albums

Listening to New Forms while working, the Roni Size/Reprazent drum and bass classic. Which, I am chagrined to realize, came out 13 freakin' years ago! Egads! Such a good album. One of my all-time favorites.

Here are the awesome videos for "Brown Paper Bag" and "Heroes"--

Pop-punker bicyclists meet The Wild One. Can't beat that. Be Your Own Pet -- "Bicycle Bicycle, You Are My Bicycle"

From their self-titled debut album:

Thanks to SF Signal for mentioning an awesome collection of Astounding Science Fiction and Analog Magazine covers, going back to the 1930s. (Start here.) That alone would be cool, but SF Signal happened to use this particular ASF cover in their post:

From October 1953. Which, if you’re a Queen fan, you’ll immediately recognize as being the inspiration for this:

News of the World, of course, released in October 1977. There’s more to the story, actually, since the original artist agreed to redo the illustration for the album! From Wikipedia:

The album’s cover was a painting by award winning American sci-fi artist Frank Kelly Freas. [Drummer Roger] Taylor had an issue of “Astounding Science Fiction” (October 1953) whose cover-art depicted a giant intelligent robot holding the dead body of a man. The caption read: “Please… fix it, Daddy?” to illustrate the story The Gulf Between by Tom Godwin. The robot killing the man was likened to a child injuring a bug and looking up at his parents saying “what have I done?”. The painting inspired the band to contact Freas, who agreed to alter the painting for their album cover, by replacing the single dead man with the four “dead” band members (Taylor and Deacon falling to the ground). The original painting (also called The Gulf Between) features on the cover of Freas’s collection of art As He Sees It (Paper Tiger, 2000).

9+9=18

Today is September 9th and as such is my stepson Hans's birthday. I always thought 9/9 was a pretty cool birthday to have, since you've got the numerical symmetry going on there.

This 9/9, however, is even more special. If you add up those two digits, 9 + 9, you get 18... which is officially how many years Hans has been on the planet. And that, my friends, is definitely a pretty cool age to be.

Congratulations, buddy, and happy birthday! :)

The Stepford Lawn

New piece up at blogging.la: The Stepford Lawn.

'From a distance, nothing looks amiss. Perhaps a little too manicured, but that's not uncommon in Suburbia. White picket fence, overly green lawn. Then the late-afternoon smell hits you.

Hot plastic.

Welcome to the world of Waterless Grass. Welcome to the Stepford Lawn.'

Continue reading 'The Stepford Lawn'...

Fastest album ever?

In a seemingly rare lapse of editorship, the BBC RSS feed story published a little while ago (War Child charity album goes live) said this:

'An charity album featuring Coldplay and other big UK bands become the fastest album ever.'

Which, given the band, might not be such a bad thing. ;) But with the typo 'An' at the beginning, the misused 'become' and the missing 'selling' ... someone should really have a strong talk with the spell-check-only writer responsible.

Kuiper madness continues

Well, more Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) are beginning to show up, although the names 'Santa' and 'Easterbunny' do not quite carry the gravitas of a Pluto or Neptune. ;)

10% of your brain

dirtSimple.org: The Multiple Self

'The thing you need to understand is that it's not a question of "using only 10% of your brain". The point is, you are only 10% of your brain. The rest of your brain is bigger, smarter, and better-educated than you, because it can learn things you don't even know you're learning, faster and better than you. It can actually do things, for one. You can't. "You" are really just an I/O filter, in a way. You can control everything because you are a software hook that controls what meaning things have. By defining the meanings of things, you can get the kernel to do whatever you want. However, if you are confused about any of this, you will feed the kernel garbage meanings, and, well, you will get garbage results....'