MICHAEL W. DEAN – Page 33 – Feeding the hamster in your brain

Heavy Inspiration for the Boondocks Theme Song

When I was a kid growing up in the 70s, whenever I went to the local movie theater, there was this 20-second or so motion logo with some really hip music that would play after the trailers and before the main feature. If we were still at the concession stand or hanging out in the lobby, as soon we heard this groovy beat, we’d run into the theater to sit down. The visual of this logo was swirling colors (I’ve put a still of it behind Riley from the Boondocks in the image I Photoshopped, above.)

This was literally the first “hip” “groovy” music I ever heard in my life, and was also the first “psychedelic light show” type imagery I ever saw. After I grew up and went to theaters that did not use this logo (or when the logo was replaced by other things, mainly more trailers), I often thought about it. It somehow had an important place in my mind. Even in my 40s, I could still hum the melody I hadn’t heard since I was 8, and I always wondered what this motion logo was.

A few years ago I discovered the animated show The Boondocks, and I love it. Neema lent me all the DVDs, and even after watching them all three or four times, whenever my wife and I are channel flipping and there is a Boondocks episode on, we watch it. The excellent theme song for the Boondocks (by the very talented rapper Asheru) contains a horn line that seems to be heavily inspired by a horn line from that 70s movie theater animation logo.

This got me thinking about the motion logo again. What was it? Who made it? Was it in all theaters or only mine? I’m assuming all, but as a kid I didn’t travel much and really thought of my tiny town as the whole world.

That theater has long been torn down and replaced with a statue of Habeas Corpus suspender and first Republican Abraham Lincoln with Grace Bedell. Grace is the little girl who famously told Lincoln to grow his beard. Grace was from my tiny town, Westfield, New York.

Grace Bedell was about the only claim to fame we had, except Westfield also being the birthplace of Welches Grape Juice.

Lucille Ball and Natalie Merchant were from our county, but not our town.

The other night I was surfing around YouTube and watched a trailer from a 70s biopic on the legendary and murderous blues singer Lead Belly. (Yes, Lead Belly is properly spelled as two words, not one. The man himself spelled it with two words.) At the end of the trailer, someone had added THE MOTION LOGO FROM THE 70s that had been so important to me as a kid. I was elated! I finally found it! It actually exists and I didn’t imagine it!

Here’s a direct link to the motion logo at the end of the Lead Belly trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48aQbh1lV1s&feature=player_detailpage#t=324s

(That link should take you directly to where the logo starts. If it doesn’t, and starts and the beginning of the trailer, scroll over to the last 20 seconds of the video.) Someone has added text over the logo on the YouTube video, that text was not in the theater version. Obviously,…it’s a Web URL for a DVD company. Web URLs and DVDs did not yet exist in the 70s. Which is why I went to movie theaters as a kid!

For comparison to the much later Boondocks theme song, here’s a direct link to the horn line I think was inspired by the 70s motion logo horn line:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgRGpbVYZz0&feature=player_detailpage#t=30s

(If that doesn’t take you to the direct spot, the line comes up over and over in the song, it’s the descending horn part after the ascending piano part.)

I still don’t know what that 70s logo animation was, or who owned it. I think Quentin Tarantino may have purchased the rights to it, someone said he’s used it on some of his DVDs. I wouldn’t know, I haven’t liked him since Pulp Fiction.

Anyway, I just wanted to share this nifty little revelation with you.

Before I go, another thing I really love about the Boondocks Theme Song is the reference to the concept “The Four Boxes of Liberty“, with the lines

I am the ballot in your box
The bullet in your gun

Neema and I are fond of the concept of The Four Boxes of Liberty, and have discussed it in the Freedom Feens Podcast, in this episode.

–Michael W. Dean

How To Bypass BitTorrent Throttling, step-by-step settings

A lot of ISPs throttle BitTorrent traffic: Charter, AT&T, Qwest, ComCast, CableVision, and many more. There’s a full list HERE. There are lot of tutorials out there on bypassing the evils of throttling. Some work, some don’t, some work for a while then stop working when the ISP figures it out. Below are step-by-step settings that worked for me in uTorrent. I went from being throttled to about three hours a week to being on 24/7. The bandwidth isn’t quite as high as before I was being throttled, but overall my weekly throughput is MUCH higher, because I can now be on 24/7.

NOTE: I do not recommend that you do anything illegal. I use BitTorrent ONLY for seeding my movies and podcasts, things I own, movies like Guns and Weed, the Road To Freedom and the Freedom Feens podcast, things I produced myself that are released Creative Commons. In fact, you can grab my torrents HERE. If you like this article and get something out of it, please do grab those torrents, download and enjoy them, and SEED them. Thanks! But I’ve done a test, and these techniques do work for downloading as well.

Overall, showing bandwidth I’m getting:

Here are the screenshots of my custom settings that are bypassing throttling on my end. (under Options/Preferences):

General settings:

UI settings:

(No screenshot for Directories. Doesn’t matter what you have for Directories.)

Connection settings: (If this port doesn’t work for you, try a different random port, but do not randomize port for each start.)

Bandwidth settings:

BitTorrent settings:

Transfer Cap settings:

Queuing:

Leave the last four, Scheduler, Web UI, Playback and Advanced, as is. You don’t need to change anything on them.

Enjoy. Always obey the law, brush your teeth and do what your parents tell you to. And don’t forget to vote, because your vote counts and politicians are looking out for your best interests. HA HA HA HA!

–Michael W. Dean

How to speed up ANY website, especially WordPress websites

This is a VERY simple webmaster trick to speed up the loading of ANY website you create. It is particularly noticeable in WordPress.

Simply add this line of code anywhere in the .htaccess file:

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/css application/javascript application/x-javascript application/x-httpd-php application/rss+xml application/atom_xml text/javascript

That will enable compression of data sent to from the server to the browser. Most browsers can uncompress on the fly, and will speed up loading of your website. Browsers that cannot uncompress will simply ignore the command and deal with the uncompressed version.

This is one of several hundred tricks and tips I’ll be discussing in my upcoming series of podcast episodes about SEO on the Freedom Feens Podcast. Go there and subscribe now so you don’t miss them when they come out.

–Michael W. Dean

People should hire me to name things….

Kinda cool thing I just realized, I named something!

In 2008 when the Zoom H2 recorder came out, I dubbed it the “Studio on a Stick” in my O’Reilly Media column, and a Google search shows that “Studio on a stick” has now become the defacto nickname for the Zoom H2.

–Michael W. Dean