Cannibal, table for one

Uncomfortable Words

Great Sports Photography

Let's do some top-of-the-head reviews!

• Return Of the Grievous Angel - Tribute to Gram Parsons. I've had this for years, but every time a song from it pops up on the iPod, I'm amazed at how great it all is. Except that Cowboy Junkies song.
• The Futureheads - News and Tributes. Meh.. It's short on the edge that made the first record fun, going instead for more elaborate harmonies and sweeter chord progressions.
• Adrian Belew - Side Three. Less heavy on the electronica than Side Two, more like traditional Belew solo stuff. Les Claypool (Primus) and Robert Fripp stop by.
• The Good, The Bad and The Queen - The Good, The Bad and The Queen. I don't know what this is all about, because I haven't played close enough attention. But I like it superficially. Reminds me of British Sea Power - maybe it shouldn't.
• Beulah - When Your Heartstrings Break. Lo-fi psychedelic pop, in a kind of Apples In Stereo vibe. Nice enough.
• Andrew Bird - Weather Systems. A little more introspective than his Mysterious Production Of Eggs record, yet still good. Too bad he's not playing within 400 miles of my house... would love to see him.
• Eagles of Death Metal - Death By Sexy / Peace Love Death Metal. There's no real difference between the two records. It's the White Stripes guitar/vox/drums vibe but instead of the blues worship, it's a sometimes-silly garage rock explosion.
• No Knife - Fire In The City Of The Automatons. Not as catchy as their Riot For Romance, but still fairly interesting - angular Belew/Crimson-scented alterna-post-punk-pop ?
• Pavement - Wowee Zowee reissue. A bunch of interesting outtakes and b-sides, and a bunch of live stuff that makes me appreciate their studio stuff more - does Spiral's mic have to be so loud?

Kilty Monroe

The awesome Dylan Hears A Who parody/tribute collection has been shut down at the insistence of Dr. Seuss Enterprises.

The iPod had just pulled up a parody-Dylan and a real Dylan back-to-back - I had to concentrate to tell if the real one was really real - and I was going to tell you all (both of you) about how you needed to rush over and get a copy of this amazing work.

But now you can't.
Green eggs and ham.

Mmm... pizza

Hey check out the awesome new sound system in my fancy new Dell computer! It's so fancy that it provides no way to play, through the speakers, what the line-in jack is receiving. Every other computer I've ever owned, the signal from the line-in jack feeds right into the speakers - though it's subject to muting and volume adjustments. Not this one, apparently - but Vista is full of little surprises. So, I poked around for a while, assuming it was controlled by yet another hidden checkbox in Vista's twisty little maze of setup screens. But, I gave up after a while, and started an on-line chat with Dell tech-support...

Abjhit, the helpful Dell technician, spent 30 minutes remotely controlling my computer from the other side of the world, before telling me "you should have purchased the upgraded sound card".

Oh yeah? You should've put that on your website.

In America, the "football field" (ex. the new Airbus jet has wings wider than a football field) is a standard unit of distance. In the rest of the world, they use non-standard "football pitch" (ex. the new Airbus jet has wings wider than a football pitch). Very handy. Well now we now have the "day of MP3 music" as a unit of hard disk space:

When stored in highly compressed form on a computer hard drive, the solution [to the 'Lie group E8' math puzzle] takes up as much space as 45 days of continuous music in MP3 format.

They don't mention the compression ratio, the encoder, or the type of music - so there's bound to be confusion over exactly how large that is. Nonetheless, I'm sure it's an impressive feat. How impressive?

"It's like a Mount Everest of mathematical structures they've climbed now," said Brian Conrey, director of the institute.

Ah, yes, one Mt Everest: the standard unit of difficulty.

Pass the wine. I want to become crazy