slow-dog.backintheusa

Monday, June 24, 2002

So, I'm looking through online job ads, as I'm wont to do, and I see a title for a job that I know I don't want: Sterility Assurance Analyst.

10:44 AM PST
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Wednesday, June 19, 2002

Here's an extremely interesting post on the future of music by Dave Davis, recording engineer and visionary. He's got a weblog which he should share more thoughts in.

02:13 PM PST
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Tuesday, June 18, 2002

What a great article! I can't put my finger on why I love it so much, but it just speaks to me. That Ms. Berry sure is one sharp cookie.

02:15 PM PST
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Sunday, June 16, 2002

Happy Bloomsday! My goal is just to finish the book by 16 June 2004, the one hundredth anniversary of the fictional journeys of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. See you in Dublin?

03:36 PM PST
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Friday, June 14, 2002

I've been playing online play-by-mail type chess. Here's a selection of messages sent by a friend to me during the course of a game:

*You are going to lose your queen after taking my queen in about four full moves and then I am slowly going to force you into checkmate.

*Actually, I was wrong. That won't happen. You'll take my queen with your rook, but I will probably let you instead of playing back and forth with my king for the draw.

*You just lost your knight, I believe.

*Do you get tired of making stupid moves?

*Okay, so you aren't going to lose your knight; but this game looks doomed to stalemate. I can keep moving my King back and forth and you can't get him without taking an extra move, in which case you are dead.

*Dude, you just had the stalemate locked up and you blew it. Now it looks like you will lose.

*Okay, I concede.

12:37 PM PST
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Thursday, June 13, 2002

Weird. I've been thinking about picking up a copy of Zaireeka for some time. When it came out, I thought it was an extremely pretentious idea--songs spread among 4 CDs, designed to be listened to on 4 separate CD players at once!. Mostly, this was because I wasn't impressed by the Flaming Lips. My major exposure at that point was "She Don't Use Jelly"--a song that got way too much airplay. At the time, I hated it so much that a friend gave me the single as a birthday gift one year as a joke (it's a miracle I still have it, as usually I'm pretty good about selling stuff I don't like).

Flash ahead five years. Since then, the Flaming Lips released the fantastic The Soft Bulletin and my opinion has turned around. Heck, I can even tolerrate "She Don't Use Jelly." So I'd been meaning to pick up a copy of Zaireeka, but it's out of print.

My interest in this was rekindled when I saw this recent article about Zaireeka, mostly as a social event. So I go and look on eBay, and sure enough, copies are available, but at more than they cost new. I'm not going to pay those kind of prices. I'd almost resigned myself to waiting for one to popup in some out of the way used CD store, when I discover that, curiously, Amazon is selling them. Apparently new, for $20.99. I don't know how a limited press run of 5000 isn't exhausted 5 years after the fact (unnanounced reissue?), but my copy is on the way, and we'll see what turns up.

Anyone want to have a Zaireeka listening party?

11:56 AM PST
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Wednesday, June 12, 2002

We are all aware that the pipe smoker belongs to a breed apart from other men. His pleasures are contemplation and relaxation; he does not rush, he is not nervous. His joys are the casual and meditative ones, those of the fireside, the easy chair, and the good book. The pipe stands as a symbol of this type of man, easily recognized by his even frame of mind, his unhurried approach to life's problems. It is almost always just such a man who chooses a pipe as his path to smoking enjoyment.

From Weber's Guide to Pipes and Pipe Smoking.

12:53 PM PST
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Friday, June 7, 2002

Obligatory Brunching Shuttlecocks weblog article:

Where can I find interesting links for my weblog?
Finding links of interest to your readers is a job requiring dedication and discernment. To begin with, you need to keep up with current events, both worldwide and Web-specific. Secondly, you need to be have a feel for the zeitgeist of--you know what? Screw this. Read Metafilter and Fark and grab some of their links.

03:48 PM PST
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It may well be, however, that the very idea of "Ireland"--like the now deserted Great Blasket which went on sale for a million dollars in the Wall Street Journal in 1987--is a kind of fiction, which the mere islanders themselves are finding it harder and harder to sustain. But it is a necessary fiction, and tens of millions of people on our planet turn annually to the fiction for an explanation of their innermost being. All nations are, in Benedict Anderson's phrase, an invented or imagined community, and the Irish have shown more relish for that fiction than most. In particular, they have asked their writers to chart its progress for them.

From The Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland.

12:15 PM PST
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Tuesday, June 4, 2002

When artists are putting out new albums, there's always news bits in music rags about releasing tracklists. Am I alone in thinking this is totally worthless? Do people really read the tracklist and say, "Oooohhh! Song #3 is entitled Cadaver Roadblock. I bet that's a good one."? No, of course they don't, yet this stupid practice continues.

09:09 PM PST
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My friend Nick is putting together one of those autistic type chronicles that makes the web interesting: the mouth project.

09:33 AM PST
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Monday, June 3, 2002

Boy did that game last night hurt. Today, Ralph Wiley offers up a column that seeks to take the sting out of the loss (as does Brian Murphy). It's still not as good as a win.

03:47 PM PST
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mine

not mine

slow-dog.backintheusa