Frigging !*#!@!!*%@^!!!!! course assignment is due at midnight.
Aaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrgh!!!!!
(Addendum, 11:53:57 PM -- Fired off something vaguely coherent. What the hell...)
Circadian Shift
Surfing the information tsunami.
« November 2005 | Main | January 2006 »
-
coming in at #3: "World's first biogas train fueled by cows"
-
a weekly podcast from the people who brought you 'The Office' (original BBC version)
-
I've heard of maybe half of these; got two (LCD Soundsystem and M.I.A.)
-
At least I've heard of most of these albums; I only have one of them (M.I.A.'s 'Arular')
-
An exhaustive set of lists, including top albums, top singles, worst albums, artist picks, and more.
-
All pandas. All the time.
A belated holiday moodboard.
Christmas was fine. I ate a ton of food. Got some nice presents. All in all, I've no complaints.
Will do a minimal amount of Boxing "Day" shopping this week. And I have that *#@#!!*#@!!!!! course assignment due by the end of Friday.
Hope y'all had a good one. Sorry that blog posting's been light lately. Will try to remedy that in the new year.
The holiday season means that a lot of people do all sorts of baking. However, it is wise to avoid leaving all those sweet goodies unattended.
Especially when there are bunnies around.
(Pic found at Cute Overload, a blog which lives up to its name pretty well. Link to Cute Overload found via tripledoubleyou.com.)
Frigging holiday season.
Am scrambling to get stuff done before year end at work, do my wretched major assignment for the course I've been taking (also due at year end), and cope with the usual Xmas insanity.
Arrgh. Arrrrrrrgh.
Snow on the ground and a looming holiday rush in the air.
I've been a bit scattered this week -- bashing away at getting a bunch of stuff done at work before year-end, trying (unsuccessfully) to work on the major assignment for my course, and thinking (intermittently) about what the hell to get people for Christmas.
Three songs figuring prominently on my musical radar in the last few days:
- Sara Valenzuela - "Para Continuar" -- this incredibly pretty tune was included on a Nacional Records Sampler that I downloaded for free from eMusic a while back and promptly forgot about until I played it at work this week; Valenzuela's work is a gentle pop-jazz hybrid that will likely appeal to fans of Bebel Gilberto or Nora Jones -- you can download "Para Continuar" plus another song for free from her website (after you enter the site -- Flash required -- select 'Galería' from the menu, then go to 'Extras: Downloads')
- Isao Tomita - "Arabesque No. 1" -- taken from his 1974 album Snowflakes Are Dancing, this is an electronic re-working of an old Debussey chestnut; soothing, without degenerating into New Age-y musical wallpaper
- Matthew Barber - "Soft One" -- heard on the mainstream radio station that I listen to on weekday mornings, this is a solid pop gem, reminiscent of the old Cars song "Just What I Needed"; purchased from iTunes this week (along with the Tomita track)
-
"Coffee improves short-term memory and speeds up reaction times by acting on the brain's prefrontal cortex, according to a new study."
Stumbled across this by accident:
Featuring an eclectic array of holiday tunage, there's only one song that overlaps with my Xmas mix (we'll just overlook have to overlook the presence of one Xmas song that I hate). Plus you have your choice of downloading everything in one ZIP file or cherry-picking individual tracks. A nice mix (and good quality MP3s, too).
There are also more MP3s of the non-holiday variety on the Making Flippy Floppy blog.
UrbanDharma has a Buddhist calendar for 2006 available for free download as a PDF.
The calendar features serene black-and-white nature photography and quotes from the teachings of the Venerable Ajahn Chah.
Running a bit later than originally planned, here is a mix of holiday tunage that I've pulled together from various online sources. Some picks are obvious, while others are, uh, different.
- Claudine Longet - I Don't Intend To Spend Christmas Without You
- Cocteau Twins - Frosty The Snowman
- No Doubt - Oi To The World
- Frank Sinatra & Cindy Lauper - Santa Claus Is Coming To Town
- Ben Folds - Bizarre Christmas Incident
- John Lennon - Happy Christmas (War Is Over)
- Jethro Tull - Ring Out Solstice Bells
- Pet Shop Boys - It Doesn't Often Snow At Christmas
- Eels - Everything's Gonna Be Cool This Christmas
- The Ventures - We Wish You A Merry Christmas
- Gayla Peevey - I Want A Hippopotamus For Christmas
- Donny & Marie - Winter Wonderland
- Missile Toe - Gloria
- The Wombles - Wombling Merry Christmas
- My Chemical Romance - All I Want For Christmas Is You
- Vic20 - A Marshmallow World
- Johnny Cash - Little Drummer Boy
- The Kinks - Father Christmas
- The Pogues - Fairytale of New York
- The Waitresses - Christmas Wrapping
- Darlene Love - Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)
You can download the Circadian Shift Xmas mix as a single ZIP file, weighing in at 73.2 MB; sorry, I'm lazy, so downloads of individual tracks are not available. The ZIP is hosted on Rapidshare, so some scrolling, clicking, etc., required.
I really found myself struggling with the mood board this week.
Using a grid is easy to do, and yields pretty good results most of the time, but it does make it hard to keep the look fresh. I tried going back to the more free-form style, like what I was doing in the spring and summer, but it just looked like crap.
Anyway, it's December now, which means that my monthly 40 MP3 allotment from eMusic was there for the taking. I got three albums.
- Thievery Corporation - The Cosmic Game -- I already have five other CDs bearing the Thievery Corporation name; I just can't get enough of that lounge-y downtempo electro goodness
- Frankie Bones - Act Like You Know -- house-y dance tunage to get up and go to
- Steve Reich / Alarm Will Sound - Tehilim & Desert Music -- Steve Reich, of course, looms large on the scene of Minimalist Classical composers, whilst Alarm Will Sound is an instrumental ensemble with an eclectic repertoire (most recently, they covered music by Aphex Twin); the resulting combination yields a work that rewards repeated listens
For those of you doing the math, those three selections actually topped out at 42 MP3s, so I had to dip into my "Booster Pack" for the extra tracks.
The "Booster Pack" also got depleted a bit more, as I downloaded a bunch more of those ambient music/noise recordings that are supposed to do good things for your brain -- Brain Power, Deep Learning, High Focus, and Increase Creativity all got some significant play while at the office this week. They actually seemed to help, as I was able to buckle down and plow through some sticky points in what I've been working on.
In terms of other media consumption for the week, I saw the documentary film March of the Pengiuns (IMDb info) on DVD. It was a good movie -- who, after all, does not enjoy watching cute flightless seabirds (and fluffy baby birds!) waddling around -- but you may, perhaps, argue with the attempt to ascribe too many human characteristics to them. Still, is was great fun to watch, and the Antarctic vistas in the background were truly spectacular.
December is here, which means that we'll now fully enter into the throes of the holiday season. And that means Christmas songs, for better or for worse. Often worse.
Here are three Christmas songs that particularly get up my nose:
- "Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer" -- So, let's see if I got this straight. Rudolf is a reindeer who is different from the others, so he gets mocked and abused by them. Then he goes and does something cool -- with no help from anyone, thank you very much -- and suddenly everybody is his new best friend. Right. Stupid, fickle, asshole reindeer. I hope Rudolf told them to go fuck themselves.
- Paul McCartney - "Wonderful Christmastime" -- Mr. McCartney crafted some truly fine pop songs, back in the day, but this is not one of them. Everything about this track -- production values, melody, lyrics -- has "wanking about in the studio between takes of something else" written all over it. It's not a bad song, but there was a time when Sir Paul was capable of writing so much better.
- Bryan Adams - "Christmas Time" -- Whereas McCartney's ditty can be excused for being a diversionary throwaway piece, you just know that Bryan Adams sat down and tried really, really hard to pen a holiday anthem of peace, brotherhood, the warm-and-fuzzies, etc. What we wind up with instead is a maudlin, formulaic, piece of crap. Every time I hear a blatantly manipulative line like "to see the joy in the children’s eyes", I want to hunt down Mr. Adams and beat him about the head with a Yule log.
As mentioned a few weeks back, I have an assemblage of Xmas tunes that I've been working on. I'm ironing out a few things, but it will be up soon.
-
"awareness, or "visual working memory," depends on your ability to filter out irrelevant information"
-
"Why we sometimes wake up a minute before the alarm rings."