Tyger, Tyger, Burning Bright…

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A few weeks ago, Prairie had a Monday off and was able to come out to the Vogue‘s Sunday Fetish night with me. While we were there, we heard a very nice track that caught our ear, with a slow, driving tempo, pulsing drums, and using William Blake’s The Tyger as its lyrics.

I went to ask DJ Eternal Darkness who the artist was, Googled it when I got home…and got nothing. No hits at all. When I asked Doug about it the next week, he told me that he’d gotten it straight from the artist.

I was pleasantly surprised, then, to notice that in his weekly playlists for this past week, Doug had included a link to download the song! A very little bit of web sleuthing (i.e., taking the filename out of the URL to go straight to the home directory) led me to Julie Rowlette’s site, where in addition to The Tiger, she has three other (more standard house style) tracks available to download on her music page.

The Tiger is by far my favorite, but the others certainly aren’t bad at all, and Julie’s got a gorgeous voice. Go give her a listen!

iTunes “Tiger, The” by Juliette 6 (2005, 6:26).

The Worst One of All

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Scoble’s playing with Vista’s security improvements:

Yup, I’m thinking of doing a honeypot computer running Windows Vista. You know, a computer where you visit the absolute worst sites you can find on the Internet and see if you get infected with stuff.

I’ve already visited the sites that my friends got spyware and malware from. So far so good. But, that’s a small set. Anyone have a good up-to-date list of places that put nasty stuff on your computer?

I was going to suggest www.microsoft.com, but he’s already been bit by that bug. ;)

(Seriously, though, while he hasn’t given much in the way of results yet, it’s good that they’re making some progress on this front. Too little too late? We’ll find out when Vista actually debuts.)

iTunes “Duty Free (full mix)” by Various Artists from the album Duty Free (full mix) (1999, 1:13:56).

Pre-release bloopers

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Harry at the graveI found this report on The Leaky Cauldron this evening:

Many readers have emailed us here at Leaky over this photo that appeared recently in Entertainment Weekly showing a scene from the upcoming Goblet of Fire film. The source of the uproar stemmed over the fact that in the photo Harry is shown standing in front of a grave with three names written on in, including one that reads “Tom Marvolo Riddle 1915-1943”. As we know, that is the name of Lord Voldemort, and who, despite his…err…unnatural state at the begining of the sequence of Goblet of Fire, was not buried in that grave. He also did not kill the Riddles until 1944 or 1945. Readers have also pointed out that even if this was the name of Voldemort’s father, then he would have only been 11 years old when Voldemort was born (and Voldemort’s father’s middle name would NOT be Marvolo; Marvolo being from his mother’s side of the family — phew!). Finally, many readers also pointed out that in Half-Blood Prince we learn of Voldemort’s birthdate as December 31st, 1926.

While there’s a certain amusement to all of this, what really struck me was that in this internet-centric age, fans are able to catch bloopers in movies before the movies are even finished — and in this case, possibly allowing the studio to correct the error before the final film is released. Pretty amazing.

Bad Math

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Approximately 60 units in my apartment building, a mix of studios and one-bedrooms.

Three sets of washers and dryers. Of these six machines, at least one will be broken at any given time. This week, it’s one of the washers.

Wash loads take about 30 minutes. The dryers take about 60 minutes.

What all this adds up to is laundry taking an absolutely ridiculous amount of time to do. I started my two loads at around five this afternoon. It’s now eight in the evening, and I’m looking at, oh, at least another hour and a half if all goes well.

Meh.

iTunes “Ba and the Ka, The” by Anubian Lights from the album In to the Mix (1997, 6:02).

Old Technology

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Does anyone out there have any need for an official Windows 2000 Professional install CD, complete with serial number? Update: Eight minutes later, it’s spoken for. You people scare me. ;)

As part of an initial stab at starting to weed out the junk from my apartment in preparation for my upcoming move, I’ve finally given up on any hope of resurrecting the PC that’s been doing nothing more than holding my desk down for the last year and junked it. This leaves me with the OS install disc, which is useless to me.

Admittedly, in these days of XP and the upcoming Longhorn Vista (in, what, another three years or something?), a Win2kPro install probably isn’t that valuable even to Windows users. Even so, I thought I’d toss this out there just on the off chance someone could use it. First come, first serve, just let me know where to mail it and I’ll send it your way.

If I don’t get a taker in, oh, a week or so, I’ll just toss it.

iTunes “Love Your Enemies” by Burroughs, William S. from the album Dead City Radio (1990, 1:13).

Bridal Parties are Fun!

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At least, as long as your definition of “fun” includes 20-some 20-something sorority girls drinking far too much alcohol, being incredibly loud (which is saying something in a dance club), having no concept that there’s anyone else on the dance floor, nearly starting a fight near the bar, and eventually having one of them carried out of the bathroom by two big beefy guys because there was no way she’d be able to walk.

So…yeah. Interesting night. Certainly amusing to watch all this from the sidelines.

Still, good times were had. A little flirting, a few new people met (Hope, Jennifer, Elizabeth and Felix), chatting outside in the cool air with Melissa, Suzanne, Brooke, Mickey, Ogre, and Ron, and some bouncing around on the dance floor (though that was somewhat hampered by both sorority girls and the Vogue‘s famous lack of ventilation…but I hear that Mony has a new fan ready to install, so hopefully that’ll get a bit more air flow going through in the near future). All in all, not a bad night.

Also (and totally unrelated to any of the above), after Prairie declared that one of my pictures of the Teatro ZinZanni acrobat to be quite “yum”-worthy, I tweaked it a touch to turn it into a suitable desktop image.

Teatro Zinzanni Desktop

There’s a 1280×1024 version ready to be used as a desktop image (or “wallpaper” for you Windows users) available to download here, should you wish.

Now…bed.

iTunes “Pigs on the Wing 1” by Pink Floyd from the album Animals Trance Remixes (1995, 5:48).

Al-Qaeda’s Shoes

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As if it’s not bad enough that advertising in RSS feeds is showing up more and more often, we’re also being subjected to the many instances where the context-selection fails miserably when deciding which ad should go with which story…

Al-Qaeda's Shoes

Teatro Zinzanni at Pacific Place

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Teatro Zinzanni's Sam Alvarez, Pacific Place, Seattle, WAIf you get a chance, stop by Pacific Place just at touch before 5pm any Thursday through Sunday in August. One of the performers from Teatro ZinZanni is putting on a short show throughout the month to promote their dinner/circus/cabaret show.

I’ve been wanting to go to one of their shows for quite a while now, and seeing this guy go twirling and spinning sixty feet above the floor — without any sort of safety harness, just the red fabric strip — just made me want to go more. It’s a pricey show at $99 a ticket, but for a full five-course gourmet meal and a three-hour show, I’d say it’d be worth it.

One of these days…

Podcast 8: Eclecticism

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And again, I’m running late. Sensing a trend yet? This, then, is the next of my mixes to go up — and probably the last one for a little while, as I don’t have any ready to go up, and the next few weeks are probably going to be busy with apartment hunting for Prairie and I. Hopefully once things are settled down again, I’ll actually start putting new mixes up. That’s the plan, at least.

This is probably my favorite of the mixes I have available right now. There’s no real set style through the piece, I just slapped together a bunch of tracks that I happened to like a lot. Luckily, it all seems to work pretty well…possibly better than it should?

Standard disclaimer: All the mixes I’m posting were mixed ‘live’ — running a Pioneer dual CD mixer directly into my computer and recording straight to .mp3 — and have had no post-mix editing done in the computer. As such, they’re not flawless, but they’re not bad, either, if I do say so myself.

Here’s the link: Eclecticism (1h 17m 32s, 88.74Mb). Tracks included are:

  1. Dario G ‘Carnival de Paris’
  2. Goodmen ‘Give it Up (Batacuda Refrescante/Hot Tracks)’
  3. Chemical Brothers ‘It Doesn’t Matter’
  4. Fatboy Slim ‘Song for Shelter’
  5. Lionrock ‘Are You Ready to Testify?’
  6. A3 ‘Woke Up This Morning (Drillaz in the Church)’
  7. Psykosonik ‘Unlearn (Hot Tracks)’
  8. Everything But the Girl ‘Wrong (Deep Dish)’
  9. Annie Lennox ‘Little Bird (Utah Saints)’
  10. Clivilles & Cole ‘A Deeper Love (Underground Club)’
  11. Sagat ‘Fuk Dat (Raw)’
  12. Lemon Interrupt ‘Big Mouth’
  13. Technoclassix ‘In the Hall of the Techno King’

Arrogant Bastard Ale

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Divine nectar James, Marc, Chris: I think I’ve found the perfect drink for you guys. ;)

Arrogant Bastard Ale!

This is an aggressive beer. You probably won’t like it. It is quite doubtful that you have the taste or sophistication to be able to appreciate an ale of this quality and depth. We would suggest that you stick to safer and more familiar territory — maybe something with a multi-million dollar ad campaign aimed at convincing you it’s made in a little brewery, or one that implies that their tasteless fizzy yellow beer will give you more sex appeal. Perhaps you think multi-million dollar ad campaigns make a beer taste better. Perhaps you’re mouthing your words as you read this.

(Photo originally uploaded by dantc)