Poem No. 1

Like any other artsy, pretentious teenager, I wrote the occasional poem. Most of them were frighteningly awful. What follows is one of the least terrible of those poems.

Interestingly, it’s one of the very few poems I wrote after I’d graduated high school. It’s also perhaps the poem with the least “life is soooooo unfair” teen angst.

Basically, it’s about the relationship between me and one of my best friends, James. The first part is about a heated discussion went got into about life and dreams one night at the St. Charles Deli in Virginia Highland. The second part recalls the (drunken) night several years earlier when we first really bonded at a party at Lake Lanier. The final part is about the drunken night I wrote the first two parts (oooooh! META!).

Read it, if you dare, after the jump:

Continue reading “Poem No. 1”

Our Secret Music

Why Saint Etienne is the best “best band you’ve never heard of” of all-time.

The home page of English band Saint Etienne’s old website featured a different fan quote each time the page was loaded. Many of the quotes talked about Saint Etienne’s “sweet melodies”, their “lush musical movements over a field of melancholy dew drop daisies” and even “a peaceful cloud of love feelings”. Some spoke of “Sarah’s breezy voice, an open coupe, twilight’s sunny beach” or “summer days, nice people, blue skies turning to cool tingling skin and the moon over the sea”. One compared the band to a “Tiffany’s breakfast”. Another called the band “the definition of loveliness” and still another “comforting – like a big pillow, woolly socks or a stiff drink”. A fan named Roland in New York said that “their songs remind you of every tender memory you had, from childhood to adulthood”. James in London said that Saint Etienne’s sound is “that film moment (usually in slo-mo) when the girl turns her head and opens her eyes”.

What is it about this band that makes people write such gushy metaphors? How is it that a band can make otherwise intelligent adults write like angst-ridden teenage poets??

Saint Etienne

Continue reading “Our Secret Music”

Separated at birth?

Holy crap! Until just a few minutes ago, I’d never actually seen what the members of the band The National look like. I got curious and went to YouTube, where I watched the video for “Bloodbuzz Ohio”.

Is it just me, or is lead singer Matt Berninger a dead ringer for a bearded Phil Hartman… at least in the music video??

Phil Hartmannational_01national_02

It’s not even the resemblance so much as it is the mannerisms. At one point in the video, Berninger does this little dance thing, and I could swear to God it’s Bill McNeal come back to life.

Watch the video yourself and tell me what you think:

Quote of the Day

“It is a very strange sensation to inexperienced youth to feel itself quite alone in the world, cut adrift from every connection, uncertain whether the port to which it is bound can be reached, and prevented by many impediments from returning to that it has quitted. The charm of adventure sweetens that sensation, the glow of pride warms it; but then the throb of fear disturbs it; and fear with me has become predominant, when half an hour elapsed and I was still alone.”

– Charlotte Brontë
Jane Eyre

Restoring all tabs in Firefox

I post this both as a tip and as a lesson that even IT guys can sometimes miss the obvious:

I’ve used Firefox for years, and one of my favorite things about it is the “session saver” feature. If you have ten eBay tabs open, you can close Firefox and those same ten eBay tabs will reload the next time you open Firefox.

But I never figured out how to restore multiple windows. If you have, for instance, one window with ten eBay tabs and another window with five Amazon tabs, you have to choose which window you want to close first, as only the last window will be restored. So if you close the eBay window and then the Amazon window, only the Amazon tabs will be restored. Or if you closed the Amazon window first, only the eBay tabs would be restored.

And then it hit me last night: if you close Firefox by clicking File > Exit (or, in Firefox 4, Firefox > Exit), the browser will restore multiple windows when you restart.

Duh!