Ultranormal

  • Mike Doughty – Haughty Melodic

    Don’t do anything else. Go out and get this album right now. It’s amazing. It’s gorgeous. It’s better than anything he’s ever done before. It’s better than any Soul Coughing album (although individual Coughing songs are stellar, their albums were wholly uneven affairs). Every song on this album cooks with an intensity that was missing from most of Skittish and Rockity Roll. This album has some songs that match and exceed those stellar Coughing gems, and some that will stick in your head forever.\
    Busting Up A Starbucks is angry, raw, bluesy and powerful. Mike reaches deep, and drops his voice to a growl. The driving drums propels each verse to the hypnotic and kick-ass chorus, where the Morphine-esque sax kicks in and whirls your head around.\
    Tremendous Brunettes is a ton of fun. A beautiful piano line driving the song forward, with an unexpected, but perfect, guest appearance by Dave Mathews rounds out the fun. Yes, the song is as funny as the title would lead you to believe. It’s great fun. It sounds almost like a sea shanty, is as much fun, and will keep you singing along at the top of your lungs on the way home.\
    His Truth Is Marching On is a better anthem than Move On (and I friggin’ love that song). This one is larger, a personal plea to a higher power for that connection that’s missing. The lyrics are rock solid, punching and will take you in. It’s good stuff.\
    Thanks to Jodi Chromey for letting me know the album was out. Go get it. Go. Now. I mean it.

  • TNT + NBA = Whore!

    Is anyone else annoyed at the combo movie/basketball ads showing on TNT during playoff games? Not only are they lame tie-ins for the movies, they’re super lame promos for playoff basketball, which really doesn’t need a whole lot of help.\
    And as an added bonus, they’re some of the most forced, weak and painful stretched metaphors for the playoffs I’ve ever seen. They’re so bad they make Bill Walton’s frequent hyperbole and crap pontificating seem almost palatable.\
    TNT, come on. Charles Barkley + Jeremy Irons + Crusades + Detroit != Compelling Advertising. Get a clue.

  • The Horrors of Beta Software

    I love Instiki, as I’ve said before. I’ve been running 0.9.2 on my Powerbook for a while (ran 0.9.1 before that), and love it. I was running it on my linux box. Notice the was in the previous sentence.\
    What happened? That box was running RedHat 8. I decided it was time to upgrade to Fedora Core 3, and did so. Then, I went to fire up 0.9.2 again, and it didn’t work. It keeps complaining about something in Madeleine (the database). Not being familiar enough with Ruby or its various parts to figure out (something with YAML), I figured it might be because I’d upgraded from Ruby 1.8.1 to 1.8.2. So, hey, let’s try the new version of Instiki! It started up fine, and then barfed on the homepages of my three wiki webs. It was something with formatting, so I went right to the edit_web url, and switched it back to Textile. That worked for two of the three webs.\
    On the third web, there’s a gigantic unordered list. Something in that list is causing Instiki to churn like mad. It locks up the machine, and I have to desperately try to kill it before the machine runs out of memory and thrashes itself to death. It’s funny that text can do that, but apparently, it can.\
    I’m not sure what’s up, but for now, I’ve had to move everything over to my G5 and run it there (where everything still works, thanks OS X!).\
    A few lessons I’ve taken from this:

    • use beta software at your own risk
    • don’t use beta software for “critical” data
    • backup everything regularly
    • beware systems that don’t allow easy import/export of data (Instiki has good export, non-existent import).
    • don’t use a development environment as a shared resource for important data.

  • A Texas-Sized Welcome

    I’m pleased as punch to announce that Katie Sunstrom has joined Bill and me over at I Buy Local! She’s even posted her first restaurant review and her author profile!\
    Welcome, Katie! And, if you’re interested in sharing your local ideas and reviews, e-mail kevin at this here domain (you know, lawver.net).

  • Ben Folds – Songs for Silverman

    I’m not one to rush out and buy an album the day it comes out. There are a few folks I make exceptions for, and Ben Folds is one of them. His new album came out 4/26, and here I am on 4/27 reviewing it.\
    It’s very good, better than The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner and not quite as good as Rockin’ The Suburbs. It doesn’t have the one kick-ass rocker on it like Suburbs does, but the songs are all good, with three or four great ones.\
    Landed is my favorite song of the moment. It has the poignancy of Brick, but rocks a little bit harder in the chorus and bridges. It’s an amazing piece of work. It’ll rip your heart out while you’re tapping your foot.\
    Give Judy My Notice is an homage to 70’s ballad rock that hits its target square in the face. This being Ben Folds, it’s better than any of its source material, and gets is some good lines even though it’s a breakup song that sounds oddly like a sitcom theme.\
    Go out right now and get it. You won’t be sorry.

  • The Phone Buying Blues

    My poor Sidekick Color died last week. My wife wants a cell phone. I want something out of Star Trek that just doesn’t seem to exist yet (go figure). Deciphering cell plans, and deciding on a phone that will do all the things I want it to. Right now, I need a phone for Jen that doesn’t have to do a whole lot. A camera would be nice, but not required, and it just needs a good address book and battery life.\
    My requirements are a little tougher. It has to be on this list, has to have a camera, e-mail, support internet-over-Bluetooth, and a calendar. Yeah, I know. I’m tempted by the Treo 650, but the only carriers who have it charge an insane amount of money for their unlimited internet plan (I did over eleven megs a month on my Sidekick). T-Mobile has a much more reasonable unlimited internet plan, but they don’t have the 650.\
    The cell companies’ websites don’t help either. They don’t have reviews on the site, are sparse with the details, and navigation is a pain in the butt.\
    If you’ve got any recommendations, I’d love to hear ’em.

  • Lenny Bruce and The Culture of Life

    Before my last trip to Ireland, I stopped by our local used bookstore, and picked up some reading material. One of the books was an ancient paperback: The Essential Lenny Bruce. I’ve been picking at it a little bit at a time since then. It’s really hard to read standup, but I read something a couple nights ago that has been sticking in my head. I can’t shake it. So, I’m going to share it with you, so hopefully you won’t be able to shake it either.\
    bq. Cause the weird part we get hung up with, “I am pure and I am good, and those people are dirty and those murderers are bad and I am so pure, I’m so good that I have to murder those murderers.” And then you end up getting screwed up.\
    How frightening is that? Have you ever heard a more succinct and spot-on description of pious anger? This is the motivation that leads people to kill abortion providers, to threaten the lives of judges, to celebrate life by ruining or ending the lives of others. That’s not a “culture of life”. It’s a culture of acceptable losses, and blatant hypocrisy wrapped in some twisted Christian vocabulary but without any meaning at all.

  • Overall Kid – The Star Of His Own Movie

    A couple weeks ago, I helped my sister with a little movie project that she filmed all on her digital camera. It made me realize I’d never tried using the movie feature on my digital camera. So I did. The day I dressed Brian up in his manly overalls and flannel shirt, I took a little movie of him playing. The voice is me trying to get him to make noise. Of course, Little Wrestler Brian didn’t come out and roar, but he’s still cute.\
    Go see it if you wanna.

  • What I’ve Been Up To

    I’ve totally redone the categories, so they’re more tag-like. I’m also slowly going through all the posts I did while I was on Blogger, over 600 of them, and moving them to their appropriate categories. It’s been fun going back and looking at some of the stuff I wrote a few years ago. It’s a lot of fun.\
    Tonight, I got to my posts around September 11th, now in a new category called terrorism that’s slowly growing. I expect the memories to come flooding back when I get to the sniper attacks here in DC. For us, they were almost worse than September 11th. It went on longer, and had the whole area wracked with fear for so long – all at the same time the anthrax scare happened. All of it local, all of it random, all of it could strike anyone at anytime.\
    Keep an eye on the categories. They’ll keep moving around, and I’ll be redesigning the archives page in the near future.

  • I’m Going To Eat You!

    Brian, Exultant

    Brian is going to happily eat you. If he doesn’t succeed in actually ingesting you, he will at least cover you in drool. That boy is cute, I tell you. I’m sure it’s all from Jen because I certainly don’t have even half that much cute in my DNA. My favorite thing is getting him after his naps. He’s usually laying there swimming. When I walk in, he perks up, lifts his head, craning it to see. When he spies me, he breaks into a giant grin and makes a happy noise. I love baby happy noises and giggly squeals. Brian makes a lot of them. They always make me feel better, no matter what’s going on.