Batalla De Los Tambores

in case i hadn't mentioned this before, but Godsmack is one of my favorite bands. why? a bunch of reasons - any band that mentions Alice in Chains as their primary influence already has my vote. any band that actually names themselves after an AiC song is flying pretty high on the radar. these guys from Boston make some pretty good music, nice heavy guitar riffs, excellent rasping lyrics and a bass drum that will blow you away.

lead singer Sully is an accomplished musician in his own right, and not just a mic jockey. he plays an absolutely deadly drum set as well, forming the encore piece of their live set - Sully plays with drummer Shannon in a makeshift drum duet-battle which is absolutely amazing.. and here's the clip

i've watched them playing at a college spring festival on an open lawn, a small club scene packed to the rafters, a closed hockey rink opening for Metallica and at an open plan arena on the summer rock festival circuit and they have been fantastic every single time.

'Image Too Large To Display'

i have a Canon PowerShot A520 digital camera. it's not the greatest digicam in the world, but it fulfills most of the basic requirements of digital photography. for the most part it has behaved itself. the only issue i have had with it in the past was its snobbish intolerance of not indubitable SD memory cards, by haughtily proclaiming "Memory Card Not Readable".

during our recent trip to Chicago, this dinky little device threw a new tantrum. after taking a picture, when i tried to review the image on the camera itself, it shrunk the image to a postage stamp size, and announced "Image Too Large To Display". what the #%&@?! since when did cameras start taking pictures bigger than they could display?! it actually got better - i took out the memory card and slid it into its slot on the computer to see if i could download the pics. on trying to open one of the pictures, the computer promptly hung. when eventually it shook the cobwebs out of its head, it gave me a very interesting nugget of info. apparently twelve of the pictures were each 4Gb in size. at four gigs a pop, these would have to be super high resolution snaps where even specks of dirt would show up on the picture! of course, the biggest irony is that the memory card itself was only one gig in size.. no wild guesses that the data on the card was corrupted.

it's feb. 20th today, kurt cobain would have turned 41 today were he still around. would he still have been making grunge music? who knows. one thing for sure is that he would have been pretty shocked at what passes for music these days. also, it's taken a few years, but it appears finally the stigma surrounding his death is wearing off. memorial concerts have been organized, his hometown Aberdeen changed its welcome sign, the album 'Nevermind' has been inducted to the Library of Congress National Recording Registry (reserved for historically significant recordings), a memorial park and youth center are being planned too. RIP Kurt.

quot et demonstratum (qed)

came upon a most interesting quote today, which has been happening every day now that i have changed my browser homepage to Google. previously it was the CNN page but i did get quite wearisome of waking up, switching on the comp and being blasted with details about gory deaths, sordid affairs and lurid politics while i was still rubbing sleep out of my eyes in a haze of smoke

oh no, i'm not pretending i haven't seen the date or don't know what day it is - i think i have done my fair part in keeping the commercialism of v-day going. ever since i was a scruffy undergrad trying to scrounge together some change to pick up any flowers bearing a shade of red, i have bowed to the gods of marketing who have deemed that this fourteenth day of february be used to not only enshrine the female half of every relationship equation, but further propagated onto pretty much every other girl/lady/woman who plays some part or the other in your life.

it is thanks to these glamorous denizens of television commercials who in breathy voices gasp their ecstasy to the men in their lives who shower them with jewelry that a pretty comic moment was played out between the gf and me yesterday. having procured well ahead of time a pretty necklace which was proclaimed on the idiot box to be the flavor of the season, i sat confident watching men everywhere scramble to get out of the doghouse. so here we are watching tv, and an ad comes up for the very piece that i have purchased. i ask the girl what she thinks of that, and with a cursory glance she goes "nahh" with nary a thought that there might be subterfuge involved in why i was asking her that! now when i fish the necklace out from behind my back, she ends up looking sheepish and i end up green to the gills. i dunno, i guess you just had to have been there.

anyways, back to the quote i referred to in the beginning:

"Have you ever observed that we pay much more attention to a wise passage when it is quoted than when we read it in the original author?"

Philip G. Hamerton, "The Intellectual Life"