12 posts tagged “qotd”

What's your favorite way to keep in touch? Phone, snail mail, email, text message, Vox, _____ ?

Carrior pigeon.

Smoke signal.

Semaphore.

Morse code.

Hobo chalking.

What albums are in heavy rotation for you right now?

Peter and the Wolf - Red Hunter's warped folk music + junk orchestra (group of howling, drunk friends banging on cans and shit) + eerie old-timey flavor = really, really good. I prefer the self-titled over Experiments in Junk.

Augie March - beautiful, lush, Australian pop. Uber-poetic and sometimes heartbreaking. I uploaded "Cold Acre," my favorite song off of the new album, which probably won't see US distribution for, like, three years. Fucking record labels! Get on this!

The Long Winters - Putting the Days to Bed. I approached TLW's 3rd album with some trepidation at first and my initial reaction was lukewarm. Slowly, the bulk of the songs earwormed themselves into my brain. "Honest" and "Hindsight" and "Teaspoon" all get stuck in my head for days at a time. Damn you, Roderick.

Page France - a double EP set called Pear and Sister Pinecone. Page France's nuanced, clever folk-pop is carefully constructed using modest but warm components -- acoustic guitar, organs, glockenspiel, tambourine, the pretty backing vocals of keyboardist Whitney McGraw -- while Michael Nau's striking voice lends the band's music an air of sincerity and innocence. More from me on NPR.

Boat - more charming indie pop. Haven't listened very deeply yet but it's made a good first impression.

Gogol Bordello - in lieu of talking about Beirut again and Devotchka again (and don't buy the Little Miss Sunshine track unless you want to hear shredded up instrumental versions of your favorite Devotchka songs, seriously), I've been taking in some gypsy punk rock. That's right. See also: A Tribute to Stesha, for more traditional  Russian gypsy music.

Astor Piazzolla - Tango: Zero Hour. A classic in nuevo tango. I'd had a bunch of Piazzolla mp3s on an older computer a while back but I have no idea what happened to them all, so I Primed this off of Amazon. If you liked the Waking Life soundtrack or Tin Hat Trio, you'll love this.

(Hmm, I wonder if I should post a neuvo tango/gypsy/Russian folk/etc. mix to Vox at some point.)

There's also new stuff from Eric Bachmann (on first listen way better than the last Crooked Fingers album), the Mountain Goats (this is definitely a cloudy fall day album and is much lighter on the barnburners than previous works), Chad VanGaalen (I have an animations DVD of his that I won a few months ago that I still haven't watched either), M Ward, and others that I haven't sat with long enough just yet.

Notes:
* I hope this doesn't look too weird on people whose layouts differ from mine.
* Uploading mp3s and then not being able to add cover art afterwards really bothers me.
* So does adding albums that aren't on Amazon (which I did by finding their cover art and the uploading it as a photo.)

Blah blah blah blah blah blah. This is how you make your own question of the day prompt. Thanks to Anil for demonstrating how this can be done on his own blog.

Quick, say something silly you want to share with the world! Click here to answer.

What's your cell phone's ringtone? What made you pick it?

Old Phone.mid.

It sounds like an old rotary phone. I picked it because it's normal sounding, not embarassing, and it was free.The midi file came from my old Sony Ericsson T610. All of the other included ringtones were crap on my new S700i. I transferred it over bluetooth to my new phone via the Powerbook and it worked like a charm.

This is such a common complaint, I don't know why carriers don't include more than one "normal"-sounding ringtone. Well, I know why, they want to charge me an absurd $4 a month for the latest and greatest pop hits in their ringtone stores -- but even then, the pickings are slim in their official stores. The phone manufacturers include basic, normal, ordinary, boring, professional ringtones by default, but the wireless carriers remove them on purpose, being the evil telcos that they are. Bastards.

Just google for "professional ringtone" or "normal ringtone" and you'll see scores of people desperately looking for ringtones that actually sound like fucking phones. Because hearing "Crazy Frog" or "Promiscuous" just isn't professional when you're at a client site, you know?

As far as I know, Nokia is the only one interested in this market by creating new phones that don't include cameras, but do include system beeps and ambient ringtones composed by Ryuichi Sakamoto. But again, I don't see Cingular or T-Mobile being foresighted enough to actually keep interesting, ambient ringtones on the phone before it hits the US market.

For now, we've got soundslikeaphone.com and that's about it.

What are your three favorite album covers of all-time? Any honorable mentions?

Question submitted by Tamara.

While there aren't my favorite three album covers of all time, they're all gorgeous and memorable in their own ways.

Something beautiful by the inimitable Jay Ryan of the Bird Machine. I love the colors, the wavy  air lines, the way the typography flows,  and the tiny bits of character that pop up in his work. The attention to detail is amazing.  He's also done a ton of show posters for Chicago area events, a series of drawings for the last Andrew Bird album, and has a book out, which I highly recommend.

This is the cover of Okkervil River's second album, as done by William Schaff. Schaff will forever be associated with Okkervil River and Will Sheff to me, since that is how I was first exposed to his lovely artwork. Schaff has done pretty much every single Okkervil release since, and taken as a body of work, it's really impressive. His figures tend to be dark, heartbreakin, poignant, and oftentimes frightening; this is one of his more lighthearted drawings. I love the tiny stitched heart on the chest of the shirt, and the broken guitar on the musician's back.

And lastly, Neko Case.

While Fox Confessor Brings the Flood is probably her best work, this album cover is incredibly evocative in the way she's fallen on her hands, her mouth is slightly open, the way her hair falls on her face.

Well, this is an easy one for me given that I'm working on a big, expensive project at the moment:

1. Two new mini-DV cameras: probably the Panasonic DVX-100B with wide angle lenses, extra battery packs, chargers, carrying cases, the works
2. Two new tripods, because we only have one right now and it's getting kind of janky from heavy use
3. A really really good boom mic and accessories
4. And insurance for all aforementioned equipment

And if there's anything left:
5. Plane tickets and hotel rooms for Christine and Dan to follow the Wrens to Germany next month

My parents love sushi, particularly sashimi. Part of it comes from eating a lot of Japanese food because my grandparents grew up in Taiwan at a time when Japan occupied the island. And since Taiwan's an island, they eat a lot of seafood. It's also pretty healthful as far as food goes if you don't count the soy sauce, and it's easy on my mother's sometimes delicate constitution. But for the longest time as a kid, I was afraid to try sushi ("ew, raw fish") so I always ended up eating California rolls, tempura, chicken teriyaki, miso soup, everything else on the menu. I remember getting stuck in Houston with my family after missing our connecting flight, and getting picked up at the airport by my Aunt. She took us all out for an all you can eat sushi feast where nearly everything contained raw fish, and I just sat there and watched everybody else eating, double-fisting handrolls. I finally tried sushi in high school and realized what I'd been missing all these years. Dammit! Stupid adults, why are they always right?

By the time I got to college, I was the one introducing my friends to various types of sushi, starting them off easy with stuff that's cooked, and gradually introducing the raw fish. Salmon, tuna, one piece at a time. And I've gotten pretty adventurous in the types of sashimi I eat. By now I've even had squid, shrimp, and lobster sashimi. The only kind I won't eat is sea urchin (uni).

My mother sometimes reminds me that my brother was more adventurous than I as a child. Even when he was a kid, he was always curious as to why the adults loved some food all of the kids ran away from. Sometimes it would be something good, other times my mother would end up letting him try dried squid snack or those fat Asian melon seeds, and I would laugh. As a child, out of the ordinary Chinese dishes were often deemed icky, weird, or gross, especially if they were not fried rice or noodles. My mother says you can always tell the Chinese kids that grew up in the United States because they won't eat certain foods when they're young, and gravitate towards the more Americanized ones. I blame the elementary school need to fit in at the lunch table and not be "too ethnic" or else the other kids would mock my meal (or at least draw attention to its uniqueness). Plus, I had TV telling me that normal families came home and at spaghetti and meatballs or pork chops or meatloaf every night. Plus, Chinese food was only thing my parents would eat when we went out to eat.

Another weird Chinese food (well, drink) that bewildered me as a kid was pearl milk tea. I can remember first time I tried the bizarre concoction. I was about fourteen or fifteen, and I hated the taste, the texture, the strangeness of the drink. I was eating lunch at a Chinese restaurant with my aunt and some cousins. My cousins were insane for this weird drink, and ordered one for me without me asking. Plus, she ordered it in Chinese, really quickly, and I wasn't fluent enough to hear what was happening. So to be polite, I drank it. Am I chewing or drinking? Sip or swallow? What the hell is this chewy ball doing in my mouth? It tastes like tea but tea is weird! Obviously, I wasn't having that much fun with it, so one of them offered to finish mine for me at the end of the meal.

Then, the second time I had pearl milk tea, a few years later, after I realized I actually liked tea (that is, Western black tea, not the ubiquitous oolong tea at Chinese restaurants) I loved it. Who knew that all you had to do was add cream and sugar? And, well, tapioca balls.

Me and the dog on the couch. My real workspace is me and the dog sitting on the couch all day.

What's the one mistake you make over and over on the computer?

I'm not sure if I make this mistake over and over, but I've made it twice in the last few weeks: marking all feeds as read in NetNewsWire by accident.

Marking all feeds as read is not undoable, and the keyboard shortcut to mark all items as read is "k," which is incredibly easy to accidentally hit. Especially on the "all new items" selection. Sometimes by a doggie.

Sigh.

ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT.

This probably my answer only because the rage is still so fresh in my mind.

Related: in the Union Square dog run a little while ago, we met a dog named George Michael. The owner said they were adopting another dog, and naming it Maeby.