Name that tune

Music meme picked up from TwoBusy:

How many songs on your iPod?
Roughly 870 (it's an old-school 4-gbyte nano, so fits about 1,000). But that counts some podcasts, old radio dramas, etc.

Sort by song title, first and last
First: The cover of "... Baby, One More Time" by Fountains of Wayne. Punctuation comes before the letter A, apparently.

Last: "Youth and Age," by that favorite, Various Artists. It was from a Peter Gabriel-sponsored project called Arcane, which featured ... well, a bunch of various artists, and no one is credited for particular tracks. This one was based on a poem by Yeats, and is rather lovely.

Sort by time, first and last
Shortest, at 6 seconds: "One Last 'Whoo-Hoo!' for the Pullman," by Sufjan Stevens. Not really a standalone track, but a coda from the song before it. Annoying, actually, as when I burned a CD of the album, downloaded from iTunes, there's a space between the two tracks, and I can't figure out how to join them when making a disk. They play without a gap on my iPod.

Longest, at 12:30, "Bros," by Panda Bear. A hypnotic drone, this is sort of a love-it-or-hate-it track, and I fall into the former camp. (That's the longest single song on my iPod, but there are longer podcasts, etc.)

Sort by album title, first and last
First: 1, by the Beatles. Numbers come before A in iTunes, too.

Last: Yours, Mine & Ours, by the Pernice Brothers.

Sort by artist, first and last
First: A Fine Frenzy. Kind of Tori Amos-y or maybe Regina Spektor-ish. The song "You Picked Me" was an iTunes freebie. I liked it enough to keep, but not enough to buy anything more.

Last: The Zombies, for their Odessey [sic] & Oracle album.

Top five most-played songs
Well, the top players are tracks I tend to put on repeat when trying to fall asleep or work, so they play endlessly till I wake up (or stop working, which ever comes first), which doesn't seem quite fair. For the record, they're tracks from Dr. Harry Henshaw's "Music for Sleep" and Gregorian chant by Hildegard of Bingen. As far as songs I listen to while, you know, listening, they would be:

"Cada Beijo," by Bebel Gilberto, as remixed by the Thievery Corporation, at 23 spins. While I do love this track, I was surprised to see it at #1.

"Fotheringay," by Fairport Convention, vocal by Sandy Denny, 17 plays.

"All My Little Words," by Magnetic Fields, 16. Another surprise.

"Acoustic Guitar," by Magnetic Fields, 16. And another.

"At the Chime of a City Clock," by Nick Drake, 15.

Find how many times the following words turn up
Sex: 0

Death: 12, mostly because of a bunch of Death Cab for Cutie tracks.

Love: 83, but the presence of many tracks from Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs set kind of skews this.

You: 98

Boy: 10

Girl: 33 (My iPod is straight? How'd that happen?)

First five songs in shuffle
"Come Back from San Francisco," Magnetic Fields

"Hackensack," Fountains of Wayne

"Goin' Back," Dusty Springfield

"(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love And Understanding," Elvis Costello & the Attractions

"Amplifier," the dB's

Unintentional truths

There was a story floating around last week that short-fingered vulgarian Donald Trump left a $10,000 tip at a restaurant.

It soon trickled out that the whole thing was made up, and Snopes has the story, as usual.

What made me laugh was not the hoax itself, but an off-hand comment by John Resig, the guy behind it. According to The Los Angeles Times:

Reached by phone, Derober's John Resig, 29, spilled the beans and laughingly marveled at the hoax's success. "How many people get on the front page of Fox News with a story that doesn't contain one single ounce of truth?" he wondered in amazement.

Oh, Mr. Resig. Don't get me started. We'll be here all day.

Sign you may be hungry and should really stop for lunch

When you go by a movie theater with Fred Claus on the marquee, but you read it as Fried Clams.

It's funny because it's true.


(BTW, if you're ever on L.I. and want chowder or fried clams, Bigelow's is the place to go.)

I'm pretty sure dew tastes like water

Sometimes, it becomes clear that I could focus exclusively on insane reviews to fill this blog. I won't, but this New Yorker restaurant review is vintage food-critic nuttiness. It's so crazy, I won't even interupt the flow with any snarky comments, though I will highlight a few of the odder turns of phrase--and keep in mind that this is a positive review.

A simple apéritif of shochu, garnished with tiny morsels of pear cut in leaf and star shapes, tastes the way you imagine dew might. Monkfish liver is presented in a vase of pebbles, abalone on a cushion of salt; you get to sear small rectangles of beef on a terrifyingly hot shiny stone. Dried mullet roe (which you grill over an open flame) looks like carrot, has the consistency of bean curd, and tastes like anchovy, only more so. Coupled with a rectangular tablet of daikon radish, it looks uncannily like a mah-jongg tile. Aigamo duck comes with a cake of mochi—a kind of rice polenta with a texture between dough and string cheese but stickier than either. (In Japan, people occasionally suffocate while eating it.) The kaiseki meal culminates in a dish that might seem plain: steamed rice. But the silvery Koshihikari rice from Uonuma is highly prized, and here it is served with condiments including twice-grilled salmon as light and brittle as a cracker and as salty and desiccated as jerky.

I just love how the writer throws into a parenthetical aside the fact that a rice dish served here has actually, you know, killed people. But, mangia!

Santa kicks Martian ass

Gold star for Punkinsmom for identifying the source of the quote, "Dropo, you are the laziest man on Mars."

For those who have never seen Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, prepare to marvel:



I dare you to get that fiendish theme song out of your head.

I saw this at a Saturday matinee as a kid, and I'm still feeling the effects.

(And yes, the Martian girl is Pia Zadora in her film debut.)


UPDATE: The video above is of fairly poor quality--it looks like it's being broadcast from Mars. There's a somewhat more watchable, 6-minute abridged version of the movie here, though with inexplicable bleeps on the sound track. And there's the first chapter of the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 version here. I love MST3K, but I can't say this is one of its funniest episodes. It's a little dull--though we watch it every Christmas season. Traditions are traditions, after all.

They blinded me ... with science!

I recently became a huge fan of the National Public Radio show Radio Lab, a popular-science program that makes really quite heady scientific concepts (say, the theory of relativity) understandable without dumbing them down.

If it's not on in your area, you can either stream it or download episodes from Radio Lab here. Scroll down that page a little and you'll see links to the three seasons that have aired so far. Season four begins next month.

Listen to one episode, and you'll be hooked. Season two's "Detective Stories" had me ignoring urgent business (well, eating dinner) to find out the end of the tale that begins with two people motoring down a highway in California when they spy a goat standing on the back of a cow at the side of the road. Yes, you read that correctly--and after that, it gets weird.

Quelque chose à ce sujet sent la merde

Third in an occasional series in which we gaze, shielding our eyes, at the intense light given off by the perfume reviews in The New York Times. From today's Style magazine:

I must admit, with some unease, my initial obtuseness toward Comme des Garçons 2 Man, one of the 10 greatest works of perfumery art in the world.

Just slightly above Axe body spray and Jean Naté and below Old Spice.

The perfumer Mark Buxton built the upper decks of this sleekest of vessels out of C11 ISO, a synthetic molecule that smells of clean pressed fire, if you can imagine such a thing; ...

No.

... the pine-scented synthetic C12 MNA; ...

A smidge of Pine-Sol.

... and a high-quality natural Haitian vetiver that smells like dust on jungle trees.

I repeat: No.

But the hull is frankincense from Oman, an incense cool as cream, warm as onion-skin stationery, glossy and slick as a traffic light in the rain.

As strong as a Gauloise, as chewy as an economy-size box of Jujubes, and as furry as ferret.

This technically flawless perfume (it diffuses like radium) ...

So, that's what Madame Curie was working on.

... smells more beautiful than one can say, like a perfect chord in an empty echo chamber.

Is that a koan? Like, what is the sound of one hand holding one's nose?

Herodotus warned that frankincense was dangerous to harvest because poisonous snakes lived in the Arabian trees that contained it, and I do believe my first reaction to 2 Man was, in part, fear.

Much like my reaction to this review. And, to be fair, I suspect that Herodotus was nipping at the absinthe.

This perfume is not just extraordinary. It is perfect.

I am now officially out of snark.


(PS: That subject line translated by the Google language tool. God knows if it's good French, because I certainly don't.)

Titles that Gabriel García Márquez rejected

--1,200 Months of Monkey Pox
--Ten Decades of Cerebrotendinous Xanthomatosis
--A Century of Genital Warts


UPDATE: Several hours after posting this, I realized I'd killed the gag by conflating two of the author's titles, One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, in my feverish brain. Somehow, I thought one of the titles was One Hundred Years of Cholera. Really. So, please ignore this post.

Nothing to see here. Move along.


UPDATE UPDATE: God Is My Codependent points out that Love in the Time of Genital Warts would have worked.

Forget the third man--perhaps the 23rd?

A few months ago, I pointed out the Amazon.com seemed to be deliberately hiding recognizable names in the cast lists of Albert Brooks movies, among some other films.

Apparently, others have noticed. Check out the complete title of The Third Man as it appears on this Amazon page.

(Whoever vandalized that page, however, would appear to be technically wrong. Those actors do appear, according to the IMDb listing, though they're not credited in the film.)

UPDATE: I see Amazon page got fixed. For a while there, the title read: "The Third Man -- You got the cast list completely wrong."

For you Fresnel fans out there

Just shoot me

My digital camera died on me recently, and with a purchase of a new new one, I've found they've become more feature-filled--that means complicated--in the last couple of years. Just reading the instruction manual is giving me a headache.

It has a button marked MF. Really, that can't be good--it won't even disguise its contempt toward me.

I'm on vacation this week, and took a few photos at the Fire Island Lighthouse today. Last one is an old lens from the lighthouse, which was built in the mid-1800s.