An Odd Story From My Childhood
So I sent my mom this video (how could you not send your mom this video?):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v
And this was her reply. (Quimby was my Cabbage Patch doll, by the way):
…you were a lot like her when you were that age. I remember the time I came home from work and you had all your dolls and teddy bears on facecloths and towels on the family room floor and you told me it was a hospital and that Quimby had to have an operation because she had Hot Blood. I asked you what you had to do for that and you said that you had to suck out all the Hot Blood and put Cold Blood in her.
I am so totally fascinated by the minds of children!
Check THIS out.
I think, ultimately, I’m going to end up making folksy children’s records, like when I become a mother, probably. But they won’t be cheesy, they’ll be really good. Kids deserve that and are so underestimated in what they can appreciate, given the opportunity.
Maybe I’ll make a whole album about the Blue Lady and Bloody Mary… But I don’t know, maybe that would be exploitive and lame. But I think kids could appreciate an epic concept album if it were coming from the right ‘place’.
Don’t even get me started on kids’ entertainment in this day & age… I will be the PeeWee, not the Teletubby, of Children’s songwriters.
Anyway. Early day tomorrow. Drawing maps for work. Just tryin’ to help people find their way to church.
Why I Am Sad About The YouTube
Youtube kind of changed my life in a way, so I’ve been pretty grateful for it over the past year and a bit, and still am, though more reluctantly now. It remains my number one source of blog traffic and musical exposure. Which is annoying at this particular ‘juncture’ because I’d really like to go the way I did with Myspace and boycott those m—–f—ers.
I’m just very sad for my friend and very angry at Google. Youtube (Google) is screwing people over who don’t, by any means, deserve to be getting screwed over. My pal Doron (a long time Youtube performer of wonderful music), just got screwed royally.
I’m aware that Google getting their asses sued left and right by the copyright police, but I’m also aware that Google have the power to fight back, unlike we little people. I’m also aware that those other bastards don’t go around pretending they’re not bastards and spouting some ‘motto’ like, “Don’t Be Evil.” It’s sure nice to know that “Don’t Be Evil” doesn’t extend to not passing the brunt of your legal problems (unecessarily) down to your users.
Sure, they now have to make people take down copyrighted material in order to cover their own asses — sucky, but fair enough. That, however absolutely does not excuse them permanently deleting entire accounts over (in many cases unintended, in many cases questionable) copyright infringements when they can easily just suspend the accounts until the problem videos are taken down. That’d be the “un-evil” thing to do.
But I’ve figured out what they really mean by “Don’t Be Evil”. They don’t mean they won’t be evil (if that were the case, their slogan would read more like, “Hey, We’re Not Evil.”). No, they’re telling you not to be evil …(do as they say, not as they do)… for example, don’t use their services in the ways they were really set up to be used (I mean come on), and which made them super-ridiculously successful in the first place.
But this is all pointless ranting (though it sure feels good). They’re Google, they can do whatever they want now that they’re the big internet monopoly-monster, at least to us non-billionaires they can.
GETTING TO THE POINT — Please check out Doron’s brief video about all this (under his new account, of course): Why Cougarman7 (Doron Diamond) Disappeared. Also, check out his other videos because they’re great! I’ve featured his guitar tutorials here many times. He’s one of the best I know doing this sort of thing, plus he’s a delighful person!
If you’re a former subscriber of his (I know our subscriberships overlapped quite a bit), please resubscribe. Because that’s the most tragic thing of all, losing connection with all the fans he’s deservedly earned over the nearly 2 years he’s been posting videos. The videos themselves, he can re-upload, but all the wonderful comments he’s recieved over the years are gone and his fanbase could take a long time to rebuild. Don’t let that happen. Show him you’re a tiger. Show him you care.
[And a note to fellow Youtube posters: You might want to back up your account. From what I’m hearing and reading, it’s becoming quite common practice at Youtube to delete accounts without warning for even minor infringements (as in Doron’s case). What I’m doing is archiving all my important Youtube pages using Furl (which is a bookmarking site like del.icio.us, but with an archiving feature so you’re actually saving the full content of the webpage, not just the URL). If you have a lot of subscribers that you don’t want to lose touch with, you may want to save them and look into a Contact Management System (not to be confused with Content Management System, though those are good too), particularly if you’re a band/musician. I’ve been meaning to do this for some time, but Doron’s misfortune (unfortunately) pushes it to the top of the list.
Anyway, nuf said. Good luck, and may none of you (nor I) ever have to see this in realtime:
Dip Your Face In My Stream of Thoughtless Words
…splicing sounds of radio men in space suits on wobbly malfunctioning space crafts, encountering martians and losing friends to the tyranny of some unknown voice in the distance who may or may not be a robot or a human, an alien or a god. the unknown sends them searching into strange curved corridors down dark passageways that seem to circle back into themselves and lead nowhere but where they have been all along. scratching the surface they find the doors are alive and can be told what to do, just like the ‘conditioned types’, men who wander and yet obey, in trances long forgotten. I cut these voices open. i break them down to their essences of meaning and sound. how I love the sound of those radio voices that still echo in the curved corridors and dark passageways of my own radio transceiver. we are radios. our brains are. though we are not our brains. we are messages, messengers, receivers and more. we are the paintings on the walls and the children below them huddled in balls, straining to hear the spacemen in the radio, eager for what they’ll encounter behind each door. we shudder with vibrant anticipation. men in masks and creatures on mars wander the reaches of our imaginations and where we leave off, they pick up. and where you leave off, i come in to save you. i come to teach you about things I barely understand myself, and you have come here to do the same for me. we are a radio symphony. we are a chorus of confused creative chaos that sometimes I want to run from, as fast as I can, and other times I want to open wide my chest and breath it all in at once and breath out something altogether different… that, my friends, is our story, but it’s bedtime and my lips are hurting from the cold, and my eyes are watering from the air that is so dry I can almost see it falling to the ground in a pile of powder, like something incinerated my entire field of vision and sucked all the water right out of the galaxy.
The Poor Deer
One more thing. How’s this for weird (and sad, and infuriating). I recently saw two different deer in less than a 24-hour period that were both badly wounded in their left hind leg.
The first was Friday night. I heard gunshots somewhere nearby, thought “what the hell!!?” then it stopped so I went about my evening. Not long after that I was sitting outside again and a deer went limping across the street in front of my house. It stopped mid-street to lick what looked like a pretty bad gunshot wound on its left hind leg, then continued limping (hopefully up into the mountains). A few seconds later a frightened-looking little fawn scampered to catch up to her. The vibe was not unlike in Bambi when the hunters came. I was pissed off and depressed for the rest of the night.
There’s been word in the news of the city hiring sharp-shooters to “take care of” the deer “problem” in the city. First of all, I don’t see how it’s such a problem. I love the deer, and they stay out of people’s way. Besides, we live right at the foot of a mountain range, what do people expect? Second of all, the sharp-shooter thing hasn’t even been approved yet, so who the hell are these assholes shooting at deer (and missing! leaving the poor things alive but suffering) — in town, where people live, on a Friday night when people are out walking around? Fucking idiots.
Okay, so then the next day I went to visit my psychic friends up at their ranch, and this little orphan fawn that their horses recently adopted was limping around, wounded on his left hind leg. It wasn’t a gunshot wound, thank God (he most likely tore it going through a barbed-wire fence), but I still felt bad for the little guy, and it was a weird coincidence given the deer incident of the night before.
On a happier note, this little guy is possibly the cutest creature on the planet. He sucked on my hair for comfort while my friend checked out the damage on his leg. The pure, innocent joy and compassion I experienced in that moment I can’t even put into words. I wish I could beam it directly into the hearts of every one of you.
Anyway, that’s my little story. Have a happy weekend, hopefully one that involves cute animals, and don’t play with guns. Peace out.
Why Must The Damned Dolphins Keep Harassing Our Poor Rich People?
When your biggest problem in life is getting peeped on by jealous dolphins while you have sex in your super-secret luxury submarine, you don’t have problems, and you need to shut up.
And what, you can’t afford super-secret luxury submarine curtains? Seriously, shut up. Go away.