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United States, North Carolina, Carrboro, English, Paul, Male, 56-60, All Music, All Food.

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Sunday, December 07, 2003

Here’s Claudette putting the finishing touches on The Meow Mix. Yeah, she’s blind, but so are Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles. Liz says that the Doppler effect on my crooning of “HERE Kitty Kitty Kitty” sounded demented, so Claudette deftly hid it in the mix. The 128-bit Lame MP3 of this is 469Kb, so if you’ve requested a copy and that’s too big, let me know. If any cat food manufacturers want to contact me to produce a commercial, I’m available! I can guarantee rapt cat attention for spans longer than most of their owners. 11:10:56 PM    comment []

Infomercial Chicken   “Henry” only cost $2.45 at Lowes’ Foods. He got a 2 hour power marinade in a vacuum container from FoodSaver. Nor a bad marinade, either, it consisted of honey, Dijon mustard, vinegar, soy sauce, and ginger. Then he was twirled in the Showtime rotisserie for a little over an hour. Liz and I watched Bandits, a surprising comedy treat directed by Barry Levinson, starring Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton, and Cate Blanchett. Billy Bob steals the show as a sensitive hypochondriac – with hair! Anyway, as the final heist wound down, Henry came to the table along with some Green Giant white shoepeg corn, boiled new potatoes, and gravy.   9:19:06 PM    comment []

Really Dumb Cat News   Maybe it was just an excuse to play with the Adobe Audition Software, maybe just boredom. I thought it would be funny to record the can opener opening a can of tuna, one of the cats’ favorite sounds. There’s that pop as the can is punctured, the whirr of the rotating can, finished off by the click of final separation from the lid. It really is a nice sound with a beginning, middle, and end – enough to be considered as art by itself.   Claudette meowed in anticipation at the end, and that became part of the sound file. I sampled some meows from Twyla for another track. Then I got another sample of the refrigerator door opening. The cats like that sound too. I added another of me walking around the room shaking a can of Pounce (I warned you that this was really dumb) and they followed me around meowing. Then, I got a sample of the top being popped on a can of Fancy Feast, and the chopping sound from breaking up the food with the edge of the can – with more meowing in the background. Finally, I recorded the sound of dry food shaking in the bag and being poured into their bowl.   The cats were exceptionally friendly as I manipulated all these tracks. Alternately, they would jump in my lap or wander from speaker to speaker in a Pavlovian frenzy. Finally, when all the individual tracks were seasoned with echo and EQ, I mixed them down to one very intense 30-second wave file, which I burned to a CD-RW. When I played it on the living room stereo, it became an instant hit with the girls, number 1 with a bullet. I call it The Meow Mix. 9:51:22 AM    comment []

SACRAMENTO — Rebuffed by state lawmakers in an early test of his administration, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will now try to bypass the Legislature whenever feasible and tap into the public support he commands by taking his agenda directly to the ballot, aides said Saturday.   I have three questions, which I hope don’t mean I’m a terrorist:   How much will these referendums cost California? Can the legislature be completely eliminated? Will Diebold make the voting machines?   Special assistance for crooks: The number on that steroid-enhanced credit card is 2785 4567 9824 3579 Exp. 05/06.   (BTW, there was a very funny parody on This American Life yesterday with Arnie working to annex Austria, making it the 51st state, so the Constitutional requirement of being a birth native could be met. No mention was made of the last time Austria was annexed.)     8:00:18 AM    comment []

When do we get castles on the moon, oh, uh, and jobs?   "Pork is pork," said Tom Schatz, president of the Washington-based Citizens Against Government Waste, which says the spending bill is "stuffed to the brim” with pet projects. Last week, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, persuaded key lawmakers to set aside $50 million for the rainforest project in Coralville, just outside Iowa City. Organizers call the project an unparalleled opportunity to teach children the wonders of the jungle, showcase clean energy concepts and boost the local economy by drawing tourists from across the Midwest. It would including <sic> a 20-story translucent dome. The project, projected to cost $225 million in all, is the dream of Ted Townsend, a Des Moines businessman who became smitten with the rainforest during a visit to Africa years ago. He runs an engineering company founded by his father, who made a fortune inventing machines that strip rind from pork and stuff hot dogs at high speed. A talent that must run in the family. 12:52:24 AM    comment []