Geekery

Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.

Hunter S. Thompson

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Seeing all the many varied reports of Hunter S. Thompson‘s unfortunate demise reminds me that I’ve actually never read any of his work.

I’m a big fan of the Terry Gilliam/Johnny Depp film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and I also have a great 3 of the book. I even used to have a hardbound copy of Fear and Loathing — unfortunately, the only times I opened it were during one ill-considered period where it was a convenient (and seemingly appropriate) place to hide the sheet of acid I was in the process of selling. I may still have the book buried somewhere in my boxes, but I’m not entirely sure.

So, then, a question for those more familiar with Thompson’s work than I am: while Fear and Loathing seems to be practically the only book that ever gets mentioned when eulogizing Thompson, I’m sure he wrote more than that one tome. Any recommendations? Should I pick Fear and Loathing up (or dig through my boxes to see if I can find it), or are there other books that I should search out instead/in addition to that one?

iTunes “Say Hello” by Anderson, Laurie from the album United States Live (1984, 5:01).

Jim Steinman

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A few years ago, the radio at work was tuned into one of the Anchorage “adult contemporary” stations — brainless background work-safe music that I wasn’t really paying much attention to. One song came on that caught my ear, so I stopped to take a closer listen to it. I had no idea what it was or who was singing, but the more I listened to it, the more a certain suspicion grew.

So I called up the radio station.

“Mix 103.1, what can I do for you?”

“I just need to know what the song you just played was — but before you tell me, I want you to check something out for me. By any chance was that song written or produced by Jim Steinman?”

“What? I haven’t got a clue.”

“Could you check?”

“Um…sure, hold on.” The DJ must have thought that I was nuts. A moment later, he got back on the phone. “Actually, yeah, you’re right. Written and produced by Jim Steinman. How did you know that?”

I laughed. “It just sounded like him. He’s the guy who wrote and produced both of Meat Loaf‘s big albums, Bat out of Hell and Bat out of Hell II: Back into Hell. Whatever that song was, it sounded like a Meat Loaf song, only it was someone else singing, so I figured it was probably Steinman.”

“Not bad.”

“Thanks. So who was it?”

“Celine Dion. It’s All Coming Back To Me Now.”

“Oh. Crap, I just liked a Celine Dion song?”

(Sigh.)

So, yeah. There’s one Celine Dion song that I do have to admit to liking. In my defense, though, it has nothing to do with Celine — it’s all about Jim Steinman. Overproduced, bombastic, and very often tongue-in-cheek rock and roll. I love it when Meatloaf’s singing it, and I even like it when Celine’s singing it.

Just another addition to my many guilty pleasures.

(This confession inspired by a MeFi pointer to this list of parody Steinman song titles, which isn’t really as amusing as I’d hoped it would be.)

iTunes “You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth (Hot Summer Night)” by Meat Loaf from the album Bat Out of Hell (1977, 5:05).

Kubrickr

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Here’s a nifty toy for all you WordPress users that have recently updated to v1.5 and are using the default ‘Kubrick‘ theme: Kubrickr. Given a tag, it will search Flickr for all licensed photos with that tag and then allow you to crop the photo down to create a replacement header graphic that drops right into the Kubrick layout.

Quite nifty, and given that there’s something of a glut of Kubrick-themed sites right now (don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice template…I should know, I’ve seen it often enough), this should help ease the monotony a bit.

(via Matt)

iTunes “Dead Souls (Live)” by Nine Inch Nails from the album Familiar Sting (1994, 6:15).

Full-time blogging

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I’ve got to admit, I wish I could ‘pull a kottke’ and move to blogging as a ‘job’. The idea has a lot of appeal. Unfortunately, I’m in no shape financially to do such a thing, and I don’t have the wide readership that he has that would allow me to request donations (which, I’ll admit, I’d likely have a few reservations about, though not as strongly as Greg does).

Still…a guy can dream, right? ;)

Another Music Meme: Cover Me

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Another music meme, this one being started by Terrance: Cover Me.

Here it is. Do these three things, either in the comments on this post or in a post on your own blog that trackbacks to this post.

This one’s not easy, especially given the size of my music library. I’ll try, though…

List your three favorite cover versions of previously recorded songs.

(This is by no means a “final” or “definitive” list. Trying to pin down just three of all the ones that kept popping into my head was difficult enough, and I know that there are tons that I didn’t think of. I’ll be coming up with more and kicking myself for the next week. I’m already coming up with more possibilities — there are a ton of good covers of the Rolling Stones’ ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, for instance, and I don’t think I’ve heard a bad version of The Temptations’ ‘Papa Was A Rolling Stone’, not to mention Tom Jones and the Art of Noise taking on Prince’s ‘Kiss’, or Sid Vicious ripping his way through ‘My Way’…argh!)

List three songs you’d like to hear cover versions of, and the artists you like to hear perform them.

  1. Ain’t Goin’ Down ’til the Sun Comes Up, originally by Garth Brooks, re-done by Ministry with Les Claypool of Primus on vocals

I know we’re supposed to come up with three here, but this particular dream has been in my head for so long that it’s the only one I ever seem to come up with. Take a fun fast country song, re-do it with Ministry’s trademark high-speed distortion-heavy guitar work, and throw Les doing his best country bumpkin patter over the top of it. I’d pay good money for this to become a reality.

List three songs you would like to cover, if you could. (Assume you would have the musical abilities to do it well.)

  1. The Pet Shop Boys, It’s a Sin: One of my all-time favorite 80’s tracks, and at times, one that has seemed all too fitting in my life.
  2. Indigo Swing, How Lucky Can One Guy Be?: Great swing, and this is one of my favorite tracks off of an album that I have a hard time picking single favorites from.
  3. Queen, Dreamer’s Ball: Queen just kicking back and having fun with a silly little ditty. The live acoustic version of this is particularly good.

(Again, hardly a definitive list. One of these days I’ll actually get suckered into Karaoke, and then we’ll see what I can actually come up with…)

iTunes “Stagger” by Underworld from the album Second Toughest in the Infants (1996, 7:37).

Not Gallimaufry

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Since I’ve kind of slacked off on my ‘Gallimaufry’ meme posts over the past few weeks, here’s a music meme from Don to play with.

How many songs?

15,293 songs, 69.10 GB, 51 days 11 hours 46 minutes 42 seconds total playing time.

Sorted by song title, the first and last songs:

Sorted by artist, the first and last songs:

  • Is It You (Scintillating), by :Wumpscut:, off of Born Again
  • Green Crumble, by μ-ziq, off of In Pine Effect

Sorted by album, the first and last songs:

Top 10 most-played songs (Most-played song at No. 1):

  1. Listen, by the Kleptones, off of A Night at the Hip-Hopera
  2. Precession, by the Kleptones, off of A Night at the Hip-Hopera
  3. Break, by the Kleptones, off of A Night at the Hip-Hopera
  4. See, by the Kleptones, off of A Night at the Hip-Hopera
  5. Live, by the Kleptones, off of A Night at the Hip-Hopera
  6. Bite, by the Kleptones, off of A Night at the Hip-Hopera
  7. Jazz, by the Kleptones, off of A Night at the Hip-Hopera
  8. Play, by the Kleptones, off of A Night at the Hip-Hopera
  9. Ridicule, by the Kleptones, off of A Night at the Hip-Hopera
  10. Plan, by the Kleptones, off of A Night at the Hip-Hopera

(Um…yeah. I’ve been listening to this a lot recently.)

Last 10 recently played songs (Most recently played at No. 1):

  1. This is a Collective (12″), by Consolidated, off of Dysfunctional Relationship
  2. The Day the World Went Away, by Nine Inch Nails, off of The Day the World Went Away
  3. Somebody Gotta Do It (Remix), by Ice-T, off of Just Say Yes
  4. Erased, Over, Out, by Nine Inch Nails, off of Further Down the Spiral
  5. Phantom of the Opera (’94 Club), by Harajuku, off of Phantom of the Opera
  6. We Care A Lot, by Faith No More, off of Never Mind the Mainstream
  7. It’s A Miracle, by Roger Waters, off of Amused to Death
  8. China, by Tori Amos, off of Little Earthquakes
  9. Sexcrime (Ninteen Eighty-Four), by The Eurythmics, off of 1984 (For the Love of Big Brother)
  10. Brian Wilson’s Dreams, by The Who Boys, off of Tales of Townshend and Wilson

Find “sex”; how many songs?

  • Global (title, artist, album) search: 188 songs
  • Song title search: 83 songs

Find “death”; how many songs?

  • Global search: 150 songs
  • Song title search: 54 songs

Find “love”; how many songs?

  • Global search: 830 songs
  • Song title search: 557 songs

Find “peace”; how many songs?

  • Global search: 75 songs
  • Song title search: 30 songs

iTunes ”To Strong (Cosmic)“ by Ultimate from the album Tripnotized Vol. 3 (1996, 6:33).

Comment Spam Update

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This is so nice to see.

Since Feb. 8th (the last time I reset the logfile), the only entries in MT-Blacklist’s log for Eclecticism are automatic updates of the master blacklist.

Over on the family weblog, since Feb. 10th (when the site got reset), there have been all of 77 spam attempts, all of which have been blocked. Two comments have required moderation, both of which were me poking around during the rebuild.

I’m a happy sysadmin right now.

iTunes “Firepile” by Throwing Muses from the album Alterno-Daze: 90’s Natural Selection (1992, 3:14).

Too many movies!

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Remove some moviesWhoops!

Apparently the most movies you can have in your Netflix queue is 500. I had no idea. Of course, I’m not sure I expected to end up with a queue this big when I started this whole Netflix thing, either. And, of course, while I understand why they do it, it would certainly help if I wasn’t getting throttled.

So now I’ve got to go through and nuke some of my list. Though, given that there’s always more movies that I think would be fun to watch (each week’s New Releases list invariably adds at least two or three to my queue), maybe I should just set up a dedicated del.icio.us account to act as a NetFlix ‘overflow queue’. That’s not a bad idea, actually.

iTunes “It All Begins Here (Oneiric Vocal)” by Ofunwa from the album This is the Sound of Tribal U.K. Vol. 2 (1995, 2:36).