is a blog by Brendan
“The music on the tape loops and looped. It was going round for a second time. We sat and listened to it. We’ll be sitting and listening to it for a while longer.”
Everybody needs to buy Magic for Beginners right now and read it because I need a discussion group to figure out what she is doing with tense, dammit. Or you can borrow my copy. You can’t borrow my copy! I’m reading the title novella to Maria and I have to read all the stories in it again anyway.
At its worst (“The Cannon”) the book descends into playful postmodern nonsense, but at its best it’s glorious. It may be less glorious to people who don’t share my borderline ADD.
The story I quoted above (“Lull”) is kind of about time travel, so maybe the tense ambiguity is tied to that, but it also shows up in at least one other story (“Catskin”) which is a fairy tale and not about time travel at all. But there are two distinct stories about zombies.
I need you to read this book so we can talk about it!
Miscellétudes: David Flora making music on the interweb! It was Lisa’s idea to make him do a weekly one-minute composition, but I get to host him for it.
I think this is frickin’ great!
Thank you, famous musicians. Thank you.
Man, people are lovin’ on the Prior-Art-O-Matic. You guys are aware that Kevan with an A has done about a billion things that cool, right?
I finally figured out what to tell people when they ask what an anacrusis is.
This is the entry where I gush about my mp3 player! Pretend it’s 2002.
My messenger bag is considerably lighter now that I’m not carrying my Discman and fifty CDs in it all the time, and I never have to try to hold three things while standing up again. That’s awesome! I sneakily got a refurbished Shuffle directly from Apple, so I got the one-gig version for the 512 price, and it’s still got a year warranty. That is also awesome! I get to carry the Magic Future Perfect* Radio Mix Tape From Heaven around in my pocket and it makes me happy.
It doesn’t introduce me to new music like the radio and mix tapes are supposed to do (remember when the radio introduced you to new music? Ha ha!), but that’s what I have Lisa and Will and Maria and Ken for. Ken, move back already, dammit.
The audio quality on the Shuffle is really excellent–I’ve actually noticed instruments in the midrange I never heard before, and there are none of the audible compression artifacts I used to get with my mp3-CD player. The one thing it doesn’t have is a bass boost, which is crippling. I am a little bit addicted to my bass boost. I am addicted enough that tonight I purchased paraphernalia with which to enjoy my dependency. Having an equalizer the size of a pack of cigarettes really destroys the point of having a music player the size of a stick of gum, but man, I was getting the dee tees. I’ll probably bitch later about how it works out.
Before I knew the Koss equalizer existed, I was actually considering looking for some converters and a battery-operated guitar effects pedal that would let me change the bass, and just carrying that around instead. Then I thought “ah, but that would strip the signal to mono.” Then I thought “and would be completely insane.“
I was annoyed at first that I had to partition the areas for audio storage and file storage separately, but I fit every song I wanted in less than the 800 megs I’d reserved. There is a remedy, as it turns out, but honestly I’m only using it to listen to the second good duet in the history of pop over and over again.
(The first, and previously only, was “Under Pressure.” Bowie and Queen.)
* A grammar joke!
Michael “Mooch” Morgan, do you still exist? Will you write me? Will you get a less damn generic name?
I was reading an article in The Morning News and noticed that all the links were red. “Man,” I thought, “they haven’t filled out any of their pages yet.”