The Music Business' Continuing Death Spiral

Constant readers know that this is one of my "broken record" posts. (For those of you in the cheap seats, and those who are chronologically challenged, when a vinyl album would get cracked, it would often skip and play the same groove over and over again.)

The music biz is not just in a slump, it's headed for a terrain conflict (as a pilot friend of mine used to describe a crash). You don't even need to count past fingers and move onto toes to enumerate the number of albums that sell over a million copies anymore.

What confounds me is why these articles never connect the dots between the terrible state of broadcast radio and music sales - even when news of payola scams abound.

But beyond radio, what's offered as the latest and greatest pop is often just dreck. (Yes, we have standouts like "The Flaming Lips" that put out great stuff, but they're decades into their careers and follow the beat of their own drummer. I'm talking about mainstream pop music here.)

I gave Justin Timberlake's (a former boy-band member) FutureSex / LoveSounds a spin, and boy did it suq.

The best way I can describe it is like someone ate disco singles, a drum machine, boy band clichés, and lengths of master tapes from Michael Jackson doing those weird vocalizations he does and vomited them up for 60 odd minutes, while barking out sexual euphemisms in the intermittent the dry heaves.

The new Gwen Stefani has a similar problem in that she's trying to ape the more brain-dead and monotonous end of the hip hop scene, doing the million-tenth version of singing the melodies of children's ditties like "nyay-nyah" and "Frère Jacques" to the same freakin' canned beat, which is too bad because she's more talented than that. The whole CD isn't a waste, though. Like the Star Trek movies, every even-numbered song is the good stuff she usually does.

This is kinda cute and mildly NSFW

Pictorial representations of rather blue phrases by artist Agnes Kunz Vigil.

The Infamous Green Flash

I've probably fried a certain portion of my retinas looking at sunsets waiting for the green flash that's supposed to happen just as it sets. After a while, I wondered if the green flash was really the burned-in afterimage on your retina. Never did see it in person.

But, heck, someone got a picture of it:


Source: Galax Lux

Heh

The first annoying vegan.

(Are there any other kind?)

Stranger than Fiction

What an interesting disappointment Stranger than Fiction was. Yet, the premise is just golden: a guy starts hearing a voice that seemingly narrates his life. Is his life a fiction - is he Neo from The Matrix, essentially - or is he real? Sounds like a lot of fun.

The first half hour IS fun, but then it gets lost in a plot device that would probably only work in a novel - if even there. (More on that in the spoilers section, below.)

There's even a neato special effect that depicts Harold Crick's (Will Ferrell) obsessive compulsive mental mechanics as he's thinking or working - sorta like John Nash's (Russell Crowe) visualizations in A Beautiful Mind. I loved it when it first popped up, because it's not explained, but becomes apparent later. To me, it was a quality gag, and usually such things only appear in movies that have been lovingly thought out.

Alas....

**** SPOILERS TO FOLLOW ****






Y'see, first Crick goes to see a psychologist, which is appropriate, but she tells him he's schizophrenic. He doesn't accept that and goes to see - get this - a Professor of Literature! See, he's being talked about as though he's the character of a story, so naturally he'd go see an expert on the same.

But what an asinine development!

Well, maybe it would have worked had it been done in a playful manner - say have the prof. be half nuts or so distracted s/he would give advice without really taking it seriously, or didn't take is seriously at all, but gave advice as sort of a lark. But no, we have an arrogant prof. who claims to know every story ever written, and yes he can help.

Look, nothing against profs. - if I had the brains, I would probably have gone in that direction. However; I am - at best and forever - a solid "B" student. Real profs. would have me for lunch, daily, had I attempted that career course.

But I think even if I were, I'd find this movie embarrassing.

Believe it or not, the next direction it takes is they embark on a voyage to discover if Crick is in a comedy or a tragedy, based on the events that occur during his day. Why this matters, we don't know.

It comes out that the woman writing his life kills every one of her characters at the end; it's like her big thing. Crick actually finds her and after they talk, she takes the novel to the prof., who's a big fan, natch. After the prof. reads it, he tells Crick that he needs to die because "it's her best one yet."

Fer crying out loud.

THEN Crick reads it and AGREES!

Fer fuck's sake, anyway.

Who would EVER think this is plausible?

Judas on a vespa.

**** SPOILERS END ****



All the best jokes are in the trailer, too.

Short version: the Joe Jackson song is still the best offering amongst the various media that bears the same title.

It's deeper, too.

Maybe someone, say Adam Sandler who has a deft touch with this kind of stuff, will remake it as a truly funny movie in the near future. One can hope. The premise is just too good to waste.

Recent Music Discoveries

Finally, finally, finally Los Lobos has released a greatest hits set worthy of their talent and career.

Wolf Tracks, Best of Los Lobos doth rock. It doth roll as well.

There are a couple of their early hits which are traditional Mexican music, though they still swing since Los Lobos is the band playing. And there's the oddity "Kiko and the Lavender Moon" that if it was ever truly a hit anywhere, I'd be surprised. The only interesting thing about the song is it's largely performed on an Optigan, and it sounds like it. (We had one of those monstrosities in my house growing up, and I actually could drone out a few songs on it.)

Other than that, it's a great rock and roll album. Were we back in the days when good compilations like the Eagles Greatest Hits and Elton Johns Greatest hits would dominate the charts forever, this album would join that pantheon.

---

This baby's about 2 year old now, so I'm a bit behind the curve, but Collective Soul's Youth is a solid offering. Not a bad tune on it. "Better Now" is probably one of the best songs they've recorded thus far.

For folks who haven't heard them (or haven't realized they've heard them - they had a bunch of hits back in the days of radio), they're the kind of tuneful, slightly bombastic rock that drives most music critics bugfuck. Which means most music lovers dig them.

You pair this with their greatest hits and their first album, you've got yourself a great set of songs.

---

To me, the Indigo Girls albums can be spotty. They usually have two or three great songs and the rest are forgettable. (Of course, rabid fans of theirs would disagree with me, I'm sure.) Even their hits compilation, Retrospective, doesn't really capture all their really good songs. I hope that in the future, they release an anthology that captures the hits and the great songs that didn't chart. (If anyone who's involved in that read this, please make sure "Peace Tonight" is on there.)

Well, for once, one of their discs is solid all the way through. Despite Our Differences is a nice set of songs. Swear to God, Emily Saliers has one of the most beautiful voices ever, imvho.

Standouts are: I Believe In Love, Fly Away (not the old John Denver, Olivia Neutron Bomb song), Rock and Roll Heaven's Gate, and Little Perennials.

---

This is not a CD recommendation, because I'm sure you already have some CD with Dave Brubeck Quartet's “Take Five” on it.

Stylus Magazine, who provide online music and movies reviews, have a list going this week of their favorite one hit wonders. (Most of their criticism is in the useless, snotty vein that pretty much all popular music criticism has decayed to.) But, in amongst the list of one hit wonders was this little trivia nugget:

39. Dave Brubeck Quartet – “Take Five”
A little-known fact: "Take Five" was not composed by pianist Dave Brubeck, but rather by saxophonist Paul Desmond. Following the song's massive success, Desmond went out to start his own group, and fearing that he would use the sonic blueprint of "Take Five" to great future success, Brubeck contractually prohibited him from using a piano in any of his future musical endeavors. As a result, "Take Five" was forever relegated to one-hit wonder status, best remembered (and wrongfully accredited to Brubeck) for the title's clever nod to its time signature. It should instead be treasured as the finest indication of Desmond's possibilities, whose sax had the slink of a Cheshire cat, the gliding ease of a seagull, and the voguish symmetry of a dry martini.
[Tal Rosenberg]

What a kick in the nards, eh? Makes me revise my mental image of Brubeck as a sweet, but somewhat square jazzguy.

Exactly

I'm a hyphenate!

While checking that I'd spelled "lutefisk" correctly in order to comment on D. Blowhard's post on a Lutheran pastor waxing political on the pulpit, I came across the term "Nordic-American."

Mwa-ha-ha-ha. I'm using that at every opportunity I can from now on.

I also came across "Scandinavian-American," but it just doesn't have the same ring to it.


Happily, I also encountered a few troves of Ole, Sven, and Lena jokes along the way. These are the stock characters in our Nordic-American (I love that) funnies.

Here's a little history and a couple good ones. Here's another trove (on an atheist site, oddly - usually they're quite humorless, with apologies to my atheist buddies who aren't).

And here's one of my favorites that I didn't see on either of those sites:

Ole and Sven are out hunting when Ole has to pee. "Sven," says Ole, "I'm going over here to pee." While Ole is peeing, a snake bits him on the tip of his thing.

Ole runs back to Sven holding his member yelling, "Sven! Sven! I've been bit by a snake! Go into town and ask the doctor what to do!"

So Sven goes to the doctor and asks him how to treat a snake bite. The doctor says, "Well, Sven, take out your hunting knife and cut across the bite holes like this, making an 'X', then suck the poison out, and then bring him here."

Sven goes back to Ole, and Ole says, "Sven! What did the doctor say?"

Sven says, "Ole, the doctor says you're going to die."

A long, long time ago...

This guy put together a fun article trying to evoke how long human history really is and how little of it we really know in relation. I recommend it; it's a nice read and does the intended job. (Via Kottke)

And you know with that setup you're about to see a bigger but than evidenced in any part of the video for "Baby Got Back."

This is way outside of the point of the article, which uses the Bible principally as a way to represent a time-slice, yet we read:

[I]f you have a grand view of the Bible's contents, that's fine, those few pixels should then conjure up your memory of historic events and aspirations and people who loved and raised families and created art and fought for what they believed in. And for those of us with less romantic visions of the Bible, it represents thousands of years of war and folly and pain and loss.

...

Uh, what did you say?

"[The Bible] represents thousands of years of war and folly and pain and loss."

...

I'm always flabbergasted by someone who is that ignorant of the overwhelmingly positive effect that the Judeo/Christian traditions and cultures have brought to the world. It's nearly impossible to overstate that we wouldn't have a world or Western culture that even remotely resembles what we have were it not for the Bible and those who wrote it and believe in it.

There's so much to explain in that regard that literally several bookshelves would be needed to hold all the relevant books to even attempt to do so.

Y'know, it would make a swell graduate dissertation whose topic was the pervasiveness of a subculture that's sprung up almost exclusively on the web made up of engineers (both computer and the various branches of mechanical and electronic) and biologists who tend towards being Randian Libertarian atheists whose exposure to history and religion is limited to opinions and summaries they've read on the web (usually written by someone of the same persuasion), and who are also overly impressed with their own obvious intelligence enough to never arrive at the truth that intelligence and knowledge aren't the same thing. These are guys who probably just assume that Thomas Cahill's How the Irish Saved Civilisation is about beer, or maybe potatoes.

You create anything in a vacuum and the most impressive achievement that can possibly result is that you were able to create the vacuum in the first place.

Oh well.

Contemplating this article also made me think of how cool it would be to see the same comparison of the time between the last dinosaur keeling over with a rattling gasp to the first time a proto-human first walked around on two legs wondering about something a little more abstract than eating or screwing (that last one's a stretch - I know).

Which whips me back to another question I get on the Bible sometimes: how come the Bible doesn't talk about dinosaurs? If you look at the timelines presented in that article, and then sorta swag the dinosaur timeline, that's part of the answer (to wit: some time had passed and it wasn't all that relevant). The other part is that the Bible is the history of a specific people that began not all that long ago in the cosmological flow of things. The Bible goes from creation to mankind in the space of a few words. It's kind of like that famous cartoon:


Yeah, it would be nice if it were more explicit in step 2 (imagine the arguments that would never have to occur), but the Bible really is not concerned with dinosaurs and primitive peoples, it's about our relationship with God.

Maybe when Moses asked God about that stuff, God said something like, "In a few thousand years a man named Michener will be born. I'm going to let him write about that stuff. You just worry about those tablets, dude." (Not to presume to speak for God, mind you.)

What's Wrong with this Picture?

"Years ago, I spent half the night chatting up a very beautiful woman. I managed to get her to come back to my place, to undress her and get her into bed. Then when I woke up the next day, I realized that she was dead. Before we had a chance to do anything."

-- Jay McInerney on the worst date he's ever had. Via Salon via NY Dailynews

Oh, bummer she's dead, but he didn't get to BANG HER! What a loss!

Crikey.

Though I think Bright Lights, Big City is a great book, one worthy of trotting out in Lit. classes, if only for the successful pulling-off of a second-person narrative, most of McInerney's work (including "Bright Lights") kinda hint at the possibility that his psyche is a narcissistic wasteland dotted with shrubs of brilliance. I think he's gone ahead and removed all doubt.

Dumb and Rather Moronic

That's my view of DRM.

This guy was trying to play by the DRM rules and got burned. (Btw, Rhino used to be a great company, but then Warner Bros. bought them and it practically changed within a week.) Steve Jobs famously said DRM should go away.

I've always preferred to have the actual album if I like a song, primarily for the convenience of being always able to play it right now, because when I get a craving for a song it must be satiated or I drive those around me nuts by humming the two or three bars stuck in my head over and over. Rainman would be moved to tell me to shut the hell up. My family members are saints in this regard, as they only go that far once a week.

The other reason is I like reading the credits. I get a bang out of knowing who did what, if there were any guest musicians I know, who wrote the songs, and the goofy stuff in the thanks area.

Finally, I want the artist to get some green, of course.

That aside, I will not purchase music that has DRM on it. Period. If you buy the song, you OWN a copy, as far as I am concerned. Copyright law agrees with me, btw.

Imagine if you bought a famous painting, and later you decided to move to another house. You try to hang the great painting on the wall, but not only will it not go on the wall, the canvas has suddenly gone blank. That's essentially what DRM does to music. It's stupid.

Yes, there is going to be some piracy. Yes, people in love will still make "mix tapes" for their significant others - though it may take the form of a burned CD, or a set of MP3s on a flash drive (how romantic!).

For the most part, though, people will pony up a reasonable purchase price for a product, particularly music, because they want to have a good-sounding version, and if they like the artist, they want him or her to be able to continue to follow their muse.

I like what Ricki Lee Jones has done on her current release. She actually includes high resolution, DRM-free MP3's of all the songs on the album. How cool is that? There're many reasons why she's known as the Duchess of Cool.

You Won't Let Those Robots Eat Me

Seems there's yet another Yoshimi fan out there.


Artist: Mike Maihack

From the 3.9.07 offering on Drawergeeks.

The (lack) of Wonder of It All

My wife says that the primary source of most tension in relationships is unmet expectations.

Well, I had a bad relationship with the last two things I've read.

First was Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business by David Mamet.

I mean, this is Mamet. One of the better movie and stage writers of our age. How could it not be good on some level?

It veered between opaque and tedious, once in a while taking a side trip into annoying. Mamet, here, seems to be more impressed with his command of five-dollar words and not so much with his ability to actually convey anything with them.

I'll recuse myself in that some forms of academic prose are as jumbled to me as a recently vomited bowl of Alphabits; my brain just isn't wired to read that kind of Möbius strip, jargon-ridden verbosity. So there may be those of you out there who Mamet's prose style connects with. 'T'weren't me.

I didn't really get one piece of take-away knowledge, either, other than "follow the money," which means if a big star is cast, give him or her most of, or all of, the best lines. Well, how often is a script-writer involved in casting?

He even has a section on "writing for women." Gotta tell ya, if there's one cat out there who, in my opinion, has not a single clue about the fair sex, it's Mamet.

Oh well. I thought it was turgid. I'm keeping the set of steak knives and sticking to his movies.


Next on the plate was The Gospel of Food: Everything You Think You Know About Food Is Wrong by Barry Glassner.

There's a lot of good info in here, but it's an effort to push forward through all the ephemera to get to the wisdom. If I were a wealthy executive, this is one of those I'd have an underling bash out an executive summary of.

The short version is the vilification of specific types of foods is largely misguided. The point is that if you eat enough variety in appropriate proportions, no food is really off-limits to you, barring allergies. There are some man-made things that are bad for you, like Quorn and foods made from genetically altered crops and animals - which the FDA has allowed to be used without any indication on the label (in the USA, anyway, in Europe it has to be labeled). But the things you would assume are bad, like fatty pork, artificial strawberry flavor (as opposed to actual strawberry parts), whole milk, butter, (real cane or beet) sugar, and potatoes, are actually benign or truly beneficial when eaten in conjunction with a balanced diet. Irradiated food is vastly safer than most organic foods, too.

Since all this stuff about food and dieting (which, as we understand "dieting" you really should NOT do) is really the satellite that orbits the true (supposed) issue - obesity - the book has some interesting stuff about that.

Seems that your genes and your stress level have way more to do with obesity and lifespan than diet (barring, again, common sense things like not eating sticks of butter or having a daily sugared tub-o-soda from 7-11). On top of that, being slightly chunky is often more about aesthetics than it is about health. There is not much of a correlation between carrying a few extra pounds and lifespan. There is a small subset of people who can control heart disease with diet, but nearly everyone else who eventually drops from a clogged ticker can really blame stress, particularly job-related stress, as the culprit.

And what's the cause of most job-related stress?

Another large body [har har] of evidence points in a different direction, to changes in the American Economy. During the decades when Americans' weight shot up, so did levels of economic hardship and insecurity. In the 1980s and 1990s, more Americans lost their jobs than at any time since the Great Depression, and those who did have jobs worked longer hours. About a third of the population became poorer during this period, and millions more had difficulties maintaining their lifestyles because the raises they received did not keep up with inflation.

A key link between the obesity epidemic and economic hardship is chronic stress. Stress provokes the body to produce less growth hormone, a substance that reduces fat deposits and speeds up metabolism, and more of what are called stress hormones, which provoke cravings for soothing substances like glazed donuts and chocolate fudge ice cream.

Y'know, when anyone I know talks about jobs anymore, along with the pay and desirability of the job, they talk about how layoff-proof the job might be. It's one of the top considerations anymore. Methinks a new labor movement is afoot.

The final, larger theme is that you're better off eating things that you like in reasonable portions, because you're most likely to be sated, not cheat or overeat, and you'll absorb the food better. Basically, if momma's meals didn't make you fat as a child (and assuming you like your mom's cooking), you'd probably benefit from that diet as an adult. (Though I think I'll make sure I don't repeat my passion for the retina-melting hot pink sugar coated Pink Panther Flakes with extra carcinogens. They're not made anymore for that reason, but I've seen a couple recent new cereals that certainly look as toxic.)

And, of course, find a job that doesn't kill you and pays you enough. We'll all see how easy that is when the predicted economic depression that's been predicted in the near future hits.

So, I liked the information in the book, but reading it was a chore. Kinda like eating tofu stir-fry when you really wanted chicken stir-fry.

This Would Spell the End, IMVPO'dO

Because of the fact we have a toddler, we currently see no movies in the theatre, with the exception of one of us 'rents taking the 10-year-old to the latest kiddie epic.

When we can return to the hallowed auditoriums, if they start doing this where I live, I'll never darken the door of a theatre again:
How the MPAA killed the movie theater experience: a first-hand report. (Via Digg.)

Even though the efficaciousness of the tactics have been questioned, I at least understand the justification for standing shoeless, holding my beltless pants up as I hobble through the metal detector at airports. But endure that kind of cavity-search security screening to watch the latest Hollywood opus? Hell fucking no, dammit anyway.

Half the kids who work at our local theatre are so stoned I barely trust them to transport my popcorn the 3 feet they have to traverse to do so. (Back when I worked a candy counter, we were shown that we always pull the popcorn from the top so as not to fill the bag with old maids. Half these kids scrape along the bottom of the bin as if they were panning for gold, and sure enough, by mid-bag you've got to eat the mashed-up popcorn crumbs as gingerly you would a pheasant that had been brought down by three separate blasts of buckshot.) If I have to trust these yahoos with my cell phone, or allow them to paw through my wife's purse, fuhgeddaboudit.

Bashing Psalms

#737380
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of dialup,
I will fear no lag: for thou art with me;
Thy lights and thy bandwidth they comfort me.
Thou preparest a website before me in the presence of mine boredom:
Thou anointest my ports with data;
My hard drive runneth over.
Surely fast surfing and low access rates shall follow me all the days of my life:
And I will dwell in the house of cisco systems for ever.

Amen.

Punctuation aside, I think that's pretty freakin' clever.

Bashing Linguistics

As Daffy Duck once said, "It is to laugh."

#734797
Malagmyr: This linguistics professor was lecturing the class.
Malagmyr: "In English," he explained, "a double negative forms a positive. In some languages, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative."
Malagmyr: "However," the professor continued, "there is no language wherein a double positive can form a negative."
Malagmyr: Immediately, a voice from the back of the room piped up: "Yeah..... right...."

The Most Significant SF & Fantasy Books of the Last 50 Years

Via Syaffolee, who referenced Tikistich (I'm beginning to feel less self-conscious about my goofy web moniker anymore) and PZ Myers.

Pretty good list, though I wonder why all of Harry Potter isn't included as one item.

Everything in bold I've read. (And now I have some new additions to my "to read" pile. Yay!) Comments on specific ones follow the list.

The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
Dune, Frank Herbert
Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
Neuromancer, William Gibson
Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
Cities in Flight, James Blish
The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
Gateway, Frederik Pohl
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J.K. Rowling
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
Little, Big, John Crowley
Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
On the Beach, Nevil Shute
Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
Ringworld, Larry Niven
Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
Timescape, Gregory Benford
To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer


The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley - I read this back in the day where I'd finish reading things I didn't like basically because they'd been so acclaimed (a side-effect of my English major). I always wanted to see if I was missing something. I've done this enough now to know that it's almost never the case that you're missing anything if you don't like what you're reading by, say, 100 pages. I hated this one. This retelling of the Arthurian Legend basically takes gender feminism (read "man-hating" feminism) and Wicca (which, of course, didn't exist back in the day) and mixes them into a bitter brew that climaxes by taking a swipe at the Catholic Church that would make Dan Brown hoist an eyebrow. Perhaps the only tome that does a more mean-spirited takedown of previously heroic people is Michael Moorcock's (I've always wondered if that was a wink-wink, nudge-nudge pseudonym given the nature of his subjects) Behold the Man where a time-traveler goes back to find Jesus, only to discover that Jesus is a retarded man birthed by a prostitute named Mary whose label of "virgin" was meant to be ironic; he ends up being crucified in Jesus' place. Yuk.

The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett - Couldn't get past the first chapter. I just don't get this guy's humour. Don't think I made it to the end of the first chapter.

The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson - Like many, I was so put off by the vicious rape of an innocent girl by the supposed hero of the story that I couldn't continue.

The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien - Long-running series and corporate mascots are kept consistent by a "bible" that gives all the back-story and do's and don't's for the franchise. This is essentially Tolkien's version of that for his books and reads like one. The very first section describing the creation of the universe is lyrical and stirring, but then the leaden detail and histories deliver nothing but endless chasms of boredom. (With a nod to Earl for that wondrous phrase.)

Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson - Another acclaimed "must read" book for the cyberage, but the writing is precious and way too "meta" for my tastes. Even though it's spun as a farce, a future world in which delivering a pizza in time is more important than the lives and property encountered en route struck me as a joke a 14-year-old would find funny, but not anyone else. Also, William Gibson owns cyberspace stories in the way that Tolkien owns sword and sorcery. Anyone else has to do a scooch better to even be worth the read. I got to my requisite 100 pages and chucked it back in the library return bin. However, I loved, loved, loved Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. That's HIS classic that no one will ever match. (Btw, M. Blowhard, you would love Gibson's Pattern Recognition, about a woman who has visceral pleasant or allergic reactions to logos and product branding so as to become the top consultant for the same; she visits the land of logo overload - Japan (think Bladerunner). Hilarity ensues.)

The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks - Like I said above, any sword and sorcery has got to outdo Tolkien and this just doesn't do it. When the Tolkien renaissance began, this was the only other thing out there, so I think it benefited by a ride on coattails. It's kinda cutesy, too, if I recall. I abandoned it early.

The ONLY contender to the Tolkien throne is the Belgariad by David Eddings, Volumes 1 and 2. Eddings creates vivid and memorable characters that outshine not only those in the genre, but in fiction in general.

Finally, Asimov's Caves of Steel is good, as are all in that robot series, but Robots of Dawn (the 3rd book) is by far the best. It's one of the few novels that has it all: romance, mystery, humor, robots, sex, and tragedy.

A hotel turns away a bunch of school kids seeking shelter during a tornado.

Let's all channel Joe Bob Briggs together and say, "I'm surprised I have to explain these things," but how f*ck'd up is that?

Almost worse, though, are some of the commenters on Digg who either side with the hotel, or turn it into a political thing by snarking about the fact "The Consumerist" reported it. (For the record, I have no idea what spin the Consumerist supposedly has, but facts are facts no matter who reports them.)

Geez

I think all bloggers pine for higher traffic, but every time I read one of Dooce's hilarious hate mail posts, I am glad that I only have you few, dear readers. I remember some clod snarked at me because I had the temerity to complain about some bad experiences at Disneyworld, and thought what a poltroon s/he was for that. I can't imagine fielding the flaming lumps of hatred she apparently gets regularly, especially the ones that take vicious digs at her personally. What's wrong with these people?

Not sure...

...if I should be impressed or concerned.

This woman went around repairing broken spiderwebs.

Apparently one of the spiders didn't like her repairs and pulled them off.

Can you imagine that scenario? Spider wakes up, wanders out on to the web still kinda sleepy, steps on the non-sticky thread, stops, says the spider equivalent of "What the f.....?"

The Dingleberry Swings Again

I've carped about the Newbery Awards before. (I affectionately call them the Dingleberry Awards.) Since I can no longer find that post (easily), here's a summary: The Newbery Awards consistently give awards to the very books you might not want your children to read, as they are filled trauma, loss of parents, violence, death, abuse, identity politics racial hatred, and other unsavory topics that don't necessarily belong in children's fiction.

There's a new scuffle because a recent (heh) "winner" talks about genitalia on the first page. See, in The Higher Power of Lucky, by Susan Patron, this orphan girl (ah ha! parents dead already!*) overhears boys talking, and one informs the other that he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog on the scrotum (ooo, pet violence, child witnessing the act, and a nutsack reference). Using a quote from the article which quotes the book: "Scrotum sounded to Lucky like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much," the book continues. "It sounded medical and secret, but also important." (And we have a clean sweep with a gross-out moment. You can see how they could not pass up giving this gem the award.)

Other Dingleberry award winners are (both made into movies):
Bridge to Terabithia - Where a main character (a child) dies on said bridge to magical, imaginary land. All the kids say (about the movie), "It's good, but very sad." Do kids need to go to a flick to be bummed out?
Holes - Where orphans and "bad kids" are forced to dig holes looking for treasure on a property owned by adults who are abusive to the kids. My whole family loathed this movie.

The beauty of the Dingleberry Award is that it clearly delineates the mine-field of possibly inappropriate children's fiction out there. They do the work for you! Any book that wins the award prominently displays it on the cover, so it's not even necessary to look it up on the Award's web site. Could that be any handier?

Now, as with all things, it's not black and white because some books (and subsequent movies) that got the award have been good. For instance, Ella Enchanted was a runner-up, and the movie is one of the better kid's movies out there. (Obviously honored because of Ella's identity politics activism work fighting discrimination against Ogres, who eat people.) I've not read the book, so I don't know if they sanded off any edges from the book. One of Beverly Cleary's "Ramona" books, Ramona Quimby, Age 8 made the list, too. (And I wondered why, as they are usually sweet and funny, so looked it up on Amazon. Ah ha, poor Ramona vomits during class. You've gotta have at least one mind-numbing children's fear played out in a Dingleberry winner.)

Also, when I originally gave the Dingleberry a wedgie here on my blog, Syaffolee said she's read many that were good, and I trust her judgment.

Therefore, I use it as a warning, not as a complete guide to pusillanimous pustules of plottitude. For instance, I now ask every the teacher at the beginning of each school year which Dingleberry award winners she's going to use, so I can preview them and be ready when my child asks what felching is.

*TLD: One of our family favorites is the live action version of Peter Pan. In it, one of the pirates is all excited because he's ended up in one of Wendy's stories. He glows, "You hear that Capn.? I'm in a story!" Capn. Hook promptly shoots him. We cut to Smee, who says, "How exciting! Two dead already!" It's a fabulous laugh line. Even if you don't have kids, you should treat yourself to this version of Peter Pan if you've not seen it. And then, if you haven't seen it either, make it a double-feature with Finding Neverland, the story of J.M. Barrie, the playwright who wrote Peter Pan, and his inspirations for the same. You'll probably dial through the entire range of emotions by watching both movies back to back, so I recommend that you not operate heavy machinery directly afterwards.

How MP3 came into being.

I find it wild that the primary inventor's name is Brandenburg. The wiki doesn't mention if he's related or not.

I just get off on trivia like:
- The a cappella version of "Tom's Diner" by Suzanne Vega was the Everest of digital music compression. To invoke Alanis Morissette's version of irony, it amuses me that Vega, who has as limited a vocal range as Lou Reed, is the creator of a song that chokes digital compressors. (Though come to think of it, most of Reed's work after Warhol's band was also dynamically rich. A theme, perhaps?)
- Supposedly Beethoven's 9th Symphony was instrumental (koff) in determining the length of CDs.

If you, too, love trivia of accidental discoveries and seemingly unrelated ephemera that coalesce into a greater whole, check out A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. It's nirvana for that sort of thing.

Cheese-eating Jail Monkeys

France outlaws the filming of violence by anyone other than a journalist. Via Slashdot.

So, basically, the folks who happen to film a crime will most likely be doing time right alongside of the people who perpetrated it. That'll make for some interesting jailhouse rock, donchathink?

And since when did we lend out Dick Cheney for consulting to other countries?

This kinda reminds me of some of the brain-deadedness of our (USA's) drug war where we spend so much time throwing potheads in jail for life that we sometimes don't have time to get around to murderers and rapists.

Garrison Keillor on parents hiring pros to do dioramas for their kids.

This is all too true. I've seen the very same thing in my eldest daughter's class. Some kids haul in museum-worthy dioramas, lacking only the glass viewing case. It's a hoot.

Recent Media Consumption - 03/06/207

Read Exile on Main St.: A Season in Hell with the Rolling Stones by Robert Greenfield, and what a freakin' waste of time. Only the third section called "Aftermath" has anything worthwhile, even though in the first or second paragraph Greenfield sniffs that anyone expecting an examination of the actual music on the album itself needs to look elsewhere to "lesser" music writing. Christ, what a prig. So, if you're a fan, read the first few pages of the last section while standing in the book store.

Finally saw Little Miss Sunshine and to be honest was expecting it to be a slog. I mean if you have a drug-addict grandpa, the obligatory gay character, and square boorish dad trying to make it in the world in a can-do indie film, it doesn't bode well. But this little sucker was kinda funny. And for once it made the gay character a person and not a cipher. MILD SPOILER: I was shocked that the ending was directly lifted from the much better About a Boy, and not once review I read mentioned that.

We tried to watch Man of the Year with Robin Williams, but none of us could summon the interest to continue after the first 15 minutes.

I watched Miami Vice by myself because I'd read a lot of "on second thought this is a decent film" kinda recommendations. I was not really impressed. It had the tone of the TV show, except it was darker (and no I'm not talking about the pastel clothes in the original), and of course has more splashy violence and sex. Meh. The show was still better. The romance was completely unbelievable.

A friend lent me a copy of an old Boz Scaggs album that's out of print called "Dig", and I kinda wondered why. It wasn't necessarily something that represented his tastes, and Boz Scaggs? Yeah, I love "Lido Shuffle" and think the guitar solo on "Breakdown Dead Ahead" is still one of the best ever. I was just kinda stumped until I gave it a listen. Every song on it is at least good. If you were or are a fan, this is one of those that got away, so give it a listen.

All the good Electric Light Orchestra albums are now remastered. Thank you, cosmos. (A New World Record, Time, Face the Music, and Out of the Blue) Yes, they sound great.

Finally, I am a total an unrepentant slut when it comes to good bubblegum powerpop (think "Mickey" by Toni Basil and "Trouble" by Pink), and holy cow has Avril Lavigne concocted an irresistible nugget of fun. Check it out: "Girlfriend"

Over There

Linking to a post on a blog that gets more traffic in a day than I do in a year often feels like the flea trying to draw attention to the dog, but just in case you don't read her regularly, Dooce has a post up about the six year anniversary of her web site.

She asks in comments what regrets people have or not. I've been enjoying them and will probably collect a few to share with my daughters as they grow up.

Enjoy.

Warning, though, there's a lot of heartbreak. A few comments stopped me cold and just made me want to make it all OK for them, if only I could.

You've probably heard this one...

This is making the rounds on email right now...

Three women, two younger, and one senior citizen, were sitting naked in a sauna.

Suddenly there was a beeping sound. The young woman pressed her forearm and the beep stopped. The others looked at her questioningly. "That was my pager," she said. "I have a microchip under the skin of my arm."

A few minutes later, a phone rang. The second young woman lifted her palm to her ear. When she finished, she explained, "That was my mobile phone. I have a microchip in my hand."

The older woman felt very low tech. Not to be out done, she decided she had to do something just as impressive. She stepped out of the sauna and went to the bathroom.

She returned with a piece of toilet paper hanging from her rear end.

The others raised their eyebrows and stared at her.

The older woman finally said, "Well, will you look at that... I'm getting a fax!!"

I'm really too old for this shite

But dammit if it doesn't make me go all fanboy and make me want to start an obsessive blog about every freakin' leaked detail until the actual flick comes out and then dog it for about a year after that until the DVD comes out, and then snark about the extras and the commentaries.

Thankfully the feeling quickly passes because I just don't have that kind of time.

If you haven't followed the link above and wonder what I'm on about, there is going to be a new Star Trek movie released in summer 2008.

I'm kinda impressed with the supposed casting thus far.

Matt Damon is Captain Kirk


Adrien Brody is Mr. Spock


Gary Sinise is Dr. McCoy


Keeping with the Kevin Smith theme of today's posts, I'd always thought the supposed debate about which sci-fi franchise was better, Trek or Star Wars, was a bit silly. (I like them both, though I do favor Star Trek.) But, more often than not, I'm surprised when someone spontaneously weighs in on the topic.

I was out to dinner with a buddy who's decidedly not a geek - he's kind of a CEO type, even - and when a discussion on The Departed shook loose the Damon casting factoid he goes, "That should be interesting. Y'know, Star Trek has always been better than Star Wars. I mean, Star Trek has great, lasting stories and Star Wars is just a western in space."

I can just hear it now. Who was the better Kirk? Damon or Shatner.

Silent Bob

The lore is either you're a Kevin Smith fan or you ain't. I is.

I think he's probably the best go-to guy for dialogue who's actually in some inner circles in Hollywood. I would love to know all the films he's been a script doctor on.

His books and lectures are as entertaining as his movies - and I would suspect they would have a wider audience than his movies because he's so damn funny.

The first An Evening with Kevin Smith had me laughing longer and harder than most comedies do. Highlights are the time he was hired by Prince to do a music video and suggests to his purple diminutiveness that perhaps he should get some tennis shows if the high heels are killing his knees so much, and the first time he had sex with his now wife.

Smith makes no bones about being a rabid fanboy himself and it's - well, it's just cute when he gets all gushy. Frinstance, he has a cameo in the upcoming Die Hard 4.0, and on his blog he waxes all spazzed out with joy about the fact.

I just finished reading Silent Bob Speaks, which is a compilation of articles he's done for various web mags, and dug it too. I just love the way he evokes a moment. When he was still the new kid in town and he was holding auditions for one of his films, one of the big stars he's a big fan of praises his work, and Smith is "a tickled Japanese schoolgirl in that moment." That still makes me chuckle.

One of the more interesting themes of the book is the apologetics for Ben Affleck. Myself, I've always enjoyed the guy and thought all the Bennifer nonsense was just a shame. What an odd society we live in if you can be mocked and harshed on for merely being in a love with a girl. Imagine if the whole world laughed at you because of your relationship. Bizarre, to say the least.

What I didn't know about Affleck was that he's as intelligent as he is humble. Yes, for honest and true. There's a lot of supporting quotage in the book, so I'm convinced.

Here's one of my fave Affleck quotes on Smith's suggestion he be a studio head

I don't know if I'd want to throw my name in the hat for a studio head job, because as they exist now, unfortunately, studio heads have been pushed down the chain of command, due to these corporate hierarchies based on acquisitions. I don't know that I would like to have the responsibilities of having to report upward, of having to explain to a company that makes something else entirely, other than movies, why this is a good project or that's a good project. The film business has gotten so vertically integrated, and the process of trying to translate creative instincts into pie charts and projected earnings is something I don't think anybody has fun with. [...] The problem with this business is that there's a lot of pseudoscience to it, but the ugly truth is that, to paraphrase William Goldman, nobody knows anything.

BAM baby!

Maybe it's too late to recuse myself in this post, but I have to admit, too, that Daredevil is one of my favorite comic book superhero flicks because it was gritty and funny all at the same time, and I thought the angst that someone might have over being a superhero was portrayed better than I've seen thus far. I also love the fact that he's Catholic. Faith is almost never dealt with intelligently or with any subtlety any more, so I found that refreshing, too.

I also think Jersey Girl is one of Smith's best films. It got torpedoed over the whole Bennifer thing, methinks. Anyone who's a regular here, give it a shot if you haven't. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Sulu's in a dress, and creator of The Terminator has found Jesus' coffin.

But the end is not nigh just yet, methinks.

---

Well, my Oscar predictions were way off. I got only three, and one of those was for makeup. I'm not floating this as an excuse for my poor performance, but I didn't see any of the films nominated (except "Cars").

Looking through the list, I will probably eventually hunt down only four: The Queen, Children of Men, Dreamgirls, and The Departed. And to be honest, I will begin all of those with a heavy heart, because none of them are what you'd call uplifting.

Before the broadcast one of the talking heads said that only 9% of Americans polled had seen all 5 top picture nominees, and that only 30% had seen ANY of them. I can see why. They're a pretty drab bunch. I've heard even Happy Feet, the winner for animated feature, gets scary and downbeat.

As we lay in bed last night, I opined to my lovely wife that what's happened with the Oscars resembles a trend I saw in rock and roll. For years rock critics lambasted the stuff that was popular and on the radio. When the govt. allowed monopolies to form in radio, and the music industry became controlled by 4 megalithic corporations, the input loop from the public was severed, and we got nothing but Britney-esque bubble gun, gansta rap, and the latest critical faves, like Lucinda Williams. Pardon me whilst I stifle a yawn. For yeas, critics have said "how come the Oscars® only reward the commercial films and not the good ones?" Well, Mr. Howard the Duck, here's the world you wanted. Enjoy.

I guess I should've known it was gonna be grim when I spotted George Takei (Sulu) in a floor-length wool skirt (read "not a kilt"). Dear God. I really think silk would've been more appropriate.

Cintra Wilson's annual report is here. My favorite quote; "Hollywood successfully Photoshopped Al Gore's foot into George W.'s ass."


Let's leave this topic with two of my wife's best bon mots:

"How many muppets had to be sacrificed for Penélope Cruz's skirt?"

"What's the theme of having Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio as presenters? 'Ships that shouldn't have sunk'?"

---

I think I've finally heard the best approach to the whole gay marriage thing (and polygamy, etc.), finally, proffered by a man I've been a quiet fan of for a long time now, Dave Trowbridge. In his words:

It would be best, IMO, if the state had nothing to do with defining marriage, and confined itself to the enforcement of whatever contract the consenting parties entered into. That would leave faith communities entirely free to define marriage in accordance with their beliefs.

Me, being thick as usual asked, "But what about secular marriage?"

Dave again:

In one sense, given my proposal, all marriages would be secular, but only some would be recognized by a religious body. Quakers would recognize more than Roman Catholics, for instance.

And yes, the state would have to allow any kind of marriage between consenting adults--that's the point of treating it as a contract. A plus here for people worried about extreme weirdness is that since one cannot enter into a contract with an animal or a child, those forms of marriage would be ruled out ipso facto.

I do not agree that "as a society we can disagree with some forms of marriage..." No, as individuals. Don't confuse society and the state: they're not the same thing, and when we confuse them we cause endless trouble.

---

James Cameron says he's gonna reveal what he says are the coffins of Jesus, his wife, and their child.

See, the crypts found 27 years ago in Jerusalem were marked "Jesua, son of Joseph, Mary, Mary, Mathew, Jofa and Judah, son of Jesua" - all common names from the time.

So of course, it has to be THAT Jesus. They even did DNA tests.

Ooo, and what do those DNA tests prove? That the folks buried as a family together were - get this - related to one another! Shock! Shock! Horror Horror! Shock! Shock! Horror!

I find it interesting that some folks are so intent on trying to "disprove" Christianity. I actually welcome challenges to it, because if it's BS, I want to know. But they need to be legitimate challenges, not smoke and mirrors.

---

Still, if you want to have the hell scared out of you, read this.

Girl Cooties

Cintra brings us the news that women's desks are skankier than men's, according to the company who makes Clorox (and I doubt I need to connect those dots even for those of you in the cheap seats). Well babies, don't you panic. Most guys prefer your natural thang over a cloud of Clorox, Pine Sol, or Lysol.

Also, Cintra's gonna be doing her yearly magic with the Oscar® broadcast, so look for the results on Salon the next day. She's put out a call for bon mots and such, so help the lady out if you can.

This is pretty funny

Warning: F-bombs galore. But this is what it would be like if....



Stabbing at Leia's 22nd Birthday

Conviviality

Saw Altman's last film Prairie Home Companion last weekend and enjoyed it immensely.

I started watching it while the Yahmdallah clan was out and about (delivering Girl Scout cookies I believe), assuming they would not be interested. But after they filed back in, everyone was glued - even the 2 year old, during the songs.

Garrison Keillor should've gotten an Oscar nod for the script, I think. Meryl, of course, NAILS the Midwestern accent, hitting that sweet spot between the slightly-over-the-topness of Fargo and too little to tell.

But, to my surprise, I thought Keillor did one of the best jobs of acting in the whole flick. If he didn't look like a Boston Terrier on stilts (he's a tall son of a gun), he'd prolly have a career as a character actor. (Please don't consider that a slam on Garrison's looks, as I think he's amongst what I call the "Beautiful Fugly" - someone who's so interesting looking that they rise above standard beauty.)

I've mostly stopped buying DVDs of movies for myself because I already have the ones I'll watch again, but I might have to pick this one up. I think I might be visiting Lake Wobegon a few more times.

Our favorite scene was his reaction when he thinks death has come to claim him. His soliloquy on the character of the Swedish and Norwegian descendants in the Midwest, which includes the truism, "We are a dark people: people who believe it could be worse, and are waiting for it to be worse," is also a highlight. My wife shot a knowing glance at me whilst she giggled about that one.

But, we know this about ourselves and so strive to be cheerful. Keillor, again, coins this particular Midwestern trait in one of his recent articles for Salon:

February is the season of small sorrows when everyone feels middle-aged even if you are 16, but there are cures for this. One is skating and another is the convivial lunch. You meet three friends at the Chat 'N' Chew and order soup and a sandwich and you yak and yak and nobody tries to sell you aluminum siding and nobody unloads his sorrows or displays his trophies and nobody harangues you about politics. You tell stories. If things drift toward the ponderous or the maudlin, somebody tosses in a joke. If somebody launches into a lecture, you stuff a rag in him and get back to that beautiful contrapuntal conversation that is possible with friends. They are the people with whom you can be at your best, playful, extravagant, sarcastic, self-disparaging, semi-brilliant and ever buoyant.

Conviviality is no small achievement. Back when I was young, most major American writers seemed to be alcoholic or suicidal or both, and we students absorbed the notion that the true sign of brilliance is to be seriously screwed up. The true poet is haunted by livid demons, brave, doomed, terribly wounded, and if one was (as I was) relatively unscratched, you concealed this and tried to impersonate doom.

The prime minister of high culture was T.S. Eliot, who suffered from a lousy marriage and hated his job and so wrote "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," a small, dark mopefest of a poem in which old Pru worries about whether to eat a peach or roll up his trousers. This poem pretty much killed off the pleasure of poetry for millions of people who got dragged through it in high school. The first line of "Prufrock," as you may recall, was "S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse" -- he opened with six lines of a language 99 percent of his readers do not understand! How better to identify yourself as a serious poet than to be incomprehensible?

So the best minds of my generation skipped poetry and became historians or went into business or took up farming. Who would make a career out of pretending to be crippled? And they sensed that, in the poetry biz, there is not much conviviality. (They were right.)

Heh. Too true.

I, too, loathed, loathe, and will continue to loathe the poetry of T.S. Eliot, all the way down to the copious footnotes that let you in on all the tepid literary in-jokes Eliot slathered onto his pustulant verses. Every time I had to wade through one of his wastelands during my Lit. degree, it conjured up images of that time I'd mistakenly put a tupperware of leftover Campbell's soup in the cupboard rather than the fridge; when I retrieved it for use a week later, the weight clued me into the fact it was already occupied. Stupid me held the thing right in front of my face and slightly below it as I opened it (chemistry majors will be smirking at my obvious blunder). A small sphincter lazily gawped open on the golf-ball sized bubble that had formed in the mottled gray scum, releasing the very stench of hell and a bag of moldy chips itself. I damn near passed out and barely got the abomination set on the counter before my fight-or-flight response reflexively swept me from the room. I think I actually peeked around the corner of the doorway before I went back to throw it away, as if it might've grown gray furry legs and pursued me.

T.S. Eliot is also directly to blame for Cats, too. One can only hope that Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche have been given the job in hell to ceaselessly perform Cats in the nude accompanied via MIDI versions of the songs for Eliot as he's forced to footnote the oeuvre of Susan Polis Schutz.

See what I mean about being a dark people?

Blogger knows my mantra!

In Blogger you have to enter a "Word Verification" code comprised of squiggled-up letters to post any entry. The theory is this stops spammers because the letters aren't machine readable.

Well, interestingly (to me, anyway), the one I had to enter to post this post was my old Transcendental Meditation mantra.

It was weird to see it crop up there, but, ah, the memories.

I discovered TM when I was about 13/14. I'd read that people who did TM could levitate. On top of that, the Beatles had done it.

Wow, what more could a teenage boy want than to be all serene and hip while levitating with the Beatles? The chicks would dig it! (Though I doubted the levitation part.)

Well, I knew enough about religions back then to be cautious about cults and pickpockets (not that that saved me from my Mormon experience later), and so sought out my Pastor to see if he thought there'd be any problem with TM. He looked into it and told me it seemed Ok, but told me to look out for ritualistic stuff like placing things on an alter, or what have you.

We had one instructor in my little home town and so I paid her a visit at her trailer. She seemed a little surprised that a freshly teenage boy was at her door, but told me I'd have to get my mom to fill out a parental consent form, pay the fee, and then bring a white handkerchief, a flower and an orange (or other fruit) to my first lesson. I thought that was odd, but surmised maybe she was poor and this was how she padded the nest.

She was a plain hippy chick in her mid-twenties with a slight acne problem and a complexion so monochromatic that the difference in the pale pink shade of her lips compared to the pale blue of her eyes wouldn't be that far apart on the Pantone scale. She favored home-knit sweaters made from earth-toned multi-color yarn (through which you could see her bra), jeans that had rhinestones or embroidery, and bare feet. She also avoided hygiene products, apparently. To this day, the particular florid sour smell she exuded, even over the incense she used, comes back to me. Her voice was quiet, airy, and strangely singsongy, which was vaguely creepy during the lessons, a lot of which are done with your eyes closed.

So, there I sat, nervously eyeing the quasi-alter that held a picture of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi grinning from a recent bong hit, some burning incense cones, and my orange, flower, and hanky; wafting in her milk-on-the-edge-of-turning odor mixed with pungent Jasmine blueberry something smoke. I immediately just had to ask if we were offering my objects up on an alter to the Maharishi, because, uh, I wasn't supposed to make offerings to other deities and stuff. She said not to worry, that it's not an offering, that Maharishi was still alive and most defiantly not a deity, and that is was just a ritual of thanks meant to symbolize my commitment to the practice of TM - as was the nominal fee. They had the view that if you brough a gift and parted with a little cash, that would indicate you weren't a dilettante (and fund the group, of course).

Let me digress from the narrative here and point out that these lessons were accompanied by the constant electrical power line hum of sexual tension. At the time I just wrote it off to my being your average teenage horndog with a rich fantasy life that had to be kept in check and strictly to myself - and hidden behind those thankfully large science texts we carted around at school. However, I now realize for something to be sustained and pervasive as that was, (cue the Motown song) it takes two, babeh. I could tell she was a lonely soul, too (for probably the myriad reasons I've given). But, hell, I hadn't even kissed a girl yet, and had I even arrived at the idea of making a pass, I would've had no idea on how to do it. In retrospect, though, I bet had I been careless enough to get within two feet of her and met her eye, she would've taken care of the rest. If you think this is preposterous, think of all the recent cases where a female school teacher has given some teenage boy a lesson or two they'll never forget.

The first lesson was your basic "how to," but in the second lesson I was to receive - pause for effect - my MANTRA. When the moment arrived, I was given a mantra that was chosen specifically for me, she said, based on what she the instructor had intuited about me thus far.

She handed it to me ceremoniously. It was a single two-syllable word, phonetically close to the name of a type of large flightless bird native to Australia, written in pencil on the corner torn from a larger piece of paper. More than a little anticlimactic, you could say. I mean, for the money I'd paid and the ceremony around, you'd think she'd pop for a whole piece of paper.

So she had me TM a bit. You sit with your back straight, legs crossed, eyes closed, hands relaxed in your lap in a quiet room, and repeat the mantra over and over in your head. You're supposed to feel refreshed, relaxed, and sharper afterwards. I usually felt like I did after a math test, vaguely dizzy with a desire for some fresh air.

I was also slightly relieved that I hadn't gotten a boner. Teenage boys get them at so little provocation that I was always somewhat amazed the slightly altered state brought about by TM didn't disturb the little monster from one of its brief slumber, as a good night's sleep always seems to do.

Anyway, she said as I got better at it, it would feel more like it was supposed to feel. After a few more lessons where she "checked" that I doing things incorrectly, I was on my own. My first near-miss at an older woman tryst had passed.

I TM'd for a year (much to the bemusement of my mom when I'd request quiet so I could meditate), got none of the benefits they claim it gives you, and even somewhat regularly got a light headache for my efforts. So I abandoned it like the rock you kick for a couple blocks during a walk, and instead use the time regained to read.

I think I go into a better meditative state when I'm reading a book than when I sit there and think the name of a bird over and over.

For the record, film director David Lynch is a vocal and financial advocate of TM. Though given the kinds of surrealistic, nightmarish films (which I like, btw) that sprout from his meditation enhanced noggin, I'm not sure that's a ringing endorsement.

The Journey and the Destination

Nick Tosches, a Vanity Fair contributing editor, hunts down the origin of the "Autumn" wallpaper that comes with Microsoft Windows. The difficulty he had is a fun ride.

This part especially hit home:

What I see are the green hills, blue sky, and stratocumulus and cirrus clouds of the Napa County bitmap landscape called Bliss, the Microsoft Windows XP default desktop wallpaper. It looks like an invitation to suicide on a Sunday afternoon.

I couldn't agree more. But, actually, it's worse.

It looks just like the freakin' "Telebubbies" hill:

© Microsoft Corp.

I couldn't find a screenshot of the opening sequence that shows the "Teletubbies" hill that looks exactly like the one above, but this'll give you the idea:


If the only exposure you've had to the "Teletubbies" is the Falwell dustup over the supposed gay teletubby (so accused because of the triangular-shaped antenna on his/her/its head - a clothes hanger, for those of you in the cheap seats - and the propensity to carry a purse), then consider yourself fortunate.

Btw, the reason they have antennas on their heads is because they have freakin' TVs embedded in their stomachs which spring to life when a pinwheel on the hill spins and kicks out alarming sparks. When this happens the teletubbies freeze, and sometimes drop to the ground (in paralyzing pain one imagines), while a video plays on these tummy TVs.

Creepier than that, the teletubbies are told what to do by speakers that rise from the ground on telescopes and announce in a female robotic voice when to eat, sleep, and so on. This so resembles elements of that other British import that explores paranoia and terrors that spring forth to do the bidding of hidden big-brother types, "The Prisoner," that I sometimes wonder if the same creative team was behind both.

Creepiest of all, though, is the baby who lives in the sun and giggles all day over the cavorting of the Teletubbies. Even my eldest, when she was all of three, pronounced the sun baby as "creepy." We only watched a few episodes before we decided that "The Simpsons" offered a better quality of programming - at least until the show where Marge cuts off Homer's finger accidentally and we see it lying there in the brownies; my poor daughter went as white as a sheet and had a rough week of nightmares.

So, when I see new installs of Windows displaying this, I waltz over and say that their refresh rate on their monitor isn't high enough (which is usually true*), and then while I'm at it, suggest better wallpaper, which they usually take me up on.

Btw, here's a great place to get some sweet wallpaper: Digitalblasphemy. This guy was able to quit his day job and live off the proceeds from the art he makes for this site. Flickr is another great place to find wallpaper. This page lets you randomly walk through images until you find one you like.


*The way you can tell your refresh is too low, which can cause headaches and fatigue because your brain is this ----> <---- close to being able to detect the screen redraws, is if you look away from the monitor, say at something about a foot to the left or right of it, you will actually be able to see flicker. If you're refresh is high enough, it'll look solid. To turn up your refresh rate in Windows, right-click on the desktop, pick properties, pick the settings tab, pick advanced, and pick the monitor tab; use the dropdown to set it to the highest available refresh rate.

Luckily, at my library the librarian just smiles at you when you burst out laughing.

Readers and Oprah fans are all familiar with this:

So not much more needs to be said about it, 'cept I hope Frey doesn't go into a drug-fueled death-spiral from the humiliation.

Today, at the library, I saw this and thought it was brilliant.


Now, these guys beat the one above to the punch by coming out a year earlier, but I think Kun's cover above is funnier; the eraser just sends it over the top.

I can't leave this one alone.

Paula Abdul says every rumor about her drunken behavior has been wrong: "I've never been drunk. I have never done recreational drugs," she tells Us Weekly. "Just look at my 20-year career. Tell me someone who is into partying or doing drugs that could have done that."

Uh, Keith Richards?

Good article:
Neoconservatives hate liberty as much as they love war

Best All-purpose Image Editor I've Found

I've used Photoshop (still the Mercedes Benz of image editors if you afford it), the GIMP (another good one, but hard to learn), various thumbnail viewers, and the freebies that come with various OS's, but this is the best all-purpose, intuitive image editor I've ever found: PhotoFiltre.

AND IT'S TOTALLY FREE!
(Though Windows only. Sorry.)

Cintra Wilson has a blog!

SFW? You might ask.

Well, Cookie, she just happens to be one of the greatest humorists regularly hitting a keyboard these days, that's why.

Every article she's done for Salon is a classic, but her submissions aren't regular enough.

But now she has a blog!

I'll just shut the hell up so you can go there.

Joan Spits

Whisky Prajer has a post up about delving into the history of rock and roll, which spurred some memories of my similar voyage. Consider this a companion piece.

Unlike Whisky, I had full access to the media at the time and from the purchase of my first record (a Donny Osmond hits package, and hey my heart was in the right place; I bought it because it was the-girl-I-had-a-crush-on's favorite song, "Sweet and Innocent" - all rock and roll is essentially about girls (or boys), beer, and fun), I was hooked and immediately built up a collection that was the envy of all. Well, not really, because I've always had eclectic tastes; you'd find Neil Diamond next to Sweet ("Ballroom Blitz") next to the Commodores. The mix of styles has almost always gotten me in dutch with roommates. My collection wasn't alphabetized either, until my girlfriend at the time had too much time on her hands one day and did it for me. I've always had a killer visual memory, and just remembered where everything was by the look of the backs of the albums - it was sort of a holistic filing system if you will.

A young, avid collector needs a guide, and mine was the "Harmony Illustrated Encyclopedia Of Rock," which featured the awesome "Rock Family Trees" by obsessive-compulsive-who-found-a-lucrative-outlet Pete Frame. Here's the one he did on Poco and the Eagles. (Click various sections to get a closer view.) Wild, no?

TLD: Back before blogs were a glimmer in the internet's cold, redundant eye, I put together a vanity web page live every other piker out there with a web connection (usually at work). The idea then was to have an informative page with links to anything anyone would want since at the beginning the web was kinda devoid of useful and authoritative content.

One of the other fads was having a "wow" start page, with the intent to get someone to just freakin' click on a link no matter how that was accomplished, because we were counting our page visits donchaknow. Here is the one I had. Trees floating in space. I was going more for a Yes album cover type-thingy, but my limited artistic skills were only able to produce this. The trailing cursor thing was big fad, too (you only see it in MSIE, btw).

Anyway, in the spirit of creating a guide to music, I created this list, which still holds its own, imnsho. (Gosh, I even mention having rock stations programmed on your radio, how quaint, those were the days.) So, if you want a run-down of the basic collection that rockers should (and probably already do) have, this is it. I haven't updated it in a while (like, years), and if I did, I'd add the last three albums of the Flaming Lips, and that's about it. When CDs first caught on, my granfalloon of the time would joke that the CDs in the very first listing should just come with the CD player since everyone buys them anyway.

That list just fills me with weltschmerz, so let me hurry right along to the second topic of this post: live concerts.

Save for little, unknown tiny teahouse or pub performances which basically get their magic from their intimacy, about the only live music act I want to see anymore is The Flaming Lips, because they're supposed to put on a hell of a show, and last year it was the only concert in Denver that sold out moments after tickets went on sale (yet they just don't get on the radio).

Still, I have some very fond memories of some live shows I've seen. Here they are, in order of awesomeness.

Elvis Costello - this was during his identity crisis phase where he changed his name back to his given name, Declan MacManus, and was touring to support the excellent King of America. He strutted out on stage and tore into a vicious set I've yet to seen rivaled in all my days. The musicians did something I'd never seen before (or since); they were all able to play many instruments, and about every other song they'd all change instruments, where the drummer would go pick up a tuba, the keyboard player would sit behind the drums, and so on. It was jaw-dropping. The songs all walked that perfect edge of sounding enough like the record version, but adding enough improv of interest for the live rendering. Sadly, the venue was only 1/3 full - they even let us general admission folks come down and sit in the reserved seating - and it seemed to piss Elvis off. The show was still spectacular, like the one he'd put on for a full house, but at the end of the last song he just turned on his heel and stalked of the stage, and was gone. Yes, Elvis had left the building. I saw him a couple years ago, and he's still that good. He did a couple encores that time, but then the audience earned it.

Joan Jett - best straight-ahead, no-frills rock show I've witnessed. The stage configuration was brilliant, too. When most bands play indoor arenas, they place the stage at one end of the oval, blocking only the small portion of seats on that end. Joan had them set up in the middle of one of the long sides so the whole opposite side all had killer seats. She hit the stage with the Blackhearts and rocked our asses off. At one point, some arsehole in the front pissed her off and she ran over between verses, yelled something at him, horked up a big loogie and spit on him, then got back to the mic in time. It was a magical.

Lyle Lovett - with his very large band. Bass legend Leland Sklar was on the tour with him, so that was an extra treat. The show began unexpectedly with one of his background singers (though that label hardly fits what they actually do in a Lovett show) who was standing in the audience one row down and to my immediate left (I could've handed her my beer she was that close) just pulling a mic from nowhere and breaking into song. Lovett's music is this amazing blend of country, standards, big-band and boogie. His voice thoroughly compensates for that hair (which suits him actually), and he's getting better looking with age. Two separate times he brought a song down to a whisper, and both times there was not a single freakin' peep, cough, whistle or belch from the audience. The effect was stunning. It's one of the few shows that have moved me to tears during a song.

Al Stewart - Mr. Year of the Cat himself once played a double-bill at the local county fair in Minnesota. The other guy was Steve Earl ("Guitar Town"). He had a crack band, and sounded just like he should. The only distraction is that Stewart is so effeminate that your nelliest gay guy would feel compelled to tell him to cowboy up a bit. I secretly wondered at the time if the theme of the double-bill was the extreme ends of the masculinity bell curve (more likely it was "who will do the gig for what we're paying"). The best part of the show was his signature song "Year of the Cat." The sax player had left the stage for a few songs and was nowhere in sight when "Cat" began. They played and played (it's a long song) taking it right up to the moment where that great sax solo hits - still no sax guy - but right on cue the solo started and he came roostering up the back stairs of the stage and planted his boots on the edge of the stage for the whole solo. It was glorious.

Steve Miller - another guy who sounds like he should on stage. A couple times the audience literally sang along so loud, it threw him off. He's a good sport, so the first time he just laughed, refound his place and turned it up. The next time he politely requested that we not deafen him. At the end of the show, he brought out his opener, guitar god Eric Johnson and they had a guitar war. Since Steve's songs are deceptively simple, you wouldn't normally detect the guitar chops behind them. When he and Johnson traded riffs, Miller ran such circles around Johnson that he threw his hands up ("I got nothin'"), laughing, did the "I bow to your talent" gesture, and just left the stage. Steve is a renowned nice guy, and so brought him back and they closed the show together.

April Wine - they opened for Foreigner (whose only memorable moment was when Lou Gramm the lead singer fell over in mid song and dropped the mic because he was so stoned) and stole the show. They were your quintessential 70s band that had chops out the waz and enough tasty tunes of their own to have made a small dent in musical history. The bassist was amazing, and I caught his eye and gave the thumbs up and he flicked his pick to me.

Kansas - another band that could deliver the goods live. Steve Walsh, the lead singer, has an amazing stage presence, and he spends the whole time doing this dance that would wear Mick Jagger out. As musicians I bet they were unrivaled at the time. The song "Dust in the Wind" began as an invention of the guitarist, Kerry Livgren, originally as just a finger warm-up for shows, but Walsh upon hearing it loved it and put lyrics to it. During the show, their virtuoso violinist Robby Steinhardt, who looked like a giant Capn. Ahab with a massive dome of hair, set down his instrument for a song, and apparently was the one elected to bang on the anvil for the center hook/effect for one song. It was hilarious seeing someone so talented being used to only hammer an anvil.

Jimmy Buffet - all his shows are good, but of the ones I've seen, the very first one is the one I remember the most fondly. Someone had brought a huge (say 20 feet long) inflatable shark and threw it up on the stage for the appropriate song (and if you don't know, you are not Parrothead, sir). The roadies immediately dashed out and snagged it, causing a small smattering of boos. Well, these are Jimmy's roadies, and within moments they had rigged it with a pull chord so they could pull it back and forth across the stage during the song. The audience lost it. Since this was Minnesota, the beers were being served in these special collectors mugs that were plastic (quite the bargain and safe for public events). You could interlock them like leggos by stuffing the bottom onto the top of another glass. As the show progressed, folks started holding up huge towers of these things all over the audience until, in a phenomenal instance of synchronicity, they all toppled over, ends landing close to other fallen tower's ends. Folks immediately linked those ends forming an impossibly large circular snake that started getting passed over the audience like a crowd surfer. Buffet broke up laughing at one point, during a song no less, and said, "You should see what that looks like from up here."

I've seen biggies like the Eagles, Pink Floyd, U2, and Bob Dylan, not to mention personal uber-faves like Dwight Yoakam, but the list above still did the best live shows.

I totally predicted this!

Back when high-impact aerobics and other forms of exercise were huge, I kept telling those who had the misfortune to be around me that all those folks are gonna be hurtin' when they got into their 50s.

I was right.

Bite me.

Oh, for crying out loud. There's a controversy around one of the superbowl 'leventy-one ads this year. From what I've read, two guys are chawing on a Snickers bar, Lady and the Tramp style, and when they finally lock lips, they do manly man things to recover from the moment.

This has been labeled as homophobic by some gay groups, and so the commercials (there were several versions, I guess) have been taken off the official sites. Jeez.

Let me point out the obvious: if you're not gay, kissing someone of the same sex on the mouth is gross (in most Western cultures anyway). This is not homophobia, this is preference.

Following the logic of the offended groups, we shouldn't cringe when Bill Murray bites into the candy bar found in the pool in Caddyshack, because that's discriminatory or phobic against people who ... let's not complete that thought - you get my point. (And if there are any freaks like that reading this, please do not chime in with any details in the comments. Please. Keep to yourself.)

The real rub is essentially a group that's dedicated to communicating the fact that allowing people to live according to their preferences (as they should, with the caveat of consenting adults only) is only fair, this same group wants people who don't enjoy same-sex contact to feel bad about that, and deny and suppress their preferences. Short version: It's ok to be gay, but it's not ok to be straight.

Let's imagine the commercial from another perspective. A guy and a gal are working down the candy bar, and - surprise - they lock lips. They lunge backwards in shock. She's got a shirt with a pink triangle, he's got on a "queer eye for the straight guy" tshirt (thus we've been telegraphed their preferences). They both go "eeeewwww!" Commercial ends. Cut to homes across America. Are hertero activists (let's just pretend there are some) lighting up switchboards saying it's heterophobic that they didn't like the kiss?

In the comments on digg linked to above, there's a lot of "I'm gay and I liked it." Well, duh. I'd love to post "Hey, I'm straight, and I didn't like it," but the howling that would ensue just ain't worth the pain for me. (And perhaps someone has since I've read the thread.)

Well, let's stop the pounding on that one as the people in China are asleep.

---

Why can we not discuss issues around the topic of being gay reasonably in this country?

I tried recently on 2blowhards to propose that the recent debates about gay marriage should really be a debate about marriage as a larger topic, but no one would bite. (Most typical response: that's silly/a red herring/etc.) I think it's because the "logic" used as the "pro" arguments for gay marriage tend to fall apart quickly when you try to apply them to other types of marriage not allowed in American. A lot of the "con" arguments are flawed, too, for the record.

I've let the debate go over there because I don't feel it's correct to hijack someone else's blog and bandwidth to debate a topic of your own. (Well, if the blog owners agreed with you, but I know suspect that all the blowhards have a different take on it than I do.)

Let me excerpt myself:

The fact of the matter is that debate about what marriage is and isn't implicitly includes any and all states thereof, even though currently people try to keep the debate focused on gay marriage.

Jon Krakauer explores polygamy in his great book "Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith." Before reading that book, I had kind of a free-floating dislike of polygamy because it seemed to be seedy, mostly about power, and it seemed most societies had wisely left it behind. But he points out in white hot brilliant detail how depraved it is and why we should never allow it as a society. Now, if we allow gay marriage (something no society in written history has done before our age), how can we deny the polygamists? Could we?

Also, another hidden form of sexual expression is incest - brother/sister, parent/child, first cousin/first cousin. If we restrict it to the world of consenting adults, then why can't incest relationships also have the "benefit" of marriage? If they would get themselves sterilized so they can't have deformed children, how can we deny their "special kind of love," either?

The larger debate is and should be, what is marriage, and what is not marriage?

OK. This is my blog. C'mon, someone give me a good argument how these other types of marriage are radically different from what's being proposed regarding gay marriage.

Keep in mind that historically all these forms of marriage were allowed and gay marriage has never existed in a society in written history. I find that interesting.

Does that mean gay marriage will be accepted, but then eventually abandoned as a failed social experiment?

Also, I'm pretty sure that if gay marriage is ever allowed in America, the very next thing will be polygamists saying, "How about us?"

What are the other angles of this? Anyone?