the frig blig

De-gourded on the 31st, separated for drying on the mat.

He rests in peace for all mankind.

Every few years I enjoy listening to some songs of Linda Cohen. The ones I like best are quiet, comforting, with satisfying chord changes and gentle chutzpa — a blend of classical, blues and folk. So today I decided to find out more about this talented but obscure guitarist and Googled her.

Turns out she died in January, in her home in Philly where she taught guitar. Sigh.

I discovered her in a slightly roundabout fashion — I was studying graphic arts in college, and one of my heros was Milton Glaser. He did the album cover art for Angel Alley by Linda Cohen, whom I’d never heard of but didn’t care — I ordered the album for the cover alone. Turned out the music wasn’t bad either. A little heavy on the electronics for solo acoustic guitar (is how I feel today), but some tasteful tunes.

I hope to play one of her tunes myself before I die.

Lovers Lookout is the new CD from local fellows Red Jacket Mine. Released just a couple of weeks ago, the timing is appropriate — autumn’s display of red gold and brown hues and shorter, darker days are a perfect compliment for RJM’s melancholy sound.

All the tunes are by songsmith and frontman Lincoln Barr, a moody bastard. His best songs are slow, arty, dark, and complex. Barr is a brooder, not a screamer. RJM’s music is like red wine rather than beer — to be savored. There’s a bit of a Ryan Adams feel, which Patrick Porter’s pedal steel helps along.

The love in this title is not ecstatic. But there is passion here — ironic, angry, disappointed passion. Even the rockers on this album, like opener Stay Golden, Childish Things and The Pose aren’t about having fun.

Stay Golden starts out upbeat but Barr can’t help himself — he ends up singing “You were so brave, but when they asked you to, you sold me out…”.

The Pose sounds a bit like The Posies…and since Ken Stringfellow helped with the production, who knows, maybe it’s alluding to that 90’s band, although it’s plainly expressive of the song’s meaning too. Can’t tell you, only the band knows for sure. Regardless, “Took a chance on an inside joke” is a great opening line.

The strongest tunes are soulful and anthemic, like Deseret News, Apricot Moon and So Long, Radiant Flower (which despite the bitterness has a sweetness too, as S points out).

New Scientist posts First black hole for light created on Earth but if you read the article you learn that the black hole built by Tie Jun Cui and Qiang Cheng at Southeast University in Nanjing works on microwaves, not light waves. “I expect that our demonstration of the optical black hole will be available by the end of 2009,” Cui is quoted as saying in the article.

Based on research published earlier this year by Evgenii Narimanov and Alexander Kildishev of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, this is a fascinating development of unexpected new technology. Who knew you don’t need massive gravitational fields to create black holes?

One thing leads to another — I went to hear Red Jacket Mine at their CD release gig at the Tractor last Thursday and discovered another great local band who played warmup: Downpilot who incidentally were also plugging their new CD They Kind of Shine and apparently will spend the next month gigging in Germany. A talented four-piece (including pedal steel) with great songwriting, Downpilot sounds a little REM-ish but more country and less hypnotic. Makes me suspect there’s this vibrant music community all around me of which I only see tiny bits and pieces.

I did purchase Red Jacket Mine’s new CD Lovers Lookout too but haven’t had a chance to listen yet — I’ll post a report soon on my impressions and maybe a comment or two on what I saw and heard at last weekend’s Hardly Strictly bluegrass fest as well.

It’s logical: examine the security vulnerabilities of household robots. That’s what these University of Washington computer science and engineering students did: Household Robot Security FAQ.

Brings a whole new meaning to ‘bot nets’…

This tip is for Windoze notepad users — clearly it’s trivial to replace spaces with tabs using sed or perl in linux. But notepad — one of the simplest and most useful Windows utilities from day one — does not understand regular expressions. And typing the tab key moves the cursor to the next dialog control, rather than entering a tab character at the cursor position. Sad!

The solution is to download notepadre by Ben Hanson. This is a nifty notepad clone with a few extra goodies, the main one being support for regular expressions (’re’). So not only can you replace spaces with tabs, but you can perform all sorts of amazing feats of pattern replacement limited only by your imagination.

I put a one-line batch file called np.cmd in my PC’s PATH which starts notepadre with the (optionally) specified filename:

start "" notepadre %1 %2

And he gives you the source code for free — thanks Ben!

Red Jacket Mine is playing at the Tractor Tavern tomorrow night to celebrate the release of their new CD Lovers Lookout. I’m hoping there will be physical copies of the disc available, with all of the non-green implications that has. I just discovered this band a few months ago and am looking forward to finding musical growth on their second CD (I’m hoping it’s harder edged than their first).

RJM shares the bill with fellow Seattle bands downpilot and Sweet Secrets. I’m looking forward to a great show — see you there!