ok-cleek

One in a million

Calpundit wonders about the mechanics of the TV romance shows like The Bachelorette. I’ll quote 75% of his post, here:

The draw of these shows is obviously their romantic lure: we get to watch in astonishing detail while a couple falls in love. But doesn’t the format of the show make it a little too obvious just how mechanical the whole affair is? After all, on every single one of these shows, all you have to do is give the guy/gal 25 members of the opposite sex for a few weeks and bingo! With almost computerlike precision they fall deeply in love with at least one of the contestants — and usually with two or three of them.

How is it possible to retain our fantasies about the ineffable and mysterious qualities of love under these circumstances? Or our common notion that the people we choose as our mates are one in a million? Why does this all-too-obvious refutation of romance nonetheless seem romantic?

Excellent question. I won’t touch it.

Hippity

After ripping 150 or so CDs to my iPod, I have a collection of some 1700+ songs. That’s a lot: 4.5 days or something. I’ve always been a album-oriented listener, not a single-oriented listener, so on the iPod I just scroll through the Artist / Album listing and find an album I want to play. Albums are listed alphabetically, so my A Tribe Called Quest albums are always at the top of the list. This got me to thinking…

Is there any hip-hop out there that compares favorably to ATCQ ?

I have a couple of Beastie Boys CDs and I like them, too. I liked Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet, back in the day. But that’s about it. I’ve tried a bunch of other stuff here and there over the years, but I’ve never found anything that eschews the blatant mysogeny, macho chest-thumping and silly bling-bling materialism that most popular hip-hop relies on. I’m not a dance/party music kindof guy, so all the Wave Your Hands In The Air stuff doesn’t do it for me. I DL’d the Gray Album but it hasn’t done anything for me; compared to ATCQ, JayZee sounds monotone and uninspired, and hearing the White Album all chopped-up in the background just makes me want to hear the real White Album. What I’ve heard of Eminem on the radio is clever and impressive, but it doesn’t really make me want to buy the whole album. And, the All Music Guide, which I consider about 70% accurate calls ATCQ’s The Low End Theory “perhaps the best hip-hop LP of all time” – am I doomed to disappoinment because I started at the peak?

So… I want to be down wit it but I don’t know where it is.

Take off your skin

ClosetMonster has a large gallery of Photoshopped images of women taking off their skin to reveal the robot/monster/whatever underneath. Apparently it’s a fetish…

Many of the images I saw were pornographic, so you might want to avoid opening this at work. Very strange stuff.

Via SomethingAwful.

Whaaaa??

The Daily Show last night was tres strange. After an opening segment where Stewart did his usual stuff (mock Bush, mock the Dems, mock the weather in Idaho, etc.), he had right-wing author John Podhoretz on for a book-promotion/interview. Podhoretz has just come out with a book that attempts to set the record straight about Bush – how he’s a great guy who misunderstood by those evil liberals, “Bush Country: How Dubya Became a Great President While Driving Liberals Insane” is the title. (yeah yeah, blah blah blah).

So, Stewart is in his fair and balanced mode, talking past the book and trying to get at the heart of why politics is so polarized and viscious these days, giving Podhoretz a hard time because the right gave us 8 years of bat-shit crazy Clinton bashing in the 90’s and how nothing’s changed but the direction of the hatred these days, so why is the right surprised, etc.. Podhoretz is saying that this book tries to clear up a bunch of myths about Bush (Bush isn’t a moron, he’s not a lightweight, he’s not a racist or crazy, etc.) and in the process he makes a few statements praising Bush, and the audience giggled, snickered and outright laughed at him. Bush is not worshipped by Daily Show audiences, or by the Daily Show writers, so this was nothing unusual; every Daily Show episode is full of jokes that mock Bush (and other politicians), and they usually get big laughs, except when they cross the line into just plain mean and the audience gets squeamish.

What was unusual was that Stewart started pooh-poohing the audience for laughing at things that, had he said them, would have been jokes. When Podhoretz said something like “Bush is doing something revolutionary by making the country and the world safe for Americans and their interests”, the audience snickered. If Stewart had said the same thing, the audience would’ve snickered too. But Stewart began acting disgusted and condescending towards the audience; and as the interview went on, he started saying that the general public is stupid and that his audience is a bunch of stoned “hippies” and how they’re examples of the mindless political polaraization that’s wrecking public discourse, blah blah blah. Yes, he often makes fun of the audience, but this time it didn’t seem like a sly wink, it seemed more like an apology to his guest.

If Stewart is disgusted by the state of political discourse, maybe he should find a job where he’s not making fun of politics and politicians every night ? Even if he does go after both left and right (not equally, but close), his job is to make politicians and world events seem silly, trivial and worthy of mockery. If he wants to do a serious talk show, maybe he needs to get a job on one of the Sunday AM shows.

Very strange. Maybe I’ll watch the replay tonight to see if I just misunderstood Stewart’s reaction.

Scripture, Religion, and Mainstream Music

Interesting list over at Dappled Things: songs that reference the Bible, Catholic liturgy or other Judeo-Christian sources.

I sent him two I could think of off the top of my head:

Pavement / Baptiss Blacktick : “I’m just waiting waiting for the baptist / that sad suck-off left me in Damascus”. John the Baptist, of course.

Cassandra Wilson / Solomon Sang : “Vanity and precious stones / Weigh you down just the same / But when he lay down with Mekeda / Solomon sang”. All about King Solomon, of course.

Via Charles Murtaugh.

myPod!

OK, so the trick is… if you’re using a USB connection to your iPod dock, don’t plug it into a USB hub! I don’t know if the documentation mentions this or not. I had to go to the Apple tech support forums to find it out. You’d think for the money, they’d put a sticker on the USB cable that tells you about this ?

But, now that it’s not on the hub and is going directly to one of the on-board USB ports, I’m transferring songs no problem: 700 down, 600 to go (that’s 3.5 days worth of music) – and that will only take up 1/3 of it. Wow!

Yes, all the songs are legal.

Yay!