My wife happens to work in the Latin music biz, so I get to hear a lot of music that never reaches the average Gringo. I really dig the extremely raw music in these two clips by Los Inquietos Del Norte (The Restless, or The Hyper-Active) and Los Pelapapas (The Potato Peelers). Mind you, this stuff is HUGE. How fantastic is it that a band of regular dudes with clarinets and tubas can shoot their videos with a cell phone (see below) and sell a ton of records? Now that rock music and hip-hop have become so completely ingrained in our popular culture, what kind of music can the kids of today deploy to get up their parent’s noses? I’d highly recommend these wild regional Mexican jams. Dig that crazy accordion!
 

 
Newly found private press LP goodness via Tony Coulter’s wonderful fortnightly dispatch over at WMFU’s Beware of the Blog.
 

 

 

Rave ‘til dawn!

If you live in or near Chicago, don’t miss this performance by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Thee Majesty—their first appearance in the Windy City!

Thursday March 4, 7:00pm / $20
St. Paul’s Cultural Center

Thee Majesty featuring Genesis Breyer P-Orridge!
US premiere of Universalove featuring live accompaniment by Naked Lunch!

Special sneak preview screening!
CIMMfest 2010 kicks off with a William S. Burroughs-themed night of film and music. First up is Austrian band Naked Lunch, who will accompany the US premiere of Thomas Wolschitzs 2008 film Universalove with the songs they built the film around. Next up is a special, but secret, screening of a documentary featuring Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, Sonic Youth, Jello Biafra, Grant Hart and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, followed by Q & A with the director. Finally, for the first time in Chicago, Thee Majesty featuring takes the stage. $20 gets you access to everything.

Tickets here.

 
Professor Himonya teaches us how to piss someone off with a paper business card. Really important stuff here, folks! From the Gakuranman:

The anger videos are in Japanese, but that hasn’t stopped many of the gimmicks from reaching other cultures. Don’t let me speak for him however – take a peek at the videos yourself. I painstakingly added English subtitles too!

Aside from being an insanely funny guy on television and having a face made of rubber, Himonya-sensei is actually a linguistics professor at the Tokyo Tokai University, teaching and writing books on communication. Or so I was nearly led to believe. Himonya is actually a stage name and the University he claims he works for is imaginary.

(via Nerdcore)

 
All I can say is that it works for us!
 

The academic study, published in the European Journal of Operational Research looked at 1,074 couples aged between 19 and 75 years, to find which social factors were most important to a long and happy relationship.

Besides the man being five years older than his bride, and that his bride should share the same heritage, they concluded that a wife should be at least 27 per cent more intelligent than her husband. She should also hold a degree, while he should not.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the academics found that marrying a divorcee reduced the chance of wedded bliss.

Nguyen Vi Cao, who led the research, promised: “If people follow these guidelines in choosing their partners they can increase their chances of a happy, long marriage by up to 20 per cent.”

Relationship experts thought there might be something in the research.

Kate Figes, who interviewed 120 people for her recent book on understanding relationship, Couples, said: “Aren’t most women the more intelligent in a relationship anyway? That’s my first reaction.”

Scientists find mathematical formula for the perfect wife (Telegraph)

 
The text is less provocative than you are probably thinking, but it did get your attention, didn’t it?

Via Feast of Hate and Fear

 
Obviously it’s not really Werner, but a pretty spot-on and funny as shit impression by this fellow, evidently.
Thx Ye Rin Mok !

American Leftist posts on the ongoing struggle over tuition hikes in the University of California system. (As previously covered on Dangerous Minds here.)

Last November, I posted about the protests that erupted within the UC system over registration fee increases of 30%. Police struck students with batons and tasered them during protests during the regents meeting in Los Angeles where the fee increase was approved on a bipartisan basis. Students thereafter barricaded themselves within buildings at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz and UC Davis. As students occupied Wheeler Hall on the campus of UC Berkeley for approximately 15 hours, a large crowd of students, UC staff and the public generally rallied in their support, and prevented their forcible, potentially violent arrest, by UC police.

The protesters positioned themselves within the social framework of opposition to the imposition of neoliberal policies within California, policies that result in incomprehensible increases in salary and benefits for people like UC President Mark Yudof and the newly hired Chancellor of UC Davis, Linda Katehi, while classes are cut, class sizes increased and students required to pay substantial increases in fees during one of the worst recessions in US history. Meanwhile, rank and file state workers experience 15% pay cuts, while judges complain about the closure of the courtrooms one day a week. In California, the more you make in the public sector, the more immune you are from participating in the sacrifice being imposed by the Governor and the Legislature.

Now, the students are back… having performed significant outreach into the community, especially in the East Bay. Not surprisingly, the faculty at UC Berkeley, as it was during the occupation of Wheeler Hall, is scared the protesters will take control of the movement away from enlightened minds like them.

(American Leftist: Fear of an Anarchist Planet)

Via io9, check out Susan Treister’s epic map of science fiction weaponry from the dawn of the genre till now. Ms. Treister aligned the weapons on a successive series of Qabalistic trees of life (nice scheme… no, her attributions don’t look correct, but nice try!) A stunning piece of work!

In A Timeline of Science Fiction Inventions: Weapons, Warfare and Security Treister has drawn up a history documenting innovations of imaginary and fantastic military technology. These include the ‘Raytron Apparatus’, a form of aerial surveillance, which was described in ‘Beyond the Stars’ by Ray Cummings in 1928, or the ‘Control Helmet’, from ‘Easy Money’ by Edward Hamilton in 1934. The timeline starts in 1726 with the ‘Knowledge Engine’ in Gulliver’s travels and carries on up to the present day. It allows us to see the meetings of worlds as these weapons sometimes travel from the fantastic to manifest themselves into the real, like the ‘Atomic Bomb’ described in ‘The Crack of Doom’ by Robert Cromie in 1895. The format in which she organises this information is the schema of the connected circles of the tree of life or the Sephirot, from the Jewish mystical traditions of the Kabbalah, a representation of linkages between the worlds above and the physical world below and which map stages of transformation between these realms.

(io9: The Epic History of Sci-Fi Weapons from 1726-2008)