Disappointing Factoid

A few years ago, for my birthday, a friend sent me a link to a website. You could put in your age, and it would report a list of people who had accomplished more than you could ever hope to in your lifetime, by the time they were your age. While poking around on wikipedia, i was just reminded of that feeling.

The voice actors on the simpsons are comparatively young. Much younger than I was expecting. Harry Shearer, the voice of Smithers, Flanders, Burms (and Handsome Dan from Wayne's World 2) is 63, about what I was expecting. But Dan Castallanet and Nancy Cartwright are 49 and Hank Azaria and Yeardley Smith are 43. They've beeing doing the Simpsons for 20 years. Which means they were in their 20's when they started doing this.

This is just a distressing notion.

been, uh, blog-slacking

guess I didn't have much to say. Or I was processing. Or both. Here's a neat little abstract I ran across while reading (one of the only cool things I've found in my assigned readings, I'm disapointed to admit):

Abstract
The proposal examined here is that speakers use uh and um to announce that they are initiating
what they expect to be a minor (uh), or major (um), delay in speaking. Speakers can use these
announcements in turn to implicate, for example, that they are searching for a word, are deciding
what to say next, want to keep the floor, or want to cede the floor. Evidence for the proposal comes
from several large corpora of spontaneous speech. The evidence shows that speakers monitor their
speech plans for upcoming delays worthy of comment. When they discover such a delay, they
formulate where and how to suspend speaking, which item to produce (uh or um), whether to attach
it as a clitic onto the previous word (as in “and-uh”), and whether to prolong it. The argument is that
uh and um are conventional English words, and speakers plan for, formulate, and produce them just
as they would any word. q 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Fun Trax

So there's been a couple of fun tracks that I've run across this week:

Truckasaurus - Angels Sound Like - Angels Sound Like a more interesting Ratatat apparently. I didn't think the other tracks on their site were that cool, but this one is gold. Thanks forkcast.

Architecture in Helsinki - Heart It Races - Track from their new album (apparently/hopefully). The associated blurb talks about how it's an actual factual whole song, that builds and doesn't just jump from hook to sweet, sweet hook. I think they're right, and while I like the old method of AiH songwriting, this could be just fine.

The Crayon Fields - Living So Well - All the tracks on here are in that 'fun-pop-twee-california-horns-backup-vocals' kind of way. So, somewhere between Beulah and Belle and Sebastian, basically. (That is one of my first Z is like X+Y comparisons, hope it's good). From Australia.

Ah, the joys of wikipedia

Nothing like learning that 20 years after the original, the Brady Bunch group attempted to reunite again - this time as a drama. Apparently it was a horrible, horrible flop (though this fact is in no way surprising).

Check out some of the spoilers, courtesy of wikipedia:

-Bobby's budding car-racing career ends abruptly in the first episode after an accident leaves him a paraplegic.

-Jan and Phillip (whom she married in The Brady Girls Get Married -dan), unable to conceive children of their own, adopt a Korean girl.

-Radio host Cindy begins a romantic interest with her boss, a widower more than 10 years her senior who has two children.

-Stay at home mother Marcia battles alcoholism while Wally loses yes another in a series of jobs.

No word on what happened to Greg, I personally hoped he would have returned during May sweeps as a post-op transexual neurosurgeon who attempts a radical experimental treatment to get heal Bobby. Will Pauline/Greg reveal his connection to the family? Will Jan's gloating over Marcia finally drive her sister to the edge? Will Bobby walk again? Stay tuned next season, for all these answers, and more...

Trying out New stuff

So I'm messing around with this blogging software bleezer. We'll see how it goes. I think that a good 70 percent of all blogs are like mine - a post like once every month that begins with an apology, contains promises for more content, and then no new material again for another month.

Pretty kicking month for movies for the 18-34 male set, between Grindhouse, Aqua Teens and Hot Fuzz. I'm curious if it was a coincidence, or if there's some sort of subconcious trend that 'the ad-wizards' have picked up on. If it is there, and gets solidified, and becomes like a 'pre-summer odd-ball over-the-top-explosions and irony before the mega blockbusters with over the top explosions hit in may in order to be the big summer giant opening and we don't want these smaller movies to be completely obliterated' kind of month, well, I for one would not be too disappointed.

I feel like this might just be me playing into the hands of advertisers, but...

I just saw an ad for (oh actually I can't remember which company) a type of White Tea. There's a dude in a field asking what makes white tea so good, and an old asian guy says something like 'we take the tea leave while it is young and still light colored, and then we Pluck It!' I've seen it a few times before and every time I've marveled at how subtly fucked up the sentiment is.

Just felt like mentioning it.


This post is kind of shitty. I felt compelled to write it, because 1) I keep wanting to tell someone about this ad, and always forgetting and 2) I just started reading a free online book on notebooking - How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Ever Think I was inspired by a phrase he repeats: "just SPITTING THIS TEXT OUT."

I am pretty excited to try out the methods talked about in this book. I've been thinking on and off (mostly while in class, or drifting off to sleep) about the problem of containing and organizing all the information I'm going to need to know to be productive. A map was a possible idea I had, and then today I just randomly stumbled upon the book, which is written in quick, easily read (if slightly scattered) prose.

What grabbed me, what really made me want to pay attention to him was this passage:

For all of this immobility, this freezing, for all of these negative effects, why on Earth would anyone want to do this?

Because of the INCREDIBLE CLARITY that comes with it. It may feel like, doing this, that for the first time in your life, you REALLY have a CLEAR IDEA of what kinds of thoughts are going through your head. You'll really understand your ideas. And you'll also see connections that you were never consciously aware of before. You'll see a structure and a pattern in your life. You're goals and psychology will become clearer to you. You'll be clearer too about what you do NOT understand.

How could anybody not want that?

So to recap:
1) Weird Tea commercial
2) Weird Notebooking theories

whoops

Didn't mean to go three weeks or so without posting. I spent most of the night making a podcast, it's full of fun pop songs, I'll post it as soon as I figure out a hosting solution.

In the meantime, it's shaping up to be a ridiculous year for music, new Arcade Fire is out tommorow/today, looking forward to that. Then two weeks later new Andrew Bird and Modest Mouse. Plus any number of new acts to find! To tide you over, here's a Bound Stems video - it's the track "Wake Up, Ma and Pa are gone" from their record, Appreciation Night, (as well as my podcast) over live footage, worth a watch:



I suspect I'll have a post about comics, loser protagonists, and taking risks in, uh, a timeframe. I'm still mulling it over.

Andrew Bird stuff

Hey, so I am getting pretty excited about the new Andrew Bird album. I've heard about the crazy live show, and of course there's all sorts of footage of youtube. Here's a cool example of what it's like, all guitars, violins, and whistles:



And I saw this on cokemachineglow - Andrew Bird on a kid's show as the stringed instrument repairman Dr. Stringz.

edit - unfortunately viacom took it down. I don't really understand why, it was pretty good press for that show.