Things I Didn't Get For Christmas 1. iPod Nano.
2. XBox 360.
3. A garden hose (I dunno, I like to water stuff...)
4. Copper gloves.
5. HDTV
6. A remote controlled mouse!!

You can read about it here. The article only mentions remote controlled mice in passing, but how cool would it be to have a remote controlled mouse! What if you had, like, 1000 of them? Even if you broke one of them (ie killed one), you could keep on playing around with it. What fun would it be! You could stand at the edge of an 8-lane busy intersection and play frogger with your little mouse. You could tie a mini-camera to your mouse and have semi-hidden mobile surveillance. Heck, you could send notes to roomates/wives via your RC Mouse! Man, if I could just get my hands on one of these I would be a happy, happy man.  ¶ 4:17 PM 22 Comments

  Conspiracies: Government DISCLAIMER: I don't buy into most of these ideas. However, that won't prevent me from spreading the ideas around.

Hopefully at least some of you dear readers have heard of the conspiracies surrounding government chemtrails, HAARP, weather warfare, and mind control.

I can't even get very deep into any of these subjects, but just do an internet search and hundreds of thousands of websites describing the dark details will be returned. Many of these are not simply believed in by some crackpot with a feeble mind, many have been analyzed and some very intelligent folks out there attest to these conspiracies.

Chemtrails are what you and I may know as contrails...the white smoke trailing behind various airplanes. This, the most widely believed in government conspiracy today, is actually full of chemicals intended to affect human beings. Some arguments go back and forth over whether it is intended as a nation-wide behavioral test, mind control, passivity-inducing, or a whole slew of other possibilities.

HAARP (High frequency Active Auroral Research Program) is operated jointly by the U.S. Navy, Air Force and several universities and is located in Gakona, eastern Alaska. Nicola Tesla patented weather influencing machinery before 1910, and explained how it could be used to control weather thousands of miles away. One reason HAARP was created was supposedly to communicate with submarines deep in the ocean using ELF radio waves which can penetrate the ocean as well as the earths surface. Some people have heard HAARP is being used to modify the atmosphere, affect the weather, repair the ozone layer or even control the jet-stream. Other people believe there is a world-wide network of HAARP transmitters to send out waves which can affect brain cells and control human behavior. Others believe the HAARP transmitter can emulate terrestrial waves which can produce earthquakes.

How many of you have heard that the recent hurricanes, tsunamis, and earthquakes are actually not natural, but instead creations of the government? Supposedly Hurricane Katrina was an out-of-control test of the weather control system. Others think it was entirely intentional. Some people believe that by sending the proper ELF radio waves through the ionosphere moisture can be brought to or prevented from going to drought-ridden areas. Some also believe that weather terrorism is something to be more fearful of than most have ever even imagined.

I don't personally think the government has any useful control over the weather, but, perhaps that is just the mind control telling me what to think...  ¶ 10:30 AM 9 Comments

  Conspiracies: Bands I'm a total conspiracy theorist today. What do you really know about most of the mainstream bands of today? Could they be sending subliminal messages to us? Think about the movie Zoolander and how male models have been top secret killing machines for decades. Is it really that crazy of an idea?

Just look at some of the things that have been put into albums. What about when you put Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon up against the movie The Wizard of Oz? Ever tried it? It's uncanny. Alan Parsons produced the Dark Side of the Moon, which is the ONLY album to ever have been "perfectly" produced. Not a single production error can be found on it. If you queue it at the correct moment it acts as a soundtrack for a large portion of the Wizard of Oz.

What about The Matrix and The Prodigy's song called Smack My B*tch Up? This one is ridiculous. When Neo and Trinity shoot up the first floor, blow it up, fly up the elevator shaft, and dodge bullets on the roof in an attempt at rescuing Morpheus it can be very precisely matched up with The Prodigy's song. I wonder who timed it to whom in that case?

AFI has a huge conspiracy around their "Sing the Sorrow" album. Not long beforehand they released an LP called "336". Why? They said it would make sense when "Sing the Sorrow" came out. All of the posters and advertisement had rabbits. The band came out with a short film. Various leads led to fans checking into number theory, chinese astrology, and numerology. Various 777, 333, and 666 type of things... Anyway, Sing the Sorrow came directly after 336, making it 337. Further research showed that AFI's lead singer was born in the year of the rabbit. Rabbits, according to that reincarnation theory, are not able to reincarnate. The front of the album has falling leaves (death, returning to dirt), and the back has water (new life). Anyway, The album begins and ends with a looping sound that is identical when reversed and which loops from the end of the album back to the beginning. Also, the track "Leaving Song Pt. 2" comes before "Leaving Song Pt. 1". Many theories state that the album is supposed to start in the middle and actually loop through then end at "Leaving Song Pt. 2". Finally, 336 is interpreted to mean death while 337 is interpreted to mean reincarnation. Plus, throughout the album is various spanish and latin that gets translated into similar thoughts. AFI is seriously crazy!

This then leads me to question other bands. What about Green Day? I know they are very popular this year, but they have one of the most politically charged albums to hit the mainstream in quite a while. It seems that an older fad sometimes called "Rock Opera" of putting a whole theme/story into an album a la "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" is returning. The old days of playing tracks backwards for secret messages and such is on the rise once again!

What conspiracies are out there that I've missed?  ¶ 1:12 PM 17 Comments

  Yo Yo Yo, I'm DJ Sounds-Like-Crap As usual I put an insane amount of effort into DJing a party to perfection. I was asked to DJ the youth group (they call themselves CD7) at my church's Christmas Banquet. I did this two years ago and I was wildly successful. I don't just show up and play some music...I prepare for weeks and/or months. I'll get back to my preparation later. For now I'll explain what happened.

We set up equipment on Wednesday of last week, but we didn't test things out. For various reasons it never got tested until 20 minutes before the banquet would be starting. Meanwhile I was frantically trying to learn how to use my newly downloaded DJ software, so I didn't really want to spare any time to figure out sound difficulties. The sound guy(s) had other tasks besides making the DJ equipment sound good, so I couldn't depend on them 100%. Anyway, the initial test sounded awful...the volume was at around 10% of normal loudness. I was ready to run up to radio shack for parts when I got word that we could wire it in a different way using the same wires. People were showing up in ties and dresses by this time so we couldn't do extensive testing. The sound guy got the rewiring done about a half hour after people started showing up. The decision was made to play quiet dinner music via a cd player until after everyone was finished eating. We did a quick (30 second) test of audio to make sure the new wiring would work and we heard some audio coming through...so I thought everything would be set. I was finally at ease and ready to go.

A short while later I was "on" and 4 seconds into it I already knew there were problems. I was supposed to start out with a 10 second audio clip leading into a mix that would get danced to by a breakdance squad. The audio clip would not come out of the speakers. The breakdance mix was missing something. I went directly from that into the dance music and I started out with my heaviest hitting bass-filled techno song. I (and everyone else) was completely underwhelmed. We had no bass coming through. Okay, okay, maybe I can deal with this...I'll avoid songs in which the bass is one of the most important sound elements. I have listened through every song a few times...I can figure this out. I decided to put on a few songs that I knew would be crowd favorites. They both bombed because, guess what?, you couldn't hear any of the lyrics. The sound coming out of the speakers was so bad that you could not hear vocals or bass from any song. I tried to switch the music around and I hoped it wasn't the software's fault. After an intermission I switched to iTunes in hopes that it would sound better. Actually I think I sounded worse. Anyway, I never got people dancing, and very luckily they miscalculated my scheduled hour and a half of DJing -- instead there was only a half hour of time available for dancing. Any longer and I would have had a heart attack and died.

In terms of how I prepare:
First of all I simply listen to tons of music to start getting a feel for what will sound good and be dancy. That's really the easy part. With all of those ideas I start to filter for bad language and I pull out songs that I know without any extra listening will be unplayable based on language or content. After that I get to the very long and tedious part... I don't actually know if any of the songs still on my list are clean or not. I have to actually listen from the beginning to the end of almost every song. Well, I used to do that. Now I search for the lyrics online and I find I can read through it much faster than listening through the entire song. Some songs have no lyrics to be found online, so you still have to listen to the whole song.

As a DJ you are supposed to have at least 10 times as much music as you will need. These teens are unpredictable, so I have about 12 times more music than I needed. They also have a very wide range of tastes, so you can't just play one type of music all night. Weeks before the dance I had requests for rap, screamo, Tom Jones, The Ramones, nu-metal, swing, various techno, punk, line dances, and much more. The night of the dance I had requests for country and for Mariah Carey. Needless to say, even with 9 hours of music on my playlist I still did not have enough music to make everybody happy.

Anyway, back to my preparations. Nine hours of "approved" music probably starts out at about 500 hours of music that gets weeded out. While I am removing songs for language and content (no sex or drugs!), I am also trying to put mixes together. Any audio or video editing is extremely tedious and time consuming. I spent hours and hours making interesting song mixes...and I ended up using none of them at the actual dance. Anyway, luckily for me I have saved my playlist this year...so if I have to do this again it will go from a 50+ hour process down to about 5 or 6.

Ugg. I've been depressed all weekend because all of that work ended up sounding like worthless noise. At the end of the night I switched my sound cable with Jake's cable (he had to play a 3 minute video...so he had his own wiring) and everything sounded great. Not my fault, but it was depressing to me nonetheless.  ¶ 9:44 AM 11 Comments

  I'm Sort of A Big Deal Hi. I'm Jason Moran. I don't know if you've heard of me, I'm sort of a big deal.

Turns out I'm in a movie trailer, check it out!.

I was doing a few thousand bicep curls like I do every day at the gym, maintaining this El Gigante physique, when I overheard some hot babes talking about how much they liked my movie.

I started to tell them about how I was training as a ninja for my next blockbuster when I totally flipped out and chopped off their heads because somebody dropped some weights and totally flipping out is what ninjas do. What you might not know is that ninjas are cool; and by cool, I mean totally sweet.

Facts:
1. Ninjas are mammals.
2. Ninjas fight ALL the time.
3. The purpose of the ninja is to flip out and kill people.

Ninjas can kill anyone they want! Ninjas cut off heads ALL the time and don't even think twice about it. These guys are so crazy and awesome that they flip out ALL the time.

Now that's what I call REAL ULTIMATE POWER!  ¶ 3:36 PM 27 Comments

  History Of Jason I have no intentions of being funny, but maybe my life is. These are just points chronicalling my formative years.
1. I had 5 chins as a VERY fat baby
2. I used to step on my 1 year old sister to demonstrate my dominance
3. She knocked me unconscious because I stepped on her a few months later
4. I lived in a Lakewood duplex until I was 1
5. I drank my first beer at 2 years old, my second when I was 18
6. My sister could not properly pronounce "Jason" at first
7. She gave me my first nickname instead of Jason - "Bobo"
8. Kelly and I listened to ANY adult, no matter what. One time (about 4 years old) an ice skating rink worker told us to leave and play on the swings while our parents were gone. We did and weren't found until many hours later.
9. I put on a track suit at 3 years of age and looked for my jogging dad in the middle of traffic on Lorain Ave.
10. I peed my pants in Kindergarten because the teacher would not let me go to the bathroom.
11. I cried in 2nd grade because the teacher asked me to stay after class.
12. When I was 3 or 4 my dad taught me to add 1+1 all the way up to 19,342,813,113,834,066,795,298,816 (yes, that is over 19 septillion) by doubling numbers.
13. Yes I was the best kid in math every year.
14. I was the shortest kid in my grade between 3rd grade and 7th grade.
15. I didn't understand the concept of insult come-backs until my sophomore year of high school.
(My clever come back was: "I'm a nerd? N.E.R.D. Never Ending Radical Dude!" or "Oh yeah? You're an intergalactic geek!" Man, I sucked at that come back thing)
16. I was a teacher's pet until 11th grade.
17. I am the only student to get over 100% (perfect scores plus all extra credit) for the entire year of geometry at St. Eds
18. My best friend in grade school, Dan Lemasters, used to pretend he was a giant 4-foot-tall eyeball who was in pain from the hot air blowing on him and said he would explode puss on me if I touched him.
19. Dan and I got into a fist fight in 7th grade over whether it was 4th down or not in a tag football game.
20. He broke 2 fingers on my chin so I won by default.
21. I am very even-tempered and am very slow to anger
22. I can count the number of times I have been MAD on my ten fingers
23. When I get angry I always cry.
24. At times of anger I often black out.
25. I literally tried to kill my sister once while I was angry. I don't remember it.
26. I tried to kill Rachael Stack more than once. I remember one of them.
27. Apparently I'm not good at killing people.
28. My anger can ONLY be triggered by perceived betrayal by somebody in my trust.
29. I was in a shaving cream fight to celebrate graduating from 8th grade.
30. I was the valedictorian of St. Marks when I graduated in 8th grade.
31. I won the "Peace" award in 6th grade
32. A mean kid from down the street threw a fist sized rock from 4 driveways away and hit me in the head as I was running away from him in 2nd grade
33. I was a creative kid
34. We made up games all of the time
35. When I was 5 we melted crayons into sidewalk cracks with magnifying glasses.
36. They stayed there for months until we had to help dig them back out.
37. We invented many hide-and-go-seek and jailbreak hybrid games.
38. One of them involved tying one person up to a pole in my backyard, with that person able to catch people as soon as they could figure a way out of their bindings. We also used to jump from garage to garage in order to get away.
39. I won a hula hoop competition in 4th grade.
40. I was a total thug
41. I actually wore my outfit backwards once like Kris-Kross
42. I could sag with my pants one inch above my knees
43. I was in all honors classes in high school, making me a nerd.
44. I was too nervous to ask girls out in high school.
45. The first girl I asked out was to my senior prom.
46. Most of the other girls I have dated have either been set-up or they were the ones to ask ME out.
47. I'm actually still shy around girls, even if it doesn't look like it
48. I was super-introverted and shy until I did a massive 180 somewhere around 10th grade.
49. I accomplished that feat by pretending I was somebody else
50. The suckers at Lifeline bought it, and I have been that "somebody else" ever since
51. Maybe that "somebody else" is who I really was all along.
52. I had a crush on basically every girl I knew at some point in high school.
5B. I was a missionary to Tijuana, Mexico when I turned 18. (What job did I get? Yes. A clown.)
53. The JKJs (Jessica Kelly and Jason) practiced our "Footloose" dance every day in case we made it to the Arsenio Hall show.
54. I've been cutting my own hair since freshman year of college.
55. I was nicknamed "Sparky" in college because I was like one of those sparky dogs at a toy-store that they set out which jump around and do flips endlessly.
56. I once three-man-sling-shot a mushy orange from a 10 story roof onto a random passerby. He was okay apart from mushy orange stuff all over him.
57. I more than overdid it on my 21st. I had 47 drinks in a 4-hour period. After filling up a 3-gallon garbage can with half of my insides I awoke the next day with no headache, completely aware, feeling like a million bucks, and still completely drunk.
58. I lived in various parts of Middlesex county, New Jersey in 2001.
59. I was within 40 minutes of Manhattan on 9/11. We got the rest of the day off of work. I went shopping at Best Buy.
60. My roomate refused to clean his bathroom toilet. Mushrooms started to grow in it.
61. Our apartment got broken into on our 2nd last day before we moved back to Cleveland. Nothing of mine was taken.
62. I permanently gained 20 pounds my first month of college.
63. I permanently gained 20 pounds in September and October of 2001 (in Jersey).
64. It might be a fluke, but I gained 10 pounds last week.
65. My wife broke up with me during the first year we dated.
66. I was blindsided.
67. She decided breaking up was a bad idea and we got back together a few months later.
68. I used to have two 12s pumping a lot more than 1000 watts of bass out of the trunk of "The Beast"
69. My "system" was stolen from my car, ending my bass coolness forever.
70. My senior year of college I walked into a circle telling lore of "Legends" from the past. Turns out the story being told was about me during my freshman year.
71. I got in trouble from the RIAA for copyright infringement in college.
72. I went from a 4.2 "straight A" GPA in high school to academic probation for bad grades in college. It was from not going to class, not studying, and not doing homework. I decided to do all of that stuff for my senior year of college and I got a 4.0.
73. The story version of all of this can be found here.  ¶ 10:12 AM 15 Comments