We got rid of our cable nearly 15 years ago, and haven’t seen any broadcast TV since then, except at neighbors’ homes. We are great patrons of Netflix and the library’s DVD loan program.
Increasingly, we get a lot of content off the internet, which we watch on our computers. I’d been wondering how to watch internet content on our TV. Now I know, courtesy Tyler Stanton (yes, the Tyler Stanton of Tripp and Tyler fame).
Looking at iTunes, I see my top song this year was “40 Day Dream” by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes. I listened to it 137 times. A few of those must have been in 2010, since I bought it that October, but there’s no question it was one of my favorites this year. (Sadly, there’s no way with an iTunes Smart List to learn what a song’s play count was during a certain period of time.)
(Note that “40 Day Dream” is on the same (eponymous) album as “Home”, a song covered by Jorge & Alexa Narvaez in their charming YouTube viral video.)
Following “40 Day Dream” in my most-played list were “Bye Bye Bye” by Plants and Animals, “Buildings and Mountains” by the Republic Tigers, and “Can You Tell” by Ra Ra Riot, with 116, 111, and 106 plays, respectively.
As it happens, all those are digital downloads from Amazon. I have a handful of songs from the iTunes store, but only a few, since a web browser offers a much better shopping experience than iTunes does. Web browsers have offered tabs since, when, 1997 or so? But iTunes is pure-linear, and shopping on it interferes with other things you might be trying to do with iTunes.
If we subtract out all the digital downloads, leaving just songs that I’ve ripped from actual physical brick-and-mortar CDs, my top songs from 2011 were: “If You Leave” by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, “He’s a Pirate” by Klaus Badelt and Hans Zimmer, “Mr. Roboto” by Styx, and “Africa” by Toto. (Don’t wince at my taste: serious musicians love that song! See track 11 here.)
The pirate song is from my collection of Film Music of course. The others are, like those I mentioned previously, from a playlist of music that has appeared on the TV show Chuck. If we subtract out “Chuck” music and “Film Music” then my top songs in 2011 were: “YYZ” by Rush, “A Raft of Penguins” by Ian Anderson, “La Villa Strangiato” by Rush, and “There is a Green Hill” by the World Wide Message Tribe. Also in the Top 10 list are the Genevan Psalter’s Psalm 124 by Calvin College, “Peace of Mind” by Boston, and “Just Showed Up (for My Own Life)” by Sara Groves.
Well. Here’s something different: Mel Torme covering Donald Fagen’s “The Goodbye Look“:
That’s my second-favorite track on, The Nightfly, one of my all-time favorite albums. My favorite track is “Walk Between Raindrops.” If you don’t like it, well, you’re a loser, I’m sorry. And if you do like it, try Kamakiriad, Fagen’s next solo album, which was released just 11 short years later. Start there with “Tomorrow’s Girls.”
From the Smithsonian, via @HankFortener, comes this useful information:
Actually, scientists are finding that the ability to detect sarcasm really is useful. For the past 20 years, researchers from linguists to psychologists to neurologists have been studying our ability to perceive snarky remarks and gaining new insights into how the mind works. Studies have shown that exposure to sarcasm enhances creative problem solving, for instance. Children understand and use sarcasm by the time they get to kindergarten. An inability to understand sarcasm may be an early warning sign of brain disease.
It’s too late to use this insight at family Thanksgiving dinners, but Christmas is coming.
The UK C|Net brings us this:
Man arrested at Large Hadron Collider
claims he’s from the futureA would-be saboteur arrested today at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland made the bizarre claim that he was from the future. Eloi Cole, a strangely dressed young man, said that he had travelled back in time to prevent the LHC from destroying the world.
I was delighted to read Sarah Palin’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. This piece deals with the topic of Crony Capitalism, which she also addressed in her September 3 Iowa speech:
… They talk endlessly about cutting government spending, and yet they keep spending more. They talk about massive unsustainable debt, and yet they keep incurring more. …
No, they don’t feel the same urgency that we do. But why should they? For them business is good; business is very good. Seven of the ten wealthiest counties are suburbs of Washington, D.C. Polls there actually—and usually I say polls, eh, they’re for strippers and cross country skiers—but polls in those parts show that some people there believe that the economy has actually improved. See, there may not be a recession in Georgetown, but there is in the rest of America.
I’m glad. This is a drum that needs beating, almost as much as the crony capitalists need beating. By continuing to address the topic, she sheds light on the source of some of our nation’s greatest troubles, and ways we can fix them. More light, I would say, than two months of silly #OWS self-indulgence. Good for her.
I watched William Shatner‘s documentary The Captains the other night. The concept is simple: Shatner, the actor who played the captain in the original Star Trek series, goes around interviewing the actors who played captains in the later series. Here’s the trailer:
There’s not a whole lot to the movie, but I thought two things were interesting. First, each of the captains agrees that the star of a television series is overworked. Well-compensated, yes, but also subject to 40 weeks of endless 14, 16, or 18-hour days. I did not know that. It was for each of them a source of great difficulty in their family relationships, and several said it was a major contributor to a divorce.
Second, I was interested to see Shatner asking the other captains about life after death. Of course, he is in his 80s now, and he knows he will eventually follow Scotty, Bones, and the Great Bird of the Galaxy to wherever it is people go when they aren’t here any more.
It’s been a fair while since I mentioned my search for the perfect monospaced font to use in Terminal.app, MacVim, and similar apps. But there’s a new contender: Ubuntu Mono. (Click the picture for a bigger version.)
(Gruber kind of dismissed the rest of the Ubuntu family, but he agrees the monospaced fonts are nice.)
Well, I won’t get my Kindle Touch until Monday, but at least now that the Fire reviews have all posted, people are beginning to talk about the Touch:
Awkward delays arise, and repainting of the e-Ink screen sometimes lags. But, overall, the experience is quite good and, in some situations, noticeably better than using the previous iteration’s buttons. This is especially true of picking items from lists or selecting text in specific areas of the screen—touch, even on a screen that isn’t especially responsive, is simply much faster than navigating via repeated button presses.
Also this: “But if your focus is on reading, I would actually recommend the bottom of the line model. It’s lighter and more comfortable to hold in one hand, and the touch screen doesn’t really make the page turning experience that much better.”
So I got a new Kindle Touch
That’s okay. I can cope with delayed gratification. Except when suddenly everybody and their uncle is posting reviews of the Kindle Fire. Now I demand to know why the more exotic Kindles shipped before mine!