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Neko Case - I Wish I Was the Moon Muy apologies for the delay in...

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 22:51:00 -0400

Neko Case - I Wish I Was the Moon

Muy apologies for the delay in updates… been singlehandedly running the office all week. Here’s your Song of the Day. Perfecto.

In Love and Death by The Used on MySpace Music

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 15:21:00 -0400

In Love and Death by The Used on MySpace Music:

Instead of a Song of the Day, I’m going with an Album of the Day. In Love and Death by The Used, ‘cause I’m currently rocking out to it at work. If there was an official video for “Let it Bleed” or “Sound Effects and Overdramatics”… it would be here. Hmmm.. One could say this is also my chicken noodle soup of the day.

Coming to you from WBEZ Chicago...

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 15:17:00 -0400

My love affair with This American Life began about three years ago in the office of a non-profit, where I worked as an evening Office Assistant. They kept the radio tuned at NPR, which I wasn’t very familiar with at the time. For nearly a year I simply tuned it all out, not ever having been a fan of talk radio and not caring for monotone news briefs.

The turning point came at the end of October 2008, when a co-worker sat in the lobby with me to listen to TAL’s Halloween broadcast. That was the first time I actually listened to what was coming from the cheap CD boombox in our window sill. And from that moment on, I looked forward to Thursdays at 6PM, when our clients were locked away in their sessions and I had the lobby to myself. I let myself get lost in the extraordinary, heart-wrenching, and often, hysterical experiences of everyday people, and I always came out with lots to think about.

When I later moved on to another office out in the country, I sifted through the online archives during downtime. When I was home alone, I listened while making dinner or cleaning the bathroom, although admittedly it’s hard for me to follow the stories unless my focus is on them 100%. My alone time now at the office is prime time to break out the latest episode. I can’t seem to get enough, and I still haven’t gone through all the archives! I’m rarely in a position to listen as it airs, so online is the only way I can keep up with it now.

A few years ago, TAL actually aired two seasons of TV on Showtime, which I own DVD’s of. Finally, there were faces and scenery to put with the stories. Episodes Reality Check and God’s Close-Up are my favorites from Season One, while Season Two’s John Smith is probably my favorite episode of all. This one follows different men by the name of John Smith throughout different stages of their lives, in an attempt to document a person’s entire life in a single episode. I’m bummed that the series wasn’t taken any further, but I’m thinking that most fans would rather use their imaginations over the airwaves.

If you’re not a listener yet, I think you’d better start. Being inherently inattentive, easily-bored and usually able to blow these things off as pseudo-intellectual, hipster crap, I never imagined that something like TAL would take hold of me the way it does. Here’s a list of my favorite 7 episodes to start with:

House on Loon Lake - This is exactly the sort of stuff I love. This is the story of a kid who happens upon an abandoned house wherein it looks like the inhabitants dropped everything and vanished. He sets off to find out what really happened to them.
Switched at Birth - Two girls born in the 1950’s are actually switched at birth and grow up with the wrong families. You might be surprised at what happens when it all comes out, much later..
Home Alone - The title pretty much says it all. My favorite act is about a 12 year-old boy who secretly lives on his own for five months while his mother is hospitalized, to avoid being taken away by Child Services.
My Pen Pal - Unusual and unlikely pen pals. Favorite act here is about a 10 year-old American girl who actually becomes close pen pals with a foreign dictator.
24 Hours at the Golden Apple - This is what happens in a 24-hour span, in a diner that never closes…
And the Call was Coming from the Basement - The Halloween broadcast that started it all!
Prom - A never-before-seen take on prom, where some high school kids in Kansas leave their prom to find out their small town has been demolished by a tornado.

There’s of course many memorable moments that I’ve ganked from separate other episodes, and I’m sure this list will get longer the further I delve into the archives. Not to seem shallow, but I don’t find everything TAL fascinating. Episodes with exclusively political and economical themes bore me so much that I skip them.

Sublime = Santeria Ahhh.. much better mood today. Absolutely...

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 19:37:00 -0400

Sublime = Santeria

Ahhh.. much better mood today. Absolutely love this song, although I’ve never been much for ska ~~barring my stalker-esque No Doubt phase as a freshman in high school~~, and I had no idea who they were when Bradley Nowell died. This brings me back to grandparents’ couch during the summer, when the MTV Beach House was still around and VJ’s still existed. This is your Song of the Day.

Ben Harper - Walk Away Gloomy mood. Here’s your Song of...

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 22:47:10 -0400

Ben Harper - Walk Away

Gloomy mood. Here’s your Song of the Day.

Netflix Treasure Trove: Fingerprints

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 18:55:00 -0400

The important thing to realize about Netflix ratings is that, even on a 5-star scale, 98.9% of the films do not achieve higher than a 3-star rating. So essentially, 3 stars = futon critical acclaim, while 1 ½ stars supposedly screams, “YOU’VE GOT WAAY BETTER THINGS TO DO WITH 1HR 57M OF YOUR TIME!” I haven’t always found these ratings particularly accurate (especially where Eat, Pray, Love and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is concerned. ugh.), but in the sea of pitifully low-budget horror flicks, Fingerprints boasts one of the highest ratings, along with some fairly decent feedback from viewers on the website. However… this is one of those times when the ratings aren’t so accurate.

Starring Laguna Beach’s Kristin Cavallari and a buttload of other nobodies, the plot of Fingerprints is based on Everytown, USA’s generic urban legend of ghost children at the train tracks who push your car to safety….right down to the baby powder, i.e., the title “Fingerprints.” Lately, I’ve been on the hunt to find a film that truly creeps me out. Sadly, I grew up on slasher flicks and recently learned that The Exorcist makes my stomach sore with laughter, so I went in knowing that it wasn’t gonna be easy. I guess it’s no surprise that I didn’t find it in Fingerprints either, but what’s more is that I found the creepiness factor to be absolutely zero. What we had was a concoction of an unimaginative plot, a fairly predictable ”twist”, dull characters and absolutely no attempt to cause a good scare, not even of the cheap Hollywood variety.

Much to my surprise, I found that the acting could have been a hell of a whole lot worse, specifically in Cavallari’s case. Although anytime the protagonist’s mother appeared on-screen, I couldn’t stop my mental voice from repeatedly asking, “really? seriously?!”. Her character was like a stiff (yet spastic), terribly unfunny female version of True Blood’s Andy Bellefleur.

Overall, if you’re extremely bored or high/drunk, it might be worth a peek, but I can think of better things to do with a $5,000 budget. It certainly wasn’t as unwatchable as The Morgue, so I rated it:

At some point today, I’m gonna turn into a breakdancing...

Sat, 23 Jul 2011 11:32:48 -0400

At some point today, I’m gonna turn into a breakdancing zombie because of this song. You can blame the hubs for showing it to me. Not normally how I roll…AT ALL…. but I love it.

Geektaculartude!

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 22:06:00 -0400

Behold my busted, second-hand laptop.

This has been a bit of a project for me, and something I’m growing to be proud of. It’s a Compaq Armada E500 that I bought on eBay for $35, from some computer recycling business. A couple of years ago, I screwed up my old laptop by trying to reset the CMOS battery and somehow the screen stopped working. Not wanting to deal at the time, I tossed it and bought a netbook (which is also long-gone).

I’d been looking everywhere for a system with mostly functioning hardware and no operating system, but I hadn’t had any luck with our local recycling place.. They typically didn’t resell ones that had functioning hardware, and also I think I weirded them out when I wandered into their warehouse.

Anyhow, I wasn’t completely stoked about getting a Compaq, but it was the only thing that had what I needed, at a price I could deal with. Apparently, this model is mostly used in corporate environments and has room for 3 batteries, bumping battery life up to 9 hours. Initially there was 128MB of RAM, no wireless capability, and again, no OS.

I didn’t want an OS installed so I could start from scratch. I’d been piddling with Linux distros for about a year, and although my desktop is less than a year old and came with Windows 7, everything changed when I happened upon Peppermint Ice. I work with dingy, late-90’s, Windows 2000 machines at the office, and have no tolerance for lag issues, so I instantly fell in love. I’d been happily using it for several months, and being a minimalist distro, I figured this fossil of a laptop could handle it. HAH!

I spent around a month testing and trying to install each and every minimalist distro in existence onto the laptop, while at the same time having thrown in the towel and installing Windows ME so I could at least make use of it. I always had issues with the LiveCD not loading, or networking not happening even if I did get lucky enough to test it. I increased the memory by 133% and was finally able to install Peppermint Ice, though on the laptop, performance was painful and slow.

Sometime shortly after that, I stumbled upon CrunchBang, and seriously considered leaving my husband for one of the programmers. It remains the only distro I was able to install and use wireless with. If that wasn’t enough, it’s super lightning fast, painless to use and is “Murdered Out” in appearance… Uh, hello? Black is my color! This is the end of the line. That same night, I installed it to the desktop as well.

Pimped out with 6GB of RAM and a crazy fancy graphics card, my laptop is not, or ever will be… but I brought it to life and it’s still my work in progress. Maybe someday, sooner than later, I’ll get the balls (and funds) to tackle more complex stuff, and perhaps even build something from scratch.

I’ll save the pro-Linux tangent for another time, but get ready… it’s coming.

No longer just an empty space.

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 19:01:00 -0400

It looks like I’m giving this another go. Though I can’t say how successful it’ll be.. I haven’t kept a LiveJournal for at least two years, and this explosion of micro-blogging has me stuck in 140< characters mode. Sometimes, though, that’s not enough. I’d really like to avoid getting bored, letting this lie dormant, and letting the domain expire, like all the rest. And I -am- in the process of buying back my old domain name…

Mostly it comes down to me being home alone for 6-7 hours after work, and going completely out of my mind with boredom. Refreshing Facebook and GMail during reruns of “Sex and the City” on Style will only go so far.

For the past few weeks, I’ve gradually been hit by the surprisingly alarming realization that, for once, there is no drama, crises or impending breakdowns. It’s a good possibility that my working on the 2nd refill of an SSRI for the first time in two years has something to do with that. Even so, things are great with the hub and we can finally pay all our bills comfortably. On the down side, as Nine Inch Nails would say, “Every Day is Exactly the Same” and I’m desperately looking to connect with more people and add some rainbow sprinkles to the Parfait of Life. Hopefully this blog can make a tiny contribution in getting me there.

Song of the Day.. inspired by this week’s episode of This...

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 15:41:00 -0400

Song of the Day.. inspired by this week’s episode of This American Life. This is the only form in which a Phil Collins song doesn’t make me want to suffocate myself with a Wal-Mart bag.