Hey, remember the rat wine?

They changed their minds. Not gonna happen.

I feel like I'm pounding on a big door

When I was young, the summertime was spent going to the big downtown festival concerts. These were the things with names like "Summerfest" and "Parkfest" and "Riverfest" and whatnot. These were the sorts of things where there was music going constantly -- new up and comers followed by bands that have just been out working the circuit for the last five years, and then the bands that had some success twenty-odd years earlier and decided to get back together for a summer tour to pay for the kids' college tuition and kill off the mortgage on the house.

At the time, I sometimes wondered what it will be like to go see an act that I'd meant to see decades earlier, and somehow circumstances put them off until I was pushing forty and the band looked like a bunch of overweight accountants who grew their hair out on a lark and hit the road for a last gasp before they all started dropping dead from heart disease.

Later this week, two days shy of my fortieth birthday I'm going to Harborfest to see Squeeze.

Nowadays Squeeze looks like this:


I'm actually quite looking forward to it.

I also have tickets to the Police tonight, unless they break up in the next four hours.

Buying the New Yorker 1976 - page 40

I think this predates the original Grey Poupon ad.

The visual joke here is that these two massive houses are so close together. Nowadays with the proliferation of McMansion farms, it's not uncommon to see houses of that size that close together. The oddity now is the massive front yard.

It's been a while since I've poked around a spirit brand website, so I thought I'd have a poke around. The only thing that stands out is the handy toggle button at the bottom of the page that increases the font size for you. I wonder what that says about the marketing demographic.

Now I am two seperate gorillas

The Bonzo Dog Band - "Mr. Apollo"

This vid makes me nostalgic. Not for the Bonzos per se but for analog videos. Back in the day, when I was trading videotapes, I frequently got things that looked like this.

Because the UK and the US were on different video standards, there were three ways to get video from one to another:

1. Drop a couple thousand bucks on a multi-standard VCR
2. Pay about $50 per tapes for a conversion
3. Get a camcorder and shove it in front of a television screen.

The combination of option 3 and the fact that much of the stuff being swapped was copied multiple times before and after the cheap conversion made for the very distinctive texture that you can see here. (The sound generally copied better because you could run a patch cord from the television to the camcorder - it sounds like the person doing this one might not have done that. I think I can hear someone breathing and trying to be quiet in the background.)

The most amazing example of camera copying that I have is one where the person doing it decides to adjust the camera in the middle of the tape and it falls off the tripod. All of a sudden the picture starts flying all over the screen.

Buying the New Yorker 1976 - page 39

This one took a while as well, but I figured it out.



At first I thought that it was just a picture a a Saab tooling down the highway, and the cars in the other lanes were blurry because they were going a different rate of speed. Nope. From the text we see that the car in front is actually stopped and the Saab is using its superior brakes to keep from a potentially fatal accident. This explains the demure little cloud of rubber under the rear tires. The one-handed steering wheel grip of the driver is another matter (which is why it took a moment to figure the picture out). That is not how someone generally holds the wheel when they are trying not to rear end someone on a freeway.

I suppose that showing this amount of danger while trying not to be too terribly alarming shows a certain amount of class: the same pitch could have gone something like "If this was a Chevy Nova, this guy would have to be hosed off the blacktop by now."

And shifting gears for a second (to coin a phrase): Heavens, weren't those old Saabs distinctive! They were always somehow comforting to see zipping down the road. Particularly when they weren't about to crash into something.

I love you too, but I'm going to mace you in the face.

Say what you like about Wes Anderson's films, he always makes an excellent trailer.

Free as a bird!

My passport finally arrived!

Now I can travel the world, spending my grossly undervalued American Dollars!

Woo-Hoo!

____________________

The question is asked: "So, where are you going?"

I have no idea!

Or when!

Woo-Hoo!

'Cause they speak a different language and it's never really happened to me

One of the things that has been pulling me away from the blog has been that I've been getting out more. I had a few opportunities to get took out to the ol' ballgame.

Between innings (while the folks at home are watching replays and beer ads, the park's speakers blast songs that generally seem calculated to keep the crowd in a bouncy, happy mood. Which is fine. The thing is that I went twice in a week and both times they played "Happy Hour" by The Housemartins.

I like that song. I don't think that they are really listening to the words. At least the words beyond the most obvious "It's happy hour again" and "What a good place to be," which are, in their slight defence, the most initially comprehensible lines of the song.

But here's some more:

Where they open all their wallets
And they close all their minds
And they love to buy you all a drink
And then we ask all the questions
And you take all your clothes off
And go back to the kitchen sink

and another bit:

It's another night out with the boss
Following in footsteps overgrown with moss
And he tells me that women grow on trees
And if you catch them right they will land upon their knees

One more line, just for fun:

I think I might be happy if I wasn't out with them

Could there be anything in this song that might have something to do with baseball, I wonder:

Where you win or you lose
And its them who choose
And if you don't win then you've lost

Ah, good times!

Buying the New Yorker 1976 - page 20

Every once in a while, I hit an ad that completely stops me for a while. I've been stalled out on this ad for weeks.

That's it. Take off your shoes and stay awhile. Get comfortable. I am. In a dress like this, I always am. It fits me, but lets me be myself.

I have no idea what to say about this ad. It frightens and amuses me, I want to be snarky at it, but I would like to understand it more before I feel comfortable trying.

Perhaps I need one of those dresses.

A cautionary tale about reader feedback

Francesco Marciuliano is, among other things, the author of the syndicated comic strip Sally Forth.

I really love this story about the sorts of letters he gets from readers.

Truth, Justice and Norwegian Expressionism

Booksteve posted this amazingly odd panel from an old Captain America comic:



Now why does that look familiar?

Oh, yes. This:

I don't know why I like this so much

I just do.

Squeeze Wilson and the Feeds

I've been doing a bit of tinkering behind the scenes.

First off, those of you who read my blogs via RSS feed, well, if I did everything correctly you shouldn't notice a thing. If you don't, there's a spiffy little link (the proper term seems to be "chicklet") on the side.

Also popping up on the side is a search box. This search box is different from the one up in the top left in that you can change the search parameters to include all the blogs I link to. It's still pretty clunky, but they're working on it.

Some may have noticed that my Pandora station list went away for a bit. It's back. The three most recent stations are the result of my experimenting. I was trying to see how the "music genome" triangulated artists, so I picked two acts of different eras to see what the genome would do.

First I created a pair of stations with nothing but one artist to create a pair of baselines. The "Jackie Wilson" station gave me Sam Cooke, The Temptations and The Isley Brothers - pretty much what I was expecting. The "Squeeze" station played Elvis Costello, Crowded House and XTC - again about where I was thinking it would go. So now the experiment: a third station with both Jackie Wilson and Squeeze as the "Artist Seeds."

Result: A Jackie Wilson song, followed by a Squeeze song, then The La's "There She Goes" and Yo La Tengo's "The Way Some People Die." At this point I thought the experiment was an interesting success, but then it played Elvis Costello followed by The Temptations, The Isley Brothers, XTC and Crowded House. Oh well.

testing

don't mind me

Two great tastes that taste great together

Coming soon to a well-stocked cellar near you: Limited edition wines released as movie tie-ins! First out of the gate: a 2004 white Burgundy from the Mâcon's Château de Messey relabeled to tie in with Ratatouille, a film about rats making soup.

The limited edition will be available from August 1st, exclusively at Costco.

I establish a baseline for the US Government

"Currently, it is taking 7-10 days for passport applications to be tracked online."

I sent my passport application to the proper authorities on April 14th. It is not yet tracked online.

"You may also request a status check on your application via email to the National Passport Information Center. Responses to emails may take up to 48 hours."

I requested a status check via email on June 28th. I have yet to receive a response.

Buying the New Yorker 1976 - page 18 and 19

Something that it has taken eighteen pages to make notice of is that 1976 was America's Bicentennial. Thus the tepid little attempt to get car buyers to want to "Rediscover America."



The thing that I find appealing is the shear magnitude of the comparison charts. Today, no advertising agency would even gamble that the typical American car purchaser would be capable of adding and subtracting, much less navigating around all these tables.

Of course these tables are horrifically odd anyway - the spark plugs need to be replaced half as often as those on a Datsun. If somebody ever really bought their car based on comparative spark plug maintenance, please let me know you exist.

Though Birnam wood be come to Dunsinane

"Man disguised as tree robs bank"

I've never trusted those panda bears

Panda Prison Break - Watch more free videos

Listening to the World - American Samoa

Pardon me if I don't have this entirely correct, but it's a bit more complicated than I was first expecting.

American Samoa is an "American unincorporated unorganized territory." "Unincorporated" means "not under the jurisdiction of a particular American State." "Unorganized" means that the territory's government is not established or overseen by the US, even though it is a US territory.

American Samoa is the only unincorporated unorganized territory that has a civilian population -- all the rest are either home to military bases or completely uninhabited. I had presumed that there would be a military base there. I was wrong, there were bases there in World War Two, but they have now been abandoned.

But the important question remains -- just what is the quality of their "Hit Music Radio?"

Well, it sounds just like American radio, except for the occasional advertisement in Samoan.

Here you go, have a listen.

Buying the New Yorker 1976 - page 17

Edward Marshall Boehm was a sculptor who specialized in porcelain flowers and animals. For the curious, you can learn more here:

Early in 1953, President and Mrs. Eisenhower recognized the art and began to utilize it for gifts to visiting Heads of State, culminating in the sculpture "Prince Philip on His Polo Pony" presented to the Queen and Prince when they visited the United States in 1957. Every American President since has commissioned Boehm for gifts to visiting dignitaries.

in 1959, His Late Holiness Pope John XXIII was presented with several pieces for The Vatican Museum, including the sculpture "Cerulean Warblers with Wild Roses." On viewing it for the first time, he exclaimed, "One hesitates to go too close for fear the birds might fly away."

There you have it.

Interestingly, while there is a great deal of attention paid to Boehm's amazing skill, the fact that his death in 1969 seems to have had no impact on the output. One speculates that his actual innovation lies somewhere in the process.

In any event, if you were around in 1976, you could have stopped by Brielle China and picked up some nice little figurines or perhaps a commemorative plate. Today, I'm pretty sure they are out of business. I see a decent amount of Boehm on eBay though.

Great moments in improbable musical collaborations

Al Stewart and Tori Amos, Royal Festival Hall, 1991.

The story behind this clip is that the person scheduled to play piano had to cancel at the last minute, so Stewart called Amos in to do it (They knew each other as she sang back-up on one of his albums a few years earlier). Problematically, Amos had been having Visa/Passport issues (She had just been given an advance for her next album, and was staying in London to write songs, but didn't have clearance to perform). So Stewart decided that the best way around this was to make up a new identity for her - one that, judging from the clip, she really wasn't expecting.

I love it when something like this happens

Soko did this song which was passed along from blog to mailing list to blog (those that pay attention to my Shared Google Reader Posts might have seen it go by):



I love the reaction to this live set where everybody in the audience knows the song.

God's fingerprints

Brother Ali.

Stick with it until 2:30 till the end. That's when the magic happens. Trust me.