So this BMW blew up across the street. At least, I think it blew up. I heard a bang, but didn’t go out to look until I heard people shouting. Sg got pretty excited when the firetruck arrived. “The firemans! The firemans are here!”
Sg, this has been stuck in my head for days. It seems like I have been hearing it on loop without stop since I first heard it. Why won’t it just leave me alone? I played it for you yesterday, hoping that (like in the Ring) I could get rid of the curse by offering it a substitute victim. No such luck. Or maybe I need more victims, like the four people who read this site:
As I write this, Google is busily going through my hard drives using face recognitions software to tag the hundreds of people in my thousands of photos. Despite the fact that I have no idea what I’ll do with this trove of metadata, I am somehow nonetheless certain that it will give me great power.
Unrelated: who are the background people in your dreams? I’ve always figured that the supporting cast members in my dreams are some combination of (a) random synapse firings triggering the models I keep handy for the people with whom I deal in real life and (b) manifestations of my own subconscious. But what about the extras? Can either of explanations work for the crowds in a dream mall, or the other passengers on a dream bus? Do I maintain “bus crowd” and “mall crowd” models to help me predict and cope with the behaviors of faceless masses? Cool.
Unrelated: check out this wicked cool picture of one of my favorite tunnels in Atlanta (there aren’t many, but I think this would be my favorite even if there were a lot of tunnels in Atlanta). A result of the recent heavy rains:
Yesterday we were riding in the car and listening to the Winstons’ “Amen Brother”. When we reached the amen break (the five seconds of solo drums that are perhaps the most-sampled waveform of all time), you said “that has the Powerpuff song in it!” Your comment came from out of nowhere, but, indeed, the Powerpuff Girls theme song relies heavily on the amen break.
This kid better watch out:
UPDATE: In case you aren’t familiar with the Powerpuff Girls, here’s the show’s intro (featuring the amen break, sped up to tempo):
So “E” is the first section of my library not dominated by a few big players, which means that I had to spend a few minutes digging a little deeper. I ended up not being able to decide, so here are songs that represent the four pillars of a 30-something yuppie’s music collection. The tracks themselves are from from Echo and the Bunnymen, Duke Ellington, Enon and Cesária Évora. Enjoy some or all of them!
Pillar: Nostalgia Pop “Don’t call them oldies.”
Pillar: Erudition “Don’t worry — I like it, so it’s not pretentious.”
Pillar: Indie Pop “Yeah, you know, I’m down and stuff. With the scene.”
Pillar: Multiculturalism “You don’t have to actually travel to sound like a world citizen.”
Jonathan Goldstein is a frequent contributor to This American Life, and he does a show on the CBC called Wiretap. I ran across an archive of his shows (via) and have been listening for the past few days. This is my kind of humor. It’s like a solid half hour of the kind of stuff that I think of that cracks me up privately, but which I only share with a few people who I expect to understand.
My favorite segments are the chats with Gregor Ehrlich, who plays Goldstein’s missing Id. These are like conversations between Ira Glass and Master Shake. Here’s one about dreams (and how to have them).
So Wiretap. Also, there’s now an RSS feed, so the show can magically appear on my Blackberry weekly.
Can you imagine these guys going up against one of today’s NCAA Division I teams? I imagine that, when this picture was taken, college basketball was not the mini-pro league that it is today. I do get a kick out of imagining the coach, in his floppy bow tie, running down the sideline screaming obscenities at the refs.
When I was in high school, Little Five Points in Atlanta equaled cool. Now I live just down the road, and, consequently, drive through on the occasional weekend night. The traffic light here gives you a left turn arrow (turning East onto McLendon from southbound Moreland) if you so much as breathe on the sensor before the crossing light turns yellow. A decision has been made (I like to think) that people turning into my neighborhood are more important than those headed North into Little Five or to Virginia Highlands. It’s like being guest-listed.
Moreover, the turn arrow turns green a little less than a second after the through-lights turn green. So if you’re on the border of triggering the arrow, there’s a half-second or so of doubt about whether you’ve made it—and the doubt is always resolved in your favor. It’s all as if to say “naw, I’m just kidding; go right ahead sir, and have a fine evening.”
It’s a small thing, but I will miss it when the City of Atlanta re-times the light (which will inevitably happen, whether it needs it or not).
Sg, you and I went down to the Dragon*Con parade this morning. It wasn’t the photographic bonanza I’d hoped, since you were scared to go near the assembly for a while. Even once we got into the crowd, you didn’t seem to be in a mood to tolerate my jumping around to get the pictures I wanted. It was still pretty fun, and you let me know when we were walking back to the train that you wanted to go back, which I take to mean that you had a good time too.
We started out with some breakfast at the coffee place down the street. Bran muffin and chocolate milk for you.
I was trying to re-create a camera-phone classic on the way to the train station, and you decided to add some dancing.
You get that trains come and go according to the cardinal directions (this is true at least on the portions of MARTA that we frequent) but you committed a major faux pas by asking if a train was going North when we were on the East/West line. I quickly changed the subject before things could get too awkward.
It took you half an hour to be comfortable with moving from the very periphery of the gathering to anywhere near the center. But you are right, I think, to be wary of people dressed as warrior elves.
So we just took pictures from where we sat.
You were first willing to go into the crowd to see this lady, but you declined to pose with her.
We ended up hanging out where they were forming up the parade.
I wonder how many perennial Dragoncon participants, when they first saw the new Battlestar Galactica cylons, were like “how the heck am I supposed to dress up as that?”
There was a periodic table group, which is pretty much the coolest.
Why would a Klingon ride a motorcycle? Why would a Klingon not ride a motorcycle?
Then there’s the loneliest rebel, who clearly spent a lot of time converting a wheelchair into a speeder bike, and nobody seemed to care.
