Star Wars, by someone who hasn’t seen it.
Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn’t seen it) from Joe Nicolosi on Vimeo.
February 8, 2010
This is the Only Level
Clever little game! My stats: finished in 8:19 with 36 deaths. Can you beat that?
February 6, 2010
The More Things Change
“Dear Dumb Dad”
By W. W. McClintock
Ca. 1935
My father, poor misguided gent,
Wasted his life — a life misspent
By working hard and working late
From 6 A.M. till way past eight.
Poor Dad! He’d fume and fret and toil
And burn the blooming midnight oil
For nothing but a little cash
To buy the daily beans and hash.
Poor Dad! He was so mild and meek
He’d work six days in every week
And 14 hours every day
To try to keep the wolf away.
Now father, meaning well, but dumb,
Amassed a rather tidy sum
With which he planned to buy some beers
To brighten his declining years.
Then the NEW DEAL came; simple Dad!
Who worked so hard for all he had
Awoke one morn to find that he
Was now a public enemy.
A louse, a Scrooge, a national cyst!
An economic royalist!
So Dad, industrious but dumb,
Is now the source from which will come
The coin to buy the gasoline
For some poor underdog’s machine.
To bring the more abundant life
To every loafer and his wife.
From Dad will be extracted sums
For radios to ease the hells
Of all the chronic ne’er-do-wells:
For booze, so labor’s little Nell
Can tell the boss to go to hell.
Poor Dad, a faithful, trustful goon,
Was born just 30 years to soon.
A moral lurks along the hall
In all this fancy fol-derol,
And it is this: That any cheat
Who says you ought to work to eat,
Is simply nuts, out of his head–
Sit on your tail or stay in bed,
The government will see, by gad,
That you get yours from chumps like Dad!
Newbie
A friend of mine, a fabric artist… back in the 80s, entered a weaving contest in a fabric arts magazine. She’d never done any weaving. She got some books, borrowed a loom, and decided to weave the fabric to make a seersucker shirt. It quickly turned into a nightmare. The seersucker threads kept breaking as she wove them. It quickly became a huge exercise in frustration, but she kept at it. She thought her difficulty was due to the fact that she was a newbie. Finally, after much struggle and heartache, she finished the weave, made the shirt, and submitted it to the contest. The magazine called a month or so later and said they were stunned by the piece, especially because you “can’t” hand-weave seersucker. She’d won the contest, and a ginormous, gorgeous Swedish loom that consumed most of a small room in her house. This is a perfect example of how you can do things when you’re ignorant of (or ignore) the common belief that you can’t. Sometimes ignorance is a huge advantage.
Via Makeonline, who is having a series on Maker “failures”.
February 5, 2010
Gross
February 3, 2010
Sing Stats
It’s done! After months of work, I’ve finally finished all of the music for my part of Sing 2010- the arranging, recording, charting, and assembling is complete and the show fills an entire legal sized box. I just spent a day and a half assembling all 600 pages of music into musician folders (which takes that long because each card stock page has to be hole punched, taped, or cut so it’ll fold and fit into the folder so the musicians aren’t wrestling with loose pages during the show). I’ve also recorded and mastered the 59 minutes of music track that’ll be underneath the live band on the necessary songs. Here’s a picture of the sheet music stack before I put everything together (iPod for scale):
Stats from this year-
Total pages: 594
Total measures of music: 4224*
Total “Active Frames”: 14268**
Approximate time: 123 minutes
*measured “left to right” without any regard for systems or additional staves. If you played all of the music straight through and counted each measure as it passed, you’d get to 4224 as the show ended.
** this includes every measure that I touched. In other words, if a single measure of music includes the rhythm section, two trumpets, alto sax, tenor sax, and trombone, and each measure has notes, this counts as six “active frames”. It’s a good way to measure how much actual work went into the scores.
If you’re coming to the show this year, expect a great one. I’m incredibly proud of the months of work and prep that have gone into it, and I think it’s going to be the best show ever. It’s not too late to get tickets (though they’re becoming very scarce).
Rehearsals start in 10 days!
February 1, 2010
January 29, 2010
That’s One Smart Bear
My friend Jason Cohen has some good thoughts on entrepreneurship and feeling like a fraud. Hey, that quote at the top looks familiar.
January 28, 2010
Hand it Over
Over the past three decades, it has become routine in the United States for state, local, and federal governments to seize the property of people who were never even charged with, much less convicted of, a crime. Nearly every year, according to Justice Department statistics, the federal government sets new records for asset forfeiture. And under many state laws, the situation is even worse: State officials can seize property without a warrant and need only show “probable cause” that the booty was connected to a drug crime in order to keep it, as opposed to the criminal standard of proof “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Instead of being innocent until proven guilty, owners of seized property all too often have a heavier burden of proof than the government officials who stole their stuff.
Municipalities have come to rely on confiscated property for revenue. Police and prosecutors use forfeiture proceeds to fund not only general operations but junkets, parties, and swank office equipment. A cottage industry has sprung up to offer law enforcement agencies instruction on how to take and keep property more efficiently.
via Reason magazine
January 27, 2010
January 26, 2010
I’m All Thumbs
Q: What’s worse than smashing your thumb with a hammer?
A: Two minutes later, smashing the same thumb in the same spot, with the same hammer.
Ouch
(signed- Jason, the temporarily one-thumbed musician)
January 25, 2010
Big Tent
You want a big tent? It’s fiscal conservatism. The people are overwhelmingly in favor of it.
You offer that, you follow through on it, and you get the Republicans, the moderates, and a sizable chunk of disaffected Democrats.
Everything else is beside the point right now. You lose the fiscal conservative fight now and allow the United States to head deeper into Statism, and it’s over. If the government controls healthcare, it will “[redefine] the relationship between the citizen and the state in a way that hands all the advantages to statists.” You can kiss freedom goodbye in the longterm.
So instead of utterly failing our future generations, leaving them to toil under the yoke of an obscenely powerful government, we should make our stand now. Embrace fiscal conservatism. Leave the rest to federalism.
It’s easy. It’s a no-brainer. It’s even Constitutional. People are sick of the spending, sick of the debt, sick of the bailouts, sick of the handouts, sick of the back room deals, sick of the taxpayer funded bribes, sick of the bureaucrats. They want unyielding, unapologetic fiscal conservatism.
Fiscal conservatism is the big tent.
via Freeman Hunt (great name)
Propping
Just had an utterly fantastic and exhausting weekend building props in the shop. We build a very cool hanging prop, and second prop that was rather clever and neat, and a huge prop on giant wooden wheels. I can’t say what they are, but I will say that they took quite a bit of thought and SketchUp design (not to mention lumber). We finally finished tonight after a solid 14 hour shop day with a crazy 11th hour construction of a jerry-rigged cradle to hold the props securely in the back of the U-Haul trailer. It was crazy! My neighbors HATE me right now for running the table saw at 10pm, but we got it done. If you go to the show this year, come see me at the rail and I’ll give you the backstage tour and show you all of the amazing props.
January 23, 2010
Middle Class
It’s clear that the middle class is the great enemy of collectivism. Only they have the combination of voting power, money, and economic self-interest to see the growth of government as undesirable, and provide effective resistance. They generally view their interactions with government in a negative light – they’ve all spent time in the Department of Motor Vehicles mausoleum, spent hours wrestling with tax forms, or been slapped with a traffic citation they don’t think they deserved. They understand the inefficiency and emotional instability of government, and instinctively resent its intrusion into their lives. A health-care takeover is the best chance collectivists will ever have of persuading the middle class to vote itself into chains… but for the better part of a century, they’ve been able to hear the hammers of the State ringing on the metal of those chains, in the forges of taxation and regulation…
The middle class is frustrated because they understand the basic concept of fiscal responsibility, and they know they – and their children – will be expected to pay for these titanic solutions…
The President says “I have every interest in seeing a unified country solving big problems.” The rest of us have an interest in being allowed to pursue our individual solutions to those problems, according to the liberties our Constitution says belong to us as absolutely as our souls. We can see the wreckage of those “unified” solutions strewn through our past, and littering the rest of the world.
Our frustration is born of intelligence and moral strength, not stubborn blindness.
Understand that my opposition is not to a black president, or to a democratic president, or anything so shallow or stereotypical. It is also decidedly not based in ignorance of the issues, or a backward, “flyover-country” view of America. My opposition is to a worldview that says “we’re from the government and we’re here to take care of you”. It is a visceral, responsible opposition to a historically, demonstrably, provably irresponsible government (of both parties) that long ago relinquished the moral authority to be trusted with the public purse. It is an opposition built on the simple high-school skill of following a descending line on a graph and saying “we can not afford to do this”. It is a responsible, adult, opposition to a comment I saw recently online that said “even if it bankrupts America, it is our moral obligation to provide every person within our borders with health insurance”. Oh really? Balanced your checkbook lately? What’s the state of your credit report? Even if it bankrupts America? I’ve never heard a rational response to the obvious question: what then?
As in all things, moderation going forward is the key. Neither a wholesale conversion to collectivism nor a total abandonment of the less fortunate will solve our fiscal and societal problems- either extreme will make our problems worse. But we must- must- maintain the fiscal health of our country if we have any hope of staying strong. Or even staying together. America is not an eternal guarantee.
