(English below)

El próximo jueves 26 de Noviembre, proyectamos ¡Allirón! en el pub madrileño Big Ben (Plaza Matute 10;  21.00 horas).

El objetivo del proyecto, compuesto por videos de Iván del Rey de la Torre, Paula Noya, Marta Azparren, Rubén Coll y Álvaro Collar, es proyectar piezas de video con la temática fútbol en lugares donde normalmente se proyecte futbol.

Mi aportación a la proyección es una pieza titulada “c.1900″ en la que reutilizo peliculas de Mitchell & Kenyon, Edison y otros pioneros del cine.

Antes de la proyección de las piezas de los miembros del colectivo Haz!, se visionarán videos  encontrados en Youtube y Vimeo por el Observatorio de Video Digital.

//

This Thursday 26th of November, we are screening ¡Alliron! at 21.00 at the pub Big Ben (Madrid).

The aim of the project, with videos from  Iván del Rey de la Torre, Paula Noya, Marta Azparren, Rubén Coll & Álvaro Collar, is to screen video art pieces about football at places where normally footbol is watched. 

My contribution to the screening is the piece “c.1900″ in which I re-utilize original footage by Mitchell & Kenyon or Thomas A. Edison.

Prior to the art screening, the Observatorio de Video Digital (Observatory for the Digital Video) will showcase some clips from Youtube and Vimeo.

Las personas no son recordadas por el número de veces que fracasan, sino por el número de veces que tienen éxito.

Thomas Alva Edison.

¿Sabes que tan sólo una palabra puede cambiar tu vida?

Earl Nightingale, en su obra, “Lead the Field” nos dice que “La palabra mágica es Actitud.” ¡Mejorando nuestra actitud, todo mejora! Si tratamos a los demás con una sonrisa en los labios, todos nos tratarán mejor. ¡De cuántas me he librado cuando he ido manejando algo más arriba de la velocidad permitida, simplemente por sonreir y tratar al oficial con respeto y una actitud positiva! Y a cuántas personas les ponen las cosas lo más difíciles posibles simplemente por tratar al oficial con una mala actitud.

Todos nosotros nos comportamos como espejos del mundo a nuestro alrededor. Generalmente comenzamos el día con una actitud neutral, y dejamos que el medio y las circunstancias la vayan modificando. Pero, si sabemos que los demás tienden a reflejar nuestra actitud, ¡Qué increíble diferencia cuando proyectamos ante ellos una actitud realmente positiva y recibimos la misma actitud de vuelta!

Esto mejora todas las interacciones que tenemos con las demás personas… Y si nos encontramos con alguien en verdad desagradable, pero no dejamos que afecte nuestra actitud… ¡Ni siquiera nos pesa tanto el haber tratado con esa persona!

Dicen que cuando al gran inventor, Thomas Alva Edison se le preguntó sobre los 10,000 intentos que tuvo antes de lograr que la bombilla eléctrica funcionara, él respondió “No he fracasado. Tan sólo he encontrado 10,000 formas que no funcionan.”

¡Eso es una actitud positiva!

Si Edison hubiera tenido una actitud promedio, después del primero o segundo intento hubiera dicho “Esto es imposible.” O “No sirvo para esto.” Pero su actitud de éxito, aunada a su pasión por hacr realidad su visión, lo llevaron a través de todas las dificultades que podríamos imaginar hasta llegar a algo que ha transformado la vida en nuestro planeta.

Si una actitud positiva pudo lograr eso en su vida… ¿Qué cambios podría tener en tu vida diaria?

Practica a tener una actitud positiva todos los días, durante 30 días consecutivos.

¡Nunca volverás a permitirte una actitud promedio!

¡Vive cada día de tu vida con pasión!

-Jorge

PD. En la siguiente publicación hablaremos de cómo transformar tu vida en 10 minutos. ¡En serio!

Espero tus comentarios al final de este artículo, y corre la voz con aquellas personas a quienes más quieres. ¡Exito!

Avvertenza: se è la prima volta che vi imbattete sulla legge dell’attrazione universale e volete conoscerne il segreto, dovete leggere prima l’introduzione e proseguire in ordine con i vari capitoli, altrimenti sarà dura poter capire bene come stare meglio! Introduzione.

Pensate ad un’auto che viaggia nella notte, la luce dei fanali illumina la strada solo per cento metri, eppure potete percorreremigliaia di chilometri guidando nella notte perchè vi basta vedere i cento metri davanti a voi. E’ così che la vita si snoda, e se crediamo che dopo questi cento metri di strada i fanali dell’auto illumineranno i prossimi cento, la vita continuerà ad illuminarsi fino alla vostra destinazione, otterrete qualunque cosa vorrete solo perchè la volete!

“Salite il primo gradino con fiducia.
Non occorre vedere tutta la scala,
salite il primo gradino.”
M.L.King

Un’altra cosa che la gente si chiede è quanto tempo ci vorrà, quanto tempo occorrerà perchè si manifestino quell’auto, quella relazione, i soldi o qualunque cosa sia. Non esiste nessun libro d’istruzioni che dice se ci vorranno 30 minuti o 3 giorno oppure 30 giorni, dipende soprattutto da quanto voi siete sintonizzati con l’universo. Le dimensioni delle cose non contano per l’universo, sul piano scientifico non è più difficile attrarre qualcosa che per noi non è più enorme piuttosto che attrarre qualcosa che hai nostri occhi appare infinitamente piccola. L’universo fa tutto quello che fa con uno sforzopari a zero. L’erba non fatica per crescere, lo fa senza sforzo, è il grnde disegno. Dipende da tutto quello che succede nella nostra mente, da come vediamo le cose, se pensiamo che il tempo è proporzionale alle dimensioni del desiderio ci sbagliamo. Per l’universo non esistono regole, inviategli la sensazione di avere quello che volete e lo avrete!

Molti hanno più facilità con le cose piccole perciò è meglio cominciare con qualcosa di piccolo, un caffè per esempio, datevi l’intento di attrarre un caffè ogg. Provate ad immaginarvi di parlare con un amico che non vedete da molto tempo. Per un motivo o per l’altro qualcuno vi parlerà di quella persona. Quella persona vi chiamerà o avrete un suo messaggio.

“Molti si meravigliano di come riesco a trovare parcheggio, è sempre stato così dal giorno in cui ho capito il segreto. Mi basta visualizzare un parcheggio libero nel punto in cui io lo vorrei è il 95% delle volte lo trovo li pronto per me. Il 5% delle volte aspetto un minuto o due prima che qualcuno mi liberi un posto. Funziona sempre.” David Schirmer.

Que algo no funcione como tú esperabas no quiere decir que sea inútil.

Thomas Alva Edison

]]> http://thomastordoff.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/monome-madness/ Tue, 24 Nov 2009 09:00:17 +0000 thomastordoff http://thomastordoff.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/monome-madness/

Edison has Mad skills

{via createdigitalmusic}

Good news future Ms. Thangs!  Edison High School will host the nation’s first Ms. Boys baseball tryouts.  A progressive move toward equality.  A gay-friendly sport, second only to girls golf.

Finally, a place where it’s ok for boys to throw like a girl and peek at competition while in the shower.  It’s a life free of secrets and shame, unlike the kids in the Glee Club.

Closeted fathers, men-on-the-down-low and bi-curious jocks can now live vicariously through their sons and classmates.  Mothers will rejoice in the cleanliness of their kids’ dirty outfits.

Team creators added a few new rules:

•    During the seventh inning stretch, players and fans will dance to the latest Madonna single.

•    Cosmopolitans and scones will be the only concession menu items.

•    Wildcats and Beavers are not acceptable team names.

•    Skinny jeans can sub for baseball pants.

•    Player numbers must be sparkly.

Post-game Lean Cuisines will be provided in lieu of ice cream.

Uniforms can be purchased at:

posted/written by caroline picard

Woody Allen Woody Allen Woody Allen

An older gentleman, he came upon a fallen Redwood, collapsed and soundless in the yellow grass. The sun was hot, it stole the sound and smell from the air, except sometimes the man heard a buzzing fly land and when it landed everything was more silent than it had been before. The man studied the log, imagined its figure wearing away with rot, woodmites and termites and peculiar worms, until it wore down into dust—the shit of insects—and fed the dull earth.

Instead, the man took a cast of the tree:

He hired a team of employees and together they gathered around its stupendous girth. They raised the dead log on pedestals—sweating, the whine of the chainsaw—cutting the trunk into eight three foot cross-sections. They took elaborate photographs of each of the tree’s parts. Like a murder scene, quadrants of the surrounding area were taped off. Surrounding tree trunks bore neon pink symbols of work on their bases. Everything was documented.  Everyone wore rubber gloves.

They took a cast of its massive breadth, width, length in sections:

sealing the tree in soap, they poured wax around its parts just before nightfall and in the night the wax hardened and in the morning they cut the wax off in clean, re-sealable pieces. They sent those pieces to Japan in a very cool box.

What came back:

The tree—a new one, it resembled the original—came back without the wax, for the wax had been burned to make the new tree. The tree came in parts, the same eight three-foot cross-sections. Its parts made of wood, not Redwood but Hinoki. Its surface had been carved in a myriad of patterns, different borring strokes; the surface of the replica was carved to look like the surface of the old. This new wood blonder and clean looking, though with the self-same hollowed core of its dead predecessor.

There was a note attached to the mid-section.

Someone was asked to translate:

Once put together, this tree will last 400 years, before hitting a crisis of 100 years, during which it will crack. Thereafter it will last another 400 years before it begins to decompose.

*

Manhattan, New York, 2009: Mr. Allen finds himself sat in the corner window of a high-rise apartment—his own, (he can tell by the family photographs, framed and standing on the bookshelves, and the side table too).  He recognizes the pattern on the carpet; it looks to be Persian, red and black interlaced geometries. He remembers the smell of the place—the smell is both familiar and difficult to perceive; it must be a smell belonging to him.

Soon-yi sounds to be making coffee in the adjacent kitchen and he can hear the clattering of domestic objects as she opens and closes kitchen drawers, cabinets, the dish washer; he can hear utensils bump up against interior wooden walls. Mr. Allen conjures a flash of light pouncing on the landscape of things, sprung suddenly from the dark. He wonders if objects possess a sense of being.

It is as if I am in a dream, he thinks assuming a moment of adolescent existentialism. My actions are not entirely my own but I am more or less comfortable. He looks at his hands clasped in his lap and feels, for a moment, the texture of the corduroy underneath. Past his hands, legs, he looks at his feet in brown, waspy loafers. He isn’t wearing socks. For a moment he imagines his actors feel this way in a set and, going against better judgment, makes the disquieting attempt to peer over the bounds of his imagined consciousness—

into the dark, a mottled grey behind his eyes, either the color of his brain or simply the color of what he’ll never know—

His eyes glassy, he looks at you without seeing. “Talk to me, shout at me, so that I’ll wake up and know that I’m here with you and that certain things really are just dreams.” He is merely talking to himself, a recitation.

Truth be told, he cannot remember living in any other place. At the same time he does not remember how he came to be here.

He lifts a hand to feel his upper lip, relieved to find the moustache still in place.

*

The first opera singer ever recorded had past her prime when she was recorded. By then an old woman in her career, her voice wove through the aria like burning paper. Upon listening to the record, people of then recalled how remarkable she’d been before, as a young woman. “The best,” they told their children, smitten by nostalgia.

Children, when grown, repeated the rumor to respective children. And everyone, ever since, has believed the first opera singer recorded to be the best singer there ever was, for their memories make her so and there is no evidence to the contrary.

*

The young people aren’t any good in his movies. Terrible actors. They don’t understand. They try too much to be like him; they aren’t like him enough. They don’t listen to his direction. They impersonate rather than become. Scarlet Johansson. Jason Briggs. Christina Ricci.

Mr. Allen crosses one leg over the other, relishing contempt. Doughy and plump and taut. Ripe. Budding.

The aroma of coffee wafts into the living room.

*

The dream is one of paradise. In the dream men and women live forever, a glistening surface projected by the whirring of gears and oil and machinations run by invisible, grease-stained hands. The dream is one of desire.

*

Mr. Allen has a hand on his temple. His eyes are closed and therefore he does not see the grey day so much as he feels it. Or, discovers the feeling of it. He can picture it in his mind. The leaves are turning in the park below, across the street; he does not see these either. He knows only they are there. For a moment he imagines that the changing leaves are expressed in the sound of loose interior cutlery. He thinks of the sun as something that pounces.

And then he concentrates:

Music comes from a computer on the desk in the opposite corner of the room. It sounds like it comes from a phonograph. Concentrating on static, the overarching fuzz and pop, as bad as any radio station, he imagines the music to be broadcast from the past.

Mr. Allen presses his fingers into his eyes, pinching the lids together almost, feeling a dull pressure in the back of his head. In the darkness behind his eyes; trying desperately to imagine what she might have sounded like—this siren—when she was young. Feeling through the static, for the traces of her youth. Straining back into the past, her voice the bridge.

In a record, he believes, there is the promise of eternity.

*

Someone said LA was like a Dream Factory. He said working in the Dream Factory was pretty tiring; he was pretty tired of making dreams. He complained about the silt he was always breathing—dream silt. He hoped one day to unionize the workers.

*

In a club in Brooklyn with Soon-yi: Mr. Allen has come to the conclusion that Soon-yi’s friends, boys mostly, hide their sexuality from him. He is conscious of the shadows in the basement barroom—no windows, barely any light. Drums clatter and dash and bang as Mr. Allen is jostled occasionally by flanking, shiny strangers.

“One time in Romania I went to a bar we drank in bars that used to be dungeons they used to torture people in those bars. No I’m serious you could still see the burn marks on the sides of the brick where they used to keep lit torches while they tortured people.” Soon-yi can’t hear him and she smiles in a dreamy way watching the young boys on stage, watching the people at the club, hiding her mouth behind her hand; hiding her mouth from her friends across the room. Mr. Allen feels the shadows like a blanket. “I’ve been feeling so odd lately. I can’t explain. I don’t feel myself,” he says. “I must be getting sick. You can have my whole fortune.” Stuttering. “Did you hear? They finally arrested Polanski.” But Soon-yi does not hear because she’s dancing also, jostling up and down against the others in the room and Mr. Allen feels like an old man wearing socks.

It occurs to him that he will die childless, save for those things that he made in discrete instances; things starring himself in scenes he could control.

*

When Charles Darwin’s turtle, Harriet, died in 2006, they discovered her organs had not aged at all. It was believed that, barring disease or accident, turtles could live forever for evidence of time was not apparent on any of her interior organs.

In Hollywood there is a single mother selling serums of Harriet’s DNA on e-bay. It was manufactured abroad. Black market. It has not been tested. Some of her clients: Ashley Olson, Elizabeth Taylor, Heath Ledger, Michael Jackson etc.

*

The next band comes on stage, just after Mr. Allen looks at his watch, notes the time and wonders what time he might be able to go home—

Soon-yi talks to some of her male friends at the bar.

Mr. Allen looks around at everyone in the room and shakes his head. He looks again on stage.

The keyboardist looks exactly like him. Only younger. And shorter. Should the keyboardist step off the stage, he might stand a head shorter than Mr. Allen. Everything else about the fellow is spot on. He hears Soon-yi giggling across the room. He imagines her covering her mouth.

“I have a proposition for you,” Mr. Allen says after the show. There are candles on the bar and they cast an irregular but welcome light. “I would like to hire you. Assume my life.” They sit at the bar. His doppelganger drinks a whisky Mr. Allen has bought. “I’ll pay you very well.” Mr. Allen’s hands dance around for emphasis. He finds himself regularly touching the young man, occasionally going so far as to pinch the fellow’s shoulders now and again, testing the fellow’s firmness. The sensation is exhilarating. Mr. Allen wonders, abstractly, if he was himself the same density once.

“Why should I do that?” the young man asks. He looks amused. He wears a plaid cowboy shirt with opalescent, buttons—snaps. Tight black jeans on and converse. Sideburns and Buddy Holly glasses. He smokes. His hands are smaller than Mr. Allen’s.

“Only, you’d have to cut down your sideburns.” Mr. Allen says, worried suddenly, brow knit. He studies the youth, looking for other discrepancies. “And maybe get just a slightly different haircut. I understand the times are different, but at least for the transition period, you’ll need to adopt a little more of my style.” With a sudden clarity of thought, Mr. Allen smiles, relived. “Oh! I know. You’ll have to go away for a while. I’ll send out a press release. I’ll say I’m going abroad. You go abroad too. We can meet in another part of the world, somewhere where no one will know who we are. Then I can teach you how to be me. Then you can come back to America. It’s very simple, really. We could even make movies abroad. When you, ‘I’” he smiles and winks, “come back, no one will ever know the difference.” The young man shakes his head. He seems not to understand. “This has to be good.” Mr. Allen continues. “I’ll pay you an exorbitant amount of money—where do you work? Retail?”

“Record store.”

“Right. Good. Well. You’re rich. Did you think it would be this easy?”

*

In the end:

After the first recording of the opera singer, but before the death of Harriet, an anthropologist and a sociologist made a movie with a cameraman and they traipsed around Paris and Saint-Tropez playing tag with a camera. The interviewee became the interviewer, each time asking, “Are you happy?”

No one was famous.

This week, one of my more amusing reads has been “Complete and utter Zebu” by Simon Rose and Steve Caplin (to find out what Zebu is, you’ll have to buy the book). It’s a catalogue of the sometimes scary lies told by businesses, politicians and publicity gurus to part us from our money, our morals, or our votes. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable read.

It seems odd for me to pull a business lesson out of a book which spends much of its time holding a sceptical eye up to some of big business’ more dubious tactics; but towards the end of the book I found a delightful chapter devoted to quotes from some of history’s most influential businesspeople and inventors- getting things wrong. And because they’re quotes, I can repeat some of them here for you.

“The Phonograph has no commercial value” - Thomas Edison

“This ‘Telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a practical form of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us”- Western Union Memo

“That the automobile has practically reached the limit of its development is suggested by the fact that during the past year no improvements of a radical nature have been introduced”- Scientific American, 1909

“Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?”- Harry Warner, head of Warner Brothers, 1927

“Television won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.”- Darryl F. Zanuck, head of 20th Century Fox, 1946

“There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.”- Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment, 1977

So – you can rightly giggle to yourself at these pontificating pronouncements from the great and the good. Edison, of course, is forgivable for many of these comments – he successfully patented a raft of inventions; and watched several more reach a mass audience with somebody else long after he had discarded them.

Several more of these comments, though (particularly Warner and 20th Century Fox) are paradigm examples of big companies sticking their heads in the sand when a new, threatening technology comes along; hoping the danger will go away.

The quote from Scientific American about cars is also by no means alone – in the 1800s, the British Society, then the world’s foremost platform for scientific discourse, almost closed its doors, claiming that “everything there to be discovered has been discovered”.

What makes these comments so interesting is that we’re all experts when we’re armed with hindsight. In the fray of business, these big players are at an inherent disadvantage. They move slowly and ponderously. It’s small, agile companies which create game-changing new business models. Some smarter large businesses see this, and create innovation labs to check out new ideas. They fund offshoots without the burden of the big corporate architecture, to accelerate new ideas to fruition.

Fashion brands even employ young style consultants who are so close to emerging trends that they can spot next year’s playground uber-trend while it’s still incubating in just one urban club.

But if you’re looking for the Next Big Thing, you can do no better than to ask yourself, all the time, “Why does it have to be this way?” By thinking differently, by challenging received wisdom, by questioning the assumed and obvious; that’s where so many innovative new ideas and their subsequent businesses can be allowed to emerge. And that thinking needs no money: just an open mind.

21 november 1877 presenterade Thomas Alva Edison sin allra senaste uppfinning; phonographen. Med den kunde man fånga ljud för att återspela dom precis när man så själv önskade. Ingen Edison, inget PopGiss. Vi höjer en bägare till denne innovatörs minne i afton.

En annan jubilar är Mac Rebennack som fyller 69 idag. Låt oss göra ännu ett besök hos The Last Waltz där Dr John, som vi oftast känner honom, bjuder på Such A Night. Magi.

Är man sugen på lite jazztoner live kan Effes vara ett alternativ i afton. Bandet Slim Pim & The Bullets, med bland andra popgissaren Kenneth Rootmos, står för musiken. Men glöm aldrig att…

Uppdatering: Staffan Lyttkens, bror till Hans Lyttkens som nämns i inlägget före detta, påpekar att Slim Pim & The Bullets alls ingen jazz spelar. Utan mer Blues Band-svängig gubbrock. Skönt att höra, eftersom jazz är farligt.

Oggi è il 20 novembre. Per me è una data familiare, essendo il compleanno di mia madre, a cui ho dedicato il mio libro.

Ma faccio un passo indietro, a qualche giorno fa.

Sono a pranzo dai miei suoceri, Emilia e Mario. Sto parlando della libreria Edison e di come l’hanno ristrutturata. Emilia, alla quale ho dedicato un intero set su Flickr, mi dice che non l’ha ancora vista. Le dico, che problema c’è, un giorno, finito il pranzo, io te e Ale ci andiamo a prendere il caffè. E lei, no, macché, come faccio, prima devo finire le faccende, e così via. Insomma, declina l’invito. Ogni tanto io e Ale abbiamo questa missione, portarla da qualche parte che non siano le botteghe per fare la spesa o i centri commerciali il sabato pomeriggio. Sicché abbiamo insistito. Niente. Le dico: ma non c’è un posto dove ti piacerebbe andare, sul mare, che ne so? Fa lei: mah, un posto ci sarebbe: al cimitero. E’ tanto che non ci vado. Lui (Mario, ndr) non mi ci porta mai. Dice Ale: possibile che una, di tutti i posti, voglia andare al cimitero? Poi mi viene in mente che a giorni sarebbe stato il 20 novembre, quindi dico: andiamoci venerdì, che è il compleanno di mamma. Emilia sembra entusiasta. Dice: allora venerdì mi sbrigo a fare le faccende e andiamo.

Così è stato. Oggi abbiamo pranzato a mezzogiorno e mezzo, prima delle due Emilia aveva fatto già tutte le faccende. Mario però ci ha informato che il cimitero apriva alle due e mezzo. Indovinate un po’? Io e Ale, per passare mezzora, abbiamo portato Emilia alla libreria Edison a prendere il caffè. Le abbiamo fatto vedere l’ex cinema Lazzeri ristrutturato e trasformato in libreria, ma Emilia è parsa interessata solo ai nuovi calendari coi gattini (e questo dà ragione a Elio e le storie tese riguardo alla scelta della copertina dell’ultimo CD).

Alle 14e30 puntuali siamo arrivati davanti ai cancelli del cimitero appena spalancati. Prima però Emilia ha comprato 4 orchidee. Così, a occhio.

Prima orchidea: Mia mamma. Buon compleanno, mamma.

Seconda orchidea: Mio babbo.

Terza visita (senza orchidea): Zia Franca (mia).

Terza orchidea: Zia Bruna (di Ale, cognata di Emilia)

Quarta orchidea: Zia Liliana (di Ale, altra cognata di Emilia)

Altre visite senza orchidee (ormai finite): Il suocero di Emilia, la suocera di Emilia, il cognato di Emilia, i genitori del cognato di Emilia, i genitori di un altro cognato di Emilia. E forse dimentico qualcuno. Comunque: a un certo punto Emilia, indicando una foto, dice: lo vedi lui? Quella accanto è la moglie. Lui veniva sempre qui a trovarla, tutti i giorni, sistemava i fiori, la tomba, ci si salutava, ogni tanto, quando si veniva. Poi un giorno siamo venuti e l’abbiamo visto in una foto accanto a lei. L’ultima volta era vivo e poi eccolo lì. E poi ha concluso con la mia frase preferita, una perla di saggezza rara (Emilia è un genio!): “Pare impossibile, si finisce.”

E così è anche finita la nostra visita al cimitero, non prima però di aver fatto una capatina a salutare Gilda, che non so chi fosse ma dalla foto sembrava una vecchina molto perbene. Non so se avete notato che Emilia è andata a trovare solo conoscenti o parenti acquisiti. Questo perché lei è originaria della Maremma, e tutti i suoi parenti morti sono sepolti là. Prima o poi toccherà portarcela…

Torniamo in avanti. Dicevo che oggi è il 20 novembre. Mia madre avrebbe compiuto 67 anni. Ho ritrovato questa poesia che ricordavo di avere scritto quando ero all’Isola d’Elba. Mmmmm, periodo buiotto. Si intitola

Happy birthday, mother!

Oggi è il compleanno della madre

che mi ha fatto così complicato

e senza pace.

Oggi è il giorno dell’incertezza,

dei sensi di colpa.

La pioggia fende il buio

e si schianta a terra

battendo il tempo

di un’altra notte

che non dormo.

È lontano il tempo delle carezze.

Io, coi piedi intrecciati,

mi trattengo da esplodere.

Happy birthday, mother.

Ho scritto questa poesia il 20 novembre 2002.

Neanche un anno dopo a mia madre è stato diagnosticato un cancro alla gola.

L’anno successivo le sono venuti due infarti e un tumore alle ossa.

L’anno successivo il terzo infarto le è stato fatale.

E ho fatto una sintesi molto stringata.

Nel 2005, per me, è cambiato qualcosa.

Qualcuno che legge lo sa.

Su Wikipedia ho scoperto che il 20 novembre 1942, oltre a mia madre, è nata un’altra donna con delle qualità. Enjoy.

Business Week’s annual ranking of the best places to raise your kids lists the best town from each of the 50 state. To be eligible, the towns needs to have 45,000 or more residents and a median income of $40,000 and 125,000. The only exception is Vermont where none of the cities would of made the population requirement. The cities were ranked based on school performance, number of schools, household expenditures, crime rates, air quality, job growth, family income, museums, parks, theaters, other amenities, and diversity.

Some of the best towns include:
West Haven, CT (Near New Haven)
Pembroke Pines, FL (near Ft. Lauderdale)
Quincy, MA (near Boston)
Edison, NJ (Near New Brunswick)
Tonawanda, NY (Near Buffalo)
Clarksville, TN (Near Nashville)

Churchill has temporary apartments in many of the best towns listed. We’ll be happy to help you with your no-fee short term apartment needs.

Mesaj din partea Pamantului:
“Va transmit acest mesaj in ideea stoparii incalzirii globale.
Cu totii stiti foarte bine ce bucurie enorma a cuprins intreaga umanitate atunci cand Edison a inventat becul, ce bucurosi au fost stra-stra-strabunii nostri cand au avut lumina in case si pe strazi. Mai tarziu…(…)

Multumim pentru inscriere si mult succes!

Thomas Edison is known to be a gallant gentleman who is known best for creating a lot (I mean A LOT) of inventions. But some strongly disagree. I am one of them. Thomas Edison might not be such a “amazing inventor” as you think.  Sir Humphry Davy and Sir Joseph William Swan are both two great inventors that also contributed to making the light bulb, but they were not credited to the light bulb. Instead of being a inventor, Edison was more of a business man. He hired people such as Tesla and took advantage of them, and later lied to them after using their ideas.

Later in life when Tesla was working for Edison, and asked for his pay of $50,000, he simply told Tesla, “When you become a full-fledged American you will appreciate an American joke.” Tesla immediately resigned, and later on, before his death, Edison said that his biggest mistake was not appreciating Tesla’s work. Yet, I don’t think Tesla ever forgave him, as he was the only man to have a negative comment on Thomas Edison in a Times Magazine article.

“Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search… I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor.” Nikola Tesla

But no matter, what he was – inventor, fraud, or businessman, Thomas Edison will be remembered with respect.

My opinion sure might be way different from yours or might be the same, but in conclusion, I don’t really care! Its okay if you think Edison is amazing!

Links – The Scientists, Wikipedia

This September a ban on the manufacture and import of 100-watt and frosted incandescent light bulbs, in use since the 19th century, came into force. The move will be followed by further phase-out steps, until ultimately all conventional bulbs will be banned in four years’ time. The ban is one of a series of measures in the EU to tackle climate change.

The light bulbs are phased out to encourage the switch to more energy-efficient fluorescent or halogen lamps, which use up to 80% less electricity. The Commission estimates that it will help EU households to reduce their electricity use by 10-15%, saving up to 50 euro a year. As it concerns companies, saving energy makes sense as a business strategy and such investments pay themselves back within a few years. It is expected that the reduced electricity consumption will help the EU reduce its CO2 emissions by around 15 million tonnes a year.

While the overall aims of energy efficiency and cost reduction are broadly accepted, there has been some controversy about the way to achieve this. Critics say the new bulbs are gloomy, and can trigger headaches and rashes in people with light sensitive disorders.  Some consumers have been stockpiling the old-style versions over concerns about the higher cost of the long-life bulbs, or for medical and sentimental reasons. The scramble for conventional bulbs illuminates the challenges of persuading consumers to embrace environmentally friendly shopping habits – particularly in the midst of an economic crisis.

For further information, please consult http://ec.europa.eu/energy/efficiency/ecodesign/lumen/index_en.htm

Thomas Alva Edison nació el 11 de febrero de 1847 en Milan (El mismo día que yo, al igual que con Obama y mi compañero Jaime López) y muere un 18 de octubre de 1931. Fue un gran empresario e inventor que patentó más de mil inventos (lo cual equivaldría a un invento cada 15 días durante su vida adulta) y contribuyó a darle, tanto a Estados Unidos como a Europa, los perfiles tecnológicos del mundo contemporáneo. Algunos de ellos son: las industrias eléctricas, un sistema telefónico viable, las películas…

Chopping up a breakbeat in the Fruity Slicer or Slicex or Recycle etc. and rearranging it is a lot of fun. You can make the break your own, instead of just looping it. Even better, making one-shot drum samples from breaks and making huge velocity mapped multisample drumkits will let you mix and match between breaks and get relatively more realistic results. I was going to make a video about this, but I can’t be arsed, so I’m just going to put up a crapload of pictures. WordPress is pretty annoying, because it likes to format pictures on the page randomly and never does what you want it to do.

The first step is to find a breakbeat, or any recording of just drums. Load it into an instance of Edison, probably on the master mixer channel, and open another Edison directly below it. The first Edison is going to be used to find each individual drum sound, and then the second is where they’ll be edited, fine tuned and saved. It’s useful to methodically chop out all the kick drums first, and then the snares, or however you want to do it, sometimes it can be hard to remember if you’ve already sampled that tiny snare or not. Before you do anything, right click in the Edison windows and go view- display settings and un-check fancy mode, unless you really like it; fancy mode is less accurate and just looks fancier. Also, right click again and go edit – and at the very bottom, make sure Click-free (smooth) editing is off, this ‘feature’ automatically fades any of your edits, so while you can’t screw anything up, you also can’t do anything useful.

Preparation

So, select the first kick in the first Edison. I’ve found that selecting more than the whole hit is better than trying to get it exact the first time, since it can be trimmed down later very easily. Copy n’ paste it into the second Edison, and trim it down so you’re left with only the stuff you want. Ctrl-Delete will delete everything except what’s selected, which is useful. Now you might think you’re done, but not quite. Since it’s chopped from an actual beat, the drum’s decay was interupted by another sound, like a hihat or something. This sounds bad because the tail of the drum just cuts off abruptly. We could fade out the end of it, but that wouldn’t really fix the problem. Bathing the whole thing in reverb might help, but might sound really bad as well. The best way that I’ve found to remedy this is to copy and paste the whole drum sound next to itself, reverse the second one and fade it out. This can give the illusion of a natural decay, and it’s faded out before you hear the ‘Schhwwwwooop’ sound.

Trimming

Zero Crossing

If you can’t see those buttons, you might have to resize the Edison window. Once that’s done, I hit Ctrl-A to select all,and then Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V for the copypaste. The first section of the sound will still be selected, so click and drag near the beginning of the selection to the end of the second section of the sound. You might have to zoom out with your middle mouse button to see it. Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be any ‘inverse selection’ shortcut, but oh well. Once you have the second section selected, Alt-Left Arrow will reverse it. Zooom in to where the two sections meet, and if it looks weird, right click- tools – reverse polarity might make it look better. Since you faded them out, there won’t be any clicky sounds, and it might make the phase better or something, it probably doesn’t really matter, I guess I’m just OCD about things like that

Fading Out

Now that you have a ‘Pooschhssschwooop’ sound, you’ll have to fade out the ‘wooop’ part. I used to use the volume envelope, but now that I’m lazy, I just use the fade out button a few times, in different places. If it doesn’t sound good, you’ll have to undo and do it over again. When you’re happy with it, trim it down. The waveform view of the sound might be deceiving, so press S to go to the spectrum view and trim it where the sound really ends. Just to be safe, select a little bit of the end of the sound and fade it out again. You can EQ your little sound now, for the most part taking out the extreme low-frequency rumblies is all you’ll do.

Trimming and Eqing

If you’re making a kit in the FPC, which you should be, right click the little grey bar above the waveform/spectrum where it says ‘TITLE’ and give it a title. I would recommend something easy like Mydrums1_kick_1 or something like that, to keep it all organized. Edison doesn’t seem to support saving as 24-bit wave files, so you could change it to 16-bit if you want to by clicking the little ‘32′ box. If you know your sample is mono, clicking the box next to it will change it to mono. If you do this and it sounds weird, your sample wasn’t mono. We’re going to be dragging and dropping sounds, and if the sounds don’t have a title, FL will automatically name them “Dragged_Sample_68″ or something like that, which sucks. All of the sounds we drag will be saved in the Patches/Sliced Beats Folder, but we’re going to save them somewhere else later, so we’ll end up with duplicates, which is okay I guess, you just gotta clean out sliced beats sometimes.

 Open up the FPC, and using the Empty preset, click on the pad you want to be your kick drum (or whatever) and using the drag n’ drop button in Edison which is on the very right, under the ‘O’, drag and drop the sound into the sample zones place of the FPC. If everything worked right, you should see your sound in the FPC with the right filename, yay!

The next step is to do this over and over again for every drum sound you want from the break, dragging each kick to the kick pad in FPC, etc. Once you’ve gleamed pretty much everything you want form the break, it’s time to organize your multisample layers in FPC. Play through each sound by clicking on the waveform display and figure out which sounds are more aggressive and which are softer. The softer sounds will go at the top of window, using the up/down arrows next to the large ‘DELETE’ button, and the harder sounds will go to the bottom. Once you think you’ve got them in order, click the little button next to ’SPREAD EVEN’, and it will spread the layers evenly, as well as not let them cross each other, so only one zone will be triggered at a time. Sometimes, layering sounds together is fun, and if you want to have more than one layer uh, layered on top of each other, make sure that button isn’t glowing. Now we can adjust the velocities that each zone will respond to. Generally, I like to have the harder sounds closer together in velocity, and the softer sounds further apart.With a pad controller, play the pad and see if it feels right, if you don’t have a pad controller, it might be kind of had to know where to put them.

Drag n drop

When everything is completely set up, and you’ve tried playing the kit with your pad controller, and everything is nice, click the dropdown arrow next to the pad selector arrow things in the top left. Choose ‘Save Entire kit as pad presets..’ and give your kit a name. The pad presets should be saved to Image-Line\FL Studio #\Data\Patches\Packs\FPC.. if you put the kick drums in the pad that FPC wants you to, it will save it to the kick drums folder, etc etc.. Down in the corner of this window, make sure you check ‘Save wave files’, it will save the audio files in the same place as each pad preset, for easy portability and generally neater organization.

I could have gone into more detail, but I didn’t. This was pretty badly organized and stuff, but I don’t care that much. Read the Edison help files.

The Crazy Ones…

~ Ayn Rand ~

This makes me want to give standing ovations and do handstands.

Are you a crazy one?

It reminds me of this wonderful passage:

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
e. e. cummings

And that’s the thing, isn’t it?  To each of us discover what makes us crazy…what lights the fire of our passions…what would call us to be anything but normal.  Do you know what that is?  Are you pursuing it courageously or are you waiting for “someday”?

The crazy ones don’t wait.  They sally forth.  They fail.  Their hearts are broken.  They heal up and leap right back into the fray.

That’s why we call them crazy.

That’s why crazy is such a precious commodity.

A falta de investimento em conseqüência de um marco regulatório defeituoso foi o provável motivo que levou ao apagão de energia elétrica em 18 cidades brasileiras e no Distrito Federal, nessa terça-feira (10). O senador José Agripino (RN), líder dos Democratas no Senado, encaminhou à Mesa do Senado requerimento pedindo ao ministro de Minas e Energia, Edison Lobão, quanto foi investido pelos setores público e privado na produção de energia em todas as regiões brasileiras.

“Encaminhei pedido de informação ao ministro porque quero saber o montante investido pelo setor público e privado na energia em todo o Brasil. Vou esperar as explicações sobre o apagão e já aviso que não vou me conformar com justificativas superficiais”, avisou Agripino. Segundo o senador, o país está vivendo “diante da ponta de um iceberg” em que é preciso aplicar mais recursos nas redes de transmissão para se vender energia de qualidade.

“O problema do apagão está no modelo do marco regulatório. O presidente Lula afirmou que o Brasil é um exemplo de investidor na interligação de energia elétrica, mas o apagão de ontem mostrou claramente que estamos diante de um mega problema: o modelo adotado pelo país não conduz à modernidade”.

Segundo o senador, a ministra-chefe da Casa Civil, Dilma Rousseff, então ministra de Minas de Energia, em 2005, terá de responder pela falência do governo. Dilma foi uma das maiores defensoras da implantação do novo marco regulatório: em que a energia velha e energia nova estão no mesmo grau de produção. Agripino defende que a energia nova tenha mais compensações.

A energia velha provém de hidrelétricas estatais que não precisam mais pagar pela construção das usinas – o que deixaria os valores das tarifas mais baratas. A energia nova provém de hidrelétricas privadas que ainda pagam o valor de empreendimento. O marco regulatório, entretanto, obrigou a todos cobrarem valores semelhantes pela energia, provocando problemas no sistema.

“Marco regulatório da energia velha está igual a da energia nova. Mas dão para a energia nova uma tarifa que não é compensatória, não era investimento”, explicou o parlamentar. “O que houve foi uma sobrecarga e não há geração de energia suficiente, assim, explode todo o sistema interligado”, acrescentou.

(Fernanda Domingues – Equipe Agripino)