I'm a light sleeper, especially in the mornings. Unfortunately I live close enough to a highway (the BQE) and some major arterials to end up getting woken up or kept up by helicopter noise occasionally. I'm not close enough to these things to hear traffic noise, but helicopters don't have to be very close to make lots of noise.

I used to live near midtown Manhattan, and every holiday season would bring the daily drone of helicopter noise as the mechanical birds hovered over midtown for long stretches filming the throngs shopping and skating and just walking about.

B&W (the speaker company) has launched a 'music club' with Peter Gabriel. They record a different artist every month, in Mr. Gabriel's Real World studios, and you get to download the files for about $67 a year, or $47 a half year. The recordings are supposed to be high-qualilty (like the speakers, eh?), and the files are uncompressed and DRM-free. And they're only available through this service for a month, after which point the recordings go back in ownership to the artists (no big-time corporate label is B&W!).

The current album, by Little Axe, sounds like some decent blues with a bit of dubby production. The next album from Grindhouse (mondo cane) sounds like it might be interesting.

I don't have much desire to go to big festival shows these days, I'm much more into smaller, more intimate venues where the musicians (and drinks) are close. But seeing Prince cover Radiohead at Coachella would have been cool. And there's always something to be said for laser light shows.

This saturday, April 19, 2008, is Record Store Day. Go support your independent record store this saturday, and any day you can. Small record store are cool. They usually have well selected collections of music - you can feel a bit better picking out random stuff, knowing it at least meets some level of quality. And you can be sure the staff, surly though they me be, knows their music.

I'm buying more music electronically, but I'm still somewhat uncomfortable with the fact that as time and technology progresses, my music 'format' gets progressively lesser quality - CDs are good but still a compromise due to the storage limits of the medium when it was developed, and MP3/AAC files are compressed, although maybe soon uncompressed FLAC files will be more widely available. I pick up CDs whenever I can (sadly, not too many records these days, although I hope to get another turntable soon!) so that I can at least have an uncompressed source to go back to. Seems like more small record stores are getting into the electronic downloads game - they'll probably have to to really survive.

Take this awareness test. It's good. It's short. It's better with sound - there's voice narration, but it's not loud or crazy or anything.

The TSTC blog noted from an article in the Wall Street Journal that it looks like there is finally evidence that Americans are responding to the high price of gas by driving less.

 

A couple scientists from the Scripps Institute released a paper about a month ago that puts even money on Lake Mead being dry by 2021. Just as bad, really, is that they also put a 50% chance that by 2017 the lake will be too low for the Hoover Dam to generate power. The authors give three main reasons: drought, water demand/use, and human-induced climate change.

 

Apparently Lake Mead is currently at so low a point (around 50% of its capacity) that the main water supply 'tube' for Las Vegas is in danger of rising above the surface. The Hoover Dam generates around 2 gigawatts of electricity and serves about 1.3 million people - not sure how it would be replaced if that generating capacity were lost.

I met this guy Steve a while (a way while...) back. He used to run a record shop in Park Slope, but closed it in 2004 and now deals online as holycownyc.com. Check it out.

Anyone else remember the rush by various states to move their primaries up to the beginning of the year, or even before it, to steal the thu

Now that it seems that the rest of the US outside of SF and some other crunchy places has caught on to the fact that using zillions of disposable plastic bags might just not be the best idea, the next question is - what's a good reusable bag?