Stuff
- 70s Survival (19)
- Albums (35)
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- Music Criticism (14)
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- Books (4)
- Comedy (22)
- Editing (12)
- Literary Criticism (1)
- Lyrics (5)
- Oracles (12)
- Pedantry (4)
- Quotes (11)
- Science Fiction (8)
- Short Stories (1)
- Stock Phrases (3)
- Writers (7)
two limericks for felix hernandez
Posted on April 16th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Sports.
Seattle Mariners Venezuelan phenom Felix Hernandez is much celebrated at USS Mariner; in fact, they gave him the nickname King Felix by which he is nationally known. Every day he pitches is "Happy Felix Day" at USS Mariner. Today limericks broke out. I contributed two:
All hail the young King from Caracas.
His eminence never should shock us.
When he mixes his pitches
He leaves batters in twitches
And our cheers can be heard in Secaucus.
But then I discovered he's actually from Valencia. You can't rhyme much with Valencia (or Venezuela) in English, so I came at it from a different angle:
A Valencian monarch named Felix
Has an extra-high-powered double helix.
Hitters flail at his flings
And their once-mighty swings
Are reduced to limp, impotent wee licks.
Happy Felix Day!
speaking the same language
Posted on April 10th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Badness.
In an mild argument at another web site I've been told I'm "kind of mincing words in the sense".
great band name and title
Posted on March 19th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Stuff.
Another fake album cover:
indie rock album cover generator
Posted on March 17th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Stuff, Elsewhere.
What a great idea: a slightly labor-intensive but fascinating method for generating faux indie rock album covers. The examples shown on Brainiac's page are excellent, but check out the entire archive, too.
When I get home, I'm going to make some of my own.
exterminate (a continuing series)
Posted on March 3rd, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Badness.
A couple more rhetorical bugs that signal the brief sleep of the conscious mind:
"Despite ... or perhaps even because of"
"That's not to say ... far from it"
name that tune day
Posted on February 29th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Elsewhere.
Name That Tune #8 goes up in fifteen minutes at Popdose.
perhaps a bit too close to home
Posted on February 25th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Untruths, Cartoons.
Sent to me by Velma:
name that tune day
Posted on February 22nd, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Elsewhere.
I keep forgetting to mention the new Name That Tune games on Fridays. Today, at 12:30 Eastern, I'll be running my Name That Tune game over at Popdose. Come over and play!
what, a bus? a truck? a helicopter? i think we should be told.
Posted on February 9th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Badness.
A headline right now on ESPN's front page:
Did Stewart hit Busch with more than car Friday?
Hitting him with a car by itself merits a suspension, I think.
advisory note for blades of grass
Posted on February 5th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Badness, Stuff.
If you're going to leave political propaganda in my weblog, have the courtesy to sign your name and the sense to link it properly.
preliminary thoughts on jeeves and wooster
Posted on February 3rd, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Stuff, Comedy.
We have only watched the first two episodes, and it's not unusual for a comedy series to take even a full season to get its legs. So I'm certainly not writing off the series with these remarks. But for a purchase that seemed like a can't-miss -- Jeeves and Wooster played by Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie! adapted from the actual stories! -- I'm getting an uneasy feeling that I may end up watching more from duty than enjoyment.
Overfamiliarity with the original material is never a good recipe for enjoying stories transfered to television or cinema, and I'm obsessively fond of the Jeeves and Wooster stories. I knew from the start that one key element in the humor -- Bertie's narrative voice -- was unlilkely to translate, so I was prepared to let that go. All I really want is a reasonable approximation of the tone. And they've largely managed that. But they've managed it far better in the sequences when they're lifting dialogue whole from the original; rewritten scenes tend to miss a little, and the scenes created entirely new have been weak. And unfortunately, this means the best scenes have been the ones where I already knew all the jokes and incidents. (Not their fault.)
Some of the portrayals are better than others. I gather one of the odd features of the series is that the actors playing the supporting characters change from season to season; but in these first two episodes, at least, Bingo Little is perfect, and Roberta Wickham, Sir Roderick Glossop, Aunt Agatha, Honoria Glossop, and Claude and Eustace are all good enough. The imbecility of the Drones Club is perhaps played a bit broadly. Aunt Dahlia is badly underplayed, which is too bad, since she's my favorite supporting character in the series, and ought to be the most loudly and enthusiastically played. Hugh Laurie is a fine Bertie.
Which brings us to the huge problem that may well ruin the series for me: Stephen Fry's Jeeves. Fry is a very funny man, and I've always enjoyed him before. And I don't doubt that what he's doing here is funny. But it's not Jeeves, and I'm going to have a lot of trouble moving past that. Fry's Jeeves is smug. He wears a perpetual smirk, and radiates an air of superiority. Now, Jeeves as written would be hard to play for a funny man. Jeeves is largely expressionless and unreacting; the humor proceeds from the barest variations in his manner and tone. His verbal humor is as bone-dry as humor gets. Instead, Fry (and the writers) have turned up the volume, making Jeeves both more obvious and less likeable. He strikes me as more of a stand-in for a modern audience's class sensibilities than a real attempt to portray Jeeves as written, a failure of interpretation which unfortunately doesn't just affect Jeeves but the tone of the whole enterprise. Orwell noted that Americans who read a class critique in the Jeeves and Wooster stories were missing the point, but in this case they wouldn't be far off. Worst of all for the tone, they have made Jeeves sarcastic. Fry's Jeeves scores points with cutting remarks off Bertie's stupidity -- and that of his friends -- in a way that is simply cruder -- lower -- than Jeeves would ever stoop to. All of these smartass remarks are original to the television series, and, alas, none of them (so far) have been especially clever or funny: conventional put-down humor that sails over the head of the target. The literary Jeeves's dry remarks may contain implications, but he is not so baldly disrespectful, ever.
So, well. I'll continue watching, and at the very least look for my favorite segments. The singing of "Sonny Boy" was well done; I'm eager to see what they do with Gussie Fink-Nottle's address to the graduates. But I no longer have much hope that I'm going to love this series, and that's too bad, because my hopes were very high.
i'll bet it was about making a statement. yeah.
Posted on January 24th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Musicians, Badness, Quotes.
Quoted from Idolator:
The Spice Girls are walking away with "£50 million between them" for their sold-out 17-night stand at London's 02 Arena. "The truth of the matter is, to put on this tour has cost £18.6 million," Ginger sez. "This is not a money-making expedition...Hopefully we will break even but it has never been about that."
I'm soliciting theories on what the Spice Girls reunions shows were really about, since they were never about making money (or breaking even), as pretty much everyone on the planet who isn't a Spice Girl might naturally assume.
horsing around
Posted on January 20th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Sports.
A gem from the always poorly copy edited espn.com:
Carmelo Anthony saddled up to Allen Iverson late in the fourth quarter and told him they needed to put an end to this game.
excuse me?
Posted on January 15th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Words, Badness.
"The announcement was a surprise (if not an unexpected one)"
--John Bush at Allmusic, reviewing Orbital's Blue Album
wallpapers
Posted on December 30th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Stuff, Boring Posts.
When we were in Seattle for Christmas, I discovered that nearly all my Parlando wallpapers looked like crap on widescreen monitors. I'd already adjusted them a couple times for bigger screen sizes and smaller resolutions than I use at home, but this was too much; I couldn't see any way to fix the problem other than making brand new wallpapers, and right now designing non-tiling wallpapers that work both on regular monitors and widescreen is not a task I am up for.
So I am now making tiling wallpapers for Parlando. I'm planning to change them entirely every month, though I'll probably also move some in and out whenever I feel like it. The first new eleven are up now.
another riff well past its pull date
Posted on December 14th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Badness, Comedy.
"I, for one, welcome our new [variable] overlords."
eponymous hiphop?
Posted on December 10th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, Lists.
It was only when I began actively compiling Eponymous Albums That Aren't Debut Albums -- now up to 86 items -- that I became aware that there seems to be a much lower percentage of eponymous albums in hiphop than elsewhere. Does that seem true to anyone else?
eponymous update
Posted on December 6th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, Lists.
The list of eponymous albums that aren't debut albums is up to fifty. A surprising number of them are from musicians who actually had an eponymous debut, but chose to repeat the title.