DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Nearly in time for your holiday spending spree, here’s a miscellaneous collection of stuff I think is neat. I’ve searched the entire planet to bring you the most intriguing stuff money can buy, at an incredible value to you. Well, not really, but you get the idea.

By the way, any of these gifts would be welcome under my own dead evergreen, if I were the sort of person who would chop down a tree to celebrate a modern secular interpretation of an old religious holiday (not that my respect for the local flora should prevent you from sending a present).

Disclaimer: none of the items listed herein should be considered a substitute for sound advice from a medical professional. By the same token, they are no substitute for really good sex, or even marginal sex. On the plus side, most of these won’t require you to make awkward small talk afterwards.

Gifts for Foodies

This is the best bread knife in the world. I’ve tried a half-dozen different bread knives and saws over the years, but none of them are fit to lick the crumbs from this slicing machine. It is equally suitable — by which I mean superior — for day-old multigrain sourdough as for oven-warm focaccia. The killer feature that differentiates this knife from its competition is the bowed blade, which not only prevents the operator’s fingers from grinding into the cutting surface, but more importantly provides an easy way to apply leverage for cutting through the heavy bottom crusts of hearth-baked breads. Unbowed blades require the operator to cut the crust with the knife tip, which is neither safe nor effective.

The gift that keeps on giving: cookie- and brownie-of-the-month subscriptions from Allison’s Gourmet. Normally I wouldn’t suggest subjecting anyone to a regular dose of white sugar, refined flour, and butterfat; I’m making an exception here because the white sugar is organic cane juice, the refined flour is organic whole-wheat, and the butterfat comes from soybeans. That’s right, kids: vegan baked goods. Disclaimer: I haven’t actually tasted these. If they’re horrible, talk to Allison, not me. It’s a neat idea in any case.

For more foodie gifts, see my Pizza Tools Roundup (which covers breadmaking tools too) and my cookbook/bread book reviews.

Miracle Foods

Flax seeds are one of a very few foods that probably won’t kill you. Further, while they’re not killing you, they’ll give you a big dose of fiber, cancer-fighting lignans, and omega-3 fatty acids. The two keywords to remember are golden and organic. If you can’t get these in the bulk-foods aisle at the nearest grocery or healthfood store, you can find them online, even at Amazon.com.

You’ll want to grind the seeds before eating them, or they’ll pass right through you, like buckshot through flannel. Buy an inexpensive coffee grinder, like this $20 Braun KSM2, and dedicate it to flax grinding. Don’t put your french roast in there unless you enjoy your flax with mocha.

Tibetan Goji berries look like dwarf red raisins and taste like cranberries, more or less. They contain 500 times as much vitamin C by weight as oranges — they’re the second-richest source of vitamin C on the planet. (The richest source of vitamin C, of course, is Linus Pauling’s urine.)

Goji berries are packed with 18 amino acids and antioxidants. And they actually don’t taste like vomit, unlike some of the other miracle foods I sampled at the Green Festival. Eat goji berries like raisins or any other dried fruit. The best prices I can find are from the Tibetan Goji Berry Company, although if you’re not ready to buy in bulk you can get decent prices at (you guessed it) Amazon.com: ~$28 for a starter bag (4-6 weeks’ worth).

Nothing says “I love you” like a big bucket of fat. Virgin Coconut Oil is reputed to boost energy, fight yeast infections, and relieve digestive disorders. Most importantly, it’s the foundation of a better Thai curry, which is reason enough to keep some at hand.

Gifts for Musicians

I listed Etymotic ER-6 headphones in a previous edition of this gift guide, but they’re worth featuring again because I’ve discovered another application for which they are superior: they’re the best headphones I’ve ever used for recording music.

Most over-the-ear headphones do a lousy job of insulating the user from ambient sound. In a recording studio, this has two unfortunate effects:

1. the user can’t hear his headphone mix if the room is loud (which is always the case for drummers)
2. the microphones can hear the headphone mix. Headphone bleed is not usually a big problem, but these Etymotic headphones make it easy to avoid.

The ER-6 headphones provide significantly more isolation than do any other style of headphones. This means both the user and the mics hear exactly what they’re supposed to, with no cross-pollution. These are ideal for any acoustic musician: horn players, guitarists, drummers, stringed instrument (e.g. dulcimer) players, etc. Anyone who relies on microphones to capture sound will benefit. And they’re damn fine headphones for your iPod, too.

Pete Frame’s Rock Family Tree diagrams are everything your CD liner notes are not. There are two volumes described briefly here, showing the incestuous life cycle of dozens of great band, from Zeppelin to the Police, from King Crimson to the Sex Pistols. See also the Jethro Tull example I put together.

Every gigging drummer you know needs at least one 90° XLR mic cable, to keep the cable on the snare mic out of the way. Soundmen sometimes carry these cables… but sometimes they don’t, and than that honking SM57 with the cable shooting straight out the back is exactly, precisely, in the way.

The Tape Op book is a must-have for musicians interested in recording. It contains the best articles from the first few years of the magazine of the same name, which unlike most studio magazines covers inexpensive ways to get great sounds…

…although you’re still welcome to buy a fancy-ass large-diaphragm condenser mic if you want to.

Gifts for Home Theater Aficionados

Don’t laugh; I really am going to suggest a $1900 gift. I bought a plasma TV over the summer without ever having seen it. It was a huge risk, but it was well worth it — the picture quality is incredible. I just realized that Amazon beats my special mafioso pricing by over $200. Check it out: the Panasonic TH-42PWD6UY, $1895 at Amazon.com.

That plasma monitor has no speakers, but there are great inexpensive choices to be found:

• Rogersound Labs Digital Fidelity One is a 3-piece sub/sat set that is, according to reviews I’ve seen, certain to outperform anything else in its price range ($60!). It comes with a money back guarantee. They’ll probably look better on your desk than in your den, though.
• The Logitech Z-2300 is a THX-certified 3-piece (sub/sat) speaker system that sells for $108 and was reviewed very well at Macintouch.

Green Gifts

The NightStar is a Faraday flashlight. It has no batteries: it gets its power from the interaction of magnetic fields. You can leave it under the bed or in the glove box for 10 years and it will still work when you reach for it. There is no bulb to break, no batteries to expire or corrode. These flashlights are waterproof, unbreakable, and cool as hell: a must-have for hikers, campers, fisherpeople, and anyone who thinks landfills full of AAA batteries are a bad thing. These “shakelights” cost more than dimestore flashlights, but remember that they last forever with an ongoing maintenance cost of $0. I bought one last month and it makes me smile every time I use it.

The Union of Concerned Scientists is my favorite eco-nonprofit. The UCS is a group of non-partisan scientists who won’t stand for bullshit from either major political party nor any megacorporation. They’re our best advocates for sanity in the debates around the food supply, clean vehicles, energy, and the environment. Give a Gift Membership for $25; the recipient will get two copies of the glossy UCS magazine plus four newsletters full of timely eco-news and an opportunity to easily send messages to senators and representatives regarding current legislation.

Kenny Ausubel of AlterNet predicted the outcome of the 2004 Presidential election 13 months in advance:

This Is Your Brain on Public Relations

Part of the problem is that human beings seem to be hardwired for fraud.

George Lakoff, an author and professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley who calls himself a “cognitive activist,” says this: “One of the fundamental findings of cognitive science is that people think in terms of frames and metaphors — conceptual structures. The frames are in the synapses of our brains — physically present in the form of neural circuitry. When the facts don’t fit the frames, the frames are kept and the facts ignored.”

In other words, forget winning on the facts or the science. It’s all about the story. And once stories take hold, they’re hard to dislodge.

The article is about greenscamming. That’s a word I have yet to hear in the mainstream media. But it’s like the Matrix; it is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television… Or, to put it another way, “You think that’s Clean Air you’re breathing?”

Survey after survey shows that Americans care deeply about the environment and are even willing to shell out money to take good care of it. So duping innocent people into harming the environment requires an occult technology of trickery.

The head sorcerer hired by the GOP to provide guidance on fooling voters into doing something they don’t want to do is a guy named Frank Luntz. I’d gloat that Luntz’ report leaked to the press, except that it didn’t matter. In the terms of cognitive science, it was an apparently inconvenient fact.

But if you’re interested, read a summary at the AlterNet article (above) or the whole report at the LCV’s Bush Administration Rollbacks site.

Journalist Bill Moyers recently received the Global Environment Citizen Award from Harvard Medical School. His acceptance speech is devastating. I couldn’t read it straight through; my dinner started to back up on me.

Bill Moyers on Health and the Global Environment

Moyers was establishing a connection between religious fundamentalism and the destruction of the environment. It seems counter-intuitive that someone claiming respect and awe for all God’s creation would willingly participate in the systematic trashing of same. But that’s Moyer’s case, and he delivers.

James Watt, President Reagan’s first Secretary of the Interior … told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he said, “after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back.”

I’m strugging to accept that nutjobs like that can achieve high office. George W. Bush, I’m looking at you.

A 2002 TIME/CNN poll found that 59 percent of Americans believe that the prophecies found in the book of Revelations are going to come true. Nearly one-quarter think the Bible predicted the 9/11 attacks… you will come to understand why people under the spell of such potent prophecies cannot be expected, as Grist [magazine] puts it, “to worry about the environment. Why care about the earth when the droughts, floods, famine and pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs of the apocalypse foretold in the bible? Why care about global climate change when you and yours will be rescued in the rapture? And why care about converting from oil to solar when the same god who performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes can whip up a few billion barrels of light crude with a word?”

Here’s the ultimate irony: the United States was founded by people who left their home country to escape religious persecution. Now I’m considering leaving the United States for the same damn reason.

I have no words.

(Day 1 is back here)

Tuesday morning I was cleaning up the session files, removing some of the track plaque in preparation for making my final backup and rough mix. I’ll repeat that: deleting files before making a backup. Can you see where this story is going? I’ll cut to the cut: instead of erasing two aborted overdub attempts, I speed-clicked through too many confirmation dialogs and wiped out the kick drum track for two verses, a chorus, and the big drum fill I’d spent hours recording the night before.

And then I panicked. I felt a wave of full-body anxiety that caused me to jump out of my seat and wrench my Etymotic earphones out of my ears so violently that the plastic earbud of one of them stayed behind, wedged in my ear canal like a cork. This was the extreme low point in the recording process, a disaster entirely born of my own haste and mindlessness: not like getting into a minor car wreck, but like getting into a minor car wreck in a friend’s 700-series because you’re trying to beat a new Corvette off the line. Not like a bad haircut, but like a bad haircut on your wedding day from the cousin in cosmetology school. Not like dropping dinner on the floor, but like dropping the baby on the floor. Well, maybe not that bad, but still.

I’d seen it coming, existentially speaking. Andrew had suffered a system crash that wiped out tons of data. Steve had come down with a headcold that threatened his ability to sing. It was simply my turn. Bad things come in threes, they say: I was born, I grew up, and you know the rest.

After remembering to breathe, and having my wife extract the remaining piece of my headphones from my skull, I looked into un-delete software for OS X. There is only one such product, and it failed. I was a bitter, bitter man.

I checked my backups and was much relieved to discover that I did have backups for the verses and chorus. I regained a modicum of perspective: OK, so I’d have to retrack the previous evening’s overdubs. That’s a loss, but not a terrible one.

I restored the deleted tracks and played back the result. “Why does the snare drum on these tracks sound so different?” I thought. I had heard the difference before; all the song sections recorded in the B set of inputs had a different snare sound. Realization hit me like a raw fish to the forehead: I had no overhead mics in the B set of inputs; instead, I’d recorded a duplicate of the stereo toms track. The snare sounded different because 75% of the snare sound comes from the overheads, which I hadn’t recorded because I hadn’t double-checked my input assignments. So much for my backups.

Re-tracking all the affected sections only took an hour. My adrenals were working overtime. And finally I re-recorded the overdubs, achieving not perfection but something close enough for rock and roll.

Ode to Soup (final drums, final bass, scratch dulcimer, no guitar, rough mix with some compression and EQ) (Copyright © 2004 matthew mcglynn)

And then I stayed up half the night tearing down the drumkit, packing away acoustic foam, and stowing cage parts in the garage, assisted throughout by my outrageously patient, incredibly supportive, and hugely pregnant wife. Steve (he’s the guitarist, not the baby) would arrive in 18 hours.