QuesoGuapo

I hardly believe that I missed it, but the anniversary of my last day at The Daily Mining Gazette passed on July 14. I was thinking ahead of the big day that I would have a beer and make a toast to my 3.5 years at the DMG, but I plumb forgot about it.

I don’t know if it’s a good thing or not. Oh well. I think that I’m in a better place now although I miss my time in the Copper Country.

I haven’t listened much to Minnesota Public Radio’s new station The Current, but I hear it’s doing extremely well. After sampling a bit of their Fourth of July offering (after following a link from TVBarn.com) I can understand why. They had 10 hours of music covering the 50 states.

Dubbed Fifty Songs for Fifty States, it aired from 2 p.m. to midnight on July 4. The playlist is chock full of classics and some unknowns. Definitely worth checking out the streaming MP3s.

Well, tonight was a slight downer. I was trying to think of songs for the Fourth of July to sing. After sorta passing through the more patriotic songs (which typically get mixed response), I settled on Birthday by the Beatles as one of the cooler birthday songs.

So to introduce the song I decided to make it a little joke. I said something like, “230 years ago we declared our independence from the British. So what better way to celebrate our birthday than to have the British wish us happy birthday.” Or something.

During the fireworks, someone shouted “These colors don’t bleed and they never will,” I said “Except the War of 1812.” Some guy took offense.

Oh horrors! I mentioned the Beatles being British — although Paul McCartney has certainly done his share of playing for an American audience practically draped in the red, white and blue. And, OMG, the War of 1812 — the one war we had our tuckuses practically handed to us, nearly 200 years ago. I didn’t mention one word about the actions in the past 40 years, which certainly have been controversial and difficult to justify.

There’s certainly power in pride, but there is a cost of hubris if we’re not careful. Unfortunately, we’ve made mistakes over the past few hundred years and it’s ridiculous not to acknowledge them — and to learn from them.

I wanted to defend my positions and the right to do so under the First Amendment — one of the supposed rights we allegedly have. Instead I bit my tongue because the whole darn thing wasn’t worth it. I know not to make my stand in a bar where tolerance, understanding or even comprehension go flying out the window (I been a bystander and minor participant in a stupid New Years fight). Instead I’ll make a defiant stand on the blog I control and edit. 😉

Anyway, that freakin’ incident pretty much ruined the whole night, although I loved singing “New York, New York” and “You and Me and Bottle Make Three.”

Geez, that Ron Moore is seriously slacking on his blog about Battlestar Galactica. No updates since April. Hopefully that means the show’s going to be really good. 😀

Anyway, scifi blogging update. TVBarn.com was linking to a new press release pimping executive producer David Eick’s video blog and has some stats.

– Series premiere “33” has been viewed more than 100,000 times online, legally.
– Moore’s podcasts have been downloaded more than 150,000 times
– Moore’s blog has had 347,000 visitors for a total of almost 1.5 million visits

Oh and Kobol’s Last Gleaming, Part II will be streaming on SciFi.com ahead of the season 2 premiere on July 15. BSG returns to the broadcast network airwaves in just over a week with three episodes airing on NBC on Saturday, July 9. Episodes include the action-packed Hand of God as well as the two-part season finale Kobol’s Last Gleaming. These will be in HD where available.

Lots-o-stuff in that press release. Frak yeah!

Once again, the anti-flag burning amendment has passed the U.S. House with a required two-thirds vote. After six previous failed attempts in the Senate, there’s the possiblity that the amendment might actually pass this time. If it gets Congressional approval, it goes to the states for approval.

And yet again, I’m puzzled as to what this amendment might actually achieve. That politicians love the American flag? Check. That’s pretty obvious.

Is solving flag-desecration a burning issue (sorry for the pun)? Statistics for years have shown most people don’t consider flag-burning to be a pressing issue especially when weighed against the First Amendment right to free speech. This amendment does gag free speech — by only allowing the positive use of the flag as a symbol.

Of course, the proposed amendment gives Congress the ability to draw up rules regarding how Old Glory will be treated. I’ve always been intrigued how far these restrictions would go.

Let’s say they make it illegal to burn a flag. What about a photo of the flag? What about a photo of a photo of a flag? A crudely drawn description of the flag? What about a flag that has only 12 stripes? It’s not the American flag ? which has 13 stripes. (BTW, the flag at the top of this post is a 12-striped flag. Please feel free to download and use as you see fit). I call it “Not-the-American Flag” ™.

When you get down to it, no matter how hard they try to pass these rules, there’s going to be serious challenges to enforcing them. Although they’re trying to regulate a symbol, people wishing to express themselves through the use of the symbol will find other symbols to use.

The scary thing is — If people are willing to place restrictions on how we express ourselves with a symbol, would they be willing to place restrictions on how we use a symbol of a symbol? Where does it end?

I poised these questions to my Congressman around 2000, the currently embattled Randy “Duke” Cunningham (who is the amendment’s primary sponsor). Sadly, I didn’t hear back from the representative or his staff.

Interestingly, President George Bush was photographed during last year’s election placing his signature on American flags for the Republican faithful. Surely that would be desecration of the flag, right? After all, what’s good for the rabblerousers is surely good for the president, right?

I thought I’d let you know that the BBC
is releasing all of Beethoven’s symphonies for download as mp3 files.

Download Beethoven

They’re brand spanking-new performances by the BBC Philharmonic performed live on BBC Radio 3. For a week after each performance, they’ll be available to download.

The thing is they’re only going to be up for a limited time. Already Symphonies 1 and 3 are gone and 2, 4 and 5 will be taken down by late tomorrow (Tuesday) morning. The other four symphonies will be performed live over BBC Radio 3 and then put online later this month.

So I’m sure you can get classical performances elsewhere, but this sounds like a really neat endeavor. I’ll probably find Symphonies 1 and 3 somewhere else.

— From an e-mail I sent to pepband-chat.

Is it time to test my driving skills when I’m hampered by glare from the sun? Driving home, two young men decide to cross against the signal at Ninth Street and Main — right in front of me. I slow down, but the glare made it really hard to see where they were.

And then, on the same block, someone turning their vehicle onto the organic market parking lot decides to head my direction — on a one-way street. I brake, because I had no idea what this person was doing. I just shake my head at these infrequent driving hazards.

Once I get home, I decide enough is enough. The glare is pretty bad in part because my windshield wipers were worn. I swapped them out in five minutes and hopefully my drive home later this week will be more pleasant.

I think I figured out what was making my Google rank drop. I had changed the way the archive pages are linked. I started using a pull-down menu instead of straight links. As a result, the pages weren’t getting linked at Google and my ranking apparently dropped as those linked pages expired from Google’s cache.

I changed it back to straight links primarily so Google can index my pages (thus making that search box on the right side of this blog ever so more useful). It’s nice that I’m back to number two, but I guess this also shows how insubstantial that ranking is.

BTW, I swear this is the last time I’ll talk about my Google ranking. Well, for a while at least. 😉

I was quite fortunate to score a pair of tickets to the sold-out Chico Microbrew Fest on Saturday. That was a boon to be around the office Friday night — being new to the area, I didn’t realize that the event sells out.

There were 35 breweries and a winery there. There were the “greats” including Sierra Nevada, Stone, Gordon Bierch. There were some local brewmasters there that I didn’t know existed. A ton of food was on hand for sampling too. All for the price of a $30 ticket that I got gratis (I gave the other ticket to a co-worker to give to a friend).

It was nice sampling all the different beers (I made it to about 17 of the total 36). I definitely liked the reds and pilsners that were being offered. I definitely enjoyed the pear cider from Fox Barrel.

I paced myself through the afternoon, taking a break for food or diet cola after every four or five samples. In the end, it worked out and I cruised to the bowling alley knock down some pins.

During the clean-up drawing to give away the prizes that hadn’t been picked up, I heard my number being called for the ultimate prize — 3-day use of a dumpster from Waste Management. Woot!

Well, all the event proceeds go to the Soroptimists so it’s a worthy cause.