Easy to say, considerably more difficult — but necessary — to do.
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Ah, showbiz. Due to some last-minute changes, the Dead Red Velvet show taking place tonight at 10:00 Eastern (UTC-4) at OnAirGigs.com needs an opening act, and I’ve just been “voluntold” to do it. If you happen to be online tonight at 9:30 Eastern (still UTC-4), tune in to OnAirGigs.com and see what I come up with!
It’s odd that the most bang-on, if you’ll pardon the term, article on the recent ruling on gun control in the U.S. was written by The Onion. Odd, but not surprising. The full thing’s over at The Onion — check it out!
I won.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that I absolutely fucking walloped you.
Now, even though you got absolutely annihilated here, I bet you actually thought you had a pretty good chance this time around. Four months ago, after 20 children were senselessly gunned down in the one place they should have been safe, you said to yourself, “Enough is enough. We’re going to get to work and make some serious changes to the gun laws in this country so that this kind of thing never happens again.” I could tell you all really wanted to win, but I knew you would lose.
The truth is, you never had a fucking chance. I had Congress in my back pocket the entire time, and so when that big gun control proposal reared its ugly head, we gradually chipped away at it, snipping away provisions for an assault rifle ban and restrictions on high-capacity magazines until all that was left was the idea of expanding background checks to keep military-grade killing implements from falling into the hands of criminals and the mentally unhinged, a relatively innocuous measure supported by 90 percent of Americans.
Once again, be sure to read the full article.
Update: I cut the article down from full-blown copypasta down to some excerpts.
What I Made by Mining Bitcoins
As an experiment, I started running a Bitcoin miner at around the same time I published my article How to Mine Bitcoins for Fun and (Probably Very Little) Profit. It’s participating in BitcoinCZ’s mining pool, which is where I got this report on its progress:
As I wrote in my earlier article, Bitcoin miners work by confirming Bitcoin transactions and competing to be the first to record them in the “blockchain”, a sort of general ledger of every Bitcoin transaction. These additions to the blockchain are called, quite naturally, blocks. A miner or pool of miners that successfully wins the competition to add a block to the blockchain gets 25 Bitcoins as its reward (creating the block also creates a 25-Bitcoin transaction), and in the case of BitcoinCZ, that reward is split proportionately among the various miners in the pool.
Looking at the BitcoinCZ report, I’ve made somewhere between 0.00036 and 0.00047 BTC since Saturday, depending on how pessimistic or optimistic you are. At the present Bitcoin exchange of 1 BTC = USD$94.13 (as of 11:57 a.m. today), I’ve made somewhere between 3.4 and 4.4 cents.
What I Made by Writing About Mining Bitcoins
As you’re probably aware, I make a little “walking around money” through the ads on this blog. Here’s that StatCounter report on how The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century has been doing in terms of pageviews over the past week:
Click to see the graph at full size.
The most-viewed article for the past week was How to Mine Bitcoins for Fun and (Probably Very Little) Profit; it currently accounts for almost three-quarters of all the pageviews. While I can’t get a direct report showing how much each article contributes to my ad revenues, it’s possible to come up with an estimation. My estimates show that in the past week, the Bitcoin mining article has made me somewhere between 32 and 45 dollars.
To summarize: I made 1000 times more money by writing about mining Bitcoins as I did by mining Bitcoins.
Tonight’s Show
Tonight, from 10:00 p.m. – 11:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (UTC – 4), Dead Red Velvet, my friend Karl Mohr’s arty, gothy, cabaret-y music project, will be airing a live internet performance, and I will be joining him! I’ll be backing him up on accordion for the goth-tastically maudlin-yet-catchy song Can Your Remains be Buried with Mine?, which I performed with him at the Tranzac Club back in 2007, as pictured below:
Yeah, it got weird, and it was cool.
A number of us will be piling into Karl’s place, where we’ll be broadcasting the show, including:
- Host Louise Bak,
- Musician Ian Revell,
- Darren Hyde, who’ll be doing the interpretative painting,
- Steven Cerritos will both film the proceedings and project films
Here’s how Karl describes the event:
Not a regular concert, Dead Red Velvet has never broken down the stage/audience barrier mid-concert before. We see this as a technology-mediated event with an interesting set of intersecting filters and advantages. With the help of our host, we hope to bring the warmth and spontaneity of an intimate house concert with all the distributive power and interactivity of the internet. Weird!
You’ll be able to log in and converse with us as well. It’s going to be interactive, odd, and fun!
Hop online tonight at 10 EST and join us! We’ll be at onairgigs.com.
How I Met Karl Mohr
I first met Karl Mohr in 1990 at the start of the school year when he was a frosh at my alma mater, Crazy Go Nuts University. I was DJing a party for incoming students and he wanted to congratulate me on playing Nine Inch Nails’ Head lIke a Hole, a song he hadn’t expected to hear, what the demographics of the place being largely preppie. It turned out that like me, he was a synth player, and that chance meeting turned into a friendship with some interesting collaborations. We even took a couple of courses together, even though our disciplines were vastly different (he was a music major, studying composition; I was in computer science), thanks to the Music Department’s strong support of electronic music and technology courses.
I probably wouldn’t have become the Accordion Guy without Karl. I’d had the accordion for a few months, but didn’t take it to the streets until Karl suggested that we take our squeezeboxes to a hospital cuts protest on Saturday, May 1st, 1999. We ended up wandering all over downtown Toronto, playing rock and pop tunes to surprised passers-by until passed Toronto’s most notorious goth club: The Sanctuary Vampire Sex Bar.
There, after playing a Marilyn Manson-style “Happy Birthday” for Mark the Bouncer, DJ Todd, who watched the whole thing, issued a challenge.
“Come back tonight,” he said, “and play anything that the crowd would like. I’ll put you onstage. If you get any applause — any applause at all — I will set you up with all the beer you can drink.”
We ran home and learned the song that led us to meet — Nine Inch Nails’ Head Like a Hole — and returned that evening in black clothing. Here’s the outcome:
If you’d like to read a more detailed recounting of the day I became the Accordion Guy with Karl, the story’s here.
Toronto’s Project Ukelele Gangsterism is a beautiful idea: they’re a group of ukelele players who are making surprise performances on the subway to brighten people’s commutes with a sweet little ditty titled Have an Awesome Day. As their Facebook page says, they’re following the Emersonian ideal of not pursuing happiness, but creating it.
I know from my own experience with the accordion how a surprise musical number can turn someone’s day around, and it’s great to see projects like this take root. It’s one of the reasons why Accordion City is one of the nicest places around.
Here’s a video of them playing earlier this morning:
Photographer Jason Cook caught the performance this morning and took some great photos, including this one:
Click the photo to see the original.
For more on this project, check out this news piece featuring the project’s creator, Adil Dhalla.
Here are more videos featuring Project Ukelele Gangsterism:
Hey, Project Ukelele Gangsterism: you have an awesome day, too!
Until last night, I had no idea that this video was posted online: it’s of me performing AC/DC’s Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap on accordion, my finalist number at the Karaoke Apocalypse competition at South by Southwest 2011.
Watching this video, it’s hard to believe that two months prior, I was a newly-separated guy gasping for breath in the intensive care unit. How quickly and completely things can change.
This took place in the back room of Austin’s The High Ball, a Mad Men-esque bowling alley straight from the 1960s, and my performance landed me second place, for which I won an iPad. I much preferred that prize to the first-place one: a year’s worth of Fandango tickets, which would’ve been useless to me since I’m in Canada.
The following year, I was invited onstage to reprise that performance: