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Weyoun42

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Everything posted by Weyoun42

  1. I just heard to opening of Sean Hannity's radio show (which is not something I usually do, but thought I'd give it a listen today) and heard the following quote from Mr. Obama after talking about how McCain/Palin are casting him as a Socialist/Communist: (Use a very sarcastic voice): "John McCain and Sarah Palin they call this socialistic. You know I don’t know when, when they decided they wanted to make a virtue out of selfishness." Here is more: "...we’ve made a virtue out of selfishness, there’s no virtue in that." I don't think there is any coincedence or accident in that turn of phrase. There may be objectivists that accept Obama, but there he is rejecting you.
  2. NBC removed it from from their site, but here's a link to a .wmv of a great sketch: Bailout Sketch (BTW, kudos for spelling "humour" properly.)
  3. Weyoun42

    Phish Reunites

    Well, I'm not going to try to deny that the vast majority of Phish fans are stoners! That would be rediculous. A is A, right? And, I completely understand where you're coming from on only enjoying rock from a certain point of hardness and up. I've always been a more mellow kind of guy, so it was very easy for me to fall into Phish. I used to hate metal and harder rock. Only within the last year or two have I made the effort to listen to bands like Iron Maiden, Coheed and Cambria, Disturbed, Avenged Sevenfold, Five Finger Death Punch, etc., and found a lot of enjoyment there. (I was turned on to the genre by a cartoon, of all things: "Metalocalypse" on Cartoon Network's [adult swim]. I also really enjoy the faux band's actual eponymous album release: "Dethklok." Kind of like Phish: on the silly side, but excellent music.) To me, the big difference is that jam bands like Phish are about exploration and creation, while metal is about composition and precision. I fully acknowledge that both are impressive to behold in their own rights when done well.
  4. Well, Kalamazoo is a double-college town (Kalamazoo College and Western Michigan University) and it's Obama signs as far as the eye can see. What little goodwill McCain had scraped out of me--that part of the convention speech about freeing education--has been more or less flushed with this bailout fiasco. I had even put out a McCain sign in my yard just to be difficult since there are ZERO that I've seen in my neighborhood, but yesterday I threw it in the garage in disgust. It's nice to see that McCain agreed with me on that and was essentially doing the same thing for the rest of the state. Let's see what a solid two years of unapologetic progressive socialist control in Washington does for people's opinions. Jimmy Carter II is on the horizon.
  5. Weyoun42

    Phish Reunites

    Well, I've never done drugs in my life. My freshman year college roommate did enough for both of us, and the only addiction I picked up from him was Phish. And the whole not doing drugs thing is probably what made it so I needed about eight years before I learned to appreciate their live stuff. While the Grateful Dead leans country, Phish leans rock. But, it's just a generally more mellow, jazzy rock. If I just want to relax and read, I find jam band music is the way to go. I've got all of AC/DC, too (and Iron Maiden, Metallica, etc.), but that's why men invented the iPod. Easy access to whatever kind of music one wants at a given moment. And my musical taste casts a pretty damn wide net. As for the hippies: I don't fault jam bands for the people that choose to follow them. The music stands on its own. Sometimes I just want to enjoy listening to guys up there creating music out of nothing on the fly.
  6. Weyoun42

    Phish Reunites

    Not just the hippies. I did a fair amount of rejoicing, myself! For a long time I would only listen to their studio stuff. By the time the switch in my head flipped and I "got" their live music, the band had broken up. Now, I finally have the chance to experience one of their live shows.
  7. Weyoun42

    Phish Reunites

    I've been having a discussion of music appreciation with one of my friends over the past couple of weeks. Basically, I've been comparing my perspective on his favourite band, Collective Soul, and mine, Phish. A couple quick points: I also enjoy Collective Soul very much. Their songs are generally very upbeat and catchy. They're probably a top ten band for me. And, yes, their name is taken from that conversation between Roark and Wynand in The Fountainhead, but the leader of the band says he just liked the sound of it and not to ascribe any real meaning to the choice (though I could, by citing some of their other lyrics). For Phish, on the other hand, I have well over 100 CD's of live performances. In attempting to explain the difference to him, I wrote the following bit in an e-mail. Now, the individual members of Phish are, to my knowledge, hard lefties (they're from Vermont, for Pete's sake), but whether they know it or not, I believe they play music for the best reason of all.
  8. Blues Traveler - The Gunfighter Lyrics
  9. You'll have to pardon me if this topic is trite. I've been watching the widespread mocking of Barack Obama's touted years as a community organizer in Chicago and having my little chuckle along with the crowd. However, I want to know why I'm laughing, so I've been trying do some research to nail down just what being a community organizer means. It's about as nebulous and slippery as one would guess. There are all sorts of undertakings he has been a part of, but why and for whom (besides "the people") is not precisely clear. I've come to one conclusion, on which the precise reasons I cannot quite put my finger--due to it being both so non-corporeal and fuzzy and also because it can be so large that a finger can't cover it properly. My conclusion is simple: To be a community organizer is to attempt to be Ellsworth Monkton Toohey. So, too simple? Not accurate? I am only half way through my first reading of The Fountainhead (Having finished Atlas Shrugged a couple weeks ago and cleansing the palate with Yevgeniy Zamyatin's We in between) and probably do not have a complete picture of Toohey's character. However, I just finished the chapter dedicated to Toohey's life story a matter of moments ago, and whenever I tried to label any "career" that he pursued, the only title that would come to my head was "Community Organizer." So, the tall, thin man with the soft, but sonorous and commanding voice is once again trying to appeal to the angels of our better nature; to shame us into being our brothers' keeper. As one can see, this is only my second post and I haven't even finished The Fountainhead yet, so the title of "n00b" would be accurate, but I thought it worth some discussion (unless it has already been covered in a previous thread, in which case, merely direct me).
  10. Weyoun42

    Videogame Music

    My first post on this board and I choose this topic? One should talk about what one knows best, I suppose. Anyhow, here goes: 1) Yasunori Mitsuda cannot be denied as one of the greats. He came up through Square as a protoge of Uematsu. Besides the actual soundtracks to his games, never forget that Japan usually has the good taste to release an "arranged" version of each quality game soundtrack. The Chrono Trigger arranged album, "Brink of Time", is smooth jazz arrangements that are well done and grew on me over time. Xenogears was his masterpiece, and the arranged album "Creid" is phenomenal. Full band Celtic-style goodness. 2) A much less known composer, but another of my personal favourites is Hiroki Kikuta. He did the Secret of Mana video game (Legend of Mana 2 in Japan). However, I believe his masterwork was a Square game that never made it to America, "Soukaigi". I ordered that CD from Japan sight unseen (sound unheard?) on recommendations and listened to it non-stop during one of my summers home from college. I can't even describe it properly. Find a sample, listen to it and then buy the album. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, he's dropped off the grid and I don't know if he's doing music anymore. I certainly hope so. The last work of his I could find was "Koudelka" which is half terrific, half okay. 3) Okay, this isn't video games, but it is music from the land of the rising sun, and since Joe Hisaishi is getting a lot of good press, I have to put Yoko Kanno out there. She is a woman without genre. She's a jazz pianist, but her compositions span every conceivable type of music. And she does them all deftly. Macross Plus, Vision of Escaflowne, Cowboy Bebop, Turn A Gundam, her solo album "Song to Fly", and much more: all of it. Heck, even her writing and producing of J-pop is great. She's done every album for the artist Maaya Sakamoto (voice of the lead character in Escaflowne, BTW), and they're very relaxing and upbeat. It's a lot easier to feel happy about pop songs when you only know the meaning of one word in every twenty. It took me a long time, but I own most of Yoko Kanno's complete works (thankfully imported a ways back with a much stronger dollar). I can't really point to a good representative piece of her's because she is so diverse. However, the first album I ever bought by her was the Macross Plus Soundtrack 1 (so good that JVC did a domestic release). Start there. If I ever have my own private island nation, I've never been able to decide if I would purchase the main theme of Final Fantasy (not the harp one, the other one that shows up in all the credits) or the National Anthem of Macross as my own national anthem. A couple asides before I go. For those not in the know, Nobuo Uematso left Squaresoft to found a game company of his own along with the original producer of Final Fantasy. It's called Mistwalker Studios and he's done the soundtracks to both games the company has done: "Lost Odyssey" and "Blue Dragon". Definitely worth a listen. Also, Uematsu plays in a hard rock band that plays exclusively arrangements of his Final Fantasy works. They're called The Black Mages and have three albums. Good fun. Personally, I love the Final Fantasy Piano Collection albums. They reduce his soundtracks to their hearts for single piano. These are available for games IV through X. IV, V and VI were originally sold with the song books as a method of piano teaching, so the arrangements are simpler. The complexity increases each album. And VII was put out only a few years ago, being the only game passed over for a piano collection. Fan outcry finally won the day on that one. Okay, that's enough. I came on this board to learn, but here was a thread that I could contribute to with actual authority backed up by my hundreds of CD's from Japan. I love that country and always have. Seems like all they're interested in doing is working hard and enjoying themselves. Pretty admirable to me. And they turn out darned fine music.
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