M Is FOR MASHUP - April 3rd, 2019
The New Useo Review
By DJ Useo
Well, I've been writing "M Is For Mashup" well over ten years now. I was mixing mashups, & long mixes even before that. Simply employing longevity has resulted in rather a large discography by this point. My main Useo site "Groovy Time With DJ Useo" has over 1400 posts, most of them remaining linked for accessibility. Sure, it requires constantly updating the hosting, but it's always been worth it to me, especially when I get the occasional glowing praise. :D
One of my specialties is releasing album collections like the "Intense Psychedelia","Halloween ep", "Frikkenfrack : DJ Useo's Strangest Mashups", & the ever-popular "Summer Booty The Summer Mashup Album", series. In all, I've released 80 DJ Useo Albums, & nearly as many group mashup compilations. You can find them on my
"DJ Useo Mashup Albums" site. They start at the top of the page with my albums, & then spread out in group comps as they move down the page.
( djuseomashupalbums.blogspot.com/ )
Inspired by my predecessors, I've steadily released new mashups since 2004, only 4 years after music was invented. ( lol ) Many have been assembled onto collections, but tons have been merely singles. My current main hosting for singles is "Sowndhaus" .https://sowndhaus.audio/profile/djuseo I like them much because they're the first host I ever had that didn't lose all my tracks at some point. Currently, there's over 236 mashups by me on my 'Haus acount. You can also find 73 of my most popular novelty mashups hosted on my "Hulkshare"
( www.hulkshare.com/DJUseo )
account. This, despite a major purge that occurred last year.
For those of you who prefer a more detailed music experience, you can find over 150 of my past mixes, radio shows & podcasts on my "
Hear This.At" account
( hearthis.at/vxmfxz7w/ ) .
I highly recommend the "Mashup Showcase w/ DJ Useo" series, as it features a half hour of mashups each show, all tracks being chosen by the featured mixer.
My latest show "DJ Useo - Genre Clash Mashups" just made #5 in the rock section top ten.
( hearthis.at/vxmfxz7w/dj-useo-genre-clash-mashups/ )
Lastly, you can find around seventy non-mashup long mixes of mine at the divine "
BMBX: Lovingly Crafted Mixtapes" site
( www.bmbx.org/category/dj-useo/ )
. BMBX is a huge favorite of mine becuase of the amazing talent that dwells there. Everyone has incredibly refined tasts in music of all styles. They don't allow mashups there, so it's a very different Useo experience. You'll hear me doing thoroughly mixed sets of Drum'n Bass, Remixes, Glitch, & tons of other styles.
Thanks for reading, I hope you find some stuff that pleases your ears. More mashups next week.
Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Paul Krugman: Republican Health Care Lying Syndrome (NY Times Column)
Even Trump supporters don't believe the party's promises.
Paul Krugman: The Incredible Shrinking Trump Boom (NY Times Blog)
At least corporate accountants are having some fun.
Eliot A. Cohen: Lessons of the Real Resistance (Atlantic)
Choices might appear when we least expect them.
Julie Bindel: Why men pay for sex, and why they shouldn't (Spectator)
Increasing numbers of countries are treating johns as sexual predators
Tara Brady: "Patricia Clarkson: 'I wanted to be one of the great theatrical thespians'" (Irish Times)
The versatile actor on her love of theatre and playing an androgynous cop in Out of Blue.
Ruth Huntman: "Diana Rigg: 'Becoming a sex symbol overnight shocked me'" (The Guardian)
The actor, 80, on her dark side, inventing a cocktail called Diana's Dynamite, and getting killed off in Game of Thrones.
Christopher John Stephens: "Cruelty at the Core of American Comedy: On 'Funny Man: Mel Brooks'" (PopMatters)
Gross-out comedies like Paul Feig's Bridesmaids and boy-child juvenilia from the worlds of Adam Sandler and Judd Apatow would be nowhere without the standard set by Mel Brooks.
David Bruce's Amazon Author Page
David Bruce's Smashwords Page
David Bruce's Blog #1
David Bruce's Blog #2
David Bruce's Blog #3
David Bruce's Lulu Storefront
David Bruce's Apple iBookstore
David Bruce has over 100 Kindle books on Amazon.com.
Presenting
Michael Egan
answered:
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
Reader Suggestions
Beauty Pageants
from Bruce
Anecdotes
• Senator Chauncey Depew once made fun of President William Taft's obesity by looking at his waistline, and then saying, "I hope, if it is a girl, Mr. Taft will name it for his charming wife." President Taft overheard him and replied, "If it is a girl, I shall, of course, name it for my lovely helpmate of many years. And if it is a boy, I shall claim the father's prerogative and name it Junior. But if, as I suspect, it is only a bag of wind, I shall name it Chauncey Depew."
• As a politician, Jeremy Thorpe, former leader of the British Labour Party, was required to memorize a great many people's names, especially since so many people come up to a politician and say, "You won't remember me." After a woman said this to him, Mr. Thorpe said, "Of course I remember you. You are Miss Bag." She replied, "No. I am Miss Gas."
• Figure skater Elvis Stojko is named after Elvis Presley. Although it seems natural for him to skate to Elvis' music, he resisted doing so for years, waiting until exactly the right moment. In January 1994, after he won his first Canadian national championship, he skated to Elvis' music at the exhibition. Only three people knew about the program beforehand - it was a surprise even to his Elvis Presley-loving parents.
• Loïe Fuller (1862-1928), an American dancer who took Paris by storm, started a dancing school whose pupils danced for her. The pupils' real names were kept secret from the general public on the grounds that they were from prominent families which might be embarrassed by the publicity, and on the dance programs they were given pseudonyms such as Buttercup, Chocolate, Peach, Pinky, and Smiles.
• A ballet dancer started dancing under his real name, Patrick Kay, but when he joined the famous Diaghilev Russian Ballet, Mr. Sergei Diaghilev put his two names together to form a new name: Patrikieff. Later, the dancer changed his name to the one that is world famous: Anton Dolin.
• Names are sometimes arrived at in strange ways. Drama executive Sydney Newman named a famous British tongue-in-cheek spy series by saying, "Let's call it The Avengers. I don't know what it means, but it's a good title."
• Humorist Ellen Orleans brought a new cat home. She named it Amanda, but it ignores its name and comes only when you call "Kitty, Kitty." Therefore, its unofficial name is "Amanda Kitty, Kitty."
• Harry Hershfield made it a practice to always stand on the news photographer's left for group photographs - that way, his name appeared first in the newspaper caption.
• In the ballet Giselle, two Wilis (vampires) are given prominent roles. They are named Moyna and Zulma, but American ballet companies often give them nicknames, such as Laverne and Shirley.
• ZaSu Pitts was a famous film comedienne of the 1920s and 1930s. Her first name was formed from the last two letters of the name of her aunt Eliza and first two letters of the name of her aunt Susan.
• Johann Sebastian Bach composed the famous "B-Minor Mass." Its name comes from its opening, which is in B minor, although most of the Mass is in D major.
• Woody Allen says he decided to name a movie of his Bananas "because there are no bananas in it."
• A high-scoring professional basketball player had the name World B. Free.
• An interestingly named opera singer is Siegfried Jerusalem.
***
© Copyright Bruce D. Bruce; All Rights Reserved
***
Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
JD is on vacation.
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Still at the shop. Sigh.
Says "F- Netflix"
Helen Mirren
Helen Mirren on Tuesday gave an outspoken tribute to movie theaters at the CinemaCon presentation for her upcoming film The Good Liar on Tuesday.
"I love Netflix, but fuck Netflix," she said to big applause from the theater owners gathered in Las Vegas. "There's nothing like sitting in the cinema and the lights go down." Mirren then added, "I would like to thank you guys for making that environment possible." (It's commonplace for talent to praise cinema owners onstage at CinemaCon.)
The veteran actress' surprise commentary prompted plenty of laughter from the crowd (Mirren was also smiling). She also drew laughs when recounting how her very first film earned her an up-and-coming actress award from ShoWest, CinemaCon's predecessor.
Mirren was flanked by Bill Condon, director of The Good Liar, a thriller based on the Nicholas Searle novel of the same name. Ian McKellen also stars, but wasn't in attendance. The Good Liar will be released by Warner Bros.
Netflix has been a huge topic of discussion so far at CinemaCon, the annual gathering of theater owners and Hollywood studios that got underway Monday. Many cinema owners won't carry a Netflix film, since the streaming giant doesn't honor the traditional theatrical window. That policy has pitted exhibitors and Netflix at odds ever since the streamer moved into the original movie space.
Helen Mirren
Justice Department Backs Netflix
Oscars Feud
The Academy Awards has long been a national obsession, and occasionally, there's controversy over winners, losers and the ground rules for competition. But until now, hardly anyone has suggested that the way the Oscars is run amounts to anti-competitive conduct rising to a violation of the nation's antitrust laws. That ends now as Makan Delrahim, the chief of the Justice Department's Antitrust Division, has outlined his concerns about eligibility rule changes in a letter to Dawn Hudson, CEO of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
The March 21 letter, which was first reported by Variety and obtained by The Hollywood Reporter, is certainly bold and audacious. A search of scholarly articles turns up absolutely nothing on the intersection of prestigious awards in an industry and antitrust law. Additionally, the DOJ appears to have a rather unique view of the Academy itself.
The DOJ letter comes on the heels of Feb. 24's 91st Academy Awards, at which Netflix's Roma was nominated for as many Oscars as any film and won three, including best director. Most top pundits expected Roma to win best picture, as well, an outcome that many industry observers feared would mark the beginning of the end of the theatrical moviegoing experience as we know it. Netflix, a streaming service that first and foremost aims to please its subscribers, refuses to adhere to the 90-day window of theatrical exclusivity demanded by the major theater owners, opting instead to release films for much shorter periods through independent theater chains.
A best picture Oscar win for a Netflix film, in spite of that controversial position, would have been widely seen as the Hollywood community condoning that, which is why, according to media reports, Steven Spielberg, the legendary filmmaker and a current representative of the directors branch on the Academy's board of governors, was planning to call for the full board to implement, at its April 24 meeting, new rules that would lock out of Oscar competition films released in that manner, effectively knocking Netflix out of the Oscars game. Spielberg has since backed away from that position - and allied himself with a competing streaming service, Apple TV+.
Nevertheless, maybe based on old information, the DOJ is weighing in.
Oscars Feud
Global Music Revenue
Streaming
Streaming has driven the US music industry for a few years. Last fall, streaming was responsible for up to 75 percent of the country's total music industry revenue. The 2019 IFPI Global Music Report, released today, shows the global scale of that trend. Streaming revenue grew by 34 percent in 2018 and accounted for 47 percent of total music revenue worldwide.
With streaming's help, global music revenue reached $19.1 billion. The recorded music market grew by almost 10 percent in 2018, and the uptick in streaming sales helped offset the downturn in both physical and download revenue. This marks the recorded music industry's fourth consecutive year of growth.
Streaming's success can be attributed to the rise in paid subscription services, which increased by 32.9 percent. According to IFPI, there were 255 million paid streaming service users at the end of 2018. That alone was responsible for 37 percent of recorded music revenue.
Considering that streaming music sales only surpassed CD sales in 2015, streaming's rise to the top has been relatively quick. Next, we'll watch to see if royalties increase -- as proposed by the Copyright Royalty Board -- and how that might impact streaming services.
Streaming
Mosquitoes Sucked Less
Skrillex
In a blow to dubstep fans everywhere, a team of insect researchers has found that female mosquitoes listening to Skrillex had less sex and sucked less blood than mosquitoes who spent 10 minutes in silence.
The authors of the new study, published March 25 in the journal Acta Tropica, wanted to test whether loud music could be used to manipulate mosquito behavior as an "environmentally friendly" alternative to insecticides. Because mating and blood-sucking are the main means by which mosquitoes transmit deadly diseases like Zika virus and dengue fever, interrupting those behaviors with obnoxious noise could also mitigate the spread of disease, the authors wrote.
In their study, the researchers tested their hypothesis by blasting electronic music from a speaker set up near a cage of hungry female mosquitoes who had gone 12 hours without a meal. The cage also contained one virgin male mosquito (for sex) and a restrained hamster (for lunch). In a series of 10-minute trials, groups of 10 female mosquitoes were continuously swapped into the cage while the Skrillex song "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites" played on repeat. The researchers chose this song because its excessive loudness and constantly escalating pitch made it a prime candidate for "noisiness," the team wrote. [Googly Eyes: Photos of Striking Wasp Faces]
When the team compared the mating and feeding behaviors of the Skrillex mosquitoes to those of a control group, whose cage was silent, they found that the noise-addled bugs had significantly less sex and sucked less blood than their quiet-space counterparts.
Despite having gone 12 hours since their last feeding, the mosquitoes in the musical group were so distracted by Skrillex's barrage of vibrations that most did not start looking for food until an average of 2 or 3 minutes of the song had elapsed. Nonmusical mosquitoes, meanwhile, homed in on the hamster after an average of 30 seconds. Once they finally found the prey, Skrillex mosquitoes also made fewer attempts to suck blood than control mosquitoes did.
Skrillex
Most Commonly Used
Drugs
There are all sorts of aphrodisiacs that you can use to spice up your sex life, although illegal drugs have always been a particularly popular choice. Prying into the sex lives of thousands of people around the world, a new study in the Journal of Sexual Medicine reveals which substances are most commonly used to provide a little extra sparkle in the bedroom.
Based on the responses of 22,000 people who took part in the Global Drug Survey, the study reveals that the druggiest sex currently occurs in the UK, where one in five people reported having slept with someone while high on MDMA, and 13 percent said they'd combined sex with cocaine.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, alcohol was found to be the drug most likely to get things moving in the boudoir, with 60 percent of people worldwide having had drunken sex. This was followed by cannabis, which expedited the seduction of 37 percent of men and 26 percent of women.
Interestingly, though, the study does reveal some distinct differences between groups when it comes to chemical courtship. For instance, gay men were around 60 percent more likely to use drugs to improve sexual experience and function than heterosexual men. Additionally, while one in 10 homosexual men reported using GHB (sometimes referred to as 'chemsex'), only 0.7 percent of straight males claimed to have used this particular drug when having sex.
Based on the responses of participants, the researchers conclude that GHB is the most effective drug at heightening sexual desire, while MDMA produced the greatest increase in feelings of intimacy and "emotionality." Several studies have indicated that MDMA tends to generate a dramatic rise in empathy, which is why the drug is currently receiving a great deal of attention as a potential facilitator of couples therapy.
Drugs
Our Mysterious Cousins
Denisovans
The elusive Denisovans, the extinct cousins of Neanderthals, are known from only the scraps of bone they left in Siberia's Denisova Cave in Russia and the genetic legacy they bequeathed to living people across Asia. A new study of that legacy in people from New Guinea now suggests that, far from being a single group, these mysterious humans were so diverse that their populations were as distantly related to each other as they were to Neanderthals.
In another startling suggestion, the study implies one of those groups may have survived and encountered modern humans as recently as 15,000 to 30,000 years ago, tens of thousands of years later than researchers had thought. "A late surviving lineage [of Denisovans] could have interbred with Homo sapiens" in Southeast Asia, paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London, not a member of the team, said in a Skype interview during a session at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists here. The new study was presented Thursday at the meeting.
Researchers already knew that living people from a vast area spanning the Philippines and New Guinea to China and Tibet have inherited 3% to 5% of their DNA from Denisovans. The leading scenario had suggested that as modern humans swept out of Africa, they first encountered Neanderthals and mated with them; hence, all people in Europe and Asia now have 1% to 3% of their DNA from Neanderthals. The ancestors of Asians then encountered Denisovans 50,000 years ago or so and acquired 3% to 5% of their DNA from them.
For the new study, an international team analyzed the complete genomes of 161 people from 14 groups in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. In the DNA of 60 people from New Guinea, population biologist Murray Cox of Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand, and molecular biologist Herawati Sudoyo of the Eijkman Institute for Molecular Biology in Jakarta and their colleagues found an unexpected twist. The first Denisovan DNA discovered, from the Siberian cave, comes from a single population (which geneticists have labeled D0). But "Papuans carry DNA from at least two [other] Denisovan populations, called D1 and D2," Cox said in his talk, which was filmed in advance and played at the meeting.
When the team members analyzed the DNA with three statistical methods, they found that the two additional sources of Denisovan DNA came from populations so distantly related that they had diverged more than 283,000 years ago. And the D2 population is most distant from the Siberian Denisovans, splitting off roughly 363,000 years ago. That makes those two populations almost as distantly related to each other as they are to Neanderthals, Cox says. "We used to think of Denisovans as a single group," notes Cox, who suggests as an aside that the D2 group might even need a new name.
Denisovans
Underground Communities
Centralia, Pennsylvania
Centralia, Pennsylvania, was once a prosperous town, largely supported by the coal industry. But in 1962, a trash fire near an abandoned strip mine ignited what remained of the 25 million-ton coal seam beneath the town. Year after year, the fire spread, releasing noxious gas, opening up sinkholes, and ultimately making the town uninhabitable - for humans, at least.
In the absence of humans and in the presence of rapidly heating soil, some interesting microbes have appeared: thermophiles. These microbes, which live at super hot temperatures, have taken a liking to some of the vent zones in Centralia, some of which have heated up to nearly 140 degrees Fahrenheit (60 degrees Celsius) over the course of just a few short decades.
Ashley Shade, an assistant professor at Michigan State University, has been studying the changes in soil temperature in Centralia and the effects on the communities of microbes living there. Her team has been looking into correlations between things like temperature change in the soil and genome sizes of the microbes she's found. "The idea is if you can keep your cell small, you are going to benefit by not having to spend so much energy just maintaining all of your cell parts, which are kind of getting more wobbly at the higher temperatures," Shade told The Verge last month.
With Shade's help, Verge Science took a trip to Centralia, collected some hot soil samples, and attempted to grow thermophiles in our studio (with an incubator - not an underground fire). Video at link.
Centralia, Pennsylvania
Prime-Time Nielsens
Ratings
Prime-time viewership numbers compiled by Nielsen for March 25-31. Listings include the week's ranking and viewership.
1. "60 Minutes," CBS, 12.59 million.
2. "NCIS," CBS, 12.19 million.
3. NCAA Men's Basketball Tourney: Purdue vs. Virginia, TBS, 10.49 million.
4. NCAA Men's Basketball Tourney: Virginia Tech vs. Duke, CBS, 10.07 million.
5. "FBI," CBS, 9.13 million.
6. "The Voice," NBC, 9.01 million.
7. "College Basketball Studio Show," TBS, 8.83 million.
8. "Chicago Fire," NBC, 8.28 million.
9. "God Friended Me," CBS, 8.16 million.
10. "Survivor," CBS, 7.76 million.
11. NCAA Men's Basketball Tourney: Texas Tech vs. Gonzaga, TBS, 7.72 million.
12. "This is Us," NBC, 7.64 million.
13. "NCIS: Los Angeles," CBS, 7.5 million.
14. "NCAA Post-Game Show," TBS, 7.41 million.
15. "Grey's Anatomy," ABC, 7.38 million.
16. "American Idol" (Sunday), ABC, 7.28 million.
17. "NCIS: New Orleans," CBS, 7.19 million.
18. "Chicago PD," NBC, 7.02 million.
19. NCAA Men's Basketball Tourney: Florida St. vs. Gonzaga, CBS, 6.5 million.
20. "American Idol" (Monday), ABC, 6.45 million.
Ratings
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