Joining the iPod Generation

If 2007 was the year I started blogging and bought an iPod, I'm either way behind the curve or going through a midlife crisis. How about a blog entry about my new iPod?

My two year old Creative MuVo2 music player stopped working this weekend, so I took the plunge and purchased a real iPod yesterday - a sleek black Nano with 8gb of storage. I like it so far. It's hard to believe that 1800 songs can fit in something so tiny! And it was an open container at Fry's, so I got it for 20% off ($199 vs. $249 list).

My old player only had 4gb of storage, so I can double the amount of music on my live, but it's still only 20% of the 40gb of music in my iTunes library, so I needed to come up with a strategy to pull the essential tunes to my Nano. My old MuVo behaved like a USB hard drive where all I needed to do was drag and drop folders to fill it, but iPods need to be loaded via iTunes, so today I was trying to find a way to seamlessly load one fifth of my fifth on my new player. I came up with an elegant solution, which I'm sure no one has ever thought of before!

I set up an iTunes playlist called "My iPod" and set up the iPod to sync up with this playlist only, then I dragged and dropped everything from my library to this playlist until it was full. The choice of what to include and what to exclude was tough though. My first pass was to go artist by artist, including no more than 20 songs (one full album plus a few stray tracks) from anyone. I chose which album by deciding which collection of songs worked best as an album, plus I have a thing for even anniversaries so albums with release years ending in 7 or 2 got special preference.

Here are all the full albums on my new iPod nano. Still 2gb free, and it seems a little too 1960s-focused.. Am I missing anything?

The Beach Boys - Pet Sounds (1966)
The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's (1967)
The Beau Brummels - Triangle (1967)
The Bee Gees - First (1967)
Belle & Sebastian - If You're Feeling Sinister (1997)
Big Star - #1 Record/Radio City (1992)
David Bowie - Ziggy Stardust (1972)
The Byrds - Younger Than Yesterday (1967)
The Chills - Submarine Bells (1990)
Julian Cope - St. Julian (1987)
Cotton Mather - Kontiki (1997)
Marshall Crenshaw - Marshall Crenshaw (1982)
The dB's - Repercussion (1982)
Nick Drake - Pink Moon (1972)
Fairport Convention - Unhalfbricking (1969)
Field Music - In Context (2007)
Flamin' Groovies - Shake Some Action (1976)
Fountains of Wayne - Utopia Parkway (1999)
Game Theory - Lolita Nation (1987)
Genesis - Foxtrot (1972)
The Go-Betweens - Tallulah (1987)
Jose Gonzalez - Veneer (2005)
Guided By Voices - Bee Thousand (1994)
The Hold Steady - Boys And Girls In America (2006)
Jefferson Airplane - Surrealistic Pillow (1967)
The Kinks - Something Else By The Kinks (1967)
Ted Leo/Pharmacists - Hearts of Oak (2003)
Let's Active - Cypress (1984)
The Lilac Time - & Love For All (1990)
The Loud Family - Interbabe Concern (1996)
Love - Forever Changes (1967)
Moby Grape - Moby Grape (1967)
The Monochrome Set - Eligible Bachelors (1982)
The Negro Problem - Post Minstrel Syndrome (1997)
The New Pornographers - Electric Version (2003)
Randy Newman - Sail Away (1972)
The Orange Peels - Square (1997)
Pentangle - Basket of Light (1969)
Pernice Brothers - Live A Little (2006)
Pink Floyd - Piper At The Gates of Dawn (1967)
Radiohead - OK Computer (1997)
R.E.M. - Murmur (1983)
The Replacements - Pleased To Meet Me (1987)
The Rolling Stones - Between The Buttons (1967)
Elliott Smith - Either/Or (1997)
The Soft Boys - Underwater Moonlight (1980)
Surfin' Stevens - Illinoise (2005)
Matthew Sweet - Girlfriend (1991)
Teenage Fanclub - Songs From Northern Britain (1997)
Richard & Linda Thompson - Shoot Out The Lights (1982)
The Velvet Underground - Velvet Underground & Nico (1967)
The Who - Sell Out (1967)
Brian Wilson presents SMiLe (2004)
XTC - English Settlement (1982)
Yo La Tengo - Fakebook (1990)
The Zombies - Odessey & Oracle (1967)

FOMM: Listen to the Flower People

After the birds and the bees, this Friday it's the flowers.



The Flowerpot Men - Let's Go To San Francisco
The Flowerpot Men were a British studio band created by Ivy League songwriters John Carter and Ken Lewis to capitalize on 1967's flower power fad. The band name came from the same children's show that inspired Peter Gabriel to dress like a flowerpot on his head a few years later, plus there's that "flower"+"pot" pun. The single sleeve calls them "The Flower Potmen" and also misspells the city name as "San Fransisco"!. The singer is the legendary Tony Burrows and the keyboards and bass are played by future Deep Purple members Nick Simper and Jon Lord. I suspect that this song provided direct inspiration for Spinal Tap's "(Listen to the) Flower People" (video)

The Great Society - Somebody To Love
Translator - Today
The Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow album was released in February 1967, so it's 40 years old now. Both of the hits from that album ("Somebody To Love" and "White Rabbit") came from Grace Slick's former band, the Great Society, but the former was the only one recorded while Grace was in the band. The Society's original version of "Somebody To Love" sounds like a demo for the Airplane's hit version, it's not quite as powerful, but also not as played to death on classic rock radio. Twenty years later, San Francisco's own Translator covered another Pillow tune, "Today", as a bonus track on their Everywhere That I'm Not compilation. Translator's four albums are set to be reissued on Wounded Bird later this year, but this cover isn't on any of them. One recent observer described Translator as "sort of a harder-rocking, less Stipe-y R.E.M.". This next S.F. Summer of Love cover song probably won't meet with this observer's approval.

The Golden Palominos - Omaha
This is a cover of a Moby Grape song from the 1985 Visions of Excess LP, with lead vocals by Michael Stipe of R.E.M. The Golden Palominos were a rotating cast headed by drummer Anton Fier (who probably thought those MIDI drums were a good idea), bassist Bill Laswell, and others. The guitars on this song by Henry Kaiser and Chris Stamey. Rolling Stone's album review of Visions said that this group had "enough combined hipness to make even a Moby Grape song sound cool and contemporary". I eschew any definition of "cool" that excludes Moby Grape. Their 1967 debut still sounds great in 2007, while this contempo 80s cover sounds silly and dated in spots (especially those spots with MIDI drums).

Pop Art Toasters - I Won't Hurt You
The Pop Art Toasters were a one-off duet with David Kilgour of the Clean and Martin Phillips of the Chills doing a 5-song EP of 60s covers. Hopefully this will put me back on the Translator observer's good graces. "I Won't Hurt You" was originally by the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band in 1966, but I didn't hear the original version of this song until much later. The Pop Art Toasters EP is long out of print, but someone posted "I Won't Hurt You" just a few days ago.

"Dolphins, eskimos,.. it's all a bunch of tree hugging hippie crap!" - Eric Cartman

I started the funniest joke in the world

An imaginary Bee Gees vs. Monty Python youtube mashup..



Narrator: This man is Robin Gibb... writer of jokes. In a few moments, he will have written the funniest joke in the world... and, as a consequence, he will die ... laughing.

RG: I started a joke, which started the whole world crying, but I didn't see that the joke was on me

Narrator: It was obvious that this joke was lethal... no one could read it and live ...

RG: Then I started to cry, which started the whole world laughing.

Policeman: I shall enter the house and attempt to remove the joke.

RG: And I fell out of bed, hurting my head from things that I'd said.

Commentator: There goes a brave man. Whether he comes out alive or not, this will surely be remembered as one of the most courageous and gallant acts in history.

RG: Til I finally died, which started the whole world living. Oh if I'd only seen, that the joke was on me

Commentator: This morning, shortly after eleven o'clock, comedy struck this little house in Dibley Road. Sudden ...violent ... comedy.

Crosses all over the boulevard

Late last year, some peace activists put a sign on the hillside above the Lafayette BART station to honor the US soldiers killed in Iraq. The sign read "In memory of the XXXX U.S. Troops Killed in Iraq" along with an updated count of the death toll. Initially, they had a few hundred crosses as symbols of the conflict, but for the last few weekends, volunteers have been erecting crosses (plus a few Jewish stars of David, Muslim crescents, and Buddhist wheels of life -- not sure how they know each fallen soldier's religious persuasion) feverishly, hoping to eventually have one for each fallen soldier. The current death toll is 3254 and counting and the whole hillside is full of crosses. And they add more crosses each weekend. This cellular photo from a train window doesn't do justice to the actual visual experience of this memorial.

I pass the memorial twice each day on my daily commute, and it's a somber reminder of the costs of this war. It's visible from the BART line and Highway 24, so there are lots of other people who see these crosses every day. Like most outlying suburban area, Contra Costa County leans a little more to the right politically than the rest of the SF Bay Area, probably deep magenta on the national blue/red spectrum. If the memorial were in San Francisco or Berkeley, it would mostly be "preaching to the converted", but putting it in Lafayette sends a much stronger message. Many people who pass the memorial probably think that the crosses disrespect the honor of the soldiers, and the site has been vandalized a few times, but it's probably also opened a lot of eyes that wouldn't have been opened otherwise.

Each cross, star, crescent, or wheel represents a person. A dead person who used to be alive. Lately I've been hanging my head averting my eyes as the BART train rolls through Lafayette, since seeing all those crosses puts me in a bad mood for the rest of the day. But today my portable music player decided to play Jose Gonzalez's "Crosses" as the train pulled into Lafayette station, and I looked left at thousands of crosses on the hill. And now I'm in a bad mood. How many more crosses will it take?

Jose Gonzalez - Crosses (mp3 from music is art)

Straight up now tell me

From The Big Picture

Which Barry makes a better Paula Abdul, Bonds or Zito?

Oscar talk

Why does the telecast run long every year? It's a TV show, not a sporting event! Can't they either schedule each segment to fit within the allotted time or schedule a longer time period? And why am I watching? I don't even like movies! Hey, Scorsese finally won best director (and also picture, but he's probably done that before). Cool!

Addendum: Al Gore's best documentary award for An Inconvenient Truth has to be the first Academy Award by a former US Vice President.

Hire Bob

New A's manager Bob Geren sat down for a three part interview with athleticsnation. Bob's favorite band is Led Zeppelin and his favorite movie is Caddyshack. That sounds like me... when I was 15! I wonder how he feels about Jan Smithers and Intellivision Baseball.

Actually, these interviews show Bob to be the right man for the job, intense, well-spoken, and the perfect antidote to Ken Macha, even though he shares Macha's views on the sacrifice bunt.

My philosophy on sacrifice bunts is that statistics show that no outs and a runner on first, you're probably going to score more runs than with one out and a runner on second

Geren doesn't completely follow the Moneyball party line, since he isn't averse to stealing the occasional base, but he isn't one of those NL managers that feels the need to bunt, hit & run, or steal whenever someone gets on first base.