News You Can Bruise

Some of these transcripts were created by running Whisper on my computer; others I created by paying someone else to run Whisper on their more powerful computer. Now that I've put it all up, one transcript per page, it doesn't seem that impressive, but it's a solid [runs script] 63.80 hours of transcribed text; that's after all the music was filtered out.

I've also updated the dataset with some previously missing information, thanks to Reddit user kiyyik. Remember, if you've got any Schickele Mix recordings, I'll take 'em!

Although the .srt files available for download are the originals as they came out of my/someone else's Whisper process, I wrote some code to tidy up the transcripts for the HTML views. Apart from cleaning up common hallucinations such as transcribing orchestral music as "¶¶" or "Thank you.", I caught and corrected forty different ways to misspell Peter Schickele's name. Here they are:

1. Chicelet
2. Chick-Alee
3. Chick-fil-A
4. Chickalay
5. Chickaly
6. Chickelet
7. Chickley
8. Chickly
9. Chik-fil-A
10. Cicholet
11. Schiccoli
12. Schick-Alee
13. Schickel
14. Schickeli
15. Schickelman
16. Schickely
17. Schickley
18. Schickli
19. Schickly
20. Schiekely
21. Shicabley
22. Shickeley
23. Shickely
24. Shickily
25. Shickley
26. Shickly
27. Shiggly
28. Shigley
29. Shikali
30. Shikely
31. Shikily
32. Shikley
33. Shikoli
34. Shikolik
35. Shinkley
36. Sickily
37. Sickle-ee
38. Sickley
39. Sickly
40. Sickely

Who could forget Captain Picard taking on the Shikolik?

I've scraped the now-defunct official Perl CGI that gave out Schickele Mix listings, and reformatted the listings with links to archived recordings of all the episodes that have been saved by fans. About 130 of about 180 episodes total have been archived, thanks entirely to two people, both of whom show up in this Reddit thread to take credit. Thanks, Frodo_Picard and gattgun, from a grateful world.

All this metadata is now available as a big JSON file (so no one else has to download those old listings from the Wayback Machine and rewrite my scraping code), and I also created a podcast RSS feed that lets you experience Schickele Mix in its haphazard original broadcast order. (This is different from the benofsky.com Schickele Mix podcast mainly in that it includes the gattgun archive, not just the Frodo_Picard archive.)

I've got one more big piece of this project planned, but this is enough to tell the world, I think. The web page makes it clear which episodes of Schickele Mix are still missing fan-archive recordings. If you think you might have one of the missing episodes on an old cassette tape or something, please email me at leonardr@segfault.org.

I should mention that, unlike most of the stuff I link to/am involved with, these songs are pretty filthy. I'm sure it's possible to have a Jewish transsexual rock band whose songs are all very tasteful, but that is not Lucian's way! I didn't write the dirty parts of "Surgical Drains"—I just came up with a lot of the couplets in the choruses.

In honor of awesome things, a 17-minute infomercial for the Univac. (Univac!) They're especially proud of having invented the numeric keypad. Also check out the enormous machine that reads from magnetic tape and writes to punch card, and the equally enormous machine that reads punch cards and writes to magnetic tape.

New York, New York, it's a hell of a town
The Bronx is up and the Battery's down

That's not really very convincing.

Beth mentioned that she'd read a play called "Phillip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread" but never seen it. The play is so short that you can just watch an online video of the whole thing, and that's what we did.

Second, it's time for another Music Piracy Minute! One of Jake Berendes's lesser-known pieces, "Sorry State of Affairs", is a Phillip Glass tribute that's also a remix of the "Mr. Belvedere" theme song. Download that sucker now! Plus, for some reason this song always reminds me of Christmas music, so you get a festive two-for-one.

Totally unrelated picture: a surprisingly sweet ad found in this otherwise cynical grouping.

1. Neko Case, "Middle Cyclone". Recommended by Brendan. Gentle rock with female vocalist. Mean song score: 3.3999... stars though a couple days later nothing has really stuck in my memory.
2. Tally Hall, "Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum". Recommended by Sumana, recommended in turn by last.fm. Sumana went and found their excellent fourth-wall-ignoring music video for "Good Day". Different styles with a core of rock and close harmony. Very good stuff. Mean song score: 3.5 stars.
3. Jukebox The Ghost, "Let Live And Let Ghosts". Recommended by Ben Heaton. Strangely enough, the first song on this album is also called "Good Day". Fun piano pop, but it's no Ben Folds. Mean song score: 3.0 stars.
4. Camera Obscura, "Let's Get Out Of This Country". As long as I'm reviewing albums. Rachel gave this to Sumana last Christmas. Slow wavery ting-ting-ting-y pop. Not as good as I remember. Mean song score: 2.58333... stars. Maybe Sumana likes it better.

1. Menomena, "I Am The Fun Blame Monster!": More like Meh-nomena. (Unfortunately, not more like Mahnamahna.) Songs that are too long and too slow with too few words. Playing only the last two minutes of each song gives a decent album. Mean song score: 2.111... stars. Originally recommended by Nathaniel.
2. Moloko, "Do You Like My Tight Sweater?": Funky and with lots of random lyrics. However, also suffers from fairly serious repetition. Does a song really need to repeat its chorus twenty times? I know that some will say "yes", but they are wrong.

   This musical style seems pretty similar to Menomena, but because I really liked the first track I was willing to put up with random track intros like the creepy moaning sounds at the beginning of "Party Weirdo". Or maybe I just like female vocalists better than male vocalists. Mean song score: 2.77 stars. (This was dragged down by the many tracks less than 30 seconds long. Mean song score without them: 3.0 stars.) Originally recommended by Evan.

3. Eux Autres, "Hell is Eux Autres": Awesome rock with male and female vocalists that remind me of (the band) Barcelona. Originally recommended by Dave (Griffith?). Mean song score: a solid 3.555... stars.
4. Girl Talk, "Night Ripper": Brilliant, but not brilliant enough to make me enjoy super-layered hip-hop remixen. "This song has the same meter as that one" is a game that's fun to play ad hoc with boring songs, but kind of annoying when extended to album length. And when I start playing that game with your remix, you've lost me. Mean song score: 1.63 stars. Maybe I'd like it better if I caught more of the references, though I did catch a fair number of them and it rarely improved my opinion of the remix. Originally recommended by Evan.
5. Chroma Key, "Dead Air For Radios": Originally recommended by "Kangaroo" Jack Masters, and is exactly what I imagined him listening to. Oceans of sound with drums and strange electronic sounds and found audio and reverb. I never specifically wanted a song to be over but I also never had a specific positive impression of a song, except for the final, creepy "Hell Mary". Mean song score: 3.11 stars.
6. Dan Bern, "Dan Bern": This guy is hilarious. The Dylan impression is unnecessary, but his songwriting is great albeit heavy-handed. Mean song score: 3.18 stars due to a weak second half. Originally recommended by Mike Popovic.
7. Veldt, "The Cause The Effect": Originally recommended by Kevan. Was not optimistic about this: I gave British Sea Power a listen because Kevan is always listening to it, and I didn't like them. I don't feel any different after having listened to this album, and listening to BSP right now, I think I like them better than Veldt. Mean song score: 2.1818... stars.
8. Silver Jews, "The Natural Bridge": Pavement precursor album, originally recommended by the jake. I don't really like Pavement, but Jake's taste is always good. And... this sounds like a less rocking Pavement. The songwriting is excellent ("All houses dream in blueprints" is the single best line in this review corpus), but the singer puts no emotion into it. It's like hearing a zombie sing. Mean song score: 2.4 stars.
9. The Wiyos, "Hat Trick": Good-tymey swing music that rocks harder than most of the rock music on this list. Like if the Prairie Home Companion house band had more of an edge. Mean song score: 3.38 stars. Originally recommended by Mirabai.

I recommend Eux Autres, Dan Bern, and The Wiyos to the general NYCB-reading public. Thanks to everyone who gave me suggestions, even the ones I hated. (I still love you!)

Now that I've accomplished that guilt-relieving task, I invite you to pile on additional guilt. Give me more music recommendations! Links to "best of 2009" and "best of the 2000s" lists will be accepted, though I won't buy every damn album on them.

I was really proud that someone had started a non-bad band named after a game I wrote, and was trying to figure out how to contact this band without creating a Myspace account, and then I did a search on the song lyrics and discovered that all four songs are really by Neil Cicierega of the Massachusets band Lemon Demon, and were put up as "robot finds kitten" songs under different names. Cicierega is also known for creating Flash cartoons like "The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny" -- so well-known, in fact, that he's also notable.

So, it sucks that the "robot finds kitten" band is either a hoax or a plagiarism, but on the plus side it introduced me to some really great music. Those who like my music (I realize that this is a... select group) will also like Lemon Demon. And according to a message a few months ago to the rfk-dev mailing list, someone is starting a real band called "robotfindskitten".

Not really relevant to anything in my larger life, but if you're not interested in an alternate-history Mormon eco-shanty, you might be reading the wrong weblog.

Can our government be competent?
Jimmy Carter says YES. (2x)
Can our government be honest?
Jimmy Carter says YES. (2x)
Can our government be decent and open?
As the 39th president, he has spoken
YES. Jimmy Carter says YES.

This language seemed very familiar to me, because as it happens I just read Carter's 1975 campaign biography, Why Not the Best?. For the record I now present the Secret Origin Of "Jimmy Carter Says YES": it's cribbed from the book.

Here's the first few paragraphs of the first chapter, "Two Questions".

As we observe the two hundredth birthday of our nation, it is appropriate to ask ourselves two basic questions:

Can our government be honest, decent, open, fair, and compassionate?

Can our government be competent?

In the last chapter ("Those Two Questions Again"), Carter restates the first question and then says: "In my judgement, the answer to that question is a resounding YES[.]" Spoiler alert: the answer to the second question is also YES.

This explains a couple of the song's odd features, ie. the capitalization of "YES" and the fact that the rest of the lyrics don't measure up to the cribbed material ("statement of eruption"??).

Incidentally, Sumana and I also own an amazing album of presidential campaign songs, sung by Oscar Brand. One of the best songs on it is Carter's campaign song, also called "Why Not The Best?" It's a great slow country tune, and the last campaign song on that album to be an original song (ie. not a filk or reuse of an existing song).

• You must play the World 1-1 theme from Super Mario Bros.
• You must then play the "speeding up" riff followed by half of the World 1-1 theme at double speed.

Other than that, you can do whatever you want. I was trying to figure out the value proposition here--do people like these videos because the songs are great, or is it just nostalgia? A question with an obvious answer, and I'm not even gonna try to be contrarian: some of the songs are legitimately great, but it's nostalgia.

Argument one: some of the songs are in fact terrible. The Legend of Zelda overworld theme is in most of these medleys, and it's a bad song. It's a theme with no variations, an annoying ripoff of Ravel's famously annoying Bolero (I believe they wanted to use Bolero but couldn't get the rights.) No one enjoys that song except insofar as it makes them think of a fun game.

Second, these videos are videos, and they often have some prop-comedy component where people cosplay and/or act out scenes from the games. Nobody does that for other music performances. Maybe they should, but they don't. (I gotta make an exception for Frank Zappa, who often did strange things while conducting.)

But the reason I started seriously wondering about this is that none of these medleys have any songs from the original Metroid game. Why is that? It's a very well-known game from the same era and the same publisher as the first Zelda and Mario games. It's got one of the best and deepest soundtracks in video game history. So why not include it? Maybe because it's a little more hardcore than Mario and Zelda, so it won't give as many people the nostalgic thrill.

Similarly for the Mega Man series, which no one would deny had excellent music, albeit more poppy and less classical (but therefore more accessible) than Metroid. The password entry theme from MM3 came up on our media player today and we were transfixed. The password entry theme, folks. Anyway, a big-name game with great music, but a little too hardcore to push the average person's nostalgia buttons.

You don't watch these videos to be exposed to new music. I'm not expecting people to put songs from Earthbound in their video game soundtrack medleys (though they should). But I think if you put some Metroid in your medley you'd be pleasantly surprised by the audience reaction.

I did find one excellent live performance of Metroid music. It doesn't fit my theory because it's 1) not a medley, and 2) full of synths and electric guitars, but on the plus side it features composer Hip Tanaka himself--I think that's him on lead guitar. I guess that's pure upside, there.

PS: I declare the comments a place to link to or cite cool reinterpretations of video game music. I'll start with this well-known but awesome acoustic version of the Wind Waker title theme.

Maybe it's the clothes she wears
Or the way she combs her hair
That makes me want to tell her that I care

Yeah, it's probably one or the other.

I gotta say that, unlike Sumana, I've never been a huge Coulton fan. When it comes to nerd music I prefer the Front. I like about half of Coulton's songs but none with the intensity the fans last night showed. Plus, I hate going to concerts (I'm pretty sure the last concert concert I went to was this one.) And it didn't help that most of Coulton's songs are about the emotional state where you don't like going to concerts, so really what are you doing here?

But it was pretty fun, and Coulton's showmanship was excellent. ("This is my 'last' 'song!'" before engaging in the encore farce.) And afterwards we hung out with Andrew. And now it's the weekend, which I'll probably squander on useless stuff instead of laying out the anthology or anything productive.

A few years ago the twittering was about The 8bits of Christmas (that really does seem to be the best way to link to it; scroll down to "8bp038"). And this guy puts out a Christmas album every year. There's also this "8 Bit XMAS 2008" which actually comes on an NES cart. If you ask me the first two albums I linked to are the best, but nobody asks me these things.

Sumana listened to some of the music and said, "You won Christmas!"

A child, a child shivers in the cold
Let us bring him silver and gold

How about bringing him a blanket?

Since I just rattled off a bunch of drug names, and because these bondage socks make it look like I'm wearing long underwear under my shirt, let's talk a little more about Kurt Cobain. I've been thinking about what I wrote in the previous entry, about imagining Cobain as "still alive, sober, and washed-up". When I was in high school, after Cobain's suicide, there were a whole lot of poorly-written tribute poems and songs. In fact one of my better songs[0] started out as one of these awful songs, and I wasn't the only one in my school who tried his hand.

The songs are awful because what do you say? Cobain, like David Foster Wallace, was a bright guy whose very brightness and success fed into his personal demons, and in the end he wasn't strong enough to fight them off. No matter how good an idea you think you have of this dynamic, if you're around to write a song about it you've probably got only a fuzzy idea. So maybe the key is to write what you do know: life with its disappointments and ARM PAIN.

[0] The song is Vertigo (here's an MP3). The story is that an artist named Sandow Birk did an oil painting called "The Death of Kurt Cobain", which you can find if you search for it but I gotta warn you it's a gruesome painting. Also I remember the perspective being different, more of a 3/4 view from above, but the Internet proves me wrong, and also tells me that Sandow Birk did "In Smog and Thunder". Anyway, I saw this painting in an art book when I was seventeen and the detail I couldn't get out of my head was that Cobain's teeth are scattered all over the floor. Or something that looks like teeth--I never look too closely, because like I said, gruesome.

That detail made it into a song, but even then I knew that tribute songs/paintings were cheesy and in bad taste, so I made up a fictional character and told a story about her. I've been coy about "Vertigo" on this site before, but this is the real dope. Brought to you by ARM PAIN.

Sat Oct 25 2008 [Dreamtime] It Can't Be!: Kurt Cobain looks so young!

Yeah, dream-self, I checked, and he does. I'm older than Cobain was when he died, and I've barely revitalized rock 'n' roll at all. On the plus side, I managed not to kill myself. If only Cobain were still alive, sober, and washed-up, my age cohort would have less complicated self-esteem issues right about now.

The second weblog entry was about a very interesting family I met in-dream, but since they don't really exist it's better for everyone that I don't remember it.

I think one important aspect of badness is irreducibility. A bad thing with something good about it is generally not as bad as the same thing with the good part removed. "The Most Unwanted Song" contains many different aspects (each disliked by lots of people), and they're not all combined into one piece but arranged in a "Fingertips"-like series of mini-songs. This raises the possibility that any given person will like part of the song, effectively carving out a smaller song that they like. I believe this is what happened, and this is why the reaction to the song is more positive than you'd expect from the parameters of the experiment.

I decompose TMUS into three major songs. Let's call them "Opera Rap", "Frank Zappa Goes to Town", and "Kids Can't Sing". Only the third song is really unredeemably bad. I was enjoying the song until around the 9 minute mark when "Kids Can't Sing" started in earnest. If the song had stopped there it would have been pretty good and not particularly Unwanted.

"Frank Zappa Goes to Town" is a series of decent Zappa-esque noisefests, I can see how some people could take or leave it. But "Opera Rap" is really excellent. There's something genuinely beautiful about hearing a soprano sing to a rap meter. And just as the cowboy-themed lyrics start to get old she busts out a verse about Wittgenstein. Really, you wouldn't write those lyrics unless you wanted to hold people's attention.

So the problem, and I think this may have been the point of the project, is that badness comes from hackwork and not from a bad choice of attributes. Songs about cowboys aren't bad per se; they tend to be bad because many people like songs about cowboys so much they suspend their critical faculties. Commercial jingles and elevator music are bad because they're forced on you: the people who wanted the song to be created don't consider themselves part of the audience. Children's songs tend to be bad for the same reason, and also children haven't developed their critical faculties yet.

If you ask people what they don't like in a song they'll give you a bunch of heuristics, but treating those heuristics as constraints won't give you a bad song because constraints are a spur to creativity, bane of hackwork. At Viable Paradise I had to write a story in the genre I most hated. I wrote a bodice-ripping vampire romance that's really embarrassing but it's a pretty good story with some emotional depth. I don't like vampire stories or romance stories because I think there's a lot of hackwork there and it's not worth it to me to filter it out. But given those things as constraints I can work within them. (Actually now that I think about it, I should have written a novelization of a movie, because I hate those even more.) TMUS is bad not where it deploys some genre or instrument that everybody hates, but where it feels like hackwork.

This is also why "The Most Wanted Song", while listenable, is not very good. People are more similar in their likes than in their dislikes. The heuristics were too close together, which made it very easy to crank out some hackwork. It's much more difficult to come up with a good smooth-jazz love duet than to come up with a good operatic rap about the profession of cowboy. That fact probably surprises a fair number of people but I doubt many of them read this weblog.

As always, Jake's music comes highly recommended and is unjustly obscure. I've got an extra copy of Foreign Policy somewhere actually, which I should give to someone.

Bonus: if you grab a copy of Ordem E Progresso, you'll get "susanna's webpage", the only song that's fan fiction about my sister's weblog.

No reliable information has survived about this band. I think they were local to Linnette, who lived in Massachusetts, I think, or somewhere in the East with a lot of trees, I guess because where else would an elf live? And the band may have opened for TMBG at one point. I've been low-key searching for information about this band for fifteen years, and although the amount of data I can search has grown by orders of magnitude this information is never in the pile. So I'm taking the first step and hoping someone attaches another piece eventually. And if not, you can at least enjoy the songs. Also it would be cool to hear from Linnette again if she reads this.

Disappointing update #1: Andy sez, "Wow, I'd completely forgotten about that tape, those mystery tunes, and their supplier! I think the original tape melted in my old VW."

Non-disappointing update #2: Caleb Wilson identifies the musician as Brian Dewan! The songs are from an EP put out by John Flansburgh's Hello Recording Club. Andy says, "The Internet saves the day again!"

Then today I discovered the ancient Eastern art of origami. Tom Hull devised instructions for folding an 8.5"x11" sheet of paper into a closable jewelcase, and there's a web application that lets you print customized cases with the folding lines marked so you don't have to guesstimate distances.

And I retain plane tickets, snapshots, receipts,
yet I stand unconvinced that this has happened to me.

In those lines near the end, MC Frontalot compares the Infocom feelies to the fake documents from "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale". Both attempts to add realism to an experience you didn't actually have.

Then I'll have enough stuff to release a little album, pretty much ten years to the day since the release of Nowhere Standard Time. (I don't know when exactly it was, as NYCB archives don't go back that far and July 1997 is missing from my mail archive. It doesn't matter. Stop tearing apart your ARCHIVE directory looking for the exact date, me. PS: I was still working on it on 7/14. That's as close as I got.

Speaking of NST: before she went to commune with the cabbages, Sumana bunched up the video I shot on my California trip (most of it shot by accident), and turned it into a music video for NST's "Relativity". It's the all-time second Google Video You Can Bruise. Enjoy it, if you can.

Where will the trail of improvisation lead next? Ninjas? Robots? Some other nerdy role-play?

Today's cool thing is Ruby's midilib, the... wait for it... Ruby interface to MIDI files. I did a recipe that shows how to visualize data as a MIDI file, and how to compose algorithmic music (sample composition).

While learning about midilib I came up with an observation about MIDI, which is that it's good for accurately representing what happens when you play a real instrument. It's kind of frustrating and unnormalized if you need to programatically compose music. I ended up taking a tip from the excellent MIDI Scripter project, and showing how to write a little wrapper on top of midilib that makes composition easier.

The experience gave me a huge number of ideas for musical programming projects. With my near-total lack of theoretical training, I will be unencumbered by traditional notions of "harmony" and "taste". For one, I plan to get into fractal music, though probably not the way the author of that web page defines it. Hard to tell, with that color scheme.

But Foreign Policy demonstrates Jake and his guitar and the rain alone in his bedroom and not even sounding as high-quality as stuff I've done that people ribbed me about afterwards. Leading me to believe that these seemingly artless recordings are actually microsecond samples of ambient noise, twisted into an approximation of the Berendan vocal cords like the Guns 'n' Roses Self-Similar Midi Synth. Just as the song lyrics have been constructed from the shattered hopes of people who asked the web for something and got Jake Berendes instead. Each song fulfils a search request while giving the listener the feeling that they have failed to find something.

Songs to watch out for as they climb the pop charts: "jla dreamer", "history of sour candy", "old lamborghinis", and the Matthew Barney-esque "synchromaids".

Sometimes they get married and everything's fine. Sometimes they get married but then eaten by a fish or a heron or a cat. Sometimes they get eaten in the sixth verse for no real reason. It's like a probability distribution of all the different ways the lives of the frog and mouse could end up. They probably got eaten, but I prefer the versions where they don't. Cause having them get eaten just seems like

I'm tired of singing this song to you, mm-hmm
I'm tired of singing this song to you, mm-hmm
I'm tired of singing this song to you
They all got eaten by a bird, and away it flew
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, the end

Especially when it happens in the sixth verse.

You don't see this much anymore. I'm actually kind of glad, because I think those songs are generally pretty lousy. From a memetics standpoint, I do like the idea of a song just being an advertisement for some accessory to the song.

[0] Maybe earlier, too? I can't think of any jazz era dances that correspond to specific songs.

In non-meta recommendation engine discoveries, HobbySpace "seeks to show that everyone can participate in space exploration and development in one way or another."

However, I think the food is pretty bad. I had a tamale which in retrospect felt like just a big chunk of lard, and I was not happy because I ate lard. The menu said you could get the tamale with chile, which I misread as saying you could get it with chili, and I was very excited until my tamale came with a line of red sauce down the middle, dashing my hopes of a Doe's-esque tamale. It also came with black beans, which were pretty lackluster despite having intermingled onion slices; spanish-rice-tasting basmati rice, which was very good, and the generic California Random Greens Salad that makes you think you're having a fancy dinner.

I had cocoa which, as happens in some restaurants, wasn't sweet at all; it's like they make the traditional Aztec cocoa and you have to dump in a bunch of sugar from the sugar container to make it taste like cocoa, and you feel un-hip. But hey, that's me to a T.

The signature dessert was rice pudding; I didn't have any because I'm trying to get rid of this peach cobbler in my fridge, but it's probably good. My verdict: come for the atmosphere, leave for the atmosphere.

Unfortunately it's hard to arrange for synths music originally written for different synths, so there's some unneccessary ornamentation in the tape tracks. Example: this version of the Metroid intro makes it feel like the opening music to a Jerry Bruckheimer film, rather than the creepy civilization-overrun-by-weeds dirge that fits in with the game. And there's a weird tooty synth patch that I'd only previously heard in actual video games trying to be cute. It's not cute, guys.

Incidentally, in addition to having the coolest NES game music, Kid Icarus and Metroid used the same game engine and were released on the same day. Metroid became a huge hit and remains a Nintendo cash cow; Kid Icarus, like its namesake, plummeted to a watery death. I certainly appreciate the greatness of Metroid, but sometimes I wonder what the world would be like it things had happened the other way around.

I almost said Jake's program worked in a Dissociated Press fashion. It doesn't, but I bet that would sound really neat. You could turn a music library into an insane never-ending medley by analyzing the waveforms, finding smooth transitions, and pasting together one-second chunks.

I was going to do a minor NewsBruiser release tonight, but it misbehaves really badly when you install it on Python 2.3, so I'll do it tomorrow.

Anyway, on one of the trips coming back from Bakersfield, what should be beamed down from the XM satellite but a song called "Cool Off", by New Orleans ensemble Galactic. It was nice, funky, jazzy. But it just went on and on. For minutes! And there were no words.

I don't know how much you know about me, random weblog reader, but I've got to have words with my music. When there are no words, I get cranky and I skip the track or change the station, or I start just making up words and belting them out. In this case the beat was groovin', so I made up words and had impromptu karaoke.

I was in me a boat crash
I crashed into the shore
Flew out of the cockpit
I wasn't drivin' that boat no more

Chorus:
You better cool off, cool off daddy,
Cool off daddy-O.
Cool off, cool off daddy,
Cool off daddy-O.

I was in me a chess match
Moved knight to queen's rook three
My opponent got angry
Started beatin' the tar out of me
He said:

Chorus:
"My name is Kulov, Kulov, daddy,
Kulov, daddy-O.
Kulov, world chess champion,
Kulov, daddy-O."

I was down me in Bolivia
Said some things made some people upset
That's when they pushed me against the wall
Offered me a last cigarette
I said:

Chorus:
You better cool off, &c.

Eventually the guy on the recording started thanking everyone for coming out tonight, so I assume the song was the last track on a live album and its purpose was to "cool off" the audience after a hot jam session. My words are still king, though.

Confidential to Jake: let me know if you're interested in laying down some jazz mix for my goofy lyrics, and I'll send you a vocal track. Think of it as like "What's A Godly Person?", except I know you're doing it.

The new theory is that the hippie Muppet is trying to communicate with the Snowths, but the only thing he can get across in their language is the phrase "Manahmanah", a context-free friendly expression that translates roughly to "Hey hey!" So the lyrics of the song, translated, go something like this:

Hey hey! (It's good to see you)
Hey hey! (I said it's good)
Hey hey! (It's good to see you, to see you, to see you, it really is a good thing that you came)

Then the hippie Muppet whips out his Advanced Snowth and starts talking about how lovely the Snowth country is, and asking where are the most beautiful landscapes, and they can't understand a word he's saying.

Perl farm woman. I'll cast you to array. Perl farm woman. Cast you to scalar too. Perl farm woman. Don't you know I'll cast to hash... hash!

I realized this while trying to find "Finnegan's Wake" (Google: 'Did you mean: "finnegans wake"'), the song that provides part of the the narrative structure for Finnegans Wake. It turns out to be a nineteenth-century American vaudeville song [Lyrics and music]. Even stack was surprised by this fact. Speaking of stack, here's his take on the matter:

There's loads of 'comic' songs -- alot written recently... but their authenticity is questionable being paddies singing about an idealized paddy (loads of drinking, working the bog, afraid o the women)...

Shaw has a character in john bull's other island that is a take on the 'stage Irishman'... There is an old irish novel, knocknagow, written by a man who was a member of an antecedant of the ira, the irb (should be the other way round says you) who took piss out of 'stage irish' mid 18th c (if i have my dates right).

As for actual songs, stack says he can't think of any in English, but "I know there'd be a legion in original irish." This reinforces my hypothesis of immigrant authorship.

Will there be rainbows, day after day?

No! There will not be rainbows, day after day! Que sera, sera, my eye!

(Not originally a pop song, but there was a pop version on one of Rachel's CDs, so it is fair game.)

For weeks I've been meaning to make fun of the poster for Bad Boys 2 where Will Smith has his arms stretched out like Christ crucified, but I can't find a picture of it anywhere.

John Brown's body lies a-moulderin' in the grave
John Brown's body lies a-moulderin' in the grave
John Brown's body lies a-moulderin' in the grave
A-moulderin' in the grave

Chorus:

Moulderin', moulderin', moulderin' moulderin'
Moulderin', moulderin', moulderin' moulderin'
(etc.)

• Pictures of random old goods from the 1950s, to be auctioned.
• Covers of records of the cast-off sort I used to buy and keep around despite not having a record player.
• Bad covers of old comic books. Awful cover aside, "Chaplains At War" could be interesting; sort of a "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition" thing. Probably wishful thinking. There's also the greatest comic book covers of all time, but who wants to read about the good and the beautiful? (link from Todd)

TSG has their own commentary on each rider, and how can you not agree with the analysis "All hail Foo Fighters"? FF's rider is Berendian in parts: "**Dearest reader-This rider is comprised of the things that make the band rock you like a proverbial hurricane!".

The common-denominator corporate beneficiary of all these riders: the Solo Cup Company.

Am I the only one this happens to? The only one who talks about it on their weblog?

Example (this happened to me just now):

Then I saw her face
Now I'm a subscriber!

How often at night when the heavens are bright
With the light from the glittering stars,
Have I stood here amazed and asked as I gazed
If their glory exceeds that of ours.

That doesn't even make sense! "If their glory exceeds that of ours?" What does that mean? "If their glory exceeds the glory of our glory?" How about "If their glory exceeds even ours."?

Cracklib Rosie, get on board...

• The new Nirvana compilation: a big rip-off. I know, what did I expect? I expected to exchange the gift certificate I got for Christmas for a CD, and that's pretty much what happened. The liner notes feature unreadable, aggrandizing blab, which is probably par for the course. To my ear the remastered songs sound no different from the originals, though I was listening to them with my lame car stereo. "You Know You're Right" is not very good. Instead, they should have had the guts to put on the album my favorite Nirvana bootleg, "Gallons Of Rubbing Alcohol Flow Through The Strip".
• No!, by They Might Be Giants. Fun songs; "Fibber Island", "Four Of Two", "The House At The Top Of A Tree", etc. Some duds, but let's not dwell on those. This CD would probably make a good supplement to other collections of children's songs, since it tells children about edge conditions not properly addressed in other songs (measurements can be inaccurate, authority can be abused, etc.). At least that's what it tells me it tells children.
• The Producers. I just watched this with Sumana, and it's very funny. The characters have amusing idiosyncracies which would kill the movie if any one character's were dwelt on for too long (the comedy graveyard is strewn with such movies), but it switched between characters fast enough to avoid problems, and was also pretty short. Only a couple of dull parts; almost every scene was full of amusing bits. Among other things: the goofy fake 60s flower-power song aged well, I think; it sounds pretty good now. Sumana made the point (paraphrased): "They mocked it, because they didn't know what was coming next."

• Oy To The World!: Fun, pretty much what you'd expect (though I didn't expect the surf music break in Little Drummer Boy).
• There Is Nothing Left To Lose, by the Foo Fighters. Starts out rockin', then gets bogged down in boring ballads (though some of the ballads are good, and some of the bad ones have good lines). What happened, Dave?
• Action Packed: The Best Of Jonathan Richman: A Kevin recommendation. Fun, peppy gospel-tinged rock songs. I don't like Jonathan's singing voice, but the songs are well-written and enjoyable.

Well, I've got some food in me, so it's back on the road.

OTTW! is the first CD in my playlist of new CDs for my Bakersfield trip. I find driving incredibly boring, and whenever I go down to Bakersfield I have to get some new CDs to distract me, or I am slowly driven insane by the vastness of I-5, which I am convinced is an enormous, serpentine H.P. Lovecraft monster in disguise. I kind of went overboard this time: I bought about 10 CDs, and then Kevin bought me some jazz so that at the drop of a hat I'd be able to say "Ah, Brubeck." and act sophisticated, and then what with the klezmer and all it got out of control (I'm sure you all know how this feels).

[0] Whenever I hear that some person or group of people is "Chicago-based" or "Los Angeles-based" I think that it's like "soy-based" or "carbon-based" and they are actually made out of the city in question. Which I guess is true, if you count the food as being part of the city.

I've got ninety thousand pounds in my pajamas
I've got fourty thousand Euros in my fridge
I've got lots of lovely Euros
Now the Euro's getting dearer
And my dollar bills would buy the Brooklyn Bridge

• Is it just me, or are Heart-Shaped Box and All Apologies the two worst songs on In Utero? Why on earth did they choose those as the singles? (I know, I know, because they sounded like singles.) Maybe they're not actually bad but I just got sick of hearing them on the radio throughout my high school years.
• What's up with Elvis Costello's songs? I can't put my finger on it. It's like they're all in some weird time signature, but they're not.

They say in Harlan County, there are no neutrals there
You'll either be a union man or a thug for J.H. Blair

Either J.H. Blair is a union man (unlikely), he is a thug for himself (bizarre, counterintuitive), or he never enters Harlan County (bizarre but possible). Or the song should be rewritten like so:

They say in Harlan County, there are no neutrals there
You'll either be a union man, a thug for J.H. Blair, or J.H. Blair himself

The great Mass in B Minor could not be played at all during Bach's lifetime: a Latin mass was not possible in a Protestant church, and at that time a performance with an orchestra was banned in Catholic churches.

Brilliant.

School starts tomorrow. I better get a schedule page up so I don't miss classes.

This is my official yummy homepage until sampo comes back. I didn't think Andy would move sampo, but there you go. Andy Schile had a plaid dealy, it was mealy, but touchy-feely. That's my theme song for Andy, sung to the tune of the "Andy Devine had a thong rind, it was divine, but the wrong kind" part of Frank Zappa's Andy. Speaking of Zappa, I got Joe's Garage and Strictly Commercial at the CD Exchange in San Antonio. I also got the Goldberg variations and some old English choral songs, but that's not speaking of Zappa.

Speaking of not speaking of Zappa, my grades are in.

• Survey of Roman civilization: A
• CS design lab of horrors: A-
• Logic design of digital systems: B+
• Statistics: B

That's around a 3.5, which is my best quarter in a while.

Okay, okay, I'd better get started on all my stuff. I have to write Segfault code, write idea base code for the LUG, write slides for my class, and write up my huge travelog complete with dadaist observations on billboards and such, and with wacky lists I compiled on the trip such as lists of apostrophe errors and roadkill.

I want to write a song about a rebellion against UPC codes and other forms of classification, a rebellion which inevitably ends in disaster. It's all part of my post-OMP!(25K-4)YOPPO (will I never finish that?) fantasy, the second in my Porcelain Puppy trilogy, Porcelain Puppy Versus Demon Dog. It will be all (mostly) about confusing the subjective and the objective. I have more songs about that than you'd think.

Oh yeah, there's also another big thing, but I'm not going to write about it until I talk to Adam and Kris about it. Oh, it's huge, it's immense. I'm surprised I haven't started obsessing about it. Wait, I just did.

    This is not a good sign, as I always get songs stuck in my head while I'm taking midterms and finals. And they're not relaxing songs, either. Once I had the part of the Animaniacs theme song that goes "We are the Warner Brothers and the Warner Sister Dot...now you know the plot" repeating over and over again. AAAAARGH!

     Speaking of finals, here is my revised schedule:

Task	Date
Physics final	20 hours
Engineering 95 report	22 hours
Math 61 final	37 hours
Math 33 final	64 hours

    So the time to panic is now, pretty much. However, in 23 hours I will be mostly free, and in 64 hours I will be completely free, for better or for worse.

    OK, I gotta go study magnetism now. I hope to be able to get at least 4 hours of sleep tonight.

    I don't know why the server was down. I'll find out eventually.