2-year-old Music Critic

The Andrews Sisters - 'Don't sit under the Apple Tree'

Again! Again!

Harry J Allstars -'Liquidator'

No! No!

Ray Anthony - 'The Hokey Pokey'

Ho-pokey! Again!

Slint - 'Don, Aman' (from the indie-rock classic Spiderland)

No! I don't like it! OFF!

Elvis Presley - The Complete Sun Sessions

Elbis! Again?!

The Gordon Bonham Blues Band - live at the Park in Bloomington

(nods head, claps in time to the music)

...stay tuned for future installments of 2-year-old music critic

I have been away, in New Orleans and other places

It is true: Bourbon Street is what would happen if all the jocks grabbed their guns, Harris and Klebold style, and took over the country.

While we were there, we saw an awful lot of kids. Unfortunately the 'I got Bourbon faced on shit street' shirts only came in adult sizes.

One Dad was busy passing on his really healthy attitudes towards women to his sons as we walked by. He lifted them up so they were standing on a window ledge on either side of him. In the window was a silhouette of the stripper inside. Somebody took a picture of the three of them for the family album.

Fortunately Bourbon Street is a very small part of New Orleans. We hung out at the Ritz-Carlton and enjoyed all the free drinks and did our best to ignore the long-winded dudes and their wives, some of whom were unnecessarily mean to the staff, or whoever they had on their cell phones at the time. We were possibly the youngest people there who were not with our parents.

The high point was the AirBoat ride through the Bayou. Those things are louder than you can ever know seeing them during their obligatory appearances in any show or movie taking place in Louisiana, and they're very fast, too. The guy who drove us from the hotel to the Bayou was an English dude, and he mentioned how Cajuns marry their cousins 3 or 4 times. He found it really fascinating and odd, yet in England they have the royal family, so it wouldn't seem like such a big novelty.

We got to hold not one but two alligators. I don't believe the alligators dug it very much.

It's a strange place. Definitely a city with its own identity, though.

Tivo: Boon or Bane?

Boon: It took me just 20 minutes to watch the finale of 'The Apprentice'.

Bane: Without TiVo, I probably wouldn't have watched the finale of 'The Apprentice'.

Boombastic Radio

It's easy to get the too-much-of-a-good-thing feeling with funk. For example, the comp The Funky 16 Corners features 21 funk tunes (and a break-beat remix by Cut Chemist) that are all fine on their own, and I'm sure they were great as 45s, but I'll be damned if I can listen to it all the way through. It's similar to T-Rex - Greatest Hits 1972-77-B Sides in that way.

Somehow, http://www.boombasticradio.com/ plays funky music and manages to keep me tuned in for long stretches of time without ever giving me that I ate too much candy feeling. They do that by drawing from various styles either explicitly or implicitly funky: old-school funk, hip-hop, reggae, dub, dancehall, electronic music, and even the occasional surf-rock number. It keeps things interesting, and this is one of those cases where picking out what to play next is being done with admirable skill. The DJs are anonymous, though. They never speak, nor could I name one of them. All you ever hear to remind you it's a radio station is the British guy doing the occasional station ID.

Compare and contrast: New Job vs. Old

I have been at the new job for only 2 weeks, so I can't exactly say I know everything about the place, but there are already some major differences between this place and the last one.

In convenient table form:

New Job	Old Job
No questions asked when I requested active noise-canceling headphones to wear in the noisy server room.	When my phone headset broke, I couldn't order a new one because the company was no longer buying them for employees (never mind that 90% of meetings/customer interaction is via phone). I had to ship them back to the manufacturer to get them replaced, and even then I got an urgent email from my boss's boss's secretary demanding I explain the $5 UPS charge.
The building is relatively new, and looks nice from the outside and the inside. The inside is kept clean.	The building was a non-descript downtown Indianapolis building. The interior was reminiscent of a Gulag Inprocessing Center in some Eastern Bloc Regime. There was Cheetos dust on the floor from some guy who was in my cubicle in the 80's.
Employees receive a bonus every quarter when the company achieves its goals for that period.	Employees got a chump change $500 bonus after working 4 days of 12-hour shifts over a weekend while the union went out on a grandstanding strike.
I have met most of the people I work with/for in person and interact with them FTF on a daily basis.	I never met 95% of the people I worked with.
There's an exercise facility with free weights, machines, treadmills, elliptical trainers, and so on. If you want, you can have a trainer assigned to you who will help you meet your fitness goals.	No exercise room, but there is a locker/shower facility featuring posters of runners with 70s hair that runners use. Warm water is available more often than not, but wear flip-flops in the shower, b/c I think I picked up Plantar warts there.
Use of the exercise facilities is approved of and encouraged from the founder of the company on down.	Taking smoke breaks with the boss is the fast track up the corporate ladder.

There are more, but that's plenty for now.

Redneck Playground of Horror

Today after visiting my sister at her new house we took our 2-year-old girl to a playground we had driven by many times. It is in a poor section of Bloomington nicknamed 'Pigeon Hill', but it appeared to be a nice playground all the times we had driven by. Thinking back now, though, there were never any people there when we had driven by. It has fairly nice equipment (at least you can't see the graffiti from the road) including a structure with several slides, one of them a 3 story high corkscrew slide. Our daughter loves slides, so she headed straight for it.

Not long after we arrived an assortment of locals converged on the place. There was a 20-something pudgy white guy with bad skin, bleached hair, and hip-hop clothes including the bandana/baseball cap combo, who was there with his buddy. At first I wondered what was going on with these 2 guys hanging out at the playground, but eventually it became evident they were there with Eminem's girlfriend, 8 months pregnant with presumably Eminem's child, and 5 other little boys besides who probably each had different daddies. I guess Eminem was keeping his distance, because hanging around a woman and a bunch of kids wouldn't look as cool as looking like some rapper pedophile on the prowl.

Pregnant woman's girlfriends were there. They all had tattoos, some had tattoos on their necks. There were no obvious 'white power' or 'Aryan Nation' tattoos, although they were the kind of women you don't want to spend long looking at, for fear a deranged methed-up jealous boyfriend will get the wrong idea and suddenly appear out of nowhere and tear you to pieces like a mother bear when you step between her and her cubs.

Pregnant girl's friends complimented her that 'you don't look 8 months pregnant'. I don't believe in my teens - early 20s I would have had any idea what various stages of pregnancy looked like. Anyhow, she looked like she had a whole basketball in there, or maybe a whole fetal basketball team. She looked plenty pregnant to me.

Around this time I am pushing the baby girl on the swing, trying to look like I'm not freaked out by everything, and in the distance I see a really skinny guy who at first looks black. Then he looks like he's wearing Al Jolson blackface minstrel makeup. Then he gets closer and his face looks all black and grimy, and I wonder between that and the way he's walking wobbly if he is just staggering away from a meth lab explosion.

He's there with his girlfriend/wife, a good twenty years older than he. He's holding her hand either out of affection or to keep from falling down. Their young daughter(?) is there too, stopped halfway down a slide with no apparent intention of going anywhere or doing anything.

All the while there's some shady guy sitting alone in a truck in the parking lot (which is even causing the tattoo girls some concern as to what he's up to), and some people in separate cars arrive and conduct some dubious transaction and leave. We let our daughter do the big slide one last time before we get the hell out.

We tell baby it's time to leave, and the tantrum starts. I pick her up, put her in the car seat in our conspicuously new Prius and we get the hell out as fast as hybrid synergy drive can take us.

Great timing

On Friday morning, the boss gave me the scoop that a couple people are leaving in two weeks due to outsourcing, and I get to be the lucky guy to support and write up all the specs for their stuff (as well as my own) to hand off to the offshore crew. He described a future of writing more specs, and my job would evolve into a job encompassing all the tedious aspects of software work, without any of that fun stuff (writing actual code) that makes the tedium tolerable.

On Friday afternoon, I got a call from a place where I've wanted to work for years, offering me a job.

Whew.

Rock Criticism in Crisis

Frank Zappa once said 'writing about music is like dancing about architecture', but he also released an album that sounded like somebody gave 80's Midi-based music composition software to a chimpanzee (Jazz from Hell), so it's not like everything he said or did was essential. The truth is, there was a time when it was actually interesting to read music writing, particularly from the likes of Griel Marcus or Lester Bangs. Bangs' review of what's arguably the best rock album ever, Fun House by The Stooges (the article was entitled 'Of Pop and Pies and Fun: A Program for Mass Liberation in the Form of a Stooges Reveiw, or, Who's the Fool?') would be required reading for all up-and-coming rock critics if rock writing had a future, which it doesn't.

MP3 and peer-to-peer technology have thrown the music business into turmoil that's been the source of much Schadenfreude for the 99.99% of rock bands that are either never signed or are screwed over and left bankrupt by labels, and rock writing is the remora that's not only forced to sweat the shark's well-being, but also finds itself threatened in other ways.

As recently as 5 years ago, a rock writer could write a review telling you how the new album by the Minions sounds like James Brown smoking a joint with Willie Nelson at Studio 54, and you'd be forced to take his word for it. To some degree you might actually make buy/don't buy decisions about music based on a review, because if you didn't own the album, you might not have a chance to hear it. Nowadays you can obtain a copy of the album over the internet, or even go the legitamate route of listening to samples on iTunes, and find out for yourself what the music really sounds like (specifically, Sly Stone doing bong hits with George Strait at a rave).

Even where reviews are concerned, there are plenty to be found at sites like Amazon.com, written for free, often of comparable or superior quality to what you'll find in magazines on sale at a local bookstore.

Actually, if anything, the reviews at Amazon.com and elsewhere are more credible, because often a reviewer will write about an album that really, really, sucks and tell you it sucks. A writer for Rolling Stone would give the album two stars (out of five) at worst. And Rolling Stone is hardly unusual in that. I recently picked up a copy of 'Filter' and 34 of the 42 albums they reviewed scored above 80%. The lowest score was 53% for 'Around the Sun', by REM. But, as they themselves say in that review,

as everyone else knows, REM's latest offering is an infuriatingly lifeless turd chock-full of bad poetry and plodding adult rock.

so it's not like there's any big scoop there, or even the kind of guilty pleasure hatchet job that sometimes livens up a dull review section.

Essentially, rock writers seemed scared to death of saying anything bad about anything they review, which doesn't do wonders for the credibility. It reminds me of when I worked for a large record company with a website that sold CDs, and the latest incarnation of the marketing staff (they turned over every 6 months or so, yet each incarnation seemed to have exactly the same grand creative out-of-the-box ideas as their predecessor) decided to add ratings to their site as part of their ongoing top secret strategy: 'copying other, better music sites'. They used the 5 star system, with a helpful legend designed by that week's graphic design team explaining what all the ratings meant. It started at one star, meaning 'OK' (?!??), and went up to 5 stars, meaning 'call the crime scene cleanup crew to come over before you put this on, because you are sure to have such an overpowering orgasmic reaction your head will explode like that famous scene in the movie Scanners' (actually the description for the 5 star rating was more concise. I never claimed to have what it takes to write copy for marketing). I believe in early stages of that project there was a push to not allow ratings below three stars, but declaring by fiat that one star meant 'OK' was the compromise they agreed on (before dispersing for salads and /or cocaine for lunch). I don't know what the site has today, because, frankly, there are a million and one better places to buy music online, and I'm a Luddite who prefers buying music from a real person in a real store who appears to give a shit about music anyway.

The morals of this story are:

• the blog format works best when articles are kept reasonably short, as in brief
• large record companies are soul-less robot-like entities
  
• the Rock Critics at Rolling Stone and Filter are ball-less wonders! Nyah!

...and they'll know we are Christians by our love

From the Martinsville Reporter-Times Letter to The Editor Section:

Letter 1:

Christian beliefs were built into the Constitution because they were Christians and they founded this nation as a Christian nation. Anyone who tries to change that or the intentions of our founding fathers is, in my opinion, a traitor to this great nation and its people, and for that they should be tried and shot for treason. For in my eyes, that's what they are doing; committing treason.

I guess they never got around to shooting that traitor, Thomas Jefferson:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man & his god, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state. [Congress thus inhibited from acts respecting religion, and the Executive authorised only to execute their acts, I have refrained from presenting even occasional performances of devotion presented indeed legally where an Executive is the legal head of a national church, but subject here, as religious exercises only to the voluntary regulations and discipline of each respective sect.]

I sure wish we had a president like that today, but Karl Rove would probably deep-six him in the primaries with push polls and whisper campaigns about Sally Hemmings.

Letter 2:

When this country was founded, 98.4 percent of the people were Christian Protestants of various denominations, about 1.4 percent were Catholic and 0.2 percent were of the Jewish faith.

That seems like a low percentage for the Jewish faith. Did they count the Jewish Indians, like Mel Brooks in Blazing Saddles?

BTW, in the irony in advertising department, both these letters feature an 'IQ Question' banner ad at the bottom.

Spotlight on: Church Signs

This week's spotlight shines on Eastview Christian Church of Martinsville, with messages for both east and west bound motorists.

Those going east see 'The greatest evil is our indifference to evil'. Of course, even if you aren't indifferent to evil, and you write a strongly-worded letter to the editor, or you put a yellow ribbon magnet (easy-off!) on your car or something, it may not make a bit of difference anyway. But I guess the point is: don't be indifferent to evil.

Those traveling west see an old favorite of mine, 'We live simply so that others may simply live'. This quote is credited to Elizabeth Seton, American saint and the founder of the Sisters of Charity. And judging by the parking lot full of monster trucks and SUVs, I can see that the parishoners are committed to this credo. The irony is richer when you consider that some of their ancestors may have been in D.C. Stephenson's camp when the Klan ruled Indiana and a big part of their agenda was getting rid of Papists like...Elizabeth Seton (well, not her specifically, she died in 1821).

Press Release: Steve retires from competitive running

Steve announced today that he is retiring from competitive running. After setting PRs , earning 10s of dollars worth of gift certificates as prizes, and generally having the best year of his 4-year running career in 2004, Steve was sidelined by a knee injury that was later diagnosed as arthritis. This caused him to miss the Chicago 2004 Marathon, causing more disappointment than Bob Kennedy's aborted New York Marathon 2004 attempt, at least for all of Steve's family, friends and acquaintances who are not that into running, and thus have no idea who the hell Bob Kennedy is.

"I have no regrets," Steve said in an emotional farewell address on his blog, Words Of Advice For Young People. "I had some great moments last year, including coming in 3rd in that race where it was hot and nobody seemed to be able to deal with it, and the trophy I got for coming in second in my age group at that 10K that was made by some elementary school kids in their art class is in a place of honor on the bookshelf in my office. Of course I have to give thanks to my support network: my wife, parents and of course my baby girl. I will continue to run and even run in the occasional race, but if you pass me, it won't count, because I won't be racing."

Steve later added that he was not necessarily ruling out a return to running in the future, especially if advances in nano-technology provide us with microscopic machines that can re-build joints damaged by the ravages of arthritis, but at that point he really started rambling, and as a courtesy to Steve, we will not re-print the full transcript of his comments here.

Quick on-line comic big up

I can't believe I never heard of achewood until yesterday. I can believe I didn't know until today that Charles Mingus wrote a pamphlet on how to get a cat to use the toilet. Oh, definitely a link to a page showing a picture and text from said pamphlet is in order.

'Rich Dad Poor Dad's' author disses dad for dollars

‘What the Rich Teach Their Kids about Money – That the Poor and Middle Class do Not!’ exclaims the blurb on the front cover of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and this drew me in. I have had a gut-level suspicion for years that rich people just aren’t like the rest of us. It’s reinforced when I hear about things like Dennis Kozlowski of Tyco and his $6,000 shower curtain. You have to really think highly of yourself to believe you need a $6,000 shower curtain, to not cheat yourself by settling for a piece of crap that costs $600. So I was pre-disposed to like what Mr. Kiyosaki had to say. At the very least I was curious. While I am not rich, I have enough disposable income for impulse buys on Amazon.com, so the book was in my mailbox a few days later.

The central story (some would call it mythology) of ‘Rich Dad, Poor Dad’ goes like this: Kiyosaki’s real father, the superintendent of education for the public school system of Hawaii (not exactly a piddly job), was ‘poor Dad’, who embraced middle class values (specifically: working hard at a job your whole life and saving along the way). Kiyosaki’s friend Mike’s dad was ‘rich Dad’, a sort of undifferentiated entrepreneurial type who represented the value system and way of thinking of the wealthy (in a nutshell: take risks, make money ‘work for you’, ‘pay yourself first’ to give yourself greater motivation to make money to pay your creditors). Young Kiyosaki and Mike became Daniel-san type apprentices to ‘Rich Dad’, who taught them lessons like ‘working a day job is for suckers’ by making them work in a little store he owned. Kiyosaki embraces the lessons taught to him by ‘Rich Dad’, and refers to them throughout the book. His real father, ‘Poor Dad’, gets the consolation prize of being ‘not an example to others, but rather a warning’.

My attitude toward Kiyosaki soured as I read the book. What kind of jackass puts down his Dad in order to sell books? Why would Kiyosaki need to do this, especially if, as he claims, he has ‘escaped the Rat Race’ and doesn’t really need the money? Further, why is Kiyosaki running all over the world hustling his books and games (Cashflow! - the Prologue is kind of an infomercial for it) if he's independently wealthy? These and other questions along those lines were raised during the course of reading the book. It took a while to read it, as it was gradually demoted from primary reading material to bathroom reading.

I tried to look past Kiyosaki’s shameful disrespect for his own father (another question, perhaps not a politically correct one: isn't respect for one's family typically highly encouraged and valued in Asian cultures?) in order to learn things that might make me a better father for my little girl, at least where money management was concerned. She may yet grow up to write a book maligning me or a thinly veiled fictionalization of me, but I don’t want that to be due to laziness or negligence on my part.

Kiyosaki seems to have made most of his money through real-estate transactions and management of rental properties. The book is full of little anecdotes about his clever deals. The book gets to be like listening to some rich guy tell you about himself while you drive him to the airport.

At one point, Kiyosaki sheds the burden of credibility completely, saying he encourages people to get involved in multi-level marketing. At this point the bull-shit detector could no longer be ignored. After some further investigation, I found that Kiyosaki does have an affiliation with Amway, and supposedly was unable to get his book published until he hooked up with the MLM crowd. For further info, see this email to John T. Reed on his website.

John T. Reed also has a pretty thorough analysis of Kiyosaki’s book, including interesting investigation into whether or not Kiyosaki really is who he says he is (what he finds out about Kiyosaki suggests that rather than having some master plan for life, Kiyosaki kind of drifted from one thing to another until he found something that worked for him, which would make him just like every other schlub out there trying to get by).

The Reed analysis makes for more interesting reading than Kiyosaki’s book. FWIW, Kiyosaki replied to Reed's criticisms, although his response mostly seems to be a defensive effort to scrape together support for his thesis that 'most rich people have sub-exceptional intelligence'.

If you're interested in learning more about money and investing, there’s no need to give up hope. There are some good books and resources out there about investing and money. I’ll talk about other stuff I’ve read or am reading in the future.

Vitamin World Tried to Kill Me!

They didn't use a bomb or gun!
V-dub tried to kill me!
Home Boys watch out for this one!

(shamelessly ripped off from Ice T's 'The Girl Tried To Kill Me')

A couple years ago I read some scary article about how athletes were dropping dead left and right because they weren't properly replenishing the minerals they lost through their dangerously non-sedentary lifestyles. I was and still am a runner and decidedly non-sedentary, and I was influenced by this article more than I like to admit. I ran out and bought some 'Colloidal Mineral Source' at Vitamin World. Then I took it home and read the label (and you can, too). I noticed it contained:

• Cadmium - I knew this was bad from the old Superchunk song of the same name.
  
• Thallium- I knew this was bad from one of the Discovery Channel 'real life detective' shows where the super-genius guy tried to kill his neighbors.
  

To be fair, it's not in a lead bottle or anything, but that label scared me so much I threw the bottle out. I still get spam from them to this day. It's like having a guy who pointed a gun at you in traffic drive by your house slowly from time to time.

I'm sure Vitamin World's other products are great. Just be careful is all I'm saying. There's Cadmium in cigarette smoke, and those are sold in drug stores all over the country, so how bad can it be?

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, 2004 Edition

44% of American adults are on drugs.

The 7 habits are now:

1. Prozac - www.prozac.com
   
2. Strattera - www.strattera.com
3. Lexapro - www.lexapro.com
4. Viagra - www.viagra.com
5. Xanax - www.drugs.com/xanax.html
6. Ritalin - www.drugs.com/ritalin.html
7. Lorazepam - www.psyweb.com/Drughtm/ativan.html

Sorry Jack Daniels, you're not on the list.

Reading Playboy For the Articles

My wife and I were having dinner with another couple a few weekends ago, and the topic of the election came up. We told them we were 'Anybody but Bush' people, and they admitted, kind of sheepishly, that they had voted for Bush. He described his decision making process: 'I watched the debates, and made a decision based on that'. At this point my wife and I had to be careful to not make eye contact for a bit for fear we'd start laughing.

Plenty of fairly intelligent people voted for Bush, sure. Using the TV debates as a justification, though, is kind of like saying 'Oh yeah, I bought the Milli Vanilli album back in the early 90's, but I did it because the lyrics really spoke to me'.

100 worst pop records

Channel 4's 100 Worst Pop Records

This one comes to us from Channel 4 in England, where they take their pop music a lot more seriously than we do in the US (the notable exception being rap, where people shoot each other over it and stuff).

It's not a bad list, but a lot of the records weren't big here in the US, and there are definitely some records that should be listed, but aren't:

• Puff Daddy and The Family - 'I'll be missing you' (I might get shot for that one)
  
• Rupert Holmes - 'Pina Colada (The Escape Song)'
  
• America - 'Horse With No Name'
  
• R Kelly - 'I believe I can fly'
  
• That 'Y'all Ready For This?' song from the 'Air Bud' movies
  

Here's a fun experiment: take this list and pick 100 songs from Rolling Stone's List of the 500 best songs of all time, give somebody both lists, and see if he/she can identify which is which.

I tunes - yet another web site allowing us to make furtive purchases

Thanks to the anonymity of the web, people can buy all kinds of things they'd be embarassed to go into a store and purchase in person.

ITunes, for example, allows me to buy all kinds of chee-zee 70's Hits that are guilty pleasures for me. See, for example, this recent purchase:

Robert Palmer - Looking for Clues
Bill Withers - Lovely Day
Boz Scaggs (Boz f*&*in Scaggs) - Lowdown
Marvin Gaye - Got to Give It Up

Marvin Gaye wouldn't fall in this category, but when they used that song for the 'everybody get funky and bust a move' scene in 'Barbershop', they pretty much raped Gaye's carcass and cheesified that song beyond repair.

It's still a good song, though.

Hello World!

I have a blog now. Details as they happen.