Category Archives: uncategorized

I’ll point out some of the obvious ones.

The first video was taken on April 26th, 2008.
I’m a senior in high school.
I have a cheap haircut.
I wear several hats.
Storm is not in the frame.
We’re in Seattle.

The second video was taken on January 7th, 2011.
I’m a junior in college.
I have an expensive haircut.
I do not wear any hats.
Storm is in the frame.
We’re on a boat.

Can you spot any others?

I know I complain about Christmas music, a lot. It drives me nuts. It makes me want to kick puppies.

More often than not, it’s not about the message or even the composition itself: I tend to take issue with the treatment. The traditional Christmas music we tend to overplay is bombastic and uncreative, and it drives me up the wall. I dislike patriotic music for similar reasons, but you don’t hear America The Beautiful and My Country Tis Of Thee in malls, banks, and grocery stores for the month and a half leading up to 4th of July.

I also don’t like the sound of sleigh bells. That’s just a knee-jerk aversion and I have no particular reasoning behind it.

There have been suggestions to write completely original Christmas stuff in response. I’m on Team Thanksgiving, so this is a bad idea to begin with. But original Christmas songs, as good as their intentions may be, have the potential to go really sour.

(Yeah, I hid the video. They’re songs! If you really want to watch the visual, click the fullscreen button.)

Barry Manilow
Britney Spears
Brady Bunch??? (probably not real, but too precious not to share)
Carrie Fisher

A few have also said, “You should cover some Christmas songs, and fix them!” and I’ve thought about it. Really, I have. And I did cover a Christmas song once, but it was a Tom Lehrer song, and I didn’t cover it because I thought it needed improving, but rather because it was one of those songs I heard and thought Oof! I wish I’d written that!

I feel like my covering Christmas music would only contribute to the problem. Nobody who produces a cover of a Christmas song goes into it thinking “I’m going to just artlessly hammer this out and it’s probably going to suck.” They go into it thinking it’s going to be good, or at least people are going to like it enough to buy it. Nobody creates crappy Christmas music on purpose (except maybe the guy behind Jingle Cats), and yet it keeps happening.

Some covers of Christmas songs are just awesome. But this is a rare occurrence.

I have assembled a playlist of Christmas music that I personally find agreeable, within the limitations of Project Playlist.

I don’t know if this is just a Washington thing, but I’ve been noticing this series of billboards for the “76″ gas station chain, peppered all around the highway (rendering them sort of impossible to get a picture of with my phone).

You can’t really read from the picture, but it says

We made this billboard
boring so you’d keep
your eyes on the road.

Google searches and blog searches bring up nothing about it. Either these billboards aren’t as common as I think they are or I’m the only one who notices this, but to me they seem really passive-aggressive, and maybe even sarcastic.
There’s a whole slew of them, and though I paraphrase the sentiment is the same.

You’re right, it was
probably just a
bump in the road.

Yeah, the road would
be safer if everyone
drove just like you.

They seem really backhanded, particularly with the connotation I get from the choice in font color.
I mean, compare

You’re not gaining weight.
All your pants probably
shrank in the wash.

versus

You’re not gaining weight.
All your pants probably
shrank in the wash.

It REALLY feels like the second one is backhandedly calling you fat, right?

Sorry you didn’t get an
invitation. It probably
got lost in the mail.

Of course you’re pretty.
But what men really like is
your personality.

Well, fashion is cyclical.
I’m sure leisure suits will
come back into style.

And so on, and so on…

(Writing those out feels like writing passive-aggressive haikus.)

Am I the only one who sees these? Am I just being cynical? I really don’t know what to think of them.
The slogan on each one is “We’re on the driver’s side.” so I understand that the gist of it, ostensibly, is supposed to be “We at ConocoPhillips think you’re a great driver and that you’re right about all things that involve driving because you’re good enough and smart enough and we’re on your side,” but they seem to me to be really condescending.

Are these outside of the Seattle metro area? Are there any existing pictures of them that I couldn’t find? Do they come off differently to you? Comment with sightings or pictures.

I was interviewed by fellow Song Fu alumni Mike Lombardo and Jeff MacDougall for episode 4 of the Too Much Awesome podcast.

It can be found here → click me!

This is what we talk about, in the order in which we talk about it.
- undergraduate debauchery
- my childhood career goals
- strange jobs that someone out there definitely has
- the states of matter, and the gray areas in between them all
- my confusing the primary shades of pigment with the primary shades of light
- serendipity
- Mike doesn’t want to date Felicia Day’s avatar
- Katy Perry vs Gwen Stefani vs Lady GaGa
- The Discovery Channel & inter-logger drama
- cable TV
- Christmas
- Song Fu
- Jon Brion
- the EP I’m not going to make yet

And since I know you’re going to ask, here is the “Someone Out There Has This Job” list.

Someone out there…

• …designs camping tents.
  Just look at them. That was someone’s idea.
• …designs maxi pads.
  They have to account for the feminine shape, and the distribution of the absorbent bits, and the placement of wings, etc. (Ew, I know.)
• …names interior/exterior paint colors.
  Skim through the names on the paint chips next time you go to Lowe’s, you’ll be blown away.
• …concocts the fictional liquids you see in movies and TV.
  e.g., Exorcist vomit, the Fluffy drool from Harry Potter I.
• …designs remote controls.
  They have to account for what will fit most ergonomically in your hand, which buttons are important enough to be placed within the comfortable range of motion of your thumb, etc.
• …designs the system/error noises on computers, DVR boxes, game consoles, etc.
• …writes/designs shirts with captions like “If You Can Read This, The Bitch Fell Off” and “It’s Not A Bald Spot, It’s A Solar Panel On A Love Machine”

News! I have so much news! Too much news for one blog post, so I’ll elaborate more should the need arise!

1. My blog is embarrassingly out of date!

2. I’m playing with Tom Milsom (hexachordal) at the Belmont Veteran’s Memorial Pier in Long Beach, this Sunday, the 26th, at noon!

3. I’ve booked my own show, at DiPiazza’s in Long Beach, on August 17th! I’m nervous! I’m so nervous!

4. I went to a YouTube gathering in Portland! I met YouTubers more famous than myself! I ate a donut with bacon on it!

5. I bought a bass guitar!

The way to garner the most votes in a contest at Quick Stop Entertainment seems to be writing about something really funny and nerdy. I wrote a song about Mr. T and I wrote a song about Wikipedia, and it got me this far. Our ultimate final masters double secret probation challenge was to write a song with three distinct musical movements that comes together to form a cohesive whole (think Bohemian Rhapsody), and I somehow turned out a basically not funny song about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

Who do I think I am, Sarah Vowell?!

I feel I should explain: My original plan was to write a song about the original Star Wars trilogy (presumably making up something like “The A New Hope Mambo” which would’ve folded into “The The Empire Strikes Back Polka,” so on), but I haven’t seen any/all of the three original films from start to finish since I was maybe 8, so I was like “It’s cool, I’ll just rent all 3 original films and watch them over the weekend.” Then it was Monday night and I’d only watched A New Hope, and so I was like “Aw, nuts” and scrapped that idea, in favor of a Plan B I didn’t actually have.

How I ended up deciding to write a song about the Lincoln assassination is still beyond me. I mean, I understand that in the abject panic associated with deadlines I’ve been able to press some my idea-coal into diamonds (e.g. I just got an A- on a paper I wrote at 4:00 in the morning, in which I’d decided at the last minute that Tupperware parties symbolized all the virtues America was trying to defend in the Cold War) but somehow the Lincoln assassination stumbled out of my brain. It’s not like I have some preexisting fascination with the Lincoln assassination either, I had to do just as much research as would have been involved in the Star Wars idea.

Also, WHY DID GEORGE LUCAS GO BACK AND ADD STUFF IN THE REMASTERED VERSION? I hadn’t seen the films since I was a wee lass and so my memories of the trilogy are all from the VHS. What were those giant monitor lizards he just threw into the desert with the sandtroopers? Why the random unnecessary floating robots in Mos Eisley? Why that random scene with Jabba and Han Solo locked in a lover’s quarrel? And if he went to the trouble of going back and “updating” all this stuff, why does Kenobi’s lightsaber still obviously look like a metal rod in the final duel with Vader?

THESE ARE QUESTIONS THE INTERNET WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO ANSWER FOR ME.

(And what is it with me and random caps lock? Who do I think I am, Hodgman?)

Anyway, the voting is here. I’m up against the crab rangooners and all-around swell guys we all know as Paul & Storm.

“Crab rangooner” sounds like an embarrassing racial slur your grandpa would use.
(“That rangooner in the kitchen cooked my burger too much, now it’s all dry.” “GRANDPA. That’s not what you call them!”)

I hate shameless plugging as much as anyone else, but I put up my other three songs that I wrote, on this here very Songs page, and I included the option to purchase lossless FLAC files, which I’m told are magical things but as a Mac person I guess I’ll never know.

Also worth mention: I did a live show on Ustream.tv last Saturday, from about 7:30pm PDT to maybe 9:00ish? It was a crap-ton of fun and I will surely do it again soon, though I will probably take requests ahead of time, and I will broadcast from a place with more reliable internet. Also, I’ll be sure to broadcast much earlier so our friends in the UK can watch too.

I was talking to my mom over break about how we’re so used to being plugged into Google and email and Twitter at all times, and so this will actually be kind of an interesting experiment, to go through Monday without being able to access the internet from anywhere.

I COULD turn on my laptop or my phone if I really wanted to, but I want to leave the phone charged in case of an emergency, and I want the laptop to remain charged as long as I can still do the same work and surf the same web from any computer.

I refer to it as “going analog”, but really I’m not. I still have email, IM, Twitter, and you can actually text message from Gmail. I gave Derek the extension to the study hall I’ve been camped in this afternoon and he called me. Considering I don’t really leave my dorm room, the lack of mobile internet hasn’t really proven such a loss yet.

I’m probably going to be writing down drafts of Tweets on my arms so I don’t forget them before I can get to a computer. You can bet money on it.
I have a Moleskine notebook that’s not really getting any mileage. Maybe I can put that into use and save my arms the degradation.

My song is posted. It’s about Mr. T, and it’s called “I Pity The (Song) Fu.” I would link straight to the file right on this here blog page, but that would prevent you from going to the Song Fu page and throwing it your damn vote.

I’m not all that competitive, but votes would be nice.

I struggled to fit some excerpt from this into my song for this week, but I couldn’t find a place to non-awkwardly slip it in. But the time is right, and I want to share it anyway.

The passage quoted below is chapter I of Mr. T’s 1984 autobiography, the unambiguously titled Mr. T by Mr. T, which I found in Long Beach’s recently-extinct used book store Acres of Books. Weighing in at 276 pages, it is unquestionably the greatest $4 I have ever spent.

I have checked and double checked to make sure that this text is true to the original. All grammar, punctuation, and syntax from hereon out is all T. (The occasional underlining is mine.)

→ I did not make this up.