Please listen to this song and give me feedback. It's worth your time.
What kind of crazy fucked up world do we live in where a Billy Gibbons throwaway track is more memorable than the complete album ZZ Top did with Rick Rubin?
One in which music has ceased being spontaneous and is over-written, over-rehearsed and over-managed to death.
Feel the GROOVE!
And listen to Billy's guitar work. He's positively wailing, inspiring all the young 'uns to pick up a guitar and the oldsters to take theirs down off the wall to learn the parts. Oh, when he goes down and starts picking from the bottom it's got the feel of those early Beatles changes.
And then Allen Toussaint comes in and adds unexpected funkiness from New Orleans. It's amazing this guy is still alive, never mind still functioning at the top of his game.
Then again, we put all our oldsters in a box, refusing them to grow, take chances, be new. And that's death for a musician. If a musician is not exploring, improvising and taking chances he might as well be dead, or in a drug coma.
"Come on, get up, get out of my life!"
Billy and Will vocalizing together, with Allen and then Billy adding instrumental accents. This is all done in the great tradition of music past.
That's the way it used to be. Recording was an effort to capture something, lightning in a bottle. You went into the studio and tried not to get it perfect, but get it right.
Now I'd say to put these guys together in a studio for forty eight hours and see what results. It'd be a modern day "Super Session." More covers, like this Allen Toussaint song of yore, would be just fine, because an arrangement can make a track sound brand new.
Wouldn't you go to see this concoction live?
Not in the arena. But in a low-ceiling place where you stood because you wanted to, because you needed to dance, not because the promoter is trying to squeeze in more people.
This is the way it used to be.
And can be again.
Really.
After a magical intro guitar sound that only Billy can deliver, the band settles into a groove and Billy's vocal is so expressive, like he really wants the woman to get out of his life, because when you auto-tune and comp vocals you get them perfect but they lose all their soul, all their humanity in the process.
But the essence of this track is the soloing, the noodling, the sound. It's Phish...if the players in that band were stars in their own right.
Maybe that's what this concoction of players should do. Go out with America's foremost jam band and show what riffing and taking chances is all about.
This is the anti-Katy Perry. The anti-Top Forty.
This is the music baby boomers grew up on, playing ad infinitum in their bedrooms and testifying about.
And going to see live.
Can't we make the music first?
It's enough.
If done right.
And this is.
P.S. Be sure to listen to the initial hit version of this song, by the Leaves, from their album "Hey Joe," it's positively lost in the sixties, but it'll illustrate what Will and Billy and Allen are referencing (YouTube, not on Spotify): http://bit.ly/zT29as
P.P.S. And be sure to play the 2009 live iteration from Allen Toussaint's recent album "Songbook", it positively swings, even though it's just him and the piano.
P.P.P.S. And play the original Toussaint take, with the sampleable beat.
P.P.P.P.S. This is the way it used to be, an infectious record put you in the wayback machine. You read the credits and were stimulated to go back and discover artists and renditions, you became fans of others along the way, according to Toussaint this is his most highly covered song, go on Spotify and have a field day!
Spotify playlist: http://spoti.fi/H0QGX8
I love great art no matter the medium
1. Excellence
If it's not great, don't release it. Put it up on YouTube, not the album, if you're trying to get everybody's attention, make sure your music deserves it.
2. Availability
Put your complete album on YouTube and all streaming services. That's where people discover your music. Your hard core fans will buy it, for now anyway, but casual users sample, and see if they're interested. There's plenty of money if you can get people to focus and continue to listen.
3. Be your own curator.
Don't put out ten tracks, call it an album and leave us to discover what's good. Sure, you can focus on a single, but too often it's trying to be all things to all people and is not great. So point us to the two or three tracks we need to listen to.
4. Trust your heart.
Don't listen to anybody else. Push the cuts that resonate with you, that make your heart sing, jump for joy and cry. People are drawn to emotion, they want to be touched. Don't second guess, unless you're playing the singles game, and that's a game controlled by the usual suspects, unless your track was made by Dr. Luke and Max Martin, don't bother.
5. Press is a circle jerk.
Kinda like the wannabes want to send a CD that the writer won't listen to in order to make themselves feel good, ancient acts believe if they get enough ink, TV and radio play that they've done their job, but the truth is they haven't even scratched the surface. It's a direct to fan era. Know who your hard core is and give them tracks for free, if they're good, they'll spread the word. Fire your PR person and read Malcolm Gladwell's "Tipping Point."
6. Virality
Your goal is to keep your music alive. There's nothing more frustrating than spending a year on an album and then seeing it disappear in a month, never to be heard again as you ply the boards playing your greatest hits.
7. Reviews
Only matter if EVERYBODY says something is great.
8. Hunger
It's a conundrum, the audience has got no time, yet is desirous of something new and exciting that will not only satiate them, but they can turn others on to. That's your job, to feed this machine. Don't ask for the audience's time, don't put yourself above them, it's a privilege to be heard, your job is to serve the audience. Interestingly, the more you focus inward, on your art, the greater chance you have of succeeding. The two biggest left field hits in recent memory are all about the track, not the campaign... Lorde's "Royals" and Gotye's "Somebody That I Used To Know." The tracks infected listeners and they spread the word.
9. Sound
Don't master for radio if your track will never be played. Extreme loudness and compression is a disservice to your music unless you're playing the hit game.
10. Fame
Is no guarantee anybody will listen to anything more than a single. Which is why your single must absolutely kill. It's like your first line in a bar, if it's bad, you've blown your chance.
11. It's something you feel.
Great records cannot be described. They contain something that penetrates you in a way that stops time and you can't focus on anything but the pure sound and how it makes you feel. I still remember hearing "Sexual Healing" the first time...driving on the 10 East, between National and Robertson... Ha!
12. They call it show business.
But it starts with art. Business is easy, and always comes last. You can always hire someone to do your business, but you can't easily hire someone to create magic.
13. Don't fake it.
If you're losing your voice (or looks!) don't cover it up! The imperfections will appeal to people. Owning who you are is so enticing.
14. Artwork and album title and running order.
Are irrelevant. The art is a tiny square on a person's computer or mobile, and the title is only memorable if your album is, as for running order, no one listens that way anymore, if they listen to the whole album at all.
15. Don't pay attention to musos.
It's great people live for albums and music, but they vocally skew the discussion, the same way they've convinced everybody that vinyl is making a comeback, it's not, it's a pimple on the ass of the music business. Don't be afraid to alienate the holier-than-thou.
Awesomely Animated Illustrations by Robin Davey
http://www.visualnews.com/2013/10/17/awesomely-animated-illustrations-robin-davey/
Sent via Flipboard
I love great art no matter the medium
Lake Natron is a salt lake found in northern Tanzania, near the Kenyan border over at the eastern branch of the East African Rift. The lake gets its life from the Southern Ewaso Ng’iro River as well as mineral-rich hot springs. These waters are believed to be treacherous, capable of turning any animal it touches to stone. This uncommon phenomenon is said to be caused by the chemical composition of the lake.
At less than three meters deep, it is relatively shallow, and changes in width depending on its water level. The levels change mostly because of high levels of evaporation, leaving a mixture of salts and minerals called natron behind. The nearby country around it is dry and gets irregular, seasonal rainfall.
The lake is situated within the Lake Natron Basin Wetlands of the International Importance Ramsar Site. Temperatures in the lake can go up to 60°, and the alkalinity can reach a pH of 9 to 10.5 or almost as alkaline as ammonia, depending on the amount of rainfall.
The hardened, petrified animals it leaves behind are just utterly terrifying in appearance. Nick Brandt photographed these frozen creatures in his new book entitled Across the Ravaged Land. The still, lifeless creatures can be found interspersed around the lake area. What is believed to be the culprit is the constant pH of 9 to 10.5 which is considered extremely alkaline, and can preserve living tissue for a long, long time.
Brandt had this to say of the eerie lake,
“I unexpectedly found the creatures – all manner of birds and bats – washed up along the shoreline of Lake Natron in Northern Tanzania. No-one knows for certain exactly how they die, but it appears that the extreme reflective nature of the lake’s surface confuses them, and like birds crashing into plate glass windows, they crash into the lake. The water has an extremely high soda and salt content, so high that it would strip the ink off my Kodak film boxes within a few seconds. The soda and salt causes the creatures to calcify, perfectly preserved, as they dry.
I took these creatures as I found them on the shoreline, and then placed them in ‘living’ positions, bringing them back to ‘life’, as it were. Reanimated, alive again in death.”
See the haunting images in his book, which can be purchased thru Brandt’swebsite.
Be sure to join us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ to stay updated on our most recent posts!
Lake Natron is a salt lake found in northern Tanzania, near the Kenyan border over at the eastern branch of the East African Rift. The lake gets its life from the Southern Ewaso Ng’iro River as well as mineral-rich hot springs. These waters are believed to be treacherous, capable of turning any animal it touches to stone. This uncommon phenomenon is said to be caused by the chemical composition of the lake.
At less than three meters deep, it is relatively shallow, and changes in width depending on its water level. The levels change mostly because of high levels of evaporation, leaving a mixture of salts and minerals called natron behind. The nearby country around it is dry and gets irregular, seasonal rainfall.
The lake is situated within the Lake Natron Basin Wetlands of the International Importance Ramsar Site. Temperatures in the lake can go up to 60°, and the alkalinity can reach a pH of 9 to 10.5 or almost as alkaline as ammonia, depending on the amount of rainfall.
The hardened, petrified animals it leaves behind are just utterly terrifying in appearance. Nick Brandt photographed these frozen creatures in his new book entitled Across the Ravaged Land. The still, lifeless creatures can be found interspersed around the lake area. What is believed to be the culprit is the constant pH of 9 to 10.5 which is considered extremely alkaline, and can preserve living tissue for a long, long time.
Brandt had this to say of the eerie lake,
“I unexpectedly found the creatures – all manner of birds and bats – washed up along the shoreline of Lake Natron in Northern Tanzania. No-one knows for certain exactly how they die, but it appears that the extreme reflective nature of the lake’s surface confuses them, and like birds crashing into plate glass windows, they crash into the lake. The water has an extremely high soda and salt content, so high that it would strip the ink off my Kodak film boxes within a few seconds. The soda and salt causes the creatures to calcify, perfectly preserved, as they dry.
I took these creatures as I found them on the shoreline, and then placed them in ‘living’ positions, bringing them back to ‘life’, as it were. Reanimated, alive again in death.”
See the haunting images in his book, which can be purchased thru Brandt’swebsite.
Be sure to join us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ to stay updated on our most recent posts!
The brain may have its own way of easing social pain, according to a recent paper, and it involves the brain's natural painkiller system.
Combining brain scans with questionnaire results, they determined that people who score high on a personality trait called resilience – the ability to adjust to environmental change – had the highest amount of natural painkiller activation.
I love great art no matter the medium
"According to Nielsen, from data provided by managers at Nielsen SoundScan, which collects recorded-music sales information, of the eight million unique digital tracks sold in 2011 (the large majority for $0.99 or $1.29 through the iTunes Store), 94 percent - 7.5 million tracks - sold fewer than one hundred units, and an astonishing 32 percent sold only one copy. Yes, that's right: of all the tracks that sold at least one copy, about a third sold EXACTLY one copy. (One has to wonder how many of those songs were purchased by the artists themselves, just to test the technology, or perhaps by their moms out of a sense of loyalty.) And the trend is the opposite of what Anderson (Chris Anderson, author of 'The Long Tail') predicted: the recorded music tail is getting thinner and thinner over time. Two years earlier, in 2009, 6.4 million unique tracks were sold; of those, 93 percent sold fewer than one hundred copies and 27 percent sold only one copy. Two years earlier still, of the 3.9 million tracks that were sold, 91 percent sold fewer than one hundred units and 24 percent sold only one copy. The trend is clear: as the market for digital tracks grow, the share of titles that sell far too few copies to be lucrative investments is growing as well. More and more tracks sell next to nothing.
Equally remarkable is what is happening in the head of industry's demand curve. In 2011, 102 tracks sold more than a million units each, accounting for 15 percent of total sales. That is not a typo: 0.00001 percent of the eight million tracks sold that year generated almost a sixth of all sales. It is hard to overstate the importance of those few blockbusters in the head of the curve. And the trend suggests that hits are gaining in relevance. In 2007, 36 tracks each sold more than a million copies, together these tracks accounted for 7 percent of total market volume. In 2009, 79 tracks reached that milestone; together they make up 12 percent of the sales volume.
The level of concentration in these markets is so astounding, in fact, that it is nearly impossible to depict the demand curve: it disappears entirely into the axes... It is staggering to see how few titles at the top contribute to a significant portion of sales, and how many titles at the bottom fail to do the same. Those are the realities of digital markets. Assortments may become more and more expansive, but the importance of the few titles at the very top keeps growing, while average sales for the lowest sellers are going down.
The same patterns are visible in album sales. ...out of a total of 870,000 albums that sold at least one copy in 2011, 13 album titles sold more than a million copies each, together accounting for 19 million copies sold. That's 0.001 percent of all titles accounting for 7 percent of sales. The top 1,000 albums generated about half of all the sales, and the top 10,000 albums around 80 percent of sales. Deep in the tail, 513,000 titles or nearly 60 percent of the assortment, sold fewer than 10 copies each, together making up half a percent of total sales.
The numbers certainly do not come close to the trusted '80/20 rule' that many managers live by, which supposes that 80 percent of the sales tend to come from 20 percent of the products on offer. For music albums, it is close to an 80/1 rule - if we can speak about a rule at all. Even if we take a conservative estimate of what would be on offer in a bricks-and-mortar store at any given point in time, Anderson's predictions that long-tail sales will rival those in the head are far off.
Of course the goods in the long tail include not just true niche content but former hits as well. Sales of a blockbuster - even one on the scale of Lady Gaga's 'The Fame' or Maroon 5's 'Songs About Jane' - will eventually dwindle. Such products can now live forever online, even if they have long been cleared from the physical shelves. For old hits, then, digital channels may present a real opportunity. But the large majority of products in the tail were not very successful to begin with. Most of them, in fact, never met the bar for a release through traditional distribution channels. Or, in the case of individual music tracks, they are orphans of unbundling activity: now that online consumers can cherry-pick the most popular tracks on an album, the rest shoot quickly into the long tail."
Chart 1:
"In the recorded-music industry in 2011, more than 8 million unique digital-track titles together sold 1.271 billion copies... For instance, nearly 6 million titles - 74 percent of all unique titles - each sold fewer than 10 copies, accounting for only 1 percent of sales.
102 titles selling 1,000,000 copies or more/189,758,000 copies sold/15%
1,412 titles selling 100,000-999,999 copies/318,473,000 sold/25%
13,492 titles selling 10,000-99,999 copies/374,827,000 copies sold/29%
74,246 titles selling 1,000-9,999 copies/212,571,000 copies sold/17%
382,720 titles selling 100-999 copies/111,117,000 copies sold/9%
1,620,959 titles selling 10-99 copies/48,687,000 copies sold/4%
5,927,729 titles selling fewer than 10 copies/15,722,000 sold/1%"
Chart 2:
"In the recorded music industry in 2011, more than 800,000 unique album titles together sold more than 330 million copies (including both physical and digital copies)... For instance, 513,000 titles - 58% of all unique titles - each sold fewer than 10 copies, accounting for only 0.5 percent of sales.
13 titles selling 1,000,000 copies or more/23,287,000 copies sold/7%
387 titles selling 100,000-999,999 copies/93,992,000 copies sold/28%
4,229 titles selling 10,000-99,999 copies/114,949,000 copies sold/35%
21,042 titles selling 1,000-9,999 copies/61,493,000 copies sold/19%
87,986 titles selling 100-999 copies/27,032,000 copies sold/8%
251,566 titles selling 10-99 copies/8,261,000 copies sold/2%
513,146 titles selling fewer than 10 copies/1,558,000 copies sold/0.5%"
From Harvard Business School professor Anita Elberse's book "Blockbusters: Hit-Making, Risk-Taking, And The Big Business Of Entertainment":http://us.macmillan.com/blockbusters/AnitaElberse
I love great art no matter the medium
Real terror lurks in quiet darkness
The deadliest (and easiest to miss) critters lurk in dark silence, ready to strike with either the barest of warnings or none at all - and with absolutely fatal venom.
Some you've heard about, and so sit there and scoff. Yeah, big deal: rattlesnake, cobra, black widow -- either you can hear them coming, avoid going to India, or simply not stick your hands into dark places. They are nothing but annoyances: fatal only to the truly stupid, or very sick... But there are others, nasty little things as vicious and deadly as they are quiet and unassuming.
(this is Guineafowl Pufferfish (Arothron meleagris), via; top image credit: Shutterstock, via)
1. The Cone Snail: can kill you in less than 4 minutes
Say, for instance, you are happily walking through the low surf merrily picking up and discarding shells, looking for just the right one to decorate your desk back at the office.
With no warning at all, however, you feel a sharp sting from one of those pretty shells -- a sting that quickly flares into acrawling agony. With that quick sting, the cone snail's barbed spear has insidiously injected you with one of the most potent neurotoxins in existence.
(images credit: Richard Ling, Kerry Matz)
"The bright colors and patterns of cone snails are attractive to the eye, and therefore people sometimes pick up the live animals and hold them in their hand for a while."Meanwhile the snail may fire its harpoon, loaded with venom (the harpoon can penetrate gloves and even wetsuits)
Nerves short-circuited by this infinitesimally small amount of juice, in seconds the agony of where the stinger struck has faded into a heavy numbness. A relief, perhaps, but then it spreads and moments later the paralysis has seized the entire limb. Then the breathing troubles start ... and then, simply, your heart stops beating.
Yes, there are antivenoms available, but, frankly, with something that can kill in less than four minutes you'd have to carry it in your back pocket to survive. It wasn't just for their fondness for these pretty shells that lead the CIA to develop a weapon using this venom to dispatch enemies.
We'll be back to the ocean in a few paragraphs, but for the next dangerous denizen we have to visit the steaming Amazon:
2. Poison Arrow Frog: Lethal Touch
That frog over there, for instance: that tiny, brilliantly colored tree frog. Doesn't he look like some kind of Faberge ornament, there against that vermilion leaf? Wouldn't such a natural jewel look just gorgeous in a terrarium back home?
(images credit: Manuel; on the right is the similarly-colored Haliconia Bush)
(image credit: Edward Noble)
Pick him and you'll be dead in a matter of minutes. One second frolicking in the undergrowth, the next spasming and foaming on the jungle floor. No stinger, no bite, no venom: just the shimmering slime covering his brilliant body.
The natives in these parts capture these poison arrow frogs (carefully) and coat their blowgun darts with that slime and knock full grown monkeys out of the trees with a single strike. (read about other poisonous frogs here).
(left image credit: Adrian Pingstone)
"They are the only animal in the world known to be able to kill a human by touch alone." They can jump as far as 2 meters - "that's nearly 50 times their body length. That is like a 6-foot (1.8-meter) human jumping 300 feet (90 meters)" (source)
3. The lazy clown of the insect world.
Not a long distance from the deep green of the Amazon is southern Brazil. if you are a tired hiker after a good trek you'd want to rest a bit, to brace yourself against a tree for support. So what if you happen to touch a certain hairy caterpillar. It’s just a caterpillar, right? The lazy clown of the insect world. One problem, though: it happens to be a member of the lonomia family of moths.
(images credit: Anuska Nardelli, Diego Gonçalves)
The adult moth is just a moth, but the hairs of the caterpillar are juicy with nasty stuff, so nasty that dozens of people die every year from just touching them. By the way, it’s not a good way to go, either: their venom is a extremely powerful anticoagulant, death happening as the blood itself breaks down. Not fun. Very not fun.
(image credit: Ronai Rocha)
Many powerful predators are loud, almost comical: they parade their danger; sharks announce their presence with a steady da-dum, da-dum, da-dum of background music; rattlesnakes... well, they rattle; lions, and tigers, and bears roar and bellow...
But the real monsters are more devious than that; they lurk on the other side of invisibility, never make a sound, and kill you faster than the sounding of that first note in a shark's theme song.
4. Beaked Sea Snake
Another creature of nightmares that doesn’t come with a theme song is a strange import to the aquatic world. When you think snake you usually think of dry land. But if you go paddling around the Persian Gulf (or coastal islands of India) keep a wary eye out for the gently undulating wave ofEnhydrina Schistosa.
(images credit: Insatiable Dreams, Kozy & Dan Kitchens)
It might not look dangerous, if anything it just looks odd to see a snake swimming in the sea, but don’t let your fascination for a "creature of the dry that lives in the wet" hypnotize you into getting too close.
The Hook-nose (or beaked) sea snake, to use its less scientific name, has one of the most potent venoms known. How potent? Well, visualize 1.5 milligrams. Not easy, is it? Such a small amount. But that’s all the venom enhydrina needs to, well, leave you "swimming with the fishes", as the mob likes to say.
"The snake is also eaten as meat by Hong Kong and Singapore fishermen and locals alike". Yum.
5. Stone Fish waits for you to step on it
But it’s not time to leave the sea quite yet. There are two nasty things in the blue depths you should spend many a sleepless night frightened of. For the big one you’ll have to wait a bit, for the one right below it in terrifying lethality you just have to watch your step when you’re walking along the bottom of the ocean.
As you can see it's very hard to notice on the ocean floor:
(images credit: Jake Adams, Alan Slater)
Like all monsters it hides, camouflaging itself among the rocks on the bottom. It’s what’s called an ambush predator: a critter that waits until something juicy walks, or swims, by. But what it could do to you requires no motion at all.
All the stone fish has to do is just sit there on the bottom and wait for you to innocently step on it.
That’s all it takes: the spines on the fish’s back are like a parade of loaded hypodermic needles, each one carrying enough bad stuff to kill even a buff diver in a matter of minutes. But death is not really the worst.
The pain from a stone fish’s sting is said to be so horrible that sufferers have begged to have the pricked limb amputate rather than live with it for another moment.
In a word: Ouch!.
(image credit: Letho)
6. Box Jellyfish should really be called the "coffin" jellyfish
Cone shells, snakes, and caterpillars can be avoided, brilliant frogs warn of their fatality, and I’ve already warned you about the stone fish, but this last terror does not roar or display its danger at all. Let's take one final swim, shall we, this time off the coast of Australia?
Paddling in the crystal sea, enjoying the cool waters, the warm sun, it's easy to miss this monster, especially as it's almost as clear as the ocean. Chironex Fleckeri doesn't sound terrifying, does it?
(images credit: Ernst Haeckel, Zoltan Takacs)
Chironex fleckeri is a tiny jellyfish, only about sixteen inches long. It has four eye-clusters with twenty-four eyes; its tentacles carry thousands of nematocysts, microscopic stingers activated not by ill-will but by a simple brush against shell, or skin. Do this and they fire, injecting anyone and anything with the most powerful neurotoxin known.
- Broken tentacles remain active until broken down by time and even dried tentacles can be reactivated if wet;
- Box jellyfish are not actually jellyfish at all; they are the Cubozoans;
- Grows to about the size of a human head, and has tentacles up to three meters long;
(image credit: Michael Reeve, reefed)
As you can see on the top left of the image above, it's pretty hard to notice Chironex Fleckeri in the wild!
The sting of a Chironex Fleckeri, also called the sea wasp, has been described by experts as horrifying torment:
Stories abound of swimmers leaping from the cool Australian seas, skin blistered and torn from thousands of these tiny stingers, the venom scalding their bodies and plunging them into agonizing shock.
Luckily it doesn't last long... In fact, the burning pain is over in just about the time it will take you to read this last paragraph (and you don't have to be a phenomenally slow reader), not even enough time to reach shore and call for help.
And as the venom works itself into your system, causing your nervous system to collapse, you'll realize that there really are dangerous things out there that'll kill you by pure reflex, by just crossing their paths - things that are perhaps the easiest to miss.
Article by M. Christian and Avi Abrams, Dark Roasted Blend.
I love great art no matter the medium
The deadliest (and easiest to miss) critters lurk in dark silence, ready to strike with either the barest of warnings or none at all - and with absolutely fatal venom.
Some you've heard about, and so sit there and scoff. Yeah, big deal: rattlesnake, cobra, black widow -- either you can hear them coming, avoid going to India, or simply not stick your hands into dark places. They are nothing but annoyances: fatal only to the truly stupid, or very sick... But there are others, nasty little things as vicious and deadly as they are quiet and unassuming.
(this is Guineafowl Pufferfish (Arothron meleagris), via; top image credit: Shutterstock, via)
1. The Cone Snail: can kill you in less than 4 minutes
Say, for instance, you are happily walking through the low surf merrily picking up and discarding shells, looking for just the right one to decorate your desk back at the office.
With no warning at all, however, you feel a sharp sting from one of those pretty shells -- a sting that quickly flares into acrawling agony. With that quick sting, the cone snail's barbed spear has insidiously injected you with one of the most potent neurotoxins in existence.
(images credit: Richard Ling, Kerry Matz)
"The bright colors and patterns of cone snails are attractive to the eye, and therefore people sometimes pick up the live animals and hold them in their hand for a while."Meanwhile the snail may fire its harpoon, loaded with venom (the harpoon can penetrate gloves and even wetsuits)
Nerves short-circuited by this infinitesimally small amount of juice, in seconds the agony of where the stinger struck has faded into a heavy numbness. A relief, perhaps, but then it spreads and moments later the paralysis has seized the entire limb. Then the breathing troubles start ... and then, simply, your heart stops beating.
Yes, there are antivenoms available, but, frankly, with something that can kill in less than four minutes you'd have to carry it in your back pocket to survive. It wasn't just for their fondness for these pretty shells that lead the CIA to develop a weapon using this venom to dispatch enemies.
We'll be back to the ocean in a few paragraphs, but for the next dangerous denizen we have to visit the steaming Amazon:
2. Poison Arrow Frog: Lethal Touch
That frog over there, for instance: that tiny, brilliantly colored tree frog. Doesn't he look like some kind of Faberge ornament, there against that vermilion leaf? Wouldn't such a natural jewel look just gorgeous in a terrarium back home?
(images credit: Manuel; on the right is the similarly-colored Haliconia Bush)
(image credit: Edward Noble)
Pick him and you'll be dead in a matter of minutes. One second frolicking in the undergrowth, the next spasming and foaming on the jungle floor. No stinger, no bite, no venom: just the shimmering slime covering his brilliant body.
The natives in these parts capture these poison arrow frogs (carefully) and coat their blowgun darts with that slime and knock full grown monkeys out of the trees with a single strike. (read about other poisonous frogs here).
(left image credit: Adrian Pingstone)
"They are the only animal in the world known to be able to kill a human by touch alone." They can jump as far as 2 meters - "that's nearly 50 times their body length. That is like a 6-foot (1.8-meter) human jumping 300 feet (90 meters)" (source)
3. The lazy clown of the insect world.
Not a long distance from the deep green of the Amazon is southern Brazil. if you are a tired hiker after a good trek you'd want to rest a bit, to brace yourself against a tree for support. So what if you happen to touch a certain hairy caterpillar. It’s just a caterpillar, right? The lazy clown of the insect world. One problem, though: it happens to be a member of the lonomia family of moths.
(images credit: Anuska Nardelli, Diego Gonçalves)
The adult moth is just a moth, but the hairs of the caterpillar are juicy with nasty stuff, so nasty that dozens of people die every year from just touching them. By the way, it’s not a good way to go, either: their venom is a extremely powerful anticoagulant, death happening as the blood itself breaks down. Not fun. Very not fun.
(image credit: Ronai Rocha)
Many powerful predators are loud, almost comical: they parade their danger; sharks announce their presence with a steady da-dum, da-dum, da-dum of background music; rattlesnakes... well, they rattle; lions, and tigers, and bears roar and bellow...
But the real monsters are more devious than that; they lurk on the other side of invisibility, never make a sound, and kill you faster than the sounding of that first note in a shark's theme song.
4. Beaked Sea Snake
Another creature of nightmares that doesn’t come with a theme song is a strange import to the aquatic world. When you think snake you usually think of dry land. But if you go paddling around the Persian Gulf (or coastal islands of India) keep a wary eye out for the gently undulating wave ofEnhydrina Schistosa.
(images credit: Insatiable Dreams, Kozy & Dan Kitchens)
It might not look dangerous, if anything it just looks odd to see a snake swimming in the sea, but don’t let your fascination for a "creature of the dry that lives in the wet" hypnotize you into getting too close.
The Hook-nose (or beaked) sea snake, to use its less scientific name, has one of the most potent venoms known. How potent? Well, visualize 1.5 milligrams. Not easy, is it? Such a small amount. But that’s all the venom enhydrina needs to, well, leave you "swimming with the fishes", as the mob likes to say.
"The snake is also eaten as meat by Hong Kong and Singapore fishermen and locals alike". Yum.
5. Stone Fish waits for you to step on it
But it’s not time to leave the sea quite yet. There are two nasty things in the blue depths you should spend many a sleepless night frightened of. For the big one you’ll have to wait a bit, for the one right below it in terrifying lethality you just have to watch your step when you’re walking along the bottom of the ocean.
As you can see it's very hard to notice on the ocean floor:
(images credit: Jake Adams, Alan Slater)
Like all monsters it hides, camouflaging itself among the rocks on the bottom. It’s what’s called an ambush predator: a critter that waits until something juicy walks, or swims, by. But what it could do to you requires no motion at all.
All the stone fish has to do is just sit there on the bottom and wait for you to innocently step on it.
That’s all it takes: the spines on the fish’s back are like a parade of loaded hypodermic needles, each one carrying enough bad stuff to kill even a buff diver in a matter of minutes. But death is not really the worst.
The pain from a stone fish’s sting is said to be so horrible that sufferers have begged to have the pricked limb amputate rather than live with it for another moment.
In a word: Ouch!.
(image credit: Letho)
6. Box Jellyfish should really be called the "coffin" jellyfish
Cone shells, snakes, and caterpillars can be avoided, brilliant frogs warn of their fatality, and I’ve already warned you about the stone fish, but this last terror does not roar or display its danger at all. Let's take one final swim, shall we, this time off the coast of Australia?
Paddling in the crystal sea, enjoying the cool waters, the warm sun, it's easy to miss this monster, especially as it's almost as clear as the ocean. Chironex Fleckeri doesn't sound terrifying, does it?
(images credit: Ernst Haeckel, Zoltan Takacs)
Chironex fleckeri is a tiny jellyfish, only about sixteen inches long. It has four eye-clusters with twenty-four eyes; its tentacles carry thousands of nematocysts, microscopic stingers activated not by ill-will but by a simple brush against shell, or skin. Do this and they fire, injecting anyone and anything with the most powerful neurotoxin known.
- Broken tentacles remain active until broken down by time and even dried tentacles can be reactivated if wet;
- Box jellyfish are not actually jellyfish at all; they are the Cubozoans;
- Grows to about the size of a human head, and has tentacles up to three meters long;
(image credit: Michael Reeve, reefed)
As you can see on the top left of the image above, it's pretty hard to notice Chironex Fleckeri in the wild!
The sting of a Chironex Fleckeri, also called the sea wasp, has been described by experts as horrifying torment:
Stories abound of swimmers leaping from the cool Australian seas, skin blistered and torn from thousands of these tiny stingers, the venom scalding their bodies and plunging them into agonizing shock.
Luckily it doesn't last long... In fact, the burning pain is over in just about the time it will take you to read this last paragraph (and you don't have to be a phenomenally slow reader), not even enough time to reach shore and call for help.
And as the venom works itself into your system, causing your nervous system to collapse, you'll realize that there really are dangerous things out there that'll kill you by pure reflex, by just crossing their paths - things that are perhaps the easiest to miss.
Article by M. Christian and Avi Abrams, Dark Roasted Blend.
I love great art no matter the medium
7 Ways The Parents Of A Young Musician Can Help Their Child
2013 Vinny Ribas
Raising a child who shows music promise can be tricky at times. One reason for this is that he or she may have to deal with issues and circumstances that they may not necessarily be emotionally ready for, such as people critiquing their performances and getting more attention than their friends or siblings. The more a parent knows what to expect, the more prepared they are to handle each issue or situation as it comes up or prevent it altogether.
Here are 7 ways that you can support, encourage and protect your child:
- Give them the freedom to decide how far they want to go with their music. If it’s their choice, chances are they will enjoy the journey. If it’s your choice, and you’re pushing them beyond their comfort level, they may resent you and/or the fact that they are being pressured.
- Be sure that your child’s learning style matches up with his or her instructor’s teaching style. The pace they work at, the amount and nature of the homework that is given, and even the tone of voice the teacher uses can all affect your child’s learning and willingness to continue.
- Understand the amount of time, money and effort that you may need to invest in your child. Discuss this with anyone else involved in the child’s daily life (spouse, other children etc.) and get everyone on the same page. Set reasonable limits so that you don’t go overboard.
- Be sure that they still have balanced home and social lives. Some musicians become hermits, locking themselves away from everyone to practice for hours and hours on end. While there is nothing wrong with this kind of passion, it shouldn’t take over their entire lives.
- Learn enough about the business side of the music industry so that you and your child can both make healthy, wise decisions. This includes knowing the right instruments and gear to purchase, how to get a website at a reasonable cost and the fair price to pay for a recording session. It’s also important to know who should be working on commission and who normally gets paid for their services.
- Find a mentor with experience in the music industry; someone you can call on to ask question or get advice. Don’t make critical decisions without consulting an expert. You can join the hundreds of Linkedin groups geared towards musicians. There you can get advice on just about any challenge you might face. One valuable group is called ‘Parents of Young Musicians,’ and it is designed specifically to help you encourage, support, educate and protect your talented child.
- Do your due diligence on anyone who wants to manage or ‘develop’ your child. The industry is rampant with sharks who love to prey on parents who will do ‘whatever it takes’ to help their kids. Be sure they have a track record of accomplishing what you want them to do. Ask for and check references from other parents.
By knowing what your child is thinking and feeling at each stage of their musical development, you will be able to support him or her every step of the way. By knowing how the music industry really works, you can navigate it without being taken by people who feast on parents who will do anything to help their children.
© Vinny Ribas is the founder and CEO of Indie Connect, a worldwide business club for up-and-coming independent artists, songwriters and musicians. He is the author of the video series, ‘Help! My Kid’s A Musician!,’ which is designed to help parents of young musicians support, encourage and protect their talented children. During his 40+ year music career, Vinny has been a full time musician, artist manager, booking agent, songwriter and the Entertainment Director for the NV State Fair. He is a published author, a consultant to start-up businesses and a popular speaker at music industry conferences.n
I love great art no matter the medium
4 Reasons Right-Wing Christians Salivate for the End Times
October 11, 2013 |
While there’s much about the Christian right that’s difficult for the rest of us to understand, the preoccupation with the “end times” is close to the top of the list. The situation in Syria seems to be having the odd effect of amplifying this already strange tendency of fundamentalist Christians to cast around looking for evidence that they will be witness to the apocalypse. One-third of Americans believes that the Syrian conflict portends the end of the world.
What makes this even weirder is how many of them want this to be true. While speaking to Jan Markell on the radio show, “Understanding the Times,” Rep. Michele Bachmann predicted that the conflict in Syria was a sign that the world was going to end, because the President was arming rebels in that country: “This happened and as of today the United States is willingly, knowingly, intentionally sending arms to terrorists, now what this says to me, I’m a believer in Jesus Christ, as I look at the end times scripture, this says to me that the leaf is on the fig tree and we are to understand the signs of the times, which is your ministry, we are to understand where we are in God’s end times history.”
While she didn’t come out and say it, the implication was crystal clear to the audience: President Obama is the Antichrist and his actions are going to kickstart the final battle between good and evil that will bring the end of the world. While most of us would be alarmed if we thought we were facing down the apocalypse and a worldwide war that will kill millions, Bachmann can't wait: “Rather than seeing this as a negative, we need to rejoice, Maranatha Come Lord Jesus, His day is at hand.”
Bachmann isn’t alone in this belief that the end of days is something to be desired. Three out of four evangelicals believe Christ will return soon. This is, of course, mostly wishful thinking—they believe they’re seeing the end of the world because they want to see the end of the world. Why would anyone want that, when the Bible they believe in predicts it will be mass murder, hellfire, and every grotesque thing imaginable? Here are some reasons.
1. They don’t think they’ll be around for the worst of it. Modern American fundamentalist Christians believe in something that has never before been part of Christian tradition: the Rapture. The idea is that the true believers will be whisked away into heaven before the ugly parts of the end times begin. The idea was invented in the 19th century but only took off in the late 20th century because of pop culture products like the Left Behind series. AsChristian writer and critic of evangelical culture Fred Clark explained, it’s an “escapist fantasy” and a way to avoid having to consider the possibility that they may die.
Christian writers don’t really hide that this is what’s going on with end times hope. As blogger Nathan Jones said, “It is an amazing hope to have because we can know that as terrible as it is getting out there, believers in Christ don't have much longer to worry about it.”
2. The end of the world would mean they get to have the last word. One thing that’s indisputable is that if the apocalypse does come and it unspools as Christians predicted, they will have won the argument! As Doug Weaver, a professor of religion at Baylor, explained to the Washington Post, “I think history will tell you that end time predictions increase when people are being persecuted or feel persecuted.”
While conservative Christians are most definitely not being persecuted, watching their privileges decline often makes them feel persecuted. When you feel put upon, mocked and persecuted, the desire to show your opponents you were right all along can become overwhelming. So much so, that you’re willing to wish for a fiery apocalypse just so you can say I told you so.
3. It provides a distraction from and an excuse to avoid the real problems in the world. The appeal of apocalypse fantasies is mainly that they help believers avoid the fear of death. (A secular version of this can be found in zombie apocalypse stories, which work because the audience identifies with the survivors, not the people who die, i.e. zombies.) However, belief that the end times are near is used by conservatives all the time to direct their followers politically.
That’s what Bachmann was doing in that interview, using the belief in the end times to turn the audience against Obama and against his choices in Syria, without having to engage a real debate about what’s really going on. The prediction that the apocalypse is near has been used to defend everything from indifference to environmental concerns to opposition to Obamacare to preferred right-wing policies in the Middle East.
4. They want to see the non-believers punished and themselves instated as the rightful rulers of all mankind. In 1980, Pat Robertson laid out this hope bluntly, predicting that World War III and the end times were upon us, saying, “sorrow and bloodshed that will have no end soon, for the world is being torn apart, and my kingdom shall rise from the ruins of it.”
Or as Fred Clark said in his criticisms of the apocalypse fantasy books in the Left Behind series, “The authors' real message for those they regard as unsaved is to thumb their nose and do a little victory dance.”
This eagerness to see the non-believers punished is so strong in the Christian right that many are unwilling to wait until the so-called “Tribulation” described in the Left Behind books, and to a lesser degree the Bible, is upon us. That’s why, after any great tragedy, there is a rush of eager-beaver pastors willing to say this is what people have coming for being sinners, from Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson blaming “pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians” for 9/11 to John Hagee blaming the devastation of Hurricane Katrina on gay pride parades.
All of this is why someone who considers herself a good, loving Christian like Michele Bachmann can stand up and declare that the end of the world and all the violence predicted in the Bible is something to “rejoice” at. The popular hymn may state that “they will know we are Christians by our love,” but when it comes to right-wing fundamentalists, a better bet to know them is by their apocalyptic revenge fantasies.
I love great art no matter the medium