My new favorite web game: Guess The Dictator/Sit-Com Character. It’s frighteningly accurate sometimes. I’ve had it guess Dwayne from “What’s Happening,” Darlene from “Head of the Class” as well as Genghis Khan. I stumped it when I tried Vicki from “Three’s a Crowd.” It guess Blanche from the Golden Girls.

The best thing is when I stumped it, it asked for a question to add in the database to help differentiate Blanche from Vicki.

Hilarious to sit there and have it ask you “Does your friend live with a rich uncle” and then ask you “Did you kill over one-million revolutionaries?” right afterwards. Pure web-genius.

Posted in I Heart The Interweb No Comments »

I woke up this morning and rifled through my TiVo, looking for something to watch. I’d forgotten I’d recorded Genghis Blues earlier this week and zoned out.

It’s a fairly unremarkable documentary, in terms of its technique and of its construction. That said, the story is so captivating that it’s hard to knock it too much. The film is about a blind bluesman named Paul Pena who discovered the art of Tuvan throat singing while fuddling about on his shortwave radio. Somehow, he’d taught himself how to sing in this bizarre style, completely in a vacuum. Soon, he finds himself competing in the international Tuvan throat singing competition. The greatest part of this film is when Paul is forced to improv some performances on the spot, and comes up with a strange fusion of old American blues with a throat singing vocal that is absolutely magical.

“Genghis Blues” is all about transcending borders with the power of music. The fact that it could teach that lesson without ever feeling preachy is a minor miracle. I found myself so juiced by the movie that I wanted to run out and find out all about Tuva, throat singing and Paul Pena.

Note: I also tried generating some throat harmonics of my own, but it’s pretty much impossible.

Posted in Moving Pictures 1 Comment »

Yay! SonicNet is reporting a new documentary from Douglas Pray about turntablists called Scratch. I’ve been fascinated by scratch DJ’s for a while now, and this film promises to feature some of my favorites: The Skratch Piklz, DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist (Jurassic 5/Ozomatli). It’s a fascinating sound, miles ahead of what most people perceive DJ’s to be. There’s a common perception that DJing is just dropping a needle onto vinyl, but scratch DJ’s are a strange fusion of straight DJing, beat juggling and manual acrobatics. The scratch becomes an instrument, and after a while you begin to hear the differences.

Hopefully the doc will turn people on to this, and everyone will go out an buy Q-Bert, Koala and Beat Junkies albums. It couldn’t hurt, right? My only worry is that it will be like Better Living Through Circuitry, the documentary about electronica. That film really bored me, as everyone kept trying to infuse the scene with a sense of importance that they couldn’t really convey in words. As a result, a lot of people just said “The music, man. The music is like… AWESOME, man.” Um, great, man.

Douglas Pray also did Hype, a great little documentary about the Seattle grunge scene that I was really into. The soundtrack turned me on the Gits and the Fastbacks, two really great groups that never really broke. Hopefully, this one turns out as well.

If anyone has a vague interest in turntablism, the one record I would recommend is Live at Future Primitive Sound Session featuring Shortkut and Cut Chemist. Two DJ’s with five turntables spinning and cutting 45′s for about an hour in front of a live crowd. One fault of some scratch work is that it’s a bit self serving, and hard to listen to. This CD has very little of that, just great music and some absolutely unbelievable work on the wheels of steel. Accessible and impressive at the same time.

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I have an administrative holiday today. I have no idea what that actually means, except that I don’t have to show up to work. So “Yay!” for administrative holidays.

The Oscars finally rolled around last night. I’m a bit disappointed at Gladiator winning the big prize, but was otherwise pleased. The show itself was fairly brisk and entertaining. Cameron Crowe finally picked up a statue, and a bunch of Asian people did too, so I won’t complain too much about this year’s results.

Posted in Endless Whining No Comments »

I’m on kind of a Dan Nakamura kick for some reason. I’m itching for the Gorillaz CD to come out. Gorillaz, is a project that Nakamura put together with Damon Albarn, Del the Funkee Homosapien, Kid Koala and Tina Weymouth, among others. It shows up tomorrow in the UK, but won’t pop in the States until April 25th. I’m tiding myself over with the Deltron 3030 CD, which will do for now.

Posted in From Blown Speakers No Comments »

I had a bit of a scare earlier, when my Palm wouldn’t boot after I switched my batteries. Luckily, Palm had a very nice page dedicated to “what happens when your Palm won’t wake up.”

After I got my PDA up and running, I was a little disturbed that this was so common a problem that they had a whole page devoted to it. What the hell kind of product are they shuffling off to us, anyway?

This does not reduce my lust for one of these, by the way.

Maybe I should create a want list for the sidebar? I want for so little and am normally so controlling of my consumer desires. Probably best that I don’t acknowledge any of that.

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Tonight I had dungeoness crab dip, Mahi-Mahi with a melon relish and pear bread pudding for dinner. Yum.

Posted in Endless Whining No Comments »

So I have this little rule, this little guideline:

You know you’re up too late, when you’re watching the 2nd episode of Conan O’Brien.

Posted in Endless Whining No Comments »

Anyone knows me, knows that I love Transformers. As a kid, I only had a few Transformers so I spent much of my days longing over the included catalogs. As a result, I still remember almost all the names of the 1st gen Transformers.

I stumbled across the Transformers Archive and holy crap, these guys make me look like a moron. Not only do they have every bit of info about the toys, but they actually have scans of every issue of the comic.

Alas, Transformers have become quite the geek chic these days and I find it hard to express my love. I really wanted the TF t-shirts that came out a couple of months ago, until I saw them being sold at Urban Outfitters. That pretty much ended that, for I knew that meant everyone and their rave-kid brother was going to be wearing a Megatron shirt or whatever.

I did get a Transformers: The Movie T-Shirt as a gift once, and that’s not so bad.

This lacks any focus whatsoever, but it is 3:30am here.

Posted in Endless Whining No Comments »

I don’t understand how people blog every day. First thing, there’s not enough time. Second thing, every thing cool gets blogged by the insane super-bloggers like Zannah or collectives like Metafilter or Memepool.

I mean, I could link on about the Taco Bell/MiR experience, neato TiVo hacks and whatever, but trust me, you’ve already read about them.

Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

That said, I still like writing in this thing. Even if no one reads it.

Posted in Endless Whining No Comments »

So I caught Madonna’s new video tonight in it’s only airing ever (supposedly). The video has been banned by MTV. Unlike most of the videos banned by MTV, this one wasn’t particularly worth watching.

UNKLE’s “Rabbit in Your Headlights” and Prodigy’s “Smack My Bitch Up” were infinitely more interesting.

Posted in Eratta No Comments »