More STUFF

Went to Borders today.

• Music has the Right to Children by Boards of Canada. I discovered this band through either Tag's Trance Trip or Groove Salad or perhaps both. N&M have their Geogaddi album. They're great.


• Organic Chemistry, a HarperCollins College Outline by Michael Smith. A phonebook-sized volume with 550 newsprint pages of chemistry basics. It seems to be just what I need to build up some basic vocabulary relevant to my job. I feel the pang of my ignorance most strongly when working on the project upon which I focus my little candle of an ego: some semblance of a Perl chemistry package. (Certainly, I have more ego invested in this than book. This is because it's an interally-inspired project. Book, really, is someone else's idea. I don't think this will hurt book's quality. If anything, it will make me happier to see book done... and out of the way.)


• Handbook of the Elements by Samuel Ruben. Just a little dictionary of the known elements and their major properties. This should prove quite useful to some upcoming programming projects.


• Robin Hobb's Mad Ship, as was inevitable. The cover art may be one of the finest SF/F covers I have seen, as far as the beauty/accuracy-to-story ratio is concerned.


• Season 1 of Star Trek: The Next Generation. My first DVD purchase (despite the fact I've owned a DVD player, within my laptop, for a year and a half) and a long-anticipated one here at Minas Morgul. (The other morgudlians are in Maine until tomorrow, so this will be a nice surprise for them.) (Maybe I should announce the Time of the Viewing of the First Disc, for the benefit of local friends?) I received a security escort to the cashier once I had the Borders gbtc fetch these discs for me. Actually, the discs got the escort (they weren't that expensive, but maybe it was a slow day), and I happened to follow. As he and I rode the escalator downstairs, the guard said that he was looking forward to the upcoming Star Trek: Nemesis movie.


• The Crossing by the Dave Brubeck Quartet. Actually bought at Disc Diggers in Davis Square, not Borders. I like Brubeck a lot.


• The sight of morris dancers cavorting, with accordion accompaniment, in front of Borders. I had never seen such a thing before, but I knew what it was on sight, unless there is a dance that isn't morris dancing which involves men with bells strapped to their shins leaping about while waving colorful cloths and banging sticks together.

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Example of not thinking things through can be seen with this riddle found within a bag of Cracker Jack:

What kind of key won't open any door?
A monkey!

I doubt the accuracy of this statement. I guess I should stop buying Cracker Jack now. Oh well; it's bad for me, anyway.

Gigantic

I saw Gigantic with Cthulhia last night. Things learned:

• Even though they've been giving concerts for something like 20 years, They Might Be Giants has observed that the predominant age of their concert attendees seems to have held steady (mostly 20somethings), as opposed to growing steadily older. This segued to Ira Glass theorizing that younger people, 14-15-year olds, are the most likely to discover TMBG and be completely knocked flat by it. At some point around here we see a high school debate team debating the meaning of "Particle Man".



• The Johns chose the band's name in part because they thought it was funny to have a band name with an ambiguous pronoun in it. The 'They' is them pointing out in the distance, at who knows what? (And one of their songs is about this...) But of course, people usually assume that 'They' means themselves, the Johns. This segued to Ira Glass saying that he felt bad for the Johns because they can't be TMBG fans; they have to toil away making their own TMBG music before they can listen to it, unlike the rest of us. Not fair!



• Ira Glass was segued to a number of other times, as were lots of other noteworthy people in the TMBGsphere. Not all of them were from This American Life but Sarah Vowell was, and she makes Cthulhia twitch in a comic fashion.



• Dr. Evil's theme song from the Austin Power movies was composed (and possibly performed) by TMBG, and sung by Linnell's wife.



• I can now confidently say which is Flansburgh and which is Linnell. But I cannot confidently spell either.



• TMBG's videos from the late 80s-early 90s are fantastic, but the film showed only tantalizing little bits of them. I wonder if they're available on media anywhere. Will do web search when I'm feeling less lazy. (The Tiny Toons version of "Particle Man" was shown in its entirety as an animated short at the start; not sure if this was an intended attachment or something the theater threw in for fun.)



• Maybe the most beautiful/funny moment of the film involved a typical-looking alterna-girl with the heavy braids and granny glasses and all who had just stepped away from an autograph table. She was clutching her new copy of John Henry and was bawling. She started to answer the interviewer's question by sobbing in a wonderful New York accent. Oh my gooahd, oh my gooahd...



• When John Henry came out and TMBG stopped doing tape-backed shows and started touring with a band instead, some fans were so upset that they tried arranging boycotts, standing outside the concert halls and handing out fliers that told people not to attend. (I certainly remember all the rage on alt.music.tmbg at the time.) It was interesting to see a couple of TMBG's earlier producers and collaborators saying even today that they thought the Johns lost something when they went to a band.

Orange

The Boards of Canada CD I got today contains "Aquarius", the song of theirs that I first noticed through its play on whichever Internet station that was. I didn't know its title until now. The song's length is slightly longer than the length of time it takes me to go get a small coffee at Rossini's and return home.

"Aquarius" makes me walk through the night with a goofy grin on my face.