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Sunday, August 29, 2004


Template 

I am not so happy with the new blog template. Was this a manual change or some sort of automatic Blogger-wide change? I'd fiddle with the html code but it's been a while and I'm not that interested at the moment. Maybe we should go to a totally different template. That might be fun.

I will allow time for objections/other people to change it before I play around.

posted by mountmccabe  # 2:02 PM (0) comments

Friday, August 27, 2004


Bob Dole Doesn't Like That 

Read http://instapundit.com/archives/017393.php and you'll probably either agree or disagree, depending on where you already stood. I'm not interested in that part; what amuses me enough to post is just how distinct Bob Dole's word style is. It's sort of like a Faux Hemingway parody but not quite.

posted by Matt Bruce  # 11:37 AM (0) comments

Kerry's 1971 Testimony on C-SPAN 

Did anyone watch this? I did; I'd have mentioned it hours ahead of time on my own blog if it weren't down.

Keeping partisanship out of it as best I can (you probably already know where I stand): This testimony actually made me feel more favorably about him. He spoke quite eloquently, even if the Boston Brahmin quasi-British short A's in his dialect confused me.

He had some strong, well-thought-out opinions on war. Too bad on one particular count he was (in my opinion) dead wrong. My opinion (but also why it's probably not terribly useful to debate it) is probably best summed up by a line at http://adeimantus.blogspot.com/2004/08/let-it-alone.html:

"In the decade following our ignominious withdrawal, communists would potash Cambodia's rice fields with the bones of millions of human skeletons. Of the millions desperately fleeing the daily terrors of communist rule, countless thousands would perish in the Gulf of Thailand or the South China Sea when their pathetically rickety boats capsized under the their own weight. If those millions of deaths weren't enough to convince you that fighting communism in Southeast Asia was a truly righteous cause, then mere words could never persuade you."

posted by Matt Bruce  # 11:25 AM (0) comments

Oh Yeah, The Rest Of My Team 

QB: Steve McNair
RB: Ahman Green
RB: Brian Westbrook (but see below)
WR: Terrell Owens
WR: Peerless Price
TE: Kellen Winslow II
K: Paul Edinger (total random default; my team was one of the last to get a kicker)
D: Michael Strahan
DL: Simeon Rice
DB: Rodney Harrison
Bench: David Carr (QB), Quentin Griffin (RB) (he'll probably start; I can't believe how late I got him), Marcus Robinson (WR), three really good defenders (Leonard Little et al), and two open spots that used to be my backup K and backup TE; I'll fill on waivers, ideally with a QB and RB



posted by Matt Bruce  # 11:18 AM (0) comments

I Hate Non-Live Drafts 

In a football league with co-workers from three jobs ago (the baseball statistics people), where the commish set us up for an automatic draft rather than bother finding a time when we could all met. Fair enough, except that I did a lousy job of pre-ranking, specifically in that I overthought the whole process.

It's one thing to downgrade Marshall Faulk and Fred Taylor as injury risks, quite another to rank them below Brian Westbrook (and therefore end up with Westbrook as the 18th overall pick, when Faulk and Taylor go 19 and 20 to the teams that already had the two best RB's).

This year I think 3rd is a bad spot in a non-keeper league draft. Probably not as bad as late first round but still. I took Ahman Green. Will he be any better or worse than the guys who went 4-7? Well, obviously someone will exceed expectations and someone will tank, but no more or less likely Green than Portis, Alexander, or whoever.

posted by Matt Bruce  # 11:13 AM (0) comments

Yesterday's Musical Interlude 

Apparently the radio gods knew I'd have a lunchtime errand to run. On KFOG's New Music Thursday, I heard the latest R.E.M. single. Forget the lyrics but the chord structure blew my mind:

vi - bVI - IV - bIII in the verse, I - V - IV - ii in the chorus.

(Or if you prefer sheet-music style: E minor, E-flat major, C major, B-flat major in the verse; G (the tonic), D, C, A minor in the chorus. Then the crescendo to the finish, with a sustained E-flat chord until the E minor at the *very* end.)

Now from the sublime to the ridiculous: You know how classic rock stations sometimes use the "[band name] yesterday... [band name] today" to link together two songs from one been-around-awhile band. This time it was Scorpions yesterday and today. Their new song sounds like what you'd expect a Scorpions song to sound like, though come to think of it even it had fairly interesting chord structure.

Even though the song is in C (not really major, not really minor, I guess more minor), most of the verse stays on an Ab (major 7) chord, finally resolving to Cm(7), guitar riff C-C-Eb-C-(ascending)-Bb, etc. Or, from the chorus, you could say the song is in E-flat, since the sequence there is Cm, Fm, Eb, Bb.

And then enough of the music theory and onto the fun stuff: "The Bad Touch" and "Closer" back-to-back on Live 105, where they did an hourlong block of sex-themed music. I claim you can't hear "The Bad Touch" in your car without rolling a window down and cranking, at least I can't.

Bonus points if you offend someone, massive bonus points if you offend someone in a community where you'd have thought it'd be difficult to, as in Berkeley, CA. (Asian Mom conspicuously rolled her window up one lane over.) As for "Closer," a couple of you know Mark Coen, who beyond his TRASH status used to "chaperone" the Boston U. team to tournaments to fulfill a bureaucratic requirement.

Once we had a really crowded van and as Mark was getting into the van, his size and its size led to mild slapstick, made 100 times funnier in that "Closer" happened to be in its opening bars on the radio as Mark was making his squeeze-in entrance. All about the mental image, I suppose.

posted by Matt Bruce  # 11:03 AM (0) comments

Today's Excel Oddity 

For alphabetizing, Microsoft Excel apparently *ignores* hyphens. So "T-Bone" will come after "Tawny" but before "Tease." That seems wrong to me but I can't finger why.

posted by Matt Bruce  # 10:59 AM (0) comments

Holy Interface Change, Batman! 

This is way different from the Blogger interface I knew and loved. Probably several steps up. Time to break the Mad Dog posting streak...

By the way, my personal blog site is down and has been for over a day. My friend and sysadmin, Mr. Matthew Boggie (Boston U. '98, Accenture), is doggedly pursuing justice from our service provider. Meanwhile, I may just core-dump here this afternoon if nobody minds.

posted by Matt Bruce  # 10:56 AM (0) comments

Thursday, August 26, 2004


Curiosa - Phoenix, AZ 08/25/04 

Ahh, the Cure. And, well, 6 other bands. I was happy even though I figured I'd miss somebody good. As it turned out I missed nobody.

They had two stages set up. Mogwai started on the mainstage at 5pm sharp. They were done at 5:35 and then somebody announced that Scarling would be starting on the second stage in five minutes. This pattern continued; a band would play a 35 minute set on one stage and then five minutes later another band would play on the other.

People didn't really start showing up until 7 or 8 so there was never a question of crowding around the second stage (the mainstage was Cricket's normal stage so there was seating [well, a small GA pit upfront and the large GA grass area out back, but I was in the seats]) so I was able to see almost full sets from reasonably close from everyone.

Mogwai did three songs in their 35 minutes, the 2nd was from Happy Songs for Happy People (Hunted by a Freak?), the third was Mogwai Fear Satan (extended guitar feedback version.) Yeah, an extended version of a 16 minute song. Anyway, it was great, but empty.

UPDATE: Ok, I'm a moron. The setlist was: Helicon 1; Hunted by a Freak; My Father, My King. But come on, give me a break. It's Mogwai for crying out loud, it's not terribly unreasonable to mistake one of their epic 16 minute instrumental songs for one of their epic 20 minute instrumental songs (which I haven't heard a studio version of, btw.) Also, just for the record, by "empty" I meant Cricket Pavillion, not Mogwai's songs.

Scarling was ok, the singer sounded something like Elizabeth Elmore (of the Reputation and formerly Sarge.) The band fit it well with the others playing, they were pretty good, I guess.

The Rapture were... well, I hadn't heard them before that I can remember and, well, I don't really care. They played some fun songs, I guess, but nothing special. One of the four guys on stage seemed to be playing only a cowbell and dancing around but he did fiddle with a keyboard before a couple songs and also played sax on a few numbers.

The Cooper Temple Clause were good. They had some minor sound difficulties and the singer seemed rather distracted/unsure for the first several songs but they closed out well. They played Did You Miss Me?; The Same Mistakes; Been Training Dogs; Music Box; Promises, Promises; and one or two others in there somewhere.

Next was Interpol on the mainstage and they were certainly the non-Cure highlight. It was also the longest non-Cure set at 45 minutes. This was the first time the crowd seemed to care much (beyond the odd guy climbing into the pit to dance to the Rapture or the two or three people in the pit who were excited about seeing Mogwai.) The setlist was Obstacle 1; Roland; Evil; NYC; Say Hello to the Angels; Slow Hands; Leif Erikson; "lonely"; PDA [I don't know the name of the second to last song but they said "lonely" a lot.] The new songs were very good; very clearly not from the first album but also very clearly Interpol songs.

UPDATE: The third new song was NARC, also on the upcoming Antics.

Cursive played the final set on the second stage. They are, to me, a weird band live. Or it could be they're just not very good live. Maybe the best way to put it is that I like seeing them live but I always expect that they should be better than they are. They also drew a good sized, enthusiastic crowd. Their setlist included Some Red Handed Slight of Hand; The Martyr; The Recluse; Sierra; Mothership, Mothership Do You Read Me? and some other stuff.

The Cure continue to surprise me with their set lengths. Both times I've seen them (now) they've played past the posted cut-off time; this time they went on for three encores and two and a half hours. Plainsong; Shake Dog Shake; Labyrinth; From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea; The End of the World; Anniversary; Lovesong; Inbetween Days; Push; Sinking; Pictures of You; Maybe Someday; Before Three; alt.end; A Strange Day; One Hundred Years; Disintigration; encore 1: (I Don't Know What's Going) On; Charlotte Sometimes; Just Like Heaven; Boys Don't Cry; encore 2: Close To Me; The Lovecats; Why Can't I Be You; encore 3: A Forest; Forever. Early in the 1st encore Robert said something about having wanted to ask the crowd what they wanted to hear since he never could tell if people preferred their pop side or their dark side - or at least that's how I interpreted what I heard, it was rather difficult to understand what the words were. He went to on say (I surmised) that the issue was already kind of decided - going on to play pop for most of the encores. The closer Forever was, well, very good. Very much not-pop, loud and agressive and, at the end, even fast. The odd thing I found when looking for the song was that they've never released it - not even on their 4 CD b-sides and rarities collection they just put out.

Most of the shirts were $30 (even the Mogwai and Interpol shirts!) but they had TCTC shirts for $15 at a satellite merch booth on the way to the second stage so that was good.

Note: All setlists are from memory except for the Cure's (well, the Interpol is from my phone's memory) which I got at the Cure website. I tried to come up with something earlier in the day and got most of it but in no order at all and missing like 6 songs.

posted by mountmccabe  # 8:54 PM

Thursday, August 12, 2004


Built to Spill, 08/11/04 

There was one huge highlight to this show but I shall approach it slowly.

By first stating that I downloaded some mp3s of the Long Winters from the Barsuk website (just checking out their roster since they're nice enough to include mp3s from everyone.) They didn't open the show or anything (a decent local band the Necronauts did) but the song "Stupid" is brilliant. UPDATE: Sweet, they have two more songs I didn't download the first time through.

At any rate, here we go:

-Early on they played quite a few news songs, it wasn't one of those.
-It wasn't Sidewalk even though it could've been.
-Because, as is their custom, they did the Stop the Vocals version of Stop the Show it wasn't that song.
-It could've been Big Dipper but Doug kinda screwed up the solo. It was still the song I was most hoping to hear among those they played.
-It could've been either of the two songs they played in the encore, Car and Carry the Zero but they're not good enough, really. I mean, the "I wanna see it when you get stoned on a cloudy breezy desert afternoon" bit is amazing, as is the corresponding bit in Zero ("afraid it'll fall apart") but overall neither of these songs compare to:
-The last new song they played. I kid you not. This site reported it as building to a climax that was "Mogwai-esque" (yes, they have a (partial) setlist up already - they really are serious about having every BtS show ever) which, well, I hadn't thought of but whatever. It definitely got big, in a BtS sort of way. Over a good 8-10 minutes. Absolutely brilliant.

When's the last time your show highlight was a new song? They're supposed to be going back into the studio in September which I think means a Spring 2005 or so release date is to be expected.

For anyone with enough interest to check out the BtS Show History site linked to above: I now know what I wish I was doing on 11/05/01. Standing around Nita's (RIP) hearing three ______ covers and _[first actual BtS song played]_ which I now have renewed hope of hearing live.

posted by mountmccabe  # 9:33 PM (0) comments

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