New YouTube Videos

1.1.2007: Two new videos are up on YouTube, but the Christmas one isn't done yet. Will come soon...

Christmas pics are up

12.31.2006: I have uploaded photos from Christmas 2006 and misc. pics of Evan on Yahoo! View, print, order, etc. Hope you all enjoy!

Top Five Records

Late at night, unwinding on the couch after work. It's cold tonight, getting hard to type because my fingers are going numb.

As some of you know, I am a bit of a DMB fan. Tonight I got an e-mail from the administrator at Ants Marching in answer to a question, and for the first time ever, I intentionally clicked on a Gooooooogle Ad in my Gmail.

It was an Amazon ad for a Dave and Tim (Reynolds) live album, "Live at Luther College." Now, I already have that album. But I heard somewhere that that album is one of Amazon's top five buyer-rated albums of all time. So I decided to click through the ad and read some of the reviews. And the reviews support the claim. Here are a few of my favorite excerpts, slightly abridged:

Not a big DMB fan, but this set is fantastic!
Having lived with two DMB fans, one of whom virtually worships the man and his band, I have been exposed to the vast majority of their tunes. I think they're talented, but between Dave's somewhat indecipherable vocals and the sometimes over-the-top instrumentation, I find that whatever message they're trying to convey often gets buried.

That being said, "Live at Luther College" is most definitely one (or two, if a two-disc set can't count as one) of the ten recordings I'd want with me if I were stranded on a desert island.

There are thousands of recordings that use electric guitar and of which I'm a huge fan, but if I had to choose, I prefer the purity of acoustic guitar. The use of acoustic guitars alone gives this set a huge edge.

And Tim Reynolds is a virtuoso--probably as technically gifted as many respected classical guitarist, but with an equally impeccable ability to reinvent each of Dave's songs so that they have every bit as much groove, humor, emotion, and force (and often more) as they did with his full band backing him up...

And while they take their guitars to the very limits of unplugged rock, Dave's voice is still able to shine through clearly...

Virtually all of the power and emotion is generated by the musicians themselves, not by special effects or gadgets, and you can really feel what a memorable experience it must have been to attend that show.

Amazing
The first time i listen to this album, i was blown away. So amazing how these two men can make daves songs into something totally different. The next time i listened to this album, i was laying in bed at 11 at night, jus relaxin, under the influence of hallucinagenic mushrooms. n it was the most amazing night of my life. the emotion on this album is unbelievable. the whole song tripping billies is amazing, n i still feel like im on the shrooms wenever i listen to the song. easily the best version of tripping billies...this is one of the best albums ever recorded.

simply amazing
The stand out song on this CD is "#41". Dave's voice is filled with emotion and the acoustic solo to close the song is almost haunting in the melody and precision Tim Reynolds gives it. This is the BEST live album ever made. Buy it for a truly amazing acoustic experience.

It doesn't get much better than this
Tim Reynolds and Dave Matthews merge into one being on this album, communicating to such an extent that I would not be scared to compare it with such associations as Coltrane/Cannonball, Parker/Gillespie and more recently DiMeola/McLaughlin/DeLucia or Lagrene/Luc.

Great songs, very surprising sound for a live recording and everything just clicks.

The Cat, Coffee, and Coltrane

Editor's note: This is not your average ultra-liberal blog entry. It's of an entirely different nature. I have made only one similar blog entry.

Woke up this morning feeling sick. It actually started last night at work. Itchy throat led to runny nose led to cough by the time I got home. This morning: full-fledged stuffiness.

But that's OK, because I'm content this morning anyway.

I actually arose earlier than usual today, despite being up till 1:30 last night unwinding and programming my old phone book into my new phone. For some reason when Jenn got up to get ready for work, I just didn't feel like sleeping any more.

So I got up at 7:30 (3 hours earlier than usual) and put on John Coltrane. I've always been vaguely aware that I like jazz, but can't say I know anything else about it. But I'm trying to expand my musical mind, and recently acquired a few Jazz albums (I won't say how...) and thought it would be a good mood setter for a Monday. And I was right.

As Coltrane played and Jenn got ready for work, I got my coffee and prepared to read the 21st-centurty morning paper: SFGate. As I read Ray Ratto's Super Bowl analysis (I surprisingly spotted three errors, the copy editors must have been in a hurry or drunk from watching the game), our cat found her way to my lap. When I'm lap-topping on the couch, she goes into stealth mode, trying to find my lap before I notice what she's doing. It's weird.

I suddenly realized that it was an alliteration kind of day, and this morning was brought to me by the letter C: My Cat, my Computer, my Coffee, and Coltrane. Life is good.

The Cat seems to like jazz. She likes mellow music. As those who know me well know, Jenn and I are unusually enamored with our Cat, who shall henceforth be known as Nana. Jenn will be the first to tell you I take WAY too may pictures of her. But with digital, why not?

And this morning, with the soft sound of the saxophone as ambiance, she and I danced. Her cutest trick -- which I always show people when they meet her -- is to stand up on her hind legs, rising up to meet my hand when I pet her. After that we had a nice little "nuggle session," as Jenn likes to call it, while I drank my coffee and began this entry.

(The difference between casual animal likers and animal lovers is that animal lovers realize that animals can also love back)

Now, at 11:52 a.m., Nana has retired to afternoon resting place -- underneath the wool cover of a living room chair. But John Coltrane plays on, second time through the album.

A perfect morning, really. My head even feels quite a bit better. Too bad I still have to work eight hours tonight. Should I call in sick? It wouldn't be a lie.

Catching up

As much as I hate to resort to the old "Sorry I haven't blogged in a while" intro, it has been two-and-a-half months, so...sorry I haven't blogged in a while.

I've been rather preoccupied, writing- and news-wise, since my last post because I now work at the sports desk of the Times-Standard. I'm having a blast doing it, taking photos and writing occasionally.

I've also been furiously working to finish up ErikFraser.com, which I did last night so I thought I ought to update the blog for the occasion. The new site has my photos, writing, and graphic design stuff on it, including some of my recent stuff that appeared in the Times-Standard.

Now, on with the show...

Humboldt County was recently hit with its most severe windstorm in some time. Winds were clocked at 84 mph, and many of the trees that used to line Highway 101 became obstacles in the morning commute. A cypress branch fell on my neighbor's house, tearing a hole in his roof. But it could have been much worse -- a few hundred feet away, two very large cypress trees were uprooted completely.

The power went out for two days, and the few major roads leading to the area were all closed for a time, cutting off all shipments of consumables. I was quite amazed at how quickly local socitety degraded into third-world chaos when this happened.

Most of the gas stations in the area closed. The few that were open on Saturday had hour-long lines -- no joke. Stores that were fortunate enough to have generators stayed open, but ran out of ice, bottled water, candles, and most sizes of batteries within hours.

Obviously, people weren't prepared. But am I surprised? No. No matter how many times the local newspaper writes an editorial listing what supplies you should assemble in your basement, we all -- myself included -- just assume that all the Katrinas and tsunamis will happen to "someone else."

Not that this "disaster" was on a scale even close to Katrina -- the only fatality was a dog in a car that got squashed by a tree -- but it did give us a quick glimpse into the anarchy that we all would be faced with if Humboldt were hit with a major earthquake or tsunami and become cut off for a longer period of time.

In other news...

There are certain times when it's quite interesting to work in a newsroom. This week was one of those times, because of the tragedy of the miners in West Virginia. Most of the country's newspapers -- including mine -- went out Wednesday morning with the glorious announcement that 12 of the 13 trapped miners had been found alive. But as people like me who were watching CNN at 1 a.m. knew, that news had been tragically incorrect.

I don't mean to trivialize this incident -- it was a terrible tragedy -- but because of how it played out, it became an instant journalism class lecture on several levels. And the newsroom is our journalism class. Should we have tried to "Stop the presses!"? Sitting at home at 12:30 a.m. after work, I wondered if I ought to call our editors. I debated it, then decided that it was realistically too late for that.

My co-worker, Tracy, had decided to do something about it. She drove back to the office and started calling people. But all the necessary press people -- plate makers and such -- had gone home. They would have had to literally scratch out the words on the plate and print it like that.

The next question was, how should it be handled? Some papers dedicated much editorial space to discussing it with their readers. We, so far have not. By the time we put out Thursday's paper, it would really be old news in this time of constant communication. So we put a correction at the top of the Web site and left it at that. But internally, we've been discussing it nonstop.

Were the 24-hour news networks partially to blame? Was the media in general? What about how the news got out, with some hysterical woman running up to Anderson Cooper live on CNN to break the news? Endless questions and ethics debates.

And for Journalism and PR classes at HSU, this became a quintessential "how-not-to-handle-it" lesson, the anti-Tylenol, if you will. No one knows exactly what happened or how the wrong news got out, but it is inconscionable to put the victims' families through that kind of emotional roller coaster. I mean, how often to you see a brawl break out in a church? After they had all gathered to celebrate a "miracle," it was all torn away from them.

'No stealth motive'

One of the measures on the ballot for California's "special" election, Proposition 73, would require doctors to notify the parents of minor girls before performing abortions. Now, we may spend the next three centuries debating the morality of abortions, and the psychological impact of sex and abortions on minors. However, today's Chronicle reveals that there are two pieces of fine print in the text of Proposition 73 that we all need to be aware -- and wary -- of, and for different reasons.

One is that the measure attempts to redefine the term "abortion" in California. Currently, an abortion is a "medical treatment intended to induce the termination of a pregnancy.'' But Proposition 73 would define it, at least for minors, as "the use of any means to terminate the pregnancy of an unemancipated minor female...with the knowledge that the termination will...with reasonable likelihood, cause the death of the unborn child, a child conceived but not yet born." (Emphasis mine.)

For their part, the measure's authors claim no "stealth motive" for inserting that definition, but the wording reeks of Karl Rove and the Religious Right's highly orchestrated campaign to impose its theology on all of us through law. There was no justifiable reason to write in a definition of abortion in the proposition. All they had to do was say, "as defined by California law." This is a "baby step" toward their desired redefinition of abortion as murder. It's the whole "how to boil a frog" metaphor. Try to just drop the country into boiling water, it will immediately jump out. But place the country in cool water, and raise the temperature incrementally, and your frog is doomed, unaware of the creeping danger. No stealth motive, my ass.

The other, and even more constitutionally -- or possibly unconstitutionally -- dangerous provision concerns judges. See, minors can avoid notifying parents by going before a judge and demostrating maturity or arguing that notifying parents would not be in the minor's best interests. But the measure would require a public report to be issued annually on every judge's record in such cases.

This is absolutely ridiculous. There is no other type of case which has this requirement. And not only would this result in vicious political attack ads, as the Chronicle story points out ("Judge X allowed young girls to secretly kill their unborn babies in 9 cases out of 10 last year"), but it could also potentially place judges in physical danger, just like the posting of abortion doctors' names and addresses on Web sites.

There is absolutely no sociological benefit to these public reports. They would only be used to attack and point fingers at judges who don't support one set of religious beliefs through rulings from the bench. It compromises the independence of the judiciary. Inexcusable. No on 73.

AP Wire + Photoshop = Blog

As I work at a newspaper, I have access to a wonderful thing called the AP Photo Wire. I also have access to Photoshop. And sometimes an opportunity comes along that's too good to pass up. Now I ask you: Which of these two images is more "truthful"?





Answer: Although the top image represents the physical reality, the bottom one much more closely resembles ideological reality.