Two recommendations:
The Affair, a rock band from Brooklyn. But not like every other rock band from Brooklyn. Worth a listen.
Bulleit Bourbon was the clear winner in taste tests conducted among friends recently: better than Woodford Reserve, Overholt, Michter’s Rye, and Eagle Rare. It’s got molasses and vanilla notes that make it gentle, but enough oak and fire to make you drink it slowly. I liked it enough to apply for a job with their marketing company, Colaneglo Synergy.
For awhile, I thought that the terrible Globe website was a strategy to drive more people to the print edition, but by now I’m pretty sure it’s just incompetence. For crying out loud, I don’t ask much from a newspaper. Bad reporting, bad website, bad books section, the abortion that is the Sidekick section…. and we still got the Sunday Globe, mostly for the crossword. But this… this is absurd: the idiots accidentally distributed the credit card information of a quarter million subscribers along with the Sunday Worchester Telegram and Gazette. Insane.
Cat Power’s lead vocalist is not named Cat Power. Her name is Chan Marshall.
One of the band’s songs is featured in a Cingular ad (requires Quicktime).
There is also an apparently controversial video for the song “Living Proof” up at MTV’s execrable Overdrive area. You’ll need Internet Explorer, ActiveX, and the patience to sit through both an ad for Pantene Pro-Vitamin Shampoo and some sort of popup which displays an error message about license acquisition. The video sends up the bling-bling rap-video conventions, and also has track-and-field athletes dressed in full hijab, which I imagine is the controversial part. That or the woman dressed in a red latex bodysuit carrying a cross in the 100-meter dash.
The video is followed by an ad for Pantene Blond Expressions Shampoo that Makes your Blondness Even Blonder. I have no idea why MTV insists on shitting in its own data stream, but hey, they’re the ones who understand the 18-25 demographic, not me.
Rather alarming PCWorld article on Adware. Sample:
How do VCs explain giving money to companies who monitor users’ Web browsing habits? “Adware is here to stay,” says Venetia Kontogouris, a managing director at Trident Capital. “Privacy for the [Internet] consumer is a lost war.”
Outfits like SiteAdvisor are trying to fight back, but it’s an uphill battle: prevention requires effort, and people won’t even expend any effort to prevent tooth decay or type II diabetes . I’m not sure it’s a lost battle, but it’s not one I’m particularly confident about.
One more thing I learned from the article: If I want to start an ethically dubious software company (and the privacy statement at WhenU doesn’t reassure me any more than the logo-and-nothing-more at “next-generation online advertising network” Turn does), I know where to look for funding.
Cat Power’s new album, “The Greatest”, was first recommended to me as similar to singer-songwriter Kristin Hersh. The comparison is pretty valid — emotionally damaged tone, a variety of instrumentation centered on guitar and vocals — but Cat Power’s vocals are smoother and have greater range. And Cat Power has awesome cover art, too.
An earlier album from Cat Power is entirely composed of cover songs, and has a really haunting, mopey cover of “(I can’t get no) Satisfaction” which I don’t think has the words “I,” “Can’t,” “Get,” “no,” or “Satisfaction” in it at all. What it does have is this soft, loping minor key and and quiet lyrics in a sad, sad voice. Really, it’s the opposite of the Rolling Stones’ version, and is not only a good song in itself, but brings new layers of meaning to the original.
Her songs have more instrumentation, accompaniment, and range, but “Satisfaction” from “The Covers Record,” and the song “Hate,” from the new album, have an ultra-spare style which just grabs me.
I tried to look up the lyrics for “Hate” online, but the various lyrics sites don’t have it yet, so I had to go and listen to 5-10 second bits of it again and again until I got the lyrics right.
And it’s not a happy song at all. My transcribed lyrics in the extended entry. They look a little melodramatic written down, but trust me: major weepiness could ensue if you listen to her singing them.
Continue reading “Review: Cat Power, “The Greatest””
M. not being much of a fish eater, I have try to take advantage of her absence to experiment with fish dishes in the hope that once I perfect them, I can get her to eat them.
Tonight she’s out at the West Side Lounge with the ladies, and I’m making brook trout steamed with ginger, scallions, red peppers, and shiitake mushrooms. I made two sauces: one a sort of dipping sauce made of local cider vinegar, ginger, hot peppers, and soy sauce, and the other a thicker Chinese-black-bean-paste style sauce: garlic, Chinese black bean paste, sriracha, hot peppers, sesame oil, olive oil, and miso to sweeten and thicken.
I plated it all Iron-Chef style.
The faults are as follows:
I finally went to Cingular today to get a new phone– I suppose I could have just gotten a new battery, but for some reason the quality of service had declined dramatically as well. The phone would work for 12 or 24 or 36 hours, then would require a hard reset. Even a hard reset didn’t correct the bug which told me I had voicemail all the time, regardless of whether I had any. Obviously, the solution to a decline in service quality was the purchase of new hardware.
After I selected a phone, it took me almost an hour to get out of the store. First, I was informed that I could not buy just one new phone: I had to buy two. See, I was an AT&T customer before Cingular bought AT&T, and my girlfriend and I have a joint account. Because the AT&T/Cingular billing systems are still separate, you can’t have an AT&T phone and a Cingular phone on the same account. So, both phones had to be upgraded because one was misbehaving.
Of course, now that I’m renewing my contract, I no longer get the discount I did when I worked for Novell. Total cost to address poor service on the part of Cingular: $126, plus locking myself into a new contract for two years– a contract which is now more expensive every month. And of course, since we’re switching from AT&T to Cingular, we get new SIM cards, meaning we have to re-enter all the data in our address books. Joy.
After forty-five minutes or so in the store, just as escape seemed imminent, the billing system refused to accept my address, and demanded a new one. The cashier called the internal Cingular helpdesk, and left the speakerphone on while she battled through the prompt system and spent a few minutes on hold. Then, just as the helpdesk answered, the system myseriously worked.
By this point, we were both laughing. She said “Gawd, this billing system sucks… but it’s not as bad as the one we had when we were AT&T: Siebel. That was terrible.”
I was glad to see that I was not the only person in the world who thinks that Siebel is a punchline, rather than a legitimate product. Not glad enough to make me stop resenting my phone company, but I smiled a little.
The following diverting media have been making the rounds. Check ’em out:
Internet gamers poke fun at themselves in a music video titled World of Warcraft is a Feeling. Originally from PurePwnage.com.
A hilarious German advertisement for a 1-hour optician is over at AdRants.
Finally, NeoBike has a slideshow of what can happen if someone stops too suddenly during a motorcycle rally.
One of the great things about Redbones BBQ in Davis Sq is the counter. There’s the bar, where the bartenders are friendly. There’s the basement, where there’s plenty of room. There’s the main dining room, where you’re sure to get your fill. But the counter… aaah, the counter.
Seats five. View to the kitchen. If they fry an order of appetizers, anyone seated at the counter is sure to get a taste. And recently they have added, dear god, pickled pig’s snouts.
I ate some. It doesn’t taste bad. Not exactly good, mind you, but there’s a flavor of tanginess and salt from the pickling, and of fat and umami from the pig, and that’s about it. Best washed down with beer. Lots of beer.
There’s a restaurant review in this somewhere, I’m sure of it.
45 minutes down on 93, choked with traffic. Ten minutes inside store: record time. I knew exactly what I wanted and where it was (Expedit, 58″x58, in black-brown), and used the self-checkout lane. Then I stopped for gas and everything went wrong.
I couldn’t get the gas flap open on the car– it was either frozen shut or broken. I bought a soda and as I pulled out, it popped out of the cupholder and spilled all over my coat in the front seat. As I finally got onto 24 North, I noticed that the trunk was ajar.
However, now that I’ve made that harrowing journey three times in one month, I am prepared never to speak or think of furniture ever again.
Secretly Ironic 