Month: January 2003

Yesterday I had an interesting conversation with someone over IM who thought I was his mom. It illustrates the dangers of not memorizing the usernames of your loved ones. In retrospect, I wish I had played along with it longer.

Edman725: hi
GarveyB: hello?
Edman725: http://gameloaded.co.uk/index.php/mainpage_url/details2.php/code/5271/Mafia
Edman725: look now
GarveyB: do I know you?
Edman725: yea
GarveyB: how?
Edman725: mom its not from london
Edman725: GameLoaded, the UK based online games and hardware site where you can read Mafia reviews by GameLoaded staff and customer comments of Mafia. Buy Mafia from GameLoaded and receive FREE UK standard delivery – the price you see is the price
GarveyB: that’s funny that you think I’m your mom
Edman725: shut up
GarveyB: that’s it, you’re grounded
Edman725: mom
GarveyB: you got the wrong person. I’m a guy from New Jersey, not someone’s mom.
Edman725: soory

It looked like he was trying to get permission from his mom to buy the game. I hope he gets it.

I skipped the Living Room open mic last night, but I’ll probably go next Wednesday. I like how the Living Room’s Website is winning the poll so far.

For some odd reason, it seems google likes to link to the printer friendly versions of my pages. And here I thought someone was going through and printing out my articles for some nefarious plot to overthrow me.

This site is a threat to national security.

I just remembered Maria told me last night the Living Room is doing away with Monday night open mics. Anyone know if this is true or not? I’m not really surprised considering the turnout on Mondays and hopefully this will make Wednesday more popular.

Count me among the fans of Jeremy Hollis. He went on early last night at the Grape Street Pub open mic and I remembered seeing him a month or two go. His website is worthless, but his music isn’t. His acoustic guitar / harmonica combination reminds me of what I like most about good folk artists, a sense of a real person up there on stage. Most of his choruses come from the harmonica and do exactly what a good instrumental chorus is supposed to do. He’s playing upstairs tonight at the Grape Street Pub’s Tuesday Night Music Club.

As is the case with a lot of shows, I missed most of the performer’s names. Calvin James, Keith Lubrant, and the singer from Quick Step John all played. I missed Maria since she was so far down the list, but her friend Tom was awesome. He just landed his first gig, so if someone reminds me of where/when it is I’ll post it here.

Tom Gillam usually refers to me as the “Punk Rock Poet” of the GSP open mic and that’s ok with me. I did “The Genius of it All” and “Why Now Satan?” and my arm was killing me afterwards. Last night I heard Tom say something as I left the stage about how I had a good name and then all I heard was “Ben Garvey: Male Prostitute” Sometimes I think Grape Street pays him in alcohol.

I upgraded this site’s version of Post Nuke and it fixed a few annoying bugs that were hanging around. The last thing I need to fix now is the weird alignment issues in pages that aren’t wide enough.

My MP3 link now points to a page here and no longer to MP3.com. My bandwidth will probably go up a bit, but I wasn’t using nearly what I pay for anyway.

If anyone else wants to submit open mic recaps or reviews, please do so by using the submit news link. I’d love to see some additional contributors.

Today’s link is a great time waster: Guess the Dictator or Sitcom Character. I still haven’t been able to really stump it on a character yet. Some of my better attempts were Uncle Jesse from the Dukes of Hazard, Cheetara from Thundercats, and Marilyn from Northern Exposure.

This is the first message I’m posting with my new computer (check out the specs). I ordered all the parts from GoogleGear.com and put them together. This is the first PC I built myself, so I’m just happy to have it up and running.

I haven’t been out to any open mics lately, but I’ll make it around to at least one next week.

Here’s a plug for my friend Jason Wheatley: He’s playing at the Living Room on Friday, January 21st at 8:00PM. I meant to mention Adrien Reju’s gigs last week at the Perkins Art Institute in Moorestown and 3 Beans of Haddonfield, but I didn’t get a chance to. If you voted for the Time Machine in the new poll, try and make it out to those shows, too.

The previous poll was a landslide and nowayscoob was one causing this avalanche of land. Somehow their recently released debut album, Nowayscoob’s Greatest Hits, removed the pants off of mainstream media picks from the White Stripes, the Flaming Lips, and Beck. A full 60% of you think nowayscoob is 3rd coming of Christ and I admit, I did play “What Would Jesus Do”, the board game, during one of their shows.

The new poll is all about looking ahead and wondering what would be the coolest technological improvement we can expect to see in 100 years. If you don’t get the joke, The Living Room is a coffee house in Collingswood that has live music 7 days a week and no web presence whatsoever. Other than here.

A thread in the Origivation message board has devolved into a discussion if I’ve turned into a whiny bitch or not. Sounds harsh, but that’s how 90% of the messages over there end up.

I leave you tonight with an amazingly obsessive collection with almost no useful purpose: The Condiment Packet Musuem

Arghhh! I’ve been a long time user of MP3.com and despite all the changes they’ve made in the past (slow song approvals, paying for premium placement, etc.) I was shocked to get this in the mail:

“After January 31, you will not be able to display more than three songs on your Artist page. If your page displays four or more songs, it will automatically default to display the three most recently uploaded songs. If you have a lot of songs you’d like displayed all the time, consider joining the Gold Service which offers a 100 song maximum.”

I have my own website but I use MP3.com to host my MP3s because of the features it offers (easily searchable among other artists, automatic low/high fi playback, more exposure), but I can’t see how I’d continue using them now.

The big story on the Internet today is the controversial Supreme Court case, Eldred vs Ashcroft where the constitutionality of the 1998 Copyright Extension Act, or the “Sonny Bono Act,” was called into question. The US Constitution grants Congress the right to allow authors and inventors a “limited” monopoly on their creations. After this limited amount of time, the novel, poem, song, invention, painting, etc. must enter the public domain, where it becomes legal for anyone to use it in derivitive works. For example, anyone can perform Hamlet without paying royalties to the descendents of W.S. because Hamlet is not owned by anyone. If copyright didn’t exist creators would get exploited by copiers as soon as their work was released and this may discourage them from creating new works in the future. Copyright grants creators the ability to profit from their work with the reasoning that these creations greatly benefit society and the profits from creation #1 will encourage creation 2, 3, 4, etc.

In other words, the value of having intellectual property is only as valuable as the future creations of creative people. All the songs I’ve written are not mine because I wrote them. Thy’re mine (for now) because the benefit I get from owning them (haha) encourages me to write new songs.

Congress seems to think that perpetually extending the copyrights of companies like Disney encourages more original material while Disney typically revamps works from the public domain (Little Mermaid, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Aladdin). Mickey Mouse was originally created in the 20’s and if copyright had the same term length it did when the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution, he would have been in the public domain for over 60 years already.

The sad part is not that Disney can continue to bring in billions of dollars on its popular characters. It’s that many companies cling to works they have no intention of making available. Technology makes the free dispersal of literature, music, and art trivial and instead of being available to everyone, these works lie dormant because the companies who own them can only lose money by releasing them.

Next time you sing Happy Birthday to someone, make sure you send AOL-Time Warner a royalty check.

My new computer was shipped today and should be here next week. Here are the specs:

• Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 Processor 1.80GHz, 400MHz FSB, Socket 478 Retail
• Abit SR7-8X SiS648 P4 (533FSB) Skt478 DDR ATX Motherboard w/Audio, LAN Retail
• Crucial Technology 256MB DDR333 PC2700 Memory
• Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 6Y060L0 60GB Ultra
• ATA/133 7200RPM Hard Drive
• MSI G4Ti4200-VTD8X GeForce4 Ti4200 AGP 8X 128MB DDR Video Card w/DVI & VIVO Retail
• Samsung SM348 DVD 16x + CD-RW 48x24x48 Combo Drive w/Roxio & PowerDVD Software
• Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition Single (Full Version)
• Antec Performance II Series SX630II Mini Tower Case Retail

Hopefully I’ll be able to get it all working together. If you’ve never been there, you should visit CaptionThis.com. People upload weird pictures and post funny captions for them.

It was intersting Wednesday at the Living Room. I showed up a little late, but squeezed in a few songs between Cathy and James Collins. I’m not positive, but I think Willie Tapps might have been on to something last night. He kept forgeting lines to songs and mixing them up. At one point Roz, the open mic host, jumped in and saved Willie with a hilarious faith healing sermon. Kopie of nowayscoob didn’t make it out, but Justin did a Radiohead cover and closed with the best song on his new album, “Waste.” I don’t think I’ve ever heard them play this song live, but it’s good. The CD version is so slick I could easily hear it on some mid 90s movie soundtrack. I’ve seen Cathy two or three times now since she came home from school and she still hasn’t played her Living Room hit from last summer, “Awfully Nice.” She did, however, leave her guitar there when she left and had to come back for it. Keith Lewis has been playing a pretty cool version of Sheryl Crow’s “Steve McQueen”.

I went through “The Genius of it All,” “Headstart,” and my cover of Gomez’s “Get Miles.” No matter how cold it is outside the Living Room always feels about 100 degrees inside.

I got a digital camera recently and took some pictures last weekend when it snowed. If you want to check them out, head here.

The other day I linked to one of my favorite sites, BoingBoing.net, and today I’m going to link to another one of my all time favorites: The Filthy Critic. If this guy wrote a novel I’d read it. I’d even watch a commercial he wrote. He can be pretty crude and harsh in his movie reviews, but if you’re looking for honest, indepedent, and insightful reviews of recent movies there is no one better. His best work is with the worst movies. When reviewing I-SPY he wrote, “If fresh ideas were toilet paper, these guys would be dead from diaper rash.”

Record companies have long been screwing music fans and there is a class action lawsuit to prove it. Here is a quick summary: The record companies have been artificially fixing prices for years and to correct that they agreed to give anyone who bought a CD between 1995 and 2000 a payment worth up to $20. How much money you can get is determined by how many people fill out this form. The dollar amount they’ll lose is already set, so if only a few people claim payment we’ll each get $20. If ($20 * number of claims) > total payout then the payments start to drop down a little. If they get lower than $5 each than the whole payout plan is scrapped and they donate the money to some sort of music related charity. Although you’ve probably bought dozens of CDs during the claim period, each person can only file once. I know exactly what I’m going to buy with my $20.

Used CDs at Tunes are only 2/$5! Fill out the form here.

The drought has ended. I went to my first open mic in about a month and it went pretty well. I even trotted out a new cover of the Pixies’ “Mr. Grieves.” It wasn’t perfect, but I think I can iron out the kinks. Roz and Keith both played great along with Cathy who is home from college. I think her voice sounds even better now than it did last summer. Roz did a depressing cover of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” that I enjoyed, but I liked the fact you can buy a Roz King lunch box even more. Two guys I went to high school with were also there with their band, “Wait.” Hopefully they’re waiting for a new band name to come along, too. They weren’t too bad though, and their singer has a good voice. I finished my set with “Why Now Satan” and “I Hope I Die On the Moon.”

According to nowayscoob.com Kopie is in town so that must be pretty damn exciting to 64.29% of you. You can probably catch them at the Living Room in Collingswood, NJ or the Carribean Crab in Oaklyn, NJ or both on Wednesday.

I was doing my wash today and (I’m not lying about this) a lady quickly walked into the laundry room saying she “forgot to add the fabric softener.” If she started worrying about ring around the collar I would have lost it.

I picked up a new book to read called Entanglement. It’s all about quantum physics and the scientists who came up with the theories. So far I love how it gives a mini biography on people like Heisenberg, Von Neumann, Einstein, Bohr, etc. The actual physics part is very easy to follow since the author reexplains the same ideas and concepts from several different angles.

If you haven’t seen the movie Ghost World yet, I highly recommend it. Thora Birch and Steve Buschemi are flat out awesome.

Lastly, I’d like to let you in on a great website for finding the best and weirdest the web can give you. BoingBoing.net specializes in keeping you up to date on articles and news you won’t find on CNN.