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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”

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Lady Gaga Fugue

“My friend Vincenzo Culotta plays my ‘Lady Gaga Fugue’, a piece based on the theme from the song ‘Bad Romance’ by Lady Gaga. This should show how counterpoint can be fun and up to date.”

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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”

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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:

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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

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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!

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2011-05-01

  • R.I.P. Poly Styrene 🙁 #
  • I love Dropbox because It just works, unlike other services that clam to offer "painless" file sharing! http://db.tt/aaVeAqN #

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Quote of the Day

It seems appropriate today.

Standing firm on this stony ground,
The wind blows hard,
Pulls these clothes around;
I harbour all the same worries as most,
The temptations to leave or to give up the ghost.

I wrestle with an outlook on life,
That shifts between darkness and shadowy light;
I struggle with words for fear that they’ll hear,
But Orpheus sleeps on his back still dead to the world.

Sunlight falls, my wings open wide,
There’s a beauty here I cannot deny;
And the bottles that tumble and crash on the stairs,
Are just so many people I knew never cared.

Down below on the wreck of the ship,
Are a stronghold of pleasures I couldn’t regret;
But the baggage is swallowed up by the tide,
As Orpheus keeps to his promise and stays by my side.

Tell me, I’ve still a lot to learn.
Understand, these fires never stop,
Believe me, when this joke is tired of laughing,
I will hear the promise of my Orpheus sing.

Sleepers sleep as we row the boat,
Just you, the weather, and I gave up hope;
But all of the hurdles that fell in our laps,
Were fuel for the fire and straw for our backs.

Still the voices have stories to tell,
Of the power struggles in heaven and hell;
But we feel secure against such mighty dreams,
As Orpheus sings of the promise tomorrow may bring.

– David Sylvian
“Orpheus”

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Useless Facts!

The original jimcofer.com FrontPage site used to have a “Fact of the Week” on the home page. I used to have a page on that site where I stored all the previous facts. This became the “Useless Facts” page on this site, but since I stopped updating the facts years ago, I decided to cut and paste the old page into a post and delete the original.

So here ya go:

– The Kid Loco remix of the Saint Etienne song “4:35 In The Morning” is exactly 4 minutes and 35 seconds long.

– The character “Fez” from That 70’s Show got his name from pre-production scripts, where he was referred to only as “Foreign Exchange Student” (abbreviated “FES”).

– Dennis Hopper really was inhaling nitrous oxide on the set of Blue Velvet.

– The scene at the beginning of Apocalypse Now when Martin Sheen put his hand through the mirror?? Also real.

– Every ten minutes, the National Security Agency destroys a stack of classified papers 6 feet wide, 8 feet tall and 60 feet long.

– The shortest war on record – between Britain and Zanzibar in 1896 – lasted just 38 minutes.

Continue reading “Useless Facts!”

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Quote of the Day

“A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

– James Joyce
“The Dead”