This article about how country music is necessarily about being a small-minded bigot troubles me.
Ok, in all fairness, I’m overstating the author’s argument. He never once said “bigot” or “small-minded.” He did, however, say a lot of things like:
But why would you want your kids to grow up with the same way of life as you and your grandparents? My best guess (and let me stress guess) is that those low in openness depend emotionally on a sense of enchantment of the everyday and the profundity of ritual. Even a little change, like your kids playing with different toys than you did, comes as a small reminder of the instability of life over generations and the contingency of our emotional attachments. This is a reminder low-openness conservatives would prefer to avoid, if possible.
Unstated here, is the author’s incredulity that someone would (could?) find “a sense of enchantment of the everyday and the profundity of ritual.”
That someone could be incredulous that daily ritual and long-seated tradition can be meaningful and important seems strangely ignorant, even for someone who claims to be “liberal.”
I’ll be the last to defend the saccrine sentimentality of modern country music, which I find emotionally manipulative and artistically shallow. However, the art I create with my band is specifically crafted to honor this sort of routine and tradition WITHOUT the sentimentality, to remind us of the good things our grandparents and their parents did, without tugging at heartstrings, and to teach us to open not JUST to new experience, but to OLD experience as well, which I think liberal people (myself included) are largely bad at internalizing.
And perhaps, this is what troubles me most about this article: while touting openness to new experiences as one his primary values, the author sets up a false dichotomy between old and new experiences, where the cannot be synthesized.
In fact, I think it’s only when we can honor the tradition of which we’re a part while including new experiences and ideas that we can be truly progressive. Anything less than that involves lying to ourselves about our identities, convincing ourselves that we aren’t who we actually are and aren’t influenced by the things that have surrounded us all our lives.
Create a Podcast from a Dropbox Folder
automagically
For a while now, I’ve been looking for a good way to get misc podcasts and other random audio into my podcatcher on my phone, something that was easy and efficient.
I want them in my podcatcher b/c when I’m in the car, I don’t want to muck around with multiple audio players–I just want to turn on CarCast and go.
My original thought was to use Dropbox’s RSS feeds. Unfortunately, Dropbox doesn’t provide all the knobs and twiddly bits in the RSS feed to make an proper podcast (no enclosures or media:content).
Also, Dropbox only provides an RSS feed for your whole account, not per folder. And I wanted a specific folder I could drop files in to.
My first instinct was just to mung this up on my home server and republish it myself. Truth be told, it probably wouldn’t have been that hard. But I’d have to set up cron jobs to republish the feed periodically, etc.
So instead, I turned to Yahoo Pipes, which lets you do all sorts of mojo with RSS feeds.
I’m not going to link to my feed because I’m not interested in publicising my Dropbox RSS feed (again, it shows activity from all folders).
But here’s the basics of what I did:
with _ (you’re going to have to pretend that underscore is a space)
with _
Save that and you should be good to go!