the other day i gave my sister a ride home from work & we were talking about elections. i was a bit surprised when she mentioned that our senator, evan bayh, is up for re-election. i had totally forgotten. admittedly i haven't watched local tv in months, but i had heard nothing recently about the bayh/scott race, no ads, no mentions on the politiblogs, nothing. today i finally saw a yard sign for marvin scott (the republican challenger); i can't recall ever seeing bayh yard signs. & now that i think about it, i do remember hearing some discussion of bayh/scott debates on inside indiana business on npr some time ago, but obviously nothing recently (apparently because there will be no debate).

so today i googled bayh & quickly found this article on WISHtv.com that explains why nobody's talking about this race:


damn, 39 points? hoosiers sure do love them some evan bayh. we gave him two terms as governor & will handily re-elect him to the senate. indiana politics are strange like that: we've had a democrat governor for 16 years now, then sent one of them to the senate, but we're still "solid red" for bush. i still dream of a kerry coup in indiana, but bush is polling consistently in the 50s here. and it's possible we'll lose our democrat governor: the media is reporting their race as a head heat. the only poll numbers i can find are 46 daniels, 43 kernan, which does not bode well considering the incumbent rule. but assuming the massive democrat advantage in new voter registration also applies here, that could be enough to carry kernan to victory. plus that poll is already at least a week old.   ¶ 6:38 PM

today i've been reading mydd. i don't read it as often as dkos, atrios, or tpm because it gets pretty technical & wonkish. but that wonkishness makes it a fantastic place to go for detailed poll analysis, like this post explaining how undecideds historically break overwhelmingly for the challenger. chris bowers calls this the "incumbent rule" but you might see it referred to as the 50% rule or the 48% rule (i mentioned this briefly in my last "kerry wins" post).

it goes like this: any election with an incumbent is fundamentally a referendum on the incumbent. the electorate is intimately familiar with the incumbent, having lived with him for a full term by now. their decision is whether they like him enough to re-elect. if they don't, & the other guy isn't a total doofus, the challenger wins.

in this context, an "undecided" voter already has misgivings about the incumbent & needs to be convinced that the incumbent deserves their vote. if they aren't convinced when they get to the ballot box, they won't vote for the incumbent. historically, most undecideds aren't convinced come election day.

so the incumbent rule says that the real measure of who's winning is whether the incumbent has around 50% of the vote or more. if a race is bush 51, kerry 45, then (assuming the poll is even accurate, a big if these days) bush wins that state. but if the poll is bush 47, kerry 45, that really means the election would be more like kerry 52, bush 47, because the undecideds will mostly vote kerry. some adjust the magic number to 48%, saying that's the minimum the incumbent needs to even have a chance of winning.

this isn't bs: the mydd post has bunches of empirical evidence dating back decades, as well as links to other in-depth discussions of the incumbent rule and quotes from professional pollsters.

unless bush does something serious soon to turn his numbers around, he's toast.  ¶ 2:47 PM

a new study shows that large majorities of bush supporters believe things that are provably false.


one thing both bush and kerry supporters agree on is that bushco says these things are true. where they disagree is that kerry supporters know all this to be false. so why do bush supporters believe the lies?


bush supporters also have no clue how unpopular bush & his policies are wordlwide, & even think bush is in favor of various treaties and the international criminal court! to give all the highlights i'd have to repost the whole thing.   ¶ 12:04 AM

i would've posted this monday if i'd thought of it:

if you're interested in last week's episode of press the button, with guests stAllio!, tfy, jack smiley, ryan from thursday club, & more, the quickest way to hear it (in fact the only sure way) is to download the 56k archive mp3 from wruw.org. hopefully every man will post a higher-quality version, but i don't count on him doing that right away if he gets around to it at all (frankly, he has many hours of rr recordings to sift through & possibly encode).

if you want to download this file, it's important to do so this week because the archive will be replaced after the next episode of ptb sunday night. so do it now!

[update: tfy points out in the comments that 160kbps stereo mp3s of the show are now available. it sounds better in stereo.]  ¶ 3:32 PM

maybe i've drunk the kool-aid & am not being as cynical as usual, but i do believe (as i have for awhile) that more likely than not, kerry will win the election. & i'm not sure it'll even be close.

forget about the national polls. even if there weren't countless signs of problems with them, the fact is that national polls don't mean shit. if they did, gore would be in office now. besides, the media isn't reporting them right anyway (even a 1-point lead for bush is reported as a lead, but when kerry has a lead it's reported as a "dead heat").

what actually matters is the electoral college, where kerry is kicking ass. indeed, in all the ways that actually matter, kerry is ahead or at least gaining ground.

kerry won all three debates. kerry is up or leading in all the swing states. newspapers that endorsed bush in 2000 & even big-name republicans are endorsing kerry. new democrat voter registrations far outnumber republican registrations.

bush, in contrast, is stuck at or below the 48% barrier in countless polls, which is almost certain doom for an incumbent. the bush campaign has nothing to go on but non-stories like kerry mentioning that mary cheney is a lesbian in the third debate (hello, this was already public knowledge. the republican "outrage" over this merely suggests that they are still uncomfortable with homosexuality in general) or that theresa kerry didn't know that laura bush used to be a schoolteacher (who cares is laura bush ever had a "real job"? hell, she doesn't have one now: she's the first lady, which means her job is to smile, stand by the prez [yes, hillary-haters, even if he cheats on you], & act feminine). bush has a rabidly devoted base but the majority of americans don't like or trust him, so the bush agenda has been to make people dislike kerry too. that was working for awhile, but it's not anymore.

so i'm convinced. barring disaster, kerry will win. i don't think nader will even be a factor this year: if any third-party candidate has a significant impact on the election it will be badnarik (libertarian). the left is almost completely united under kerry, but i know a few conservatives who are voting libertarian because they hate bush but can't bring themselves to vote for a democrat. but for some reason no pollsters ever include badnarik, yet they often include nader (who is only on the ballot in like 20 states, whereas i believe badnarik will be there in all 50).

so for me right now the real question is not will kerry win, but by how much? the conventional wisdom is that the race will be very close, like 2000. but i'm not convinced. because of factors such as the overwhelming advantage the democrats have in new registrations, i suspect that kerry will win by a much larger margin than the polls actually suggest. maybe it won't be a landslide, but i have a feeling it might be a fairly decisive victory. what i would love is for some of the "solid red" states to flip for kerry: specifically indiana. maybe that's a pipe dream, but a man can dream, right? i would cream my jeans if it happened.

naturally bushco will try everything possible to hold on to power, including voter disenfranchisement, legal battles, the whole shebang. but if i'm right that kerry will have a decisive win, the bushco effort to cockblock the vote will not be enough. it won't matter. even after they turn people away at the polls & try to discredit democratic ballots, kerry will still have enough to win.

obviously i'm rooting for kerry here, & i've joined operation momentum to get out the word that not only can kerry win, but he will if kerry-supporters & bush-haters stay motivated & actually vote. you might think i'm deluding myself. if i turn out to be wrong, you have every right to rub it in my face (if you have the stomach; i can't imagine anyone who'd read this blog actually being glad if bush wins). but the fact is that things are looking great for kerry, & bush is going to need a minor miracle at this point to turn the momentum around.  ¶ 1:54 PM

last night drbmd & i finally made it out to see shaun of the dead. i wasn't blown away or anything, but it was thoroughly enjoyable. before the movie we had drinks & partook of the complimentary happy-hour taco bar at don pablo's. nummy.

i just received my personal copies of the brand new compilation from tokyo-based lost frog: hell. this is a great comp with new unreleased tracks by animals within animals, panicsville, five starcle men, kingdom scum, and many more. see lostfrog.net for more info, and how to order. i've been listening to secret sneak-preview mp3s for awhile now so trust me when i say the cd sounds good... now that i have a physical copy, i can assure you it looks good too!

lost frog has also posted a new, corrected version of the cover art pdf for the animals within animals mp3ep get me some press or kill these people. so if you've already downloaded that release, go get the updated cover art. & if you haven't downloaded the release, what are you waiting for? it's free, dammit! frizzee!  ¶ 9:19 AM

so i took 3 days off to travel up to lakewood/cleveland for recycled rainbow 9. i left thursday and got back a few hours ago. alas, i took no photos nor video on this vacation.

i got into lakewood around 7 local time. connie had already arrived at the hotel by that time. mostly we relaxed for the evening, though we took a brief drive to get dinner and ended up getting stromboli from some place on detroit called the pizza pan.

friday afternoon we took a scenic drive through downtown cleveland on our way to empirial sound to hopefully get my cd players repaired. drive 1 of my decks had been giving me problems for months, to the point that drive 1 was totally unusable. empsound is the closest authorized numark service center i've found, & i didn't want to mess with shipping my decks to numark and waiting for them to come back. the place itself is overflowing with gear; amps and assorted electronics are piled everywhere, to the point that it's tough to walk around in the place. but i talked to walt (the specialist in such matters) & he agreed to take a look & get them fixed by monday if possible.

on the way home we had a nice vietnamese meal at someplace at around w 56th & detroit. i don't remember the name, but the curry was good.

a couple hours later walt called from empirical sound to tell me that my drive 1 was actually spinning backward! he'd even swapped drives 1 & 2, and the drive in slot 1 still spun counterclockwise. so he told me he would have to replace the control board & quoted me a price of about $300. i wasn't pleased, but i did desperately need the work done, so i gave him the okay to do the work.

we went to the rr house around 8pm, expecting the place to already be bustling, but it turns out we were the first to arrive. others slowly filtered in after us & we worked for a bit. the music in the basement got started very late. johnny la rock "set up" for hours in a fashion that strongly reminded me of WRP: johnny la rock himself behind a control deck a la matt the pm, bantering constantly (& with vocal fx) with mush mouth (who admittedly was not so reminiscent of pimpdaddysupreme). eventually they played their set and it was good: nice beats and interesting composition work (& not totally unlike WRP, either).

by this point it was already quite late, and connie was getting a bit tired & really wanted to try out a cafe we'd found called dianna's. dianna's was just your typical pancake house, packed with people who'd just left the bars. not all that different from the place called "my friends" where we'd been so many times on previous visits.

saturday afternoon, we hooked with tfy at bent crayon to do some record shopping. bent crayon's selection is terrific, but the place is horribly cluttered & disorganized. records are stacked horizontally on top of other shelves of records; in some places the piles are so deep that you couldn't reasonably even go through the whole pile, let alone look at the records trapped in the shelf underneath them. still, everybody found stuff to buy; i personally spent abour $240 there.

connie & i had wanted to grab sushi afterward at sakura, a local japanese joint that isn't up to connie's usual standards but is pretty decent for sushi in the midwest. but we had sucked up so much time shopping at bent crayon that we wouldn't have time left to finish our costumes before going to rr. so instead we went to schlotsky's on the condition that we would have time to eat at sakura the following day. we grabbed our sandwiches to go & spent some time in the hotel room with our needles & thread putting our costumes together.

the theme was classic literature & we had the idea to do a "couple costume" where our costumes complemented each other to form one greater theme. we decided to do the sound & the fury so i dressed as "the sound" (as in puget sound) in bluish aquatic-looking clothes with foliage around me: i had to sew some big fake leaves and cat-tails to my shorts, which was awkward & uncomfortable (not to mention very cold, since the weather was unusually chilly this week). connie dressed up as a "fury", one of the kindly ones of greek mythology who would haunt those who spilled the blood of their kin. she had a slowing dress, snakes in her hair, and wings (the wings were awkward & uncomfortable in much the same way as my foliage).

we arrived right at 7, when i was supposed to go on, but already the event was more than an hour behind schedule & the record exchange (thursday club in dj form) was still setting up. this is pretty much noise djing: thick and loud, with very little recognizable.

i played next (using every man's gear, since mine was obviously still in the shop), mixing random noises & beats with some codename kids next door, some presidential debate stuff, a bit of psalty, & other random stuff. i didn't think it was among my best performances, but if/when i hear the recording i might decide i love it.

tfy was supposed to go on next but wasn't quite ready, so instead up next was a performance by tropic (formerly known as nagoya math journal) in the garage. first they did a performance piece about the tower of babel, repeatedly retelling the story while the language they used progressively deteriorated into slang, then incoherence. next up was the story of abraham preparing to sacrifice his son isaac's life at the lord's request: abraham spent several minutes elaborately binding isaac while isaac asked dejected questions about why life seemed to be heading in the wrong direction. it was good but i was cold.

then tfy did it in the basement with the laptop, kaoss pad, and the thrift store turntables. it was a noisy yet subtle performance of dsp delay effects and literature records. one of the performance requirements for rr9 was that all performances should deal with the event's theme at least briefly: i rather doubt everyone followed this rule but tfy went above & beyond.

things didn't quite progress in the order currently listed on the site, so forgive me if i misremember the sequence of events here... did the volta sound play next? if they didn't, let's pretend they did. the volta sound is some kind of psychedelic rock band. friends & loyal readers will know i can be a tremendous snob regarding rock music, & the volta sound is not the kind of band i go to rr events to see, so connie & i decided to make an important run to the car around this time (because of weather conditions and our somewhat skimpy cotumes, walking those 15 houses to my car was a bit of a chore).

up next, i guess, was the electric grandmother. remember that old tv movie the electric grandmother about an adroid grandmother? (apparently the movie was based on "i sing the body electric" by ray bradbury.) what kind of act would name itself after that movie? an act that's obsessed with '80s tv, obviously. the electric grandmother (the performer) sings silly songs, most of which are about '80s sitcoms, over beats that are one step above wesley willis. there's also a slideshow, so when the electric grandmother is singing about how kirk cameron sucked after he went hardcore christian, sure enough, there is a big cheesy photo of kirk cameron on the screen next to him. fun stuff, & a nice change of pace that i'm quite glad i got to see, but after awhile the schtick starts to lose its oomph. it would work better if the set were shorter.

i guess this was when we did "a little deaf", a ritual where we go outside & toss around glowing stuff in complete silence for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. these rituals seem to grow harder to control... it took several minutes for everyone to get outside & quiet down, & it was pretty cold out by this point. then the ritual started & i immediately got hit in the face by a glowing ring; it knocked me in my glasses & for a minute or two i was convinced it had knocked them onto the ground as i searched around frantically to find them. eventually i realized they were still on my face. regardless, i for one think the little deaf ritual has jumped the shark. it's past its prime, so let's come up with something new next time.

then came leia alligator's puppet show. she told the familiar fables of the three wolves & how the elephant got its nose, leia style. this is the second of her puppet shows i've seen and both times i felt a bit sorry for her because the crowd was unbelievably rowdy boths times. some audience participation is expected, and i appreciate friendly heckling as much as anybody, but when the show can't go on because it seems like half the crowd is heckling, something has gone wrong. still, leia put on an admirable & enjoyable performance for the circumstances. and much of the heckling, as rude as it may have been, was pretty funny.

we were at least 3 hours behind by now, as the black fives performed in the basement. quahogs played with a baby monitor, reading literature and generating feedback, while gabe busted out the beats: nice hard sophisticated beats, just the way i like 'em. very good. we ran out to the car after their set so i could trade gabe a copy of true data for a couple copies of the black fives/fudgie & fufu split 7".

when we returned, the damn weiner kids had started playing. the damn weiner kids consist of leia alligator, dirt goddess, and i guess hetmana (she at least participated at times). first they rocked out tearing a bunch of paper in front of microphones, creating a thick stew of tearing sounds & shakers. then they went into a technopop hip hop number, then a more ambient piece with ocean sounds, flute, and poetry... very enjoyable. but by now it was 4am & connie was passing out, so we went back to the hotel & missed the remaining acts for the evening.

sunday we slept late, then went for a relaxing sushi meal at sakura. not perfect, but fun. since connie lives in san francisco she's surrounded by some of the best, freshest sushi in the country, but for me, living in the midwest with only a few sushi-eating friends, it's still a treat. then back to the hotel to pack a bit & watch some more tv until it was time to meet up again at the rr house & caravan to the wruw studio for the press the button radio show.

we ended up following ryan from thursday club to the studio; ryan takes a far simpler path than every man, but his turn signals are messed up so he was occasionally hard to follow. i can now make it 99% of the way to the studio without assistance.

i still didn't have my cd players back, so for the radio show i just plugged in my kp2 and plugged in some headphones to use as a microphone (i also hooked in a portable cd player, but i didn't even use it). the first half hour of the show was chaos, everyone fighting to be heard, so we then started performing in 3-person shifts of 15 minutes apiece. i thought it turned out well. i had some good moments on the mic, including a series of pitch-shifted "boom selecta" ad libs that seemed to be crowd pleasers.

wruw had probably a dozen crates of records they were getting rid of, so i went to town & grabbed a ridiculously thick pile of crap. i don't expect to really enjoy many of the records i got, but they were free and might be useful, so hell, i stocked up.

after the show, connie & i went to the gold coast cafe, yet another nondescript pancake house within a few blocks of w 117 & detroit.

only a few hours sleep before we had to get up so i could take connie to the airport. we said our tortured goodbyes & i was off to empirical sound to pick up my cd players. it rained my entire drive home, so that sucked, but mercifully it didn't start until i had left empirical sound & stopped by the time i got home.

so good times, good music, tender moments with my girlfriend... & i got much-needed, if pricey, repairs to my performance rig. the full stAllio! live rig will be in full effect this halloween baby!  ¶ 8:24 PM