pantsravaganza

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• Commented on Vintage Synth of the Day: David Company's Clavitar
  My old drummer has a keboard controller that went even further down this road. It looked like a bass until you tried to play it. You strike notes on it by plucking cords which approximate strings and have some sensitivity...
• Commented on Forty-foot long ancient snake
  It's that snake from Conan the Barbarian, when Conan gets loaded and decides to rob James Earl Jones' temple....
• Commented on Video footage of Sarah Palin's church
  I think most churches have at least some fringe element of their congregation who comes to a random week night "holy roller" type of thing. The main congregation who just shows up on Sunday may be a lot more normal....
• Commented on Random House asks young adult writers to contractually promise not to behave immorally
  This is standard in all sports and celebrity endorsement contracts. Sponsors want to be able to distance themselves from entertainers/artists/athletes quickly if things get ugly. There are tons of boilerplate clauses out there covering this sort of thing. Same thing...
• Commented on Freaks (1932 Tod Browning movie) at Archive.org
  One of us!...
• Commented on Color coded cutting boards separate salmonella from sausage
  If you are in NY, then go down to the Bowery to the restaurant supply district and get color coded chopping blocks for a couple bucks each. Restaurants in some places are required to use a different color for each...
• Commented on Microsoft's PC maker of choice
  Apostrophe abuse....
• Commented on Tell me the best place to buy a gaming PC
  Man, computers are a waste of time. Get a stick and a fistfull of pebbles. Push one end of the stick into the ground and walk 15 paces away. Turn around and throw pebbles at the stick. 1 point for...
• Commented on Murky Coffee's owner responds to espresso-over-ice kerfuffle
  The store had two locations, one in DC near eastern market and one in Arlington, VA, which is just outside of DC. The DC store was shut down and the top notch equipment was auctioned off for only a few...
• Commented on What to do with an adopted, button-cute indigo iMac G3?
  Maybe incorporate it into a glass-top table and make it into a table-top pac man console. Maybe put it in the bathroom for a quick round of tetris. Or hang it from the ceiling above your bed/couch on a pulley...
• Commented on Akai MPC5000 and MPD32 Midi machines
  The basis for all of these boxes is typically a processor and RAM amount that is a few years behind any bottom-end laptop on the market. It is kind of like buying a really old desktop that has been tricked...
• Commented on Akai MPC5000 and MPD32 Midi machines
  MPCs are nice, but are notorious for crashing a lot with their first software release. They aren't the most intuitive boxes out there either. The Roland MV-8800 is about $1200 cheaper (and can do a lot less), but us perhaps...
• Commented on Moog Guitar: synth legend unveils an axe with auto-mute, infinite sustain
  Sadly, Bob Moog (rhymes with rogue) has indeed passed on. There's a nice documentary out about him and his instruments, called "Moog." It has a lot of him talking about the history and disgn of the instruments. That said, the...
• Commented on The Mouse Phone is painted like Mickey's mutant brother (Update: it's not Mickey at all!)
  Pucca is a she, and it is a fun and intelligent cartoon with fun characters and crazy background renderings or whatever they are called. It's highly stylized Korean computer animation. The plot usually revolves around her chasing after a boy...
• Commented on Boomerangs in space
  Title typo, yo! It's spelled "space." Cheers....
• Commented on DIY tape delay machine is useful, has <i>the look</i>
  Looks like a guitar/recording effect features on Bowie's space oddity or any radiohead from OK computer onward. Tape delay units are pricey and much in demand on ebay. I can see why homebrew would be an attractive option. Popular commercially...
• Commented on Experiment: 96% of passers-by ignore famous artist's street painting
  I think that how we value fine art can be largely set by context--the act of a curator setting a painting or sculpture up in an large room signals to us to dig deeper and try and process the image....
• Commented on NJ Court Asserts Online Privacy Rights
  As opposed to the Federal 9th Circuit which just stated that the Federales can search ones laptop at the border sans warrant just as if it is your luggage. http://volokh.com/posts/1208829306.shtml...
• Commented on Happy 107th birthday to my grandmother!
  107th! ...sorry....
• Commented on Graffiti at the National Portrait Gallery
  The gallery was just reopened after many years of restoration. Other highlights include the enclosed courtyard with the wavy glass roof (picture here: http://americanart.si.edu/index3.cfm ) as well as the Colbert portait, a freaky portait of john Brown, and the allegedly...
• Commented on Tell Me About Studio Monitors
  For listening to other people's music, treat the corner with some of the DIY ideas mentioned here, or just don't put them in a corner if you can avoid it. If you go too far with tuning your apartment with...
• Commented on Morning Tech Deals Highlights
  Well, I do allow some adjustment for inflation since I came up with this rule in the mid-90s, but I've found that when I seriously break this rule, I always end up buying much more guitar/bass than I need and...
• Commented on Morning Tech Deals Highlights
  Nevre pay more than $400 for a guitar unless you play it for a living....
• Commented on 50 Years of LEGO: Nine Sets I Have Known and Loved
  I had the galaxy explorer and have passed it along to my nephews. I need to get around to having some kids so that I can play with these again. I had some of those ugly apce lego sets that...
• Commented on Man gets disorderly conduct charge for writing vulgar message on check
  DC meter maids are notorious for ticketing you twice for the same offense, but not putting anything on your car so that you don't know you have an offense and are in default. Then one gets booted the next time...
• Commented on HOWTO Make a magic fireball (flaming oily rag) -- UPDATED
  magic missle!...
• Commented on Clive Thompson on the Death of Audiophilia
  If you really want an expensive gear habit, try starting a recording studio. The extinction of audiophilia is coming from many angles, though there will always be a place for it. As aluded to in the articles, digital consumer formats...
• Commented on Clive Thompson on the Death of Audiophilia
  Therev said "The mastering engineer is the one twisting the knobs to create the loudness, but I wouldn't say they are responsible." -You are correct--I should have worded it a bit differently. Many mastering engineers make their reputation by not...
• Commented on Clive Thompson on the Death of Audiophilia
  There are a few more distinctions one could make. There are many forms of compression and it occurs at a number of stages. Here's some distinctions between dynamic range compression and digital audio encoding/compression: The former is used in recording...