2017 February❮❮prevnext❯❯
2017.02.01
- Que Sera Sera (Last Dance) (Marita Dyson) Ripped this off youtube because sadly there doesn't seem to be a full version available, but this one minute clip is kind of perfect, despite the voiceover. Trigger warning, though, if you ever had a relative in palliative care at home, it will make you cry.
- Make Out (Julia Nunes) Lovely little paean to making out. Love the rhythm of "You're an open book / But I can't read you / Start the countdown 'til I lose it... / Three Two.... / One, I'm Done, I'm Dead..."
- Yodelling (Franzl Lang) Ripped from Youtube. Classic instance of me not being afraid to like music I like! The rhythm of it is has some terrific syncopation.
- Star Wars Medley (Jimmy Fallon The Roots & Star Wars: The Force Awakens) Youtube rip! Love this and how they have the actors singing the appropriate good guy / bad guy part, especially Adam Driver on the Imperial March
- Love Yourself (Justin Bieber) Another challenge of not being afraid of liking music I like. The lyrics are a bit sophomoric, but I love the sparse arrangement and this video is fantastic, I really love the stop and go pas de deux of it.
- Down (Marian Hill) This is from the Apple Airpods commercial I guess? Anyway, spare and lovely, with a cool use of electronic distortion.
- You're Dead (Norma Tanega) Another youtube rip - this was playing at the end credits for "What We Do in the Shadows"
- Anyone Who Knows What Love Is (Will Understand) (Irma Thomas) Sweet song, I think it is its role in a Black Mirror episode that really cemented it for me.
- House Of The Rising Sun (Heavy Young Heathens feat. The Nashville United First Baptist Vocal Assembly) Nice use of chorus. Tempted to arrange this for the honk band.
- Time in a Bottle (Demo) (Jim Croce) This is less glossy than the regular album version. But it's the muppet version that has my heart.
- Check Me Out (Little Denise) Great Motown beat and horns.
- Bukowski (Modest Mouse) My first Modest Mouse song, though I feel like their name comes up a lot. Anway, always fond of a good literary and/or blasphemous reference.
- Boogie Shoes (KC and the Sunshine Band) Simple and funky.
- Hey Good Lookin' (Hank Williams) Kristin rocked this at a recent house karaoke party
- Hannibal Buress (Morpheus Dorpheus) Another youtube rip. I feel like this was a drunken "you can't rhyme anything with morpheus" challenge.
- I'm Yours (Jason Mraz) Sounds too much like too many other ukulele songs.
- Chain Hang Low (Jibbs) I'm a little too fond of kids songs shoved into hiphop, but it's a catchy melody.
- Classical Music Mashup (Grant Woolard) Greatest hits artfully put together! Melissa does not get why I'll tolerate MIDI-ish music...
- Welcome to Atlanta (Jermaine Dupri) I grabbed this from some the work chatroom about the upcoming football championship. Not the greatest hiphop, but the videos kinda fun.
- Quicksand (Single Stereo) (Martha Reeves & The Vandellas) About as generic a "Wall of Sound" song as you can get, but not bad.
Playing at a rally today, Safe Communities Coalition Against the Travel Ban
It is the arrogance of every age to believe that yesterday was calm.
2017.02.02
2017.02.03
You'll need:
* one pint glass
* one can seltzer
* strong cold coffee (preferably on tap at your weirdly dot-com'ish employer)
Empty most of one can of plain seltzer into a pint glass. Drink the rest. Add iced coffee. Enjoy the caffeine and carbonation!
2017.02.04
If you understand, things are such as they are; If you do not understand, things are such as they are--
Then, one day, the oldest seer he had ever sought out (and the one most to be feared) had asked why the camel driver was so interested in the future.
"Well... so I can do things," he had responded. "And so I can change those things that I don't want to happen."
"But then they wouldn't be a part of your future," the seer had said.
"Well, maybe I just want to know the future so I can prepare myself for what's coming."
"If good things are coming, they will be a pleasant surprise," said the seer. "If bad things are, and you know in advance, you will suffer greatly before they even occur."
"I want to know about the future because I'm a man," the camel driver had said to the seer. "And men always live their lives based on the future."
The seer was a specialist in the casting of twigs ; he threw them on the ground, and made interpretations based on how they fell. That day, he didn't make a cast. He wrapped the twigs in a piece of cloth and put them back in his bag.
2017.02.05
Is it just me or is Edelman '17 looking a lot like Welker '12?
february loveblender
Man all that smooching of the trophy... all I can think is hope Bill's fever blister ain't acting up.
And here come all the Goodell Boos...
2017.02.06
2017.02.07
--from the bootleg game "Mario 3: Around the World" for the Sega Genesis" via SupperMarioBroth. These screens were much more hip than the gameplay video suggests.
Hate to rain on your parade, Patriots fans, so we're going to go with a wintry mix.
New weblog entry, about an old blog about a designer horrified at an interview at "X10.com". In thinking about how webdesign has changed over the years, I was trying to remember the URL for http://fabianburghardt.de/webolution/ with a neat time slider for trends over the decades, but I also found a brief history of web design for designers outlining some of the biggest trends.
Also... my startpage kirkzilla circa 2001 vs now. So funny that I had my own homebrew webmail for a while, til it got swamped by Spam.
That liberal guilt feel when you realize how much happier you are dealing with a lot of January "at least you don't have to shovel rain" vs what the snow accumulation might otherwise be to this point.
2017.02.08
--from Simpsons Scenes That Are Just Like Movies
2017.02.09
2017.02.10
Honestly, Ivanka would have a lot more success selling her brand at Walmart
I admit yesterdays event was more of a pain in the butt than I was bargaining for- and next week has the potential for being worse, with the next big threat on Monday.
2017.02.11
"I don't need a spoon, It's in a cup- I can treat it like a beverage."
Melissa says I eat the fruit like a pelican, or a seagull, just letting the fish or fruit in this case flow down the throat
Ugliness is in a way superior to beauty because it lasts.
2017.02.12
CRUISIN' the 50s and 60s is the way back machine for an old tripod site with the complete album cover story and a lot of background. Pretty cool idea for a series really, and the song selection was great.
xkcd.com/1796/:
2017.02.13
2017.02.14
College has taught me you don't need fun to have alcohol.
Valentines Jello by Melissa and candy hearts for her :-D <3
Years ago, The Onion put up a Kid's Valentines Day Page... I feel like they're on the verge of falling down the old memory hole, so here they are...
Those cards actually aren't as good as these old authentic but horrifying ones!
2017.02.15
via suppermariobroth
I've always loved Homer Simpson's "Could you, um, work any harder than this" style of management...
2017.02.16
Also:
2017.02.17
(Reminds me of how long it took me to realize Douglas Adams saying Man "goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing" was about traffic safety and not a surrealist absurdity, or perhaps a slice of life scene on Eastern African plains)
my favorite thing i've learned in college is that way back in ancient china there was this poet/philosopher guy who wrote this whole pretentious poem about how enlightened he was that was like "the eight winds cannot move me" blahblahblah and he was really proud of it so he sent it to his friend who lived across the lake and then his friend sends it back and just writes "FART" (or the ancient Chinese equivalent) on it and he was SO MAD he travels across the lake to chew his friend out and when he gets there his friend says "wow. the eight winds cannot move you, but one fart sends you across the lake"
Retired Vice Admiral Robert Harward declining Trump's offer to be national security adviser saying it was a "sh*t sandwich" reminded me of a quote I posted 12/31/2000, literally the second day of my blog:
"Life is a sh*t sandwich. But if you've got enough bread, you can't taste the sh*t."
2017.02.18
I saw the Steelers use remote control tackling dummy robots.
I think - well, hope - the future will be Atari's Cyberball 2072:
I don't know if it's considered embarrassing to admit to using dandruff shampoo, but ever since I heard that Head & Shoulders was the only product or procedure our beloved president would cop to using on his hair ("like cotton candy made of piss" to quote one magician-comedian) I have been anxiously awaiting finishing up this giant bottle of it... On to Selsun Blue! Probably forever.
2017.02.19
The sorting hat increased polarization and instability in the wizarding world by sorting youngsters into predefined echo chambers, so they grow up without understanding opposing viewpoints
--/u/concave_ceiling
2017.02.20
2017.02.21
Doing some light coding, watching an episode of Girls, drinking Amaretto underneath a little whipped cream from a spray bottle. I feel like a zen master of soothing distraction.
2017.02.22
--photos by Andrew Huang
Trump to say transgender protection is a "state's rights issue"
Huh, I didn't realize states had genders.
I just read the book Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences. I took the "Left/Right 20 Questions" quiz from the appendix and put the 20 Questions online with automated scoring. I score reasonably liberal, a 5 or 6 spots over.
2017.02.23
2017.02.24
Across a range of topics, the mean responses of liberals consistently favored the new experience, the abstract, and the nonconforming. Conservatives just as consistently favored traditional experiences that were closer to reality and predictable patterns. Conservatives, for example, preferred their poems to rhyme and fiction that ended with a clear resolution. Liberals were more likely to write fiction and paint, or attend a music concert. Experimental, arrhythmic verse, amorphous story lines, and ambiguous endings just do not trip the triggers of many conservatives and, perhaps relatedly, they are less likely to be performers, a fact that is all too apparent from the announced political affiliations of comedians, rock stars, and Hollywood actors.
Young found that this individual tendency toward hard or soft categorization--the tendency to take what we see and divide it into clearly labeled and separated mental boxes or, alternatively, to opt regularly for the mental equivalent of a catchall kitchen drawer--turns out to be a pretty good predictor of political temperament. Liberals are more likely to be soft categorizers and conservatives hard categorizers.
From the conservative perspective, referring to a set of findings and claims as "just a theory" could hardly be more damning; it bespeaks an absence of certainty that is troubling, especially if someone is proposing big and expensive changes on what is taken to be little more than debatable conjecture. To liberals, theories, even if dissent is present and i's are left undotted and t's uncrossed, are much more valuable--the weight of current scientific evidence is likely good enough for them and future modifications to knowledge (look, a new bean!) are more likely to be taken in stride. "The great thing about science is not that it is right but that it can be wrong."
A common question we get when people learn that our research deals with the biological differences of liberals and conservatives is whether one ideology is "more evolved" than the other. Typically, liberals are eager to be told that conservatives are some type of antediluvian life form and conservatives are equally eager to learn that liberals are at odds with the natural order. Sorry to disappoint, but this type of question is silly.
The human nervous system is complicated 8 and includes sensory systems, which rely on specialized neurons to detect things like light, pressure, temperature, and motor systems, which make possible everything from locomotion to nose picking.
As Shankar Vedantam points outs, "no one intuits the presence of a neurotransmitter."
Liberals seemed more amused by, "I almost had a psychic girlfriend but she left me before we met," or "I planted some bird seed... a bird came up... now I don't know what to feed it," while conservatives preferred puns or jokes such as, "You know you're in trouble when at the control tower there's a note taped on the door that says 'back in 5 minutes.'"I don't know about conservative joke (I feel like it would be funnier if it was on the cockpit door?) but that psychic girlfriend one is pretty good.
2017.02.25
Marched in the Pertinent Political Puppet Parade.
Did you know Boston has a puppet lending library?
2017.02.26
More shots from yesterday's puppet action...
Open Photo Gallery
2017.02.27
When I read that nobody should ever feel ashamed to be alone or to be in a crowd, I realized that I often felt ashamed of both of those things. Epictetus' advice: when alone, "call it peace and liberty, and consider yourself the gods' equal"; in a crowd, think of yourself as a guest at an enormous party, and celebrate the best you can.My introduction to modern stoicism was via William Irving's "A Guide to the Good Life", Batuman's reading of the original texts brought some distinct thoughts and quotes I hadn't yet encountered. (I also liked "Starting with things of little value--a bit of spilled oil, a little stolen wine--repeat to yourself: 'For such a small price, I buy tranquillity.'")
RIP Judge Wapner...
2017.02.28