Catwalk queen Kate Moss has been reportedly taking a supplement, which makes goats randy. The supermodel is on a Chinese aphrodisiac known as Horny Goat Weed in the hope of falling Keith Cheggers. Kate, trying for a baby with fella Jamie Hince, was given the tip-off by pal Sadie Frost. “Kate thought it was worth [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Weed’
Tea Leaf Green | 04.17 | San Francisco
April 22nd, 2010 |
No Comments
Words by: Dennis Cook | Images by: Josh Miller
Tea Leaf Green :: 04.17.10 :: Great American Music Hall :: San Francisco, CA
 Tea Leaf Green :: 04.17.10 :: San Francisco |
Sometimes it helps with our favorite bands to step back for a spell. Without some distance, they can only be so fresh to us; their changing angles obscured by what we’ve seen and want to see. Tea Leaf Green was one of the first bands I wrote about when I got serious about music scribing eight years ago. Then, playing tiny clubs and searching for their sound, I heard shit-tons of promise, and there’s not many more charming quartets on the planet – something felt in their easy-to-like music and smiling, seemingly effortless stage demeanor. Dramatic personnel changes, a few hundred new songs and countless nights honing them in front of sweaty, happy people have worn away the baby fat to reveal one of the sturdiest American rock bands out there, a group capable of playing multi-night runs at quality theatres like the Great American Music Hall. Having spent many months away from their concerts, I arrived in S.F. open to whatever might unfold. Based on this gig’s resounding evidence, they’ve fully coalesced, a classic four-piece rock combo with talent, tunes and tenacity to spare.
Nicki Bluhm & The Gramblers played a lovely opening set to a sparse but increasingly enthusiastic early evening crowd. There’s the pull of flames for moths to Bluhm and her tight, thoughtful boys. One simply wants to move nearer when they ply their newfangled country rock meets skipping pop sound. The initial draw, obviously, is Bluhm’s powerhouse voice and charming phrasing. Don’t even bother trying not to stare or reveal your shock when the full force of her pipes hits you. But, she’s not up there alone, and The Gramblers play with brilliant economy, giving just as much and no more as each moment requires, exemplified by the tasty, leave-them-wanting-more guitar work of Deren Ney. New one “Jet Plane” had the together oomph of electric Fairport Convention and raises hopes pretty high for their forthcoming new album. My money says they deliver and then some.
Tea Leaf’s first set put a shadowy hue on their trademark bounce. Where once they were defined by their “California” feel (nicely revisited in S.F. with “Panspermic De-evolution”), here their collective reach touched on bloody nosed hard rock, jam flexibility, prime ’70s singer-songwriter fare and post-Wilco pop-rock. I’ve always liked them a touch heavier than some TLG faithful, and this gig let the clouds rain strong even though they always ultimately resurfaced into sunlight. Looking Unabomber chic, bassist Reed Mathis possessed a hairy intensity, a powerful aura that silently infiltrated the others, particularly in the grand-fab-tab-u-lous second set, which ranked amongst the very best TLG sets I’ve ever witnessed.
“Weird,” “psychedelic,” “heavy” and “intense” were some of the adjectives folks pulled out around me, yet none of it hints at how much forward motion and honest reflection lies at the heart of their music. For as much fun as one is likely to have at a Tea Leaf Green show, there is something decidedly more profound afoot. TLG is a dance hall band that slips emotion-triggering mementos into your pocket while you’re lost in the smoke, volume and flashing stage lights. It’s only the next day that one really appreciates the full measure of the experience, and it’s that lingering satisfaction that brings one back again and again.
Tea Leaf Green :: 04.17.10 :: Great American Music Hall :: San Francisco, CA
Set I: Germinatin’ Seed, Criminal Intent > Dreaming Without Sleeping, Cops Took My Weed, Santa Cruz, The Devil’s Pay, Miss Mae, Hello Jane, Baseball Song, Fallen Angel
Set II: 354* > Morning Sun, The Invasion, Honeymooners, This is Real > Georgie P, Not Fit > Panspermic De-evolution > One New Day > Panspermic De-evolution, Zoom Zoom, Emma Lee, Let Us Go
E: Forgivin’ > New Shoes > One Reason
* Guns N’ Roses cover (first time played)
var siteRoot=”http://www.jambase.com”;var newPhotoIndex=”0″;$(document).ready( function() { $(“#GalleryWidget”).load(siteRoot+”/Photos/Widget.aspx?galleryID=33″);}); Tea Leaf Green | Great American Music Hall | San Francisco, CA Tea Leaf Green perform at San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall on Saturday April 17, 2010… View Photos
Tea Leaf Green Tour Dates :: Tea Leaf Green News :: Tea Leaf Green Concert Reviews
15 Greatest Proponents of Marijuana Legalization
January 6th, 2010 |
No Comments
Some celebrities are more forthcoming with their love of weed than others — ahem, Willie Nelson — but you might be surprised at a few that fight for the drug’s legalization.
Dark Party | 12.01 | San Francisco
December 11th, 2009 |
No Comments
Words by: Justin Gillett | Images by: Michael Mullady
Dark Party :: 12.01.09 :: Mighty :: San Francisco, CA
 Dark Party :: 12.01 :: San Francisco |
It’s been almost four years since Eliot Lipp released his debut LP, Tacoma Mockingbird, and already the producer extraordinaire has grown into one of the preeminent names on the electro circuit. Whether he’s performing with Lipp Service (which includes Alex B and Lane Shaw of Pnuma Trio), or more recently with Dark Party, Lipp has become one of the more interesting electronic musicians to track. His unique approach to producing – a blend of retro synth noises combined with rarely predictable hip hop beats – has helped propel Lipp towards an intelligent sound that’s well crafted and original.
Lipp’s love of ’70s era electronic music, along with his impressive work ethic, has recently led him to work with the highly underrated producer Leo123. This two-man collaboration has spawned something fresh, yet still similar to Lipp’s solo work, that combines erstwhile electronic grooves with futuristic and modern drumbeats. The paring of old and new has created a sound that somehow manages to be both sedentary and danceable at the same time. When listening to Dark Party, one can either nonchalantly intake the music with little physical movement, or get down and let the low-end beats move their bones. Either way, the music is enjoyable on many levels and almost impossible to categorize in any sort of strict electronic genre.
During the recent Dark Party layover in San Francisco at Mighty, Lipp and Leo123 brought their unique outlook on music composition to a discerning Bay Area crowd. Seeing that it was a Tuesday and that the evening’s biggest name (Eliot Lipp) was performing in a group that almost no one knows about (Dark Party), the people who showed up were somewhat connoisseurs of the electro scene. It was slightly unfortunate that there was not a larger audience, although, the lucky few that did stumble across the bill were not disappointed and the calibration of the two producers was an intimate experience, which might not have been possible if throngs of faux electronic music fans were there.
 Dark Party :: 12.01 :: San Francisco |
Seeing Dark Party perform was a treat, especially considering that the group hasn’t released an easily accessible collection of recordings. Watching the band live was a way to absorb the songs and listen to the nuances of the tracks, opposed to struggling to fully comprehend the possibilities from the group’s MySpace page. Lipp did polish off a few solo cuts, including the finely mastered “Calling Me” off his recent release Peace Love Weed 3D. Performing this aforementioned Lipp track was an opportunity for the duo to add a few extra layers to a song that Lipp would typically be playing by himself. The group also played their remix of the STS9 tune “Shock Doctrine,” pulled from Peaceblaster (The New Orleans Make It Right Remixes) album (JamBase review).
Many of the pieces Dark Party played during their set were organized in a fashion more akin to a classic rock song structure, as opposed to a typical electronic song progression. There were defined verse-chorus-verse-chorus shifts that helped add layers of originality to the music. These tonal changes were finely executed and helped keep the audience’s attention, despite the absence of any “real” instruments.
While it was hard to really know what the two producers were doing as they hunkered down behind their laptops, it was apparent that these two musicians were locked into the groove and intent on spreading their music to the masses. It’s hard to compare musicians playing laptops to musicians playing traditional instruments, but what Lipp and Leo123 were doing onstage was worthy of recognition. There lack of overall showmanship forced the crowd to almost ignore the two artists and wholly concentrate on the music.
Performing electronic music and making it visually engaging in front of a crowd is a quandary that both Lipp and Leo123 have no doubt grappled with, but instead of making a halfhearted attempt at producing some sort of stage spectacle, the pair was keen to just let the music speak for itself. Their performance was a no nonsense electro show without any sort of impressive pageantry. Yet, despite the lack of any real presentation, the music was extremely powerful and further cemented the upward career paths of Lipp and Leo123.
JamBase | Dark
Go See Live Music!
Erectile Dysfunction – Why Herbal Cures Are More Effective Than Synthetic Drugs
August 4th, 2009 |
No Comments
If you want to cure erectile dysfunction you can of course use synthetic drugs but there just a quick fix, with side affects furthermore, most men are disappointed with them because they think these drugs will improve sex drive and they don’t. Herbal cures can get you a hard erection, give you more libido and [...]
Youth Radio — Youth Media International: Oakland Passes “Respectability Tax” for Pot Clubs (VIDEO)
July 23rd, 2009 |
No Comments
Originally published on Youthradio.org, the premier source for youth generated news throughout the globe. By: Orlando Campbell You’d think youth in Oakland, California would be…
Lenore Skenazy: Why The Nice Man Didn’t Save the Toddler
July 15th, 2009 |
No Comments
Worse, in a suspicious climate like that – not unlike our own – adults grow wary of any involvement with kids who aren’t theirs.
Confessions of a Spam-Catcher: How to Identify Spam
As part of my role as Lifehack’s manager, I am responsible for moderating the comments queue. Lifehack’s back-end has a “Pending†queue for comments that our spam-catching software thinks might be spam, a “Spam†queue for comments labeled “spam†either by the software or by me, and another queue for comments that have been approved, again either by the software or by me. As a general rule, I check that “Pending†queue several times a day, the “Approved†queue every day or so, and the “Spam†queue every week or so.
I’ve been doing this for two years, and I’ve gotten pretty proficient at figuring out what is and is not spam – a tough call to make sometimes, since spammers get more and more sophisticated in lock-step with those of us charged with blocking them. I present my “formula†here for two reasons: one, to give less experienced bloggers and webmasters an idea of how to catch spam on their own site, and two, to give commenters an idea of the kind of thing to avoid so their comments don’t get accidentally thrown in the “Spam†bin.
I should say, a big part of catching spam is a “feel†– intuiting that some comment just doesn’t feel right. I’m not sure I can capture exactly what goes into that feel. Andy Warhol once said that to recognize a great painting, first you have to look at a thousand paintings, and catching spam is a bit like that – the experience of having looked at thousands of spam messages cannot be easily encapsulated. But I’ll try as well as I can.
What is spam?
What makes a message spam is relative and subjective. In a sense, spam is like a weed – a weed is not any particular kind of plant, but a plant that isn’t wanted where it’s at. (See, for example, Wikipidia’s definition of Weed as “a plant that is considered by the user of the term to be a nuisance.â€) For instance, Corn is delicious, but if it’s growing in your soybean field, it’s a weed. A message that, say, pimps a word processor might be perfectly welcome on a post that asks for product recommendations for writers, while on a post that just happens to mention writing, the same message could be considered spam.
Some messages are clearly spam; for example, anything delivered by a spambot programmed to leave its message wherever it can find an open form to submit through. But a message can be left by a living person, custom-written for the particular content it’s posted to, and still be spam. This list starts with the most obvious signs and moves to more vague and difficult-to-interpret signs. My guess is that a lot of people run into the ones further down the list because they post without thinking very clearly, so pay attention.
A comment is spam if it:
For example, a comment might say “I think your baby is really cute!†but the word “baby†links to a site selling baby clothes or even a Forex trading site or other scam.
This is obvious, right? Real people don’t post the same comment over and over on different posts, no matter how relevant. most likely it’s a spambot responding to multiple posts on your blog that contain similar keywords.
While there are a few situations in which a legitimate comment could contain several links, they’re fairly rare. As a general rule, the likelihood of a comment being spam increases directly with the number of links; anything over three and it’s virtually guaranteed to be spam.
A lot of spambots (or even live spammers) crawl the web looking for posts with certain keywords and then insert a generic message loosely related to the topic on the hopes that it will slip past any human reader who is likely to just skim through their comments. Unless a comment addresses something specific about your post, it’s likely to be spam.
Most spammers are fairly astute observers of basic human psychology – particularly our desire to believe good things about ourselves. So they butter us up, saying things like “Great post! In fact, I love this whole site – I’m definitely going to come back again and again!â€.
A basic search engine optimization strategy is to get your website’s address associated with specific keywords, and search engines look closely at the text associated with a link to determine the usefulness of the website linked to. Real people aren’t trying to game search engines, and frankly, we want to be recognized for our contribution, so we use our actual name, or a username. If you can’t imagine replying to a person by the name in their “Name†field, you’re dealing with a spammer. (For example, here’s one taken from our spam queue: “Having a good vocabulary not only gives a framework for thought. It also allows you to be concise and precise to make communication better.†This is relevant to the post, and thoughtful, but it was left by an entity named “dining room tableâ€. It’s spam.)
This is a tough call – sometimes I’ll see a thoughtful comment clearly written in direct response to the post it’s commenting on, under a real person’s name, and still mark it as spam because they link to a site whose legitimacy is questionable. Could be porn, WOW gold scams, Forex scams, get rich quick schemes, blogs with stolen content, or anything else that feels to me like someone left a comment more to get their link out than to add to the discussion.
This is a relatively sophisticated spam technique: pulling lines out of the post it’s responding to in order to make the language of the comment sound like real writing. Real people mark the quotes they’re commenting on (usually with quotation marks, but it could be by italicizing or bolding it, putting it in blockquotes, or some other means) and try to clearly separate their response form the post’s words.
Old posts tend to attract a lot of spam. Real people generally recognize that if a post is a year or so old, the conversation there is pretty much over. Spambots do not realize that. It still sometimes happens that someone comments on an ancient post, but the age of the post is a big red flag.
If the point of a comment is to engage in discussion with the author of the post and his or her readers, it doesn’t make much sense to comment in a language that you’re not sure the author knows.
I hate to stereotype an entire top-level domain like this. I’m sure there are Russians out there making thoughtful comments on blogs all the time. And yet I’ve never had a comment that wasn’t spam from a commentor with a .ru domain or email address.
This is experience talking – a lot of times you’ll see what appears to be a blog post in its own right in your moderation queue that starts off, at least, relevant, and is clearly written by a real person. This falls under the “Weed†heading – it might have been totally welcome except it’s out of place as a comment on your blog.
This is another “weed†situation: a comment on a post about, say, installing Windows 7 that asks for help with a specific problem. Unless the point of your site is to answer specific questions about computer problems, this comment is out of place. There are better and more likely places to get help than on your blog.
Sometimes a comment just feels wrong – it is a little too smarmy, maybe, or it’s a little too formal and stiff. You click through the link and it’s a legitimate-enough site, maybe a little sketchy, but you can totally construct a case where this comment was written by a real person with something to say. The question, though, isn’t what was the intention of the writer, but what is the effect on the conversation on your site. If a comment doesn’t seem to quite fit, you’re well within your rights to “spam itâ€.
Anyone else have advice for would-be spam-catchers? Or for commenters who might be finding their comments relegated to the spam-heaps of history? Leave a thoughtful, non-spammy comment below!
Dustin M. Wax is a freelance writer and project manager at Stepcase Lifehack. He can be reached though his freelancing site at DustinWax.com</a., where his various projects can be viewed. When he's not writing, he teaches anthropology and gender studies in Las Vegas, NV. He is the author of Don’t Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College.
Follow him on Twitter: @dwax.
Share This