Posts from November 2009

One thing you might not know about me is that I don’t listen to a lot of music, by which I mean I tend to focus on a small selection of music and then listen to it over and over and over again.

One of the things I do is I make Mix CDs that I listen to while I’m driving around—to and from work, to and from Fools Play, etc. Thing is, I only make one Mix CD about every three months and that’ll be pretty much all that I’ll listen to until I make another one.

Traditionally I go iTunes and organize my music by most recently added, then start pulling the best songs over to a new playlist as I work my way back in time through my music collection. This way my Mix CDs tend to have a handful of songs that I’ve acquired recently. I also try not to put in too many songs that were in my previous Mix CD. But I don’t add much music to my collection very often, so doing it that way only fills up a portion of the CD. So then I delve into my list of all-time most listenable songs. Y’know, the songs that I don’t really ever get tired of listening to (the playlist that I call “Ultimate Flawless Victory” in iTunes) and toss in a few of those. Then I look at all of the songs in my collection that I’ve given four or five stars and toss in a few of those.

These Mix CDs are both reflective and projective. I try to incorporate how my musical tastes have changed over the past three months while at the same time trying to predict what I’ll want to listen to for the next three months.

Here are the last two CDs I created:

August 2009:

1. Always Been There Anyway – Julia Massey
2. Around the Bend – The Asteroids Galaxy Tour
3. Brain Problem Situation – They Might Be Giants
4. Buddy Holly – Weezer
5. Cellars by Starlight – Kay Hanley
6. Golden Blunders – The Posies
7. Good Fish – Julia Massey
8. Have a F*****g Baby – Three Ninjas
9. Headphones on Your Heart – Leeni
10. House of Mayors – John linnell
11. The Last Thing On Your Mind – Lights
12. Little Fighter X – Fighter X
13. Lollipop – Mika
14. Lovebite – Order of the Crimson Wizard
15. Me + Yr Daughter – Natalie Portman’s Shaved Head
16. Over and Over – Leeni
17. Red Underwears – Three Ninjas
18. Say It Ain’t So – Weezer
19. Shut Up and Let Me Go – The Ting Tings
20. Soft Rocked By Me – Jonathan Coulton
21. Somewhere on This Couch – The Crazy Boy Floyds
22. The Way I Am – Ingrid Michaelson
23. You Don’t Know Me – Ben Folds (featuring Regina Spektor)

November 2009 (there is one repeat song from the August CD—see if you can spot it)

1. Dance, Dance, Dance – Lykke Li
2. Dirt Bike – They Might Be Giants
3. Doll Partz – Order of the Crimson Wizard
4. Heading Out at Dawn – Terrapin Productions
5. Jenny Towner – Julia Massey
6. Los Angeles – They Might Be Giants
7. Mario’s Café – Saint Etienne
8. Powers – Three Ninjas
9. Pride & Strawberry Wine – The Wastelanders
10. A Quiet Room – Tangentbot
11. Secret Skin – Busdriver
12. Spin Around – Josie & The Pussycats
13. Stairs – Locust Street Taxi
14. Starry Eyed Surprise – Oakenfold
15. Stop – Spice Girls
16. Sun Shower – Busdriver
17. Teenage Dirtbag – Wheatus
18. Theme from “Greatest American Hero” – Joey Scarbury
19. True Affection – The Blow
20. Ugly Girl – Fleming & John
21. Vancouver – They Might Be Giants
22. Veronica – Elvis Costello
23. The Way I Am – Ingrid Michaelson
24. What’s Golden – Jurassic 5
25. Your Love Is a Drug – Puffy AmiYumi

I have no idea what these songs say about me, so feel free to psychoanalyze me to your hearts’ content based solely on the content of these lists. Enjoy!

Lookit this cute li’l guy I just designed! I’m going to make him into charms/pendants and sell him on ThirstyRobots.com

He’ll be available (along with some other kawaii stuff) some time next week. Hooray!

So I’m only just now getting around to posting about what happened leading up to, during, and after Halloween. Why? On account o’ the busy-ness, and some unavoidable delays.

My wife caught a powerful sick that lasted the entire week leading up to H’ween, so I was busy taking care of her as well as doing everything around the house that needed to get done. I also had to drive out to me mum’s place a couple of times so that I could borrow her sewing machine, which I needed to create the body portion of my H’ween costume. I’m not a very good tailor, so it took a while, but it came out shockingly well. More details in moments.

The theme I decided on for my H’ween punkins this year was “fossils.” Probably because my friend Three Ninjas is so into them. So about a week and a half before H’ween I carved the first one: an ammonite fossil!

Then the day before H’ween my pal Leiapico had a punkin carving party! It was also a costume party but I didn’t have my costume completely finished yet. Anyhoo, I carved another punkin at the party. You should recognize it pretty easily:

Then during the day on H’ween I carved a trilobite fossil:

Then I had another punkin left over, so I carved a fossilized dinosaur thigh bone into it just for fun.

And here they all are!

Normally Carrie & I make Reuben sandwiches with potato/green bean/sauerkraut soup on H’ween evening and give out full-sized candy bars to the trick-or-treaters, but this was an unusual (and special) year in that Halloween was actually on a Saturday, so we actually performed our Fools Play Halloween format (Fools Play Trick or Treat) on Halloween night! As per usual, all the Fools dressed up in costume, so here’s a run-down of what was what:

Yeah! I designed it so that I could put the jellyfish “hood” down. I also made slits in the long tentacle sleeves about even with my hands. I then sewed strips of velcro on the slits so that I could cleanly close them when I was in full costume, but I could open them and stick my hands out when I was performing or interacting with grab-able things. I also put my purple shirt on over my jellyfish bottom for the duration of the show.

The Fools were not, of course, the only people dressed in costume. A huge percentage of the audience came in costume as well, which is what we want for our Halloween show. Some of my faves were Tia as a Starfleet Medical officer (with a costume she made herself), and her boyfriend James as Master Onion from Parappa the Rapper. There was also a very good Velma from Scooby-Doo.

Anyway, at the end of the show our apprentice Jamie, whose soul we’d manage to free from the influence of dark magic (long story; don’t want to bore you with the details) and who had overcome the brainwashing of Sir Ian McKellen (who wanted us dead for tearing a page out of his copy of the Forbidden Book of Improv Lore (but, again, I don’t want to bore you with the details)), managed to turn his soul completely around and became an official frikkin’ fool: Jamie Pederson the Ginger Fool!

Originally we were going to give him the Orange shirt seeing as how Nathan Geyer the Orange Fool hadn’t performed in about six years. But in a shocking turn of events, Nathan Geyer was actually in the audience that night, and jumped up in protest when we were about to give the Orange shirt to Jamie. He said he was back in town now, and so he was going to reclaim his Orange shirt and start performing again. So we had to scramble to find another shirt for Jamie and the best we could find was a shirt the color of crystallized ginger, so the Ginger Fool he became. So in one night we got a new Fool and saw the return of a long-lost Fool!

So, yeah, that was fun.

But because I was at Fools Play on Halloween, Carrie & I didn’t do our Reuben Sandwich Feast as per usual. We were gonna do it the day before, but she was still having the sick in her (which is why went to Leiapico’s punkin carving par-tay), so we delayed it until the Friday after. I made 12 Reuben Sandwiches. They were good.

Anyway, one of the reasons why this post is so late is that my digital camera broke back in September, so I didn’t have it with me at Fools Play to take pictures of everyone’s costumes! I had to wait for the person who took these pictures to get them off the camera and email them and then have them be sent to me, etc. Took a while. But there they are, baby.

OFFICER KANE

But there they are, baby. There they are.

CAMERA TRUCKS UPWARDS as OFFICER KANE puts his arm around CINDY. They turn and walk away down the alley in SLOW MOTION and are soon lost in the fog as the END CREDITS MUSIC begins playing.

FADE OUT.

THE END.

Hmm… I went somewhere weird at the end of this post. Oh, well.

Link of the Month:
Brizzly
Brizzly is a Twitter interface that does all of the things that Twitter should be doing anyway, like in-lining all linked pictures and videos so that you don’t have to click to a different website just to view them, and showing the full URLs of all links instead of the shortened ones so that you don’t have to click blind and get sent to a potentially dangerous redirect. I use it as my default instead of the actual twitter.com.

Album of the Month:
Terrapin Productions: Sketches of Perfect Landscapes
40-some minutes of good, dreamy, mellow, spacey, noisy, (mostly) instrumental guitar rock. Much layering and echoing and building of atmospheric walls of sound. I like it. It’s groovy.

Game(s) of the Month:
Bloons Tower Defense
A horrifyingly addictive series of games from Ninja Kiwi, the Bloons Tower Defense games are about various types of monkeys trying to pop balloons (“bloons” as they call them). There are 4 of these games released so far, and they get steadily better and better. If you like Tower Defense games, well, then here you go.