Sunday, March 04, 2012

Titanium Sporkestra's Big F***ing Show on East Marginal Way

By Jack Brummet, NW music editor


Kee-Kee and Daryle at the show

We went to a great show last night near Georgetown.  Titanium Sporkestra had a fund-raiser to fund their trip to HonkFest in Austin.  The benefit was in an old warehouse building in which they set up several performance spaces.  There were three or four bands in the various rooms and bars, and then Titanium Sporkestrta played two sets in a covered area outside, which I think is essentially a staging/loading dock area.  A barrel bonfire was roaring.  These are two video clips from Sporkestra's first set at midnight.








One of the tubas was illuminated inside the bell (you can see it in the vids), and on a couple of songs, several of the trumpets had gas jets just inside the bell, so the 'bones were shooting out flames as they played and marched around.   And to top that, they also had two teams creating DIY fireworks, using grinders and pieces of iron.  These grinders shot sparks and cinders about fifteen feet in the air, which *mostly* cooled off before they scattered over the crowd.  It was a little spooky, but fantastic to see these two streams of sparks cross-crossing over the floor as they band played and moved among the crowd.

It was a great show, with a fascinating crowd in a cool venue.  As part of the VIP admission we also got swag bags with a Sporkestra beer cozy, a sweet t-shirt, and a copy of their new album which they just released last night.  The pass also included free drinks from a rag-tag and hilarious bar.  The first drinks we had were probably triples or quadruples! 'Round about midnight, we saw our bartender clearly in his cups.
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Saturday, March 03, 2012

Painting: Will you, Keelin Curran, claim your one million dollars?

By Jack Brummet


[acrylic, pen, and mixed media on canvas]

Not sure when I painted this (sometime in the 90's) or where it is now.  I think it may be in the Jerry Melin collection. . .

click to enlarge
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Friday, March 02, 2012

Thursday, March 01, 2012

Oliver Voss's "Die Badende" a/k/a Hamburg water woman statue

By Jack Brummet, Visual Arts Editor

This (13 foot high and 98 foot long) statue of a woman is, or was, installed in Hamburg, Germany. Die Badende was created by the artist Oliver Voss.  I can't determine whether it is still there, or if the installation was just a temporary exhibition.  Pretty cool, in either case.  I like this.






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All This Is That contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We make these materials available to advance the understanding of political, economic, literary, artistic, and social issues. In some cases we satirize, parody, or lampoon materials from other sources. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of copyrighted material as provided for by section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit for research, educational, and entertainment purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', please read and follow our Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license and attribute the work to All This Is That, along with our URL (http://jackbrummet.blogspot.com).

Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Hold your noses and vote, GOP/Tea Party—there is no man on horseback on the horizon







Steve Schmidt, on MSNBC: 


"Four years ago with Democrats, the tension in that race was which of two historic candidates the Democratic party voters all liked. who were they going to put forward in the general election contest? They liked both of them. They would have been happy with both of them. The longer this goes on, Republican voters are saying, 'We don't like any of them, we want somebody new in the race.' And that new person isn't going to appear in the race."
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Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Election night rumination: BHO is going to win; Mitt Romney is desperately out of touch; Rick Santorum is in touch, but insane

By Jack Brummet, Editor-in-chief



Since Pablo Fanque, our National Affairs Editor and political whiz is M.I.A.(after promising to live blog the Michigan and Arizona primaries), I wanted to mention a couple of things.

In his speech tonight, Rick Santorum once again shows he has what it takes to connect with the voters.  I disagreed with nearly every clause of the speech, but he has a way of reaching out that Mitt Romney will never achieve.  Listen to the cadences and delivery of Mitt Romney's victory speech tonight.  It sounded like his basic $35,000 speech to an insurance convention. 

This should have been Mitt Romney's night. And he blew it.  He came from way behind in his home state to triumph.  But he never even talked about Michigan, or growing up there, or his deep connection to the people of that state.  He didn't mention it at all.  There was no real joy in his speech.  It felt like a candidate that resented he'd been forced to work so hard to win.  He should have laughed and expressed his great delight that his home state pulled through for him.  And he did not.  I don't think Mitt Romney's a scary guy, but I do think he is seriously out of touch, as we've seen over and over again in his foolish, unscripted, utterances. Mitt needs a new speechwriter.  He needs to think about retail politics.  He needs to read Chris Matthews's masterful book on political strategy, "Hardball."

Tonight President Obama delivered a masterful speech to the U.A.W. in Washington (the other Washington).  It was brilliant, inspiring, and it reached out to the voters. . .and connected.  BHO, like Romney, needs to remember to connect.  And he can; it's second nature to him.  Unfortunately, this is the only clip that's online at the moment.  If you get a chance, check out the entire speech.  The crux of it was that "you, the American people, did this."  He didn't talk about his brilliance as a manager; he talked about how people pulled together.  The President is back.  Now, it's on to November 6th!


If you get the chance, look for the entire speech...
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All This Is That contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We make these materials available to advance the understanding of political, economic, literary, artistic, and social issues. In some cases we satirize, parody, or lampoon materials from other sources. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of copyrighted material as provided for by section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit for research, educational, and entertainment purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', please read and follow our Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license and attribute the work to All This Is That, along with our URL (http://jackbrummet.blogspot.com).

Now, with 8% reporting, the gap is closing in Michigan (Santorum still leads, by 1%)

Santorum 40% 28,537

Romney 39% 27,968



/pablo

Ex-Senator Rick Santorum leads by 4+% in early returns from Michigan

By Pablo Fanque, National Affairs Editor



























We've been a little down since it looked like Ex-Governor Mitt Romney might actually pull off a victory tonight in Michigan after trailing in all the polls earlier.  In the very early reporting from Michigan tonight, Santorum leads Romney by four+ points (40.8% v. 35.6%).

1% of the precincts reporting:


Santorum 3,622 votes       - 40.8%
Romney 3,162 35.6 votes  - 36.8%
Paul 1,074                       - 12.1%

Gingrich 1,361                 -   7%

Why do we want Santorum to win?  a)  We would love to see him run against BHO; b)  it's kind of fun to watch the Romney campaign unravel; and c)  a Santorum win should make Super Tuesday a whole lot more interesting.
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The Russian Moon Base

Depiction of a Soviet moon base from a 1961 Russian comic, artist and provenance unknown. . .


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ATIT Reheated: Alien Lore No. 29 - Nazis on the moon

According to the lore, Germans landed on the Moon as early as 1942, using "exoatmospheric" rocket saucers. The Nazis had several models of rocket craft-- fifty and 150 feet in diameter, as well as a turbine-powered saucer 220 feet in diameter that was intended for interplanetary travel. The largest craft was had ten stories of crew compartments. It was about 130 feet high.

Another part of the lore tells us that "beyond the shadow of a doubt there is atmosphere, water and vegetation on the Moon, and man does not need a space suit to walk on the Moon. A pair of jeans, a pullover and sneakers are just about enough. "




The story continues that everything NASA has told the world about the moon is part of a deliberate disinformation campaign to keep the moon club exclusive. Obviously, these physical conditions make it a snap to build a Moonbase. And guess what? Naturally, there are a few on the moon!

Shortly after landing, the Germans hopped out and began tunneling under the surface. By war's end, a small Nazi research base was established on the moon.

By 1944, the Germans had people, materiel and the first robots at the lunar construction site. When Russians and Americans secretly landed on a joint mission with their own saucers in the early fifties, they spent the first night as guests of the Nazis in the underground base.

In the sixties a massive Russian - American base had been completed. The rumor says the Moon now has a population of 40,000 people. After the end of the war in May 1945, the Germans continued their space effort.

According to one Renato Vesco, Germany was sharing a great deal of the advances in weaponry with their allies, the Italians, during the war. At the Fiat experimental facility at lake La Garda, a facility that fittingly bore the name of air martial Hermann Goering, the Italians tested advanced weapons, rockets and airplanes, created in Germany. The Japanese also received the benefits of the Nazi technology.

In July of 1945, two and a half months after the war ended in Germany, a huge German transport submarine brought to Japan the latest German invention--two spherical, wingless flying devices. The Japanese put the machines together, following the German instructions, and created a ball shaped flying device without wings or propellers. But, nobody knew how it worked! Fuel was added, the start button of this unmanned machine was pressed and it disappeared with a roar and flames without a in the sky. The team never saw it again. The engineers were so freaked out, they dynamited the second prototype and chose to forget the whole incident.



According to the authors of the underground German documentary movie from the Thule society, a very advanced, 220 foot diameter "dreadnought" was chosen for a trip to Mars. A volunteer suicide crew of Germans and Japanese was chosen, because everybody knew that this journey was a one-way trip with no return. The large intensity of the electro-magnetogravitic fields and the inferior quality of the metal alloys used then for the structural elements of the drive, was causing the metal to fatigue and get very brittle after only few months of work. The flight to Mars departed from Germany one month before Patton's and Montgomery's armies overran Berlin. Hitler must have decided to go down with the ship, having passed up the chance to head into the heavens.

This saucer had a crew in the hundreds, because of the low level of automation and electronic controls inside the saucer. Most of the systems were operated like those on a U-boat of that time (a lot of manual knobs and handles). Because the structurally weakened "tachyon drives" were not working with full power and were not functional all the time, the trip to Mars took eight months. An initial short trust towards Mars was probably used to break the gravitational field close to Earth. After that, the craft was coasted for 8 months in an elliptical orbit to Mars with its power turned off. Later trips to Mars by the joint Soviet - American craft in 1952 and a Vatican craft (!!!) reached Mars in only 2 - 3 days, in 1956, because their drives were working and more robust.

No one seems to know how the Germans were able to regenerate air for the hundreds of crewmen inside the craft for eight months. Quite probably they were using the sort of advanced life support systems that had been developed for submarines.

The saucer landed hard on Mars in January, 1946. They sent a radio message indicating they had landed, and were now stranded. The story seems to end there.
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All This Is That contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We make these materials available to advance the understanding of political, economic, literary, artistic, and social issues. In some cases we satirize, parody, or lampoon materials from other sources. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of copyrighted material as provided for by section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit for research, educational, and entertainment purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', please read and follow our Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license and attribute the work to All This Is That, along with our URL (http://jackbrummet.blogspot.com).

Painting: Karl Marx

By Jack Brummet

[Acrylic and japanese ink on silk, 2' x 3', circa 2004]

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Monday, February 27, 2012

Shaggy Dog Story No. 7 - The Prayer

By Jack Brummet, Folklore Editor


[This is a shaggy dog story, collected in the UK in the early, 2000s].


Listening at the bedroom door one night whilst my son said his prayers I heard him say, "God bless Daddy and Mummy, Grandad and Grandma, Uncle Albert and goodbye to Rolf my dog". I thought it a little odd but forgot about it until the next morning when, on opening the door to go to work, Rolf shot past me straight into the road and into the path of an oncoming car. I ran to him straight away but he was as dead as a door nail. I thought a lot about my sons prayer during the day but in the end put it down to coincidence.

A few weeks later I was again listening to him saying his prayers when I heard him say, "God bless Daddy and Mummy, Grandad and Uncle Albert and goodbye to Grandma".

I waited in anticipation the next day to see what would happen. At four o'clock just as I was beginning to think what a fool I was the phone rang. It was my father to tell me that my mother had just died. From that point on I was convinced that somehow my son could foretell misfortune. I made a special point of listening to his prayers every night from then on.

About six months passed, and then when listening to his prayers, I heard, "God bless Mummy, Grandad, Uncle Albert and goodbye to Daddy". I was mortified, scared out of my wits. I dare not confide it to my wife, she would only laugh at me. I had terrible nightmares that night and woke up haggard and drawn.

I thought about staying home out of harms way but realized that if I was going to die it could happen anywhere. On the way to work I took great pains to stay out of danger, keeping well away from the curb as I walked to the station; picking the middle section of the train as possibly the safest if there was a crash; waiting until there was absolutely no traffic anywhere near before crossing the road and the like. I didn't dare leave the safety of the office at lunchtime and sat drinking coffee and worrying myself sick. At five o'clock I left for home taking all the precautions I had used that morning. By the time I got home I was all in, I even had to ring the doorbell because I no longer had the strength left in me to search in my pocket for the key.

My wife opened the door with a scowl on her face and I staggered past her saying "I've had a really awful day, I feel totally drained, physically and emotionally. "My wife replied bitingly "Don't give me your hard luck stories I have had a really bad day, it started when the milkman dropped dead on the doorstep!"
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Mitt Romney reaches out to voters, saying, yeah, I like NASCAR. . .well, the owners

By Jack Brummet


Ex-Governor Mitt Romney was asked by a AP reporter the other day if he follows NASCAR, and Romney responded, "Not as closely as some of the most ardent fans. But I have some great friends who are NASCAR team owners."

 "I don't know people who fish but I know people who own yachts," tweeted Brad Woodhouse, communications director of the Democratic National Committee.

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