Saturday Matinee – Clanadonia, Mickey Hart / Planet Drum & Joe Bonamassa with Tina Guo

How ’bout something primal? Nothing better than Scottish tribal drums and bagpipes. Clanadonia is what it is, and it’s loud. “The Last of the Glaswegians” is going to be stuck in my head for days.

Mickey Hart & Planet Drum perform “Fire On The Mountain” (24 July 1999, Rome, New York).

Amazing speed cellist Tina Guo jams it with Joe Bonamassa on “Woke Up Dreaming” at Carnegie Hall (June 2017?). Takes them a bit to get in synch, then it soars. Guo’s take on Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” is fun, too.

Have a great weekend folks.

Time to Pot or Get Off the Excrete [Updated]

Folks–

Might have to go dark, but it’s only temporary.

My old XP mule (2005 Compaq Presario SR1750NX) is having sporadic seizures, messes with the files and programs, and otherwise shows signs of dementia. Bessie has no viruses, rootkits, worms or other detectable infestations according to MalwareBytes Premium and Kaspersky Anti-Rootkit, but she no longer wishes to reboot to an earlier date, even in safe mode. In the words of hospice providers, she’s “in transition.”

Bessie also no longer recobanizes Firefox. Her memory is fading, some of her RAM is gone for good, and I think her hard drive is giving out after so many rotations. Sometimes she grunts incoherently and speaks in tongues on a blue screen. After so many years of loyal service, I’m forced to put her out to pasture, and I’ll miss her.

But I have a backup that I’ve been avoiding using, mainly because of Windows 10. It’s a Dell XPS with a solid state drive, a lot of bytes and a big ‘ol honkin’ wad of RAMMAGE that should last me for a few years. That’s what I’m posting on now.

I haven’t named this new-and-improved, cutting-edge, state-of-the-art, wave-of-the-future, now-more-than-ever computer yet, so any suggestions are welcome.

Bunk

[Image found here.]


Update: Successfully made the transition. A full system malware scan used to take hours, but now it takes under a minute. Now all I have to do is spank Windows 10 a bit, realign the monitor, and increase the font size to something legible. 6 pt sucks.

The .Gif Friday Post No.502 – 1st Day of School, Parkour Cat & Mountain Mishap

[Found here, here and here.]

Quarter Past Noon and the hour hand is stuck.

And the hour hand is stuck…

[Found here.]

Snake & Jake

bar-new-orleans

Snake & Jake’s Bar.

[Found here.]

Homogeneous Diversification Hot Links

Sebastian Junger’s “The Perfect Storm” was one of the best books I ever read twice. The movie version was kinda okay, but it ignored significant details IMO.

Top Ten Finalists for Best Illusions of 2016.

Communists are illegally crossing our southern borders. TRUE.

For only a few hundred dollars you can eat and study Greek philosophy at the same time.

Here’s an interesting Princeton Senior thesis. It explains a lot.

Launched on 17 October 1997, The Cassini Spacecraft has been messing around near Saturn for about thirteen years now, and it’s scheduled to crash and burn on 15 September 2017 after 20 years of service [via].

Making a very stressful salad.

[Top image found here.]

The .Gif Friday Post No. 501 – BoomBoomBoomBoom, Bird/Camera Frame Synch & Dance Hard

[Found here, here and here.]

Pah-Rumpah Pum Pum.

[Found here.]

Anthropogenic Global Hot Links

From Twitter: “I had a floppy disk on my desk and my student said, “Oh cool, you 3D printed a SAVE button.'”

Twitterer plays the drums.

Looky what we found in 2016! It’s an interactive map of discoveries!

¡Viva La Venezuela! Ami Horowitz discusses income equality with NY millennials.

Spin a shiny new penny 10 or more times in a row and it will come up tails approximately 80% of the time. Here’s why [via]. What about flipping an undoctored coin ten or more times in a row? Are the odds 50-50? Not if I do it. It just takes practice – same flip, same height, same catch. Any bets? More coin-flipping cons here.

Oops. Pardon me.”

“These work as screwdrivers, knives and various other multi-tools at the tip of your finger…  also you can shine them with Brasso.” DIY bullet casing hack is cool.

Paul Reubens (aka Pee Wee Herman, pictured in 1968 at top) named his stage persona after this. TRUE.

Saturday Matinee – Wind Chimes, Samantha Fish & The Bo Keys

I found this both oddly fascinating and mildly disturbing. It’s an a/v collage from 2013 somewhere near Lake Erie, yet it’s also kind of an appropriate soundtrack for the damage caused by Hurricane Harvey, and for those survivors who haven’t yet fully realized what they’ve lost.

What happens once the news crews are gone? What happens once the reality sets in that you survived the ordeal, but you’ve lost everything? Our prayers are with you.


Now about those looters and scammers…

For a long time, this was THE signature song of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, and in some ways his 1956 hit was a blues parody. In January of 2014, Samantha Fish picked it up and jammed it right down our throats with no apologies. Killer version.

Loved this proto-funk theme, and I love the Bo-Keys for rocking the retro soul grooves that I grew up with.

Have a great Labor Day Weekend, folks, and we’ll be back tomorrow with more stuff than your imagination can even tolerate. Or not.