Halloween you are my pride

There are some great Halloween pictures over at Zooborns.com, the zoo baby picture blog.

Have a great Halloween!

read more

You can only hope to hear me

Radio is a tremendous medium for discussion, education, and arts. One thing it is astoundingly bad at: pictures. For some reason that remains obscure to me NPR's Morning Edition ran a segment on political cartoons. They had two cartoonists on describing a few of their cartoons. "So there's this picture of a person and there's a label on them that says 'Undecided' on it." Gripping stuff. No offense to the cartoonists who were on, but they made the Morning Zoo team look like deep thinkers. I actually said out loud "Wait, are they really *reading political cartoons* at their audience? WTF?!?!!"

And yes, I did actually use the acronym when I spoke . Because I'm committed to my internet lifestyle, such as it is.

read more

The bus at the corner

After putting Boo on the bus I flipped on the CLO podcast. The next lesson queued up was Lesson 51: 今天的天气非常冷. Quite apropos. Especially as I forgot to wear my coat to the bus stop.

read more

If you are a fan then you know that you've already got it

Back in 1989 Faith No More broke onto the national music scene after building a fanbase for five years through a series of singers. They proceeded to release 3 Top 40 and 1 Top 50 album over the next seven years. I was and am a huge fan. They broke up for good in 1998. In the subsequent 10 years their label (either directly or through a licensee) has released FIVE greatest hits collections. The band only had six albums! Sure, they released 17 singles over their career, only seven of which charted in the U.S. They did a lot better in the UK and Australia, where they charted 15 of their 17 singles. I'm not knocking them, I love their music and still listen to it frequently.

Are the labels morons? Five compilations in 10 years? I can see a band like Nirvana that sold 20 quadrillion records and hold an iconic place in the memory of many 30/40-somethings today, but FNM simply were never THAT huge. They should have been, of course.

It does figure that the only one of the five collections worth considering is put out by Rhino. People who truly love music tend to do well packaging compilations.

read more

Hey friend, what happened to you?

Among the many reasons I'm disappointed by CNN is that every time I see a headline along the lines of "Rollins: Joe the Plumber versus Colin Powell" it's a commentary by intellectual lightweight Ed Rollins, not aging alternative icon Henry Rollins.

read more

There is fiction in the space between you and reality

The term slashfic popped up in my reading somewhere today. I was already familiar with the term fanfic, and I thought "What the hell is slashfic?" The most obvious description is of course "fan fiction in which half of a poorly thought out story is posted and thousands of alcohol/caffeine fueled and/or prepubescent socially inept obsessives armed with poor reading comprehensions skills and a hi-larious arsenal of stock inside jokes compete to comment on it quicker than everyone else. In which case no one ever actually reads the story in question and most of the comments have no relation to it, not that it matters because it was stupid to begin with."

Unfortunately that description is wrong. Which is too bad.

read more

Remember dancing on the pier last night

I have to wonder if Maureen Dowd's column today is an indication that she has a high opinion of the education level of Americans or if she has become completely detached from reality. Hmmm, those might be synonymous. Either way: her column is IN LATIN. This is not change I can understand.

After a second reading I actually find it surprisingly comprehensible. Or at least as clear as the average blog post.

read more

Let's party over here with one hundred dollar bills

So I've been passing these around to a lot of my friends and the response has been very good, and it dawned on my that I hadn't shared it with both of you, my faithful readers.

The episode of This American Life, Another Frightening Show About the Economy that inspired the Cheetos comment was produced by Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson. They also did the much lauded and equally enlightening episode Giant Pool of Money (not nearly as fun as it sounds).

They now also have their own podcast about the economy called Planet Money which currently updates several times a week.

read more

I'm going to rob you blind (woo-hoo)

I was discussing the This American Life about the scary scary economic situation with a friend on IM and he came up with the most awesome description of the situation possible.

rev They come down pretty hard on the regulators, Congress in general, Clinton, and Greenspan in particular. The one thing I thought was missing was pointing out that the regulators did a lousy job overseeing the financial institutions because the financial institutions paid craploads to lobbyists to ensure that Congresspeople made sure the regulators were lenient.
Shon: keep the cashier busy while i stuff this bag of cheetos in my coat

read more

I can rock the mic to silence by John Cage

There is a good reason we decided to make microphones for the girls rather than go out and buy them. A good reason. A really good reason. However, as I can't remember what exactly it was, I'll go with it was cheaper.