The Blogg

March 6, 2010

Concert Review: Blue Oyster Cult 2010-03-05

Filed under: Music — chadhogg @ 8:27 pm

I have now seen at least a dozen concerts at Crocodile Rock Cafe in Allentown, and this was definitely the best attended of them. I would have estimated the crowd at 1,000 people, but the room is advertised to hold 1,400 and it was filled. There were a few teenagers, many people my age or slightly older, and lots of children of the ’60s. I have been critical of the long, boring waits between acts at this venue before, but they did an excellent job this night. Striking and setting the stage took on average 25 minutes, and in the meantime they showed footage from Woodstock ‘99 on a large screen lowered in front of the stage. Just before the headliners, they switched to the infamous “more cowbell” sketch. Doors opened at 7:00 and I arrived around 8:00 but was still able to find a great spot at the front of a riser about 12 feet, 45 degrees to stage left. I had apparently missed two opening acts that were not well-received.

I did see three other openers, all of which were quartets. I believe they all played original music. (The songs from the last one sounded familiar, but I feel the same way about all music in that style.) I did not catch the first band’s name, but I think they may have been the Brendan Quinn Band. Their sound was purely blues-rock, but none of their songs were based on a blues progression. They were not bad, but nothing you could not hear in a pub in every community. The next band was Voice Of Reason, which played in a style like thrash metal but slowed down 20%. They had a powerful, operatic vocalist who sounded a lot like Bruce Dickinson to me. The rest of the band played like face-melting clockwork, but it was strictly rhythm. I would definitely see them again, but hope they add some serious lead guitar. I did not hear the third band’s name either, but they played modern rock. Not my thing, but they did it well.

The headlining Blue Oyster Cult came on just after 10:00, and played until 11:40. Instead of current member Richie Castellano on keyboards, guitar, and background vocals, former bassist Danny Miranda was featured in that role for this show. Allen Lanier he is not, but he filled in well enough. Rudy Sarzo looks almost exactly like videos from playing with Ozzy 25 years ago: rail-thin with overly long, spindly limbs and an impressive mane of hair. The rest of the band look like fairly typical, doughy middle-aged men. My memory of the setlist and rough order is: “This Ain’t The Summer Of Love”, “Before The Kiss, A Redcap”, “Burnin’ For You”, “Buck’s Boogie”, “The Vigil”, “Shooting Shark”, “Then Came The Last Days Of May”, “Black Blade”, “Godzilla”, Guitar Solo, “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper”, and encore “The Red And The Black”. The only adventurous choice was “The Vigil”, but it was surprising to not hear “Cities On Flame”. I cannot complain about the length of the show of any of the choices, but I sure would have liked to have heard something from one of their two most recent albums and one of their audience sing-alongs such as “I Love The Night” or “Golden Age Of Leather”.

During the first two songs I was concerned that Donald “Buck Dharma” Roeser was having an off night. Fortunately, after that he retuned his instrument (one of those strange looking guitars with no headstock and tuners at the bridge) and played like a man possessed for the rest of the show. On most songs he completely abandoned the solos he had recorded back in the day for blistering new ones. He especially killed on extended versions of “Burnin’ For You” and “Then Came The Last Days Of May”, but was fantastic throughout. Sarzo also put his own stamp on the songs rather than copying Joe Bouchard note-for-note, and it sounded good in most places. Due to the large proportion of the concert given over to the more radio-friendly portion of their catalog, I think Buck had more lead vocals than Eric Bloom. Between that, Buck’s incredible lead guitar work, and Eric’s pedestrian rhythm playing, it really seemed like the band is now Buck’s vehicle and Eric is as much in the background as the replacements filling out the band.

As I might have expected from seeing one of my very favorite bands, this was one of the best concert experiences I have ever had, well worth the 2.5 hour drive each way.

March 5, 2010

Book Review: Anathem

Filed under: Books — chadhogg @ 11:40 am

Through much of Anathem I believed that Stephenson had fallen into the trap of many authors of speculative fiction do: creating a fantastically rich setting but a relatively uninteresting plot. I would probably have been happy to read 1000 pages of exposition of the Mathic world. As I continued, however, the plot drew me in, and I ended up reading the last 400 pages or so in the span of two days.

Stephenson writes in a language that is primarily English, but includes a smattering of invented words for which English ones would have been perfectly suited. I generally tend to despise this kind of behavior, but at least he helps the reader out by including a glossary and often using words that are suggestive of their English near-synonyms. At times this does get way too cute for my taste: “Reticulum: (1) When not capitalized, a [network] formed by the interconnection of two or more smaller [networks]. (2) When capitalized, the largest reticulum, joining together the preponderance of all [networks] in the world. Sometimes abbreviated to Ret.” Fortunately, it is eventually revealed that all of this is quite intentional and important to the story.

The book is dense with mathematics, physics, and philosophy presented through dialogs between characters. I find all of these topics enjoyable, but the explanations are at times ham-handed with multiple analogies to explain something that I had groked pages earlier. Although I have seen him do so well elsewhere, Stephenson does not seem to be as comfortable or competent writing about relationships and romance as he is technical details. This is not a book that has much emotional impact, but it is a damn interesting workout for the mind. Most of the technical content seems correct / plausible to my mind, but I find the explanations regarding oxygen near the end wholly unsatisfactory. (Those who have read it will likely know to what I am referring, while those who have not should not find anything spoiled.)

At first I intended to write that this was my least favorite Stephenson work, though still very good by other standards. Now that I have completed it and seen how everything fits together, I am not so sure that it does not belong to the same class as Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, and Cryptonomicon.

February 24, 2010

Questionable Advertising #4

Filed under: Politics — chadhogg @ 10:11 am

Today’s installment is not about a horrifically amateur production or a message that makes no sense when you think about it. I do not watch that much television (though all of those Olympic hockey games are adding up), yet I have seen dozens of commercial slots taken up by the U. S. Census Bureau. Most are the version that follows a filmmaker named Payton, but this one is a reasonable facsimile. My complaint is not about the quality of these ads, although there are certainly arguments to be made there. My question is how the government could possibly justify spending money for any sort of advertising budget. Perhaps they have some sort of study that advertising does significantly increase compliance, but my intuition is that people are going to return their forms or not regardless of marketing. It is not like people do not know what the purpose of the census is. I am sure that the funds spent on this campaign, even including a Super Bowl slot, are less than a drop in the bucket compared to the budget busters we discussed earlier, but that does not excuse forcibly extracting money from taxpayers and future generations and handing it to broadcasters. One of our regular readers is an employee of the Census, so perhaps she can shed some light on this.

My second topic is a series of commercials for TheLadders.com, a recruiting and job search site for “only $100K+ jobs; only $100K+ talent”. These advertisements proclaim, in not so many words, “you are better than most people and should not have to see or interact with the riffraff”. This sort of message is implicit in all sorts of advertising to the wealthy and upper-middle class, but I am not sure I have ever seen it stated quite so explicitly and earnestly. Doing so in a way that will be seen by millions of the disparaged proles requires some serious cojones. I suppose there is no good reason for the owners of TheLadders to care what anyone thinks who is not a potential customer (that is, someone who does not have the “talent” to earn more than $100,000), but in the era of bank bailout rage they should keep an eye out for pitchforks.

February 19, 2010

Book Review: 1919 and The Big Money

Filed under: Books — chadhogg @ 4:09 pm

It was with some trepidation that I followed The 42nd Parallel with the remaining two books in the series. To make the task a bit less onerous, I stopped reading the “Camera Eye” sections entirely and only skimmed through the “Newsreel” chapters. Dos Passos took up a new frustrating habit of inserting paragraph breaks seemingly arbitrarily in the middle of sentences. I am sure there was some poetic purpose behind this, but its effect was to remove any interest I may have had in reading something else “artistic” in the near future. The cast of disparate characters fractured enough over the rest of the series that by the time I reached a chapter about some particular character I had forgotten entirely which of the stories thus far applied to them. As I expected, there was nothing to eventually tie the stories together. Both books end around momentous events — the signing of the Treaty of Versailles and the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, but these cannot be seen as real resolution since most of the characters are involved peripherally or not at all.

I can say a few good things about the books. They have indeed painted a broad picture of life in the United States in the first 30 years of the 20th Century. I learned more about the socialist movements during those times than in any study of history, and have seen more clearly how the transfer from government by/for/of the people to government by/for/of the corporations was already well underway before even my grandparents were born. In the one Camera Eye that I did read carefully after the fact, Dos Passos wonderfully turns around the anti-immigrant sentiment that fueled the Red Scare to note that it was the men who sailed from distant shores to find a land where all men were created equal who were Americans in spirit:

America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have turned our language inside out who have taken the clean words our fathers spoke and made them slimy and foul
their hired men sit on the judge’s bench they sit back with their feet on the tables under the dome of the State House they are ignorant of our beliefs they have the dollars the guns the armed forces the powerplants
they have built the electricchair and hired the executioner to throw the switch
all right we are two nations
America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have bought the laws and fenced off the meadows and cut down the woods for pulp and turned our pleasant cities into slums and sweated the wealth out of our people and when they want to they hire the executioner to throw the switch
…
we stand defeated America

(Lack of punctuation, capitalization, and sensible structure preserved in case you somehow find it meaningful.) Now, time to pick up a book from someone who knows how to tell a story.

February 14, 2010

The Federal Budget

Filed under: Politics — chadhogg @ 9:43 pm

The New York Times has an excellent interactive view of the current federal budget proposal. I already knew the big-picture data from the chart, but it becomes much clearer in graphical form. I remain convinced that eliminating waste at all levels is worthwhile, but this leaves no doubt that spending cannot be brought under control without addressing the military, Social Security, and Medicare. I believe that funding for operations in Afghanistan is not included in the budget, so the military is an even larger portion of government spending than it appears. Does any politician with real power have the will to touch the third rail?

Game Review: Knights Of The Old Republic

Filed under: Gaming — chadhogg @ 9:33 pm

Around Christmas and New Year’s Steam was running daily specials with old games up to 90% off their normal prices, so I purchased a few that I had missed in their time but wanted to eventually play. A month or so ago I began with Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic. The idea of porting a d20 role-playing game into the Star Wars universe works quite well, and while I still think I prefer the overhead view of Baldur’s Gate and other earlier Bioware games, the first-person perspective does help the player to identify with the main character. While not as large as some of the company’s other games, there is plenty to explore and an engaging plot. My first playthrough took about 40 hours, and when I went back through as a dark side character I still found 22 hours of gameplay.

For such an excellent game, however, it really could have been much better. Frequently after a battle my character would be frozen in place for between 5 and 30 seconds. Depending on the order in which you do things, some seemingly unrelated quests can become unfinishable. Once you (spoiler!) become a Jedi and have other Jedi in your party, the other characters become nearly worthless. This is faithful to the expanded universe, but disappointing gameplay. Furthermore, skills are very nearly useless in the game. You find enough parts and computer spikes to be able to do any hacking or repairing without investing any points in those skills. There was only a single door / container in the entire game that could be opened with the security skill but not through simply bashing it down. Disabling mines is nice, but none of them are powerful enough to make simply walking through minefields not an option. I did not come across a single invisible character, and if you do not need to disable mines nor do you need to be aware of their presence. I also never activated stealth throughout the entire game. Some parts of the plot and puzzles are very cliche-ed (for example, you have to solve a clunky implementation of the Towers of Hanoi).

Overall, I give the idea an “A” and the execution a “C”.

February 12, 2010

Short Story Review: Manna

Filed under: Books, Computing, Politics — chadhogg @ 4:43 pm

You can read Manna online in 30-60 minutes, and if you find value in dystopian or utopian literature, it is worth your time. The writing is average at best and there are some serious holes in the story, but this type of work is more about ideas than execution. The first four chapters are best, but the remaining six are good as well.

Marshall Brain explores the economic impact of the expansion of automation in the workplace, and I find his dystopian scenario very likely. Even now, we need to recognize that a part of the current 10% unemployment is not a result of an economic downturn, but because there is simply not that much work to be done. It is a good thing that machines are now able to perform many tasks that previously required much human labor, and that this is becoming more true every year; by most standards the quality of life of the average first-world citizen was better in the 2000s than any previous decade. But the growing disparity between the ultra-wealthy and everyone else is a growing crack in this foundation. On a more micro-level, the difference between those who have jobs and those who do not is immense. The only way that the labor-based economy can continue to work through the next several decades is if people start working less and being paid more. That is, the abundance produced by cheap machine labor should mean that everyone can live comfortably on income derived from working 20 or 30 hours per week, rather than some working what is now considered full-time and others barely subsisting. Is there any chance this will actually happen?

February 8, 2010

Who Dat Has A Dumb Catchphrase?

Filed under: Sports — chadhogg @ 10:47 am

Yesterday’s Super Bowl was not a great game like several recent ones, but a good game. I do not think many people picked the Saints to win by 14. (My prediction was Colts by 7 or less.) Although the second quarter looked one-sided, both teams were in this to the very end. The call to open the second half with an onside kick was bold — I am not sure I could have done that myself. It was a strange game in several ways. No turnovers in the first 55 minutes, and the Saints won even though their defense has been build around turnovers. Very few penalties, and only one instances of a player not getting right up after a play. What is wrong with the announcers? On the 2 point conversion try, as soon as they showed a replay all of the males in the room where I was watching were yelling “Challenge! He crossed the plane,” while Simms was spouting off about needing to maintain control while going to the ground. Is it that difficult to find a crew that at least knows the rules as well as the average fan? At least when Madden was making inane comments it was humorous. They should have Ron “Jaws” Jaworski work every game.

I am a big fan of the The Who, and thought they still sounded great 9 years ago at the Concert for New York City, but the last decade has not been kind to them at all. Losing Entwistle was a major blow, obviously, but Daltrey is the real problem. Maybe he has just decided to change up his timing a bit in recent years, but it sounded to me like he was actually missing cues, most noticably at the beginning of “Baba O’Riley”. The guy they had playing drums was like an anti-Keith Moon: calm and efficient. Townshend can clearly still play his old riffs, but I think it is time to hang up The Who and go on solo tours.

Continuing the trend of last year, I think more than a third of the advertising was for the host network and its shows, implying that they could find no buyers willing to pay the steep price tag. There were a few memorable advertisements, and a few disappointing reruns of ones that have been in use for a while. I particularly liked the Doritos spot with the no-bark collar, the Volkswagen one (although everyone knows it is only the Beetle that earns punching rights), the Dodge Charger ad, the HomeAway.com spoof of the National Lampoon’s Vacation series, and the three Denny’s clips (especially the third).

February 1, 2010

Disaster Insurance

Filed under: Uncategorized — chadhogg @ 8:34 pm

Scott Adams today touched on a topic that I first thought about in the context of flood insurance circa Hurricane Katrina. The supposed purpose of insurance (though this has been perverted in the case of health and life insurance) is to spread risk over the population. With a large number of participants and an event that affects individuals randomly and at a fairly predictable rate, it makes sense for all participants to pay into a pool from which those affected by an event are compensated with the overhead going to profit for a broker. But when we are talking about an event that, if it occurs, will affect a large percentage of the participants, this breaks down.

If everyone in Louisiana (or Californian earthquake survivors) files a claim for the value of their home in the same year, there is no way the insurer will have the assets to be able to pay them. One option for the company would be to borrow enough cash to pay those claims and pay down the debt with premiums from future years, but they could also simply declare bankruptcy and leave all of their customers with nothing. Seeing the financial meltdown over the last two years, I suppose they would actually buy insurance against having to make a large payout from a larger company, who would in turn try to offset their risk. In theory this might allow the whole system to work, but it seems just as likely that all of these companies would fail together.

If you were an evil genius, as we have seen a great number of Wall Street executives are, why not create a flood / earthquake / etc insurance company, sell lots of policies, and have no intention of ever paying on them? The worst that happens is that you dissolve the company, take the boatloads of money you have earned in salary over the years, and start a new one. I am sure there are all sorts of regulations on insurers requiring them to hold a certain percentage of their total potential liability in semi-liquid assets, but doing so to the extent that would be necessary to cover these kinds of widespread disasters would make the entire enterprise untenable.

I suppose the same problem exists with any transaction in which you pay a fee now for the promise of a service in the future, but insurance against natural disasters seems like an especially easy way to throw a lot of money into what could be essentially a legal scam.

January 27, 2010

State Of The Union Remarks

Filed under: Politics — chadhogg @ 11:04 pm

The first third of the President’s State of the Union address was a bit disappointing and I began to lose interest during the last third, but the middle was encouraging. A few more specific responses below:

  • I really hate the way President Obama likes to mention the names of random locations. Anecdotes about specific persons or businesses that illustrate his points are bad enough, but name-dropping cities serves no purpose at all.
  • He proposed many new tax credits, such as one for small businesses that raise wages. Unfortunately, this is just another case of taking from some and giving to others. Why should the entire population go further in debt so that some people will be paid better? If they simply decreased taxes a moderate amount on everyone, the economy and eventually the labor market would see similar gains. There were all sorts of other tax credits proposed for various other special classes of people.
  • I agree with the president that the economy will not reach full employment without some fundamental changes, but I am not sure that he goes far enough in proposing them. It is good that he wants to reform financial institutions to prevent the kind of illusory wealth building and risks that led to the current meltdown, but I do not know whether or not his proposals will do this. It is good that he wants to reform the healthcare industry, although I do not think the bills circulating through Congress are the best way to do so. But there are far more deep issues than these.
  • President Obama is unwilling to “accept second place for the United States of America”. While we should certainly strive to be the best, perhaps it is time to tone down the nationalist rhetoric. He later made a claim that American rescue workers in Haiti are chanting “U.S.A.!, U.S.A.!” every time they pull a body from the rubble. That is absurd, and I hope not true. The relief effort should be a prime example of international solidarity in which people realize that their country of origin does not matter at all.
  • Good for him, promoting nuclear power. It is a shame it will take a decade to get new reactors online.
  • A spending freeze is an excellent start, and going through the budget “line by line to eliminate programs that we can’t afford and don’t work” is certainly necessary. But that kind of talk sound hollow when you have just proposed creating a new bureaucracy to oversee exports. This spending freeze will not take place until next year “when the economy is stronger”. But what if it is not stronger then? Is it really necessary for spending to increase during the current year.
  • One of the reasons I voted for the president was the hope of greater government transparency and nonpartisanship, and while there is much to be done there, I appreciate the strides that have been made. More so, I appreciate that this is still a priority for him. This was the high point of the speech for me.
  • You want Congress to do more to eliminate earmarks? Good. But let’s talk about the existing health care bill, which has all sorts of special sections for individual Congresspersons. If you were serious about this, you would have made it clear that you refuse to sign a bill, even an important one, if it includes this sort of nonsense.
  • If all of our troops really do leave Iraq in August and leave behind a stable state that does not need them, it will be a major accomplishment. But I am not holding my breath. What I have read about the situation and future in Afghanistan is rather less rosy than the perspective in this speech as well.
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