February 29th, 2008
I love the iTunes store like I love air. — and not so much as a ’store,’ but as a research facility.
Thirty seconds of hundreds of thousands of tracks, free? Bitchin’! I’ve spent hours and hours exploring their library. (Mel threw an African feast party last summer, and I put together hours and hours of great, contemporary African music one Saturday afternoon — and it cost about $40. Without the iTunes store, we would have been listening to “Wimoweh (The Lion Sleeps Tonight)” all damn night.)
That said, there are at least two problems with the iTunes store.
- It requires iTunes.
And since I’ve been trying out Ubuntu as my main machine for the last few months, that’s been a pretty serious limitation.
- It’s reviewless.
You can see ‘popularity,’ whatever that is, but it’s a little challenging to find the new good stuff. And the stuff they promote … well, I suspect money changes hands somewhere.
So!
Check out the awesomeness that is searching for new music in Metacritic music and then hearing the samples in LaLa.com. Metacritic music gathers the opinions of many critics, then boils it down into one score; LaLa lets you listen in their Flash player to :30 clips. Also, LaLa plays the whole album, one clip after another, whereas in iTunes you have to clip to start any clip.
Also, LaLa makes it a lot easier to point to albums and playlists. So, for instance … “the best reviewed album of 2007? I preferred these other ones, but here’s a list.”
Pretty neat, pretty cool.
February 28th, 2008
“I want to crawl up inside you. Like Luke Skywalker crawled up inside his tauntaun to protect himself from the sub-zero temperatures of Hoth, where the Rebel Allience was hiding from the Galactic Empire.”
I think we’ve all been there. Raging with lust and alcohol and loneliness, including the lyric in the letter that just seemed so meaningful when you were listening to it at 2 a.m., and then later realizing that maybe … well, maybe that was a mistake.
I’m here to tell you: there is no lyric — and I’m including Spandeau Ballet in this — that compares with telling your girl that you’d like to splay her open and crawl up inside of her, right next to her liver, while dropping the full Star Wars sub-plot.
Listen to Jessica, bud. Time to let this one go.
February 26th, 2008
I wish I was making this up.
February 26th, 2008
… that God hates George Bush.
After leveling a city, and plaguing us with disease, we now have an infestation of snakes.
Seriously, people. What does God need to do to get our attention?
February 25th, 2008
Really?
Can’t wrap your head around “survival of the fittest,” but “eternal burning pit of fire” makes sense?
Never did understand why “ignorance” wasn’t one of the 7 deadly sins.
February 25th, 2008
oh, yeah! … we found our guy. Robert Ovitt, ex- of The Mistakes, and a few bands out South Carolina-way is joining the band as lead guitar. We’re ramping him up and should be back out live … I’m gonna say in late March, early April.
He moved to town a few months ago to set up a coffee shop with his lovely wife, Jenee.
We still have hope than Dan’s gonna come back from California some day, and then we’ll pull out all the 3-guitar Molly Hatchet tricks we can find…
February 18th, 2008
A tank that makes rainbows.
Gene Kelly, tap dancing on skates. Still miss Gene.
The homeless guy, who everybody in the neighborhood thought was dead – a memorial sculpture was produced — turns out to be watching Star Trek at somebody’s house in the Hill Country. Go, Samaritans!
Oh, and today’s virtue of the day: charity.
February 4th, 2008
Putting together a band has had some unexpected side-effects – I’ve become more diligent about getting things done, and surer about what I want to do with my time, I’ve gotten closer to some people, and further from others. (Like having a tattoo, ‘being a musician’ attracts the right people, and repels the right people.)
One of the nicest – and most unexpected – was that our friends, Annie and Keith, asked me to officiate at their wedding.
I’ve never been more honored.
I expect that they asked me, in part, because I’m tall — Annie’s close to 6 feet, and Keith has an inch or so on me — but it probably also had something to do with them seeing me on stage, talking, and knowing that I wouldn’t shy away from an audience.
The ceremony was last Saturday, and it was beautiful. The weather was great — a dramatic shift from the rehearsal on Thursday, which was windy and cold — the gathered crowd was handsome and lively, the bride and groom looked perfect, and so happy.
I went through the ceremony – posted below – and three of Annie and Keith’s friends spoke. Annie’s brother, Joe, said some things about how his sister had always supported him, and how he quietly supported her, then and now. There was weeping. At the end of his talk, Keith — all 6′ 6″, ex-UT offensive linesman of him — sobbed.
After the event, a number of people were very nice to me about the ceremony and how it had gone. I overhead someone being surprised that I wasn’t a professional religious figure. After a few beers, I got encouragement to start a church. (”There’s money in that, you know.”) A young guy at the bar said, “Hey, reverend! Nice speech!” A pretty girl asked me to do her ceremony, which I agreed to, but I’m unclear on whether she’ll remember.
One of Mel’s other bands — Karaoke Apocalypse — played that night at the reception, so, as a couple, we got to represent the two sides of their wedding — the sacred and the profane.
It was a lovely, lovely night.
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