We're having Dodge City's first Drupal Meet-up Thursday evening. (Drupal being the kick-ass open-source content-management software that powers this blog, along with most of my professional projects.)

Currently, we're expecting some familiar faces (Eric, Emily, Justin, Mike M and others)-- but also, and more importantly, some local Drupal heads I've never met before.

I couldn't make it to DrupalCon Vancouver last week (saving up for SXSW!), but am pretty excited by the community, energy and nefarious plans for global domination that came out of it. The goal for Thursday is to create something similar, but smaller and local.

Jay Dilla the beat killa died today. He was 32.

Cannot overstate this man's musical influence on the sound of hip-hop today, and on my personal music listening and production. Stones Throw has the complete discog, and it's huge. There are just not more than a few producers in the same league- Pete Rock, Premier, Prince Paul, RZA... Anyone else?

The man broke into my consciousness in 96 doing the production on The Pharcyde's Runnin, De La Soul's The Stakes is High, and the bulk of A Tribe Called Quest's Beats Rhymes and Life. Am I missing any, or is that is literally all the best hiphop albums from 1996 that weren't The Roots or DJ Shadow?

Then over the next ten years just consistently dropped stunningly good beats all the time. Highlites for me: Runnin, Stakes, ATCQ's The Jam and Start It Up, The Roots' Dynamite, Q-Tip Breathe And Stop and Ride, all of Welcome 2 Detroit, Four Tet's As Serious As Your Life remix, and finally Questlove's freaking-out-excited rants about JD circa 1999. There's more, I know there's more, but that's all I got for now.

I commemorate him with this appropo-seeming clip of Clyde Stubblefield drumming with James Brown in 1968. Keep the funk alive?

A storm has blocked my exit from my parents' house in CT with a giant scary mass of trees and electrical cables.

I havent been able to get my car out the driveway for a few days now, but at least we didn't lose power for more than a few hours. Hope all those in the area who are still without electricity are doing ok tonight.

I was planning to go to BarCampNYC today, but am feeling a bit sick and muddle-headed, possibly as a result of spending last night scrubbing vicious black mold off of my records.

Instead, it's a sample-spotting Saturday.

• Exhibit A: 'Today'- Tom Scott, 1967
• Exhibit B: 'They Reminisce Over You (Instrumental)'- Pete Rock, 1992

A rainy afternoon game: Listen to both tracks, then try to figure out how many different EQ'd layers and snippets of the Tom Scott are playing simultaneously at any given moment in the Pete Rock.

Bonus round: Try to re-create the beat using only an SP-1200 with ten seconds of audio memory.

We've just launched the new IndependentCourt.org, one of the key stars in the growing constellation of posses gearing up to combat the Samuel Alito SCOTUS nomination.

This marks my first web launch as a solo freelancer. Look out, world.

Some other good Alito links:

• Alito's America is CFAP's main Alito website, which has easily the coolest political logo of 2005.
• Tuesday's NYTimes had an Alito article titled-- I am not making this up-- "Alito's Grit Is A Plus". Bizzare headlining aside, it's a somewhat fascinating chessmove of expectations-setting political theater from the Administration. Terrance's and Scott's deconstructions are both good reads.

After a four month outage due to blog depression and bread slicing, The Department of Toneland Security is back in commission. Thank you for your patience.

To start 2006 off right, this is a half-hour mash-up of some much-loved tracks from 2005: New_Year_Resolution.mp3

DKP has a new blog about robotics.

Flavors of Borf:

• Leering Face Borf- stenciling and stickers: i.e. here and here.
• Bloody Borf- bright red blocky letters: i.e. here and here
• Poet Borf- Words on things: i.e. here and here and here
• Uncategorized Borf- Clip art collage stickers here, mailbox defacements here, cartoony-writing borf here (bottom photo)
• Art Gallery Borf- wtf?
• "THE MAIN BORF"- Via the DC Police Department. Tagging style unknown.
• Chalky Borf Action Swarm, our newest Borf, as met by DCist and others in Dupont Circle yesterday. Uses washable chalk to thwart police surveillance. i.e. here.

Borf says: "I am Borf, you are Borf, Borf is everybody, we hope."

I almost missed this, since KK posted it while I was in Italy with limited internet access. But, here is Music Dork Meme, via KK and Wayne.

total volume of music files on my computer: Like Wayne and KK, about 20GB. This is down from about 23 yesterday before I had to clear some off to make room for the latest gargantuan World Of Warcraft patch. If you count miscellaneous noncompressed audio for composition, that's another 4GB on my laptop and 10 or so on my outboard drive.

last CD i bought was: Scavengers by Food For Animals. After listening to astounding MP3s of Elephants and Cut And Paste for months and months, I finally broke down and bought the album. It's part of an effort I've been making recently (partially inspired by recent conversations with Ian MacKaye and Chuck Brown) to find really good DC-native musicians. AoW are mindblowingly new and innovative and noisey and good.

song playing right now: Bonobo's Recurring from the new Live Sessions EP on Ninja. Which I've only had for a few days since Bleeping it, but is seriously growing on me-- I was listening the tricky midtempo percussion and delicate pizzicato strings and complicated swooning harmonies and suddenly found it to be intensely conected with that archetypal grandaddy of delicatronica, the RDJ Album, which now has me real excited to hear where B's future output is going to go...

five songs i listen to a lot these days: Excepting the afforementioned. All 5 are seriously impacted by recent balmy and spaced-out weather conditions.

1. David Last- Cat-Silver. This track is just gorgeous and nice.

2. Four Tet- High Fives. Not really Tet's best track, but I'm a sucker for the plinky xylophone beeps and swirly faux-turntable sounds. Also of course the recent Madvillain remixes have been in heavy rotation.

3. Nightmares on Wax- Argha Noah. In line with the K&D track I posted a few weeks ago, late-90s open-aired synth-heavy shimmery-guitar tracks like this one have been getting a lot of listening time from me lately.

4. Edan- Making Planets. But really the whole freaking album is brilliant. Seriously throwback/retro while still experimental and forward-looking and creepy and so on.

5. Cellophane- Music Colours. Since its post on gabba a while back, I have played this hella cheesey italodisco so much that I am really sick of it. Really. Colours!