Game of the Moment
Too make up for the terribly dull and self-indulgent entry below, here's a lovely and addictive flash game:
Boomshine... kind of a cross between Missile Command and Maxwell's Demon. The urging on you do of your little boomshine circles to just hold one one...second.........LONGER is amazing.
Ramble of the Moment
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I bought the red iPod, which
gave a token amount to fighting AIDS
in Africa. Also, this image is about half again as big as the real thing.
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I finished sorting through and rating my iTunes music collection the other day.
Out of the 6400-odd tracks in my collection, there were about 5000 I never wanted
to hear in a mix. Of the 1400 I thought were ok, I rated
270 of them as stuff I'd actually be happy
to hear when they came up in rotation, and
about 30 of those as "great". Thus, my 37-gig collection got reduced to the
5.75 gigs that matter.
(Admittedly, my judgement is biased towards stuff that's good
to do geekwork to, so energetic music tends to have an
advantage over the slower stuff, and long jazzy or classical bits have
very little chance.)
So I decided to grant myself one final birth day indulgence, or reward
for sorting through all this, and bought an iPod.
I had an iPod a long while back, but didn't really have a spot for it, the car radio adapter was more trouble than it was worth.
But now that I've started walking to and from the T station and my work PC
doesn't have a reliable sound setup, this one should be more useful.
It's kind of weird that the 8-gig Nano costs the same as a 30-gig iPod video,
but still I went for the former. Besides better battery life, and not having
internal moving parts, its petite minimalism just resonates for me.
And for your reading pleasure, and since I was on kind of a self-indulgence roll, I thought I'd blow
a day on kisrael discussing the 29 bestest songs on my iPod.
Music of Every Damn Moment
The first three I identified as the Best. Songs. Ever. a long while back.
They are
Deee-Lite's Groove Is In The Heart (which I am morally compelled to dance to every
time I hear it, even if just a little),
Buildings And Bridges by Ani DiFranco, which is
the most beautiful blend of dimestore profundity and musical grace I've ever heard, and
It's Your Thing by the The Isley Brothers, the bass and piano that never fails to grab
me by the cajones.
(There's a bit more R+B in the Top 29: James Brown's I Feel Good and
Soul Man by Sam & Dave.)
I've always loved Fever by Peggy Lee, and
Shirley Bassey has a similar vamp effect in the Propellerheads' History Repeating.
Lately I've been getting into mashups,
Tripper Trouble is dj BC mixing up the Beatles and the Beastie Boys,
Groove's a Bitch by dsico is Groove is in the Heart plus She's a Bitch plus Just 1 Kiss,
My Other Car Is A Beatle by Jay-R is an even bigger swath of artists.
And before there was mashups there were covers and remixes, like
Shake Your Thang, which really is how Salt-N-Pepa introduced
me to It's Your Thing, and more recently
JXL's A Little Less Conversation revived a sleeper Elvis work.
Also two by Tom Jones et al.:
Burning Down The House and Sexbomb.
Mystery Dance by Elvis Costello is the only song to appear in the Top 29
twice, it's short enough that both the electric and acoustic versions seem worthwhile.
Cake's The Distance always holds a special place in my heart as being my big solo in Tufts' sQ.
Then there's a string of modern stuff...
Smash Mouth's Diggin' Your Scene and the overplayed but great AllStar,
t.A.T.u.'s All The Things She Said,
the nostalgic drumline of Gwen Stefani's Hollaback Girl,
and the cool retro-western-gogo of Legend Of A Cowgirl by a Imani Coppola
Slowing things down,
Holly Cole's cover I've Just Seen A Face is just lovely,
and I find
Dar Williams' As Cool As I Am,
Paul Simon's Tenderness,
and Willy Mason's Oxygen can all move me to tears when I'm
on the hunt for that kind of catharsis.
Finally, some oddballs:
Johnny Cash's Riders In The Sky is just THE cowboy song for me,
Maynard Ferguson's Chameleon is the only instrumental to make it here,
and Madonna's Hanky Panky (Bare Bottom 12" Mix), with its giant percussion
and naughty spanky talk is the best thing to have spun off from the movie Dicky Tracy.
I might be willing to make a mix cd or mp3 set if anyone is interested.
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