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Hurricane Gustav is bearing down on Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. God help them.

Jazz trio from Jersey. Click here to be taken to their website. I was introduced to their music while driving back from a gig with my old band. The music was playing on my favorite radio station, KFCF, 88.1 FM out of Fresno.. It was late night, around midnight, we were tired and wired, and this wacky music was so perfect for the mood. I think it was off their Combustication CD, a track called Hypnotized. Or maybe “Sugar Craft.”

Anyway, I can’t think of a higher complement that I personally can pay to their music other than using it as the soundtrack to my 2004 family reunion DVD.

I recommend the albums Combustication, Shack Man, and Uninvisible. But it’s all good.

They are at their best when John Medeski is heating up his hammond, Chris Wood is thumping a funky upright bass, and Billy Martin is syncopating all around the beat on his simple jazz drum set. Then they’ll accent it all with a scratchin DJ doing really weird sounds. It marries the best of old school jazz sensibilities with triphop technology.

A difficult thing for any band to do is change tempo during a piece (successfully). Check out Latin Shuffle on Combustication!

This group feeds my soul, without ever singing a word.

Philip E. Johnson makes a good point about the connection between creationism and equality. In his article “The Creationist and the Sociobiologist,” Johnson observes that the contemporary secular university is immersed in the flux state of post-Modernism. In such environments, the “nature and even the very existence of objective knowledge is in question.”
He then notes that our national reverence for the Declaration of Independence is well-deserved, and reminds us that it speaks out on behalf of our Creator early on, crediting Him with a “self-evident” truth. (The very idea of self-evident truth throws post-Moderns into spasms). And the truth is that we are all created equal.
Johnson then asks: “Suppose men and women are not created, and instead evolved… that dogmas exist no more… and all persons must now decide for themselves what they will believe. On what foundation, then, can human equality rest?”
Good question!
I call upon my Darwinist friends to provide a better basis for equality than that offered in the Declaration of Independence.
For more on Darwinism here at JimBlog:
http://www.jimblog.net/2005/10/04/the-cult-of-evolution/
http://www.jimblog.net/2007/01/07/a-fresh-look-at-the-creation-evolution-debate/
http://www.jimblog.net/2005/11/19/intelligent-design/

I was so tickled today to receive an email from my sister Sherry.  Sherry was second born of us five, an occupational therapist living in Colorado with her husband, Gary.  They love hiking and taking pictures of their adventures.  She often sends me pictures and albums.  But today she pointed me to a very interesting picture of my father, Robert Miles.

She had recently asked our dad about the ship he had served on during his Korean War days in the U. S. Navy.  During Thanksgiving visits to my dad’s place in Las Vegas, I had heard the story about the tender ship before; it was the USS Hamul, and dad’s job was to repair radios and electronic equipment.  Tender ships were like floating repair shops and ammo warehouses, tending to the needs of the battle group.

Well, the idea struck her to check the Internet for history of the USS Hamul.  Turns out somebody made a website dedicated to the ship: www.usshamul.com, and had posted a few pictures of the various crew compliments.  His crew is pictured on this page: http://www.usshamul.com/photo_013.html, and I reposted it below.

That’s my dad, Robert Miles, on the front row, 5th from the left.

Thanks to tomdispatch.com for this:

On November 14, 2002, the New York Times published a column by William Safire entitled “You Are a Suspect” in which he revealed that DARPA had been given a $200 million budget to compile dossiers on 300 million Americans. He wrote, “Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every web site you visit and every e-mail you send or receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book, and every event you attend — all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as a ‘virtual centralized grand database.’” This struck many members of Congress as too close to the practices of the Gestapo and the Stasi under German totalitarianism, and so, the following year, they voted to defund the project.

However, Congress’s action did not end the “total information awareness” program. The National Security Agency secretly decided to continue it through its private contractors. The NSA easily persuaded SAIC and Booz Allen Hamilton to carry on with what Congress had declared to be a violation of the privacy rights of the American public — for a price. As far as we know, Admiral Poindexter’s “Total Information Awareness Program” is still going strong today.

(source: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174959)

It’s been a disappointing summer for blockbusters, for me.

I had so many sure-fire hits lined up on my Gotta-See list: Wanted, Hancock, Hellboy II. How can you go wrong when you’ve got A-list stars like Angelina, Morgan Freeman, Will Smith, Ron Perlman? Directors like Guillermo Del Toro, who did a masterful job on Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) and the first Hellboy (2004), but somehow drained all the fun and angst from the sequel. And Peter Berg, a good actor, directed The Kingdom (2007), but gave us Hancock, which held such great promise, but succumbed to dumb twists and predictable patterns, which hurts especially since it purported to be about a NONtraditional superhero.

Wanted, which I would have guessed should have been my favorite of this summer, took the coolest ideas (boomeranging bullets, and prophetic tapestry) and somehow flat-lined them. Am I just too jaded? Too desensitized by all the preponderance of shoot-em-ups? The actors seemed bored, especially Morgan Freeman. I am not writing off any of these actors, or directors, least of all young Scot James McAvoy, whose acting skills are just beginning to be tapped for film. Why did they not let him use his incredible Scottish accent? Would it have killed them to adjust the story to allow it? It probably would have been a redeeming factor for me (I’m a sucker for great accents, and Scottish and Kiwi are my favorites).

Maybe Hancock had too much money to work with. They should have paid for a few more re-writes of a badly wandering and predictable script. I recently saw Primer, Shane Carruth’s 2004 breakout indie sci-fi film, and for $7000.00 that little mind-bender gave me a block-buster’s worth of entertainment and intellectual challenge.

Sequels always fail to capture the original’s flair, right? With few exceptions. Hellboy II is not an exception. The campy humor felt obligitory instead of pleasantly surprising, Hellboy’s attitude seemed tame and drugged compared to his appropriate mix of sneer and puppy love in the first entry. The interaction between the team felt forced– we have to do a fight scene, and the boss has to be pissed off, and gee, I wonder if that agent-guy is gonna get eaten by those teeth-craving spider crawlies? Sigh. The bright spot was the tree-demon’s death effect, producing incredibly flourishing forestation in the middle of the city. Cool art direction there. But in an underground “Cantina” scene, crammed with creatures from the fantasy world, you would think it would put the original Lucas Tatooine bar to shame. Maybe we’re all too sophisticated now, but all that foam and drool and polystyrene just looked lame. Not that I would have preferred CGI, because that just annoys me anymore.

Oddly enough, I enjoyed Journey to the Center of the Earth, probably because I was expecting the worst. It couldn’t have been more predictable, and terribly written and blandly acted, but — don’t hate me — I kinda liked it. I feel guilty for saying that, but honesty demands that I admit it. Of course, I loved Wall-E, for all the same reasons that everyone else does.

The Incredible Hulk was also predictable, but worth it due to Edward Norton and Liv Tyler taking their roles very seriously, and the perfect mix of humor, tenderness, action, and semi-believable science. Setting the first act in Brazil was a great idea. The director Louis Leterrier did the two Transporter Jason Statham flicks, and I am a devoted fan of both Statham and the Transporter franchise. Leterrier took great care with the Hulk, and it shows.

Iron Man was a great, fun thrill ride, again due to the casting, mostly. Robert Downey, jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow, like Norton and Tyler in the Hulk, refuse to just phone in these profitable performances. They took the roles seriously, acted them carefully, and brought their own uniqueness into the characters. I am not a reader of any of the comic series, but I have many friends and family who are devotees, and so I have a more than passing interest. Particularly since Marvel has come into its own as a movie production powerhouse. Those comics serve a director well, as lovingly crafted storyboards, often suggesting better color, lighting and angles than many directors manage to pull off.

Iron Man was executed with the appropriate blend of comic ingenuity with a freedom given to the actors to do what they do best. Robert Downey, Jr. is funny, in any medium; Kudos to director Jon Favreau (another good actor-turned-director) for letting him add his own already-interesting personality to the Stark character. Kudos also to Paltrow, who could bring significance to a breakfast-cereal commercial, for not taking herself too seriously to miss out on (and make us miss her) playing in a just-for-fun flick while bringing that usually-lacking element of credibility to her supporting character.

Pay attention, you Hollywood A-listers!