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Is it just me, or does Apple iTunes kind of suck when it comes to actually having the random tune you want? Red Nex (or whatever) cover of Cotton Eye Joe, George Michael's cover of Papa Was A Rolling Stone, like 2 or 3 other things I thought of, no chance. That really sucks: that's why Napster was terrific, it just Had Every Song. iTune's 30 second preview is great (once I realized double clicking on a title activated it, it wasn't obvious); I'd buy a ton of music after a 30 second sample if they just had the selection.

Frickin' music publishers.

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More Music of the Moment
Making the rounds was this video of "Japanese guitar virtuoso KeiicHi" doing the theme from Super Mario Bros on electric guitar, including some great sound effects. To me, the rhythm sounds a little strained at parts, but still pretty cool. The same page links to a more pedestrian piano version (that really chokes on the sound effects) but it was cool to see it in sheet music form.

I remember Martin Witczak in highschool did a great version of the gameboy "Super Mario Land"...a remix of that and a lot of other old videogame music as always is at Overclocked Remix...seems a bit popup heavy, so be warned.

It's amazing how catchy some of those tunes were...8-bit Nintendo was an interesting time for video game music, where the composers had more tools but still had to synthesize the music, couldn't just record it in a studio.

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Cartoon of the Moment

--This has been sitting in my harddrive for a few PCs now. I don't know where it's from. I think of the punchline often at work, though for some reason I always misremember the boss as saying "work harder or your fired" which I think is somehow a little snappier.

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Provocative Thought of the Moment
Report: Blix Says Iraq Worse Off After War. And I think he might be right. Despite our probably more or less good intentions, there are a lot of reasonable Iraqis who ain't gonna see us as the good guys in this one.

I still think it comes back to Saddam screwing up w/ Kuwait; yeah, it's probably part and parcel with him being a somewhat powermad dictator and all, but if he hadn't done that, we would probably hold our noses and count ourselves lucky to have a secular strongman ally in the region. And pretty much everyone but dissidents in Iraq would be living in a safer world.

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Milestone of the Moment
gulp -- just put in the call to my family trust's "Real Estate Guy" and put the wheels in motion for selling the house. Friday (after the court date with Mo) his team comes over and away we go...hopefully just under the "interest rate increase" wire.