M Is FOR MASHUP - January 25th, 2017
Crumplstock 6 Round-Up
By DJ Useo
From the view point of the music,
Crumplstock 6
( crumplebangers.com/crumplstock/crumplbangers/ )
was a glorious success. Since music was what it was about, what could be more fitting. Nearly everyone who attended was a DJ & a home producer of distinguish. For instance Marty Batfreak displayed his vast DJ experience through crowd-proven tunes & set-awareness, leaving us all anxious for more, which he provided handily.
In addition Marty introduced us to his 11-year old offspring, DJ Nightwing, who brought abilities beyond a youngsters' years to bear. At one point, the two Batfreaks traded off every other track in an excellent dj battle. Honestly, it was hard to say who won. Many more sets were very impressive, & memorable. Personally, I'd like a copy of them all. If I get the links, I'll share them here.
As I stated, all the dj sets were notable for either content, style, & presentation with Grave Danger, AtoZ, DJ Rudec & BorisB taking the lead, amongst leaders. Now, it's totally my opinion, but the Crumplstock founder PomDeter did the best set. He featured whimsical bootlegs of his own creation, & still had one really appealing set.
Literally everyone did a notable job of keeping the energy, & party vibe going. My set was so rewarding for me, not just because it was me, but also because it was streamed to the Flask Lounge in Seatlle, ME where DJ Cougar streamed many of the Crumplstock sets to one happy live crowd over two nights. Word reached me that much dancing ensued.
For some weird reason, the Crumplstock festival doesn't draw many non-bootleggers. I don't get that, as the tunes are proven audience-pleasers. I always post my sets after, & they do ok enough, but some of us tried new hosting, & got rewarded with numbers of a higher order. AtoZ got over 1000 plays in his first hour of hosting his mix at
MIXLR.COM
( mixlr.com/david-m-roberts/ ) . I experienced a similar numbers spurt.
Here's my Crumplstock set composed of only tracks I mixed, plus some skits I wrote. Numbers remain suspiciously low at this hosting.
( hearthis.at/vxmfxz7w/dj-useo-crumplstock-6/ )
Meanwhile, the MIXLR response is incredibly bigger
( mixlr.com/djuseo ). Although it was delayed, I also did an after-party set of other peoples mashups. I'll give you the link to that next week.
So, enough words from me for now. Be of good cheer till next week, if you can.
Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Christopher Ingraham: The Trump administration just told a whopper about the size of the federal workforce (Washington Post)
President Trump on Monday signed an executive order instituting a hiring freeze on all nonmilitary federal employees. At a press briefing, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said that the move "counters the dramatic expansion of the federal workforce in recent years." In both raw-number and percentage terms, this is an inaccurate statement.
Ashley Parker, Philip Rucker and Matea Gold: "The first days inside Trump's White House: Fury, tumult and a reboot" (Washington Post)
President Trump had just returned to the White House on Saturday from his final inauguration event, a tranquil interfaith prayer service, when the flashes of anger began to build.
MICHAEL D. SHEAR and EMMARIE HUETTEMAN: Trump Repeats Lie About Popular Vote in Meeting With Lawmakers (NY Times)
President Trump used his first official meeting with congressional leaders on Monday to falsely claim that millions of unauthorized immigrants had robbed him of a popular vote majority, a return to his obsession with the election's results even as he seeks support for his legislative agenda.
Andrew Tobias: David Brock's Plan To Fight Back
"We wanted voters to understand three things about Trump. One, that he is temperamentally unfit to serve and, thus, that a Trump Presidency is a mortal danger to the country. Two, that Trump is too divisive to lead America in the 21st century-he's sexist, racist, xenophobic. Three, that Trump is a fraud and a con-man, only in it for himself. Put differently, Trump is not just a sexual predator, but also an economic predator. American Bridge did prodigious research proving all three points." - David Brock
David Bruce: Trumpcare (davidbruceblog)
What will Trumpcare look like? I hope it will look a lot like Medicare but will have deductibles and co-pays that are lower than under Obamacare.
As told as told to Colin Drury: The day I met Picasso at Sheffield railway station (The Guardian)
Trade unionist Bill Ronksley recalls welcoming the famous artist to his city for a peace conference in 1950.
Jonathan Jones: We must rescue Van Gogh from becoming a pop culture cliché (The Guardian)
Loving Vincent is a corny new biopic made from 62,450 hack oil paintings in Van Gogh's style - and is an insult to the human struggle in his original works.
David Bruce's Amazon Author Page
David Bruce's Smashwords Page
David Bruce's Blog
David Bruce's Lulu Storefront
David Bruce's Apple iBookstore
David Bruce has over 80 Kindle books on Amazon.com.
took the day off.
took the day off.
has returned to semi-retired status.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
Team Coco
CONAN
Reader Comment
Who didn't see this coming?
Hey, Marty:
I just read that Trump has exerted his corruption 'executive power' and
taken some definitive action concerning the Dakota Access Pipeline. Since he used to
own stock in the companies that own/control the company doing the 'drilling', if not
now, I can't say I was surprised. I knew this was going to happen!
I'm in South Dakota, not North Dakota, where the pipeline is currently being
built, but it was originally slated to come down through South Dakota west of the
Missouri River, all the way through the state almost down to the Nebraska border
until it curved east, eventually crossing the Mighty Mo somewhere near Sioux City,
IA. We dodged a bullet by putting it the vote, the problem being that the southern
half of the county I live in lies over the Ogallala Aquifer, America's largest
underground aquifer, also under and providing water for 8 states, from here to
Texas! If there was a leak or any kind of problem it could have contaminated the
entire system.
Our vote forced the company to move the project up into ND, so it
would also cross the river there. Instead of stopping it, we just moved the
problem out of our state but we knew that somewhere, somehow, it would eventually
cross the river because the company does NOT want to pay to 'truck it' over the
river, thus ensuring no possible future catastrophes. I feel for those folks up
there, because the land it's going under is truly sacred ground, however, I knew
that Obama's halt to the project wouldn't last once Trump was crowned took office.
It looks like the project is back on...sigh...
Let us pray,
Tiera H.
Thanks, Tiera!
Seems their motto is 'let us prey'.
Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
Reader Comment/Suggestion
Current Events
Janet sent a link to an article about Stain's ego & how he will implode. The first was a bit slow, but then:
Trump is famously hostile to the notion of learning: no-one has anything to teach him. He was born rich, and that means he's a genius and that everyone must respect him. He appears to have no ability for self-reflection. The mirrors he has in his house may be framed in gold, but he's never been able to bring himself to look in them for more than a few seconds. Instead he's surrounded himself by people who tell him what he wants to hear, who repeat back to him his inner mantra: you're the richest, the best, the greatest writer, builder, statesman, etc etc etc. But it's his inner voices that are the problem, the ones that tell him that he's nothing, a failure, that everyone sees him as a joke. The ones that (presumably) sound a lot like his father.
He's become in two days the paranoid and deluded ruler of so many novels by Latin American and African writers. Usually this point is reached after several decades of rule and the imposition of terror and a cult of personality.
He will snap very, very soon.
Our job is to increase the tension.
Ha ha ha ha hah! I'll help in every way I can. If you want to read the full article:
from Marc Perkel
Patriot Act
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
FIGHTING THE GOOD FIGHT WITH EACH OTHER!
DUMB AND DUMBER!
"A GHOST IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER."
CHILDHOOD MEM0RIES!
KNOW THE ENEMY!
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
The kid & I are on our way to PA for dear old Dad's 92nd birthday.
Have a laptop, so I'm planning on keeping the page going.
OTOH, there may be some challenges in finding an internet connection.
So, if the page isn't up when you expect it, try again later.
And if you send me anything, the earlier, the better.
Promises Reporters 'Never To Lie'
Sean Spicer
P-resident Donald Trump's (R-Prevaricator-in-Chief) press secretary promised reporters on Monday that he would never lie after a weekend briefing in which he made statements about the crowd size for Trump's inauguration that were debunked.
In comments to reporters on Saturday that became known as the "alternative facts" briefing, White House spokesman Sean Spicer declared that Trump's crowd was "the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration - period."
Spicer's statement drew further criticism after Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway said on Sunday the White House had wanted to "put alternative facts out there" to counter what she said was a biased media.
At his first formal White House briefing on Monday, Spicer was asked by a reporter if he intended to always tell the truth from the lectern.
"Our intention is never to lie to you," he replied.
Sean Spicer
Conductor Keeps Discovering
Semyon Bychkov
As a boy in Saint Petersburg, Semyon Bychkov would scrounge to buy second-hand Tchaikovsky scores with pocket change from lunch money given by his mother.
Living in a communal apartment with other families in the city then called Leningrad, he recalls that by age 12, he would spend nights in the kitchen -- the only room with both lights and privacy -- waving an imaginary baton as if guiding orchestras to Russia's most treasured composer.
Bychkov went on to become a renowned conductor, fleeing the Soviet Union for the West after reaching adulthood to escape anti-Semitism and official suspicion of his political views.
Now 64, the maestro has put together a Tchaikovsky festival at the New York Philharmonic, an in-depth exploration through performances from Tuesday until February 11.
Scholars have persistently debated whether Tchaikovsky was uniquely Russian or an extension of the Western classical tradition.
Semyon Bychkov
Dwarf Galaxies Shed Light
Dark Matter
The first sighting of clustered dwarf galaxies bolsters a leading theory about how big galaxies such as our Milky Way are formed, and how dark matter binds them, researchers said Monday.
Theorised but never seen, the bundled galaxies were discovered using the largest optical survey of the night sky ever compiled, they reported in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Seven clusters of three-to-five galaxies are each 10 to 1,000 times smaller than the Milky Way.
Unlike our home galaxy, all have long-since stopped giving birth to new stars.
Dark Matter
Fossils Of Huge Otter Unearthed
China
Scientists have unearthed fossils of an intriguingly large otter as big as a wolf that frolicked in rivers and lakes in a lush, warm and humid wetlands region in southwestern China about 6.2 million years ago.
The outsized otter, called Siamogale melilutra, weighed about 110 pounds (50 kg) and measured up to 6-1/2 feet (2 meters) long, making it bigger than any of its cousins alive today, the researchers said on Monday.
"Siamogale melilutra reminds us, I think, of the diversity of life in the past and how many more questions there are still to answer. Who would have imagined a wolf-size otter?" said Denise Su, Cleveland Museum of Natural History curator of paleobotany and paleoecology.
It had enlarged cheek teeth and strong jaws that appear to have been used for crunching hard objects, perhaps large shellfish and freshwater mollusks, and was capable of swimming in shallow, swampy waters.
The fossils, found at a site in China's Yunnan Province, include a largely complete cranium and lower jaw, various teeth, and limb bones.
China
Net Neutrality Opponent To Head FCC
Ajit Pai
P-resident Donald Trump (R-Grifter) on Monday tapped Republican Commissioner Ajit Pai to head the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, which is expected to roll back many of the Obama Administration's telecommunications and internet policies.
Pai, a former Justice Department, FCC and Capitol Hill staffer, in December predicted landmark "net neutrality" rules adopted in 2015 would not last. The son of Indian immigrants who grew up in Kansas, Pai said the commission should take a "weed whacker" to unneeded rules and was harshly critical of many FCC regulations imposed during the Obama administration.
"During the Trump administration, we will shift from playing defense at the FCC to going on offense," he said in December. "We need to fire up the weed whacker and remove those rules that are holding back investment, innovation, and job creation."
Pai will also have a key role in deciding whether to approve or reject or impose conditions on mergers involving cable and telephone companies. In May, Pai opposed FCC conditions imposed on Charter Communication's acquisition of Time Warner Cable.
Last week, then FCC chairman Tom Wheeler urged Republicans against dismantling internet access protections that bar service providers from slowing consumer access to web content.
Ajit Pai
Recover Poorly
Climate-Ravaged Corals
Coral reefs that survive rapid bleaching fuelled by global warming remain deeply damaged, with little prospect of full recovery, researchers said Wednesday.
Sixteen years after the 1998 El Nino ravaged coral in the Indian Ocean's Seychelles archipelago, no reefs had recovered their original growth rates and barely a third were expanding at all, they reported in a study, the first to track coral health over a two-decade period.
A dozen of 21 reefs tracked from 1994 were still struggling in 2014 against leafy algae, sea urchins and parrot fish to restore their original balance of shallow-water flora and fauna.
The rest underwent what marine biologists call a "regime shift", and are today composed of a new -- and far less diverse -- mix of corals.
Four of the reefs only had two percent coral cover in 2014, and are likely to die out entirely.
Climate-Ravaged Corals
Alterbate Facts / Alternate Reality
T-rump
The White House on Tuesday confirmed that President Donald Trump (R-Delusional) believes millions of people voted illegally in the November election, but declined to provide evidence to support that claim.
Hours after Trump told congressional leaders that as many as five million people could have voted illegally, White House spokesman Sean Spicer confirmed the president's belief.
"The comment he said was three to five million people could have voted illegally based on the studies he's seen," said Spicer.
<
There is no public evidence of widespread illegal voting in last year's poll.
If proven, it would be one of the biggest political scandals in US history and could fundamentally undermine faith in US democracy.
T-rump
Dispute With Vatican
Knights of Malta
The head of the Knights of Malta, who has been locked in a bitter dispute with the Vatican, has resigned, a spokesperson for the Rome-based Catholic chivalric and charity institution said on Wednesday.
The spokesperson said Grand Master Matthew Festing, 67, had resigned after Pope Francis asked him to step down at a meeting on Tuesday. Grand masters of the institution, which was founded in the 11th century, usually keep their positions for life.
"The pope asked him to resign and he agreed," the spokesperson said, adding that the next step was a formality in which the group's Sovereign Council would have to sign off on the highly unusual resignation. The order would be run by its number two, or grand commander, until a new head is elected.
Festing and the Vatican have been locked in a bitter dispute since one of the order's top knights, Grand Chancellor Albrecht Freiherr von Boeselager, was sacked in December in the chivalric equivalent of a boardroom showdown - ostensibly because he allowed the use of condoms in a medical project for the poor.
Von Boeselager appealed to the pope, who appointed a five-member commission to look into the unusual circumstances of the sacking, but Festing refused to cooperate and called the commission illegitimate.
Knights of Malta
Prime-Time Nielsens
Ratings
Prime-time viewership numbers compiled by Nielsen for Jan. 16-22. Listings include the week's ranking and viewership.
1. AFC Championship: Pittsburgh at New England, CBS, 47.95 million.
2. "Championship Post-Game," CBS, 22.66 million.
3. "NCIS," CBS, 15.5 million.
4. "The Big Bang Theory," CBS, 15.16 million.
5. "Hunted," CBS, 11.85 million.
6. "Bull," CBS, 11.11 million.
7. "Blue Bloods," CBS, 9.77 million.
8. "This is Us," NBC, 9.59 million.
9. "NCIS: New Orleans," CBS, 9.33 million.
10. "Kevin Can Wait," CBS, 8.67 million.
11. "Mom," CBS, 8.57 million.
12. "Hawaii Five-0," CBS, 8.41 million.
13. "The Great Indoors," CBS, 7.809 million.
14. "Scorpion," CBS, 7.807 million.
15. "Man With a Plan," CBS, 7.7 million.
16. "Chicago Fire," NBC, 7.15 million.
17. "The Bachelor," ABC, 7.13 million.
18. "Chicago PD," NBC, 7.11 million.
19. "The O'Reilly Factor" (Friday), Fox News, 7.09 million.
20. "Tucker Carlson Tonight" (Friday), Fox News, 7.02 million.
Ratings
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