Category: Music

  • Do the pink robots win?

    Last night I saw the Flaming Lips open for Beck and then back him for the second half of his set. Good show, interesting alchemy. I have all of Beck’s records except his most recent one. And I only have the most recent Lips record, but I’ve listened to it a lot and plan to…

  • metaxian blog ping aggregation

    I’ll be pinging this entry to see if I can get my other blog posts listed here automatically on the category page (x-pings).

  • Burning Laundry

    Saturday I paid the bills, and sent a contributor (at long last) his signed copy of my last book. Monday I made an appointment for the car’s 57-month checkup and updated the contributors to my new book about the cancellation of the contract by the publisher. Tuesday I got groceries, talked to an editor about…

  • Catsup

    I’m doing myself a disservice, in this exercise, but not logging what I’m getting done daily. The whole idea is to counter the negative-sum to-do list view of life and actually log accomplishments. If they don’t measure up to the time spent, so be it, but let it be a record at least of some…

  • Top 100 albums of the '80s

    I haven’t found much to argue with in Pitchfork’s Top 100 Albums of the 1980s, but then I’m also a huge Pixies fan. Let me put it this way: if not for Doolittle, there would be no Pitchfork. In other words, the influence of this record is so vast that, fifteen years on, it has…

  • Pete Townsend reviews Kurt Cobain's diaries

    “Hope I die before I become Pete Townsend,” wrote Cobain in his diary. Pete doesn’t seem offended so much as saddened in his review of the just-published journals of the suicidal muse of the ’90s. It is desperately sad for me to sit here, 57 years old, a huge chunk of life still ahead of…

  • Kikkomaso

    Let me be the last one on the block to link to this bizarre flash soy sauce superhero risqué music video.

  • Small errands, loosely joined

    Finally sent a signed copy of Dreamweaver Savvy to Guy Rish, who wrote the ColdFusion chapter. He only had to ask me like ten times! Did basically nothing else today except mess around. Oh, wait. I did shovel the ruined jack o’lantern into the compost (photos to follow) and took a bunch of shots of…

  • Oven burner element replaced

    With Thanksgiving approaching, the bottom burner element in our twenty-year-old oven gave out. It took us a while to diagnose the problem. The symptoms were the oven taking much longer to come up to full heat, except when in broil mode (top burner only), and then the way my last banana bread baked, burning at…

  • Burning laundry

    I need a place for a very simple log of things accomplished. Like a to-do list, but as things are done, not a plan for future things, which is elsewhere. Like my occasional “burning to-do’s” posts to my old bodega blog, except in real time instead of catching up now and again.

  • Humor crosses political lines

    My dad forwarded me a Mad Magazine poster called Gulf Wars: Clone of the Attacks. The satire beat anything they put out in my day (except maybe their controversial “So why not pardon Hitler?” back-page ad after Ford pardoned Nixon. Even as a child I could see that was a little over-the-top. I usually get…

  • Reprising their roles…

    I thought this was a brilliant bit of webhackery till I saw the Mad Magazine credit in the lower-right. See the full-sized version to read the fine print.

  • Writer's log

    I feel that one of the things I’d like to be “logging” is the start, milestone-reaching, or conclusion of any of my writing projects. For example, today I completed the first draft of a review of The Deadhead’s Taping Addendum (PepperTonic, 2002) for the upcoming issue of Dead Letters Magazine, a scholarly (believe it or…

  • APOCAMON: The Final Judgement

    From the Well’s Politics conference comes this link to APOCAMON: THE FINAL JUDGEMENT, which bizarrely combines end-times mythology (see the popular Left Behind series or your local evangelical for more on that) with Flash Pokemon-style animation. (Sidenote: when did “swag” become “schwag”?)

  • birdhouse.org: Boxen

    Scot Hacker: Next person to say “boxen” when they really mean “computers” gets a wedgie. Also, he points out this utterly hi-ho Flash animation for Panasonic.

  • Wet garden

  • People to whom I owe email replies

    I am up to my ears on a project right now, with deadlines coming fast and furious, and I’m taking today off. I’m well aware of a number of pressing email messages in my in box awaiting my reply and I hope that my correspondents can forbear a while longer as I get my act…

  • Sullivan calls the election an

    Sullivan calls the election an endorsement of the tax cut. I guess even when his team is winning the spin never ends: In his Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan slips in “…for the tax cuts” as presumably one of the motivating factors that led the electorate to give Bush both houses of Congress. I don’t see…

  • Interactive Seattle skyline

    From Cal Godot (via antiweb) comes this link to an interactive “before and after” view of Seattle’s skyline.

  • Pacbell email down

    My SBC Pacbell account’s email server is down at the moment. It’s this server that handles any mail to my widely known pobox.com forwarding adress, which is where most of my custom or vanity domains currently point. If the problem persists, I’ll redirect pobox to my minimal Earthlink account used for traveling (that I won’t…

  • Catechism against telemarketers

    EGBG, in the Netherlands, provides this anti-telemarketing counterscript: Telemarketers make use of a telescript — a guideline for a telephone conversation. This script creates an imbalance in the conversation between the marketer and the consumer. It is this imbalance, most of all, that makes telemarketing successful. The EGBG Counterscript attempts to redress that balance.