DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I’ve been playing drums since high school. I’ve studied rock, latin, jazz, rock, parade, rock, blues, progressive rock, and rock styles. Oh, and rock, and also let’s not forget rock.

Anyway the one thing I never learned was how to smile when I play. It’s like my face just doesn’t go that way any more.

Maybe I can blame my days in the marching band, when we were encouraged to don a rigid “game face,” even though my game face was indistinguishable from my “gas pain face.” Maybe that’s a story for another time.

I watch Carter Beauford with amazement. His joy in playing is evident on his face. Watch his instructional video or a DMB concert; he wears a grin half the size of his enormous drumkit.

I think this must be something he studied. It requires five-way independence: the left foot is playing eighths or quarters or something fancy on the hi-hat, and the right is going ballistic (but tastefully so) on the kick drum; the right hand is zinging out some amazing ride pattern across two cymbals and the left chatters ghost notes like the entire Blue Devils snare line at triple pianissamo. And the rest of the brain is thinking “smile nice for the camera!” But I’ve never seen such an exercise in the tutorial columns of the drumming magazines.

(Don’t even tell me that Beauford chews gum at the same time. I know this. The man has two brains.)

The closest I can come to smiling is a sort of baleful grimace. I try not to aim that at anyone else on stage, lest they stop playing in alarm. What happened, is the building on fire?! I tried a few times at rehearsal tonight, with extremely limited success. Maybe this is why my bandmates rarely look at me when I play; they’re afraid what they might see.

Inkjet ink: $8000/gallon

Here’s a neat technique for creating custom photo edges in Photoshop. (In a nutshell: select the image area, invert, enter quick mask mode, and apply Distortion filters to the mask.) Read more on the topic here and especially here (pdf with illustrations).

John McManus, former journalist and journalism professor, runs Grade the News:

Grade the News is a media research project focusing on the quality of the news media in the San Francisco Bay Area. We are affiliated with and based at Stanford University’s Graduate Program in Journalism.

We aim to provide timely critiques and in-depth, systematic analyses that allow the public to compare newspapers and local television news broadcasts on equal footing. Think of us as a kind of Consumer Reports for news.

Our signature service is a periodic survey of thousands of local print and broadcast stories. For each story, we determine the newsworthiness, number and expertise of sources, thematic approach, number of people affected, fairness and other traits. The end product is a letter grade for the newsroom — anywhere from A to F.

In a brief Q-and-A in the Chronicle Magazine, McManus revealed something shocking, in his answer to the second question below:

So what’s the report card?
The most recent grades are The Chronicle, the Mercury News and the Contra Costa Times all got A’s. For television evening news, they all got C’s. Newsworthiness is probably the biggest difference…
What can the consumer deduce from this?
If anyone thinks they can cancel their subscription to the newspaper and just get their news from television, they’re dreaming.

Me: “Did you know that Wal-Mart is the nation’s biggest grocery chain?”

Spouse: “I buy paint at Wal-Mart.”