Thursday, April 28, 2005

"Do you realize?"

So I stopped by Orion Music after work to see if there is anything new or interesting. I finally bought the Iron & Wine CD (Woman King). I went to see them at Kilby Court a while back, and wasn't that impressed, but that was probably because I was blocked out of the room where they play at Kilby by the crowd of folks and had to sit outside to hear them. I keep hearing them on KRCL Drivetime and rather like them each time I hear them, so I will chalk-up my bad reaction to them to the venue.

I also found a surprise: A version of The Flaming Lips' Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots that includes a DVD. I think I have all the various permutations that they produced of that album, so it made sense to get this one as well. They've had some pretty cool side projects in the past, such as their 4 (or was it 3?) disc set that to be properly listened to had to be played on 4 separate stereos simultaneously. They also fancy themselves fimmakers,and based on their over-the-top live show I'm sure the DVD is bound to be entertaining. (The $12.99 price tag also made it appealing. )

Speaking of DVDs, Beck's latest Guero apparently comes in a special DVD version as well. I bought the regulation CD a couple of weeks ago (and have been enjoying it, but not enough to pop 27 bucks on a DVD and 7 more songs.

I also found a free Morrissey sticker that reads "The World Is Full of Crashing Bores." It is stuck to my water bottle now.

I'm in the coffee shop now watching the rain pool on the brick sidewalks. I'm liking this weather lately.

A long haired guy in the corner who fancies himself a rocker tells someone on the other end of his phone conversation that he needs to do right by that woman.

A frazzled student desperately scratches out notes for a biology class he seems to have fallen hopelessly behind in.

A smoker huddles underneath the big white umbrella outside. He ogles a smoking girl who passes by.

A boy and a girl with parallel lip piercings and complimentary blue and green hair color pass by. They are holding hands and seem in love.

The barrista ignores a girl at the counter.

The girl at the counter stays quiet, clutching her dollar bill in front of her like a talisman.

Wednesday, April 27, 2005

Wookies!

During the unfortunate hiatus of his Star Wars appearances, we witnessed the Wookie's unfortunate venture into commercial television. Wookie Cop was an abject failure, while the 1980 "What You Talkin' 'bout Wookie" was slightly before its time and subject to the whims of those coquettish writers, our favorite hairy almost ape-like but oh so human Wookie slipped into a deep depression of too much Jagermeister and gin. Luckilly, someone saw the lucrative value of the Star Wars venture and made The Empire Strikes Back, probably the best of the whole series and devoid of absolute control from certain parties that will go unnamed.

Wookie rode high on his renegotiated salary for the next two Star Wars films. Like his co-stars Mark Hamill, and Carrie Fisher he avoided any real work and enjoyed the massive Star Wars payout.

But payouts only last so long, especially for 20 minute at best side characters who's best line is "uh ohhhhhh ahhh eehhh" leaving your much more lucrative leading man, Harrison Ford, to say "Laugh it up, Fuzz ball!"

No respect.

And such was the fate of our Wookie. Left with his now millions which were quickly drunk away in so many vegas nights of too much whiskey and too many girls.

So left with little recourse, our Wookie found himself in the start of and the lowest dreggs of entertainment: the children's show: 1)broadband, 2)broadband who don't want to wait(it is really bad, I tell you what), 3)the handicapable, 4)the extra-handicapable (both very teensy, but the audio is good).)

Unfortunately for the Wookie, drunkeness is not a charming characteristic for childrens shows. Cancelled. Barney came on 6 weeks later.

Next up: Wookie hits bottom.

What you talkin' 'bout, Wookie?

After his failure in prime-time cop drama, the Wookie next turned his talents to the all American sitcom. He plays a fun-loving but highly strung Wookie adopted by an average white family living above a porn shop. Wookie added a new catch phrase to the sitcom pantheon of catch phrases. Unfortunately, the writer's strike of 1980 stopped production of "What you talkin' 'bout, Wookie?" and only the pilot was made. Unable to re-sign Wookie because of his other contractual obligations, the producers retooled the comedy and turned it into the laugh-a-minute fun-fest we grew to love: Alf!

Update: 1) you probably need to get QuickTime to watch these movies.
2) On the internet archive page that comes up after you click on the movie link above, select the MPEG4 file to the right. The stream thing doesn't work, so don't click on that.

Tuesday, April 26, 2005

"Wooooooooooooooooo-kie!"

After his success on the Star Wars Holiday Special, our Wookie went on to make several ill-fated television series. One such series, Wookie Cop, lasted only 5 episodes before it was yanked by the network.

Monday, April 25, 2005

"Its the end of the world as we know it"

There are only 25 days left until the world as we know it ends and will never be the same. Oh what will we do without the wonderful Space Wars saga!? I guess we'll just have to wait for the postquel. In the mean time we'll always have WOOKIE RAGE!

Sunday, April 24, 2005

"Listen!"

BoingBoing has recently been posting links to odd answering machine/voice mail messages (not greetings, but messages people leave). One in particular caught my ear because it had a wicked sort of beat to it. So using Garage Band (GB) I whipped up a little remix of her complaint entitled "What the hell is the matter with people nowadays?". I have uploaded it to the Internet Archive for posting, but it has not been approved as of 12:00 noon April 24. If it doesn't receive approval, I figure out some other place to put it.

I didn't modify the woman's voice at all save for adding reverb. The beats/drums are stock in Garage Band. I would have made it longer including more of her word music (particularly where she imitates a touch-tone phone), but I did something wrong in GB and it won't let me add the whole of her track any more.

It is an AIFF file (sorry I can't figure out how to get GB or iTunes to change that format.

Saturday, April 23, 2005

Beleza

I think my PowerBook is depressed. The many many many CD's that I've downloaded to it are, ultimately, quite depressing music (with some notable exceptions.) Please suggest some songs to cheer my PowerBook up.

In other related news, for some reason I want to name my PowerBook "Wendy." What the hell?

Saddle bags

I thought I was enabled to cross off "saddle bags" from the needs list that is sufficing for my blogger description right now ( Three things I need: 1) Haircut 2) Saddle bags 3) Coffee
) but the thing I purchased the other day doesn't want to work. You see I want to get some "panniers" for my bike--saddlebags for my less-Frenchified parliance) for toting things on my bicycle. The item I purchased, however, is incompatible with itself. It is a basket that locks into place on a back rack of the bicycle. Both the rack and the basket are made by the same company, but they refuse to play nice with one another. Apparantly the company likes to change its rack size regularly in order to force customers to buying whole systems rather than just replacing componants. I would look for alternative from the same company, but I have no desire to do business with them since they treat their customers and the environment so poorly.

I'm not handicapped! I'm handicapable, damn it!

Salt Lake Tribune - Salt Lake Tribune Home Page: "But Winterton says the mix-up demonstrates a culture of disrespect for physicians. 'In their eyes, we're providers, not physicians.' "

I think the word Winterton was looking for is "vendor."

Friday, April 22, 2005

Your government at work

Thanks again, Republicans for raising my taxes for nothing. I guess such action is to keep people from knowing which way the wind blows, eh?

Tuesday, April 19, 2005

"You got to love it, baby"

I was talking to Lisa B. of High Touch Megastore and she indicated that she has heard that Hot Rod will not be retiring completely, but will continue to calling the radio games for the Jazz. That is some how fitting, since that is how I best remember Hot Rod as a kid since the Jazz were not on TV much in those days. They were a new team, didn't have a very wealthy owner, and were losing constantly. They couldn't even swing a constant local TV gig. (Does any one but me remember when they tried a few seasons playing some games in Las Vegas trying not to die as a franchise?) Now, of course, they have their own TV station and you can pretty much see all the games there.

I recall those games on the farm by the radio while I did my homework looking out my window to moon lit fields when Dantley scored his umpteenth point weedling his way inside the paint with his snake-like move, or the Golden Griff actually hit a three pointer, or Frank Layden got thrown out of the game. It was all narrated by a much more firey Hot Rod: a man who would regularly yell at referees as they passed and say things like "NBA officiating at its finest!" Or would show his disgust with everything (including the Jazz) at the end of the game by "slamming the refigerator door" on them. His play-by-play could make you see the basketball as it rimmed in or out of the basket. His passion was evident in his then solo commentary.

All that calmed down, of course, when the Jazz started winning and Hundley's personal life got him into trouble one too many times. He calmed down markedly, and even stopped bitching about the worst of the refs towards the end. Only once in the past 10 years have I seen a glimpse of the snide Hot Rod of the 80s. Once while bantering with his sidekick Booner, he actually went on a mini-slamfest of a player on the oposing team who'd never lived to his potential. The most redolent line was "And that caps off the waning of a mediocre carreer."

So yeah, I will miss Hot Rod, even though he has been sanitized these days. He is still funny and interesting to listen to, even if he doesn't bait the other team or the refs as much.

And so here are some Hot Rod annecdotes, even though he will be around for, I should hope, a long time:

1) While on the radio after an outage that knocked out power for Northern Utah for nearly 24 hours he said "I was stuck on the escalator in Cross Roads Mall for 5 hours!"
2) According to the Little Brown Book of Annecdotes edited by Clifton Fadiman
Rod Hundley and Bob Leondard were notorious for their off-court activities when they were teammates on the Minneapolis Lakers. Having missed a team plane flight after a night out, they were summoned to the offices of team owner Bob Short. Hundley was called in first. After observing that they had been warned for their misbehavior many times, Short told Hundley that he was being fined $1,000. (Hundley noted he was making $10,000 a season at the time; so a player earing the $500,000 usual today would have to be fined $50,000 to match that fine. Relative to earnings, Hundley's fine was the largest ever5.)

When Hundley left Short's office to call Leonard in, he found him worrying over how much money he could afford to pay without his wife finding out. "How much?" he asked anxiously.
"A big one, baby, a big bill," replied Hundley.
"A hundred dollars?" ask Leonard.
"A hundred, hell. A thousand," Hundley told him. Tears came to Leonard's eyes. "It's a record," said Hundley consolingly.
Leonard brightened. "Let's go out and celebrate," he said. (293-294)
3) And again,
Hundley roomed for a while with Elgin Baylor, one of the greatest scorers in the history of the National Basket Ball Association. One night in New York..., Baylor set a league record by scoring seventy-one points in one game. That night Hundley scored two points. As they got into the taxi for a ride back to their hotel, he put an arm around Elgin and noted triumphantly, "What a night we had, buddy! Seventy-three points between us." (294)
4) And finally
Hundley picked up a lady at a bar and as they talked he realized that she was a prostitute. "How much do you get?" he asked.
"Twenty-five bucks," she replied.
"Too rich for my blood," said Hundley.
"How much do you get?" asked the woman, laughing.
"Twenty-five cents," he said.
"You're on," the woman replied.
After they had spent the night in a hotel bedroom, he awoke to find her gone. On the dresser she had left a shiny new quarter. ("I save it as a souvenir for years," said Hundley.) (294)

(Work Cited, Fadiman, Clifton, editor. The Little Brown Book of Annecdotes. New York: Little Brown, 1984.)

Monday, April 18, 2005

"The kid likes to play and he wants to be out ther on the court."

Despite my rather bitchy last post, the Jazz lead the entire game and won and as Harpring said in the post-game interview "We're on a two game winning streak!" At least they're keeping it in perspective.

Anyway the Jazz have a lot going for them next year: McCloud, Humphreys, Giricek, Okur, and a healthy Kirilenko. (My apologies for any misspellings of their names.) Along with any veterans like Harpring and Eisley that stick around, they have a decent shot.

I'll be back on this whole Jazz thing on Wednesday, the last game of the season , and Hotrod Hundley's last game announcing for the Jazz. (Unless he decided to not retire afterall. I haven't paid much attention to that.) If I get the gumption, I'll write a tribute to Hotrod.

26 wins. 55 losses.

Ah well.

"Put this one in the refrigerator, baby"

It is half time of the Jazz's last home game for this pretty sad season. Overall the Jazz are playing pretty much like they have all season: sketchy. I don't want to be too hard on them since they have had an injury- and conflict-plagued season. Right before the game started Larry Miller gave an impassioned enough speech for him, thanking the fans for sticking around through such a craptastic season. He stated, in effect, that the fans have stuck through the thin. Hopefully next year we'll start getting some thick again.

Ball play has been pretty sloppy for both teams, but Sacramento has left the lane open when Oster(thank the basketball gods he is no longer sucking away at the Jazz's salary cap)tag is not in. The Jazz still suck at outside defense, and that is leaving them vulnerable to Sacramento's strength.

One note of patheticness so far is that fans cheered Ostertag (a.k.a Goo) when her came in. I'm not one for fans booing former players, but this piqued me since I despise Goo for his long years of hit-and-mostly-miss lazy play while being incredibly overpaid. At the same time he had far too many run ins with both Malone, Sloan, and Miller. I still wouldn't boo him, however. What piqued me was that I've seen similar situations with far better former Jazz players and they have been roundly booed--including the likes of Malone, Byron Russell, and (what a joke) current but formerly former Jazz player Howard Eisley.

I'm not with Larry Miller on this one, I'm afraid. Fuck the fans.

Rainy Day Music Selections

To follow this weekend's nice spring sunny days, we're having a rainy Monday, which as I've mentioned before never bothers me since rain here is such a rare thing that you quite appreciate it when it happens. Now it is not so rainy that one couldn't go out and do thing in it, but it makes for a handy excuse to be inside and listen to music (if there is any need for excuses for such an activity). The community CD player has been in a bit of a rut for the last week; new things might be put in, but it always seems to go back to the same five CDs after a bit. Granted they are all new CDs, but they have all reached their half-life with me, and I prefer to give them a little more space. We'll see how the rest of the Wilhelm crew react to my complete remake of the CD changer. I wanted to go for things that seemed appreciate for a rainy day: the two Radiohead selections (Kid A and OK Computer take care of that with their sonorous dreariness (that's not a bad thing, mind you). In between those two I put Wilco's A Ghost is Born which although I haven't listened to it in a while now, has little of the catchiness of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot but has a lot of its soul. I then found something I've never seen before Moonshake's Eva Luna. It is playing right now and it does fit the weather since it is a sort of cross between Laika, Pavement, Sonic Youth, Radiohead, and a jazz combo. I don't know why I haven't heard of them before since dissonant music of the 90's is my heartbeat. Some called this kind of music "post rock," you know--a name that has been placed on yet another group of artists these days. To round things out in the 5 album cycle, I chose The Folk Implosions Take a Look Inside the Folk Implosion another CD I haven't heard in a long while.

It is getting darker outside and the rain is coming down in fine sheets. A guy across the street is fixing the neighbor's sprinkler system.

Sunday, April 17, 2005

"The arrival of an evil Shaolin monk, brings the Physician and Iron Monkey together to battle the corrupt government."

Iron Monkey: "Not the ugly virgin again!" I was amused. Not quite Kung Fu Hamlet, but it would do in a pinch especially since it has a conflicted co-hero and a bad guy that puts Claudius to shame. Lessons are learned, and fake religious zealots are put in their place.

Thursday, April 14, 2005

If you were lost in a song, where would you be?

Right now I'm lost between the third movement and before the people start singing in Beethoven's ninth. My god. Paradise.

Save a stamp, eat a tree!

One of the tutors at work does tarot. She was sorting through a new pack of cards that she had bought because she is going to give a reading to her sister. While she was shuffling through them, I haphazzardly picked out two cards: the 2 of cups and a card I didn't really look at to remember but it marked the start of something new. Those two cards pointed to success in a new venture.

I was reminded me of my friend Charlotte from the old days who could read palms like nothing and her mother who could read your fortune from regulation playing cards.

Tuesday, April 12, 2005

"My time is a piece of wax dropping on a termite, choking on a splinter."

Since I’m in a a Fray/Middlebrow/Dr.Write/High Touch Megastore mood today, I’ve decided to offer up a bit of interactive blogittiness. A while ago (I don’t recall when) a friend and I were talking about a lyrics and lyricism. I don’t recall the exact context but it got us onto a discussion of the poetic merits of lyrics, and why lyrics are ill-received in poetic circles. (You know those poetic circles, always with their exclamations of “that’s not poetry!” while they chain smoke cigarettes and drink espresso in dark bistros.)

The whole conversation lead me to realize that there are many lyrics that I couldn’t do with out and they sometimes run in my head as songs should. Since I recently mis-treated some lyrics, I thought I would make amends and celebrate them.

Your task, oh reader, is to quote some lyrics that have some merit for you—whether poetic, philosophic, pathetic (in the rhetorical use of the world, not the disparaging) or whatever reason something might have merit. Include the lyricist, group/singer, title, and album title, if you don’t mind, as applicable. Obey fair use, please. You may explain the significance of your choice as you see fit.

I shall respond as a regular customer.

Monday, April 11, 2005

"Everyone hates a tourist/Especially one who thinks everything is a laugh"

Today's business-taking trip downtown (yes I am a big financial wizard who must visit downtown on a regular basis--actually my bank is down town and it is easier to go there on the train than it is to find one of the suburbanite branches in their carvenient locations), was chock full of kids who think they are in Lord of the Rings. (I'll wait while you catch up after that last parenthetically damned sentence.) The phenomenon is kind of an outgrowth of the D & D geeks I remember so fondly from my highschool days, Goths, and kids who hung out in coffee shops and played way too much Magic the Gathering. LOTR defined their lives for these kids, and they clung to it: brown pants they pretent are really leather; green or black shirts they pretend are woven by some elf; and talismans--many many silver talismans.

On the train there were a passel of them wearing their talismans and talking about magey kinds of things. It wasn't as if they plannned to be there, since they would get on the train at different locations, some recognizing each other, some ignoring each other. Usually there are a mix of kids on the train along with other folks not so ardently in search of some identity: the punker kids, the hippy kids, the Columbine kids (yes they dress like the famous Columbine murderes), the Goths. Other folks on the train are positively non-descript, other than the occasional homeless habitual drunk who decides to risk being hasselled by the transit cops for not paying his fare and at the same time scare the hell out of some suburbanites riding the train to beat the traffic so they can see the pretty flowers at temple square.

But not today. Today the magic was in the air and the kid who desperately wants to be Galdalf to make it all better with a spell, and the girl who wants to be Galadrial to make it all make sense with some Elfen wisdom, and the kid who wants to be Sam so he thinks he might actually have solid and real friends in this world, occupied a good two thirds of the train. I suppose one wizardly LOTR kid could have cast a spell and brought on this confluence of role-players, but I prefer to think it was the nice spring day that brought them out of the dark basement appartments where loop tapes of the 11 hour saga play continually, without pause for months on end.

Sunday, April 10, 2005

I like my desperation quiet, thank you very much.

I made a rule for myself very early on in writing in this thing that I wasn't going to write about the actual creation/management of it. It seems extraordinarly tedious and boring to write about how one is going to write about something or the look and feel (design) of the very thing that you are designing. I suppose I wanted to avoid a weird sort of meta-blog since I am annoyed by such things. It is like talking to some one who only discusses some new feature of his or her appearance simply to get you to comment on how cool it is: LOOK AT MY HAIR! LOOK AT MY TATTOO! LOOK AT MY LIP RING! Bleh. That's too much unquiet desperation for me.

With that in mind, I must ask you to bear with me here, becase I do have some necessary explaining to do on the sudden change of appearence of good old SigNo.

I've been mouthing off lately that a blog or an online journal (that's how I prefer to think of this thing) is like a pet: you get used to it being around and need to feed it and clean up after it on a regular basis. Like all analogies, of course, this one fails miserably when you get down to it, but there is something apt in the connection: it tends to describe the care that one can give to such things even though they are simply electric pulses streaming out from your finger prints to become stored electric impulses streaming out from some unknown server stuck away in some unknown closet. A sort of desire to care for such a thing creeps up after a while: to buy it a nice collar or give a special treat.

Lately the old dog has been getting a bit shaggy in that I've found a great deal of limitations in the software I chose for keeping the thing fed inadquate. Basically the program only runs on the PC that sits in combination chow-hall/office, and try as I might, I cannot get it to go out and find emails that I clandestinely send to it for publication purposes.

I guess my pet has grown to the size that I have to keep it in a barn now, because I (horror of horrors) have switched away from my ecclectic blogging program and have moved to using blogger.com. It still stores the files for the blog on my own server, but I get to use their web interface to publish. I know folks out there with more discerning tastes will tell me to use some other more flexible blogging environment.


The problem with making such a switch, however, is that you can't easily tranfer content from one database system to the next. (Blog software are basically simple databases if you didn't know.) This requires one to start afresh and if you want to find the old entries, you will have to go to the old archive. Sorry there are so many on that list. I suppose I should have just gone with a month-to-month list rather than a weekly one.

To keep up with animal analogy this change is like
  • cleaning the cat's stinking litter box
  • getting the dog groomed
  • shearing the sheep
  • de-horning the cow
  • putting more brine shrimp eggs in the brine shrimp tank
Take your pick.