Scalzi Link.

Whatever: Leviticans

Take the Lords Name in Vain Here

.: It just couldn't last could it! I'm sitting here listening to Transatlanticism since I decided I wanted to hear that damn song again. And NOW, NOW I found myself digging on the song I previously liked the VERY, VERY least on the whole album. The Sound of Settling with it's "Bah, Bah...Bah, Bah".

I have one Heineken and I desperately need five more. Fuck.

Coming Around?

.: Some will be glad that I've found a song on the most recent Death Cab for Cutie album to help redeem its existence.

Aftermath

.: I acquired The Walkmen| Bows + Arrows earlier this year and didn't really get into it, I probably only listened to it once all the way through and for some reason I dismissed it. It's been hailed as one of this years better albums on many of the lists I've seen. Today while walking home from work I was dialing through the list on my iPod and stopped on Bows + Arrows to give it a listen, maybe it's the new headphones (oooh, soothing warm bass), maybe it was the fatigue, but I'm sure I don't know why I've waited until today to dig up this gem. It's been added to my own picks for the year in the sidebar.

.: Christmas was good to me this year. I got to hang out with my cousin Marcus, and may get to again before he heads back to Bellingham. I will be enjoying The Return of the King sometime this week, in it's extended form. I just finished watching Best of SNL| Eddie Murphy. I'll be sucking the crap out of my carpet for weeks with my new Eureka| The Boss Pro, the worlds lightest cyclonic bagless vacuum cleaner, and once I obtain a USB cable that will fit it, because you just wouldn't want to include one as part of the package (feel my rage), I'll be copying, scanning, and printing my way to dear happiness with my new hp psc 1311 all-in-one printer - scanner - copier. Good food, good company, good beer & wine, my darling nephew, 3 hours of sleep and a slight hangover at work topped off my wonderful Christmas. Hope yours was cheerful.

Lists

I've spent the good part of an hour, probably more skimming throught best of lists, and found some nice sites in the process.

I've based nearly every music purchase I've made in the last two years on one thing, Pitchforkmedia.com. I will convert their Top 50 into a checklist of music to acquire. I will likely never have it all, but one of my little goals, one of the little things that keeps me going, is to get everything in the Top 10 of all their lists. If I ever succeed at that, then mayble I'll venture into the Top 11-20. This is quite a challenge because I of course want to buy new music as it is released, nonetheless I strive.

Through my skimming though, I've determined a sort of Top 10 things to get next (does not include Brian Wilson| Smile, which should be available for purchase at Boo's this week). I think that nearly all these are somewhere in Pitchforks Top 50, though I don't recall PJ Harvey. So here it is, my little list to live by for the next couple months:

Dungen| Ta Det Lungt
Fiery Furnaces| Blueberry Boat
The Streets| A Grand Don't Come for Free
Junior Boys| Last Exit
Devendra Banhart| Rejoicing in the Hands/Nino Rojo
Joanna Newsom| The Milk-Eyed Mender
The Futureheads| The Futureheads
PJ Harvey| Uh Huh Her
The Animal Collective| Sung Tongs
Kanye West| College Dropout

I *heart* quotes.

Thanks to DC Pol Sci - "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross -- Sinclair Lewis"

Mott The Hinky

.:Well, The Arcade Fire is album of the year for Pitchfork and Tiny Mix Tapes. I guess I need to listen to it more, because a) I do like it and b) I'm just not hearing album of the year and I hate the feeling that I'm missing something.

One thing that intrigues me about music is that I can enjoy so much of the same music that my friends do and then disagree on something like this. For example I know there's a bunch of music that Dan digs on that I just don't get into, but I have immense respect for his taste & opinion because I know I can give him something like Broken Social Scene, or Sufjan Stevens, and he'll say 'Wow!'. Of course then there's 'My Morning Jacket', which he slammed. It's alright though, because for the life of me I don't quite hear the appeal of Autopilot Off, one of his picks for the year. I don't hate it, but, you know...

...if you wander over to I Do What I Can you'll see that I have very similar taste in music to Chris and he's given his nod to The Arcade Fire as well.

I haven't bothered putting together any numbered list yet and I don't know that I will. I think I bought about one-third the music this year as I did last year, and I could hardly give that the attention I should've. I don't know how I listened to so much music last year, but I couldn't get enough. This year is just different somehow. I've listed most of the stuff that I like from this year over on the sidebar, that's all from 2004. The album I find myself liking more than any other this year is the 2000 release from Clinic, Internal Wrangler. It came highly recommended from Pitchforks list of 2000's top albums. It only took a couple listens to adjust to, and now everytime I hear it I dig it more.

A final note on The Arcade Fire - if there's one thing I know about myself it's that if I don't get it at first AND it's as good as everyone says it is, it's probably only a matter of time before I'm hailing it as brilliant. There are plenty of examples of this in my past. I just need time.

Done

.: The End of the Year tape is complete, along with comments. Linky is in the usual spot.

Malware & Data Miners

.: God bless Ad-Aware!!!

.: I've suffered unthinkable torments at the hands of evil. I like to think that I do a fair job of upkeep and maintenance on my computer, but after today I will increase my efforts. I run SpyBot S&D and a virus check about once a month, I run Ad-Aware as well, but not as often. As I was saying, the last couple of days have been lame for my online ventures. Mozilla Firefox just kept crashing and getting hung up on stuff. I went in and did some cleanup, uninstalled some stuff I didn't need, shut down services, and disabled all manner of unecessary startup crap. Not the culprit as it turned out. A couple of weeks ago I began using AVG anti-virussoftware and it came up with three trojans that nothing else found. I figured most problems were taken care of, and so it was, for a week or so, and then everything went to hell. So I ran Ad-Aware today in hopes of finding something. I checked the settings, ran it and NOTHING!!! Arghhh! "There must be something else I can do," I told myself. I checked the settings again, I'm not sure what I did differently than the first time, but I ended up with a deepscan of the whole damn C: drive and my friend, that bastard turned up 18 Data Miners and 3 Malware programs. Well, I had to go mail a bill and hit the store so I fired up SpyBot and ran out the door. When I got home I was very interested to see if SpyBot found anything additional, nothing. OK, well here we go, fire up Firefox! and see what happens. And Holy Crap that shit loaded fast and all the pages are loading faster and with anyluck I won't be crashing anything this evening. I'm running that shit weekly from now on. Later.

Don't Miss This!

Because I think it's pretty.

Tools.

Here Kitty Kitty

.: I just remembered something that I wanted to post a few days ago. Sometime in the last couple weeks a local family lost their home to a fire and also lost some pet cats. A recent update in the 'news'paper a couple days later documented the charitable intent of the many kind people who offered goods and services to help the family. Apparently among these folks offering clothes, furniture, housewares and etcetera were people who also wanted to donate cats. Who does this? Who genuinely considers that one of this families top priorities is to replace their deceased felines?

Child's Play

.: The link takes you to a web site that wants people to donate $ or videogames to children's hospitals. Any moderate reader of the web is probably aware of Penny Arcade-who run this little shindig. Kudos to them for doing so.

You don't have to donate, of course, but if one has the ability, charity to some organization is a good thing-at any time. Plus, it helps improve the world, even if just a little.

And let's face it. The world needs improvement.

Dunno who might read this blog aside from anyone who would already know about Child's Play, but fuck it. That's not the point at all-as I'm sure you all know.

It's time!

Fuck did I hate 2004. That's why I'm so glad it's ending. And part of it ending is my mostly annual tradition of the End Of The Year Mix Tape.

Who will make the cut? What was I listening too far too much this year? Will anything from 2003 make it, since there was no 2003 tape? And why the fuck is Master of Puppets being considered for inclusion? HAVE I LOST MY MIND???

I'm making the tape now, and let me tell you, the word is: excited, and everyone wants to know all about it!!!!

But don't think I'll just tell you now! Oh no. As any woman will tell you: I'm a big tease! I like to stretch things out!

(Note to actual women: I'm a total slut and will fuck on the first date. Sooner, if possible.)

So as I make this tape, I'm thinking of the accompanying essay, which I will probably post in Storytime, since that section of my site never gets enough time. I'm also going to be working on an EOTY rant, where I pretty much outline the 3 things I liked about this year, and the 15 things that can lick my ass and die a horrible, septic death all alone and, hopefully, beaten by hobos. Drunk hobos.

Coming soon! Don't miss it!

Wired News: Home-Brew IPod Ad Opens Eyes

impressive.

Odds are

.: I had a better day than you did yesterday. 'You' in this case being everyone. My sister, on the other hand, did not fare as well, as her car was stolen.

Crimes

.:Lo', The new Blood Brothers album Crimes appeared in my postbox yesterday, courtesy of my friend Dan. Joy! I've listened to it numerous times and I think that it is quite good. I know that Dan talked of it some over at his site, but I didn't give that a thorough reading yet, but I know he liked it as well. I don't imagine he would've given me one if he didn't find it worthwhile.

Initially I've found that I like it better than Burn Piano Island, Burn!, as amazing as that album is. What I like is that it isn't quite as Loud, Fast, or Hard. I like all those things, but as I age I find that my propensity to listen to such music for any length of time decreases. I could listen to Crimes all day long. Easily one of the best new releases I've heard this year. Thanks Dan.

Funeral

.: I've listened to The Arcade Fire's Funeral 3x in the past 24 hours now.
I dig on it. It's going to improve as I listen to it too-which is good, but lucky. Let me explain.
I read a lot about how TAF 'rocked'. Or produced 'the best rock album of the year' or shit like that.

OK-TAF...doesn't rock. Or at least, they do not rock as I understand rock. The Hot Snakes rock. The Secret Machines rock-or at least they come pretty close to rocking. But Sufjan Stevens-he does not rock. Autopilot Off-rock. Blood Brothers-would rock if they could write a song that didn't have 12 time signature changes in it. Broken Social Scene-not rock. Foo Fighters-rock. Andrew WK=ROCK. Crystal Method-not rock.
(I have tried to stay away from more extreme bands here. It is my opinion, of course, that Slipknot rocks. They are metal, though, and that's pretty much a prereq for a metal band. If you do not rock, you cannot be metal. One easy way to see if your metal band does not rock-do you have a keyboard player?)

Don't get me wrong-The Arcade Fire is GOOD.(so are all those other bands) They seem to have a style nailed, where you start a song quietly, and then crash in at the end with a cool hooky riff, or beat, or something that grabs and says 'listen to me again!'. I like that. I like hooks.

Which is why it was easy for me to discard my first listen to Funeral. I was expecting a rock album, and it did not rock-but it had songs that insisted I listen to them again. So even though I felt initially disappointed, I was able to recognize that this was based in what I thought this album should be-and not what it was. The difference meant that I was more open to the 2nd chance I gave Funeral, and more songs have begun to appeal to me.

However-and this may have something to do with it-I don't see myself going to see them play live tonight. I just don't see them producing a live experience that makes me want to stand up and jump around(which, is part of what I feel a rock album should do).

Now, I understand that my view here is a little narrow. I don't know that I'd call TAF anything but an alterna-rock band. They've got a touch of shoegazer, a definate Trail of Dead influence(I think, but less guitar oriented), and they certainly come out of a punk tradition(the one that The Talking Heads are best known for). I also recognize that this is all about my ego-but whofuckingcares?

Quirk-rock? I dunno. I like it. But anytime you have to put a modifier on the word 'rock' that means you're diluting the rock element of that sound.

So-enjoy The Arcade Fire. They're good.

Earth to Obi Wan, come in Obi Wan

.: Can't wait until everyone's blogging about the Holy Wars.

& Then There's This

.: