.:Colter:.

Rainy days make for peculiar interior adventures. I started off trying to record some music for my friend Jessie’s art project at RISD, but I’m having some weird flutter in my audio signal so I gave up and practiced scales and arpeggios on piano for an hour or two. Then I ate some dinner and started catching up on my DVDs of Mysterious Cities of Gold, which then led me, naturally, to start investigating the Nazca Lines on Google Maps.

I had always assumed that the Nazca Lines were reasonably organized and well-laid out. They really aren’t; they’re remarkably scattershot, and if there’s an overall theme it appears to be “failed rectangles.”

There are a lot of these.
And a lot of these.
And mixtures thereof.
I think the curly part here is the tail of a monkey but it’s hard to tell.

The entire plain northwest of the town of Nazca was apparently treated like a giant Etch-a-Sketch, only there was never any shaking up to erase anything. For me this pretty much dashes any UFO-related theories as to the lines’ origins; clearly these were people making it up as they went along. And unfortunately the most artistic designs (the hummingbird, the condor, the spider, and the human) are too small for Google Maps to show. Still fascinating to think about, though.

Oh and I found a cool shot of an airplane in flight.

And as long as we’re in Peru, let’s check out Machu Picchu, which looks totally odd from the sky because you have no depth perception. It just doesn’t look as impressive because you can’t tell, for example, that its entire west side is an incredibly steep dropoff.  Google Earth, however, will allow you to get some idea of just how freakishly high up that place is.

Last June I made up a word, “inspiratorial,” and just today I discovered I’m #1 in Google for it, out of some 140 pages! I rule!

Most of the other sites in the SERP[1] are blogs, which means I’m more important than all of them. This feeds my little nerdy ego a glorious repast. Granted my ego is roughly the size of a walnut and I keep it in a barren cupboard, fed only by occasional trips to Banjo Center.

1.) Search engine nerd lingo for “Search Engine Results Page.”

Two new things.

Mog is kinda half myspace, half pandora. You connect to people based on what you listen to, which is a great idea if enough people catch on to it. Given the obscurity of my musical tastes, very often I’ve found that no one on Mog listens to the stuff I like. But maybe more will come. Mog scans your music folders and makes public everything you listen to - which sure is neato, assuming you have nothing to hide.* It also tracks your most recently played tunes. All of the technology is somewhat scary as far as movement-tracking goes - I’m trusting their terms of service when they say they’re not snooping other things or selling that info. Anyway, here’s my page, check it out.

Writely is a Google-copyrighted product that’s basically the same thing to Word that Gmail is to Outlook. It’s online document creation and storage, but with the added kick of collaboration features and versioning (you can roll back to earlier drafts).You can import and export your documents to and from Writely. Apparently this Web 2.0 thing is taking off - I never thought I’d store documents on the web, but this thing looks pretty appealing.

1.) Which I don’t. I’m steadfast in my appreciation of Winger.

Every night The Daily Show delivers the finest comedic satire that I think this world has ever produced. Every episode is worthy of the praise Saturday Night Live gets (or used to get, or occasionally gets) for being the best comedy since Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Tonight’s episode was the first time I felt compelled enough to transcribe a bit for posterity. This from a conversation between Jon Stewart and Samantha Bee:

Jon: Sam, what are you reading from?

Sam: It’s the official Middle East Reporting Template. It provides the basic story of cyclical violence. All you have to do is fill in the specific country, weapon, and number of hostages - boom, there’s your story. It’s a lot of fun. Around here they call it MidLibs. Here’s one my niece Kimberly filled in. “Monkey planes continue to rain strawberry jam from the skies as tensions in the region mount over a unicorn prarade.” Kids, you know…

Jon: Sam, but is there any chance that this is a different kind of conflict, that might change this paradigm; I mean that out of all this cyclical horror something positive might result?

Sam: Your lips to God’s ears…I mean Allah, I mean Jesus, er, Abra - God I hate this f*cking place! Argh!

Jon: Sam, how is all this affecting the people on the ground?

Sam: Well, Jon, for now, the hope is that these violent aerosols between Israel and Lebanon won’t result in a nuclear fudgecicles. Ooh! KIMBERLY!

Jon: Thank you, Sam. Samantha Bee, everyone.

So perfect. So true. So damned funny.

I’ve been waiting almost 30 years for this. Not with any great intensity, but I’ve always been curious about it. The first part is black and white with no original audio, but keep watching as it does get better. For a Star Wars fan, it’s the last real trip back home.

21 years ago this week, Coca-Cola introduced New Coke. It burned down, fell over and then sank into the swamp, but might I suggest something to the good people at Lay’s Potato Chips? A slight name change for better, more accurate marketing:

New Crack™

Seriously, Wesley Snipes could start a New Jack City empire on this sh*t. And apparently, for those who may live in the uncivilized wilds of Saskatchewan or Newton County, you can buy it on Amazon.

Warning: Guitar nerdisms ahead.

I saw a lot of bands last week, and I saw a lot of telecasters. It was uncanny. Nearly every scruffy indie band I saw last week played either a Fender tele or maybe a Gibson ES. There was nary a stratocaster, Les Paul, PRS, or even a weird pawnshop junker to be seen. Fender stratocasters and Gibson Les Pauls are far and away the most popular instruments in rock, or at least mainstream rock. Indie bands apparently go far enough out of their way to avoid playing popular instruments. I guess that makes sense, since they want to avoid the norms of popular music. Generally the telecaster is considered a country music guitar, so I guess there’s an added visual irony for a snarky indie rocker to choose a tele.

The one notable exception was Animal Collective. They had a strat, a PRS AND a pawnshop junker onstage. I think there may have been a tele, too, though. They were musical deviants that sounded like nothing else around, though, so they’re the exception that proves the rule.

Overall, though, I realized that, as much as indie rock claims freedom from the restrictions of the mainstream, they too have their own rules and norms and boundaries. Their uniform is just as strict as mainstream rock: must have thrift store shirts, must have Chuck Taylor All-Stars, must look generally scruffy, holes in clothing preferred…must have telecaster. Indie rock isn’t as self-defined as it might think. It exists only as a reaction to the mainstream, and can only define itself by what it’s not. The mainstream is pretty narrow in its scope, though, so there’s a lot more room for creative expression in indie rock.

It has been an interesting and exciting day. The main reason is that I have learned that the keyboardist for Jellyfish, Roger Manning, is playing at South by Southwest on my birthday, March 17th. I have already planned to attend SXSW from the 15th through the 19th, and in addition to Roger, another of my all-time favorites, The Soft.Lightes are playing that same day. Not a bad way to turn 30.

Also, I have been immortalized by the marketing department of Mr. Electric. Today they had us put up a coloring book for kids. They had to come up with names for the characters….and so one of them is named Sparky McCorkindale. Click here for the PDF (5 MB).

Something else I’m excited about is that I just discovered the Toon Disney channel, which has The Tick on EVERY DAY!

McSweeney’s had a good bit not too long ago about follow up songs to one-hit wonders:

How Are We Going to Get These Dogs Back In?

Bust an Additional Move

Seriously, Eileen, Come On

(Won’t You Give Me a Ride Home From) Funkytown?

Remember When You Lit Up My Life? That Was Great

I Will Now Pass the Dutchie Back to You and Thank You for Passing It to Me Originally Because I Really Enjoyed the Dutchie

The Morning That the Lights Came Back On in Georgia

Everybody Was Kung Fu Making Up

Achier Breakier Heart

Whoomp! There It Continues to Be

867-5309 extension 2

We Never Took It and Persist in Our Refusal to Take It

But I figure, why stop at one-hit wonders?

We Have Successfully Received the Funk

Hit Me Baby One More Time, Then Please Stop Hitting Me

I Wanted You to Want Me, But Now Not So Much

It’s Cooler Now, We Should Put Back On All Our Clothes

Feel free to add your own in the comments section.

…where apparently they kidnap American guitar players and force them to battle in cage-match riff-offs. I found this video at YouTube.com, which is slowly taking over the world as a video answer to Flickr. People upload videos and share them online for free. The content is an amalgam of home movies and TV clips. I did a search on some of my favorite guitar players and found this clip of Paul Gilbert and Marty Friedman from a Japanese TV show. Even if you’re not a guitar player, I think this video is illuminating as a cross-cultural experience. First the guys compete in a name-that-Kiss-riff competition (which Marty wins, although if the game were Beatles tunes, Paul would totally have killed him), then another one based on letters of the alphabet. There are also clips from random videos (UFO and Ramones, anyone?) and a completely surreal The Price is Right-esque advertisement for Paul’s PGM301 guitar. Watching it I couldn’t help but feel as though there is a parallel universe where guitar shredding never died. Kurt Cobain never made it to Japan.

Compounding the weirdness is the fact that Marty and Paul speak fluent Japanese throughout the show.