Category: Music

Songs and bands I love!

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Weekend Update!

Oh look! A rare Saturday news update! Let’s get to it!

– A teacher at an elementary school in Raeford, North Carolina forced a student to eat a school-provided lunch instead of the lunch he (or she) brought from home because it “wasn’t healthy enough”. School officials admit that the teacher went too far, but the fact that this even happened in the first place tells you everything you need to know about our Nanny State.

– I recently posted about a study which found that schools serving “healthy options” actually had higher obesity rates than schools that served traditional items like pizza and tater tots. Researchers aren’t sure why this is, although the obvious answer would be that kids forced to eat salads and baked fish for lunch go home and gorge themselves on junk food, while kids who eat pizza for lunch are less likely to do so. Now there’s evidence that vending machines in schools don’t cause obesity, either.

– And you can thank Jamie Oliver for much of this hysteria. However, this is kind of cool: he’s opening a new restaurant inside a former bank in Manchester, and during renovations hundreds of safe deposit boxes were found. Since the bank had changed hands several times, it was “too difficult” to find the box owners, so the Bank of England got out the power tools and found at least £1.1 million worth of treasure inside the boxes… including master tapes from Joy Division and New Order!

– Back to the Nanny State: some researchers now want to regulate sugar like alcohol. You didn’t care when they went after drug dealers, because you don’t do drugs. You didn’t care when they stripped away civil rights for DUI suspects, because drunk drivers are bad. You didn’t care when they went after Big Tobacco, because you don’t smoke. When ARE you going to care?

Continue reading “Weekend Update!”

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The Queen of America

My Queen
(click to embiggen)

God save our gracious Queen,
Long live our noble Queen,
God save the Queen:
Send her victorious,
Happy and glorious,
Long to reign over us:
God save the Queen.

Sigh. She’s so beautiful! Katy Perry is America, and America is Katy Perry. I mean, can’t you just imagine this beautiful countenance on our currency, the same way Elizabeth II appears on British money? I know I can.

Let the haters hate. They’re just jealous.

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Top 10 Tunes

From the home office in London, here’s the Top 10 song chart for the week ending February 12, 2012:

1) Marsheaux – “Stand By”
2) Saint Etienne – “Tonight”
3) Marsheaux – “Summer”
4) Marsheaux – “Thirteen/True”
5) Marsheaux – “Destroy Me”
6) Parralox – “Supermagic”
7) Psychedelic Furs – “Into You Like a Train”
8) Freezepop – “Pop Music is Not a Crime”
9) Cloetta Paris – “Secret Eyes”
10) Foretaste – “The Prototype of Love”

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Top 10 Tunes

From the home office in London, here’s the Top 10 song chart for the week ending February 5, 2012:

1) Saint Etienne – “Tonight”
2) Marsheaux – “Thirteen/True”
3) Freezepop – “Pop Music is Not a Crime”
4) Two Door Cinema Club – “Something Good Can Work”
5) Marsheaux – “Stand By”
6) Ambra Red – “It’s Just A Dream’
7) Rolla Scape – “Heaven is Real (feat. Marsheaux)”
8) Ladyhawke – “Black, White and Blue”
9) David Sylvian – “Waterfront”
10) The Jody Grind – “Eight-Ball”

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Top 10 Tunes

From the home office in London, here’s the Top 10 song list for the week ending January 29, 2012:

1) Saint Etienne – “Tonight”
2) Ladyhawke – “Black, White and Blue”
3) Marsheaux – “Thirteen/True”
4) Freezepop – “Pop Music is Not a Crime”
5) Cloetta Paris – “Secret Eyes”
6) Ambra Red – “It’s Just a Dream”
7) Marsheaux – “Stand By”
8) Katy Perry – “The One That Got Away”
9) Marsheaux – “Eyes Without a Face”
10) The Sound of Arrows – “Into the Clouds”

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iTunes not updating play counts

iTunes is supposed to keep track of the songs you play on both your computer and on your iPod. Unfortunately, this feature seems to break early and often for a lot of people: songs played using iTunes on your computer will update their “last played” dates and “play count” totals, but songs played on the iPod simply do not.

Frustrated users at the Apple Support message boards report that this is a persistent and intractable problem. Folks there say the problem happens on both Windows and Mac, so it’s not OS-specific. Every version of iTunes seems affected, although version 10.x seems worse than others. It can happen on any model iPod, although Nanos and Touches seem to be the most affected. This started happening way before Apple released iTunes Match, the cloud-based service which backs up your songs (and complicates the play count process, since plays can come from multiple sources). Users have uninstalled and reinstalled iTunes, gone back to previous iTunes versions, and reset their iPods. A couple of people even went out and bought new iPods to see if that would fix the problem. But sadly, nothing seems to fix the issue.

But board member MVLaing came up with (what appears to be) a solid workaround… and it’s bizarre that it actually works! He (or she) suggests that before you sync your iPod to your computer, briefly play anything (on your iPod) that’s not a song, such as a podcast or an audiobook. 30 seconds is enough. Then connect your iPod… and be amazed that play counts are updated! Hooray!

Try it out and tell me what you think!

And lastly, a bit of a rant here. I went to several message boards looking for help with the problem, and was surprised by the amount of ridicule directed towards people who asked for help. Many responses were along the lines of “OMG! What a moran! Why do you even care when you last played a song! Your a tight-ass! LOL!!1!11!!”.

Well, Internet Tough Guy™, I can give you two good reasons why people care about play counts.

The first is Last.fm. It’s a website that keeps track of which songs you play, and offers streaming radio stations based on that info. It can also hook you up with other users who have similar music tastes, and you can see what music they listen to. It works so much better for me than either Pandora or Spotify. In fact, neither of those services have ever offered me a single new band that I liked. Not a one. Last.fm has introduced me to 14 new bands in the last month alone. And guess what? The whole thing stops working if play counts aren’t updated.

Secondly, there’s “Smart Playlists”. iTunes has a nifty feature where you can create a playlist consisting of (for instance) “every song I’ve added to my library in the past 60 days and played more than three times in the last 30 days”. And such playlists are dynamic, so they automatically update themselves as time passes. And guess what, Internet Tough Guy™? If iTunes isn’t updating the play counts on songs from your iPod, then this feature doesn’t work, either!

“Moran”.

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Top 10 Tunes

From the home office in London, here’s this week’s Top 10 song list!

1) Marsheaux – “Thirteen/True”
2) Katy Perry – “The One That Got Away”
3) Ambra Red – “It’s Just A Dream”
4) Blouse – “Videotapes”
5) Teddybears – “Cobrastyle” (feat. Mad Cobra)
6) Marsheaux – “Summer”
7) The Raveonettes – “Hallucinations”
8) Marsheaux – “Breakthrough”
9) She & Him – “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want”
10) Marsheaux – “Exit”

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Top 10 Tunes

From the home office in London, here’s this week’s list of Top 10 songs!

1) Lana del Rey – “Video Games”
2) Marsheaux – “Pure”
3) Marsheaux – “The Promise”
4) Nina Gordon – “Straight Outta Compton”
5) Marsheaux – “Summer”
6) Marsheaux – “Stand By”
7) Marsheaux – “Destroy Me”
8) Joy Division – “Disorder”
9) Freezepop – “Pop Music is Not a Crime”
10) Marsheaux – “Faith”

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Introducing Marsheaux!

I’d never even heard of the Greek electropop band Marsheaux until the middle of last November. But since then I’ve listened to them 304 times according to Last.fm, an average of five songs a day. Heck, I’ve even become one of their “top listeners” on Last.fm:

Marsheaux LastfmSo… what’s the appeal? Well opinions about music vary, of course. But if you’re a fan of female-led, throwback 80s electropop, Marsheaux is Leonardo Da Vinci, Babe Ruth, Michael Jordan and Albert Einstein all rolled in to one. Check out “Summer”, the track that initially caught my ear:

Beats, beauty, atmosphere… it’s all there! The music… almost seems like a musical security blanket. Or a pair of comfy slippers. Or a favorite old sweater. Or a hot bowl of chili on a cold winter’s night (substitute your favorite soup as needed). Check out this tune, “Stand By”, also from the album Lumineux Noir:

Cool, hip, beautiful… what more is there to say? The band also does a few covers, too. Here’s their version of When In Rome’s “The Promise”:

Here’s one last tune, an older song of theirs called “Dream of a Disco”, which sounds like a beautiful, updated Flock of Seagulls:

The band, whose name comes from the first syllables of the band member’s names – Marianthi Melitsi and Sophie Sarigiannidou – really is all kinds of awesome! Check out their MySpace page here and their Last.fm page here.

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Top 10 Tunes

Here are my Top 10 songs for the week, courtesy of the good people at Last.fm:

1) Lana del Rey – “Video Games”
2) Ambra Red – “Killer Princess”
3) Marsheaux – “Stand By”
4) Marsheaux – “Summer”
5) Blouse – “Videotapes”
6) Ambra Red – “She’s a Model”
7) Ambra Red – “Game Over”
8) Marsheaux – “The Promise”
9) The Sound of Arrows – “Into the Clouds”
10) Ambra Red – “It’s Just A Dream”