Old Ex Cathedra

I’m delighted to pass along this announcement from my friend Maria Schneider. Hey, she prefaced the email “Dear Bob” and she answered a couple of my questions on that interview a few months ago and she’s friends with Bob Florence, and I think I can get away with claiming him as a friend if I don’t say it too loudly, so….

She’s going to be at the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild (1815 Metropolitan Street) in Pittsburgh for a four-day stand:

• Thursday, April 6th at 7:30 p.m.
• Friday, April 7th at 8:00 p.m.
• Saturday, April 8th (Two Sets) 7:00 p.m. and 9:30 p.m.
• Sunday April 9th at 2:30 p.m.

Tickets by phone call: 412-322-0800. Tickets by Internet, visit instantseats.com

If you can possibly get there, get there. After the band had performed at the London Jazz Festival last year, people were saying it was the best musical experience of their lives.

Harry Browne, the leader of the libertarians (to the extent that you can utter that phrase without imploding) has published all in one place the creed of the church of libertarianism The 7 Vital Principles of Government. There are very few surprises there if you’ve ever spent more than a couple of minutes in the company of a libertarian.

Well, maybe there’s one: it’s possible without too much trouble to demonstrate that every single one of those libertarian articles of faith is wrong!

Let’s start at the beginning and see how we do.

1. Government is force. Every government program, law, or regulation is a demand that someone do what he doesn’t want to do, refrain from doing what he does want to do, or pay for something he doesn’t want to pay for. And those demands are backed up by police with guns.

Browne is perfectly right in his main thesis that government is force, and if he’d stopped there the debate would be over. You and I, together with our neighbors, do indeed decide together that we want to forbid certain kinds of behavior, and that we further want to pay people to enforce those prohibitions. Those people, our police officers, are subject to more than ordinary scrutiny in hiring, and they’re subject to constant vigilance as they enforce those laws.

Can that system break down? In many, many ways, from the originators of the laws (Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act) to the way the laws get passed (Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay) to the hiring of police officers (the real Miami Vice cops) to the conduct of the police (Rodney King). Our hope is that they work better, and as history has shown, they do get better over time. Not inevitably, and not without citizen scrutiny and effort, but they do improve.

Are we doing well enough? Certainly not, and if this were Browne’s point, he would simply be doing his duty as a public spirited citizen to remind us that we all need to improve our laws and our oversight of law enforcement. Or if he thought, as Barry Goldwater did, that we needed fewer laws, then sensible people can reply as Peter Shaffer had Mozart do in Amadeus:

Emperor Joseph II: [T]here are simply too many notes, that’s all. Just cut a few and it will be perfect.
Mozart: Which few did you have in mind, Majesty?

So what can Browne have in mind? There are two possibilities. One we can dismiss out of hand: Browne isn’t a Polyanna who thinks we’ll solve all our problems by giving criminals a big hug. I suspect he recognizes that the Kingdom of God on earth is unlikely to arrive before lunchtime. Yes, fewer laws might mean fewer law enforcement officers, but you’re fiddling around the margins, and Browne is intelligent enough to realize that you’re talking about couch cushion change. Some people will always need to be restrained by force, and Browne knows it.

So if less need for force isn’t the answer, what’s left? I suggest (based on Browne’s saying so himself many times) that his problem isn’t with the use of force, but with the use of force by government.

So we’re certainly entitled to ask, what’s the alternative to force applied by all of us through our government? The answer, to nobody’s surprise, is the use of force applied by some of us through our bodygards. Private force. The security guards who are so bright and helpful at the airport, the mercenaries who let bin Laden escape and are now losing the whole country in Afghanistan, and the private security guards who protected the property of the wealthy in New Orleans. These are Browne’s paradigms. It’s the dawning of a new day in America: the day of Soldier of Fortune.

I’ve saved the other two paragraphs from this item in Brown’s credo because they’re especially vicious when you ask what the alternative to public force is:

You expect that force to be used only against the guilty. But we can see how the Drug War, the foreign wars, asset forfeiture, the Patriot Act, and other government activities have used force just as often against the innocent — people who have not intruded on anyone else’s person or property.

In fact, government force is used more often against the innocent than the guilty, because the guilty make it their business to understand the laws that apply to them and stay clear of them. Meanwhile, the innocent, thinking they’ve nothing to fear, suddenly find that they’ve innocently violated laws they never heard of.

Let’s leave aside the whole issue of mens rea and the distinction between malum prohibitum and malum in se — distinctions that have existed in the law for centuries and which gut, stuff, and mount Browne’s last paragraph like a muskellunge.

That neglect isn’t the worst thing about Browne’s argument. In private enforcement, innocence and guilt don’t even enter into it. If you want everybody who crosses your property line to be beaten up or shot, and if you can find people who’ll do the work — as, for instance, Henry Clay Frick found the Pinkertons in the Homestead Strike — then that’s what you’ll get.

Government is force. But when you “forget” to mention that it’s a force whose means and aims are controlled by all of us, when you “forget” to mention that the alternatives are rent-a-cops and Yakuza (or flower-child optimism that the guy with the gun over there repent and see the light before he gets to you) then you aren’t setting your sights on “big government” (whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean), you’re gunning for civilization itself.

FREE THE DOBBSTOWN 2.71828!!! – Batrix

In college I took a course in local current events, but since the school was in Kansas, there wasn’t much going on. Mostly, we just looked out the window. If a squirrel showed up, we’d have a quiz. – Anthony Myers

Don’t get indignant if you ever get the question, “What kind of moron are you?” Simply respond with “I find it best to answer that question through interpretive dance!” – Carl Knorr

Here, the story and the setting give [Neil] Young a hook for the record, a common theme that he can rally around, and the album benefits so much from that focus that it doesn’t really matter that the story is convoluted beyond comprehension; the plot matters so much that it winds up not mattering at all. Close attention and repeated listens offer few rewards to the careful listener, because Young doesn’t really say much of anything here, no matter how elaborately he says it. Learning more about the narrative — whether it’s through the simultaneously released DVD of the Young-directed film Greendale, hearing his rambling on-stage between-song narratives, or reading apparent transcriptions of these ramblings in the liner notes — illuminates the story slightly, even as declarations like “When I was writing this I had no idea what I was doing, so I was just as surprised as you are” emphasize the suspicion that there’s not much meaning in the whole enterprise. All this doesn’t really matter because Greendale works as a record — it ebbs and flows and it holds together, playing as a unified whole on a level he hasn’t approached since Ragged Glory. – Stephen Thomas Erlewine

An excerpt from Erlewine’s review of Neil Young’s Greendale on allmusic.com. And oh what a favorite issue he raises! To give Erlewine his due, Young did go on and on about the plot in his concerts, supposedly, without enlightening his audiences much. So what about that increasingly anachronistic object, the concept album, when the artist himself doesn’t understand the concept? What about program music?

I’m not much for lyrics. To tell the truth, half the time I can’t hear them anyhow. I’d start to worry if there weren’t websites devoted to giving us “revved up like a deuce, a motor rotor in the night” and the like. So a song that depends on subtlety of lyrics is going to have to snag me musically first, long enough to get me curious about the lyrics (and I have to say, sometimes what I think the lyrics are is a lot better than what they turn out to be). The whole form of the song — an object we listen to in a fixed time — encourages artists to stretch meaning out. Listeners’ brains can be relied on to fill in the implicit links in “crop circles in the carpet” as the song goes by.

All of this is to say, artistic intention — at least insofar as it shows up in lyrics — doesn’t cut much ice with me. Whatever you intended, Mr. Artist, there the thing is, and I’ve got to deal with it the way it shows up at my door. Besides, I listen to music in too strange a way (reconstructing the score in my head) to have time for Beethoven’s babbling brooks and Schubert’s splashing fish. Worse, I’ve seen the Hartmann pictures that inspired Mussorgsky, and to me they wouldn’t have inspired a good spit.

Oh, I hear Grofé’s thunderstorm, but I get a bigger grin out of the harmony under the beginning of that last reprise of the theme. And I worry that the folks who listen too much to what Grofé is doing are missing how he’s doing it (in part by being a hero to the viola players). That’s a good little piece of writing there.

Let’s pause here with a question about Neil Young (remember him?) and his intentions for Greendale. Is his discourse about the plot in his concerts an attempt to keep working on the songs? Or is it a part of the total piece of art? Or is it simply talking to the audience, whose company he enjoys?

A followup to a metaphor from yesterday: our scientific understanding being the new Torah.

There are millions of laws legislators have spoken
A handful the creator sent
The former are being continually broken
The latter can’t even be bent
- unknown

Or, as the fortune cookie has it:

186,000 miles per second
It’s not just a good idea, it’s the law
- BSD fortune

I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own – a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotism. It is enough for me to contemplate the mystery of conscious life perpetuating itself through all eternity, to reflect upon the marvelous structure of the universe which we can dimly perceive, and to try humbly to comprehend even an infinitesimal part of the intelligence manifested in nature. – Albert Einstein, column for The New York Times, Nov. 9, 1930 (reprinted in The New York Times obituary, April 19, 1955)

Three separate points, each of them worth considerable thought:

1. God is not a tinpot Hitler, our worst authoritarian impulses writ large. (Nor, by the way, is he a purveyor of cheap parlor tricks, limited in power to what we can imagine.)
2. Our souls don’t survive our death. As Einstein wrote elsewhere, there isn’t any such thing as a soul, separate from the body. We’re smart enough to figure out the implication: this is the only life we’re ever going to get, so we’d better make the most of it.
3. The best scripture is written in our understanding of nature. Though our understanding (and therefore the truth of our current scripture) is dim and partial, we keep getting better at it.

Not a bad credo. Einstein’s god is a true rex tremendae majestatis, a god cujus regni non erit finis.

Last year a colony of an endangered breed of plovers was discovered on the beach in a Long Island community right next to where the town sets off its annual fireworks display. Rather than subject the birds to a mortar attack, the town canceled the fireworks. Residents were unhappy, and one, legendary ad man Jerry Della Femina, was livid:

You know why the plovers are endangered? Because everyone hates them. – Jerry Della Femina

Oh, if only being annoying were enough. Who wouldn’t prefer to live in a world where the birds who fill up on purple berries and head straight for your car, somewhere in their evolutionary history had a little “accident”? No, in order to be in real trouble, the species must be delicious.

As The Onion remarks, about a newly discovered species,

An international team of scientists conducting research in the Amazon River Basin announced the discovery of a formerly unknown primate species inhabiting a remote jungle area roughly 300 miles from Manaus Monday. According to scientists in Manaus, the new species, Ateles saporis, is “an amazing biological find” and “incredibly delectable.”… The adult [of this species, informally called the] delicacy ape weighs between 35 and 40 pounds and tastes wonderful with a currant glaze.

Things aren’t looking good for the delicacy ape.

Which is why I applaud Sam Dinkins prize-winning entry in the “message to space” competition:

We taste terrible. – Sam Dinkins

As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular. – Oscar Wilde

Underneath Wilde’s snark there was often a deep kindhearted and hopeful sentiment, no more so than in this quote. It’s in our lower nature to kill and make war, and in our higher nature not to. How long until we take that great step (perhaps as great a step as in 1776) and say we’re no longer the kind of people who wage war?

Look at our current war. It isn’t just that this war is being conducted incompetently, it isn’t just that this war is bad. War is bad. And not just because it perpetrates evil, but because it’s unworthy of the kind of people we want to become.

The “war on terror” is exactly wrong: terrorism shouldn’t be engaged as though it were an act of war, but as though it were a crime. By engaging in warfare, no matter how badly aimed, we lower ourselves to the level of the hateful and happily ignorant people who commit acts of terror. We surround the terrorist with an army and a nation, when in fact he’s one of a tiny ad hoc gathering of individuals acting out against a civilization they aren’t good enough to join.

And we delegate the task of visiting justice on the perpetrators away from ourselves and to a specialized group. We “have people to do that” for us. People like the cohort of the privileged running this Republican administration always have somebody to do the nasty little jobs for them.

We’re better than that. And we need to show not just our outrage but our scorn at people who drag this great nation down into the degradation and vulgarity of war.

Another in what has turned into a series of posts on our governments efforts to protect us from terrorism.

This from Reuters:

Security screeners at 21 U.S. airports failed to find bomb-making materials during recent government tests, NBC Nightly News reported on Thursday.

Federal agents carrying materials that could be used to make bombs escaped detection in airport screening during tests conducted between October and January, NBC said, citing government sources.

“In all 21 airports tested, no machine, no swab, no screener anywhere stopped the bomb materials from getting through. Even when investigators deliberately triggered extra screening of bags, no one stopped these materials,” the report said.

….

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) had no comment on the report but said in a statement that detecting explosive materials and IEDs (improvised explosive devices) at the checkpoint was the agency’s top priority.

I dunno, if you score a perfect zero on your number one job….

Interestingly, the AP [via the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette] had this dispiriting statistic:

In the rush to hire airport screeners after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the newly formed Transportation Security Administration spent as much as $143,432 per screener on recruitment in Topeka, Kan., according to a report released yesterday.

The TSA hired a company, NCS Pearson, to recruit screeners soon after Congress ordered it to replace private airport screeners with a government work force by Nov. 19, 2002.

Lawmakers later criticized the TSA for its spending after they learned the recruiters worked out of lavish resort hotels with golf courses, pools and spas.

The new report, written by the Homeland Security Department’s inspector general, concluded that the TSA didn’t have the staff or organization needed to manage such a contract.

“As a result, TSA made critical decisions without the benefit of sound acquisition planning or adequate cost control,” said the report by Inspector General Richard Skinner.

The agency replied that it now has 94 people to control and monitor costs. It also said it does a better job of keeping track of funds and is establishing a system of internal controls.

Presumably, doing a better job of tracking funds and controlling expenses is something like second or third priority. Imagine how well they are handling that, now.

[From Reason via Nobody's Business]

For more depressing assessments of the TSA, see this article:

before the [TSA] was even a year old, it was clear that it had “become a monster,” to quote the chairman of the House Aviation Subcommittee, John Mica (R-Fla.). Arrogant, abusive, incompetent, and expensive, the TSA is, in the words of the House Appropriations Committee, “seemingly unable to make crisp decisions…unable to work cooperatively with the nation’s airports; and unable to take advantage of the multitude of security-improving and labor-saving technologies available.”

The attacks of September 11, 2001, changed many things, but they did not make the federal government more competent or effective, and they did not make it more willing to respect the dignity or liberty of its citizens. For proof, one need only examine the TSA’s sorry record.

– updated –

As long as I am banging away at the TSA – here’s a bit from another brouhaha:

The disclosure Monday that Ms. Martin had sent trial transcripts and e-mail messages to seven government aviation officials listed as witnesses with suggestions as to how they should testify caused a furor. Judge Brinkema called it the worst case of a lawyer tampering with witnesses she had experienced on the bench. Judge Brinkema also said Ms. Martin had not told the truth when she told prosecutors that some of the government officials had refused to talk to Mr. Moussaoui’s court-appointed lawyers.

The judge ruled Tuesday that the government would not be permitted to call any of the witnesses who might have been tainted by Ms. Martin’s conduct.

And just who is this Ms. Martin who has such staggering ignorance of or blatant disrespect for the law? Ms. Martin is a lawyer, and as a result of this fumble “Ms. Martin has been forced to take a leave from the Transportation Security Administration, a department spokeswoman said Thursday.”

But don’t cry for her, according to the lawyer’s lawyer: “When her opportunity comes, her response will show a very different, full picture of her intentions, her conduct and her tireless dedication to a full trial.”

I can’t wait.

Thanks to Herbert Schneider on the Finale list for this tip: PaceMaker, a nifty little WinAmp DSP plugin that varies pitch without varying tempo, tempo without varying pitch, or both (speed). If you’re transcribing, you really need this plugin. Or, of course, if you’d just like to make Chuck Schuldiner (the guy in Death) sound like a chipmunk.

But wait, there’s more! A not-that-bad vocal eliminator. Ain’t DSP algorithms grand?

Here’s a little coda to the video articles. I was setting up some of the files I’d collected from the net so we could show them on the TiVo, and I noticed quite a number of them were in .wmv format.

How do you convert those files to something a little more useful? At one time VirtualDub would open ASF and WMV files, but evidently a letter from Microsoft’s lawyers took that capability away. After all, if you could use Windows Movie Maker to create a file, and you could convert that file so it wasn’t trapped in Microsoft’s proprietary format, wouldn’t you do that? Wouln’t everybody?

One solution, of sorts, is to use VirtualDub 1.3c, the last version of VirtualDub before they took out ASF file processing. It’s not supported any more, thanks to those corporate lawyers, but you can still find it on the net. Unfortunately, most .wmv files you’ll find out there cause VirtualDub to choke. Either Microsoft has changed the format (it’s totally proprietary, so they can change it whenever they want), or Microsoft has changed some of the DirectWhozis files VirtualDub uses to do the conversion.

Nil desperandum. AsfTools used to be able to do the conversion. The trick was to get Windows Media Encoder 7.1, recode the file, and then convert it to AVI. Unfortunately, the current version of Windows Media Encoder is 9.something, and you can’t get version 1.7 any more. I finally found it on a German site and (after making a restore point) installed it. No luck. Something else must be wrong.

And so I went out looking for a purpose-built WMV to AVI converter. There’s a few of them out there, but there’s a price tag on all of them. And then, way down at the bottom on some list of converters, I discovered MediaCoder. Free, open source, and it converts not only .wmv files, but RealMedia .rm files and QuickTime .mov files.

MediaCoder has a lot of parameters to tweak (and to get wrong), but fortunately it comes with some presets. After some experimenting, “VCD Compliant MPEG” seems to work well for a fair copy.

The picture at the top of the article is some guy driving a car on some race course , which started out as a WMV file.

The picture at the bottom is Gilman Hall on the Hopkins campus at sunrise. I stitched it together from a couple of frames of a QuickTime panorama by Michael Wyszomierski. I had VirtualDub rotate the image left 90 degrees and expand the height to 1000 (a figure I picked out of the air, but it looks pretty good). I also converted a couple of Real Player movies, and they went fine too. I think I’ll put TINRA (This Is Not Real Anymore) out to pasture now.

Alas, this famous video doesn’t seem to convert. Is it a bug in MediaCoder, or is it a copy protection scheme? I’m guessing it’s a bug. Rad Video Tools converts it fine. Not open source, but free, and definitely worth having as well. Between Rad Video Tools and MediaCoder, most of your conversion problems should be over.

What’s needed to make my life complete? How about an MPEG2 exporter filter for VirtualDub? Presently I open the movie in VirtualDub, cut out the commercials, save it as an AVI (uncompressed if the file is small, XviD MPEG4 if it’s big), and then convert it back to MPEG2 with Videora. Exporting in MPEG2 would save time and probably improve the appearance of the final video.

And another inexplicably missing filter: gamma. Oops. Spoke too soon. There’s one on this wonderful list of VirtualDub filters. And there’s an Unsharp Mask filter there too, which I bet would have improved the appearance of some of the movies I’ve used to illustrate these articles.

We’re at the tail end now. Before I go, here’s a few more video goodies: I’ve mentioned videohelp.com before. Here’s doom9’s site. Lots of tips and downloads. Chris LaRosa’s MovieID is a perfect little gizmo to put in your context menu for video files to help you find videos that are mislabeled or that use oddball codecs.

And the thing I’m going to study next: cleaning. Here’s Matt Woodward’s Digital Video Cleaning without the Elbow Grease on Ars Technica and another tutorial by Nicky Pages on cleanup with VirtualDub.

The federal government is going to vote to lift the debt ceiling.

Notes the Houston Chronicle:

The debt limit increase is an unhappy necessity _ the alternative is a disastrous first-ever default on U.S. obligations _ that greatly overshadows a mostly symbolic, weeklong debate on the GOP’s budget resolution.

….

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley said: “It is necessary to preserve the full faith and credit of the federal government.”

Grassley came to the floor to speak on the debt limit increase after presiding over a House-Senate bargaining session on a debt-financed $70 billion measure to extend several tax cut provisions passed in recent years.

Actually, I think living within one’s budget would do a lot more to “preserve the full faith and credit” of the government. But I guess I don’t see things quite the way the fiscal conservatives who run the government do.

The Washington Post is scornful, too. Pushing the limits of fair use, I reproduce their editorial here.

Bill Frist’s Double

Thursday, March 16, 2006; A22

“NOW IS THE TIME to reaffirm our roots as the party of fiscal discipline, beginning with the line-item veto,” Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) told a Republican gathering in Memphis last weekend. “Bureaucrats in Washington,” he said, are going to have to “tighten their belts,” just like families. “No more hidden earmarks. No more mortgaging our children’s future. No more bridges to nowhere. And no more runaway entitlement spending.”

We thought this man was the Senate majority leader and had been for three years, but maybe we’re mistaken — maybe there are two Bill Frists out there. Memphis Bill, wooing the GOP faithful, just hates that runaway entitlement spending. Washington’s Bill Frist, on the other hand, presided over Senate passage of the biggest increase in entitlement spending in decades, the Medicare prescription drug bill, calling it “an extraordinary day for seniors and indeed all Americans.” Just this year, when President Bush called, however halfheartedly, for entitlement cuts totaling $65 billion over the next five years, where was Mr. Frist? The budget resolution pending in the Senate — Mr. Frist’s Senate — ensures none of those cuts. Too bad Memphis Bill wasn’t around; we haven’t heard any complaints from Majority Leader Frist.

Too bad, also, that Memphis Bill was AWOL as the use of earmarks ballooned over the past three years. When Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) pitched a hissy fit on the Senate floor to salvage $453 million earmarked for his “bridges to nowhere,” Leader Frist cheerfully obliged. A proposal to redirect some of that money to rebuild the Interstate 10 bridge across Lake Pontchartrain wiped out by Hurricane Katrina, went nowhere in Mr. Frist’s Senate.

Naturally Mr. Frist is not the only Washington Republican suffering from this peculiar form of political amnesia. To hear party leaders bemoan out-of-control spending and the sad legacy of debt to grandchildren, you wouldn’t have a clue that they’ve been in control of Congress as it jacked up spending and cut taxes. Somehow, though, Mr. Frist’s sanctimony is particularly galling, and his finger-pointing at “bureaucrats in Washington” particularly offensive, as he prepares to run for president after years of running the Senate. Maybe he thinks those hicks back home in Tennessee — or in Iowa and New Hampshire for that matter — haven’t been following the news.

Yesterday I blogged about capturing frames from movies you’ve tivoed and transferred to your PC. Today another simple sounding task: taking movies you got from the net or made yourself and playing them on your TiVo.

This all started when I read that Tom Cruise had allegedly prevented UK TV stations from airing the South Park sendup of the Church of Scientology called “Trapped in the Closet”. And Paramount supposedly promised never to air the episode again.

Wait a minute. Some media corporation wants to keep people from seeing something? I’m all over that. Or, rather, I would be if it weren’t questionably legal, and if it wouldn’t offend the delicate sensibilities of those lovable leprechauns, the scientologists, and all their cuddly lawyers. So what I’ll do instead is get a more or less random file to demonstrate the capabilities of the tools I’m reviewing.

Here’s some random files that might work. Let’s pick one to download. OK, let’s look at that puppy. Double-click on the icon in Windows Explorer and it plays fine. Good, now let’s set it up so I can show it to the family on our TV.

I see you smiling out there. You’ve already discovered that simply moving the video file into your My TiVo Recordings folder won’t do it. TiVo’s error message “This movie is not on $HOSTNAME” is deceptive. That movie is too on my computer! You’ve probably figured that out too. I confess that the first time I saw that message I went ahead and moved my TiVo files to the default location under My Documents, just in case. Nope. That wasn’t it.

So I went to TiVo’s website and after some searching, I found this web page: Transferring Personal Video from PC to TiVo, which specifies in excruciating detail the characteristics of video files TiVo is supposed to love.

OK, so I need to convert the file from AVI to MPEG2. What programs do I have on my PC that will do that? TMPGEnc will do it. But I’ve had it on my computer long enough for the license on the MPEG2 codec to expire. Drat!

So how about the other video programs I’ve got? [Pause while I skip over several hours of video hell, with sound getting out of sync with video, trashed video, trashed audio.] Nope. TMPGEnc is the only one that claims it can make a sensible MPG2 video. Can it? Pay your money and find out. Nero might be able to do it too, but it’s the same deal: I give them some money, and they give me something that might work. No way. So I went out hunting for something free that might do the job.

I found a pretty good candidate: the Nero Mega Plugin Pack. A word of caution: I’m pretty straitlaced about warez. I won’t have them on my computer. The authors claim the MPEG2 codec that’s in there was developed independently using the MPEG spec. I took them at their word, but you may want to research it yourself.

A second word of caution: the Mega Plugin Pack is more than a year old and Monkey’s Audio is under active development. Since I wan’t completely sure the Mega Plugin Pack installer wouldn’t overwrite the Nero plugins with older versions, I installed the Plugin Pack and then reinstalled Monkey Audio and FLAC just in case.

So, with the plugins installed, I burned an SVCD from the South Park video. It took a while, which I considered a good sign, and eventually out popped the CD. I took it over to the DVD player and played it. Bingo! Looks and sounds good. So I’m halfway there. Worse comes to worst, I can burn files I download onto SVCDs and play them that way.

Now let’s see how the file plays on TiVo (“give me convenience or give me death”). I found the .mpg file on the CD and copied it over to My TiVo Recordings. Walk over to the TV and try to play it, nope, same error message from TiVo Central. It can see the file, but when it starts to transfer, all of a sudden it doesn’t like it.

Could it be I got the wrong file from the CD? Nope. It plays fine in Media Player Classic, and when I bring it up in VirtualDub (the MPEG2 version I talked about yesterday) and look at the file properties, they’re a perfect match for the specs on TiVo’s web page.

Hmmmm. Back to the TiVo Community forums and see what else might work. Several people suggested Videora TiVo Converter. So I download it, and that works like a charm. No idea why. It just works. Anyhow, Videora TiVo converter converts a pretty impressive array of file types (e.g., AVI with MP3 audio) to MPEG2 files that TiVo loves.

By the way, all this information is available on the TiVo website and in the TiVo Community forums. There’s very little in this article that’s you can’t find if you’re willing to dig long enough (and struggle with their search engines long enough, and evaluate all the false information that turns up alongside the good information. The only value added by this article is that I know it’s true because I did it, and I remember what I did. Come to think of it, that’s quite a bit of value.

After all these trials, errors, and searches, I actually ended up better off than I was before. I can burn SVCDs with Nero, I can turn a lot of the files I snarfed from the net into movies that will play on my TiVo, and I can capture frames from movies I’ve TiVoed and transferred over to my PC.

Those aren’t horrendously difficult technical tasks. I suspect they’re tasks just about everybody would want to do. Why is it so difficult? Why does it take a half dozen different programs? Why were those capabilities left out of TiVo and Windows Media Player?

I think it’s this: what customers want is being overridden by the way corporations are using our broken intellectual property system to enrich themselves at the expense of everybody else. And there’s no technical fix for that.

This all started when I wanted to do two simple things: (a) capture a frame from a movie I’d tivoed and transferred to my PC, and (b) play a movie from the net on my TiVo box. Turns out, neither of those things is easy.

Let’s talk about frame grabbing. If you’ve ever tried to grab an image from most of the movie players available for the PC, you’ve discovered pretty quickly that “Print Screen” and “ALT-Print Screen” don’t work the way they do in other applications. The movie image evidently isn’t “in” the player window the way it seems to be. Before this dawns on us, most of us do a series of captures and then come back to the graphics files only to discover we’ve captured dozens of black rectangles.

I’ve got a fearsome array of media players: ASUSDVD, BSPlayer, DivX Player, Flash Movie Player, FLVPlayer, iTunes, Media Player Classic, Nero Media Player, QuickTime Player, Real Player, The Core Media Player, WinAmp, Windows Media Player 6, and Windows Media Player 10.

Of all these players, one (count ‘em) one, has “Save Image” in its menus. That’s Media Player Classic. Unfortunately its frame grabber is a little buggy. Sometimes you get the frame where you’ve paused, sometimes you get the frame a couple dozen frames away. It just depends. Bottom line, while grabbing frames with Media Player Classic is possible, it isn’t a way to spend a pleasant evening, it’s a way to exercise your vocabulary of cuss words.

OK, sez I, what else have I got on this machine that might work? VirtualDub has about the coolest frame dump ability imaginable: select a range of frames, choose “Save image sequence” from the File menu, and out comes a neatly numbered set of Targa files. Could we get that to work on TiVo files?

Yup, but you’ve got to do a couple of things first. If you load your .tivo file into VirtualDub, VirtualDub will spit up. That’s because the .tivo file has some special TiVo headers, and, possibly more worrisome, the MPEG data in the file is encrypted.

EtiVo’s Direct Show Dump will strip off the TiVo headers and decrypt the file, leaving you with an MPEG2 file. It uses Windows Media Player’s security, so you have TiVo Desktop and the TiVo Media Access Key installed so that you can play .tivo files before this will work.

This is mildly h4xx0r-ish, but since the only thing it’s doing is giving me improved access to a file I already legally have access to, I don’t think it crosses the line. Now saving a frame out of a movie or TV show may be another matter entirely, depending on how you use the image. I assert the use of the frames in this article, which is a review in which frame capture is an essential part, falls under fair use.

So let’s fire up our new .mpg file in VirtualDub. Oops. VirtualDub doesn’t like MPEG2 files. Unless you have the latest version of VirtualDub, it may give you a deceptive error message that it’s found errors in your file. Are we stuck? Nope, just get FCCHandler’s VirtualDub-MPEG2. It’s just another version of VirtualDub, and that version reads the output from DirectShow Dump perfectly.

So now we can load the movie into VirtualDub, pick a range of frames, save them off, and pick the ones we want at our leisure.

We’re left with only one gotcha, and it’s very, very minor. You can give a 480×480 movie file to a video program and tell it to apply a 4:3 aspect ratio, bur that won’t work with plain old graphics programs. To display the image on a web page, you could leave the file at 480×480 and use the width and height attributes to give it the right aspect ratio, but you don’t want to do that. It needlessly slows down people’s web browsers, and even if it didn’t, you still don’t want to trust a web browser to do what you tell it.

And besides, you don’t want to put a Targa file on the Web. So as long as you’re in your favorite 2D bitmap graphics program (IrfanView, Paint Shop Pro, etc.) you might as well resize the file to 640×480 in and then save it in a file format that’s more suitable for the Web (e.g., JPEG or PNG).

Done! And as you can see from the images in this article (recorded at TiVo’s second-best resolution), they aren’t that bad. That’s it for today. Tomorrow we’ll get to the other hald of our problem, playing homemade files and files you got from the net on your TiVo, because it turns out it’s even harder than capturing frames from a TiVo movie.

134. At the end of The Merry Wives of Windsor do NOT have the company arrive to torment Falstaff dressed as for Venetian Carnivale in all white robes with pointed hats. It ends up as a Klan rally gone seriously awry. Poking Falstaff with the point of your Klan hat should ABSOLUTELY be avoided as it causes uncontrollable laughter on the part of the audience. — se_parsons in The Things I Will Not Do When I Direct A Shakespeare Production

A wonderful list, based pretty obviously on productions that perpetrated some of these horrors. Here’s another:

146. I will not allow my extremely young Juliet to have caffeine before the performance. She’s supposed to be immature, not a Muppet on speed. — butterflykiki

Now that everybody’s putting cool movies on the net and we’ve finally got hard drives big enough to save some of them before they disappear, isn’t it just our luck that the places that host them are making it annoying to grab the movies off the page? Fear not. What tech can do, tech can undo. KeepVid lets you download files from Google, Youtube, iFilm, Putfile, Metacafe, DailyMotion, and a host of others.

I’ve tried it with a good assortment of sites, and it seems to work as advertised. Hint: don’t forget to click the tab for the host you’re getting the files from; this isn’t a universal one-size-fits-all thing yet.

And if you run across a site they don’t have an embedded media downloader for yet, never fear. Get the Save Embedded Firefox extension and download away. Hint: the documentation is wrong. It doesn’t give you a new context menu item. Look down at the bottom on the status bar and you’ll see a big red arrow pointing down. Click it and you’ll get the file. Try it out on Monster Kid Home Movies, a really cute site: click one of the icons for the sample clips, and not long after the movie starts you should see that red arrow:

There’s one negative about downloading these movie files. Last night while I was sleeping a huge population of .flv files has infested the net. .flv files? Not a problem. They’re Flash videos (as opposed to regular flash movies which end in .swf). Martin DeVisser has a lovely free .flv player. Or if you think Flash video won’t last (yeah, because we all know how big an egg Flash laid, right?), you can convert .flv files to .mpg or .avi. Just read this howto by hitrec.

And for good measure (you probably have this already), for old-timey Flash movies (.swf) that you’ve downloaded, there’s no need to fire up Firefox just to play them., Use EOLSoft’s free flash player.

I have absolutely no idea why I like this cartoon so much. Maybe it’s attitude envy. Maybe it’s those drugs I should have taken in the Sixties. Beats me. But if you haven’t seen 12oz Mouse yet, I think you’re in for a treat. Even if you hate the cartoon, you might like the theme music.

Robert and Kelly want me to make absolutely clear that I’m not speaking for anybody else at the Rectory. Robert says it’s the worst thing he’s ever seen on TV. That’s impressive, because when he was a kid he watched Uncle Zeb’s Cartoon Camp.

I do not feel obliged to believe that that same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. — Galileo, Letter to Grand Duchess Christina (1615)

Thanks to fellow North Alabamian Jean Smith for telling me another favorite sentiment (besides the one in the title and the one I quoted a couple of days ago) is also from Galileo. I’ve said it many times, though not as well. No wonder he got into trouble with the Church.

Reader’s Digest was at one time a very funny magazine. I know it’s hard to believe nowadays, where it’s only funny if you think Michelle Malkin is another Will Rogers and Bill O’Reilly is the reincarnation of Oscar Wilde, but it’s perfectly true. If you were ever fortunate enough to run across their 1949 collection Fun Fare, it’s no doubt one of your prized possessions. The one thing better than a new joke is an old joke that nobody’s heard before.

But you need to keep your wits about you. Even then Reader’s Digest was a little odd. W. C. Fields would no doubt have made some of their Kansas readers’ heads explode, so they attributed a number of his quips to a singer and comedienne who’s virtually unknown today, Gracie Fields. She was safely in Britain when the quotes were published, and probably wouldn’t contradict the Digest.

And too, their paradigm that lowered remarkable people and their acts to things that anybody could do (e e cummings skewers this brilliantly in his i: six nonlectures) pretty surely resulted in stories that were unquestionably apocryphal, but which were too good not to print. Here’s a favorite (copied without credit from someone who copied it without credit):

[T]he inscription on the metal bands used by the U.S. Department of the Interior to tag migratory birds has been changed. The bands used to bear the address of the Washington Biological Survey, abbreviated:

Wash. Biol. Surv.

until the agency received the following letter from an Arkansas camper:

“Dear Sirs:

While camping last week I shot one of your birds. I think it was a crow. I followed the cooking instructions on the leg tag and I want to tell you, it was horrible.”

Snopes kills the story pretty thoroughly. It definitely isn’t true. But I still get a kick out of it.

Surely, God could have caused birds to fly with their bones made of solid gold, with their veins full of quicksilver, with their flesh heavier than lead, and with their wings exceedingly small. He did not, and that ought to show something. It is only in order to shield your ignorance that you put the Lord at every turn to the refuge of a miracle. — Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems

God may work in mysterious ways, but one of the principal wonders of his creation is that the mysteries and the miracles are moved way to the background. What you and I can see and observe and reason about is lawful and consistent. And when it’s inconsistent it’s usually not that long until a deeper understanding replaces our previous approximate understanding — except in physics where it seems to be taking quite a long time.

That is, our reason can easily impose order and law on the universe we observe and infer from our observations. God is subtle, but not malicious. And he works in a way that our reason interprets as a deep order in his creation. Except when Recent Creationists look at him — the first thing he shows them is a miracle!

So one question we should all ask about a candidate for recognition as a science is, “how far away are the miracles”? As Galileo said, that ought to show something. It’s our old friend Ockham’s Razor. Well, it’s our friend, but it’s not the Recent Creationists’ friend.

Another useful question is, “what next?” It’s possible to construct a plausible pseudoscience within hard and fast boundaries. Try sticking a toe or two out past those boundaries into the regions marked “here be dragons”. If a science seems frozen in time; if its borders aren’t just specified but fortified; if, once you’ve passed those borders, you find yourself having to pile miracle upon miracle to take the next step — you aren’t in the realm of science, you’re in the realm of Dungeons and Dragons, Wizards and Warlocks, and things that go bump in the night.

Taken together, those two things add up to the characteristic of Intelligent Design that smells the fishiest: our observations don’t lead us to a consistent and orderly mechanism, they lead us straight to the deus ex machina working his miracles. It’s like the Wizard of Oz doesn’t even bother to draw the curtain. It’s unseemly and undignified for a deity to work that way. And so once again, religious conservatives are proposing a god who’s puny: a god who’s been diminished to fit inside their imaginations. No wonder their god is so ill-tempered.

Since this was remarkably similar to yesterday’s posting (but with a nifty quote I hadn’t seen before), here’s a cookie: speaking of refuge, courtesy of the Top5 List, hiddenpassageway.com will build a hidden passage, panel, niche, you name it, in your house.