When you tell people what you plan to do, it increases your motivation to follow-through. Therefore, I’m telling you that I’m going to follow this so I can run this.

I ran it two years ago, and got my ass kicked. I skipped the next year, because I wasn’t running at the time; but I felt bummed about it because the race takes place in our neighborhood and I saw people who could barely walk but were nonetheless out there doing it, while I loafed.

I haven’t run since October, after a third strained calf muscle in a month knocked my enthusiasm for running to zero. But, it’s time to get back out there.

I still haven’t yet decided if it will be shoes or no shoes – no shoes is still enticing, but I never strained a calf running in shoes. Whatever I decide, I’m going to run this hilly, early morning, get beat by 13 year old girls, wife is still asleep and the cats can’t wave from the porch even if they wanted to, race.

This I declare.

Matador has released the list for their Pavement comp, and has announced the winners of the guess-the-tracklist contest.

The list is… odd. Out of 23 songs, there is only one song from their last record, “Terror Twilight”, and only two from “Wowee Zowee”. While the former is pretty widely considered to be their weakest record, it definitely has more than one strong song; and the latter is one of their best records, with plenty of good songs to choose from. Instead, Matador took five songs each from “Slanted and Enchanted” and “Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain”. While those are admittedly their two best records, focusing so closely on them gives a distorted picture of Pavement’s overall career – which is what I thought the point of the compilation was. At least that’s the impression I got from the description Matador used when they announced the comp. Now obviously Matador wants to sell records, so they want to load the Best Of with as many strong songs as they can both to encourage sales of the comp itself, and to entice people who buy the comp to go buy the back catalog. But I’m not sure their list is the optimal for either of those goals.

But, never mind me. I’m just cranky ’cause my list didn’t win. :)

Via The Consumerist:

Florida Highway Patrol troopers say a two-vehicle crash Tuesday at Mile Marker 21 on Cudjoe Key was caused by a 37-year-old woman driver who was shaving her bikini area while her ex-husband took the wheel from the passenger seat.

“She said she was meeting her boyfriend in Key West and wanted to be ready for the visit,” Trooper Gary Dunick said.

The whole shaving-while-driving this is truly awesome, but I just can’t get past the ex-husband part.

Dude. WTF?

Ever heard of ascorbic acid? It is better known as “vitamin C”. Ever wonder what “ascorbic” means ?

Here’s a hint in the form of a question: what disease is vitamin C famously known for preventing? A hint within a hint: sailors who spent long times at sea without fresh fruit or vegetables (though even fresh meat can prevent it) used to get this disease.

That’s right: scurvy.

And, so ascorbic acid is the acid which prevents scurvy. If the scientists who discovered it were inclined to use English names, it could’ve been called ascurvic acid. Instead, they went with the Latin root of “scurvy”, “scorbutus”.

For more on vitamin C and scurvy, go read more about scurvy and how the cure was discovered, then lost, then discovered again.

My first official iPod Start Your iPod since May!

1. Wilco – Dark Neon
2. Spoon – Everything Hits At Once
3. Mazzy Star – She’s My Baby
4. Liz Phair – Alice Springs
5. Radiohead – All I Need
6. Big Star – Stroke It Noel
7. Sea And Cake – Magic Step
8. Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks – We Can’t Help You
9. Bill Monroe, et al – Gotta Travel On
10. Spoon – Don’t Buy The Realistic

It’s nice being back on the iPod, where I’ve hand-picked each album it holds. A shuffle doesn’t bring up any of the C-list stuff that lives in the full iTunes collection!

No, really – it actually is exciting to me. I’m easily amused.

30

Elliott Smith 1998 XO He was the king of bittersweet-(or just bitter, sometimes)-but-beautiful pop songs, and this album is full of them. It’s a bigger and richer album than his previous ones – with more of a full band sound and fewer numbers with just Smith and his guitar. And normally, I prefer records where the musician has abandoned the band, and is delivering the songs as minimally and directly as possible (ex. Robyn Hitckcock, Joni Mitchell, Nick Drake, etc.). But I think Smith’s songs benefit from the added depth. His solo-acoustic stuff is a bit repetitive; he falls back on steady eighth-note strumming a bit too often, for my tastes – giving him the benefit of the doubt, I assume he’s playing rhythm guitar behind a melodic lead that only he can hear. But with the band, all of those spots get filled in. And he, or his producer, was smart enough to not over-fill the arrangements. They’re big enough to stay interesting, but not so big that they overrun the song. Plus, “Waltz #2″ is the most tenacious earworm I’ve ever come across.

29

Liz Phair 1993 Exile In Guyville This is yet anther of those that I’ll go for years without listening to, maybe even thinking it probably wasn’t as good as I remembered, that it was just a phase. But once I get around to listening to it again, I can’t deny how great it is. The intervals between listens are getting longer, however. But, the strange song structures, the dissonance, the sharp, smart, dark and sarcastic lyrics, the spacey guitars – it was all odd then, and it’s still odd today, but it’s a smart and charming odd.

28

Nick Drake 1972 Pink Moon Unlike many of the records here, this is a final album. He finally got tired of the strings and horns that had weighed-down his earlier records (an opinion we share), and, except for a single piano overdub on one song, did this one without accompaniment of any kind – and he recorded it in less than four hours. Sadly, he died of an overdose of anti-depressants before he could finish another record, so this was his last. It’s dark, raw, melancholy but beautiful. It’s just his sleepy voice, his incredible guitar playing, 11 haunted folk-ish songs, 28 minutes. What a way to go out.

27

Pink Floyd 1971 Meddle A relaxed and, at times, playful, record from Mr Floyd. It doesn’t try to be big, as all subsequent Floyd records do. There’s no central theme or concept tying it all together. It’s just a bunch of nicely done Floyd songs – in which, you can hear the seeds of things that would show up on “Dark Side Of The Moon”, sure. So, you can tell in hindsight where they were going. But, it’s nice on its own. Ah.

26

My Bloody Valentine 1991 Loveless There’s no theme here, either. It’s just looped drums and a guitar haze with voices floating around inside it all. Well, that’s not all it is. It’s also loud with beautiful psychedelic melodies and sheets of screeching dissonance, and it’s intentional – you can tell that there’s nothing accidental about any of the noises swirling around inside this. This is a well-crafted, finely de-tuned, mess.

25

Peter Gabriel 1986 So Now here’s a nostalgic one. I don’t know if I’ve listened to this all the way through in a decade. But, just hearing one or two of the songs is enough to remind me of 1986, and of how amazing this record was to me (and everyone else, it seemed), at the time. And how cool were the videos for “Sledgehammer” and “Big Time” ?! Very cool, is how cool. Since I was really into King Crimson, at the time, it was also very cool for me hearing that distinct Tony Levin bass/stick sound in the bottom-end.

24

The Shins 2003 Chutes Too Narrow Of all the The Shins records, this is the shortest, and the punchiest. It has their catchiest songs, and their fastest songs. It’s their least-cluttered, and their sharpest. It’s their best.

23

Pink Floyd 1977 Animals This one is the sound of riding the Greyhound bus from Rochester to Albany, winter 1988, looking out the window, watching the Mohawk river slide by. Cold, dark, lonely. Your mileage may vary.

22

Bob Dylan 1965 Highway 61 Revisited It’s wild and exuberant, swirling with Dylan’s surreal free-association lyrics and spiked with Mike Bloomfield’s raw electric guitar licks. Most of it sounds like a party.

21

Pink Floyd 1973 Dark Side Of The Moon I started out thinking “The more I listen to this, the more I find myself liking the second side better because that’s where most of the songs are.” Then, I went to verify that, and realized that the sound collages – the clocks, airplanes, running, twiddling synthesizers, etc. – don’t really take up much of the record. They’re interstitial, intros, etc.. And they’re only extraneous if you’re thinking about the first side as a collection of separate songs, and not as parts of the great tapestry Pink Floyd wove them into. And if I was to discount the entire first side because it’s not as song-oriented, I’d miss out on the actual songs: “Breathe”, “Time”, and perhaps my favorite Floyd song ever, “That Great Gig In The Sky”. So, yes, side two is great – “Money”, “Us And Them”, “Brain Damage”, etc. – but, so is side one. Maybe side one’s even better.

Every histo tells a story, don’t it:

Thanks to Michael Ruhlman, I have discovered the magic of gremolata. What’s that? It’s basically a chimichurri without oil or vinegar. What’s a chimichurri ? It’s like pesto without pine nuts or parmesan.

In other words, a gremolata is an herb (typically parsley), lemon zest and raw garlic (in a 3:2:1 ratio), all finely chopped, then mixed. You can put it on hearty beef/veal/lamb dishes – Ruhlman used it with braised short ribs, I put it on a grilled sirloin last night. It works on fish, too. It’s strong stuff – raw garlic and lemon zest have a lot to say – so you need something rich and flavorful to put it on. But it’s tasty. And dead-simple to make.

All hail the gremolata !

So, it turns out this “job” thing is eating up all my time. I wake up, rush off to the “job”. I leave the “job” and get home just in time to cook, eat and watch a couple of episodes of Lost (they’re better cooked). Then it’s right to bed so I can get up and do it all again the next day.

This doesn’t seem like a good way to live.