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. This graph from the Federal Highway Administration is pretty interesting – constant increase for two decades except for the last year. You can see a couple inflections along the graph where there were recessions in 1991 and 2002, but this time it is far more serious a dip in the graph. As the price of gas has risen, lots of people have wondered at what point it would start to affect the driving habits of this mobile country – well, it looks like we’ve hit that point.
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| Photo: arbyreed |
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.
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| Photo: lakelandlocal |
