On 1/30, I posted a review of the Safari Cup open mic, posing the question: "Can they still call it that?" It turns out, the answer is "no." The Safari Cup open (no-)mic is no more. I'm glad to say, though, that I'm left with several new friends, a slacker stalker (hi, Aaron), and a performing partner, Nick Narbutas, for my next show (!): Saturday, April 24th at Brothers K in Evanston. Nick is an awesome poet (and singer-songwriter), and we're calling it the Words Gone Wild Tour 2010. Be there at 6pm to get a good seat! Below is the last song I performed at Safari Cup. Good times.
Update: for easy calendaring, import this invite into your electronic organizer thingy.
When I was a rookie open mic performer, I had a terrible habit of getting on stage, blasting through three songs back-to-back, and then being disappointed with the resultant golf-claps from a disinterested audience. At first, I convinced myself that I really had to have a great opening line/stanza to a song to get people interested, and this approach earned me a little more attention from my crowds... but not all that much. It took a close friend to remind me that what the performers I admired most did was tell stories -- get vulnerable -- at the mic, and that I needed to do the same if I wanted people to maintain interest in a song from beginning to end. Besides the obvious, another benefit to this approach was that I gained the ability to set up a line that's halfway into a song with a good introduction; a strong opening line no longer had to carry the remaining 2 or 3 minutes.
Having learned my lesson, I've been introducing Sister Mary Catherine with a disclaimer, a preemptive apology, and an explanation that the titular character was my attempt to create my own personal, unattainable ideal, and definitely not a metaphor carrying some greater message. I always worried that someone would be put off by the story, and I've had my share of audience members jokingly tell me that I'm going to hell for that song, but always in an I'll-be-right-there-with-you-for-enjoying-it sort of way. Over time, I've added color to the story with details about my own rather unorthodox religious upbringing -- a major reason why the character is who she is -- and how, as an adult, I felt lucky to have stumbled upon people who shared my experience. Focused on the possibility of someone taking umbrage with the character I created, I didn't see it coming when, after performing Sister Mary Catherine at the most excellent Brothers K open mic last month, I was approached by a very nice, older man who politely expressed what can only be described as a cocktail of pity and disgust at the introduction itself.
Was it simply my particular point on the secular/nonsecular spectrum? Was it because I made light of a topic that is so serious to so many? Was the juxtaposition with the previous song simply too much? Should I have just stuck to reminiscing about the Hamptons scene in Annie Hall? I'll probably never know. My critic offered to send me a book that would change my entire outlook on the question of religion, and followed through the very next weekend. I suspect its effect was not the intended one, but I must thank Leonid K______ for the effort: it led to a wonderful heart-to-heart with my dad that probably wouldn't have happened without Leonid's enzymatic input. Plus, now I have an even better story with which to introduce that song.
Warning: bigger-than-your-typical-YouTube-size video above
4/1/2010. With yet another piece of critical infrastructure made vulnerable to authentication bypass due to the use of ROT-13, I do believe it's time for the information security community to band together to stamp out this plague. My proposal is simple and borrows from the time-tested tradition of 3DES: we need to deprecate ROT-13 in favor of 3-ROT-13. Software vendors of the world: if you're using ROT-13 today, pleased heed this call. 3-ROT-13 is a simple, backward-compatible replacement for ROT-13. Just like 3DES applied DES in three consecutive rounds to ciphertext, extending the lifespan of DES beyond its imminent demise in 1999, applying three rounds of ROT-13 can do the same for this venerable cipher. And, unlike DES, there is considerably less performance impact to carrying out additional rounds, as there is no pesky keying necessary in between steps. Let's pledge to make 2010 the year that we clean up this ROT-13 mess and make the world safer for computing. Cisco, you go first. Messrs. Schneier, Rivest, et. al., in the words of Craig Ferguson, I await your letters.
