warning to record shoppers...

So I'm a huge fan of that Bobby Brown song "Every Little Step I Take." I'm sure you all remember the
Richard Avedon-ish video in which Bobby, set against a huge, all-white backdrop, dances around these towering, capitalized white letters spelling out the name of the song. Great video--worth youtubing if you have a minute. Anyhow, while at Amoeba yesterday, I stumbled across a 2.99 Bobby Brown LP which had this song on it and was overjoyed. Once at home I put the record on only to realize the whole album was remixed in the fashion of those awful C+C Music Factory songs that were so popular in the days of Arsenio. Actually, wasn't one of their songs ("Things that make you go hmm") based on that segment of the same name that was a nightly fixture on his show? Or was is it the other way around?

Another recent purchase--what I thought was a normal Devin the Dude CD--turned out to be a "Screwed and Chopped" remix of the original album. This is a slowed-down production style popularized by the late-DJ Screw. Avoid these albums at all costs. The album cover did say "Screwed and Chopped," but to my untrained eye I took the warning to be merely part of the cover art.

Maybe I should launch a Tipper Gore/PMRC-like campaign against record labels for these misleading, predatory practices and ask that all these records be clearly labeled as "remixes." Who's with me?

negative databases

Read an article not too long ago in The Economist about this new concept for a database. Apparently, some fella named Hempel, back in the 1940s, took the statement "all ravens are black" and derived its negative equivalent by saying "all non-black objects are non-ravens." Some Yale (had to include that for you, Dad) computer scientists have taken this line of thought and are attempting to apply it to the problem of protecting sensitive data.

I'd try and paraphrase but those Economist writers (whomever they are--why don't they list authors' names in that magazine?) say it best:

"The idea is to create a negative database. Instead of containing the information of interest, such a database would contain everything except that information."

Try and wrap your head around that crazy-ass shit.

skeptic sceptic

How do the Brits spell sceptic as in "sceptic tank"? that is if "sceptic" is already reserved for the doubters among us-- or them--i should say... Something to think about.

addendum: you can just ignore this entire post. just realized that both the brits and we yankers spell it "septic" without a "c" so the question is moot as they say. I thought of deleting the entire post but decided against it as I like the foto.