Sushi Lies

wired.com:

The team of researchers from Columbia University and the American Museum of Natural History ordered tuna from 31 sushi restaurants and then used genetic tests to determine the species of fishes in those dishes. More than half of those eateries misrepresented, or couldn’t clarify the type of fish they were mongering.

This isn't tuna! It's bleargh peanut butter!

~

On an almost completely unrelated note:

FALSTAFF: Why, she's neither fish nor flesh; a man knows not where to have her.

HOSTESS: Thou art an unjust man in saying so: thou or any man knows where to have me, thou knave, thou!

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Free Deg ticket (Bay Area, Fillmore, Monday 11/23/2009)

from the jrocknyc@gmail.com inbox:

Do you suppose you could make an annoucement on your blog to your readers in California that I'm seeking a ride from Fresno to the Bay Area [for the Deg show at the Fillmore on Monday] in exchange for a free ticket to see Dir en grey?

He's a 20-year-old male originally from Hawaii and offered to share the gas & tolls... So if anyone's headed from Fresno to the Fillmore on Monday -- and you consider yourselves to be nice people -- email Karl (who i don't personally know and may just be a serial killer!) at eleven.eight@hotmail.com!

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The Joy of Speed (long fucking entry about podcasts & audiobooks)

I recently discovered teh awezmeness of speeding up podcasts & audiobooks by 50%.

(I was trying to justify buying an iPod Touch, with it's "Faster" playback feature, but too many reviews referred to it as "double-speed" -- and 2x is waaaay too fast...)

So what I did is open Audacity. File > Edit Chains > Add.

Then give the chain two instructions: Change Tempo, and Export MP3.

Then I gotta manually drag 'em to the right folder (slight pain), but I get twice the listening done that I used to. And still completely comprehensible.

I also stopped listening to several podcasts, including ALL the Slate.com ones I've listened to for the last year or more. Got tired of all the friendly NON-INFORMATIONAL banter and pseudo-intellectual posturing and the lameduck Audible ads, and realized most of the info it was taking me 30-40 minutes to absorb, could've been read in about five minutes on their site, assuming I cared, which increasingly I found I wasn't for most of it, so, poof. In retrospect, I can't believe I wasted so many mornings listening to that crap.

I also nixed several TWiT podcasts, keeping only Windows Weekly and This Week in Tech. Again, it was like, "the info you're providing me can be gotten elsewhere in 1/100th the time." And after a year, you realize you're hearing all the same damn opinions and reasons all the damn time... And again, the fucking ads! Same every week! Five minutes each, for shit I don't need.

But I like the guests on WW & TWiT enough to go thru the minor hassle of speeding them up and dragging the faster mp3 into the right folder... for now. Everything else (TWiG, TWiL, MBW.... gone.)

The only other podcast I like is the Kunstlercast, which is usually eye-openingly educational. Unfortunately it's usually necessary to skip the first and last several minutes, because the host/producer keeps forgetting it's the Kunstlercast, not the Duncan and Random Idiot Callerscast. :(

I've done the same with audiobooks, (NOT from Audible.com but from the god damn Brooklyn & New York Public Libraries, thankyouverymuch) ...but this post has already gotten long & boring enough.

Takeaway: you can and should speed up your podcasts & audiobooks.

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Marty + Sugizo

It's no fake nude Misaki!

Blabbermouth:

Marty Friedman has contributed the song "Meguriai" to Sony's new Gundam Unplugged. The album also features Sugizo...

Release date: December 9th.

There's a complete artist & track listing on Siam Shade's official site. No Andrew WK, unfortunately. :P

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Now You're Thinking with Magnets!

The Pirate Bay:

Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down!

• With decentralized peer acquisition, there is no central tracker that can be down.
• With decentralized fetching of metadata (torrents) we don't need to rely on a single server that stores and distributes torrent files.

Guess I maybe should learn what the hell those magnet thingies are...

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reviews: capricorns, pelican, priestess & russian circles

Capricorns River, Bear Your Bones 2008
Pelican What We All Come to Need 2009
Priestess Prior to the Fire 2009
Russian Circles Geneva 2009

Four sorta similar albums.

Pelican repeats the mistakes of City of Echoes, writing shorter, hookier, less satisfying songs again. Mostly it feels rushed, like the last hour of work on a Friday afternoon. Except the last track -- now featuring vocals! It feels too slow. :\

Russian Circles continues to crank out the dark, proggy, complex (god I love this drummer) jams on Geneva. Once in a while I kinda get the feeling that these songs are more fun to play than to listen to, but (unlike the Pelican disc), they do a better job of purposefully building towards crushing, crazed crescendos, than retreating back into cold Eastern European woods. :)

Priestess is in a different category, harking back to old Sabbath, but wiser and more modern. I assumed they were southern, but it turns out they're Canadian. Not mindblowing, but good for those times when you want some "natural" rock undistilled by overmastering. :\

My favorite of the bunch this month is the "new" (last year's) Capricorns album, which combines Russian Circle's uniqueness with old-Pelican's heft and Priestesses rawness to make something new. If Capricorns was a kid, he'd have a tipsy trucker for a dad and a lit major grad student for a mom. :)

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L4D2 x 4?

Anyone wanna buy L4D2 for $35 instead of $45? We can do the four pack together... :)

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Fun Times (photo update!)

I had the BEST TIME out last night.

Yakitori Taisho, Sing Sing Karaoke, and Sunrise Mart (above the St. Marks bookstore).

Me and E and Sungwon and Christina (formerly known as Tenken), we hit a Tibetan place near St. Marks, where The Sungwon Who Does Not Carry ID was carded, so he couldn't drink, as he had no ID.

Then we hit The Forum, where he was carded AFTER ordering and paying for a drink, and had the drink TAKEN AWAY FROM HIM like a recalcitrant child!

Then we hit the Japanese conbini at St. Marks. Got me one of those Weider Energy Jellydrinks -- the ones that used to sustain me through Deg's moshpits so long ago... nummy! *^_^*

Then off to Sing Sing Karaoke, which cards at the door, so we turned around and left immediately.

And finally to Taisho, an awesome troo-Japanese restaurant downstairs from Sing Sing, which also carded him, unexpectedly. Loved the aspara-bacon there. (I love just saying Aspara Be-kon... altho my pee smelled all day today from the asparagus. What is that all about?) The $12 pitchers of Sapporo & Kirin were also nice. :)

We ended up spending most of the night pouring our drinks into his glass (ginger ale + beer, anyone?) and laughing and laughing and just having the best time evar... it was just the jolliest fuckin' evening I've had in ages. :)

But I took no photos. :(

edit: But E did!

But I have these animated gifs from the old Lo/Rez website!

Sung (b), Tenk (v), Go (g)

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review: dead end | "metamorphosis" (2009)

dead end

metamorphosis

2009

"Princess" and "Dress Burning" are killer, swaggering hits.

Other tracks -- some rollicking ("Matenro Game"), some purposeful and deliberate ("Telepathy"*), some thrashy ("Devil Sleep") and some long and ballady (that last track) -- are a little less infamous/awesome, but, combined, create an effective full-album, masterpiecey ambience.

Dead End is You (g), Minato (d), Morrie (v) & Crazy Cool Joe (b).

There's elements of Van Halen, Steve Vai, and Slash throughout, but with Japanese pop & rock seasoning. And together, these guys are simply unstoppable. The spacious, roomy production adds up to more than the sum of its parts.

So although a few sections sag (the last couple tracks, the two-minute instrumental that serves as an opener to the grandeur of "Princess"), it's hard to imagine old school VK and metal fans not digging this disc muchly.

rating: :)

Some sites list track three as "Incarnation." JDIC, CDJapan, and my wife all agree it's "Telepathy."

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The Best J-Rock Songs of the Decade Thread

Comment (as many times as you want!) with the Artist, Title, Year, and a Youtube link for the newbies. :)

Then vote for others using the "like" button (next to the reply button) on each comment!

Voila, instant scientifically accurate polling!

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James Hetfield & Dir en grey

thx ryan!

Deg MySpace:

"A special thanks goes out to James Hefield from Metallica, who came out last night to enjoy Dir en grey at The Gramercy Theatre on our opening night in NYC!"

That's kinda cool... although having the band say "Look who came to our show!" negates almost all the coolness of Jaymz having come!

(It's like hitting on girls by saying, "Hi, I'm wealthy!" rather than having allowing them to notice the Rolex on their own...)

So I'll assume no one at the show saw Jaymz... he didn't come out on stage to wave Hi, and wasn't visible in the audience?

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