I’ve been waiting for HBO’s “Bored to Death” for a month now. Yes I’m aware waiting for a tv show is sad and mildly depressing, however the cast seemed very promising. I figured you can’t go wrong with Jason Schwartzman, Zach Galifianakis, Parker Posey and Ted Danson. Tonight I wasn’t disappointed in the least bit. Smart, humorous and stylish. I enjoyed the clever mentions of obscure pop culture and the one liners reminded me of a dark Rushmore mixed with Spun. A bit cheesy and a little slow, but I hope it will pick up.

Busy Busy Busy. Haven’t touched this blog in some time. Using it to test some Twitter features right now. Will update more this week. Including some iPhone wordpress app testing with photos and video from the blink show in vegas. Hope everyone is doing well.

yes yes I actually upgraded my blog and I’m posting… sorry for the lack of effort, but frankly it’s not on my list of things to do. here is a quick recap as of lately.

- MAGIC in vegas was pretty normal. Meetings as usual and craps tables, video poker and love of free drinks. Project and Pool tradeshows were good, met some cool people. Famous party was fun and pretty damn over the top, thanks to Siglin and Maxx for hooking that up.

-ColorScavenger.com updated, check it.

-Got to hit the golf course and played horrible with Jordan before he left on tour. Not a bad way to spend a Tuesday afternoon in beautiful Saint Diego.

-Little Big Planet is amazingly fun to play.

-Working a ton… Still have to finish and launch a project tonight and its 1:20am… wicked.

-A new sushi place opened up a block away and its pretty damn good. “Hot Night Roll” is a new favorite and will be eaten often.

-Tomorrow is Friday.

-If you treat the person making your coffee like shit and belittle them in front of numerous people, I will loudly call you a bitch and shocked as you may be there is nothing you can do about it.  Re: Street Rules

Ever since Cursive burst onto the music scene with their 1997 debut album, the band has consistently and continually churned out heady albums heralded by critics and fans alike. Wrestling with life’s miseries and mysteries, Mama, I’m Swollen is an album brimming with the universal, questioning the human condition, social morality, and the “Peter Pan Syndrome” of grown men.

After the underground success of their third album, Cursive’s Domestica, in 2000, the band followed up with what would prove to be their breakthrough album, The Ugly Organ, in 2003. A self-aware conceptual record about artistic constraints (or lack thereof), relationships, sex, and the intersection of all three, it landed them on the Arts section cover of The New York Times and accolades from Rolling Stone, Alternative Press, Blender, Magnet, Esquire, and Spin – as well as a place on many year-end best lists. Cursive spent the next year and a half touring the album relentlessly, headlining the Plea For Peace tour and playing Coachella before being handpicked by The Cure for their Curiosa tour in late 2004.

Exhausted and admittedly daunted by the task of following up a hit record, Cursive went on an indefinite hiatus before reemerging with the adventurous Happy Hollow in 2006. Lauded as a triumphant comeback and evolution of the band by publications such as Alternative Press, Spin, Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, and Blender, the album examined small-town angst, American dreams, and religion. Midway through touring in early 2007, original drummer Clint Schnase amicably departed the band. After a short break following a national tour with Mastodon and Against Me! and feeling somewhat conflicted about proceeding forward without him, Tim Kasher (vocals, guitar), Matt Maginn (bass, vocals), and Ted Stevens (guitar, vocals) decided to begin writing – only without the ambitions of necessarily turning it into the next Cursive record. Shortly thereafter, Cornbread Compton (formerly of Engine Down) officially signed on as drummer by this time and what musically unfolded from this newly realized foursome was indeed…Cursive.

Conceived together in intermittent rehearsals as the band is now spread out across the west and Midwest (Kasher and Compton live in Los Angeles, CA; Maginn in Columbia, MO; and Stevens in Omaha, NE), they road-tested and refined the new material for Mama, I’m Swollen largely via a few shows this past spring and summer. The band’s new process resulted in a more enthusiastic and focused set of ten songs to record when they entered Mike Mogis’ ARC Studios in Omaha, NE in the fall, producing the album themselves alongside AJ Mogis.

Kasher is a storyteller, a weaver of songs that can read more like short stories or fables than the standard verse-chorus-verse. Mama, I’m Swollen finds him at his literate, lyrical best, where references to both Poe (“Going To Hell”) and Pinocchio (“Donkeys”) are intertwined seamlessly within his own tales of characters grappling with the moral quandary of being human, adult, and playing a role in ‘civilized’ society. Musically, Cursive is as smart and sophisticated as ever, the songs’ rousing, cerebral content complemented by moments alternately hushed and exhilarating (the cathartic “From The Hips,” the noisily melodic romp “I Couldn’t Love You”), eerily moody and jaunty (the almost prayerlike “Let Me Up,” “Mama, I’m Swollen”) – moments that often occur within the very same song. From the charging bass lines of album opener “In The Now” to the quiet first chords of confessional closer “What Have I Done?”, Mama, I’m Swollen is a natural progression that remains distinctively Cursive: a fluid amalgamation of the band’s sound past, present, and future – a band that both your punk kid sister and English lit grad student best friend can call their own.

Check out the new updated Color Scavenger. Go buy something.

I moved to *all* Linux for my desktops this week and its been interesting and kinda of a huge change. Little work habits that I have had for years and years are being streamlined with launchers of neat little commands. I’m working a hell of a lot more efficient now, but change is change… Sometimes it takes some time before it feels good.

Everything around the office is getting more streamlined as well. E-mails are answered in order and on time, paperwork is dealt with immediately (so as not to grow into a monster), data is organized, clients are happy and deadlines are met. New year going good.

I thought I was too old and too much associated with work to get excited about shows anymore… Well, I’m pretty damn excited about Cursive (from which this blog was named) is playing the Casbah in March. My favorite venue in San Diego and one that boasted such shows for me as The Good Life and the very first Postal Service show but not to exclude many good Counterfit, Social Distortion, Drag the River, Blackheart, Fluf, No Knife, LCI, etc show and good times @ Randy’s old place down the street and general parking lot drinking + airplanes.

Now I’m also tempted to fly out to Austin for the pop unknown reunion show next month… Airfare isn’t bad and I really wanna be there.

Randomness

- 24 is back and actually great! I won’t lie, 24 nights on Monday is back in full swing at my place.

- Just completely rearranged my office. Its very refreshing and a much better use of space. Trip in Ikea is in order tomorrow for lighting and shelving solutions.

- Don’t ever talk yourself out of buying at networked printer, its a must.

- Just ordered 4 more gigs of RAM off newegg.com. Work has been pretty crazy and I find myself needing more than 4. Thunderbird, fillazilla, winscp, skype, trillian, photoshop, firefox + 10 tabs, dreamweaver, synergy, itunes, and openoffice all day long adds up. Plus I moved 2gigs to my ubuntu desktop for that much needed mediatomb blueray streaming. With the prices so low, why not?

- Tomorrow is taco night. FYI

- It’s 3am and I put in a long day, so I’m retiring…. good night.

Very glad the election is over. Some of the people/things I voted for won and some lost and the world continues to spin. I’ve managed to tune out of world news and politics for awhile.

Was in class all last week. 6am to 5pm was very much a change to my normal schedule. I will admit this week I kind of miss it in a weird way. There is something refreshing about stepping outside your box and bettering yourself even if its only for a week. I am now a certified armorer. Random talent number #102.

I am going to try to update this blog more. I’ve been using Google Reader to share most of the fun stuff I find, so if you use Google or any RSS reader you can add my feed here.

More soon…

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Dear Friends,

Whenever a Great Bipartisan Consensus is announced, and a compliant media assures everyone that the wondrous actions of our wise leaders are being taken for our own good, you can know with absolute certainty that disaster is about to strike.

The events of the past week are no exception.

The bailout package that is about to be rammed down Congress’ throat is not just economically foolish. It is downright sinister. It makes a mockery of our Constitution, which our leaders should never again bother pretending is still in effect. It promises the American people a never-ending nightmare of ever-greater debt liabilities they will have to shoulder. Two weeks ago, financial analyst Jim Rogers said the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac made America more communist than China! “This is welfare for the rich,” he said. “This is socialism for the rich. It’s bailing out the financiers, the banks, the Wall Streeters.”

That describes the current bailout package to a T. And we’re being told it’s unavoidable.

The claim that the market caused all this is so staggeringly foolish that only politicians and the media could pretend to believe it. But that has become the conventional wisdom, with the desired result that those responsible for the credit bubble and its predictable consequences – predictable, that is, to those who understand sound, Austrian economics – are being let off the hook. The Federal Reserve System is actually positioning itself as the savior, rather than the culprit, in this mess!

• The Treasury Secretary is authorized to purchase up to $700 billion in mortgage-related assets at any one time. That means $700 billion is only the very beginning of what will hit us.

• Financial institutions are “designated as financial agents of the Government.” This is the New Deal to end all New Deals.

• Then there’s this: “Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.” Translation: the Secretary can buy up whatever junk debt he wants to, burden the American people with it, and be subject to no one in the process.

There goes your country.

Even some so-called free-market economists are calling all this “sadly necessary.” Sad, yes. Necessary? Don’t make me laugh.

Our one-party system is complicit in yet another crime against the American people. The two major party candidates for president themselves initially indicated their strong support for bailouts of this kind – another example of the big choice we’re supposedly presented with this November: yes or yes. Now, with a backlash brewing, they’re not quite sure what their views are. A sad display, really.

Although the present bailout package is almost certainly not the end of the political atrocities we’ll witness in connection with the crisis, time is short. Congress may vote as soon as tomorrow. With a Rasmussen poll finding support for the bailout at an anemic seven percent, some members of Congress are afraid to vote for it. Call them! Let them hear from you! Tell them you will never vote for anyone who supports this atrocity.

The issue boils down to this: do we care about freedom? Do we care about responsibility and accountability? Do we care that our government and media have been bought and paid for? Do we care that average Americans are about to be looted in order to subsidize the fattest of cats on Wall Street and in government? Do we care?

When the chips are down, will we stand up and fight, even if it means standing up against every stripe of fashionable opinion in politics and the media?

Times like these have a way of telling us what kind of a people we are, and what kind of country we shall be.

In liberty,

Ron Paul