Brad Barrish

I try not to talk much about work-related stuff here, so you'll have to excuse me if I make fun of a particular artist we're doing something with. I was passing by a co-worker's desk who showed me their wikipedia page, which excerpted an interview with them.

In an interview with Blender magazine, the two expressed their disbelief in the process of evolution, with Aly saying, "Are they teaching that in schools now?", and AJ adding, "Evolution is silly. Monkeys? Um, no." Both Aly and AJ are home schooled.

Subsequently, moments later as I was browsing popurls.com, I stumbled upon the Top Ten Myths About Evolution.

Humans and great apes had a common ancestor about 5 million years ago Humans and monkeys had a common ancestor about 50 million years ago. Nowhere, except in the most illiterate anti-evolution literature, will you find a claim that humans evolved from monkeys.

Funny, eh?

I can't remember where I heard +/- for the first time, but it was recently and I'm in love with this song. Don't you love it when that happens? I haven't bothered to read much about them, but I know they've been around for years.  Boy Kill Boy has been a favorite around the office. The album is solid and this is one of the catchiest songs I've heard in a long time. Has this song been on The O.C. yet? It will be. You've been living under a rock if you didn't know the Thom Yorke album leaked last week. Of course I can't stop listening. It's political and pretty. We'll leave it at that. Lily Allen is buzzing all over the internets and you're about to hear why. Shayna already gave me shit about putting Angels & Airwaves on the mix, but umm, these mixes are for me. I ain't trying to impress. Ok, maybe a little. The new Hidden Cameras song is lovely. I wish I could have put it on the mix twice. And Vetiver is so dreamy. Those subtle hand claps! I'm a sucker for hand claps. Have a beautiful June.

01 +/- - Steal the Blueprints
02 Boy Kill Boy - Suzie
03 Hidden Cameras - Awoo
04 Psapp - Hi
05 Thom Yorke - Black Swan
06 Phoenix - Lost And Found
07 Keane - Is It Any Wonder
08 Headlights - TV
09 Angels And Airwaves - Do It For Me Now
10 Gonzalez Jose - Lovestain
11 Vetiver - Been So Long
12 The Black Heart Procession - Not Just Words
13 My Dad vs Yours - Law Of Unintended Consequences
14 Lily Allen - LDN
15 Mark Ronson - Just (Featuring Alex Greenwald)
16 The Roots - Don't Feel Right
17 DangerDoom - Sofa King (Remix)
18 Cloud Cult - Outside Of Your Skin
19 Editors - Orange Crush
20 Cribs - Mirror Kissers
21 The Futureheads - Fallout

I don't read AlterNet very often. I used to read it much more, but it started getting a little to left for me. Shocker, right? They just published an interview with Sam Harris, author of "The End Of Faith." He talks about how people need to be more rational and less relgious if we as humans want to overcome our differences. I agree with a lot of what he has to say.

Interpersonally, we don't challenge everyone's crazy beliefs about medical therapies or alien abduction or astrology or anything else. Yet if the president of the U.S. started talking about how Saturn was coming into the wrong quadrant and is therefore not a good time to launch a war, one would hope that the whole White House press corps would descend on him with a straitjacket. This would be terrifying--to hear somebody with so much power basing any part of his decision-making process on something as disreputable as astrology. Yet we don't have the same response when he's clearly basing some part of his deliberation on faith.

Apparently Colbert gave a fine commencement speech. I'm looking for the audio now. Perhaps Boing-Boing will post a link in the near future?

What the hell is going on in our country?!

The Pentagon has decided to omit from new detainee policies a key tenet of the Geneva Conventions that explicitly bans "humiliating and degrading treatment," according to knowledgeable military officials.

What's that one saying about actions speaking louder?

"The rest of the world is completely convinced that we are busy torturing people," said Oona A. Hathaway, an expert in international law at Yale Law School and a former law clerk to then-Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. "Whether that is true or not, the fact we keep refusing to provide these protections in our formal directives puts a lot of fuel on the fire. It makes people think we are violating these provisions left and right."

In case you missed it, Russia has lax copyright laws that allow allofMP3.com to exist. As you can probably imagine, there are some people that aren't happy with this.

I would pay good money to see Al Gore debate Bill Gray.

I saw An Inconvenient Truth this afternoon. It was a mature, and dare I say, balanced look at the problem of global warming. This isn't a political movie and whether you like Al Gore or not, you owe it to yourself (and the next generation) to see this film. It explains and illustrates in very simple terms why global warming is such an important issue. So much of what Al Gore says in the film is obvious, but it helped to have everything in one nice package. One of the greatest things about this film, and why I think it will appeal to so many people is that it isn't coming from a treehugger point of view. It's not alarmist, though much of what you'll see is quite alarming. It lays out what the realities are, based on hard scientific data and pictures to go along with it. And just when you feel like throwing your hands up in the air because we can't really do anything, it offers realistic ways in which we really can do something.

I always get this idealistic schemes going in my head on how to get more people to see this film. Here are some thoughts. Feel free to take them and run.

1. Take $300 that you might normally spend on something and place an ad on craiglist offering to buy tickets for people that would like to see the film, but can't afford it.
2. Write Al Gore and tell him you would like to screen the movie in cities it won't be showing in. You could start a college campus campaign where you lend out projectors and have gatherings of students that project the film on the sides of buildings like drive-ins. There's a company that does this and the name of it is escaping me.
3. Quit your day job and go work for Al Gore.
4. instead of getting that Audi or BMW you want, get something more efficient.
5. Write the CEOs of American car companies urging them to come out with more fuel-efficient cars

I had no idea that color photos existed during WWI. Pretty incredible.

When is live better than the original? goodhodgkins.com takes you through several songs where the live versions of songs are better than the original.