Robin Davies's blog

I'm over here! Migration notice.

Taking this thing home.

See the new Ready, Steady, Go!

HERE

Take those naked pictures!

Back with a vengeance!

This is great!
Make Love to the Camera
How to shoot the female nude!

Leaving on a jet plane la la la

Worst graphic ever pre-travel, but tough. Those cards in airplane pockets always blow my mind.

SkyMall Rocks too!

Opportunists!

Just love this story about skateboarders using the mortgage crisis to find empty pools! Pretty obvious to use realty search engines to find backyard pools.

I've always felt that skaters were like cockroaches. The ultimate urban creatures. Taking advantage of their surroundings for their needs. Maybe it's a schoolyard bank, maybe a fire-hydrant or curb and now the home foreclosures. That pool looks epic!

And my dogs using the holidays as an opportunity to get some LUV

Stick Pile

The biggest pond hockey game of the season is in Chicago on Thursday. Patrick Kane of the streaking Blackhawks gets to test his skills against those amazing Red Wings. Besides dropping their Zamboni off the back of the truck, they are ready at Wrigley. Live field cam here.

A portable 200-by-85-foot rink was driven in from Mobile, Ala. It sits between first and third base, 112 feet from home plate and 288 feet from the center-field wall.

Nearly one-quarter of a million people entered a lottery for a chance to buy up the 40,000 tickets for this unique event

Local press has these lovely tidbits:

Bathrooms

The most crowded places between periods will be the washrooms, the only places for fans to warm up at Wrigley. Expect a rush a minute or so before the end of the first and second periods. The water was running in the troughs Monday to keep the pipes from freezing.

and:

 The crew made a layer of ice about three-quarters of an inch thick Monday before taking off for Christmas.

NHL facilities/operations manager Dan Craig said last week the original plan was to begin spraying another 20,000 gallons of water on the surface this weekend to thicken the ice to at least 2 inches, as NHL regulations stipulate.

The crew was supposed to begin painting the ice Saturday, using about 350 gallons of paint. But the league can't control the weather, which plays such an important part in the outdoor spectacle.

Current Chicago forecast... WARM! 40s over the next couple of days and maybe snow on Thursday.

RELATED NEWS: Pond Hockey (The Documentary). Trailer. Snippet at NBC.

Epic!

Digital Dump

A whole pixel pile today as I am overwhelmed with holiday spirit and winter glee:

-8º f. this am. -21º wind chill! More snow in the forecast. We are experiencing winter at it's finest!

They call Montana "Big Sky Country," but I swear the upper midwest when the temperature is in the minus zero digits has the biggest bluest skies EVER!

No science from me to support this, but this site says:

The blue color of the sky is due to Rayleigh scattering. As light moves through the atmosphere, most of the longer wavelengths pass straight through. Little of the red, orange and yellow light is affected by the air.

However, much of the shorter wavelength light is absorbed by the gas molecules. The absorbed blue light is then radiated in different directions. It gets scattered all around the sky. Whichever direction you look, some of this scattered blue light reaches you. Since you see the blue light from everywhere overhead, the sky looks blue.

So, if the air is so freakin cold and is full of ice crystal, that would explain why our skies are so azure on these ice cream headache when you walk out the door days.

Got the most excellent chocolates at work today from these local folks. Check the box

Lovely!

Celebrated Festivus/Winter Solstice yesterday and it was wonderful. Had the best dog pile!

Dog fur yin/yang

Been loving this Gang of Four reissue/remix collection Return the Gift. It is more and more amazing as I listen to each version in depth. I am struck by the complexity of these guys song writing and layering of tracks. It is super cool to hear guitar, percussion, synth and bass tracks shifted here and there in the various mixes. I think Go4 are really my favorite band of all time (The Minutemen too of course and the connection is obvious.)

"Return the Gift" can be interpreted in two ways it seems. One, you get something and take it back because you don't like it or, you reciprocate a gratuity. I love this second response. Someone gives you something and your response is equal compassion back at ya. Music keeps giving. Every listen brings new response. Maybe it's my mood that day, maybe it's the color of the sky, maybe suddenly this scratchy guitar track that was always there, but barely audible is suddenly "on your radar" and you are moved. What Go4 did on the second disc of the set was give basic tracks to various artists that were fans to remix. The results are exciting and transformative. Super fun BUY IT!
Here's a sample of "Anthrax" remixed by the Blood Brothers. Nice reviews at WIRED and VH1.

Speaking of which, I hear the Gomers do the Tar Babies "Link in the Chain" by request at Gomeroke. HA! Now that would most certainly be a transformation. Please someone request this song and let me know it is going down! Tony Jarvis where are you?

Excellent interview with Joe Carducci (former SST) here and part2 here. Love Joe. The man is a visionary

TR: Do you think something like SST could operate today?

JC: You have to assume anything is possible. Watt used to say regarding finding greatness in unlikely places or formats, ‘It's down to the dudes’. But then you can easily think up alot of reasons why nothing could ever happen again like that. Musically we'll never come off the same twenty year, or even 80 year period we were in 1975. It was a world-historical meeting of a post-African black American music that had incubated for three hundred years before the civil war, and unlike in the Caribbean and South America, in North America the slave drivers took away the slave's drums. That probably accounts for the starker more rhythmic use of string instruments here than elsewhere. Then they ran into Spanish and Scots-Irish and English forms, the hymnals and the bawdy ballads, story songs etc. And finally the broadcast and phono media began to move the music out of its folk circumstance and into other places where it could be taken as pure music. Just that was a process that took the twentieth century. None of that and nothing like that will ever be a launching base for a new music again. Now the bottlenecks of those media are gone under the hammer blows of the internet revolution. Its not that major label help is necessary; we had none of that. But it does help if great musicians can be launched at a large audience that takes what they do as important. The web works against that. Even so, where do you find the dudes we had crawling out of the woodwork? Even given all of them I think if you subtract Greg Ginn from it the only thing that happens is those early bands on SST just go new wave like everybody else.

TR: You think The Minutemen or Overkill would have gone New Wave?

JC: (snipped) ...But Husker Du, Firehose, Meat Puppets in particular wasted everybody's time at the end of the eighties.

My horoscope I just got!

Dogs and cats play in the long grass. You run with them, and then continue on to the Land of Comfortable Beds. You jump on all the beds to try them out. You bump into your favorite teacher of all time, and the two of you have a heartfelt talk about philosophy, poetry, and peanut butter. The kids at the Floating Treehouse have begged you for souvenir, so you bring them back pillows from the Pillow Tree. A faraway light appears, like a comet falling to earth. You cross lagoons and prairies and come to a glowing crater. You see the face of someone that you used to know, confused and wandering. You run to them. THE END

WHOA!! Don Hunt died this year after fighting brain cancer for 14 months. I wish I could sit and chat about PB with him...

Got some new belts, an awesome book, clothes. Kinda nice to celebrate when you want to, not when church/state says so.

Happy Festivus!

Site(s) of the Week

Alan Taylor of the Boston Globe has this great photo site at Boston.com called The Big Picture. This week he showcases the Year in Photographs. Three installments:

Part1

Part2

Part3

FU Portland!

Our circle is bigger than yours!

From the Chicago Trib

Evil<->livE

Hear about this? Soul Cry's lead singer and bass playing little brother stab the lead guitarist 50 times in the back and head for playing a solo that sounded evil. I thought Death Metal was supposed to sound evil?!?

From AP

ROME — The singer in a teen gothic metal band and her brother allegedly stabbed the band's guitarist dozens of times because he did not play well enough, Italian police and a lawyer said Friday.

Here's how to piss off your band-mates without risking a jail sentence:
Keep asking "are you sure you're in tune?"
Forget to the bring beer to rehearsal
Change tempo randomly
Bass solo! (click on it... comon' I dare u)
More cowbell
Bass drum as laundry hamper
Crank echo on PA when nobody's looking
Leather thong