Thanks for all the fish

I've now shut this blog down completely, in accordance with my plans. To those of you that contributed to it with comments or time, thank you. Its surprising how much a part of my life this blog was, and how difficult it was to give up. Even now, I can't bring myself to just click the 'delete blog' button. to whit, I have gone through and individually deleted all the posts here, with the exception of this one, and a few few others that will remain on in perpetuity.

Soapy 'burbs, the iTunes Cartel, and God Bless Instant Gratification

I originally heard of this band, Cities of Foam, two years ago, durring pepsi's first "buy our soda and get free itunes downloads" promotion. Being a pepsi swilling cheapskate, I was all over this promotion. I installed iTunes @ work and began downloading free music like a crack addict who was given the keys to the lab. Another of the tricksey and devious schemes iTunes implemented was a 'music spotlight' where they would have 2 or 3 songs from random artists available for free download for a week, in hopes of you purchasing more music by the same artist. Remember kids, the first one's free.

So there it was, Out of Reach by Cities of Foam, smiling benignly at me from the corner of my iTunes window.

what the hell I thought, it's free after all

I listened to the 30 second teaser they had, hard to get a handle on the song from just that. So I downloaded it. OMG, fucking awesome.

Haunting vocals by london jazz singer Nia Lynn overtop what sounds uncannily like trip-hop. Only it's trip-hop stripped bare of it's electronic regalia and reduced to a subdued bass line and acoustic guitar.

this is going somewhere, I promise...

loved the song, but too cheap to buy the rest of the album. I made a vain search on limewire for the rest of it. Wouldn't you know, my music is too esoteric for that bunch of file-swapping louts. Not a single return.

Two years pass, the song remains in several playlists and surfaces into regular rotation every once in a while.

December 2005 rolls around and I purchase a secksey new computer. Now comes the tedious process of moving all the non-work related files from my work PC to my home PC, including 7gb of music and about 1gb of pictures and miscellaneous files. The files have been long since moved over via a 1gb jump drive, but I have been putting off the arduous task of copying all my music files to my home PC. I can burn them all to disk and keep the number down to 8 disks of music provided I don't convert to CDFS during the burn process. That's still a lot of time wasted at work, and when 5pm rolls around, the last thing I want to do is hang around burning CD's. So it hadn't been done yet.

This weekend, before leaving work, I set up a gotomypc session on my PC. Gotomypc, for those that don't know, is a service that enables you to access a computer remotely from any computer connected to the internet (for a small fee of course). My company uses it extensively when supporting franchise owners who have PC trouble. I am the keeper of the gotomypc account. It's good to be the king >:]

So, gotomypc session enabled I come home and begin copying my entire music folder to my personal PC. I set the session timeout at 30 hours and go about my business. Saturday at 5pm the transfer finally completes. I have all my music! Yay! I start going through the lists of artists, albums, and songs now populating my media player, listening to gems that I hadn't listened to in ages.

(we're getting back on track now, I promise)

nestled in my songlist is Out of Reach by Cities of Foam. So I listen to it, still fucking good. I decide to google the band to see if there's any news (or perhaps another free download) of them. I find their website (linked above). They have 30 second blurbs of all the songs on their album. All fucking great. So in a whim of self gratification (not that kind children, get your minds out of the gutter), I decide that if they have a way to purchase and download the songs, I will.

No Luck, but they have a link to Amazon. mayhap I can download the songs there...no love. To make things worse, they want $18.00 plus shipping to get me the CD, and it takes 5 days before the blasted thing is even shipped! Way too long for me.

Then Cali, whom I happen to be chatting with, has a wonderful idea. Why not buy the album from iTunes? So back to the crack shack I go. Download iTunes, install, wonder of wonders I remember my account password. There it is, the whole fucking album for a whopping $10.00! Needless to say within 5 minutes time I had dropped the electronic 10-spot and downloaded 14 fantastic songs, which I am currently listening to.

Of course there is the minor problem that I use Windows Media Player, not iTunes, but that is easilly fixed. mp3 conversion ftw!

back to the point....does anyone remember where I was going with this?

Ah well, this is why I'm not a good story teller. I try to provide backstory, so that no nuance is lost in the actual story, and invariably the whole thing gets muddled.

The point..the point...Oh yes. Go get the Cities of Foam album A Great Day for the Race. Download from iTunes for instant enjoyment, or be a wuss and order it from Amazon.

Contentless: check
Rambling: check
Grammatical/Spelling errors: legion

Mediocrity achieved! Watch the fingers, they may blister.

p.s. logo still pooched, sigh

EDIT: new logo up, needs some tweakin though

The Don's of Seseme Street

EDIT: Now with 100% more picture-phone goodness.

So people credit the rise of organized crime with the prohibition movement. Enterprising persons found ways to supply america with its booze. Things got a little hairy for the Mafia when prohibition ended. They probobly had many meetings in smoke filled rooms looking for new avenues of revenue. Prostitution? Drugs? Protection? All these things work ok for organized crime, but they were always looking for something new, something better, something more lucrative.

Until the arrival of the 70's, they had as yet, not found that something more. Then a little public show, geared towards children became popular. Seseme Street was born. Here was a market the mafia could get into. Parents will pay an inordinant amount of money to placate their children. Reason being, no doubt, the parent's deep seeded belief that their children will turn out to be good people if the kids are happy all the time. (As opposed to also teaching their kids discipline, respect, and accountability but that's another post for another day) So the Mafia, no doubt, saw the desperation of the parents, and more importantly, the Mafia saw the pocket books of these proto yuppies. In typical Mafia fashion, they infultrated Seseme Street Live and turned it to their own nefarious ends.

Which leads to this Saturday past. My daughter and I headed downtown to the convention center to partake in a little Elmo and Big Bird up close and personal. I had secured 2 tickets through work, which meant the seats were pretty good. We arrived about 1/2 an hour before the show. I had also managed to land a parking spot in the garage through work, which saved me a little money.

I pulled up to the garage, shocked to find that the plebs (who didn't secure tickets and garage passes through work) had to shell out 10 bucks to park. We walked inside and parked right next to the entry door was a souvenier stand selling all manner of Seseme Street related pariphanaelia. I thought my daughter should have a little something to commemorate this auspicious event (though it's highly doubtful she'll actually remember them). So I walked up and asked the gentleman how much a shirt would be.

"$18 dollars" he says
"No, a children's shirt. I don't need one for myself."
"$18 dollars. If you want one it's $28."

Mouth agog, I hand over a 20. By this time, my daughter has spied other children clutching a toy of inestimal interest to 2 year olds. It's an elmo toy that features the red haird bastard seated atop a light, with 3...tentacles protruding from the light (also lit in different colors). When the button is held down the top portion (light and elmo) spin arround and the tentacles stretch out so you get a large glowing disk, that I am sure is in no way a danger for children to be hit by. Scanning the souvenier stand I see the blasted device. Another $15 gets funneled into the Mafia coffers.



We now head to find our seats. Children are milling arround all over, with their parents trying to maintain a modicum of control. In all I estimate there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 300,000 children in attendance this saturday night. 15 minutes before the show starts Big Bird comes over the PA to let everyone know the show will be starting soon. My daughter pauses in her manic elmo whirring to look arround expectantly for the big man himself.

Presently the lights dim and the whole crew comes out to begin the show. I'll spare you the details of this unrivaled spectacle of song and dance, but will leave you with the moral of the story. A good night's sleep, along with healthy food and good hygene are things everyone needs. Overall I would say everyone's performance was excellent, except for Zoey. I hate that little bitch...stupid pet rock....

One highlight of the evening was the 'intermission'. Yes, they had an intermission for the hour long show. Soon as the lights came up, the cotton candy and sno cone venders were out in force along with a man carrying nothing but 1000 elmo helium balloons. $10 balloons mind you.



By the end of the intermission, the children were intensifying their sugar highs and I had watched no less than 5 balloons sail majestically up towards the ceiling of the Center. The balloon man left, empty handed.

At the end of the show, the children were filed out by their parents who looked as though they had just been run through a ringer. The Don's were $60+ richer from me alone, and I got a discount on the tickets. I'm sure they're laughing all the way to their (swiss) banks.

My daughter had a great time, and I did as well watching her face lilght up seeing these famous people so closely.

Unabashed Pride

So my daughter turned 2 in September, and I have just gotten my hands on some electronic copies of the various pictures that were taken. None of them are terribly large, but I wanted to put them up anyways. So without further ado...


I wonder at times like this how long blogger will be arround. Will my daughter be able to read this blog as an adult? Can she come to this url 18 years from now and scroll through years of archives to find this post (Hi Sweetpea!) and see her adorable little face all over this thing. Will my image host even be arround anymore? Will I have to move all my pictures to a different host 10 years from now b/c imageshak has gone under?

I guess time will tell.



and one last picture, now I have to go back to work.

Hard at Work

Fresh from the pumpkin patch, those flowers apparently needed watering, good thing there was an industrious toddler arround to fix the problem.