Late entrant for the Darwin awards

See the drunk bus can be fun...

How's this for getting arrested? The cops take you to a bus stop and say you can get on the bus and leave drunky, but if you don't, we are going to have to arrest you.

Daniel Trimm, 43, of Seminole, Florida, said, "Oh yeah, try to arrest me! I'll call the cops on you." And subsequently called 911 to explain that the cops were arresting his publicly intoxicated ass and kicking him out of Tampa International Airport. Needless to say, he is still in jail this morning, charged with not only trespassing and disorderly conduct, but also a special bonus count of making a false 911 call. Genius.

Have you heard about the bacon explosion?

We are not saying that a bacon packing plant exploded. Nor are we saying that the popularity of bacon has suddenly increased, blown up, as it were. No, rather the "Bacon Explosion" is a recipe. It is a 5,000 calorie, 500 grams of fat plus bacon log.

Let us explain, it is a tube made out of a mat of 2 lbs. bacon, woven together around 2 lbs. of sausage. The New York Times reports that the creators, BBQAddicts.com, "bought about $20 worth of bacon and Italian sausage from a local meat market. As it lay on the counter, [they] thought of weaving strips of raw bacon into a mat. The two spackled the bacon mat with a layer of sausage, covered that with a crunchy layer of cooked bacon, and rolled it up tight." Voilà! Bacon-loaf. It can be cooked in either an oven or a smoker.

Chris Brown

If Chris Brown really did this to Rihanna he should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. If he still his fans out there, they need to have a serious re-think. Allegedly she was found alone and visibly battered on a street in the Hancock Park neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Follow-up on the Quartet for the End of Time

For more info on this photo click here.

A local reader gave the Clarion Content's editorial staff some brilliant further insight into the performance we saw at Duke University the other night, "Akoka" and Olivier Messiaen's "Quartet for the End of Time." We noted in our review and reaction that the musical performance was accompanied by fascinating and evocative lighting changes that are rare for a classical music concert.

Our friend Lindsay P. says this was quite appropriate because composer Olivier Messiaen experienced synesthesia. Synthesia is a neurologically based phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. Perceiving music as color is one manifestation of such a phenomenon. To quote her at length,

"Another figure central to the early documentation of clinical synesthesia employed in the compositional process is Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992). A French composer, [and] organist... Reportedly, Messiaen experienced chordial color associations with written musical notation as well as auditory stimuli, and although his color-photisms seemed to manifest as inward, mental projections (rather than the external visuals described by many synesthetes), he was fully aware of the function of these mental colors as integral to his relationship with music. A number of his own writings as well as interviews describe the means by which chordial color affected his experience with music: “…when I hear a score or read it, hearing it in my mind, I see also in my mind’s eye corresponding colors which turn, mix and blend with each other just like the sounds which turn, mix and intermingle, and at the same time as them…” In a set of interviews published in 1967, Claude Samuel asked Olivier Messiaen if, as a result of this ‘synopsia’, he tries to translate colors into his music. Messiaen responds, “Actually I try to translate colors into music: for me certain complexes of sound and certain sonorities are linked to complexes of color, and I use them in full knowledge of this.” When asked if Messiaen has ever composed a work inspired by the contemplation of a painting, Messiaen answers, “No, never” and explains that when composing, rather than imitating a painting he essentially becomes the painter: “I use [musical sonorities] as colors, juxtaposing them and putting them in relief against each other, as a painter underlines one color with its complementary.”

How's about that for background? It fits perfectly with the execution of the show we watched at Duke's Page Auditorium. The colors were part of the becoming of the music, a fusion that heightened the mood, the tension, the despair. Studies report that there are parallels between the way synesthetes and non-synesthetes perceive color.

Thanks for the knowledge Lindsay!

Facebook owns you forever

The Clarion Content has long been suspicious of Facebook and other social networking services. Obviously, they have a profit motive to track information about their users. Facebook's Beacon was the most blatant attempt to cash on this data we have seen to date. They caught hell about it and revised their policy slightly, but continued to collect data in the same manner. They seem more impervious to criticism about their methods than most other social networks. A reported 175 million users will make a company cocky.

This month they revised their Terms of Service User Agreement to give themselves the right to data about their users and their content in perpetuity. According to the New York Times, Facebook changed its service agreement thusly, "it deleted a provision that said users could remove their content at any time, at which time the license would expire. Further, it added new language that said Facebook would retain users’ content and licenses after an account was terminated." They quoted the blog The Consumerist describing the new terms as meaning, "anything you upload to Facebook can be used by Facebook in any way they deem fit, forever, no matter what you do later."

Wow. Sounds a little invasive and Orwellian. Facebooks's CEO has indicated the language will not be changed.

From the Facebook Terms of Service User Agreement, which hopefully you read in full before signing up...

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.

A put on?

Was Joaquin Phoenix being facetious about his budding rap career the other night on David Letterman? Andy Kaufman was a wrestler, anybody? Phoenix, who has a troubled family history, sounded sincere. He was wearing both sunglasses and a thick beard which made his expression very difficult to determine. Letterman, as always, played the willing foil to his guests mania.

Phoenix's appearance was re-cut together by Letterman and World Wide Pants to make it look especially loopy. (It ends with we owe an apology to Farrah Fawcett, what a reference.)

Check it out here.

Read People Magazines take here.

Against the grain

You thought healthy was in? You thought excess was out? You thought independent restaurants were in trouble? Well here is a joint that is bucking the trend on all three levels, the Heart Attack Grill of Chandler, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix-Tempe.

The Heart Attack Grill is the concept of one Jon Basso. The centerpiece of the menu is an 8,000-calorie Quadruple Bypass Burger. It has four layers of cheese and 12 slices of bacon. The theme is continued throughout in numerous ways including a waitstaff dressed as sexy nurses, ala the Hooters girls. They also sell Flat-Liner Fries cooked in lard. They offer no-filter cigarettes for the adults and bubble gum cigarettes for the kids.

Can it get an more un-PC than that???

Maybe. If you eat the Quadruple Bypass Burger, you can elect to have one the waitstaff/nurses roll you out to your car in a wheelchair.

Read more here in the Nation's Restaurant News.

Kids don't do it

It may seem like oh such a funny prank, but it isn't. A seventeen year old Columbia County, Georgia student has been arrested for taking surreptitious upskirt pictures of one of his teachers and showing them to classmates. Of course, he used his cell phone. The teacher was not amused. She identified her legs and underwear in the photo and the cops are pressing charges.

Carlin on Advertising

Long time readers know how the Clarion Content feels about advertising. While researching something else entirely we ran into this funny George Carlin bit on advertising. Watch below. Kinetic type thanks to Cousin of Sparda.

Cheap paint

The Clarion Content just got a hot tip the other day on where one can find interior house paint for cheap. Apparently, if one is not dying for a particular color, one can go the hardware store or the local paint store and buy remainders and mistakes. In North Carolina at full retail price a gallon of paint can cost anywhere from $10 to $30 per, depending on the gloss of the finish. Remainders and mistakes are often available at the local paint store, according to our sources, for as little as $5 per gallon.

Akoka, Quartet for the End of Time

After Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time

The Clarion Content correspondent attended the performance of David Krakauer's Akoka, Olivier Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, and Josh Dolgin aka DJ SoCalled's remix of Messiaen called Meanwhile. The performance was held Saturday on Duke University's campus at the Page Auditorium. It was performed by clarinetist David Krakauer, cellist Matt Haimovitz, violinist Todd Reynolds, and pianist Geoffrey Burleson. They were joined by DJ SoCalled for the final piece.

The show was seventy minutes of music straight through with fascinating and evocative lighting changes that are rare for a classical music concert. Messiaen wrote his piece during the darkest days of World War II, January 1941 when the Germans occupied nearly all of Europe. It is music written in at the nadir of a great crisis. Hope for the free world was dim. Henri Akoka was an Algerian Jewish clarinetist who played with Messiaen at the premier of his piece, in a German Prisoner of War camp, Stalag 8-A. Akoka was left behind when a music loving German guard released Messiaen and the two other French musicians to the collaborationist Vichy-French government. He later escaped and went on to a career as a character actor.

As for the music it was dissonant, anti-melodic, anti-harmonic, arrhythmic. The meter constant shifted and felt turbulent. Yet it was oddly and eerily coordinated; self-aware.

It was not the kind of music that one would want to hear at the end of the world. It was not comforting or soothing. It was more the sort of music that one might hear in one's head if one were a European who'd had classical music training and felt the end of the world was nigh. Regular sounds become disturbed, panicky, overly-rapid, then the mind seizes control of them again, marshals them ,imposes will, but dissonance and crazy thoughts and sounds seep through, then explode. The pace changes again, it slows to become mournful, baleful, somber, but still arrhythmic.

There were solos for each of the instruments. There was frenetic clarinet. The mournfulness of the cello was set against the piano played almost like doleful metronome. The musicians' faces held intense expressions as if the difficulty of what they were doing was almost physically painful. The meter changes and the anti-melodic discord made those looks vibe as if the players were fighting against their instruments and instincts. Within that, their ability to sync up what they were doing precisely with the timing of what someone else was doing was remarkable. How hard must it be, how inhuman and against the nature of the beat that thrums within our caveman souls must it be, to play against the musical instinct of rhythm and harmony. There was a tension between lack of tempo and the simultaneity of sound. The strain on the musicians was evident.

In the audience the emotion of the music was conveyed, too. It was fear music. It was disturbing, its eeriness echoed and underlined by the changes in lighting, primal colors. Not much of the music was downright sorrowful, but if one were used to listening to classical music, hearing it and anticipating what might come next through the forces of habit and the expected form of the usual, some of this music could have freaked one out. It went nowhere it was supposed to, it went there vitriolically, then it went slowly back, still off-beat and discordant. The music shrieked and screeched in dissonant ways to totally other places, only to circle back to vague hints of oddly familiar lines, bars and scales.

The only way the conceit worked was to play the whole thing through start to finish, to have had it stop and then start up again, with what they were playing, aurally the nature of it, the act of it would have been somewhere between too irritating and too disturbing to be acceptable. It would have been highly agitating. The music was quite literally off-beat, a frantic pace, then almost East Asian sounding calm, a subdued moment beyond the storm. Nope, it was the eye, more unpredictable crashing and madness. It almost felt like the music could be seizure inducing, especially combined with the lighting changes. There was a palpable panic.

Highly effective, not comforting. Let us hope the world never faces days as dark as January 1941 again.

The Urban Art of Shepard Fairey

The Clarion Content was not familiar with the urban Art of Shepard Fairey until the recent controversy about his Obama poster was in the news. We had seen the famous "Obey" image pictured above, but not Fairey's first stickers, "André the Giant has a Posse," which were originally seen in skate culture and around Providence, Rhode Island.

The "Obey" image reportedly was developed when Fairey was warned the André the Giant, the wrestler's name, was trademarked by Titan Sports, Inc. His redo with the word, "Obey" made a huge splash. He has replicated more than 500,000 stickers and the image campaign has been copied and homaged in graffiti, posters and stickers worldwide. Fairey graduated RISD, the Rhode Island School of Design. His Obey campaign spawned a clothing line, and a fascinating reiterating and recalibrating of the original design.

According the Giant.org, this is the Obey Manifesto,

"The Obey campaign can be explained as an experiment in Phenomenology. The first aim of Phenomenology is to reawaken a sense of wonder about one's environment. The Obey campaign attempts to stimulate curiosity and bring people to question both the campaign and their relationship with their surroundings. Because people are not used to seeing advertisements or propaganda for which the motive is not obvious, frequent and novel encounters with Obey propaganda provoke thought and possible frustration, nevertheless revitalizing the viewer's perception and attention to detail. The medium is the message."

Yo Yo Da

Ladies and Gentlemen, give it up for the Jedi Master cellist.

Erotic museum to close

You may recall the Clarion Content warned not long ago of financial turbulence hitting the porn industry. Here is another indicator of the tough times. After a failed eleventh hour search for potential investors, the Museum Erotica in Copenhagen faces bankruptcy.

The City Council's cultural committee has denied a request for fiscal support and the museum may be forced to sell off its extensive collection of erotica.

Hanne Stensgaard, the museum's C.E.O. told the The Copenhagen Post, "We've been hopeful [of securing investors] for a long time and miracles can happen, but if we don't get the funding within a week, we will have to close." Stensgaard estimates the museum is 2 to 3 million kroner short on the expenses of a current rebuilding project.

The museum houses better than 1,500 artifacts and pictures depicting erotica through the ages. Among some of dedicated exhibitions are those detailing the history of Playboy magazine as well as Marilyn Monroe, among others.

Many celebrations had been planned for this season as it will mark the 15th anniversary since the museum opened on Købmagergade Street in central Copenhagen. 2008 also marks the 40th anniversary of the legalization of pornography in Denmark.

"We think it's very important that people know about sexual and erotic history as it defines many gender roles today," said Stensgaard.

Ahhh, but what an opportunity for other collectors of erotica to buy during a limp market.

Score one for the animals

Mayor Michael Bloomberg met a recalcitrant constituent up-close and personal Monday morning in Staten Island. Chuck the Groundhog was clearly not interested in the Mayor's Groundhog Day photo-op. He bit the mayor’s left hand, his piercing teeth penetrating Mr. Bloomberg’s fancy black leather gloves.

The New York Times describes the Mayor's moment, sounds like he got what he deserved,

"As cameras rolled and the crowd took in the event — a local imitation of the Punxsutawney Phil tradition — Chuck at first refused to come out. Children chanted his name to no avail. Mr. Bloomberg seemed to realize that the reclusive rodent was spoiling the show.

He tried to lure Chuck out of his cottage with an ear of corn, but Chuck shrewdly grabbed the corn and dragged it inside to enjoy. The mayor tried again, twice, but then, seemingly out of patience, he grabbed Chuck by the belly with both hands before he could hide again and held him up in the air for everyone to see.

By then, the mayor had already been bitten."

City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, clearly sucking up to the Mayor and the media, blamed the groundhog, "I made it out alive: no bites, no scratches. But I kept a little bit more of a distance from the groundhog. I knew him not to be the jolliest fellow. But I didn’t know he was nasty."

Podcast killed the radio star

Bill Simmons, the Clarion Content's favorite sports columnist, made a fascinating prediction in a pre-Super Bowl chat the other day. Here it is...

I love doing the podcasts and feel like I'm on the ground floor of a medium that is really starting to take off. It's like radio on demand and I think it's going to kill satellite radio in 2 years. I really do. It's also a huge threat to real radio in my opinion, especially when people can get internet in their cars and can just cue podcasts up within 3 clicks. It's astonishing to me that nobody has written a long piece about podcasts yet. This is EXACTLY the same as what happened with sportswriting in the late-90s where nobody was taking the internet seriously and suddenly within 7 years there were a million sports blogs, mainstream sites were crushing newspapers and newspapers were hemorrhaging money. We are headed that way with podcasts. I just think radio is going to become much more niche-oriented over these next 10 years... people don't see it yet. Christian Slater in "Pump Up The Volume" is going to look like a genius.

Links were added ex post facto by the Clarion Content.

Comcast, Arizona, really?

Evan Stone, it was his Johnson.

A saboteur, allegedly, got into Comcast Cable's non-high definition feed of the Super Bowl in the Tuscon, Arizona area. The Tuscon Citizen reports that, "Just after Cardinals wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald scored a dramatic touchdown in the fourth quarter...30 seconds of pornographic content was aired." Talk about a whoopsie.

According the Citizen, "Comcast cable TV customers saw a video clip with full-frontal male nudity. It originated from Shorteez, an adult pay-per-view channel...a second clip showed about 10 seconds of end credits for Club Jenna." Wow! The Clarion Content can report that we didn't see anything like that in Durham, North Carolina. Anything that interrupted that dramatic fourth quarter Sunday would have made us mighty mad. We can't even imagine how Cardinals fans in Arizona must have felt.

In typical modern American fashion, Comcast is offering to payoff consumers whose broadcasts were disrupted by what it calls, an "isolated, malicious act." Their offer, ten dollars in credit off of their next cable bill. Move over Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake, you have been topped.

See the GRAPHIC video here.