BrockLi Soup

Holy crap I’m slacking. It’s been damn near four months since I’ve posted one of these, so this is going to be an abridged version.

January

At some point, I got The Weepies’ Say I Am You, a very mellow, folksy indie rock album that I listened to non-stop for about a week.

The last weekend in January, I was wandering around DC and protesting the war with a bunch of people. We stopped into a Starbucks, I grabbed the Decemberists’ The Crane Wife, and quickly fell in love with it. I haven’t listened to it much lately, but it got a lot of play in February and March. Plus, I actually bought the physical CD - isn’t that quaint?

The New Pornographers figured in there prominently as well.

February

I spent the first week of February in the SF Bay area, and while I was there, I picked up Kaiser Chiefs’ Employment (again, the actual CD!) and listened to it a whole bunch - mostly because I had heard Ruby on Ethel (on the flight there, no less!) and it was stuck in my head all week. I managed to find that MP3 and listened to it dozens of times while I was there. A couple weeks later, I got Yours Truly Angry Mob when it came out, and earlier this month, I got to see them live. They’ve been in rotation since early February.

Around the same time, I heard about Rautakoura, the Finnish bluegrass band, thanks to Boing Boing.

March

St. Paddy’s Day and Shamrockfest were upon us, so Flogging Molly and Dropkick Muphys got a lot of action.

Flogging Molly released the Complete Control Sessions EP (only on iTunes, I think), so I got the Float and Requiem for a Dying Song singles.

Later in the month, I got the Street Dogs’ Fading American Dream after catching a song or two during their Shamrockfest set. They’re a lot like Dropkick Murphys - no coincidence, really, since the lead singer sang for Dropkick before leaving to be a firemen, before leaving to be a musician again. Similar musical style, more working-class pro-union liberal lyrics.

April

Lucky Boys Confusion made a comeback earlier this month, probably by accident. I particularly like the song Atari.

Jonathon Coulton sauntered in for a while with Code Monkey and Re: Your Brains.

And this week, it’s been all about Arcade Fire. Somebody somewhere linked to a video of them playing in a freight elevator, and I knew I had to have it. I got Neon Bible, listened to it a few times, and began to understand why people had been raving about them for the past couple years. I did pick up Funeral after that, but I still like Neon Bible better, particularly Black Mirror, Intervention, and above all, No Cars Go. I feel like I’ve known them forever.

I’ve also been on a comedy kick for the past month or two, so Eddie Izzard’s Unrepeatable, Jim Gaffigan’s Beyond the Pale, and a Henry Rollins album (I can’t remember which one) have been repeated far more than such things should be repeated, and excessive quoting has resulted.

So that’s most of the music and spoken word I’ve been listening to. Sooner or later, I’ll get around to posting about the podcasts I’ve been listening to lately. Be patient.

This evening I went to see Fracture with the Sunday Night Film Club (though it was less “club” and more “me and Brian”). It was alright, but not good enough to warrant a second viewing.

But that’s not the important part. The important part is that one of the previews was for Hairspary, with John Travolta playing the role of the mother.

No, seriously.

I turned to Brian and asked, “What the hell happened to Travolta’s career?”

And I think he summed it up nicely: “Scientology.”

So, how much was in the bucket?

Honestly, friends, I’m a little disappointed in some of you. Most of you guys were WAY off, and granted, you only had a picture to guess from and couldn’t actually lift the bucket, but I gave you measurements and everything! I think Pete’s was the most reasoned response, with the coins per square inch calculations, but he was still 25% off.

The value of the bucket was $101.43, making Katie the winner with a guess of $100. Katie, you may collect your hug at any time (oh by the way, I decided that instead of giving away the money, I’d use some of it to get some Chinese and see a movie. They were delicious and entertaining, in that order).

Jonson and Heewa, I suppose you may also collect hugs, but mostly just because I like hugs. No anal.

(Another old, unfinished entry from July 11, 2005. I’m not sure where I was going with this, so I haven’t changed it.)

Whatever happened to the idealism of childhood? As one comedian (whose name I’ve forgotten) put it, “why isn’t this a room full of firemen and ballerinas?” Kids don’t like going to the doctor, so why do so many say that’s what they want to be when they grow up?

Children seem to have an innate sense of responsibility for the public good. When does the human decency fade away? At some point, everyone is stricken with cynicism and becomes jaded with the world around them.

I love driving down some of the back roads near home and seeing stands at the road with fresh vegetables and a money jar. In some places, people can still rely on the honesty of others without being ripped off. Some people still believe that people are good and won’t take advantage of others at the first opportunity.

(Another old, unpublished post from April 4, 2005. Didn’t change anything.)

One of the books I’ve been in the middle of for weeks is Fear and Loathing in America, vol 2, by Hunter S. Thompson. It’s a collection of letters he wrote between 1968 and 1976 to “a virtual who’s who of the era.”

No one writes letters these days. No one uses typewriters. The immediacy of desktop publishing and e-mail has taken something away from the meaning of the written word. Will our generation leave behind letters to be found in the attic by our grandchildren in 40 or 50 years? Unlikely.

(I found this list in my unpublished entries. I wrote it almost two years ago, on May 4, 2005)

• Skydive.
• Get a motorcycle and a license to drive it (halfway done!).
• Buy a house (I think I’ve decided against that).
• Have a kid (or maybe more, depending on how the first one turns out).
• Quit smoking (haven’t had one in two weeks!).
• Write a book (maybe I’ll try NaNoWriMo again this year).

I’ve been tossing all my change into this 2-gallon bucket for the past year and a half, give or take. Once in a while, I’d pull out a few quarters to get a soda from the machine, but since our laundry room doesn’t use coins, it hadn’t been pillaged for quarters.

The bucket is 9.5 inches across, and the coins were about 1.25 inches deep. According to Google, that’s about 88 cubic inches of coins.

I took it down to the bank today and poured it all in their machine. Care to guess how much it was? Whoever is closest wins it all. Or maybe a hug, I haven’t decided yet. I’ll post the winner tomorrow or Monday.

Also, figure out where this penny came from, and you can have that too. Here’s the Queen’s backside (teehee).

Have you ever woken up and thought, “Crap, I need to get up for work! How many times have I hit snooze?” Then you roll over and see it’s only 1:40, and you’re not even halfway through all the sleeping? That happened to me last night. It was awesome.

I also dreamt of iminlikewithyou.com. Is that worse than dreaming of Twitter?

I’ve recently started using Tumblr, which lies somewhere between a full-blown blog and Twitter. I like it because it sort of fills in this middle ground - there are plenty of times when I want to jot down a thought, but it’s more than Twitter’s 140 character limit and not enough to bother writing a blog post around. Tumblr allows for regular blog-style posts, but it also specially handles photos, videos, quotes, links, and conversations. Furthermore, you can import feeds as any one of those types. So, for example, my Flickr photos are pulled in and displayed nicely, my Twitters are included as text posts, and any time I tag links with “tumblr” on del.icio.us, they appear as links. And, it colorizes conversations and displays quotes in…well, in a quote-y manner. Here, look at this one, and you’ll see what I mean.

I don’t think anyone is actually following mine, and that’s fine with me. I still haven’t read Getting Things Done, but I hear that the important part is making a note of things you think of so you don’t feel like you have to remember it, so you can get to thinking about other stuff. In that respect, Tumblr works well for me: I can paste in AIM conversations that I know I’ll enjoy reading later, or include a quote from a book that I really like. It doesn’t matter too much if other people are reading it, because I’m using it to store stuff that I want to see again later.

Of course, you’re welcome to enjoy it too.

Friends: I need a good way to keep track of my contacts - phone numbers, addresses, web sites, things like that. I’m not too fond of Address Book or Outlook, and really, I’d prefer something web-based so I can get to it anywhere. I considered buying a cheap Palm (or equivalent), but don’t really want to spend money, or carry another device, or have a single fail-point.

Anyone know a site that’s free, reliable, and won’t sell my friends to spammers?