Does anyone else think that the US presidential elections are taking too damned long? The more time the democrats have, the more time they’ll have to mess up their campaign. Here’s some thing good from the good folks at onion indirectly about the protracted campaign:
A botellon is an informal gathering of teenagers to drink in public. The concept comes from Spain, where the kids wanted to rebel against bar-prices by organizing massive drinkathons in parks. The largest botellon was held in Madrid with 10,000 participants.
These parties are organizable by word of mouth, and most recently, via social websites such as facebook. The possibility to call up thousands of fellow kids at once is a power only recently in the hands of the kids themselves. A botellon requires no organization: just declare a day and a place. The momentum builds amongst the kids who have no more money left for vacations and openair concerts. The fright and angst among the parents also builds.
Slowly but surely this phenomenon is arriving in Switzerland. First in Geneva, geographically Switzerland’s closest corner to Spain. Then in Lausanne and now in Zurich.
The German-speaking authorities are scrambling to legislate this currently unlegislatable phenomena. The police in Zurich and Basel are even scanning facebook for evidence of Botellon formation in their precious tax-mountains. Oh how I love the thought of my tax-francs paying 25-year-old police officers to cruise facebook! However, drinking in public is not illegal in Europe (illegal public-intoxication would shut Europe down for a few years). Undeterred, the German-speaking (AND certain French-speaking!) authorities still have questions:
Furthermore, the German-language police have stepped in, the “academy”, the “Duden” from Germany, and have launched a task-force to incorporate the word “Botellon” into the German language. Wow. Can’t let any word organically slip past the glaring eyes of the high-paid professors standing guard over their German language!
Its a further beautiful example of the clash of the titans that remains Europe! A few kids way down south of the olive-oil/butter border rebel against the bar-owner mafia by organizing a few drink-ups in the park. They name the fests after the spanish word for “big bottle”. This idea is then accelerated and distributed via high-speed social-networking, which bleeds the phenomenon firstly into France and then into Switzerland! Now the country with problems-light has a “real problem” deserving dire measures such as task-forces (CSI Facebook).
That’s why Switzerland so exciting: its situated exactly on Europe’s olive-oil/butter border. The southern Europeans keep conjuring up new ways to rebel, and the hapless teutonic authorities are constantly having to reinvent themselves to counterract problems which, in any other country, wouldn’t be considered problems.
Where were all the task-forces during the European Cup?
I’ve made my first tweet. Aren’t we excited?
I’ve stopped smoking and am experiencing intense nicotine withdrawal: my stomach is wrecked, evening headaches, but, i’m sleeping VERY WELL. It is a terrible feeling being owned by tobacco companies.
Although, the way cigarettes worked for me, they helped me concentrate and gave me a reason to get away from the PC at work. Also, smoking helped facilitate informal conversations with coworkers, especially in our factory, because a smoke-break was always away from the production line.
The next installment in the Weezer saga has hit the stores (or did so a while ago). I used to complain about CDs costing about thirty bucks in Switzerland but for this opus I consider that price a real deal.
Weezer have been mainstream now for fourteen years, half of my current lifetime and maybe a third of my personal lifespan. Ha! This album appears to be at first glance a mid-life crisis work. The band obviously has no creative direction from their management, only from themselves. “Themselves”, because the entire band is now largely participating in the songwriting, with a rotating “lead-singer” role and several songs in which the drummer Patrick Wilson plays guitar.
The band-members find themselves keeping their musical and personal boredom at bay with a stick, and with a production budget of one million dollars. I found myself quite ridiculously claiming to myself that, “this work harks back to the beatles and queen”, with respect to the lushious production. Again, one million dollars. With Cuomo now sporadically yielding the creative reins to his bandmates, his “own” tracks have reached large-scale maturity, as he now can sing much more exact and elastically than in the “blue” and “pinkerton” days. Was that a part of the production?
In Rivers Cuomo’s own songs, “Troublemaker”, “(I am) The Greatest Man who ever lived”, and including the song he wrote though which was sung by bassist Scott Shriner “King”, we hear his own haunting as a geek gone big. That the world doesn’t take him seriously as a ex-metal rock’n'roller is a problem we wish we all had. Once a geek, forever a geek, haha.
This is a rare occasion when I encourage the purchase of a CD. The booklet’s notes include per track interviews by the band-members of the other band-members explaining aspects of the songs, and even musicial-oriented details are revealed. The forays into southern rap and R&B are not complete flops and invariably lead into the crystalline melodies which we expect from Cuomo and Crew. Maybe, though, the world would take Cuomo’s rock-n-roll credentials more seriously if he didn’t detour into other genres.
Nonetheless, this a hauntingly refreshing listen. And I’m not a full-fledged weezer acolyte either, the previous album from these guys “Make Believe” is not worth the plastic its printed on. But the colored albums, “Blue”, “Green”, and this one, “Red”, they really are worth the plastic they’re printed on.
Buy it here, via the clickable pic:
I get to read the free daily paper “Blick am Abend” during my hour-long commute. Yesterday on the cover was a picture of some singer (whose identity I won’t reveal, because she doesn’t need this type of news). The singer, sitting passed out in front of a club. Why does that news sell? The readers read that and say to themselves, “say what you want about my(son/daughter/partner/self), but at least he/she/I am/are not stooped in front of a nightclub in a near-life experience, getting photographed”. Schadenfreude is bad manners in private life, and terrible manners in public life. Terrible manners sell, but this daily newspaper was FREE?!
In order to cover your tail when requested or requesting to sing at a karaoke gathering, here are a few tips. I do recognize that watching people botch their performance is most of the entertainment of the entire act of kara-okaying. But to not be on the laughing-stock side of the fence when singing, I recommend the following selection criteria.
It’s been a while. I wanted to write more often. I’ve however been travelling, in order to evade this football madness which has gripped Europe.
It’s a shame, how the European Cup warps friendships into pathetic superficial reports of goals, red-cards, and injuries. But how can I personally care about twenty-two millionaires chasing a leather ball around a field? These are real adults and they should get real jobs.
I’m also amazed at the behaviour of my female friends. At least when club football is on, they don’t flock to the pubs to get neck cramps watching TVs. But during this god-forsaken European Cup, even they feign being interested in this nothingness.
I’ll continue doing lots of overtime hours and travelling every weekend. To hell with football.
Had a great weekend in that worldly city of Berlin. Flew back, and checked out the weather greeting me on the tarmac. To the left, France and the rest of Europe. To the right, Switzerland!
Hi all,
I just went through all of the songs and licensed them using a creative commons license. Do a wiki on that term if your interested in its definition. Before, a musician had to send an actual CD to a copyright organization who (supposedly) registered the work and administered the copyright. That organization is called the RIAA (US), SUISA (CH) or GEMA (DE).
Now, I can simply paste in some HTML code into the product for sale, informing that users may distribute it as I request, which explicitly is “distribute, use for other works, attribute credit where is due, but don’t make any money using derivative works”. If anybody really wants to make some skrillah using a B-Tune then you know where to get in touch with me.
Before I get carried away, I should attribute the majority of these ideas to www.jonathancoulton.com. He came up with pretty much all of the marketing models and sales models used on this site. I wrote him once asking to buy his marketing model off of him. I said, “could you sell me a copy of your website with backoffice?”. He responded, (I paraphrase): “I’d rather be in the business of selling music than selling websites. Feel free to copy whatever you want”. What a decent view of the world. Thank you Jonathan.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.
I hereby christen the first draft of our online music store of our tunes, “b-tunes”.
http://branderson.net/store/downloads
The fact that I programmed almost everything myself*, however, means that broken links, wonky files and general mistakes in the programming are inevitable. I continue to be a beginner at this stuff. Send me an email and I’ll fix whatever it is quicklike.
*Special thanks to Tummyrub, who lent some of his flash programming kung-fu for the in-line music players.
