Aaron Traffas

Tides

I’m sitting in the Phoggy Dog in Lawrence listening to my friend Blaine Younger play. I’m beginning to realize that Blaine and I have very different approaches to playing.

Blaine has fun. You can see it in his performance and the kind of songs he plays. The crowd responds well.

I have fun by not showing it. I have an agenda. Bleu Edmondson told me once in Hays that the secret was to force eight originals “down their throats”, give them a cover, and then play 10 more originals. Bleu may not be the biggest alt-country artist, but I’ll put his latest release “Lost Boy” up against any offering from the movement and give you a spread.

The covers I choose have always been songs I respect for pith or because they’re cryptic in a way I admire. My rule of thumb has been if the crowd responds positively that means I have a mandate to depart farther from mainstream into the obscurity I enjoy. After all, if they wanted to hear Kenny Chesney they could have stayed home, played CDs and continued watching NASCAR while flipping through Anti-science Weekly.

Maybe I’ll change. Maybe I won’t. While I like my musical-masochism, I enjoy Blaine’s approach and may begin experimenting with something like that again. We’ll see. Until then, go listen to some Lucero and Old 97s. And vote for Obama and Biden for a mature America.

Palin doesn't meet expectations

 

Palin’s performance in the debates last night was unremarkable. That’s unfortunate, because I was hoping to write this post with more of a see, I told you so attitude, which is always more fun than trying to argue a point. Everyone expected Palin to get crushed, and she simply didn’t.

 

Palin did make one point, though. Something to the effect of “golly gee willikers, it’s plain as day how I’m sooooo a Washington outsider”. It was daisy-chain-the-colloquialisms night for her, after all.

The point is that we don’t want an Washington outsider. We don’t want a governer who can hunt. We’ve had one for the last eight years. We want someone who has been involved in the governing of something other than a cold, satellite state. 

We don’t want folksy. We don’t want cute. We want a bulldog who can show the world that after eight years of screwing up and screwing around and screwing over everyone else in the world that we’ve grown up and are now ready to maturely and intelligently negotiate with our fellow countries on this planet. 

Sara Palin is not who we want.

Debate night

I had a hell of a birthday yesterday. Thanks to everyone for the Facebook comments. We had a Wii party at our cabin last night until 2 a.m. Needless to say, I’ve had better days than today.

We’re slowly gathering around the 56″ view into Ole Miss for tonight’s debate that nearly wasn’t. I’m glad McCain figured out how to multitask.

Our friends over at Dream Not of Today are posting real-time coverage, so make some popcorn, turn on CNN and join in.

Chrome Palin

Rush Limbaugh is a big, fat, ignorant bastard. I listen to him when I leave work during the day in my car and forget to grab my Zune. It’s better than more entertaining than music, and in the doldrums of the day between Morning Edition and All Things Considered, it’s about the only thing without a beat that comes in on my radio.

Today he was ranting about how the liberals (said, of course, with audible disdain) were trying to make political hay with Bristol Palin’s pregnancy. He said the ‘rest of America’ had already moved on.

First, let’s ignore how thie ‘rest of America’ is actually the liberals he dispises and focus on this simple concept: liberals care about Palin’s daughter in the same way they care about a lost puppy. They want to help it, feed it and give it a good home, unlike the Republicans who want simply to eat it.

Liberals don’t factor Palin’s daughter’s pregnancy into the political equation. It’s something that happens and, like the sex lives of political candidates, it won’t effect how Palin would govern. We liberals have plenty of hay to make over the issues and what kind of governor (used generically) she would be were she to hold a higher office than Governor. The political group with the most desire to make a big deal out of her daughter’s predicament is exclusively the right-wingers, who see it as an affront to their monotonous abstinence-only drone that continues to fail to produce real results. Perhaps she’s not as conservative as she was made out to be. Or, perhaps, and I think this more likely, she’s not as good at leading and demonstrating those conservative values as she was made out to be.

I spent a fair amount of time today immersing myself in Google’s Chrome. I watched the live announcement today and downloaded it within a few minutes of it being released to the public. Unlike the server shortages that plagued Apple with it’s last big product launch, Google’s offering was easily conveyed to the multiple computers on which I installed it.

Chrome has a new Javascript engine so it’s fast. Balls fast. Melt your face fast. It’s running on Webkit so it’s pretty. Kate Bosworth pretty. Kate Bosworth in 21 pretty. I tried to get it to run on Linux using WINE and, while I got it to load, it didn’t work well enough to render any pages without crashing. It puts Firefox to shame in the coolness category, and while it has a ways to catch up when it comes to community and available plugins, it’s still faster and sexier and what I’ll be using until Microsoft puts IE8 on the ground.

New shows section

We had a great show at Bobby T’s on Friday. Thanks so much to everyone who tuned in to the broadcast. Thanks to Ty and Rob, our friends from San Francisco, who called in with credit cards to buy us rounds of drinks from several states away.

Thus ends the three-day weekend of relaxation. Today was the best day by far. Erica ate with us this morning and when I dropped her off she ended up with both of my cell phones. There is an unexplainable sense of peace that accompanies the knowledge that nobody can contact you.

It’s weird having Erica here and Megan gone. My sisters are quite similar and yet quite different. I’m excited to get to know her as I got to know Megan.

I’m watching Chelsea Lately with Lucas and Diane and plugging away at finishing the new shows section of the website. My mother was in town all day Saturday and never contacted me because she thought I was in Omaha because that’s what my website said. We had booked a show there and when I Twittered regarding its cancellation I never got around to updating the convoluted event calendar that was nailed on top of WordPress. That’s all fixed now, as the new shows section now includes all shows, both upcoming and past – all the way back to the first launch of the site when Trevor Burgess and I were playing at Fats.

I’m typing away on my Apple slim aluminum keyboard. It’s the one I poured nearly a full cup of coffee into a couple weeks ago. I dried it, wet it, dried it again and when it wouldn’t work I’d left it for dead. A week passed and I tried it one more time and it’s been working well ever since. I guess I bought a pair to have a spare. With all the damn computers around here, I guess it will get plenty of use.

I’m selling my Cloudbook at Thursday’s auction. I couldn’t ever get the wireless to work as well as I wanted, though it seems I’m not the only one. The graphics always seemed weak, though VIA just released an open source driver for it.

I’m currently rocking the ASUS EeePC 900. It’s quite possibly the finest piece of equipment on which I’ve ever laid my hands. I turned it on long enough to hit restart on the Knoppix distribution of Linux so that I could install Ubuntu. I had good luck with Ubuntu-eee as opposed to Eee-Ubuntu. Everything worked pretty much right away. I had to load a different kernel to get the microphone working so I could play with Skype with Diane.

I got Diane an Acer Aspire One as an early birthday present. It’s slightly bigger than my Eee, but the difference in the keyboard size is pretty huge. It also runs Windows XP, which is pretty much a must for her iPod Touch. It was also crazy-cheap, weighing in at $349 at Best Buy.

It seems like John McCain’s Eskimo running mate’s daughter is knocked up. How fun.

I'm running for president

Vote for Paris

Happy Darwin Year

Happy Darwin Year…150 years ago (on 1 July) the theory of Natural Selection, which has held through to this day with all its modifications and improvements as any good theory does, was first presented.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/07/fire_the_starting_gun_the_darw.php

Newsweek ran an article comparing Lincoln to Darwin recently, claiming that because both men were born on the same day, it was fair to ask who was more important to history. I disagree with their conclusion. Lincoln was a politician who, while arguably a very good one, is limited to the field of social constructs. At the end of the day, all we have as a population is what we know. Laws and perceptions change over time, while we can only figure something out once. Darwin figured out what is unquestionably the most important, most fundamental principle for biology and history and taxonomy.

How many times has public perception changed during the course of the last few thousand years? How many empires have risen? How many forms of government have been devised? How many fluctuations have we seen in mores? How many republics have failed?

All of the answers to the above questions are influenced, at least in part, to the sum of the knowledge of the human race. As time moves forward, we know more about the world. This accumulated knowledge, with a few exceptions, certainly molds new political ideas. Knowledge pulled us, perhaps kicking and screaming, out of the dark ages when, as the general public became more well-informed, they threw off the fetters of abstract, dogmatic teachings in favor of an empirical reality that better matched what they observed. When the church said one thing, and people observed another, the domain of the church – the unexplained – grew smaller.

Lincoln’s presidency was most definately influenced by accumulated knowledge. Had he ruled fifty years prior, things would have been very different. The field of politics, while perhaps more glamorous and favorable to a participant’s reputation and ego, is inherently limiting when referencing the question of leaving a mark on history. In a thousand years, there may not be a country – or a planet, if we keep electing Republicans – but there will still be science. We will still know about Natural Selection, undoubtedly in a more complete way than we do now, just as we will still understand and indeed know more about string theory, nuclear theory and other fundamental concepts in the world of science.

Who was more important to history? In the short term, the arguement can be made for Lincoln, though I don’t know who answers the question of history in the short term. Indeed, the correct answer for the long term is Darwin, as the theory he championed will continue to live and be refined and perfected long after the issues surrounding the presidency of Lincoln have been marginalized to the history books.

Manhattan tornado

I’m in Sharon playing mechanic. I can’t get enough of the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe podcast. I’d love to see the Skeptologists TV series come to fruition.

Did you think Ben Stein was smart like I did? Do you dislike the gag reflex? You can find some solace here.  http://www.expelledexposed.com/ I wish I could protest the Expelled movie.

We’ll probably be posting some of Diane’s pictures of the tornado that went through Manhattan last night at some point. Everyone I know is ok from what I’ve heard. Wayne Graham said he found a box on our lawn with a partial UPS label that was delivered a couple miles from our house.

Archipelago video

From Bobby T’s in Manhattan, Kansas, on 29 March, 2008, this video of Aaron Traffas Band playing Archipelago features Aaron Traffas, Mason Powell, Chris Goering and Lucas Maddy.

For more YouTube goodness, view this gem. Rob told me about it the other day. It’s for all you asshole racists out there. This shows how smart you sound.