Now Everything's Broken and Hard To Replace

Someone needs to tell me when things I have are going to be hard to replace so that I can take better care of them.

It's happened twice so far, once with Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie, which seems like an odd thing to go out of print. I bought it at some huge chain store many years ago, and because I was not as careful with my master copies of things during my college years as I am now (which I'm still barely competent at), it's kind of scuffed. It still plays, but it was kind of a shock to look at Amazon for a copy that doesn't look like it was dragged along a gravel road by a fleeing band of horse theives, I found out that they're, oh, seventy dollars. Which is a little absurd, considering that it's basically just an episode of the show. Apparently, since I've checked into that (and done absolutely nothing about it, because that's how I roll), they've worked out a deal to re-release it so that future copies to replace the ones I've destroyed will be somewhere in the reasonable range.

The most recent "oh no, I was an irresponsible youngster and have either lost or destroyed this relic of my childhood" occured a little while ago, when I went looking for what happened to a band that I apparently saw at some point. I remember really enjoying their debut album (and, because I discovered Pilfers at about the time I was getting into ska, rooting out everything else Coolie Ranx did, which is why Hard Band For Dead and Dub 56 became pretty solid staples of my collection) and wondered what happened to it, because I can't find it at my parents' house any time I go back to Pittsburgh. So I looked online for copies.

Apparently, it was only sold at shows and on the website, and only 20,000 were made. Which means Amazon told me, at the time, that it was about $45 to replace.



Robbery

I gave up on it, resolved that I would never enjoy it again and went on with my life. Could I have found it illegally and downloaded it? Probably, and it's less of a moral dilemma because I owned it at one point and so had already given the band money for it, but I tend not to trust things online. Then, magically, while illustrating what happens to the prices of CDs when they're out of print, I found that someone was selling a copy for about $12.

Purchased and received. It's not as good as I remembered, but few things from my adolesence are. I'm still a fan of it and listened to it while biking to and from work at about 3am yesterday. Oh, and yes. I do associate it strongly with a specific action.



Kensuke Kimachi recommends the track Generation

And, checking back in on Amazon now, it appears that the album is once again unavailable. I have a sense of victory. Now if only my chemistry would work.

I'll get you back for this, Steve Jobs

Yesterday, for some reason, while I was getting ready to leave work, my mp3 player of choice decided that everything that was on it was suddenly unplayable. No problem, I just had to delete everything and reload it, except that that meant I lost a bunch of podcasts that I've since removed from my computer. Still, cleaning that thing out isn't a bad thing, probably, and it brightens my day to be forcibly reminded of punk rock bands from the middle of nowhere in Pennsylvania is something I'm not opposed to in principle.

And sure, iTunes somehow forgot where a lot of my music was, but that's ok because I relish the opportunity to tell software "No. Screamin' Jay is here. It hasn't moved since I told you where it was last time. No."

This is what happens when I make a commitment to post everyday, but haven't had any revelations since yesterday and am running out the door to go to the one theater in Chicago which is playing Diary of the Dead, which is actually pretty conveniently located near where I used to live. I've got some stuff on the mixture of politics and science and will have up a review of that movie at some point, but those will have to wait for when I'm not actually trying to convince the CTA to take me somewhere.

Music and Associations

I've changed my music listening habits. I don't listen to as much music as I used to, but when I do listen, I tend to prefer whole albums to either compilations or "Greatest Hits" albums. There are a few exceptions, which I'll talk about, but for the most part, I tend to get accustomed to a sequence of songs and it throws off my ability to enjoy the music if I'm being shifted around a lot. I tend to prefer albums over Greatest Hits compilations partially for that reason (I get confused if "Getting Better" is not followed by "Fixing a Hole") and would prefer to listen to a more accurate representation of where a band was at musically at any given time than just listen to their most popular works as selected by someone who isn't me. Plus the fact that everyone who's released more than one album (and some who haven't) has a Greatest Hits record.

What I've noticed, however, is that certain albums are very, very strongly tied to vivid memories in my mind. When I was getting ready to go in to work today, I threw on Buck-O-Nine's Twenty-Eight Teeth, an album that's not superb and that I haven't listened to in years but that was around during the third-wave ska surge of the late nineties, and so, to my shock, other people had it.


Chances are you only listened to My Town

I noticed, about halfway through "Jennifer's Cold" that I desperately wanted to be playing GoldenEye 007. Somehow, Buck-O-Nine and their fairly standard pop-ska-punk have become inexorably linked to me running around a dam in Arkhangelsk trying to figure out what to do with the little uplink bugger and then looking for something to bungee jump off of.

Off the top of my head, and this is somewhat unsurprising, I can think of two other albums that come to mind if I think about a video game. One of them I'm a tinge embarassed to admit . One I'm not. Guess which one's which for a prize.

Music: "Moonshot! A Moon Ska Records Compilation"


Game: The Legend of Zelda-Ocarina of Time

I know. I said I don't listen to many compilations. This is one exception. It was one of the first CD's I'd ever purchased with my own money (and may or may not have been the second album I ever bought) and I've listened to it so many times that it bothers me when "Nex Finga" by Skinnerbox isn't immediately followed by "Regular Guy" by Easy Big Fella. It's stuck in my memory there because my friend and I resolved to learn the lyrics to "Nex Finga" which are sung quickly and in an accent while beating the Water and Shadow Temples.

Yes, I still remember them.

Music: Tubthumper by Chumbawamba


Game: Legend of Zelda- A Link to the Past

I know. I know. Stop yelling at me, I know. Although, really, if you skip "Tubthumping" and the insanely excessive airplay it got when the record came out and listen to the rest of it as an album like any other, it's really not that bad. Anyway, I remember having it in a CD player and not bothering to take it out while I was playing this. I distinctly associate "Drip, Drip, Drip" with one of those "here's some water-striders" dungeons and "Mary Mary" with knocking armored knights into an abyss rather than the movie on whose soundtrack it appears. Possibly embarassing? Sure. But honest.

And yes, there are albums that remind me of things which aren't games in the Legend of Zelda series. Two examples.

Music: The Mouse and the Mask by DangerDoom



I hadn't really heard of MF DOOM when I decided to buy this album and had only heard of Danger Mouse as the guy who came up with The Grey Album, a mashup of the Beatles' White Album and Jay-Z's Black Album and knew that it was somehow tied in to Adult Swim. I ended up really enjoying the album (and buying more MF DOOM) and really strongly associate it with biking into work first year, because it was one of the few albums I had placed on a tiny mp3 player I owned at the time and listened to it pretty much every day. I associate "Benzie Box" and "Old School" specifically with the stretch of Sheridan between Estes and Tuohy. Probably because I would get to that stretch of road on the way home in about the time it took to get to "Benzie Box."

Music: Jinx by Quarashi


Associated with: the intersection of Peebles Road and McKnight Road in Ross Township, PA


This is, I think pretty obviously, copyright Google, but for some reason when I cropped the picture to include it, I cropped out the mark. Please don't sue me, Google. Afterall, Murphspot will eventually quadruple the number of people that use Blogger. Eventually.

I wish I had an explanation for that one. Oddly, I associate that corner with the first track, "Stick 'em up" and the stretch of road about a mile before that intersection with the second track, "Mr. Jinx". That confuses me further.

And there we are. Done with today's post one minute before midnight. Hopefully, I'll be able to get this up in time, but I'm typing this at a Burger King and the internet connection is really shoddy. We'll see. Oh, and editing may take place after midnight. Deal with it.

Let's say for the sake of argument that people actually ever read this. And that those people who do listen to music. Am I the only one who strongly associates music with very specific actions, or is there an album you listen to that you can remember listening to at a specific time and place?

I'm A Terrible Musician

Once upon a time, not long ago, when people wore pajamas and lived life slow, I played the bass guitar. Not very well, mind you, but I still played it, dammit. I'd played mostly the lines to songs I knew which tended to be incredibly easy. I improved slightly when I joined the jazz band in college and discovered that "Hey! I can't read music." That worked sort of well for a while. I still wasn't terribly good, but learned enough to play the accompaniment to alto sax in the intro of 'Round Midnight in a dining room in Erie, so I considered it a success. I haven't been playing much recently. Part of it is that I don't plan my time out very well and end up playing NHL06 instead, but a larger part is that I don't have anyone to play with recently, and playing bass unaccompanied by any other instrumens is fine if you're Vic Wooten, but not so much if you're mortal.

I have thought in the past that the solution to this would be to either find someone that plays another instrument (a difficult prospect for a graduate student) or learn how to play guitar. That's been kind of on hold for a while because, in addition to not actually having a guitar yet, the whole "playing more than one note at once" thing kind of eludes me. That's where this comes in. I'm not exactly sure how "Guitar Hero for an actual guitar" would work, as the easier settings on Guitar Hero are made easier by skipping long passages, which doesn't really work if you actually want to play a song. Still, it's an idea that intrigues me. I'm a big fan of the Guitar Hero franchise, don't buy into the whole "stop playing this and start playing a real guitar" thing in general because the point of a video game is not to delude the user into thinking they're actually acquiring a skill other than "playing the game", and because people who whine about that somehow don't say the same thing of, say, people who play Madden but don't actually play professional football.

So yes. Perhaps this level of "slow down there, cowboy, and we'll show you how to play a guitar" tutorial will motivate me to actually pick one up and learn. Or maybe I'll take up basketweaving.

One of those two.

The Train Ride

So I tried to keep pretty good tabs on what was going on during my trip home. It turns out that the guy's column was kind of boring because riding the train is a pretty pedestrian activity. Still, though, this might give you a decent picture as far as what happens on a typical trip home for me.

It seemed quicker than usual, probably because I was scribbling on a notepad furiously throughout. I ended up using Post-Its, mostly because it was a choice between those and a legal pad. And constantly checking my phone for the times that I've put down. We'll see.

1:01 AM-Left Pancoe Life Sciences Buiding. I'm the last one out, so I shut down everything and locked the doors inside the lab. Flipped on a podcast of On Point, this week's "Week in Review" thing. Lots of talk about the Democratic Debate. As I didn't see it, I don't really know how much of what they said was actually insightful. But whatever. I'm heading to Davis, which is not the closest stop. The closest is Noyes (and is about 15 minutes worth of walking from Pancoe). Foster's about as far. Davis, however, is a much nicer station, in that there's not big holes in the roof. It's not raining currently, but it was earlier in the day, and so there's bound to be small ponds at Noyes and Foster. Plus, I could use the walk.

1:09am- Off campus. The academic part of it, at least. Left past the Business school.

1:15 AM- Downtown Evanston. Past the Tower. I've seen a total of four people so far on the walk here, which is a bit strange. The answer to "where the hell is everyone, it's 1am on a Friday on a college campus" reveals itself. They're all at Burger King. All of them. Eight thousand undergrads. It's only slightly less full than the first day of the spring quarter, when it seemed that everyone had deeply missed the Evanston Burger King for the entirety of spring break.

1:22 AM- Arrived at Davis station. Northbound train arrived and departed on time. This is the real reason I think I felt like doing this. Just to see how long I was actually on the train. There was, according to the schedule, last a train here at 1:12 and one should be by at 1:27. If I've somehow missed that, there should be one at 1:42. We'll see which of these shows up. Five people were on the platform when I showed up. Two left. There's a new set of stairs that lead onto the tracks from the platform (behind a gate). I have absolutely no clue what color they are. The lighting is this really dull orange, so I have no idea.

1:29 AM-"Attention Customers: An inbound train, toward the Loop, will be arriving shortly"

1:32 AM-Victory! A train! The car I got on was empty, had an pretty neutral smell for this time of night and had a bunch of garbage from Dunkin' Donuts strewn about. Some ads about a radio station, a floral service, and why you should give your seat up for people.

1:33 AM-Passed Dempster at a pretty good clip without stopping. There was no one on the platform, but I'm sure if I were going to Dempster, I'd be really angry.

1:34 AM-Main Street. We stopped, so that's new. There are no lights on on Chicago Ave. I'm glad I'm not riding my bike.

1:38 AM- We're pulling into Howard. Looks like I'm not going to ride my bike in tomorrow. They're tearing up the southbound platform, and that means delays. Train operator's trying to be helpful about what's going on, but he's doing so by repeating everything over and over and not shutting the hell up. Actually got to the platform at 1:41.

1:45 AM- Departed Howard. There was some 20 year old kid at Howard sleeping against a garbage can with headphones on, six other people on the train, four of them conscious, and I'm switching to listening to actual music. Putting this thing on shuffle, because I never do that and it might make up for the fact that this is a really boring experiment.

First song: December 4th-Jay Z from The Black Album. Works for me.

1:49. There's some guy who keeps getting up and sitting back down and looking nervously out the window. We get to Morse, and a few people actually get on this thing. About half the people I see get on are wearing thick winter coats, which is surprising on in that it's like 48 degrees. It's not cold. Next song. Stagger Lee-Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds off of Murder Ballads. Awesome.

1:50 AM- Loyola. Two people get on, then the driver has to open the doors again to let on the other person that was on the platform the whole time, but apparently forgot that if you want to actually travel south on the train, you need to board it at some point. She's screaming into a cell phone. As we pull away, there's some guys running up the stairs and realizing that they've just missed the train. That's been me pretty much every time I try to board at Loyola. We pass the hostel on the way to the next stop, my old stop, Granville. It's not really interesting except in that there's a guy who walks up and down Broadway just north and south of Devon asking for money from passers-by and gives the excuse that he needs $6 to stay at the hostel. I have no idea if this is true or not. I've seen him often enough to think that it's probably not. He holds the distinction of being the only person to ask me for money on the sidewalk who stopped me while I was riding my bike by just standing right the hell in front of me.

1:55 AM- Thorndale. I'd occasionally use this stop when I lived at my old place, but didn't like to during the summer or when it was raining. This is because the roof just barely exists, such that if it rains, there's no real cover. The summer bit is because the rotting wood of the roof is apparently a haven for innummerable spiders. And I'm not fond of them. New song: Pez King-Less than Jake from Losers, Kings, and Things We Don't Understand. Interesting switch.

1:59 AM- Lawrence. Northbound train sitting at the station is packed. Mine might be as well, but I took the front car which tends usually to be a bit less crowded, and so can't tell. New song: Quatre Parishe-Dr. John from N'awlinz: Dis, Dat, or D'udda. Again, a really abrupt switch.

2:01 AM- Another Northbound train goes by, also packed. Clearly I missed something that was going on downtown tonight. The only thing with any lights on around here is the Uptown Tattoo Factory. I'm not a big fan of the immediate area around the Uptown stops, but I haven't had any real experience in the neighborhood and don't want to write it off without that experience. New song: Political Science-Randy Newman from whatever the hell album I've got on here. Another northbound train passes. I have a bit of trouble keeping the iPod, which I need out in the event I don't know what one of the songs is (like "Pez King", which I haven't heard in forever) balanced on my leg. Some guy in a hat, a sweatshirt and a windbreaker (who's got both hoods on) starts looking at me funny. I imagine I look a bit off.

2:03 AM- Sheridan. Which they should just call Irving Park, because even though the station goes over Sheridan, that's a north-south street and so telling you you're getting off "on Sheridan" on a train that generally runs parallel to it is less useful than telling you the name of a street that actually tells you how far north you are. New song: Keep Him Away-The Slackers from Live at Ernesto's. Hearing a live track out of nowhere is odd, especially as the track starts with an explanation of the previous track on the album.

2:05 AM- Addison. Bar patrons board.

2:07 AM- Stop awaiting signal clearance. New song: Fertile Crescent-Bad Religion from Generator, which I really ought to listen to more. It's got some good tracks on it.

2:09 AM- Belmont. Another new song, The Answer-Bad Religion also off of Generator. Clearly my iPod is psychic and will be appearing on talk shows soon.

2:11 AM- Fullerton. So, you know how I mentioned that I was balancing things on my leg? I was doing that by propping my left leg up on my right knee. As a result, my leg is completely asleep. I limp off the train, which actually doesn't look that odd compared to the twenty-five college kids that stumble off of the other cars. I'm not that old, and I can't figure out why these guys look like they're twelve. Maybe they are. But they're giving off that "drunk freshman" vibe. They're in about two groups (I think this is why I dislike college kids on the El. They travel in freaking packs.), the latter of which is having much more trouble navigating things. When we all get to the stairs, most of them make it down ok, but one girl in the back has apparently forgotten how to use them. She seems kind of afraid, but mostly frustrated that she can't get her enormous chunky heel to go through the first step so that she can use the next. All of her friends stop to look, but not to help. I'm not actually sure if they got her down from there. New song: All You Need Is Love-The Beatles from Magical Mystery Tour. That's a swing and a half in terms of musical styles.

From here, there's just the walk home, which took a bit longer as I stopped to look at a beat up car that was parked next to the McDonalds at Lincoln and Fullerton with its doors open, a police car right behind it with lights going like mad and a kid in an orange striped shirt with his hands behind his back. I don't know what the hell was going on. Either way, the walk home was pretty uneventful except for passing a few more packs of college kids, listening to Last Dead Mouse-Mighty Mighty BossTones from Don't Know How to Party. I really like that album as well, by the way, and only purchased it recently. It's much closer to the whole ska-core thing they were doing on Devil's Night Out and a far cry from the more popular Let's Face It, but it's got a whole lot going for it. If you like Dickie Barrett's voice, that is. Following that, Burn On-Randy Newman from Sail Away, which is the album that Political Science was on earlier, incidentally. I don't know why I keep getting hits from the same albums out of a thousand or so songs. Skipped ahead to Fever-Rhymefest off of last year's Blue Collar which is a really solid record. I would like to claim that I knew enough about Rhymefest to know to buy it outright, but it was pretty much a five minute interview clip I heard (on NPR, no less) and the fact that the final track of the album is a version of "Build Me Up, Buttercup" done by Rhymefest and Ol' Dirty Bastard recorded when, well, he was alive. The last bit of the walk consisted of Materialist-Bad Religion from The Process of Belief, which I repurchased recently after realizing that whie I really like that album, I lost it something like four years ago. Shame. Arrived at my building's entrance at 2:28 AM (but not before noticing that of the four cars at the intersection, there was a total of one hubcap, and the shaky ride up the "fixed" elevator to the tune of Dem Bones from Alice in Chains Dirt.

So yeah. That was probably boring and really long, but that's kind of what I do around here. I'm going to bed.

I Need Another Vacation

I'm awake at 1am on a Sunday (which is admittedly pretty early for me) and I'm not quite able to go to sleep yet, so I thought I'd write a bit on here whie I wait for water to boil so that I can have some rice. I've not posted on here in a while, but rather than try to catch this up to what's been going on, I'm just going to kind of wing this return.

1) Thanksgiving: We actually did it. Jenna and I actually, successfully, cooked and ate Thanksgiving dinner. I'd like to start by noting that I had no idea how much food is required to cook a proper Thanksgiving dinner, or how much spices cost. Admittedly, we bought these things at the Big Apple Supermarket twenty feet from the back door of my building which tends to be more "small-market"-ish and thus a bit more expensive than, say, Dominick's, but we offset this by buying the cheapest spices available (I'm sure the fine people at McCormick would argue that theirs is just as good, and I'd be inclined to agree because disagreeing costs me double). Still, I ended up paying, evidently, $3.99 for bay leaves (3g), which I'm not even sure what they do, $4.99 for ground ginger which I think may have gone into the pie, but in any case I've still got like ninety percent of the 22g bottle, $5.79 for sage (14g), which was just sort of sprinkled on the squash we cooked anyway and I think we probably could have gotten by without, and cloves (17g) which were supposed to be ground but evidently no one in Chicago sells ground cloves so they're whole and Jenna ground them in a food processor. Suddenly, I feel like I should probably have ground ginger on everything I eat. Especially, say, fish sticks.

Still, the whole thing worked out well, there were no "family movie/sitcom" situations in which we burned the turkey and were forced to eat at the diner (which, incidentally, was offering a pretty good deal at $10.49 for whatever the hell the "complete dinner" consisted of), and I even took some pictures, though because my digital camera is somewhere at home at the moment, I'll only be able to get up once I have them developed and scan them. We've got a good amount of food left over, though did have to eat out over the weekend because turkey's really boring and Jenna went all super-cook today and made soup from turkey bits and celery or something. I don't know. I was playing Katamari Damacy and sacking Ben Roethlisberger.

2) Things I've been reading lately: I just finished World War Z, which is Max Brooks followup to the Zombie Survival Guide which was occasionally humorous and pretty interesting. World War Z is his crack at, I guess, historical fiction, though that term makes me think that Washington and Lincoln should be involved somehow. It's essentially, in the first half or so, an amalgam of the last two bits of the Survival Guide, being the description of a world in which zombies not only exist but have taken over and little "personal accounts". It was a fun and interesting read, and as I've got a 40 minute commute as penance for living in a neighborhood that accepts "Pocket Puppies" as a valid store, it helped stave off long hours of staring out the window and being talked to by, well, anyone. From there, it appears I'll be proceeding with a book I picked up while buying presents, Bertrand Russell's Sceptical Essays. I'll let you know more about that as I actually get into it.

3) Music: Tower Records, if you haven't heard, is being liquidated. As it happens, I live about 200 yards (some ridiculous standard measurement) from one, and so have really cheap music and videos really closeby. Today's purchases: In the Mood for Ska: The Moonska Years- The Skatalites and Ace of Spades- Motörhead. It's odd. I actually like Motörhead quite a lot apparently based on the first few listens, and Ace of Spades seems like a good album to start with when it's $8, their first album isn't actually still in stock and I know the song Ace of Spades from a video game (which is the lamest reason to buy a CD). The Skatalites are, as I expected, fantastic on the two disc set that has them playing with Doreen Shaffer, Laurel Aitken and some stuff from Tommy McCook apart from the general output.

4) The Steelers' O-line makes me weep.

5) Al Jazeera has begun broadcasting in English though no cable companies have agreed to air it actually in the US and if you want to see it in the States you have to pay $6 a month to stream it from their website. It's being carried in the UK on Sky Digital, which, as a bit of trivia, is owned by NewsCorporation, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch. From reviews I've read, Al Jazeera is actually pretty good at providing an alternate perspective, which is really the only reason that any cable company should agree to carry it, as it's not as though we need another 24-hour news channel. It's a channel broadcasting from and centered on the Middle East, and should, I think, if well done, provide an interesting view from inside that allows us to get an alternate viewpoint, which is good. There are, of course, those that claim that we shouldn't be allowed to elect to watch it, as it would be a mouthpiece for anti-Americanism, something that I have no clue about. It might be, but I haven't actually seen it to make a judgement, and I suspect that most people that already have very strong opinions about it probably haven't either. Then again, none of that really effects me as I don't subscribe to cable and get my news from listing to NPR all day with wicked huge wireless headphones because I don't have to pay for it and it tends to be somewhat neutral, but it's an interesting topic, I think.

6) In addition to my weekly subscription to the New Yorker, I've been occasionally picking up the libertarian magazine Reason now and again. The experience of violently switching between either agreeing completely with what it's saying and denouncing it as unreasonable is kind of fun (I tend to agree heavily on social issues but am a bit of a centrist with regards to the economy, which is actually a change from a few years ago). The issue I picked up most recently does have a moderately interesting interview with the creators of South Park and a bit of a long article in which different individuals are interviewed to try to discern whether someone who is in complete agreement with the magazine on every issue (which is how I presume they define "libertarian") should vote for in the elections that happened a few weeks ago. It's an older issue. Not surpringly, Grover Norquist wants you to vote for Republicans on the "less taxes" issue (which is juxtaposed wiht an article immediately after this one which tries to discern why the Republican party, which campaigns on being fiscally responsible, isn't even close), the guy that runs Daily Kos and Terry Michael, former spokesman for the DNC say the libertarians should vote D on social grounds, and Markos Moulitsas throws in a bit about perhaps the solution to neither party going wacky lies in perpetually divided government, and a guy who was running for representative in Arizona as a Republican says, essentially "please don't vote me out of power, we're still better than those damned Democrats." He won his seat... over the Libertarian candidate, who the last person interviewed in the article, the President of the Libertarian Party, would have preferred. More updates as I continue reading.

7) I think I might be the only person who's disappointed that O.J. isn't releasing his book, tentatively titled "If I Did It", in which he posits that if he puts things in the subjunctive, everyone will be so stupid that they don't realize that the book is basically a confession. Slate had a bit of stuff a while ago about potential legal troubles for O.J. as they related to the book/TV deal. Conclusion: Not really all that much. I don't think I'd read it, but in a world where they're doing things about the Jon-Benet Ramsey case as recently as this year, I can't believe that there's actually no interest in what this particular scumbag has to say. In that, I agree with Timothy Noah. It's news.

I'm going to bed.

Weekend 11/4-11/6: A Compendium of Awesome and Suck

I rarely update on here, and it's usually some vague rehash of what's been reported elsewhere or about some event that's widely publicized. So in the interest of letting those people that actually read this know what's going on in my life (which was the goal at my outset), a breakdown of things that were good and bad this weekend.

Things Which Ruled:

1) Having presented on my projects for my job last wednesday, it wasn't actually necessary to spend time in the lab until some ridiculous time on Friday. I got to go home early, and with my newfound freedom and recent paycheck, went out and bought Guitar Hero because I've given up on being a rock star, so may as well play one in a video game. Yes, I know Guitar Hero II is coming out... today. But as I never buy games or systems the day they come out (my Playstation 2 was purchased a mere five and a half years after its release) and figured I should warm up on the first game before I jump into the new. Also, I needed the controller anyway, and buying it with the first game is cheaper than buying it with the second. I'm quite happy with this purchase, and will most definitely be acquiring the second round of Guitar Heroing, solely on the strength of the first five songs on the setlist, mostly because you can't not like Danzig's "Mother" and "Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You" is more hilarious an inclusion than anything. If anyone has any tips on how the hell I'm going to beat "Institutionalized" by Suicidal Tendencies or "Misirlou", I'd be happy to hear them.

2) Good times spent at the Hopleaf Bar. I do not pretend to be a connoisseur of the impressive array of beers served at the Hopleaf, but have decided that I am a fan of Kwak, because it's tasty and hey, silly glasses are fun.

3) I've been watching "The Adventures of Brisco County Jr." courtesy Netflix. I don't really recall this show, but it's goofy, quirky, funny, and stars Bruce Campbell, whose book If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B-Movie Actor, I've been plodding through when I'm home. Hurrah for him.

4) Sunday night was the highlight with a Jurassic 5 show (with Clipse opening) at the Patten Gym at Northwestern. I was told that I bought the seven hundredth ticket, but it appeared that about three hundred of that number failed to show up. The show was incredibly good, and well worth more than the $10 the tickets cost. I'd seen them once before, on the 2000 Warped Tour, and was very happy they performed their older material. Clipse... I'm not a huge fan of, though I do have to admit that I hadn't heard of them before attending, and another lab member who is a fan of their music told me today that she was somewhat disappointed by their set. So maybe I just saw them on an off night.

Things which sucked:

1) Occasionally, when I close my eyes and am very tired, I can see the Guitar Hero fretboard coming toward me, haunting my dreams and mocking my inability to fake playing "Bark at the Moon" well enough to please a video game.

2) While the Jurassic 5 show was very good, the organizers of the event made two key errors which resulted in me writing mild things about them on my pointless blog. First, for a ten dollar show at a gymnasium (on a basketball court, to be completely specific), there were an awful amount of annoying people running around trying to get me to join Chase Bank's Facebook group or drink a bunch of Red Bull. But then, perhaps that's the reason tickets were so cheap. The other bit was that the back doors of the basketball court were WIDE FREAKING OPEN, so that anyone walking by or setting up a lawn chair behind Patten Gym could hear the concert better than the people inside, for free. That bit is only annoying because I didn't think of doing that.

3) The group that brought Jurassic 5 to campus appeared to start advertising three days before the show, and did so in a way that's extremely common to Northwestern, that I'd never seen before and which pisses me off. This mode of advertising is to print up a bunch of posters, disperse them to those in your group charged with advertising things, and then to stick them using as much tape as you can to the ground. The problems with this approach abound. If you want to read these flyers, you have to walk around with your head down like, well, me in eighth grade. The flyers become unreadable once it rains (so they're effective for, at most, two days) or when enough people walk over them that they're torn to shreds. That, and no one that puts these things down ever comes back to clean up the mound of tape, so that there are rectangles of masking tape along all the sidewalks on an otherwise very nice campus.

4) The mid term elections are today, which are all fine and good, but it deprives me of the increasingly comic lunacy of negative campaign ads.

Pandora

I'm still comprehending the fact that the Pirates have managed to avoid 100 losses this year (which they cemented with an out-of-nowhere sweep of the best team in the NL to force them to clinch the division somewhere other than PNC) and the rationale that sends a quarterback who spent much of the off season in a hospital bed into a game with a fever of 104 degrees and thirty tons of rust, but I can put that aside for now.

I felt I should post about this because it's one of those things that I'm already way too late on, and yet am willing to laughingly ignore that fact. It involves Pandora, which I'm quite happy with recently, and would enjoy more if I worked somewhere other than a bunker that kills everything that could even be close to a wireless signal, so that I can't actually listen to this at my bench. It works by picking apart the style of music of an artist or song that you've input. Z.B., for "The Pietasters", it surmised that I like music that has subtle vocal harmony, a vocal centric aesthetic, busy horn section, major key tonality and an upbeat tempo, which is pretty good. I often run into the Tower Records down the street, gasping for air and bleeding, demanding that they point me toward the "Major Key, Subtle Vocal Harmony" section. Which is to say that they found a way to describe Third Wave Ska without using those words. It's the internet radio version of The $25,000 Pyramid.

Slate has a article up comparing this type of very technical music recommender, which tends to pull music out of context with everything but that it's somequality-centric, with things like Last.fm, which rely too heavily on very popular tracks, recommending them over and over, because hey, they're so popular after all. That's like, the Man's free internet radio music recommender thing. Presuming the Man is Cee-Lo. Actually, he'd make a good Man. I don't think I'd want a still from the Closet Freak video staring at me as if to tell me to love Big Brother.

No, I don't care which shot you'd pick from that video to use for hate propaganda. Pick one. It's all creepy enough.

And a shiny nickel to the first reader to relay what "Z.B." means. Jenna and Rory should be on this.

Moment of Silence

I keep regretting checking Wikipedia's "Recent Deaths", mostly because I'll stop in to see what minor author from Bulgaria has passed on, or to check on the status of someone that's notable and whose sickness is so widely broadcast that I feel some kind of duty. And it's quick. Just that one little link, and there you go.

Then, sometimes, I look and I'm actually taken aback by one of the deaths, because either I earnestly believed tha the person in question had died by now, or because it's someone that has actually had quite a bit of influence over the things I listen to, and their passing does more to accentuate what feels like an era coming to an end. It happened last year with Laurel Aitken and yesterday with Desmond Dekker.

That's not good.