The New York Times gave us a great interactive election map to play with this year.
But they only gave us two colors: red and blue.
Mohave County in Arizona circa 11:45 p.m. on election night should be a different color.
(Who are these guys voting for?)
Labels: journalism, web
The Choir of St. John's College Cambridge is webcasting one evensong each week from their new, freestanding website. The inaugural webcast debuts today.
Their audio player makes it ridiculously easy to skip the sermon.
One can hope that King's and other English collegiate chapels are not far behind in this endeavor.
Now, a non-musical web tangent:
The arrangements of the webcast do make one wonder a little bit about the politics behind the St. John's enterprise. The choir has recently launched this new website which is separate from the college's domain. It is also a bit heavy in the self-promotion department, but that's another story.
Perhaps one of the primary reasons for the creation of this site is the choir's desire webcast evensong services. This initiative does seem to have the blessing of the college (see this press release) but I think it loses some of its prestige by not being hosted by the college.
Now, maybe there's some technical or theological reason that ac.uk addresses cannot stream audio, but I'm not privy to that kind of "Bob's your uncle" or "Heath Robinson" or whatever you want to call it.
And this separation of a music program from its umbrella institution is not an isolated incident. I run across this from time to time in parish churches and cathedrals on this side of the Atlantic. It seems to me that in the interest of the web presence of both parties this kind of separation should be discouraged and regarded as insubordination on the part of the musicians. Of course this is only valid if the umbrella institution has a responsive site and adequate technical support.
Labels: Evensong, St John's (Cambridge), web
I'm always on the lookout for organists with their own websites, but never in my wildest dreams did I think I would find the composer of GENERAL SEMINARY has his own blog.
Here's his "about me" blurb:
Initially trained as a classical musician (organ, harpsichord, conducting, composition). After ordination, I taught for a few years at General Seminary in New York City before becoming Rector of a small parish in Brooklyn. Then to California & served parishes in San Diego, Beverly Hills, and ended up with 12 years as Chaplain & Director of Pastoral Care at Good Samaritan Hospital, Los Angeles, from which I retired in June 2003. There have been a few of my compositions published & recorded, and I wrote the music for two hymns in The Hymnal 1982: “King of Glory” (GENERAL SEMINARY) and “Baptized in Water” (POINT LOMA). My partner, Nam, is a Pharmacist, and we live happily in a beautiful section of Long Beach, not far from the ocean, with our much-loved four-legged little guy, Josh, a Shih Tzu.
Go read David Charles Walker's On the Beach. Then go sing hymn 382 in the Hymnal 1982
At least, that's what I'll be doing.
Labels: church music, web
The logo for Gawker's "Celebrity Theory 101" bears an uncanny resemblance to the Oberlin College seal.
MusicaSacra is hosting the Liber Usualis online. Note that this is not a link to the file itself, which is 115 MB.
(via Hot Lutheran on Lutheran Action)
Labels: liturgy, Roman Catholocism, web
Common usage also applies the term to devoutly religious people, particularly Christians; however, it is also used to describe devout members of any religious persuasion, and perhaps its particular application to Christianity is a combination of the fact that Christians are the majority religion in the Americas and Europe where the term is commonly used, and the fact that Christians describe themselves as a "flock" and Christ as a "shepherd."
from Wikipedia's "Sheeple"
Previously: Christians - sheeple as culturally persecuted
Labels: Advertising, cars, Christianity, web
It doesn't bother me so much that a new online videogame advertising the Toyota Scion xD is violent, but I am offended that it seems to be blatantly anti-Christian.
The innocuous sheep-faced humanoids of the game are "sheeple". And who are we supposed to believe the sheeple are?
Know that the Lord is God. It is he that made us, and we are his;* we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.Psalm 100:3
Yes, Toyota. When we're not busy drawing fish in the sand, we Judeo-Christians like to think of ourselves as sheep.
We are, in fact, his people and the sheep of his pasture. Sheep-people, if you will.
The advertisement I was forced to endure in the movie theater (because no, I wasn't going to walk out before Harry Potter 5 started) featured a "little deviant" wearing the disemboweled carcass of a "sheeple" in the spirit of Jesus' remarks in Matthew 7:15
"Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves."
The sheep in the advertisement and the game itself are defenseless. They are the "harassed and helpless" sheep without a shepherd that the author of Matthew describes in 9:36. (The ones we sing about "harvesting" to the tune ORA LABORA.
Jesus also uses the sheep as a metaphor for the children, "the greatest in the kingdom of heaven":
What do you think? If a shepherd has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray?Matthew 18:12
The sheep in the game also bleed green. [NEED BIBLICAL REFERENCE FOR THIS!!!]
And, finally, there's the infamous "Sermon on Mt. Sheep":
“Very truly, I tell you, anyone who does not enter the sheepfold by the gate but climbs in by another way is a thief and a bandit. The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers.” Jesus used this figure of speech with them, but they did not understand what he was saying to them. So again Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and bandits; but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly. “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The hired hand, who is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away—and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. The hired hand runs away because a hired hand does not care for the sheep. I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep. I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd. For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again. I have received this command from my Father.”John 10:1-18
More to the point: Toyota's advertisement refers to sheeple murder as "evolution". The implied message that Toyota wants it's car buyers to inhabit is "Gray-painting Christians are cramping our style. This car will show them who's boss. I'll be a little demon! Try to stop me now!"
To help them with their new worldview, Toyota offers a fictional guidebook. The ads feature a tattered tome with the title "Book of Deviants" in goldleaf gothic script.
I take all of this to mean that I read this to be somewhat anti-Christian, and I don't think I'm too far off base here. I suspect this is what the marketing campaign is after.
Tapping a cultural undercurrent of Christian antagonism to sell cars is pretty . Especially when the kind of car they are selling is an eco-friendly compact (32/38 mpg), which is exactly the kind of car a progressive Christian might be interested in.
Labels: Advertising, cars, Christianity, web
I have a Gmail email address, and I'm really happy with it. Gmail has, from what I can tell, far and away the best web-based spam filtering.
Heck, I'll even go so far as to say that Gmail provides the best spam filtering, period. The one I use at my place of employment is far from perfect and has its share of false positives. This can be very annoying as one doesn't want to look in one's spam folder for important information.
But back to Gmail. It does a great job catching spam. It's very rare that anything gets through (especially lately). And it's not like the amount of spam sent to me is trivial. At the moment it's around 1500 pieces in the last 30 days. (I've seen this number climb over 2500 in a 30 day period.) And I've never Gmail pick up any false positive. Not even big "opt-in" corporate emails. Everything seems to go where it's supposed to.
So it must of been a pretty serious case of boredom that led me to look at my Gmail spam earlier this week. But the spam wasn't what caught my eye.
Gmail does offer discreet text advertisements based on the content of your email. And what, you ask, does it offer when presented with a folder full of spam?
More spam.
Mmm.
Netflix tells me that I can now drag and drop movies in my queue.
It's about time.
Unrelated update: IsParisInJailRightNow.com tells me that yes, Paris is back in jail.
Labels: web
We've all heard it, the audio file dubbed "Messiah Organist on Crack", but unless you're an organist, you might have wondered how this could have happened.
I would postulate that the famous excerpt is a result of inadvertent transposer use.
Unless I miss my guess, the organist in question is performing on some incarnation of a pipeless (digital) organ. (If those really are pipes, they sound pretty nasty.) Many pipeless organs, like synthesizers, are equiped with transposers -- for you see, not being concerned with what pipes can play what notes, they can freely move the playable range of the instrument up and down willy-nilly.
There are two distinct designs for organ transposers. The most common is an inauspicious knob off to the side of the console that turns to the right to transpose up and to the left to transpose down -- usually about six in each direction (this just about covers all the keys). The other design, which is much less common, employs the transposer as a series of separate buttons underneath one of the keyboards.
A majority of all organ consoles, however, are equiped with buttons that look just like these: pistons. Each piston stores a specific, settable combination of stops. When the piston is pressed, those stops are drawn as if by magic!
So, the problem in this system of transposer buttons is that they can easily be confused with piston buttons. I believe that's what's happening here. Toward the end of the piece, the organist would want to add more sound; he would do this by selecting a piston.
Here's a possible rundown on the scenario:
- A mid-size church with an pipeless organ wants to perform selections from the Messiah. The bring in an outside guest organist who is relatively unfamiliar with the instrument.
- The organist hired typically plays at an Episcopal church where he is familiar with the technique of making small changes with divisional pistons (affecting only a part of the organ) and large changes with general pistons (affecting the entire organ).
- Toward the end of the "Hallelujah" chorus the organist presses what he believes to be a divisional piston (affecting the stops on a portion of the organ), but, in fact, he has inadvertently pressed the tranposer and lowered the organs pitch. (You can hear the organ's pitch separate from that of the orchestra's pretty early on in the excerpt).
- At the cesura, the organist takes advantage of the break in the action to hit a general piston. This adds to the organs sound considerably and the previous mistake becomes readily apparent to all. The organist continues playing while searching for means to make the correction which he finds only at the last chord.
The performance ends up sounding a little strange, but I would be lying if I said it couldn't have happened to me.
You might be interested to know what Sinden.org visitors have been looking for lately:
- panda - The ever popular "panda" has brought more people to Sinden.org than the fact that we sell diphthongs.
- mypipes.org - is close behind, probably because I'm the number one Google result for it at this point.
- Holtkamp martini organ - If you have a Holtkamp and you have a martini, you have the makings of a good time.
- UK teen modeling - None to be had here, sorry. Unless you mean that picture of William Crotch. That's actually UK pre-teen portraiture. Very different. But I'm sure you'll keep finding your way back after this.
- Victoria Osteen pictures - Absolutely not. Never have, never will. Unless someone caught her hitting a flight attendant on camera. That would be fun.
- Grandpa Val's Beef Jerky - Ah yes. All admirer's of Grandpa Val and his delicious beef jerky are welcome here. Do I start a fan page?
MyPipes.org, a website selling organ mp3s, did not impress me the first time I visited. Now that the site actually has content, my impressions haven't really changed.
The site looks cluttered, the graphics have an 80's sheen, and all the text is too small.
The photos are all poorly chosen. From the banner image at the top to the oddly cropped images of CD photography (one presumes?), everything looks sort of thrown together.
Part of the blame here must lie in the site's concept: getting away from the CD. Zarex is somehow under the misapprehension that to confuse the mp3 files available on the site with the CDs from which they come would be detrimental to sales. This is absurd. I would never have listened to these excerpts anywhere else, and was frustrated that links to the CDs from which they come are not provided.
The buttons for manipulating each product are needlessly cumbersome and redundant. "Download to cart" one button says. "Listen 30"" says another. And these appear for every file (and they don't even work well -- see below). As a site offering mp3s for sale, users are going to expect to be able to listen to exerpts of files before purchasing. This doesn't need to be explained with so much text. A few universal symbols would suffice.
I must have clicked on "Listen to 30"" about six times before I realized that my browser was blocking a popup. How annoying. And when I did hear it, I was sure it didn't play the whole way through, but then I realized that someone did a remarkably poor job of fading out the excerpt the way online music perveyors have known to do for years.
And I must have clicked on "Download to cart" about six times before I realized that on the opposite side of the screen, in a red box viewable only by scrolling down, was an indication that had "1 item" in my cart. How anti-user.
The phraseology "Download to cart" presents its own set of problems. What am I doing when I click this button? Am I actually downloading the file? Or am I just tagging that file to be downloaded later, say when I hand over my credit card information?
Occasionally, by clicking on the title bar, I was able to get the site to tell me "There are currently no tracks available. Please try again at a later date."
I would love to try again, especially if Zarex would just put these up on iTunes. They would spend a lot less on MyPipes.org, and I'll wager that a lot more of their organ music would be purchased too.
Today on the current issue of Living Church, a periodical about the Episcopal Church and its affairs, I noticed the back cover was devoted to an advertisement for MyPipes.org
As you enterprising link-clickers have already discovered, there's nothing there! The site just says "Coming Soon" (which at the very least is a step up from the undercapitalized "Coming soon" and the hopelessly casual "coming soon"). But what is the site supposed to be?
Well, you guessed it: something about organ music. The advertisement prominently features an organ pipe and says something about organ mp3s.
I distinctly remember the phrase "turn your iPod into a virtual cathedral".
A quick check reveals that mypipes.org is registered by Zarex corporation. So, it could be interesting.
But let me just ask first: why take out such a prominent advertisment if the site isn't active at all?
Wasteful.
What about "Coming [small picture of organ pipe] soon"?
I mean, come on.
Labels: Advertising, organ, web
After long last, Bun-bun is finally home! (For details, see the Sluggy Freelance strip of 5 Feb 2006)
If you're not yet addicted to a nerdy web comic, there's no time like the present.
In other news: It turns out that the revolution will not be televised.
Labels: web
Further proof that organists should be heard and not seen:
George Foster is the Crazy Midi Man!
Things you might encounter on Foster's website:
- "Midi is the best invention for any organ and other instruments."
- "But I enjoy them digital organ better because not like pipes, they stay in tune forever!!! I like that!!! That is the very part of pipe organs are hard to maintain, keep in tune!!!"
- advice for hiring an organist for your wedding
- links to every state
- no MIDI files, oddly, but . . .
- lots of
Thanks to Margaret (who says, "be sure to turn your speakers on!")
Update: It seems Crazy Midi Man won a Worst of the Web award 31 August 2001. But for some reason, not even this achievement could propel him to stardom. (22:22)
Labels: web
This is the official page of the Indiana State Excise Police. Our goal is to make our site more accessable [sic] to you.
Seems like Indiana needs to work on excising some poor spelling!
Also, site accesibility is the inherent goal of web design. Any attempt to spell this out to the user (let alone misspell this out) indicates a major failure on the part of the author.
Tangent: Um, is that a buffalo in the Indiana State Seal? I remember on my way home last night, I had to wait for a herd to cross the road. Not!
Labels: web
Yesterday was a very good day for comics on the web. First there was Sluggy when Mosp thought she had killed Lord Horribus, but this turns out not to be the case.
Then, in an instant classic from the animated Homestarrunner, Strongbad looses his 386 in a schizophrenic collage of computer virus-induced hallucinations. Simply brilliant.
These were some of my favorite lines from Bubs:
It's in a better place. Rather, it's in the same place, but now it's got a big hole in it.
and
Look Strongbad, my mouth was a broken JPEG. I had no choice.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, you're missing out.
Tangent: And, if these aren't quite your style (let's say you, the discerning web comic/cartoon connoisseur, need something a bit darker) you could try Strindberg and Helium or Making Fiends.
Labels: web
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