A Slight Delay

Okay, here’s a review that will probably be useless to a lot of people. I’m posting it mostly for the handful that may find it useful.

As someone who goes bald (voluntarily) from time to time, I find the HeadBlade to be a pretty handy little item. Traditionally, a straight razor is supposed to give the best shave, but to be honest, the prospect of using one gives me the willies; I think my head would end up looking like a well-marbled New York strip steak, which wouldn’t be a good thing. That’s where the HeadBlade comes in. There are two designs: the Classic, which uses standard 2-blade Atra cartridges, and the Sport, which uses a triple blade, and comes with a set of little wheels (somewhere there’s an awful lot of Matchbox cars on little tiny cinderblocks). It’s thoughtfully designed, a hell of a lot easier to use than a conventional razor when you’re trying to de-fuzz your dome. (more…)

Okay, maybe you don’t need a potato ricer, as such. But once you have one, it’s a bit like having a microwave oven; you’re not sure what you did without it. If, when you’re mashing potatoes, you wonder how long it’s going to be before you end up with a repetetive strain injury, a potato ricer will be a welcome addition to your kitchen arsenal. Mine cost all of ten bucks, purchased at Target. You can also get a Potato Ricer on Amazon for the same price. The construction’s simple: picture a garlic press on steroids. And it’s easy to use, too. Boil your taters, stick ‘em in the ricer, and squeeze, and you’ve got perfectly fluffy, non-lumpy, mashed potatoes. They require less labor, and less butter and milk, than they would if you used a masher. Cleanup of the ricer pictured is easy, too, since the part that holds the potatoes removes easily for cleaning. See the next entry for a recipe to road-test your ricer.

I’m suspicious of anything I see advertised on television. So I’d been skeptical for a while about the George Foreman Grill, in any of its guises; if television advertising is cause for suspicion, then a celebrity’s name attached to a product is the kiss of death.

On the other hand, when you live in an apartment with no balcony, no patio, and not quite enough room to swing a cat, it’s not like you can set up a gas grill in the living room. So we caved in and bought the G5, the latest incarnation of the George Foreman Grill. (more…)

The promotions make it sound so enticing: motion pictures and events on demand, high picture quality, a variety of channels, and service that rivals cable. Then there’s the tagline: “Friends don’t let friends subscribe to cable.” Let’s just say that after having their service for nearly a year now, I know why so few of my friends and family have DirecTV. The channel selection’s not what it’s cracked up to be, picture quality is merely passable, and the service… well, I’ll let one story stand in for the several I could tell about the nail-biting experience that is DirecTV.
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A couple of years ago, when I picked up White Limousine by Duncan Sheik, I was surprised to find that it came with a DVD packed with .WAV files, and Ableton Lite. Anyone who wanted to could remix any of the album’s songs, leaving aside for the moment the fact that when one hears the word “remix,” Mr. Sheik’s name isn’t usually the first that leaps to mind.

But I digress. Many artists put up isolated tracks from their tunes in order that fans can do what they please with them. 808 State comes to mind, as do the tracks David Byrne and Brian Eno put on a dedicated site around the time that “My Life In The Bush of Ghosts” was re-released. Other artists, such as Bill Laswell, David Torn and Martin Atkins, have released sample sets for Cakewalk, ACID, and other DAWs. This was the first time, though, that I’d seen someone put up the whole kit n’ kaboodle, with the disc, and at a reasonable price.

A few years on, we have a followup. Trent Reznor has offered the backing tracks from his music before, but with Y34RZ3R0R3MIX3D / [CD/DVD Combo] he’s put out an LP’s worth of remixes, and the individual backing tracks for each. Not only are the remixes themselves of a much higher quality than he’s done in some time, the samples (and the entirety of his new album, Ghosts I-IV) have been released under a Creative Commons license, which should go some way toward encouraging some creative responses to his music. Here’s hoping that other artists follow suit.