Author: colter

Another Pointless 2008 “Best Of” List

I always read people’s end-of-the-year review lists of music and secretly wish that I kept up with the pace of new music during the year, but honestly I never can. There’s so much to discover in the nooks and crannies of the recent past, and so the amount of music I discover in any given year that actually came out that year is like a snow cone on the tip of the proverbial iceberg. That said, here are some things from 2008 that wound my particular clock.

Steinski – What Does It All Mean? 1983-2006 Retrospective
Steve Stein is hip-hop’s Missing Link between old school rap and today’s collage-sample producers like Prince Paul and DJ Shadow. I wrote about this phenomenal album in-depth here back in July.

Spiraling – Time Travel Made Easy
I have a hard time finding enough great things to say about my favorite band. The new album is more laboratory-crafted syth-pop-rock with a proggy edge. “Victory Kiss” is the greatest radio single you’ll never hear. “Cold Open” is the best album intro (and title for an album intro) I’ve heard in a long time. And “The Future” is one of those songs I wish I’d written about how disappointing it is that we’re almost to 2010 and we haven’t made any headway into the life promised us by the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Jetsons, the 1964 World’s Fair, or hell, even Back to the Future II[1].

Panic at the Disco – Pretty. Odd.
I know the young teenagers like this band a lot, but I don’t hold it against Panic. I still haven’t heard their first record, but this album shines like a thousand Christmas trees. Clearly they wanted to make a grandiose Sgt. Pepper statement with it. It may be the best sophomore record I’ve heard by any band since Jellyfish’s Spilt Milk.

Sonny Landreth – From the Reach
The world’s greatest slide guitarist goes the star-studded route, with help from Eric Clapton, Eric Johnson, Robben Ford, Vince Gill, Dr. John, and Mark Knopfler. I’ve been dying to see what Sonny and Eric Johnson might do on record, and “The Milky Way Home” does not disappoint.

Other fine releases from 2008: Take Shelter by Boondogs, Play by Brad Paisley, An Invitation by Inara George with Van Dyke Parks, and Other People by American Princes.

Pre-2008 music that I discovered for myself this year: Mew, Mika, Mulatu Astatké, Pelican, The Factory, The Nines, Henry Cow, Soft Machine, Hawkwind and Dada’s amazingly gorgeous final disc, How to Be Found. Honorable mention goes to the distinctly nonmusical but no less compelling Conet Project.

Albums I’m dying to hear in 2009: the new records from The Mercury Program, David Mead, Owen, and The Bird and the Bee.

1.) Although I have to say I’m impressed that my mom’s TV does display her caller ID so we’ll know not to pick up when Flea calls.

Scam Hilarity

Gmail’s spam filter has been preventing me from finding great spam poetry, but this scam message just came through and I found it highly amusing:

United Nations compensation office.

You are selected among the list of beneficiaries to be compensated by United State Government in
collaboration with United nation Organisation office with sum of US$4, 250,000.00 for being;

1)A Victims and one among people that has been scammed from any part of the world,
2)Foreign contractors that may have not received their contract sum,
3)Unpaid beneficiaries, inheritance next of kin that was originated from, Africa, London United Kingdom or any part of the world,
4)And one amone the people that have had an unfinished transaction or international businesses that failed due to Government problems,financial crisis and those people that has delay or failed international funds transfer etc.

This is United Nation Organisation and Queen Elizbeth II initiative.you can contact Barrister William Stevenson of
Crown Chamber Office,London for detail or Get back for detail.

barr.williamstev@lawyer.com

United Kingdom compensation office

God forbid these scammers should ever learn to grasp basic concepts of grammar, punctuation and capitalization. This thing reads like it was written by a LOLCat.

How to Create a Password

This is something I’ve been meaning to write for a long time, mainly for my family and any other lass-than-savvy Internet users who might read this blog.

These days, you really need to have a strong password. It needs to have numbers and letters. Preferably even symbols and capital letters. Here are some ways to create a strong password that’s still easy to remember:

  • Take a word with an I, A, O, E, or S in it and replace those letters with 1, @, 0, 3, or 5, respectively.
  • Make a pattern on the keyboard. I was perusing a list of 100 common passwords and was surprised that one of my old standbys, 1q2w3e, was not on the list.[1]
  • Spell your name backwards (or your kids’s names or your street, whatever) and put your age or birth date in the middle.

For an even stronger password, capitalize every other letter. Or just the first and last if that’s too annoying to perform.

And since most people have a ton of different websites that they use, and since using the same password for every site you visit is not a good idea, here are a couple of tips:

  • Keep a mental keychain of passwords, some easy, some hard. For basic sites like MySpace or Facebook, a simple password is fine, but if you’re logging into your bank account or anything involving your credit card, you want that password to be as tricky as possible.
  • If you only want to use one password, then alter it slightly for each use by adding the initials of the website at the beginning or end of your password (preferably in caps for extra safety). So if your standard password were 1q2w3e, then you might use 1q2w3eMS to log into MySpace.

1.) Please don’t try to hack any of my accounts with this password. I haven’t used it for anything in years.

Mini-Rant: The New Yorker

The New Yorker‘s website Table of Contents is really painful to scan because they put the various authors’ names before the titles of the articles. Writers’ names should never be more important than the content of their articles. Am I supposed to scan down the page and only read articles by authors I know and like? It’s maddening and it makes me feel like I’m supposed to know these peoples’ names, which in turn makes me feel like a Philistine.[1]

Just look at this mess. Click the link and scroll down about halfway to the Table of Contents.

1.) This is something at which The New Yorker excels. I suspect I am not alone.

Mr. Roy Griffin

I was watching Saving Private Ryan recently, and my thoughts turned to Mr. Roy Griffin.

Roy is a gentleman 90 years of age who lives by himself in a house with a large vegetable garden a block north of my house on Tyler Street in Hillcrest. I’ve met him only twice. On a particularly chilly Sunday morning a few years ago, I was stepping out in my pajamas to get the newspaper when my front door closed behind me, locking me out. Barefoot in 35 degree weather at 8 a.m. on a Sunday, I knocked on a couple of neighbors’ doors to no avail. A black Ford SUV pulled up and the man at the wheel was Mr. Roy Griffin, on his way to church. He asked me if I needed a ride somewhere, and I figured my friend Sara’s place would be the next best bet, so he took me there.

He told me, “I know what it’s like to be cold. I spent a winter in Belgium in World War II.”

He dropped me off at Sara’s and waited with me until she answered the door (which she did very grumpily, of course). I just needed to get the number of my friend Kathy, who had my spare key, so I waved Mr. Griffin goodbye and he went on his way. A few days later I took him some cookies to say thanks. He was on the phone when I went by, so I didn’t stay to visit. And, because I’m naturally kind of shy, I never got around to going back to his house just to chat.

Truthfully, his statement about knowing the true meaning of the word “cold” always kind of intimidated me. I never figured I’d have anything to offer the guy – he’s a WWII vet who still drives to church and works in his very impressive garden, so the guy is clearly tough as nails.

And today I found out just how tough. I Googled him. As it turns out, AETN has a vast website of veteran interviews and archives at InTheirWords.org. Here is Mr. Griffin’s page. He was an amphibious engineer in the Army. He fought WWII from the Kasserine Pass in Tunisia to Omaha Beach, and helped liberate the concentration camp at Buchenwald. It’s a lot to dig through, but here are some highlights to get you interested.

From Video #9:

When I first come home, I was just hanging. What I wanted to do most of all was to get my feet on the ground, just be a normal person. And I could picture myself going way out into the Rocky Mountains and get so far out I couldn’t hear a train blow or nothing. It didn’t work that way. I know if it hadn’t been for my family I’d have probably lost it all. I never did get depressed, but I was worried because I was with this tough outfit for five years.

Also in that video, he tells about finally getting home from the war, to Camp Shelby in Mississippi, just a few hours from his hometown of Yazoo City. He was being told about his options for assignment, none of which involved getting home to see his family any time soon. When an officer told him he didn’t have any privileges while awaiting assignment, he said:

Then I told him which side his bread was oleo’d on. “I’m a tell you something. I haven’t seen my wife in three years. Do you think I’d recognize her if she walked in?” I said, “if you need me in the next few days, get a bunch and come after me, don’t come by yourself. Just sure as God made little green apples, I’m gonna go home.”

I won’t give away the ending, because it’s great.

All of this made me realize that war stories are only stories to those who didn’t live them. The rest of us can only sit back and be fascinated and enthralled. Reading about Saving Private Ryan on IMDb.com, I see in the trivia section that the film is listed as President Bush’s favorite movie. Neither President Bush nor I have ever seen combat, but I can’t help feeling like he missed a lesson there: War is a last resort. And as the world is coming to a slow realization that the Iraq War represents either the world’s most colossal intelligence blunder or the world’s most cynical exploitation of warfare for corporate gain (or both!), maybe we’ll even start to realize that there was a justifiable war once.

And even it was hell.

Happy New Year. Here’s to 2009 being a time for learning lessons.

Socio-Economic Silver Lining?

From Vanity Fair:

Another Upper East Side woman often goes from lunch at Michael’s restaurant on West 55th Street to Manolo Blahnik a block away to pick up a $600 or $700 pair of shoes as “retail therapy.” No more. “I was at Michael’s yesterday and was thinking, Oh, Manolo’s … But then I thought, Why? Why do that? It just doesn’t feel good.”

One prominent “hedgie” recently flew to China for business—but not on a private plane, as before. “Why should I pay $250,000 for a private plane,” he said to a friend, “when I can pay $20,000 to fly commercial first class?”

From Newsweek:

Steve Schwarzman of private equity firm Blackstone Group expressed regret for the $3 million he spent on his 60th birthday party in February 2007—an event that politicians and the press won’t let him forget. “Obviously, I wouldn’t have wanted to do that and become, you know, some kind of symbol of sorts of that period of time.”

It’s Still a Wonderful Life

It’s interesting to watch It’s a Wonderful Life through the lens of the current economic crisis. Watching the run on the Bailey Building and Loan, and listening to George explain how bank loans work, I’m struck by how far finance as an industry has come, with so many labyrinthine variations on illiquid funds, debt, stocks, speculation, etc. A modern version might go something like this:

“You act like I’ve got the money back in the safe. But it’s in Joe’s house, and he’s mortgaged to the hilt because although he only makes $80,000 a year he wants people to think he makes $100,000, and he wants the jet ski and the Hummer and so you loaned him the money because you were in the same frat and why not? They’re just numbers, ink on a page. Everybody fudges the numbers, even Joe!”

And the scene where Potter tries to buy George out. It’s become the American Dream.

You wouldn’t mind living in the nicest house in town, buying your wife a lot of fine clothes, a couple of business trips to New York a year, maybe once in a while Europe. You wouldn’t mind that, would you, George?

I think most of Wall Street sold out to Potter at birth. It’s pretty much the goal of most Americans. But it shouldn’t be; and that’s actually one of the lessons of the movie that people miss.

The movie is trying to tell us that the stuff we think of as “important” – building big things, living the good life, fame, fortune – is so far, far less important than helping people and holding it down in your own corner of the world, wherever that may be.

One of the things Camille Paglia[1] talks a lot about is elevating the trades. We’ve become so materialistic that we assume that anyone who makes less than $30,000 or who doesn’t work in an office is automatically a second class citizen. We’ve got to find some way to be happy with who we are and what we do. Because it seems like no one is.

1.) Who by the way, clearly has a big crush on Sarah Palin, so I take her less seriously than I used to.

Race is Bunk

Mara Leveritt at Arkansas Times has a fantastic piece on race, a concept she cunningly refers to as “junk science.”[1] I hadn’t given it much thought, but from a strictly scientific standpoint, race is kind of a crock. Certainly there are evolved characteristics among people adapted to a specific environment, but cultural factors define and divide people far more than genetic ones. Skin tone has until recently been the clearest indicator of cultural background, but this is changing more and more every day.

I really want to send the article to Thom Robb and see what his reaction to it would be. He’s built his identity on his notions of racial superiority. I’m sure he’ll fume. He was bouncing off the walls when Obama referred to himself as a “mutt,” because he didn’t understand that, to Obama, the term is pretty inert and worthless. It’s simply a descriptor, like “tall,” or “skinny.” To Robb, it means everything; it stands for impurity and implies disadvantage and low status. With one casual aside, Obama singlehandely deflated the position of people like Robb.[2]

Obama’s ascendancy reminds me of medieval times, when two lords wanted to unify their houses by marrying their childen together. The offspring would be of united blood, loyal to both houses. Obama seems to be in a similar place. The more unity children this world has, the less petty squabbling humans can do.

1.) Somewhere there’s a racist Creationist jumping up and down with steam puffing out of his ears saying, “that’s my derisive label! Not yours!”

2.) Interesting side note: my office blocks websites with potentially offensive content. When I started my new job, I was able to peek at Robb’s blog. This is now no longer the case. That means somebody saw the traffic, checked out the content, and blocked it. I hope nobody thinks I’m a bigot; I just find them hilarious.

Treasure Trove of Trash Talk

If we needed any more proof that swear words are a legislative and judicial Pandora’s Box of insanity, Jay Wexler brings up the recent hilarious Supreme Court case between the FCC and Fox TV. Justice Scalia made this curious remark:

“Don’t use golly waddles instead of the F word.”

Wexler suspected that Scalia improvised “golly waddles”[1] and consulted language expert and Harvard Psych prof Steven Pinker, who confirmed the invention, and who then proceeded to let loose this handy list of polite and/or archaic euphamisms for such things.

“I am pretty sure that Scalia made up ‘golly waddles’ on the spot. He needed a hypothetical term that was not “f*ck,” and so used that; I don’t think it was an allusion to any commonly used euphemism. On the other hand he was certainly influenced by the truncated profanities for “God” that are ubiquitous in polite speech, such as golly, gosh, egad, gad, gadzooks, good grief, goodness gracious, Great Caesar’s ghost, and Great Scott. Similar truncations pop up for just about every taboo term, including Jesus (gee, gee whiz, gee willikers, geez, jeepers creepers, Jiminy Cricket, Judas Priest, Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat), sh*t (shame, sheesh, shivers, shoot, shucks, squat, sugar), and f*ck (fiddlesticks, fiddledeedee, foo, fudge, fug, fuzz, flaming, flipping, freaking, frigging, effing). I’m not sure why he felt he needed a second word in his hypothetical euphemism, but it may have been inspired by the prevalence of two-part euphemisms for bullsh*t, like applesauce, balderdash, blatherskite, claptrap, codswallop, flapdoodle, hogwash, horsefeathers, humbug, moonshine, poppycock, tommyrot.”

Truly amazing is the human capacity for human linguistic invention, especially in finding safe alternatives for the “magic” words. I wonder if any of the outmoded examples were as weighty in their heyday. People forget that a lot of swear words from a hundred years ago are teethless and innocuous today.

UPDATE: After ruminating on “golly waddles” I think Scalia may have meant “mollycoddles.”

1.) Of course, Scalia is old as the hills, so you never know if he’s using some Depression-era Jersey slang.

Chunks of Childhood

I wrote this on Facebook today, and thought it was worth sharing:

Once you’ve been tagged you have to write a [note] with 15 weird/random facts about you. I was tagged by Jill, so I’m doing my duty. This one seems to have a childhood theme to it.

1. I don’t think I ever learned how to properly untie my shoes until college. I used to always pull the loops rather than the ends. I have no idea why.

2. When I was 4, I knew every make and model of every car on the road in the US. Or so my mom tells me. I have no recollection of this whatsoever.

3. When I was 2 or 3, I left the house in my pajamas at 8am and went across the street to our neighbor’s house for cookies. I think Mrs. France called my mom to let her know. Mom was looking everywhere for me. So yeah, I’ve had this cookie thing for a long time. It may be congenital, because….

4. …My dad always had a stash of Butterfingers. He called them his “medicine” and kept them on a high shelf away from our stuff.

5. In 1982 or so I burned my Star Wars AT-AT into plastic glop on a snowy day. I was burning a hole in the underbelly (like Luke!) when it caught fire. I learned that when plastic catches fire, there’s no stopping it. I threw snow at it, but eventually gave up and threw it in the fireplace.

6. Elizabeth Evans and I would constantly re-enact the scene in E.T. where Eliot’s mom hits E.T. in the face with the refrigerator. Guess who played E.T.? I wonder if chronic mild head trauma has cumulative effects over time…

7. In the days before video rentals, and yes I’m old enough to remember them, my dad had a friend dub Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back onto VHS tape, which I watched with a regularity that approached monomania. By 1985, you could see through the tape.

8. My dad owned an old and busted Austin Healey. It lived in the garage and made scary noises and I used to have nightmares about it because the grill looked like the teeth of a monster. Cut me some slack, I was 5. In 1986 my stepmom’s cat had kittens in it, and the car was sold not long after.

9. In kindergarten, my sister and Amy Crosland locked me and Robert Whisenant out of my house. We panicked and then totally went on the offensive by trashing Amy’s mo-ped. I poked holes in the seat and Robert put rocks in the engine. We had to pay for that.

10. In the summer of 1990, I would walk to Quail Tree swimming pool listening to nothing but Steve Vai’s Passion and Warfare on cassette. That fall, I started guitar lessons.

11. The only time I ever went to drama competition, I got first place in solo acting, thanks to a great piece my dad gave me, written by Peter Cook. I’ll post a link to it on my page in a few minutes.

12. In 3rd grade Chad Causey and I used to have competitions to see who could put more pepper in their chili. Mountains we’d put in there. I don’t recall who won. But I know that I’m addicted to Vietnamese hot sauce today.

13. In addition to the many ashtrays stolen from Burger King, I participated in the heisting of a newspaper rack, along with Odie and I think Dave Deere? Maybe Lance. I forget. I know it was in Odie’s truck. Probably listening to BloodSugarSexMagik. Because music makes kids commit crime.

14. I was only paddled once. Summer Rec, by Coach Hudson. My crime: going into the stands of the junior high gym to retrieve a frisbee, after we were specifically forbidden from doing so. I was clearly a juvenile delinquent and had to be punished.

15. My grandfather was a minister who wrote and self-published a book on ghosts and their relationship to divine spirit. He did this on a Mac Plus in the mid-80’s, hampered by his slow-moving fingers, which gave him limited movement following a stroke in the late 60’s. I only ever knew him as a man with slurred speech, with a walker or a wheelchair, but his mind was as sharp as a tack.