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To all visitors: Kalvos & Damian is now a historical site reflecting nonpop from 1995-2005. No updates have been made since a special program in 2015. |
Chronicle of the NonPop Revolution
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| Why listen to Kalvos & Damian? |
Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar is different music radio. K&D has taken on a task no one else has dared to do -- to present new music and its composers as a normal state of life's affairs, challenge and all: Music that is cool or cold or hot, composers who speak eloquently or trip over their own thinking, people who are quirky or sparkling or dull and whose music ranges from sonic big-eyed-kids-n-clowns-on-black-velvet through the Ockeghems of our time. Composers who are alive & live or unedited live-on-tape, with no second chances or politically correct rewrites. No cream of an afternoon's interview skimmed for satellite, but just the tumbling forward -- or the uncomfortable pauses -- of an afternoon visit.
In the process, we often embarrass the new music community. You won't see us mentioned in print very often, despite having an audio archive of interviews that would take eight 40-hour weeks to hear. That's because we have opinions, hate fakery, love credibility, and don't mind if composers weave a verbal rope for their own hanging. We also do the unthinkable in 'classical' music. We mix. We multitrack. We interrupt, dovetail, cut off, laugh, sneer, enthuse, or hoot.. We don't justify with pop similes or Mozartean parallels. And it doesn't matter if the composer is already famous, or we help in the discovery. The music just better not suck.
Oh, sure, sometimes it's stupid, we're stupid, because we play on the same field as our guests. We're composers, but that's not what we mean by playing on the same field. We don't script the show, nor prepare questions in advance, so no one knows what's coming next, not us, not the guest. Our guest composers are welcome to show us up as louts or compadres. Yes, we prepare material carefully for each show, but we also improvise it on a theme, a Glass Bead Game of 120 minutes length. It's a soirée or a matinée or just a kick-back in the locker room.
We also have personal standards that make our show unexpected. We know what we like, sure, but we'll play anything that's well made or interesting or even dull if there's a story to tell. K&D won't let you down, even if it makes you angry or stunned or shuffle-footed red-faced at our awkwardness.
Ultimately, you'll hear music available nowhere else, and hear from the composers themselves.
| A Guide to Kalvos & Damian |
Kalvos & Damian is a broadcast/cybercast of new music and interviews, with audio archives, essays, presentations, and composer resources. We host guests and play interesting new music. But our goal is to do more than just entertain ... we provide musical and personal insight from our many guest composers and even ourselves. We two host composers, Dennis Báthory-Kitsz and David Gunn, provide extensive on-line support for research into the latest compositions and ideas, work with educational groups to provide on-line mentoring for students with important composers from around the world, and keep a good sense of humor.
Browse our site and read our funding report and the 1999 report supplement, which detail our projects and budget. A new report for 1999-2000 will be out shortly. In the meantime, please help support us.
| Five years on line September 16! Join the celebration! |
We can't believe it. A local summer replacement show has turned into an Internet radio geezer. On September 16, 1995, Kalvos & Damian went on the Internet with audio (not streaming yet, just clips) after four months as a local new music radio show. It was an experiment. We used scratchy RealAudio 1.0 -- some of those clips are still up there somewhere -- and small images, and had severely limited server space. We're still severely limited, these days by our budget (about 10% of which is from contributions, the remaining from our own pockets), but we can look back at five years of with a measure of surprise that we were there with new music at the beginning of Web audio. What a kick!
| K&D has rotating show on MP3.com |
In January, Kalvos & Damian opened a site on MP3.com with a rotating five-hour show featuring interesting composers who we have had or would like to have as guests on the show, including Jeff Harrington, Erika Jürgens, Joel Braverman, Sean Varah, David Drexler, N.N. und Ähnliche Elemente, Pamela Zero, David Gunn, Joseph Benzola, Stephen Smith, James Bohn, "Screwedupmusic" Duckworth, Chris Milmerstadt, Jeff Alu, Dan Fioretti, James Signorile, David Ernst, and Prent Rodgers. Head for http://www.mp3.com/stations/kalvos/ and have a listen. The show is updated infrequently so there's lots of time to listen before it changes.
| Guests 140 -- Visitors 200,000 |
As we mentioned above, on September 16, Kalvos & Damian celebrates five years of presenting new music on the Internet. Most of the K&D guest composers were heard on the net for the first time right here. We're into our sixth broadcast year as well, and have played over 5,100 pieces of music and interviewed 140 guest composers (some still to broadcast).
Shortly, Kalvos & Damian will welcome our 200,000th visitor to this site. In April 1996 we installed our Honest Abe Web Counter. Though Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar contains nearly 1,000 web pages and 5,000 separate files, visitors are only counted once (or when their browser cache is emptied). We may not gather a million visits a day like CNN, but we're grateful to all 200,000-plus of you for visiting us in the past five years.
We also hope you'll tell others about us. The best part of our work is knowing that people across the globe listen to new music streamed and archived here. Composers, publishers, and record labels have generously permitted us to maintain these archives -- so if you listen, also consider purchasing CDs of the music. Sometimes you can't (K&D plays lots of music on private recordings from the composers), but in that case, a friendly email to us or them would be welcome.
| K&D T-Shirt Design Contest ... Now yer talkin! |
Kalvos & Damian still need shirts! We been holding our first T-Shirt Design Contest with a prize of a bucket of new music goodies, all the recognition you could stand, and our undying concern for your sanity. We have only two entries -- good ones -- but we've extended the contest so we can look at a few more cool designs! It'll also go on our new mugs and other trinkets! Check out the official rules and gory details, and then do your worst! We'll be wrapping it up this fall for sure (we do like those new entries), so if you're good, jump in there!
| Board of Advisors keeps us sane! |
Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar established its Board of Advisors in September 1998. The Board -- all of them composers -- provides assistance and suggestions in matters of funding, publicity, and distribution, offers suggestions on composers to interview and cities to visit for interviews, and helps with problems. Our board consists of composers and active listeners to new music.
Board of Advisors
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| K&D Ought-One Festival |
Plans have just been set in motion on a suggestion from new board member Phil Kline: A 2001 festival of music created by and presented by as many Kalvos & Damian guests as we can pack into Vermont for a week. We'll need advice, ideas, help, funding -- and we want to hear from you. We're calling it the Ought-One Festival (or maybe "Aught-One", dunno) ... and beyond knowing it'll be a week of incredible & insane music in lovely Vermont, we're wide open for ideas!
The featured guest will be Clarence Barlow, without whom, in the threads that make up life, K&D would never have happened. We have asked for a new work from Clarence, and he has agreed to provide us with a few seconds of the inimitable Barlow touch.
Since our last announcement, we haven't moved forward on the Festival due to constraints on our own time. We hope to have more information soon so you can all plan your summers.
| Reminder of our Saturday cybercasts |
The K&D weekly live cybercast has become a very popular feature, sometimes running our server to its limits. Here's a reminder of when to listen in for the live show -- when you can also call in (no in-studio email yet) with your comments:
Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar is live on-line every Saturday from 2:30 to 4:30 pm Eastern Time with this link (which also cybercasts WGDR-FM during its normal 18-hour broadcast day). This link will always be available from K&D's home page. We use RealAudio, which gets good audio streams to most users. You can obtain a RealAudio player for your system either from our download page or from Real Networks -- our downloads are in an older format that should reach everyone. By the way, if you like the mp3 "sound", also check out the WGDR-FM home page for a link to the ShoutCast stream.
| Our archived shows are your greatest resource |
Listenership continues strong for K&D's archived programs. The main body of archived music and interviews come down the Internet "pipe" courtesy of Goddard College. You can see an index of these archives at our shows page.
There are well over 200 shows now. Here are some of the interviews programs you can hear:
There are special show topics without guests, too: Atonality, funny music, marches, electronic music, piano and string quartets, music of the 1980s, "tune tech", Vermont Composers Festival, the odd "wimmintune" in two parts, unique instrumentation, New York composers, "ears over easy", music of war & stress, dance music, unusual combos, recent classics, rhythmic music, music for voices, Our Golden Age, music for winds, renting orchestras, celebrations of Anton Webern, John Cage, Conlon Nancarrow and Harry Partch, choruses, a two-week Electroacoustic Music Week special, political music, the annual Golden Bruce awards, an impeachment festival of marches and dances, and a special Composers' Wisdom Series.
The complete list of these shows if found at our KalvoNet page, and the new shows are always announced on the K&D homepage.
We have addressed most issues presented by changes in U.S. law (the Digital Millennium Copyright Act) which we talked about in the last newsletter. The most stringent restrictions are now in effect, and lawsuits are in progress everywhere, but K&D has made an acceptable case to publishers and record labels, and they are happy with our presence on line. We are still seeking pro-bono legal counsel as these issues continue. Please contact us if you can offer that.
We would like to commend BUMA, the Dutch licensing agency, for being the first in the world to freely license medium-fidelity streaming audio of their composers' music. That's the kind of progress we believe in. We'll keep you updated, and in the meantime, be sure to keep listening.
| How you can help! |
We have several important projects that need hands and funds. Here they are:
Our applications to the Freeman Foundation, Copland Foundation, corporations, and others were turned down. What we do here at K&D still apparently doesn't make sense to the institutional world. Kalvos & Damian believes in accessibility for all, but our volunteer project needs transcribers to turn the composer interviews into text. Each interview lasts between 30 and 60 minutes of actual speech, and all are clear. If you want to help and are familiar with musical terms, please contact us and we'll provide you with interviews to transcribe. In the good news department, we may have a student intern to help us this year.
Our Music Resources for Composers and Music Resources by Composers are suffering from serious neglect. When we began this project in 1995, we could barely find a hundred resources for and by composers. Now there are thousands -- dozens of new ones every week -- and we're unable to keep up. Our composer references were updated in July 1999, but some of our resource links are over 18 months old. Volunteers are needed to make these pages useful again. Please click here and see if you can rustle us up some help! Again, we may have a student intern to help, but HTML hand-coders are sought for this.
It's a great disappointment for us to fall behind with this, since K&D was the definitive site for new music links for the first three years of its existence. We have been graced by research from composers David Robert Stewart and Prof. William Harris, who helped us refresh the 2,000-link resource collection a year ago, but we're months and months behind schedule on our latest updates. With current update submissions, more than half the resource list will be entirely new within the next few months.
Are you available to research a few pages and update links? Do you have students looking for some research work? Please check our resource pages to see what we need, and then please contact us.
As we mentioned above, there are changes in U.S. law (the Digital Millennium Copyright Act) which are making our project time-consuming if not occasionally difficult. The law's most stringent restrictions are now in effect, and lawsuits are in progress everywhere, such as that still underway between the record labels and MP3.com. K&D has amicably settled a cease-and-desist order already (part of a blanket order to all websites with audio), but nevertheless, we are seeking pro-bono legal counsel for copyright issues. We have always obtained licenses we need, but a peculiar retroactive provision in the law with respect to archiving our broadcast material has given us a struggle. Please contact us if you can offer help.
If you are a teacher needing composers to speak with, we can put you in touch. But we also need a coordinator for our Composer Mentoring Project, which has been dormant for over a year. If you want to help re-activate this unique program, please contact us.
Our project is presently 85% funded by the two hosts, Dennis Báthory-Kitsz and David Gunn. This amounts to nearly $30,000. So please see our request below, contact us with your contribution, or simply use PayPal.
| Funds very much needed |
Our thanks to the latest contributors to K&D: Rand Steiger, Joseph Benzola, John Blinn, Dean Dierschow, Kui Dong, Matthew H. Fields, Richard Fredette, Patricia Goodson, James Grant, Patrick Grant, Steve Gryc, Rip Keller, John Levin, Jeanna Malachowski, Sarah Peebles, Larry Polansky, William Rhoads, Aggie Birdsong Smee, Carl Stone, Argentum Fugit Farm, ASCAP, Carl Fischer Inc., DoDaDa Idea Company, Quality Software Solutions, Northfield Savings Bank, and anonymous individual and business contributors
Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar did not benefit from the economy of IPO's and on-line trading. Our fiscal agent is the Vermont Contemporary Music Ensemble, a 501(c)3 organization, so gifts to K&D are tax-deductible to the extent allowed. We are not presently funded by government or corporate grants -- our most recent grant application to a major music funding source was turned down in January 2000 -- and only private contributions let the program continue, along with facilities generously provided by WGDR-FM and Goddard College. You are invited to read our 1998 report to contributors and the 1999 supplement (PDF documents). This year's report is not yet available.
Please offer your support. For more information, contact us by email, just write out your check to "Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar" and send it to us at 176 Cox Brook Road, Northfield, Vermont 05663 USA, or send a micro- or macro-payment via PayPal. Gifts of DATs, blank CD-Rs, Zip disks, a nice pair of headphones, and other supplies -- as well as help with research and maintenance, and perhaps a nice PC-based Dreamweaver package or music database system (we do this site by hand right now) -- are also welcome.
Another excellent way of supporting K&D indirectly is to use the services offered by the hosts, David Gunn and Dennis Báthory-Kitsz: We accept commissions for music, and provide writing and editing via The Transitive Empire, or Web site accessibility evaluations such as this one from OrbitAccess.
| News for Guest Composers |
| Do you want to return as a guest? |
Our schedule for Winter 2000-2001 is now open. We always keep open shows for guests to visit us again. If you're in the area, we welcome you to schedule an appearance. Scott MX Turner passed through Vermont and gave us a wonderful live performance (along with a kinky station ID and new Vermont State Song) with his band The Devil's Advocates on March 11. Also returning were Dennis Darrah, Peggy Madden, and Gwyneth Walker in the studio, and on tape we had re-visits from Nick Didkovsky, Daron Hagen, Jeff Harrington, Mary Jane Leach, and John McGuire.
We had hoped to be broadcasting tapes from a Montréal visit by now, but we haven't raised the funding for this travel, and so it has been delayed for well over a year. We trekked to New York City in January and had a wonderful time. Our thanks to John McGuire and Beth Griffiths for their hospitality and to the American Music Center and Mary Jane Leach for hosting our interviews.
If you would like to return as a guest on Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar (or if you haven't appeared at all!), we'd love to have you on the show. Remember that this is real radio with knobs and buttons as well as a cybercast. Funny. Last year we emphasized the cybercast part, but now everybody's doin' bitcasts. But old-fashioned broadcast radio, doggone, we got that too!
The funny part: Not all our guests become aware of how K&D works, even after they ask to be on the show. We have fun, we zone out on academia, and we let guests, um, talk themselves into a corner. So for a chuckle on what not to do if you come to K&D, read Kalvos's real-life chronicle, How Not to Prepare for a K&D Guest Appearance, where names have been changed to protect the innocent.
To be a guest, please contact us by email, phone, or post.
| Do you have new recordings? |
We repeat this message in every newsletter, so bear with us -- most of the content is the same, but some important changes pop up every time.
Whenever you have new recordings (especially good-quality concert recordings) be sure to forward us a copy. We can't play everything (K&D has been "discovered") but we want to keep our guests in our audience's ears, and we love to present unique live recordings. We also scan the covers of your recordings, and add the images to your web page (see below). If you have a record label, please ask them to send us copies. Forward your latest recordings directly to Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar, 176 Cox Brook Road, Northfield, Vermont 05663 USA. Important: Do not send recordings to WGDR. They will not reach K&D, as we are independently produced. Some of your record labels are still doing this!
With your recordings, please include a note giving us permission to include your music as part of our cybercast archives. All of you have been enthusiastic about this in the past, but new legislation is complicating our lives. This once was a pre-emptive request "just in case", but now we really need it: We hate to deal in legal issues, but lawsuits under the new Digital Millennium Copyright Act collar everyone into the Digital Witch Trials. Despite our non-profit and research status, our cybercast licenses, and our very purpose, we are targeted in blanket cease-and-desist orders being thrown out by licensing agencies. We no longer broadcast music that cannot be archived, so please grant us permission to archive, and note that may be withdrawn at your request. Below is the agreement created by our friend Joseph Celli at oodiscs:
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Agreement between [Composer, Label] and Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar ("K&D"), a broadcast program, Internet cybercast, and Web site sound archive. [Composer, Label] hereby certifies that all audio files placed on-line as part of the K&D Web site, and on servers managed by K&D creators, are made available to the public with the expressed permission of the publishers of the compositions and the actual recorded work, and that all royalties or waiver of royalty have been cleared with the artists or their representatives by [Composer, Label]. No funds for the use of samples of these recordings are required as long as no sales of transactions of a monetary or substantial nature occur. [Composer, Label] further agrees to take full legal responsibility for any problems that may arise with publishers, artists or their representatives (including but not limited to organizations like ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, etc). |
Are you prolific? Please don't overwhelm us. Send us one or two good CDs of your work. One guy (you know who you are!) sent us eight CDs, and we hardly know where to start. When was the last time you listened to eight CDs by another composer? Yah.
Make listening easy on us! Then you'll get played more often ... well, write great music first, but you know what we mean. When you submit recordings, try to give us a hand by using the guidelines below. First, label, label, label! Then...
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| Are your web pages current? |
Many of you started actively using your K&D web pages, and others of you have discovered the joys of your own personal web pages. The latter seems to be the case now, and we're losing some of your active submissions (and, sniff, interest).
So here's what we're gonna do.
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We actively submit pages to searchers, so fresh information is important -- including where you've moved, so the spiders will scurry your way. We try to update pages monthly, so please keep us informed. You can send us your text as an email, and you can send us photos and music clips as email attachments -- or through postal mail. For any submissions it's best to use our FTP directory at ftp://maltedmedia.com/incoming/
We can use brief video clips (under 1 MB) on your pages as well. Some of what we use is listed below. Note: Email us if you use FTP so we can retrieve the files!
If we haven't yet updated your page, please remind us. We've just caught up again, but it's been a very busy summer. Updates were slow this spring as we completed our own major artistic projects -- we both had orchestral premieres. We're going into other projects now, but over the next month we'll update the missing pieces.
If you send us computer media, you may send us PC- or Mac-formatted diskettes, Zip disks or CDs. Good preparation helps all around:
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| How about those K&D station IDs? |
We look forward to our guest composers' creation of 10-second K&D station IDs. We now have 45 very kewl spots. We love these IDs! Please do a few for us!
The ID would consist of your greeting, such as...
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Record the message in your native language (or any other language, if you like!), and using whatever audio techniques or special effects you'd like. You can mail us a recording to 176 Cox Brook Road, Northfield, Vermont 05663 USA, FTP us an uncompressed or .mp3 file via binary transfer to ftp://maltedmedia.com/incoming/ or email us a .mp3 file (please don't email uncompressed files) to Contact Form.
Do you know one of our email-free guests? Please ask them to contribute an ID -- or give us their email address if you know it. Those whose email we don't have are Eliane Radigue, Shane Rooks, Batya Weinbaum, Barbara Wellspring, Fred Ho, Kaija Saariaho, Benedict Mason, Dennis Murphy, Glenn Sproul, Craig Bove, Olex Beck, Mary Oliver, and Henning Berg.
We would love it if every guest recorded a station ID for us! Many thanks -- we've been having great fun with this.
| Do you have audio art for broadcast? |
We would broadcast more of your audio art -- essay, collage, composition, or other unique use of the audio medium -- if we could get it! Come on, just about anything creative you'd like to send in -- up to about 15 minutes in length -- will be featured, and also added to your web page. For audio art, we would appreciate the material on CD-R, DAT or MiniDisc, but for this project, high-quality cassettes or MP3s can also be used.
First read our recordings submission guidelines, then send material to us at 176 Cox Brook Road, Northfield, Vermont 05663 USA or upload it to our FTP site at ftp://maltedmedia.com/incoming/.
| Have you made cool scripts or applets? |
With our new server, we have breathing room. Some of you have made musical scripts or applets to run over the Web, and we would be pleased to have them served from the K&D site, or we can link to your existing applet. So if you have Javascript or Java applets that would delight visitors, send them along ... we can't include cgi or applications that need to be run using server features, but other items are welcome for us to try.
Email your applet or link, with instructions (and a demo, if necessary) to add to your web page, to Contact Form, or use our FTP site via ASCII (for scripts) or binary (for compiled applets) transfer to ftp://maltedmedia.com/incoming/ site. Source code is welcome for posting if you'd like to share it.
| Do you have essays, commentaries, word art? |
The commentaries and essays on the K&D pages are many and varied, and generate considerable public response. Send along some of your writings and we'll attach them to your web page suite -- and make sure they're found by searchers. One essay received over 900 visits one week, apparently the result of a university assignment; the composer was pleased.
Email a text copy (read the guidelines) to Contact Form, and include any illustrations, diagrams, etc., in JPEG, TIFF or GIF format. You can also FTP (ftp://maltedmedia.com/incoming/) the materials using ASCII transfer. If you have no electronic version of the goodies, mail a crisp copy on white paper to us at 176 Cox Brook Road, Northfield, Vermont 05663 USA -- we'll convert them and get them posted when we have time.
| Web discussion board: Do you want it? Last call! |
We have set up a web discussion board off-site at Malted/Media at the request of several composers. You can begin using it immediately, introducing your own topics as you go along, but it still isn't official.
Since our first announcement over a year ago, it has seen no use. Perhaps there are too many discussion boards on the web. But if you have a particular interest and would like to have an ongoing section of the board dedicated to it, please contact us to set you up a section and give you moderator status.
The discussion board will be officially announced and linked to the K&D homepage once we get a sense from you of how it might be used. At this point, however, it may see the fate of our daily news alert, fading into oblivion.
| Why don't we play your music more often? |
We have limited air time and budget, so choices are made for our convenience; we apologize but hope you can understand. The two composer/hosts Kalvos and Damian choose the music, write the commentaries, conduct the interviews, edit the tapes, do our own engineering right down to WGDR's transmitter logs, prepare post-show RealAudio conversions and perform website maintenance.
So we've set up guidelines. Selections most likely to be played are great compositions (...had to say that!...), under 15 minutes in length, and recorded on a clearly indexed medium, including CD, CD-R, Minidisc, and vinyl. We understand that it's too much to ask that every composer make copies of music on CD, but all other issues being equal, keep in mind that we'll grab a CD before any other format. Remember, we love to play stuff. So please follow these format guidelines to keep us enthused!
| Did you make big bucks in an IPO? |
Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar is costly for us. Unlike Artswire, American Music Center, etc., we do not ask that our composer guests be "members" or pay for their web pages. But we do need support, and several composers and fans of new music have been very generous. We thank them again here. K&D's fiscal agent is the Vermont Contemporary Music Ensemble, a 501(c)3 organization, and gifts to K&D are tax-deductible in USA to the extent allowed.
We are not presently funded by government or corporate grants, and only private contributions let the program continue, along with facilities generously provided by WGDR-FM, Goddard College, and our own Malted/Media.
Please offer any support you can. For more information, contact us by email, or just write out your check to "Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar" and send it to us at 176 Cox Brook Road, Northfield, Vermont 05663 USA. Gifts of DATs, blank CD-Rs, Zip disks, some nice headphones, and other supplies -- as well as help with research and maintenance, and keeping your own K&D page fresh -- are also welcome.
As of October 23, 2001, the goddard.edu audio service is permanently going down. We will try to relocate all audio clips, interview clips, and shows as soon as possible. Important! Please change your bookmarks from goddard.edu to kalvos.org ... and if you see any references or links to Kalvos & Damian's site at goddard.edu, kindly notify the webmaster of the change to kalvos.org
We've also made it easier to help. You will now see this PayPal logo on the top right side of every K&D page. It means you can click it and contribute any amount directly into the K&D account. Encourage your friends and patrons to drop by and contribute. We calculated that if every site visitor had contributed a mere 18 cents since our show's start, we'd have a balanced budget instead of a $26,000 personal deficit!
You don't see any ad banners on K&D pages. That's because we don't like them. The pennies we'd earn from "click-throughs" just don't seem to be enough to make their ugliness worth it. We've maintained this policy for five years, and hope you agree with it.