It was a musician's worst nightmare.
At least that's how Dave Schneider, guitarist and singer for Hanukkah-themed rock band The LeeVees, described it when his guitar?a 1965 Gibson ES-335?got jammed in an elevator by baggage handlers at a Detroit airport.
Schneider was traveling with fellow LeeVees guitarist Adam Gardner from Portland, Maine, to St. Petersburg, Fla., for a gig last month at a conservative temple when their flight was diverted to Rochester, N.Y., due to bad weather, causing them to miss their connection in Philadelphia, Pa. They then drove to Buffalo, N.Y., to hop on a plane destined for Detroit, Mich., where they planned to make a connecting flight to Tampa, Fla.
While boarding in Buffalo, Schneider says he asked Delta staffers not to check in the vintage guitar?which he estimates is worth about $10,000?and allow him to carry it on the plane and place it in an available space, as he did on the flight from Portland.
"I've always carried it on," Schneider, who also tours as the lead singer of the hockey-themed rock group the Zambonis, told Yahoo News. "Never been a problem before."
Schneider says he even showed them a link to a story about Congress passing the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012 that made it easier for musicians to fly with their instruments?allowing them to purchase an extra seat on the plane for their fragile instruments.
But he was denied.
[Related: Penguins, flying first class, delight passengers on Delta flight (VIDEO)]
When their plane landed in Detroit, Schneider says, "I had a bad feeling." He whipped out his iPhone and started filming.
As the pair of rockers waited at the gate for their checked guitars, Schneider asked a member of the flight crew to check on his prized ax as it was being removed from the plane. "He did and said it would be fine," Schneider recalled. But as the musicians waited for the luggage to appear, they could hear a screeching noise coming from the elevator.
"It was this crazy sound," Schneider said. "Metal on metal."
The case carrying Schneider's semihollow-body guitar was lodged between the mobile service elevator and a rail on the loading dock, shaking the elevator door. The case even bent a steel beam.
The guitar itself was pinned between two beams and took workers an hour to retrieve it. It sustained damage to the bridge, neck and tail that would cost an estimated $1,980. But so far, Schneider says, Delta has given him the "runaround."
He says the airline offered to cut him a check for $1,000 in Tampa, but Schneider refused it because he didn't know how much the repairs would cost. The online claim forms he filled out after the guitar carnage were blank when Schneider checked on them, and two emails he sent to Delta chief executive Richard Anderson were not returned.
Delta told Yahoo News that the airline "will be reaching out to the customer directly to discuss how we can make this right."
"This instance is certainly not indicative of the high regard we hold for our customers? property when they travel with us, and for that, we apologize," Delta spokesman Morgan Durrant said in an emailed statement. "We look forward to making a direct and sincere apology to the customer as we work with him to rectify what happened."
This is not the first time touring musicians have clashed with baggage handlers.
In 2009, Dave Carroll, a Canadian singer-songwriter, turned his experience with United Airlines into a music video ("United Breaks Guitars") that went viral and landed him a book deal.
Schneider, though, says he isn't looking for that kind of fame.
"I'm not a greedy dude," he said. "I'm just looking for $1,980."
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/vintage-gibson-guitar-delta-baggage-leevees-214634001.html
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There is a brand new console and competitor in the gaming market, and it is going to take the world by storm in 2013. It is called the Game Stick and it is ?Bad-Ass?!!! This new console simply plugs in to your existing television or monitor?s HDMI port and you are ready to play?well almost ready to play.
This new-era gaming system does not require a ton of wires or cords to get power, rather it simply plugs into the HDMI and emits signals via Wi-Fi technology. The concept has been seen before, but not as expansive as the Game Stick. The Game Stick also includes a library that the user can browse and navigate for more games, music, and much more.
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Source: http://stupiddope.com/2013/01/03/game-stick-portable-hdmi-gaming-console/
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KAMPALA (Reuters) - A Ugandan court threw out a case on Wednesday against a British theatre producer accused of staging a play about homosexuality in the religiously conservative east African country, the producer said.
David Cecil, 35, was arrested in September after he put on 'The River and The Mountain', a comedy-drama about a gay businessman, in the capital, Kampala.
Cecil was charged with disobeying a public official but the trial was halted due to a lack of evidence.
"The magistrate has given me back my passport and said you can go," Cecil told Reuters. "I left the court with a big grin."
The production defied an injunction imposed by the authorities and came at a politically sensitive time.
Uganda's parliament is sitting on a draft anti-gay law which rights groups have blasted for its draconian penalties against gays in a country where homosexuality is already illegal.
The bill had initially proposed the death penalty for gays but still presents an array of jail terms for convicted homosexuals, including life imprisonment in certain circumstances.
Denounced as "odious" by U.S. President Barack Obama, the bill has left veteran President Yoweri Museveni struggling to balance the demands of the evangelical church on one side and aid donors who have threatened to cut aid on the other.
Cecil had faced two to four years in jail if convicted.
Minister of Ethics and Integrity Simon Lokodo promised a new investigation into Cecil whom he accused of promoting homosexuality.
Cecil denied he was a gay rights activist.
"I am not interested in promoting homosexuality or even protecting gay rights in the country. I simply find it contemptible for people to pick on an embattled minority," he said.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/uganda-throws-case-against-british-gay-play-producer-063625245.html
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A bird listening to birdsong may experience some of the same emotions as a human listening to music, suggests a new study on white-throated sparrows, published in Frontiers of Evolutionary Neuroscience.
"We found that the same neural reward system is activated in female birds in the breeding state that are listening to male birdsong, and in people listening to music that they like," says Sarah Earp, who led the research as an undergraduate at Emory University.
For male birds listening to another male's song, it was a different story: They had an amygdala response that looks similar to that of people when they hear discordant, unpleasant music.
The study, co-authored by Emory neuroscientist Donna Maney, is the first to compare neural responses of listeners in the long-standing debate over whether birdsong is music.
"Scientists since the time of Darwin have wondered whether birdsong and music may serve similar purposes, or have the same evolutionary precursors," Earp notes. "But most attempts to compare the two have focused on the qualities of the sound themselves, such as melody and rhythm."
Earp's curiosity was sparked while an honors student at Emory, majoring in both neuroscience and music. She took "The Musical Brain" course developed by Paul Lennard, director of Emory's Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology program, which brought in guest lecturers from the fields of neuroscience and music.
"During one class, the guest speaker was a composer and he said that he thought that birdsong is like music, but Dr. Lennard thought it was not," Earp recalls. "It turned into this huge debate, and each of them seemed to define music differently. I thought it was interesting that you could take one question and have two conflicting answers that are both right, in a way, depending on your perspective and how you approach the question."
As a senior last year, Earp received a grant from the Scholars Program for Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Research (SPINR), and a position in the lab of Maney, who uses songbirds as a model to study the neural basis of complex learned behavior.
When Earp proposed using the lab's data to investigate the birdsong-music debate, Maney thought it was a great idea. "Birdsong is a signal," Maney says. "And the definition of a signal is that it elicits a response in the receiver. Previous studies hadn't approached the question from that angle, and it's an important one."
Earp reviewed studies that mapped human neural responses to music through brain imaging.
She also analyzed data from the Maney lab on white-throated sparrows. The lab maps brain responses in the birds by measuring Egr-1, part of a major biochemical pathway activated in cells that are responding to a stimulus.
The study used Egr-1 as a marker to map and quantify neural responses in the mesolimbic reward system in male and female white-throated sparrows listening to a male bird's song. Some of the listening birds had been treated with hormones, to push them into the breeding state, while the control group had low levels of estradiol and testosterone.
During the non-breeding season, both sexes of sparrows use song to establish and maintain dominance in relationships. During the breeding season, however, a male singing to a female is almost certainly courting her, while a male singing to another male is challenging an interloper.
For the females in the breeding state every region of the mesolimbic reward pathway that has been reported to respond to music in humans, and that has a clear avian counterpart, responded to the male birdsong. Females in the non-breeding state, however, did not show a heightened response.
And the testosterone-treated males listening to another male sing showed an amygdala response, which may correlate to the amygdala response typical of humans listening to the kind of music used in the scary scenes of horror movies.
"The neural response to birdsong appears to depend on social context, which can be the case with humans as well," Earp says. "Both birdsong and music elicit responses not only in brain regions associated directly with reward, but also in interconnected regions that are thought to regulate emotion. That suggests that they both may activate evolutionarily ancient mechanisms that are necessary for reproduction and survival."
A major limitation of the study, Earp adds, is that many of the regions that respond to music in humans are cortical, and they do not have clear counterparts in birds.
"Perhaps techniques will someday be developed to image neural responses in baleen whales, whose songs are both musical and learned, and whose brain anatomy is more easily compared with humans," she says.
Earp, who played the viola in the Emory orchestra and graduated last May, is now a medical student at the Cleveland Clinic.
So what music makes her brain light up? "Stravinsky's 'Firebird' suite," Earp says.
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Emory University: http://www.emory.edu
Thanks to Emory University for this article.
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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/126094/Birdsong_study_pecks_theory_that_music_is_uniquely_human
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