lune” was discovered earlier this month in an archive in Paris by a group of American audio historians. It was made, the researchers say, on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back. But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable — converted from squiggles on paper to sound — by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.

“This is a historic find, the earliest known recording of sound,” said Samuel Brylawski, the former head of the recorded-sound division of the Library of Congress, who is not affiliated with the research group but who was familiar with its findings. The audio excavation could give a new primacy to the phonautograph, once considered a curio, and its inventor, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a Parisian typesetter and tinkerer who went to his grave convinced that credit for his breakthroughs had been improperly bestowed on Edison.

Scott’s device had a barrel-shaped horn attached to a stylus, which etched sound waves onto sheets of paper blackened by smoke from an oil lamp. The recordings were not intended for listening; the idea of audio playback had not been conceived. Rather, Scott sought to create a paper record of human speech that could later be deciphered.

But the Lawrence Berkeley scientists used optical imaging and a “virtual stylus” on high-resolution scans of the phonautogram, deploying modern technology to extract sound from patterns inscribed on the soot-blackened paper almost a century and a half ago. The scientists belong to an informal collaborative called First Sounds that also includes audio historians and sound engineers.

David Giovannoni, an American audio historian who led the research effort, will present the findings and play the recording in public on Friday at the annual conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif.

Scott’s 1860 phonautogram was made 17 years before Edison received a patent for the phonograph and 28 years before an Edison associate captured a snippet of a Handel oratorio on a wax cylinder, a recording that until now was widely regarded by experts as the oldest that could be played back.

Mr. Giovannoni’s presentation on Friday will showcase additional Scott phonautograms discovered in Paris, including recordings made in 1853 and 1854. Those first experiments included attempts to capture the sounds of a human voice and a guitar, but Scott’s machine was at that time imperfectly calibrated.

“We got the early phonautograms to squawk, that’s about it,” Mr. Giovannoni said.

But the April 1860 phonautogram is more than a squawk. On a digital copy of the recording provided to The New York Times, the anonymous vocalist, probably female, can be heard against a hissing, crackling background din. The voice, muffled but audible, sings, “Au clair de la lune, Pierrot répondit” in a lilting 11-note melody — a ghostly tune, drifting out of the sonic murk.

The hunt for this audio holy grail was begun in the fall by Mr. Giovannoni and three associates: Patrick Feaster, an expert in the history of the phonograph who teaches at Indiana University, and Richard Martin and Meagan Hennessey, owners of Archeophone Records, a label specializing in early sound recordings. They had collaborated on the Archeophone album “Actionable Offenses,” a collection of obscene 19th-century records that received two Grammy nominations. When Mr. Giovannoni raised the possibility of compiling an anthology of the world’s oldest recorded sounds, Mr. Feaster suggested they go digging for Scott’s phonautograms.

Historians have long been aware of Scott’s work. But the American researchers believe they are the first to make a concerted search for Scott’s phonautograms or attempt to play them back.

In December Mr. Giovannoni and a research assistant traveled to a patent office in Paris, the Institut National de la Propriété Industrielle. There he found recordings from 1857 and 1859 that were included by Scott in his phonautograph patent application. Mr. Giovannoni said that he worked with the archive staff there to make high-resolution, preservation-grade digital scans of these recordings.

Spring springing, EVOC training and road-trippin’

Steven — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 13:46:09 +0000

On spring: Walking into work today, with a tangerine sun winking behind me, I thought how quaint it felt to hear the birds chirping (including a nice little tune from a baby crow) and the taste of blue air lingering in my lungs. Glad to even have a respite from winter. It’s been a hard, yet memorable one. And one I’d like to forget.

EVOC (Emergency Vehicle Operator Course): Last night I went through EVOC training with St. Paul P.D. as part of my training in their Media Police Academy. For the last two months, every Wednesday night I have undergone training in various aspects of metro police work. They include: child predator tracking; domestic abuse; Special Weapons And Tactics (SWAT); Bomb Squad; reconstructing murder scenes and accidents; use-of-force continuum; Tasers, hand-to-hand takedowns and weapons training. And, again, last night was EVOC, also known as crazy effin’ driving course.

Here’s a video (albeit a bit over-the-top):

http://wcco.com/local/police.car.chase.2.676105.html

Overall, I’d say I did “pretty well” or so said the training officer. Taking curves at 40 mph, trying to hit your apex, all while cherries are screaming and it was slick out to boot. Sure, I took out a cone or two and nearly put my cruiser in a snowbank … but nearly is better than totally. Lots of fun, gaining insight into everday police work, and hopefully gaining a little bit of respect – personally and professionally – from the officers in the process.

Road trippin’: Anyone got any good road-trip tips? I take off Friday for Gulf Shores, Ala. According to Google Maps it’s a 21-hour trip. Holy balls. I’m also going to be driving down with Dre’s family so wish me luck, toss me a buck or some advice.

Cheers and chandeliers.

here lies david st. hubbins; and why not.

Steven — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 04:55:25 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/swf/l.swf?video_id=fPxYdObyJ2A&rel=1&eurl=&iurl=http%3A//i.ytimg.com/vi/fPxYdObyJ2A/default.jpg&t=OEgsToPDskKocXr7xm-YgB0r2BPo7Qtg&gt=&param=&lt=&/param=&border=0%22

For some reason I am obsessed with this song

Steven — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 15:30:09 +0000

Girl you have no faith in medicine
Oh girl you have no faith in medicine
Acetaminophen you see the medicine oh girl

Is there a way to find the cure for this implanted in a pill
It’s just the name upon the bottle, which determines if it will
Is the problem you’re allergic to a well familiar name?
Do you have a problem with this one if the results are the same?

Acetaminophen you see the medicine
Oh girl you have no faith in medicine x2
Acetaminophen you see the medicine oh girl
[Bridge]

But girl you have no faith in medicine
Acetaminophen you see the medicine oh girl

Well strip the bark right off a tree and just hand it this way
Don’t even need a drink of water to make the headache go away
Give me a sugar pill and watch me just rattle down the street

Acetaminophen you see the medicine
Oh girl you have no faith in medicine x2
Oh girl x4

Good bye Blue Sunday

Steven — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 17:12:03 +0000

Could there be a repeal of Minnesota’s Blue Laws?

The fact that you can only buy 3.2 booze on Sundays baffled me (as a lifelong Wisconsinite) when I moved more nigh three years ago. And now there’s allegedy bi-partisan support of the repeal of the law.

I’ve only really felt the need to crack a Sunday brew during Packer games. And God Bless the Legislature if they go through with this. That means – gasp – pushers can sell (oh no!) 4.2 Miller Lite on Sunday. Oh, and as the law stands, there’s no car sales on Sunday. I consider myself a believer in God. However, I don’t believe God would car if I bought a corolla on sabbath. Go figure.

List of obsolete skills (courtesy of today’s MinnPost)

Steven — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 16:54:55 +0000

http://obsoleteskills.com/Skills/Skills

They call me weird beard …

Steven — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 00:21:22 +0000

I recently grew a beard. It’s gone down. R.I.P. beard.mug12.jpg

Mountaintop (working lyrics)

Steven — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 01:00:04 +0000

Acoustic tune, I believe. About getting engaged, and shit.

A mile high
I pulled a thick beard out of thin air
Travelin’ through tunnels
Borne through mountain passes
Under concrete trees
And past rifle caches
Snow skips off a mountaintop
And blue air enters my lungs
I recall followin’ the footpath
To the fog on Sapphire Point
Stepping towards stardom
With the only other breather around
I saw her eyes in an ornate picture frame
Knowin’ soon it’ll never be the same
Down on a knee
I found your feet
With a ring on your finger
I thought ‘She’s quite a sing-ger.’
On the way down
All the signs pointed sideways
Before I could fall, I tripped
And put the car in the ditch
Seeing the look on your lips
Shake as the tires slipped
Back on the road
My hands at 10 n’ 2
The sun takes a seat
Behind the fog
Down on a knee
I found your feet
With a ring on your finger
I thought ‘She’s quite a sing-ger.’