January 11, 2005
Russian Stars Radio!
I'm a total captive of Russian Stars Radio. I started streaming the stuff the day after the tsunami and was bouyed to a great extent by the silly raps and ravey beats and the heavily accented flava of Russian pop. It's both undeniably dirivitive yet branded so culturally Russian there could be no confusing this for French pop or Israeli club music.
Some of it is straight up hip-hop, delivered in a colloquial Russian that throws in a few very American phrases. When it comes right down to it, Russian is a
great language for hip-hop. It's bnatural tympanic rhythm gives it an even flow that bounces along as easy as Snoop Dogg's cadence.
Other songs are poppier, blending the Europop sensibility of, say, Atomic Kitten or any number of faceless club producers with Russian folk accordians and balalaikas. It's not a mix that you'd think sounds great at first, but it is.
Russian Stars Radio is at [
http://3mp3.ru/ru/radio/] and is also listed under "Internet Radio" in the Winamp Media Library (Alt-L in Winamp). The stream is always CD-quality and never breaks up. They have a definate rotation that loops every few hours, but all the songs are good at worst and damn great at best. The site is mostly in Cyrillic.
jb | | # |
The daily grind
This is the part of unemployment that I hate - the daily routine of résumé shopping, emailing, and follow up calls. Financial solidity notwithstanding, perhaps the best part of getting a job is not having to spend so much time looking for work. Having to go through the same conversations over and over is rather dulling, and the number of companies that put jobs out there only to put them on indefinate "hold" is ridiculously high.
I'm pulling together a bunch of California news at [
http://www.jasonbentley.org/etc], and there you can get the latest news about the landslides in Southern California. Some sources are reporting up to fourteen dead at this point, and there's likely more. When disaster hits so close to home it serves as a bit of a reminder of the Sword of Damocles hanging over us Californians and makes me wonder if I'm ready for disaster should it come.
When I last visited friends in New Orleans, we talked about how they live with the yearly threat of a Category 5 hurricane charging up the Gulf of Mexico and innundating New Orleans - the historic and modern sections alike - in a fierce storm sturge over the low-lying land, flooding the French Quarter up to their highest windows. This isn't a doomsday scenario - it's a very real, yearly threat that most residents of the Gulf Coast are brought up to prepare for. I can imagine December's tsunami gave them even more to think about.
The landslides are like that for me. The only thing separating my daily grind from the center of an awful news story is chance and 30 seconds. In the Bay Area, we live with the threat of potentially massive destruction along the San Andreas fault because it's otherwise such a perfect place to live. Most of the people I know here, myself included, were in school back east when the last major quake hit in 1989.
Am I ready? No.
jb | | # |
Son of a...
So I should prostrate myself upon the Altar of Idiocy. I've been in this place five months now and I just yesterday discovered I have on-demand digital cable. There's all these movies and shows that I can watch at my pleasure. It's not exactly TiVo, but it's the next best thing. I mean...I can watch Jim Lehrer
whenever I want to. And what more can you ask from your cable company.
I found that if I push "Menu" instead of "Guide," it pulls up a little menu for "On Demand."
Next time I'll be readin' that manual, I guess. I only, like, write them for a living.
jb | | # |
Simba's results...
...inconclusive.
So Dr. Walker, Simba's vet, says the results of the culture came back negative for any major infection, but her concern with his condition when I brought him in lead her to have them try again with different criteria. We're running low on Clavamox, but I'm gathering she wants to have some kind of confirmed culture before extending his precription, changing it, or ending it. So, a few more days on these other tests.
Here at home, Simba's doing much better. He's eating his normal Science Diet again - not without some difficulty, but at least he's not going without. The love affair with Pounce treats is back on. The fur on his face is growing back nicely and the scabbing is almost gone.
Here he is, just a few minutes ago:
jb | | # |
