Circadian Shift

It's sad that the last entry made in this blog was last week's mood board (and I'm late with this one). All work and no play is making me very dull indeed.

Actually, things have eased off a bit chez office. It's still busy, but not the insane pressure-cooker like in previous weeks. I must getting the hang of things. Still, much of the week was spent at the computer, cranking out flowcharts.

And I still had time for some media consumption...

Yes, I had the TV on for a good chunk of Saturday to watch the Live 8 broadcast (although I went out in the afternoon -- hey, it was a nice day outside). There's a decent overview at Wikipedia of what the event entailed, as well as criticisms of it.

I saw the movie Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (here's the link to the official site -- needs Flash). While I knew the basic outline of what happened, this movie filled in a lot of the details, and brought out the people behind the headlines.

It just boggles my mind how the key players managed to emerge relatively unscathed, after ripping off thousands of people -- including their own employees. As Roger Ebert writes in his review of the film:

"Strange, that there has not been more anger over the Enron scandals. The cost was incalculable, not only in lives lost during the power crisis, but in treasure: The state of California is suing for $6 billion in refunds for energy overcharges collected during the phony crisis. If the crisis had been created by Al Qaeda, if terrorists had shut down half of California's power plants, consider how we would regard these same events."

Lastly, there was this week's musical nostalgia selection, namely The Carpenters. Yeah, shut up -- if they were good enough for the likes of Sonic Youth and Matthew Sweet to pay tribute to ten years ago, they should be good enough for you.

Actually, I come by my Carpenters fanhood quite honestly. Back in the day, my dad had an 8-track tape of their hits that he used to play in our van frequently during our drives up north to the cottage. (Geez, nothing says "The 70s" quite like the words "8-track" and "van", huh?) I knew them all, and of course I sang along. Obviously, my voice was nowhere nearly as good as Karen's.

Just because, here's a ZIP file (EXPIRED) (6.85 MB) with two of their tunes. "Only Yesterday" was the duo's last Top Five hit (they actually thought the track was going to bust the charts wide open, but it didn't get any higher than #4). There's something about the lyrics and the way the song builds that reminds me a little of The Ronette's "Be My Baby". (OK, maybe very little.) The other song in the ZIP, "Superstar", had already been recorded by other artists (including Bette Midler) before The Carpenters got ahold of it; they really managed to make the tune their own.

If you go to this page of Sonic Youth MP3s (from their official website), you can download their cover of "Superstar". It may be almost blasphemous of me to say it, but I think it surpasses Karen and Richard's version. You can decide for yourselves.

(Note 1: The flowchart shown on the board is not one of mine, but is this one. Also, the pic of the computer user is not me; I got it from some free stock photo site, can't remember which.)

(Note 2: The ZIP file is being hosted on RapidShare, which will entail a wee bit of clicking before you get to the actual download link. And, you won't be able to use a download accelerator -- just right-click and "Save As...").