Hey kids, it is now nigh on Monday and that means that you will soon be enjoying another missive from the Rt. Rev. Fischer. This weekend the infamous acosta and I spent some time rocking out around Chicago. We definitely saw The Plastic Constellations at the Empty Bottle. That was quite the treat, and they definitely scored the first podcast track tonight. Other than that I am hoping that this podcast will lead to massive booty shaking. There are some very nice mashups by Party Ben which make the podcast courtesy of Dopefulhopefiend. If these are not enough to motivate you for uncontrolled dancing then I am going to assume that there is some mutation in your bootylicious receptors that is preventing you from full rump shaking. Until Friday:

1) The Plastic Constellations - The Best Thing - Crusades
2) Promo Release - Noir Blues to Tinnatus - Of Montreal
3) Annie and Will - Chewing Gum - [a duet]
4) Gorillaz vs. Cake [mashup] - Never Feel Good - The Party Ben Experience
5) White Stripes vs. Eric B. & Rakim [mashup] - Pump Up The Doorbell - The Party Ben Experience
6) Pixies - Holiday Song (Raleigh, NC - 6/12/2005) - Hey: Live Pixies
7) Gillian Welch - I Want to Sing That Rock and Roll - Time (The Revelator)

That’s it for now kids…

Posted by shollen for contentious younger brother, rhollen:

As we know from shollen’s most recent Sexy Science article , there are small (30 µK) fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background. While the article was intriguing I did find one error in it: there is a theory for these fluctuations in the CMB. The theory is known as the Sachs-Wolfe effect.

To fully understand the theory you must first have a basic understanding of what is happening in the universe today. First off, the time is 0.35 megayears after the big bang; the temperature of the universe is about 3000 K, the redshift z ≈ 1100, and there is a 30% chance of scattered showers. Also, the relative energy densities of dark matter, radiation and baryons is roughly 6.4 : 1.4 : 1, respectively. We can assume that the universe is only made of hydrogen, protons, electrons, photons and dark matter (helium was also present, but was thrown out of calculations to keep the respective vocal tones baritonistic). So now that we have a working universe, off to apply the theory.

The Sachs-Wolfe effect assumes that the present day universe is 26% dark matter (consistent with the benchmark model). The density of dark matter at the time of last scattering can be found using the Friedmann equation

ε_dm = Ω_dm (1+z)³

Where ε is the energy density of dark matter at the time of last scattering and Ω_dm is the percentage of dark matter in the universe at the present time according to the benchmark model. After plugging in our redshift z we obtain ε_dm ≈ 1.8 x 10¹² MeV m^-3compared to the ε₀ ≈ 5200 MeV m^-3 (energy density of dark matter now). This accounts for the grossly dark matter-dominated universe stated above.

Unless this dark matter was completely smooth the gravitational effects it would have would cause it to clump together. At the time of last scattering, consider a photon released in the center of one of these clumps. The photon would have to climb out of this “potential well” and in doing so would lose energy, causing the low energy fluctuations. Now consider a photon released at the edge of one of these clumps. The photon would be accelerated (blueshifted) by falling down the “potential hill” and gain energy, causing the high temperature fluctuations.

This picture of the universe is only valid on large scales. On smaller scales the effects of the “photon-baryon fluid” complicate matters more. The photon-baryon fluid, which is a sludge of hot baryonic matter and photons traveling at v < c, is affected greatly by the gravitational effects of dark matter. This clumps the fluid as well. When the fluid gets compressed enough by the dark matters gravitational forces, it’s pressure will push back outward working against the gravitational effects until the pressure force is less than the gravitational force. This causes “acoustic oscillations” in the dark matter clumps. Now again consider the release of photons in these clumps. If the clump is at maximum compression when a photon is released in the center of the clump, the photon will be accelerated (blushifted) outward with the expansion of the clump, causing energy gain. If the clump is at maximum expansion, the photon will be negatively accelerated (redshifted) by the compression of the clump, causing a loss of energy.

So there we have it, a working theory for both differences in energy on a large and small scale. The theory is not fully proven, since we don’t know how dark matter really reacts when placed in such situations. We are also assuming that the dark matter is not perfectly distributed at the time of the big bang. This is not a bad assumption since only a small discontinuity would cause this dark matter to clump. We also haven’t detected dark matter yet, but most physicists assume it is there. So, until a new theory is thought up by a younger and smarter sibling… I mean physicist, this is what we have to work with.

Just a quick note to let you know that I have been indulging in photo excursions a bit more frequently lately, and as a result, my gallery continues to grow. I will partially blame a Mr. Acosta for not giving me any sort of limit on webspace. Anyhow, you should know that I’ve been developing my stalking and portrait-theiving habits, and there are a ton more pictures of random people I don’t know, mostly under portraits. With some of these people I asked permission, most I did not. Those I asked, though, were surprisingly receptive despite my creepiness. One woman complained she didn’t look good in pictures, but I beg to differ.

A brewing project is the LA Metro and its passengers. No normal people ride Los Angeles public transportation, so this should prove to be an interesting survey. Stay tuned…

In an effort to keep myself well stocked with sleep I am keeping this short (this seems to be a more frequent trend that probably relates to MCAT studying). This is perhaps the most “non-cannon” podcast to date. It is short on songs yet long on time. We have no less than 3 that top the 8 minute mark, I believe. For a little background you should all take the time to look up things about Jeff Mangum and parts of his twisting musical history. He might be the closest thing that indie rock has to a messiah and hopefully he shall come again. There is also some relatively new stuff by David Thomas Broughton. I am still investigating this album and will probably write a full review at some point. It is more of the dogmatic neo-folk revival so I am instantly drawn to it and repulsed by it (thus is my curse). Monday’s podcast will probably traffic heavily in loud rock and punk music as a nice counterpoint/curative tonic so prepare yourselves for that. There may also be joint podcasting by myself and acosta for the Monday missive. Until then, enjoy:

1) David Thomas Broughton - Unmarked Grave - The Complet Guide to Insufficiency
2) Orange Twin Field Works Vol. 1 - [excerpt] - Orange Twin Field Works Vol. 1
3) Neutral Milk Hotel - Where You’ll Find Me Now - On Avery Island
4) Akron/Family - Future Myth - Angels of Light & Akron/Family

Cosmology is one of the hippest most active fields of physics these days, and this excitement has been reflected strongly in these monthly articles thus far. Other reasons for this trend in my coverage are that I currently have a pretty unique vantage point on the topic, and also that cosmology is nearly able hypnotize me. This month’s issue will continue in this fashion, but I will diverge a bit to discuss with you another aspect of my current interests in physics: levitating small animals–But first, I want to bring to your attention a mission that might just provide the next big bang in the field of cosmology: ESA’s Planck.

As a JPLer, I know next to nothing about what’s going on in the space industry in places on the Earth other than America (couldn’t be important), but awhile ago I started noticing all these signs around my lab that said “Planck Flight Hardware” and stickers in places to the same effect. It’s true that I didn’t think twice about not knowing what these pertained to for at least a month, when finally it all was packed up and taken away and its absence made me more curious about the matter. In fact, any noticeable action at JPL is considered a curiosity, despite the fact that the people I work with have built dozens–and are currently operating 17–spacecraft in the last three decades. Upon further research into this mystery, I found that my group at JPL was commissioned by ESA to build a cryocooler for Planck. It seems that this is what had been meandering about my lab.

The mission follows in the wake of COBE and WMAP and, fundamentally, the Nobel Prize winning accidental discovery made by Penzias and Wilson in 1963: bird sh** does not cause 2.7 x 10¹¹ Hz background noise in radio antennas. Regardless of how meticulously the antenna was cleaned of pigeon dung, the noise reading was persistent and also curiously independent of the position of the antenna. After consulting a theoretical cosmologist (practically lepers of the field of physics in the height of the quantum era) at Princeton, Robert Dicke, the mysterious background radiation was identified as the echo of the big bang, and had been predicted by Dicke’s group.

Almost overnight, cosmology, once viewed as a field for metaphysical outcasts of “real physics,” gained enormous prestige. The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), as it came to be called, was proof that there was once a huge and very uniform explosion that burped into existence the universe and everything that can possibly be conceived of. The big bang is the most perfect example of blackbody radiation, which was well understood at the time of the CMB discovery. The frequency of the cosmic background radiation corresponds to a blackbody temperature of 2.7 K. Remember that the universe itself is expanding, and therefore we have to consider a redshift when we study the frequency of the CMB today (T_CMB = T₀(1+z), z == redshift). This is good because it means that the temperature of the universe at the time of the big bang was (a lot) hotter than 2.7 degrees above absolute zero.

I mentioned that the radiation was uniform. Imagine an infinitely dense and uniform ball of quarks exploding. This ball of radiation has to cool a little before the quarks will drop to a lower energy state by forming electrons and protons, and lower still before those particles can form atoms (analogous to shooting a probe past a planet: if the probe has too much kinetic energy, it won’t be captured in orbit). Eventually you’ll get molecules and then we get into chemistry, so it gets boring and I’ll stop. But the mystery here is how–if everything is shot out uniformly–do we end up with structure in the universe? If you look into our sky, there are clusters of galaxies here and there, and empty space, and—bottom line—our universe is not uniform. This is where detail becomes important: there must have been some disturbance that broke the uniformity of the big bang and propagated to leave us with our clumpy cosmos. No theories or simulations can account well for the structure evident in our universe, and this is one of the most prominent problems in physics today.

The Cosmic Microwave Background is incredibly, but not entirely, uniform: there are very small fluctuations (1 part in 100,000) that represent how matter and energy were distributed when the universe was very young, and may provide us with a thread to follow back to the source of the universe’s structure. COBE, launched in 1989, was the first of the space-based instruments sent to study the CMB. It returned valuable images and data, but with insufficient accuracy to study the anisotropies. WMAP, the second mission sent to study the CMB, returned data with 45 times the sensitivity and 33 times the angular resolution of COBE.

ESA’s Planck (cool spacecraft model here!) will measure the CMB with resolutions of an unprecedented 10^-6 ΔT/T, providing us with the most detailed set of CMB data in existence, and hopefully the drastic improvements will lead to a better understanding of the causes and origins of the anisotropies of the early universe. By the way, most of the increased accuracy derives from having a very good cooling system to minimize stray radiation from the spacecraft itself. It should be clear from this that my group rocks. Now that you have a little background, and before I start rambling, I encourage you to read Planck’s (surprisingly concise) list of scientific objectives from ESA’s webiste.

I hope you’ve read to this point anticipating cruelty to small animals in dark magnets. This article became longer than expected, and the amount of energy I have left to spend on describing how a creature is levitated and what we learn from the experiment would not do justice to the topic. So I will leave you here, salivating with miniature images of violence flickering behind your eyeballs, and we shall move on to our physicist of the month (this monthly part of the article was entirely neglected last month), Robert Dicke. Elected to this status mostly because he has a very unfortunate name and that really shouldn’t be taken into consideration by the Nobel committee (tsk tsk), but also partly because his group set an upper limit on the temperature of the CMB, which has turned out to be one of the most important scientific discoveries of the 20th century.

Finally, I would like to point out that MOND was Slashdotted today and I provided you with extensive information on this in November. The attention was brought to Slashdot because of a theory that I don’t know much about, called scalar-tensor-vector gravity (STVG–terrible name), which is a spin-off of MOND and has been able to account for the huge (400,000 km) discrepancy in the position of NASA spacecraft Pioneer 10, among other discrepancies not able to be reconciled with dark matter theories, or raw general relatively, for that matter. Coincidentally, the most significant theoretical issue for all three of these theories of gravity and mass distribution is that none of them can account for the structure that we see in the universe. Planck will hopefully continue to bulldoze through this mystery, closely following the progress made by COBE and WMAP.

Errata: I imply that electrons are made up of quarks. As far as can be told at this time, electrons are in fact fundamental, indivisible particles (and waves). Thanks to rhollen for this insight.

I’d like to update everyone on the effect Wordpress 2.0 has had here at vdov.net.

The most important new feature as far as I am concerned is comment spam filtering. Wordpress 2.0 employs the Akismet comment/spam filtering system, which I have to say does an absolutely marvelous job. I’ve caught 5 spam comments in the past few days and nothing unwanted has gotten through. Kudos to the Akismet and the Wordpress development team.

The second most (important) noticeable change is the WYSIWYG text editor for authors on the site. This has had mixed reviews, and after having played with it a bit … well, I hate it. So I turned it off. It’s just freakin’ annoying and I know what I’m doing enough to be able to post without pretty graphics guiding my way. Those of you who are authors, if you still want to use it you’re welcome to … just go to your user preferences in the admin panel and turn it back on. I just set the global default to ‘off’.

The main purpose of this post however is not to update you on Wordpress but instead to elicit your aid. This web site has really been getting a whole lot bigger and better in the past year, and changes are in order and are desperately needed. No longer is it reasonable for us to do an interview or album review and let the content die into the ether as the blogroll moves forward. It just won’t work. For now, I’ve increased the number of posts you see on the front page of vdov.net, but I’m very seriously looking for suggestions for new content management systems. We need a great way to display all album reviews. We need a great way to display all interviews. And it must be content manageable. There are too many authors to do individual pages.

Point being, please impart your knowledge. How should I do this? I’m looking in the direction of you technical people who might have an idea or system in mind. Cheers.

Most of the time I’m sitting around with my computer, I’m online. I’m always online. I can’t not be online. But recently I’ve spent a lot more time aggregating feeds in an RSS news reader. I’ve supported RSS and Atom (all versions, etc.) here at vdov.net since its inception — personally however, I’ve never been a fan. I decided to take the plunge more to save myself time during the day than for anything else. This was about 3 weeks ago.

Slowly over the past 3 weeks I’ve added new feeds, in new categories, for different purposes. Now I’m aggregating over 75 feeds and I have them set to check automatically every 30 minutes. I would have set it to check every 5 minutes like my mail application does, but unfortunately my favorite RSS reader for Mac doesn’t support custom times. Seriously, what’s up with that NetNewsWire? Fix it …

Each 30 minutes somewhere in the area of 50-60 new articles show up. Of course this depends on the time of day, but I’d say that’s a pretty good estimate. Each time new articles come in I set forth reading, reading, reading. I can’t get enough. In fact, 10 minutes later when I’ve read each article I find interesting, I am COMPLELLED to click the refresh button to see if anything new has been posted in the past 10 minutes. I have often found myself sitting at my desk, during time when I should be being productive, simply clicking the refresh button over and over and over until a new article or post shows up.

This, I’ve found, is mildly like I would expect heavy addiction to feel like. I am, quite literally, addicted to information. This is an incredible new phenomenon. I read probably somewhere over 500 individual articles or news stories per day, yet that isn’t enough. I have to have more. I have to add more feeds — I need more information. My father is a very high-end newspaper editor, and I’m absolutely sure that even while obtaining my Ph.D. in Chemistry here at Purdue, I read many more news articles per day that he could in a week. It’s all about efficiency. RSS aggregators are simply too efficient. They’re too good at feeding my addiction. I have to cut myself off. I have to. But I won’t — it’s too good.

We are on fire over here at vdov.net and by that I mean we are rolling out another original interview. This time we depart from the normal musical genre and delve into the seedy, yet glorious world of artists. You may have heard of the strange gnomish people in fairytales told at bedtime or legends around the camp fire. I am here to tell you that these semi-magical creatures endowed with such woundrous powers as “creativity” and “+3 saves” are very real and walk amongst us even now, leaving behind presents for good little boys and girls that give them money and provide a mailing address.

I am proud to say that I am the current owner of three prints by the interviewee, one Dan McCarthy. He is a spritely 29 year old hailing from Cape Cod. He went to Boston and attended the School of the Musuem of Fine Arts, studying drawing and printmaking: etching, lithography, wood block and screen printing. He worked in graphic design until the Black Wednesday (the great graphic design crash of 2004). He is now a freelance artist, which is exactly as awesome as it sounds. He must be doing something right, because he was able to con even my cynical self into trading my hard earned cash for some scraps of inked up paper. (I would be lying if I didn’t say that I was practically dying to get my hands on the prints). Now on to the inquisition:

An appropriate first question: when did you decide that art was what you wanted to do?
I think i’ve always wanted to be an artist. Art has been a part of my life ever since I was young. My mom is an artist/musician and I grew up in a very creative environment. Me, my brother, sister and friends were always creating something, whether it was music or art.

What do you do besides art?
Lately I’ve been collecting re-issued skateboards from the 80’s. Nintendo is always fun when i have the time. I collect bicentennial quarters, and I like to watch really bad T.V.

Classically trained or learn as you go?
Am I “classically trained?”…sort of/not really… I do know about color theory and I studied the figure all through out art school. I’ve never taken a formal graphic design class. Most of what i have learned is
through trial and error.

You seem to have very distinct themes (houses, trees, power/telephone poles, skeletons). Any reasons behind them?
With power/telephone poles, I like to draw attention to things that are usually overlooked or ignored. My goal is to have the viewer of my art look at their street in a different light. Trees and power lines I think
of as opposites in a way… like symbols of nature and technology, and I think the lines both of them compliment each other nicely: power lines tend to be more rigid and straight and trees are more natural and random. The houses in my work represent comfort and safety. Power lines, trees and houses are things that you can find on almost every street around the globe. It’s exciting to me to think that people all over the world can relate to my art in the same way.

Skeletons create a narrative in my work. They bring up the questions why? and what happened? I am also trying to change the way people see death. I don’t see death as an absolute end but a new beginning to other things. Also, skeletons and death are something that every human can relate to.

Vdov.net writes a lot about independent music. You make a lot of band posters. What kind of relationships do you have with different musical artists? Are you “down” with any bands?
Most of the posters I make are for my band Helms. I’ve made friends with a lot of bands through playing shows…a few bands i am “down” with that you may know: Ted Leo and The Pharmacists, The Mercury Program, Album Leaf, Victory at Sea.

What are your favorite bands?
Lately… Scout Niblett, Constantines, Sigur Ros
Past 5 years… Blonde Redhead, Radiohead, Cat Power, The For Carnation, Papa M, The Shins, The Strokes
Past 15 years… Melvins, The Jesus Lizard, Bitch Magnet, PJ Harvey, Slint, Tortoise, Shellac, Rapeman, Don Caballero, Rodan
And some classics… Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Bob Marley, Television, Velvet Underground, Fugazi, Nomeansno

Who are your biggest artistic influences?
Chris Ware has definitely influenced me a lot, and Frank Kozik and Derek Hess inspired me to start screen printing.

Who are your favorite artists?
Leonardo da Vinci, Hokusai, Van Gogh, Egon Schiele, Windsor McKay, Chris Ware, Charles Schultz, Edward Gory

Vdov.net also writes a lot about technology and science. How do you find that technology has impacted you? (I found out about your art completely via the internet)
Technology has impacted me greatly. I can’t imagine what it was like for artists before the internet. These days it’s so easy just to have your work up on a website for the world to see.

Do you find that there is a positive interaction between independent visual artists and independent musical artists?
Yes, usually. Sometimes there can be a clash of interests and i’ll have to make a lot of revisions (which can get annoying).

What is your current biggest annoyance with what you do?
Going to the post office.

What is your favorite aspect?
I don’t have to wake up to an alarm clock.

Lastly, do you have any upcoming shows/events/new art/etc?
I have some prints hanging in the Graphic Noise Exhibit. It started at the Museum of Design in Atlanta last summer and it’s working it’s way all over the country. Right now it’s in Minneapolis then Philadelphia, Houston, Omaha and Boca Raton.

If you are a vdov.net staff writer then you probably already know how awesome posting in Wordpress 2.0 is, if not… well you can only hope to be so cool. I am keeping this one uber short so as not to bury the AWESOME interview with local Chicago rockers Bird Names.

1) Them - Mystic Eyes - The Story of Them
2) Dj Js1 - Audio Technitian - Amoeba Music Compilation Vol. 5
3) Bird Names - Snow - Fantic Yard
4) Why? - Waterfalls - Elephant Eye Lash
5) Cockamamie - Pants - Amoeba Music Compilation Vol. 5
6) Wooden Wand - Babylon the Great Pt. 3 - Harem of the Sundrum & The Witness Figg
7) John Wilkes Booze - Meanwhile at the Hideout - Five Pillars of Soul
8) M.I.A. - Fire Fire - Arular

As always you can reach the Rt. Rev. at rtrev -at- vdov -dot- net

I have great news for our faithful readers. I was able to wrangle an interview from Bird Names who I have recently been spinning and writing about here at vdov.net.

A little background about the band by the band:
The Bird Names formed properly November of 2004, when Albert Schatz with a head full of prog assumed the saddle of psychedelic violinist Andrew Royal (who headed west to study maritime law) in a like-minded group named by turns: The Culinary Arse, The Terrible Mystery, More Dangerous Than Spiders. This group featured too multi-instrumentalists Colin Hartz, Eric Siegel, and David Lineal, friends all from high school, and called their corpus, a steady stream of low-fi recordings, sprung from the strange summer of ‘04 and on and on. The Bird Names called themselves such because they thought it connotatively neutral to fill up. [certainly more neutral than 'the names', which sits well with the linguistic interests of certain band members.]

Naomi Caffe, David’s long-time musical accomplice at Grinnell College (where both studied russian), placed her hat in the ring summer 2005, and the thick ambling of our live sound came moreso; The Bird Names tottered still from noise to pop both smartly and wrongly. In august The Names put out a heterodox collection of recordings of divers vintage and fidelity called ‘Fantic Yard’, which fights away silence for its storied length. [18 tracks and 17 songs!]

Schools attended not mentioned in the above block paragraphs: colin went to NYU for philosophy, Albert went to Depaul for history, Eric has been going to various city colleges (Robert Morris, more) for photography and printmaking.

On your website (myspace page) you list neither influences nor “sounds like.” After hearing you play I can understand that. In lieu of that what are your favorite bands? (both currently and all time)
Fela Kuti, Neil Young, Pram, Glenn Miller, Can, Electric Eels, Slim Whitman.

Do you have day jobs or is music a full time job?
We work. Our jobs reflect our lack of credibility as human beings, from faceless office fu** to the hegemonic stoogery of teaching kids. Day by day we dream less and less of girls and more and more of not working.

What do you guys do besides music?
Raw food dieting, amateur opinion-having, historical rumination, low television, speculum glancing, badminton, swear, speak incoherently about husserl, misogyny, play writing, love-making, recreational drug using, story telling, laughing, introspection, driving, lamenting, growing older, enjoying music.

You seem really happy to make music even if you are pretty self depricating about your sound. Some people seem to have a hard time coming to grips with the noisiness of it and real difference from more conventional sounds. How would you describe the music you make? What do you like best about being in the band?
Our music isn’t appreciably different from most American popular music ever created. Its the difference between Ernest Tubb and Jimmie Rodgers. Sure Ernest’s music came in frillier dress than Jimmie’s, his voice less dynamic, his songs arguably more agreeable to the modern ear, but Jimmie’s rubric of framing tiny pieces of harmony and melody in repetition persists through his oeuvre. While we would never pretend to approach the soulfulness of Ernest Tubb, we follow him following in Jimmie Rodger’s footsteps, and seek like these men to isolate compelling aspects of the world’s mystery in simple arrangements of sound.

That said, we do not employ the Andrew Sisters — if only for a lack of logistical means — to couch our song in dulcet female harmony, nor the tearful wail of the pedal steel, but translate these inflections in stingy noises, and like things that happen in low-fidelity space. The tension between the repelling strange and snagging catchiness of pop, of sh**-thunder and being rocked, is what we crosshair, and occasionally successfully purvey.

As for seeming happy to produce music: we are. The dominant trait of the band, for our divergent musical tastes, aspirations, and musical limitations, is a shared sense of play; ludic interaction is the sorcerer’s stone for our getting musically along. In the sense of being dominated by attitude, we’re punk rock, but instead of being charged by rebellion or anger, we’re motored by celebration.

What kind of plans do you have? Anything coming up? New album? Project?
We hope to continue to write and record songs with diseased industry, play out in Chicago and the midwest, and tour about the South and East in late-spring, to the end of garnering whatever crumbs of credibility might fall to our floor, that might salve the wearisome logistics of being a relatively unknown band. We’ve muttered amongst ourselves about starting work on a new album, and been greasing and shaving our legs, too, ready to flash some great space of thigh to interested labels.

Where can people see you guys play next?
Saturday, February 11th, we’re playing at the Open End Gallery (2000 w. fulton), with local luminaries the Hot Love and Shopping. The Friday before, February 10th, we’re cohosting a radio program on WNUR 89.3 for the station’s fundraiser; listen for post-ironic editorial, deep cuts from David’s organ record collection, and some a cappella numbers. It starts at 6:30pm.

Where can people get your merch?
In Chicago, both Reckless Records locations carry ‘Fantic Yard,’ as well as High Fidelity. You can buy it on the internet, too. Of course, we also have tunes for your casual, online perusal.

And finally… is there anything else you want to add? Random screed? Short manifesto? Tale of adventure?
Oh, a few words on our album. In August 2005, we Bird Names self-released our debut album, called ‘Fantic Yard’, on our label, Heavy Medley. The album is a compendium of what had been groomed as a seven song E.P. of new material and select tracks from fifteen months of home and live recordings. In the resultant interfingering of strange sonic waters, of high-fidelity bombast and low-fidelity bombast, we had hoped to demonstrate the scope of our vision, the places where we’d go exploring and hunting. We think its a pretty solid sampler, especially for stoners and the socially affected. [but, in my experience, people who aren't stoned are more likely to buy it.]

Ok that is all we have from The Bird Names for now. Also you had better believe I will be at that February show (perhaps with my little brother if it is as it appears “all ages”) and hopefully listening to the WNUR show as well.

Finally, I’ve taken the time to upgrade to Wordpress 2.0. It was really easy … mostly. Actually I tried this a number of times in the past few weeks always with no results. As it turns out, on Debian/etch, it works very nicely if you’ve upgraded to php5 and mysql5, and works less-than-well on php4 and mysql4. So, to all those on Debian thinking of going to Wordpress 2.0, I’d suggest a little backend upgrade before taking the plunge.

There aren’t any visable enhancements yet to the site proper, just really nice things for those of us who write for the site. If you’re an author here, go check it out now! You’ll like it. There should be some noticeable performance benefits to you out there on the web. Hopefully sometime soon I’ll have a chance to finally do the design/layout upgrade I was hoping to do about a month ago. Cheers.

UPDATE: I’ve updated dopefulhopefiend.com to Wordpress 2.0 now as well. I had a lot of trouble getting it to work right so you may have noticed some strange behavior for about an hour. But all is good. Beware of the 2.0 wp-content/cache if you’re doing multiple blogs!

It’s Thursday night and that means new Friday episode of the indie sermon. I believe that if things work out I will very soon be properly listed in the iTunes music directory. So you can look forward to letting your friends know how to get the show the easy (almost wretchedly so) way. Tonight’s podcast has appearances by Bird Names and Wooden Wand which I have recenlty written about. If you don’t already know you should be getting some Wooden Wand Albums (i.e. Harem of the Sundrum…) because I have been leaving hints all over the place. I also play the Bound Stems who will be playing here in Chicago tomorrow. I may go and give a short update about the show. There is some emo (the good… kind) from the band Why? who has made some top 10 lists recently. This song is also a love song to a girl which flies in the face of recent commentary on the prevelance of woman hating in emo, which I coincidently disagree with. The last song this week is from Akron/Family and Sam Ubi of Pitchfork has written a good review of the album and there may be some news soon of a proposed project with Ubi and vdov.net friend Bob Hammond. I will definitely keep my ear to the ground on that one. Also, as a side note, there may be an interview in the works with the members of Bird Names so maybe we will get to hear in their own words why they are so dang awesome. So until Moday:

1) Bird Names - Damnation - Fantic Yard
2) Wooden Wand - Eagle Claw - Harem of the Sundrum & The Witness Figg
3) Viva K - Does It Matter? - Viva K
4) Bound Stems - Wake Up, Ma and Pa Are Gone - The Logic Of Building The Body Plan EP
5) Why? - Gemini (Birthday Song) - Elephant Eye Lash
6) Akron Family - Raising the Sparks - Akron Family/Angels of Light

As always you can reach the Rt. Rev. at rtrev -at- vdov -dot- net and I play requests, I love new music info, and I am always open to suggestions/critique. Let me know…