DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

The half-time shuffle is one of my favorite grooves. I used to play the hell out of it — see the track Pandemonium Clockwise on the JAR page for a full-song example in MP3.

Ghost notes and shuffles go together like dietary fiber and colo-rectal satisfaction. And yet I never learned to bounce my stick to catch the ghost note after the backbeat, until recently, so that’s one of the things going on here.

The other somewhat tricky combination in this groove is the bass drum note sandwiched between the ride notes on the second beat, below the ghost note on the snare. It might take a few minutes of practice to perform this cleanly — feel those neurons sprouting?

    /3\/3\/3\/3\ (shuffle feel)
    1  2  3  4
RC  o oo oo oo o
SD   o  o Oo  o 
BD  o o oo     o

Patronize these links, man:

• Virtual Drummer loop
• MIDI
• MP3

I was a lowly tourist in a zoo of sweaty, desperate people. I was in Las Vegas during NASCAR’s UAW-Daimler Chrysler 400… which meant that every Winston T-shirted redneck within a thousand miles had come here for the weekend.

Simultaneously, John Ruiz battled Evander Holyfield in a WBA pay-per-view event. These crowds mingled poorly. NASCAR fans were easily placed by their accents and the fact that most of their conversations seem to include the names of engine parts. In contrast the boxing fans all looked like MBAs; they were dressed for a fancy evening on the town, as if they’d come from the opera instead of the ring.

Boxing and auto racing have some elements in common — the action is fast, and there’s a constant threat of serious injury. And the concession stands at both venues serve cheese fries.

And yet, the crowds are vastly different. As a momentary diversion I mentally combined members of these two groups… I pictured a trim athletic man in a satin “Pit Crew” jacket, accessorized with Bally loafers, a Cartier watch, an embroidered Mr. Goodwrench cap, and a drawl. His scent is YSL, and Pennzoil.

I took the fantasy no further; I had to get back to losing money.

Fortunately I was on a strict budget, so 5 minutes after I started losing money, I was finished losing money… no point losing my dignity too. And so we checked out a few of the town’s free shows.

Treasure Island puts on a special-effects-laden pirate battle that must be seen to be believed. It’s a pyrotechnics extravaganza — and even if you know what to expect, the blast of heat that erupts from the ships will shock you. (It’s the sort of thing that makes you blink to see if your contacts have melted to your eyeballs.) You can see the pirate battle via QuickTime video.

If your senses are already overloaded, you might prefer the Dancing Lights show at Bellagio — a huge fountain whose jets are choreographed to classical music. You can see a slideshow of Bellagio’s dancing lights.

Today is day 8 of my 10-day “cleanse:” an attempt to purge, in under 2 weeks, a body full of toxins that took over 30 years to accumulate.

So far, so good… it’s been:

• 9 days since I’ve eaten chicken or pork. (It’s been 10 years since I gave up cow, to the ongoing happiness of my colon.)
  
• about 10 days since I’ve consumed any dairy products at all, except for occasional butter “as a condiment.” (Approximately 3 million people on this planet will understand the condiment joke. You know who you are.)
  
• 12 days since I’ve ingested any alcohol. (But I’ve taken to brushing my teeth with Zinfandel.)
  
• 2 days since I began drinking funky green stuff — reconstituted wheatgrass and algae, for God’s sake — for breakfast
  
• 8 days since I drank any beverage at all within 20 minutes of eating
  
• 8 days since I’ve eaten fruit with any other food

I’m ecstatic that I didn’t have any horrible addictions to cure — caffeine, nicotine, or sugar — because any healthy lifestyle plan forbids coffee, cigarettes, and soda, the holy trinity of American substance abuse.

I eat a salad nearly every day. Some days, I have two. But I refuse to eat steamed broccoli for breakfast (sorry, Tony).

I try not to combine starches and proteins. This rule, which would seem to affect the “steak and potato” crowd primarily, turned out to be tough for me, too. I don’t miss milk, and to my surprise I haven’t missed cheese very much, but my standard breakfast menu is an unbeatable combination of starch and protein, and for a time (until about 10 minutes ago) I feared my happiness had been irrevocably harmed… until I found this eye-opening treatise on food combination, which makes a distinction between animal and vegetable proteins, and which means I can combine Trader Joe’s peanut butter with my own fresh bread for a fast-breaking taste sensation. Ahh, the small pleasures…!

Rich Karlgaard of Forbes makes a fascinating case that the failure of the web advertising market is due largely to Microsoft’s latest strategy for preserving their status as market leader: Microsoft’s War Of Attrition.

New features:

• month-to-month navigation in the calendar
  
• syndication via RSS 0.91 (XML)
  
• item descriptions/synopses now stored for use in META tags, RSS files
  
• plus a bevy of bugfixes

… for the low, low, GPL-compatible price of $0.

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