03.13.09
Help The Economy By Addressing The High Cost Of College / Student Loan Debt In America
With college costs continuing to soar and more college graduates struggling to make their student loan payments, the Reduce The Rate Petition is urging lawmakers to extend the benefits of the federal bailout to students.
Rev. Jesse Jackson has launched a new website to bring attention to the Student Loan Crisis in America.
He also recently appeared on Democracy Now! alongside Alan Collinge, author of the book The Student Loan Scam: The Most Oppressive Debt In U.S. History And How We Can Fight Back.
If you have student loans or have a family member with student loans, here’s how YOU can learn about this issue and help:
1. Visit Jackson’s new website ReduceTheRate.org, which advocates reducing the interest rate on student loans to 1%.
2. Visit StudentLoanJustice.org, which advocates restoring standard consumer protections to student loans.
3. Watch Rev. Jackson and Alan Collinge on Democracy Now! for full details.
4. Read The Student Loan Scam: The Most Oppressive Debt In U.S. History And How We Can Fight Back by Alan Collinge.
5. Listen to Alan Collinge interviewed on the Michael Savage Radio Show.
03.07.09
Shonen Knife — Brown Mushrooms
02.23.09
How To Understand Jazz Music
I wrote this article years ago for a website that is unfortunately now offline. Luckily, I had a back-up copy in my archives. It will probably seem a very simplistic explanation to a serious jazz lover, yet I think it might be a good start for a person who knows nothing about jazz and is interested in dipping his toe in the water. Hope to post a few other “lost essays” from that website in the future, as the fresh content seems to be decreasing lately here at the Spiddlement office while we work on a few unrelated projects.
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How To Understand Jazz Music
For much of my life, I was needlessly intimidated by jazz music. A lot of people who come from a pop music background are. I mean, I liked jazz music a lot, thought it sounded great, but I never understood it.
Whenever I would see a live jazz band playing in the park, it was easy to enjoy the groove and notice the proficiency of the musicians. But what kind of structure were they using? It certainly wasn’t the “verse-chorus-verse” structure of pop tunes like “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and “Be My Baby”, or even the Tin Pan Alley structure of early pop and show tunes like “Come Fly With Me” and “‘Til There Was You”.
Sometimes I heard songs that I recognized played by jazz bands, songs like “Night and Day”, “Stella By Starlight”, “Georgia On My Mind”, or “Midnight At The Oasis”. I could relate to the great melodies, but was amazed at the way the players would totally deconstruct these songs and create new interpretations on the spot. How the heck did they do that? I finally decided that I would try to solve the mystery of jazz music.
02.21.09
Miho Hatori — “Barracuda”
02.09.09
The Future of Voice Email?
Email is great for business, short notes, attachments, and links.
But it’s incredibly bad for detailed personal communications. More than about five sentences and no one has time.
I keep finding myself in the same situation: I want to send a nice update to family overseas, but don’t have time to write a long email. Or someone sends me a long email — the kind of thing that would have been a telephone conversation in the old days — and I don’t have time to respond to everything in a way that I would like without taking forever to reply or responding with another long email.
When faced with this situation, most online etiquette advice I’ve read says, “Just pick up the phone.” But what if your family and friends live in another time zone? Isn’t there a way to send a personal message without having to type out a long email or wait until you are awake in the middle of the night– and they are available too — to Skype?
An idea hit me the other day: Voice Email. Of course I had already heard that term years ago. For some reason, it hadn’t seemed that great an idea then. But these days, considering I’m a podcast addict and listen to recordings of people speaking all the time, it suddenly seemed to be a pretty natural thing to try. Why not just record my “update” to MP3 and email that? The recipient of the email could just listen at their convenience. Not only can I speak faster than I can write, but the recipient can probably listen a lot faster than they could wade through a long, formidable email.
02.01.09
Clifford Brown, “Easy Living”
I learned the adjective for “easy” today at my Japanese lesson, and found myself singing this song for some reason.
Living definitely is easy when you’re in love with the things you do.
01.31.09
Paul McCartney, “Pretty Little Head” video
This is a gem from McCartney’s underrated 1986 Press To Play album. It was playing in a dream I had the other night.
I was surprised to find that there was a video, which I had never seen before today, for the song. This video mix is slightly different than the album version.
01.27.09
Asking Stupid Questions: My New Goal
I could easily link to Seth Godin’s blog several times a week. He’s always brilliant and inspirational — and I’m not just saying that because he included my picture in his new book.
But his latest post, “The Goals You Never Hear About”, was particularly great:
“It’s not stupid to have a stated goal of starting several ventures that will fail, or asking three stupid questions a week, or posting a blog post that the world disagrees with. If you don’t have goals like this, how exactly are you going to luck into being remarkable?”
When I look back at my adult life, the great info/advice/chances I’ve gotten were usually from taking the initiative to ask someone a question. It’s amazing how often just asking open doors or gives you some great insight into a problem. And most people I’ve asked have been more than happy to share information.
Seth’s post reminded me that I’m not asking enough “stupid questions”. So my new goal will definitely be to ask those three questions every week.
