The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

Dante and Randall from Clerks: a great example of how loser friends
— loveable loser friends, to be sure, but still loser friends — can hold you back.

An article recently posted to PandoDaily with the rather ominous-sounding title Young People are Screwed…Here’s How to Survive has this as its final piece of advice:

Don’t worry about your network. Worry about your friends.

If you have successful friends, you will be successful. It’s pretty much that simple. If you hang out with a bunch of losers, you too will adopt their loser ways and not achieve anything. Regardless of whether or not you go out and network, please make sure that your friends are ambitious and hard working people who you admire.

For some, this means that they will have to move on from their high school buddies. For others, it means that they will need to have friends who are older than they are. Some people will have to learn new skills in order to penetrate the friend groups that they would like to join.

But if you hang out with quality people, you won’t need to worry about networking. Your friends will be your network. The only reason you are reading this article is because Sarah Lacy has a lot of friends who are very high quality, and they not only supported her PandoDaily ambition, but also put money into it. And even though she is nobody, she does have quality friends.

It works. I’ve seen it work innumerable times. Your friends bring you up or pull you down. There’s no in-between. Make sure they are pulling you up.

The suggestion may seem harsh and something straight out of Mean Girls, but it’s probably not all that far from what many folks’ moms and dads say: be careful of the company you keep. Don’t fall in with a bad crowd. That sort of thing.

“Your friends are fucking dicks and assholes,” an acquaintance of mine once said, little bits of spittle and other ejecta flying from his mouth as he expressed his utter disdain. He was referring my circle of friends from Toronto’s DemoCamp scene: techies, businesspeople and creatives who liked getting together to talk about the stuff they were making, and how to energize the city’s tech and startup scene. They in fact were warm, welcoming and kind to him; it’s just that he felt far more comfortable around a less ambitious crowd and most at home with people you’d swear were characters from Portlandia:

…you know, the sort of people who complain that one of the first questions people in my circles ask is “What do you do?” They hate the question because they don’t like their answer.

Cops, emergency room doctors, and insurance actuarists all know it. They realize how many crazy impossible things happen all the time.

A burglar gets stuck in a chimney, a truck driver in a head on collision is thrown out the front window and lands on his feet, walks away; a wild antelope knocks a man off his bike; a candle at a wedding sets the bride’s hair on fire; someone fishing off a backyard dock catches a huge man-size shark. In former times these unlikely events would be private, known only as rumors, stories a friend of a friend told, easily doubted and not really believed.

But today they are on YouTube, and they fill our vision. You can see them yourself. Each of these weird freakish events just mentioned can be found on YouTube, seen by millions.

— Kevin Kelly, The Improbable is the New Normal

I’d heard that a power transmission tower shaped liked Mickey Mouse’s head existed outside the creepily-conformist gated community Celebration, Florida, but I had to see it for myself. I snapped this photo on Saturday while travelling on the I-4 going back to Tampa from Port Canaveral (where the cruise I went on started and ended).

I spotted these bottles of Pat’s Ho-Made BBQ Sauce at Bearss Groves Market in Tampa on Sunday and couldn’t resist snapping a picture. The folks at BBQSauceReviews.com found the name amusing, but weren’t as impressed with the sauce, saying it was a bit on the bland side and giving it a 3 out of 5 rating. Being “Ho-made”, it should be spicy, a little bit dirty, and you should feel both satisfied and shamed after having some.

An online acquaintance of mine stumbled across this gem left for waitstaff by a patron:

Some suggested interpretations of this message include:

• “You may have already suspected that I was an asshole, but I have left you some documentation just in case.”
• “I’m incredibly angry and not entirely sure who to blame so i lash out at everyone around me.”
• “I’m mad about having to pay to keep the country running, and I’ve decided the most effective way to make my displeasure with this governmental policy known to the people responsible is to take it out my impotent rage on waitresses.”

And just to put things in perspective:

They may look like Tea Partiers and fire-and-brimstone preachers, but these are actually swingers from the 1960s and their personal ads. Is it me, or do they look at least 10 years older than their posted ages?

Thanks to spoon for the pic!

If you’re of a certain generation, you’ll remember this:
Fisher Price’s clever music box made up to look like a record player.

It’s a whole new year, which means that it’s time for the music blog Said the Gramophone to compile its list of the best songs of the previous year. As I’ve written before, I generally find “best of the previous year” lists to be of little value, but Said the Gramophone’s list is one of the exceptions. As always, their tastes lean towards the indie, but they’re not too hipster to pick a pop gem (in fact, Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call Me Maybe made the #1 slot of the list this year). Music, like life, is too large and important to look at through just one window, so any selection that’s not afraid to throw Nicki Minaj in with Rufus Wainwright, mix some Usher with Django Django, or combine Bonnie “Prince” Billy with PSY deserves some attention.

In their explanation of the list, they write:

Said the Gramophone is one of the oldest musicblogs. We try to do just two things, well:finding good songs, and writing about them. We don’t mess about with tour-dates, videos or advertising. We post new songs and old songs, write clumsy dreams of what we hear. If this is your first time here, I hope you’ll bookmark us or subscribe via RSS. You can also follow me on Twitter.

Of these 100 songs, approximately 71 are fronted by men, 29 by women. 53 acts are American, 24 are Canadian, 10 are British, 2 are Swedish, 2 are Ghanaian, 2 are French, and there is one Kiwi, one Australian, one Dane, one Korean, one Nigerian, one Chinese and one Finn. This is the way it worked out; it certainly ain’t perfect.

My favourite songs of the year do not necessarily speak to my favourite albums of the year. But if you want full-length records that are the best, the best, these were my ten in 2012: Micachu & the Shapes’ Never, Taylor Swift’s Red, Eric Chenaux’s Guitar & Voice, the Chromatics’ Kill For Love, Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!, James Irwin’s Western Transport, Damien Jurado’s Maraqopa, Avec pas d’casque’sAstronomie, PS I Love You’s Death Dreams and Eternal Summers’ Correct Behavior.

Some songs that you heard in 2012 may have been omitted from this tally because I heard them before this year, and included them in my Best of 2011. For example works by Gotye, TEEN, Bry Webb, Grimes and Azealia Banks.

The list isn’t just one you can read; it’s one you can listen to as well. Every song in the list has a link to someplace where you can hear it online and another link to where you can buy it. You can also download all the songs from the following locations:

• songs 1-33 (161mb)
• songs 34-67 (162mb)
• songs 67-100 (146mb)

You can also download the entire set from this mirror or this mirror.

These won’t be available forever, so the sooner you get these downloads, the better!