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DudeAsInCool

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  1. Our President, busy working in the Oval Office...
  2. Allen & Manoo - The Good Reason - BNO Records (Deep House Electronica)
  3. Each month Rolling Stone highlights new videos. I particularly liked Neil Young's "Leave the Driving." You can download the following videos here: http://www.rollingstone.com/videos?pageid=...&pageregion=nav So Cold - Breaking Benjamin Vibrate - Petey Pablo I Don't Wanna Be - Gavin DeGraw Leave the Driving - Neil Young Walk Idiot Walk - The Hives Mass Destruction - Faithless She Will Be Loved (Live) - Maroon 5 Barracuda (Live in Seattle) - Heart Everything (Live) - Alanis Morissette Most Popular Videos 1 Vindicated - Dashboard Confessional 2 Confessions Part II - Usher 3 The Reason - Hoobastank 4 Everybody's Fool - Evanescence 5 How Come - D12 6 Turn Me On (Re-Edit) - Kevin Lyttle 7 Welcome Back - Mase 8 Move Ya Body - Nina Sky 9 Shut Up - Black Eyed Peas 10 She Will Be Loved (Live) - Maroon 5
  4. Here is Pitchfork's review - high marks: Loretta Lynn Van Lear Rose [interscope; 2004] Rating: 9.3 Like so many honky-tonk singers of her own and previous generations, Loretta Lynn was always a little country-come-to-town, a rural-raised girl in the big city whose pre-fame struggles lent her music grit and authenticity. Born in a Kentucky mining town called Butcher Hollow, a teenage bride and a mother several times over before she even arrived in Nashville, Lynn sang with a hill-country accent (notably different from typical Music Row stars) and with the unchecked candor of her toughening experiences. In this smoothly defiant voice, she sang of her man's and her own cheating ways, as well as the hardships of motherhood, wifehood, and celebrity as if each were one and the same-- and they probably were. In Nashville, she was a rough in the diamond: Her hard-edged songs like "Fist City" and "Rated X" were backed by pristine countrypolitan production-- mostly courtesy of Owen Bradley-- which helped sell her to a wide audience. At the same time, the disparity between her voice and her accompaniment created a fascinating rural/urban friction that never let listeners forget that she was less a superstar than a small-town girl at heart. Crucial to her image and her success, the depth of Lynn's noncelebrity is perhaps why her old material still bristles and burrs even today. On her new album, Van Lear Rose, producer and admirer Jack White (who dedicated White Blood Cells to Lynn in 2001) immediately erases that friction with a rawer, in-one-take live sound that adds texture to her songs without overpowering her voice. White's intention isn't to update or revise Lynn's music or her persona, but simply to recast her voice in a new setting, to make her sound like she's right back in Butcher Hollow. To this end, White has corralled a backing band that consists not of Nashville veterans, but of young 'uns from the decidedly non-rural locales of Detroit and Cincinnati. Dubbed the Do Whaters by Lynn ("I named them that because they got in there and did whatever we needed them to!" she explains in the liner notes), the group consists of The Greenhornes' rhythm section Jack Lawrence and Patrick Keeler, with Blanche's Dave Feeny adding elegant pedal steel and slide guitar flourishes. Together, they prove a dynamic backing band, able to set a warm country atmosphere but not afraid to make some rock noise. And they do just that on the first single, "Portland, Oregon". Lynn and White exchange verses about sloe gin fizzes and drunk lovin', recalling her adultery duets with Conway Twitty but with more of a boisterous sound, courtesy of White's Zep blues riffs. On "Mrs. Leroy Brown", the band bang out a bar-stormer to match Lynn's adventures riding around town in a pink limousine. Even bigger than that limo, though, is the unmistakable smile on her face as she disses her man and his floozy: "I just drawed all your money out of the bank today/ Honey, you don't have no mo'." If Van Lear Rose recasts Lynn's sound, it also revisits the subject matter of her earlier hits, following her stories through to their sometimes dire ends in songs like "Women's Prison" and "Family Tree". But on the album's most memorable songs, Lynn tells her own story, singing in no other voice but her own, and it still soars with surprising grace and with all the sass and intimacy of her younger self. Most ofVan Lear Rose is autobiographical, relating her life in both Butcher Hollow and Nashville with evocative detail and steady candor. The title track, for example, recalls her father's stories about her mother and "how her beauty ran deep down to her soul." Her voice trembles with a tender, nostalgic wistfulness, especially when she remembers how the miners teased her dad: "You're dreamin', boy, she'll never look your way/ You'll never ever hold the Van Lear Rose." After the spoken-word reminiscence "Little Red Shoes" and the devastating widow's lament "Miss Being Mrs.", Van Lear Rose ends with "Story of My Life", which is exactly what its title purports. The coal miner's daughter happily relates the events of her life-- early marriage, motherhood, stardom-- leading up to the present, but instead of dwelling on hardship and tragedy, she sounds satisfied, even joyful. It's perhaps a testament to her modesty that she winds up this autobiography in less than three minutes, but by song's end, her contentment feels undeniably hard-won and admirable: "I have to say that I've been blessed/ Not bad for a country girl, I guess." Lynn's triumphant return on Van Lear Rose isn't exactly unprecedented: Ten years ago, Johnny Cash won a younger audience with the Rick Rubin-produced American Recordings, and George Jones, Merle Haggard, Dolly Parton, and Willie Nelson have all released strong albums late in their careers. Nor is it surprising that fans would flock to such sturdy music, that critics would celebrate such a comeback or pursue such a great story. But the rating above does not reflect critical sentiment as much as it does critical amazement: Van Lear Rose is remarkably bold, celebratory and honest. It's a homecoming for a small-town musician gifted with poise, humor and compassion, but at its very heart, it's happy to be just a kick-ass country record. -Stephen Deusner, April 30th, 2004 http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/record-revie...lear-rose.shtml undefined undefined
  5. After issuing the stellar We Got the Movement EP in 1999, which copped everyone from Fugazi to Sonic Youth in a gruff morass of youthful ingenuity, the group followed with an equally impressive debut full-length, Let's War, securing their status as promising post-punk debutantes....Then came a four-year hiatus, as the group's members done and went got some college. That's right: The Plastic Constellations' prodigious early yield was entirely the work of suburban high-schoolers. In an age rife with quixotic minstrels-- the bohemian equivalent of varsity football stars-- and lead guitarists with three-CD vocabularies, The Plastic Constellations were refined beyond their years. What's more, Let's War and We Got the Movement contained the kind of unbridled enthusiasm that usually trumps technical prowess, lyrical substance, and songwriting inventiveness in teenagers' judgments of the next local emo band. Alas, if only the patrons of Hopkins, Minnesota's underground music scene knew how lucky they were. Mazatlan, the group's emergent comeback, is full of universal qualities, but perhaps most importantly, it transports the listener back to the cozy early days of music fandom, when finding a record you loved was an episodic event, and one or two songs could occupy an entire afternoon. -Sam Ubl, June 29th, 2004 You can read the full review at Pitchfork: http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/record-revie.../mazatlan.shtml
  6. Pitchforkmedia.com gave this new indie rock opera collection almost a ten, so something must be good on it: Though they made their name on last year's raucous stomper Gallowsbird's Bark, nothing on that album hinted at the pure, riveting ambition of The Fiery Furnaces' second album. Blueberry Boat is, without question, one of indie rock's most ambitious statements in years: A sprawling, 76-minute behemoth reeling with labyrinthine pop songs, barnburning rockers and haunted balladry-- often all within the span of just a few minutes. The Fiery Furnaces emerge here as true pop auteurs, acknowledging the influence of The Who's rock suites, and integrating a half-dozen seemingly separate ideas into each track in ways that make every piece feel epic. Unequivocally, one of the year's best releases. You can read the full review here: http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/record-revie...erry-boat.shtml
  7. I thougth this was interesting enough to provide the full interview. What are your thoughts? **** Byrd vs. Bush Sen. Robert Byrd blasts fellow senators for believing "the garbage that was being spewed out by the administration" on Iraq, and thanks the airline passengers who "died to save this Capitol, my life and my staff." By Mary Jacoby July 24, 2004 | When Sen. Robert Byrd entered Congress, Harry Truman was ending his presidency and America was grappling with the Cold War. Over the next 52 years, the West Virginia Democrat would participate in the great national security debates of the 20th century, from the Vietnam War to the Cuban missile crisis to the Persian Gulf War. And yet Byrd, a former Senate majority leader, says no president has troubled him as much as President Bush has in his march to invade Iraq. A prominent critic of the Iraq war, Byrd was one of 21 Democratic senators who voted against the October 2002 resolution that authorized the use force to topple Saddam Hussein. But his critique of the White House goes beyond national security to what he considers Bush's contempt for the constitutional balance of powers and his administration's excessive devotion to secrecy. Of the 11 presidents he has served with, Byrd gives Bush the lowest grade -- lower, even, than for President Nixon, who resigned under the threat of impeachment. His dismay with Bush, whom he disdains as a "child of wealth and privilege" who "did not pay his dues" and is thus ill-prepared to lead the world's most powerful country, prompted Byrd to write a new book: "Losing America: Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency." Commanding on the Senate floor, in person Byrd is soft-spoken and charming, almost cuddly, one-on-one. And while he calls Bush arrogant, he can sometimes be equally imperious, especially when dealing with high officials of the executive branch. As a young reporter for the congressional newspaper Roll Call, I interviewed Byrd in 1993 in his grand office suite off the Senate floor. (He then chaired the Senate Appropriations Committee.) An aide interrupted to say that Vice President Al Gore was calling. Byrd waved off the aide and continued his leisurely interview with me about the multivolume history of the Senate he had recently published. After bidding me a gracious goodbye, he took the vice president's call. An amateur scholar of the ancient Roman Senate and its influence on the framers of the Constitution, Byrd has always been fiercely protective of Congress' constitutional role as a coequal branch of government. In 1993, he delivered a compelling but somewhat eccentric series of 14 speeches linking the fall of the Roman Empire to a then current debate over the "line-item veto," a deficit-fighting tool that was intended to allow presidents to strike individual "pork-barrel" projects from congressionally written spending bills. Byrd argued that such power would allow the executive to blackmail Congress. Although he was unable to block the politically popular line-item-veto law, the courts would later declare it an unconstitutional breach of the separation of powers. A child of the Depression who grew up in West Virginia's hardscrabble coal-mining country, Byrd's belief in the power of government to improve lives has put him at odds with the modern Republican Party. But while he opposed President Reagan's 1981 tax-cutting package, he says that, unlike Bush, Reagan won fair and square because he allowed full debate, hearings and amendments. Bush, by contrast, rammed through his 2001 tax cuts by having Republican congressional leaders manipulate legislative rules and stiff-arm lawmakers who wanted to offer amendments and by manipulating the legislative rules. The result, Byrd says in his book, is that Bush pushed through a tax bill with disastrous fiscal consequences for the country -- acting as if he'd been elected with a resounding mandate instead of by an evenly and acrimoniously divided public. At 87, Byrd is still vigorous, proudly noting that he has attended more than 17,000 roll call votes in his career, though he uses a cane and seems increasingly frail. He discussed his new book with Salon in his Capitol office on Wednesday. In your book, you write that Bush doesn't have the character to run the country, or at least that's the impression I drew. Can you explain? I'm thinking about the word "character." I would not use that word; it can mean different things. I would say that he wasn't prepared to be president. I would say that he has hurt this country's image, or our character -- I will use the word in this context -- as a nation. Are we honest? Do we use information from the government to the people in a way that twists it differently from reality? He has hurt this nation's character. I know that he is appealing to various religious groups. That's all right. But the character of this country is not what it was when this administration came to office. Why do I say that? It has misused information. It has acted secretively, time and time again. The White House has tried to operate, and has operated, in a very secretive way. That hurts the character of the country. And this administration, it seems to me, tries to intimidate anybody who criticizes it. I have particularly taken notice of the Senate: It is cowed. How effective do you believe the Senate Democratic leadership has been in confronting the Bush administration? It has tried. But I don't think that we can be in session three days a week and be very effective in confronting the administration, as we can be and as we ought to be in this branch of government. We don't ask enough questions. We didn't in the run-up to the war. The Senate was silent. And having come to the Senate when I did, and having seen and heard and worked with the type of senators who were here, when I compare that in my own mind with our virtual cowardice about the war, the buildup to it, I'm very disappointed. I'm chagrined. Be more confrontational? Or do Democratic senators, like lawmakers in both parties and chambers, not want to give up their comfortable three-day workweeks? They have rules in the Senate, and they could ask more questions. Why don't they? I wonder myself. In respect to the greatest question that has come before this Senate in my lifetime -- or at least during my career, which extends over a half century -- we failed. You're talking about the war? The war, yes. We failed. We relegated ourselves to the sidelines. How many times? How many times did I hear the words [from other senators, privately], "Let's get this thing behind us. Let's talk about something else. It would be better for us in the election if we changed the subject." This "thing" being the war resolution? The war resolution, yes. We had our little meetings. We talked about those things very little in the conferences. When it came to the run-up to the war in the last few days, the silence was deadening. Why? [Democratic] senators were afraid. Those who were running [for reelection] didn't want to be charged with being unpatriotic -- and they would be. They believed the garbage that was being spewed out by the administration. They believed that Hussein constituted an immediate threat. They were told that there were drones that could be sent over here and used to destroy human life. It was scary, if it were really true. But then what does it say about the judgment of both John Kerry and John Edwards that they voted for the war? It says the information on which they based their judgment was false. That's what it says to me. And [the information] has since been shown to be false. Hussein couldn't get a plane off the ground during the war. But shouldn't they have questioned more vigorously the administration's rationale for the war? Well, I have no reason to doubt that they did question it. In our conferences, I don't remember any senator who did not question to some degree -- but [it was] not enough. As far as I was concerned, I didn't believe it, and said so at the time. But this administration misled senators and House members. I think the stories this administration told -- I remember the vice president, I believe it was on Aug. 26, 2002, when he spoke before the VFW [Veterans of Foreign Wars] national convention, said something like, "Simply stated there is no doubt that Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." That's the vice president of the United States, and he's saying, "There is no doubt that Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." And [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld said, "We know where they are. They're outside Baghdad, in the north, in the east, in the west." Now, that's what I'm sure John Kerry and all the other senators who voted that way [based] their decisions on. Given that the rationale for war was predicated on lies or untruths, if there had been a Democratic-led House, do you think President Bush would have been impeached? After all, the House impeached President Clinton, even though his conduct had no bearing on national security. I kind of doubt it. This is not to say that he might not still be impeached. Things are coming to light now that people need to know. Why do you doubt it? Everything was caught up in Sept. 11. That has an impact on members of Congress, as it did with everybody else. We immediately went to war, and rightly so, in Afghanistan because we were attacked. Any president in that situation would have acted as Bush did. The country was almost 100 percent behind Bush when he went in to attack the Taliban. There wasn't any chance of Bush's being impeached that early [even if Democrats had run the House]. You mentioned Sept. 11, 2001. You were in your office here in the Capitol that morning. You describe in the book your feeling of being a captain asked to abandon his ship. Can you tell me more about how you felt, knowing that this beautiful building where you've spent your professional life, which has such symbolic resonance for the world, was possibly going to be destroyed in minutes? I couldn't believe that this majestic edifice was about to be bombed. And the policeman was saying 15 minutes, 10 minutes, eight minutes, whatever. Get out of here! I wanted to stay with the ship. I couldn't believe that I had to get out of this building. But members of my staff insisted that I go. This was a terrible feeling. And so I found my way outside the building, but the staff and policemen were saying, "Go farther." Well, the people who voted on that plane [united Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania] to take things into their own hands, knowing that they were doomed, saved our lives. They saved my life; they saved the lives of many of my staff that day. This building was the target. I didn't get far enough away from it to avoid a direct hit by that kind of missile, a plane loaded with aviation fuel. We're living in eerie times. Do you believe the Capitol was the intended target that day? I do. In my mind's eye, I thank those people who died to save this Capitol, my life and my staff. It is a feeling that still haunts me whenever I think about it. But instead of attacking al-Qaida, the administration turned its energies, after Afghanistan, to Iraq. You said this is the "most arrogant" administration you've ever seen, one that treats the public contemptuously by being secretive, or untruthful, about its motives. Are you saying it is worse than the Nixon administration? Of course it is. And it has some carryovers from the Nixon administration who are right smack in the middle of the arrogance. Who are they? Well, the vice president was part of the Nixon administration. Mr. [Paul] O'Neill, the former treasury secretary, was part of the Nixon administration. Mr. [Paul] Wolfowitz [deputy secretary of defense] was part of the Nixon administration. I'm sure you've read "Bush at War" by Bob Woodward. Here is a quote by Bush in the book that I want to read to you. [byrd picks up a notecard with the quote written on it and speaks as if he were Bush.] "I'm the commander. See? I don't need to explain. I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation." There's your arrogance supreme. Why did you write the book? The first three words of the preamble to the Constitution answer that question. "We the people." It's the people's Constitution. It's the people's government. This administration came to power without the president's having received a majority of the popular vote. He had no mandate. His administration claims a mandate. The people are being misled by this administration. They're being ... well, "cheated" is a pretty strong word, but in some respects, they are being cheated. When Bush came into office, he had a $3.5 trillion surplus. But what happened to that surplus? He recommended in his first year, right off, that more than $2 trillion go out of this government in tax [cuts] in the first 10 years. And the administration, working with Republicans in Congress, devised the approach of back-loading most of the revenue losses that would come from these tax cuts. That was being dishonest. It's another instance of saying, "Watch my left hand, don't watch my right." We'll put this back over here so it won't be noticed immediately. That was wrong. In other words, a train wreck will happen when Mr. Bush is out of office, not while he's in. That's why I wrote this book. The people are being misled by this administration. salon.com http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/07/...byrd/index.html
  8. Man Found Dead on Hospital Lounge Couch Saturday, July 24, 2004 MIDDLEBURG HEIGHTS, Ohio — A man was found dead on a couch in a hospital lounge, and a nurse told police that nobody had checked on him for at least 17 hours because he appeared to be asleep. "It's just unbelievable," his wife, Robin Johnson, said Friday. "Somebody out at the hospital didn't notice that a man was laying there for such a long period of time and not moving? Why didn't anybody check? http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,126913,00.html
  9. PLAYLIST The Best Rapper No One Knows By KELEFA SANNEH Published: July 25, 2004 DEVIN THE DUDE Unbeknownst to just about everyone, this Houston rapper recently released one of the summer's best and breeziest albums, "To tha X-treme" (Rap-A-Lot). In a world that knew how to appreciate a self-deprecating hip-hop stoner equipped with a sharp wit, woozy beats and a flow that puts the daze in lackadaisical — in that gentle world, the release of a new Devin album would be cause for a feeding frenzy at the record shops. Unfortunately, Devin remains a cult hero, but he's a reliable one: on the new album, he fends off suspicious girlfriends ("Who? When? Why?" he stonewalls) and suspicious cops ("I'm just sippin' coffee," he croons) without breaking a sweat. And then there's "Briarpatch," a surreal hip-hop version of a Bre'r Rabbit tale: as nursery school keyboards tinkle in the background, he mumbles, "You can carve me/ Tie me up and starve me/ Put me on the grill, still nothing can harm me/ Like the briarpatch." THE BRONX This Los Angeles band knows that punk rockers no longer seem quite as intimidating as they once did — compared to rappers, punks seem positively quaint. So in "They Will Kill Us All (Without Mercy)," the great new video directed by Mike Piscitelli, a punk-rock song gets a hip-hop makeover. A black man in a big coat and a do-rag swaggers through Los Angeles streets, lip-synching the snarled words and occasionally pushing passers-by out of the way. It's a sophisticated commentary on race and music, as well as an audacious new form of blackface. Find it at www.ferretstyle.com/withoutmercy, and for the full effect, watch it twice — the first time with the sound turned off. CHRISTINA MILIAN This Cuban-American singer and actress (she recently starred in "Love Don't Cost a Thing") has already scored hits overseas, and she has a breakthrough American hit with "Dip It Low," one of the summer's most popular songs. But Ms. Milian's new album, "It's About Time" (Island Def Jam), includes an even better song, "I Need More," on which she breathes a serpentine melody over a beat that consists of jagged snippets: some guitar chugging, a few handclaps, a couple of strategically placed beeps and, in the chorus, an unexpected nose-diving bass line. Ms. Milian's consonants snap as hard as the beat, and she spits out her kiss-off line — "It'll be a cold day in hell before you see your girl shed another tear, boy you better hear me" — so fast you almost miss it. KILLSWITCH ENGAGE This brawny Massachusetts metal band recently released "The End of Heartache" (Roadrunner/Island Def Jam), with the group's new singer, Howard Jones. The staticky guitar riffs and angular rhythms hint at hard-swinging syncopation beneath the screaming chaos, and Mr. Jones knows when to switch off his guttural roar and unleash great, sobbing melody, vowing, "It won't be long, we'll meet again." Perhaps without meaning to, this seemingly fearsome band has made one of the year's best emo albums. TRAX RECORDS This pioneering Chicago house label (recently reborn as Casablanca Trax) has been flooding the market with reissues this summer, starting with an invaluable (but messy) three-disc compilation, "Trax Records: The 20th Anniversary Collection," which brings together many of the mid- and late-1980's singles that gave birth to modern dance music. Classics like Adonis's "No Way Back" and Mr. Fingers' "Washing Machine" sound as startling and as exuberant as ever, distilling all the joy of disco into stark drum-machine beats. A dreamier, more seductive compilation, "Acid Classics," focuses on the squelchy subgenre known as acid house, starting with Phuture's jaw-dropping 12-minute fantasia "Acid Trax," from 1987 — it still sounds decades ahead of the 1990's British rave scene it inspired. A third compilation, "Queer Trax," celebrates the culture that created and sustained this revolutionary music: it evokes a sweaty night out at a black and Latino gay nightclub in the late 1980's. NELLY At www.nelly.net, you can hear his incendiary new single, "Flap Your Wings," which has a brain-rattling Neptunes beat and — best of all — no tune whatsoever. Nelly barks out dance commands ("Drop down and get your eagle on, girl"), the Neptunes supply some ascending chromatic scales, then the beat takes over again. M.I.A. A Sri Lanka-raised, London-based rapper with a pair of devastating dancehall-influenced singles to her credit. Her debut, "Galang" (hear it at www.miauk.com), had a monstrous mechanical beat topped with playful party chants and a magnificent surprise — some wordless singing — near the end. On her new single, "Sunshowers" (watch the video at www.xlrecordings.com), she updates the avant-disco classic by adding some slick, tongue-twisting rhymes and a frenzied beat. XL Records plans to release her debut album in January, which seems like a long time to wait. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/25/arts/music/25PLAY.html
  10. This one looks kind of interesting: 'Harold and Kumar': A Dumb Stoner Comedy for a New American Century By A.O. SCOTT Published: July 25, 2004 THE plot of "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle," succinctly summarized in the movie's title, consists of an amusing, anarchic grab-bag of road-picture mishaps and low-comedy gags. Many of the comic elements are predictable (dumb stoners doing dumb, stoned things, sexual come-ons and gross-outs of various kinds) while others are less so, like the part when Neil Patrick Harris, playing himself, starts licking the headrests on a Honda. But a clever bait-and-switch early in the film signals its sly subversive intentions. Its director is Danny Leiner, who made "Dude, Where's My Car?," and he seems at first to pick up more or less where that movie, or any of its illustrious predecessors going back to"Porky's," left off. An ex-frat boy type, with a roomy office in a New York high-rise, is finishing up his work week. His pal, immediately recognizable as the wilder half of a classic buddy-movie pair, shows up proposing a fun-filled weekend of babes, booze and bong hits. But what about that big report due on Monday? No problem: just dump it on the Korean guy in the far cubicle. Our hero is free to pursue the carefree debauchery that is his birthright. Except, of course, that the pale-skinned frat boy type is not the hero at all. He and his friend (who happen to be played by the screenwriters, Hayden Schlossberg and Jon Hurwitz) are walk-on doofuses who pretty much walk out of the movie, leaving it in the hands of that unassuming Korean guy, Harold. He turns out to be the more uptight half of a classic buddy-movie pair — the wilder half is his roommate, a South Asian former pre-med named Kumar — intent on claiming their own share of carefree debauchery. In the process, they pretty much revolutionize the slacker-stoner-comedy genre. Well, perhaps that's a bit grandiose, given that what Harold and Kumar really want to do, after a few Friday night tokes, is satisfy a powerful case of the munchies, an urge that leads them deep into the wilds of New Jersey and lands them in all kinds of trouble. But the movie's apparently simple shifts of racial and generational emphasis — replacing the traditional white (or, in recent variants, black) teenagers or undergraduates with Asian-Americans in their post-college years — at once upend the conventions of youth-oriented goofball comedy and revitalize them. "Harold and Kumar" is as delightfully stupid as "Friday" or "Road Trip" or "Wet Hot American Summer," but it is also one of the few recent comedies that persuasively, and intelligently, engage the social realities of contemporary multicultural America. Read the full review here: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/25/movies/25SCOT.html
  11. DudeAsInCool

    Febe Dobson

    We're Gonna Party Like It's 1986 By JEFFREY ROTTER Published: July 25, 2004 The beginning of "Don't Go (Girls and Boys)," the latest video from the Canadian singer-songwriter Fefe Dobson, viewers might ask themselves what decade it is. As the camera breezes along West 23rd Street, borne aloft on a popping synth-drum beat, it enters an apartment, where Ms. Dobson is perched on a bed with a young man. The setting is a Big 80's tableau — Ms. Dobson dons a pair of red new wave sunglasses, sneers like Adam Ant and jerks her head to the beat as if she's working herself up to an old-fashioned flashdance. Her hair is a neatly disheveled wig reminiscent of Joan Jett's "I Love Rock and Roll" shag. Then the anachronisms creep in — Ms. Dobson removes a pair of earbuds and passes her MP3 player to her boyfriend. No, this is not 1986. In fact, 1986 was the year Ms. Dobson was born. Seventeen years later, the singer released an eponymous album and cast her lot with other sweetly irate rock acts like Avril Lavigne and Lillix. On her latest single, Ms. Dobson has ditched the guitars and downloaded a synthesizer melody straight out of the brain of the robotic pop innovator Gary Numan (it appears that she's borrowed parts of his wardrobe as well). The video for "Don't Go" was directed by Rainbows & Vampires, a trio of Los Angeles video artists who received recognition for creating Yoko Ono's inventive "Walking on Thin Ice" last year — a surprisingly moving black-and-white cartoon about a girl and a rabbit. The threesome's visual style balances live action with animated text and floating collage elements. As the directors toggle between cartoon and reality in "Don't Go," Rainbows & Vampires gives a contemporary spin to the punk, new wave and early hip-hop aesthetics of the 80's. You can read the rest of the video critique here in the NYTimes: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/25/arts/tel...ion/25ROTT.html
  12. Here's an update: Web Phone Service May Have It All, Except Many Users By KEN BELSON Published: July 25, 2004 TWO years ago, Allen Tsong had just about had enough. Tired of paying $50 a month for a local phone line fromVerizon that he rarely used, he canceled the service and ordered a voice-over-Internet phone from Vonage, a start-up that entered the market two years ago. He has never looked back. To start his service, Mr. Tsong, who lives in Brooklyn, attached an ordinary phone to a paperback-sized adapter that can send his calls over high-speed Internet connections. The biggest draw was the price: Mr. Tsong spends $15 a month for 500 minutes of calls anywhere in the United States or Canada, and speaks to family and colleagues in China for pennies a minute. "Why shell out 40 to 50 bucks a month for a regular phone line?'' he asked, adding that he had installed another Internet phone in his Brooklyn office. "At first, my wife was skeptical, but as long as she can pick it up and get a dial tone, she'll use it." Mr. Tsong enjoys many of its other features, too. He can check voice mail on the Web, keep his number when he travels and forward calls to a cellphone or other line. In moving to the new phones, Mr. Tsong has joined a growing band of residential and business customers who want to free themselves from an old telecommunications order often marked by high taxes and lukewarm customer service - an old order that crumbled a bit more last week when AT&T announced that it was easing out of the traditional consumer phone business. And Verizon, the biggest of the Baby Bells, said that it would roll out Internet service nationally, a recognition that its traditional network is fast being eclipsed. Once the province of techno-nerds, the new phones are going mainstream as a variety of companies, from start-ups like Vonage to more traditional companies, like the Bells andCablevision, introduce services. These companies can charge less for Internet phone services because the calls, sent as data packets, typically avoid the switching fees that make up the bulk of the cost of an ordinary call. The flood of new offerings, though, has made it harder for consumers to distinguish between core needs, like price and voice quality, and all of the bells and whistles. But with a bit of searching and skepticism, you can cut your bill in half without sacrificing much of the reliability and quality of traditional phones. First things first: to use a voice-over-Internet phone, you need a broadband connection, which typically costs $25 to $50 a month. That sounds like a lot, until you consider that you also get a reliable Internet connection that is 25 times as fast as dial-up service. Most cable and phone companies now sell broadband connections, but phone companies often require you to keep a regular line to get a high-speed Internet line. That makes an Internet phone superfluous, unless you want two lines. Some companies, like Qwest, offer stand-alone broadband connections for $49.99 a month; others charge less for broadband lines if you keep your phone line. Companies like Time Warner Cable and Cablevision also offer high-speed data lines and voice-over-Internet phones with their programming, allowing consumers to bundle the three services at a reduced price. Once a broadband line is in place, you are ready to compare Internet phone plans. As Mr. Tsong knows, price is the big selling point. Most providers offer scaled plans: the more minutes, the higher the monthly fee. Some, like CallVantage from AT&T, offer one price - $34.99, but with introductory specials - for unlimited domestic minutes, with no extra taxes. Dialing internationally costs more because carriers have to pay their overseas counterparts to connect the calls. But rates are still lower than for ordinary long-distance service. In a Vonage plan, a call to London costs 3 cents a minute; Tokyo costs a penny more. One way to start comparing prices is to visit sites that list links to various voice-over-Internet providers. The sites include www.easycall.net/broadband-phone.shtml and www.cryptosavvy.com/voice_over_internet_protocol.htm. If cost were the only factor, more consumers would have ditched their old phones already. Instead, only 300,000 or so have signed up, because most consumers remain hesitant about the quality of Internet calls. As little as a year ago, those fears were valid. Many consumers, including Mr. Tsong, complained about hiccups in their conversations; these can occur when calls, as they are broken into packets of data, are momentarily lost while traveling over the Internet. Sometimes, calls go dead. tter software and Internet connections have reduced these problems, but the same axiom holds: Internet calls are only as good as the lines that connect them. If your broadband connection is reliable, the quality of your calls should be, too. There is an ancillary concern: the quality of the network your provider uses to connect the call. Cable companies and long-distance companies like AT&T and Covad, a national broadband service provider, run their own networks, so voice calls are less likely to break up. By comparison, Vonage uses five different networks to connect its calls, raising the likelihood of interruptions. Still, the gaps among various Internet providers are narrowing, to the point that fewer and fewer consumers can detect the difference between traditional and Internet phone service. "Consumers shouldn't believe the reports that the quality isn't as good as plain old telephone service," said Ford Cavallari, senior vice president of the broadband and media practice at Adventis, a telecommunications consultant in Boston. Mr. Cavallari, who uses an Internet phone, is smitten with the features. Like most other users, he was able to keep his old number or choose a new area code from anywhere in the country. The advantages are clear. When Mr. Cavallari visits San Francisco, he plugs his adapter into a broadband line and gets a dial tone from Boston. Friends calling him on ordinary lines in the Boston area are charged only for a local call, even though he is 3,000 miles away. Like many business travelers, Mr. Cavallari uses a Web site to track every call he makes. He can also listen to his voice mail on the Web, because the calls are stored like any other computer audio file. Like any emerging technology, though, voice-over-Internet has plenty of wrinkles. The biggest concern is losing service if there is a blackout. Some companies sell battery packs to keep modems going. Consumers like Stephen Caccam, a Vonage subscriber in New Canaan, Conn., also complain about the time needed to transfer existing phone numbers to new Internet providers. The process should take a few hours, but Mr. Caccam spent weeks trying to sort it out. In the interim, Vonage gave him a temporary number, but not all his friends and relatives knew about it. AND some services do not allow you to send faxes with a voice-over-Internet line. That can be particularly inconvenient for small businesses. Perhaps the most hazardous variable is the inability of emergency services to automatically track callers who dial 911. When callers sign up for a phone plan, they can register their location with emergency services. Lawmakers are trying to hammer out regulations for these and other issues, and could eventually start taxing Internet lines like traditional phones. Do not expect higher prices anytime soon, though. Lawmakers are unlikely to act before next year. And that means voice-over-Internet phones, while still not a perfect substitute for plain old phone lines, remain a good deal for many consumers. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/25/business...ml?pagewanted=2
  13. Gotta link to their website, the album, or some cover tunes, or that pic of Umma?
  14. Yep, happy to report that our great city council has there priorities straight. Silly string, that festive plastic goo, is making a mess at our city's great celebrations and making it difficult for our sewer rats! *** L.A. considers banning silly string Associated Press Jul. 23, 2004 09:33 AM LOS ANGELES - Silly string's days may be numbered in Los Angeles. The City Council is set to consider an ordinance Friday that would ban the substance from use in public places. One councilman says banning silly string is needed to clean up the streets of Hollywood and other areas where it is often used during Halloween and New Year's parties. He says the aerosol-powered spray string can clog sewers. http://www.azcentral.com/offbeat/articles/...tring23-ON.html
  15. BS15 was one of our earliest members, and although he hasnt been around here lately, we wish him well Happy Birthday, Man!!! :frog: :frog: :frog: :frog: :frog:
  16. Ah...hmmm - Umman, the American Dude with a Mercedes doesnt miss a thing
  17. That and I dont drive it slower than the speed limit or lurk around to see the sights :)
  18. I bet there are no signs or regulations about Skateboarders on the autobahn 'cause probably no one ever thought to make them. Good for the skateboarder, Im sick of cars t hinking they have the right of way over pedestrians...
  19. Hey - I have a vintage bourgoie mercedes...
  20. One of your fans beat you to the punch: http://www.beatking.com/forums/index.php?s...he+audiopocracy Welcome to Beatking :strumma:
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