Hey Mister DJ
At work we have satellite radio, and I usually get control over the choice of station, so I listen to a lot of different stuff, including several flavors of classic rock, a couple flavors of the more accessible kinds of jazz, and the folk music station.
Top three things I wish classic rock DJs (satellite and broadcast both) would stop saying:
1. "It's the music of your generation!"/"The music you grew up with!" Um, I wasn't yet born when the Beatles broke up. Thanks for making me feel included. Or don't you want any younger (or older) listeners?
2. "Back when the music was good." Because clearly all of us who like your station are old fogies that don't appreciate anything written after 1975. Because if you like the Mamas and the Papas, Jimi Hendrix, and Pink Floyd, you can't also like
Neko Case,
Franz Ferdinand, and
Fleet Foxes. Obviously.
3. "From when the music finally got good" or words to that effect. Usually this bit starts with a clip of a song by Johnny Mathis, like
"Wonderful, Wonderful" or
"Chances Are." Then there is a noise of scraping a needle across a vinyl record, and the song changes into the guitar line of something by Led Zeppelin. The voiceover basically says, thank god that rock & roll came along, or music lovers would have all had to shoot ourselves. Because if you like rock music, you can't possibly like big band jazz, or Frank Sinatra, or early bluesmen, or Chopin nocturnes.
Poor Johnny Mathis is always the scapegoat. His songs are pretty sentimental, but his voice is beautiful. Lay off him already.
Top one thing I wish non-rock DJs would stop saying:
- The DJs on the jazz standards and folk stations are always saying their music "is timeless," "will endure," "will be around forever" (either implying or actually saying, "not like that flash-in-the-pan known as rock").
First off, guys, defensiveness is a real turn-off. You don't hear rock or classical DJs blustering about how important their music is. If you didn't worry deep down that rock had destroyed your genre, you wouldn't need to constantly say that you're "not dead yet." Take a few deep breaths. Musicians are still recording jazz and folk, there are multiple satellite radio stations dedicated to each, and besides, both have been strong influences on rock.
Second, jazz, including those "timeless standards," is only about a hundred years old. Rock is already, what sixty years? Get over yourself, jazz.
Third, we have these things called recordings, which ensure that
all of our music will be around forever, short of our entire civilization being destroyed by the apocalypse.
In conclusion, all of you DJs stop saying stupid things and just play me some good music.
Labels: music
5 Things
Taking a page from
strangething this week, I thought I'd blog about five things I liked, in no particular order.
1. Finally got to see
The Next Doctor, the 2008 Doctor Who Christmas special. (Just released on region 1 DVD September 15, possibly a new record in slowness. I think it got screwed up because of the negotiations over what American network would show the new season.)
I loved the first plot (guy who says he is the Doctor) but thought the second plot (Cybermen doing something incomprehensible) was, um, incomprehensible.
2.
Fable II. Having discovered video games even later in life than I started reading comics, I'm gradually learning about what sort of game I prefer. Lately I'm spending a lot of hours on
Fable II. Some things about it I love, like the entertaining sidequests, and the sort of "free-play" aspects that gamers call "sandbox" play. You can buy real estate, get married, have children. Your character can get scarred, get fat, or get more muscled. She (or he) can dye her hair and change her wardrobe, and teach tricks to her dog. All that is fun. Pity the main story of the game is a bit lackluster. The guy over at
Twenty Sided wrote about 7,000 words of rant about the lameness of the main story, so I feel that ground has been covered. It is just a poorly thought-out story. Luckily, you can play for a lot of very fun hours while totally ignoring it. Of course that is also one of the problems with it: saving the world doesn't feel as urgent as it should...
3.
Neverwhere. For some reason this miniseries gets a lot of flak from fandom. It's actually really cool. The writing is as good as you'd expect, given that Neil Gaiman wrote it, and the casting and acting is also very good. And since when do geeks care about production values? We still love the Pertwee-era
Doctor Who for cripes sake.
Neverwhere is much, much better-looking than that. It looks like a 90s TV show, which is what it was. Everyone should Netflix it.
4.
Dollhouse. So it had some first-season issues, but who wanted to see Joss get another series canned by FOX? Season 1 got better as it went, and so far (two episodes in) I think season 2 looks promisingly plot-arc-y. I hope it gets with the pacing and moves things along better this season.
5.
The Ellensburg Film Festival. We just came from
Mantra, a Buddhist horror film. It was extremely freaky and really awesome. We have two more weirdo films lined up to see today, and then a batch of shorts tomorrow. Life is good.
Labels: doctor who, games, movies, TV
More fall excitement
More photos of our exciting life in the new house. ;)
Some friends gifted us with the biggest zucchini and cucumber that I have ever seen:
Here is the unnaturally huge zucchini in our old fridge, next to some normal-sized tomatoes from the same friends:
Here is our new fridge that was just delivered this week. We did not buy it just to make more room for the mutant zucchini, but it is in fact a bit more spacious. Also, it doesn't shower our food with water at random intervals, and the dials for adjusting the freezer & fridge temperature actually work.
The stainless steel door looked cool, sleek, and space-age in the store. Of course I forgot that our collection of fridge magnets and goofy postcards would impact its looks. Here is the interior. The zucchini is in there somewhere, but has been partially eaten by this point.
Though I'm thrilled about our new fridge, this entry seems a bit less exciting when compared to my brother's recent documentation of nature, red in tooth and claw, exemplified by
this photo series of a praying mantis eating lunch (and dinner, apparently). My brother can take a picture, can't he?
Hey, strangething, here's how big the mantises get out west:
Gifts from our house
...and I don't mean housewarming presents, but presents
from our new house.
We moved in in July, and in August our peach tree started giving us ripe peaches:
Here's the tree in the corner of our backyard.
Here's a shot of one of our peaches next to some big ones from the farmer's market. Heh.
They were about the size of apricots, but they were delicious.
We also got a whole slew of cat toys. I mentioned earlier
how Tuesday found some cat toys under the stove? After those three, we found two more under there, plus several more living under the clothes dryer, for a total of nine. Here's the haul:
(The dangling ones have been washed and are hanging to dry. It is very dusty under the stove and under the dryer.)
Tuesday is excited.
Labels: house, Tuesday
Movies in rodeo town
You never realize what all you take for granted, until you move to a small town.
Ellensburg had, until recently, two movie theaters. The Liberty was a quirky, picturesque old building with fancy bathrooms, and was fun to go to. The Grand Meridian is your basic modern multiplex, just like multiplexes everywhere.
They had a sort of noncompetition deal so that they never had the same movies. This was fine, except that the smaller, cuter one (the Liberty) was not well run. We went there probably four to five times total, in the two years we've been in Ellensburg, and at least three times had trouble. We watched
Iron Man with muffled sound, and
Public Enemies with the picture out of focus through the whole movie (despite Gary's going out to complain). They were always stupid problems that any competently run movie theater would be able to fix. So we resolved to stop going there. It was more frustration than it was worth.
Unfortunately, some movies we wanted to see this summer came to the Liberty, such as the most recent Harry Potter, and
District 9. This was a problem, but turned out to be only a temporary problem, as the Liberty has just closed.
I tried to be sad, since it was a fun, interesting, historic theater. But really I'm not too sad, because that meant that the Harry Potter movie promptly opened at the Grand Meridian, so we finally got to go see it, in multiplex comfort. Sorry, Liberty: I would have put up with your odd layout, smaller screens, and less comfortable chairs, but I do insist on audible sound and a picture that is in focus. Call me picky.
This is high drama in a small town. In central New Jersey where we used to live, there were two competing multiplexes, fifteen minutes south of us and twenty minutes north of us. If you didn't feel like supporting one, you'd go to the other. Here, it's now either the Grand Meridian in Ellensburg, or else you drive 45 minutes to Yakima, or over an hour to the west side of the Cascades.
We should be good now as far as the major movies (they will come to the G.M.) but one thing that hasn't changed is that we still have no place to watch the smaller movies. There is a film festival every fall for the real art house stuff, but I'm noticing that there is a grey area, where movies are too big for the film fest, but too small for the multiplex (or for the Liberty when it existed). For example, we only caught
Moon because we were in Seattle for other reasons. (
Moon is great, but AVOID being spoiled for it! Go see it without reading too much about it.) We would have had to go to the west side for
Food, Inc. too. Miyazaki's latest,
Ponyo, had a brief run in Yakima but left theaters before we got around to making the trek down there. It never came to Ellensburg at all.
On the subject of movies, if any friends or family out there are not Netflix subscribers but are interested, they sent me a code for a free month of membership. Let me know if you would like it. Netflix is awesome.
Labels: Ellensburg, movies
The Hugos
The Hugo results.List of all the nominees here.Inevitably, every year, most of the winners are things I have never heard of. Traditionally I resolve to go out and read them all, but never get around to it.
This year I happen to be listening to the audio version of the Best Novel (Neil Gaiman's
The Graveyard Book). I just read one of the runners-up for Best Graphic Story, and I've seen two of the Drama Long Form and three of the Drama Short Form top contestants.
I have not finished
The Graveyard Book yet, but I am fairly underwhelmed by it. I sometimes feel like I am too old for the target audience, which is a strange thing to feel about Neil Gaiman's work. Usually I love all of his stuff. Does it have an amazing slam-bang finale that I haven't got to yet? or am I missing something? or were the pickings really slim for Best Novel this year?
Neil says he turned down the nomination for Anansi Boys a few years back, which is a shame, because (in my humble opinion) it is a better book.
I haven't read the
Girl Genius volume that got Best Graphic story - that may be a series I should check out. I recently finished the Dresden Files prequel
Welcome to the Jungle which I liked a lot: the feel of it matched the novels, and I liked the art. Special commendation to the artist Ardian Syaf for the way women characters are drawn to look like characters instead of fetish objects. And for the way Harry's duster is drawn to look like a fetish object instead of an article of clothing. <3 style="font-style: italic;">Welcome to the Jungle to you.
I haven't seen
WALL-E (I know! It's on our Netflix queue) but I'm surprised it won over
The Dark Knight.
I'm not sure how I feel about
Doctor Horrible winning the Short Form. Neil Patrick Harris was hilarious, of course. Nathan Fillion is love, but his character was a one-joke wonder. Less said about the woman character the better. I guess I think
DH was a bit over-hyped by the fans.
Maybe I just don't get it; Joss usually writes great characters, so clearly he was making cardboard-cutout characters on purpose in
. I suppose it got extra credit for its historical value - first miniseries distributed on the internet to go mainstream. It is interesting in that context. An experiment or a joke isn't the kind of thing I'd vote for for a Hugo though.
Of the nominees for Short Form, I'm not sure what I would have voted for. Haven't seen the
Lost or the
Battlestar Galactica episodes. The two Doctor Who episodes are both good. "Midnight" maybe deserved a nod too.
There should be an award for "best season" of a TV show too. I guess it would place a big burden on voters to watch whole seasons of TV. But I appreciate a show that is consistent.
Stargate: Atlantis would have been a contender maybe - it doesn't always have flashy standout shows, but it is consistent good SF nearly every damn week, which is more than you can say for
Doctor Who sometimes.
Labels: books, movies, TV
Update on the house
We have moved. Just got my internet connection set up yesterday. If you are trying to reach us, email works now.
Things are a bit in chaos, because we ordered new carpet for the living room, which is supposed to be installed this week, and so we have been living here for over a week without setting up the living room furniture. Books can't go on shelves, speakers can't be set up, Xbox 360 can't be set up. I am in
Fable II withdrawal.
Poor Tuesday spent the first day hiding from the world, but now she is getting back to normal. Normal, for her, includes trying to get inside and explore every box, closet, cabinet, and drawer in the place, when she isn't rampaging up and down the hall chasing her toy mouse.
A few days back, she was digging her paws under the stove and pulling out dust bunnies, much to our annoyance. Just as we are saying, "Come on Tuesday, what could be under there that is so interesting? Knock it off!" she pulls out a toy mouse. Not one of ours; we've never seen it before. Gazza got a stick and fished around under there and pulled out
three more dusty, unfamiliar toy mice. It was like the cat toy mother lode.
You can bet Tuesday is checking under every appliance and piece of furniture now. Just in case.
Labels: house, Tuesday
