Category: tunes

Music. Bands. Songs. Concerts.

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hairyguy30


Wednesday! The day I take my trash down to the curb at night, and wake up to it being gone! America is great, it’s that kinda freedom-magic that makes terrorists hate us so much. Sitting here rooting around my super-secret leak-friendly haunts like a pig hunting truffles, looking for some new Justin Tenderlegs songs for Sharaun. She’s always so happy when I can grab a couple more tunes off his upcoming album – tonight I got two, maybe I’ll get laid. Keaton fell asleep on my chest tonight, I didn’t want to put her in her crib – but my arm fell asleep and I figured she’d be more comfortable there anyway. Good dad.

First off, let me say how happy I am that yesterday’s co-op mega-post drew the comments it did. You guys had some great input. Hunting, fishing, biodiesel, and a ram pump are great “misses” on my part and make me think that one of the requirements for my “ideal” fantasy scenario should be a piece of property with flowing water. Now, having rights to fish or impede that water is another thing altogether, but, who knows, I’m sure there are still parcels of land available somewhere in this great country that come with limited water rights.

I found the biodiesel and ram pump comments most interesting. In fact, I’m somewhat ashamed to say I’d never heard of a ram pump prior to stinkmeat’s comment yesterday (go here for more info on this beautifully simple piece of engineering). These things have some impressive specs, from the Ram Company website:

We have a customer in Montana using our 3″ cast aluminum pump ($2100), pumping water 270 feet vertical lift and over 1,500 feet from the pump and is getting 2 1/2 to 3 gallons per minute. They have a 33 foot drop into the pump with a 100 foot drive pipe.

After reading about them, I’ve now decided I want one for the co-op. Also, the biodiesel thing was something I initially chose not to touch, but it’s conceivable to just go all-out and spend the cash up-front to convert vehicles and equipment (the notion of a biodiesel generator is very interesting). While I’m not 100% convinced on the ease of manufacturing biodiesel (my hangup comes mainly from the source of raw, unrefined material), I think it’s worth considering (not officially part of the fantasy, but flirting with it pretty hard).

Yes, my friends, all good points indeed. I wonder if I could take a tax writeoff for traveling around the country scouting plots of land for things like an elevated water source, proximity to hunting and fishing, soil conditions for planting, and average sun-hours and windspeed? Because seriously, when I see this place in my head it’ so awesome. And, before I leave the topic – I stumbled on this link today and found it pretty interesting (and germane). Hippie crap over now, all you conservatives can take off your blinders and start reading again.

The saga of WordPress eating my posts while I’m still working on them continues. It’s so unpredictable now that I’ve been cutting and pasting my posts into a text editor prior to hitting the “save and continue editing” button (the button which seems to shuffle 2/3 of my posts to the nether regions of the internet). It’s actually really pissing me off. Seems to happen on bigger posts more than smaller ones, but I haven’t really “studied” it or anything so I’m not sure. All I know is that it’s been making writing more difficult and less enjoyable.

It got so frustrating when it erased my co-op post the other day multiple times that I started searching for it. After much hunting, turns out it’s a Firefox bug – not a WordPress bug. It’s a known, reproducible bug with Firefox – and the only decent workaround right now is to either use Internet Explorer to edit long posts, or install the Firefox IE Tab plugin and have your WordPress “Write Post” page default to opening in IE. Only problem I have there is that, for some stupidass reason, a carriage return in the “Write Post” window using IE gets automatically double-spaced. What a sucky solution, but I’m now doing it rather than risk losing reams of writing.

I’ll admit it, I’ve been totally engrossed over the past week with the whole lonelygirl15 thing. And yes, I realize I’m about a month late to the party here… what can I say, I’m way out of touch in my old age. I name-dropped her the other day, but was too embarrassed to admit the sheer level of my interest by writing an actual paragraph about it. After watching all her videos, and Daniel’s responses, a week ago – I’m pretty convinced it’s some kind of orchestrated fake. Fake or not, it’s sure been getting attention lately – making the cover of the New York Times website is nothing to poop at.

But just what is lonelygirl15? A viral marketing campaign for the Thelemic Church of Satan? (Don’t worry, you’ll get it after you get rabid enough to start following the LG15 “dissection” threads out there and come to the “Crowley photo” bit.) Some NYU grad student’s thesis project in meta-trends and media manipulation (a theory straight from the pages of stereogum)? Teaser to get the MySpace crowd pre-hooked on a new MTV show? I love this kind of online mystery, in the same way I love the Lost Experience and once love the Smashing Pumpkins Machina mystery. Mixed-media clue-hunting and puzzle-solving have always been fun to me. Can’t wait to see how this one ends up.

Well, sorry I strayed from my normal high standards of academia to scrounge around in pop culture. I promise I’ll be back to my regularly scheduled programming just as soon as I finish reading my brother’s blog (he really has one, I found it last month – must run in the family) and watching the last lonelygirl15 video again to analyze how “professional” the lighting is.

And, as a parting shot – one more interesting post to relay: The Most Isolated Country In the World. Goodnight.

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floor ice cream


Tuesday, and I’ve got a mixed bag for ya. Had a lot of time tonight… thought about breaking this up into multiple entries to ensure a wall-to-wall week, but sometimes it’s good to knock down the cobwebs, clear house so to speak. If you could try and not get too wrapped up in any one paragraph, it may help ease the awkward transitions betwixt varied topics. Y’know, I don’t normally comment on my own blogs, but I got a comment yesterday from an old friend. I love getting comments from people like this – makes my day, actually. Thanks for the comment Sheila, I’m sure Andy will be interested to hear you’re still dreaming about him. Oh, and maygsters yes it was your husband – and… 12:16am? Sheesh.

Making a bowl of mint chocolate chip ice cream some time after dinner this evening, I spooned in a scoop and lost the bowl to the principle of physics known as “lever action.” The bowl tipped first up, then over, as it jumped off the kitchen counter and headed towards the floor. I watched in slow motion as it turned over, and braced my ears for the sound of shattering. When I heard nothing, I moved my eyes to the point of impact – thankfully the bowl had landed, upside down, on a pair of Sharaun’s flip-flops. The foam rubber providing a soft landing pad for the bowl, and the ice cream falling gently to the faux tile floor below. I did what any discerning ice cream fan would and snatched the scoops up back into the bowl. Floor ice cream is good.

Did some WordPress tinkering tonight. Added a plugin to give some simple Google Analytics reports in my admin panel (helpful quick-glance stats without having to login to stattraq), and added a “most viewed” plugin and report-out data to the sidebar. The most wanted is interesting, as it tracks which of sounds familiar’s posts are visited most often (you can see how many visitors per post by hovering over the links). Also took the opportunity of mucking with the sidebar to remove the long unused audioscrobbler/LastFM link – as I listen to nearly all my music on the iPod now and Winamp tracking just doesn’t make sense anymore. Anyway, just another step in the embetterment of the blog.

Every evening, I’ll usually do a quick scroll though the blog comments that Akisment has branded as spam – just on the off chance it’s ID’d something incorrectly (almost never happens anymore). Tonight, I found a series of spams that intrigued me. For some background, there’s an oft-used spam technique where the spammer uses copied-and-pasted strings of text from pieces of literature in their missive. Sometimes the spam comment is just a few sentences from a book, sometimes the spammer replaces random words in these strings with the spam subject – yielding funny results like this:

All this obfuscation is merely an attempt to bypass the Bayesian style spam filters which are so successful in weeding out the comment wheat from the comment chaff. The random string of words is meant to fool the filter into passing the comment as legitimate. It hardly ever works.

The comments that caught my eye tonight, though, were hawking the comment-spam staple Human Growth Hormone (HGH, for short), and read like this:

I just realized that the whole point of doing interviews was to promote this movie, so see it three times.

I have a lot of real life experience with hustling and doing stupid stuff.

I had had a troubled past, but like most rappers they go out and talk about it to kind of help their career.

I had been approached by a couple of people as far as making movies because of my success in music, but it was always to play the white rapper in Sister Act 2, or something that would just kind of put the final nail into my coffin of my career.

To me, those sounded like real-life quotes. Indeed, copying and pasting one into Google revealed that there were quotes from Mr. Mark Wahlberg. That’s the once-famous “rapper” Marky-Mark, for those who don’t remember. Back in the 90s, he could be seen curling cinderblocks and parading around in his underwear while trying his best to sell a menacing swagger. Now his quotes are being misappropriated to sell Human Growth Hormone. Apparently, this stuff is marketed as being able to help you burn fat, build muscle, and prolong your life. Doesn’t sound like something Marky-Mark would need at all, I can remember how in shape he is because of the chin-ups he did in the “Good Vibrations” video. I’m still waiting for the C&C Music Factory spam hawking cheap propecia, or, Things That Make You Grow Hair.

Tech related, in an attempt to go completely anonymous with regard to my online activities, I once again tried installing Tor the other night. I have to say, the installation procedure and GUI are much nicer than the last time I tried out the applications. Firefox and µTorrent were setup and using Tor/Privoxy in mere seconds. Only one problem, the dang thing still slows your connection down so much it’s just not worth it. Yeah, I’d like the anonymity, but not at the price of my connection… sorry.

Let’s do some music talk, eh? Eh.

I’ve been eating up PF’s new 200 Greatest Songs of the 1960s feature, these lists always give people a lot to talk about. So far, they’re doing pretty good by my judging – even throwing in some obscure tracks that I’ve not heard of. My goal now is to create an iPod playlist of these 200 tunes, just for the sake of doing it. I have a lot of them, and can “find” the rest with little effort I’m sure. Heck, I bet there’ll be a torrent of the whole thing up on the major trackers before too long – such is the age of digital media.

I loved these two posts, here and here, over at marathonpacks a while back. What a great idea. One of the bits that really intrigued me was that this guy actually took a college course called “The Music of the Beatles.” Man, I would’ve killed for that in place of COBOL or Statics or something equally as gay (no disrespect, it’s not my fault the word is slang for “dumb”). Anyway, when I first read them way back I decided I wanted to do my own list – but soon gave up. It’s too hard, and anyway, it’s already been done. Besides, I’ve already covered music that gives me chills – so I think I’m good.

This post is spiraling out of control fast… I’m not sure I can reign it in anymore… Maybe we should poke fun at some of the recent search strings leading people to sounds familiar? OK then, why the eff not… we’re already past the point of repair with this mess:

masturbate with prosthetic hooks
Y’arrgh… don’t ye be doin’ that.

andre the giant penis when erect
Who is researching this statistic?

Easy South Florida Crack Whores
Yeah, I’m sure there’s a list of these on the internet.

there is someone in this school is it a human what is it
This one just gives me chilling visions of someone squatting in an old abandoned school building. An old abandoned school building with an internet connection.

“dave is a pussy”
WTF?

how do birds do it
I’m not the only one.

That’s it, I’ve wrecked it. I’m outta here. Goodnight.

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i’ll finish it later


Thursday night. Damn, this week flew.

Sharaun’s at the gym, I’m here listening to King Crimson’s In the Wake of Poseidon (not the album, well, yeah, the album… but I mean the title track in particular). What a great song. Reminds me of some of the more haunting tunes from ELP’s debut, or even some Threshold era Moody Blues. I’d like to put this song in the movie I’m always talking about putting songs in.

Keaton’s out of sorts, I’ve rocked her to sleep and put her down now three times, each time to have her wake up crying just minutes later. Frustrating, especially since she usually goes down so easily. I think, though, that this last time was the one – she’s woke up and fussed but I let her power through it and she seems to be out now. Not sure what her deal was tonight, Sharaun said she napped well today.

There now, much better: washed the dishes, brought in the trash from the curb, and wiped my ass for good measure (you can never be too prepared).

Goodnight.

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lonely people and holiday inns


Fell of the wagon yesterday folks, what can I say – it happens. Had a good hump-day, did an incredible amount of work at work – so much so that I fear, should something new not land on my desk tomorrow, that I’ve finished a week’s worth of work in a single day. Curse my exceptional efficiency! But, instead of writing an intro here, I’ll default to what I wrote yesterday. Yeah… I did write, but it wasn’t worth posting… just an intro. So here it is, I can’t stand tossing out effort.

Tuesday night finds both Sharaun and I in the computer room, her having made me mute some newly downloaded prospective tunes I was auditioning so she can listen to some bootlegged Justin Timberlake show where he plays songs of his upcoming album. Sounds terrible, like it was recorded in the engine room of a ship with a Fisher Price microphone – but I suppose I’m one to talk. She’s loves some Tenderlegs… and I must admit he has a team of good producers, but I’m just not a fan. Anyway… let’s move along to what little else there is this evening, shall we?

Cleaning up around my desk today, I found a wad of Taiwanese and Chinese bills. I know the rough conversion rates in my head, seems I’d have just about $100 in USD if I were to exchange it. Made a mental note to remember to bring it next time I’m in an international airport, so I can trade-up for some real Christian money, not that heathen BS that’s worthless in God’s country. Seeing the money there got me thinking: I had decided not to exchange it upon leaving the Orient the last time because I figured I’d be back soon enough to warrant holding onto it. I mean, I was there so many times last year, wracking up 100,000+ flyer miles going back and forth, that I just assumed I’d be back before too long. Turns out that my baby-instigated travel moratorium has been more successful that I envisioned – and I haven’t been back in nearly a year. This doesn’t bother me, actually; I’d now much rather stay put. I’m slowly accepting my new role as house-bound parent.

Printed a new picture of Keaton today, hung it on the fabric walls of my cubicle with the others. I feel like I need new pictures every so often, as she’s changing so much right now. The only problem is that having all those images of her looking at me and smiling make me want to be here even less. It’s not quite as bad as if I had a picture of a beckoning Natalie Portman under the sheets in my bedroom, but it’s close. Maybe that was a bad comparison, since the reason for wanting to leave isn’t shared across the two scenarios, but it’s what came to mind.

Ended up reading a bunch of indymedia.org reports on the Israel/Lebanon/Hezbollah conflict/war today, spurred by a comment Thom Yorke made on Radiohead’s official messageboard. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I actually stopped reading indymedia about six months ago. Overwhelmed by the limpwristed, milquetoast, liberalness of the articles; the tree-hugging, everthing’s-a-human-rights-violation dreamworld the authors presented was too over the top for even my strong liberal leanings. I mean, you can get a sense of what I mean from their “about” page mission-statement:

The Independent Media Center is a network of collectively run media outlets for the creation of radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of the truth. We work out of a love and inspiration for people who continue to work for a better world, despite corporate media’s distortions and unwillingness to cover the efforts to free humanity.

Sorry, I just puked up some chai tea and cous-cous.

I will admit, however, that I find it incredibly amazing to be able to read independent reports written from those sympathetic to the Lebanese side of the fighting really was interesting. Seems, rightfully so or not, that most of the international “mainstream” media reports are from Israel’s point of view. As thousands of refugees are being evacuated from Lebanon into southern Cyprus, the Cyprus “chapter” of indymedia is where you’ll find a lot of Lebanon-viewpoint reporting, and I’d recommend it just to get a different angle on things. For the interested, Thom’s comment pointed directly to this article (caution, link contains some graphic images) and urged Britain to “… throw Tony Blair out of office NOW.”

War is bad, missiles and death and broken families are bad; but we knew all that before reading the article, didn’t we? Let’s change subjects.

The iPod seemed to be stuck in some crazy Paul McCartney->Grateful Dead->Paul McCartney->Grateful Dead rut today; sometimes that “random” function is super fishy. Through some short-term data studying, I’ve decided I can get through about 100 songs a day on random. Of course, this includes a good deal of “I don’t feel like hearing this right now” skipping – but nevertheless, 100 songs/day isn’t a bad listening pace.

Goodnight people of the internets.

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please make a daily call soon


Hey Monday, and a good one at that. I think I liked my weekend so much I didn’t want it to end, but more about that later. Tonight was a big night: Keaton’s 1st “solid” food. They call the stuff “rice cereal,” but it’s just mush. She really doesn’t have the whole open-mouthed eating thing down yet, and insists on sucking the spoon. It works, but it’s slow. We filmed it, of course – I think it’s required.

Woke up today and decided I wanted to work from home. Sometimes this is legit, sometimes not. Today, though, my day was 80% consumed with meetings – and I can call into those from home just as easily. The weather has changed from last week’s 100°+ afternoons and I was able to have the house and work in the fresh breeze. Spent some of my lunch break fashioning a couple homemade wasp traps. The wasps in my backyard are worse than any previous year I can remember, they are thick. In fact, when I went outside to scavenge a used two-liter from the recycle bin in order to make the wasp trap, I ended up running back to the house with my arms flailing in wasp-defense. It’s like they knew I was up to something. I made two traps, one baited with meat and one baited with sweet. Wasps are attracted to either depending on the time of year, and since it’s right on the line between the two I decided to try each and stick with the best performer. The frustrating thing is, there are no visible nests in my eaves – but I have observed numerous wasps flying under the tiles on my roof and into my rain gutters. I think they are constructing a massive hidden wasp-civilization.

This new Midlake album, The Trials of Van Occupanther, is outstanding. I love theme and words of the opening track, and the slow creeping harmonies throughout. With melodies recall slower Radiohead, Steely Dan, and even Paul McCartney. Sometimes the “softest” or “laziest” albums are the ones that sound best played ear-burstingly loud, and that’s the case with this misleadingly-sleepy record. But man, this album is ridicu-good. I wish it was colder outside though, and maybe a little grey… this album sounds cold and grey.

Found this great site today, it indexes torrents of public domain movies and TV broadcasts (items which have fallen out of copyright and are thus legally owned by the public and freely distributable). There are some great flicks, and some real stinkers, on there. Thing is, I like a reeking stinker every now and again for sheer tackiness and comedy – so this site is full of gems to me. I want to start watching these things, maybe one per flight or something. What a great way to legally watch some interesting old movies, especially for B-movie fans like me. I mean, who not like down a site that has every episode of the old Flash Gordon or Radar Men from the Moon serials available for legal, free download? What’s better, they’re prepackaged for iPod, PSP, and DVD… awesome.

Guess what? I didn’t want to rewrite the wasp bit at the beginning of the story, so I figured I’d follow up here as an ending. Finally got serious, broke out the 10ft ladder, and did some recon on the wasps in the rain gutter theory. In just a few brave minutes of investigation, I located four obvious nests – each of considerable size. And thus began the first sortie of Wasp War 2006. I struck with vengeance, soaking the nests in foamy death spray. After each attack, I’d jump off the ladder and run for cover. Allowing time for the angry to settle, I’d then move the ladder and attack the next nest down the line. I think I got most of them, although I’m fairly convinced there are a couple more which are better hidden. Those die tomorrow, as they all do eventually.

Goodnight.

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grease up your keyboards


Friday at last! Hallelujah!!

I honestly don’t have much today: an entire paragraph built around one funny thought, some other junk here and here, and two paragraphs built around links. Not much original, I fear. We’ll try to make the best of it though, eh?

Man, stem cells are good for blog comments, huh? I should write about divisive poll-splitting issues all the time. Next week I’m going to write about my opinions on using affirmative action to select condemned pregnant lesbian white women prisoners (with committed illegal immigrant christian life partners) for first an abortion and then subsequent death penalty. Yeah, that should get the comments flowing. Grease up your keyboards, you opinionated mofos… I love to hear from ya.

I know it was BoingBoingized yesterday, but it’s worth posting in my ongoing coverage of the I/L/H (my new shorthand for Israel/Lebanon/Hezbollah) conflict. Some people out there are actually rooting for escalating violence in the Middle East. I imagine these folks sitting in front of CNN cheering on the Israeli rockets with big foam-finger #1 things on their left hand and a bible opened to Revelation in their right. The more natural disasters, stem cell research, rock and roll music, and Middle East violence – the better. C’mon Lord, you’re really planning on taking these idiots?

Way to go Thom Yorke! Thom’s ‘headless solo debut crowned at #2 on its initial Billboard splash, being just barely edged out by some new Now! compilation of greatest hits. When I used to manage a record store in the mall, we sold tons of those Now! albums – people eat it up. Yeah, people love hits. Hits and crappy reality TV talent shows. Anyway, Coolfer had this to say about Thom’s good works:

Yorke’s first solo album, Eraser, is less commercial than would be a Radiohead release, and it was released by XL Recordings (distributed by Warner Music Group’s ADA). So we have a less-than-totally commercial album released by an indie, and it still sold 90,000 in its first week. Digital sales accounted for a sizeable 16% of total sales.

Somebody out there likes them quirky beats and loopy basslines! Go Thom.

Goodnight

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pleasantly longer than usual


Good Sunday evening my friends, coming off a weekend that seemed pleasantly longer than usual. I’m bringing you quite a disparate entry today, written off and on over the weekend to ensure it doesnt tie together at all. I did manage, however, to stick to tradition and post another (small) batch of photos to Keaton’s gallery. Last week, a friend asked me if I plan to post new pictures every week for the next eighteen years. Fair question, I suppose. I have no idea how long I’ll be obsessed enough with this baby to post weekly – but for now it’s become something of a habit, and, besides, I think you secretly like it. So here they are, Keaton’s gallery.

Sometimes, when I sit around on a Saturday doing absolutely nothing, wasting time, be ultimately nonconstructive, simply gaining weight – I get this feeling that all my friends are busy doing something with their time. I imagine them pulling weeds, cleaning house, gardening, washing cars, or spending their time doing something else equally as useful. I’m about 50/50 torn between loving being able to completely lose a day to sedentariness and hating the fact that I can be so lazy. Often, a thousand thoughts will run through my head: useful things I could do, things I’ve put off during the week which I could now devote hours uninterrupted to. Like now, it’s noon on Saturday and I’ve done nothing with my day but cook breakfast and play with the baby. I mean, I downloaded some music, messed with the iPod, and finished off some dirty dishes – but I feel like none of that matters because I haven’t even put on a shirt yet. I’m obviously not serious about today if it can’t even motivate me enough to clothe myself properly. Doomed to a day of sitting on the couch, listening to music, and writing… I’m 24hr useless.

But folks, as a result of that paragraph… I got the spirit. I went up to Home Depot and purchased some supplies to build some shelving in the garage, as well as the beginnings of the Baying Wolves project I have planned this Halloween (one of the two I hope to complete). Sharaun and I braved the 100+ temperatures to clean out and reorganize the garage. If you know me, you know I love organizing and tidying, and if I can do it in the garage while kicking some tunes on the iPod all the better.

I am positively in love with about 2/3 of this new Guillemots album – which means mostly the numbers with a decent tempo and a couple of the slower tracks. Some of these songs are so lushly done, with strings and rising chorus, plenty of cymbal crash to fill up the background, and unexpected falsetto. I recommend it, as it sounds like not much else I’ve heard out there right now. Also part of my playlist right now is an album by the group Midlake, which, while being slower and more muted, is crafted with extreme care – not to mention it’s not just 2/3 good, it’s 3/3 good. And, since we’re in the music paragraph – I’ll go ahead and say how excited I am about getting the new Ratatat album this weekend. Seeing as I liked the last one so much, I’ve got high expectations.

Looks like I’m not the only one who thought that CNN’s coverage of the current Israel/Lebanon/Hezbollah conflict is lacking. I’m finding that it’s really hard to get a “balanced” article on the current events over there, and I still stand by Wikipedia as the best checked-and-balanced telling of the tale as it’s unfolding.

Goodnight.