If you've ever seen VTW (and if you haven't, don't you think you should do something about that before any more of your life slips away?), you know that I'm a fan of well-deployed 19th century engravings. Now I'm not expert enough to say that if Max Ernst had drawn a comic strip it would've looked like Wondermark. But I think it'd have been in the same zip code. (note: found via Making Light)

Some days it's just a little too Monday out there. Like, say, the computer that houses the shared drive with all your files blows its motherboard over the weekend. And the HVAC is out. And there's something dripping from the ductwork onto your workspace. It's probably just water. But why is it greenish like that? Really what else is there to do but come home, fire up the Weber, flame broil some meat, have a glass of wine and write a whiny blog post...

One of the best things about this blog post, about writers appearing in movies/TV (found via Bookslut), is that you can clearly identify the exact point at which things start to spiral out of control. And that moment is the appearance of the words Philip K. Dick.

End o' week linky-link clean up (special Daily Show edition). Here's links for some of my fave past and present performers from the Daily Show:

After a long run with some fairly mediocre talent (I'd be happy never to see Rob Corddry or Samatha Bee again), the Daily Show is featuring some good work lately from John Oliver, Larry Wilmore and others. But my personal fave is Aasif Mandvi. He's usually featured as their Baghdad correspondent. Lots of links to clips on the site (ETA: as noted in the comments below, this is a fansite and not official... it's still great, tho, and we should all be so lucky to have such an awesome fansite) which point to the Comedy Central page. I was pleased to see that the Mother Load clips now work in Firefox for Mac, which wasn't the case originally.
Blast from the past time -- it's Frank DeCaro. From back in the days when the Daily Show didn't take itself quite so seriously. I don't mean that as a slam. I enjoyed John Oliver's bit on the falling dollar just as much as "Out at the Movies" or "Even Steven" but I think it's hard to argue that the current model of the Daily Show really doesn't have room for Frank DeCaro anymore. One of the best part of DeCaro's site are the celebrity recipes (Vincent Price's pepper steak!!).
And, of course, John Hodgman. I'm almost finished listening to the audiobook of Areas of My Expertise. I've actually gotten thru the book and the announcement of the next book and am now at the list of hobos. Aside from the fact that it's a pretty impressive one-take, it's also funnier than I'd expected (see: repetition = key to humor). Altho I can see why they moved it to the end of the audiobook. Anyway, I know several of my valued readers are not as enamored of Hodgman's deadpan drollery as I am (careful readers will have noted Hodgman quotes appearing as blogpost titles on and off since the beginning of the year). I also noticed that in the latest "I'm a Mac; I'm a PC" ad, Hodgman's wearing a fat suit that makes him look uncannily like a washed-out version of Violet Beauregard (post-gum chewing but pre-squeezing).

Another every-other Thursday, another playlist. Close readers of my playlist (of whom there are approximately none) will note that the "bonus beats" portion of the show, the time before the official 7am start time, has been getting shorter as the semester rolls along. Why this should be the case -- that I was finding it easier to get up early when it was crack o' doom dark out than I am now when the birds are up and singing and sunrise was at 6:29 this morning -- I'm not quite sure. So I regret that I only had time for one Sonny Rollins track and not the whole album side. I think the highpoint of the show, for me, was the segué from Sarah Vaughn to Au Revoir Simone. I lost track of my time and had to cue up something from the ARS disc without having a chance to preview it. One of those "oh hell, I hope this works" moments. Altho, like I told DJ Xiane, if it doesn't it's only a few minutes of bad radio, not the end of the world. And of course, it got balanced out later when I hit the stop button on the Donald Byrd track by mistake around minute 5 of a 7 minute track.

Anyway, I'll definitely have one more Thursday show, on 5/10. New schedule starts up the Sunday after that and I'll just have to wait and see where & when I end up.

¡Woohoo! Just got notice in the mail today that my car is now paid off. Or in other words: it's art car time. Those of you not in the art car scene will, no doubt, find this an utterly bizarre choice. Rest assured, tho, that folks in the art car crowd absolutely could not understand why I'd want to wait until the car was paid off. To me it's like painting the walls in a rental apartment. Actually, it's probably more like taking out a wall in an apartment you're renting. Anyway, I've been kicking around a few ideas. Will just have to see where it all goes.

There's this radio commercial I've heard a couple of times now. It's for some airline, talking about how they understand the needs of those traveling to and from the non-existent city of Raleigh-Durham (but the non-existent city of Raleigh-Durham is another rant entirely). What gets my attention every time is the way the voiceover guy is pronouncing Durham. He's saying (as near as I can reproduce it) DEWR-em. Not even DEW-rem, which would be weird enough. But the R is definitely attached to the first syllable. Very strange. It goes without saying that I have never heard anyone pronounce Durham that way. I say DER-um. Actually, if I remember my phonetics (and I probably don't), I think the 2nd vowel sound in my pronunciation is a schwa.

XDU wrrld music top 10 (week ending 22 apr 07) ::

Studio One Kings :: various
Guitar Music from Western Sahara :: Group Doueh
Backspin: A Six Degrees 10 Year Anniversary Project :: various
Mind Control :: Stephen Marley
El Tarab El Aseel :: Riad Abdel-Gawad
Do Good :: Turbulence
Stop the Earth, I Want to Get Off :: Zeb
Pequeno Transistor de Feria :: Radio Zumbido
Remixed :: Midival Punditz
Don't Mess with the Dragon :: Ozomatli

Here is today's playlist from the Divaville radio programme. My plan for today was to focus on vinyl (mine, the station's and Xta's) and I think I did a pretty good job at that. The show was about 75% vinyl which made it a bit more hectic than usual. But not all that much, really. As a side effect of that, the show was almost all stuff I'd never heard before or had only heard a few times and that made it a ton of fun for me. I hope it made for good listening for the 4.65 listeners (cats are included, but pro-rated). Looking back over my playlists, I notice that I also did an all Cole Porter set last time. Oh well. But all the songs were different this time. And, hey, there's no such thing as too much Cole Porter.

It's good to be Neil Gaiman, apparently. Which the first thing I took away from that post. One of the things that shows what a good writer Gaiman is, I think, is that nothing in there comes off as bragging or annoying (in a "look at me, i'm wonderful" way). Further reading, tho, reveals interesting details about Gaiman's writing process. I was particularly fascinated by the stuff about page numbering. I guess because what little writing I've done lately has all been on the iBook, I hadn't really thought much about the importance of hand-numbering pages. But I can definitely relate to the sense of satisfaction when reaching the end of a chapter or section or whatever. Altho I've never drawn little grave markers to capture the moment.

This post from the always pithy & insightful Matt, at scrubbles.com, mentions the slow standardization of the TCM on-air identity, in terms of promos, bumpers, etc. I also miss that "Sunny Side of Life" spot, with the faux-Hopper graphics and the Chet Baker music. But what's really missed around our house is the old intro for One Reel Wonders, which had this kicky little bit of 20s/30s music backing it. I actually kinda like the oldschool postcard rack image that they're using but the music for it is just bland and forgettable (in fact, I've completely forgotten what it sounds like). Also, can I just say that I'd be very happy if they never did another promo spot with Ben "nepotism had NOTHING to do with my getting this job" Mankiewicz and his pal driving around LA in a badass Mustang trying to be witty.

More proof (as if any were needed) that you should not (not not not) make any important decisions in the morning before you've had at least one cup of coffee. I mean, I've gone out w/ mis-matched socks before but... shoes?!? That's pretty sad.

At my peril, I'm slowly getting drawn into this spiral of reality show madness. Last night they all sloped off to Australia. Apparently being on ANTM gives you the super power to get off a 14+ hour non-stop flight to Sydney and not look like 12 miles of holy hell. Sadly, no interesting drag queen appearances on last night's episode (earlier this season they had someone from the House of Ninja). But they did do this challenge where they had to film a TV commercial that required them to do a fake Aussie accent. That was about the extent of hilarity ensuing. (cont'd below, w/ spoilers)

Phil asked (below) about the deal-breaking potential of 2% milk v. cream. It's true that there are some recipes (esp. baking) where I would not make that substitution. And there have probably (and will be again) times when I'd categorically refuse. In this case, I believe the recipe said "milk or cream" so the fact that we had milk meant one less thing I had to buy. And also indicated that they felt the recipe would work with varying degrees of dairy fattiness. Whole milk has around 4% fat and I've found that, in many instances, I can switch freely between 2%, whole milk, or half & half without seriously compromising the recipe. (otoh, I'd only use 1% or skim to substitute for water; they just don't have enough fat to adequately stand in for milk, let alone anything heavier)
But thinking some more about this particular batch of soup, I think the reduced creaminess may have been one of the problems. I added, as per instructions, some Greek yogurt when serving. Mixing that in added some fullness to the flavor that had been missing.

Some soup thoughts: I tried this new recipe for artichoke soup last night. Found online altho I can't remember where or I'd link to it. It used frozen artichoke hearts which I think has up and down sides. On the major up side, this made the recipe possible in the home kitchen. I can't imagine how many artichokes you'd have to cook to get enough hearts to make this recipe -- somewhere in the neighborhood of a lot. But the flip of that is that I'm sure the flavor would be a lot stronger if you could take the time to cook all those artichokes from fresh. It could be that there was something else missing, flavorwise. Maybe it needed more salt. Or pepper. The herb flavor (tarragon) was coming thru so I don't think that was it. The recipe called for cream but I used 2% milk cos that's what we had, so maybe that's why the flavor didn't pop like I wanted it to.
So, a partial success and worth trying again but not quite there yet.

XDU wrrld music top 10 (week ending 15 apr 07) ::

Backspin: A Six Degrees 10 Year Anniversary Project :: various
Mind Control :: Stephen Marley
Stop the Earth, I Want to Get Off :: Zeb
Do Good :: Turbulence
Pequeno Transistor de Feria :: Radio Zumbido
Security :: Antibalas
Techarí :: Ojos de Brujo
Cê :: Caetano Veloso
Vieux Farka Toure :: Vieux Farka Toure
Remixed :: Midival Punditz

Blog Advisory System. Sadly, the ones who need it most are always the last to know...

I'm going to walk it off.


Comedy gold.






(more cowbell!)

This week's top shenanigans-call has to be on Don "fired ass" Imus. Or rather on all the bloviating about the aforementioned firing of his ass. I think Joe Conason cut to the chase rather nicely over at Salon: "the only issue for NBC and CBS was the standard of discourse on their programming, not what some idiots may be saying somewhere else." Altho I am pleased that almost no one has tried to drag freedom of speech into it. The alert and generally not-braindead will note that the gov't has not hauled the black helicopters over to the Imus Ranch (they're too busy harassing bloggers who won't turn over video footage). Thus ends the "free speech" portion of our program. Which has exactly nothing to do with the fact that if you stir up a PR shitstorm and start causing your bosses to lose considerable amounts of $$, they will fire your ass.
This time at least.

If you're interested, here's the playlist from this morning's show. Which was fun, apart from an absolute trainwreck in the middle when I started a 2 minute song without having a next song in mind. I did have a Martin Denny CD in #3 which I'd been using as backsell music. Grabbed a CD and started cue-ing but it was horrid. Still not a problem, altho a bit flustering. But then I pushed the wrong button and ejected Martin Denny. Hello, dead air! Just for a couple of seconds, which only seemed like a couple of years to me. Scramble scramble... read PSA while grabbing another disc and getting it into a player. Only a small amount of unrestrained panic.

Meanwhile, on Survivor... (note: there are spoilers below the cut)

Here's some musical meme fun, yoinked from Porcini Chronicles. And I don't think I can describe it better than she did: the seven songs I would pick if I could only listen to seven songs for the rest of my life, which, yeah, like someone is going to impose that... Of course, I'm chronically unable to narrow things down -- this is the closest I could get. I couldn't really wrap my brain around the only songs for rest of life concept. So I went instead with songs that I've happily played over and over and over again, and not just over the years but at the same time.
set one
"here we go" :: Stakka Bo
"thank you for sending me an angel" :: Talking Heads
"fly me to the moon" :: Frank Sinatra
"mera pia ghar ayaa" (Bally Sagoo remix) :: Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan
"the devil in me" :: John Wesley Harding
"constant craving" :: k.d. lang
"the love cats" :: the Cure

set two
"v-thirteen" :: Big Audio Dynamite
"la réalité" :: Amadou & Mariam
"if i should fall from grace with god" :: Pogues
"water no get enemy" :: Fela
"they can't take that away from me" :: Fred Astaire
"anarchy in the UK" :: Sex Pistols
"goodnight, baby" :: the Butterflys

set three
"woke up this morning" :: A3
"singin' in the rain" :: Gene Kelly
"sensoria" :: Cabaret Voltaire
"king of rock" :: Run DMC
"your life" :: Konk
"my kingdom" :: Echo & the Bunnymen
"my favorite things" :: John Coltrane

¡wow! Poking around on youtube tonight, I found this gem. It's Talking Heads performing "I Zimbra" live in Rome in 1980. This song probably has a much to do with the wrrld music geek I've become as any one single other song. If you check this out (and you should), you'll notice that the whole concert is available on youtube and it's an amazing thing. Still, even all these years later, I have these slight twinges of regret as I had a chance to see Talking Heads play in NYC which was one of their first dates with the expanded line-up. But instead we chose to see Devo a few weeks earlier and I only had the green to see one show. Ahhh... heavy sigh.

XDU wrrld music top 10 (week ending 08 apr 07) ::

Stop the Earth, I Want to Get Off :: Zeb
Security :: Antibalas
Techarí :: Ojos de Brujo
Pequeno Transistor de Feria :: Radio Zumbido
Do Good :: Turbulence
Remixed :: Midival Punditz
Highway to Hassake: Folk and Pop Sounds of Syria :: Omar Souleyman
Don't Mess with the Dragon :: Ozomatli
Selda :: Selda
Cê :: Caetano Veloso

I don't know if this is true for other parts of the country or world, but here in Durham it was colder today on Easter than it was last year on Xmas. Wiggy! Today was a pretty downtempo day. Which was good cos I was still feeling the effects of wrestling with the blueberry enclosures yesterday. It wouldn't have been so bad if the wind wasn't whipping around so much. Well, and if it hadn't been in the low 40s at the time. Howsomeever... it's over. The moment has passed and etc. My main productive efforts for today were writing up a couple of reviews (which I'd already created notes for while listening to the CDs earlier), picking up the Divaville CDs from Xta (Sarah or I will be subbing for the next three weeks), and buying more dog food. My non-productive time was spent watching Easter Parade on TCM, watching Iron Chef America (Morimoto episode! woohoo!), and reading the NYTimes online.
And this may be the definitive Sunday NYTimes story. It's got it all: rich people, obscure NYC history, dead people, academics, eccentrics, food, rich dead people, windmill tilting. Who knew the saga of eggs benedict was so rife with controversy and contention?

Here's the playlist from this afternoon's edition of Mondo Mundo. It was the all Six Degrees special edition. The station just got Backspin, a 10th anniversary compilation, with Six Degrees faves (Karsh Kale, Banco de Gaia, Shrift, dZihan & Kamien, and more) doing covers -- mostly rock tunes, some more obscure than others. Altho I guess "obscure" is a basically subjective notion. My stone classic is your "what in the what now?" You can guess my faves by looking at the playlist. But can I just say: Midival Punditz do Led Zep! w00t!! The show was fun. No one called, which was fine cos I had most of my sets figured out and didn't really have room for requests. I had about another hour of Six Degrees music pulled (had to drop the whole mellow, laidback set cos there wasn't time). And, yes, the entire second half of the show was one long set. Sometimes you just gotta let the music play.

Here (via boing²) are some amazing cars pimped out, otaku style. Really, words fail me. Some of them are, frankly, a bit creepy. But, still, pretty cool...

Or, if that's not your bag (baby), please enjoy the dogs of Nashville.

Today's geekout was of a musical nature: I was driving home this evening, listening to my iPod playlist and it came to a track from Dirt Crew (German tech-house producer/DJ guys). The track was "What You Want", from their CD the First Chapter and it contains this break or sound or sample or whatever that was just so naggingly familiar. But I could not ID it. I even skipped back and played thru the track again before it finally clicked. The sample (and it's almost gotta be sampled; it sounds exactly the same) is from "Mmm Skyscraper I Love You" by Underworld. +5 music geek points for me.
And can I just say that Dubnobasswithmyheadman is one of my favorite albums. Evah.

So this starts out as an interesting Q&A about sampling from food stores. I'm with her on the main points, about the polite way to sample. But then she loses me halfway thru when she starts up with the paradox of choice and how people like novelty less than they think they will. I'm always uncomfortable with any claims about what "people" want. Okay, I don't have enough information to doubt the results of the Schwartz study. But on the other hand, so what... I'm not happier when I have the same snack every day and I don't become overwhelmed with dread and find myself haunted by the 90 cheeses I didn't get to taste. The argument seems to be that you shouldn't try something new because you might not like it and you'll be happier if you stick with the safe and the known. Well, I call shenanigans on that. Even if you show me an experiment where 75% of people are happier taking the same lunch to work every day. I reject that "know-nothing" approach to life.
And besides, the article makes less sense the more I read it. A perfectly reasonable Q&A about what is the polite approach to sampling food in a store gets side-tracked on some arguable point about how you'd be happier if you didn't try anything different and just stuck with what you already knew. Except it then wraps up with an endorsement of the pleasures of trying new things. What in the what now?

shenanigans!

I've completely fallen down on the job of peep photography. Will try to come up with something this week. Fortunately, the internets are on the job. Peeps for Passover. Feel the awesome!!

According to the tubal interwebs, today is Peanut Butter and Jelly Day. In case you didn't have time to make a sandwich, here's an internet classic (warnings: plays sound; will totally brainworm you; might be considered Really Annoying)

XDU wrrld music top 10 (week ending 01 apr 07) ::

Cê :: Caetano Veloso
Security :: Antibalas
Highway to Hassake: Folk and Pop Sounds of Syria :: Omar Souleyman
African Spirit :: Soweto Gospel Choir
Don't Mess with the Dragon :: Ozomatli
All Good Things :: Pacha Massive
Techarí :: Ojos de Brujo
Le Monde Musical de Baden Powell :: Baden Powell
Samba Nouvelle Vague :: Sivuca
Remixed :: Midival Punditz

Happy 50th birthday to the one & only Tropicana. Or the MF-ing Trop, man (as I like to call it). Cos that's what it is. I'm glad that the new owners seem committed (at least as this point) to keeping the Trop going and not doing a tear-down to maximize the property value, as they say. I'm not sure they can keep things running with the towers while they're tearing down the Garden Rooms. On the other hand, Alladin's managed to survive all the construction of the Planet Hollywood switchover and Venetian's making it thru the addition of their new tower. So there may be hope. At the very least, reports of its demise (which I myself have spread) seem to have been exaggerated. Of course, I have many fond memories of the MF-ing Trop, man.