DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I’m in gear-buying mode, as I prepare for another month of recording. Recent research has revealed the folly of previous purchases.

Last year, I recorded drums for five songs, as chronicled here in excruciating detail. I think I captured workable, but not stellar sounds from my drum kit. (You can, in fact, judge for yourself, as I posted some early mixes: Bleed, Groove95, Cincinnati Summer, Best in Me, Ode to Soup.) This time out, I’ve upgraded a few key pieces of equipment. [Note to future self: I already know I’ll write this exact same article again next year.]

I was using AKG C1000S mics for drum overheads. Of all my mics, I was the least pleased with the sound of these, and so I started my upgrade process here. The question I asked was simply what mics should I use?

Net.wisdom says that the Oktava MK-012 is the best cheap drum overhead mic. And you know where that led me. But finally I did order a genuine pair of Russian “OktaBa” mics and shock-mounts. If I have time I hope to post an A/B comparison of the AKGs and the Oktavas.

I tracked my drums with compression, because I figured it would be easier to spend $100 on a compressor than spend five years learning how to hit each drum with exactly the same force every time I hit it. Not using compression risks clipping, which could blow a take. Or, alternatively, recording drums without compression requires dialing the gain back so far (to accomodate the risk of a louder hit) that the signal gets lost in the noise.

Anyway, after about 10 minutes of exhaustive research, I’d decided on a dbx 286, which is a 1U rackmount compressor/gate device that enjoys great reviews on the dbx corporate website. It has the added attraction that it can be picked up used for less than $100, in fact for about $40 if you happen to buy from someone who ships it with literally no padding inside a box from a microwave oven and who agrees to refund 60% of your purchase price as compensation for the years of abuse endured thereby.

But like the C1000S mics, the dbx 286 has a lousy reputation within the community of online audio engineers — a reputation best summarized as “the first thing to sell to finance an upgrade.”

The low-cost compressor with the best reputation is the RNC — which, ironically, a coworker had suggested to me before I bought the dbx. Anyway, I’ve ordered two RNCs (one for the kick and one for the snare) and I’ll likely add a 3rd if I feel the need to compress toms or overheads too.

As a counterpoint to yesterday’s piece about living forever, here’s one about dying young.

The Golden Gate Bridge is a popular tourist destination. But as is true with lots of landmarks that offer dramatic downward views, more people come to see it than go home to tell their friends afterwards.

Not everybody who jumps dies, although most do. And it’s not a pretty way to go:

Jumpers … hit the water … at about seventy-five miles an hour and with a force of fifteen thousand pounds per square inch. Eighty-five per cent of them suffer broken ribs, which rip inward and tear through the spleen, the lungs, and the heart. Vertebrae snap, and the liver often ruptures.

The fall broke both of [the man’s] ankles and three of his ribs and collapsed his lungs, but he lived — becoming one of only twenty-six people to survive the plunge from the Golden Gate.

There’s nothing funny about suicide, but I laughed when I read that some of the people who jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, presumably with a vision of dropping gracefully into the water to disappear below the waves in a sort of romantic farewell, instead hit the southern tip of Sausalito.

From the pictures, Sausalito looks like a pretty easy thing to miss, but from a pedestrian’s point of view there is a long span of something that looks like the bridge that isn’t anywhere near the water. (Photo courtesy Ken Adelman’s wondrous californiacoastline.org.)

In January, the Chron ran a story about Eric Steel, a documentary filmmaker who filmed the bridge constantly for a year. Steel recorded about 20 jumpers, and plans to make a full-length documentary about the bridge suicides. The Chronicle published his comments in January, in an article called Film captures suicides on Golden Gate Bridge:

My crew and I spent an entire year looking very carefully at the Golden Gate Bridge, running cameras for almost every daylight minute… We observed and filmed most of the two dozen or so suicides and a great many of the unrealized attempts.

[O]n several occasions during the year, my crew and I were the first callers to the bridge patrol offices when we saw these events begin to unfold.

Bridge spokeswoman Mary Currie tells a related story. While accompanying a foot patrol, she encountered a man who seemed like a jump risk:

[H]er group stopped to assess a handsome middle-aged man who’d been at the south tower for two hours. “He said he was just taking a walk. But we all had a feeling,” Currie said. “Still, you can’t gang-tackle a guy for taking a walk. Five minutes after our last contact with him, he walked to the mid-span and looked back. We all took off after him; I was only twenty feet away when he went over. We saw him go in, feet first.

“The other guys felt they’d followed procedure, done what they had to do, didn’t get him, and they’ve moved on. But I had nightmares for a week.”

The Chronicle Magazine ran an interesting article about Cynthia Kenyon, a biochemist at UCSF working in the area of lifespan research. Or more specifically, lifespan extension.

By suppressing a single gene, her team has extended the life span of a particular variety of worm by a factor of six. If she could perform the same trick on me, I’d live to be 400, which would be a good thing. (For example, I’d have more time to update this website.)

Tiny, transparent worms are not genetically similar to humans, except for a few ex-roommates I could mention. But there is good news for any of you who happen to be mammalian vertebrates:

Other researchers have conducted versions of Kenyon’s age-bending experiments to increase the life spans of flies and yeast — and, far more significantly for humans, of mice. Conducted by Martin Holzenberger of the French Biomedical Research Agency and independently by Ron Kahn at the Harvard Medical School, the mouse tests genetically coaxed mice to live 33 percent longer than normal.

Here’s the full article: Finding the Fountain of Youth

The SF Chronicle reports:

San Francisco city officials are investigating a popular exhibition of plasticized corpses and body parts at the Masonic Center, including whether the bodies pose a public health problem and were improperly obtained.

The immediate issue is that some of the corpses — which have been injected with plastic and dissected to reveal muscles, bone and nerves — are leaking.
…
The fluid leaking out of the bodies could be either polymer or body fat, said Dr. Robert Henry, a professor of anatomy at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Leaking can occur if not enough of the lipid, or fat, is removed from the body before injection with the polymer.

The process of removing the fat “can take a real long time — two to four months, depending on what is used,” said Henry, treasurer of the International Society for Plastination. “If that wasn’t done long enough, and these people seem to be novices at it, a larger percentage of the fat is left in the body than is ideal, so it’s going to leak out.”

(Previous plastination news and photos.)

… it is possible to express the concept “vegan” in German.