📺 Finished the second season of From on MGM+ yesterday (until a couple weeks ago, when we signed up for a free trial to specifically watch this show, I had never heard of this service) and found it really interesting. Like Lost, but horror (Harold Perrineau, even!)
# 🎵 An hour-long Oasis playlist
After getting hooked on @adam ’s St. Vincent playlist and the rest of their “Finest Hour” series in which they “compile [their] favorite of an artist’s songs into a playlist not a minute longer than 1 hour in duration1,” I decided to take the format for a spin myself, starting with Oasis.
Gtting this playlist under an hour was an excruciating task. I had to cut a dozen or more songs that I consider among my favorite by any artist. Initially, I had almost four hours. But I’m proud of what I ended up with. I love having the constraint of an hour… takes me back to the days of recording cassettes or burning CDs and being by their capacity.
The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself of the chains that shackle the spirit.
–Igor Stravinsky
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And what a great name for that concept. ↩︎
Winging it
This is now my fifth post of WeblogPoMo across three different sites. Maybe I’ll try for four by the end–I’ve heard great things about Pika. There are things I like about each of the trio of micro.blog, weblog.lol, and scribbles.page. I guess it’s nice to have options. Maybe through sheer volume I’ll have some semblance of a plan or path by the end of the month.
Star Wars Day Top 10 #WeblogPoMo2024
As a kid whose most formative years fell in the early 90s, I missed some of the Star Wars craze, and might have missed it altogether if not for my friend Geoff. He had a couple older brothers who I think had introduced him pretty early on and he was obsessed. I remember watching the original trilogy on VHS at Geoff’s house many times (Star Wars and Sega and Space Hog), and I know for sure that was my initial introduction. At the time–I think I was maybe 8?– Return of the Jedi was my favorite.
The “Special Edition” theatrical releases came out while I was in junior high and by then Empire was my favorite (of course). I remember going to the theater with Geoff and several other friends to catch these and it really took the experience to another level to be able to watch on the big screen. I wasn’t attached enough to the originals to take offense to any of the changes, but I empathized anyway.
The prequel trilogy debuted around the time I started high school and I also remember going to see all of them in the theater with groups of friends. I did not care for them, but I had one friend who really loved them.
We had this super cool theater in the town where I grew up that was kind of a dump–a relic of another time. One screen. Old, saggy seats. Bad concessions. But it was in our town. And it got new movies. And a bunch of us could meet up there and watch something and then use the pay phone on the corner to call for a ride. It was amazing.
I never got into any of the animated series, and kind of let Star Wars as an entity fade from my mind in the years after the prequels, but I was, somewhat surprisingly, super excited about the announcement of the new sequel trilogy and have really liked several of the films and tv series. Anyway, all of this is intended to lead in to my (a relatively casual fan who needs to do a lot of catching up on stuff) completely non-definitive ranking of my top ten favorite Star Wars properties, in terms of how much I like them on this May the Fourth of 2024.
- Andor, s1
- Empire
- Rogue One
- TLJ
- A New Hope
- The Force Awakens
- RotJ
- Mandalorian, s1
- Mandalorian, s2
- Solo
Lifelong Learning
I realized recently (or, maybe just remembered) that learning is one of my favorite things in the world. This week, it came up in a work context wherein I volunteered to cross train with another department despite being completely buried with my own work at the moment and having already committed to other similar opportunities that haven’t even begun. I’m fortunate enough to work in a role and for a company that values learning and puts enough priority behind it that we can actually take advantage and build some new knowledge within our company and field. It’s the most excited I’ve been for a new project in quite a while.
#WeblogPoMo2024
🤯 Saw one of these guys crawling around on the dining room table this morning. Had no idea such a creature existed. What a world.
🔗 Suicide Mission: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane
A shocking look at the inner workings at Boeing from Maureen Tkacic at The American Prospect.
Nine days after the stock reached its high of $440, a brand-new 737 MAX dove into the ground near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, at nearly 800 miles per hour, killing 157 people on board, thanks to a shockingly dumb software program that had programmed the jets to nose-dive in response to the input from a single angle-of-attack sensor.
What will it take for corporations like this to start putting something–anything! safety! literal lives!–ahead of stock price?
Finished reading: Something in the Water by Luke O’Neil 📚
Finished reading: Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut 📚
This start by Falter was completely unexpected. ⚾️🏴☠️
Really enjoyed Wonka with the kids. 🍿📽️🎥
Good year for our cherry blossoms
Thanks, sign!
Finally watched Oppenheimer. Lived up to the hype! 🎥🍿🎬
Finished the Hulu series Death and Other Details tonight. Can’t say I thought it was good, but it was certainly a wild ride. Plus, Mandy Patinkin. 📺
Now Playing: Liam Gallagher & John Squire 🎵
The real action is in novelty 📚 💬
I can’t believe all these animals we have are real and we just take it for granted I said before drinking half of my glass. Growing up our parents tell us there’s no such thing as monsters so we’ll go to sleep but a bear is a monster and a moose is a monster and a bird is a monster too. Every bird in the world would rip your head off if it were somewhat larger and you were somewhat slower.
Imagine if whales didn’t exist and then one showed up out of nowhere? We’d never stop talking about it Joe said. We would never get over it.
It’s probably no coincidence that the most famous novel ever written was about how fucked up a guy got after knowing about one particularly angry whale.
It’s just that we get used to the things that are scary Joe said. The real action is in novelty.”
― Luke O’Neil, “Kingston Street” from A Creature Wanting Form
Wonderland Tea Party with the little princess. She was slightly intimidated by Alice and the Mad Hatter who were there to take photos; she was not intimidated by the dance floor. 💃💃💃
Finished reading: The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler 📚
And maybe something in every single person is broken, and we just keep moving forward as if it were all normal—all of it—like insects with their heads torn off who keep crawling toward a shadow to hide in. Until that thing that has already destroyed us catches up with us, and we stop moving.
I’ve been on a music nostalgia kick lately. A few weeks ago, we were out with the kids and, for some reason, the phrase “American Girls” worked its way into the conversation and I, of course, immediately needed to listen to the song of that name by a band named “HOMIE1”. Turns out, this song is not part of the available music on any of the three major streaming services. I know I had this song as part of my old iCloud Music Library uploaded via the old iTunes Match service at some point (my collection of random Weezer-adjacent B-sides was, for a few years from like 1999 through 2002 or so, immaculate), but it wasn’t showing up in my library of songs on Apple Music either. Needless to say, it became my personal mission to find and rip a copy of the Meet the Deedles: The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack that included the only officially recorded version of this song. Luckily for me, a Goodwill in Racine, Wisc., had a copy of the CD for sale for less than three bucks, shipped, on eBay. It arrived and I’ve since ripped and uploaded it to my Apple Music library and my “American Girls and Boys” playlist is now complete.
Relatedly, sometime in the days between the inciting incident mentioned above and the arrival of my eBay purchase, another song from my Apple Music library uploads came on while I was driving around with my 3-year-old daughter. This song, as far as my records indicate, is named “Hello” by a band I have listed as Planet Janet. My daughter LOVES this song and we’ve listened to it probably six thousand times in the weeks since. I also love this song and remember downloading it from a Weezer message board some time around the turn of the century – it’s filed next to “Dr. Frank Was Right” by The Benjamins in my brain which leads me to believe I was introduced to both of these songs around the same time and probably had them on a cool mix CD together and that song is from an album that came out in 2001. Anyway, this is the only song that I remember ever hearing from this band and I can’t remember if the reason the song was shared on this message board was because they opened for Weezer or opened for Ozma or were just a band that one of the other commenters on the message board liked (or maybe even was in) or something. Weezerpedia does not list Planet Janet as a band that ever toured with or performed with Weezer and the rest of my internet searching has turned up absolutely nothing on this band or the song. It’s a little frustrating because it’s seriously a jam and my daughter and I would both love to hear any other songs they ever did. I’m going to transcribe the lyrics here to the best of my ability just so they exist somewhere on the internet.
40,000 ways to say “Hello”
And I forget how to walk - oh nevermind
How do thirty seconds pass and I give up
And figure “This’ll take another week”
But another week comes and another day
Another awkward silence trying to find a simple way to say
To say…“Won’t you stop and talk to me?”
Acknowledge my existence
I know I’ve been persistent
But won’t you stop and talk to me
…
Thirty times a day I’ve looked your way
Tongue-tied I fantasize about what I would say
If you were to waste your breath on me
But then I blink and I’m back suffering through my reality
But another week comes and another day
Another awkward silence trying to find a simple way to say
To say…“Won’t you stop and talk to me?”
Acknowledge my existence
I know I’ve been persistent
But won’t you stop and talk to me
[some words I can’t make out]
And I don’t know what to doAnd maybe I try too hard to make you notice me
So I’ll count my lucky stars and look distracted and sleepy
I’ll bet that Kara Beardsley never had to go to such great lengths
But as her bra size grew her brain seemed to shrink… do do di do do do do do do di do . . .
“Won’t you stop and talk to me?”
Acknowledge my existence
I know I’ve been persistent
But won’t you stop and talk to me
[some words I can’t make out]
And I don’t know what to do
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HOMIE (which I realized was stylized in call caps through the process described in this post) was a random, one-off (as far as I can tell) side project of three of the guys who were at that time in Weezer (Rivers, Matt and Pat) along with a couple of at-the-time members of Soul Coughing and Cake – a real supergroup for a certain type of music fan. ↩︎