One of my long time favorite podcasts is The Waiting Room, by One Half of Drunk Country and The Woman of the House. They were on WOXY.com, they were on error.fm, they used to be hosted on Podbean.

For some time now, though, they’ve been hosting The Waiting Room on Official.fm, which is a nice enough service but doesn’t offer a true podcast feed. You can get an RSS feed of tracks, but it doesn’t offer the tracks as enclosures and therefor your podcatcher doesn’t know what to do with it.

Here’s what 2 episodes (“items”) look like in the “tracks” feed you get from twrhq.official.fm (I’ve cut out some non-essential stuff):


<item id="322806" downloadable="true" private="false" sharable="true">
<track_id>322806</track_id>
<title>The Waiting Room - Syndication #069 w/c 11.12.11 SAMANTHA CRAIN in session</title>
<link>http://official.fm/tracks/322806</link>
<pubDate>Fri, 18 Nov 2011 15:16:25 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item id="319523" downloadable="true" private="false" sharable="true">
<track_id>319523</track_id>
<title>The Waiting Room - Syndication #068 w/c 11.05.11</title>
<link>http://official.fm/tracks/319523</link>
<pubDate>Mon, 14 Nov 2011 21:50:35 GMT</pubDate>
</item>


So each item has an id, which is also its track_id, as well as a title.

I noticed, from browsing the page, that the download link for each episode is basically just the “link” provided in the feed with “/download” added to the end of it.

So, I created a Yahoo! Pipe which takes the tracks.rss feed from Official.fm and transmogrifies it into a proper podcast feed with enclosures.

Here’s what the Pipe looks like:

And that outputs items which look like this:


<item>
<title>The Waiting Room - Syndication #069 w/c 11.12.11 SAMANTHA CRAIN in session</title>
<link>http://official.fm/tracks/322806/download</link>
<description>The Waiting Room - Syndication #069 w/c 11.12.11 SAMANTHA CRAIN in session</description>
<guid isPermaLink="false"/>
<pubDate>Fri, 18 Nov 2011 15:16:25 +0000</pubDate>
<enclosure url="http://official.fm/tracks/322806/download" length="http://official.fm/tracks/322806/download" type="audio/mpeg"/>
</item>
<item>
<title>The Waiting Room - Syndication #068 w/c 11.05.11</title>
<link>http://official.fm/tracks/319523/download</link>
<description>The Waiting Room - Syndication #068 w/c 11.05.11</description>
<guid isPermaLink="false"/>
<pubDate>Mon, 14 Nov 2011 21:50:35 +0000</pubDate>
<enclosure url="http://official.fm/tracks/319523/download" length="http://official.fm/tracks/319523/download" type="audio/mpeg"/>
</item>


Because the “” bit is there, my podcatcher therefore knows how to get that one.

Stick http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=44ff84a6ca0e11dc30398c7688856b41&_render=rss into your podcatcher and let me know if it works for you.

Unfortunately it doesn’t work in iTunes, because iTunes ignores the mime type (audio/mpeg) and looks for the “mp3″ file extension on the enclosure url. Luckily I don’t use iTunes anymore, having found Downcast for the iPad far superior.

If you’re trying to get some other official.fm feed, you can clone the pipe and edit it – just look at the four “fetch feed” items which feed into the “union” – each of them represents 1 page of items from the feed, 20 per page. (Not sure of official.fm lets podcasters choose how many items per page to show – just looking at what the feed output was). The key pay part you need to change for a different podcast feed is the userid:

Leaving the other bits in place.

Then, save your pipe, run it, and grab the “Get as rss” link – that’s the link you need for your podcatcher.

Rathole Radio

I’ve long been a subscriber to Floss Weekly, a video/audio podcast in the TWiT network focused on Free/Libre/Open Source Software. One of the occasional co-hosts of that show, Dan Lynch, also does an audio podcast (weekly) called Rathole Radio. I’ve just started listening but so far I’m loving it: he mixes genres (french instrumental hip-hop, dance, heavy metal / hardcore), and mixes in live performance.

The most recent episode, Rathole Radio 62, included all (assuming that includes the live performance) creative-commons licensed music from Jamendo. (There’s also a Rathole Radio Sampler EP you can download on which all tracks are creative commons licensed).

Two quick links to share from that episode. The first is an EP by “8in8,” a supergroup including Ben Folds, Amanda Palmer, Neil Gaiman, and Damian Kulash. Dan played the track “Because the Origami” on the podcast, but the whole EP is embedded below and downloadable for just $1 USD.

The second is from Bad Panda Records, a creative commons record label.

Back in September when they announced their 100th release, they also put out a downloadable 1.1GB archive of all 100 releases. Be sure to also check out the Big Panda Store for merch.

Veggie Galaxy: Vegetarian Diner and Vegan Baker, 450 Mass Ave, Cambridge MA

The place looks fantastic – hip, modern but retro, clean, and inviting: I love seeing vegan restaurants get the ambiance right, since so many have failed on that front. The place was packed, so I sat at the counter, diner style. Luckily I was positioned right next to the station where the waitstaff picked up food for deliver, so I saw lots of plates prepped and handed off. (Open kitchen means you can watch the staff doing much of the cooking – also a good step forward in a vegan establishment, though I did unfortunately see a fair number of eggs going out as well).

The counter at Veggie Galaxy. Not a fancy instagram effect, just bad focus on my part - but I like the way it turned out.

The food was fantastic, too. I had a burger (they offer both a chipotle black bean version and a portobello chickpea version – I had the latter) with vegan cheese, homemade seitan chorizo, and carmelized onions. It was messy – ended up eating as much with a fork as with my hands – but delicious and filling. The red cabbage and dressed arugula were a nice touch too, though if you’re going to go diner food why not fries on the side?

Veggie burger with vegan cheese, carmelized onions, and seitan chorizo

I do wish the menu were a bit more explicit about vegan/vegetarian. Essentially the menu notes that items are vegan except where explicitly said to contain eggs or cheese, and even in those cases vegan substitutions can be made. That’s great, but what about the sandwiches listed as having mayo? (I overheard a waitress saying they use a vegan mayo, but it would be nice to have that clearer on the menu itself). Are the eggs and “tofu eggs” cooked on the same grills? Toast buttered with earth balance? Just feels better to me to have a specific notation, even if it’s just a footnote somewhere on the menu.

For that matter, of course, I’d be happier if they just went all-vegan, instead of perpetuating the idea that eggs and cheese are somehow exceptions to the institutionalized animal abuse that is the “animal foods” industry, small and large.

The desserts are all vegan. I was too stuffed to enjoy any there, so I got two chocolate items to go: A slice of chocolate cream pie and a piece of chocolate layer cake. Both were excellent, even 8 hours later.

Chocolate layer cake and Chocolate cream pie, both vegan

I definitely plan to make it back to Veggie Galaxy. (I think next time I’ll try the breakfast menu – a tofu scramble with that seitan chorizo would be wonderful I bet). It’s not the cheapest diner you’ll find in the Boston area, but the food was well worth the trip and the wait. Fill up on lunch / dinner and get the desserts to go for later – you can’t go wrong.

Right now they are open 11am-3pm and then 5pm-10pm, but they’ll soon be changing to 7am-3pm, 5pm-10pm. Best to check their site for updates.

In the experiment, users are told to count the number of passes made by either the team wearing white shirts or the team wearing black. The experiment, however, isn’t really about the counting. Instead, the experiment is about selective attention, and how our focus on one specific task (counting) makes it impossible for us to see another phenomenon (the female student in the gorilla suit who walks into the center of the frame and strolls causally out). As Davidson puts it in the Introduction to the book:

He’d set us up, trapping us in our own attention blindness, priming us for his lecture. . . . By concentrating so hard on the confusing counting task, we had managed to miss the main event: the gorilla in the midst. (pg. 2)

The point of the anecdote, for Davidson, isn’t so much that most people missed the gorilla in their attempt to count accurately, but that she saw the gorilla (largely because she made no attempt to count accurately, knowing that kind of task was not well suited to her). Rather than reading the event as a failure of attention, Davidson uses it (here and throughout the book) to represent the positive opportunities of collaboration through difference:

If we see selectively, but we don’t all select the same things to see, that also means we don’t all miss the same things. If some of us can accurately count basketballs in a confusing situation and some can see the gorilla, we can pool our insights and together see the whole picture. That’s significant. The gorilla experiment isn’t just a lesson in brain biology but a plan for thriving in a complicated world.

Davidson uses this central principle to drive a far-ranging discussion: how humans learn (more brain science), how institutional education tries to teach (via rote memorization and standardized testing of a very specific kind), how modern workplaces are transforming based on the internet and globalization, and how collaboration through difference represents a way of adjusting education to better match the realities of the new world of work. Our modes of education need to be changed in order to produce the kind of workers needed in the 21st century: capable of complex, cross-cultural understanding, multitasking at a high level, and collaborating through difference on cooperative projects at large scale. (cf. the Internet itself, linux, wikipedia, open source, etc.).

Reading Now You See It as a vegan, though, I couldn’t help but notice that my own attention also often goes to places the author does not intend. Being vegan in a world of carnists means constantly seeing and recognizing animals as sentient beings with interests we are ethically bound to respect. Being vegan means seeing the gorilla in an entirely different way than Davidson intends the metaphor: seeing as fellow beings animals that others see as food or raw materials.

In chapter 2, “Leaning Ourselves,” for example, Davidson describes the scientific discovery of mirror neurons:

They placed electrodes in the ventral premotor cortex of macaque monkeys to see how their neurons were firing when they were picking up food and then eating. By doing so, the neurophysiologists were able to record the activity of single neurons when the monkeys were feeding themselves. That, alone, was news.
Then, one day, something really interesting happened. The Parma scientists began to notice that neurons were firing in exactly the same pattern whether the monkey was picking up a piece of food and eating it or was watching a human or another monkey pick up a piece of food to eat. (p53)

Of course the point Davidson is trying to make is about how mirror neurons work in primates (ie, in humans and macaque monkeys) and not about the monkeys themselves. But reading as a vegan, I can’t read that passage without stopping short on the line “placed electrodes in the ventral premotor cortex,” interrupted by visions of the horrors of vivisection and institutionalized animal abuse flooding my peripheral consciousness. (Cue Peter Gabriel’s “Shock the Monkey” video in your own peripheral consciousness).

Macaque monkey in Borneo (Photo by David Ogden, cc--by-nc-nd license)

In Simons and Chabris’ experiment, the female student in the gorilla suit walks undetected through the basketball passing crowd, by observers too focused on counting to notice. In Davidson’s retelling of the Parma experiments, the unnamed macaque monkeys with their implanted (“placed?”) electrodes, bred for scientific experiments, live their entire lives in cages but go essentially unremarked, serving simply as a data set because her attention is elsewhere.

Now, I’ve no idea how Giacomo Rizzolatti and his fellow scientists at the University of Parma treat the animals on which they perform experiments (though I’ve seen enough video of animal experiments to have a good guess). I’ve no idea what Davidson thinks about the ethics of animal experimentation (though her discussion of brain science suggests that a minimum she finds it acceptable). But it certainly seems to me that this time she’s missed the gorilla in the midst.

One of the largely positive role models in the book is Inez Davidson, the mother of Davidson’s first husband. Inez Davidson taught in a one room schoolhouse in the Canadian Rockies:

She rode half-wild horses to school each morning, alone in the dark and cold through grizzly country, “putting miles on them,” as she would say, before they could be sold to local ranchers as well-trained working horses. (p.82)

Inez is described (romanticized?) as a kind of prototypical cowgirl but also a budding environmentalist and prescient supporter of physical education for kids:

She was concerned about both food additives and contaminants in the air and drinking water even in cattle country, where the water supply was tainted by runoff from oil and smelting plants far away. She was also shocked at how parents were driving to school instead of having them walk or ride horses in; these were forms of physical exercise she believed were important to kids’ health, well-being, and concentration in the classroom. (p.83)

Confronted with Rodney, a student other teachers have written off as “slow,” Inez Davidson teaches him to use his hands like an abacus, becoming a kind of savant with arithmetic:

He could put his hands under the table and, without anyone seeing, do “rapid calculation” instantly. He did so as a kid, acing math tests, and he did so as an adult, gaining a reputation for uncanny speed and accuracy in the brawny, take-no-prisoners arena of the cattle auctions. Rodney was no one’s fool. (p.83)

Again, Davidson’s point is meant to be about different learning styles. Inez Davidson saw that Rodney’s learning style was better served by a different teaching method, adapted, and made success where others had seen only failure. Take too narrow a perspective on what success looks like – standardized, end-of-grade testing in the public schools for example – and you alienate significant parts of the student population for whom that style of learning is ineffective or impossible.

When my son takes standardized tests (Photo by Tom Woodward, cc--by-sa license)

But I can’t help reading it without wondering about the cattle auctions, and the half-wild horses. Would the passage have the same resonance if it were a story of an antebellum schoolteacher whose student went on to make a name for himself at the slave auctions? I realize to some readers that sounds like hyperbole, or risks invoking Godwin’s law, but buying and selling slaves was once common practice too.

Cattle Auction in Comanche (Photo from Al Jazeera English, cc-by-nc license)

Later, in a section on the origins of letter grades, Davidson writes:

The first school to adopt a system of assigning letter grades was Mount Holyoke in 1897, and from there the practice was adopted in other colleges and universities as well as in secondary schools. A few years later, the American Meat Packers Association thought it was so convenient they adopted the system for the quality or grades, as they called it, of meats*. (112)

The asterisk points to a footnote – the only footnote in the whole book, the rest being all endnotes and mostly references:

It’s interesting that if you dig at all into the U.S. Department of Agrilculture literature you find that even grading slabs of sirloin or chuck is a less clear-cut matter than meets the eye. There are uniform standards of meat quality that are debated regularly and changed occasionally. A truth-in-labeling law had to be instituted to guard against misrepresentation of what the grade even means. If it’s that tough grading beef, imagine what’s behind testing our kids.

Why is it “interesting”? (I used to write this in the margin of my student’s essays, as “it’s interesting that” is often a construction that buries the lede, as it were – better to start the sentence with what makes it interesting, or what point you’re trying to make by identifying some kind of contradiction or complication). It’s interesting, presumably, because the assumption would be that grading beef is simple and straightforward: nothing to worry about in the meat supply. Discovering that the “uniform standards” actually get debated, challenged, and changed occasionally suggests that maybe it isn’t all that simple. Never mind the serious and substantial concerns even among omnivores and carnists about the dangerous levels of e.coli, salmonella and related bacteria in the U.S. Food supply, or mad cow disease, or the over-use of antibiotics on livestock leading to the development of antibiotic resistant strains, or the fundamental inability of inspectors to actually regulate the industry. Nothing to see here, just more proof that grades are artificially concealing complexity by oversimplifying the task of evaluating students or the carcasses of slaughtered animals.

Trouble Puppet's production of The Jungle based on Upton Sinclair's novel (Photo by Stephen Pruitt, cc-by-nc-sa license)

Ultimately Davidson concludes that:

If I were to distill one simple lesson from all the science and all the stories in this book, it would be that with the right practice and the right tools, we can see what we’ve been missing. . . . From infancy on, we are learning what to pay attention to, what to value, what is important, what counts. Whether on the largest level of our institutions or the most immediate level of concentrating on the task before us, whether in the classroom or at work or in our sense of ourselves as human beings, what we value and what we pay attention to can blind us to everything else we could be seeing. (p.291)

Shifting one’s perspective to embrace veganism often means becoming suddenly and painfully aware of things you previously managed to shut from consciousness if not from view. It is important, however, to keep that perspective: to keep pointing to the gorilla in the midst, the macaque in the lab, or the cattle being prepped for auction. It matters because what we can bring to the “collaboration through difference” opportunity is a sustained ethic of paying purposeful attention to animals otherwise considered merely as raw materials.

The Green Panther / La Panther Verte (Yelp)

The Green Panther was just down the street from my hotel, near Concordia, at 2153 Mackay Street. I got there close to closing, so they were already starting to wrap up for the night. I had the BBQ Tofu Wrap, an excellent smoothie, and a hummus platter. Excellent food with a focus on local, organic, and vegan. Definitely a spot I’d be visiting regularly if I lived in Montreal.

Chalk boards at the Green Panther

Aux Vivres (Yelp)

Aux vivres was quite a bit further, but was well worth it.

Aux Vivres exterior

I had “Le complet” which was a tofu scramble, tempeh bacon, sweet potatoes, cornbread, and a salad. Everything was excellent – again I think I’d be here every weekend for brunch.

Le Complet

Chuch / Chuchai (Yelp)

Chuch is the express version of Chuchai – thai style cuisine with an emphasis on faux meats. Not always my favorite approach to vegan cuisine, but Chuch really makes it work. I had a fried mushroom appetizer, some tom yum soup, and fried tofu with chiles.

Chuchai and Chuch on Saint-Denis

Chuchai, the sister restaurant (they share a kitchen and broadly the same menu) next door is fancier, but I found chuch quite nice as well (reading it was the buffet I expected even more casual).

When the streams cross, so to speak, and the same artist pops up in the multiple feeds, I know they’re worth checking out. That happened recent with Other Lives, who were (in my somewhat delayed podcast viewing anyway) on KEXP’s Video of the Week, did a Tiny Desk Concert, and were on Morning Becomes Eclectic recently.

Here’s the KEXP Video of the Week (more videos from the set or MP3 from the Live Performances feed (will expire eventually)):

Here’s the Tiny Desk Concert:

And the Morning Becomes Eclectic episode:

The duo is Joy Williams (California transplant to Nashville) and John Paul White (Alabama to Nashville). Unlike The Swell Season, at least until recently, and Jason Bentley goes into this during the interview segment of the above, they’re not a couple. (Married, but to different people). It’s easy to see how people make that assumption, though, given how well they work together and the way their presented in their own tour photos.

Checkout the album Barton Hollow (properly pronounced Barton Holler), and look for them on tour. You can also get a free download of the title track single (video below) in exchange for signing up for their mailing list.

“I was sort of always under the impression that these things were done while everybody was just trying to work,” The Decemberists’ Colin Meloy says a little ways into this Tiny Desk Concert in the NPR Music offices. “I kind of like the romance of that.”

The play:

• Down by the River
• Rox in Box
• June Hymn

Also be sure to check out the Decemberists archive at NPR – lots of good stuff there.

]]> http://www.goatless.org/2011/08/06/tiny-desk-concert-the-decemberists/feed 0 http://www.goatless.org/2011/07/04/fourth-of-july-music-gil-scott-heron-live-at-the-bottom-line http://www.goatless.org/2011/07/04/fourth-of-july-music-gil-scott-heron-live-at-the-bottom-line#comments Mon, 04 Jul 2011 15:59:16 +0000 John http://www.goatless.org/?p=677 Gil Scott-Heron (1949-2011) is most well known for “The Revolution Will Not be Televised” but this 1977 live gig with Brian Jackson will expose you to more of what Scott-Heron was about.


Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson Live at the Bottom Line 1977

You’ll find the original posting with much more info (from which I took this cover) on Never Enough Rhodes but it was also recently posted at Aquarium Drunkard in MP3.

]]> http://www.goatless.org/2011/07/04/fourth-of-july-music-gil-scott-heron-live-at-the-bottom-line/feed 0 http://www.goatless.org/2011/07/03/pokey-lafarge-and-the-south-city-three http://www.goatless.org/2011/07/03/pokey-lafarge-and-the-south-city-three#comments Sun, 03 Jul 2011 16:50:53 +0000 John http://www.goatless.org/?p=659 Loving Pokey LaFarge and the South City Three, who I discovered via this Tiny Desk Concert from NPR:

I know some folks find this to be a bit of a “shtick” or “gimmick” but I love the 30s/40s look and sound – he even leans his head back to sing and forms his mouth like an old time radio singer. But then, I was a huge fan of Squirrel Nut Zippers too (especially hot and the Inevitable, which evoked similar distaste in some folks for being too retro.

Some other video embeds below. Check out Middle of Everywhere, their latest album.

]]> http://www.goatless.org/2011/07/03/pokey-lafarge-and-the-south-city-three/feed 1