I never heard an accordion played like this

[Pilgrim]

Americans are stupid about Hi Def anyway. Even with a 1920 by 1080 progressive scanned image, when you get up to the huge 70" and larger sets that are becoming more common, processing artifacts become much more visible, no matter where they occur in the production chain. Here's a dirty little secret most cable companies don't want you do know: their signal isn't true HD, but a recompressed format similar to H.264, Apple's ITunes HD video compression.

Ain't it true? And if you're a satellite subscriber like me, if you ever stop to think about it you realize that bandwidth limitations and receiver processing power mean that everything you're seeing has been stepped on HARD, otherwise it wouldn't be possible to transmit.

Watching any full-screen motion image serves as a good reminder of this, as artifacts constantly pop up in the image.  Football is one of the most challenging images, since the entire screen is moving and within the image are so many moving figures. Too many changing pixels!

But hey, it still looks lot better than the image on the old Zenith I grew up watching. We had a set like this in two-tone surf green and cream.

[uwe]

Three things:

- I come from a smokers' family (and have never smoked myself, not because I find it repulsive - I don't - but because it was nothing special in our family, if I had wanted to smoke as a teen, my father would have handed me a pack, so I didn't, simple as that). Even as a child in the sixties I knew that it wasn't healthy and the chief cause of lung cancer. My parents both agreed with me (and continued smoking!). In school I always hung out with smokers, already in the early seventies jokes such as "here's for the lung" or "got to keep the cancer fed" were prevalent when people lit one. How can inhaling the smoke of something that is burning be healthy?

- I have successfully turned the smooth motion/DMM mode of my Loewe TV off! If it wasn't for this place here and our beloved Psycho - thanks! -, I would have never known there is such a thing.

- I have no issues with Ayn Rand getting cancer treatment paid by a collective. I doubt that she paid in as much (if at all, I don't know whether a freelancer like her was under the obligation to) as her treatment cost though. The balance must have been paid based on a concept called "solidarity of a nameless collective for an individual". Through George I now know that she was in favor of that, why it must been the red thread running through all her works, you live and learn! And I had thought she was a poor dying woman grasping at any - even collectivist - straw offered to her. How unheroic, average, yet at the same time utterly human.

[Dave W]

All insurance is a socialization of risk. That's the whole idea.

[westen44]

In one last attempt to find the Golden Earring video that actually has an accordion playing in a rock song, I suddenly encountered something else.  Someone had posted some songs from the Golden Earring album the song is from, but he had many other videos, too.  Most of them seemed to be Ritchie Blackmore.  I found myself watching these, almost as if I were in a trance.  I'm just wondering if maybe this site has subliminal messages leading people to do such things?  By the way, the songs were actually very good, though. 

[uwe]

Accordions can rock - it was George (who has a fine music taste when not reading Ayn Rand  ) who dragged this in a while ago in a Hanoi Rocks related thread (and I bought the CD immediately afterwards), it sounds like Klezmer on cocaine   :

[westen44]

Accordions actually can rock, although, obviously they aren't usually in rock songs.  Their reputation, needless to say, isn't a very good one, though.  My friend who plays is very much aware of this, and is probably self-conscious about it.  Sometimes it seems that the instrument chooses you, regardless of the instrument.  She is a great musician, however, as is the guy playing Vivaldi.