Besides burning some popcorn last week and setting off the fire alarms at work, I managed to singe the crap out of my processor (see right). Notice that burned-looking spot in the middle? That’s what you call a dead processor. For those not geeky enough to know how the insides of your computer work, there is a fan that sits right on top of your processor intended to keep it cool. Processors can get hot, and if they aren’t kept cool, they fry. As my luck would have it, the fan on my processor stopped working, so the processor overheated and fried itself. When processors overheat, computers get upset.

Now I have a new fan and a new 1.3 GHz AMD chip (upgraded from a 700 AMD chip). Sweet. My computer is noticeably not faster. But hey, at least it doesn’t lock up every five minutes.

I finished The Final Confession of Mabel Stark this weekend. Overall, I enjoyed it, but there were oddities.

First, the sequencing was kind of weird. At the beginning of the book, the narrator (Stark) claims that as the years passed, time lost its sequential quality and progressed in a gumball-like fashion:

…what it boils down to is time. The way it works changes. Used to be, I imagined the way young people do, as something with an order and a flow, like sand through an egg timer. Then, around the time I started wearing orthopedic splints, I began to view time as something different, as more an accumulation than a march forward. I’d have to say it’s like gumballs in a penny machine, all mixed together, jumbled up, rubbing the colour off one another.

…there’ll be times I take liberty with this thing called order, with this thing we pretend is time, if only because at my age it’s hard as the dickens not to.

Sometimes I wonder if the author used this random structure to compensate for the fact that there could have been holes in the research he did on Stark’s life. If reading it above kind of sounds like a cop-out, imagine reading it in the context of the whole story.

The other oddity was the language. The narrator spoke in a very colloquial form of ‘southern’ English. Just take a look at the two above passages to see what I mean. It does have an endearing quality, I admit, it feels like she’s right next to you in a rocking chair, sipping a beer and telling you about her life. It takes some getting used to, but once you hit the groove, you start thinking like she does, in her language.

One of my favorite aspects of the book was Stark’s sharp tiger sense and Hough’s excellent job with the research he did on it. One passage that stuck with me was:

Naturally, I could barely drag myself out of bed when the alarm went off at 4:45. Felt logy all day. Even Goldie noticed it- when I was finishing boning our her cage she gave me a good long look and an eye roll followed by a lazy high-pitched arf, which is tiger for I know, I know [italics original]

A compliment I gladly award to Hough is that he could not have done a better job in portraying how much Stark knew about tigers, how much she loved them, and how much they controlled her life. Stark had a grand total of five husbands and one tiger (that she raised from birth). She stayed with that tiger for its entire life. She slept with it, cuddled with it, shopped with it, wrestled with it, let it use her as a rubbing post, and performed any other non-tiger-conducive behavior you can think of. This tiger was 550 pounds and, with her, as docile as a house cat. She trained it to think it was human. Amazing.

Iraqis seem to have found something worthwhile in its democratic neighbor:

A close inspection of photos from inside the Mosul villa where Qusay and Uday were shot dead by American troops last month reveals beer bottles and a candy wrapper with what looks suspiciously like Hebrew lettering.

The sudden demand in Iraq for Israeli six-packs owes much to the dearth of beer manufacturing in the strictly Muslim Persian Gulf region and the dry heat raging in Baghdad, Tikrit, Mosul and Basra, which makes an iced beer a favorite thirst-quencher for the close to 150,000 American GIs and 15,000 British troops sweltering there in full combat gear. Many Iraqis, too, have taken advantage of the new openness to their geographical west and cultivated a taste for the Israeli brew.

In other news, there is a new pictures page: Family. See link on right.

Addendum, 10:50pm: Bryan May said something funny. Ever wondered if you could laugh at someone else's liver? Don't miss your chance.

Artist: Self
Album: Gizmodgery
Year: 2000
Engineer: Self and Shawn McLean
Label: Spongebath

Quick history lesson: Self is a quirky group from Murfreesboro, Tennessee that combines rock, pop, dance/electronic, rap, R&B, punk, and a slew of other styles of music. Its core songwriters are the brothers Matt and Mike Mahaffey. One of them (can’t remember which) spent his college years playing in rock bands and selling beats to rappers. The music is like Beck on overdrive. Self mixes, matches, melts, stitches, slices, and dices its music together. The first album, 1995’s Subliminal Plastic Motives, was mostly rock sprinkled with random noises resembling, in some instances, pots and pans. I also remember a decent amount of electronically produced sounds. Over the following few years, the band released albums either on record or the Internet. Their style shifted from album to album but the foundation remained: catchy songs that meld styles complimented with sarcastic lyrics.

Gizmodgery is, in my opinion, the most unique of the bunch. The band only used toy instruments and listed them out on the back of the cd case. True, the music was probably recorded on high-end studio gear, but the fact that they even considered an album of toy instruments is pretty brave and creative if you ask me.

No two songs sound alike. The rhythms, ranging from pop to R&B to rock to electronic, lie underneath melodies neither predominantly major nor minor. Many bands tend to stick to either major (happy feeling) or minor (sad feeling) melodies, but Self change it up from song to song. The rhythms also change mid-song.

“Dead Man”, for example, has a noticeably light-hearted melody backed by a vaguely electronic beat in the verse that melds into a rock beat in the chorus.

“Chameleon” is dominated by a raunchy rap beat with minimal instrumentation, just some random toy sounds that seem to add depth and structure. Then, in the middle of the song, the music stops and a stoned guy mumbles in slurred speech:

You cats gotta order me [pause for thought] the All-American Slam, then you gotta find me when it’s ready. [pause for thought] I can’t sit in Wal-Mart and boil.

“Pattycake”, probably my favorite track, starts out with a nursery rhyme-esque melody on top of a straight rock beat. The vocals are done in BeeGee traditional falsetto and the choruses have an “Oohhh la la” in the background. A normally sung voice doesn’t appear until 1:18 into the song. Below is a lyric excerpt:

let's pretend it's 1978
we're playing patty cake and baker's men
let's pretend the popsicles we ate all gave us stomach aches
on our neighbor's lawn

hello operator please give me number nine
and if you disconnect me I'll kick your fat
behind the refrigerator there was a piece of glass
miss suzy sat upon it and broke her little
ask me no more questions, i'll tell you no more lies
the boys are in the bathroom zipping up their
flies are in the city and bee stings are our crutch
the boys and girls are necking and asking you just

what ya gonna prove
how you gonna prove it
there's no need to waste your life
shatter and abuse it, babe
i'm talking about a time when a dimebag was a dime
no need to dwell upon the here and now, baby

On Sunday night, I decided it was time I began training my body for when the temperatures drop and I can start riding again. Mountain biking, road biking, whatever, I gotta get out and ride. So I put on some angry, aggressive music and cranked out three sets apiece of push-ups and sit-ups. I could hardly move for four days. How the hell am I supposed to survive an hour on a bike if I can’t even do some sit-ups? Things are not looking good.

I think I know where Radiohead got the title for their song Paranoid Android. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the book I’m reading, there is a human-like robot. It was given a personality by its manufacturer. The personality is a new feature and has yet to be perfected, so the robot does not know how to control its emotions. It is, in a sense, paranoid. The characters in the book ask whether or not they have to take the robot with them to a nearby planet. Specifically, the exchange is as follows:

“Are we taking this robot with us?”
“Oh, the Paranoid Android…Yeah, we’ll take him.”

Turns out I wasn’t so novel with my Paranoid Android hypothesis. But of course, it only makes sense. Somebody else has to have read the book and heard the song. I guess it’s both cool and not cool to know that I found something cool that many others have found.

There is a reason (link via cleverhack) and I don’t buy it. The logic is like this: if they put a Shutdown button next to the Start button, we’d have people accidentally shutting down left and right. Very true, there should not be a Shutdown button next to the Start button. Bad idea.

So why not put a Shutdown button on the other end of the taskbar, far away from the Start button? It would make shutting down a one-click process. It wouldn’t even give you the option of choosing between a log-off or a restart. It would just shut the computer down, pronto. It would also be nice if the monitor would automatically shut off, but I suppose that’s getting picky.

A friend introduced me to Taboo sometime during college. In fact, I think he introduced a whole lot of people to Taboo during college. Over time, I noticed its uncanny ability to get a party moving (party of total dorks, that is). When alcohol is added to the equation, things get even more uncannier.

So, imagine my satisfaction when I was at a pot-luck dinner last night and someone busted out a Taboo game. Whole chapters of my college career came flooding forward.

Last night’s Taboo session was a little tamer due to an unfortunate lack of alcohol, but one guy in particular had been drinking and therefore supplied plenty of entertainment. I’m talking about Russell. When the other team was trying to guess words, he would butt in with random explicit comments. For example, for the word ‘cocktail’, the exchange went as follows:

Tracy: why do you go to 6th street [downtown Austin]?
Russell: (suddenly) DICK. COCK.
Tracy: Shutup! Yes, kind of.

Kyle: What’s the Weezer song titled “In The blank”?
Kyle’s team: (dumbfoundedness)
Particleman's internal dialogue: GARAAAAAGE!!!
Kyle: C’mon, you know the song, “In the blank, I feel safe, da da da da da da da”

My friends have been asking me what The Hitchhiker’s Guide the Galaxy is about. Several things come to mind: survival; discovery; the pursuit of happiness; the cycle of life; philosophy; and other vague ponderous issues.

But the real answer is this: it is about finding questions to answers (not vice versa).

What the hell does that mean? Easy. Spend a couple hours reading the short, 200-page book, and it will all be clear.

Recently, on a message board hosted by my server (for us webmaster types), the following question was posed to me:

Hey particleman, I realize this is way off topic, but how did your fight with Triangle Man turn out?

Cheers,
[name omitted]

(Like you haven't heard cracks like this one before, eh? Sorry.)

The fight with Triangle Man was overrated and under-televised. I challenged and he balked, tripped, and fell. One of his corners got mangled in the fall and he was disqualified on account of being malformed. I won by default, but the judges still voted for Triangle Man. Turns out he was in kahootz with 3/4ths of the panel. It went down in history as the most controversial and uneventful fights that never happened.

I’ve wanted to read The Unbearable Lightness of Being for a long time, but other seemingly ‘more urgent’ books got in the way. I read my first Kundera book two years ago. It was funny and smart - two words often used to describe books that don’t live up to the cliché. But Kundera did, and I promised myself to read another one.

Yesterday, while perusing my sister’s library, I stumbled upon a Kundera book I had heard a lot of good things about. I sat down, began reading, and was instantly confused. That had to have been the most bizarre first chapter of any book I’ve read. Maybe I'm just slow, but I think I read it three times and was still not sure I fully grasped what was said. Like John Cusack said in High Fidelity, I'd like to think I'm capable of understanding a book like The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I'm just not sure I could explain it to anyone and I'm not sure how long it may take me to let it sink in.

Kundera’s style is what is currently keeping me glued to the book. The story is not in any way spectacular (yet) but I enjoy the way he tells it. He also has a philosophical tendency I’ve come to expect from Eastern European authors, especially the Russians. The difference between Kundera and, say, Dostoyevsky, is that Kundera takes this philosophical element lightly- almost in jest. He uses it in an offhand manner, suggesting that it’s all just ‘talk’, but will come in handy later in the story (or life). Dostoyevsky, on the other hand, treats it like an academic, forming structured arguments for his characters that drive the story. His characters stand by their philosophies and Dostoyevsky uses them as a soapbox with which to advertise his own ideas. As the novel’s name suggests, The Unbearable Lightness of Being does nothing of the sort, but rather takes itself lightly, using wit and cynicism to keep the reading fresh and sharp, with the ideas planted firmly in the background.

Here's a review from blogcritics.org.

Stay tuned for Maya pictures.

check it: there is a new comments feature at the bottom of every post and a calendar to navigate through the massive archive of posts (all 3 months worth). sweet.

muchas grassyas to Jonathan and Chris for taking a few minutes out of their weekends to test everything out. if there are any straggling bugs, let me know.

My sister and brother-in-law are the proud new parents of a their first child, which makes me the proud new uncle of my first niece. Maya was born on June 23rd and you can see pictures of her on the Family page (see link to the right). The family now lives in Little Rock, AR, which happens to be very beautiful despite whatever ideas I (or you) may have had about it. It sits on the edge of the Appalachians and reminds me of Austin, but more sparsely populated with a downtown the size of my closet.

I have yet to see Maya and I’m pretty darn excited to hold her in my arms. I have big plans for giving her an early start on her road to carrying the musicianship torch in the family. My sister seems to have left her musical skills in her pre-teens, which leaves me as the only remaining musician in the immediate family.

Ok, so I’m kind of exaggerating. I mostly plan on changing diapers, rocking her to sleep at 3 am, making funny faces to get laughs, and reading. I have no idea how challenging it is to be a parent, but I imagine my sister and her husband don’t sleep much (or so I hear), and I hope to alleviate some of that exhaustion.

Today is also my sister’s 29th birthday… Happy Birthday! Here’s to always being 21 at heart.

I will be posting new pictures while I’m there. Stay tuned.

ok, so it's not quite the Appalachains. it's the Ozarks. but hey, my intentions were good.

Maya is beautiful and precious and an eating machine. back in college, i might have four or five meals in a day, depending on when i woke up and went to bed. but this girl eats every three hours. amazing. she's multiplying her weight at a rate that would make football players envious.

on a more unfortunate note, Umbie, the family dog, seems to have caught a bug. poor guy. he has an appointment with the doctor tomorrow. let's all wish him a speedy recovery from whatever it he has.

He claims he was taking "art photos". What the hell?

When responding to a request for an interview, Phish's manager e-mailed a joint statement from Gordon and the child's parents that reads: "It is now clear to all involved that this was an unfortunate misunderstanding, and we look forward to putting this matter behind us."

Right now on mightygirl:

San Francisco tolerance combined with the temperate clime is apparently a recipe for men without pants.

Curious as to how many of these blog things there are on the net? Or how many blog hosts? See above link for details (courtesy of cleverhack). I’d like to see a chart of how the rate of blog creation compares with the general movement of the economy.

I know that fiction is fictional and the events in a fictional book are in no way meant to resemble real life, but the following statement by Tomas, a main character in the Unbearable Lightness of Being, seems wholly out of place. Quick set up: a male name is being debated as a viable name for a female dog:

It is entirely possible that a female dog addressed continually by a male name will develop lesbian tendencies.

And so far, this is my general impression of the book. It’s a riot. Page after page is filled with wry observations about daily life as told from someone more jaded than myself. The characters are zany and witty and the writing is concise yet descriptive: an aged mother that likes walking around the house naked, a female dog with a male name that gets annoyed when the living room is rearranged, a married man who will only make love to his mistress when on business trips (though they live in the same city), and a photographer who keeps a her late grandfather’s bowler hat on a red wig stand by her bed, just to name a few. In short, I’m really enjoying this book.

As for those ‘ideas’ that are planted firmly in the background, they help give the book more depth. It feels like an old wise man is narrating, all the while humoring me with the many philosophical tidbits he’s gathered over the years.

A final note: if you intend on reading Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, read it before The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Kundera spoils the ending.

While on vacation, I left my cd changer with my cube-neighbor at work (I left my car at work). I thought he might get a kick out of the cd collection that happened to be in my changer at the time. It varied from Bjork to Soungarden to Tori Amos, with some ska-punk thrown in for good measure. That ska-punk was the 1996 album Destruction by Definition by the The Suicide Machines. Of all the cds I thought he might sample, this was the last I expected him to pick first, even by chance.

My friend (let’s call him Pablo) is from Nepal. As far as I know, there’s no punk rock in Nepal. I don’t know what the Nepalese listen to, but I’m pretty sure it contains no punk elements. Thus, imagine my shock when he told me he tried to listen to the Suicide Machines cd while at work, but couldn’t manage- it was just too intense. I wonder how far into the cd he ventured. Perhaps he skipped quickly from song to song. Perhaps he listened to the first 30 seconds of track one and gave up. Either way, he did not mention anything about not liking the album. He mentioned that it was the kind of music you’d listen to at home. I don’t know what he’s talking about; I think it’s a fine album to listen to in a conservative corporate environment.

So I think I may have inadvertently converted him to punk rock. Of all the things people at work are trying to convert him to, punk rock is probably the least ridiculous.

Funny thing is, he spent a year in New York City. How he managed to live in NYC for that long without exposure to punk is beyond me, but I’m glad I helped fill the gap.

Artist: 2 Many DJ’s (Soulwax)
Album: Hang All DJ’s vol. 1
Year: 2003
Engineer: ?
Label: Head Traxx

Continuing from my last review of Self’s Gizmodgery, today’s review furthers my exploration into bands that don’t make sense. Using only toy instruments for an album makes no sense. But so does layering a Busta Rhymes track on top of a classic Beach Boys tune.

2 Many DJ’s, a UK band, released Hang All DJ’s vol. 1 under the name of their other band, Soulwax. I first heard it in my friend’s car a few weeks ago. I could not believe my ears.

The combinations these guys came up were brilliant and hilarious, and they all rocked. Some of my favorites were: Missy Eliot and AC/DC, Velvet Underground and some house, Steve Miller and some house, and Lords of Acid and 2 Live Crew. I laughed out loud when I heard Busta Rhymes declare “Woo Haa I got you all in check” while the Beach Boys rang out with “I’m picking up good vibrations”.

The creativity of their sampling is second to none. They don’t just cut and paste samples on top of each other, they craft new songs with new grooves using pieces of existing songs. The samples essentially double as instruments. What is perhaps most impressive is that the tracks flow seamlessly from one to the next.

If you’re looking for some driving music to put a smile on your face, or make your passengers flip out, buy this cd. I found it at Amazon, but it is pricey. Regardless, it’s worth every penny if you can get your hands on one.

Artist: New Bomb Turks
Album: Live ’93 VPRO Radio Holland
Year: 1993
Engineer: Paul Weijenberg
Label: Anyway Records

Summary: blistering punk, snarling vocals, bilious lyrics. It rocks. (Click here for detail of sleeve.)

On one of my excursions to the now defunct Sound Exchange in Austin, TX, I stumbled upon an oddity: a 45 rpm 12” of the New Bomb Turks on a radio show in Holland. It only had 5 songs, one of which was the first track on their debut, Destroy-Oh-Boy!!, but I figured that at $5, it was worth a shot.

That was sometime in 2002. Today, I can say that it was easily the best music buy I made that year. The first two songs, Taller Order and Girl Can Help It, are my favorite NBT songs (I own two other NBT albums). I thought that Destroy-Oh-Boy!! was a fairly impassioned album, but those two songs on the LP raised the bar. They are seething with energy.

My favoritet thing about this album is the sound. They turned the guitar’s midrange frequencies all the way up which brought the guitar to the front of the mix - the first and loudest thing you hear is the guitar. It cuts through everything else in the mix.

The good: if you like simple, power chord-based punk songs with simple rhythms, this is your record.

The bad: this record is hard to find. It’s nowhere on Amazon and I only found two other sites that even list it for sale. Look here and here (the second is in Holland). If you can’t find it, there’s always ebay, and as a last resort, give their first album a try. It will give you a good idea what they’re all about and contains one of the tracks on this record.

I had the day off today, so I made plans to wake up early and drive to Austin for my first ride at the Greenbelt in at least a year. My plans were foiled because I stayed up till 2 am doing absolutely nothing of use. It felt a lot like college. Needless to say, I didn’t crawl out of bed until 10:00 or so. No matter, I had yet to ride one of the most popular trails in San Antonio, McAllister Park.

It was fun aside from my poor timing: I got to the trailhead at noon. It was hot as balls. On the bright side, most of the trail winds though a canopy of trees that provide for some convenient shade.

The trail itself is a good choice for beginners. It has its share of roots and rocks, but nothing to send you over the bars. As such, I got bored quickly. I guess I’ve become spoiled after spending four and a half years in Austin. The trails there always keep me guessing.

Either way, I managed to pick up speed here and there, but only temporarily; the bonk was inevitable.

I made it a point to see a show sometime during my weekend in Austin. I checked Pollstar on Friday and noticed that Emo’s was featuring a band called The Anniversary that night. I listened to the three mp3s on the band’s website and liked what I heard. It sounded like harmless emo-pop. I imagined the show wouldn’t be too thrilling, but at least it would be a show I could enjoy. Having not seen a show in several weeks, I was desperate for something to fill my music vacancy.

As my luck would have it, the two opening bands were much better than The Anniversary. First came Grand Champeen, who rocked. Their music was a mix of rock and pop with a tinge of alt-country. They displayed a good amount of intensity and general ‘fun-ness’ that was a breath of fresh air after many weeks of not seeing any music. The singer was especially energetic. He flailed about when the music took off and struggled to find his way back to the mic in time to sing. I thought he might hurt himself a couple times.

His vocal style was from the bottom of the throat and had a certain degree of grind (slightly Cobain-esque). The music was fast-paced and heavy but with an undeniable pop element. I liked them so much I just bought the cd from their distributor (as well as the new Deathray Davies album, who are playing Sept 6th at Emo’s).

For another take on Grand Champeen, go here.

The second opening band was Cruiserweight, who I’ve seen like fourteen times but have consistently improved their show. The band sounded tight and Stella looked confident up there on Emo’s main stage. I won’t go into too much detail about their set, but suffice to say they've grown into a solid band.

The Anniversary, on the other hand, picked the wrong opening acts, or vice versa, or somebody somewhere messed up. Grand Champeen kicked things off with a bang, Cruiserweight kept the groove going, and The Anniversary lost all the stored momentum and forced everyone to sit back and ponder how pop can be stretched out and turned into a quasi-psychedelic experience complete with soft harmonies and thoughtful arrangements. While the music was unique and creative (and good) it didn’t fit the setting. I was only able to handle about twenty minutes of it before giving up. It was the kind of music I’d want to see while sitting down with a beer, not standing up in the sticky heat of Emo’s. So I’m sorry to say I didn’t particularly enjoy their show, but I did enjoy Grand Champeen and Cruiserweight. In sum, I got to catch up with an ‘old’ band and discover a ‘new’ band.

PS: mark your calendar for the Deathray Davies’ show this Saturday.