Four Thousand Flashdiscs

Regular readers of this blog probably know that I've been engaged in a daily blogging competition with Flasshe. We've both posted every day since October 30th of last year, so today marks six months straight of daily postings by the both of us. I'm sure our mutual friends have already started taking bets about which one of us will crumble first. Not me.

To honor this occasion, today's entry will be an analysis of the contents of Flasshe's CD collection. He has more than four thousand CDs (4088 entries according to that list), most of which date from the mid-90s. Flasshe's favorite year was 1996 (with 306 discs purchased and/or released in that year) and his least favorite were the years before 1974 (when BOC's Secret Treaties launched music as we know it).

This plot of his CDs by year of release looks like a normal distribution centered around the mid-90s (click to enlarge).



Here are some other notable things about Flasshe's CD collection.

Total Discs = 4,205
Total Artists = 1,689
Total Tracks = 17,191
Artists with only one disc = 912
Favorite Year = 1996 (306 titles purchased)
Favorite Month = June (384 titles purchased)
Oldest CD: Bob Dylan - Highway 61 Revisited (1965)
Newest CD: Many released in 2007
Biggest Purchase Date: 08/29/1998 (19 cds purchased)

Top Five Formats
CD (3997 titles)
DVD-Audio (28 titles)
Mini CD (23 titles)
SACD (14 titles)
DualDisc (10 titles)

Top Ten Artists:
Bill Nelson (34 titles)
Blue Öyster Cult (32 titles)
Mike Oldfield (29 titles)
The Cure (29 titles)
The Church (28 titles)
Simple Minds (28 titles)
Julian Cope (23 titles)
The Moody Blues (23 titles)
The Stranglers (22 titles)
XTC (21 titles)

A quarter century of nickel-dime people

Happy Lee Elia Day Everyone!

Elia's legendary tirade in the Cubs clubhouse was 25 years ago today. Here's the transcript, with all 44(!) expletives excised. It reads funnier that way.

[Expletive] those [Expletive] fans who come out here and say they're Cub fans that are supposed to be behind you rippin' every [Expletive] thing you do. I'll tell you one [Expletive] thing, I hope we get [Expletive] hotter than [Expletive], just to stuff it up them 3,000 [Expletive] people that show up every [Expletive] day, because if they're the real Chicago [Expletive] fans, they can kiss my [Expletive] ass right downtown and PRINT IT.

They're really, really behind you around here... my [Expletive] ass. What the [Expletive] am I supposed to do, go out there and let my [Expletive] players get destroyed every day and be quiet about it? For the [Expletive] nickel-dime people who turn up? The [Expletive] don't even work. That's why they're out at the [Expletive] game. They oughta go out and get a [Expletive] job and find out what it's like to go out and earn a [Expletive] living. Eighty-five percent of the [Expletive] world is working. The other fifteen percent come out here. A [Expletive] playground for the [Expletive]. Rip them [Expletive]. Rip them [Expletive] [Expletive] like the [Expletive] players. we got guys bustin' their [Expletive] [Expletive], and them [Expletive] people boo. And that's the Cubs? My players get around here. I haven't seen it this [Expletive] year.

I still don't know what "They can kiss my ass right downtown.. AND PRINT IT!" means, but it's one of my favorite statements ever. And you can take that downtown and print it! And if anyone ever run into Tommy Lasorda, be sure to ask him what his opinion of Kingman's performance is.

Stuffed Logic

From the baking instructions for Papa Murphy's Stuffed Crust Pizza.

If you are not going to bake the pizza within 1 hour, it should be refrigerated. Remove pizza from refrigerator at least one hour prior to baking.

If we follow these instructions, and refrigerate our pizza if we are not going to bake it within one hour, but remove it from the refrigerator at least one hour prior to baking, we will never be able to bake our pizza!

It is not possible to leave a stuffed pizza out of the fridge for at least one hour while simultaneously baking it within one hour.

Papa Murphy's instructions create a chronological contradiction.
Reductio ad absurdum, QED.

Kiss Me Kate

No time for a full post today, but Kate Pierson of the B-52s(*) is 60 years old today!
Happy Birthday Kate! You'd be old enough to be someone's grandma (if "your people" were allowed to have grandkids).

The new B-52s(*) album is pretty good, and silences people who thought that Imperial Teen were too old to play that kind of music last year. The B-52s(*) are now a whole generation (and a year) older than Imperial Teen were last year, and they're still playing that kind of music!

(*) - The correct name for the band has long been "The B-52's," but in 2008 they dropped the apostrophe, with their official website, and Funplex album and single covers reading "The B-52s." However, the file tags on the digital releases of both of these retain the apostrophe. Both spellings can now be considered correct, even though it wrecks havoc on digital libraries everywhere!

Wake up, it's a Chelsea morning

In honor of Chelsea's 2-1 victory over Man United today (pulling the Blues level with the Red Devils on points and keeping their title hopes alive), here's a young Joni Mitchell live at the BBC in 19 and 69.



Joni wrote the song about the Chelsea in Manhattan, not the one in London, but they're both working class neighborhoods that have been gentrified into Yuppievilles. The Chelsea neighborhood of London reminds me a lot of downtown Palo Alto, since they both have more coffee bars per square mile than anyplace else on the planet. Plus Chelsea's home stadium (Stamford Bridge) is just one letter removed from Stanford Stadium, where the Blues played an exhibition match last year. West London and Palo Alto, CA should be sister cities!

According to wikipedia, Bill and Hillary Clinton named their daughter Chelsea after Judy Collins' version of this song (isn't that like naming your daughter after Suzanne Vega's version of a Grateful Dead song?).

Chelsea Clinton now lives in Chelsea, so she lives in the area that inspired the song that inspired the version for which she was named. Where she probably gets ridiculed by other Chelseas named after Joni Mitchell's or Judy Dyble and Fairport Convention's version of "Chelsea Morning". I don't know how she deals with all of that, on top of being the daughter of a President and a Senator who's (surprisingly still) running for President.

At least she can feel superior to Chelseas named after Neil Diamond's version of the song!

Spring Mix Meme

Another one of those music memes making the rounds on LiveJournal and the rest of the blogosphere.

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they're any good, but they must be songs you're really enjoying now, shaping your Spring. Post these instructions in along with your seven songs. Then tag seven other people to see what they're listening to.

Only seven songs? Over the last few weeks, I've migrated my Friday music posts from posting songs to sharing sites to posting songs to muxtape, where you're allowed up to 12 tracks, but I've settled on ten tracks as the ideal length. So I'm listing ten songs. Ten songs at three minutes each is about a half hour or one side of a Certron C60.

So here are ten songs chosen from the M section of my library. Some of them are old songs from the 60s, some are new songs from this year, and some are newer versions of older songs, but they're all very good. I don't like songs that aren't very good.

1. The Magnetic Fields - California Girls (from Distortion) The new MFs album is kind of a mixed bag for me (I concur with the assessment that "a little distortion goes a long way"), but this song shines through the mush.

2. Manfred Mann - My Little Red Book(from The Best of Manfred Mann)
Just the next song that grabbed my fancy in alphabetical order.

3. Marillion - Lavender (from Misplaced Childhood) Today is Fish's 50th birthday. If "Musical Box" by Genesis were condensed down to two minutes and 27 seconds, the results would be "Lavender".

4. Mas Rapido! - Christopher Robin's Dead (from Parasol sampler) Some of us may remember Mas Rapido! by their earlier names Toothpaste 2000 or Cowboy & Spin Girl. If they keep changing the band name every few albums they might come up with a good one.

5. The Meadows - Forever California (from First Nervous Breakdown) Something I downloaded on a whim from emusic that I really like. Very laid back and folky pop, not exactly earth shattering, but perfect for sunny Spring days.

6. Mr. D - New Day (from Wings & Wheels) I checked this out a while ago on a recommendation from the fine folks at 125 records. Sue and Joe have their own muxtapes. Joe's tape has another Mr. D tune from the same album.

7. The Monkees - Mary, Mary (from More Of The Monkees) Mike Nesmith wrote this song before he joined the Monkees and it was released by Paul Butterfield before they recorded it. Apparently covering a song written by a Monkee hurt Butterfield's blues cred. People were a lot stupider back in the 60s.

8. The Mood Six - I Wanna Destroy You
(from Songs From The Lost Boutique)
I don't know a whole lot about the Mood Six. According to their bio, they were part of the short-lived UK psychedelic revival that swept London's West End in the early 80's, were often compared to Squeeze, R.E.M. and The dB's. That was pretty much all it took for me to download this whole album from emusic. This is a cover of a Soft Boys song, and they also covered Todd Rundgren's "I Saw The Light" and the Groovies' "Shake Some Action". My new favorite obscure band.

9. The Moody Blues - The Story In Your Eyes
(from Every Good Boy Deserves Favour)
One of the Moody Blues six good songs? The Loud Family used to cover this one.

10. The Moore Brothers - Sorting Books
(from Now Is The Time For Love)
Two voices and one guitar. This song slays me every time I hear it.

I don't like to do the "tagging" thing, but any readers are encouraged to share songs that they're currently into, either in the comments or their own blogs. There's no need to mux them up or link to songs or videos, just listing them is fine.

Big Hurt Baseball is back in the Bay Area

The Oakland Athletics signed Frank Thomas off waivers today, so the Big Hurt is back in Oakland where he tore up the league (39 home runs and 114 RBIs) and led the A's to the playoffs a couple of years ago. The A's picked Thomas up for a bargain after a few injury-plagued seasons with the White Sox, then he signed with Toronto as a free agent after his monster year in 2006.

Thomas had another good year with the Blue Jays in 2007, but after a slow start they released him on Sunday. Toronto is still holding the bag for most of his salary, so the A's can take a flier on him for a pro-rated league minimum. Has any team ever acquired the same Hall of Fame player at a bargain price, twice in two years?

This also hints that the A's are aiming to win this year, since teams in rebuilding mode won't sign a 40 year old designated hitter with his own video game (Big Hurt Baseball -- buy it now for Super NES and MS/DOS -- works with Windows 95!).

Even if Thomas is only a shadow of his former Big Hurtness, his presence is exactly what the A's need. Even though they're 13-9 so far this year, they've hit just nine home runs and need someone who can bring some power to the table. I was at the game on Sunday against the Royals, and they scored seven runs with one extra-base hit.

Thomas was in the Oakland lineup today, and didn't do a whole lot (0-3 with 2 walks and a run scored) but the A's still beat up on the Twins 11-2. And Donnie Murphy hit two home runs today, so now the A's have eleven for the year!