A Microcosm Of Modern America In The Wendy’s Line
Posted on | January 30, 2010 at 11:44 pm | 2 Comments
Conversation overheard today at Wendy’s between two guys standing next to me in line (verbatim):
Guy 1: “Are you an actor?”
Guy 2: “Huh? No.”
Guy 1: “Because you look like that Snoop Dogg dude.”
Guy 2: [Who, actually, did not look to me like Snopp Dogg: Silence, shakes head slightly]
Guy 1: “He’s got a good act, that Snopp Dogg. Doesn’t he have a good act?”
Guy 2: [More silence, then:] “How tall are you?”
Guy 1: “6 foot 9″
Guy 2: “Wow.”
Guy 1: “You look like you’re about 6 foot 4″
Guy 2: [Who, in fact, looked to me considerably shorter than that, shakes head slightly:] “I have a 17-year old nephew who’s 6 foot 8.”
Guy 1: “Whew!”
Wendy’s counter guy to Guy 2: “Here’s your nuggets, sir!”
Guy 2: “Thanks!” [Walks away]
Guy 1: “Nice talking to you! Have a good one!”
Latre.
Note: Guy 1 then went on to engage the Wendy’s counter guy and other diners in conversations I didn’t quite hear. I think there was something a little off about him. Or maybe he was just overly friendly.
Pet Peeve of the Day: The caps on the Safeway gallon milk jugs don’t work nearly as well as the ones on the King Soopers’ jugs. They are very hard to screw on and off.
Kink In America
Posted on | January 29, 2010 at 6:29 pm | 5 Comments
One of the positive benefits of digitally archiving all my CDs is that I get to hear a lot of things that I haven’t heard in (literally) decades. The iPod in my car is set up with a random playlist of things added to iTunes in the last year, so it’s mostly a mix of eMusic downloads and songs from bands that start with the letter “A”. Recently, I was driving around and was taken aback when an 80s-sounding song with a different type of lyrical message played. I was doubly surprised to see that it was from the one-”hit” wonder band Art In America (from their only album 1983’s Art In America, which produced their only “hit”, the song “Art In America”). I believe they are chiefly remembered for having a harp player as a fulltime member of the band. That’s a regular big old acoustic harp, not an electric or horizontal or altered one. Must’ve been fun to take on the road. In my mind, the whole harp thing gave the band an image that was squeaky clean. Which is why this song “Won’t It Be Strange” caused me to do a double take. Here’s the lyrics (as best I can make them out, incorporating bits from another website):
*****************************************
Won’t It Be Strange
Performed by Art In America
Words and Music by Chris Flynn
I needed to see you
I needed to fall
I need to feel all of you
I can’t wait for the Masters and Johnson’s call
Do you think will hear me?
Well you just might not heel
But darling I just need to know
Is it your love that I’d feel?
Won’t it be strange,
When the world brings us bondage and pain?
And if there is someday
Some laughter for a change
Won’t it be strange- won’t it be strange?
Do you think you will hear me
When my moment has come?
Do you think you will hear me
With your face mask and blindfold on? Yeah
Do you think you will hear me
Well you just might not heel
But darling I just need to know
Is it your love that I’d feel
Won’t it be strange,
When the world brings us bondage and pain?
And if there is someday
Some laughter for a change
Won’t it be strange- won’t it be strange?
And if you’re not for certain
Don’t take the box for what’s behind the curtain
When your sealcoat’s re-haired, find out….
Won’t it be strange
When the world brings us bondage and pain?
And if there is someday
Some laughter for a change
Won’t it be strange- won’t it be strange?
*****************************************
Okay, so basically they seem to be singing about an S&M relationship. How could I not have known that at the time the album came out (1983) or when the CD was finally issued (1996)? It sure seems like something I would’ve remembered. Of course, I’m sure the whole S&M theme is just a metaphor for something else… like how hard it is to play a harp or something…
Of course, things are always more complicated than you originally think. In the course of researching this blog entry, I ran across this incredibly detailed deconstruction of the album, courtesy of a familiar pen. However, there’s not much of a comment on this song, which bums me out.
Latre.
Pet Peeve of the Day: The docking station for my laptop introduces noise into the audio channel.
Poignant Search Term Of The Day That Led To This Blog: “heathenism resort”.
Zomblog
Posted on | January 20, 2010 at 11:22 pm | 6 Comments
Yes, even though this blog is, for all intents and purposes, dead (or at least the approval rating has dropped like Leno’s ratings), I feel I must mark the anniversary anyway. Six years, woo hoo! Of course, there hasn’t been much going on here for the last year.
The thing is, I do have lots and lots to talk about, just no time or energy to do it. I don’t even have the time or energy to read other people’s blogs, assuming there are still such things. Are blogs dead? Did Facebook and Twitter kill the blogio star? Are we all just lame ducks waiting for the destructive palinization of civilization?
And does anyone remember MySpace? Oh, the hairstyles of three years ago make us so embarrassed, don’t they?
Everything we eat is bad for us, unless we nurtured it in the dirt ourselves.
Medical marijuana has come to Colorado and the Dispensary Wars threaten to tear the city apart. If only Hick can become governor and unite the state and find a decent defensive coordinator for the supremely defensive McDaniels. Jason Sheehan is leaving for Seattle and the last reason to read Westword goes with him.
We all wear masks, but why is it so hard for me to find one that fits?
I have a feeling iPhones are doomed sooner rather than later.
The cloud contains all our information and all our media, but what happens if we lose access to it?
Olympics. Olympix. Olympia. The gods look down from the control booth and try to get someone to care. But the only thing we worship is a gallon of milk or a gallon of gas under $2.
2010. The Year We Make Com-post.
Latre.
And I Feel Fine
Posted on | November 16, 2009 at 7:41 pm | 4 Comments
This past weekend, I went out and saw the disaster-porn flick 2012. I know, I know… but I have some gift cards to use up, and it looked like pretty eye candy. Well, if you consider the end of the planet to be eye candy… which in the hands of Roland Emmerich and crew, it most certainly is. Plus, I was depressed about the Broncos losing their third game in a row, and wanted to see some massive destruction. It’s a long movie, almost three hours, but there are enough “character” moments in-between things collapsing and blowing up to allow for much-needed pee breaks.
Though the movie is over-the-top, and utterly preposterous in the way that John Cusack & family keep narrowly escaping getting turned into fossil fuels for the next species that arises to dominate the planet, the movie is not without its charms. At least it wasn’t boring (for the most part – see “pee breaks” above). So I was willing to go with it. It brought me back to those heady teenage days, watching flicks such as The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, though the scale of 2012 dwarfs any catastrophe Irwin Allen could splatter on the screen in the 70s.
However, there was one thing that I just could not forgive. Granted, the movie takes place over only a period of a day or two. But during that entire time, John Cusack’s character (I could never figure out if he was named Curtis Jackson or Jackson Curtis – even the movie seemed to be confused on that point*) never takes off his tie. He is subjected to all manner of potentially life-ending scenarios, almost literally clawing himself back up from hell at one point, and yet he keeps that dang thing on like it’s the only link that humanity’s survivors will have to their past great civilization. The world is going down in flames, but dammit, I’m going to look good! GQ may not survive the holocaust, but future societies will still know how important fashion is. There’s even an extended sequence near the end of the flick were Cusack spends a lot of time underwater trying to fix a particularly vexing problem, and he still has that damn tie on. I kept thinking it would get caught in the gears he was dealing with, causing him to get crushed to death, but I guess that would’ve been too ironic for the filmmakers.
I tried to rationalize it by saying maybe he just didn’t have time to take off the tie, but there were a few minutes here and there where he wasn’t running/driving/flying/swimming for his life, including some time on an airplane when I think he was sleeping. So maybe he was keeping it on for additional warmth. Or he thought he might need it for a sling or tourniquet or something. I don’t know… it’s just hard to take the End of Humanity seriously when your protagonist is not even flustered enough to remove his tie.
Although at least he did loosen it.
Latre.
* – People kept calling him “Jackson”, and the cover of the book he wrote says “Jackson Curtis”, but at one point he shows his driver’s license to another character and it clearly says “Jackson, Curtis”.
Pet Peeve of the Day: Can Oliver Platt ever play a character who’s not full of himself?
Perplexing Search Term Of The Day That Led To This Blog: “pocket pool registration”.
Videogame(s) Played Since Last Blog Update: Still none.
CD Archiving 5: Milestone A
Posted on | November 12, 2009 at 7:00 pm | 5 Comments
I’ve just reached a milestone in my CD Archiving project. You didn’t think I was still doing that, did you? Actually, with everything else going on, that kind of got put by the wayside. I’ve been starting it back up again lately. And guess what… I just finished archiving all the CDs from bands whose names start with the letter “A”! ABC through Aztec Camera. Actually, it’s even better than that, since I’ve also done the ones from bands names that start with a number, like 13 Engines, 22 Brides, and 54-40. I used to file those under the spelled-out numbers (example: “13 Engines” was filed under “T” for “Thirteen”), but when I got partway into this project, I decided that was pretty hokey. It just caused too many sorting/archiving issues. So I had to rearrange my CD collection a bit.
So… where does that put me on the progress bar? That’s 158 titles out of 4128. Note I say “titles” instead of “CDs” or “albums” because some of those are actually double CDs, so in reality I’ve ripped more than 158 discs. Anyway, that’s 3.8% of my collection. In a little over three months.
(Note that my CDs are stored in plastic sleeves instead of jewel boxes, so there are many more in the picture above than it would appear.)
My original plan was to try to average around 6 discs a day, which would take me around two years to complete. My real average has been about 1.6 discs a day, but like I said, there were extenuating circumstances. I think I went probably a whole month or so without ripping a single disc. If I keep that lower rate, it will take me 7 years, and FLAC, MP3, and probably PCs, will all be obsolete by then.
Also, remember that I’m not buying any new CDs, just buying new albums in digital format only, so I don’t have to worry about never catching up with the physical collection. Once I’m done, I’m done!
One interesting statistic is that there was only one CD that I could not get a perfect copy of (Aztec Camera’s Dreamland). On every other CD that I had problems with, I was always able to switch to a different drive (I have a CD and a DVD drive on the PC) and it would work. But that one disc had issues in both drives. Nevertheless, the archive it made from the disc is perfectly listenable. It only had problems with the first track, and I can’t distinguish any actual sound problems with it using my tired old ears. So even though EAC took an incredibly long time to rip the track and kept getting read/sync errors, it was still able to error correct it enough for me to not tell the difference. Most excellent. I don’t expect that to always be the case though. I’m sure at some point I’ll run into some discs that are so degraded they won’t rip.
Latre.
Pet Peeve of the Day: The fact that downloaded digital songs are always so much louder than files made from ripped CDs. Thankfully we have ReplyGain (or iTunes Soundcheck) to even things out!
Poignant Search Term Of The Day That Led To This Blog: “unbearable on coke”.
Videogame(s) Played Since Last Blog Update: None.
Fielding The Sound
Posted on | November 4, 2009 at 7:05 pm | 8 Comments
Yeah, I know. I thought I was getting back into this whole blogging thing when I started in with the CD Archiving posts. But then there was a family crisis (ask me for the password), and the aftermath of that has been taking up a lot of my time, and will continue to do so for awhile. It’s been hard to get back into a regular routine.
And at the same time, I’ve had to deal with another life change. The company I work for closed the office I was working at. Since they closed the previous office in April, I had been going into the further-away office two days a week and working from home the rest of the time. Now I’m working from home 100% of the time. I don’t like it. I need the occasional social interaction, plus I like having at least a semblance of a separation between work and home. But there’s no real choice.
Those of you who work at home know how important it is to have a comfortable work environment. There’s a lot of problems with mine, but until I get a new house or get the basement finished, I have to deal with what I have.
One thing that helps me get through the day is listening to music while I work. Not only does it help to block out other sounds and distractions (the neighborhood kids can be pretty noisy), but listening to music I like just makes for a more pleasant work environment in general.
I’ve also found that I’ve been really getting into music lately, like I haven’t for a long time. I think that’s partly because there’s just so much good new music out there these days – I’ve been downloading like crazy from eMusic, AmieStreet and Amazon lately. More on that in future posts. It’s easy to do, almost too easy, when you’ve given up physical media and are going all digital – which I’ve talked about in recent entries. And the CD archiving project has renewed my interest in music I already own. It’s a kick to hear something cool I haven’t listened to in years.
I’m sure there’s a fad aspect to this. I tend to go in cycles with my interests: music, video games, comics, blogging, movies/TV, etc. At any one time, I’ll be bored with all but one those. And right now, that one thing is music.
It’s important for me to listen to the music in the best possible way. I’ve got my music library (downloads plus ripped CDs) in iTunes on the PC, and that’s my primary listening venue these days. I also still listen on my iPod nano when I work out at the gym 3-4 days a week, but I no longer have the all-important car listening experience, since I don’t have a commute any more. My iTunes library is over 23,000 songs and growing quickly. When I’m working, I alternate between playing the entire library on shuffle play and listening to whole individual albums at a time – usually ones I’ve recently downloaded or ripped.
The problem is that iTunes is on my home PC and not my work one. The two computers are at a 90 degree orientation from each other in my computer room. My home office stereo was setup to optimize the listening experience at the home computer. I tried playing around with the stereo balance when at my work computer, but the experience was just not optimal. Headphones work okay, but I can only wear them for so long, the cord gets in the way, and I’m not crazy about the sound quality with comfortable phones.
Then I had the brilliant idea to hook up another set of speakers to the stereo. Because of the work space limitations, I would need some pretty small ones. I have a couple of pairs of small computer speakers that I could’ve just hooked up to the headphone/speaker jack of the home computer, but I don’t really like the sound of any of them, and the cabling for that presented some obstacles.
So I looked around in my basement and found an old pair of Realistic (i.e. Radio Shack) speakers that I had bought a long, long time ago for some long forgotten reason. I probably used them for rear speakers or something back in the dawn of surround sound. I did however remember that I liked the sound of them, even though they were small 4-inch cubes. So I strung some speaker wire and placed a speaker on each side of the work monitor.
Wow – I was blown away. I don’t know if they’re actually good or if my hearing is just really going in my old age, but I’m extremely satisfied with the sound these tiny things pump out. Yeah, I do have to crank the bass a bit on the amplifier, but no big whoop. What really gets me is the sound field. The stereo separation is fantastic, and I feel totally enveloped in the sound. Maybe that’s just because of where the speakers are placed in relation to where I’m sitting, and I would get the same effect with any speakers that fit in the space. But I don’t know – there’s just something about the sound of these things that I really like. Perfect for digital music.
I can’t believe how much this has improved my work situation in general. I feel more energized and productive having these things surround me with my tunes all day. Thank you, Radio Shack of old!
Latre.
Note: I’ve joined last.fm and have installed their Scrobbler, so you can see what I’ve been listening to by going to my profile. The most recently listened-to tunes are also displayed on this blog over to the side.
Pet Peeve of the Day: Brokers, lawyers, accountants, and plumbers.
Poignant Search Term Of The Day That Led To This Blog: “why do contact lenses for distance mess up my close up vision”.
Videogame(s) Played Since Last Blog Update: Batman: Arkham Asylum (PS3)
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