Dr. Laura's Family Values

Heliocentrism is an Atheist Doctrine

Andrew Bird walks the streets of Paris, playing, singing, whistling - a free concert for anyone who wants to walk along with him. Great stuff.

Oh how I wish he'd come to NC.

New records this month from Sea And Cake, Dino Jr., and Wilco. Elliot Smith even manages to assemble a new one from the great beyond. What a magical month!

Update:
First listens:
Sea And Cake - Everybody *sigh*. They've lost the electronics that they'd really gotten into for the last couple of records, but the songs just aren't there. Sam Prekop sings the same lyrics in the same way, just like he always does - I'd almost given up on him do anything else - but the band just isn't grabbing me anymore. Oh well. I'll always have Nassau and The Biz.

Wilco - Sky Blue Sky This is great. 3/4 through and it's already my favorite record of the year. Pretty bold characterization... hope the feeling lasts. "I've Got a Million Things That I'd Rather Do / Than To Play Rock n Roll For You".

Dinosaur Jr. - Beyond I like it much better than Green Mind and whatever that one after Green Mind was. It feels more like a band, and less like a J solo project. It's like 1990 all over again.

Elliot Smith - New Moon These are the things that didn't make it onto any of his other records - demos, alternate versions, etc.. They're almost uniformly bleak - sometimes strikingly so. He sings about addiction, death and the expectations he couldn't meet, as he always did, but these are much more raw, unpolished, direct. Ouch. There's a surprising, and damned fine cover of Big Star's Thirteen, too. "I Got Nothing That I Want To Do / More Than Make Another Sordid 'Fuck You' To Play"

In the middle of this very interesting article about Jonathan Coulton, a musician making a living by selling his music on-line, is this paragraph about musician as entrepreneur and self-promoter:

Will the Internet change the type of person who becomes a musician or writer? It's possible to see these online trends as Darwinian pressures that will inevitably produce a new breed — call it an Artist 2.0 — and mark the end of the artist as a sensitive, bohemian soul who shuns the spotlight. In “The Catcher in the Rye,” J. D. Salinger wrote about how reading a good book makes you want to call up the author and chat with him, which neatly predicted the modern online urge; but Salinger, a committed recluse, wouldn't last a minute in this confessional new world. Neither would, say, Margo Timmins of the Cowboy Junkies, a singer who was initially so intimidated by a crowd that she would sit facing the back of the stage. What happens to art when people like that are chased away?

And yet, the Cowboy Junkies run their own website, message board, record label and book publishing arm. Margo spent so much time promoting all this stuff between songs that my wife said it got a little "tacky" - and she had a point: there was a lot of promotion from the stage; more than I'd ever heard before. But, that's understandable because they're doing it all themselves these days: no big record company. Near the end of the show Friday night, Margo even announced that she was going to meet people out in the lobby afterwards, and if anyone wanted to stop by and say Hi - we passed, because the lobby was totally jammed with people waiting to meet her, when we got there. She might have been shy back when they started out, but these days, she's out there selling it.

Nonetheless, it's an interesting article.

(via)

Man accidentally shoots himself without a gun:

Damion M. Mosher, who put bullets in a vise and whacked them with a hammer to empty the brass shell casings, was hit in the abdomen by one of the shots, authorities said.

This was in Lake Luzerne, NY, just a few minutes from my hometown.

We used to take bullets from Jimmy's dad and throw them against walls. Or, sometimes we'd saw shotgun shells in half to get at the sweet sweet powder. We weren't trying to get brass for scrap, though - we just liked to blow shit up. Throwing cigarette lighters, tubes of model glue and model rocket engines into fires was always fun, too.

Der Dolchstoss

Because Microsoft can't make printer sharing work right between Vista and XP, I bought a new HP networked all-in-one printer. Among its many amazing features, it apparently has the ability to automatically uninstall its own drivers, without requiring any interaction on my part - *poof* the drivers are gone. All you need to do is put Vista into stand-by, then wake it up again, a couple of times. Maybe you need to let Vista sleep on its own. Who knows. However it does this, it's pretty amazing.

Now I'm wondering if it has the ability to put itself back in the box and get itself to Office Depot for a refund...

This is the Heinkel He 219:

It was a very capable German WWII night fighter. Somehow, there is only one of these left on earth, and it's in pieces in a hangar, at the National Air And Space Museum.

I Has a Sweet Potato