OK, so I've become a little obsessed with the typing countries thing.
130
As you can see, I KICK ASS at it. This is a score I got earlier today, right before I left work. I decided that I was running into a stone wall near the end, because I just didn't know the names of enough countries off the top of my head. I'd get through Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and then I'd have to start thinking about it. There are a shitload of countries in Africa (...obviously), but under pressure I just couldn't think of very many of their names. (It's funny how the brain works -- the ones I would ALWAYS think of without fail -- not counting the Arab-world ones -- were Lesotho, Botswana, Djibouti, and Ethiopia and Eritrea. And sometimes Cameroon. Forget, you know, Kenya or Somalia.)
So I went to Sheppard Software's fantastic map-quiz site and set about learning Africa. I...have been doing this for much of the evening since I got home, because I have no life. I can now find any country on a map of Africa with no trouble. (Woo!) So I went back to the country-typing thing, and...I THINK I BROKE IT.
Seriously. Once it gets to 132 or so countries left (it counts down as you type), the clock stops. Like, if it's at 00:12, it just stays at 00:12 and doesn't move anymore. It keeps letting you type countries, and it keeps counting down the number of countries, but because the clock is stopped, you can type them forever, and it never finishes, and it never gives you your score. The first couple of times I thought it was Firefox's fault, so I restarted Firefox and tried it again -- same thing. So I opened Safari. Same thing. I think it's 132-ish where it stops, but of course I only notice when I happen to see the clock stop, and I'm kind of busy typing countries, yo.
Does this mean that...nobody on earth has ever typed so many countries before?? And maybe the program just doesn't have any instructions beyond whatever all the countries minus 132 is? Because...that, in a way, is awesome. But it's also INFURIATING. Because I KNOW I am way beyond that score of 130 countries, and I want CREDIT, bitch!
All right. I just did it again, looking at the clock this time, and according to my calculations (121 left; it starts with 270) got 149. KICKASS!!! But why can't I have some HTML about it?? UNFAIR.
149
FINE. I customized my own. Hmph.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Friday, March 21, 2008
The stars. Are they for Man? Discuss.
I used to read a lot more sci-fi than I do now -- the last thing in the greater sci-fi area that I think I read was Never Let Me Go a couple years ago, and it had been a while before that too. For some reason, I would read a lot more old-timey sci-fi than modern sci-fi -- specifically, Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. I think I've read almost every Heinlein book -- with the notable exception of Stranger in a Strange Land, whose hippie bullshit I could never get into (to be fair, I think I was about 13 or something the last time I tried to read it). I did not grok it, you could say. Robert Heinlein's books are a little full of figurative (and literal) secretary-ass-slapping for my tastes nowadays. Nevertheless, I will always love Time for the Stars (in which one identical twin travels through space while the other stays on earth, as part of an experiment, and the one on earth gets old and it's very sad, and it had a whole part about twins speaking psychically and not realizing they were doing it because they thought they were just whispering quietly, which I have often thought I have with my sister), and Citizen of the Galaxy (from which the deservedly MST3K'd movie Quest of the Delta Knights was ripped off), and The Puppet Masters (one of the first "body-snatching"-themed works, I believe -- and FUCKING SCARY! -- at least when I was in high school), and the one where they're all on a spaceship and they've been on it for generations and by the time the book takes place they don't realize that their spaceship isn't the world because their forebears put it on autopilot, and they don't know where they're going or even that they are going somewhere. I think that was Heinlein -- I can't remember what it's called to save my life, but it was one of my favorites.
For Arthur C. Clarke, who as I'm sure everyone knows died a couple days ago (that obit spoils the plot of Childhood's End, BTW) there were two works I mainly liked. (I never did read 2001 or its sequels -- I saw the movie, but I suspect that's more Kubrick than Clarke.) One was the Rama series, which started with Rendezvous with Rama and then had three sequels (which I believe were co-authored by Gentry Lee, so...probably mostly written by Gentry Lee, so, yeah). The basic story is, mankind finds a crazy cylinder floating in space, and some astronauts go up to meet it and it's so huge that there's basically a whole world inside, and pretty much the whole book is how they try to puzzle out what its deal is. It's fucking awesome because they're going around exploring the whole thing and figuring out what's going on and it RULES. I love stuff about exploring a new territory, which is why (1) I was obsessed with treasure hunts as a kid and always wanted my mom to set one up for me, on my birthday or what have you, despite the fact that that must have been insanely labor-intensive for her; and (2) I love the game Civilization, because you get to explore the world over and over and over again and never know what you're going to find. Seriously, the buzz I get when I'm sailing my little cartoon ship around the map and I find a SWEET JUICY UNINHABITED ISLAND that I can hop off and explore -- despite the fact that I've played the game a zillion times and it's not like I'm going to find anything surprising -- is like no other. Anyway, Rendezvous with Rama has a lot of that kind of Age of Exploration porn, to coin a phrase. (The sequels are more of a soap opera and totally different -- I loved them when I was a teenager but the general critical consensus is that they are complete ass. I think I will never read them again, because I'd rather not ruin them for myself.)
The other Clarke book that I loved was Childhood's End. This might have been the first "real" sci-fi I ever read -- I seem to recall reading it when I was in the school that I went to at ages 10 and 11. I've read it several times, but not for years -- I lent my copy to someone and she lost it and was very apologetic about it but never got me another copy. I always meant to buy another one, but it's one of those things that's so easy to do -- it's a classic, any halfway decent bookstore has it, it costs 7 bucks -- that I never did it because I could do it any time.
What happens in Childhood's End is, one day on Earth, a bunch of alien ships appear in the sky. A voice tells everybody that they're in charge now, but to go about their business. They are benevolent and they eliminate poverty and hunger and war and (pretty much) national borders, and the human race freaks out a little, but is more or less OK with it, because there's nothing they can really do about it, and their standard of living does immediately and steadily go up. But what are the aliens' real motives? (Hint: Their real motives are not to kill and eat everybody. They really are benevolent. But everybody would freak out a lot more if they knew what was truly going on.)
One of the niftiest parts is, the aliens don't want to reveal themselves, how they look, when they first get there. Humanity is pissed off by this, with good reason. Finally they say that in 50 years (they're there for the long haul) they will show themselves. It turns out that the reason they didn't want to show themselves right away, but wanted to wait until they could prepare humanity properly, was that >> they look like the devil. A first contact with humanity way back in the day that didn't go very well is the assumed explanation, though it does turn out there's a bit more to it. << (I hope that will suffice for spoiler text -- if not, well, this happens on page 61 so it's not like it ruins the end of the book.) Anyway, I think this is super fucking cool.
So, of course there's discussion online about Clarke on the occasion of his death, and I happened to read two of his short stories, which both were awesome and both gave me chills (I think I'd read at least "The Nine Billion Names of God" before, but I didn't remember it very well). This put me in the mood to reread Childhood's End. So, last night I went to the Coop and bought it. It has a much uglier cover than the one I am used to, and I have the annoying feeling that the first chapter is completely different (there is some vague author's note that nothing "from Chapter 2 on" is different from when it was first published, but there's nothing about what has changed in the first chapter). But I'm so happy to be rereading it. It's like someone I used to be super good friends with and haven't seen in years. I practically have it memorized -- phrases keep jumping out at me as being completely familiar -- but there was so much of it I didn't really get as a kid (I don't remember when the last time I read it was -- probably around college, so I wasn't THAT young, but even then there was a ton of stuff I didn't really get) that it's really neat to be reading it with new eyes. I'm still at the beginning (I fell asleep on the couch watching The Daily Show last night so I didn't read any in bed as I normally would), but just so far the very idea of superintelligent beings showing up and demanding that humanity stop being assholes to each other, without violence or any force beyond their immutable presence, is fascinating to me in a way it never was before, probably because I'm so pissed at the world so much of the time these days. In Clarke's vision, there are scattered protests, and the underlying but mostly unspoken theme is that they don't want to accept that their religious beliefs are being disproven. Many countries don't want to just fall out of existence, and one country tries to A-bomb the alien ship, which doesn't work -- the bomb just fizzles out with no visible effect.
This book was first published in 1953, and I think it's safe to say that today not only would humanity react differently to such an event, but anyone writing a book about it would write it differently. The two issues that, of course, come immediately to mind are nationalism and religious extremism. I think that today (and probably even then -- just because the West didn't THINK that people under colonial rule minded it that much doesn't mean that they didn't) there would be MUCH MUCH MUCH more resistance to the idea of the establishment of a world government. I don't remember the details (I haven't gotten that far yet), but I think there's going to be one language (the aliens learned English but didn't spend much time on other languages), one set of laws, etc., and while I do think the world will get there someday, right now the trend seems to be to split into smaller fractions, not the reverse. Sure, Europe has one currency now, but, I mean, Kosovo, just for one recent example, and it's happening all over the place, the retreating into smaller and smaller groups, I would imagine as a pendulum-swing result of so many years/decades/centuries of the West (or other powers) galloping in and glomping people into conveniently delineated countries without much regard for, you know, what they already had going on there. I don't think people would take kindly to the idea that their specific culture, language, traditions, etc. should be allowed to gracefully go out of existence in order to provide a smoother transition for the majority -- nor should it.
The second thing is that I feel that many people of strong religious conviction would just kill themselves rather than sit around and wait for their religion to be disproven or made irrelevant. In the book, the aliens don't make any laws against religious expression or belief, they just allow it to fade away naturally -- the argument is, nobody ever disproved the existence of Thor, but nobody really believes in Thor anymore, and nobody's mad about it. I think that, eventually, that might happen in this scenario, but I really do think that there would be a MASSIVE and feverish first several months/years of extremely religious people going out in a blaze of glory and taking whoever they could with them. I don't think the aliens (as laid out in the book, I mean -- I know this isn't real, hee) would allow large-scale terrorist attacks, but I think they'd be able to do very little to stop people killing themselves, and I think that would engender a lot more unrest than is described in the book. A lot more.
This is what I like about sci-fi -- when it takes humanity and says "But what if THIS crazy shit happened" and makes you think about what would go down. Someday I'll talk about Nancy Kress's Sleepless books. Sci-fi is all in the concept, I often feel. (And often the characters suffer -- if the science part is any good, the characters are very often shitty, and vice versa. X-Files is a great example of this, to my mind -- come for the aliens, stay for Mulder and Scully, because it's my belief that without the Mulder/Scully thing the show would have been cancelled in a year, because after a while I feel like the whole mythology thing became cool wallpaper, pretty much. A MARVELOUS exception to this rule, however, is Battlestar Galactica. The current one. Sorry, '70s.)
Anyway. There are definitely days when I wish that a group of friendly aliens would swoop down and whip the world, kindly but firmly, into shape.
And: I went to the Coop instead of the Harvard Book Store because I thought I had a Coop gift card, which I couldn't find. However, I did find an old Barnes and Noble gift card that had $13.60 left on it. (Because: the Coop is Barnes and Noble. Don't let its Harvardiness fool you. Viva Harvard Book Store.) Because my change was less than $5.00, I got cash back -- $4.06 to be exact. So I'd like to think that, through his skillful manipulation of the laws of time-space, Arthur C. Clarke, from beyond the grave, reversed the polarities on something something something and fixed it so that I GOT money for buying Childhood's End. Which I immediately spent on cat food. THE MYSTERIES OF OUR UNIVERSE!!
For Arthur C. Clarke, who as I'm sure everyone knows died a couple days ago (that obit spoils the plot of Childhood's End, BTW) there were two works I mainly liked. (I never did read 2001 or its sequels -- I saw the movie, but I suspect that's more Kubrick than Clarke.) One was the Rama series, which started with Rendezvous with Rama and then had three sequels (which I believe were co-authored by Gentry Lee, so...probably mostly written by Gentry Lee, so, yeah). The basic story is, mankind finds a crazy cylinder floating in space, and some astronauts go up to meet it and it's so huge that there's basically a whole world inside, and pretty much the whole book is how they try to puzzle out what its deal is. It's fucking awesome because they're going around exploring the whole thing and figuring out what's going on and it RULES. I love stuff about exploring a new territory, which is why (1) I was obsessed with treasure hunts as a kid and always wanted my mom to set one up for me, on my birthday or what have you, despite the fact that that must have been insanely labor-intensive for her; and (2) I love the game Civilization, because you get to explore the world over and over and over again and never know what you're going to find. Seriously, the buzz I get when I'm sailing my little cartoon ship around the map and I find a SWEET JUICY UNINHABITED ISLAND that I can hop off and explore -- despite the fact that I've played the game a zillion times and it's not like I'm going to find anything surprising -- is like no other. Anyway, Rendezvous with Rama has a lot of that kind of Age of Exploration porn, to coin a phrase. (The sequels are more of a soap opera and totally different -- I loved them when I was a teenager but the general critical consensus is that they are complete ass. I think I will never read them again, because I'd rather not ruin them for myself.)
The other Clarke book that I loved was Childhood's End. This might have been the first "real" sci-fi I ever read -- I seem to recall reading it when I was in the school that I went to at ages 10 and 11. I've read it several times, but not for years -- I lent my copy to someone and she lost it and was very apologetic about it but never got me another copy. I always meant to buy another one, but it's one of those things that's so easy to do -- it's a classic, any halfway decent bookstore has it, it costs 7 bucks -- that I never did it because I could do it any time.
What happens in Childhood's End is, one day on Earth, a bunch of alien ships appear in the sky. A voice tells everybody that they're in charge now, but to go about their business. They are benevolent and they eliminate poverty and hunger and war and (pretty much) national borders, and the human race freaks out a little, but is more or less OK with it, because there's nothing they can really do about it, and their standard of living does immediately and steadily go up. But what are the aliens' real motives? (Hint: Their real motives are not to kill and eat everybody. They really are benevolent. But everybody would freak out a lot more if they knew what was truly going on.)
One of the niftiest parts is, the aliens don't want to reveal themselves, how they look, when they first get there. Humanity is pissed off by this, with good reason. Finally they say that in 50 years (they're there for the long haul) they will show themselves. It turns out that the reason they didn't want to show themselves right away, but wanted to wait until they could prepare humanity properly, was that >> they look like the devil. A first contact with humanity way back in the day that didn't go very well is the assumed explanation, though it does turn out there's a bit more to it. << (I hope that will suffice for spoiler text -- if not, well, this happens on page 61 so it's not like it ruins the end of the book.) Anyway, I think this is super fucking cool.
So, of course there's discussion online about Clarke on the occasion of his death, and I happened to read two of his short stories, which both were awesome and both gave me chills (I think I'd read at least "The Nine Billion Names of God" before, but I didn't remember it very well). This put me in the mood to reread Childhood's End. So, last night I went to the Coop and bought it. It has a much uglier cover than the one I am used to, and I have the annoying feeling that the first chapter is completely different (there is some vague author's note that nothing "from Chapter 2 on" is different from when it was first published, but there's nothing about what has changed in the first chapter). But I'm so happy to be rereading it. It's like someone I used to be super good friends with and haven't seen in years. I practically have it memorized -- phrases keep jumping out at me as being completely familiar -- but there was so much of it I didn't really get as a kid (I don't remember when the last time I read it was -- probably around college, so I wasn't THAT young, but even then there was a ton of stuff I didn't really get) that it's really neat to be reading it with new eyes. I'm still at the beginning (I fell asleep on the couch watching The Daily Show last night so I didn't read any in bed as I normally would), but just so far the very idea of superintelligent beings showing up and demanding that humanity stop being assholes to each other, without violence or any force beyond their immutable presence, is fascinating to me in a way it never was before, probably because I'm so pissed at the world so much of the time these days. In Clarke's vision, there are scattered protests, and the underlying but mostly unspoken theme is that they don't want to accept that their religious beliefs are being disproven. Many countries don't want to just fall out of existence, and one country tries to A-bomb the alien ship, which doesn't work -- the bomb just fizzles out with no visible effect.
This book was first published in 1953, and I think it's safe to say that today not only would humanity react differently to such an event, but anyone writing a book about it would write it differently. The two issues that, of course, come immediately to mind are nationalism and religious extremism. I think that today (and probably even then -- just because the West didn't THINK that people under colonial rule minded it that much doesn't mean that they didn't) there would be MUCH MUCH MUCH more resistance to the idea of the establishment of a world government. I don't remember the details (I haven't gotten that far yet), but I think there's going to be one language (the aliens learned English but didn't spend much time on other languages), one set of laws, etc., and while I do think the world will get there someday, right now the trend seems to be to split into smaller fractions, not the reverse. Sure, Europe has one currency now, but, I mean, Kosovo, just for one recent example, and it's happening all over the place, the retreating into smaller and smaller groups, I would imagine as a pendulum-swing result of so many years/decades/centuries of the West (or other powers) galloping in and glomping people into conveniently delineated countries without much regard for, you know, what they already had going on there. I don't think people would take kindly to the idea that their specific culture, language, traditions, etc. should be allowed to gracefully go out of existence in order to provide a smoother transition for the majority -- nor should it.
The second thing is that I feel that many people of strong religious conviction would just kill themselves rather than sit around and wait for their religion to be disproven or made irrelevant. In the book, the aliens don't make any laws against religious expression or belief, they just allow it to fade away naturally -- the argument is, nobody ever disproved the existence of Thor, but nobody really believes in Thor anymore, and nobody's mad about it. I think that, eventually, that might happen in this scenario, but I really do think that there would be a MASSIVE and feverish first several months/years of extremely religious people going out in a blaze of glory and taking whoever they could with them. I don't think the aliens (as laid out in the book, I mean -- I know this isn't real, hee) would allow large-scale terrorist attacks, but I think they'd be able to do very little to stop people killing themselves, and I think that would engender a lot more unrest than is described in the book. A lot more.
This is what I like about sci-fi -- when it takes humanity and says "But what if THIS crazy shit happened" and makes you think about what would go down. Someday I'll talk about Nancy Kress's Sleepless books. Sci-fi is all in the concept, I often feel. (And often the characters suffer -- if the science part is any good, the characters are very often shitty, and vice versa. X-Files is a great example of this, to my mind -- come for the aliens, stay for Mulder and Scully, because it's my belief that without the Mulder/Scully thing the show would have been cancelled in a year, because after a while I feel like the whole mythology thing became cool wallpaper, pretty much. A MARVELOUS exception to this rule, however, is Battlestar Galactica. The current one. Sorry, '70s.)
Anyway. There are definitely days when I wish that a group of friendly aliens would swoop down and whip the world, kindly but firmly, into shape.
And: I went to the Coop instead of the Harvard Book Store because I thought I had a Coop gift card, which I couldn't find. However, I did find an old Barnes and Noble gift card that had $13.60 left on it. (Because: the Coop is Barnes and Noble. Don't let its Harvardiness fool you. Viva Harvard Book Store.) Because my change was less than $5.00, I got cash back -- $4.06 to be exact. So I'd like to think that, through his skillful manipulation of the laws of time-space, Arthur C. Clarke, from beyond the grave, reversed the polarities on something something something and fixed it so that I GOT money for buying Childhood's End. Which I immediately spent on cat food. THE MYSTERIES OF OUR UNIVERSE!!
Thursday, March 20, 2008
And if you complain once more, you'll meet an army of Facebook
It's a Thursday-afternoon FACEBOOK MYSTERY! That sounds like it might be on CBS, or possibly the Hallmark Channel.
I don't know if anyone outside the Facebook "Harvard network" can see this. Basically, what happened is, I got a "you were friended" e-mail about my friend, whose name I won't give, but she has a very common first name and a very common surname. I tried to confirm and Facebook couldn't find any evidence of the friend request. I was confused, so I tried to search for her, and I came up with a ton of people with her name, which makes sense because it's really common, but there were some weird things in the first two pages' worth:
1. The first 19 of the people with my friend's name were at Harvard. All Class of '08.
2. The vast majority of those 19 were in all lowercase.
3. None of them had a profile picture.
4. None of them, in fact, had anything on their profile except the bare minimum: a birthday (all 1985, but different months and days), Harvard '08, and friends. Furthermore...
5. Most of them had no friends except one: "jenn smith."
So I went to jenn smith's page -- she has 1453 friends. All of them are at Harvard. All of them, in fact, are Harvard '08. And, all the names are lowercase, have no profile picture, have nothing on their profile (except Harvard '08 and their friend jenn smith), and are a combination of one of a limited set of generic-ish first names -- patricia, joe, sarah, elizabeth, will, dave, jenn, maggie, richard, lisa, etc. -- and a generic-ish last name -- brown, davis, johnson, jones, miller, and it goes on through "wilson." Many of the names are duplicates of each other (including the multiple copies of my friend's name). Also, jenn smith has a profile picture -- of a spider.
I guess my question is, WHAT IN THE FUCK? I mean, it's just so weird. I assume it's some kind of...army of Facebook spambots? But...why? Can you even spam people from Facebook? Are they test accounts or something? Is this some kind of Microsoft-spawned thing? Does every school/network have these "people" or just Harvard? Do they want to steal my identity? I'm sure as fuck not going to be friending any of them, though I have the urge to write a ton of messages on jenn smith's wall and poke her multiple times.
It turned out that my friend had briefly joined Facebook in order to look at someone's pictures, then un-joined, and she thinks she might have friended me accidentally because she had no idea what she was doing and hit a bunch of buttons (which is pretty much how I operate on Facebook most of the time too). So that's why I couldn't see or answer the friend request. But I'm pretty sure her button-pushing didn't accidentally generate 1400 robots. Though that would be AWESOME IN A WAY.
In conclusion, Facebook, you creep me out sometimes. And stop e-mailing me about Oregon Trail. I'll play it when I want to AND NOT BEFORE.
I don't know if anyone outside the Facebook "Harvard network" can see this. Basically, what happened is, I got a "you were friended" e-mail about my friend, whose name I won't give, but she has a very common first name and a very common surname. I tried to confirm and Facebook couldn't find any evidence of the friend request. I was confused, so I tried to search for her, and I came up with a ton of people with her name, which makes sense because it's really common, but there were some weird things in the first two pages' worth:
1. The first 19 of the people with my friend's name were at Harvard. All Class of '08.
2. The vast majority of those 19 were in all lowercase.
3. None of them had a profile picture.
4. None of them, in fact, had anything on their profile except the bare minimum: a birthday (all 1985, but different months and days), Harvard '08, and friends. Furthermore...
5. Most of them had no friends except one: "jenn smith."
So I went to jenn smith's page -- she has 1453 friends. All of them are at Harvard. All of them, in fact, are Harvard '08. And, all the names are lowercase, have no profile picture, have nothing on their profile (except Harvard '08 and their friend jenn smith), and are a combination of one of a limited set of generic-ish first names -- patricia, joe, sarah, elizabeth, will, dave, jenn, maggie, richard, lisa, etc. -- and a generic-ish last name -- brown, davis, johnson, jones, miller, and it goes on through "wilson." Many of the names are duplicates of each other (including the multiple copies of my friend's name). Also, jenn smith has a profile picture -- of a spider.
I guess my question is, WHAT IN THE FUCK? I mean, it's just so weird. I assume it's some kind of...army of Facebook spambots? But...why? Can you even spam people from Facebook? Are they test accounts or something? Is this some kind of Microsoft-spawned thing? Does every school/network have these "people" or just Harvard? Do they want to steal my identity? I'm sure as fuck not going to be friending any of them, though I have the urge to write a ton of messages on jenn smith's wall and poke her multiple times.
It turned out that my friend had briefly joined Facebook in order to look at someone's pictures, then un-joined, and she thinks she might have friended me accidentally because she had no idea what she was doing and hit a bunch of buttons (which is pretty much how I operate on Facebook most of the time too). So that's why I couldn't see or answer the friend request. But I'm pretty sure her button-pushing didn't accidentally generate 1400 robots. Though that would be AWESOME IN A WAY.
In conclusion, Facebook, you creep me out sometimes. And stop e-mailing me about Oregon Trail. I'll play it when I want to AND NOT BEFORE.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Dear Hillary, Do you like Fribbles? Check yes or no.
For the record, I prefer Dunkin' Donuts coffee to Starbucks coffee (though that may be because I'm a coffee novice and DD really piles on the sugar), and I support Obama. But what if you're really a tea drinker? A Tealuxe Democrat, if you will? Does that mean you're pulling for Kucinich? Maybe Nader? Ron Paul? King George? Grandmas? OMG I'M UNCATEGORIZABLE! HOW WILL I KNOW WHO TO VOTE FOR???
Also, what are Massachusetts Republicans drinking in this scenario? Mead? Postum? Au Bon Pain coffee? (For the record, ABP coffee unequivocally blows.)
Anyway, everybody knows you should choose the leader of the free world by evaluating whether you would feel like having a beer with him that day.
I do prefer Starbucks tea to Dunkin' Donuts tea. But that's because Starbucks has real tea and Dunkin' Donuts has Lipton. Maybe that means I want Obama, but I want him to get to the White House and become a foofy prissy-pants.
Also, what are Massachusetts Republicans drinking in this scenario? Mead? Postum? Au Bon Pain coffee? (For the record, ABP coffee unequivocally blows.)
Anyway, everybody knows you should choose the leader of the free world by evaluating whether you would feel like having a beer with him that day.
I do prefer Starbucks tea to Dunkin' Donuts tea. But that's because Starbucks has real tea and Dunkin' Donuts has Lipton. Maybe that means I want Obama, but I want him to get to the White House and become a foofy prissy-pants.
Monday, March 17, 2008
The ability to quickly type country names is just one of mah many skillz!
115
(I love how you totally could just go into the HTML and change the number to whatever you wanted. But I didn't! So there. :P )
To be fair, I've practiced a few times with that country-typing thing. My first try, I got 92. I still TOTALLY feel like I could do better, but, you know, one must accept and move on at some point. And I got 115 or thereabouts the other day, so I feel like that's about where I am now. So I am at peace. With the country-typing.
I found this at the same site as Could You Pass 8th-Grade Science? The answer is, I could, but barely. Oy.
So, what I've learned is, I have many gaps in my elementary science knowledge, BUT I am a fast typer and I know the names of many countries. FRANKLY, I think that's a much more valuable skill.
(I love how you totally could just go into the HTML and change the number to whatever you wanted. But I didn't! So there. :P )
To be fair, I've practiced a few times with that country-typing thing. My first try, I got 92. I still TOTALLY feel like I could do better, but, you know, one must accept and move on at some point. And I got 115 or thereabouts the other day, so I feel like that's about where I am now. So I am at peace. With the country-typing.
I found this at the same site as Could You Pass 8th-Grade Science? The answer is, I could, but barely. Oy.
So, what I've learned is, I have many gaps in my elementary science knowledge, BUT I am a fast typer and I know the names of many countries. FRANKLY, I think that's a much more valuable skill.
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
I like green! And adequate line spacing.
And the ability to choose my own fonts. And crazy stuff like that! Hmph.
Obviously, I've just been pantsing around with the templates. Because I know so little CSS (note: "so little" = "zero" in this case), I'm more or less shackled to the Blogger templates. And...I like elements of all of them, but none of them are just right. I wish they were standard as far as allowing you to choose font/size/color for ALL the elements (blog title, post titles, body font, date/comments/etc. font at the very least). What if I want the body text a certain size, but I want the post header larger relative to that than the template dictates? Well, I can change it -- sometimes. Depending on the template. Some have that as an option and some don't. And sometimes the ones that have it as an option, like, are in the style of the Old West or something. Or have a picture of a bridge. Or have rounded corners. I hate rounded corners! Or some dots! Do not want!
So, I am grudgingly OK with this layout. But I wish the body text was spaced a little better. And I could possibly go for a serif header! But with a sans serif body font! And I want the sidebar stuff on the left. Grumble! Why am I not a CSS genius? Or, journeyman? Or even novice? Stupid style sheets, with your frightening curly brackets everywhere.
Ah well, maybe it'll be like iGoogle and at some point they'll start adding 70 new templates every hour. I look forward to that day.
Obviously, I've just been pantsing around with the templates. Because I know so little CSS (note: "so little" = "zero" in this case), I'm more or less shackled to the Blogger templates. And...I like elements of all of them, but none of them are just right. I wish they were standard as far as allowing you to choose font/size/color for ALL the elements (blog title, post titles, body font, date/comments/etc. font at the very least). What if I want the body text a certain size, but I want the post header larger relative to that than the template dictates? Well, I can change it -- sometimes. Depending on the template. Some have that as an option and some don't. And sometimes the ones that have it as an option, like, are in the style of the Old West or something. Or have a picture of a bridge. Or have rounded corners. I hate rounded corners! Or some dots! Do not want!
So, I am grudgingly OK with this layout. But I wish the body text was spaced a little better. And I could possibly go for a serif header! But with a sans serif body font! And I want the sidebar stuff on the left. Grumble! Why am I not a CSS genius? Or, journeyman? Or even novice? Stupid style sheets, with your frightening curly brackets everywhere.
Ah well, maybe it'll be like iGoogle and at some point they'll start adding 70 new templates every hour. I look forward to that day.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Not the piping plover! He's so smart with his finances.
(My sister gets credit for that line.)
This is a (judiciously cropped) screen cap of Boston.com's front page right now. Yes, there's a headline below the picture that relates to birds. But still, hee.
That bald eagle is going to CUT YOU when you foreclose on his home. And the common loon looks a little strung out, frankly, so it's no wonder he's having money issues. Get a job, slacker!
I also like to think of a loan officer taunting the common loon. "How did you think you could afford a TWO-BEDROOM condo in BROOKLINE? On your salary? You're just a COMMON LOON! Try LOWELL."
Addenda to yesterday's Police opus: Obviously "Synchronicity II" contains a line about your boss kicking YOU in the nuts (metaphorically), not the reverse. It wouldn't be "Synchronicity II" if it was that, because there is only the building of tension, not tension release. My bad. Also, Sting didn't write "Does Everyone Stare," it was Stewart, so that doesn't count in the list of "Sting is lonely and pitiful, please comfort him and also coincidentally notice his super hot biceps, especially if you happen to be a fine lady" songs. And I do like that song, so go Stewart.
Monday, March 10, 2008
I'd invite you back to my place...it's only mine because it holds my suitcase
This is one of those subjects that I get to talk about in my blog because nobody wants to hear me talk about it in real life. Woo blogs!
The Police, as everyone knows because they never shut up about it, are touring. Which also means they're back together, at least for the (ever-increasing) length of the tour. I went to see them at Fenway over the summer, AND IT WAS AWESOME. They're at Great Woods (or whatever it's called now -- bah, crotchety grumbledy dee) again this summer, and I am SO tempted to go. By myself, probably, because I have no friends who care about the Police. I took my mom to the Fenway concert. And even my mom doesn't care about the Police, really. She had a good time, but still. She's such a sport. Hee hee. Still, I think I'd just go alone this time. Because, the Police! Who cares? I'm not a 55-year-old man, so, yeah.
I have loved the Police since...oh, maybe the middle of college, which of course was long after they broke up, but it took me a decent amount of time to buy and absorb all their albums, so it was almost like they weren't broken up, for a while anyway. I know it's sort of a random band to love -- not old enough to be retro (well, it wasn't when I started liking them), not new enough to be, you know, current. Plus there's the awkward fact that the lead singer is now huge in the adult contemporary. (That doesn't mean I don't like Sting -- I do, and I have most of his solo albums, though I drew the line at the one with the lute. I even really like them up through Ten Summoner's Tales or so, and selected things through Brand New Day, after which I basically gave up.) And that he's all English-majory and super, super full of himself (though I tend to dig that in my celebrities for some reason -- see Duchovny, David).
But back in the day...oh, back in the day. So the Police have five albums, OK, not counting the greatest-hits one and the live one and whatever other stuff there's been. At different times I've had pretty much every one of them as my favorite, depending on what I'm sick of, I guess. I've long ago done the thing that you do with music where first you like the singles, and then you think the singles suck because you're tired of them, and then you come around to the singles again because they're sort of good, actually, and now you're tired of all the other songs equally as much. I never listen to the greatest-hits album anymore, not because I hate all the singles, but because it's like listening to a mix of Police songs that are not necessarily what I'd pick in a mix of Police songs.
Anyway...again, because it's my blog and I'm in the mood, I thought I'd pick my favorite Police songs and babble about them a little. I'm going top 15 because, well, I couldn't narrow it down to 10. These are in no order except the order in which I happened to think of them.
1. Driven to Tears
This is from Zenyatta Mondatta, the third album (hm, maybe I should have done these in chronological order...eh, who cares), and by this time song topics have come around to, like, touring and being in a band (also see "Man in a Suitcase"). This is an early example of Activist!Sting; it's basically about going around the world and seeing poverty and everyone talks about it but nobody does anything about it ("too many cameras and not enough food -- this is what we've seen"). So, OK, but that's not why I like it -- I just like it because of the drums mainly. And the whole part at the end that gets faster and faster. It's just An Awesome Police Song, where everything fits together super great and sounds terrific and innovative and different without being pretentious. (Lyrically pretentious, perhaps, but not musically.) This was the number-one song that I hoped they would play at the concert, and they did.
2. Man in a Suitcase
I can't think of this song without its buddy "Canary in a Coalmine," which is from the same album (Zenyatta Mondatta), because they're very similar. For a long time I preferred "Canary in a Coalmine," which has probably better lyrics ("First to pull over when the atmosphere is less than perfect/Your sensibilities are shaken by the slightest defect" etc.). "Man in a Suitcase" is very specific -- it's about being on tour and barely remembering where you are because you've been so many places, and after a while they all blur together. Which is something to which I can, to put it mildly, not relate. Heh. But I still think I like it better because it's just catchier. It's a little ska-y, which is cool. It's also one of a grand tradition of Sting-penned "poor me" songs, which I quite enjoy. See also "So Lonely," "Does Everyone Stare," "Can't Stand Losing You," and about 1,000 other ones.
3. Miss Gradenko
This is a Stewart Copeland song...I think the only one I have on here? Yup, although there are a couple others of his that I like. This is from Synchronicity (their last album) and it's just...I don't even know what it's about, but it evokes 1984, the Soviet Union, Brazil (the movie, not the country), totalitarianism, all that kind of stuff, and it just KICKS ASS. Again, I mostly like it for the music. That guitar part kills me. It's so SPEEDY. I dig the hell out of this song.
4. O My God
Also from Synchronicity, and with the best bass line ever. This is a song that is cheerful on the surface, and poppy, and it's only when you get around to listening to the lyrics that you realize that it's a sad song ("All This Time" from Soul Cages is like this too). It's pretty much about wanting to be closer to God but not being able to or knowing how to try, and feeling God's abandoned you. But the hooks, the hooks!
5. Born in the '50s
This song (from Outlandos d'Amour, their first album -- NICE ALBUM TITLE, doofuses, by the way) is, I'll admit, a sentimental favorite AT BEST. I fricking love this song, despite -- and perhaps because of -- the fact that it HAS NOT aged well. For obvious reasons. It's supposed to be about youth, if that gives you a clue. Hee hee hee. The '50s. We don't need your rules, adults! We're 53! We're redefining debauchery! We were born AFTER television was invented! There's just something about Sting screeching on this one that is awesome. YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND US SO DON'T REPRIMAND US WE'RE TAKING THE FUTURE WE DON'T NEED NO TEACHERS!! (The fact that Sting WAS a teacher before this band is another thing that makes it so amusing.) One thing the Police IS NOT is a Sex Pistols-esque youth-anarchy band. So this song is really not them at all. Which is half the reason that it's awesome. They did not sing this at the concert. Hee.
6. Masoko Tanga
This is one of the reggae-est of their songs, along with "Regatta de Blanc" on the second album (which..."white reggae"? So lame). It has words, but the words are all nonsense (and sung by Sting in his patented fake Jamaican accent). And yet they go perfectly well. And if you listen to the song enough, it's quite fun to sing along to. This is just a straight-up awesome jam. It's the last song on Outlandos.
7. The Bed's Too Big Without You
It was this or "Bring On the Night," which I also love, but there's something about the structure of this one that just hits my pleasure centers (ew, sorry). I wish I knew, like, ANY music terminology AT ALL, but one thing I love that Sting does is how he starts singing like partway through the verse, on the second...measure...or something...seriously, I know nothing about music. But like, the music plays a melody, and then he starts singing a complementary melody after it. And there's that bass part that has nothing to do with anything (except, of course, that it does). This is about Sting cheating on somebody and then being dumped and then whining about it forever and ever, as he is wont to do. It's from Regatta de Blanc, and it's clear (dude, I so should have done these in chronological order) that they've gotten more sophisticated from the first album, when they were sort of trying to be like, the Ramones or something, and by this album they've pretty much given up the punk thing, which is good because it didn't fit them at all.
8. So Lonely
Back to Outlandos. This is the crown jewel in the I AM SO MISUNDERSTOOD AND PITIFUL genre. I used to sing this song to our elderly, sickly cat, who would get confused and lost all the time and meow sadly until you went and found him (we lived in a five-room apartment, BTW). This is nothing super exciting musically, until the end, where the "lo, lo, lo" part is pretty kicky. But mostly it's just great because IN THIS THEATER THAT I CALL MY SOUL, I ALWAYS PLAY THE STARRING ROLE! And so forth.
9. Synchronicity
These are SO out of order. I might rewrite this. By Synchronicity, they were super sophisticated and like a big arena band and cranking out hits. I don't remember if this was ever on the radio, but it's a fricking masterpiece. It's in 6/4 time? Something like that. I wish I knew more about time signatures. But it's a weird one (one of Sting's favorite things -- he's got at least one weirdo time signature on each album; he really likes 7/8 and 9/8). And the song doesn't make a whole lot of sense -- it follows the general album theme of unsettledness/the world being screwed up and scary/being watched (see basically every other song on the album). Maybe in a way it's like an updated "Born in the '50s," only darker, much much much more musically sophisticated, about 50 times more abstract, and about 100 times less stupid. Or maybe that's a reach. In any case, I generally consider this song to be pretty much the pinnacle of the Police as a band.
10. It's All Right for You
This is, I just realized, another of those songs like "Synchronicity" where it's really fast and full of rhyming words/phrases all in a row. Apparently I like that. Can you tell a story in three verses made up of two-word phrases? Apparently, you can. And: catchy. (From Regatta.)
11. Hungry for You (J'aurai toujours faim de toi)
This is one good reason the Police are not the Ramones: the Ramones would not fruitily sing a whole song in French for no reason. Oh, Sting. Despite my FIVE YEARS of French, I still can't really make much sense of this song, except that he wants her and stuff, he drinks her blood, there's one part where he wins the world in a game of cards -- whatever. I don't even speak French well enough to be able to gauge whether this is crappy French or not. All I know is, "jusqu'a ce que je sois sec" is pretty awesome to sing in the car. This is from Ghost in the Machine, album number four, and this is the first one on this list from that album, I see, which...might mean something, or not.
12. Omegaman
Also from Ghost in the Machine. WHAT DOES IT MEAN? I don't know. Really, by picking "Omegaman" (the only song I have on here of Andy's) I'm picking the last three songs on Ghost in the Machine, which are "Omegaman," "Secret Journey," and "Darkness" (and by Andy, Sting, and Stewart respectively).
Ha ha, OK -- I was about to say that though the entire album seems green to me "for obvious reasons," these songs are the "greenest" for me, and then I realized that the logo is red and I just had to go look it up on Amazon to believe that it actually has no green on it, on the cover, at all. My synesthesia, let me show you it! I have no idea why I think of it as green -- neither "ghost" nor "machine" is a green word for me, generally, but the phrase "ghost in the machine" is VERY green, and I thought it was because the album cover was green, but it's so not. I imagine I got it from something in either the X-Files episode (pretty much everything on that show is green, man) or the movie that I faintly remember seeing. (That could be it -- all the posters are green on black.) ANYWAY, I very very strongly associate this album with the color green, for reasons that are now unclear to me (hee), but the last three songs are just this big mass of nighttime, sort of neon green on black, that I find evocative and sort of soothing. This is apparently...just me. All righty! Anyway. "Omegaman" -- it's energetic and cool and I like the lyrics even though I usually hate Andy's lyrics. And "Secret Journey" is corny but it still fits that mood for me somehow, and "Darkness" is moody and it's you inside a small room before you fall asleep thinking about your life (and also about how you're famous, but whatever), which works for the end of the album after you've been the Omegaman and met the holy man on your secret journey, and now I am making zero sense. "Omegaman": Good song. GITM: Not green. Except to me.
13. Synchronicity II: The perfect rock counterpoint to "Synchronicity" Regular. Full of kickass lyrics and imagery, including kicking your boss in the nuts and also THE LOCH NESS MONSTER. Totally square as far as the beat, which is why it's a good counterpoint. I'm pulling this out of my ass, in case that wasn't obvious, but it is. A good counterpoint, I mean. Also AWESOME to scream along to in rush-hour traffic. And, contains the line WE HAVE TO SHOUT ABOVE THE DIN OF OUR RICE KRISPIES!!! which of course NEEDS to be yelled as Sting does.
14. Can't Stand Losing You
Total opposite of the one above. Hee. It's from Outlandos and it's Sting sulking about his girlfriend dumping him. Also brilliant though: "I see you sent my letters back/And my LP records AND THEY'RE ALL SCRATCHED." It's the most awesomely passive-aggressive song in the entire world. And your brother's gonna kill me and he's six feet ten. I can't see the point in another day, when nobody listens to a word I say. Also, he's not really going to kill himself. Don't worry.
15. Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic
Unabashedly corny and sentimental and I just love it. Also from Ghost in the Machine, weirdly, because it doesn't really fit there, but I guess they needed a single that wasn't about the disintegration of society and stuff. Sting loves to quote himself, and he's used that "Do I have to tell the story of a thousand rainy days since we first met/It's a big enough umbrella, but it's always me that ends up getting wet" more. than. once since this, but, well, it's a good couple lines. This song is totally timeless and I am not ashamed to love it. The bridge is the best part.
Bonus (ha ha, I suck): When the World Is Running Down, You Make the Best of What's Still Around
I tried not to include this song, and I couldn't do it. I don't even really listen to it anymore because I'm so sick of it because I was so obsessed with it for so long. It's about the apocalypse (I guess), and Sting is in his house and is tired of all the stuff he has. He watches the same porn and listens to the same records and eats the same food. It's very flip (obviously!), and it doesn't sound like any other Police song, and it's just good times all around. I just love how it's like, "Yeah, well, it's too bad about the apocalypse, and I AM sick of watching this one talk show that I taped, but -- what can you do!" The live version is much faster and less lazy, which is fun too. Off Zenyatta.
All righty! Some good Police songs. And now, because I like being critical and shooting my mouth off, here are 10 that I don't like so much. And why! Of course. Muahaha.
1. Contact
I think this is my least favorite Police song of all time. It just blows. It's not clever, it's not musically exciting in any way -- it just sits there, the guitar sort of jangles boringly, and it has a lamely naughty line about a "raincoat" (that they repeat three times just in case you missed it), and it has the line "I've got contacts in my book and in my eyes" -- AUUUUGH, and the chorus is dumb, and THE WHOLE THING IS DUMB. This song completely sucks. Sorry, Stewart. I do like some of Stewart's songs -- "Miss Gradenko," for one, and "Darkness," and I even like "Bombs Away," but when he misses, he misses. This is off Regatta.
2. Murder by Numbers
This is from Synchronicity and it's by Andy Summers and it's just boring and lame. The chorus goes "Murder by numbers, 1-2-3/It's as easy to learn as your ABCs." I'm sorry, any song that contains the line "It's as easy to learn as your ABCs" automatically sucks. (That means you, "Locomotion"!) Any song that rhymes "1-2-3" with "A-B-C," unless it's sung by the Jackson 5, also sucks. So this sucks double. It's just sort of a showtune-y, wannabe-"dark" thing about how to kill somebody. It's like something a nine-year-old boy would think was awesome. It's also weirdly Victorian or something. I don't know. It has no point. Go away, song.
3. Every Breath You Take
All right, I don't really hate this song -- I just don't LOVE it, and I get annoyed when it's the only Police song that people know. I also get annoyed with idiots who think it's a love song when it's (as is fitting for the Synchronicity album) about stalking and being creepy. I do like the bridge. Other than that, there's just not that much to it, and I don't get how it became, like, the hugest hit of all time. Whatevs.
4. Be My Girl/Sally
This is half on the list, because I LOVE the "Be My Girl" part. Even though it's just Sting singing "Would you be my girl, would you be my girl, would you be my, be my, be my girl" over and over. It's still good. But the middle part, the "Sally" part, is another of Andy's bizarre Britishy, faintly Monty Python-y ramblings about something he thinks is edgy, and this time it's a blow-up doll. Named Sally. That's all you need to know. It is silly. I guess it works with "Be My Girl" though, since that song has one lyric and wouldn't really make a song all on its own. But I always fast-forward through the Sally part. Also because the whole song stops and it's just Andy reciting a poem, with some weird tinkly piano in the background. Do not want. It's from Outlandos, before they knew better.
5. Deathwish
From Regatta. I guess it's about...having a deathwish, specifically with regard to driving, but it's just forgettable and unclever. If you want a song about getting in/not getting in/surviving a car accident, "Airbag" is one squadrillion times better.
6. Walking in Your Footsteps
Just overly literal for me. And the whole weird drumbeat thing that goes on through the WHOLE SONG is just too much. Also, am I supposed to feel bad that dinosaurs went extinct, and tie it somehow to our environmental assholishness today? Because...I think they were killed by a meteor. Not my fault! This song is so high-concept and it's just dorky.
7. Voices Inside My Head
Sort of more or less an instrumental, and full of what my friend Dan used to call "stoner jamming." Yawn.
8. Invisible Sun -- the one on the Fight the Future soundtrack
This is cheating, but I'm talking not about the one on GITM but the remake, by Sting and a reggae guy named Aswad, on the X-Files: Fight the Future soundtrack. (Look, I can't help it that everything in my life relates back somehow to The X-Files. Don't judge!) This is one of the dumbest things I ever heard of, and it's from the era (which is still going on) where Sting likes to randomly collaborate with people. Now, I know the Police is a band with reggae elements, BUT, this song, in its original version, is a very grim and dark and almost monotonous (intentionally so, I mean) song about Northern Ireland, with zero reggae, since they weren't really doing that by GITM anymore anyway, and making it into a sunny, friendly reggae song makes ZERO SENSE. It just doesn't work. At all. (That soundtrack album has some good songs on it though. No, it really does!)
9. Peanuts
OK, I actually like this song (from Outlandos) -- BUT I cannot ABIDE when Sting, near the end of it, sings "PEEEEEEANUTS!" real loud and demented like a crazy peanut-selling guy. It makes me cringe. When Sting tries to be demonic it rarely works. The live version is better. Because it doesn't have that part.
10. On Any Other Day
Another of Stewart's weirdo songs, on Regatta. How do I not like thee? Let me count the ways. 1. Stewart cannot sing, though he is one fantastic drummer. 2. The melody generally sucks. 3. Having Stewart, who is American, use words like "chap" and talk about having his tea just annoys me for some reason. 4. I don't like that one of the bad things that happens, in the chorus, is "My fine young son has turned out gay." I know, you have to take the times into account, blah blah, but, they had heard of gay people in the '80s. Shut up, Stewart.
And there you have it. Next time: Fiona! Or not. I need to take a nap now. And I have "Contact" in my head, somehow, after all that. Curses!!
The Police, as everyone knows because they never shut up about it, are touring. Which also means they're back together, at least for the (ever-increasing) length of the tour. I went to see them at Fenway over the summer, AND IT WAS AWESOME. They're at Great Woods (or whatever it's called now -- bah, crotchety grumbledy dee) again this summer, and I am SO tempted to go. By myself, probably, because I have no friends who care about the Police. I took my mom to the Fenway concert. And even my mom doesn't care about the Police, really. She had a good time, but still. She's such a sport. Hee hee. Still, I think I'd just go alone this time. Because, the Police! Who cares? I'm not a 55-year-old man, so, yeah.
I have loved the Police since...oh, maybe the middle of college, which of course was long after they broke up, but it took me a decent amount of time to buy and absorb all their albums, so it was almost like they weren't broken up, for a while anyway. I know it's sort of a random band to love -- not old enough to be retro (well, it wasn't when I started liking them), not new enough to be, you know, current. Plus there's the awkward fact that the lead singer is now huge in the adult contemporary. (That doesn't mean I don't like Sting -- I do, and I have most of his solo albums, though I drew the line at the one with the lute. I even really like them up through Ten Summoner's Tales or so, and selected things through Brand New Day, after which I basically gave up.) And that he's all English-majory and super, super full of himself (though I tend to dig that in my celebrities for some reason -- see Duchovny, David).
But back in the day...oh, back in the day. So the Police have five albums, OK, not counting the greatest-hits one and the live one and whatever other stuff there's been. At different times I've had pretty much every one of them as my favorite, depending on what I'm sick of, I guess. I've long ago done the thing that you do with music where first you like the singles, and then you think the singles suck because you're tired of them, and then you come around to the singles again because they're sort of good, actually, and now you're tired of all the other songs equally as much. I never listen to the greatest-hits album anymore, not because I hate all the singles, but because it's like listening to a mix of Police songs that are not necessarily what I'd pick in a mix of Police songs.
Anyway...again, because it's my blog and I'm in the mood, I thought I'd pick my favorite Police songs and babble about them a little. I'm going top 15 because, well, I couldn't narrow it down to 10. These are in no order except the order in which I happened to think of them.
1. Driven to Tears
This is from Zenyatta Mondatta, the third album (hm, maybe I should have done these in chronological order...eh, who cares), and by this time song topics have come around to, like, touring and being in a band (also see "Man in a Suitcase"). This is an early example of Activist!Sting; it's basically about going around the world and seeing poverty and everyone talks about it but nobody does anything about it ("too many cameras and not enough food -- this is what we've seen"). So, OK, but that's not why I like it -- I just like it because of the drums mainly. And the whole part at the end that gets faster and faster. It's just An Awesome Police Song, where everything fits together super great and sounds terrific and innovative and different without being pretentious. (Lyrically pretentious, perhaps, but not musically.) This was the number-one song that I hoped they would play at the concert, and they did.
2. Man in a Suitcase
I can't think of this song without its buddy "Canary in a Coalmine," which is from the same album (Zenyatta Mondatta), because they're very similar. For a long time I preferred "Canary in a Coalmine," which has probably better lyrics ("First to pull over when the atmosphere is less than perfect/Your sensibilities are shaken by the slightest defect" etc.). "Man in a Suitcase" is very specific -- it's about being on tour and barely remembering where you are because you've been so many places, and after a while they all blur together. Which is something to which I can, to put it mildly, not relate. Heh. But I still think I like it better because it's just catchier. It's a little ska-y, which is cool. It's also one of a grand tradition of Sting-penned "poor me" songs, which I quite enjoy. See also "So Lonely," "Does Everyone Stare," "Can't Stand Losing You," and about 1,000 other ones.
3. Miss Gradenko
This is a Stewart Copeland song...I think the only one I have on here? Yup, although there are a couple others of his that I like. This is from Synchronicity (their last album) and it's just...I don't even know what it's about, but it evokes 1984, the Soviet Union, Brazil (the movie, not the country), totalitarianism, all that kind of stuff, and it just KICKS ASS. Again, I mostly like it for the music. That guitar part kills me. It's so SPEEDY. I dig the hell out of this song.
4. O My God
Also from Synchronicity, and with the best bass line ever. This is a song that is cheerful on the surface, and poppy, and it's only when you get around to listening to the lyrics that you realize that it's a sad song ("All This Time" from Soul Cages is like this too). It's pretty much about wanting to be closer to God but not being able to or knowing how to try, and feeling God's abandoned you. But the hooks, the hooks!
5. Born in the '50s
This song (from Outlandos d'Amour, their first album -- NICE ALBUM TITLE, doofuses, by the way) is, I'll admit, a sentimental favorite AT BEST. I fricking love this song, despite -- and perhaps because of -- the fact that it HAS NOT aged well. For obvious reasons. It's supposed to be about youth, if that gives you a clue. Hee hee hee. The '50s. We don't need your rules, adults! We're 53! We're redefining debauchery! We were born AFTER television was invented! There's just something about Sting screeching on this one that is awesome. YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND US SO DON'T REPRIMAND US WE'RE TAKING THE FUTURE WE DON'T NEED NO TEACHERS!! (The fact that Sting WAS a teacher before this band is another thing that makes it so amusing.) One thing the Police IS NOT is a Sex Pistols-esque youth-anarchy band. So this song is really not them at all. Which is half the reason that it's awesome. They did not sing this at the concert. Hee.
6. Masoko Tanga
This is one of the reggae-est of their songs, along with "Regatta de Blanc" on the second album (which..."white reggae"? So lame). It has words, but the words are all nonsense (and sung by Sting in his patented fake Jamaican accent). And yet they go perfectly well. And if you listen to the song enough, it's quite fun to sing along to. This is just a straight-up awesome jam. It's the last song on Outlandos.
7. The Bed's Too Big Without You
It was this or "Bring On the Night," which I also love, but there's something about the structure of this one that just hits my pleasure centers (ew, sorry). I wish I knew, like, ANY music terminology AT ALL, but one thing I love that Sting does is how he starts singing like partway through the verse, on the second...measure...or something...seriously, I know nothing about music. But like, the music plays a melody, and then he starts singing a complementary melody after it. And there's that bass part that has nothing to do with anything (except, of course, that it does). This is about Sting cheating on somebody and then being dumped and then whining about it forever and ever, as he is wont to do. It's from Regatta de Blanc, and it's clear (dude, I so should have done these in chronological order) that they've gotten more sophisticated from the first album, when they were sort of trying to be like, the Ramones or something, and by this album they've pretty much given up the punk thing, which is good because it didn't fit them at all.
8. So Lonely
Back to Outlandos. This is the crown jewel in the I AM SO MISUNDERSTOOD AND PITIFUL genre. I used to sing this song to our elderly, sickly cat, who would get confused and lost all the time and meow sadly until you went and found him (we lived in a five-room apartment, BTW). This is nothing super exciting musically, until the end, where the "lo, lo, lo" part is pretty kicky. But mostly it's just great because IN THIS THEATER THAT I CALL MY SOUL, I ALWAYS PLAY THE STARRING ROLE! And so forth.
9. Synchronicity
These are SO out of order. I might rewrite this. By Synchronicity, they were super sophisticated and like a big arena band and cranking out hits. I don't remember if this was ever on the radio, but it's a fricking masterpiece. It's in 6/4 time? Something like that. I wish I knew more about time signatures. But it's a weird one (one of Sting's favorite things -- he's got at least one weirdo time signature on each album; he really likes 7/8 and 9/8). And the song doesn't make a whole lot of sense -- it follows the general album theme of unsettledness/the world being screwed up and scary/being watched (see basically every other song on the album). Maybe in a way it's like an updated "Born in the '50s," only darker, much much much more musically sophisticated, about 50 times more abstract, and about 100 times less stupid. Or maybe that's a reach. In any case, I generally consider this song to be pretty much the pinnacle of the Police as a band.
10. It's All Right for You
This is, I just realized, another of those songs like "Synchronicity" where it's really fast and full of rhyming words/phrases all in a row. Apparently I like that. Can you tell a story in three verses made up of two-word phrases? Apparently, you can. And: catchy. (From Regatta.)
11. Hungry for You (J'aurai toujours faim de toi)
This is one good reason the Police are not the Ramones: the Ramones would not fruitily sing a whole song in French for no reason. Oh, Sting. Despite my FIVE YEARS of French, I still can't really make much sense of this song, except that he wants her and stuff, he drinks her blood, there's one part where he wins the world in a game of cards -- whatever. I don't even speak French well enough to be able to gauge whether this is crappy French or not. All I know is, "jusqu'a ce que je sois sec" is pretty awesome to sing in the car. This is from Ghost in the Machine, album number four, and this is the first one on this list from that album, I see, which...might mean something, or not.
12. Omegaman
Also from Ghost in the Machine. WHAT DOES IT MEAN? I don't know. Really, by picking "Omegaman" (the only song I have on here of Andy's) I'm picking the last three songs on Ghost in the Machine, which are "Omegaman," "Secret Journey," and "Darkness" (and by Andy, Sting, and Stewart respectively).
Ha ha, OK -- I was about to say that though the entire album seems green to me "for obvious reasons," these songs are the "greenest" for me, and then I realized that the logo is red and I just had to go look it up on Amazon to believe that it actually has no green on it, on the cover, at all. My synesthesia, let me show you it! I have no idea why I think of it as green -- neither "ghost" nor "machine" is a green word for me, generally, but the phrase "ghost in the machine" is VERY green, and I thought it was because the album cover was green, but it's so not. I imagine I got it from something in either the X-Files episode (pretty much everything on that show is green, man) or the movie that I faintly remember seeing. (That could be it -- all the posters are green on black.) ANYWAY, I very very strongly associate this album with the color green, for reasons that are now unclear to me (hee), but the last three songs are just this big mass of nighttime, sort of neon green on black, that I find evocative and sort of soothing. This is apparently...just me. All righty! Anyway. "Omegaman" -- it's energetic and cool and I like the lyrics even though I usually hate Andy's lyrics. And "Secret Journey" is corny but it still fits that mood for me somehow, and "Darkness" is moody and it's you inside a small room before you fall asleep thinking about your life (and also about how you're famous, but whatever), which works for the end of the album after you've been the Omegaman and met the holy man on your secret journey, and now I am making zero sense. "Omegaman": Good song. GITM: Not green. Except to me.
13. Synchronicity II: The perfect rock counterpoint to "Synchronicity" Regular. Full of kickass lyrics and imagery, including kicking your boss in the nuts and also THE LOCH NESS MONSTER. Totally square as far as the beat, which is why it's a good counterpoint. I'm pulling this out of my ass, in case that wasn't obvious, but it is. A good counterpoint, I mean. Also AWESOME to scream along to in rush-hour traffic. And, contains the line WE HAVE TO SHOUT ABOVE THE DIN OF OUR RICE KRISPIES!!! which of course NEEDS to be yelled as Sting does.
14. Can't Stand Losing You
Total opposite of the one above. Hee. It's from Outlandos and it's Sting sulking about his girlfriend dumping him. Also brilliant though: "I see you sent my letters back/And my LP records AND THEY'RE ALL SCRATCHED." It's the most awesomely passive-aggressive song in the entire world. And your brother's gonna kill me and he's six feet ten. I can't see the point in another day, when nobody listens to a word I say. Also, he's not really going to kill himself. Don't worry.
15. Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic
Unabashedly corny and sentimental and I just love it. Also from Ghost in the Machine, weirdly, because it doesn't really fit there, but I guess they needed a single that wasn't about the disintegration of society and stuff. Sting loves to quote himself, and he's used that "Do I have to tell the story of a thousand rainy days since we first met/It's a big enough umbrella, but it's always me that ends up getting wet" more. than. once since this, but, well, it's a good couple lines. This song is totally timeless and I am not ashamed to love it. The bridge is the best part.
Bonus (ha ha, I suck): When the World Is Running Down, You Make the Best of What's Still Around
I tried not to include this song, and I couldn't do it. I don't even really listen to it anymore because I'm so sick of it because I was so obsessed with it for so long. It's about the apocalypse (I guess), and Sting is in his house and is tired of all the stuff he has. He watches the same porn and listens to the same records and eats the same food. It's very flip (obviously!), and it doesn't sound like any other Police song, and it's just good times all around. I just love how it's like, "Yeah, well, it's too bad about the apocalypse, and I AM sick of watching this one talk show that I taped, but -- what can you do!" The live version is much faster and less lazy, which is fun too. Off Zenyatta.
All righty! Some good Police songs. And now, because I like being critical and shooting my mouth off, here are 10 that I don't like so much. And why! Of course. Muahaha.
1. Contact
I think this is my least favorite Police song of all time. It just blows. It's not clever, it's not musically exciting in any way -- it just sits there, the guitar sort of jangles boringly, and it has a lamely naughty line about a "raincoat" (that they repeat three times just in case you missed it), and it has the line "I've got contacts in my book and in my eyes" -- AUUUUGH, and the chorus is dumb, and THE WHOLE THING IS DUMB. This song completely sucks. Sorry, Stewart. I do like some of Stewart's songs -- "Miss Gradenko," for one, and "Darkness," and I even like "Bombs Away," but when he misses, he misses. This is off Regatta.
2. Murder by Numbers
This is from Synchronicity and it's by Andy Summers and it's just boring and lame. The chorus goes "Murder by numbers, 1-2-3/It's as easy to learn as your ABCs." I'm sorry, any song that contains the line "It's as easy to learn as your ABCs" automatically sucks. (That means you, "Locomotion"!) Any song that rhymes "1-2-3" with "A-B-C," unless it's sung by the Jackson 5, also sucks. So this sucks double. It's just sort of a showtune-y, wannabe-"dark" thing about how to kill somebody. It's like something a nine-year-old boy would think was awesome. It's also weirdly Victorian or something. I don't know. It has no point. Go away, song.
3. Every Breath You Take
All right, I don't really hate this song -- I just don't LOVE it, and I get annoyed when it's the only Police song that people know. I also get annoyed with idiots who think it's a love song when it's (as is fitting for the Synchronicity album) about stalking and being creepy. I do like the bridge. Other than that, there's just not that much to it, and I don't get how it became, like, the hugest hit of all time. Whatevs.
4. Be My Girl/Sally
This is half on the list, because I LOVE the "Be My Girl" part. Even though it's just Sting singing "Would you be my girl, would you be my girl, would you be my, be my, be my girl" over and over. It's still good. But the middle part, the "Sally" part, is another of Andy's bizarre Britishy, faintly Monty Python-y ramblings about something he thinks is edgy, and this time it's a blow-up doll. Named Sally. That's all you need to know. It is silly. I guess it works with "Be My Girl" though, since that song has one lyric and wouldn't really make a song all on its own. But I always fast-forward through the Sally part. Also because the whole song stops and it's just Andy reciting a poem, with some weird tinkly piano in the background. Do not want. It's from Outlandos, before they knew better.
5. Deathwish
From Regatta. I guess it's about...having a deathwish, specifically with regard to driving, but it's just forgettable and unclever. If you want a song about getting in/not getting in/surviving a car accident, "Airbag" is one squadrillion times better.
6. Walking in Your Footsteps
Just overly literal for me. And the whole weird drumbeat thing that goes on through the WHOLE SONG is just too much. Also, am I supposed to feel bad that dinosaurs went extinct, and tie it somehow to our environmental assholishness today? Because...I think they were killed by a meteor. Not my fault! This song is so high-concept and it's just dorky.
7. Voices Inside My Head
Sort of more or less an instrumental, and full of what my friend Dan used to call "stoner jamming." Yawn.
8. Invisible Sun -- the one on the Fight the Future soundtrack
This is cheating, but I'm talking not about the one on GITM but the remake, by Sting and a reggae guy named Aswad, on the X-Files: Fight the Future soundtrack. (Look, I can't help it that everything in my life relates back somehow to The X-Files. Don't judge!) This is one of the dumbest things I ever heard of, and it's from the era (which is still going on) where Sting likes to randomly collaborate with people. Now, I know the Police is a band with reggae elements, BUT, this song, in its original version, is a very grim and dark and almost monotonous (intentionally so, I mean) song about Northern Ireland, with zero reggae, since they weren't really doing that by GITM anymore anyway, and making it into a sunny, friendly reggae song makes ZERO SENSE. It just doesn't work. At all. (That soundtrack album has some good songs on it though. No, it really does!)
9. Peanuts
OK, I actually like this song (from Outlandos) -- BUT I cannot ABIDE when Sting, near the end of it, sings "PEEEEEEANUTS!" real loud and demented like a crazy peanut-selling guy. It makes me cringe. When Sting tries to be demonic it rarely works. The live version is better. Because it doesn't have that part.
10. On Any Other Day
Another of Stewart's weirdo songs, on Regatta. How do I not like thee? Let me count the ways. 1. Stewart cannot sing, though he is one fantastic drummer. 2. The melody generally sucks. 3. Having Stewart, who is American, use words like "chap" and talk about having his tea just annoys me for some reason. 4. I don't like that one of the bad things that happens, in the chorus, is "My fine young son has turned out gay." I know, you have to take the times into account, blah blah, but, they had heard of gay people in the '80s. Shut up, Stewart.
And there you have it. Next time: Fiona! Or not. I need to take a nap now. And I have "Contact" in my head, somehow, after all that. Curses!!
Sprung forward
Sorry, that kind of sounds like spam.
I feel like I'm hung over, the sun is in my eyes in weird random ways, and the bus clock is wrong, but it's going to be light when I get home. Maybe even if I go to the gym first. Spring! It's really coming. Someday. Now, if only it would get warmer than 13˚F windchill, we'd be in business.
I feel like I'm hung over, the sun is in my eyes in weird random ways, and the bus clock is wrong, but it's going to be light when I get home. Maybe even if I go to the gym first. Spring! It's really coming. Someday. Now, if only it would get warmer than 13˚F windchill, we'd be in business.
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
So, this makes me upset.
"If you have any desire to ever have a baby, you should stop fucking around and find a husband, you lazy cow."
At least that's what I get from this article. Now, I understand her point, and it's valid -- the biological clock is what it is. But it's...not like I don't think about it. A lot. And it's not like I just turn around to my rows of patiently waiting, perfectly compatible suitors and say, "Naaaaaahhh, I don't feel like having a baby today, you guys. I'll just, like, have one when I'm retired and stuff."
It's the flippancy of it that bugs me, really. That it's that easy, and that if you're not settled down with a husband it's just because you're an idiot and you're not TRYING hard enough. Or that the ONLY reason you haven't gotten around to snagging a man is that you work 120 hours a week at your high-powered law firm. As if that's the dichotomy of possibility for every woman on earth -- either you're already married with three kids, or you're a top executive who's too busy drinking Cristal on your yacht while rolling around in your piles of Prada handbags (or whatever the fuck) to KNOW HOW to LOVE. So, the article says, look up from your Cigar Aficionado and marry that dude across from you right now! Anything else is just poor planning!
I mean -- freeze your eggs for $14,000 in your 20s? Who the fuck has that kind of money in their 20s? Oh, right -- women who have been "climbing the corporate ladder" instead of husband-hunting. So, it's like this -- either have a baby with the husband you already have, or use the money you have instead of a husband to freeze your eggs so you can have one later. Just pick which one of those two you are! It's as simple as that!
I feel a bit about this, also, the way I do about the idea that everyone should vote no matter what. Yes, you should vote -- if you're minimally informed. If you have no idea who any of the people are and you look at their pictures in the newspaper one day and you vote for the hot one, then maybe, just maybe, I'd rather not have you helping to decide the future of the country and the world. And yes, you should take steps to have kids (assuming you want to have kids) -- if you're prepared to provide them with a minimally happy life. Grabbing the first male you see on the sidewalk, getting Rules-y with him until he gives in and marries you, and then tricking him into knocking you up just to ensure you stick to a timetable does not, in my opinion, constitute an ideal parenting situation. And to me that's what this article is saying. Get married, as early as possible, to the first halfway decent prospect who walks through the door. Have some kids. Because if you don't do it now, they might turn out deformed and then won't you feel like a dumbass. Who cares if you're not really compatible/if you're both too young to know what the hell you want/if neither of you has any particular INTEREST in having children at that point in time. Just get it done! Otherwise you might have trouble! And then it will be your fault! And you won't have to feel guilty/sad/conflicted/regretful yourself because we've already done it for you with our IMPENETRABLE! LOGIC!
I know, I know -- she's just stating biological facts. But it's a bit like somebody going up to you and saying, "You should really do something about how fat you are. You're hideous and you're also going to die young. Why don't you just lose weight?" and when you object they say, "I'm just telling you because I want to help you."
I guess it just dredges up every "single woman" anxiety I have, logical or illogical; mixes them all up into a pie; and casually shoves it in my face while saying, "Sorry, but you really need to eat shitloads of this pie right now, so I thought this was the best way to get it to you." Oh well, at least I have my high-powered, obscenely lucrative career that I consciously chose over babies to get me through. Oh, wait. Sigh.
At least that's what I get from this article. Now, I understand her point, and it's valid -- the biological clock is what it is. But it's...not like I don't think about it. A lot. And it's not like I just turn around to my rows of patiently waiting, perfectly compatible suitors and say, "Naaaaaahhh, I don't feel like having a baby today, you guys. I'll just, like, have one when I'm retired and stuff."
It's the flippancy of it that bugs me, really. That it's that easy, and that if you're not settled down with a husband it's just because you're an idiot and you're not TRYING hard enough. Or that the ONLY reason you haven't gotten around to snagging a man is that you work 120 hours a week at your high-powered law firm. As if that's the dichotomy of possibility for every woman on earth -- either you're already married with three kids, or you're a top executive who's too busy drinking Cristal on your yacht while rolling around in your piles of Prada handbags (or whatever the fuck) to KNOW HOW to LOVE. So, the article says, look up from your Cigar Aficionado and marry that dude across from you right now! Anything else is just poor planning!
I mean -- freeze your eggs for $14,000 in your 20s? Who the fuck has that kind of money in their 20s? Oh, right -- women who have been "climbing the corporate ladder" instead of husband-hunting. So, it's like this -- either have a baby with the husband you already have, or use the money you have instead of a husband to freeze your eggs so you can have one later. Just pick which one of those two you are! It's as simple as that!
I feel a bit about this, also, the way I do about the idea that everyone should vote no matter what. Yes, you should vote -- if you're minimally informed. If you have no idea who any of the people are and you look at their pictures in the newspaper one day and you vote for the hot one, then maybe, just maybe, I'd rather not have you helping to decide the future of the country and the world. And yes, you should take steps to have kids (assuming you want to have kids) -- if you're prepared to provide them with a minimally happy life. Grabbing the first male you see on the sidewalk, getting Rules-y with him until he gives in and marries you, and then tricking him into knocking you up just to ensure you stick to a timetable does not, in my opinion, constitute an ideal parenting situation. And to me that's what this article is saying. Get married, as early as possible, to the first halfway decent prospect who walks through the door. Have some kids. Because if you don't do it now, they might turn out deformed and then won't you feel like a dumbass. Who cares if you're not really compatible/if you're both too young to know what the hell you want/if neither of you has any particular INTEREST in having children at that point in time. Just get it done! Otherwise you might have trouble! And then it will be your fault! And you won't have to feel guilty/sad/conflicted/regretful yourself because we've already done it for you with our IMPENETRABLE! LOGIC!
I know, I know -- she's just stating biological facts. But it's a bit like somebody going up to you and saying, "You should really do something about how fat you are. You're hideous and you're also going to die young. Why don't you just lose weight?" and when you object they say, "I'm just telling you because I want to help you."
I guess it just dredges up every "single woman" anxiety I have, logical or illogical; mixes them all up into a pie; and casually shoves it in my face while saying, "Sorry, but you really need to eat shitloads of this pie right now, so I thought this was the best way to get it to you." Oh well, at least I have my high-powered, obscenely lucrative career that I consciously chose over babies to get me through. Oh, wait. Sigh.
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