Note to bands who are out to impress me: loud, fuzzy guitars and strong vocal melodies are surefire ways to get me to like your album. And in that respect, Arlo's 2001 debut for Sub Pop, Up High In The Night, does a real crummy job at getting me to hate the Los Angeles-based band.
How could anyone hate this record? It's chock-full of infectious tunes, heavy on lyrical consonance while still packing a mean, power-pop punch. "Nerf Bear Bonanza" and "Shutterbug" are akin to the Ramones at their best—sugary, yet tough. "Sitting On The Aces" and "Lucid" pay homage to Seattle's early 90's grunge, à la Mudhoney or Screaming Trees, while "Oh Yeah" and "Elena" will have you swaying your lighters in the air.
Best of all, Up High In The Night (don't say it too fast, or people will think you're saying "A Pie In The Night") is a great driving record, especially during warmer months that allow for rolled-down windows and cranked-up stereos.
Since I've been on a space kick lately, here's a short video from University of Colorado scientists Andrew Hamilton and Gavin Polhemus on what it would be like to get sucked into a black hole. Trippy:
Light from stars directly behind the hole is swallowed by the horizon, while light from other stars is merely bent by the black hole's gravity, forming a warped image around the hole . . . [researchers] Hamilton and Polhemus have painted a red grid on the horizon to help visualise it (as the horizon is spherical, the two circles on the grid represent the north and south "poles" of its central black hole). And as you pass one Schwartzschild radius, another artificial visual aid pops up. The white grid that loops around you marks where distant observers would place the horizon – this is where you'd see other people falling in if they followed you through the horizon.
ADDENDUM: My friend Farzad turned me onto this video of Neil DeGrass Tyson talking, amongst other things, about falling into a black hole. It's interesting and very entertaining:
Two astronomical stories caught my beautiful greenish-blue eye this week (or is it more blueish-green? Oh well...)
First, the Sun is quieter than it has been in a long time. It is at a 50-year low in solar wind pressure, a 55-year low in radio emissions, and a 100-year low in sunspot activity. All this inactivity is drawing concerns that an extended period of repose could result in a mini ice age, much like the one that took place in the mid-17th Century, during a 70-year span of solar sedation. The phenomenon known as Maunder Minimum (excellent name for a black-metal band) was brought on by an exceedingly rare occurance of sunspots.
Others think that this anomaly is just a temporary phenomenon and soon the Sun will return to its natural and predictable 11-year cycle of activity.
Here's what Professor Mike Lockwood of the University of Southampton and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory said in an interview to Astronomy Now editor Keith Cooper about the subject:
The second thing that caught my eye (still greenish-blue/blueish-green, still beautiful...) was the finding of one of the most distant objects ever seen by humans, at an unfathomable distance of 12.9 billion light years away; it has been denominated a "Lyman-alpha blob" (pictured at left in all its pixelated glory.)
What is unsual about this object is the sheer size—it's 55,000 light years across—the size of most modern-day galaxies. And since the basis for formation of galaxies lies within the concept of smaller objects merging to form greater ones, the emergence of such a massive object existing 12.9 billion years ago forced scientists to rethink some important established theories.
As exciting as these findings are, current technology can only foster further speculation since these objects are just too far away to be studied thoroughly. But the mere existence and documentation of them should advance the understanding of how the universe was created and how it developed through time.
Why is this interesting to me, you ask? Because it has nothing to do with The Hills. And yet, it has *everything* to do with The Hills.
To the tune of the Phil Ochs classic civil rights anthem, "Here's To The State Of Mississippi", I'd like to introduce a new feature on bazookaluca, titled Find Yourself Another Country To Be Part Of. I think you can guess what that means and the kind of people it's directed towards.
And in the longstanding tradition of adopting the folk classic to fit the times, I'll add a verse to state my case as to why the subject in question needs to find a new place to call home.
My first deportation:
Bill O'Reilly
Here's to the ass known as Bill O'Reilly, For 'neath his smug pretense, the charlatan hides behind, If you stir up his emotions, a bloated egomaniac you will find. The populist rage he urges has spun a thousand crimes, His disservice to the nation should cost him some hard time. Whoa, here's to the land you've torn out the heart of, Bill O'Reilly, find yourself another country to be part of.
I worked Sundays at a record store for a long time and when Easter came around I would play Black Sabbath albums exclusively all day. I'm not sure how this tradition got started, but it seemed just profane enough to keep me going and customers didn't seem to mind that much. So, in keeping with that tradition, here's Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi and one of the best rhythm sections in rock history, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward:
And what the hell, here's one with Dio, just because he's so fuckin' righteous:
Courtesy of the always fascinating Space.com, this picture from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory is of high-energy X-rays emanating from the nebula around PSR B1509-58.
I, on the other hand, would much rather think that it's photographic proof of the giant hand of a space ghost.
That's right, the gigantic Titan hand of an ancient space ghost*, reaching for cosmic lights as if they were clusters of grapes, and then consuming them just the same.
What's to keep it from doing the same to our dear ol' planet Earth, you ask?
Nothing. Its just a matter of time. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
*Not to be confused with THE Space Ghost.I'm pretty sure he wears white gloves and is the size of a regular human.
