You're right with 30 Rock; Liz's ex-boyfirend was The Pager King. "I'm expecting a phone call from 1983."

Um... this is the wrongest thing in Wrongtownland....

You know the Johny Cash video for his cover of Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt"? This is a parody. Starring Kermit the Frog: [link]

NSFW because of drug use. And sex. Seriously, if you don't want your memories of Kermit sullied, don't watch this. OTOH, it is pretty damn funny, in a sick and wrong way....

Wow, that's amazing. I got a bit verklempt when they showed the photo of Kermit and Henson in the background.

More (unrelated) NIN internet stuff, from one of my favorite science blogs:

The trick is figuring out how to visualize sound in order to analyze it scientifically. Acousticians do this by turning sound waves into spectrograms. Wikipedia tells me that "the spectrogram is the result of calculating the frequency spectrum of windowed frames of a compound signal. It is a three-dimensional plot of the energy of the frequency content of a signal as it changes over time." Whatevs. We prefer to think of it as a live-action visual depiction of a sound wave traveling through space over time. It's basically the aural equivalent of a telltale fingerprint of any given signal, whether it be an animal's cry, speech processing, or -- in the case of the image shown -- a violin.

There's different ways to plot a spectrogram, but in general, the horizontal axis denotes time, and the vertical axis denotes frequency. That's two dimensions. The third plot point is the amplitude of the sound wave (which roughly corresponds to decibel level), or intensity. In the above spectrogram, intensity changes are depicted by using changes in color, but there are computer modeling programs that can create truly 3D visual representations of a sound wave.

Even better: it's a two-way process.There are also a plethora of computer programs capable of turning a digital image into sound, including (for all the hard-core geeks out there, these are for Mac, Windows and Linux, respectively) MetaSynth, Coagula, and Enscribe, as well as JavOICe (a Java applet). So those who create electronic music can "hide" images in their tunes.

We're mostly talking relatively obscure electronic artists who do this, but Internet rumor has it that a leaked MP3 version of "My Violent Heart" -- a track from an upcoming Nine Inch Nails album, Year Zero -- ends with a few seconds of static. Analyze that static in a spectrogram and you'll end up with the image of a hand reaching down from the sky. Spooooky. The cerebral wags in the band might also have included an MP3 of crickets chirping on a second track, "Me, I'm Not," that reveals the number 216-333-1810 when fed through a spectrogram. Trent Reznor's home phone number, perhaps? Who knows? This the 21st century technological equivalent of back-masking, or the Beatles' hiding "Paul is Dead" in a track off one of their later albums.The NIN album comes out April 17th, and it'll be interesting to see if there's any basis to the rumor.

Cool. Anyone played with this software?

Actually, the whole blog entry has lots of cool science-y stuff on music, as well as a discussion of:

Capoeira, a Brazilian martial art noted for its acrobatic movements and kicks. In recent years, the style has become hugely popular in North America and Europe, in large part due to its unique blend of music, dance, athleticism, and martial arts strikes and dodges.

[link]

You know the Johny Cash video for his cover of Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt"? This is a parody. Starring Kermit the Frog

Pretty incredible, but they need a better Kermit voice. That sounded more like Kermit's nephew (memfaulting on the name).

Robin.

Captain Beefheart to tour: [link]

(be sure to check out the photo credit at the bottom)

Today's Dinosaur Comics has a music theme: [link]

(Jon especially should check it out.)

What's the story behind this? I am super-amused.

Ha! Thanks, Tommy. Whenever I try and hum the theme for \"Cheers\", it comes out as the theme to \"Flaming Moe\'s\".

I\'ve mentioned that the Lothars recorded a Clash cover (\"The Call Up\") for a Sandinista tribute album that\'s coming out next month, right? We recently has a little scare. The producer of the project sent me an advance copy of the CD and our song was mastered AT THE WRONG SPEED! It ended up about 8% faster than what we recorded and submitted. I figured out that the mastering engineer he used must have input our song at 48khz instead of 44.1khz (two common bit rates used in digital recordings). It\'s the sort of error that a novice might make, but this engineer has a top notch resume.

Anyway, THANKFULLY, the CDs hadn\'t been manufactured yet (except for some advance copies for press and the bands involved). They were able to remaster the CD and it now sounds great. Whew!