Crickets Chirping

Oscar maintains that ‘Space is Cool’.

I still don’t think we should send anything to Mars, manned or otherwise. Unless the CIA can manufacture plausible evidence to suggest that Martians are hiding Saddam’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, or that Osama Bin Laden may be hiding behind one of those big red rocks, our tax dollars have more immediate problems to address. Sure the pictures are neat, and the technological side-effects of getting there will create products that benefit everyone like Tang and Velcro.

Really though, the neat little side effects don’t justify the cost and neither does the ultimate goal of the program. What could they possibly discover there? Even if they found pure gold, it wouldn’t be economical to bring it back.

I suggest that we should replace the “Mission to Mars” with the “Mission to Eradicate Malaria“. Redirect all that Mars funding into un-manned remote vaccination vehicles or something like that. We’ll get press conferences featuring wonderful pictures of kids that aren’t sick, instead of more lame pictures of a Martian landscape where the most interesting feature is the probe itself.

I have to admit that my only real reason for bashing Mars exploration is Steve Squyres. Paranoid conspiracy theories aside, I just get a bad feeling about the guy. He reminds me way too much of Kent from the movie Real Genius.

Apologies to Gil Scott Heron for ripping off “Whitey on the Moon“

Saturday night I went to Stubbs to see some local Austin bands- Single Frame, This Microwave World and Oliver Future. Single Frame sounds like Fugazi meets Devo, but I think they sound better in the studio than they do live based on this show. Oliver Future really impressed me. I’ll probably go see them again.

While I was wandering around between bands, I ran into Booher from Zykos. I asked him if he knew of anyone looking for a bassist and he shrugged, “yeah, I might. people always tell me they’re looking for other people to play with but I just forget it all.” I said he should try to keep a spreadsheet since he gets this kind of question all the time. That’s when it hit me. I haven’t found a single date on Friendster, but I did find a drummer there.

Someone should run with this. Jamster? Bandster? You list what instrument(s) you play, what style of music you want to make, the distance you’re willing to travel to practice/play and so
on. It also keeps track of what bands everyone’s been in so you get some background too. With all this information, it can match you up with bandmates.

Yeah right like we need another social network service. I hope one of the bunch I’m on adds this as a feature. I would use it.