Category: General

I love this song.

In the delta sun,
down in Arkanasas,
it’s the Great God Bird with its altar-call

and the sewing machine
the industrial god
on the great bayou where they saw it fall
it’s the Great God Bird down in Arkansas

And the hunters beware,
or the fishers fall
and Paradise might close, from its safe flight flawed,
it’s the Great God Bird through it all

And the waters beware
lest they see it fall
and Paradise might laugh when at last it falls

and the sewing machine
the industrial god
it’s the Great God Bird with its altar-call
yes, it’s the Great God Bird with its altar-call
Yes, it’s the Great God Bird through it all…

It’s by Sufjan Stevens, who became very big at my alma mater, Calvin College, but long, long after my time there. This particular song was written for NPR, and accompanied a story about the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, which may or may not be extinct, but which is supposed to be so large and striking that it provokes an exclamation of “Great God!”

The mp3 is available from npr.org.

I haven’t actually heard any of Stevens’ other work, and I’m kind of reluctant to, because I love this song so much I am pretty sure I’d find anything else he did disappointing in comparison.

There’s nothing new here, I just happened to listen to the song.

Glenn Greenwald – Salon

Over the weekend, it was revealed by National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru that Rudy Giuliani believes that, as President, he would have the power to imprison American citizens without any sort of review of any kind, and Giuliani stated he hoped to exercise that power only “infrequently” (Mitt Romney said he’d have to convene a team of “smart lawyers” before he could answer). That Giuliani expressly believes that, as President, he can exercise (and apparently intends to exercise, though just “infrequently”) one of the most tyrannical and un-American powers there is received notice only in the blogosphere, but not in any national media outlets.

So says Kerry in an interview at MyDD :: Direct Democracy for People-Powered Politics, addressing a previous report at thehill.com.

That makes McCain’s subsequent puppy-dog devotion to the cause of George Bush (whose campaign had so viciously attacked McCain in the primaries), and his pandering to all the extremist elements of Bush’s base, even more pathetic and sad.

Especially because it has all reduced McCain to a laughingstock. There’s little trace today of the respect people had just a few years ago for McCain as a man of independence and integrity.

I wonder how far those negotiations got, and what caused McCain to back away and start on the downward spiral he’s in today?

YouTube – 1977 Vrillon of the Ashtar Galactic Command Incident:

This is a video accompanied, apparently, by authentic audio of the 1977 “Vrillon of the Ashtar Command” incident, in which a British TV signal was interrupted by a deep-voiced alien demanding that humanity get rid of its “weapons of evil” (which sounds like a George W. Bush phrase…) and get ready to evolve its way into the Age of Aquarius. Following it there are various discussions of the incident by news announcers.

Some bits of this would make awesome samples for dance tracks. Are you listening, Warlord of Marz? :)

Ingredients:

• a YouTube video that you want to steal the music from for your collection. For example, the MC Rove rap. Who doesn’t want to listen to that again and again? Not to be missed!
• a means of downloading the video, for example DownloadHelper for Firefox, or one of the zillion online youtube video downloaders.
• ffmpeg, an open source video manipulation program. I checked mine out from Subversion and compiled my own, but there may be easier ways to get ahold of it.
• a command line to run ffmpeg on. This ain’t no gui, baby. Sorry.

Anyway — download the flv file.

See what you’ve got, like this:

ffmpeg -i Rapping_Rove.flv

You’ll get back a bunch of stuff, hopefully including something like this:

Input #0, flv, from ‘Rapping_Rove.flv’:
Duration: 00:01:55.7, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 64 kb/s
Stream #0.0: Video: flv, yuv420p, 320×240, 29.97 fps(r)
Stream #0.1: Audio: mp3, 22050 Hz, mono, 64 kb/s

Hey, there’s an mp3 in there, trying to get out! Score! Let’s help it. Here’s the magic command:

ffmpeg -i Rapping_Rove.flv -vn -acodec copy Rapping_Rove.mp3

And now you’ve got the file Rapping_Rove.mp3, ready to slurp into iTunes and put on infinite loop. It’s that easy!

Thanks to this posting on some mailing list which helped me figure out the magic command in the absence of comprehensible documentation for ffmpeg. :)

If all this is a little too much, the vixy.net guys have an interface to do it for you on the web. I am not sure however whether it actually extracts the mp3 out of the flv itself, or else pulls the audio out of the flv and re-encodes it as an mp3, possibly losing precious sound quality! But it’s probably a better bet than this ffmpeg voodoo for 99% of people.