Mowed the lawn today, and the iPod’s shuffle function was feeling anthemic. Now, when I wrote that sentence in my head as I mowed, the word “anthemic” sounded awesome. In fact, the word “anthemic” was the entire reason I wanted to write the sentence, I wanted so badly to use it – as it just sounded great in my head, and I figured it would look so sexy on the screen (sans serif, of course). How crushed do you think I was when I banged it out at the keyboard and the little red dots popped up underneath it when I hit the space bar to move onto the next word. “What, ‘anthemic’ isn’t a word?” I thought. Bollocks. A quick Google search to vindicate me – no definition quicklink in the upper right for “anthemic.” Dang, what’s going on here. Maybe it’s “anthematic?” Little red dots again. Well, that was such a bust – and I was so geared up, a shame. I’m gonna use it anyway, ’cause it makes you just want to drop your pants: anthemic. What I meant to say was, the iPod played long greats like Weezer’s “Only In Dreams,” and Death Cab for Cutie’s “Transatlanticism.” I mowed with a grin; the weather was perfect.
I think it should be illegal to sell dishtowels that don’t actually absorb water. I hate this. Hate it with a passion. We must have twenty dishtowels at home, all of which aren’t worth their weave but for the microfiber ones. Those microfiber ones are like those super-mashed up t-shirts you get at trade shows, you know the ones that are unbelievably compressed into shapes like little rocketships or wrenches or tennis shoes (depending on the trade show, of course). Everything else is jack. Don’t be fooled, my painstaking research has proven that about 90% of dishtowels just push water around and don’t absorb a drop. If you want a towel that will actually dry your dishes, get the microfiber ones… they are the jonk.
Wow folks, a few months ago, I was busy ripping through my entire CD collection, turning them into MP3s. And, since I’m anal and I like all my audio files to be tagged correctly (i.e. contain the right artist, album, track, etc. data embedded into the file), I oft-lamented on the difficulty of getting my treasured Beatles bootlegs (or bootlegs in general, for that matter) to properly tag-up. The lack of a centralized CDDB-style database for bootlegs was the main problem. Back then, I decided to do something about it and I wrote a script for the great freeware tagging app, the Godfather, that would go out and “scrape” the then-incomparable bootlegzone.com website for tag data. The script was complex, full-featured, and worked like a charm. With its help, I automatically tagged up hundreds of Beatlegs… all with the press of a button. That whole time, I kept thinking, “What if bootlegzone went offline tomorrow?” Me, with hundreds of untagged bootlegs still to go and so much invested in my script… I’d’ve been heartbroken. Well, fate, this time, it seems, spared me. As of sometime late last month, bootlegzone went dark for good. Sad to see it go, but glad I got to exploit its labors before it died. Believe me though, in the Beatleg world, it’s a big deal.
In Keaton news, she’s begun to stand unassisted at every chance she gets. Sharaun or I will say, “No hands!” and she’ll throw her hands in the air and squeal like she’s riding an imaginary roller coaster. So far, she seems more interested in perfecting her standing technique than she does taking any real steps – but we have been able to get her to take a single step by moving away from her and holding her hand. She can push into a standing position from sitting, so I’m assuming walking isn’t far off. Things move fast. Speaking of Keaton, I managed to get up a new series of images to her gallery – check ’em out here.
Thanks.
