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"Special favors come in 31 flavors. We're out of mints, pass the life savers." -- Violent Femmes Prove My Love |
For some time I have limited the width of images on my blog to 500 pixels:
But these days, computer resolution is such that I can probably expand:
On the other hand, people reading blogs on littler screens (like phones and such) might have trouble if I go too wide.
So what say you, readers? What are you reading this on, and how do the above images look?
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There was much consternation on Twitter yesterday when news came that a much-revered and influential work was going to be re-examined in a way that made its fans distraught. I speak of course, of the decision to re-issue Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark without its famed horrific artwork by Steven Gammell.
The truth is, I know about this book and its artwork only second-hand. For some reason, I never read these, which is probably good, because I was a bok-bok-chicken when I was a kid, especially afraid of the supernatural (though I naturally was drawn to such stories.)
However, I got a similar dosage from a different book, one I often checked out and pored over, and which also terrified me with its frightening artwork (done in a similar style). It was called Monster Tales: Vampires, Werewolves, and Things, and it was an anthology edited by Roger Elwood.
All the talk of SStTitD reminded me of this book and I did a Google search. It wasn’t easy, since all I remembered about it was the title of one story, “Precious Bodily Fluids”, and that’s a phrase with a bit of other history. Still, with a bit of Google-fu I was able to locate someone else’s blog post about it, complete with scans of the artwork that gave me dozens of heebies interspersed with jeebies.
Turns out to be a pretty good testament to what a scaredy-cat I was, because Franz Altschuler’s pictures aren’t that scary (certainly not as bad as the Gammell ones I’ve seen, although the style is similar). The stories I remember spooking me the most were the aforementioned “Precious Bodily Fluids” and “The Vrkolak”. The images, courtesy of that blog, that got to me the most are this one from “The Vrkolak”:
and this one from “Wendigo’s Child”:
Mild stuff. Now I want to track down a copy of Scary Stories!
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The Susan G. Komen Foundation — source of all that pink stuff that moves a little bit of money towards fighting breast cancer — has withdrawn its grants to Planned Parenthood, money that went towards breast exams. Komen says this is because of an investigation that anti-abortion Republicans in Congress are doing into Planned Parenthood. The investigation hasn’t been done yet, and there’s no evidence that what they want to find (government money used to fund abortions) will be found, but that’s enough for Komen to pull the plug on vital funds.
It’s probably not a coincidence that the Foundation’s Senior Vice President for Public Policy is Karen Handel, a “pro-life” conservative who’s had it in for Planned Parenthood for some time. And it’s also been a problem for Komen that idiot “pro-life” groups have them on no-fly lists because of their contributions to Planned Parenthood. This is a way for Komen to get some of that sweet sweet Christian cash.
As usual, “pro-life” refers solely to fetuses, not to mothers, women, babies, or children. Pregnant? Don’t you dare get an abortion because life is sacred but after the kid’s born, get bent. Pay for pre-natal care for the child we’re making you have? Ha, don’t be ridiculous. Don’t like it, don’t get pregnant, and by the way we’re also trying to ban contraceptives and actual useful sex ed.
It’s tempting to look at this as just another day in the Republican Party, making sure women are nothing but breeding machines, but honestly, that’s just lagniappe. This is all about taking down all social services. It’s another step towards ensuring that health and security are only for the wealthy (and whomsoever they choose to bestow it upon) and that being poor and sick is simply a sign of your moral failings.
It also continues the constant mission of the Republican Party: ensuring cheap labor. As I keep saying, the current level of unemployment is not a problem for Corporate America, it’s a solution. Planned Parenthood’s crime is not just providing abortions (a very small percentage of what it does) but providing health care in general to poor people. If poor people want mammograms or pap smears they can go get a job which will provide them with whatever the cheapest health care their employer will pay for and still dig in for ever-rising co-payments, assuming the job doesn’t cut them off at 39 hours a week so they’re not “full time” and thus ineligible for such magnanimous gestures. But we’ll still need you to come in off the clock this week to help out with inventory — don’t like it, there’s the door.
You cannot pretend to care about the health of women and do something like this. Planned Parenthood represents many women’s only access to any kind of preventative health care. It’s a disgraceful move on Komen’s part.
There are other groups fighting cancer that would like to have your money, but why not help out more by donating straight to Planned Parenthood? In fact, you can make a gift in honor of someone else here, and they’ll send an acknowledgement to someone. Someone like, for example, Susan G. Komen, 5005 LBJ Freeway, Dallas, TX, 75244. Just sayin.
(Credit to Mr. Bryant Paul Johnson for this post’s title.)
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Now there’s mini-mall-ist movie posters!
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Previous: The Cool New Music Chronicles: You’ll Never See Jesus Doing This
As I said before, there aren’t many changes, story-wise, from here on out. For me, January of 2005 wasn’t overly different from January of 2004.
I apologize for this anti-climactic turn of events.
This mix (and the previous one) appears on my blog here.
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There’s a LOT of KEXP stuff here. More importantly, there’s some stuff here that went on to become some of my favorite music of the decade.
Yes, yes, I’m a sucker for some of U2′s more egregious pop.
I don’t think I heard of this band from KEXP. I started following music blogs at this point and it’s possible I heard about them from one of those.
Heard on the radio, downloaded. I don’t much like this song anymore.
We were getting Paste magazine at this point, but I had grown tired of its singer-songwriter-folk-rock angle. This song, though, from one of their sampler CDs, amused me.
Another KEXP band that eventually became a favorite. This album, We Shall All Be Healed, is one of my favorites.
I like this song a lot, but nothing else of theirs has done a damn thing for me.
I really don’t have much patience for the Tweemo of Elliot Smith and his ilk, but I like this song well enough.
Remember my friend Dan? This is his band! He wrote this and is singing it! At the time they were called Audio Ninja, but they later became Social X-Ray. I’m not just including this because he’s a pal; I really dig the song.
As much as I love Bleed American (and, to a lesser extent, Clarity), their follow-ups just lost me. This is actually an earlier song, I think.
Nothing much to say about these. They’re followups from previous albums or bands.
I know I heard this song on a music blog and loved it. I sampled a few other songs of theirs and this was the only one I really liked. Eventually I would just grab songs and not worry about if there were any others by that band I liked.
Nellie McKay’s debut double album would have made a great single album. There’s a lot of clever stuff on it, but a lot of it is not nearly as clever as it seems to think. I don’t think either of us was much blown away by the follow-up, another double album.
Dan introduced us to these guys, and we ended up seeing them perform in Northampton. The album this is from, Underneath the Radio is pretty good, if you like this tune.
Another one from the Garden State soundtrack.
These are all KEXP bands.
This WOULD have been just another KEXP band, except for the album he was about to release.
Becky got hipped to this, and I like a lot of it fine, but most of it is a bit too showtuney to me, meaning that it sounds like songs excerpted from musicals, which I can take some of, but not one after another.
I loved the TCS’s Cake album way back when, but hadn’t followed them much since then, having found the followup to be disappointing. This release, Weightlifting, was much praised as a return to form for the band, but once again I was just not blown away.
From the Collateral soundtrack, yeah.
I had heard about Smoosh somewhere, this crazy band made up from two little girls who rocked the hell out of it. The music did not disappoint.
I was just as surprised as anyone when I started hearing that Green Day was a band we were now supposed to take seriously, but damn if I wasn’t impressed by American Idiot.
Cake finally followed up the amazing Comfort Eagle with Pressure Chief which, perhaps inevitably, was a bit of a disappointment. A lot of the energy seemed to be missing, though the songs aren’t bad.
I listened to this song about a dozen times trying to figure out if I liked it or not. I eventually decided I did. The rest of the album wasn’t bad, but wore out its welcome pretty quickly.
It took me a few listens to really appreciate this album, but once I did, it blew me away. This is possibly my vote for best album of the decade.
And here’s Matthew Sweet, still plugging away. The guy may not be as notable as he used to, but he can still put out a fine pop song.
Here’s the story of the title. We were out at karaoke night, looking for a song to sing. We came across a song called something like, “You Can’t Surprise Jesus” and Becky said, “You’ll never see Jesus doing this:” and then made a “surprised” face. We laughed ourselves silly. It’s possible we’d been drinking.
This is another early cover, which explains the no-frills nature of it, but I actually like the front. The back is boring, though.
Click on the player below to listen to this mix!
Unity Games, which I missed last year, is taking place on Feb 4! That’s less than a week away!
This year I decided not to enter games in the Math Trade and go straight to the auction. I wanted to get stuff gone, and didn’t really need to replace it with other stuff at the moment. Here’s the stuff I’ve already sold so far (the auction doesn’t end until Wednesday, and I have only two items that don’t yet have bids).
I’ve pulled in over $200 so far — it may be closer to $250 now — and have only bid on one item in the auction, so that’s a nice profit, as well as some space cleared.
---Next: The Cool New Music Chronicles: You’ll Never See Jesus Doing This
Gather round, children, and Old Man Lartigue will tell you a story set in the distant past of 2004. In that year a new web service made its debut, called Gmail. It was exciting and revolutionary in many ways, and soon became the standard that other email services sought to copy. It had a bunch of nifty features, but there was one it didn’t have: a delete button.
Sure, there was a way, buried behind a menu or two, that you could delete an email, but at the time there was nothing right up front that allowed this. Google’s reason for this was, “Why would you want to?” Since they were giving you tons of space and a powerful search engine, they argued, there was no need to delete anything.
I don’t know when they gave in and finally put a delete button on the main screen, but it wasn’t too long afterwards.
Can you imagine keeping everything you ever owned? Even if you had a living space big enough to comfortably store it all, and let’s say you had a robot butler who, given an accurate enough description, could locate an item somewhere in the house, what would be the point? I look at just my office and all the clutter and stuff in it and it’s overwhelming enough; I can’t imagine if it also included every single thing I’d ever owned.
We often hear about people with amazing memories and, though my wife would argue against this, I have a pretty good one myself, when it comes to some things. I know all the lyrics to hundreds of songs, some of which I haven’t heard in years, and some of which I don’t even like. I’ve discovered I remember a lot more about my middle- and high-school days than many of my peers who were also there, which includes a lot of embarrassing, miserable stuff I’d just as soon not be able to call to mind quickly and accurately. But there it is.
Forgetting — within reason; I still know how my mom died — can be a blessing. Getting rid of stuff, physical stuff, is often followed by an overwhelming sense of relief. We need our physical and mental spaces thinned out from time to time.
And yet…
I have two things that won’t let me do this. And they’re both related to the iPad. Cutting-edge technology with the same bizarre attitude that Google had back in 2004.
The first is the iPad itself. Every app I’ve ever bought (including apps I bought for free) is available to me. If I delete it from the iPad itself, I can still re-install it from “the cloud” (ugh) later on. Whether I want to or not. There’s no way that I’ve found to say, “Yes, I downloaded this, but it was terrible, I’ll never use it, and I never want to see it again. Make it go permanently away.” Because why would you want to? Why wouldn’t you want access to every single app that ever had an icon nifty-looking enough to make you hit “install app”? After all, if it’s not actually on my iPad taking up space, what’s the problem?
Here’s a screenshot:
If there were something in there I’d like to re-download, I only have to go through nearly 200 items to find it, and most of those 200 items are things I don’t ever want to see again. Hopefully I’d be able to remember the name of what I’m looking for but sadly, that portion of my brain is often tied up with keeping track of the second verse of “One Night in Bangkok”. I’d love to clear out most of this junk, but Apple sees no reason for me to do so.
Similarly, the comiXology app — which, don’t get me wrong, I love — also assumes I want to hang on to every single comic I’ve ever bought from them. This includes free ones and samples. I bought Grandville by Brian Talbot, so I no longer need access to the free Grandville preview comic, but I can’t make it go away. Again, I can make it be off my device, but it’s still going to hang around in my purchases forever. I bought a few things to try out, didn’t care for them, would like them completely gone, but that’s not possible. ComiXology is designed to delete older things you haven’t read in order to free up space for newer things, which is fine. I like that. But then when I want that older thing again, I get to wade through the longbox of history. I complained about this before and heard some noise about it being implemented, but so far it hasn’t been.
A friend suggests the reason might be that they’d rather deal with whiners like me, who want something that few other people care about, than people complaining about being “ripped off” because they permanently deleted something after being asked by six menus if they really for sure really wanted to do so. I think he’s right, and that’s a big part of it. But I think there’s also a healthy dose of “why would you want to?”, of people for whom having access to everything that ever was, no matter how unimportant or undeserving, is a feature, a desired thing.
Embrace the delete button, folks.
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