While I’m fairly certain my favorite creature on the planet is the cuttlefish, I have to say that I’m mighty pleased that evolution has favored us with the Vampyroteuthis infernalis or “vampire squid from Hell”. Take a look at this web page for more information. And hooray for cephalopods!
Einstürzende Neubauten first performed on April 1, 1980 in Berlin. They’re generally considered an “industrial” band, and that is a reasonable description of their sound, although most people think of industrial music as having more of a techno beat, e.g. Nine Inch Nails or Skinny Puppy. I would be tempted to classify their music as being similar to the futurist style of Luigi Russolo, in which the music is inspired by the sounds of human industry.
EN employs wide array of instruments of their own construction, along with found objects and some traditional instruments. Their music has a complex compositional style and the band has invented its own notation system for internal use when arranging and recording. The band’s name Einstürzende Neubauten means “collapsing new buildings” or “new buildings falling down”. Their logo is reputed to be an ancient Toltec design, and it happens to be tattooed on my right arm.
Back in 1988 I was a subscriber to “Guitar Player” magazine. In the back pages of each issue, the editors would review musical submissions from up-and-coming guitar talents. One of the big mentions that year was an enigmatic guitarist who called himself “Buckethead”. It’s generally believed that his real name is Brian Caroll, but he is something of a mystery. Buckethead wears a white plastic mask covering his face and a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket on his head. He is 6’6″ tall (over 7 feet tall with the bucket) and never speaks when on stage. And he claims that he was raised by chickens and lived in a chicken coop. Moreover, he is fascinated with Disneyland, particularly the Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean. His web site is essentially a strange haunted amusement park full of monsters and robots. Many of his CDs carry this theme as well.
read more…
For the past five years, I have been hosting all of my web sites at webhost4life. They consistently deliver great service and support, to the point where I regularly recommend them to friends, family and professional clients. The major selling points for me have been the level of flexibility with server-side technologies and languages, along with solid database support. In a single host account with them, I house six different web domains, each with databases and email accounts. They offer a simple control panel to manage the implementation of pre-written applications for blogging and merchandise catalogs, but I am always eager to dig in and write my own code (hence the implementation of this site). Webhost4life has been a handy place to write/test/deploy my library of classic ASP, ASP.NET/C#, and PHP code. Overall, I’m very satisfied with their service and have been delighted with their quick-response technical support.
