I know this is juvenile, and I know that it’s a real food item…but I really have to think that classy restaurants should avoid naming a \$22 dish “The Captain’s Pupu Tower.”
iTunes: “Symphony for Taps” by Pigface from the album Gub (1990, 1:25).
Upcoming movies
Every so often, Prairie and I will go through Apple’s movie trailer page, checking out what’s coming up in the next few months and seeing what interests us. Here’s today’s batch of possibilities (in no particular order)…
- The United States of Leland: Can Jena Malone be in a bad movie? Everything I’ve seen her in so far has impressed me (Contact, Donnie Darko and The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys), and now I keep seeing her in trailers for movies that catch my eye (Saved, and now Leland). Add Kevin Spacey and an interesting looking trailer, and it definitely goes on the “potential” list.
- King Arthur: So far, I’ve got mixed feelings on this one. If they can do the story well, then I’m all for it (one of my favorite retellings of the Arthurian saga is Jack Whyte’s Camulod Chronicles, which take a very realistic non-magical approach) — but something about the trailer isn’t quite grabbing me. All the stars look much to “pretty” on first blush, like they’re trying to aim for a cast full of Viggo Mortenson-as-Aragorn to pull in the teen girl contingent. On the other hand, Keira Knightley looks supremely drool worthy in her battle garb, so maybe I’m not one to talk….
- The Village: M. Night Shyamalan is a bit of an enigma to me. So far, each of his films has been great upon first viewing, but has absolutely no replay value afterwards (with the sole exception of The Sixth Sense, which was fun to watch a second time just to see all the subtle hints you missed the first time), and I found Signs to be a letdown at the end. As with the rest, the trailer for this one has me going “Oooohhh…” — but will he finally be able to craft a movie that stands up to multiple viewings?
- Raising Helen: Okay, this one was definitely a Prairie pick. ;) Looks to be a cute little comedy — but it’s got Kate Husdon (yum) and Joan Cusack, who I’ve always enjoyed when she pops up in a film. Probably a renter rather than one to beeline for in the theater (at least in my estimation).
- Connie and Carla: The first part of the trailer had me cringing. Then the drag queens showed up, and suddenly I was fine with it. Which probably says something about me, but I’m not sure I want to go there….
- The Notebook: Again, sappy romantic stuff is generally more along Prairie’s tastes than mine, but if I’m in a mood for it, this looks like it could be good, and it’s certainly pretty. We’ll see when it comes out.
- The Last Shot: I’m most intrigued by the fact that this is apparently based on a true story about a guy hired by the FBI (without his knowledge) to direct a movie (that will never be released) in order to run a sting on the mob. The trailer has some cute lines in it (though these days, often those are the only good lines in the entire film)…reserving judgment on this one for the moment.
- Godsend: This one I’d never heard of before tonight, but it’s rocketed right the top of my “potential” list. After a couple loses their son in an accident, they’re approached by a doctor who offers to inseminate the mother with a clone of their son, essentially allowing him to be “reborn.” Once the new son hits the age that he died, things start to get all sorts of freaky. Looks to be quite cool.
- Garden State: This trailer caught my eye when Prairie, Kirsten and I went off to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Very little idea what the movie is about, but the imagery in the trailer is enough to catch my interest. I am amused by the link on the trailer page to the trailer’s music on the iTunes Music Store, though — hadn’t seen that trick before!
- The Stepford Wives: I’m really unsure about this one. While I’ve not read the book, I’m a fan of the (dated, but still creepy) original film version, and the fact that this is listed as a “comedy” makes me wonder about it. Of course, with Nicole Kidman (yum) and Christopher Walken in the film, it can’t be all bad, right?
- Godzilla: The orignal — UNCUT. UNCENSORED. UNDUBBED. I am so there.
iTunes: “Kooler Than Jesus (Electric Messiah)” by My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult from the album Confessions of A Knife (1990, 4:12).
Symphony #2 for Dot Matrix Printers
I just got back from wandering around outside in the sun (I may be feeling a bit sick, but I didn’t want to miss out on a nice, warm spring day!) when I got a quick heads-up from Phil…
Phil: Have I got some weird shit for you, if you have a moment.
Phil: Pop open iTunes, go to the iTMS, and do a search for “Symphony #2 for Dot Matrix Printers“
Phil: I’ve heard of music using “found sounds” but this is ridiculous ;)
The album is twelve tracks long, and they’re all exactly what you might expect from a project with a name like this: ‘songs’ constructed using the sounds from a working dot matrix printer.
As it turns out, the Symphony is a music/art project by The User, commissioned by the Fondation Daniel Langlois and Hull Time Based Arts, and it sounds like something I’d love to see in person.
Dot matrix printers are thus turned into musical ‘instruments’, while a computer network system, typical of a contemporary office, is employed as the ‘orchestra’ used to play them. The orchestra is ‘conducted’ by a network server which reads from a composed ‘score’. Each of the printers plays from a different ‘part’ comprised of rhythms and pitches made up of letters of the alphabet, punctuation marks and other characters. [The User] uses ASCII textfiles to compose, orchestrate, and synchronize sonorous and densely textured, rhythmically-driven music. During the half hour performance, the sounds are amplified and broadcast over a sound system. The audience is also presented with live images of the sound sources: the motions of the mechanisms, rollers and gears are captured using miniature video cameras installed inside the printers and projected onto large screens.
There’s another project by [ The User ] that sounds worth investigating (and also has an album on the iTMS): Silophone, in which they use the acoustic capabilities of an empty grain silo to produce sounds…
Silophone makes use of the incredible acoustics of Silo #5 by introducing sounds, collected from around the world using various communication technologies, into a physical space to create an instrument which blurs the boundaries between music, architecture and net art. Sounds arrive inside Silo #5 by telephone or internet. They are then broadcast into the vast concrete grain storage chambers inside the Silo. They are transformed, reverberated, and coloured by the remarkable acoustics of the structure, yielding a stunningly beautiful echo. This sound is captured by microphones and rebroadcast back to its sender, to other listeners and to a sound installation outside the building. Anyone may contribute material of their own, filling the instrument with increasingly varied sounds.
I love bizarre stuff like this. I’ve purchased both of the albums from the iTMS, and have been enjoying what I’ve heard so far — in many ways, these projects remind me of some of the songs that first got me into the industrial genre, with Einstürzende Neubauten running around inside empty water towers and banging on the walls to create a rhythm track or throwing forks at an electrified shopping cart to see what noises would result, or local Anchorage industrial band Fsunjibleableje crafting an entire performance around rhythmically destroying an old abandoned car with sledgehammers.
Okay, so it’s not for everyone.
I think it’s cool, though.
iChat just went bye-bye
That was more than a little odd. I was just in a conversation with Phil, and wanted to blog some of it. Normally I use iChat in “cute” mode (pictures and bubbles), like so:
When I want to blog a conversation, I’ll switch it to “text” and “show names”, which works much better for a copy-paste into a weblog post:
However, for some reason, iChat just went all wierd on me. When I switched it into text and names mode, everything in the chat window went blank. I could see what I was typing in the text input field, and hear when messages came through by the “bloop” sound…but I couldn’t see anything!
Thankfully, closing out the window and starting a new chat session cleared it up, but I was quite amused for a few moments there.
iTunes: “Pink Potassium” by Radioactive Goldfish from the album Rhythm and Rave (1992, 4:46).
Gmail and Safari
So I got curious about Gmail, Google’s new e-mail service, and thought I’d stop by to take a look.
Somehow, I’m not very impressed so far.
Update: As it turns out, they’re in a closed beta right now, so I couldn’t have signed up in any case. Still…the lack of support for Safari — the default web browser on all new Macintosh computers — hardly leaves me with a good first impression.
iTunes: “Run to the Sun” by Erasure from the album I Say I Say I Say (1994, 4:25).
Kinja
So all the buzz over the past few days (aside from whether or not Google’s e-mail service is an April Fool’s Joke or not) has been Kinja. Essentially, Kinja is yet another web-based news aggregator, this time with the stated goal of exposing more weblogs to people who aren’t already sucked into the weblog world.
Of course, I’ve signed up, added all the feeds I subscribe to (hooray for data export and import), and made my Kinja page public so that anyone can stop by and get an idea of what I’m pumping into my brain each day.
Being a long-time NetNewsWire user, I’m a bit underwhelmed…but then, Kinja wasn’t made for people like me, but rather for the “unwashed masses” who still think that USA Today and Fox News are the best places to get all of their reading material. Still, it’ll be interesting to see if this goes anywhere.
iTunes: “Open Arms” by Journey from the album Pop Music: The Modern Era 1976-1999 (1981, 3:20).
The Heirophant’s Proselytizer Questionnaire
Ellenoir pointed out a fascinating page that I’d not seen before: The Heirophant’s Proselytizer Questionnaire, one person’s response to being constantly harassed by missionaries of one faith or another trying to “save” or “convert” him.
The Heirophant’s Proselytizer Questionnaire is a series of offensively phrased questions that explain my problems with and objections to the various Christian churches. I originally wrote it in 1997 as a tool that I handed out to the too-numerous proselytes who were crowding at my door, explaining that I would consider entering into a dialogue with them if and only if they could answer each and every question to my satisfaction. …Though I have received numerous responses to the Questionnaire since I wrote it, none has satisfied me enough to tempt me back to Christianity.
The questionnaire itself is a list of 153 questions for the proselytizer to answer before discussion can continue. The author admits in the FAQ that the questions are written in a very aggressive, possibly offensive style…
…It’s meant to be really offensive. If you look at the reasons why I composed it in the first place, you’ll see that my primary motivation was, quite simply, to get proselytes to fuck off when they wouldn’t do so any other way. By setting a condition for them to fulfill before I’d engage in a dialogue with them and by making the condition more trouble than it was worth to most of them, I wound up able to sleep later in the mornings than I’d been able to when I had a constant stream of preachers on my doorstep. Ensuring that the phrasing of the Questionnaire was confrontational and offensive was an integral part of the process of getting people who had essentially nothing to say to me to leave me alone.
As someone brought up in the Episcopal church who still bases many of my core beliefs in the Christian faith (though I’ve certainly had my fair share of questions, concerns, and doubts over the years), I thought the idea was wonderful — and have no problem at all admitting that I would be very hard pressed to answer many (if not most) of the questions posed.
On a personal level, I stand very much in the same camp as the author (along with Ellenoir, too, from what she said in her post): believe anything you want, just don’t try to force your beliefs on me, convince me that you’re “right” and I’m “wrong”, or attempt to frighten me into joining your religion through threats of hellfire and damnation.
This document is not meant as a personal challenge to you or to your beliefs. As far as I’m concerned, you can worship Jesus or be a Buddhist or a Muslim or have sex with Tinky Winky and call that a religion: It’s all the same to me. Really. The HPQ was meant to state my own reasons why I’m not a Christian; it’s not meant to imply that you shouldn’t be one. (There’s a big difference between the two, and many Christians would do well to learn it.) Be a member of whatever religion you want; just leave me alone and don’t push it on me. I’m not knocking on your door asking you to be a Wiccan or a Buddhist or a Satanist or an atheist or a Muslim or anything else that you’re not; all that I ask is that you extend me the same courtesy.
iTunes: “Blasphemous Rumours” by Depeche Mode from the album Blasphemous Rumours (1984, 6:23).
T minus one month and counting
The first few days in May were usually busy days in my family. My birthday is May 3rd (I’ll be 31 this year), my little brother Kevin’s is the next day (we’re three years and one day apart — he’ll be 28), and my best friend from fourth grade on, Royce, has his birthday on the 5th (he’ll be 31 also).
While I’m sure there were some times when Kevin and I had separate parties, there were many, many years of joint parties also. Often my mom had the unenviable task of handling these more or less on her own, too — dad was flying in the Air National Guard, and his “one weekend a month” happened to fall on the first weekend, so he often had to leave mom to handle two excited little kids while he went off flying.
One year, on a whim, I entered a “guess the number of jellybeans in the jar” contest at the Anchorage Chuck-E-Cheese, and wonder of wonders, I actually won! The prize was a free birthday party, so that year Kevin and I had our parties officiated over by a giant rat. As Chuck-E-Cheese is a pizza parlor, mom and dad had an idea that “seemed like a good idea at the time”, and when the pizza arrived, they popped birthday cake candles into the pizza instead of into a cake. We laughed, blew them out, and started gobbling down slices of pizza.
Unfortunately, what parents hadn’t thought about was the heat of the pizza. While the candles were sitting in the pizza, not only were they melting from the top down due to the flame…but from the bottom up, too. I can’t really recommend a pepperoni-and-candle-wax pizza. It’s a bit more chewy than pizza is supposed to be.
iTunes: “Teclo” by Harvey, P.J. from the album To Bring You My Love (1994, 4:58).
PDA stylesheet tester?
Is there an online resource that will display a webpage as if it were being viewed on a handheld PDA device? I’ve had a request for a handheld-friendly version of my site, but not having a PDA, I’d essentially be “coding blind”.
Any suggestions or pointers would be greatly appreciated. :)
iTunes: “Das Land Der Elefanten” by Nena from the album 99 Luftballons (1984, 3:42).
Sick
Well, I survived my three days of long hours helping out at one of the other stores in the area (up at 6am, out the door at 7am to catch a 7:15am bus to Redmond, work from 8am – 3:45pm, catch the 4pm bus back to downtown Seattle, then the 5pm bus out to Georgetown, work from 5:30pm – 9:15pm, catch the 9:30pm bus home, get home about 10pm and fall over soon thereafter). Unfortunately, pushing myself that hard seems to have resulted in my picking up a really nasty little bug (stuffed up head, bad cough, general full-body exhaustion, etc.). I’m not thrilled about this.
Ah, well…I’ll bulldoze my way though work tonight, then come home and do my best to enjoy a weekend with nothing planned except lots and lots of sleep. Not the most exciting plan in the world, but it sure sounds good to me right now.
iTunes: “Ono Soul” by Moore, Thurston from the album Buy-Product (1995, 3:29).