Month: December 2004

Just one quick thought on the Jesus sandwich — which sold for for $28,000 — or the latest x-ray image.

Didn’t Time magazine run a photo put together by some scientists (yes I know, how silly to reference Science) recreating what Jesus probably looked like? I couldn’t find the image I remember, but CNN links to a similar effort that appeared in Popular Mechanics.

Now, if you were Jesus, and you chose to mess with us Earthlings by placing your face on grilled cheese sandwiches and in dental x-rays, would you choose to go with the effeminate renaissance artists-rendering version? I mean, there was a real guy walking around at one point and I don’t know how thrilled he is being recreated like this rouge wearing version.

Anytime anyone asks me where I live in NY, I flash my West-Side gang sign.

At least I’m doing it right. Here’s a handy guide to throwin down signs.

 

 

Also quite funny is this re-imagined sign language instructional manual. The dirty ones at the bottom are especially good.

[Both via Screenhead]

I bought a pair of Etymotic ER-6i earphones for my ipod. $129 @ J&R. 

These guys jam all the way into your ear canal. Getting them in takes practice and lubrication. Essentially I give myself a wet-willie. Is it all worth it?

I’m not sure yet. Here’s the thing: for those of us who ride the subway these are great. Because they plug the ear it isolates nearly all outside noise. It turns a thirty year old #3 train hurtling along at 45 mph into some kind of silent-futuristic-monorail subway. (Doing the research for top speeds somebody quoted the downtown 3 train between 72nd and 42nd streets as one of the fastest, woot! And they say that they do go faster than 45, but that’s the official speed limit and I’m sure that the drivers would never…)

So the benefit is you can listen to a really subtle, elegant song like Ani DiFranco’s Both Hands and hear every note; something that is just plain impossible to do with the standard ipod earbuds. No more turning the volume way up just to be able to hear anything. Of course walking around with absolutely no audio clues as to what is going on around you is weird. Forget that business of your other senses becoming heightened, that only happens if it is permanent I guess. I find that I become extremely clumsy: bumping into things and people, stuff falls out of my pockets. And take some extra time crossing the street; one of my concerns before I bought them was “will I get hit by a bus on 7th avenue”; this remains a real possibility.

The bass response absolutely relies on getting a good seal. So if you don’t put them in all the way, or for some reason they don’t fit your ears right you won’t hear any bass at all. My experience with this in my few days so far has been mixed. Sometimes it works great and the bass is excellent, but other times I can’t seem to get it sealed right and I get nothing bass-wise.

Since everybody’s ears are different they come with foam style ones to try, but I haven’t gone there yet. Folks on the head-fi forums also claim various techniques of cutting flanges from the stock set and that it helped them.  

One pet-peeve is the cord sucks: it feels cheap and is way too long, which is inexcusable because these are *made* for the ipod and the best part of the ipod standard earbuds is the cable length and quality feel. Overall the sound quality is great, but I don’t have patience for products that I have to mess with this much. If I figure any of this out I’ll post it.

Last night, my friend Lori and I went to the Canal Room to see Swayzak and Matthew Dear perform.

Matthew Dear did a short warm up DJ set for the room as it filled.

Swayzak was interesting; I had never seen them before. The group is two dudes, but four guys came out on stage. One guy had essentially half an electric drum set that was wired through the mixers onstage so guy #2 could control the sound of the guy drumming. Guy #2 was working the knobs of a couple sound machines (couldn’t get behind him to see exactly what they were). Guy #3 was at the laptop, which seemed to be the core of the whole show. He didn’t do all the songs, but the last guy sang over the music, but hard as we might couldn’t hear a single word or even tell what language it was — I had mistakenly thought the group was German; nope, British.

No idea what time it was, but Matthew Dear came back on and did a completely great DJ set for the folks that stayed. The first time I saw him he did a live set of his own material, the second time (which I blogged my disappointment for) he was singing live, and last night spinning other people’s music. One thing I’d like to note about my previous review of the vocal show is that the CD that roughly corresponds to that style is very good and I wholeheartedly recommend it, I just didn’t enjoy it live.

I loved too this move of Lori’s. She walks up to the ubiquitous table full of tee shirts and CDs, picks up a CD out of the six or so laid out to investigate. The kid working it asks which CD she wants and she says something like “yeah, ok, I’ll take them.” Saleskid: huh? Lori: “yeah, one of each.” The guy was flummoxed, he must have thought he was the best salesman ever.

Now playing: Swayzak – Make Up Your Mind

so let’s return the favor.

Rory of Neopoleon.com, one of the “good ones” who happens to be consistently hilarious is now working for MS and apparently his boss’s bosses don’t think blogs can have “much of an impact”.

So do what he says:

If you want to help, then click on this link. I don’t care what happens after you “get there.” If you just want to close the page or hit the Back button without reading anything, that’s fine. This is all about showing some numbers – not about inundating you with propaganda.

So, help a brother out, eh?

Corey: I promise nothing bad will happen.

Since my last post on celebrity blogs was my second most popular post ever I figured this couldn’t hurt traffic either.

Zach Braff, you know the guy from Scrubs and impressively wrote, directed and starred in Garden State has a blog.

I had always wanted to see Garden State, but not enough apparently since I missed it, but now I even looked up to see when the DVD is going to be released (Dec 28) and was reminded that Natalie Portman is in it. Side note: old Natalie has developed quite an underground following among us men. We’ve been talking about seeing Closer, a movie I wouldn’t normally be dragged to, just because of some rumored strip tease/pole dance involved. The power of blogging. Seth, Scoble, Hugh, wouldn’t it be swell if all movies had a blog for the runup to release, preferably by one of the primary actors or director?

Via Waxy who pointed to this funny anecdote about Zach calling a movie reviewer on her cell phone. Check out 692 comments!

Funny too while reading I kept thinking “man, it sounds just like him, but almost too much like his character on TV and therefore some ghost writer is writing this to sound like him.” But he addresses this in a previous post

Again I want to thank you all for all the amazingly nice comments you have posted on this site. I do read them all even though it’s frustrating that few of you seem to believe me. Let’s try a little game: let’s see if we can make it through one exchange of posts and comments without one person writing (even as a joke) “I know you’re not reading this but…”