hithervox

I dunno, maybe life's just a confluence of increasingly confusing stuff recently, but today seems extra-random for some reason.

Hello, by the way. It's been a while.

So, yeah.

First, this:

Iattire_bunnyears_i_300

What song or lyrics are stuck in your head at the moment?  What album is it from?
Submitted by Lox Ly. 

I have two "stuck in my head cycles" - a long-term "this song has been going around my head for weeks" cycle, and a short-term "song of the day".

Veneer

Today's short-term song is Jose Gonzalez's "Crosses" (from the "Veneer" album), and is easily explainable by the fact that I saw him play live (along with Zero 7) last night. As well as playing the song during his set, he played a second version with Zero 7. The repeated line "catch some light and you'll be alright" is lodged in my brain-pan.

Babylon Springs

In part it's the tune, just the right side of 50s Americana pastiche, filling my head with images of big-finned cars and classic diners. In part it's the sly T.S. Eliot reference in the second verse. And in part it's the wistful, playful "boy done wrong" story of a guy who's sleeping with an already-attached girl.

Finishing one another's sentences
Like a pair of identical twins.
Your boyfriend's out of town until Tuesday
And nobody saw me come in, nobody saw me come in...

...with a gleam in my eye
And an almost airtight alibi.

It's been a good year for music so far, in my little world at least, but these two will definitely make the "top 20 tracks" list.

Tayto

So it's somewhat weird that my first taste of Irish crisps would happen a long, long way from Ireland, but hey. I have a local shop with an "Irish shelf", and I was curious.

First impression: the Irish make good crisps.

What's really interesting to note is the flavour - a lot less pronounced than that of your average English/American crisps, and on contemplating I realised that it seems as though the flavourings are specifically designed to not mask the flavour of the potatoes.

Which, when you think about it, is exactly what you'd expect from Irish crisps...

It's not often that I take musical direction from Popbitch, but the Lebanese/French Mika really is something else.

Mika

His music is like a bizarre collision of Queen, Beck, The Darkness, The Divine Comedy and several other things, and comes out on the "slightly less flamboyant" side of the Scissor Sisters.

It's overblown and cheesier than a French dairy, but somehow it all just works.

Have a listen.

The Roman Empire, according to some accounts (the fun ones anyway) fell apart in an orgy of decadent eating and eye-popping, um, orgies. Not particularly high-minded, but at least they were having fun.

The British Empire fell to pieces mainly due to a very British sense of creeping, crippling guilt over subjugating large swathes of the world's population. Terribly sorry, old chap, and all that.

And the American Empire (well, the one that George seems hell-bent on building to complement the continent-spanning superpower nation)...?

Healthy_handle

It appears that items like this, the healthy handle, will be the downfall of the USA. Eventual cause? Paralysing fear of everything (even shopping carts), and an economy which death-spirals into nothingness because people only buy utterly useless crap and can't keep up their credit/mortgage payments.

Found via the addictive yet terrifying Strange New Products, courtesy in turn of Kelsey.

Killer Bunnies

1 comment

Found via random IRC-o-sphere URL postage (hey, if blogs can have a sphere, so can IRC).

I've no idea whose this is or where it comes from, but it makes me giggle incessantly.

..."Wikipedichains"

The premise is simple. You take two seemingly unrelated and suitably random Wikipedia entries, then try to find the shortest path between the two items, using only links between articles on Wikipedia.

Let's take, as illustration, the article on Croque Monsieur sandwiches, and the Wikipedia category "Fictional people from North Carolina".

My first attempt to link the two was 8 links long. To give you a taste for the game, the link-chain was as follows...

Croque Monsieur > Monte Cristo sandwich > Los Angeles > 1960 > Category: 1960 > 1960 in television > The Andy Griffith Show > Barney Fife > Fictional people from North Carolina.

There's a shorter chain out there for those two topics... it clocks in at 4 links. Finding it is left as an exercise for the reader.

How one "wins" any round of this game is up for debate. Some suggestions include...

• Finding the path in the shortest number of links (the obvious, rational choice)
• Finding any path in the shortest amount of time (good for "group" games organised via real-time communications like IRC or IM)
  
• "Widest range of subjects visited in under 10 links." (one for the creative types)
  

Whatever, it's a 3-day week in the US, you didn't seriously think you were going to get any work done in that time, and now you have the perfect way to fill hours and hours and hours.

Blame/thanks should mostly go to this man who effectively thought up the entire idea by issuing the "Croque Monsieur/Fictional Characters" challenge in the first place..

(and yes, this is not a new idea. But some of us have real lives which preclude us grabbing onto every tiny net-fad, and have to invent these things for ourselves. When we're bored.)

I was born in the UK, where the number one at the precise moment I emerged into the world was "Matchstalk Men & Matchstalk Cats & Dogs (Lowry's Song)" by "Brian and Michael". My only memory of this song is that they used to play it incessantly during "assemblies" at my Primary (Junior) school, and that between the ages of 6-9, I found it horribly irritating.

I fare better with the US number one, which was the Bee Gees' "Night Fever". I was a Disco Baby, baby! Scientists are still baffled by the unnaturally high pitch of Barry Gibb's voice.

As for my 21st birthday, the UK Number One was Mr Oizo's "Flat Beats", a fairly dull song notable only for its puppet-centred Levis commercial. Stateside, Cher was making a temporary comeback with "Believe", a reasonable effort on her part, but ultimately annoying because it opened the way to shameful overuse of the vocoder across popdom... Without "Believe", Victoria Beckham's singing career would have been over a good few years sooner, something which would have benefited mankind immensely.

Viagra

So Rush Limbaugh got in a spot of bother at Palm Beach airport last night, for carrying viagra without a prescription.

Okay, so it's not particularly clever to laugh at another man's erectile disfunction, but the irony is amusing nonetheless.

Firstly, as part of the conservative-nutjob-establishment, Limbaugh is presumably one of those who has pushed for ever-more invasive searches, detentions, monitoring, interrogation... you name it, he's now on the receiving end of it.

But most amusing is the fact that the prescription was "labeled as being issued to the physician rather than Mr. Limbaugh for privacy purposes".

I guess the three-hour police questioning and subsequent AP newswire story kinda screwed that up, huh?

I am, rather boringly, "hitherto" pretty much everywhere online and off. Around 1999, I was looking for an alias to use on IRC (yeah, call me "Mr Nerd"...)

I was in a rush, so I picked the first distinctive dictionary word I could find which wasn't in popular usage.

Friends who knew me on IRC started using "hitherto" in real life and, well, it stuck.