An internet radio by any other name sounds just as sweet

Many music streaming services have popped up over the years -- Pandora, last.fm, Spotify. I tried some of them, and didn't even bother with others, because I became convinced that the good ole' Youtube has everything I need.

Most streaming services don't have the artists I listen to, and not because the artists are super-obscure. Well, they are, but not the hipster-kind of obscure. They are unknown to most people because of the genres they perform in: medieval, folk, or world music. Pandora and last.fm (at least two years ago, when I tried them) had almost nothing in those categories. But even the most arcane taste is represented on Youtube, where some obliging souls have uploaded records from my favorite early music groups -- Ensemble Organum, the Huelgas Ensemble, Anonymous 4, you-name-it. And if you add your favorite tracks to a playlist, it will play continuously without stopping, with no interruptions, and without commercials (unlike Spotify). And it will play exactly the artists and songs you selected, not the artists that are "like" them, the way Pandora does. Pandora is no good if you want to try an artist you haven't heard before but your friends rave about. I want to hear the songs by this specific artist, not ones that are "like" him or her.

YouTube lets you create an internet radio station -- even if it doesn't call it that -- exactly according to your tastes. So unless it changes its business model (hopefully not), I won't be subscribing to new music streaming services.

Paris: street music and fashion

Street music night in Paris looked promising -- at least in posters that were plastered all over town. They promised "a night when Paris won't sleep" because live bands will be playing in the open air all through the night. Public transportation was supposed to be running throughout the night, too.

When we tried to find out which exactly busses and metro trains will be running, the picture turned out to be far less rosy. In the part of town where we lived, no overnight bus or train traffic was scheduled. Ordinary Metro trains stop running around 1 a.m. That's still not too bad, allows you to take in some of the nightlife. Now, how to find out where, when, and what bands will be playing? Tricky. My mom, who among all of us was the only one armed with knowledge of French, tried to find out on the internet. Turned out, most scheduled bands stopped playing around 11 p.m. After that, there were only "spontaneous" concerts on street corners. It wasn't clear where or when they were supposed to be happening. Even their approximate locations weren't indicated. So we set out on a lark to search for any bands that may be playing.

We got off the Metro at a certain popular nightlife area, only to find out that there wasn't any street music there as far as we could see (it was a long shot anyway). Instead, the streets were full of aggressive-looking teenagers. Those with cars burned rubber on the road; those without hung out on the street, making comments at the passersby. Even without knowing French, you could tell the comments were not exactly friendly.

There was only half an hour left until the last train home. Worse -- walking back to the Metro station, we managed to miss the station we came out of. It took some searching, and two helpful French girls who explained, in a broken but passable English, where the metro station was. So we made it to the train in time. There was a twenty-something girl on the platform that started talking to us; she was from New York, but originally from Italy... I think. She was studying in Paris. Maybe. It's all a blur now. She said that she actually saw some live bands playing that night, but in a completely different part of town, somewhere near Notre Dame. She also said that earlier that night some metro station were closed and evacuated, because somebody set off gas in them; fortunately, we were nowhere near the incident.

So we got home, and it was getting close to 2 a.m. In our quiet, out-of-the-way neighborhood, all restaurants and bars were closed, but surprisingly, one little bar was still open. There was even a live band playing, but it was already wrapping up when we got there. The bar was tiny, and it only had outdoor seating. The bar owner, who was also working as a waiter, brought us drinks and stopped by to talk with us. It was like an archetype of all neighborhood bars. So the night wasn't a total loss.

Accordion player on a Metro train.	A puppeteer on a Metro train.

Live music in Paris, however, can be obtained without looking far and wide -- in fact, it can and will be shoved down your throat precisely at the moments when you don't want it. I'm talking about performers on Metro trains. The trains are usually quiet, with everyone minding their own business, so it's quite jarring when the silence is suddenly interrupted by loud blaring of a 70s pop hit. At first you can't even understand where it's coming from. Is it someone's phone? Then you realize it's actually a guy standing near the door with a portable drum machine, singing into a microphone. Meanwhile his accomplice, a woman, is walking down the train and collecting donations. Perhaps these "performers" expect that people will give them money just to make them go away. I can't imagine how anyone would see this as anything but annoyance.

The performers usually get off at the next stop. I wonder if they are actually violating some law by imposing their "art" on the captive audience, and they want to get the heck out before police cracks down on them?

One time, though, I saw non-annoying metro artist. He hung a curtain between two vertical handrails and performed a short puppet show. That was kind of cute. (Sorry that the picture is so poor -- from where I was sitting, I could not photograph around that handrail in the middle. :-))

So much about music on the streets of Paris -- now a little about fashion. The boldest fashions I've seen in Paris were worn, oddly enough, not by women but by men. I'm speaking, in particular, of this odd style of combining a jacket with short shorts, often worn with low-cut or no socks.

The first time I saw a guy dressed like that, I thought he was in a costume, but later I saw more and more guys in similar outfits. I dare say it works about as well as a mullet: business on top, party at the bottom. But what do you know -- in a year or two, the streets of U.S. metropolises might be full of hipsters sporting a similar look.

ApolloCon 2009: literary rap, materials science and space panels

I stopped by at a filk session on Friday or Saturday night, since the parties weren't exactly hopping. One quiet guy who sat in the corner until then surprised us (well, at least me) with a Game of Thrones rap. "Rap" is not quite accurate. The song had a simple melody with Celtic motives, but the melody was peripheral to the lyrics, which he delivered rapid-fire, never stopping to catch his breath. As a recap of a series of 700-page books, the song lasted a solid 10 minutes (not that I was looking at the clock). It was impressive, to say the least. If I understood correctly, the guy said he wrote it himself.

Then a woman said this reminded her of "Hamlet in 5 minutes" song, and she sang -- or rapped it, as that song is more or less pure rap -- right there and then. That's the kind of talented people we have lurking at the fringes of filk circles.

Beg, Steal or Borrow: Precious Commodities in the Space Colony

Maybe it's just me, but I noticed a hint of a theme in this year's ApolloCon 2009 -- many panels were related to material sciences (no wonder, because Wil McCarthy was the Guest of Honor), or space (also not surprising, because, well, this is Houston, home of NASA). When you combine the two, you'll get panels like "Beg, Steal or Borrow: Precious Commodities in the Space Colony". I regret I missed most of it. I wanted to check out a tea tasting, conducted by Ziactrice first, and then I was too lazy to leave the tea tasting midway and head to the panel. (It was worth it, as I got to taste some awesome, smoky lapsang souchong.) When I finally got to "Beg, Steal or Borrow", the panelists must have decided that none of those methods will get them far, because they were talking of manufacturing precious commodities.

You can ship oxygen you make on the Moon to a space colony in a lower orbit, cheaper than you would ship it from Earth. If you are just shipping freight, you could have a robot shipping system. Most of it could be automated. You could use solar sails as far as the asteroid belt. You could mine materials in asteroids, process them, and move them wherever they are needed. In many cases, what you need is just a fraction of the mass of the asteroid, not the whole thing. On the other hand, you should be careful with the economics of asteroid mining. If you mine a 700-meter diameter cast iron lump, you may dump too much of a good thing into economy, creating inflation.

Material sciences, or habitat design was also the theme of another panel, "Architecture of the Future Living in a Materials World", but the panelists did hardly more than complain how hard it is to build, or maintain, houses in Houston, because Houston climate is so tough on buildings. Well, that wasn't all they said, but the discussion was mostly about the present, not the future.

Pictures from ApolloCon 2009 can be found in my photo gallery.

George Hrab concert in Austin

George Hrab was one of the line of atheist singers and songwriters (Roy Zimmerman, Paul Martin a.k.a Aspiring Atheist, Linda Chorney) that performed for the Center For Inquiry Austin in the recent months. He gave a concert at La Madeleine on November 22, 2008.

I was impressed by his songwriting more than that of others (except maybe Roy Zimmerman, who is quite witty too). Hrab's lyrics are fast -- both in the sense that his tongue goes a mile a minute, and also that they are so full of unexpected witticisms and intellectual references, you blink and you'll miss them. Speaking of Blink -- Malcom Gladwell's book by the same title -- the musician takes a jab at its premise in his song "Assumption". Here's a YouTube video of it.

He takes on all sorts of skepticism-related topics. One of his songs' topic was "grief rapists", psychics that will "communicate" -- for a fee, of course -- with your dead loved one, making money off people's grief and prolonging their suffering. As he says, if your dead loved one was really able to bend time and space and laws of nature to communicate with the living, do you really think the only thing he/she had to say would be along the lines of "you own a locket"?

Here is the video of his live performance of this song. It may or may not be called "Why would they only speak to you?" (That's a line in the chorus.)



Then there is a song "think for yourself" that admonishes the reader to use their mind and read the fine print. If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Here is the video:



Many of his songs do not explicitly deal with nonbelief in god(s), but address some of the universal themes like relationships or grief. "Small comfort" is a song he wrote after his beloved dog died, during the time at which he had to really resist a comforting fantasy that his dog is living carefree somewhere in the doggy heaven. So he sang about comfort that can be found in an atheist's view of death: at least his dog would not have to miss him. If the dog passed away with a thought of waking up and going for a walk, that was it -- he did not get to find out otherwise.

A video of the grief song:



Then there was a memorable song "How do you do what you do", dedicated to all those people that are more successful than us at the things we strive to do. In the presence of people who are superior to you in the the area that really matters to you it's very hard not to fold and give up. This song, with its edgy, anxious melody, has stuck with me.

A video of "How do you do what you do"



Then again, he had some very outspokenly atheistic songs, like "God is not great" (a YouTube video) -- the same title as Christopher Hitchens' book. Hrab said he secretly hopes Hitchens will get to hear it and maybe like it. This would not be unprecedented, as Hrab's experience shows. He spent a lot of his between-song patter talking about his encounters with famous skeptics and atheists. At one convention he introduced himself to Mike Chapman, the great-great...-great-grandson of Charles Darwin. Chapman had him floored by recognizing his work: "George Hrab? You're funny." Hrab recounts shaking hands with Chapman as "I touched Charles Darwin's DNA!" He had more such encounters with the who-is-who of the freethought pantheon (so to speak :-)). The crowning moment came when James Randi, sitting in the front row of Hrab's concert, was singing along -- he knew the words of Hrab's songs! Hrab fake-swooned when he recounted this. Then again, one must wonder if such idol-worship doesn't run counter to the spirit of freethought? :-)

His most memorable song was "brainsbodyboth", about his dream girl who would have a killer body and brains to match. It's full of funny and politically incorrect double entendres, and each line gives you something to chuckle at (or occasionally cringe). The line that really gave me a pause was where he compares his dream woman's brain and body to a... wait for it... "domain name that's case-specific". I'm not completely sure what that meant. Perhaps there's some kind of a visual analogy created by uppercase and lowercase letters strung together? Hmmm.... :-)



Another source of amusement in his concert was audience's questions. At the beginning of the show he asked people to write down questions for him (about anything in the world) on pieces of paper, and he was going to answer them during the show. He promised to reward the author of the best question with a "Think for yourself" t-shirt. The slip of paper with the question he deemed the best held these words:

" "? This is a homeopatic question.

So we had funny people in the audience on par with the performer -- our own CFI'ers no less!

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"Mamma Mia": movie impression

I saw "Mamma Mia". Don't know if I would side with the reviewers who said it was a stupid movie, or with those who found it great fun. ABBA's songs remain as catchy now as they were when I first heard them as a child. But the action between the songs is the problem. When I see people acting very stupid, I feel embarrassed for them. Well, unless they deliberately act stupid and I know I'm supposed to laugh at them, as in any Rowan Atkinson movie, then it's funny. But in "Mamma Mia" you were supposed not to laugh but to sympathize with them. And yet the antics of both the girl's and Meryl Streep characters made me cringe. And it doesn't matter that Steve said the only purpose of the characters' existence was to set up situations where they could break out into an appropriate ABBA song. I realize that. But when I see people on the screen, I can't help but judge them as if they are real and supposed to make sense. Unlike my 3-year-old, I can't tell myself "it's just fortend." :-)

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Movie review: "Sweeney Todd"

The story is almost Shakespearean, if not for that little deviation where Sweeney Todd and his baker girlfriend set up a rather bizarre business that leverages a perfect synergy of their respective skills. :-) Though I guess when your characters wear heavy goth makeup you can't expect them to play by the rules of classical tragedies. :-)

Their makeup also made it near impossible for me to tell them apart, at least for the first half of the movie. I think I've said before that all actors in any movie look the same to me, modulo distintive hairstyles, haircolor, beards, glasses, height, body type etc., which are visual clues I use to tell actors apart. That's true even when they are not wearing harsh black-and-white makeup! (Exceptions are actors who I've seen in at least 3-4 movies, so that their faces start to look distinct to me. So for example, if I hadn't stopped watching Harry Potter movies after the third one, I may be able to recognize its cast already ;-)) But the makeup in "Sweeney Todd" makes it hard to even tell men and women apart!

This is just one reason why I have difficulty understanding what's happening in the movies. "Sweeney Todd" made it exponentially more difficult because everybody in it spoke very quiet, very fast, and with a British accent (which is so alien to me it might as well be Chinese). This is one of those movies that gives your fingers a two-hour long workout on a remote control. When the music surges, you scramble to turn down the volume (especially when a child is sleeping upstairs). When dialogue starts, you frantically pound the buttons to turn the volume up. I don't understand what's the logic behind that. Shouldn't the dialogue be loud, while the music kept down to a non-irritating level?

Despite all this, I was surprised the plot seemed fairly cohesive to me. Except for one thing. At the very end Sweeney Todd is shattered to discover that a very important character has died. How did that character get into the basement? The last I saw of that character, he/she/it was in the barbershop. I wasn't even sure of this character's identity, but Steve (who says I am hopelessly imperceptive) assured me it had to be what it was in order for the movie to make sense. Still, he could not explain how that character got in there. So it's not just me. Either he is imperceptive too, or there is a hole in the plot.

The best thing about "Sweeney Todd" is its music. It's beautiful. The melodies are very complex. Such a beautiful reprieve from one-dimensional pop tunes. (Not that I listen to pop tunes much, but some of them infiltrate even the public radio (the only kind of radio I listen to).) If I found a legal and free download of Sweeney Todd soundtrack, I might even lift a finger to click on the link! ;-)