Taught the Fear of Jesus in a Small Town

Some people are looking at tonight's debate as if Sarah Palin can win over voters with a good performance. As if one debate, where Palin is sure to be well rehearsed on providing non-answers without rambling, is going to make a difference after her embarrassing comments of the last week. I was thinking about adding on to that last sentence in a way to make it Palinesque, but that would be overdoing it. It is clear that Palin is stupid. She could not name a newspaper that she reads. The obvious conclusion is that she doesn't read newspapers. She could not name a Supreme Court decision that she disagreed with. That is because she is not informed. I doubt she has even read Roe v. Wade or understands that the case was decided on a privacy basis. And is it really helping that Palin continues to parade around that baby? Is Palin suddenly going to become more knowledgeable while busy with child care? I am sure we will hear from people after the debate who will say, "see, Palin can handle herself and is competent!" Those are people who would never vote for Obama. It is interesting that intelligence is seen as a liability by many people. Is the Republican Party becoming the party of the stupid? What is really scary is that George W. comes off like a genius when compared to Palin.

It Goes To 11!

One of my new discoveries in the past year is high quality stereo music. I'm not talking about quality in terms of The Beatles versus The Jonas Brothers. I'm talking about the actual production quality of the music, in terms of the mastering/mixing of the music. Mastering involves setting the loudness of music within the limitations of a CD. If the loudness is set too high, the dynamic range of the music is lost. This loudness war has come about for several reasons. The increased loudness can sound like an improvement for those people listening in less than optimal conditions, such as low quality Ipod headphones and car stereos. Unfortunately it makes the music worse, in some cases horrible, for people with high quality sound systems in their home. Listening to this music can be fatiguing. This topic is recently in the news thanks to the new Metallica release, which is a prime example of the loudness mastering. For most new releases people have nothing better to compare them to, but in this case there is a Guitar Hero version of the album that does NOT have the loudness mastering which everyone seems to prefer. Ironically most people are listening to this superior version through illegal downloading. This article provides a great read on the issue. It makes me wonder if Lars has any hearing left after 25 years of touring. Even the mastering engineer is complaining about this release!