So I was watching Roger Dodger the other night and was impressed by Campbell Scott's performance, but couldn't think of much that I'd seen him in (save for the short-lived show six Degrees several years ago).

Dutifully looking up his filmography, I noted that he had been in Singles, which I haven't seen in a long time, so I went to my TV listings to see if it was showing anytime soon so I could set my DVR to record it. Alas, it was not, so I started searching for other movies that fit the same basic criteria: early-90s films about people in their 20s with soundtracks that did just as well, if not better, than their movies. I found Reality Bites and Threesome, so I set those both to record and just finished watching the latter.

I had forgotten what was on the Threesome soundtrack (except, of course, for the predictable [though great] New Order song), and I was pleasantly surprised to hear the following played at a seminal part of the movie:



Brad is the side project of Stone Gossard (of Pearl Jam) and Shawn Smith and Regan Hagar (of Satchel), and I got into them when they released their debut album when I was in 7th or 8th grade. I ended up liking them better than Pearl Jam -- better groove and Smith has a better voice than Eddie Vedder. I was quite happy to hear this song. Good memories.

Since I like to share, here's the entire first album arranged into a playlist:

http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/Man-Dies-In-Tank-of-Chocolate.html



La-dee-doo-dum, la-dee-doo-dum-day.

(The above is a stream of the entire The Two Sides Of The Smothers Brothers album. You can find more here.)

I haven't been this let down by discovering The Daily Show was on vacation since Dick Cheney shot a dude in the face.

Ignignokt and Err are nowhere to be seen, but this is fantastic footage nevertheless.



http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-amp-space/article/2009-06/moon-hd-closer-ever

I'm sitting here with my bedroom door open to the outside so I can see the fireworks when they start, and I just heard Soulja Boy playing from some car stereo outside. Really? We didn't get enough of him back in 2007 or 2008 or whenever his mealymouthed, nonsensical, untalented self was polluting our mass culture consciousness?

NOW WA ME YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

What the fuck does that even mean? Don't even get me started on Supermanning [a] ho.

I think this birthday is a better one than last year's. I have high hopes for the future, since I know you're capable of great things.



(Forgive the minor patriotism, but [as those of you who took the quiz about me on Facebook know] I am related to two people who were present for the signing of the DoI: Congressional Custodian and Bell-Ringer [which is the awesome part, because, yes, it's totally the Liberty Bell, though (sadly) he was not the one to crack it], Andrew McNair [yeah, I know, though I am not named for him] and Lyman Hall [one of the signers from Georgia], so I feel a certain historical tie to the day and its consequences.)

New podcast (my 27th! a cubic number!) is available for download and streaming at OnlineRock and for subscription through iTunes.

1. Mew: "Repeaterbeater," No More Stories ...
2. The Most Serene Republic: "Heavens to Purgatory," ... And the Ever Expanding Universe
3. Bowerbirds: "Northern Lights," Upper Air
4. Summer Cats: "Hey You," Songs for Tuesdays on Slumberland
5. The Polyamorous Affair: "White Hot Magic," Bolshevik Disco
6. Woods: "To Clean," Songs of Shame
7. Royal City: "A Belly Was Made for Wine," Royal City
8. Real Estate: "Green River," Fake Blues 7"
9. Lusine: "Two Dots," A Certain Distance

Favorites of this one: the Mew is nice and hard and both the Bowerbirds and Royal City are great and the softer points of this podcast (which clocks in at just less than 30 minutes, as nearly all the songs are, like, less than 3 minutes long). Lusine, a local electronic musician, is awesome -- probably my favorite song of this podcast. Very catchy and good sampling of a female vocalist.

Also, here's my reading list for June. Short but packed:

* Drown by Junot Díaz
* The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
* The Faggiest Vampire by Carlton Mellick III
* The first third of Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (I figure it's worth mentioning, even if I didn't finish, since this is ~375 pages)

IJ is even better the second time around.

Because I want to see how wide-spread this knowledge is

Poll #1423009 T1 throughput
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

A T1 connection provides you with how much bandwidth? (downstream/upstream)

( And my reasons for wanting to know are under the cut -- please vote before clicking, as I give the correct answer away down here and I want your gut response. )

I warmed up with "Girl from the North Country" last night to get a feel for how my little mic handles guitar and vocals at once (since I don't know "Kids" well enough to do the vocals and guitar separately, I did them at the same time so I could be sure to get the number of measures right, since the whole thing is just ||: F#m | D | A | E :|| and I could lose track of the number quite easily without the vocals to guide me). Certainly not my best effort, but not bad for one take with the most minimal of editing (some light compression and a fadeout): my intro's tempo gets a little flubbed in the 3rd measure and I sub in "form" for "storm" in verse 2. So it goes.

americanbeetles requested it, so here ya go:


Girl From the North Country - Andrew McNair

Recording "Kids" last night was fun, even if I had to spend about 20-30 minutes doing the ukulele part (I kept screwing up the intro). Drumming on my guitar case was probably the most fun part.

So I recorded some music: a cover of MGMT's "Kids" on guitar, ukulele and guitar case.


Kids - Andrew McNair

Worked out a few kinks of my recording setup (single $99 USB condenser mic into Audacity [open source freeware for recording and manipulating audio]), namely that when I record multiple tracks and guide myself by listening to the current track, it ends up being shifted forward slightly and thus off the beat. I fixed that by first laying down a click track at 130 BPM and recording to that, then using the same click track to match up subsequent tracks. For only about 2 hours and no professional recording or mixing experience, I don't think I did too shabbily.

That just came on. Love that band.

Also in awesome news: for the first time since, like, last November, I get to wake up at a human hour during the week. Starting Monday, I work the 9AM-6PM shift at work. Yes.

Like, seriously? That's what I felt when I heard the news that Michael Jackson was dead (and if early rumors are to be believed, dead by his own hand via an OD of sleeping pills—which, I've got to say, given the events of the past decade, does not surprise me). I mean, I used to like Michael Jackson. Now, I wasn't a cool enough kid to have gotten into him for Off the Wall, but you better believe that two of the tapes I had in my paltry album collection as a child were Thriller and Bad. By the time the nineties hit, however, his weirdness was starting to diverge from eccentric to plain old freaky, and I got off that train. Still, it's hard to reconcile the pasty, frail, quasi-delusional, tragically-altered, pederast man-child we've all grown to fear and revile with this cute little kid who, when you really listen to him, had probably some of the best pipes a child pop music performer has ever had (given, of course, that "Little" Stevie Wonder could give him a run for his money):



The man literally destroyed himself and he spent pretty much the last two decades doing very little of importance, musically. Each more recent picture I've seen of him is worse than the last as we were allowed the sadistic privilege of watching a man become a shell of a person, all the while actually surgically chiseling his very shell away. It was creepy. And it's honestly a bit of a relief that it's over.

Remember him, then, like this, or if you rather, as the force that brought Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins back together as they joined forces with the ghost of Koko Goldstein to allow Toto to record a smooth song with MJ for Thriller:

Originally from Passive Agressive Notes:



Anything with a T. Rex = awesome.

So, WKSU held a poll for the Top 100 Folk Songs and NPR has the list here. I agree with much of it (well, that which I know), but I take particular issue with #37:



How the hell is that a folk song? Sounds like rock and roll to me, played fucking loud.

So I jumped the gun a bit on the whole Infinite Summer thing (lj community for the read can be found here: infsum) and am about 200 pages into Infinite Jest (i.e. ~20% done) while the "official" start time is tomorrow (though there are no rules about the whole thing). The reading is slower than what I usually do (for several reasons: 1) I'm taking notes as I go; 2) the pages are big and full as compared to other books; 3) it's DFW, so it requires slower reading. Still, it remains one of the more engaging books I've ever read and it just draws me in, even if I only have time to read a page or two. redbaker commented the other night that "[DFW] created a universe" and it's pretty true. Nearly every character you meet in IJ has some sort of story/fleshing out, even if that character and his/her story isn't at all consequential to the main action of the book. So far, the highlights for me in this read have been James Incandenza Sr.'s monologue to James O. Incandenza in 1960 and the chapter about things you learn if you spend any amount of time in or around a halfway house. It's much sadder than I recall it being, but I think I was reading it faster back when I was 22. It's a different experience 7 years later.

With that in mind, however, redbaker sent me a link to the following book today (which he got from a friend who got it from Wil Wheaton's Twitter): Shatnerquake by Jeff Burk. From the book description on Amazon:

William Shatner? William Shatner. WILLIAM SHATNER!!! It's the first ShatnerCon with William Shatner as the guest of honor! But after a failed terrorist attack by Campbellians, a crazy terrorist cult that worships Bruce Campbell, all of the characters ever played by William Shatner are suddenly sucked into our world. Their mission: hunt down and destroy the real William Shatner.

Featuring: Captain Kirk, TJ Hooker, Denny Crane, Rescue 911 Shatner, Singer Shatner, Shakespearean Shatner, Twilight Zone Shatner, Cartoon Kirk, Esperanto Shatner, Priceline Shatner, SNL Shatner, and - of course - William Shatner!

No costumed con-goer will be spared in their wave of destruction, no redshirt will make it out alive, and not even the Klingons will be able to stand up to a deranged Captain Kirk with a lightsaber. But these Shatner-clones are about to learn a hard lesson...that the real William Shatner doesn't take crap from anybody. Not even himself.

It's Shatnertastic!

How could I not get this book? Further investigation of similar authors led me to the following books as well:

The Faggiest Vampire by Carlton Mellick III: "Deep in The Land of Broodsarrow, just outside the village of Gneirwil, and high on a cliff overlooking the Everbleed Sea, there stands the faggiest gothic castle that any mortal being has ever seen. Living in this ancient faggy castle is none other than the well-renowned vampire, Dargoth Van Gloomfang. The citizenry of Broodsarrow sure has its share of faggy vampires, but old Dargoth has always been by far the faggiest of them all. That is, until a new vampire came to town. A younger, hippper vampire. One that emits such a grand amount of fagginess that one cannot help but be completely overwhelmed by his presence. Now Dargoth Van Gloomfang must figure out a way to out-shine this young newcomer if he wishes to ever reclaim his throne as . . . the faggiest vampire."

HELP! A Bear Is Eating Me! by Mykle Hansen: "Trapped in a remote Alaskan forest, pinned under his own SUV, gnawed upon by nature's finest predators, Marv Pushkin -- Corporate Warrior, Positive Thinker, Esquire subscriber -- waits impatiently for an ambulance and explains in detail the many reasons why this unfolding tragedy is everyone's fault but his own."

Rampaging Fuckers of Everything on the Crazy Shitting Planet of the Vomit Atmosphere by Mykle Hansen. This is a collection of three novellas:

MONSTER COCKS: A poignant tragedy of penis enlargement gone horribly wrong.

JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF AGNES CUDDLEBOTTOM: A gripping history of the first Starbucks in the anus of an 80-year-old prostitute.

CRAZY SHITTING PLANET: A touching parable of love, friendship, and feces.

These will serve as my light reading while plowing through IJ, I think. The UPS man can't get here soon enough.

Watch this:



Note how Neil Diamond is perfectly capable of carrying the song (and how!) without people chanting "ba ba ba" or "so good, so good, so good" during the chorus. If you're at a sporting event, that's one thing. But to do this every single time you hear "Sweet Caroline?" Doesn't it get old?

Yeah, I'm a musical curmudgeon. And get off my lawn.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdos_number

That will answer the questions you have about the most recent XKCD.

Here is an XKCD for those who might not have gotten the William Carlos Williams one from earlier today:

Ganked from maxograph:

A bunch of good stuff this time around, and a good deal of it noisy (Dinosaur Jr., Deer Tick, Oneida).

1. Dinosaur Jr.: "I Want You to Know," Farm
2. Bibio: "Ambivalence Avenue," Ambivalence Avenue
3. Stuart Murdoch: "Come Monday Morning," God Help the Girl
4. Royal City: "A Belly Was Made for Wine," Royal City
5. Sunset: "Fishtown," http://www.weathervanemusic.org
6. The Rural Alberta Advantage: "Don't Haunt This Place," Hometowns
7. There Will Be Fireworks: "Foreign Thoughts," There Will Be Fireworks,
8. Deer Tick: "Easy," Born on Flag Day
9. Oneida: "Saturday," Rated O

Stream or download here: http://onlinerock.com/partners/podcasts.shtml
Subscribe here: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=281576502

They've kinda fallen off my personal radar since it's been a few years since they released anything new, but they popped back onto it when Asya (the lead singer/keyboardist) showed up in the credits for the new Stuart Murdoch (of Belle and Sebastian mastermindery) release, God Help the Girl.

I've seen them open a few times for bands here in Seattle (one time I saw them open for Eels, the other time, I forget -- but they're Seattle natives, so it could be anyone, really), but they put on a pretty good show. Here they are live on Jimmy Kimmel about 3 years ago with probably their best song ("Find a Way"):



It bears mentioning, if you do not know this already, that as of this video, they are 14 and 12 (Asya and Chloe, respectively). Don't you wish you were this cool and connected at that age?

Auto-tuned:

So when my brother and I got to our hotel room, I noticed that there was a device called a Protege coming out of the phone in the room and that this thing was being provided for internet access. I also noted that there was a surcharge mentioned when talking about internet access in the room (so either they're charging people for patch cables or this Protege device has some password management in it).

But here's the thing (which I was able to suss out after looking at this setup for about 5 second -- I mean, this is my day-in-day-out):

* they have IP phones in their rooms
* IP phones need IP addresses
* unless they want to manually configure each and every phone with a static IP, they're handing these suckers IPs with a DHCP server somewhere in the network

My brother was trying to find an open wireless network: no go. "Unplug the cat-5 cable from the phone and plug it into your computer," I told him.

Instant free internets. Haha. Thank you, job!

Landed in Ray-Gun International Airport today (one of my first cousins is getting married out in Easton, MD on Saturday). Walked outside to get to the rent-a-car place.

What the fuck, humidity? How do you all out in this region deal with this bullshit? This shit's just uncomfortable.

Poll #1411878
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

How do you pronounce it in your mind's ear?

doogiedownunder appears in this month's Smithsonian! Check out his feature about penguins here!

He wrote an article about me once, so this is probably also good, since he obviously has good taste.

ETA: Out-of-context snippets to snag your interest:

"It is at this point that I realize there are things about a penguin that one can never fully know, never fully understand, until one is trying to grip a penguin perilously between one’s own thighs."

"Wedged in the back of a small burrow, it is a female that scowls out at me when I come to measure her clutch, my trepidation running high, egg cup in hand. Like all classic field equipment, the egg cup is a product of domestic salvage and ingenuity—a tin can wrapped in layers of the ubiquitous duct tape and lashed to a yardstick. So laden, I feel a little absurd as I try to explain to some bemused tourist in my caveman Spanish, with supplemental gestures, that I’m off to 'touch egg with cup.'"

What's your favorite anagram of your name?

Mine: Rwandan crime.

Laura Cantrell is a lovely performer in just about every sense of the word.

( More Laura )

Podcast #25 is up and live in iTunes. This marks the 1(ish) year anniversary of my doing this. Yay!

1. Foreign Born: "Vacationing People," Person to Person
2. Free Energy: "Dream City," Stuck on Nothin'
3. The Portland Cello Project: "Tallymarks" (feat. Thao Nguyen), The Thao and Justin Power Sessions
4. Broken Records: "If Eilert Loevborg Wrote A Song It Would Sound Like This," Until the Earth Begins to Part
5. Rubies: "Stand in a Line," Explode from the Center
6. Tortoise: "Prepare Your Coffin," Beacons of Ancestorship
7. Jay Bennett: "The Engines are Idle," Whatever Happened I Apologize
8. Viva Voce: "Octavio," Rose City
9. Hermas Zopoula: "Courons, Courez," Espoir

Highlights are Foreign Born, Rubies, Tortoise and Viva Voce. Hermas Zopoula is fun too, but maybe not up your alley if you're not a fan of West African pop.

As always, you can download or stream at Onlinerock.com or subscribe using iTunes.

My reading (at least the books I finished -- there were a few others that I'm still in the middle of) is pretty monochromatic this month (gearing up for a reread of Infinite Jest in the coming months—pretty sure I'm going to sign up for Infinite Summer and am toying with the idea of bringin IJ along with me as plane/downtime reading for next week when I travel to Baltimore for a cousin's wedding):

* The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace
* Girl with Curious Hair by David Foster Wallace
* This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life by David Foster Wallace [his Kenyon College commencement address repackaged and slightly edited—I saw it in Barnes and Noble, so I took it off the shelf, sat down and read it. If you haven't read it yet (and if you click the link, you can), you should. It's short and good. The commencement speech we all would have liked to have had.]

All of these were rereads (though, if I recall my initial read of GWCH about 7-8 years ago, I never got around to reading the final story, "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way"). Reading was generally slower, too, since I was taking notes the whole time (and this, itself, was an act that was at times slowed itself since I do a lot of my reading [and therefor note-taking] on the bus, whose bumps and shimmies make for a slower hand to compensate for the excess movement to produce my semi-legible scrawl). Still, ~700-800 pages of DFW in a month isn't too shabby (especially with GWCH which has some rather difficult stories).

and Waitress was one damn fine movie. Awful what happened to Adrienne Shelly -- I would have loved to see more out of her. Watch it if you haven't.

So while I knew that Kari Byron was married and pregnant, tonight was the first time I saw an episode of Mythbusters where she's showing. And, boy howdy, I was a little bit sad.

You can hear Hombre Lobo in its entirety at http://www.myspace.com/eels.

I cannot vouch for its quality, having only heard the title track thus far. From that, I'd say this sounds more like Souljacker or Shootenanny! than Electro-shock Blues or Blinking Lights and Other Revelations -- a fairly safe assumption to make since E's albums tend to be fairly consistent in tone.

From the team IRC channel at work:

A woman walks into a bar and asks the bar tender for a double entendre.

So he gives it to her.

I have to say that I'm getting tired of the stunt-year phenomenon. I mean, it was interesting back in the mid-nineties when Sarah Vowell kept a journal of a year of radio listening. And it was a little novel when A.J. Jacobs decided to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica or follow the commandments in the Bible as literally as possible all in the span of a year. But the stunt-year phenomenon has started to wear thin. To wit:

* the self-help-book stunt year

* the home-grown/local-food-eating stunt year

* the reading-the-Oxford-English-Dictionary stunt year

* the lapsed-Orthodox-Jew-trying-out-Christianity stunt year

* the sex-every-day stunt year

* the not-shopping stunt year

* the giving-up-things-like-alcohol,-tv,-eating-out,-etc.-for-one-month-each stunt year

* another eating-locally-grown-food stunt year

* the learning-how-to-play-the-french-horn-(again) stunt year

* the religiously-following-the-advice-of-women's-magazines stunt year

* the saying-yes-to-every-man-who-asks-her-out stunt year

* the living-on-a-budget-of-$8-a-week-and-800-calories-a-day stunt year

* the eating-weird-things-all-over-the-world stunt year

* the competitive-eating stunt year

* the living-like-it's-1900 stunt year

* the competitive-birdwatching stunt year

* the being-a-prison-guard-at-Sing-Sing stunt year

* the cooking-all-524-recipes-in-Julia-Child's-Mastering-the-Art-of-French-Cooking,-Volume-I stunt year

* the posing-as-a-college-freshman-when-she's-really-an-anthropology-professor stunt year

I propose the following: the reading-nothing-else-but-stunt-year-books stunt year. Anyone know any agents who can get me the hookup with, like, Simon and Schuster?

But this is the coolest thing I've seen all day: a man accessing an electronic encyclopedia using a ~45 year old modulator-demodulator device connected to his computron:



Wow.

In response to Pat Robertson's recent claim that hate crime legislation would potentially protect somebody "who likes to have sex with ducks", Riki "Garfunkel" Lindhome and Kate "Oates" Micucci respond with the song "Sex With Ducks":



More G&O love under the cut.

( Read more... )

So for the past several months, I've been using Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke as bathroom reading. It's quite conducive to this sort of short-burst reading as the entire 400+ pages of it are snippets detailing the buildup to World War II (ending with the US entering at the end of 1941), specifically the pacifist reaction to it and the atrocities on both sides—none of the entries are longer than a page, but it's typically fairly somber reading.

Until today:

"Five pacifists, dressed as refugees, led a march to the Broadway Tabernacle on Fifty-sixth Street in New York. It was January 1, 1941. They had walked from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, pushing a handcart, to protest the British hunger blockade. KINDNESS BUILDS REAL PEACE, one of the marchers' signs said. Another said, STARVATION BREEDS ANARCHY, NOT PEACE AND DEMOCRACY. The marchers sang a song about the power of love" [emphasis mine].

You know the exact two notes that immediately played in my mind:

http://izismile.com/2009/05/15/one_miserable_childhood_9_pics.html

It's a children's (?!) book. And it just goes downhill from there. I wish I could find who published it.