nearly a year after pimpdaddysupreme first invited me, i have finally given in & joined myspace. of course, no luck so far finding the mysterious source of the traffic.

my profile is here so go ahead & add me if you like associating with losers.  ¶ 1:48 PM

831 requests for "we will iraq you" since 8pm last night. 7.3GB transferred in the past 13 hours. referrer logs suggest the traffic might be coming from somewhere on myspace (but as for where exactly, i don't know). i have never signed up for myspace myself, so i don't know who on there might've discovered it, and the search function on myspace is not very useful. maybe the link is circulating its way through myspace blogs?  ¶ 9:18 AM

i've recruited pan's (my web host's) help in tracking down the source of the "we will iraq you" traffic. in order to find the source he'll have to turn on the "referrer" logs (which are off by default). he'll have to reset my logs to 0 in order to do that, so don't call me a liar if you check the stats & there are only a few hundred hits. checking the log right now (before he resets it) shows 10,300 requests for "we will iraq you".   ¶ 8:18 PM

on a lark i was visiting my site stats & came across something unusual: i seemed to be doing quite a lot of traffic.

the stats page resets whenever the server is rebooted, so they only go as far back as 11/02. right now, it says i've been transfering an average of 9.93GB per day. usually i peak at 1GB/day max! that's a lot of traffic. scrolling down further, i discovered that all this traffic seems to be for one specific file: /stallio_-_we_will_iraq_you.mp3. in fact right now it says i've gotten 10,072 requests for that file since november 2.

that's an insane amount of traffic for this site! so i googled "we will iraq you" looking for some popular site that might be linked to the file, resulting in those numbers. i couldn't find any specific site, but i did find a couple interesting things.

i'm not the only person to have thought of the "we will iraq you" joke: various bloggers, message board posters, & the like have included the phrase somewhere in their online ramblings. one or two have even explicitly talked of reworking the queen song. i seem to be the only one to have done the actual splicing. apparently there's a conservative parody writer named paul silhan who released a clinton song with the same name in 1998. though since his work has been prominently featured on the rush limbaugh show, and he doesn't sample at all, i reckon his piece is quite different than mine.

i also found a site called active opposition with audio & video galleries as well as news & activist info. that site has an mp3 on the site (currently attributed to "artist unknown") called "we will iraq you". turns out that yes, it's my track... but it's a shorter "radio edit" version without the 7 minutes of c-span noise at the end. i don't know who made this edit. i'm pretty sure i didn't do it. i did give ctephin permission to create such an edit, but then ctephin would know who to credit... is that what happened, but the attribution got lost? did someone else somewhere on the net do it, sensing intuitively that the track doesn't really need all those c-span callers at the end? i don't know, but since creating that edit was a good idea anyway, shortly i will upload a copy of it to the site here for folks to download (properly credited this time). [update: file is now avaiable here]

my only theory right now about the high traffic is that the track has picked up a lot of buzz by being referenced in the INtake article and being played on the free zone last saturday. but that doesn't really account for the stats: neither of those link to the file, so someone would still have to search & find the file through the site, but the main page & mp3 pages would have a lot of hits too. i suspect something else is going on, but i'm not sure what.  ¶ 7:40 PM

leland is now safely at home, & i am back in the office to finish off my workday. woohoo.

apparently leland has an abnormally high heartrate. his x-rays were pretty clean (no signs of heart enlargement, tumors, etc), but the rapid heart & the heart murmur suggest that he might have hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (hcm). so he still needs an ultrasound for a proper diagnosis. i've left a voicemail with the recommended specialist; if possible i will set up an appt for next week sometime.

the fact that he's otherwise asymptomatic is a good sign & suggests that if he does have hcm, it's likely to still be mild, so he could still live a fairly normal life. on the other hand, hcm is known to kill quite suddenly in some cases.

it all comes down to the ultrasound. they'll have to shave a bit of his belly for that.

i'm supposed to find out about blood test results tomorrow.  ¶ 2:21 PM

got up early this morning to take leland to the vet for his x-rays & blood tests. he's there now, likely unhappy or at least confused, but the vet said he hoped to be done by noonish, at which point i will go pick him up & take him back home... then return to the office.

apparently he is not getting an ultrasound today. there was some confusion about this last time: they technically don't do ultrasounds in-house at this place (the paw patch in broad ripple), although sometimes they'll have an outside crew come in to do it. i was under the impression that this was what i was scheduling for, but apparently not. the good news is that this will cut $200+ off my bill for today! that's cool. but the bad news is that, of course, if it's determined that leland still needs an ultrasound after today (which is likely), i will still need to set up another appt to do so... most likely i will take him to noah's pet hospital, where they do ultrasounds and have a specialist in-house, as opposed to bringing him back to the paw patch yet again.

anyway, hopefully i'll know more in a few hours. i have no idea how long it takes for feline blood tests to come back: if they have a lab in house, they might have the results for me when i pick him up, but having dealt with human doctors & human blood tests before, i know better than to count on that.

the poor kitty, stuck in the doctor's office all morning...  ¶ 8:33 AM

there was much rejoicing yesterday when it was announced that the holy roller john ashcroft had resigned as attorney general. that rejoicing lasted about 24 hours.

now bush has appointed white house counsel alberto gonzalez as the new attorney general. this is the guy who wrote some very controversial memos that attempted to justify brutal interrogation techniques in iraq & afghanistan (using ideas similar to the ones that were just struck down by a federal judge):


he's latino, which is good. but he has a seriously flawed sense of ethics and human rights. he probably won't annoint himself with oils or censor seminude statues in the justice department, but he probably won't do anything to preserve civil rights in this counrty (or throughout the world) either.

he still must be approved by the senate, but they approved ashcroft last time, so don't count on that meaning much.

rumors are also circulating that powell & rice will step down soon, and millions of fingers worldwide are crossed in the hopes that rumsfeld will resign also.  ¶ 4:52 PM

the election is over. the actual vote counting is still underway. & if the US is going to go around the world inflicting our vision of "democracy" on other countries whether they like it or not, it seems obvious that we need to lead by example & make sure all the votes are counted. the chances of the final vote counts flipping the election for kerry are slim (and you'd better believe the gop would fight with all its might to ensure that doesn't happen), but that's not really the point.

(i keep having visions of the Count from sesame street inspecting punchcards... "that's one vote for kerry, ah ha ha! two votes for kerry, ah ha ha!" maybe that's just me. or maybe that would make for a kickass episode of elmo's world.)

if you listen to the mainstream corporate media, they might tell you how amazingly "clean" this election was. but that's not really true, except possibly by 2000 standards. yes, so far there have been no federal lawsuits filed by the candidates. the election will most likely not be decided by the supreme court this time around. but there are lawsuits aplenty, with tons of allegations and stories of voter fraud, voter intimidation, & all-around voter irregularities.

so far, the only member of the mainstream media to acknowledge all this is keith olbermann at msnbc. he's been doing some great blogging about voter irregularities, such as strange results in many florida counties, which show bush winning significant numbers of democrats (some counties even have more ballots cast than actual voters... thousands more). or the fact that everyone was so quick to accept that exit polls were wrong, despite the fact that exit polls have always been considered fairly reliable, to the point that observers would shout "fraud!" if exit polls were that far off in other countries. and greg palast has been talking a lot about "spoilage": the whopping three percent of votes in a standard election that are simply thrown away due to "voter error": undervotes, overvotes, chads of the hanging & pregnant persuasions.

so far, if you want to hear about these stories you must research them yourself, or frequent the liberal blogs & news sites. but with olbermann, a major pundit on a tv network, pushing the story, the rest of the corporate media might get shamed into covering the story as well. ohio results are confirmed on november 12, if i'm not mistaken. so pay attention.  ¶ 1:37 PM

good show, bad turnout.

the previous two times we hosted shows at the bloomington playwrights project, our shows were scheduled while indiana university was on break, so there were no kids in town to attend our shows. this time, we made sure our show would happen while the students were still in town, but it was all put together at the last possible minute, with no time for promotion, and once again people didn't come out. i'm convinced there were at least 30+ people there during the earlier hours, but 10 of them were performers & many of those brought guests. if the guests had paid to get in, i do believe we would've broken even, but as it is we lost money on the show.

the performances were all great, though, & i believe everyhing was recorded to dat, so although nobody was there, many might still get the chance to enjoy the music in the form of mp3s.

first up was miim vs humdrum, a "versus" set between humdrum's dj & experimental personas, performed on turntables and bent electronics. the humdrum style of bending involves taking simple RCA cables plugged into the mixer and touching them to open spots on various consumer electronics: the current produces a range of odd sounds with no soldering required. so this was somewhere between harsh noise & bangin' hardcore records. good stuff, straddling the line between a dj set & a live PA.

i played second: a well-received half hour of political noise. i played some election returns, a little rave master, some porn for kerry, and some quotes from the awesome movie network, with lots of digital noise & loops. i thought it went pretty well (a good sign, since often when i'm improvising a performance i can't tell how it went until i hear the recording), & as soon as i looped my finale sample of "i'm mad as hell and i'm not gonna take it anymore" people started cheering... kids like the anger, apparently.

after me came a dj set by amy v, better known as one half of local digital hardcore group the people bomb. slammin' hardcore & breakcore. people dug it.

then came firestorm viper, performing on turntables & laptop, though at first he was having some technical problems with the laptop. another set that straddled the line between dj set & live PA: i couldn't tell how much of it was original material, but he clearly played at least a bit of both. good stuff, though, and he seemed to bring a big chunk of the crowd with him... strange because he only moved here to indiana from seattle a few months ago. dark jungle, ragga, hardcore, & more.

mark tester, the other half of the people bomb, followed. another dj set of breakcore & other dark, sick music. what else is there to say? we had a few djs, they all played similar styles, & they were all pretty good. peeps were dancing.

then came a leaner, meaner murkbox, our prodigal son who currently lives in tennessee. he started with some new material before going back & playing a bunch of his hits. he told me later that he'd played so much older material because he forgot to bring his external hard drive, which had even more new stuff on it, but you couldn't really tell during the performance; it all sounded good, & it was cool to hear some of those tracks again on a loud system. the set also ran longer than anticipated since bobby vomit was still setting up while murky was scheduled to be wrapping up.

bobby vomit augmented his usual turntable hijinks with the addition of a casio sk-10: harsh noise & fm tones. one of his turntables was a unit designed for hunting: portable, with a megaphone-loudspeaker that he would point in different directions to change the acoustics of his performance. good stuff as usual.

there was a break of a few minutes while backstatic set up. he played without a computer for a change (due, as always, to technical problems with the computer), but that didn't impair his set that i could tell: hard, slow rhythms and rhymes from the man with the gas-mask microphone. his vocals were mixed too quietly (problem with the monitors) but beyond that it was yet another successful performance. too bad everyone but the core crew had left by this point, because we were having a night of great music!

unszene took the stage for the penultimate performance of the night. unszene plated a stripped down set of circuit bent noise: he had a simple box of bent circuits, controlled with switches, touch sensors, and a light sensor that he triggered with a flashlight. this was all run through an fx processor and several petals to build up some deep, heavy tones. fun sounds, & fun to watch.

dr. butcher m.d. rounded off the night with a set of drunken breaks & electro. lots of tomfoolery & showboating such as air guitar solos and playing his computer keyboard with his tongue, and plenty of false stops.

so it was poorly attended, but well documented. murkbox had four disposable cameras that he farmed out for others to document the show with: i had one of those, so i took approximately 27 photographs, although it could be days or more before i get to see them. there were also other cameras, video cameras, & like i mentioned earlier, all the audio was recorded to dat. much fun was had, & much falafel was eaten.

big ups to all the performers, to matt for the use of his PA, & to jon for the phat hookup on falafel sandwiches & hummus. stay tuned: mp3s and photos will hopefully start to turn up soon, & i'll post links as they become available.  ¶ 1:26 PM