msb-0005 Reflections on the media

I've got a question and a request for my audience.

I know there's at least 60 of you out there, not bad for a show which is basically unknown and unpromo'ed. I checked on the stats from libsyn, and I may not know who you are, but I know you're out there. (Actually I've been crunching some numbers and you'll get to hear about them in the next show. :-)

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So could you get yourselves on my Frapper map?

Its just down the left hand side of the msb.libsyn.com page.

Right now its only got Josh Jacobson and me on it and it feels so lonely and pathetic.

Let me know which city you are from.

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Just above that, you can Subscribe with iTunes.

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You might want to Email Me.

The link is right on the page...

Right above the link to Subscribe with iTunes

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And you might want to fill out my simple little Audience survey.

That link is also right on the page...

Right above the link to email me.

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And some comments left on the episode you liked, or didn't like, would help me guide my future episodes to reflect what you want. (Kind of like market research, focus group studies and feed back analysis.)

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I know I'm a dissolutioned mass media junky and a frustrated ex-musician, (well maybe not, I got what I wanted, respect as a guitarist, and chose a different path after that,) but that's just me and this podcast is about MS and not all about me.

I mean, I like myself and I think I think deep thoughts about all kinds of sh-, uh, stuff but after a while even I get bored with myself. (Sorry Josh, I'm censoring myself and it is really demeaning to your adolescence, but its hard to break the 'adult conspiracy'.)

Right now, I'm just sitting in my home office surrounded by my usual messiness.

I have got to buy some new office furniture and it wouldn't hurt to attack the floor with a shovel to clear off some of the debris.

I'm in a contemplative mood.

I've got the "Pod Pyrates #53" and Johnny Velcro playing on my earphones... But now its over.

Okay the selection in my ears now is Antartica by Men Without Hats.

Hey! I bought the CD so I can listen to it.

But you're not hearing it because the RIAA, ASCAP, BMI and the rest of the legal alphabet soup would grab me, strip me naked, shave me, dip my cohones in creosote and then I can only hope that they would tie me up and leave me for dead. (I can "itch like a man on a fuzzy tree" if I'm tied up. If I'm not ... I'd scratch my self into sterility. Creosote's nasty itchy stuff!)

I've just finished watching a PBS biography of Samuel Goldwin and it started me thinking of why the popular media has needed to reinvent itself several times over the last century.

Apart from the interruptions bought by the world wars,

• the first was fought by German Junkers over pig marketing rights in Silesia (I kid you not, check your copy of Causes of the Great War,)
• the second was fought over the insult by the winners over the losers of the first by the treaty of Versaille and some pseudo-mystic claptrap by leaders who thought themselves Aryans,
• the cold one was fought by paranoid schyzophrenics and their successors over the entire planet since the imagined enemy was everybody, and the American generals who were only too glad to oblige,
• the bloody mess left by Pol Pot and his agrarian reforms, (actually agarian reforms have been fertile ground for making fertilizer out of farmers since the code of Hammurabi,)
  
• the latest minor skirmishes pitting the established national political structures of the west against the Islamic ideologues and mystics who are playing the asymmetrical leverage for all its worth,

the reason that media have had to reinvent themselves is that our wars and our tastes have changed us.

There will never be another Leni Riefenstahl and another Triump of the Will, anymore than there could be another Reine Mathilde and another Tapisserie de Bayeux.

And for the same reasons.

The media have metastacized as we in turn have metastacized.

In biologic term, phonographs, moving pictures, radio and television all began from stem cells of ideologies/technologies that were quite crude to begin with.

But they all achieved an organic cohesiveness that requires an enormous expenditure of energy, read money, to maintain.

Broadcasters are now killing themselves trying to produce successes and it is always going to be a qualified non-failure. They're playing safe with content in direct opposition to the quest for novelty that is the driving force for creating new content.

But, that's just economics in a world of scarce resources.

The reason that they don't make shows like they used to is because they can't take the risks.

• Transmitters just costs too much.
• The licensing just costs too much.
• Operating a media outlet just costs too much.
• Purchasing content just costs too much.

There are too many compromises to be made. Getting things commercially perfect gets you dumbed down pabulum. (Actually that's why food pretty much tastes like nothing these days. Buy a French baguette, warm from the baker's oven, and you know that its bread. Buy a loaf of packaged plastic and you Wonder if this is bread?)

As influence grows, it doesn't scale. Media don't scale either.

The broadcast delivery mechanism is crumbling as it tries to cope with the facts of the internet:

• bandwidth is virtually infinite,
• the costs of show production are now evident and dropping all the time,
• RSS means the end of the synchronized audience model,
• Googling for content is all ready happening.

Influence is still applied to a very small number of people even as the broadcasters try to spread the costs and shrink them.

The result is consolidation of one form or another.

The amount of airtime, the number of broadcast stations, is shrinking in diversity even as it fights to even stay static in quantity.

I'm waiting for several smaller stations to just fold up shop and give up as the competition with ClearChanel and its ilk becomes fiercer and the media content get safer and more inane.

Not only is the RIAA suing their customers but they're being squeezed by the broadcasters who are trying to get rid of non-paying content alltogether.

So where does that leave podcasting?

• We don't have an FCC regulating us, we don't broadcast.
• We don't have licensing, we don't broadcast.
• We don't have transmitters, we don't broadcast.
• We don't have to worry about censorship, we don't broadcast.
  
• We don't have to worry about offending anybody, we 'talk' only to our subscribers.
• We don't have to worry about sponsors, though there are some experiments in that direction, but that implies certain compromises that both the podcaster and the sponsor may not want to make, just like the situation with the current media.

If you don't like it, there's plenty of content spread and plenty of collaboration/competition.

You can find somebody else to fill your 1,440 minutes per day, unlike in the broadcast world.

And they're your 1,440 minutes per day, not what somebody else wants to fill them with.

We can and do take the risks necessary to grow the medium.

We are allowed to fail because it doesn't hurt.

There is enough room for everyone to fail; fail on content, fail on delivery, fail on style, fail on adapting quickly enough to changing tastes, styles, fads and fashions.

We are even allowed to fail by not even noticing our failure and staying with our small audience in our little world.

And this little world is a self-demarkating focus group for marketing. It is indeed the ultimate person to person medium.

Unlike Spam, which is just an annoying stab in the dark, podcasting audiences are the market you want to target.

There are some geographic, demographic, psychographic and behavioristic differences to be sure, but you can be sure that they at least all share an interest in what the podcast is about.

We have a situation of plenty instead of a situation of scarcity.

The economics are not entirely unprecedented.

They were the same in the earliest days of the last century when airwaves were unregulated.

But unlike then, when collisions were to be avoided or the message was going to be lost, packet switching lets us all share a time-sliced piece of the fibre and keep our media files on our own machines.

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I'm looking at the wave of the future. amNY.com has an article "Changes in the law could imperil community TV."

We are being pushed, nay, shoved, into podcasting as a result of the broadcasters and telcos reaction to public access TV.

They are against the very existence of any channel which is not making them money. Its not enough for them to win, they have to make sure you lose. That's the politics of scarcety.

They own the air waves and the accountants in their souls demand that they squeeze every penny.

All this content is just cutting into the 1,440 minutes per day in their inventory.

But the last laugh will be ours.

As the telcos succed in creating a tiered access and charge a premium for synchronous streamed delivery of DRM'ed signal, meaning more channels for more ads with the most profitable being the lightest in content, podcatcher's don't depend on continuous streams.

Frankly, as long as the song just plays, who cares how long it took to download it.

With RSS, that can happen at night while we're sleeping.

With Google, we can search for things to download, things that interest us, things we like, things we're curious about, things we want to focus on.

The internet is designed around, with, for and using the asynchromous TCP/IP protocol.

It was designed to survive nuclear blasts blowing holes into its fabric.

I think it can survive the minor onslaught of the accountants and their business model of scarcety because they have to build the internet up in order to try to conquer it.

We are benefitting because they don't know how to handle the politics of plenty.

All of the training, theory and thought is focused on scarcety and on maintaining control over scarce resource.

They will never know how to handle plenty. Oh, they could grasp the concept of plenty, but they just don't want to.

Podcasting can just be like a flower in a brick yard.

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Unfortunate for me that the nervous system seems to be analog.

If it was packet switched, with the capabilities to route messages around damaged areas, I would never know I had MS until my body locked up and I probably died.

Gad, I'm depressing myself. Three Dead Trolls to the rescue.

Next week, so that you can see that I'm not some kind of lone gunman sitting in a book depository, I'm going to reveal my business plan.

I actually have one. (There's got to be some advantage to being in Business School ... Right?)

msb-0002a -An Answer For Mark Yashimoto Nemcoff

Mark Yashimoto Nemcoff asked me a question and the aswer will definitely be something that he will have learned this week; and I'd fuckin' better hear about it on Friday.

You hear me Mark? I'd fuckin' better hear about it on Friday.

Mark asked how MS affects my sex life... You would, you sick fuck you. Christ only knows what intern-boy has to put up with.

Well, sit down kiddies, (I'm over fifty, you're all kiddies, even the Yuppie in the corner, stop arguing with me,) and I'll tell you a story all about multiple sclerosis.

Are you sitting comfortably?

Then I'll begin.

Well, MS is an auto-immune system disease where otherwise healthy T-Cells respond to some trigger, (in my case its a particular and specific genetic strain of influenza,) and the T-Cells get confused as to the identity of the offending substance or organism and start attacking the myelin sheath surrounding the neurons and axons of my nervous system and the oligidendrocytes which produce the myelin.

In English, stripped of the medical mumbo-jumbo, its like taking a pair of wire strippers to the control cables that run your body and the wires that feed back to tell you how your body's doing.

Any competent high-school graduate will tell you that that's really gonna fuck you up.

Any competent dancer will tell you that it messes up your kinesthestic sense.

Any competent audio engineer will tell you that this will introduce cross-talk and modulation distortion as signals leak in and out of your cabling and span across your wiring.

Any competent robotics systems analyst will tell you that the feed back and control mechanisms will be approximations and require constant monitoring and recalibration to a baseline.

Any competent physiologist would tell you that it would wreak havock with your 'somatic cage'.

I hear Mark crying out from the back... "But what about your sex life?"

There are some occasional effects on the sheer mechanics of the situation, but right about then I don't feel like having sex at all. Those extremely rare days when I can't get it up are usually those days when I'm too fuckin' busy trying to stay alive.

The other 99.99% of my life, MS sort of has no real effect, but the unreal effects are, uh, unreal.

Dude, I wouldn't wish MS on my worst enemy, but if you know what you're doing...

Here's a flashback:

The reaction of a nurse at the Ottawa General back in 1985 to my question of "What will this do to my sex life?" was an embarrassed giggle.

Fuck that, and fuck your embarrassment, bitch! We're obviously NOT all adults here.

I sincerely hope that they're not still shoving patients out the plane's back door and into the great unknown without a 'chute. 'Cause that just sucked ass man.

Back to the present, I was a dancer, an audio engineer and a computer systems analyst...

I figured out what my soma was actually doing with the stripped wires and crossed signals.

Like I said, Dude, I wouldn't wish MS on my worst enemy, but if you know what you're doing...

As long as the stimulation was not overwhelmingly repeated, which leads to sensory fatigue, and which required me to become an inventive sex partner, and the 'signal source' not too strong, which required me to become a gentle sex partner, I could then take advantage of the 'fuzziness' of my nervous system and its unintended routing of signals for my own pleasure.

I had just discovered sexual Nirvana and could orgasm with breath-taking, earth-shattering, mind-blowing, toe-curling, sweaty after-glowing intensity.

Spaniard call orgasm "The Little Death." (With a last name like "Robvira" and you couldn't figure out that my father's father was a Spanish Civil War draft dodger?)

Well, some times it felt like I'd died while shooting the uncensored European version of a Victoria Secret commercial, gone to heaven and was just kicking back with a drink in one hand, a joint in the other, just lying on a whole bunch of naked angels, legs and tits and pussies splayed out every which way, while I slowly detumesced.

My sex life is un-fuckin-believable dude.

I have the most intense, rip-your-guts-out, fry-your-brains-out, incredible orgasms.

If you gotta be sick, might as well be with MS, 'cause if you know how to handle it ... there are definite compensations.

Of course, life's a bitch otherwise.

My feet are always cold right up until I touch them, and then they're no colder than any other part of my body. I've learned to just disregard the fact that my body's always telling me to step out of the Champagne bucket.

(I read somewhere that Montel Williams's feet always feel like they're burning. That his exuse for smoking up. I can see why and even explain the effects of such psychotropic substances in signal processing terms. But just spark a Doobie and chill dude, I won't launch into it. I don't smoke though. I gotta stay sharp to stay on top of this disease.)

Walking's a pain in the ass now, and a slow, with a cane, one at that.

I don't dance anymore because my kinesthetic sense is now too fuzzy and my 'somatic box' doesn't correspond to what my senses report. (Which is also behind my occasional spasticity.)

I aim my body well but my I need constant visual correction to the somatic feed-back and in dancing there just too many things to track at once for it not to descend into chaos and a tangle of legs, arms and torso.

But I'm okay.

It's my immune system that's slightly screwed up and I have episodes when it occasionally tries to kill me.

Remember, Mark Yashimoto Nemcoff, ya sick voyeur, I wanna hear all about this on "Things I leaned this week."

msb-0004 -The Princess of Twee & Rachel Knight

In a bit of a change for me, (about time, I'm sick of listening to great music and talking only to myself,) I'm trying to get in touch with a Scottish lass who goes by the name of Kaye Brewster.

I discovered Kaye on a CD-Rom by the original MP3.com, called "101 of the best songs you've never heard." She IS the Princess of Twee and she defined the genre.

MP3.com got shut down, sued into oblivion by the RIAA for no conceivable reason since they weren't owning any of the music or representing any of the indie artists that were originally on there.

Now MP3.com is YARIAASUO (Yet Another RIAA Suck-up Outfit,) featuring music which has been produced by their methods. Its become an outlet for the disposable Gwen Stefani puppets of the elevator and shopping mall world.

I liked the way Kaye's voice sounds and what she did with it for my ears. I bought her self-produced albums and I liked them, though she's moved on quite a bit from twee since then.

Her music is available for FREE DOWNLOAD at http://www.polopop.com/ and check out her info at http://www.polopop.com/info.html

I Googled until I found her and emailed her but she still has to get back to me before this podcast epidode is produced.

But I imagine getting some ear-time, as opposed to air-time, may prompt her to wonder why her site access statistics are up and check her damn email.

C'm'on Kaye. I wanna interview you.

I'm also conducting a bit of an experiment on remote interviewing with a fellow MS person from across the pond.

I hate calling anyone with MS a victim or a sufferer or disabled or any of the other dread and dreary adjectives because I feel it doesn't describe the person, or the disease.

Rachel Knight, also known as "alternativekitten", has a blog ( http://alternativekitten.blogspot.com/ ) and a vodcast (that's a video podcast for the two or three people who still don't know,) which is concerned only partly with MS because her life is not defined by MS. (We may be constrained with MS but we are definitely not defined by it.)

The vodcast can be found on iTunesMusicStore by searching the podcasts for sclerosis. You can then select her smiling face and subscribe to it.

She also records some things on dogs, (and I promise to help her on any French translation in the future, :-), on cats, on the universe and everything.

She also has a book (in print and on download,) which I have only just downloaded so you can just wait for a review.

We're thinking of setting up some form of collaboration for some media (vodcasts, possibly podcasts too) which could be created by MS people for consumption (read lucre) by anybody who wants to pay, we're not prejudiced, to benefit MS organizations. (I think that some compensation/incentivization would help get it off the ground and quickly raise the level of quality.) If we can, we'd set it up on both sides of the pond.

The music this week is by Kaye (a.k.a. Kaye Brewster, a.k.a. polopop) and by some of the links on her site to other artists she admires or considers her influences.

I'm now going to STFU and let you enjoy the music.

msb-0003 Lets all get up and dance to a song. -Lennon/McCartney

"Lets all get up and dance to a song that was hit before you mother was born."

When Lennon and McCarney wrote that, it was clearly impossible since the music industry had a lock on every piece of music written and recorded since the turn of the last century.

(Actually the RIAA has been against EVERY innovation since the invention of the piano roll. We have the archival record of the lawsuits they have filed since then. If it was to them we'd be sitting without every thing invented since our great-grand-parents used gas for lighting. There would be no photocopier, no radio, no juke boxes, no movies, no television, no MP3 players or iPods ... nothing. Think of how interlinked everything is. That also means there would be no telephone, no fax, no penecilin or other antibiotics, no computers and no internet and therefore no Google.)

The only way it was happening was with your own instruments or with legacy cylinders, 78s and maybe them newfangled 33 and 1/3s.

Basically the RIAA and friends felt that they owned your as-, uh, ears.

With podcasting and with podsafe music, that model of music distribution is showing us just how badly the artists and the audience has been ripped off.

Face it. Mozart died broke. Chopin died broke. Beethoven died deaf and not rich. Bach needed his patrons to keep eating.

The recording industry LOVES classical music. There's no royalty cheque to cut for the composer.

More recently, Satchmo' never got rich, despite being America's music ambassador to most of the planet.

He never got rich, but the recordings made others very rich.

Little Richard is still performing ... because he has to.

The list goes on and on.

The back catalogues of the music industry contain a wealth of material of unimaginable value. And its just mouldering away while we get Britanny Spears, Maria Carey and the latest talentless boy band pushed at us.

And we're not even the real customers, the real consumers of the music.

If you want to find the real paying customers, change floors...

That's right.

Now playing in elevators and malls all across the planet, Muzak (www.muzak.com/) is massacering songs by using professional musicians to play 'toned down,' placified, flacified renditions of music. Anything to stop it from being done right.

They feed us feces because that's what they feed anybody, anywhere, anytime.

Now that the recording quality is 'good enough' and has been since the fifties, and now that the media is now essentially perfectly reproducible, have you noticed a heavy preponderance of oldies stations?

Yep, we're being fed the same brown stuff again. But, lets be fair, its not just the RIAA that's doing it. Its their buddies, ClearChannel.

ClearChannel, Infinity Broadcasting and their ilk are trying to come up with the most cost effective means of delivering 1,440 minutes of commercial air time per channel. And with the merger of some channels the number of outlets that they can get to pay is shrinking.

If they could get rid of content all together, they would, and you'd be stuck with infomercials all day long.

But then the ratings would go to hell and they couldn't keep their prices up, so they churn the back catalogs.

The new hits that they manufacture, with the 'Gwen Stephani's, Celine Dions and the latest boy bands that get in, are carefully staged to cost them very little since, even with payola, they pass the costs down to the artists trying to break in by offering them contracts which leaves the artists in debt, rather than in clover.

Rap is a big commercial success because is so cheap to do (kids on the street rap out acapella.) So its cheap to produce, package and get to market. And young black urban culture is so violent that they give the AAs free publicity on the 10 o'clock with another shooting.

Like I said, Little Richard is still performing because he has to. (But he is still finding an audience because rap and all the rest of it is so bad.)

Well, now we've got podsafe music (GarageBand.com and music.podshow.com immediately come to mind,) ... and something else ...

The Cylinder Presevation and Digitization Project of the University of California, Santa Barbara (http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/) is a treasure trove of copyright-free music.

Granted some of it is just horrible to listen to, I happen to feel the same way about the average 'boy band,' but some of it is actually quite good.

If you listen to it, if you can hear past the scratches, hiss and pops with your CDified ears, you can hear what the artist tried to say.

Maybe you're an artist looking for something worth recording but there doesn't seeem to be anything commanding enough to bother. Check it out. Maybe you're just looking for some roots. Check it out. Maybe you're looking for some riff to 'borrow.' Check it out.

As Pablo Picasso said: "A good artist copies. A great artist steals." And that is what is at stake here. If the **AAs have there way, no one will be able to beg, borrow or steal anything because everybody will be facing a lawsuit by humourless creatures known as lawyers.

And that would be a sad drag.

I could go on about "The Politics of Dancing, The Politics of, hmmm, Feeling Good" and I probably I will again because its such a rich vein of material. But for now I will drop the subject and you will have to wait for me to tell you about "Kay" and "The Princess of Twee."

I told you last time that I'd tell you why I ate duck.

I eat duck out of revenge.

A duck killed my father with a hammer. No ... I'm just being my usual assinine self.

But I do eat duck out of revenge.

My MS episodes are triggered by periods of intense stress (I was a project manager working for a couple of idiots, you wanna talk about stress. I still remember a sign on someone's desk that said "Stress is a reaction to wanting desperatly to strangle the crap out of some fool who needs it." Man, do I agree with that sentiment.) or the episodes are triggered when I contract certain strains of influenza.

ALL flu virii are bred in the gut of Chinese ducks. ALL of them.

When pigs get it, it may be called "swine flu", but the pigs contract it from eating feed contaminated with sick duck shit.

That's why I eat duck every chance I get... Revenge.

As for the fools... I just think of "Silence of the Lambs" and Hannibal Lecter's diet, or maybe of "The Donner Party" diet, until I calm down.

For the podcast, I've just bought a Marantz PDM670 portable recorder with 2GB of RAM, a PortaBrace carrying bag, a twin pack of AKG C1000S microphones and a couple of tabletop tripods.

If I have to interview anybody, I'll be able to go anywhere and do it. (Its good to have a job. You feel like a king. Of course you have to pay the credit card bill though.)

I am communicating with the New York chapter of the MS Society and trying to get the notes from the annual meeting I attended, including the name of the fascinating doctor who was a key note speaker, I hope to interview him later in the series, and to get some MS news about what therapies are available now and which ones look promising for the future.

Also I want to meet some people with MS and ask them some questions. (I now have the equipment to do it.)

Next time, I'll hopefully have some feedback. Or some feed-forward.

msb-0002 They also serve who only stand and wait -Milton

You're getting this podcast, even though I sound like someone stuffed a cork in my schnozz.

I'll try to edit out all my horking, but I DO have a pretty bad cold. We had a couple weeks of 'global warming' weather here in New Jersey and it allowed all kinds of virii to proliferate. Guess who got in the way of one last week? Right.

This was rarely a problem back in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. It got cold enough that virii broke up and shattered on contact with anything warm, like lung tissue. (Later I'll tell you why I eat duck with so much gusto.)

I'm sitting here, 'engine on idle,' while I wait for some listener feed back.

I'm not expecting any yet.

Hell, I'm still developping promos for the show.

Well, already I'm wrong.

My promo ran on "Pacific Coast Hellway", (http://www.pacificcoasthellway.com/ or http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73801582 will take you to the iTunes Music Store) Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff is really a great guy.

And it ran on "The M Show", (http://www.themshow.com/index.html?jflag=ac or http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73331454&s=143441 will take you to the iTunes Music Store) John there is also wonderful.

I'd written that nobody'd heard of me yet, but, hey, I might be wrong.

The feed back from the podcasting community has been great, though they're really not my main focus. Its all about the MS.

Speaking of which, I'm trying to get the word out to Montel Williams. He's a media personality and he's got MS so I figure, what the heck? Let see if I can interest him in the podcast, or better yet if I could interview him on his MS.

I put together a promo and C.C. Chapman of the podcast "Accident Hash" (http://accidenthash.podshow.com or look for it on iTunes) said it was too long to fit into his format.

Rather than debate the point that "Its podcasting. You're not on anybody's clock but your own and if something takes two-and-a-half minutes, screw it, it takes two-and-a-half minutes."

Instead, I was (un?)characteristically cooperative and cut the hideous thing down to less than thirty seconds.

Still, it gets the data across.

But my point about podcasting being time/duration independent still stands.

Legally, podcasting constitutes an asynchronous, time-shifted, place-shifted, medium-shifted, personal and privileged, direct communication between two people, me and every individual member of my 'community.'

We can say whatever we want, however long we want.

It is speech and protected by the first ammendment here in the 'States and the equivalent legal/human rights writs in the United Nations and in what ever countries the message happen to be received in.

That's not to say that its not subject to any steps that the government of the nation in which the message is received might deem expedient/necessary. Its only an email after all.

But it is NOT a broacast.

The FCC, and I suspect the RIAA, BMI, ASCAP, and all the rest of the IP concerned institutions, DON'T HAVE ANY RIGHT TO INTERFERE.

Actually, I also suspect that ANY and ALL music is, by the definition of the medium, 'podsafe'. Of course, that's just my opinion.

[holy shit & hot damn Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff] is a great guy.

Not only does he entertain lots of people, me among them, with "Pacific Coast Hellway" (I already gave out the links) but he ran the spot and has asked me for a 'personalized' demo that he'll run later in the week. :-)

Here it is now:

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[background is ocean waves. (Go figure?)]

Mark Yoshimoto Nemkoff, like, you're real ignurnt, eh?

Canada was originally named 'kah-nah-tah,' eh?

Its an old indian word for 'meeting place', eh?

Like, its not my fuckin' fault the fuckin' Red Coats couldn't pronounce
anything right, eh?

So fuck your 'Canadia' and fuck you, and the split-beaver you slid outta,
eh?

This is Chuck, the Canuck, for msb.libsyn.com, eh?

A pod show by, for and about people with MS, eh?

That's m-s-b dot l-i-b-s-y-n dot com, eh?

And, like, I'm on iTunes too, eh?

[sound of beer bottle opening]

--
[back to incidental music]

I never really liked the sound of my voice. "Zat, is why is speak with all these outrageous accents." Je suis d'origine Francaise. "Un bon 'ti Quebecois, hostie!"

So how about some music from the 'south shore' of where I originally hail from:

[guytare] "Cantons de l'est"

[back to incidental music]

Since most people with MS are diagnosed as adults, I figure, the occasinal cussing's acceptable.

My target audience doesn't need molly-codling or to be 'protected' from 'strong' language.

Hell they're probably coping with the devastation and subsequent uncertainty of MS and can contribute their own salty language.

This actually brings me to Josh Jacobson of The Just Joshin' Podcast (http://justjoshing.org/ or look for him in iTunes.)

He's far too bright to need such molly-codling and probably has just a little resentment of the 'halts' and hiccups in people's speech as they try to censor themselves.

But, he's below the age bar for the 'adult conspiracy', as as Piers Anthony so charmingly puts it, (http://www.hipiers.com/,) so he'll have to use the 'clean' version. :-)

But because of the onset of my own MS, and that of quite a few others, occured while my body was in the throws of puberty. I wonder if anyone he knows, or more to the point if anyone that knows of Josh, is exhibiting slight tremors, mild blurred vision or other tell-tale symptoms.

There are other podcasters who I've been reaching out to but I haven't heard back from yet.

Okay, I'm listening to "Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie" (http://www.deadtroll.com/ or just serch for them on iTunes) do "The Proximity to God Index"

[Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie, "The proximity to god Index".]

[back to incidental music]

Actually, I was listening to them do "My Girlfriend's Got a Boyfriend" but its a protected AAC file so I can't convert it to the MP3 format required for podcasts. DRM rears its UGLY head, even if I have the Trolls' permission to podcast their stuff. Shit happens.

They skewer new-age (pronounced like 'sewage') and they do a damn good job of it too.

I am struck by the small but persistent number of charlatans surrounding MS 'Cures' and other mechanisms by which the healthier but the definitely depraved segment of society try to prey on us.

Still, I suppose its no worse than the witch doctors who are selling 'cures' for aids.

I wish them no luck.

[hurt street]ravenous

Its interesting that both are immune system diseases. While AIDS is the result of the collapse of the immune system under a viral attack, MS is the result of some misdirection of an overactive, or even perfectly healthy, immune system which gets confused and attacks the myelin sheath around your nerves.

Well, I'm going to cut this episode here. And give you a little more time.

[Lonnie Brooks, Long John Hunter, Phillip Walker] A Little More Time

I have a special treat for you next podshow...

Tata for now.

msb-promo-0001

Being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis is no picnic, nor is MS;

but its NOT the end of the world.

It certainly wasn't the end of mine.

Do you have MS?

Does your spouse or significant other have MS?

Does a parent, child or relative have MS?

Do you know someone with MS?

Do you care for someone with MS?

Are you just curious about MS?

Well, I've got MS and I'm reaching out to you with my blog and podcast.

I'm not one to cry and whine, bemoaning fate and the uncaring world.

Instead I'm using this as a channel for our special interests.

Special interests, like people affected with multiple sclerosis, have always been shut out of access to mainstream media.

If you weren't rich, like a mainstream advertiser, or the popular genre of the week, you were out of luck.

Well, no more.

The msb podshow is by, about, and for people whose lives have been touched by Multiple Sclerosis.

It should be a focus for health news, our news, our lives and carry some topical advertising for us, people with MS.

The msb podshow can be found at msb.libsyn.com and can also be found on iTunes (just follow the on page link or search for "Multiple Sclerosis" and my cat 'Wiki' will guide you to it.)

I'm not a professional podcaster, yet, but I'm having fun learning, while I cope with MS.

I've got some show ideas, some podsafe music, lots of podsafe music, and some questions for the audience so they can teach me what their lives are like.

Drop me a line at msb@artdogs.org, use the on-page Email Me link, and there are links to the US National MS Society, a Frappr map, and links back and forth between the blog and the podshow.

Maybe you're not here in Jersey City, in New Jersey or even in the 'States. Then I definitely want you to drop me a line at msg@artdogs.org, use the on-page Email Me link, and lets get your country, state or city chapter on the Frappr map.

There are other MS maps and MS podcasts out there and this is all good.

What I don't get to one week, maybe they will, and vice versa.

The msb podshow can be found at msb.libsyn.com and can also be found on iTunes (just click on the link, or search for "Multiple Sclerosis" and let my cat 'Wiki' guide you to it.)

msb-0001 Hello and Welcome

Hello all.

I am blogging and podcasting (sorry but that what I really sound like,) because this is a great way to get the word out that, while tragic, MS is not the end of the world.

And also to fill our ears with cool podsafe sounds.

Here's a little about me, my setup, my mission, and your chance to send me emails and voice mail to get your voice heard.

Since this not a broadcast, FCC restrictions don't apply. If something really pisses you off, if you have something less than complimentary to say about somebody or something in your life, go ahead; vent. (I've been screwed over myself and I'll be getting even...)

But enough about you. Its my platform for now.

I've had MS since I was 16.

I didn't recognize it as such but my handwriting went to hell. I' d never even heard of multiple sclerosis but that didn't mean I didn't have it. A couple of tremors while sitting in Mr. Miller's history class and all the work the nuns had done to teach me how to write went to Hell. 1969 was a portent of my entire life.

MS didn't bother me again for years. I'd learned to play guitar, got good, got real good, got to play play at the Yellow Door Coffee House in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, in a room full of other guitarists and their girlfriends, the staff who'd heard it all all before, and I noticed that you could have heard a fly fart. I was playing Fantasia in D minor by Silvius Leopold Weiss and I was playing it great. Not just good, but great.

I got a feeling that I was done with all that, gave away my guitar and got into computers in an odd way.

A little supersilious shit of a human being named Krishna at the math lab at Dawson College, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, once saw me looking at a Wang 2200 computer and said: Oh that's a computer. You wouldn't understand.

He tried to imply that, while he was bright enough, he didn't think I was.

Well screw that. I respond to intimidation by doing exactly the opposite of whatever reaction was intended. I was going to learn everything about computers. And so I did.

By 1976, I got married, found computers fascinating, obsessively so, and since have got to work with lots of interesting people, travel all over North America, Lisbon, Portugal, and got really, really good at my job.

I was 31, living and working in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada when, in 1985, after a few minor and undiagnosable exacerbations, I had a major attack. That's when I was diagnosed.

While lying there, unable to even pronounce the letter A, and getting bored out of my mind, I decided to think about object-oriented programming. You think real deep thoughts when you don't have any disturbances to bother you, like a body or an appetite or anything.

After I left the Ottawa General Hospital after five weeks, including a week in neuro-ICU, and had rehab, I just kept improving until there were no symptoms left. Life was good. I was writing articles, and getting them published, travelling again, working again and earning again.

In 1995, I finally ended up in Staten Island, then in Brooklyn, then in Manhattan in New York City, New York, USA, got divorced, got remarried, got one job after another, when in 1996, at the ripe old age of 45, I got another major attack.

I re-discovered that you do think deep thoughts when you don't have any disturbances to bother you, like a body or an appetite or anything.

This time it was about objects, instances, relationships and connections. (That's the subject of another blog [http://oirc.blogspot.com/] and podcast [http://oirc.libsyn.com].)

I walk with a cane now, slowly too, so my mobility is definitely impaired, as is my speech. It takes some cohones to host a podcast when you speak like I do. Well, I got cohones.

I lived through 9/11. I was living literally next door at the Gateway Plaza in Battery Park City, New York City, New York, USA when Osama bin Laden tore a hole in my sky. My commute used to be a thousand feet forward and a thousand feet up. That was gone. Utterly gone.

I ended up across the Hudson river in Jersey City, New Jersey, USA.

After a year or so, I got my head straight and my views adjusted and I found another job. (Being good at what I do really, really helps.)

I was still a nut-job, but I never let that handicap stop me. I went back to fill in some gaps in my education.

I was going to school for a Bachelor's Degree in Business when I discovered podcasting.

I heard "On A Podcast" by Cruisebox and I did what I usually do; obsessively research and learn more about it than a human being normally would, plotted and planned, bought equipment, software and hardware, came up with a concept which would help me get the word out there, wrote some scripts for my other obsession: objects, instances, relationships and connections. "Big deal", you say.

At an annual convention of the New York Chapter of the Multiple Sclerosis Society, after a fascinating presentation and a couple of uninteded appointements with my doctors, I created this podcast.

For my equipment, I use a couple of Macs, a couple of microphones, GarageBand, Podcast Maker, Blogger.com and LibSyn.com.

I haven't quit my day job yet, but now I do podcasting for fun and potentially for profit.

My mission is to spread the word about MS, about Rebif (which I use,) and about any other products out there which could help people cope with MS. Another mission is to spread the word of other people with MS and people who care for or about other people with MS.

I still have it. MS is like ugly luggage; you can't give it away. It's not going away and neither am I.

I am going to have music and MS news and I'd love to hear from you.

I'll be interviewing people I meet who have MS, people who are coping with MS, people who are thriving despite MS.

And I want to meet their sigificant others; the ones that put up with all their pains.

I want to meet women and men who felt shattered by the news but are getting over it, like I was and like I did.

I also want to podcast interviews with the mover and shakers in this world of MS diagnosis, MS treatment and possible cure for the diferent types of MS.

I have remitting relapsing MS. That's my tough and its good for me too. There are some people out there who have something like a degenerative MS.

I am also concerned that the precursors of MS are being ignored just like I ignored my very first attack, in Mr. Miller's history class.

MS used to be thought to be an adult-onset disease; striking down those between 25 and 25.

I thought I was weird when I cast my mind back to Mr. Miller's history class. Now I'm not so sure that it I was. I've been hearing about other young people getting MS. I've been reading about other people remembering their own precursor events.

Maybe its an adolescent onset disease... Something that happens during puberty, when our bodies are changing redically.

I think that its great what the doctors are doing with treatment and their other research, but I think that this adolescent-onset area also needs some research. I want to hear your stories.

Also, are there any sponsors interested out there? (I will be getting in touch with the MS Society, the drug companies and anyone else I can get to hear of or otherwise know.

Give a shout out or send me en email (msb@artdogs.org)