City Council: Let’s Try Destroying Chicago Music

The specimens that inhabit the Chicago city council chambers are an odd lot. When they raise upon their hind legs and bleat as one, the strangest, most alien ideas are aired. Ideas that do not boggle so much as numb the mind with their breathtaking vacancy. Kafka is merely the quaint reference point for the depths of the council’s legal absurdism - when this governing body flies by the seat of its pants and burps up legislation without the direct cajoling of the Mayor, you can always bet on comedy gold.

This time, they have decided that this city’s most well-known and precious cultural resource - music - needs fixin’. And they’re gonna fix it good.

Pointing to a five year old tragedy that may not even have involved live music, the E2 nightclub stampede of 2003, the city council is proposing to create an incredibly draconian series of licensing, background checking, police notification and insurance ordinances for all promoters of live music — except, of course the ones who already own or control the city’s largest rooms.

The proposed law, being voted on tomorrow and published in its full, impenetrable ancient Greek on Jim DeRogatis’s blog, is bad news for anybody putting on small shows in Chicago. The ordinance’s definition of “promoter” is insanely loose and will include bands putting on their own shows.

Normally, city council members don’t have such a antagonistic attitude toward entrepreneurism, and it’s almost certain that even this ridiculous proposal, if passed, would be enforced as selectively as clout with City Hall allows.

In any case, this is a time when resistance needs to be mounted. Sign this petition. Show up tomorrow to city hall if you can.

UPDATE: Reportedly this ordinance has been tabled and will not be voted upon tomorrow. More details forthcoming, but at this point it looks like public outcry got the council’s attention. Really.

In related news, pigs are appearing on the radar screens at Midway Airport and volcanos are spewing crushed ice.

Slumping White Sox Explore Alternatives To Euthanasia

Greg Walker, Chicago White Sox batting coach and oft-touted fall guy for the team’s sleepy offense might not have been the one to dream up last night’s profoundly retarded clubhouse exhibit, but I bet nobody’s happier to have his name out of the papers for a few days.

In a move one might better expect from a Duke-graduate Cubs fan planning a bachelor party in Kenilworth, the Sox clubhouse was decorated with a tableau of blow-up dolls and baseball bats. Now get this, some of the hee hee bats were haw haw inserted into the dolls dude!

Yeah, it’s a regular Algonquin Round Table in Major League Baseball.

While the Sox have every right to be concerned about repeating - with depressing exactness - the awful 2007 season of wasted pitching via petulant non-hitting, this is the wrong approach. As badly-needed motivational initiatives go, instead of one reeking of moronity, desperation and latex, I suggest the Sox consider all the options the world of sport has to offer.

For example, Saturday’s Kentucky Derby reminded us that for some competitors, the end of a bad day comes not in a clubhouse but in a little white trailer staffed with a doctor, a syringe and a map to the glue factory.

Let me be clear: I am not, under any circumstances, advocating that 2B Juan Uribe (Avg .181) be led into that trailer.

I only suggest renting and parking that trailer in 3rd base foul territory, so that repeated trips back to the dugout while going 0 for 4 include for each batter a glimpse of what might be.

That’s got to work better than proxy-rape humor - the whole point of a wake-up call is that it’s something you don’t hear all the time.

“I Forgot My Nuts”

Another one from the Dave Letterman NBC-era vault: Dave siezes Tony Randall for an appearance on the show. At the time, the great Randall was doing a series of commercials for Fisher Nuts.

Somehow, Randall’s wife is referred to, but not shown.

Officer-Bob.com Starts His Shift

I was born in Chicago. I’ve lived in this town, this state, this country for forty years. I’ve been making artistic choices of one kind or another for more than twenty-five of those years. More often than not, these choices were about balance.

I became interested in balance when I learned what exactly happened in the world that gave me - of all the billions of the earth - the options I have. What happened was empire. Empire is my counterbalance.

I have spent my life in the interior of the world’s most powerful empire. I am surrounded by proof of this in the form of an unending stream of immigrants, a parade in which my own ancestors marched during the 19th and 20th centuries.

If the imperial character of my home ended there, I might even be a fan of empire. Of course, it does not, and I am not.

This empire, as all before it, breeds its own demise in the form of rampant authoritarianism, official corruption and intellectual stagnation. My friends and I have always tried to stand in opposition to these things, to varying degrees of success.

Officer Bob is one such attempt. It’s a black humor protest of the widening acceptance of senseless force and corrupt officialdom. It’s a counterbalance and a spit into the abyss of history awaiting us.

What I’m trying to say is Officer Bob will never, ever appear on Oprah.

The Atari 2600 Cartridges That Weren’t

I think I was eleven or twelve when childhood pal Alan Buchbinder left on vacation with his family for a week and let me borrow his Atari 2600 while he was gone. I played that thing until I made myself sick, and that’s not an exaggeration. I flirted with epilepsy, dehydration and starvation, and that was only the first day.

Why so obsessed with the 2600? Well, somewhat due to the exciting cartridge packaging. These were always painted tableaus of drama, espionage, military conflict, dragons and kings - hilarious already since the games themselves were rendered in flickery 8-bit boxes you shoved around using a joystick.

Apparently, this guy has a different, considerably more awesome recollection of the game titles.

(Thanks to Andy Lester)

4.5 Hz Bass Solo Felt From 200 Miles Away

Bass! How low can you go?

This morning at around 4:30 AM, I experienced my first earthquake, courtesy of the downstate Illinois New Madrid Fault. I woke to a dark bedroom and a low but regular thumping sound. My first thought was that one of our cats was doing that scratch-the-ear-with-hind-paw thing, as the thumping had that regularity to it.

Then I noticed that the whole house was gently, but insistently swaying north-south in time with the thumping. Probably a couple of inches each way.

If this was a cat, it was twenty feet tall.

It lasted about one minute - one supremely weird minute. The thought “earthquake?” did occur to me at some point, but right when the shaking ended, I heard the furnace fan also shut off by coincidence, which let me shrug off the whole thing and get back to sleep.

What was most striking about the quake was its creepy, regular oscillation. I don’t know why I thought this, but I always assumed a quake would be more irregular / noisy than this one was. It was downright pro forma and mechanical. The ground tugged and released the house at what I reckon to be a steady 4.5 Hertz (shakes per second) for about a minute, making maybe 270 total oscillations.

I measured the frequency later in the day by firing up Audiomulch and dialing a low frequency oscillator until I found what seemed like the right frequency. The exact reading is 4.6273 Hz, but I rounded because I’m not a geek.

News and USGS reports called the quake a 5.2 on the Richter scale, centered in a small town about 200 miles south of my house.

Whenever the ground you’re occupying acts like a fluid, it will get your attention. Like waves on a calm surface radiating outward from a thrown pebble, an utterly enormous volume of dirt was bunched and stretched into hundreds of waves that reached as far north as Michigan and as far south as Atlanta. Our house rode these waves - four and a half of them a second. Wow.

Also, let me take the time to debunk a myth about animals during an earthquake. Supposedly, animals are able to hear crazy events like quakes and freak out a little bit before they hit. We hear this a lot from our friends in California.

Uh huh. Put down the bong, Peace Bear. Not even the neighbor’s dogs — who will bark at grass — uttered a peep.

Officer Bob #2: Physical Fitness

In which our constable explores the role of physical fitness in today’s policing environment. Added bonus: watch for the “Ask A Pirate” t-shirt.

Flash nerds: Are you doing character anim with bitmaps and want to cut your SWF size in half? Check this out: this time around, The (Heather) Smith experimented with a new asset building technique. When she did the character builds, instead of bitmapped objects, she used mask vectors - that show the texture beneath. The aim was to reduce SWF size / load time by reducing the number of real assets in a rendering. The series’ art direction as it stands is a good opportunity for this thanks to its use of paper cutouts with more or less consistent textures in the original designs.

As a method for reducing the size of the SWF, it was a big success. Both episodes come in at about one minute length but #2’s SWF came it at 628K where #1 was 1.3MB.

Sure, the dev environment acted weird with all those masks on the stage, but weird behavior is to the Flash dev environment what bling and grills are to rap videos.

Big up yaself to to japnm for the quick audio post.

Where’s That Music Coming From?

The guys at the always-excellent animation blog Cartoon Brew celebrated their fourth birthday today and dredged up a link from February about the improbable Sponge Bob Square Pants Musical Rectal Thermometer (pictured above, business end presumably at the left).

While a complete assessment of the tuneful device’s impact on the development of human dignity won’t be in for years, it’s safe to say that the price of parental failure to closely read operation instructions just went way up.

The Agonies Of Earbud Jesus

Photographer Antonio Perez’s Good Friday coverage in the Chicago Tribune shows a closeup of a crucified Jesus, portrayed by one Rafael Melendez.

Apparently, in order to extract maximum emotion from Mr. Melendez, at some point after crucifixion, his personal stereo or cellphone earbud was removed. It can be seen dangling on the ends of Mr. Melendez’s hair, at the bottom right.

Some may take this as an opportunity to mull over the role of showbiz in worship. Others might simply wonder how much of Mr. Melendez’s pained visage is good acting and how much is reaction to what was playing on the other earbud.

In other words:

What Was The Big J Listening To?

Poll: What Was Jesus Listening To?

• ‘You Have Killled Me’ - Morrissey
• ‘Easter Parade’ - Fred Astaire
• ‘Te Quiero’ - Flex
• Sprint Customer Service hold music
• White Sox broadcaster Ken Harrelson

Status:

Arthur C. Clarke, 1917-2008

We are lucky that Arthur C. Clarke, inventor of the geostationary orbiting satellite and author of genre-defining science fiction works such as Childhood’s End, Rendezvous With Rama and 2001: A Space Oddysey was born when he was. Had he been born later, it is possible that some of the finest works in SF would have been snowed under, rendered indistinguishable from the slush pile left by the online blizzard of typing we today navigate. Be thankful that his words met their paper medium in a forceful collision of metal and ribbon. If he were blogging instead, would he (and we) have recognized his ideas as indelible narratives of the celestial frontier? I doubt it.

So long, Sir Arthur.