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.