Everything illuminated...

Please wecome Carter, who arrived after a 16-hour excursion last Saturday....

Carter
Originally uploaded by Knial.

DIY: One was a real battle...

Let's compare and contrast:

A Virginia school district sells iBooks for $50...



versus Picasso's "Guernica."



Discuss.

DEEPLINKS: Random and compelling

There must be some psychological theorem to explain why a self-refreshing stream of the 50 most recent pictures posted to LiveJournal is so damn interesting...

IMHO: Five earworms

This story about the syndrome where your brain hears music constantly describes about 30 percent of my waking life. Just for fun, here's the top five singles burning up the charts in my synapses now:

5. Wilco, "Late Greats" (live version)

The addition of Nels Cline to the lineup has brought the band off that narrow King Crimson road it was heading down. Every live version of a track from "A Ghost Is Born" sounds far fresher with the new crew, and "Late Greats" gets that much better. Cline says Tweedy wants the record they're going to start this summer "to have a lot of groove." It's about damn time.

4. Herb Brown, "Never Gonna Dance," (from the 1936 musical "Swing Time")

Perhaps one of the more oddly depressive musical numbers of all time. "I'll put my shoes on beautiful trees/I'll give my rhythm back to the breeze/My dinner clothes may dine where they please/For all I really want is you." There's a wolf and a penny and Groucho Marx, too.

3. Brendan Benson, "Spit It Out"

Benson and Jack White are working on something of a Detroit-based superpop group called Raconteurs. Now would be a good time for Benson to do something different -- three albums of catchy pop songs should be enough to tide anyone over.

2. Imogen Heap, "Hide and Seek"

So I don't watch "The OC." So I didn't know Imogen Heap was in Frou Frou. All I care about is that whoever produced this little gem rescued the vocoder from its grim reputation as the reviver of Cher's career.

1. Sufjan Stevens, "John Wayne Gacy Jr."

I'll let Sufjan explain what he was thinking writing about a serial killer:

"I made a concerted effort to scrupulously evoke the series of events which led to his crime, and, considering the circumstances, that was not a pleasant task. In all the crime novels I'd skimmed and in all the news clippings I read, there was a deliberate obsession with finding the source of his depravity. What went wrong, everyone asked. What made him this way? Was it his abusive father? Was it a head injury? A doting mother?

"I'm less interested in cause and effect, in terms of human iniquity. I believe we all have the capacity for murder. We are ruthless creatures. I felt insurmountable empathy not with his behavior, but with his nature, and there was nothing I could do to get around confessing that, however horrifying it sounds."

It's a quiet folk song, with that patchwork sound that Stevens uses for much of the Illinois record. The lyrics are simple and descriptive -- "Folding John Wayne's T-shirts/When the swingset hit his head" -- and walk right up to the scene of the crimes.

"Twenty-seven people, even more/They were boys with their cars, summer jobs/Oh my --" and here, Stevens lets out a soft wail, stretching the word "God" over three measures, blowing a cold breeze through the rest of the album. It may be the best song I've heard in many a year.

IMHO: My one-word review of podcasting after two weeks with the new iTunes

Eh.

DEEPLINKS: The end of BONG Bull

Charley Stough started the Burned-Out Newspapercreatures Guild (BONG) Bull e-mail newsletter in 1988, and kept dishing out its mix of an all-text comic strip, dusty newspaper parables and the occasional joke list on a nearly weekly basis until a few weeks ago. I started subscribing whilst learning The Craft, and find it hard to quantify just how much I picked up from the damn thing. BONG Bull was kinda funny, sometimes, and always well-put together, but through some mystical farrago it imparted more bedrock truth about journalism as we know it today than many years of urgent care from the brahmins at the review mags and pointy-head websites. I never did pick up Stough's merchandise, such as the typewriter-key cufflinks or my official Chagrin Falls Commercial Scimitar press badge (which was apparently used as a real press badge in hostile territories around the world), but the last tickets for Charley's nostalgia tour won't last forever.

DEEPLINKS: 64-bit caulking

The Macolytes have been unsettled lately, as their leader has called on them to trek onward into the Sinai Desert of x86 processing he decried for oh so many years. Much rending of garments and nashing of nails has followed -- "Woe betide the Photoshop filters! Where is my Altivec engine?" Yea, verily, I say unto thee -- all I give a darn about is the ability for my cherished machine to do this:

TRAVELS: Mr. Bean's Wonder Machine

Back in 1999, James Surowiecki wrote a column in Slate that was the best explainer of the airline business that I have seen to date. "It is the fact that the airline business is so capital-intensive that makes it such a sketchy business to be in, especially when on top of having to spend tons of money to operate you have to worry about oil prices, cyclical demand, and very little pricing power...In its entire history the airline industry has probably created zero economic value, which is to say that its return on invested capital has never equaled the cost of that capital."

Over the past few weeks I've flown about 7,000 miles, on business and leisure. I've been cossetted in extra-wide seats and offered warm cookies. I've been bumped due to airline incompetence and offered snuff by my seatmates. (It was Levi Garrett. Not my brand.) I've been to Jackson, Mississippi, for no reason whatsoever. So I consider myself an experienced traveler. And when I read this, I got that tingling sensation all of us get when we inherit a clear glimpse of our future. And lo, I was sore afraid.

DIY: Get Thee Behind Me

Here's my current script for people who've seen me looking a little more tired and desperate than usual:

Q: So, how's the house?

A: Well we're finally to the point where we don't have to apologize to people who come over. We've passed the entry course and have signed up for intermediate classes like Ceiling Fan Installation 101 and Intro To Garbage Disposals: Yes Honey, I Know The Kitchen Smells Like Day-Old Jambalaya.

Q: You're taking classes?

A: If by classes you mean reading Home Depot books and making stuff up as I go, yes.

Q: Sweat equity, huh?

A: No one ever told me exactly what that exchange ratio was between sweat and real capital. You're better off trading pesos.


After two fun months of home ownership, I've started to work out a few tips for those who think this all looks fun:

-- There is a special circle of Hell reserved for people who paint over wallpaper.

-- Don't think you can hide stupid home improvement mistakes from future generations.

-- In nearly every case, you have to make a problem worse before you can make it better.

-- There are few tools more useful than a wrecking bar.

-- You would think that a cat would be smart enough not to hop into a paint pan full of Sunshower yellow interior eggshell latex. You would be mistaken.

-- Behind the camera of every HGTV/Discovery/Extreme Makeover show is a small platoon of people who do the actual work or correct what's going on.

OK, now for the unveiling. First, the before....

It's hard to see from this photo the exact shade of pink that covered the chair rail in the dining room. I believe it was called Expired Pepto Bismol.

And now the after:

Hail and huzzah, strike up the fight song Fanny! Three rooms down! Just a kitchen redo, two bathrooms and a basement to go. Oh yeah, and a room for the Wee Lance. And the office.

SLAMMER: The More You Know...

Celebrities. They're more than just people who've stumbled into fame and fortune. They're our surrogate family members, always on call to give us advice for all life's tough moments, everything from corraling your runaway Texas hold'em addicition to improving your digestive systems.

So I thought it was high time for me to give back, before yet another cherished member of our extended celebrity family is forced to sit for an unflattering impromptu pencil-and-chalk courthouse portrait complete with fuschia waves of energy. The next time, say, some native Australian wants to make sure Bill's breakfast bistro in Sydney will keep a ricotta pancake platter warm for when he or she returns, here's the best procedure:

1. For international calls, it's best to use a calling card or credit card. Hotel long distance rates can be fiendishly expensive, even when you make $10 million a film.
2. Dial 8 or 9 for an outside line, then use the 1-800 number for your calling card service. When the automatronic lady asks for the number your calling, dial 01 + the country code (in this case 61) + the number (02 9360 9631).
3. Punch in your calling card or credit card number, and chatter away. If you do get Bill himself on the line, ask him why none of his recipies ever seem to work in the United States. If he blames operator error, chuck the phone into the nearest non-human target.

404: Sorry about the delay

That's the thing about blogging. If you don't do it regularly there's really not much point. Here's the best explanation of how I've spent my time over the past two months.

DEEPLINKS: The Middle Age of Mashups

As the worldwide pop mashup scene enters its fifth year, the signs of middle age -- forgetfulness, a decline of style, the occasional stretch mark -- are everywhere. Trends and fads die at the hands of their own success, and the mashup scene feel closer to an end than the beginning. To its credit, mashups have rekindled that ol' indie spirit that once gave pop music the only heart it ever had. The scene has also moved as fast as an overeager prom date: It took eight years for rap to work from NYC clubs to The Sugarhill Gang, yet "The Grey Album" could stand tall in any argument over the best album of 2004.

Over the past two years I've collected about 130 mashups, and listened to about 3x that number in the process. I'll let somebody else write the annotated history. Here's my four points:

1. Lots of mashers dissed "The Grey Album" for overusing technology and taking the Cuisinart approach to the backing music. A traditional, high-quality mashup uses two tracks with a minimum of beat/pitch shifting and a not-so-obvious merging of melodies -- say the best of Mark Vidler, or DJ Crook Air's Junior Senior/Lauryn Hill combo. The very best mashups use even more, but keep the song as a whole from turning into techno-goulash.
   
2. Hip-hop started out as essentially mashups of classic hooks and backup music with new lyrics, and its popularity guarantees plenty of raw material for the future. The reverse has been rare, but with hip-hop moving to more sophisticated productions, maybe that will change.
3. Britain was the cradle of the mashup world, but San Francisco has become a hotbed of the best new American work.
4. The mashups I keep coming back to tend to be the ones that are not just good, but have a sense of humor.

DIY: Nuestro Primer Castillo

I’ve been spacing out as of late, because of this little problem.

Let’s say you buy a house, a brick cottage from the 1930s in need of a few updates. Which goes first – the wallpaper:




Or the carpet, which covers 80 percent of the living area, and may/may not conceal a wood floor in need of refinishing?



Oh, and you have three days before your stuff arrives. And you're working those three days.

DEEPLINKS: Ending a cliff hanger

If you were lucky enough to be a student at the University of New Brunswick a few years ago, matriculating along the banks of the St. John River, you could spend your free time in the many coffee shops and open bars that spill out of Fredericton much as they do any North American college town. You might have even taken in the entertainments of a performer known as Petunia, whose real name is Robert, a musician whose act was dominated by the kazoo and the yodel. Petunia, while given over mostly to light comedy, had some mad kazoo skillz that occasionally shone through, such as on her rendition of "La Vie En Rose." The yodeling skills were not as appreciated, and as one reviewer said, were "apparantly (sic) picked up from watching The Price is Right."

I'm willing to bet hard-earned money that at the end of that sentence a sound popped into your head, a yodel that has been buried in the subconscious of millions of people around the world. It is the most famous yodel of all time, a lilting, driving, circular phrase that is both instantly recognizable and completely anonymous:

"Ah-de-lu-de ah-de-li-do ah-de-lu-di-ah,
ah-de-lu-de ah-de-li-do ah-de-lu-di-o"



That sound comes from "Cliff Hangers," a game that's been on "The Price is Right" since 1977. According to those who know, the sound came from a record called "Swiss Mountain Alp Music, Circa 1975-'76," and to the best of my knowledge, has yet to find its way onto the Web in unadulterated form.

"Cliff Hangers" is a stupid, stupid game. For those whose "TPIR" memories are obscured by strep-throat fevers: Players have to guess the price of everyday items, and if they're wrong by more than $25 (an amount which has not changed in the 28 years that the game has been played) the mountain climber crashes into the ravine apparently filled with broken glass. Despite its inanity, that yodeling has become a universal code for waiting. It's not in the same league as its more famous "Jeopardy!" theme, but it gets a fair share of references, with a more subtle syntax. The "Jeopardy" theme suggests cheery impatience; "Cliff Hangers," despite the yodel, is more blase, even sarcastic, a musical tag for waiting with the knowledge that the end can only mean falling off a cliff.

As it turns out, "TPIR" has spawned a litany of aural cues that have spread throughout modern culture. I can't go to my gym without hearing the original theme song set into a thumping dance groove, popular about four years ago. Others have noted the appropriateness of the loser's refrain -- "Buh-bump-a-nahhhhh, wahhhhhhhh" -- for many of life's little messes. And while children today may never be drilled with a singular set of sounds as we were, they will still be able to enjoy "Cliff Hangers" for generations to come.

Don't Look Back

In 1994, I stole a column title from H.L. Mencken and ran with it in The Maneater. "The Free Lance" lasted only a semester after I finished living at the paper as editor. As the 50th anniversary of the paper comes around, I thought I would find out what everyone was up to. Including me.

Let's begin with the people I keep in touch with, in the same way the IRS keeps in touch with me once a year. There's Theo. A true Renaissance man, parts of whose life are shrouded in more mystery than the continung appeal of Carrot Top. There's Sybil, whom I met in high school and now commands much of greater Gotham. I haven't caught up with G.H. lately, as she's been busy scouring words unfit to print. Two of the old gang work around the District; one is in my building, and the other across the state line. And I haven't spoken with Scott in quite a spell, but the movie career is coming along.

Sometimes I find it all odd, this mini diaspora. On average, when some of us catch up, we talk about the past way too much, including those missing in action. Maybe some will pop up again.