Rocky Raccoon is amazing. For the Beatles, that kind of honky tonk piano is entirely unexpected and absolutely stunning every time you know they're about to go there. I don't know how I feel about the spoken part, but spoken parts don't have the best track record beyond Love Me Tender, so you gotta give a man some credit for trying. The end of the track has the same bittersweet appeal as Butch and Sundance getting gunned down. In league with Tumbleweed Connection in this sense, it is strange how Brits- or non-Americans - can reproduce such a staunchly American timbre. But maybe I'm forgetting too quickly that it was Ennio Morricone who penned the score for a generation of spaghetti westerns, and then there's always Wim Wenders.

After reading about Radiohead's pay-what-you-want scheme for their new album In Rainbows, I was excitedly trolling around for it, mistakenly thinking it would be found on iTunes instead of on their official site. By happenstance, while bumbling about I found this really wonderful lullaby series in the iTunes store: Rockabye Baby, which does lullaby renditions of different rock bands. The Radiohead one was pretty fantastic, but the Lullaby Renditions of the Smashing Pumpkins blew my socks off. You should have a listen- they have free snippets.

Flickeur, and CSI: LGA - MDW ?

Flickeur is all at once unsettling and silly (it uses flash, after all). The explanation for how the program functions is at the bottom, but once you start watching it, you get to wondering what it is, exactly, that makes it work so well. It probably feels most like a documentary about a serial killer, with its typed log of events and eldritch soundtrack. It is at its most interesting when there are series that really work when overlaid or juxtaposed. Taking from the entire pool of inane DSC_10012, etc. easyclick shots and the more professional alike proves effective, and I'm also pleased that the log that is incorporated is that of the miscellaneous descriptions of all the images on flickr. It seems incredible to me that code can be written for this kind of improvisation, however simple it might be to generate.

These are a couple minutes that I saw:
Two ugly pug dogs gussied up in red bows
A smiling cover girl
January 30, 2007. Something tells me her modeling days are over
bleached out photo, a boy in a field, only half of his head in the picture
Thursday, October 6, 2007. How many times have I told you I hate you?
A palm with a baby rabbit in its center
a huge glistening eye, and then an overexposed blue sky with blood red foliage
the baby rabbit, again and again
Monday, May 8, 2006 - 04:06. Shock and Awwwwwwwwww
the dome of the Seville Cathedral

Yea, it's better to see it for yourself. check it out, fool.

In other news, CSI: NY was amazing and I hope the current (I use this term loosely, since "current" over here means "episode I currently have my hands on") crossover episode in the Second City spawns CSI: Chicago. Chicago has been left wanting as a setting for a decent television show since Family Matters went off the air. CSI: NY gets top marks- not only have they already done an episode this season where Gary Sinise chases a murderer through Second Life, but now Sinise finds himself at the Tribune building, after following the clues (a bit of the Alamo, the Hagia Sophia, and the California redwood forest) to their embedment in the skyscrapers' walls. Some may argue that CSI: NY has really been jumping the shark recently, but who are they kidding: that's what makes it so fantastic.

As for realism in television, the writers strike is ushering in a new batch of really terrible reality shows. How about this show Mark Wahlberg is going to be hosting called A Moment of Truth, where contestants are strapped into a polygraph and asked the most intimate questions about their personal lives? The polygraph machine seems almost extraneous, since it seems pretty impossible to imagine that anyone would be able to lie to Mark Walhberg.

Woes, though some things are still top drawer

So one of the reasons blogs make me uncomfortable are the growing pains involved. Back in 97, when I was first using basic HTML for my hanson fanfic site, I became master of the Geocities/Angelfire basics. If you remember the sort of banded creativity involved in early websites, you can imagine my dismay, a former maestro of the hit counters and scrolling marquee of yore. It's another ball game now! I don't spend the same long amounts of time alone on the old desktop, trolling FAQs for information on resizing. These last couple of months, I decided I was to take a stand, learn how to resize my header and fix the horrible cropping effect written into my template, and reclaim HTML for my own, see if the website HTMLgoodies still exists, and have a day of it.

But to my chagrin, just like with the study of any new language to someone suddenly (albeit just slightly) further on in years, it just didn't come. In a broader computer scope, I'm bored to tears with installing things, and I thought getting my MacBook would be the end to the nightmare of dreaded drivers and .DLLs at least, but this dark lady comes in different forms now. Quoting the laughably pessimistic family motto of the Baylor family in the film Elizabethtown, "If it weren't this, it would be something else." Although I appreciate some of the simplicity of Mac OS, the bare bones programs I have drive me mad- for starters, I don't have a decent photo editing program. When I first decided to dive into digital, my decision had been backed by a glorious well-resourced year in an Adobe wonderland, tasting the fruits of digital imaging and editing at its best. However now I feel like a fool whenever I use the ridiculous tools of PictureProject (Nikon's horribly designed importing, cataloging software included with its products). I can't synthesize the effects of masking an image, and, as I said before, something as simple as resizing or framing an image has proven a first class nightmare.

Nevermind, I'm just feeling the sting at the moment.

I've been reading a lot about Hillary v Obama in the news. Unfortunately, I've found myself in the camp of the mindless Obama supporter. There's nothing anyone can tell me to shake my irrational convictions on the subject of our rightful future president. Fortunately, since he's making the best Mr. Smith impression I've ever seen in blood-and-flesh politics, I feel more comfortable, supporting in the way I do. I'm sure, reader, you may have seen this crazy incident in poor campaigning in the last couple of days. After feeling intense appeasement with Hillary's bad move, what throttled me a bit was the witch hunt of a message board following the opinion piece. This itself is not startling at all, because anyone who posts in the comments section of a web paper has one, if not many, axes to grind. What disturbed me was my readiness to join the fray and back Obama like a gutless wraith. I should get back to reading more policy. Maybe it's simply that, outside of the country, Obama feels heartbreakingly close to home, and supporting him, like blowing kisses to Chicago.

Yes, despite the glories of my days, there are a few things in the UK that meet with my distrust. The chip shop onion bhaji is the foulest thing I have ever come across on a plate. My affinity for Indian food has at times put me at odds with the madhouse joke of some British Indian food. The bhaji is the best example, since it can be found at chip shops. One day when in Risca, I picked up a battered sausage and chips with curry sauce. Totally standard, albeit shockingly unhealthy. I thought I'd continue the faux Indian trend with the addition of the ominous onion bhaji, the only edible not on wax display behind the glass counter. What arrived between my chips and sausage was not unlike the Creature who lived behind the mayonnaise, next to the ketchup and to the left of the coleslaw in the inimitable and timeless 1992 Garfield episode. To what foul heights did they go to derive this recipe? It was not golden and crispy on its exterior like a good and decent bhaji, but rather a soggy murky purple, a sort of sodden mixture of perished onion in congealed batter. Not recommended.

I just bought Bruce Springsteen tickets yesterday at a sorrowful 130 bucks a pop. I know he's the Boss, but where's my pay day? I know- that joke was tacky. I don't see gigs often so I figured I should just spring for the real deal. Although, I saw Ryan Adams play Cardiff Bay on November 11th, and he was achingly good. Dear John is a killer, especially the rendition based on the Follow the Lights LP that just came out, with Neal Casal replacing the wretched Norah Jones on backing vocals. Just as he was making me feel at home, I think he was starting to feel like a stranger. He had just come from New York and was publicly lamenting - in his classic style - the separation pains he was already experiencing.

But I was grateful to have him there. The thing that's so terrifying about Ryan Adams is that you feel so dizzyingly intimate with him when you see him. His show is like a bashful conversation, to the point that he dolefully asks pardon when informing the audience that everyone will be going on an intermission, so, as he said, "You can have a drink, we can have a drink, go to the bathroom, and then come back, and keep playing as long as we're allowed" - with the implicit message: "if that's okay by you." So his shows are never perfect, the faults often bare, but then at moments he is so good that his inconsistency garners some brand of little brother sympathy, even when he lashes out at you (the loving audience), like his gig at U Chicago a few years back. People rail on his inconsistency all the time, his sheepish relationship with his drinking problem, that he is prolific to a fault-- he puts out so much material and a whole lot of it is garbage. But I'll take his rough edges any day.

Well this has been a whole smatter of things, but it had been a while. I miss everyone, and thanks for your birthday wishes.

I haven't written in a very long time, partially because I needed to reconsider this whole blogging business, but mostly because I haven't had email access except sparingly (and I only use the term "sparingly" sparingly). I am now living in a small cottage approximately 9 miles from the nearest small town, Banchory, in the heart of Royal Deeside. Where is Royal Deeside? West of Aberdeen in Scotland, and fitted with all the pins and whistles a girl could need, save for a place to develop photographs. So, sadly, we will have to make do with no visuals for now, except for those I've managed to take with my handy iSight camera.

It's salmon pools and Oil Men up here, and a lot of greenery that runs the gamut from pines and ferns to green wool fisherman socks. The color palette on occasion overdoes itself with its sunsets, accompanying an evening meal whose components are all dragged up a two-mile winding forest road by foot with no small amount of effort. The addition of the internet in this last day after of month in a home that has become something of a hermitage by default is seeming, after I've been whiling away my day off online, perhaps something more controversial than I had previously imagined.

I have indulged other options available for entertainments, namely learning German and reading S.K. Woodcroft. Wir gehen Ski fahren! Alright- I just began, really, today, and this was the first phrase I learned. What I thought would be a standard beginner's course seems to be a phrase book for Brits looking to take a skiing holiday, that calls itself an intensive guide geared "towards fluency rather than mere phrase learning" because it helps you string together phrases about going skiing with those about drinking glühwein after hitting the slopes. Mmm, but it does sound delicious.

For those who have already received communiqués pertaining to my misadventures here, I apologize for my certain redundancy.

I love you. I will write soon. Maybe in a matter of hours.

the new american passport

I had to get a new passport before I flew out, and it's pretty fantastic.

This is just one of its pages, which are completely mind-blowing and look like the freebie dolphin, Daffy, and Canadian geese checks you get at the beginning of a book of checks.

But the passport is not complete without elegantly wrapping my mug in a flag and eagle:

I am not commenting on this derisively. To the contrary, I always admire dolphin check bearers for their gusto and humorous relationship with money. And no, my name is not Frank Moss.

Canton is a funny area just outside Cardiff, a perfect outskirtsville, more complete than Cardiff is complete as a capital city. Of course, Cardiff did not become the capital city yesterday (although it did, to rub some idioms, become so overnight). Actually, when I was trolling through its endless glorious retail sector and found the Cardiff castle gift shop, I read about Cardiff's bid for capital city in 1954, and how the newspaper headlines heralded the day of Cardiff's victory as "The Day of Great Relief."
But it's hard to be a city.