palewire

Bo Diddley died today. But his beat lives on. Don’t know what I’m talking about? Try to tell what these songs have in common.

Has anyone else seen @hemingway, this weird Twitter feed that just spouts Ernie quotes every once in a while? Well, tonight I decided to code up my own twist on the idea. Follow @mistadobalina to receive hourly bursts of verse from one of my favorite albums, I Wish My Brother George Were Here by Del Tha Funkee Homosapien.

The whole thing is automated by about 30-45 minutes worth of work. So don’t expect any miracles. But all the code is over on github if anybody wants it. I had a couple problems (no matter what album I asked for, I was only getting track listings for Staind), but the LyricWiki SOAP service is a pretty sweet Web service.

If, like me, you’re up keeping an eye on whether Obama might come from behind, I get the feeling you might enjoy the following.

Written, of course, by my fellow Iowan, Meredith Wilson.

I signed up for Twitter this morning, opening an account at http://twitter.com/palewire. Since I haven’t seen or heard from my cell phone in a week or two, don’t count on much on the scene reporting. But I did take a few minutes this morning to line up my Last.fm feed, so that my lastest listenings are now automatically Twittered to the huddled masses yearning to have my musical taste shoved down their throat.

For any other Ubuntu users who’d like to follow along, here’s a quick recap on how I made it happen.

1. Move to the folder where you store random scripts. Me, I use…

cd /usr/local/bin

2. Create a new Perl script and open it in gedit.

sudo gedit twitter_fm.pl

3. Copy and paste in the ready-to-serve code provided by Walter Higgins.

4. Edit in your Twitter and Last.fm login information. Save and exit the file.

5. Create a new shell script.

sudo gedit twitter_fm.sh

6. Paste in the following, editing the folder structure to reflect wherever you stuck your steez.

#!/bin/sh
 
perl /usr/local/bin/twitter_fm.pl

7. Set the shell script so it becomes executable.

sudo chmod +x twitter_fm.sh

8. Navigate through the System>Preferences>Session menu as described here and add the shell script to your startup processes.

9. Restart!

I just patched this mess together a couple minutes ago, so there might be some bugs. Either in my setup or in Walter’s script. Don’t know yet. Let me know if you see anything idiotic on my part.

I also installed Wordpress’s Twitter Tools plugin, so now my latest blog posts will also be sent out via Twitter.

Also on the Twitter tip, earlier this week we launched a feed at work for our popular political blog, Top of the Ticket. It includes the latest posts from our team of writers, and, on election nights, live election results as they come in. You can sign up here. For anyone looking to reroute their own data streams to Twitter, I can’t recommend Chris Thompon’s Net::Twitter Perl module enough. Easy. Peasy.

Last weekend I finally got around to seeing Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, a really good 70s movie starring Harvey Keitel and Robert DeNiro. I had a light bulb go on in the first couple scenes when I realized that one of my favorite one-hit wonders from the 2000s took their name from DeNiro’s character, the self-destructive Johnny Boy. I’m sure everybody else had this figured out by now, but it seems like a good enough excuse to put two great YouTubes together.

from Mean Streets, “Be My Baby,” by the Ronettes.

“You Are the Generation That Bought More Shoes And You Get What You Deserve” by Johnny Boy.

Knowing this now, it’s clear JB aren’t shy about any inspiration from the Ronettes.

The media circus found its latest entertainment Friday when word of Barack Obama’s allegedly controversial remarks shot across the blogosphere. Unlike previous presidential titillations, this one was set off by The Huffington Post. That alone seems somewhat remarkable, considering how the lefty HuffPost openly apes the practices of the usual outlet for this sort of news: the more rightly Drudge Report.

But, in keeping with the spirit of Dave Berry Barry, may he rest in peace, let’s not take this opportunity to reflect upon what the means for the state of the news media, or even the campaign of one Barack Obama. No, let’s use it to consider which related news headline contains the best potential band name.

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Sources:

• Huffington Post: “Obama: No Surprise That Hard-Pressed Pennsylvanians Turn Bitter”
• Associated Press: “Obama Concedes Remarks Were Ill-Chosen”
• LA Times: “Obama seeks to explain ‘guns or religion’ remark”
• Powerline: “OBAMA ‘SCRAMBLES TO QUELL THE FUROR’”
• NYT: “Obama Says He Mispoke; Clinton Raps Him Hard”
• Daily Kos: “Barack Obama Shows Disrespect For Rural Americans”
• Newsday: “Obama says ‘bitter’ didn’t come out right”
• FoxNews: “Obama on Guns and Religion: ‘I Didn’t Say It as Well as I Should Have.’”
• Washington Post: “Opponents Paint Obama as an Elitist“
• Washington Post: “In Hoosier State, Clinton Ramps Up ‘Bitter’ Talk”

Right now I’m getting a kick out of this YouTube hype tape for last year’s CL Smooth album. There’s not a lot to it, but I love seeing my man Pete Rock do his thing with some pure 80s cheese. Are there more “producer-in-action” tapes like this around the web? I’d love to see ‘em.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Co__eHlCFJs[/youtube]

You can sample the whole song here. These guys can still out some pretty decent hip hop considering their age. It’s not anywhere as startling as the burner Premier and AZ recently managed, but CL is about as solid as ever. Pete isn’t weaving as tight as he once did, but the novelty of the sample is enough for me right now.

So I’m out on a casual stroll in downtown LA the other night, and what do I bump into? If you guessed an illegal rock show put on by a group of chicks armed with fireworks and dressed in bikinis, you guessed right. Photos below the fold.

The crowd wandered over after a show at the nearby indie club, The Smell. The noise brought down an angry loft-dweller from the nearby Higgins Building, and eventually the LAPD officer pictured below, who advised the musicians to considering holding future events a few blocks further down, away from residential developments.

For their part, the band — who go by the name Josh Taylor’s Friends Forever — played dumb, telling the cops that they didn’t realize so many people lived downtown these days.

Have you seen the goofy new McDonalds commercial with the kid dancing to “The Cha Cha Slide?”

Funny stuff, right? And I bet you’ve heard the same song at weddings too, even if you didn’t know its name.

But did you know it was produced M.O.B. Records Inc., a Chicago record label controlled by Marvel “King Vel” Thompson, the reputed head of the Gangster Disciples street gang?

Or so said U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald back in 2004, before he became famous as the special prosecutor who convicted Vice President Dick Cheney’s aide Scooter Libber.

Doesn’t look so cute after you hear that, does it?

I wonder where the royalties for the commercial are going. Is M.O.B. Records still operating? If not, who is collecting off the track these days?

It looks like their Web site is down. Here’s what the homepage says:

Sorry our site’s broken… but we have had problems with our web server and a slow hosting company (yawn!) and we’ve had to take it out of service. We will resume normal service in the next day or so… Come back soon!

Thanks for being here for us…

Maybe I’ll send an email over to the McDonalds PR squad on this.

After perfecting the hell out of the electro angle they went after on Black Cherry with 2005’s Supernature, Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory have picked a pitch perfect change of direction. If the lead single, “A&E,” is any indication, they’re intent on moving into Kate Bush’s old territory. All airy longing and surging electronic burble. Oh, I’m thrilled.

Here’s the new thing:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VPyso87fZU[/youtube]

And the string it plucks in my brain:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRHA9W-zExQ[/youtube]

Who knows if the album can deliver on the single’s grand promise. But I’m eager to find out.