Category: Music

  • Superbowl ads – What you talkin' about, Willis?

    The next ad was for Tears of the Sun, a new Bruce Willis movie…

  • Superbowl ads – roadtrip / football fans

    First ad I tuned in for was a cute ad about a roadtrip, for Honda Element. Amusing, but no sale. Next up was an ad for watching football. Heartwarming.

  • Never explain a joke

    The usually impeccable attitude on display at The Gawker shows a slight crack today when editor/writer Elizabeth Spiers responds to an illiterate slam from some Tim Goodman groupie. The main response on the Gawker home page is just perfect, but the extended entry tries too hard: I was merely challenging his assumption that American audiences…

  • How much proof do you need?

    There’s no use denying it any longer. Elijah Wood is very, very gay.

  • Bashing SF/NY/LA getting tired

    Gawker has published another round of SF sucks/no it doesn’t. It’s kind of a weird obsession, and somehow it seems related to the dashed dreams of the dotcom crash. Growing up in New York, we never even thought about any other cities. We took for granted that we were at the center of the world.…

  • now playing:Sister Morphine, The Rolling

    now playing:Sister Morphine, The Rolling Stones (Sticky Fingers)

  • You gotta hate those tag errors

    It wasn’t the first time I failed to close a tag correctly (in this case the STRONG tags surrounding the song same in the template for iTunes listings), and it won’t be the last time, but I’ve fixed it now, so here’s another example: Wicked Path Of Sin, Old And In The Way (That High…

  • Locked out, loaded

    I did something very bad to Internet Explorer 2.2 for the Mac and now it crashes whenever it tries to start up. I downloaded a replacement and installed it but the problem remains. Something in the configuration or preferences must be triggering the problem, I suppose. As side effect of this is that I’m using…

  • More iTunes format tests

    before: Birdcage from the album “Shmo’s Sampler” by Stew and the Negro Problem after: Stealin’ (Instrumental), Grateful Dead (Birth Of The Dead – The Studio Sides) Pungee, The Meters (Look-Ka Py Py) Midtown (Instrumental), Tom Waits (Rain Dogs) Exquisite Dead Guy, They Might Be Giants (Factory Showroom) OK. Now to post and test the search…

  • Testing iTunes reporting format (administrivia)

    When I feel like referring to or quoting from the music I’m listening to at the moment, I want the reference to be succinct and to link to a search for the song title, album name, and band or artist name (as opposed to just a search for the band name). This format is still…

  • Back of an envelope

    I’m sure the Gettysburg Powerpoint is already a well circulated meme, but it’s new to me, and such a perfect send up of the reductive power of slideshows as communication tools that I could not resist linking to it here.

  • Apologies for the reruns

    For readers of my X-POLLEN blog via (an RSS) news feed, which includes LiveJournal friends reading the xpollen user Mark Pasc setup for me, I apologize for the way the feed just resent something like seventeen recent posts. I just made a minor administrivial change to this blog’s archiving nomenclature. Posts are now stored in…

  • For what it's worth

    To the people I referrred to in Outrage over Pete Townsend, who are busily debating the story over in the discussion area of my Pete Townsend reviews Kurt Cobain’s diaries entry, I feel that I should pass along this report from the Smoking Gun, which lends at least some credence to Townsend’s vapid-sounding defense that…

  • Who's blogging Karl Rove?

    I was just musing on how the right in this country has succeeded at presenting their views in the most poll-tested appealing ways possible, and still they are alienating more than half the population with their agenda items in many areas, especially outside of the multi-front effort against terrorism (which was thrust upon them). Even…

  • Have you seen this man?

    WANTED for MURDERING time Make your own composite sketch at Ultimate Flash Face, a Russian site. Put up flyers of your friends, or fiddle together a self-portrait. People who know me will realize that the likeness above is pretty crude, but I think if I’d been willing to spend a lot more time tweaking it,…

  • More love for the Bay Area

    Instapundit graces another (well deserved) link to the Devil’s Excrement today with a gratuitous swipe at Berkeley. I’m not sure I get the subtext. Is it that the perennial protesters here in the East Bay don’t have as much fun as Venezuelan protesters do? This follows the continuing S.F. sucks theme at the Gawker (and…

  • Camper back together for real

    It now appears that the one-time Camper Van Beethoven reunion shows last fall were some kind of dry run for a more substantial reunion. Look at all the tour dates listed at the Cracker site. The show I saw was a great nostalgia trip for me and it seemed to be an almost religious experience…

  • Which is worse, rape or murder?

    Scot Hacker has posed a provocative thought-experiment to his readers who defend video games that depict killing. In his post entitled Just Pretending he asks which is worse, rape or murder. Then he asks whether it would be OK for children to play rape games. This has spawned an active discussion, at the birdhouse and…

  • Outrage over Pete Townsend

    Here’s something odd. Back in November I posted a link to Pete Townsend’s review of Kurt Cobain’s diaries. Now that the pedophile (or paedophile, for British readers) arrest story has broken, it seems that people must be Googling his name and somehow finding their way to my old post. Even though it was written about…

  • Another fine meme-tracking site

    One day I’ll need to come up with a big list of sites that track memes, especially those that do so automatically or semiautomatically (as opposed to sites like Metafilter and half the weblogs in the universe that track memes all the time by virtue of their infectious passing of memes from one to another).…

  • When did 'demagogue' become a verb?

    Just asking.