Visitor 15000 Contest

Well, we are rapidly approaching visit 15,000. Not bad for a blog with such an esoteric theme that has provoked reactions like “now there is officially a website for everything.”

In honor of this milestone, we are planning to award the 15,000th visitor a free copy of my CD Aquatic and a $10 donation to the charity of his or her choice.

At the current rate, I would suspect 15000 will occur either Friday or Saturday, but it might be sooner. And RSS subscribers don't count, it's got to be a visit to this site that is logged for the counter. I just programmed in the award logic, so I know.

Good luck, and keep reading!

Weekend Cat Blogging #103: Texas Cat, and some updates

Luna is taking a break this weekend while we introduce a little friend from my recent trip to Texas. While staying at a cottage outside the town of Wimberly, Texas, I encountered this fellow hiding under the deck:

Presumably, he (she) is one of the many roaming outdoor cats that one finds in rural areas. Quite shy at first, a day later the cat came out in the open and allowed me to take some better photographs:


Although quite thin (as several have already commented), this cat had a very nice coat, suggesting he does get some decent food, probably on a mixture of rodents, the occasional handout from neighbors, and naive city folk.

It's always a treat to see cats when I travel. There were a couple others in town and in the countryside, but I was not able to get any photos of them.

Check out the other cats this weekend at the The House of the (Mostly) Black Cats, where Boni and Mini are hosting. Among this weekend's entries is an update from kitikata-san on Bruno, the “little black kitty” who needed a home after being found with cuts and bruises on the side of the road. He's doing well now in his new home. You can read more about his story here.

We would also like to remind WCB'ers and others that we are donating all CD sales through June 4 to the family of TeaCup and the Bad Kitty Cats. Please consider supporting new music and our friends.





lolcats in the news

Well, it's definitely news and commentary day here at CatSynth, and I found a much lighter story of cats in the news to finish things off. Those lolcat pictures that have all over the place, including on this site, are going mainstream with articles like this one from the Toronto Globe and Mail:

For reasons that nobody can quite explain – and not for lack of trying – the Internet is recently awash in photos of cats who are speaking like little hackers. “IM IN UR FRIDGE,” says one cat, “EATIN UR FOODZ.” A cat rolled up in a blanket says, “I IS BURRITO.” Another yowling cat has been immortalized beneath the caption, “I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?”…
… The fad is called “lolcats” – the “lol” stands for “laughing out loud” in online jargon – and it's more than a genre for ridiculing cats; it's becoming a shorthand for describing an exaggerated, faintly derogatory way of speaking.

A few examples of lolcats that have appeared on this site include dj lolcat, are our very own “Mission Accomplished” parody. Here's another I found today on lolcats2 that seemed worth a repost:

Not quite a CatSynth pic, but close. It is tempting to turn one of the many CatSynth pics into a LolcatSynth, but it's generally impolite to mangle other people's photos, at least without their permission. Any contributors OK with lolcat-ification of their submitted photos?

Of course, the phenomenon has jumped species. Walruses, or lolruses, are quite common – they seem particularly obsessed with buckets. It seemed to be an obvious extension to apply the lolcat language and captions to our rather dim and inarticulate leader, and a quick Google search suggests that I'm not the only one who thought of lolbush. From Tensegrity Dan at flickr, another take on “mission accomplished”:

I can haz Iraq?

Why do people do things like this?

PARMA, Ohio, May 25 (UPI). An Ohio cat named Lucky survived being shot in the head with an arrow…Kristin Slovensky told WKYC-TV she was on her porch when the 8-year-old cat staggered up with an arrow through its neck.

…Police were investigating and Slovensky was wondering why someone would shoot an arrow at her cat.

“He's fixed, he's gentle, he loves to walk through the neighborhood, everybody on this street knows Lucky, and loves him,” she told the television station.

As the title of the article suggests, Lucky was a “Lucky cat indeed.” Another poor cat, Sammy from Georgia was not so lucky :(. You can follow the link to find out more, but is both sad and graphic, so please keep that in mind before reading. This was a couple's beloved pet, and we at CatSynth send them our condolences. It is worth noting that this tragedy occured in Georgia, which as discussed earlier recently upgraded its animal cruelty laws and has a strong veterinary forensics program. We certainly hope they catch whoever was responsible for both of these acts.


Radio Play

The KUSF (San Francisco) radio program Breakthrough in Grey Room recently featured my piece Neptune Prelude to Xi as part of the May 16 program. It's a great show for experimental music that you can hear both on broadcast at KUSF 90.3 FM in the Bay Area, and online.

There are now a handful of internet and/or airwave broadcasts that have played my music. In addition to Breakthrough in Grey Room, there is sfSoundRadio, andWTUL in New Orleans, and others.

It's too bad that just as I'm starting to get some airplay/netplay the economics of broadcasting threatens to curtail or even shutdown the small independent internet broadcasting venues on which musicians like us depends. This interview from truthdig helps spell out the issues better than most:

Wellings: Exactly. The broadcasters, regular terrestrial broadcasters, do not pay the actual artists and performers of the songs that you hear on the radio. It?s sort of the problem with music where the RIAA, the recording industry and the record companies, tend to be the ones that reap the profits from songs and the actual musicians, performers, are not actually getting those profits. With Web radio they actually are getting profits, and that?s part of the good part about Web radio. We want to make sure that that stays, that that is the case, that that remains. And satellite as well. But the problem is that satellite has a reasonable fee. The webcasters? fee has been set so high that it?s just going to kill the medium, and that?s not going to do anything for artists in the end. That?s actually going to hurt artists in the end. So we want to set a fee that?s fair and balanced for everybody across the board so that artists are paid and webcasters can survive.

I wish Wellings hadn't used the phrase “fair and balanced”, but she does make the point that it's not fees per se as much as exhorbitant fees. I get fees from MusicNet for personal radio station plays, for example, but they are pretty low. The issue is both the recent huge increase in broadcasting per-play fees for web broadcasters, and the fact that SoundExchange tends to represent mainstream musicians who record for RIAA remembers. Many independent musicians will not receive such fees from SoundExchange, and their online venues may be priced out of existence. It even affects such established broadcasters as NPR, or KUSF mentioned above, who have an online broadcasting presence.

And on top of this, there is now a move by the RIAA to bring a similar pricing structure to airwave broadcasters, as described in a recent Los Angeles Times article:

Now, the Recording Industry Assn. of America and several artists' groups are getting ready to push Congress to repeal the exemption, a move that could generate hundreds of millions of dollars annually in new royalties…
…with satellite and Internet radio forced to pay “public performance royalties” and Web broadcasters up in arms about a recent federal decision to boost their performance royalty rate, the record companies and musicians have a strong hand.

It looks like the RIAA has also lined up several artist groups to support them, mostly crusty mainstream acts that are complaining about having to tour for so many years. Apparently they are also having to embarrass themselves on American Idol, which I agree is unfortunate. But still, they have been paid pretty well to make music.

One potential silver lining from this that more radio stations and internet broadcasters will turn away from RIAA products and try new music and new show formats around small indepedent musicians…