British Metal Band: President.
Pretty good. Front man has a excellent voice, but the weird thing no one knows who he is. He wears a mask, and the whole world is trying to out and dox him.
Roy Scarbrough
Martin Barre grew so
old in Ian's shadow.
His fingers running down
the fretboard, after
roots he pulled, bending
the thirds and perfect fifths
As Acqualung's snot was running
down his nose.
On stage in Harlequin's
Jacket and pantaloons,
while the other's greasy
fingers smeared shabby clothes.
So old now, but still time.
Though gray beard, too young to die
not too old to solo rock and roll.
SJ Blues I really like this. It's basically saying "Don't go into that quiet night" when it comes to age
Roy Scarbrough Martin's story is really interesting, a really fine guitarist who played for decades in Ian Anderson's Jethro Tull band. He was given few solo parts. He was not the frontman, but always a loyal and critical contributor to the sound with his riffs and flourishes. A few years ago, Ian disbanded the Tull band, with out telling Martin directly. And then later Ian restarted his band without the former bandmates. Meanwhile Martin form his own band for the first time.
Alex Morton SJ, that's a good paraphrase of Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night."
Roy Scarbrough That's right. Drink your way to the good night! I feel the same way, though. Stay for the credits. You always learn something watching them and listening to the music.
It may not make that big difference, but I'm switching AI providers. ChatGPT is embracing the Pentagon with moveable ethical guardrails, toward autonomous weapons and mass surveliance. Anthropic is pushing back, even though they have the pentagon contract, and are likely to loose it for being "too woke".
Lizzy Hale of Halestorm. Rock is not dead...yet
Roy Scarbrough those double Gibson guitars weigh about 30 pounds
E. Writer I miss the days when MTV and other video stations showed music videos. That was how I found new artists. I was a bit sad when they ended MTV for good this year. Now you've gotten me in the mood for some music.
Rainbow Kitten Surprise!
E. Writer The imagery has a very European feel to it. An almost "80s" feel to it. It feels joy, and transports to a different time.
Roy Scarbrough What I'm discovering is this kind of feel is still very much a thing, followed not by rock geezer set, but actively by gneration Z on places like TikTok and streaming platforms. Interesting how thoroughly the corporate music industry has marginalized it, but not yet defeated it. I like Bad Bunny too, but he really is mainstream glitz and showmanship,
Hyperphantasia. That's a new word I learned today, and it's about me and the 3 percent of the population who seem to have it. I thought everyone was like that. It's kind of fun, actually. Except it limits some bandwidth in other areas. So I am always loosing things: keys, reading glasses, wallets, etc.
E. Writer I can't even imagine (no pun intended) what that is even like.
Roy Scarbrough
I'm reminded of proust's In Search of Lost Time. He must've had it. There's a sense that one is unstuck in time. It's not a bad feeling.
In the article Eugenio has linked here says one does not have to close one's eyes to see the past. True. Someone will be talking to me, and I will be pretending to listen, but I'm somewhere in the distant past, triggered by some word from the conversation I was just then listening to.
Eugenio Cappuccio Have you tried a madeleine with your tea?
Roy Scarbrough I've dunk doughnuts in tea. The little ones covered in powder sugar remind me of my childhood.
Speaking of philosophy, the Epicureans didn't have a chance once the Church and State merged as one.
Epicurus founded his Garden School in Athens around 306 BCE. Unlike the more civic-minded Aristotle’s Lyceum or Plato’s Academy, the Garden was:
socially mixed (women and enslaved people admitted), commune bases, withdrew from politics,, materialist in cosmology, and focused on tranquility and freedom from fear).
It taught, gods do not intervene in human affairs, soul dies with the body,
Death is nothing to us
It didn't have a chance in the long term because it undermined state religion and authority
Nevertheless it had a good run from fourth century BC so the second century AD. Made it to the Roman period.
By the 1st–2nd centuries CE, Epicureanism still had: endowments, scholarchships, teaching communities, private libraries. The Garden at Athens itself likely lasted into the 2nd century CE.
In In 176 CE, Marcus Aurelius marginalized epicurianism by endowed chairs in Athens for other philosophies. but not epicurianism, priviledging instead Platonism, Aristotelism, Stoism and skepticism.
By the fourth century the church supressed epicureanism, seizing endowments, confiscating property, dispersing private libraries, shutting down teaching spaces.
E. Writer
When you consider the implications of religious order on philosophy and science, it likely delayed human technological and scientific advancement by a few hundred years. Religion demands belief in only one system, irrespective of facts, and truth.
If a philosophical or scientific narrative ran counter to that system or doctrine of religious beliefs, then that narrative was eliminated, and often on the pain of death. There have been philosophers who have died refusing to recant a philosophical or scientific belief because it had been denounced by the dominant religion of that time as heresy. Giordano Bruno was one such philosopher and the first to theorize that distant stars were suns and that the universe was full of "other worlds." He was the first to state that perhaps Earth was not the center of the universe. He was burned alive for refusing to renounce this belief. Galileo spent the rest of his life on house arrest.
Roy Scarbrough Burned alive with a nail driven through his lips and tongue to prevent him to speak "blasphemy" to the crowd gathered a rome's Piaza dei Fiori.
E. Writer Oh that is awful. Human cruelty truly had no bounds.
Roy Scarbrough They did hang a packet of gun powder around his neck so that he would die by explosion not too long after the flames started burning him.
E. Writer That is so evil. And even then he refused to recant his views. There was plenty of heresy going around at that time. I wonder why he was treated so viciously.
To bake a cake with AI. One the first things to fall under the bad spell of internet enshittifiction were recipes. So full of ads. So full of inane text before you get to the most important parts: list of ingredients and cooking time. Once you got that, the recipe would call for weird hard-to-get ingredients. What you could get from these is different ways to customize the thing, or even an easy way to change the size.
So I go on Chatgpt and just ask it, can I please have an ingredient list for a two-layer dark chocolate birthday cake with topped with a raspberry glaze.
And then just like that, Bingo it's there.
And then we have a conversation about adding coffee to the batter and frosting to darken the chocolate. This sort of stunned me as I was already of thinking to do this and had thought it was my original idea.
It suggested something called, "espresso powder" I TBS. I never heard of the thing and where would I find that. It then tells me to look for it in the store where they have the baking powder.
I ask it I can just grind some coffee beans really fine.
It says, no. The ground coffee won't dissolve and will be gritty.
I say, can I just ad some instant coffee.
It says, "Yes, absolutely" and tells me how much.
And it is says, "If you like you can substitute a cup some strong brewed coffee" for a cup of the water.
I say I have an esspresso machine, Can I use that?
It says. Perfect! Brew four shots of espresso and ad that to wthe water
See, there is back-and-forth conversation, which goes on in a most entertaining way with different methods of mixing and blending and baking.
It reminds me to not forget the birthday candles. Cute.
E. Writer I agree all of those recipe sites are laden with ads I've never even thought to ask a for the ingredients. I am always looking for dairy free and gluten-free recipes and I always meet with a bunch of ads that I don't trust not to download something to my computer or phone.
Roy Scarbrough If you tell it that's what you want, it will amend the recipe for that. Ain't that awesome? There's so much crap on those recipe sites that they slow down my computer.
bb santx Gotta love digital Gramdma!
I can't watch the figure skating. It's beautiful, but I cant stand to see them fall. And then, they replay the damn fall. I feel so bad for them.
Alex Morton I know, but with all the baseless anti-Canadian rhetoric and downright lies spewing out of the White House I'm feeling very protective of my country and countrymen.
E. Writer How are the hockey winners decided?
Alex Morton The US team won fair and square in the tournament. This was the first time that the Canadian women's team has lost to the US.
E. Writer I can see that as shocking, especially since it is not a prominent sport here. I don't watch hockey so I wasn't sure how it worked.
Alex Morton I never watch sports except the Olympics and America's cup sailing. I've never been one to sit and watch "the game", whatever it is. Even as a kid, the only time I would watch a game was when my father would take me to a baseball game and that was always special. I've always liked participating in sports, rather than watching. And, even there, the sports have always been ones that challenged myself rather than against someone or something else. Fighting my way across the Strait of Georgia in a storm with just a scrap of sail up has always been far more interesting and exciting to me than any game I could have played or watched. I don't usually care about what a bunch of strangers are doing with a ball. I know that makes me weird, but I've always taken a bit of pride in my weirdness.
Is Blue Sky still a thing? I'm still off Facebook. They exiled me from my long curated community on Jan 13. Appeal ignored after I sent them good documentation of my identity. I had posted an obvious parody, which led the bots to think my account had been hacked by someone distributing false information. I know, I know, there is no recently discovered sequel to James Joyce's Ulysses. The bot didn't think my mimicking an AI review of a non existent literary work was funny at all.
Roy Scarbrough Than you. That's both reassuring and also a game plan.
Roy Scarbrough In the time I've been off facebook, a friend of mine was home suffering from GERD, and it was so bad that he was hospitalized, only to learn he has cancer. He let friends know on facebook, so not knowing, sent a note innocently asking, how are you. The note came back a 3 a.m. from his hospital bed. Cancer. Just the one word. Cancer, and he turned off notifications. He could not do more. Fuck Facebook.
E. Writer That is sad. My husband noticed that on his birthday he received fewer birthday wishes from lifelong friends, who have all historically over the past decade wished him happy birthday in big numbers on Facebook. It hurt his feelings when some of his closer friends didn't get on, with a few people wishing him a Happy Birthday days later. I reminded him that Facebook's algorithms are preventing us from seeing our own friends and what they post. I told him it was unlikely that they received a notification about his birthday because everyone is getting less engagement, so they're not getting on as much because their friends are not engaging them on Facebook anymore when in reality, we simply don't see each other's posts anymore because of the algorithms. I am sorry about your friend. I hope you have everyone's email, or at least someone's email so you can keep in touch outside of Facebook. GERD is terrible. I have it, and it sent me to the hospital a few times and gave me Paradoxical vocal cord dysfunction, which caused my vocal cords to snap shut at the wrong time, which felt like my air was being cut off. I would swerve my car, thinking I had stopped breathing.
Roy Scarbrough The algorithms are weird. I was getting ads from plumbers and roofers and realtors who live thousands of miles away.
E. Writer That's because facebooks ads show your book to everyone. Doesn't matter where they are located. That's why I run a lot of ads on facebook.
E. Writer There's another story like this. Sone British rapper everyone thought was actor Timothee Chamaalet. He also wears a mask. Must be a thing.
Roy Scarbrough The interesting part of this is that it overturns and fractures the public and corporate expectations of personality cult monetized celebrityhood. I like that.
Frank Hutton Also, fame is a batshit crazy condition to try & live with. Gotta be real rich, to make it even sort of work.