Mexico may be about to do just that.

Wow.

The Lonely Planet Guide To My Apartment, at The New Yorker.

EXCURSIONS

A short trip in almost any direction will bring travellers to one of many unique Starbucks outlets. Or try one of the nightly walking tours to the sidewalk in front of the brownstone across the street to watch that redhead getting out of the shower with her curtains open. And tourists are often sent around the corner to visit the A.T.M. machine in order to stock up for the rigorous financial demands of a trip to My Apartment.

If you're at all interested in songwriting, I encourage you to go read the Anatomy Of A Song at bobby lightfoot and the orchestra of sweet regret. Right now, he's on part 9. But, dig around a little on his site and start at the beginning. It's a fascinating look into the way some people write and record songs.

And then there's this bit from part #6:

The little voice inside insists that the entire exercise is futile and will provide nothing of value, simply another lovely bauble to reside on a shelf. While this is likely true we do not let such thoughts stay our hand. We remind ourselves that beauty is an end in itself and that creativity is a divine energy. We remind ourselves that the gift of talent is to be enjoyed greedily, sensually, and that it is, like all that is sensual, a thing of the moment. We do not disparage the talent. And above all other concerns, we remind ourself that we are a machine of the universe, designed to take in carbon and process it into beauty. A mill does not question the validity of grain; a printing press does not question the worth of books and we do not pretend to understand our place in the scheme. We simply appreciate that it is good to occupy it and that it is a priviledge and a gift of unimpeachable generosity.

Steve's Beatles Page can tell you things you never knew about Beatles' songs. For example, in "I Want You (She's So Heavy)", at 3m, 37s there's a "Fluffed bass note"; and at 2m, 47s in "Ticket to Ride", the "First bass note in double time ending is quite sharp"; and in "Norweigan Wood", from 2:01 to 2:08, the "song slows from 118 bpm to 109 bpm, and stays like that."

I checked a few of them and was surprised I'd never heard them before; they can be pretty obvious.

Recently, my McAfee anti-virus installation has been telling me that there's a new update to download every time I log-in to my computer; the auto-update thing wakes up, goes to the net and discoveres it needs to update itself. So I let it download and update, and everything is fine - until I log-in again, when it tells me ther are new updates available. It's been happening non-stop for days - too frequent to be actual updates, in my estimation. So, I got on a web chat with McAfee tech support and told them I thought something was wrong. After a few minutes of silly questions from the tech person, he hit upon a solution: disable automatic updates.

Yes, I guess that will probably stop the auto-update from telling me there are new updates to download. Thanks so much, "Michael" with the lousy English.

So, yeah. Here's the new place. I've been thrashing around trying to find a theme that I like that can handle posts with images 500 pixels wide. Most are too narrow, and fall apart when you try to tweak the .CSS to make the main column wide enough. Then there are those that are wide enough but can't be rendered by both Firefox and IE. Then there are those that are simple enough to be able to withstand modification, simple enough to be rendered correctly by those two browsers, but are just plain or just plain ugly. For now, I'm going with simple and plain. Maybe I can find a nice photo-blog theme somewhere someday.

WordPress is nice (it even imported all my Blogger posts and comments!), but I sure do miss being able to use the "BlogThis" button on the Google Toolbar...

Oh yeah, if you want to comment, your first comment has to be approved (aka "moderated") by me. All comments after that should go through without intervention - it's a WordPress anti-spam thing.

... and like the vast majority of the uncountable number of stars, nobody will ever see this one.

Since Blogger was dead for most of the morning, I decided to waste some time looking at alternative blogging options. I installed a copy of WordPress on the site I use to hold the images for Cleek, and started to configure it. Looks pretty good. It's definitely more powerful than Blogger, and I like the idea of having the whole application under my control - unchanging unless I change it myself, unlike Blogger and it's constant upgrade/breakage cycle. And, after Blogger's extended downtime today, I like the idea of having it on my own servers, for reliability - I know how important this site is to you, my handful of occasional readers.

But then blogger came back up. And then my other site died - not just my site, but the whole server, and all their other servers, including the one that hosts my business site, and the helpdesk site, and the main page for the hosting company. Poof, gone. That's why all my pictures are gone right now...

So much for that theory.

I still might do the move.

OMG OMG OMG! A list! A music list!

Respectful Insolence shows us Q Magazine's "The 50 Worst Albums Ever":

1. Duran Duran - Thank You
2. Spice Girls - All Their Solo Albums!
3. Various - Urban Renewal: The Songs Of Phil Collins
4. Lou Reed - Metal Machine Music
5. Billy Idol - Cyberpunk
6. Naomi Campbell - Babywoman
7. Kevin Rowland - My Beauty
8. Mick Jagger - Primitive Cool
9. Westlife - Allow Us To Be Frank
10. Tim Machine - Tin Machine Ii
11. Limp Bizkit - Chocolate Starfish And The Hot Dog Flavored Water
12. Tom Jones - Mr Jones
13. Bruce Willis - The Return Of Bruno
14. Terence Trent Diabolical - Neither Fish Nor Flesh
15. Various - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band - OST
16. Spice Girls - Forever
17. Bob Dylan & The Grateful Dead - Dylan And The Dead
18. Crazy Frog - Crazy Hits
19. Goldie - Saturnz Return
20. Mariah Cary - Glitter OST
21. The Clash - Cut The Crap
22. Robson & Jerome - Robson & Jerome
23. Alanis Morissette - Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie
24. Lauryn Hill - MTV Unpugged 2.0
25. The Cranberries - To The Faithful Departed
26. Vanilla Ice - Hard To Swallow
27. Destiny's Child - Destiny Fulfilled
28. The Rolling Stones - Dirty Work
29. Various - Christmas In The Stars: Star Wars Christmas Album
30. Michael Jackson - Invincible
31. Stevie Wonder - Woman In Red
32. Ace Of Bass - The Sign
33. Billy Ray Cyrus - Some Gave All
34. Fishspooner - #1
35. Puff Daddy - Forever
36. Kula Shaker - Peanuts, Pigs & Astronauts
37. Shania Twain - Come On Over
38. Chris Rea - The Road To Hell Pt2
39. Big Country - Undercover
40. The Others - The Others
41. Paul Simon - Songs From The Capeman OST
42. Babylon Zoo - The Boy With The X-Ray Eyes
43. The Travelling Wilburys - Vol 3
44. Kiss - Music From The Elder
45. William Shatner - The Transformed Man
46. Oasis - Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants
47. Ozzy Osbourne - Under Cover
48. Milli Vanilli - All Or Nothing
49. Neil Young And The Shocking Pinks - Everybody's Rocking
50. Beck - Midnight Vultures

I suspect the theme of that is really "Bad albums from otherwise decent big name artists, and some novelties". Obviously, you could find some horrors in the discount bin at any record store that would make anything up there look good.

The only one of those I own is Beck's Midnight Vultures, but I own (or have owned) dozens of records that are far worse than it.

Scot at Izzle! Izzle pfaff! muses about flying to Utah. In the middle, he writes:

It doesn't help that I'm going to fucking Utah, the boxy state that fails even in its geometric imperative towards Platonic boxiness. This is a state that got out-rhomboided by Wyoming, for Christ's sake. WYOMING! Here's a gerund of a state, which is just pathetic, and yet it eats Utah's Platonic lunch.

Counting the five dollar words, that's a $30 paragraph - in my estimation. Not only that, I fucking love it. I wish I thought myself capable of coming up with a phrase like "a gerund of a state". Damn you Scot. Damn you all to Utah.