Stray Hawkeye

The Mountain Goats “This Year” from A Bruntel on Vimeo.

As is Stray Hawkeye Christmas tradition:

Tuba Christmas is coming up again.  If you don’t know what Tuba Christmas is, or why it’s awesome, or want to find one in your own region, see my previous post here.  More details on this year’s Twin Cities event below:

TUBACHRISTMAS 2011
The 24rd Annual MINNESOTA TUBACHRISTMAS Concert will be Sunday,
December 11, 4:00 p.m. at Central Presbyterian Church, 500 Cedar St., St. Paul.

Audience Admission Free.

Free parking (see directions)
For directions and parking info see:
www.cpcstpaul.org/directions.html

To Play the Concert:
If you play Tuba, Sousaphone, Euphonium or Baritone you are invited to play. (NO other instruments)
All ages welcome. There will be over 100 players. (Players age range from 10 to 80+)

Registration: 2:00
Rehearsal: 2:30
Concert: 4:00

Registration fee $5
Music book $18
Hats & Scarves available $15 each.
Head bands $10 each

Decorate your instruments.
Bring a music stand if needed.

I’ve posted it before, but I still like this, so I’m posting it again. Laura Marling – Ghosts:

A good song for Halloween, and it just seems entirely fitting to the moment right now.

Last we checked in with Parker, he and I were on our way home for a break after the Uptown Art Fair.  More of the Dino Saga here.

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“Hey Parker, ready to go again?”

“I think so.”

“It’s getting pretty late, so we probably won’t make the Loring Park Art Fair, and might have to make a quick trip though Powderhorn.”

“That’s okay Kearn.  I’d rather be well rested and enjoy what we see.”

“Okay, let’s go hop in the car.”

After a brief drive across town, we hopped out, and…

“That’s a good idea Parker.”

So, after much ado, we finally made it over our first booth of the Powderhorn Art Fair – Dan Parker’s Parker Project (no website to link to):

Next we walked by Jon Offutt’s House of Mulciber booth.

“Oh Parker, you have to take a look at Jon’s work!  It’s really beautiful.  I’ve seen it at some past art fairs.  Just look at these ones up on the top shelf!”

“But I can’t see Kearn, I’m too short!”

At that Jon came over.  “Hi there little guy, just hop right on up there so you can see better.  Here, I’ll give you a hand.”

“Parker, I’ve already told you, you can’t eat the art.  Now come on, I think I hear some music you might like.”

“Okay.  Thanks again for the lift Jon!  Hmm, I do kind of like that sound.  Where’s it coming from?”

“Kearn, I’m getting thirsty.  Could we go get a drink?”

“Sure Parker, it looks like that next booth, Ascension Art Glass, has a water bowl out front.  Maybe you could ask the pretty girls working there if you could have a drink.”

“Excuse me miss, could I have a drink from you water bowl?”

“Why yes, of course!  That’s what it’s there for!”

“Come on in and take a look around.  Hop on up, I bet you’d look great in yellow.”

“Here, take a look at some of our other tables too.  Hop right on over!”

But, just as we had started talking with the super nice people at Ascension Art Glass…

Parker got spooked and ran off again.  (Raptor courtesy of Kay Schneider of Iowa City, IA (no website). )

By time I caught up to him, he had wandered into a strange land.

It turns out he was in Steve Brewster’s Moon Bay Artglass Studio (no website) of Poteau, OK.

“It sure does Parker.  I think that may be all the art we’ll see today.”

“Okay, but we still have to go check if there are any geese to talk to before we go.  Come on!”

“Slow down Parker!”

“Come on Kearn, we’ve got to get home and tell Sinclair we know where Minnie is!”

To be continued… (though probably not for a couple of weeks).

Last we saw our dino heroes, Parker was wrapping up an Orange Bowl victory in Miami, while Sinclair was still trying to figure out where Minne the Lake Creature had gone to.  Since then, I’ve found out that for dinosaurs to live to 65 million years old, they have to hibernate for a while every now and then.  It’s a rather sporadic schedule, but if that’s what it takes to live to 65 million years old and still keep your youthful vigor, I guess you can’t complain.

Parker has woken up from his hibernation with a lot of energy and ready to go, while Sinclair has still been a bit groggy lately.  Parker has also decided to have the tattoos on his back removed, so people don’t keep confusing him with his beloved brother, who he got them in honor of.  If that none of that makes any sense, you can catch up by reading the existing posts in the Dino Saga series.

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“Good morning Parker, what are you up to?”

“Sure Parker. Are you planning to buy some art while we’re there?”

“Maybe, what does it take to buy art?”

“Just some money.”

“Oh, let me go grab mine!  I’ve been saving up!”

“Um, I don’t think so Parker.  Most places don’t take bits of string as a form of payment.  But we can still go look.”

“Okay.  Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!”

And out the door we went.

“You know Parker, we’re going to be doing a lot of walking today.  I know you have the energy for it, but do you think you feet will be able to hold up?”

“Hmm, you’re right, they might get sore.”

Luckily, the first place in the Uptown Art Fair is the Uptown Running Room.

“Okay, we could always order something in your size, but for today maybe Kearn can just carry you when your feet get tired.”

“Yeah, I could do that.  Thanks for trying Running Room people!”

Parker was getting anxious, “Okay, now let’s go see some art!”  So, our first stop was Daryl Harwood and Kevin Murphy‘s booth.

They make Ikebana flower bases, which have little spiked clusters in them you can put the flowers on so they’ll stand up straight, and have water.

Next, we stopped by the music stage Old Chicago had set up, which seemed strangely empty.

After Parker’s set, and three encores, we continued on, and found a Volvo dealership had set up shop at the art fair.

“Hey Parker, how do you think the ladies would like you in this old car?”

“Hmm, but Parker, can you reach the pedals?”

“Well, let’s see what else they have.”

“Parker, could you come over here and jump up real high?  I want to get your picture with the Uptown Theatre sign!”

“Kearn, all this jumping is making me hungry.  Can we go back and eat those flower stands we saw earlier?”

“No Parker, I don’t think the artists would like that very much.  But, we can see if we can find you some real food.”

“Here, let’s ask this guy if he know where we could find some food around here.”

To be continued…

Since I posted this, I’ve felt the need to post a compare and contrast post between the idea in the original post and the following two videos posted right after each other.  (I know that doesn’t really make sense, but I can’t think of any way to say it better that isn’t pages long.)

Alice Cooper’s I’m Eighteen as covered by Creed:

Tegan and Sara’s Nineteen:

Also, I found that one of the media players on my computer (VLC) lets me play an mp3 of the Nineteen at 67% speed, which is about perfect. Also, I’ve decided my imaginary band’s cover of The Con would really be best as a punk rock version a la Me First and the Gimmie Gimmies.  From the same VLC trick I’ve found that at 150% speed The Con starts to sound like a mix of Japanese pop and death metal – it’s kind of great.  Also, at 150% speed, The Nobodies by Marilyn Manson is hilarious – gets sort a vaudeville, lounge singer, show tune, dance mix feel.

And while we’re at it, I got nothing for 20, but for 21 and 22 – Billy Bragg’s A New England (yeah, the years aren’t in the name, but it’s the opening line, and a great sounding one.)

A little more steam punk-y than I usually go for, but I really like this one. And I rather like the term chap-hop.

Via a friend’s Facebook post.

Been stuck in my head for a couple weeks.

Kind of reminds me of Fear the Boom and Bust.

Have I mentioned lately that I’d like to start a hard rock / heavy metal band that exclusively does covers of Tegan and Sara? Just crank up the drums, replace the awesome, adorable vocals with a growling bass / baritone, get a little guitar reverb in there. Imagine it with me, won’t you?

And I imagine this one at about 2/3 of the tempo so it grates just a bit, and throw in a few more voice cracks on the long held out notes, with the word “nineteen” breaking into an all out vocal chord spraining scream roughly every other time it occurs:

Note that said metal band would include some awesome special sound effect reverb thing that would make me sound like twins.

Now I just need to learn to sing, or play a normal rock band instrument. Somehow I don’t think tuba would fit in the average metal band. Though I do think it would be great for doing a solo cover of The Cave by Mumford and Sons, or perhaps a tuba / banjo duet with percussion played on the bell of the tuba:

(Previous Tegan and Sara here.)

For the comic in my Facebook / Twitter post, I came across it on Swiss Miss, which had a note that it was from BrownChickenBrownCow.  It’s pretty standard in blogging that you include a link to where you found something / who created something (usually the same place) when you include an excerpt from someone else’s work.  This leads me immediately to why I hate Tumblr.  On Tumblr, people just link to where they found something, which is usually another Tumblr blog, which in turn links to another, and another, and so on, with no note whatsoever along the way of where it originally came from.  For example, for this comic, the chain went:

• Swiss Miss, posted that it was from BrownChickenBrownCow
• Who posted that it was from mikehudack
• Who said it was from pberntsen
• Who got it from bethtucker
• Now, Beth Tucker doesn’t say where she found it from explicitly, but if you click on the picture, it takes you to ReadWriteWeb (and if you look at the url, she apparently found that through her google reader feed)
• Now, strange thing here, if you go to the ReadWriteWeb page, you notice something different about the image – it has where it came from (Noise To Signal) *in the picture*.  Which means before it got into the Tumblr ecosystem (read – cesspool), the image had as a part of the image where it came from clearly noted.  Someone along the way didn’t just copy the image and repost it without noting where it originally came from (laziness), they saved it, opened it in a photo editing tool, cropped it to remove the attribution of who actually made it, and then posted it to their Tumblr blog (purposefully stripping the source).  All the blogs in that chain point back to Beth, so I would assume that’s where the change came, but that the glory of Tumblr – everything is reposted without credit (stolen), so who knows where she stole it from without accrediting it?
  *Note – Updates and clarification on what actually happened here in the comments below, which includes facts and sensible / rational explanations rather than ranty speculation like the above. *
  Someone else may have cropped it to remove the attribution, and then she took it from their site and didn’t attribute them.  Who knows?  And, as icing on the cake, who is this Beth Tucker?  Well, if you read her “About Beth” page, she apparently used to be a lawyer.  Gee, wonder why that didn’t work out.  Oh yeah, and she talks about herself in the third person, because that’s sane.
  * Update – sorry, cheap jab. I’m a dick when I get on a humor/rant roll. I think it tends to be more amusing if you know me / if it’s in person and you get a bit of the George Carlin-esque-ness of it, which doesn’t always translate well to written form. I’m working on a new blog theme/skin that should highlight this a little more.*
• Now, if you did click on the image on Beth’s Tumblr blog, and got to the ReadWriteWeb page, there is both the water mark on the image for where it came from, and a link to the creator’s site, but not to the specific comic.  I’ve seen lots of people argue either way for if you should link to the specific piece of content or to the site as a whole.  I tend to favor linking to the specific piece of content (left over from documenting page numbers for research papers), but really either way works, as long as you actually give credit to who made it.  So, we’ve finally made our way back to some sort of accreditation.
• ReadWriteWeb links us to Noise To Signal, who actually made the cartoon, and we can do a quick search, and, about 7 steps from where we started (you could link this cartoon to Kevin Bacon quicker), we find (trumpets sound) the actual original cartoon.  Now, here’s the part that makes all of the above even more ridiculous (and I would say even tops the lawyer part) – the original comic has the following right under it:
  

  Post this cartoon on your site:
  Copy and paste this embed code…

  That’s right, on the original comic’s page, there’s code you can just copy and paste to put it right in your site, without having to download it, crop the credit off of it, and re-upload it.  Simple as can be, ctrl-c, ctrl-v, publish button, done.

And it’s not just that the four or five Tumblr blogs above reposted this cartoon without noting where it was from, if you look at the bottom of each, it has a list of other Tumblr blogs that have reblogged it since then (or liked it), which on the first two is 530 additional people.

Now you may say, “One comic that made the rounds, big deal.”  But, the thing is I come across this all the damn time with Tumblr.  Someone posts something cool on a site that usually accredits things well and it leads back to Tumblr, where there’s no clear attribution of where it came from, so people give up and just say it was from there.

The above is actually one of the only times where a chain of accreditation went into Tumblr and I was able to find the way out back out.  Most of the time you can’t even search for where it originally came from (even with tineye, which is awesome), because it has been so heavily reposted on Tumblr without notes on where it came from, that the search engines just show you a hundred Tumblr links.  There’s been a ton of things I’ve come across and would love to post here, but won’t, because due to the glories of Tumblr, I don’t know who actually did the work to make it, and probably never will.

The reason this really pisses me off is because the whole web is based on sharing and copying (in case you didn’t know, everything that you’ve ever looked at on the web, including this, has gotten copied to your computer before you ever saw it – that, at a technical level – making copies – is how the web works).  But people share things on the web with at least the slight hope that they’ll get some form of credit for it.  At least a link back.  For a fairly poor metaphor – bands let their music get played on the radio for free so people will hear it and want to hear more of their music, and, ideally, buy a CD or some mp3′s or come to a show.  The internet and the world of blogging works a lot the same way.  But, in my mind, Tumblr is the equivalent of a band playing the song American Pie and either claiming they wrote it, or that it’s by Madonna.  Or, more accurately, a band lip syncing to the original recording of American Pie, and then claiming they wrote it, or Madonna did.  Unless you’re Don McLean, you can’t claim you wrote American Pie, and you can’t claim the person singing it in the original was you.

This is why I hate Tumblr.