Entries from January 2001 ↓

I think there’s something weird going on in the background of Faith Hill’s “The Way You Love Me”. Her vocal track sounds okay, but the backing tracks are kind of babbled and sound sort of backwards. I’m listening to it because it’s on the Billboard Hot 100 this week, at number 10.

“I want to ask you a bunch of questions, and I want to have them answered immediately!”

As Cratchit points out, Half.com certainly is a fine place to get rid of stuff you don’t necessarily want any more. For instance, I sold a near-new Macy Gray CD for $6. My copy of Radiohead’s “Airbag/How Am I Driving” went for $15, which I thought was ridiculous considering it listed for $9.99 two years ago. Alas, it’s a limited edition, and I could have gotten $30 for it on eBay. Oh well.

The main point is that they do have a deal worked out with both Amazon and eBay, which is a nice deal. On the other hand, I tend not to do business with corporate dicks who buy the names of Oregon cities. Oh, who am I kidding? If I had $800 million in IPO funding, I would change the name of the moon. Kids in history class would learn about the race to land on Planet Tubbs, and teachers would speak in hushed tones about how that all happened before it was called Planet Tubbs.

I should mention that BlogVoices is back up. Comment away, you duplicitious idiots!

Some memes just aren’t worth committing to memory. KDWB has come forward with their “we’re turning the power off Monday morning” explanation. They’re turning the power off, alright: on power companies that have power over you, with their power bills! They’re not going off the air; they’re offering to pay power bills of randomly selected listeners. It’s a contest. Sigh. (People outside this cold state: Minneapolis’ KDWB is a Top 40 station, except more annoying. They’ve been pushed into a more urban format by competition, but they’re the only true Top 40 station we have.)

On the other hand, thinking about losing KDWB (and I use the word “loss” in the non-grieving sense: like “I lost my headache”), I decided to check out the Billboard Hot 100 and see what the kids are actually listening to. For whatever reason, I Napstered the Top 20 songs and burned a big old 78 minute CD. Now that’s what Tubbs calls music! Actually, a lot of it is pretty dismal.

My dad says that it took him 47 years to get to the point where he can no longer listen to pop music. The Billboard Hot 100 should be the best example of this, but you have to a pretty jaded popluarity-hater to dislike everything on this week’s top 20. Number three is OutKast’s “Ms. Jackson”, one of the standout tracks on this standout record from one of the most intelligent, funky and off-center hip-hop groups working today. I don’t like #16, 3 Doors Down’s “Kryptonite”, but Christie does, and that probably speaks for something. Ja Rule’s “Put It On Me” (#13) is a nice track, but I really thought it was DMX. My bad. I really like “He Loves U Not” (#7), by Dream, and the Charlie’s Angels song (#2) by Destiny’s Child is pretty sweet. And it all wraps up with this week’s number one, “It Wasn’t Me” by Shaggy featuring Ricardo “RikRok” Ducent.

Only 19 would fit, but the deletion of number 20 (N’Sync: This I Promise You) made room for all three Schwarzenegger pranks. I rule.

So today I have all kinds of burned CDs to listen to at work. There’s the Top 19 CD, and I also burned a bunch of stuff I paid for from emusic a while back. I also burned A Perfect Circle, because it should really be considered for album of the year honors, even though I didn’t buy it yet. (Also added to media award eligibility: U-571, a very entertaining movie that we saw at Tim’s on Saturday. Thanks for the beer, Tim!)

I was also able to find an actual group release of the Guns N’ Roses show in Rio two weeks ago. (I guess it was broadcast via pay-per-view or something: lots of tracks were floating around, but they were of varying quality and not in any sort of order. Someone finally put all the pieces together, set the levels right, and released the tracks in order.) For a while I thought I’d have to spread it out over three CDs, but then I realized that 74 minutes is an hour and 14 minutes, not an hour and 4 minutes. I’m a math genius, sure, but sometimes I’m stupid like that.

Wow, am I in love with the colon lately, or what? I just deleted four of them from the above passages and there are still six left!

Sorry for not making any sense the past few days. Christie and Tim both noted that they couldn’t understand anything I was talking about, and they constitute roughly 66% of my audience.

You might be looking at the copius amounts of snow on the ground outside and wondering exactly how late I was to work. I left the house at 8:14, leaving me 16 minutes for the 17 minute drive to work. That’s 17 minutes on a Saturday, with no traffic, no snow, and no cars flipped over on 7. I got here before 9, though, which is really my outside acceptible limit.

In the days leading up to what could be the least interesting Super Bowl ever, I’m tickled pink: Dennis Miller and Cris Carter will both be back next season. Hooray! (Two times!)

I think I’m going to see how much coffee I can drink today. It makes me wonder if there’s ever been a lawsuit against a company that provided free coffee to their employees by a worker that drank too much coffee. I don’t know what you’d do exactly that would require you to sue your employer, but the 1998 Freedom from Personal Responsibility Act (and the subsequent Congress ban on Consequences of Unwise Actions) should make it a cinch to win in court.

My phone just rebooted. Odd. Good thing I wasn’t on it.

Shawn from Solid Consulting sent me an email yesterday about an internet startup that might be interested in hiring me. It was like an answer to my unspoken (blogged?) prayer. I’m not sure how I would feel working at an internet-related company, but my uninformed inclination is that it would be something like finding the field full of people dancing in bee suits. I’ll let you know how that goes, but I’m not exactly walking out of here flipping the bird quite yet. (Not that I would do that anyway… well, maybe I would.)

Well, back to work.

So yeah, BlogVoices is dead. Long live BlogVoices.

You might be wondering what happened in that thread from earlier, where I went nuts and deleted six messages. The thread started with what appeared to be a book recommendation from matfei, but that wasn’t actually him. BlogVoices captures IP addresses, so I know now who it was, but I didn’t catch that in time, so it was left for a day or two until matfei wrote me a seried of emotional, paranoid and furious emails begging for an end to our teasing. While this amused me, I’m not much for identity fraud, so I deleted the thread. Hey, he’s got more problems than me and my friends, you know?

After reading today’s Suck column, I’m sure you’re wondering what’s going on in my work situation. The short answer is that work’s been worse. This will be carefully worded to avoid any offense to employers past, present and future, but the real estate lending industry isn’t one that people are dying to get in to. I’ve never been sitting around, jazzed about the next conversation I’ll have about mortgage banking. On the other hand, the drugs must be working, because lately I’m actually kind of grateful to have a job at all, not to mention one where I basically pick what I do all day and it’s not an emergency if I’m not in until 8:45. Without too much more detail, let me just say that I don’t know what I’m going to do next, but I’m really very ready for a change of pace.

I should probably post this on Entertain Us, but then nobody would read it. (Hee hee.) Seriously, I’ve been spinning the new Queens of the Stone Age record, and it’s got that “go ahead, hit play again” quality that I very rarely find in CDs. That would make it a front-runner for Favorite Album of 2000.

In other news, the Honey Maid Honey Bee has released a scrambled list of his favorite things. My sources tell me that this list, decoded, includes honey, smiles, flowers, milk, friends, family, and graham[cracker]s.

Words cannot describe how freaked out I was during Millionaire last night. First, because Regis kept talking to the first contestant’s husband, Mike. I thought to myself, “that dude looks exactly like Mike Bordin, the drummer from Faith No More. That’s so weird!” Then when he said he was a musician, and they lived in San Francisco, I felt the need to call Christie into the room. When it turned out that he was actually seated for the fastest finger round, and they introduced him as “Mike Bordin of San Francisco, CA” I threw a tape in the VCR in case he should win. When he won the first bout of fastest finger and was seated for the game, they took a commercial, and Regis came back saying “Mike here was of course a founding member of that great band, Faith No More!” They joked during the US geography question about having traveled around the world so many times, but Mike said that he was mostly sleeping on the bus.

People who aren’t crazy like I am for Faith No More can take note of the fact that his wife was the last winner on the previous show, so came back to finish her game on the night he was selected to participate. It’s the only time that a husband and wife have been on the same show. Odd….

Curtis and Vinny - I’ve seen this on lots of logs, but I know that a lot of you don’t get out much and might have missed it. It’s funny.