That'll apply to may musicians, but didn't Taylor Swift donate a hefty chunk of money to Kesha's defense? Ironically, I think she did it without public comment, which would make that action the opposite of lip service.

Try that out with a different pronoun. Consider a hypothetical case of someone who has been raped, but cannot prove it in a court of law. He or she knows that rape occurred in the absence of legal proof.

"When the abuse is physically violent, there is usually evidence or witnesses who can verify that it occurred."

That process is happening in a very different context from that of a comment thread, though. As you say, it is not simply an intellectual exercise in a situation like that, as there are obvious real-world consequences involved. That isn't generally the case for people on comment threads, so I think it's pretty…

I think that's why piano is the classic sight-reading instrument. It has no doubled or redundant notes; you couldn't play a unison interval on the piano. Thus, every note always corresponds to one and only one key on the keyboard. On a fretboard instrument like the guitar, on the other hand, many notes are doubled…

Also, sight-reading is something of a separate skill from playing by ear, which is key for improvisation. Improvisation tends to be an electric guitarist's calling card, so yes, non-jazz electric guitar players tend to prefer to go by ear and use their guys to keep track of their fingers.

There's supposedly a trick (that I have not tried) where you use a Cyrillic character that looks like a C.

I wonder if he would've gotten a commemorative statue if he had died in the escape?

Yeah. I've really come to appreciate Bowie as a studio general of sorts, lining up just the right talent and seeing what they can do. It honestly makes more sense to separate his discography by collaborator instead of genre or place. You have Mick Ronson? Rock the hell out. You have Carlos Alomar? Set up the…

I don't know how well-respected either Logan's Run or Soylent Green were in their day, but their premises are definitely better-known these days than the movies themselves.

It's interesting how he kept moving on to different modes of composition. Compare the chord patterns of "Life on Mars?" and "Word on a Wing", for example, to something like "Beauty and the Beast" (tonic chord for almost the whole song except for a flat-III on the bridge) or "Lazarus". Hell, "Within You" from the…

That poster is rad as hell. No way that the movie lives up to it.

"Spread out" depends on how you look at it. Sure, if you just want to point the nukes at Ottawa and Toronto, you can take out the huge chunk of the population that lives in one relatively small part of Ontario. Every big population centre, though? You'd be going from Victoria to Halifax and trying to decide if…

"Vancouver is a direct hit, sir!" *all feeds from Seattle fuzz out and die*

Hitting Canada in the 80s would have been a frustrating use of your country's arsenal, I think. We're all spread out as hell and the population was even lower in those days. The thought of devoting nuclear resources to strategically eliminate the military powerhouse of Moosejaw or somewhere is indeed pretty funny. …

Gorbachev managed to steer the whole ship in such a fashion that the world didn't blow up, and he did it in a way that was far, far more humane than his predecessors (or successors, for that matter). I feel gratitude towards the guy for doing what he could to edge the doomsday clock away from midnight. I don't think…

Well, it looks like you're doing everything that you possibly could. It sucks, but it looks like there's at least a way out of it. I hope that what you're doing works well and gets you out of this in short order. Good luck.

Our PM in Canada, for a long time and up until very recently, was a guy named Harper. Many of us laughed with some bewilderment when he first took office because he had managed to do it with a) cold, merciless eyes, b) no public laughter, and c) a seeming inability to smile. As the years of his reign wore on and he…

There's relaxational massage and therapeutic massage. The former is pretty self-explanatory; it's gentle and relaxing and intended to feel nice. Therapeutic massage is all about fixing problems, like knots of tension and such. It's focused on medical benefit and often painful. I've never had relaxational, but I…

I have five siblings. My perspective on what constitutes a large family was always somewhat warped.