Since I can't seem to sleep...
Recommendation: Omnibus, Tarkio.
What happens if you take the Decemberists and replace all conceptual instances of "the British Empire" and replace it with "rural Montana"? You get Tarkio. It's a little more complicated, but Tarkio is Colin Meloy's band from his college years in Missoula, Montana. Omnibus is a collection of all their recorded material, and as such is a little unpolished and uneven, but the highs are so blisteringly high that it's easy to accept.

The album includes early versions of "Annabelle Leigh" and "My Mother Was a Chinese Trapeze Artist" which are fairly well realized, but there a several originals that are even better. Tarkio's flavor covers a fair amount of ground from "traditional" to "alt-country" to "high-distortion bar band". Songs in the latter category include the dark Tom Petty-ish jangle of "Carrie" and the grinding "This Rollercoaster Ride". Also entertaining is "Helena Won't Get Stoned".

Meloy says in the liner notes that wanting to be in a band with a banjo was a major factor in Tarkio's formation. Said banjo is played (by Gibson Hartwell) to great effect on the standout tracks "Weight of the World" ,"Neapolitan Bridesmaid", and "Better Half". These also feature some great writing by Meloy( "Bridesmaid" references both the Bible and Albert Camus). On the mid-tempo, indie-er side of things are "If I Had More Time" and "Following Camden Down".

"Sister Nebraska" sounds a bit like a country-tinged predecessor to "Song for Myla Goldberg". "Save Yourself" is an epic lament full of echoing pedal-steel. "Mountains of Mourne" is a nice rendition of an Irish song from the 19th century. "Tristan and Iseult" is spare and subtly gorgeous, casting mythical figures into college kids ("God I love you, but you trouble me.").

There are missteps, especially in the sometimes rough production, and a few fairly uninspiring lyrics. "Am I Not Right?" is a bit too confessional (and not all that catchy), and "Mess of Me" sounds like it was scrounged off a demo tape. One understands why Meloy and Hartwell express a bit of embarassment in the liner notes. This is the nature of compilations meant for completists (There are 27 tracks here in all, most of which actually stand up quite well).

While the impetus for its widespread release was clearly the burgeoning fame of the Decemberists, the material stands well on its own. As someone with a love of banjos, pedal steel, and bar band esthetics, I think there's some pretty fantastic material here.

Weight of the World - One of many songs which might be my very favorite ever (Right click and save).

I can hear my graphics card: not in the sense that I have a powerful fan on it etc., but rather a confluence of two conditions has arisen. Firstly, I have absurd professional quality earphones (because my mom works at Shure). Secondly, The headphone jack on my PC is not particularly shielded from the electromagnetic effects of the rest of the machine. This mean I have been able to detect audibly the transmissions along various buses in my PC, most notably (as far as I can tell), the graphics output.

Dragging windows produces a faint crackling/buzzing sound. Larger windows produce louder noises. Maximization and minimization produce more of a beep. Progress bars tend to fizzle.

I do not think there is any useful application of this phenomenon, other than to tell whether the graphics bus is in use. It fascinates me nonetheless. I used to be able to determine the speed of a dial-up connection from modem noises.

Hmm. I think the keyboard may be involved as well. holding down "shift" brings on a rapid machine-gun rattle unrelated to any action onscreen... or not, as testing it on the desktop suggests. that rattle may be the text cursor refreshing.

That aside, Merry Christmas/Xmas/Atheist Kids Get Presents Day to all. The development of Christmas as a secular holiday is a strange but perhaps unavoidable phenomenon in our culture (brought about, paradoxically, through Christianity's dominance in the culture). It intrigues me, especially as the custom of gift-giving is now ingrained in our economic system as the make-or-break event for retailers.

Our economy is dependent upon the widespread acceptance of a tradition once tied to a religious celebration, which was itself positioned to compete with older religious ceremonies. I think there's a kind of hilarious beauty to the course of history sometimes.

Side note: scroll bars sound sqeaky.

I don't mean to belittle religion or the giving of gifts: I myself am now undertaking to read all the sci-fi novels I got today. First up: Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land, is engrossing so far. Other gifts: Leather jacket, baked goods, socks, sweaters, cash.

And Naps!
Saw (possibly a rerun) Bill Clinton on the Daily Show Monday. A digression in the conversation about what's changed about Congress in recent decades. In a phrase: sleep deprivation. With the ability to commute by plane, and the need to be constantly fund-raising, very few people on Capitol Hill are getting a decent night's sleep and getting re-elected. Therefore our congresspeople are more irritable and thinking less clearly.

Makes as much sense as anything else.

Fortunately, all is not lost, as a watching of Escape from New York demonstates. Things could be worse. We still have New York. And we haven't elected any bald presidents. Now, I haven't seen Escape from LA recently, but it's hard for me to imagine how that can be the "sillier" of the two movies.

Thoughts on a recent issue of Newsweek (I am not up to date. There have been finals): That Mike Huckabee sure is charismatic; too bad he doesn't believe in science.

Rhythmic Surrealist Purgatory
I was writing a song today, and I realized I had two parallel phrases, any two words of which could be exchanged across phrases. Observe:

"Through a haze of darkest morning, in a blaze of deepest white"

Blaze/haze and deepest/darkest are completely interchangeable for the most part, meaning the phrases are completely rearrangeable except for the rhyme scheme. This is probably a sign that I should shoot for more meaningful phrases, although I think the configuration above is the most "sensible".

So yeah, this phenomenon is now to be called "Rhythmic Surrealist Purgatory."

I will probably keep the line though.

I am unexpectedly cheerful at the moment. I had my own song stuck in my head for while. It was glorious. It's also absurdly simple to play, and gives the impression that I can sing (This is much safer to say than "I can sing," which is not something I have ever really confirmed).

So maybe I'll ba able to record that. I don't actually know whether this cheap computer mic will work for vocals, though it picks up the guitar decently enough (Can't do both at once unless I learn to sing a lot louder while staying in key).

Probably finish some poems over the break, too. I should really look into getting published.

I've spent the past few days working through the collected archives of American Elf, a diary comic by rock star/cartoonist James Kochalka. It's chock full of whimsy, and kind of adorable in a way I don't normally expect to appreciate (Cute is not typically my bag). This is a good one.

And you take to wing
And you take to stranger things
[wanders off humming]

Festive or Something
21st birthdays, a sacred rite of passage. And also they make things convenient. Also a convenient reason to party for a week. This is good because what with classes being over and the population being sparse, there's not much to do but celebrate Megan's 21st. Good times.
That and write and draw a little.

This is a notebook sketch/abstract thingy I did a while back. Trying to see if I can pretty it up with some image software and the like.

-On an entirely different note, I occasionally worry that I can play odd games with my state of happiness. I suspect I'm far more interesting when I'm discontent, and this takes energy to cultivate. Being at the top of my game is tiring on several levels. I'm still hashing plenty of things out, I guess.

"Black Excited to Return to Projects"
The above is still the best/worst headline the Maroon has ever published, about a Professor (Robert Black, I believe) leaving some post and pursuing independent projects. I am not sure whether they considered the alternative reading of that headline.

Anyway, as winter sets in, with its ice storms and such, I've been trying to start my own projects, such as webmastery, telature, and birdkeeping.

-The bird is a dove by the name of Erik Emanuel the Orange (aka Erik, aka Birdman, aka "a little communist"). He is mine for break by way of my roommate Rob's girlfriend Lindsey. He is surprisingly entertaining, and today has displayed an enthusiasm for full-throated cooing. He almost sounds like an owl.

-Also in my living room is Falcon, the name given to the computer I got for free from the library in June. It is basically my Dell desktop minus a graphics card and a hard drive. Fortunately,we had a spare hard drive lying around in Lurch, the Shady Dealer's old webserver. However, Falcon seems to disagree with Lurch's hard drive, and may be expected, whenever something must be loaded from disk, to flail wildly for a second, bewildered by the existence of its own hard drive, before loading the data.

-Falcon is running Kubuntu Linux 7.04 (aka "Feisty Fawn". The latest version is "Gutsy Gibbon", with "Hardy Heron" on the way... Programmers, they're quirky. ). Goddamn this OS is secure in ways I'm not used to dealing with, such as requiring a password for commands that might bone your system. Which is reasonable and all, but mildly inconvenient. Despite this, it is now equipped with Apache (webserver), MySQL (database), and PHP (server-side scripting language). After some more effort, all these things became aware of each other and play nicely. So now Falcon is hosting my in-progress update of the Max Palevsky Scav page... but only for my local network, since letting in the internet at large is going to take more finagling.

-I am maybe also designing the Shady Dealer's new site if I have enough time.

-I've been recording random things on guitar and trying to figure out what to do with them. Chord progressions in need of lyrics, mostly. I also have a version of "Man of Constant Sorrow" that mostly works, even though I'll need to rerecord the vocals. And I did it with a chord arrangement that I haven't seen before.

-People have been telling me I need to be more aggressive and confident so here: "Dammit you motherfuckers, I'm pretty goddamn awesome!"

-End of Quarter Score for my workplace: MacLab 30, Professionalism 4. As recorded by "MacLab vs. Professionalism: The remote server program". Yes, I wrote a program to keep track of an arbitrary measure of the ridiculousness of my workplace.