Author: Monkeystador

Enthusiast.
Posted on // 1 Comment

The Perfect Crime

From Defector:

The Justice Department announced today they’d arrested the two people behind the 2016 Bitfinex hack and recovered 94,636 of the 119,754 bitcoins stolen in the heist. That haul is currently valued at more than $3.6 billion, making it the largest financial seizure in United States history.

One of the actual crimes the pair of alleged masterminds are accused of committing is money laundering, which is somewhat redundant given, again, that we are dealing with cryptocurrency. In this case, the feds say Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan successfully laundered 21 percent of their bitcoin plunder through a number of labyrinthine pathways, including setting up fake accounts, swapping BTC for gold, and buying a bunch of PlayStation and WalMart gift cards. The feds found the unlaundered 79 percent just, uh, sitting in Lichtenstein’s cloud storage account, which they pretty easily recovered after getting a search warrant.

Morgan bills herself as a “Surrealist Artist, Rapper” and “Forbes writer” performing under the stage name Razzlekhan. 

“Just like her fearless entrepreneurial spirit and hacker mindset, Razz shamelessly explores new frontiers of art, pushing the limit of what’s possible. Whether that leads to something wonderful or terrible is unclear; the only thing that’s certain is it won’t be boring or mediocre.”

Um… right. The interwebs are having a field day with her terrible rapping. You were warned.

Posted on // 4 Comments

Hit Factory

I always forget they’re Californian, as it seems like they could have spewed forth from Appalachia, or anywhere.

Fogerty’s ’68-’70 run was nuts:

  • I Put A Spell On You
  • Proud Mary
  • Bad Moon Rising
  • Green River
  • Down On The Corner
  • Fortunate Son
  • Travelin’ Band
  • Who’ll Stop the Rain
  • Lookin’ Out My Back Door
  • Long As I Can See The Light

Been reading more about them, their implosion, all the record label nonsense.

I was alone when I made that [CCR] music. I was alone when I made the arrangements, I was alone when I added background vocals, guitars and some other stuff. I was alone when I produced and mixed the albums. The other guys showed up only for rehearsals and the days we made the actual recordings. For me Creedence was like sitting on a time bomb. We’d had decent successes with our cover of “Susie Q” and with the first album when we went into the studio to cut “Proud Mary.” It was the first time we were in a real Hollywood studio, RCA’s Los Angeles studio, and the problems started immediately. The other guys in the band insisted on writing songs for the new album, they had opinions on the arrangements, they wanted to sing. They went as far as adding background vocals to “Proud Mary,” and it sounded awful.

Posted on // 4 Comments

Well-Wishery

Join me, won’t you, with the musical community in wishing Makerbot – by many estimates the world’s oldest living blogger –  a happy 68th!

Friends of the Blog Jethro Tull dropped a new album in his honor.

The Ergs offered their inimitable dorkrock cover of Odessey & Oracle.

And Leo Sayer released these unwatchable Beatles covers!

Enjoy, Macré Beau!

Posted on // 4 Comments

Universal Caption

In 2006, a blogger argued that the above caption worked for every New Yorker cartoon. As I am not as highbrow as you lot, I wouldn’t necessarily know.

More recently, the following universal caption has been suggested:

I’ll leave it to all y’all to decide if they both work for every cartoon.

Has anyone entered this week’s caption contest?

Posted on // 8 Comments

Pedal Pusher

I think my meager collection includes a RAT, a chorus, and a wah-wah, and I have no idea where they are. It’s about all I deserve. This guy, though:

“The merits of a geezer with my inconsiderable musical skills owning even one Big Muff are debatable; more than one is indefensible. See, I have a problem. I quit drinking 35 years ago and began spending beer money on guitars and related toys, like amps and speakers and, worst of all, effects.

My guitarsenal now takes up so much space in my house that I “joke” that at this point I would have been better off had I just kept drinking. Pedal addiction is particularly evil because so-called stomp boxes take up so much less space than instruments or amps or speakers, and also because there’s so damn many different ones out there! I realized long ago that I have too many pedals, and also that I’ll never own enough. Now I’ve got suitcases and drawers and cardboard boxes full of them. I’ve also got a rack effects problem, a close cousin of pedal addiction. I spent last weekend in the basement wiring up a ridiculous arsenal of decades-old tube overdrives and multi-effect units in one big shelf. Push a few buttons, and this assemblage of rock electronics can turn “Kumbaya” into “Eruption.”

Effects aren’t for everybody. The Beatles, it should be noted, weren’t pedal pushers. Gearheads took to message boards to marvel about how in the new documentary about the band, Get Back, pedals get next to no play. Eagle-eyed nerds claim to have spotted a Fuzz Face, a box also stomped on in that era by Jimi Hendrix. But little else in the way of tone-enhancing implements could be spotted. (I haven’t watched much of Get Back yet, but of the scenes I’ve seen so far, nothing hit me harder than seeing John Lennon playing through an Ampeg B15 amplifier. I have two Ampeg B15s.) Then again, there weren’t that many pedals being sold in their day, and as the new doc shows these guys had sound technicians in lab coats walking around Abbey Road Studios, inventing sounds for them on request.

It has been reported, but not confirmed, that there are bassists and keyboardians amongst us. Do you people use effects pedals? Do you need a Rick Nielsen secret storage location to manage them?

Posted on // 5 Comments

Which House?

You can only live in one. Which is it??

I’d like to submit House 10, if acceptable to the greater bastardate:

House 10
Tom Petty
Bob Dylan
Roy Orbison
George Harrison
Jeff Lynne

Posted on // 8 Comments

I’m Not Your Crypto Tool You Tool

Hopefully no one here watches the sportsballs, as recently you would have seen this ad ad nauseum.

Periodically I enjoy trying to make sense of speculative digital currency, most of it not even underpinned by scarcity. It makes my brain hurt.
Bitcoin, Ethereum, NFT – sounds like electronica I’m too old to fathom.

And apparently it’s terrible for the environment: a single Bitcoin transaction consumes the same amount of power that an average American home uses in a month.

Twitter, please roast this clown:

I can just not stop laughing that Matt Damon’s pitch for crypto is “Be like a brave explorer, invest your life savings in crypto.”

This commercial where Matt Damon compares buying $5 in ElonAssCoin to the Wright Brothers inventing flight or astronauts exploring space really hypes me up!

Posted on // 4 Comments

I Get Along

One of my favorite Libs songs. The bridge is fantastic.

Where’s Doherty? Who knows?!