Gallimaufry 2

Same as before, ten songs that iTunes chooses at random:

  • Naughty by Nature, ‘Every Day All Day‘, off of Naughty by Nature: One of the weaker tracks off of what’s overall a very good 80’s hip-hop album. I’ve never been a huge hip-hop fan, but generally when I am, it’s 80’s era stuff, and most of Naughty by Nature’s stuff was a lot of fun.

  • Rent Cast, ‘Tune Up #3’, off of Rent: One of the brief inter-song mini pieces from the Broadway musical. Works well in context, but these short bits are rather odd when mixed in with everything else in my collection.

  • Rent Cast, ‘Today 4 U’, off of Rent: Another odd coincidence with random selections. Angel’s introduction song, Rent’s single foray into a pseudo-techno piece. Again, one that works well in context, but it doesn’t really stand well on its own (it’s somewhat annoying on its own, to tell the truth).

  • Linda Perry and Grace Slick, ‘Knock Me Out’, off of The Crow: City of Angels: A slower, somewhat atmospheric song. Not bad background music in a mix, but it doesn’t really stand out to me one way or another. Of course, the movie it comes from is pretty hideous (sad to say, I’ve seen all of the Crow films to date, and the first one is by far the only one worth paying attention to).

  • James Horner, London Symphony Orchestra, Mel Gibson & Sophie Marceau, ‘Not Every Man Really Lives‘, off of More Music from Braveheart: A little bit of dialogue from the movie leading into some of James Horner’s wonderful soundtrack. Every time I hear some of the music from Braveheart it makes me want to give the movie another watch.

  • Nine Inch Nails, ‘Down In It (Shred)’, off of Down In It: One of the remixes of Trent’s early singles. At this stage, he hadn’t become nearly as experimental as he did later on, so there’s really very little to tell the various mixes of Down In It apart from one another. Still, not a bad little song in itself (even if he has openly admitted that he was essentially ripping off Skinny Puppy‘s’Dig It‘ when he did this track).

  • Eddy Grant, ‘Electric Avenue (Hot Tracks)’, off of The Edge Level 2: A DJ-exclusive remix from the Hot Tracks remix service, this is from one of their 80’s retro discs. “We gonna walk down to Electric Avenue, and then we’ll take it higher….”

  • The Weavers, ‘Goodnight, Irene‘, off of The Best of the Decca Years: I got this album mainly because of Wimoweh, and then figured I’d see what all else they’d done. It falls right in line with much of the music I heard growing up in my dad’s collection, and I ended up knowing a lot more of these songs than I expected at first.

  • The Remains, ‘Why Do I Cry‘, off of Rock: The Train Kept A Rollin’: A 1966 pop-rock track from another of the discs in the Sony Soundtrack for a Century series that I’ve been working on collecting. Not a bad track, but not really a standout track, either.

  • Nine Inch Nails, ‘La Mer‘, off of The Fragile: This is the album that got me to stop obsessing over anything Trent Reznor did. After quite a few years of talk about how different his next album was going to be, and hearing his remix work with artists like Puff Daddy and the Family, instead of anything new or groundbreaking we got an album comprised mostly of tracks that sounded like all the instrumentals off all his prior albums. I was unimpressed, and as such, have only listened to the album a few times.

Not quite as interesting a selection as I got last week. Maybe we’ll do better next time…

And now, the ‘bonus track’:

iTunesCase #12” by 29 Died from the album Sworn (1995, 1:29).

Goodbye, Grandpa

I just got word from my dad that my mom’s father, Harold Ward, died peacefully in his sleep last night, at the age of 88.

Grandpa, mom, and GrandmaGrandpa had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease last year, and had been deteriorating fairly quickly over the past few months. Earlier this week he was admitted to the retirement community’s hospice center, and it was expected that he would pass on fairly soon. Mom flew down to Florida to be with him and Grandma last night, but Grandpa died while she was on the plane. Dad will be flying down as soon as he can. Unfortunately, I don’t currently have the spare finances or available time off to fly down, and as there has been a fair amount of traveling in our family recently as mom fit in as many visits as she could this past year, I most likely won’t be able to be there for the funeral.

Grandpa and Grandma, Mom and Dad, Grandmother and Grandfather at Mom and Dad's weddingDue to the distance between G&G in Ft. Meyers, Florida and our family in Anchorage, Alaska, I never ended up as close to my grandparents as many people do. They would come up to visit us every few years, Grandpa driving their big Winnebago, and we’d go on trips around Alaska (and no trip was ever complete until Grandma had sat on the bread). We’d fly down to visit them in Florida every few years too, and those trips are where some of my strongest memories of Grandpa are from.

He spent many of the last years of his life as a tour guide at the Thomas A. Edison and Henry Ford Winter Estates in Ft. Meyers, and we would always get to go on tours of the grounds. Grandpa would lead us through the gardens with plants and trees from all over the world — complete with a huge, beautiful banyan tree that drops its multitudes of trunk-like roots over the grounds just in front of the main entrance — and then into the family homes, through the workshops, and on into the museum at the end. He never seemed to need a script, and was always content to to keep track of a couple of very excitable (and probably frequently bored) children year after year, filling us with information that was probably forgotten straight away as we looked forward to the nearly obligatory trip to Disney World later in the trip.

I may not have known him as well as I might have had we lived closer, but I have a lot of fond memories of the times we did get to spend with him over the years.

Goodbye, Grandpa.

Into your hands, O Merciful Savior, we commend your servant Harold. Acknowledge, we beseech you, a sheep of your own fold, a lamb of your own flock, a sinner of your own redeeming. Receive him into the arms of your mercy, into the blessed rest of eternal peace, and into the glorious company of the saints in light. Amen.

Update: The official cause of death is undiagnosed leukemia. I keep waffling back and forth on that one — on the one hand, Grandpa was already ailing and all, but I really wonder how common it is for leukemia to go undiagnosed (apparently it’s not entirely unheard of), and how much longer he might have lived if it had been diagnosed. Of course, given the effects of the Alzheimer’s and the necessary treatments for leukemia, perhaps this was easier on everyone than a longer, more protracted battle would have been.

iTunesDies Irae, Dies Illa (Sequence from the Mass for the Dead: Requiem)” by Capella Antiqua Munchen from the album Gregorian Chant: Sequentiae (1992, 6:05).

Seattle Rep: Noises Off

Prairie and I just returned from using her dad’s Christmas present to her, which while it originally appeared in the form of cash, was soon converted into two tickets to the Seattle Rep‘s performance of Noises Off.

If you’ve ever been involved at all in theater and haven’t yet heard of Noises Off, you’re really missing out and, if there doesn’t happen to be a local performance anywhere around you in the near future, you should at least rent the movie version (it’s a very good stage to screen adaptation). The story is that of a touring troupe’s troubled performance of ‘Nothing On’, a stereotypical British sex farce. With love triangles, murderous jealous rage, alcohol, and far too many plates of sardines all in play, it’s not long before things start to take a turn for the worse — and just get funnier and funnier as they go along.

The Rep’s production was outstanding and very well cast, but for me it was Bhama Roget as Brooke Ashton who stole the show (and not just because she spends the majority of it running around in her underwear). Even when Brooke didn’t have any immediate business, her wonderfully spaced-out moments and hilarious facial expressions had me cracking up throughout the show. Stephanie Timm as Poppy Norton-Taylor, Michael Patten as Frederick Fellowes and Mark Chaberlin as the long-suffering director Lloyd Dallas all also gave standout performances as well — though this certainly isn’t to slight the rest of the cast, as there certainly wasn’t a dud in the bunch.

As an added bonus, the program contains a secondary program for the play-within-a-play ‘Nothing On’ which is quite funny in itself, from the cast bios to the sponsor advertisements and the hilariously deadpan excerpts from ‘Eros Untrousered: Studies in the Semantics of Bedroom Farce’ printed on the back page:

The cultural importance of the so-called ‘bedroom farce,’ or ‘English sex farce,’ has long been recognized, but attention has tended to center on the metaphysical significance of mistaken identity and upon the social criticism implicit in the form’s ground-breaking exploration of cross-dressing and trans-gender role-playing. The focus of scholarly interest, however, is now beginning to shift to the recurrence of certain mythic themes in the genre, and to their religious and spiritual implications.

The show runs for the next two weeks through January 15th, and tickets are very reasonably priced (Prairie and I had second row center seats for \$35 each) — if you’re into theater at all, this really shouldn’t be missed.

Other reviews:

iTunesWhere the Lemons Bloom Waltz” by (unknown) from the album Ultimate Classical Collection, The (1995, 9:08).

Santa’s Flight Exam

Santa Claus, like all pilots, gets regular visits from the Federal Aviation Administration, and it was shortly before Christmas when the FAA examiner arrived.

In preparation, Santa had the elves wash the sled and bathe all the reindeer. Santa got his logbook out and made sure all his paperwork was in order.

The examiner walked slowly around the sled. He checked the reindeer harnesses, the landing gear, and Rudolf’s nose. He painstakingly reviewed Santa’s weight and balance calculations for the sled’s enormous payload.

Finally, they were ready for the checkride. Santa got in, fastened his seatbelt and shoulder harness, and checked the compass. Then the examiner hopped in carrying, to Santa’s surprise, a shotgun. “What’s that for?” asked Santa incredulously.

The examiner winked and said, “I’m not supposed to tell you this, but you’re gonna lose an engine on takeoff.”

(via The Usual Suspects)

My Netflix

I’ve just added a new page to the site (and linked it in the header navigation of every page): my Netflix queues.

Thanks to the plugin goodness of the Netflix Suite, it lists the movies I currently have checked out, the last 90 days (?) of movies I’ve watched and returned along with what I’ve rated them, and my entire Netflix queue (sitting pretty at 441 as of this moment).

Christianity and the ACLU

John Scalzi is looking for Christian lawyers who work for the ACLU:

Someone who is very close to me (who will remain nameless for the moment) just presented the opinion to me that, for various reasons, she strongly suspects there are no lawyers who work for the ACLU who are also Christians, since she was also of the opinion that the ACLU isn’t interested in the constitutional rights of Christians…

Naturally, I was appalled at this statement and told her that I would make it my mission to find her an ACLU lawyer who was also a Christian, and that upon finding such a specimen, that I would ask her to consider the possibility that one could be a Christian and a lawyer and consider as one’s mission the constitutional rights of all Americans.

If you are a lawyer who loves Christ and are either on staff or has worked for the ACLU, would you please come forward to say hello?

The ensuing comment thread on his post is getting very interesting, too. Worth checking out (though it keeps getting longer, so give yourself a few minutes).

(via Boing Boing)

iTunesI Believe” by Absolute U.S., The feat. Palmer, Suzanne from the album This is the Sound of Tribal U.K. Vol. 2 (1995, 9:23).

Quick Review: Quills

Really, really good. Admittedly, they had a couple things going for them to start with — interesting subject matter and a powerhouse cast (Geoffrey Rush as the Marquis de Sade, Kate Winslet as Madeline, Michael Caine as Dr. Royer-Collard, and Joaquin Phoenix as the Abbe du Coulmier) — but that’s not always a guaranteed success.

Geoffrey Rush was loads of fun to watch, though, as the Marquis. I commented to Prairie not long after the movie started that while there are a lot of actors who can read and deliver their lines competently, Rush is one who obviously loves language and all the verbal games that can be played with it, and the Marquis’ neverending stream of innuendo (and frequent out-and-out blatant obscenities) was perfect for him.

“Well worth the dig!”

iTunesIgnore the Machine” by Alien Sex Fiend from the album Gothik (1983, 6:42).