Do you hate that Windows Update "Updates Completed. Restart Now?" message that pops up every ten minutes ? This fixes it.

Hey buddy, ya wanna play some Cornhole ?

8,500 fucking songs in iTunes. 8,500 songs.

Weekdays, I come home from work and I have to make dinner, and sometimes I like a little music in the background to keep me from dwelling too much on the shit rattling around in my head at the end of the day. So, I crank up the laptop, and tell iTunes to shuffle those 8,500 fucking songs. Well, fine - but a bunch of those songs are things like Sonic Youth's Bad Moon Rising, which I can only listen to if the stars are aligned just right; or lame-ass latter-day Van Halen albums that I know I'll never listen to, but got in a batch deal along with all their early stuff, and I can't bear to delete cause what if someone comes over really wants to hear Poundcake; or they're from a half-dozen crappy Doors bootlegs; or a bunch of my own stupid stuff that I'll never play for anyone else, but keep archived just 'cause; or mothafukkin You Can't Always Get What You Want, which I never want to hear again, ever, but shows up on a half-dozen different Stones' records, and iTunes doesn't give you a way to share individual songs between albums so I gotta keep six copies, if I want to preserve the albums' structures; or the annoying little turds bands smear between real songs (Haha, Unrest and your Volume Reference Tone song, good one). I don't want to hear any of that crap. I need a filter.

iTunes allows you to make playlists, of course. But to me, that defeats the point of shuffle. If I wanted to manually choose what I wanted to hear, I'd just go ahead and do that. Maybe what iTunes needs is a way to mark songs with a flag that says: "when I choose Shuffle, never play this song." That would help a lot - I could build anti-lists to filter out crap I don't want to hear after work, or to filter crap I don't want to hear if I'm on the back porch drinking beers with friends, or to filter crap I don't want to hear if I'm washing my car in the driveway. But, iTunes doesn't have that feature. [Edit: it does have that feature. You may stop reading now] [Edit #2: but, you can only apply that option to one song at a time - no multi-select or by-album allowed. sigh]

So, I'm stuck with playlists. I could make a special "Cooking with Cleek" playlist, but again: manually choosing is the opposite of random (yes, I know manually choosing which to exclude is logically equivalent to choosing which to include - but I'm assuming I'll have far fewer things to exclude than include). iTunes also has something called "Smart Playlists", which let you sift and sort through your Most Frequently Played lists, through your song ratings, etc.. I rarely pick individual songs, so Most Frequent is out. And I don't rate things, so that's out too. Or is it... ? No, it's not. Friday, I started rating songs on the iPod at work. I hear 120 songs on the iPod in a typical work day - so that means it would it something like 2.5 months to rate all the songs that way. But, you can also rate them en masse in iTunes. So, I've started doing that, too. Someday, I'll have all those 8,500 fucking songs "rated" on a scale of 1 to 5 stars.

Stars? The concept of 1-5 "stars" brings up some questions:

• When I rate a song, what criteria am I using? Sometimes I hear a song and think, yes, this song speaks to me, 4 stars; or, this is fucking annoying, 1 star. Or, is this a good song for a dinner party (i.e. Will other people like this ?)
• Should my criteria stay consistent ? If so, doesn't that mean the ratings only apply to the situation I was envisioning when I applied the rating? If I rate according to "good for the back porch" metric, do those ratings mean anything anywhere else?
• Likewise, is a 3-star song a 3-star song in every situation ? Brahms is fine when I'm cooking dinner - play that 3-star concerto for piano and viola , baby. But if I'm hanging out on the porch drinking beers with friends, Brahms isn't the right music now. You only get to give one rating, though, so yes, a 3-star song is always a 3-star song. But it's clearly not. Do I smell a paradox?
• Have I over-thought this whole thing?

Yes, this is the kind of thing I spend my day thinking about. And then I write it out like anyone else wants to hear about it. What a dick. Kill me now.

You can learn all about George Washington, in this informative video.

... that Mick Fleetwood and John McVie [a.k.a. Fleetwood Mac's rhythm section] play drums and bass, respectively, on Warren Zevon's "Werewolves of London" ?

Well, now you know.

Yes, of course it's important to know your thirty-year-old music trivia! Didn't your momma raise you right?

Back in 88, I went to visit my father in Holland, where he was teaching English as part of a teacher's exchange program. I stayed three weeks. Great place. I'd love to go back. One of the things I remembered, in addition to the mayo on their fries, the great beer, and the lack of drinking age, was the shape of Dutch toilets. Unlike every other toilet I'd seen where there's a deep bowl filled, to some level, with clean water, Dutch toilets had a small bowl in the front, and a large, flat shelf taking up the rest of the space. I always assumed it was some half-baked water-saving idea. Turns out, the shelf has other uses.