Here’s an interesting idea: someone took a recording of T.S. Eliot reading The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and added the vamp from Portishead’s Sour Times — which you couldn’t escape back in 1995 — as background music. It’s not bad, but I think it would work better if more variety could’ve been worked into the music (this sounds like a job for Boston-based mash-up wizard Luke “Lenlow” Enlow!).
For those of you with the gear and talent — Karl Mohr, I’m lookin’ at you — here’s a link to Eliot reading Prufrock sans music [3.9 MB MP3 file]. Culture jammers might have some fun subverting the whole thing by mixing in Yakety Sax (the theme to the Benny Hill Show) as the background tune.
No, not the “King of Pederasty Pop” Michael Jackson, but the “Beer Hunter”/Scotch expert Michael Jackson. He had Parkinson’s disease and died earlier this morning.
Most of what I know about beer came from Mr. Jackson, thanks to his Great Beer Guide as well as his Beer Hunter TV series. That’s why I plan to salute him with a toast with some fine Belgian beer, of which he was especially fond.
Requiescat in pace, Good Sir.
This is how I get to work most days.
Over at The Sietch Blog: an essay titled How to Ride Your Bike to Work. It’s cheap, safe and easier than you think!
(This article was cross-posted to Global Nerdy.)
Possible dream jobs.
The poll posed these two questions to adults:
The results:
Both my parents were doctors, so at the age of 5, I wanted to be a doctor when I grew up. This was in the early seventies, and the way I hear my parents tell it, those were some of the best years to be in medicine, from a money-making point of view.
However, at around age 7, I discovered space and astronomy books. I was glued to the TV set when the Apollo-Soyuz mission took place and followed any news about the not-ready-for-flight space shuttle, which was stilled named the Constitution. (A letter-writing campaign from Star Trek fans would later make them rechristen it as the Enterprise.) I thought I might make a good astronomer, space scientist or rocket engineer.
In my teen years, I met my friend Pavel Rozalski, whose dad did some computer/electronics work at a glass company, and he got me into computers. We developed a sort of early Apple Computer working relationship while working on our science fair projects: Pavel played the “Woz” role doing much of the building of our simulator of AND, OR, NAND and NOR gates, while I was the “Jobs” guy, doing a lot of the writing of reports and talking to the judges. Our heroes were the guys who did stuff out of their garages — Woz and Jobs, as well as Hewlett and Packard. From then on, I was hooked on computers. I wanted to do something computer-related when I grew up.
I was also a dabbler in music and graphic arts (especially cartooning — most people at Crazy Go Nuts University know me for being a DJ and a cartoonist rather than an engineering and computer science major), so I always hoped that there’d be a way to combine those two loves with computers, perhaps with some chatting with people thrown in.
I remember reading an article in Creative Computing, one of the premier computer hobbyist magazines of the late 1970s and early 1980s. In that article, a programmer predicted that in the next coupel of decades, computer programmers might get the same sort of recognition as rock stars. I remember thinking, “Yeah, I’d like that.”
I showed the article to a friend of mine who laughed at me. “That’s stupid. That’s why I’m going to be a rock drummer. It’ll be way better — you’ll be coming home, all tired from work, ready to die, and I’ll be onstage and on TV in front of screaming chicks, getting high off the audience’s smoke.”
(Dude: been there, done that. With an effin’ accordion. How ’bout you?)
Finally, at the end of my teens — or maybe just after — I became aware of Guy Kawasaki, who held an interesting position at Apple: Technical Evangelist. I remember thinking “That’s a cool job…maybe I’d like to do that someday.” Since then, Guy’s been a role model of mine.
All this is an explanation for my generally good mood: I’m working at my dream job.
Me and Chad Fowler playing the opening number for an evening keynote at the RailsConf 2007 conference.
Here are some scenes from last Friday night, when I joined my old pal from Crazy Go Nuts University, Karl Mohr for his last number of the evening, the maudlin yet somehow catchy Can Your Remains Be Buried With Mine? at the Tranzac Club:
(Now that I look at the photos, I think I may need to explain what’s going on at a later time…)
You can see more photos from the performance in this online album set up by photographer Roman Bershadsky.
I was sick in bed with a really bad cold for most of the weekend. I alternated between sleeping, drinking lots of juice and water, watching a little TV (I’d never seen Good Will Hunting before) and a little light surfing on the laptop.
While poking about the web, I stumbled into a site I’d never seen before: the TV Tropes wiki. It started out as a catalogue of TV writing tricks of the trade, formulas and cliches, but has expanded slightly to incorporate movies, literature and even videogames. Here are just a few of the tropes you’ll find on this site:
If you don’t know where to start, go visit the wiki and hit the “Random Item” button at the top of the page, then start following links. It’s an entertaining read.
