I Hate the Word "Blog"

June 30, 2003

Quote of the Month:

"He should lighten up...I mean, my mom was a bitch too, but I don't go writing songs about it."
- Triumph the Insult Comic Dog on Eminem

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June 27, 2003

Big News day today. Strom Thurmond is dead, the Supreme Court struck down the Texas Anti-Sodomy laws, and the EPA is being told by the Bush Administration to edit out hefty chunks of global warming data in its latest report on the environment in favor of findngs released by the American Petroleum Institute (surely an unbiased source).

Maybe it's just me, but I have to ask, why is the American Petroleum Institute even making environmental reports? Isn't that a conflict of interest? Isn't that a bit like Philip Morris doing cancer research?

At least it's OK to have gay sex in Texas. Not that I'm going to get involved anytime soon. This, coupled with Canada's recent approval of gay marriages, makes it a banner year for the Liberal Humanist Commie Homosexual Agenda. Too bad the environment will probably collapse in a few more centuries...

Meanwhile...

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June 26, 2003

Just So You Know...Some Popular Misconceptions

"Infer" means to receive an impression; "imply" means to send an impression. I infer from what you imply.

Referring to text layout - "justified" does not mean "aligned." To "align" is to set something left, right, or center. To "justify" means to spread out the text to prevent jaggedy columns and line breaks. Like the text of this page is justified and this one is not (see the ragged right side of the text).

Tomatoes are not vegetables and dolphins are not fish.


This makes a handy refutation for anyone who likes to say "walks like a duck, talks like a duck..." Well, looks like a fish, swims like a fish...could be a dolphin.

Use "its" the way you would use "his" and "hers." No apostrophes for possessive pronouns. Only nouns. The dog's bark is loud. Its bark is loud. His bark is loud.

"Your" is possessive. "You're" means "you are."
You're a churlish boor if you're not getting your grammar on, fool.

A Neat Internet Explorer Shortcut: Say you're going to google.com. Type only "google" into the address bar, and then hit "Ctrl-Enter." This keystroke command adds "http://www." to the front and ".com" to the back and executes the request. Isn't that marvelous?

And Now, Your Moment of Zen:

"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence."
-- Robert Frost

(side note about "temper." A temper is something that keeps you from getting angry, a limitation of sorts. A temper is not an angry disposition, it is the very opposite. If someone has a temper, that means they're well in control of themselves. Having a bad temper means having difficulty restraining oneself. It's like having a bad muffler; losing it means there's going to be a lot of noise.)

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June 23, 2003

Utterly random link #2. This shouldn't be done. The facial expressions in every picture on this site read very clearly: "KILL ME NOW."

Utterly random link #3. Go to this page and do a Find on "Rogers, Arkansas." Those crafty liberal, leftist, commie, pot-smoking hippies! Those meddling kids! But this is the best part. Some poor schmuck ranting about Hollywood and how he's going to only go see movies by Bruce Willis and the Rock rather than go see movies featuring actors with whom he disagrees. God forbid he should make choices based on artistic merit. This guy must really feel unempowered by the world. Sure celebrities are mostly idiots (or worse, they're normal people), but I'll trust an actor before I'll trust a CEO. And here's why. Something I learned from an actor:

Even the villain is the hero of his own story.

I've often wondered why Hollywood is so liberal, given that so many in La-La Land are so wealthy (I'd expect them to be conservatives after they've made money). But I really believe that good actors (not celebrities, since they're by definition out of touch with reality) have studied the heart of man more thoroughly than most people. A good actor understands the motivations and churnings of the human animal. It's not make-believe when a great actor is performing, it's a work of art. A work of art that says, "here is Man in all his grandeur and folly."

As an actor myself (which I can say because in January I actually got paid to act - I'm still not sure I was worth it), I've learned a great deal from the process of putting yourself in the shoes of another and trying to understand the reasons why people are the way they are. So perhaps by definition good actors have to have bleeding hearts.

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June 20, 2003

The Incredible Moses Leroy returns. Leave it to the guy who made my favorite record of the last two years to come back with an ultra-spiff new website.

IML is really just Ron Fountenberry. There seems to be a real band around him this time, but it's his brainchild. I've discovered that the new record features some work by Roger Manning, Jellyfish's keyboardist, as well as Miho Hatori of Cibo Matto. This is particularly amusing to me because now I can put 3 degrees of separation between Jellyfish and De La Soul (Miho was on Handsome Boy Modeling School with Prince Paul, who produced De La Soul). IML's last record, Electric Pocket Radio, is utterly fab - every song is its own genre. Click that link and you can get it for as low as $7 from the good people at Djangos.com.



Meanwhile, Utterly Random Link #1 in a continuing series.

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June 19, 2003

Female Trainspotter Wanted

Why is it that, by and large, men are more fanatically geeky about things? Comic books, music, computers, Star Trek, mathematics....each demographic has a population whose female participants are far outnumbered by the males. Do we obsess more? I have no shortage of male guitar geek friends, but I have no female guitar geek friends. That are heterosexual anyway (congratulations, Trina - you'll always be exceptional). I do have two or three women with whom I exchange album recommendations regularly, but I can't really have in-depth conversations about irrelevant minutiae with them. And really, I guess irrelevant minutiae is what I'm talking about. Trainspotting.

For those who don't know, trainspotting is a hobby of many Brits who wander around UK train stations and keep track of train serial numbers in an effort to catalog the trains. I would imagine there's a certain romance to this, although it's not something I think I would find appealing. However I certainly relate to the collection of useless data. So the term "trainspotting" gets applied to any brand of hobby where the participants are obssessed with something.

Oh the tiny joys of irrelevant minutiae. Band member names, album credits, Ibanez catalogs....my brain is host to inumerable bits of information that I'll likely never use. Sadly, there's not even a trivia game worth watching or playing to which I can apply my vast stores of obscure knowledge. I think I get it from my father, who can tell you just about every tune that ever made the record charts pre-1965.

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June 16, 2003

Failed Attempts at Humor #1

This just didn't turn out as funny as I thought it would. Plus it's a web geek joke, so not content with simply being lame, it's also esoteric. Nevertheless, I feel it has a right to exist. I mean, we let these people run around freely, don't we?

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June 16, 2003

Sucka MC's be Bitin' my Rhymes.

Today at work I thought to myself, "I wonder if anyone has ever taken content off my company's site and presented it as their own?" So I grabbed a pretty unique sentence of my own composition from my company's site and plugged it into google.

Sure enough, a company in Reading, PA, not only bit my content, but basically jenked the whole shebang! This is actually somewhat exciting to me as it means that A.) I'm writing stuff worth stealing and B.) we may well lay down the smack on them. So don't go pester them or anything.

In other news, the weekend was spent in Memphis hanging out with Chris and Heather. I plumbed the depths of Shangri-La Reocords and came up with Dweezil Zappa's first record, a Chet Atkins album, a collection of Bach played on Moog synthesizers, and some classic hip-hop 45's: Herbie Hancock's "Rockit" and Kurtis Blow's "The Breaks."

I also got to meet a new friend. Turns out she's even cuter in the 3rd dimension. Sadly, we had but an hour or two together, so we could not fully consummate our tryst. Or something.

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June 13, 2003

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June 12, 2003

The meteorological quirks of this state never cease to amaze me...5 minutes ago I went to the bathroom and the weather was all grey, rainy and Seattle-esque....when I got back, it was sunny and clear.

Last night I went for a run around the neighborhood and the world was yellow-tinted. I love that - I feel like I'm in a 70's B-movie. The sky was an orange silk quilt of clouds. By the time I was heading home, the sun had almost set and I felt the temperature drop 10 degrees as the lightning started and the grey clouds took over.

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June 10, 2003

You Can Have It All.....so why don't you?

God I love this woman. This column would be worth it alone for the brief examination of the subtext of that famous slogan of western culture. Commercials often use variations of "you can have it all," yet subconsciously we start to ask ourselves why we don't have it all. Then we feel bad that we don't have it all, that we don't have a life, that we're not exceptional, that we're not beautiful, or what have you. Which then leads to widespread dissatisfaction. Which then leads to further consumption in the pursuit of having it all. And the cycle begins anew.

Are you satisfied with your life? I know I'm not, but I'm not quite sure why. I've noticed, though, that when I'm bored or don't want to do the stuff I should be doing, I go shopping. I usually buy DVDs that I probably don't need, books I could easily get at the library, or CDs I don't need. Jeanette says, "What power have we when our leaders lie to us...no wonder we pick up the credit card and go shopping – at least when we buy things we feel we are exercising choice and control."

The choice and control thing stuck in my mind because I've read many times that addictions are sustained by the desire for control - you know what you're getting and it makes you feel good. Whether you're shopping, drinking beer, or smoking anything, Process A leads to Reaction B, and who wouldn't choose to feel good when the alternative is to feel empty and bored? Granted, some processes are healthier than others, but there's a kinship between all of them in that they are processes that produce predictable (and therefore comforting) results. Add to that whatever amount of chemical pleasure the process produces (be it alcohol, nicotine or just natural endorphines), and you've got a formula for addiction.

Typing this, I also discovered "beings" and "begins" are anagrams of each other.

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June 9, 2003

New photo gallery today. Yay.

This picture isn't in Tokyo, it's in Memphis at the park, with Taranasaurus Rix. She gave herself a halo and gave me horns. So I gave her Godzilla and Tokyo. Take that, woman!

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June 6, 2003

Happy birthday, Steve Vai. How big a fanboy am I that I know his birthdate? Well, it caught my eye when I read he was born on 6/6/60. Clearly rock and roll is the work of Satan...

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June 5, 2003

Not sure why, but I started reading a little basic economic theory and I think that if record companies and muscians read this stuff they'd discover how incredibly flawed the business model of today's music industry is. The most basic model of economic theory is supply and demand. Given the advent of mp3's and high speed internet connections, the supply of all music recordings automatically becomes near-infinite. With an infinite supply of something, the demand is going to be on pretty uncertain terms when it comes to cost. How do you determine the cost of something that can be replicated infinitely? Todd Rundgren says it's time for music to be viewed as a service rather than a commodity. I'm inclined to agree.

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June 4, 2003

There's just something about a beautiful woman and a guitar...and a blue hat.

In other news, another reason to love "Almost Famous":

This is a picture of Cameron Crowe's sister as she left home at age 18.

It's almost identical to the scene in the movie.

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June 2, 2003

As I was walking to the microwave just now, a potential blog entry materialized in my mind:

"Every day at lunch when I go to the microwave to heat up my Campbell's Chunky Soup® I take the Daily Cryptoquote with me to see if I can solve it in the 3 minutes and 30 seconds alotted for proper soup nuking. Most days I fail, today I didn't."

3 minutes and 30 seconds later this prophecy came to pass. It's the first time I've ever felt clairvoyant. I solved the cryptoquote with 7 seconds to spare.

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June 1, 2003

Deep in the Heat of Texas

I spent the weekend in the scenic Dallas/Ft. Worth Metroplex, where the temperatures are already into three digits. I ventured south to attend my friend Sarah's wedding, and to hang out with fellow Hendrix grad Allison D'Auteuil. Did I mention the heat?

I was rewarded for my struggle with 50 cent CDs! Wherehouse Music in Lewisville had a big used CD sale, so I merrily partook of these bargain-bin wonders:

Emmet Swimming - Wake
Josh Clayton-Felt - Inarticulate Nature Boy
The Apples in Stereo - The Discovery of a World Inside the Moone
John McLaughlin - The Promise
The Spent Poets - The Spent Poets (4 copies of this gem I bought)
World Party - Egyptology (2 copies)
Jungle Funk - Jungle Funk (featuring Living Colour rhythm section Doug Wimbish and Will Calhoun)
The Soup Dragons - Hotwired
Dan Reed Network - The Heat
Baby Animals - Shaved and Dangerous
Girl Bros. - Girl Bros. (Wendy and Lisa from Prince's Revolution)
Tackhead - Strange Things
*at this point the entire stack just fell off my desk...fuck!*

Oh, but the joys don't end there...shortly after that I found my way to Half Price Books, where I picked up the following:

The Crystal Method - Vegas (for $4, I'll mail it to Tara since she said she wanted it)
Michael Hedges - Breakfast in the Field (For ONE DOLLAR - I mean, can you believe it??)
T-Ride - T-Ride (I already own it, but it's so great and so tragically out of print)

Also got some fine books - a hardcover copy of Michael Ondaatje's "The English Patient," Douglas Coupland's "Microserfs," in paperback, and a hardcover copy of Jeanette Winterson's "Gut Symmetries." I feel mixed about reading "English Patient" after having seen the movie - all the images will be pre-formed in my head, which I'm not so sure I like. However, I do love the movie, and I can imagine few things as enjoyable as being lost in the desert with Kristin Scott Thomas, or spongebaths with Juliette Binoche, so...

A fine haul indeed. I almost bought "Conversations with Wilder" in hardcover, but a tiny voice inside my wallet said, "just stop."

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