It’s been far too long since I blogged, and there are a series of random thoughts running through my mind.  I think I’ll share them, in no particular order.  This will be a bit long, but I hope you’ll forgive that since I haven’t written anything here for many days.

Thought one:

I make a good part of my living with my ears, so I am usually pretty careful to take care of them.  I wear earplugs when I go to rock concerts, I wear a noise-cancelling headset when I fly noisy airplanes, and I play my music at reasonable levels.  Every now and then, though, an exception must be made.  There is nothing quite so effective at relaxing me after a long, stressful day as putting on some appropriate music (Styx’s “Mr. Roboto”, for example), turning the volume on the car stereo all the way up, and letting the sound wash over me.  Feeling the drums and the bass notes bombard me from every direction, watching the image in the rear-view mirror vibrate, immersed in the sonic image, I feel completely energized.  I can’t do it very often without endangering my hearing, but when I do, it’s great.

By the way, this only works if you’ve got an audio system that can deliver some significant power without distorting.  You won’t feel the effect if the audio’s just a mass of mangled squarewaves and ugly odd-order harmonics.

Thought two:

Have you ever noticed that when you watch a movie on television nowadays, at the end of the movie, the network usually uses a DVE move to scrunch the credits into about a third of the screen, rendering them completely unreadable even on a big screen?  They use the remaining two thirds of the screen to show you a talking head that teases you about the upcoming newscast, or a promo for another show, or something similarly useless?

Sometimes they leave the credits at full-screen size, but speed them up so that they whiz by at an impossibly fast rate so that no one could possibly read them.

This bothers me on a lot of levels.  I’ve worked in the TV and film industry, and I know that people work very, very hard to get their names into the credits of a film or television program.  The appearance of that credit is often their only tangible reminder of the work they did on the project, and their only way of receiving recognition for that work.  When a network or TV station chooses to show the film, then either skip or abbreviate the credits, I think those folks are being cheated.

The motive is obvious … the networks want to make maximum use of their time, and if they roll their silly promo over the credits, they won’t have to waste sellable commercial time doing it.  The movie studios and distributors could stop this practice if they wanted to, by adding clauses to the licenses that are required to air the movies, but to date they haven’t made the effort.  It’s a disturbing trend.

Thought three:

I once took classes at a school in Orlando, Florida called Full Sail. At the time, the school taught primarily audio engineering.   Later, I joined the staff and worked there for several years as their Chief Technician.

A few months ago, I became aware of a site called ‘fullsailsucks.com’.  I immediately checked it out.  It turned out to be a site run by a disgruntled former student named Ryan Spevack, which was generally filled with sour grapes (the site, not Mr. Spevack).  There were many diatribes from people who attended and didn’t immediately become tour manager for Bon Jovi the moment they graduated.  This was unfair, to hear them tell it, and the school must be a corrupt gang of losers out to steal students’ money and give them nothing but grief.

I don’t know where kids get this sense of entitlemen.  It’s as if they’re sure they’re owed the world on a silver platter, and no one had better ask them to do the least amount of actual work in order to get it.  Not for a minute, though, did I object to that site’s existence … I may not have liked what he had to say, but he had a right to say it.  I posted my own comments, which were largely positive, and to my great surprise he let them stand.  I  upped my respect for the fellow a small notch, and thought no more of it.

In 2003, Full Sail filed a dispute with the WIPO, claiming that Spevack was unlawfully using a domain name that should rightfully belong to Full Sail.  The decision came down in November, and Full Sail lost.  I remember privately applauding that decision, and thinking that Full Sail was being pretty petty by trying to shut Spevack down.  It would have made more sense to simply ignore or discredit him … trying to shut him down tends to acknowledge that he’s a threat and that they want him silenced, which isn’t good PR.

I never heard any more about the site, but today I went to look at it, and it’s gone.  To me, this is a mixed blessing.  I’m glad that people aren’t airing their dirty laundry anymore, and that Full Sail’s reputation isn’t getting smeared by silly, groundless rants.  However, the site disappeared so quietly, without so much as a press release, that I have to wonder … did Full Sail pay Spevack off to shut him up?  Did they find some other legal means to coerce him to shut the site down?  Neither one of those would make me very comfortable.

Thought four:

I miss my little Timneh African Grey parrot, Bam-Bam.

We found him one Sunday afternoon, at a pet store in Carrollton, Georgia.  It was about a year after I got my first bird, Phoenix, and we were toying with the idea of another bird to keep him company.  We heard this store had a lot of birds, so we went in for a look around and didn’t really expect to do much more than that.

There were certainly a lot of birds there.  A baby umbrella cockatoo kept sticking his toes through the cage bars for attention.  A yellow nape was screaming noisily, and a cageful of finches chittered away in their cage.  Somehow, though, my attention was drawn to a small cage sitting on the floor, under a shelf, out of the way.  In it was the scruffiest looking Timneh African Grey I had ever seen.  He had chewed just about every feather on his body that he could reach, and the only ones that remained undamaged were on his head and the nape of his neck.  I knelt down to see him and he immediately made a LOUD, cork-popping noise, followed by a very clear and unequivocal, “NO!”  When I approached more closely, he retreated to the far side of the cage, shivering and making sounds similar to a chicken clucking.

My heart went out to this bird.  He’d been horribly mistreated.  Bird psychology is not like human psychology, and people who don’t understand birds can really do a lot of damage.  Birds’ image of their own importance and status is directly tied to the height of their roost or living quarters in relation to the rest of their social group.  Birds on high perches feel powerful and dominant, while birds on low perches feel intimidated and submissive.   Some people feel the best response to a nippy bird is to put him at floor level for a while.  That’s true if the nippiness is just aggression, but if the nippiness is due to fear or abuse, then putting the bird in a low position just makes the problem worse.  This bird was terrified of people, probably because he’d been mistreated by them at some point in his life, and now he was nearly insane from fear and the stress of being at foot-level with people walking around.  The cage he was in was also far too small.

I asked the pet shop owner about him, trying to keep the irritation out of my voice.  “Ah, that one.  Bam-Bam.”, she said with some disdain.  “You won’t want him for anything but breeding.  He’s mean.”  She then quoted me a price that was less than a quarter of what one would normally expect to pay for a Timneh Grey.

I went back into the aviary, picked up his cage, and set it on top of the cockatoo cage.  I opened the door.  I was being pretty ambitious, especially since I wasn’t really an expert bird handler at the time, but I knew what I was doing.  The bird’s mood changed immediately.  He still wanted to bite any hand that got near him, but he was more confident and a bit of personality started to emerge.  With some effort I got him to step onto a wooden dowel, then onto the top of the cockatoo cage.  I put the dowel down, positioned my hand in front of him, put the other one behind him, and said, ‘STEP UP” in a firm voice.  He stepped onto my hand.  My wife and I looked at each other and knew he was going home with us.  We had to rescue him from this hell.

Two days later, Bam-Bam had a new, bigger cage, a nice spot at eye level near a window, and lots of attention.  He still had quite a beak on him, and my hands were covered with small wounds for the next two or three months.  With time he came to accept and even enjoy human contact.  He learned to ask for peanuts.  He did some fantastic impersonations, calling people using other people’s voices.  Once, I forgot to change the battery in our smoke alarm and he learned the sound far too well … I changed the battery, but we never stopped hearing that beep, which he could reproduce with uncanny fidelity.  He barked with the dog, he squawked along with Phoenix, and he even stopped chewing his feathers.  He became a part of the family.

You always remember where you were when a bad call comes.  I was in a recording studio mixing a song when my cell phone rang, and my wife told me Bam-Bam had died.  I rushed home, which was an hour away, and I think there were a few moments when I couldn’t see the road.  When I got there, she told me she’d simply gone to feed him and found him on the floor of the cage lying still.  A heart condition seems to be the predominant theory on his demise, apparently it’s common among Timnehs.  The stress he suffered early in life couldn’t have helped it.  I looked at him and couldn’t believe the unfairness of losing him now.  We’d come so far.  He was well-adjusted, talking, eating right, and he’d even grown back most of the feathers he’d chewed away.  He was beautiful.

Some religions will tell you there’s no heaven or hell for animals, no afterlife at all.  Sorry, I can’t agree.  If there’s no eternal life for pets, no “promised land”, then how else can they be rewarded for the joy they give us in life?  I comfort myself today by reminding myself that wherever Bam-Bam is now, he’s even more beautiful … in full, shiny feather, proud and happy, and eating a steady diet of his favorite peanuts … and driving Jesus crazy with that smoke alarm beep.