It’s been a while since I last tried GarageBand…maybe 10 years. The latest version is quite different than I remember. But I put together a couple minutes of loops and samples from one of my favorite shows & movies, Star Trek. I successfully uploaded it to SoundCloud (I think) and wanted to share my newest track, called ST Chill.
My buddy Jack DeMarco stopped by to visit yesterday and helped me feel a little less frustrated about STILL being in the hospital. We worked on some music and talked about life, the Universe and Everything. Somewhere in the midst, he mentioned he had never really watched “The West Wing”…one of my favorite television shows of all-time. Creator, Aaron Sorkin, wrote most of the episodes (until season 4) and created some of the best monologues and dialogues on television. I figured I’d share a snippet of one of my favorite moments from season 2 starring Martin Sheen as POTUS.
Top 10 Takeaways: “Ant-Man and the Wasp” Edition #top10takeaways
10) This anti-aging digital tech is awesome. Can someone please give us a young Captain Kirk before Shatner dies?
9) I think I remember seeing Paul Rudd first as Phoebe’s piano playing boyfriend on “Friends”…he pretty much just does that guy in every movie and I am perfectly okay with that.
8. Michael Pena (apologies for lack of tilde on the n of his name and also lack of accent on the e of tilde) is really, really good. This guy has been creeping on the edges of leading man…he is there.
7) Michael Pena and Michael Cera… totally not the same dude. (I know! Me too!)
6) Lawerence Fishborne. “Mr. Clean”. If you don’t know what I am talking about, do yourself a favor and watch one of his first films…at age 14, “Apocalypse Now”.
5) There are two post-credits scenes that, if you care about the Marvel Cinematic Universe, you should stick around for…. errr..For which you should…. errr….just watch them. Never end a sentence a preposition with.
4) So many awesome scenes in downtown San Francisco. They don’t always match from cut-to-cut…(wait…they were just on Lombard Street…how are they now at Pier 39?) But that’s what they apparently call #suspensionofdisbelief
3) If you saw “Avengers: Infinity War” and wondered where was Scott Lang during all of this… you probably get your answer.
2) Is that Kitty from Arrested Development? Yes it is. Was that the Stair Car Truck from Arrested Development in Captain America: Civil War? Yes it was. Was that Tobias in the Collector’s collection… seriously WHAT IS HAPPENING?
1) Three words: World’s Greatest Grandma.
This was my 7th burn, in a row. A few firsts, a few thirds, a few 7ths…. a few things good and some bad.
Burning man is expensive. Even if you do it cheap…its an expensive art festival in a very inhospitable climate, with lots of hoops to jump through and red tape and you better have your head checked before you decide to go, because it can drain your soul and wallet and any reasonable friend will tell you to not go.
My first year I documented my burn. It was 2012…I took still shots on my Canon 7D and pieced them together, sequentially with a Philip Glass soundtrack “Crazy Life”.
That was my first year, I was part of a camp called “Papa Legba” and we were a bunch of communication tech geeks who were trying to understand how people communicate with limited technology. Cell phone and wifi/data is fairly nonexistent in the middle of nowhere when 70,000 people arrive for a week. Does civilization collapse?
The answer is no.
I later did talks at hacker conferences including this subject… HOPE X (Hackers on Planet Earth) was one in NYC.
That was year 1. More about year 2 next time 🙂
Walking and biking in Orlando is deadlier than in any other major city in Florida — and the nation.
But the city’s new transportation director, Billy Hattaway, is a reformer. And he’s trying to change the wide, high-speed roads that put people at risk.
Recently, the City of Orlando kicked off a 4-week test of a particularly dangerous stretch of Curry Ford Road. I’m a biker and have lived in downtown Orlando for over 20 years…I have avoided biking on Curry Ford at all cost. The test involves cutting Curry Ford from 4 lanes down to two (plus a middle turn lane) and adding bike lanes on both sides of the street.
The test has caused quite an active debate in the nearby Nextdoor.com discussion boards…with some going as far as to claim that the city (or someone) is getting rich from adding bike lanes (not sure I follow the logic there) and online petitions to remove the bike lanes. Some excerpts from of the Nextdoor posts:
On Saturday April 14th, the city is hosting the first Curry Ford Community Bike & Pedestrian Safety Fair:
Curry Ford Road is undergoing a temporary transformation to make the corridor safer and more accommodating for all modes of travel. This includes a reduction in travel lanes and the addition of bicycle lanes and mid-block pedestrian crossings. This community event will focus on bicycle and pedestrian safety by providing demonstrations, interactive drills, helmet fittings, and giveaways. Walk or ride your bike to the free event.
Melissa Jeltsen writes in the Huffington Post that “Everyone Got The Pulse Massacre Story Completely Wrong.” I live a couple of blocks away from Pulse. I’ve performed there, have friends that worked and frequented the club…almost everyone that lives in Orlando knows someone who was there when Omar Mateen opened fire with an AR-15 style SGC MCX semi-automatic rifle, killing 49 and wounding another 53.
The LGBTQ community in Orlando was hit hardest by the attack…Pulse was widely known as a gay-friendly nightclub, although probably third or fourth in the list of most popular gay clubs in town. It is located in an area south of downtown, in an area known more as the home of the Orlando Regional Medical Center (ORMC), fast food restaurants and Super Target than nightclubs.
Almost overnight, a narrative emerged that until now has been impossible to dislodge: Mateen planned and executed an attack on Pulse because he hated gay people.
“Let’s say it plainly: This was a mass slaying aimed at LGBT people,” Tim Teeman wrote in The Daily Beast. The massacre was “undeniably a homophobic hate crime,” Jeet Heer wrote in The New Republic. Some speculated that Mateen was a closeted gay man. He was likely “trying to reconcile his inner feelings with his strongly homophobic Muslim culture,” James S. Robbins wrote in USA Today.
The recent trial and acquittal of Mateen’s widow in Federal Court in Orlando has reopened the partially healed wounds of many in Orlando’s gay community, and hearing that his motive may not have been driven by homophobia, but rather his ties to Islam, is of little comfort to those still mourning.
Salman’s trial cast doubt on everything we thought we knew about Mateen. There was no evidence he was a closeted gay man, no evidence that he was ever on Grindr. He looked at porn involving older women, but investigators who scoured Mateen’s electronic devices couldn’t find any internet history related to homosexuality. (There were daily, obsessive searches about ISIS, however.) Mateen had extramarital affairs with women, two of whom testified during the trial about his duplicitous ways.
I was surprised to learn that the shooting was not classified as a “hate crime” at all. In fact…
…the 2016 Hate Crimes in Florida Report does not include the 49 victims of the Pulse shooting in its official total. “These crimes were not classified as hate crimes by the Orlando Police Department in the Uniform Crime Reporting Information System.”
So what about all those stories of Omar Mateen being a “regular” at Pulse? Well, as the article puts it,
As far as investigators could tell, Mateen had never been to Pulse before, whether as a patron or to case the nightclub. Even prosecutors acknowledged in their closing statement that Pulse was not his original target; it was the Disney Springs shopping and entertainment complex. They presented evidence demonstrating that Mateen chose Pulse randomly less than an hour before the attack. It is not clear he even knew it was a gay bar. A security guard recalled Mateen asking where all the women were, apparently in earnest, in the minutes before he began his slaughter.
Read the article in its entirety here:
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/noor-salman-pulse-massacre-wrong_us_5ac29ebae4b04646b6454dc2
