New George Carlin

Hi folks. Today is the day of the release of the new album by George Carlin. Wait! What? Yes, he’s been dead for 8 years now but we the fans have been given something new that we probably haven’t heard before. I will get into the title and the tracks in this post, as well as my own comments on it as a Long time fan of his work.
First of all, the album is called i Kinda Like It When A Lotta People Die. That was the original title to the 2001 HBO special and album called Complaints and Grievances. It was changed after the September 11th attacks in New York for obvious reasons. However he didn’t throw the title or the main peace from the show away and it exists in 3 versions, with 2 of them here and the other on the 2005 special Life Is Worth Loosing. it also exists in written form, in the posthumously published book Last Words, also read in the audiobook by George’s brother Patrick. I’m actually surprised that he didn’t keep the peace as it was in the original show, despite the attacks. After all, comedy and tragedy go hand-in-hand. Right? However, New York was the main focus with media on the September 11 attacks so, I have no problem with it.
Now, let’s go through the album track by track and I will give my own opinions if necessary, on each track and what he says about the topics discussed. The first track is called Boston Rant 1957 and is a comment on how those in Authority may not be oh good people. In particular, he talks about the police and firemen and the people in both jobs who have less to do. They may be stealing from you or planting guns in the hands of dead people, so they could say that he committed suicide, after the police had shot them. Or, so they can say that the person have a gun on them so they had to shoot them.
The second track is called Rats and Squealers, which goes after the snitch hotlines, which exist for the public to help the police solve crimes.
Track 3 is called Cocaine and is a short one of very little significants. Track 4, The Fecal Differential is about farts on a plain and in particular, those from coach class. He even gives us some fart jokes. If you have the album Complaints And Grievances you will notice that these are the same fart jokes from that album an HBO special.
Track 5 is a comment about there being too many songs and it is called Tired Of Songs. He also says that all the songs we hear are mostly love songs or about a broken heart. Well, those are the ones we hear on the radio to cell albums and attract the young hipsters. There aren’t any songs about Cancer or things that come up in everyday life, according to him. I agree and unfortunately those songs are kept off the radio and TV and only in the individuals homes or on their playback devices. Think about a band like Cannibal Corpse and songs such as Fucked With A Knife. It’s a shame he didn’t mention bands like that and how they should be played on the radio, even on specialty shows spotlighting all forms of heavy metal. But he couldn’t do that because that would be too obvious. Right?
Track 6 is called The First Enema and well, I’m going to leave that for you to listen to for yourself. Track 7 is called Uncle Dave and is the first version of I Kinda Like It When A Lotta People Die, with Uncle Dave and all the other dead Uncle Dave’s in the peace, along with some material about natural disasters.
Track 8 is George’s long time manager Jerry Hamza talking about how he met George and about how this album came together. Track 9 is an interview with Rocco Urbisci, who produced 10 of George’s HBO specials and in fact, his last 10.
Track 10 is the original peace itself, I Kinda Like It When A Lotta People Die, which he read out in front of an audience for the first time. He’d been writing and fine-tuning it for almost 13 years or so, before he did it some time in either 2000 or 2001. When you listen to it and the earlier track uncle Dave, listen to the intensity which builds throughout both pieces. Doesn’t it remind you of an earlier peace he did on the 1986 album Playin’ With Your Head called Things To Watch Out For? Then, listen to the track Coast To Coast Emergency on Life Is Worth Losing and you will notice this version builds then tails off slightly, when uncle Dave shows up. Then it builds again when things explode and end off the album on that rather large ominous note.
Overall, I think this is a great album in its own right although, the sound Quality could’ve been better but I don’t mind. After all, the bonus disc on the Little David Years box set contains 20 tracks and they’re all in mono so, I’m not going to complain. Also, the material is taken from recordings in 2000 and 2001, except for the Boston Rant 1957, obviously because you can hear more of his New York accent and his younger voice. Which reminds me, have you noticed that his voice timbre changed significantly, after 1992? I first noticed the change on his TV show The George Carlin Show and at first, I didn’t recognize him except for how he talks in his comedy routines. Well, it’s just something I noticed but it’s not bad.
If you are a serious diehard fan of George Carlin I suggest that you go out and get this album to keep and not to stream. You should have this in your collection so you can Play it for your friends and family. Congratulations to those who had a hand in putting this album together and if there is more material on the way, please, let me know so I can blog about it. I’m just a regular guy who is a fan and wants to share things with people, like this new album.
Anyway, that’s all from me and I hope you enjoy both this post and the new album.

IOS 10, So Far

Hi folks. This is the first post since iOS 10 was released on Tuesday and I have some things to say about it, both good and bad. These are all my own personal feelings on it and you may agree or disagree but, I stand behind what I say here.
Okay, let’s start from the beginning… I first heard about it back in July, when I read about it on Wikipedia. Okay, I know that Wikipedia isn’t always right but in most cases they are absolutely bang on and in the case of iOS, I wanted to find out about it so I could be prepared for what was to come.
So, I did my research and I have posted here, my feelings on Apple dropping support for certain iPhones and iPods and I did what I had to do, to get ready for September 13th. Of course, I had no idea that iOS 10 would be released that day. I thought it would come out on a Wednesday, as it had come in the past few years.
Now we will get to the download itself. On Tuesday September 13th I went to my usual location to download anything that was bigger than 100 MB and or the latest iOS Software updates onto my iPhone. I did it successfully on my iPods but not on my iPhone at first. I have an iPhone5c and well, it’s kinda old and the battery is rather shaky in that it charges quickly and discharges just as fast.
The download got through but the installation was a real problem. First of all, my phone decided to go to 0% battery power, despite that I used my portable charger to keep up the charge. I went to the Apple Store and found out that the iPhone was frozen and I wasn’t surprised. I had this problem with it for a while now and it is frustrating but I know now not to do a hard reset unless I really, must do so.
Anyway, I went home and managed to get the phone going again and iOS 10 was now installed in all my devices. So, I was happy and now, we can get to what I like and dislike about iOS 10 so far.
What I Like
I like the new voices you can download and if you have any type of screen reader or GPS you know the mall. We have: Tom, Susan, Allison, Lee and many others who are familiar to anybody with anything which talks. We even have Fred, who sounds like an Old fashion computer from the 1980s. In fact, if you have the album OK Computer by Radiohead, check out the track Fitter Happier. It is a short peace which consists entirely of 1990’s slogans which singer Tom York put together quickly, according to what I read. That’s Fred on the track and on the first single paranoid Android, under Tom’s singing “What’s that?” With the held e on the word that. Anyway, I digress.
As for the classic voices for Siri and the iPhone, they are all there in the basic and enhanced forms. I like that all the names of all the voices are available now and they are not just named Female Siri or Male Siri. For example: my favourite Austrailian Siri voice is named Catherine I called her Sheila before I found this out. So, I’ll call her Catherine now but I still like her and she likes me too.
I think it is really cool that we are now able to change how some words and phrases are pronounced. Too bad you can’t change the dialect of a voice such as changing Catherine’s voice to an American dialect. Hmmm! If we could I would do that in a second and as for Karen, I would change your dialect and her inflections. I found that she was rather unemotional, unlike her current counterpart.
What I Don’t Like
Okay, this is about what I don’t like about the new iOS but there are some things in this section, I like but they need to be improved upon. I also believe there are too many things that if not used properly, you could shoot yourself in the foot.
For the Music app, I like that everything is organized and the “Downloaded Music” tab is a good idea. However, if you swipe the wrong way then tap you could accidentally delete a song or an entire artists work from your music library. Everything else is fine and I may comment on other things that will come to mind later.
I find the email is now confused in that in some message threads, I had a real hard time reading all the messages at first. I had to change some things in the settings so I could be able to get to all emails in a thread, when they apply. Also, if you have more than one email address it will direct you to send an email to a certain folder or another email box. That is used with the second or third email address and not so much with the default account. That is confusing and hopefully this will be looked at for future updates.
The alarm is fine except that it repeats songs like in iOS 9. Another thing I found out is that it will only play a song for 15 minutes and that is it. I used a 22 minute song as an alarm to wake me up for the past couple of years and now, it cuts off after 15 minutes. I think that Apple should have gone back to how it was in iOS 8, where you could play a song as an alarm once and it would play the entire length of the composition.
One more thing I will mention here is the video application. Earlier in the summer I said that there should be an option where you can create a playlist of videos and or movies, which you would like to see. This will be good if you are on a long trip wore want to watch episodes of a TV season you have downloaded, in a certain order according to you. However, you still can’t do that and I think that it should be looked at for future updates pronto.
Something else that deserves a mentio is the new iPhone7, coming out tomorrow. The main thing everyone is talking about is that lack of an earphone jack. I agree with those who don’t like this and I believe that this is done, so you can listen to your much using Bluetooth headphones or, the new EarPods coming out later this fall. Let’s be honest about this and ask ourselves, do we really need something else to be responsible for while listening to her music or talking on our phones? It seems that Apple is forgotten that Bluetooth uses battery power, just like the iPhones, iPods and iPads. This is just one more thing to have to babysit, while either listening to music, talking on your phones or writing out a report, blog post, etc. I know there are other things you can do but I think you understand the point. In the future there will be other add-ons but you will need to purchase, which require you to monitor battery power. This means carrying multiple battery chargers with you, while you were mobile.
Well, that’s about it for this post and I will be back tomorrow with another one.

September 11 15 years later

Hi all. Obviously I don’t need to remind you all who are reading this post, that today is the 15th anniversary of that terrible day. Yes, when the World Trade Center was collapsed by planes flow’n by terrorists. I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I found out what had happened.I was doing my grocery shopping and I was having a great time. I had decided to take a taxi home and the cabbie was trying to find news of what was happening. Naturally, I thought it was another suicide bomber in Israel or something like that. I had heard about a lot of them on the news, from about September 2000 up until then. When I got home, I had no idea of what I was in for, while listening to the radio.

Eventually, I had heard about it on all radio stations and even when Howard Stern was on local Toronto radio station Q107, his show was talking about it and had people in the area helping him cover it. Obviously, his show was right in New York City so it made sense. Even the Crazy Cabbie was covering the story, less than a week or so after crying on the air when discussing a personal issue.

I was glued to my radio all day and most of the week with more information and repeated information on what had happened coming at me. After that I was thinking about how it was going to affect our entertainment. In my case it was New Metal that I was listening to at the time. I was afraid of the music being watered down to the point of being rather tame. Another way to go is to go all angry and write all about how we should kill others, who don’t like our open society. I was interested in how bands such as: Slipknot, System Of A Down and others who had released albums in the past year were going to react, when their new albums came out. In the case of System Of A Down, they wouldn’t be releasing any newmy written songs until 2005. All though Steal This Album was released a year later, with the song Boom which had somewhat of a related theme to what was going on politically.
I was also thinking about how much bands would have to scale back on pyrotechnics, particularly concussive Pyro which makes a loud booming sound at appropriate parts of songs to get the audience to make a lot of noise. When I saw Rob Zombey in April 2002 there were a lot of explosions but no booming, which disappointed me. However, other bands were using it still like Green Day and Slipknot, but not in Canada. I miss that and I hope it comes back, despite everything.
Another thing that also concerned me was how much things would change when I was traveling on the bus, whether it was public transit or intercity transit. Obviously, the July 30th 2008 murder on a Canadian Greyhound bus would be years away but I had thought that things would change at the bus station too. I have traveled much since then and not much has changed except for the rising price of tickets.
As for flying, I can’t speak to that because I haven’t flow’n since 1990 and that was only because I was on a sports trip with my school. Would what happened 15 years ago today Deter me from flying ever again? I can tell you emphatically no. Although, it would make me more vigilant but not vigilante.

Anyway, for me things haven’t changed all that much but I still think about that day every so often and wonder what would have happened if the flight from Boston was delayed or canceled. Would it have changed everything? I don’t know but it does make you wonder what would have been if things had been different that day, before the first plane hit at 8:46 AM. Let’s all try to remember that day and be glad that we’re still here and can live to talk Or think about it, from where we stood or sat that day.