James Rising

The Jimmy Castor Bunch combining a big beat with spirited storytelling on records like “Troglodyte (Cave Man)” on RCA, which hit No. 6 on the pop charts in 1972 and sold a million copies. Another hit was “The Bertha Butt Boogie” in late 1974.

Jimmy Castor, a singer, instrumentalist and songwriter whose mastery of genres from doo-wop to Latin soul to funk, and instruments including saxophone and bongos earned him the title Everything Man, died on Monday in Henderson, Nev. He was 71.
The cause was heart failure, his son Jimmy Jr. said.

Any student burning the midnight oil Tuesday may have been disappointed as what has become a primary research tool, Wikipedia, blacked out its Web pages as part of a global protest against anti-piracy legislation making its way through Congress.

“Student warning! Do your homework early. Wikipedia protesting bad law on Wednesday!,” warned Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales on Twitter, and with that, one of the most heavily visited websites began a 24-hour “blackout.”

Google slapped a virtual black tape across the word “Google” on its home page, as if it were muffled, although it continued to be available for search. Social news site Reddit said it will be blacked out for 12 hours, starting at 8 a.m. ET. The metaphor by the protesting sites: To shutter and silence the Internet the same way many in the tech world say will happen if the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House and the Protect IP Act in the Senate move forward.

http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/18/10177219-wikipedia-goes-dark-on-piracy-bill-protest-day

WEEKENDER Column: The center will not hold :

During Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 presidential campaign against George H. W. Bush the phrase “It’s the economy, stupid” was widely used.

If Barack Hussein Obama II has a sign in the oval office it should say “It’s the stupid economy” and folks, it’s getting worse.

Three recent events hit close to home in Dallas. The big multinational owned Offset Paperback Manufacturers turned the page on 69 employees. Friendly’s restaurant made its last “happy ending” sundae and in Edwardsville, the Gallery Of Sound took the needle off the record.

The Friendly’s closing was a shock to some but the parent company has been in Chapter 11 since October of last year. Seems there was just not enough profit in Supermelts and Fribbles to keep the wolf from the door. Friendly’s joins two other pretty big restaurants in the Back Mountain, the Mark II and the Dough Company in closing. When people don’t have jobs, it’s pretty tough to get them to eat out.

And 69 workers at Offset Paperback will be in that unhappy situation pretty damn quick. A statement from Offset says the company will lay off the workers on January 27. The company makes 350 million paperback books a year, but officials say e-readers, such as the Kindle and Nook are doing them in. So this whole digital thing was a complete surprise to the owners, the Bertelsmann AG group ? Interesting because the same company owns TV and Radio stations and certainly should have seen the light approaching as a train and not the end of the tunnel. Go figure.

The Gallery of Sound had a store in Dallas and they had 11 stores once but the bad news is only four stores remain in downtown Wilkes-Barre, Wilkes-Barre Township, Dickson City and Hazleton. The good news is the fact that any locations remain open at all. Gallery of Sound owners saw the oncoming digital train, made the appropriate survival moves, tough as they were, and survived.

I hate to point this out but the owners of Offset Paperback had the same warning. Here’s hoping they make the right choices and we don’t have another empty building. In the world now it’s adapt or die and I fear that spells doom for many. It’s a digital world and until the power goes out forever or the internet goes down completely under the weight of spam for male enhancement products it’s just going to be more so.

But hey, thanks for reading THIS dead tree publication.

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Reach Jim at contact@jamesrising.com Even more rants are on his blog, updated every day that ends in “y” at jamesrising.com

These guys probably did:

Beginning in July 2008, the Koobface gang aimed at Web users with invitations to watch a funny or sexy video. Those curious enough to click the link got a message to update their computer’s Flash software, which begins the download of the Koobface malware. Victims’ computers are drafted into a “botnet,” or network of infected PCs, and are sent official-looking advertisements of fake antivirus software and their Web searches are also hijacked and the clicks delivered to unscrupulous marketers. The group made money from people who bought the bogus software and from unsuspecting advertisers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/technology/koobface-gang-that-used-facebook-to-spread-worm-operates-in-the-open.html

Tuesday Review: Moneyball

Moneyball (2011)PG-13 133 min

I don’t follow stick and ball sports.

Hell I have ENOUGH to do during the endless NASCAR season. And..they pay me to do that.

So going into it, me viewing “Moneyball” was already a stretch before we got to the previews on the DVD. One reason I don’t follow baseball or football is that I don’t know the rules well enough to truly enjoy the nuances of the game. A movie about the machinations behind the scenes in baseball just couldn’t be good for me, could it?

The answer is wrong, wrong, wrong.

“Moneyball” was fast moving, compelling and really interesting. It was also heartfelt, something I really didn’t expect.

In the film, adapted from the book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis, Brad Pitt plays Billy Beane the beleaguered GM of the hapless underfunded Oakland A’s. Up against the huge budgets of teams like the monolithic N.Y. Yankees, he improbably gets the team close to the big prize.

He does it by using the controversial statistical approach sometimes referred to as “Moneyball” or Sabermetrics which uses computer programs and analysis of players that go against the grain of traditional baseball. He is branded a renegade, a fool and meets resistance at every turn. And worse, because the manager of the team, Philip Seymour Hoffman as Art Howe will not follow his direction they are failing miserably.

Beane eventually prevails, the team goes on an unprecedented winning streak and Beane is more or less vindicated.

The two big plots are both about love. Billy’s love; for the game and for his young daughter, Casey Beane played by Kerris Dorsey who does a heartwarming scene in which she doesn’t appear on screen.

This film is directed by Bennet Miller who is at the helm for Foxcatcher (pre-production) and did Capote 1998 and The Cruise (documentary), and brings a documentary sensibility to the production. Very little of the action is on the playing field but when it is the soundtrack is manipulated powerfully with the use of a technique I was taught in radio. Silence. Dead air. Nothing rivets the attention better.

Pitt plays it restrained almost to a fault. Seymour Hoffman plays it a but over the top and is tough to recognize under all those layers of heft.

It’s a great popcorn family movie which gets the PG-13 mainly for some swearing which in context is no worse than 11 year olds hear everyday.

Or possibly “the bird is the word”.

Personally I feel that the the bird and the yellow cat are actually friends but it’s tough to tell. Parental guidance suggested, the cats really go at it and the swearing is something awful. Some will wonder why the camera operator didn’t try to intervene. The camera operator (not me) has all his finger and toes and no stitches and didn’t lose any blood. Such would not have been the case if they had tried to stop the fight.

You may say a cat uses good grammar. Well, a cat does — but you let a cat get excited once; you let a cat get to pulling fur with another cat on a shed, nights, and you’ll hear grammar that will give you the lockjaw. Ignorant people think it’s the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain’t so; it’s the sickening grammar they use.

Mark Twain

You can’t make this stuff up. A store that sells Ku KLux Klan robes, Confederate flags and assorted other racist paraphernalia is owned by…a Black church!

It’s a complicated story and almost too hard to believe but I think it’s the perfect message for Martin Luther King Day.

Can’t we all just get along?

LAURENS, S.C. — The Redneck Shop has been selling Confederate bikinis and white satin robes on the historic courthouse square in this former mill town for so long that most people have learned to ignore it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/13/us/in-laurens-sc-the-redneck-shop-and-its-neighbor.html

Tom Ardolino, a self-taught drummer who for 30 years provided the impassioned but steady pulse for NRBQ, one of the longest-lasting and most beloved rock groups never to have a Top 40 single, died on Jan. 6 in Springfield, Mass. He was 56.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/arts/music/tom-ardolino-56-longtime-drummer-for-nrbq-dies.html

Sunday Wrap – 1/9/11-1/14/11

This is that was the week that was. A look at the song that was on the radio the day I was brought into the world, a tribute of sorts to Glen Campbell, a goofy look at snail farming, an exciting episode of Radio DaZe, a story about something that was hard, and hardly worth getting fired for, and the usual Saturday rambles.

This marks 15 days of Vegan Life, a work in progress.

Thanks for reading!

Monday 1/9/11

Blog Post The number one song in the land on my birthday was a spoken word parody by the great Stan Freberg.

Tuesday 1/10/11

Blog Post Glen Campbell says the long goodbye

Wednesday 1/11/11

Blog Post Waiter…there are SNAILS on her plate!

Thursday 1/12/11

Blog Post Radio DaZe: Star Struck at WACKY 102:

Friday 1/13/11

Blog Post Peter story raises questions: Cover up?

Saturday 1/14/11

Blog Post Aggregate Saturday 1/4/11:

Can't have it. I'm Vegan.

Aggregate Saturday 1/4/11:

Anything bad befall you on Friday the 13th? I thought so.
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Why is it that most of my rice cake ends up on the floor? At least to hear the long-suffering wife complain about picking up my crumbs that’s how it seems. Cash reward for crumb-less rice cakes.
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Day off today. I could get used to this but I better not. Full-time motorsports racing is bearing down on me fast. Soon it will be WFO!
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WFO Weather Forecast Office
WFO Wirtschaftsförderung Osnabrück Gmbh
WFO Western Field Ornithologists
WFO Washington Field Office
WFO Work for Others (USACE)
WFO World Federation of Orthodontists
WFO Wood Fired Oven
WFO Wide Full Open
WFO World Food Organisation (note European spelling)
WFO Western FJR Owners (Yamaha motorcycles)
WFO World Football Organization (soccer) (Note American spelling)
WFO Worldwide Freezing Order (formerly Mareva Injunction)
WFO Workforce Management Optimization
WFO Wide Freakin’ Open (polite form)
WFO Wall Furniture Outlet
WFO Waste Facilities Operations
WFO Wild Florida Online
WFO Weights Fully Out (old steam engine term, denoting maximum engine speed)
WFO Wound Flat Out
WFO Wing Field Order
WFO Women for Ocala
WFO World Future Organization (Los Angeles, CA; est. 2009)
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Now you know
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A BIG printing concern in my town just fired 69 workers. Offset Paperback from the website:

Offset Paperback Manufacturers

One of the largest manufacturers of mass-market paperback books in the world, Offset Paperback Manufacturers (OPM) produces approximately 350 million mass market and digest book products a year. OPM can take a project through the entire process starting with digital photography through pre-press, printing, binding and distribution/fulfillment.

OPM has a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility and is the only paperback book manufacturer to use exclusively the offset printing process for text reproduction. The result: OPM produces the highest quality mass-market and digest book products on the market today. Our commitment to the industry means that type and halftones are sharp, clean and crisp. In addition, the technology in place at OPM translates into reduced cycle times, higher image quality and accurate page (insert) placement for our customers.

According to a statement from Offset, the company will lay off 69 full-time workers on January 27. The company produces about 350 million paperback books a year, but officials blame the layoffs on the increased use of e-readers, such as the Kindle and Nook.

DIDN’T THEY SEE THE ONCOMING TRAIN?
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One of the reasons I bailed out of radio was that I saw the train. I knew if I stayed I would become just like so many of my friends are now. Scrambling for a job. So I forced the issue and forced myself to find something else to do. I now have work. I make money. It is on the internet. Wake up, big companies. The future is here, now. If you are still making buggy whip holders, no one needs them or buggy whips.
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Recently a music store chain in the area closed another store. At one point this family owned “record store” (quaint term that) had 15 stores in the area.
Now they have five. BUT, they are still open for business.
They saw the train. Did what they had to do and have survived. They will find a way. Unlike the big paperback company, which I predict will be shuttered in less than five years.
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Wow-on a soap box today, aren’t we?
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Just finished the new Tom Clancy. “Locked On” I LIKE Tom Clancy. The ending REALLY pissed me off. Just sayin’. Soap opera bullshit. Cliffhanger. Now I can’t wait for the next one. Dammit.

Long sucker, too. 884 pages.
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I am trying to hold my temper with people who piss me off. Last night I was on the phone with the power company in a dispute about a bill. I paid it. They managed to credit to the wrong account (I have two-long story short the studio has it’s own meter-tax purposes) and I was fuming.

The phone tree menu pissed me off greatly. It was endless and offered no option that spoke to my issue. I did what I always do, punched “O” until someone came on the line.

“How are you today?” she asked after we got thru all the opening stuff.

“I would be a lot better if I could have the half hour of my life back it took me to get you on the line.” See how I am?

At this point the long-suffering wife came into the room and gave me the look. The look can stop locomotives in their tracks. The look is able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. The look is faster than a speeding bullet.

Usually the look will just egg me on.

Last night, for whatever reason, it worked. I was nice as pie, blueberry, warmed, with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

These are more like tarts. I like tarts too.

And I got what I wanted, an apology, credit and a wiped out late-fee charge.

Maybe this “nice” stuff works. huh?

Nah.

As always, thanks for reading.