His ND Xmas

After assembling a batch of copyrighted songs with a copyrighted cartoon cover, my 2008/09 Holiday Compilation is complete.

It's called "His ND Xmas" after an old Mary Lou Lord song, and features mostly "downer" songs from the ND genre. For the parents in the audience, there are only a couple of curse words (of the "damn" and "hell" variety), but it's a little dark. Here's the cover, with the king of holiday depression feeling down like a clown, Charlie Brown.

HIS ND XMAS - Steve's Anti-Holiday Mix 2008/09

01. Culturcide - Depressed Christmas
02. The Weepies - All I Want
03. Blitzen Trapper - Christmas is Coming Soon
04. Chatham County Line - Oh! Santa
05. Jonathan Coulton - Chiron Beta Prime
06. Clint Coker - Dead By Christmas
07. Dave Ford - Have Yourself A Bitter Little Christmas
08. The Everly Brothers - Christmas Eve Can Kill You
09. The Fawns - Snow Day
10. Fleshtones - I Still Believe in Christmas
11. The Grip Weeds - Christmas Bring Us
12. Bill Kelly - Here Comes Christmas
13. American Suitcase - If We Make It Through December
14. Chris Isaak - Christmas On TV
15. Jason Ringenberg & Kristi Rose - Lovely Christmas
16. Keegan DeWitt & The Sparrows - Christmas Light
17. The Len Price 3 - It's Christmas Time Ebenezer
18. The Magnetic Fields - Mr. Mistletoe
19. Mud - Lonely this Christmas
20. The Bobs - The Night Before The Night Before Christmas
21. Buck Owens - Tomorrow Is Christmas Day
22. Pugwash and Friends - Tinsel and Marzipan
23. Red Star Belgrade - Xmas Day
24. Ryan Adams - Hey Parker, It's Christmas
25. R.E.M. - Merry Xmas Everybody
26. The Spongetones - Merry After-Christmas
27. Tommy Tutone - Santa I Got Your Number
28. Daddy Bone - Zombies Eating My Brain

It's available for the next seven days as a two part download
(via yousendit)
Download part 1
Download part 2

If anybody wants an actual CD, please let me know. I'm going to try to post about all the songs one at a time, so I might post them for individual download later.

Mulligaturkey Soup

Thanksgiving leftovers are one of my favorite things about Thanksgiving. Turkey is pretty good on Thanksgiving Day (and anyone who doesn't think so is either a vegetarian or someone who's never had either grilled or deep-fried turkey), but it gets better on the days after. A few slices of leftover turkey breast and pepper jack on sourdough with mayo and dijon makes the perfect sandwich. Turkey white meat is just like chicken breast, but better, and its dark meat is ideal for soup or curry.

My main conflict with dark turkey meat is "soup or curry", so I compromised and made a turkey mulligatawny, which I decided to call "mulligaturkey". Unfortunately, I didn't invent that term, but my mulligaturkey soup recipe is mine and mine alone.

My soup is based on this recipe from chow.com, but didn't include the coconut milk (because we didn't have any) and replaced the rice with more Thanksgivingy leftover faire (mashed potatoes and root vegetables -- parsnips and rutabagas). It's the same basic soup with the same spices, and a very creative use of Thanksgiving leftovers.

Mulligaturkey Soup
4 cups turkey stock
1 medium yellow onion, medium dice
1 medium Granny Smith apple, peeled, cored, and medium dice
1 medium carrot, peeled and medium dice
5 medium cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 tablespoon curry powder
1 tablespoon garam masala
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
1/8 teaspoon ground cloves
2 cups diced, cooked turkey
1 cup leftover mashed potatoes
1 cup mashed other (squash, sweet potato, root veg)
1/4 cup freshly squeezed lime juice
1/2 teaspoon finely grated lime zest (optional)
1/2 cup packed fresh cilantro leaves and tender stems, for garnish

1. Chop apples, carrot, and garlic, add spices (masala, cumin, cloves), and saute in a large stockpot with oil or butter (ghee) until apple is tender and onion is translucent, about 5-10 minutes.

2. Add stock (my turkey stock is just bones and water) and an extra cup of turkey gravy (if you have it). Bring to a simmer and cook for 8-10 more minutes, until vegetables are tender.

3. Add lime juice, mashed potatoes, and "other" (something orange is best -- sweet potato or pumpkin or rutabaga). My family is Norwegian, so we always roast rutabagas with our turkey on Thanksgiving. Stir the soup with a hand-blender, bring to a simmer, then add cooked turkey keep simmering for 20-30 minutes more.

4. Garnish with cilantro, lime zest, or plain yogurt.

If there were actual Indians at the first Thanksgiving, I'm pretty sure this is what they would have served on the days after Thanksgiving!

Reruns and leftovers

I'm not aware of many Thanksgiving traditions,
but this is my favorite Thanksgiving VSE.

And this is my favorite Turkey Carol.
Always thankful for good things below.

The heat is off

I was starting to worry about how I'd keep up with daily blogging over this upcoming long weekend to keep in NaBloPoMo contention, but I missed a day early in the month (Saturday 11/8), so I'm off the hook, and don't have to feel any pressure to blog every day.   Blogging every day but one is like guessing 42 out of 43 Presidents in a U.S. Presidential quiz  correctly, missing Martin van Buren. Close but no biscuit. 

I made one of my rare ventures into clubland last night to see the Bye Bye Blackbirds and the Family Arsenal at the Bottom Of The Hill. There was also a third band on the bill (The Crazies Will Destroy You), but they didn't start until after 11pm, so I don't know what they were like. Might be the best band in the history of music for all I know.

The Family Arsenal have shared a few bills with the Blackbirds, and provide a good yin to their yang. Their sound can best be described as Shelter Records circa 1976. They should be produced by Leon Russell and appearing on a package tour with Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers (before they broke) and the Dwight Twilley Band. Paul Tyler even sounds like a perfect Petty/Twilley hybrid, and they even cover the DTB in their set. If they were a drink, they'd be bottom shelf bourbon and coke, in other words, the perfect band for the Bottom of the Hill. I don't get out to the BOTH that much anymore, but it's still probably my favorite live music venue in the entire world.

This was the first BBBs show in support of their new album, which means that they started with a bunch of new songs that weren't from it, but then played a few from Houses & Homes and its predecessor Honeymoon, and ending with a rollicking version of the (GP-era) Byrds classic "One Hundred Years From Now" with the Family Arsenal's Paul Tyler on third guitar. The wall of Telecasters was disrupted because one of the guitarists didn't have one, but it was close enough for Tuesday night at the Bottom of the Hill.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Don't eat too much, and go out and buy something on Buy Nothing Day just to mess with the system. I probably won't post tomorrow, because I don't have to anymore. Whutevah..I do whut I want!

Revenge of the geeks

In the weeks since the election, I've been slowly weaning myself off political blogs and TV shows. Over the course of a random twenty four hour period in the two months between the convention and the election, I'd keep up with posts on all the standard political sites, and sometimes watch most of MSNBC's triumvirate of Olbermann, Matthews, and Maddow, plus the Daily Show and Colbert Report on Comedy Central. It was almost like having a second full time job!

After the election, I started cutting off the MSNBC shows as well as Jon Stewart, even though I still can't drop the Colbert Report. This is like the political offseason, where there's a bunch of discussion about things that aren't that important, so I've also stopped reading most political blogs, but I'm still regularly checking in to Nate Silver's 538.com. He's even changed their motto from "electoral projections done right" to "politics done right".

Silver's idea to applying his sabermetric analysis to elections was almost as successful in the 2008 election cycle as Barack Obama's campaign. The PECOTA algorithm he developed for Baseball Prospectus is unbelievably accurate in projecting performance of baseball teams (guessing that the Tampa Bay Rays would make the playoffs last year for example), but there was some question whether baseball stats could extend to election polling.

There was some "meta-analysis" during the 2004 election, but it didn't go as deep or make as much impact as 538.com and other sites like Sam Wang's Princeton Election Consortium did in 2008. These sites analyzed the daily polling data in nearly real time to determine the projected win percentages, electoral vote, and popular vote totals for Obama and McCain, and ended up projecting what happened in the actual election.

Sabermetric analysis is often derided by people inside baseball as egghead wankery by geeks in their Mom's basement who probably couldn't hit the curveball. Even when it's practiced by folks like Oakland A's GM Billy Beane who actually played the game. There's a similar prejudice in the political world that these geeks don't know what's really going on -- they're just silly bloggers in their Mom's basement.

Stats have been used with a lot of success inside the sports world (where Bill James is a consultant for the Red Sox, and his sabermetric strategies are still employed by other organizations), but until this year (or perhaps two years ago) political campaigns were still run based on time honored legends and seat of the pants intuition. "Only Big states matter", "Democrats can't win in Virginia", "The Bradley Effect will keep Obama from winning".

When 538.com launched during the Democratic primaries, it was obvious which candidate Nate Silver was supporting (he's a Chicago guy after all), but his model showed no bias. And his objective analysis was just trying to determine who was "ahead" based on who won the latest caucus or primary, but who stood the best chance to win the big contest in November. They determined that Hillary Clinton had no chance long before anyone else did, and that John McCain was on shaky ground, when many experts (including comments here) thought he was sure to win.

538's greatest achievement after the election was throwing a wrench at the meme that California's Prop 8 passed on the backs of Obama's new African-American voters. One exit poll claimed that 75% of AAs "supported" Prop 8, therefore CA's homophobia was all caused by black folks. QED. I was upset by these theories for many reasons, but they all ran out of gas after Silver's post one week after the election showed how misguided that theory was. Statistics don't really "disprove" anything, but they do show that certain things are unlikely, like 6% of the population being responsible for anything based on an unscientific sampling of 6% of that 6% (around 0.36% of the voters).

There's also been lots of analysis of the recounts and runoffs in Alaska, Minnesota, and Georgia on 538.com, as well as interesting stories about Nate's adventures interviewing right wing hacks like John Ziegler. I wasn't sure what would become of that site after the election, but it seems like it's found a niche in the post-election world as "politics done right". Score one for the geeks!

But the humans will give no love

Scott Miller takes on 1996 this week on "Music - What Happened?" which makes a nice followup to his 1997 entry from a few weeks ago.

Those were two of my favorite musical years, when I bought a ton of albums that I don't listen to anymore. In those years before the dawn of Napster and mp3s, I would buy CDs recommended by random people on the internet, and ended up hating a few, loving a few, and liking the rest enough to keep, but not enough to keep in steady rotation twelve years later.

One of those neglected titles I recently unearthed was the Posies' Amazing Disgrace. This album can best be described by its one sentence wikipedia entry -- it's "the fourth album by Seattle power-popsters The Posies and their final release for DGC Records". Even wikipedia contributors can't be bothered to write more than one sentence on this album. Which is a shame, because despite a few misguided production touches, it still rocks pretty hard!

"Posies hell", as Scott defines in his writeup of "Please Return It", is "seven minutes of sludgy, unparseable drop-string minor chords with scenery-chewing regret over personal excesses.. in harmony". Emphasis on the last two words, because Ken and Jon's vocal harmonies always shine through their worst excesses. I've seen so many shows where they've fallen on drunken ragged versions of half-remembered cover tunes, but just before they hit the bottom of the barrel, they'll nail a chorus in perfect harmony and all is well again.

Which brings me to this video that was posted on the 125 Records newsfeed a few weeks ago to carry Scott's fans through the off week of "MWH". It's Scott Miller and Jon Auer doing a duet on "Horse With No Name".  



The late Richard Jeni said it best: "You're in the desert. You've got nothing else to do. Name your freakin' horse!!" The Loud Family covered this on one of Pravda's Star Power volumes, probably because the label thought it would be cute and ironic for a band with an album called Plants and Birds and Rocks and Things to cover "HWNN". It was an interesting version, but this one is truer to the original.  Which doesn't necessarily equal "better".

There's also a youtube of Jon Auer's solo version of "Blackbird" from the same performance. It's a version of a song by a band called "the Beatles", from their self-titled album that came to be called the "The White Album". Which was released 40 years and 2 days ago.

God Save the Village Green

Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society. One of the coolest albums ever, which had the misfortune of coming out on the same day as the Beatles' White Album.

Andy Miller's 33 1/3 book on this album is probably my favorite one in the series. An ideal reading companion while listening to your Village Green reissue (in mono and stereo).