Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-12-13

  • "Hello liver damage, I've been expecting you." #
  • Have fun in Shreveport, Dawg fans! #
  • The BBC "Sound of 2010" list is out! http://ping.fm/hfrpE #
  • "… starring AJ Hawk and Chris Tucker!" #
  • "Agents: Woman sold moonshine at day care" http://ping.fm/Fcr5k #
  • I'll ask again: if anyone has a copy of the song "Minutes in a Day" by 86 in mp3 format, I'd love to have a copy! Thanks! #
  • Holy crap! I found it! http://ping.fm/xt8ZL #
  • WOOOO-HOOOOO! I *finally* found the 86 ep! #
  • GO NAVY! BEAT ARMY! #
  • Take that, grunts! Navy wins again! #
  • Nobody rocks The Scorpions like Veronika! #
  • I fought the law… and *I* won! #

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SONGS I LOVE: “Minutes in a Day”

86_coverI sometimes wonder how much great music there is out there that will one day be lost forever.

You’ve probably heard about the thousands of movies slowly turning into dust in film vaults. Likewise, there must be millions of great albums, singles and cassettes released by bands that either existed before CDs, or who just weren’t popular enough to make the leap to CD – and thus, easy ripping to mp3 or other digital formats.

As turntables and cassette players continue their march towards obsolescence, people don’t know what to do with their old vinyl and tapes, and eventually just give or throw them away. And then there are people like me, who continue to hold on to their vinyl in hopes of one day converting it to digital format, but just can’t get around to it. Either way it’s a shame.

Take the Atlanta band 86 for example. One day I was at the Book Nook, an iconic used book and record store in the city, when I stumbled across their EP Minutes in a Day. I bought it and took it home for a listen. Most of the EP is just OK, but I quickly fell in love with the title track. The desolation of the opening made it my perfect “drive home song”. When I listen to it I think of driving home on almost empty interstates at 4:30 on a Sunday morning, and the eerie stillness of everything at that hour. And it makes me smile.

I searched high and low on the Internet for the EP for years, but never had much luck. Given that the band broke up in the early 90s and didn’t have much of a following outside Atlanta, I didn’t have much hope of their music ever turning up on iTunes or at Amazon’s mp3 store. However, thanks to a “magic Google search” yesterday, I was finally able to snag a copy in mp3 format from a music blog. So now I can share it with you!

Have a listen and tell me what you think:

[audio:86.mp3]

Outlook: Filtering for Read Messages

Microsoft Outlook makes it easy to filter for unread email messages and posts. In fact, the default view in Outlook 2007 is unread messages. However, Outlook makes it a bit more difficult to filter only read messages. There’s no built-in way to have Outlook display only read messages in a folder.

My favorite feature of Outlook 2007 is the built-in RSS reader. I use it to subscribe to at least three dozen different feeds. However, because some posts in some feeds interest me more than others, each feed’s folder oftentimes is a jumble of read and unread posts. De-cluttering the folder by deleting or moving the read posts would certainly make my life easier, but there’s no easy way to do it.

Or is there?

To have Outlook display only read posts in a folder, do the following:

1) If you don’t already have the “Advanced” toolbar displayed, do so by clicking on View > Toolbars > Advanced.

2) Click the “filter” drop-down box and choose “Define Views”:

Outlook Message Filter

3) In the window that opens, click “New” and then type a short name for your new filter (I recommend “Read messages”). Leave the “Type of View” at “Table” and then click the “All Mail and Post folders” (unless you only want to use this view on a single folder). Click “OK”.

4) In the next window, click the “Filter” button, then click the “More choices” tab. Check the “only items that are” button and choose “read” from the drop-down box. Click “OK” several times to accept the settings.

5) Click the filter drop-down box and choose “Read Messages” (or whatever name you chose in step 3) to filter only read messages.

If you don’t want to have the Advanced toolbar appearing all the time, go to View > Toolbars and uncheck the Advanced toolbar, then right-click the main toolbar and choose “Customize”. Click on View in the left column and scroll until you see “Current View” and drag it to your main toolbar: presto! You have only the “Current View” applet and none of the other bits of the Advanced toolbar!

Those Eyes, That Mouth

Sure, it was the name of a Cocteau Twins song… but it could also apply to Kat Dennings:

Kat Dennings

Aside from being incredibly cute, she’s also one of the coolest actresses around (seriously: check out her blog or Twitter feed). She’s funny, kind of nerdy and doesn’t know how pretty she really is (that last part sounds like a girl I know!). As a bonus, she’s going with the pale skin, which is kind of cool in a world of “Hollywood orange”.

Weird Things I’ve Seen #2

My dad was a “busy businessman”, and often when my family would go on vacations, my mother, sister and I would drive to wherever and pick Dad up at the local airport. This meant that there were only three of us in the car, so I could often stretch out in the backseat. My Mom had a ’77 Lincoln Continental, and my seven year-old self could stretch out completely in the backseat and sleep.

So one time, we were driving to Daytona Beach. My dad was busy at the office, so we were going to pick him up later that night at the Daytona Beach airport. Mom was driving, my sister was in the front passenger seat and I was in the back seat, stretched out and fully asleep.

At one point, the leather seats made me sweaty, so I woke up, then sat up in the seat. I looked out the window, still rubbing the crust outta my eyes, and saw a man in a gorilla suit on a motorcycle. He was also wearing a red necktie. He waved at me.

Continue reading “Weird Things I’ve Seen #2”

Weird Things I’ve Seen #1

I used to live right in the heart of Buckhead, Atlanta’s party district.

One time, my ex had some co-workers from out-of-town come in for a meeting. The last night they were in the city, all of us met at our apartment and went out for dinner and drinks.

After dinner, we walked from bar to bar. At one point, we were crossing the street, when I noticed a man crossing the street in the opposite direction.

He was wearing old, nasty biker boots. He had on ancient blue jeans with stains and dirt and what appeared to be dried paint or jizz on them. He was wearing an old, equally-stained red and white checkerboard flannel shirt that looked like an old Pizza Hut table cloth. He was shorter than me, I’d guess around 5’7″ or so without the boots. He was very skinny and had this incredibly greasy salt and pepper hair, which was combed back. He had a stringy mustache and a 5 o’clock shadow. I think he was missing a few teeth. His skin was weathered and wrinkled and his eyes were slightly sunken in. He completed his ensemble with one of those “chain wallets” that bikers and rednecks like so much.

In short, he looked like a cross between your typical urban homeless guy and some wild “Mountain Man”. Or, even better, he looked something like the love child of Earl Hickey (from My Name Is Earl) and Begbie (from Trainspotting), only with AIDS or some sort of debilitating disease that makes you waste away.

But his red and white flannel shirt was open, and underneath it he was wearing a white, ribbed ladies t-shirt… the kind with the collar that circles down low to show off their cleavage.

And there, the man had a perfect set of tits.

They were large, Katy Perry-sized breasts, and they formed perfect teardrops on his chest. The white shirt was such that you could see the cleavage, and it didn’t appear that he was wearing a “push ’em up” or “squish ’em together” bra. I’ve actually known a few transvestites in my time, and in every case they ended up with the “grapefruits under the skin” type of fake breasts. But not this guy. I’ve rarely seen women that had such perfect breasts, much less a Mountain Man homeless guy.

I turned to the male one of my ex’s co-workers to ask if he’d saw the man and his breasts too. But I actually didn’t need to ask him, because when I turned to speak to him, the look on his face said it all: he’d seen Perfect Tits Homeless Mountain Man, too.

Tuesday’s News Roundup

– It’s funny that record companies should have such a strict stance on their customers respecting copyrights… while they themselves seem to flaunt it at will. Ars Technica is reporting about a lawsuit in Canada where Canadian record companies are being sued by their own artists for up to $60 billion! It seems that there was a change to Canadian copyright law in the 1980s which allowed record companies to use tracks from artists pending approval of the license. So if a record company wanted to release a “Best of the 80s” compilation, it no longer had to have a license in hand to use A Flock of Seagulls “I Ran” – it only had to have a application “pending”. But it seems that the record companies never bothered or even intended to follow-up on those applications, and have since released thousands of compilation albums without having the proper licenses. And the best part: the labels don’t even deny that they did this! I think it’s only fair that if Jammie Thomas was forced to pay $80,000 per song in her non-commercial piracy case that the record labels should be forced to pay the same, since they were actually making money off the deal (and yes, I know – Capitol v. Thomas was an American case, and this case is in Canada).

– Speaking of music, every year the BBC makes a list of up and coming artists they think might make it big in the upcoming calendar year (you might remember that I discovered La Roux via the 2009 list). Well, the 2010 list is out, so go and have a listen and stay ahead of the “coolness curve”!

– One last thing about music: if you’re an aspiring pop star and you’re going to be on live television, you might want to sing into the right end of the microphone.

– Smoking, estrogen and family history all contribute to breast cancer… but if studies from the University of Chicago are correct, loneliness might actually triple a woman’s chance to getting breast cancer. Studies so far have only been carried out on animals, but scientists are fairly certain that it would apply to humans as well. And given the jaw-dropping results – lonely rats had 84 times the amount of cancerous tissue their non-lonely but genetically similar counterparts did – you have to wonder.

– Brian Bonsall, who played little Andy Keaton on Family Ties, has been arrested. Again.

– Hines Ward is the NFL’s dirtiest player? Not with Flozell Adams around:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7qye-KxaFc&feature=player_embedded#

The Game That Killed Atari

It might seem hard to believe today, but back in 1982 the film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was huge. It didn’t have the “teen appeal” of Titanic or Twilight, but it was the kind of movie grandparents, parents and church groups could feel good about taking their little ones to see. And so take them they did… and the movie became a phenomenon.

It only made sense, then, that there would be a video game tie-in based on the movie. Although newer systems like Intellivision offered better graphics than the stodgy Atari 2600, Atari’s gigantic user base ensured that the company would win the rights to make the game. When kids found out that E.T. the video game was coming out, they gleefully added it to their Christmas lists by the millions. E.T. was perhaps the hottest gift of the 1982 Christmas season.

There was just one problem… the game sucked. The graphics were so horrible and the gameplay so boring that even today, 27 years later, the game still makes it onto “Worst Video Games of All-Time lists”. In fact, given the game’s high-profile at the time, it often ranks near the top of those lists, too.

Continue reading “The Game That Killed Atari”

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-12-06

  • Charlie Weis: fired! Hahahahaha #
  • Man… the 'Ain'ts just beat the snot outta the Pats! #
  • @Paula_Deen Your Walmart pies are AWFUL! Just so you know! #
  • DHS '89ers: the official class reunion pic will be mailed out tomorrow! #
  • The yard is nothing but a fence, the sun just hurts my eyesSomewhere it must be time for penitence. #
  • The yard is nothing but a fence, the sun just hurts my eyes. Somewhere it must be time for penitence. #
  • "…and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats" #
  • GO RED RAIDERS! "South Point advances to state title game" #
  • Hell YES! GO JACKETS! "I'm a Ramblin' Wreck from Georgia Tech and a HELL OF AN ENGINEER!" HEY! #
  • I'm a Ramblin' Wreck from Georgia Tech… gimme another beer! #
  • "39 is more than 34." – CPJ #
  • Drunkenly: "Mommy's alright, Daddy's alright, they just seem a little weird…." #

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