Behind the Music

With today's installment, I've done Friday Five 40 times now. I keep track of them on a spreadsheet - mainly to make sure I don't repeat songs, but also because sometimes it's fun to analyze data. For instance, the top ten artists by appearance:

#1: U2 (40)
#2: Barenaked Ladies (16)
#3 (tie): INXS, The Pogues, R.E.M., Sting/The Police (6)
#7 (tie): Creedence Clearwater Revival, David Bowie (5)
#9 (tie): Del Amitri, Lyle Lovett, Simon & Garfunkel (4)

There are 7 artists that have appeared 3 times. There are 12 artists that have appeared twice. There are 53 that have only come up once.

In the very first installment, I said that U2 comprised about 20% of my playlist. I thought I was exaggerating, but apparently not. Now I'm worried that I will run out of things to say about them soon. Other than the oddities tied for 7th (I really don't listen to CCR and Bowie all that much), it seems to be a pretty accurate reflection of my music collection.

Friday Five: 3/27

In which I blather about five songs randomly selected from my iPod playlist as I listen to them.

"Gay Bar" - Electric Six
Any song endorsed by the Viking Kittens can't be bad, right? OK, so it's something of a novelty song, but here's the deal - it's also a pretty kick-ass rock song. Also, it's incredibly infectious (don't click that link unless you want it in your head all day).

"Special" - Garbage
Garbage, I think, sounds an awful lot like U2 a lot of the time. Only with a hot redhead for a lead singer. And despite that, they kind of faded away.

"Sunday Bloody Sunday" - U2
Studio version from War. I used to have a down-tempo live version, but the sound quality was pretty crap so I dropped it from my playlist. What I would love to get is a quality recording of the version that was featured in Rattle and Hum (the movie). The "Ffuck the revolution" version. The anger and the urgency that they packed into that performance was goosebump-inducing.

"Angel of Harlem" - U2
So, speaking of Rattle and Hum, I know that it was derided in some circles as an attempt to appropriate American culture. Those are probably the cirlces that have a hate-on for anything U2 does, though. Cynicism didn't really seem to into into U2's songwriting/stage persona until the Achtung period. Sometimes a love letter to Billie Holiday really is just a love letter to Billie Holiday.

"Scarborough Fair/Canticle" - Simon & Garfunkel
I took me forever to realize that the two different vocal parts were entirely different songs. It's a really cool effect.

As In 'Slightly Better Than Mediocre'

Good news: all 4 of us were finally there for game night. Not as good news: we played Descent again.

I went into it this time with a better expectation of how the game would play, but it didn't stop it from getting rather tedious. Especially since Mike, as the Overlord, employed a brutally effective two-part strategy - concentrate all your attacks on the weakest hero, and do everything in your power to make the other heroes waste their turns. As a result, my character spent the entire game running in circles not accomplishing anything and Jay's character spent a lot of time respawning. Effective for getting the win; not effective for inspiring me to want to play again.

Afterwards, we played a couple of games of Bang!, in which I (as an outlaw both times) still wasn't able to accomplish a damn thing. In the first game, Jay had about the easiest victory as the renegade that I'd ever seen. I almost won posthumously the second game but sheriff Mike outlasted my fellow outlaw Matt for the win.


This week: role-playing?

News of the WTF

Did you hear Kenley Collins, everybody's least favorite designer from Season 5 of Project Runway, was arrested last week? For assaulting her (now ex-)fiance. With a cat.

WTF?!


Rejected titles for this post:
"I Don't Think That's What They Mean by Catfight"
something something "Fur Flying"
"I've Heard of Girls Using Their Pussy as a Weapon, but This Is Ridiculous."

Friday Five: 3/20

In which I blather about five songs randomly selected from my iPod playlist as I listen to them.

"I Fought the Law" - The Pogues
Live performance, although I have no idea from when or where. Shane MacGowan's vocals sell the song pretty well, but it is the punk accordion that really sets it over the top.

"The Times They Are A-Changin'" - Bob Dylan
As I understand it, this song is used to pretty good effect in the opening credits of Watchmen. I (GEEK HERESY ALERT!) haven't seen it yet to say for sure, though.

"Ex-Girlfriend" - No Doubt
It must kinda suck to be Tony Kanal (No Doubt bassist and Gwen Stefani ex-boyfriend). Your band gets to be popular, but every other song is about how terrible you are as a person.

"That Was Your Mother" - Paul Simon
It would figure that the only zydeco music I have is by a middle-aged white dude from New York City.

"Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" - Wham!
Wham! used to be a guilty pleasure of mine. but then I stopped feeling guilty about it. It's very good for what it is, even if what it is is bubble-gum pop.

A Modest (Sales) Proposal

I spent all day yesterday in a sales training class. In the 8 years that I've been here, this is the third exciting new method that will completely transform the way my office works that has been rolled out. Maybe fourth - they all tend to run together after a while.

The culmination of the day was giving a full presentation to your partner in front of the entire group. Since we were the last ones to go, by the time it was my turn I had spent the last 90 minutes listening to essentially the same script over and over again. So I went gonzo. Ludicrously over the top. If a salesman tried this spiel on me, I would laugh in his face.

They loved it.

I don't even know what to make of that.

Into Madness?

Three people for gaming again last Friday. This time Jay was the missing man. One of these days...

Mike recently acquired Descent (plus some of the expansions), so we broke that out. As expected, it played a lot like Doom, but with swords and wizards. Unfortunately, that means it also shares Doom's fundamental weakness - in attempting to hew so closely to the video game experience, it makes you wonder why you aren't just playing a video game.

There are two areas of game play that ended up bugging me that I think are linked. The first is that you are constantly in "encounter time," ie there is no time to stop and catch your breath after clearing a room. There is no reason to expect that there would be, other than the fact than that's how it works in pen-and-paper RPG dungeon crawls, but I did have that expectation. The second was the way in which characters can die and respawn. We won the scenario (the first one in the book, I believe) because one of Matt's characters kamikazeed the boss monster's lair, which he only did because we figured out we could probably afford to lose 3 whatever tokens.

Rather nakedly, both of these reminded me that the theme didn't matter - the skin was stripped away from the resource-management wireframe. The tension at the end of the game didn't came from seeing if the heroes could complete their quest before the giant overcame them. It came from determining if the 2 tokens in the 2-square wide map area could survive an attack from the 4-square based named threat so that on the next player turn the other 2 token could advance from the respawn point into attack position. Intellectually interesting, but not viscerally exciting.

I'm sure we'll probably play it again sometime. I'm sure it will go more smoothly as we become more familiar with the rules. But I'm also pretty sure that I'm glad I'm not the one who shelled out a bunch of money for it.

Friday Five: 3/13

In which I blather about five songs randomly selected from my iPod playlist as I listen to them.

"What You Need" - INXS
You don't hear a lot of saxophone in rock anymore. I wonder why that is?

"Geography" - The Judybats
"People will tell you what to do, where your head should be/ They don't tell me nothing I ain't already heard before/ Or better said/ We all want focus, we crave company/ But we're cross-eyed and punchdrunk from too much scenery/From our battles with geography."

"Fairytale of New York" - The Pogues
Widely acknowledged as the best Christmas song ever. Assuming "best" means most bitter and cynical. Worth a listen any time of year.

"Killing Me Softly With His Song" - Fugees
On one of those VH1 countdown shows, a (white) commentator said the reason white people really liked this song is because they could bob their heads and say "one time... two times" at appropriate intervals and feel cool. I think he may have been on to something.

"Twilight" - U2
Early track from Boy. It's amazing how well that album has held up over the years.

Ouch

If you didn't see the ritual sacrifice of Jim Cramer on last night's Daily Show, you've probably at least heard something about it by now. If you haven't, go watch it. It was brutal. At times, uncomfortably so. It wasn't as entertaining as Stewart's dismantling of Tucker Carlson on Crossfire, because Cramer in no way attempted to fight back. Or even, after a while, defend himself. As an expression of populist rage, I think Jon Stewart's rant about financiers playing games with people's retirements is going to find much wider purchase than Rick Santelli's "losers."

For all of his grovelling though, I have the sinking suspicion that Cramer will back to business as usual in two weeks, tops.

Friday Five: 3/6

In which I blather about five songs randomly selected from my iPod playlist as I listen to them.

"Don't Fence Me In" - David Byrne
Another selection from Red Hot + Blue. It has a really awesome blend of Graceland-esque percussion and western swing fiddle. It's like this song was tailor-made for my dad, who loves horseback riding and African drums.

"U Got the Look" - Prince
The beginning of Sheena Easton's journey from "Morning Train" to "Sugar Walls." Thank you, Prince.

"Mrs. Robinson" - Simon & Garfunkel
This is one of those songs where I have to make an effort not to start singing along with.

"Buffalo Soldier" - Bob Marley & the Wailers
Not one of his best, but like all Marley songs it is very groovy.

"Can't Buy Me Love" - The Beatles
I wonder if, during the writing of this song, Paul even dreamed he'd be a billionaire some day.

The Queue

A periodic feature in which I regale you with thrilling tales of my Netflix queue.

Finished
Sex and the City (Season 1): I ended up watching most (all?) of the episodes with Susi, and it was better than I thought. I guess having them unedited helps - for the profanity more so than the nudity, actually.

In Progress
Justice League (Season 1): On disc 4 of 4. Even though the pacing can be languid at times, I'm really digging this series. The 'Legends" episodes (the ones featuring the Justice Guild) were tremendous.

Sex and the City (Season 2): On disc 1 of 3. I'll probably keep watching them until the Flanderization gets to be too much. With no Project Runway on the horizon, I guess this is now out quality time.

Unwatched
Hoop Dreams: I saw the last half of it a couple of years ago and was engrossed.

That Thing We Did

For the first time in 3 weeks, we got together for gaming last Friday. This time, we were without Matt, so we did the board game potpourri again.

First up was Pandemic. Corry sat in, so we had all the characters except the operations expert. We also bumped the difficulty up to 'normal' (5 epidemic cards instead of 4). It did not go so well for us. We spent the first couple of rounds without a coherent plan, then were unable to keep up with black disease. We chain-reactioned into our 10th outbreak about halfway through the player deck.

Next up was Ticket to Ride, where there was a lot more competition for routes than in other games I had played. I once again committed the cardinal sin of going back for more route cards once i had completed the ones I started with (both western north-south routes). The best of the lot was New York-Seattle, which I wasn't able to complete. Jay ran away with the victory.

Last, we played Carcassonne. I won, but it didn't feel like a true victory because Jay had never played before and hadn't caught on to some of the nuances. The difference maker turned out to be that all of out farmers ended up in the same humongous field, but I had more meeples in it than Mike or Jay. The 30 or so points for adjacent cities proved to be my margin of victory.

We are off again this weekend (I've got way too much going on), and the next weekend is up in the air. Maybe some day we'll get back to a regular schedule.