Shameless plug: my virtual friend Linda has written a book based on her blog Animals Behaving Badly. Because animals really do want to eat us, and cause various other forms of woe. It looks like a hoot and a half. Check it out here.
]]>1. The Helio Sequence “Keep Your Eyes Ahead”
2. The Black Keys “Sister”
3. Junip “Rope and Summit”
4. Iron & Wine “Tree By the River”
5. Band of Horses, “The General Specific”
6. Beirut, “Santa Fe”
7. Foster the People, “Call It Want You Want”
8. Gorillaz, “Doncamatic (Joker remix)”
9. Little Dragon, “Ritual Union”
10. Bon Iver, “Minnesota, WI”
11. The National, “Exile Vilify”
12. Wye Oak, “Civilian”
13. Freelance Whales, “Generator ^ Second Floor”
14. Kings of Leon, “Back Down South”
15. Army Navy, “The Long Goodbye”
16. Yuck, “Operation”
17. fun, “Benson Hedges”
18. The Joy Formidable, “Whirring”
Drop a comment or send a message or e-mail if you want to get a copy.
]]>
Shameless plug: my virtual friend Linda has written a book based on her blog Animals Behaving Badly. Because animals really do want to eat us, and cause various other forms of woe. It looks like a hoot and a half. Check it out here.
]]>At the risk of offending the easily offended, I too have been wondering what exactly we are supposed to remember about 9/11.
Republican folks in states like George sure do like to hate on illegal immigrants. And then they act all surprsied when local farms can't get their crops in.
A big part of the problem with the Tea Party: Half of Americans Getting Government Aid Swear They've Never Used It.
What liberal media? A good "Suppose the parties were reversed?" exercise is fun every so often.
Sesame Street vs. Beastie Boys
When Vin Scully passes, I will probably cry.
]]>Dinosaur Jr. "How'd You Pin That One On Me"
Uncle Tupelo "No Depression"
Guided By Voices "Skin Parade"
Josh Rouse "Middle School Frown"
Q-Tip "Won't Trade"
Death Cab for Cutie "A Movie Script Ending"
Elvis Costello & the Attractions "Alison"
Smashing Pumpkins "Soma"
The Detroit Cobras "Laughing at You"
The Primitives "Stop Killing Me"
Animal Collective "Taste"
Wire "Eardrum Buzz"
Cursive "Lament of Pretty Baby"
Stevie Wonder "All in Love Is Fair"
Prong "Whose Fist Is This Anyway"
Beastie Boys "Heart Attack Man"
Yo La Tengo "Don't Say a Word"
Bob Mould "Sacrifice/Let There Be Peace"
Big Audio Dynamite "I Turned Out a Punk"
Soundgarden "Mailman"
TV On the Radio "Snakes and Martyrs"
The Finn Brothers "Homesick"
Jane's Addiction "Idiots Rule"
Mos Def "War"
R.E.M. "Time After Time"
Buffalo Tom "Clobbered"
Afghan Whigs "John the Baptist"
Bloc Party "Blue Light"
Earth, Wind & Fire "Saturday Nite"
Orbital "Illuminate"
Last night's Daily Show lead segment is making the rounds, for good reason. It shows how nonsensical and just plain mean the tax rhetoric is on the right at the moment. Class warfare, indeed. This in the wake of Warren Buffet's op-ed that has been linked pretty much everywhere.
Why are corporate profits up, but there are no new jobs? In part, because of the speed-up.
Captchas to keep idiots out of comment threads. Well played.
Someone's made a documentary on the McDonald's spilled coffee lawsuit, which is only the most misunderstood legal case in American popular culture.
A couple of food items: I have quite enjoyed Lucky Peach magazine, which defies convention by, you know, being a printed magazine. Locally, I liked this review of Good Stuff Eatery, which is very specific in its criticism's of Good Stuff's burger technique. Down in comments, it sounds like Spike just kind of laughed it off.
]]>An old man is sitting on his porch during a heavy rainstorm. A jeep pulls up, and a National Guardsman gets out. "Sir, flood's a-comin'. We're evacuating everyone."
The old man says, "Don't you worry about me, sonny. The Lord will save me." The jeep drives off.
The next day, the water is up to the top step. A guardsman comes up in a rowboat. "The water's only going to get higher! We have to get you out of here!"
He still refuses to leave. "The Lord will save me!" So the guardsman rows away.
By the next morning, the old man has been forced to climb on his roof. A helicopter flies over and drops a ladder. "I'm not leaving! The Lord will save me!" he shouts. When it's clear he's not budging, the helicopter flies away.
Soon thereafter, the old man is swept from his roof and drowns. He comes to in heaven, and when he finds himself in front of God, he says "Lord, I had faith! Why didn't you save me?!"
And God says, "Hey, I sent a jeep, and then a rowboat, and then a helicopter. What more did you want?"
As such I can imagine Rick Perry saying "Lord, why didn't you save us from economic calamity and the ruins of climate change?" And God will say "I sent Paul Krugman and Al Gore, but you meatheads wouldn't listen."
Our only real day trip was to Corolla to visit the Currituck lighthouse. We passed on climbing to the top, but enjoyed the area and the arty shops in that part of Corolla.
I find myself toying with the idea of a Beach Week II later in the summer. Or at least a weekend.
]]>Here is as fine a high school graduation speech as you will ever read, largely free of fluff and bullshit.
Rush Limbaugh gets called out during Weiner-gate, and doesn't take too kindly to it.
A thing that makes me want to hurl: Senators making themselves bigger experts on esoteric fields than actual experts, for blatantly political reasons.
It's a little distressing to see the Nats' relatively new ballpark near the bottom of this ranking of ballparks based on Yelp ratings. I guess I'm not surprised, though. First, as Silver notes, the Nats have been wretched over the last few years (OK, all of them), which invariably colors people's opinions of the park. And second, it's a very OK ballpark, when you get down to it. Yeah, it's nice enough, but there's nothing truly great about it. Anyway, it's worth noting the drop-off between Nats Park's score and the truly wretched parks underneath it.
A more positive baseball item: Drew Storen thinks the Nats should be America's Team!
]]>Newt Gingrich promises to make the nation more like Texas. Oh, joy.
Scientific proof that long commutes are bad for you. I had to go downtown two days in a row this week, and just that about sucked the life out of me. I have turned down projects in the city purely because I don't want to add 2+ hours of largely wasted time to my work day.
Lastly: sometimes, all you can do is quote the headline: 10-Year-Old Captures 6 Foot Alligator, Rides It Home.
]]>If you are a member of an environmental group, and someone shows up who tries to work their way in and then encourage you to blow stuff up, tell them to leave and never come back. They might be some kind of undercover officer, wasting huge amounts of public money.
Lastly, Mike Rowe's Senate testimony on the decline of trades in the U.S.. He's got a point. I will admit that in high school, us "preps" looked down at the vo-tech kids, but now if my plumbing explodes, I feel like an incompetent moron, and I think the handyman who arrives and puts it all back together is pretty awesome. Working in IT project management, where there are days when I have a hard time putting a finger on what exactly we accomplished, I have a much greater respect for people who work with real, solid things than I did 20 years ago.
]]>I love this article on recycling oil filters not just because I know the blogger and the subject's son. It displays the kind of can-do American spirit that we hear so much about, and yet is in astonishingly short supply these days when it comes to solving our problems. Just think how much better off we'd be if the auto manufacturers hadn't spent so much time telling us fuel-efficient or alternative-fuel cars couldn't be made, and had just gone ahead and tried to do it. Same goes for large scale alternative electricity: quit spending so much money lobbying to convince us that coal is actually wonderful, and just build some of this stuff.
Lastly, this is actually leftover from last week, but: #NotIntendedToBeAFactualStatement is the best Twitter hashtag of the past month.
]]>Are people starting to catch on to just how much of the national wealth the top 1% owns? And maybe national policy shouldn't consistently favor those people at the expense of the rest of us? Sadly, probably not.
Kevin Drum smacks Gregg Easterbrook on territory I've covered before: it is ridiculous to suggest that people who think they should be paying more in taxes should voluntarily write a check to the government. I would gladly pay an extra $1,000 in federal taxes if I knew everyone else in my bracket was paying the same, and those in higher brackets were paying appropriate amounts; then we might make actual progress on the deficit everyone is pretending to care so much about. But if I alone send $1,000 into the Treasury right now, that would accomplish basically nothing.
Also on the budget, John Cole on why the "conventional wisdom" on the budget debate can't be bothered to think about what it means for people other than themselves.
If solar power was subsidized like fossil fuels.
Sales and marketing 101 in one panel, courtesy of The Oatmeal.
Sports: Blah de blah Yankees-Rangers or Duke-North Carolina. For my money, the best sports rivalries on Earth are India-Pakistan (they have nuclear weapons pointed at each other!) and Rangers-Celtic.
Do not like: Five Guys at Nationals Park ousted in favor of New York-based restaurant concepts that undoubtedly paid more for the space. Yeah, Five Guys is everywhere now, but I consider them a DC-area landmark. I remember when there were, like, three of them. They should have stayed.
Joe Posnanski on angry people.
Sports-politics crossover (and another item slapping Gregg Easterbrook, which is OK by me): Claiming indignance over Obama's filling out an NCAA bracket is one of those trumped-up things that only people who already hate Obama claim to be upset about.
One video game company takes on the sense of entitlement of one guy in the majority, and tells him to get over it. Good for them.
Lastly, awesomely depressing: Peanuts strips with the last panel removed.
]]>
After I'd booked the San Diego trip, Mike pointed out that the Angels were also home that weekend, and Anaheim was only 90 minutes away. That was not a difficult sell.
The Big A is an older stadium that's been through some remodels over the years, so while it's bright and shiny in some regards, its age shows in others. Some of the concourse tunnels on the lower level looked more like the basement of some government buildings I've worked in rather than a ballpark. Fortunately, we didn't spend much time out there. Our seats down the left-field line faced the outfield (rather than home plate) a little more than I'd have liked, but otherwise the sight lines were good. The rock pile in center field is mildly wacky, but not as ridiculous as the riverboat in Cincinnati. Plus, fireworks shoot out of it when the Angels hit a home run.
The Angels seem to have pretty good fan support; it probably helped that this was the second home game of the season. Plenty of red and Angels gear, and a couple of drunk morons gave Mike a hard time about his Padres jacket. (The Dodgers, sure, but really, are the Padres enough of a threat for them to get riled up over? They either did not notice or did not care about my Expos jersey.) And some baseball purists may curse me for this, but I love me some Rally Monkey. They rolled him out staring in the bottom of the 7th, and damn if it didn't get the crowd fired up every time. They showed a number of film sequences with the monkey digitally imposed, such as the deer-wrecking-the-car scene from Tommy Boy, that caught me off guard at first and actually made me laugh. The Rally Monkey's appearance also brought out a guy selling stuffed monkeys on a stick, and judging from how many monkeys were waved about every time he came on the jumbotron, he did decent business. (And yes, I bought a small monkey to bring home to the girls.) Additional props to the scoreboard operators for playing the "Peanut Butter Jelly Time" dancing banana between innings. That blows the doors off of the "Flippin' Pizza Toss" and other minor-league shenanigans they foist upon us at Nationals Park.
Unfortunately, the Rally Monkey was not all that effective at getting the Angels to score runs. The game started out as a back-and-forth affair, with each teams scoring in three of the first four innings, and each collecting ten hits by the 5th. It had the makings of a double-digit-run slugfest. And then... nothing. Both sides went relatively quietly, inning after inning. In the bottom of the 11th, the Angels had first and third with no one out, and then the bases loaded with one out, but Aaron Hill snagged a grounded with the infield in to cut down a run at home, and Jeff Mathis struck out to end the threat. Very frustrating (not least of all because it was now really freakin' cold). After a double play ended the bottom of the 12th, and with an hour and a half drive back to San Diego looming, we bolted. We heard the Angels win it in the 14th on the radio.
Much as with San Diego, I wouldn't rank Angel Stadium among the best out there, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. Miscellaneous thoughts below.
]]>
When I decided to head to San Diego for this year's baseball weekend, the thought of planning for rain never crossed my mind. It's southern California, right? We'll have great weather!
Yeah, not so much. As the trip neared, the weather forecast turned ugly. On gameday, things were looking iffy. We arrived at the ballpark an hour before game time to heavy clouds, but no rain yet. Nonetheless, the powers that be made the bewildering decision to put the tarp on the field and delay the game by a half-hour. First pitch went off at 7:30; we watched the first inning, Matt Kemp doubled to lead off the top of the second, and then the skies opened up for real. If they'd started the game on time, we'd have seen three or four innings, but no. We huddled with the masses on the concourse for about 45 minutes, and debated as to whether the game would be resumed at all. Since we were supposed to meet some friends in the Gaslamp District after the game, we decided to head over there, knowing we could get back in on our tickets later if we wanted to. But many beers were served in the Gaslamp District, so going back to the stadium never actually happened. And that's probably just as well, as the game was delayed repeatedly, and at some point after midnight play was suspended, tied 2-2 in the 9th. The Dodgers won it in 11 when the game was picked up the next day.
Still, we had enough time to walk around and get a feel for the place. One criticism I'd read of Petco before going out was that it wasn't old-school ballparky enough for some--where's the red brick? I didn't find that to be a problem, though; the place feels very appropriate for southern California. The park is large (again, some people don't like this, but I do), and as such there are good sight lines from everywhere. There are several quirky places from which to watch the game, like next to the giant paint can in left field, or from field level in the left-field corner after you go through the team store. It was from this spot that we heckled the grounds crew as they rolled up the tarp; they didn't appear to have had much practice at it.
The best feature, in my opinion, is the Western Metal Supply Company building that was incorporated into the park. The upper levels are suites, the lower level is the team store, and the floor above that is incorporated into the concourse, with old wood-beam construction. In right field, you have the grassy hill where you can sit on a blanket and watch the game, albeit from far a-way. There's also a kid-sized baseball field out behind the batter's eye. One frustration: you can't see the field from much of the concourse. I am very spoiled by Nats Park, where you can keep an eye on the game even while waiting in line for a hot dog.
Overall, I don't know that I'd put Petco in the top 10 or anything, but it's a perfectly fine place to take in a ballgame. Of course, one could argue whether I actually did that. I'm going to go ahead and count it, but I'm sure I'll be back sooner or later, maybe as a sidebar to a Dodger Stadium trip. But next time, I'm going in July or August.
Random thoughts follow.
]]>