Casey's Blog
Casey's Blog
The Twelve Days of Podcast concludes with an epic-length twelfth night Epiphany featuring a classic SeaQuest DSV episode review.
Topics: SeaQuest DSV
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On the penultimate day of the Twelve Days of Podcast, Jeff and Casey journey to the imaginary planet of one of professional football's current news-makers.
Topics: fake coral, Planet Chad, General Lee, parenting tips, Planet Hollywood, Chad Ochocinco, football, child support, Usain Bolt, koi, court, Europe, Indiana Jones, Luke Skywalker, strip clubs, aquarium, Claude Shannon, Frank Sinatra, baby shark, Tony Gonzales
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On the tenth day of the Twelve Days of Podcast, Casey asks Jeff to apply his trademark judicial proceedings to the realm of musical Christmas toys.
Topics: robot dogs, Terminator 2, Christmas shopping, Frosty the Snowman, Big Mouth Billy Bass, Nazi criminals, assassins, sentient Christmas toys, good/no-good, The Singularity
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On the ninth day of podcast, Jeff and Casey dive head-first into David Cornelius Doremus's tumultuous work in the field of unified field theory.
Topics: unified field theory, divining rod, Albert Einstein, unicorns, great literature, zip-state, rainbows, David Cornelius Doremus, Talmud, immune system, Cracking the Universe, Special Theory of Relativity, Doremus Industries, ether, vanity press, Zombie Einstein, Carl Sagan, water witching
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Here on the eighth day of the Twelve Days of Podcast, Jeff proposes a TV series based on a pornography-related post he saw on the internet, but Casey argues the true value of the post lies elsewhere.
Topics: government nepotism, Pink Panther, CSI, pornography problem, USA network, Mechanical Turk, genitalia, Columbo, disorder, Monk, House, Psych, biometrics, Sherlock Holmes, FBI, addiction, Google
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In this seventh installment of the Twelve Days of Podcast, Casey gives an alternate interpretation of everyone's favorite Christmas carol.
Topics: teabagging, sex tapes, Santa Claus, swan, eating disorders, goose, Christmas carols, GPS, Mannheim Steamroller, Garmin, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, naughty list, birth defects, Santa Claus is Coming to Town, smoking
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In this sixth installment of the Twelve Days of Podcast, Jeff takes issue with the military's criteria for considering someone a "veteran" as he tries to purchase a can of soup from the local supermarket, while Casey tries to provide some historical perspective.
Topics: UPC codes, mechanic, gamertags, veteran, asshole blocked, supermarket checkout, inner asshole, storytelling, story triggers, heroes, World War II, Lucky Charms, The Queen Mary, Larry David, Microsoft, John McCain
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On the fifth day of the Twelve Days of Podcast, Jeff presents his fool-proof set of rules for determining whether or not a holiday gift is racist.
Topics: arbitrage, Mel Gibson, postal service, Birth of a Nation, The Twelve Days of Christmas, Clinton corkscrew, recursion, Chia Obama, Left Behind, gifts, Paris Hilton, Twilight, cash for gold, afro, expected value, apocalypse, gold teeth, accentuation, racism, Sarah Palin
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Here on the fourth day of the Twelve Days of Podcast, Casey proclaims a heart-felt thank-you to Jeff for a rather surprising reason.
Topics: parties, Gregor Mendel, dildos, camping, David Blane, shock hazard, Casey thanks Jeff, being genuine, socializing, disingenuously charming, Clerks, domestic violence, bitch-slap, fixations, Larry David, Quaternions
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Here on the third day of the Twelve Days of Podcast, Jeff and Casey apologize to their listeners on behalf of the Zoolights, and Casey explains why ballet and NASCAR are artistically equivalent.
Topics: giant spiders, literature, pedophile, French chickens, Slovinkia, Jesus, The Nutcracker, Zoolights, ballet, apology to listeners, creepy uncle, Christmas train, racist dances, Tacoma, NASCAR
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On the second day of Christmas, your true love Jeff brings you a classic 400lb squirrel when he refuses to believe that his Jewish friends did not have their Seder dinner during Hanukkah.
Topics: Yom Kippur, rabbis, condoms, Judaism, matrilineal descent, entertainment, Hanukkah, miracles, religion, Seder, 400lb squirrel, Larry David, Passover, Jesus Christ, Bris, thirty-plus, Dredel, Jewish side-hug, Rough Riders
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Kicking off the Twelve Days of Podcast, Jeff and Casey attempt to prove that, despite starting their twelve days of Christmas on Christmas day, they actually aren't late, but rather right on time according to Christian mythology.
Topics: Black Friday, brainwashed, Frankincense, Christian side-hug, Lennon-McCartney, Myrrh, crucifixion, George Martin, Gold, Nokia N-Gage, Twelve Days of Christmas, Christianity, Rough Riders, The Epiphany, atheism, Three Kings Day, painting with feces, peso, defective
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I finally gave up recording MIDI on my PC altogether. It just doesn't work. I've decided that MIDI on Windows is pointless.
I opened up my old ThinkPad, which has Ubuntu Linux on it, and figured, why not? I did a search for MIDI recording software, installed it via the package manager, and hit "record".
Worked perfectly. First time. This piece is my test run.
I am happily getting quite close to being able to do everything on Linux. If I had a good way to process my MIDI through Ivory on Linux, I would be left with only 3D stuff that I still need the PC for. I've heard good things about WINE... maybe I'll give that a try soon.
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Site: http://www.gametrailers.com/user-movie/ooh-innuendo/288112
About a year has passed, so I think it's time for another honorary viewing of this fabulous scene from Ar Tonelico - Melody of Elemia, perhaps the finest three minutes of dialogue translation ever produced in the video game industry.
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Site: http://www.alternativeradio.org/programs/FRAT002.shtml
This was, unfortunately, another one of those lectures where somebody gets up and says a series of things about problems with government without really have any central thesis or narrative. The result is a weak lecture that leaves you with no real new ideas, historical insight, or specific action to take.
If I had to categorize Frank's work in general (I've read his articles and heard his lectures before, but never have I read an entire book), I would say that he functions as somewhat of a historian of, but not for, the conservative movement in America. This is useful as an exercise, to be sure, but tends to be about as engaging as a history book typically is as well.
I suppose if you are someone who has no idea what the political right has been up to in this country for the past half century, then you might find this lecture interesting. If not, I'd skip.
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Jeff and Casey conclude their marathon podcast session with this double-length episode featuring a potpourri of topics including outhouse problems, Google's new font, Flash, Bing, and oh-so-much more.
Topics: X-Files, cbloom, outhouses, fonts, shrinkage, truth, ClearType, singers, FBI, Chrome, yoga, zodiac, SafeSearch, superpowers, Colombo, DNS redirectors, programmers, Freud, Bing, Flash
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As the Longest Podcast Ever draws on, Jeff and Casey become tired and lethargic as they plow into the subject of the Windows 7 Launch Party video.
Topics: launch parties, drugs, cores, terrorism, rum, Ireland, Revolutionary War, Lithuania, World of Warcraft, Windows 7, marriage, launch videos, heroin, bathroom rules
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Lately, nothing around me seems to be working.
My Ivory stopped working, then my MIDI stopped working, my credit card was stolen (on line) twice in a row, my iPhone stopped working with my computer so I had to do a clean reinstall, a stray cat sprayed my car while I was on the way to the vet with her and even after two details it still stinks, it took two trips to Fry's and two trips to BestBuy and countless calls to Comcast to get internet working at my apartment, the POS DRM on my 3DSMAX stopped working so I couldn't do any artwork, and the list goes on.
But you know what? I bought a Roomba, and damned if the thing isn't rock solid. It vacuums my apartment three times a week while I'm out, and it never has a problem. We're talking about a robot, with moving parts, that has to traverse an apartment its designers never saw, picking up actual debris and bringing back to its little home base where it waits for me to empty it.
So I hereby dedicate this song to the one thing in my apartment that works: my robotic vacuum cleaner.
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Site: http://www.alternativeradio.org/programs/NELD001.shtml
Recorded right down on the waterfront at the Elliot Bay Book Company, this is the promotional lecture for Pullitzer-winning author Deborah Nelson's book The War Behind Me. The concept behind the lecture (and book) is simple: to get Vietnam War veterans' stories of war atrocities down on paper while the opportunity still exists.
It is self-evident that the only lesson learned by this country from the Vietnam War was that tighter media control is necessary to properly pursue what would otherwise be an unpopular war. We certainly haven't learned anything else, because we continue to engage in conflicts very similar to the Vietnam War without exercising any additional caution for the benefit.
War is ugly. As interesting as the Geneva Conventions are as an experiment, the reality is that if you are engaged in a full-scale war, perhaps for your country's own survival, nobody is going to pay any attention to them. We only respect the human rights of others when our own human rights are secured, to coin a phrase.
So the heart of the matter is that the responsibility for war atrocities rests squarely on the shoulders of those who made the decision to go to war in the first place. As much as people like to complicate things, that is the simple truth. I don't believe there is a way to execute a "civilized" war, because in the history of mankind, I have yet to read about one. Once you make the proclamation that your citizens may take the lives of the citizens of another country, you should expect atrocities, for you have at least explicitly authorized murder, if not worse. Endless dithering about whether or not you were attempting to bomb a "valid target" when you hit a civilian area seem so hopelessly misguided, I truly wonder if anyone has any perspective.
Which brings me back to this lecture. The primary benefit of the material here is exactly that perspective. Forever keeping fresh the facts of what happens when you send people into war is of vital importance. The United States has been continuously involved in small-scale warfare all over the globe for as long as I've been alive and then some, all conflicts similar to Vietnam in one way or another. I think it is crucial that, as a nation, we finally acknowledge the fact that when you send people to war of any kind, they are going to commit unspeakable acts. Therefore, we must commit them to do so only in times of extraordinary need, a definition which by no means applies to most (if not all) of our conflicts since Vietnam.
Recommended.
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Site: http://www.alternativeradio.org/programs/PILJ003.shtml
Journalist and documentary filmmaker John Pilger opens this lecture with a brutally sarcastic anecdote from his service in Vietnam, where the US made a formal gift of Uncle Ben's Rice and electric-flush toilets to a village in order to "win their hearts and minds". From there, Pilger fast-forwards to the present where he lays out a rather sweeping condemnation of Barack Obama's policies and opiate public relations message of "Hope". I should first state that I am in no way an unbiased reviewer for this lecture. I hold an extremely unfavorable view of Barack Obama, beginning from when I heard him say, in the Democratic primary debates, that "all options" were on the table for dealing with Iran, and continuing to this day as I observe his rather abhorrent policy decisions. In this past Presidential election, I voted for him at the last minute, despite my reservations. Normally I will either write in a candidate or vote for a decent progressive candidate if they are fortunate enough to make it onto the ballot. But the McCain campaign had become so insulting to me by election day, for some reason I decided it was better to have as strong a Democratic victory as possible. That's the last time I ever make that mistake. I would not be surprised if my vote for Obama is the last vote I ever cast for a Democrat. In hindsight, it's one of the few black marks on my voting record since I began to actively follow politics, and that is rather shameful to me. Which brings me to this wonderful lecture by John Pilger. It is essentially a soapbox lecture, condemning Obama for perpetuating essentially the same imperialistic foreign policies as George W. Bush, while simultaneously placating his predecessor's left-wing opponents with one of modern politics' best dog-and-pony shows. I think my favorable reaction to Pilger's lecture is due largely to the fact that I hear so much stumping and demagoguery that is patently false and blatantly misleading, it's good to hear a passionate speaker give an emotional lecture on something with which I actually agree. I just wish more people would listen, and actually consider the possibility that we really do cause massive damage throughout the world by our policies, and that a little bit of demilitarization on our part might go a very long way towards a better world. Pilger employs a wonderful quote from Milan Kundera: "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." With this framework in mind, I believe it is no exaggeration to say that Barack Obama is today's most powerful weapon on the side of forgetting. In many ways he parallels John F. Kennedy: a young (by presidential standards), attractive, charismatic, powerful speaker who has a lot of grandiose things to say about what America could be, who simultaneously allows all of the worst of American imperialism to thrive under his command. With Bush, there may have been a limit to the nefarious doings of the United States, because he began with a large percentage of citizens disapproving of him, and that percentage continued to grow over time. With Barack Obama, will the same be true? I can only hope that actions speak louder than words. Recommended.
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