Daniel Gold reports that there was a surprise reunion of four members of Leftover Salmon, on Saturday 9-24-05 at the 78th birthday celebration of George’s Majestic Lounge in Fayetteville, AR. Apparently, Vince joined Drew at the end of a long set by The Drew Emmitt Band. They played “Euphoria,” “Bend in the River” and other songs.
Widespread Panic: After playing the Austin City Limits Music Festival on Saturday, the band went over to the KLRU studios on the UT Austin campus Monday to film a new episode of the long running concert series seen on PBS. We’ll let you know as soon as we know when the episode will air on your local PBS affiliate.
WP first appeared on the legendary live music showcase in October of 2000.
Wired: Tens of thousands of empty storage containers are stacked in towers along I-95 across from the harbor in Newark, New Jersey. They’re heaped there in perpetuity, too cheap to be shipped back to Asia but too expensive to melt down.
Where many might see a pile of garbage, Lior Hessel sees, of all things, an organic farm. Those storage containers would be ideal housing for miniature farms, he believes, stacked one upon another like an agricultural skyscraper, all growing fresh organic produce for millions of wealthy consumers. And since the crops would be grown with artificial lighting, servers, sensors and robots, the cost of labor would consist of a single computer technician’s salary.
Hessel has a personal stake in this vision: He’s the CEO of OrganiTech, a Wilmington, Delaware, company working toward making such farms a reality. The design and layout of the automated farms are more related to the semiconductor plants of Silicon Valley than the lettuce fields of Salinas Valley. “This is a factory, not a farm,” says Hessel, whose own background is in the chip industry. “We just build lettuce instead of CPUs.”
The vertical farm model is one of Hessel’s ultimate goals, and OrganiTech has been busy laying the groundwork to make skyscraper farms possible.
OrganiTech can supply a complete set of robotic equipment plus greenhouse for $2 million. A system the size of a tennis court can produce 145,000 bags of lettuce leaves per year — that’s a yield similar to a 100-acre traditional farm. According to the company, it costs 27 cents to produce a single head of lettuce with its system, compared to about 18 cents per head of lettuce grown in California fields. Factor in the transportation costs and suddenly the automated greenhouse grower saves as much as 43 cents a head.
We’re visiting St. Augustine, Florida this weekend.
St. Augustine is the oldest continually occupied European settlement in the continental United States; only San Juan on Puerto Rico predates the city as the oldest settlement within the territory of the United States. The city was founded by the Spanish admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés on August 28, 1565, the feast day of Augustine of Hippo, and consequently named by him San AgustÃn. This came 21 years before the English settlement at Roanoke Island in Virginia Colony and 42 years before the successful settlements of Santa Fe, New Mexico and Jamestown, Virginia.
Over the next one hundred years, the city was defended by nine wooden forts. Following an attack in 1668, it was decided by the Queen Regent of Spain, Mariana, that a masonry fortification be constructed to protect the city. In October 1672 construction began on the fort that would become the Castillo de San Marcos. In 1670, Charles Town (modern-day Charleston, South Carolina) was founded by the British. This was one of the events that spurred the fort’s construction, being just two days sail from St. Augustine.
The Castillo is made of a stone called “coquina”, literally “little shells”. The coquina was very effective at absorbing the impact of canon balls, causing very little damage to the walls themselves, but much consternation for enemy ships.
[update] We took the scenic route home, heading up A1A to Jacksonville Beach before crossing the St. John’s River by ferry at Mayport, a village with docks lined by old shrimp boats. We continued north across Big and Little Talbot Island before reaching Amelia Island, where we were impressed by the large dunes (and equally large waves) that give the beach character.
Arthur Lee Land’s publicist sent me his new album, Dragonfly, a few months ago. The other day Arthur followed up to see how I liked it. As we e-mailed back-and-forth, I asked myself who is this guy, Arthur Lee Land. Then I asked him. And he was kind enough to answer.
Q. What’s your background? Hometown? Schooling? etc.
A. I was born in NY–Arthur Leland Sikking III and I grew up in the Midwest in the northern suburbs of Chicago. I went to New Trier High School and my high school band, Bass 30, ended up studying under jazz bassist Richard Davis at UW Madison. In Madison I mostly just sat in on Richard Davis’ classes and played with my band. I loved listening to him tell Miles stories. I didn’t technically “go to college” I just hung out because everybody else in the band where going for their degrees. I did study Jazz Improvisation at Chicago Conservatory of Music for a short while and took private guitar lessons and learned my modes and how to analyze jazz standards.
My biggest schooling was doing gigs playing lead guitar in various bands. Once I heard the sound of the Fender Telecaster that changed my world and I spent a lot of time working on the country chicken pickin’ style of guitarists like Albert Lee, James Burton, Ray Flacke. I played for a year in southern California with Jann Browne (who was in Asleep At The Wheel) and is a great country singer. That was a huge learning experience because we played 5-6 nights a week and we had a rotating utility man seat (mostly steel and fiddle players) and I got to play with some heavy cats like Byron Berline, Al Perkins, Steve Fishell and even a gig with Bobby Cochran from Bobby and the Midnights which was a thrill for me. I spent three years in Nashville and that taught me a lot about studio work and doing sessions. Ray Flacke became a good friend and was my mentor. He taught about Nashville chord charts and how head arrangements went down in the studio. He produced some demos on my band and we played a bunch of gigs together.
I spent six years in Minneapolis and got into the whole funk and roots thing up there and fusing twangy Tele over funky stuff and getting back into my more jammy roots. I had a band called Arthur Lee and the Next Step with Michael Bland who was the drummer in Prince’s New Power Generation and a bunch of other incredible Twin Cities musicians which was a lot of fun. I also got back into the acoustic singer/songwriter thing up there and when I left there and moved back out to California I started writing songs with my wife Carol Lee. I ended up moving toChicagoand writing lots more songs with Carol. In August 2002 we went to the Rocky Mountain Folks Festival and Song School in Lyons CO and there I ran into to producer/songwriter/recording artist Wendy Waldman and she loved what Carol and were up to and said “If you have an album of Dragonfly’s, I’ll produce your next record!” That was almost a three year process from start to release date and what a learning process. Working with Wendy taught me a lot about my self as an artist and as a singer. It was a very spiritual process of learning how to find my center and my true voice and when I am singing from Soul and not my head. We also picked 13 songs to cut out of about 40 songs and I learned how to put a record together as a whole piece of work with special attention paid to each song being a facet of the diamond and not having two songs take up the same space. Wendy is all about the SONG and she has written some huge hits and knows the craft. Deciding on the songs for the record was another great learning opportunity and there was one song that she said “I’m not cutting this unless you change this line” so everything had to pass her quality control and I’m so grateful for that process.
Oh yeah, one other MAJOR part of my schooling was studying the teachings of ECKANKAR, a spiritual path that teaches Soul awareness and how to have personal experiences with the Light and Sound of God. The teachings resonated with me because of its focus on the transformational power of the Sound Current. The spiritual exercise of chanting HU (pronounced hugh) an ancient name for God, opened some very profound doors for me as an artist and musician.
Q. When/how did you know you had to be a musician?
A. I remember my senior year in work study class where my teacher said to me “What are you gonna do with your life!!!?” I stood up in the middle of class and said “I’m gonna play Rock ‘n’ Roll!!!” And so it was.
Q. You have a lot of major players on your new album. How did you approach them? Did you have a word from a friend or did you just pick up the phone and ask?
A. Well that’s a great question. This was another big process in the making of the record and working with Wendy. Since I didn’t go in as a member of an already existing band but more as a singer/songwriter/artist, Wendy had me ask the question “what kind of record do I want to make?” Then “what instrumentation would best serve the songs and the focus of the record?”
We decided that the record would be primarily acoustic since I was going for this Afrograss flavored Folk Rock sound that I had been experimenting with in my live shows doing the solo looping thing. I wanted upright bass and lots of percussion and somebody who could be somewhat of a multi instrumentalist for some of the other bluegrass instruments (Mandolin and fiddle). At that point the next logical question was “who are the cats that can do the job and vibe with us and our music?” I saw Grateful Dawg right as we were asking the last question and when I saw Joe Craven being interviewed in the movie I KNEW he was the guy. He had the right energy for the project and I could tell we would get along wonderfully. So I had Wendy call him and he said he’d love to do the project. I called him shortly afterwards and we hit it off. I had heard of his Camptown CD and that it was out of print and so he burned me a copy. After I heard that I was floored with how cool his world music take on traditional fiddle tunes was and how his playing was exactly what I was looking for.
Q. Do you allow taping of your shows and encourage peer-to-peer sharing of your music?
A. Absolutely!!! We have a some shows available for free download at www.archive.org. There’s a Fox Theatre show from June 10th 2005 that was our CD release party with my new band that I highly recommend. I also encourage fans to BUY artists STUDIO CD’s and tape and trade live shows for free. Studio recordings are very expensive to produce and need to be paid for. Live shows are a great way to spread the love and I highly encourage people to burn live shows and share them with their friends (with the artists consent of course).
Christian Science Monitor: As China began to go online, observers made brash predictions that the Internet would pry the country open. Cyberspace, the thinking went, would prove too vast and wild for Beijing to keep under its thumb.
Now these early assumptions are being sharply revised. Under an authoritarian government determined to control information, China has grown a new version of the Internet. As former US President Bill Clinton noted recently, China’s Internet is very unlike the cauldron of dissenting voices that is the hallmark of the Internet familiar to Americans. Instead, it’s heavily filtered, monitored, censored, and most of all, focused on making money.
The success of Beijing’s strategy – to harness the network’s business potential while minimizing it as a conduit for free speech – has some concerned that it has established a medium and new censoring tools that other countries can adopt.
“The biggest danger is that China creates a very large market and testing ground for surveillance and filtering software,” says Danny O’Brien with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco.
As Chinese Web companies seek to enlarge their markets particularly in developing countries, the question looms about whether they will export their values as well. Chinese tech firms have an eye on emerging markets in Africa, South America, and India. These firms are probably peddling censorship tools, says the free-speech advocacy group Reporters Without Borders.
Part of the Chinese success has been co-opting American tech companies with the lure of its lucrative consumer market. Microsoft blocks bloggers from posting politically sensitive words in Chinese; Google shuts down for several minutes when a user in China looks too many times for forbidden words like “Falun Gong;” and Yahoo recently admitted turning over private e-mail information that helped lead to the jailing of a Chinese journalist.
“I do not like the outcome,” Yahoo chief Jerry Yang said of incident. But it’s a decision he said he had to make when he decided to do business here.
Unlike other authoritarian regimes, notably North Korea and Cuba, which depend on keeping the Web away from the people, China has promoted access – a fact that initially surprised observers. Chinese leaders, says Julien Pain of Reporters Without Borders, knew they needed the Internet to attract global business and trade. Access is abundant and cheap, and those who cannot afford a home computer rely on more than 2 million Cybercafes nationwide. An estimated 134 million Chinese will be online by the end of this year, according to the Beijing-based research firm Analysys International, and nearly one-quarter use broadband.
The country’s Internet Service Providers remain controlled by state-run companies, giving the government a window on every user’s connection. It’s an open secret that around 30,000 telecom workers are dedicated to policing the net as part of the country’s “Great Firewall.”
Thanks to R Conversation for the pointer.
Step right up and get a good look at the Baptist Belt. Come on. It won’t bite.
More studies in American cultural geography are also available, care of Valparaiso University.
KETV: ABC sportscaster Brent Musburger was ticketed at the intersection of 9th and T Streets in Lincoln after Saturday’s Husker game.
Lincoln police said Musburger was a passenger in the ABC crew’s rental car.
One witness said a traffic officer had just waved traffic through the intersection when he spotted Musberger drinking a beer.
The witness said he saw other passengers with alcohol, but Lincoln police said only Musburger was ticketed.
The driver was not drinking.
Musburger was given a $144 citation, including court costs.
[UPDATE] This is classic. There’s a Brent Musburger drinking game. “It may be the only way to listen to a Musburger broadcast without throwing a hammer through the screen,” says its propagator and fellow Big 12 fan.
Here’s one of the rules of the game:
Rule #8: Mentioning a Big 10 school during a non-Big 10 game. Whenever Brent does this, the first person who names the Big 10 school’s mascot gets to make somebody drink for 11 seconds, since there’s 11 schools in the Big 10.
Grateful Dead is now utilizing the download only distribution model, in addition to their traditional releases. Smart move if you have the fan base to pull it off, for there’s no manufacturing, no packaging and no distribution involved.
I just purchased the 5th release in the series, a spring tour show I attended at Hampton Coliseum in March 1988. This is the night they played Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man” in the first set and teased Miles Davis’ “So What” to open the second. It’s nice to have such a crispy ‘board to remember the show by.
A group of right wing Christian soldiers wants to take South Carolina. And these Cailfornia-based idealogues are already talking about secession from the union as a legitimate goal, a road the Palmetto State has already been down.
Fox News: Nearly 140 years after the Civil War, another group of Americans wants to secede from the union.
Christian Exodus, a California-based group, wants God to be its commander in chief. Decrying what it perceives as the unjust secularization of the United States, it wants a sovereign state of its own.
But rather than eye the Golden State — a “lost cause,” says the group’s founder — it’ll settle for South Carolina.
Cory Burnell, Christian Exodus’ founder and president, told FOX News that the group narrowed its focus to the Bible Belt state based on an electorate that is already “Christian-leaning,” has its own ports and — unlike its neighbor North Carolina — is no hub of liberalism.
Christian Exodus’ mission, according to its Web site, is to scrap the “tyrannical authority” of federal government in favor of a constitutional republic, with the Ten Commandments rather than the U.S. Constitution as government’s guide.
Phase One of the group’s “plan of action” in breaking down the wall between church and state is to enlist groups of 1,000 members to move into 12 designated House districts in South Carolina, with the goal of voting 12 “Christian sovereigntists” into the state government by 2008.
If by 2016 group leaders have not achieved the kind of government they want, Christian Exodus will throw down the gauntlet and seek independence.
Direct from the horse’s mouth:
ChristianExodus.org is coordinating the move of thousands of Christians to South Carolina for the express purpose of re-establishing Godly, constitutional government. It is evident that the U.S. Constitution has been abandoned under our current federal system, and the efforts of Christian activism to restore our Godly republic have proven futile over the past three decades. The time has come for Christians to withdraw our consent from the current federal government and re-introduce the Christian principles once so predominant in America to a sovereign State like South Carolina.
ChristianExodus.org offers the opportunity to try a strategy not yet employed by Bible-believing Christians. Rather than spend resources in continued efforts to redirect the entire nation, we will redeem States one at a time. Millions of Christian conservatives are geographically spread out and diluted at the national level. Therefore, we must concentrate our numbers in a geographical region with a sovereign government we can control through the electoral process.
ChristianExodus.org is orchestrating the move of thousands of Christians to reacquire our Constitutional rights and, if necessary to attain these rights, dissolve our State’s bond with the union.
The hippies tried to do a similar thing (minus the secession scheme) with Wyoming–the nation’s least populous state–thirty five years ago. It didn’t work.
