The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

Here’s another installment in my series of articles on what I’m playing on my various audio devices at home, in the office and on the road.

Fun’s single We Are Young crosses a number of borders: it plays on SiriusXm’s Alt Nation and got covered in Glee (ugh), switches tempos, brings in Janelle Monae for vocals that aren’t normally part of their oeuvre and bounces between catchy indie pop tune and anthem.

(Once upon a time, I liked Glee. It started quite strong, but started to sag in the second season when they wrapped up stories a little too quickly, after which the storylines became too-transparent excuses to fit in specific songs. That’s all right; I try to keep my TV-watching to a minimum anyway.)

If you could travel back to my DJ days at Crazy Go Nuts University’s Clark Hall Pub and tell me that I’d like a band featuring the guitarist from Blind Melon, I’d probably have slapped you with a glove and said “You, suh, have insulted mah hon-uh! Ah dee-mand satisfaction!”

But you’d have been right: AWOLNATION’s lead guitarist Christopher Thorn used to be in that awful band. That’s the beauty of music: there’s always one more note to play; one more chance to redeem yourself. The video above is for their track Not Your Fault.

With all the travel I’ve been doing lately, “Home is a nice place to visit” is my new catchphrase. I’m fine with that; I figure that if you’re going to have a midlife (“midlife crisis” is the wrong term to use, unless in the line “Best midlife crisis EVER!”), you might as well do the things you love, and for me, one of them is seeing new places, meeting new people and doing new things.

In the process of bouncing about from place to place, I’ve discovered that I can get by with far less stuff. Give me the computing gear in my bag, a camera, my accordion, a decent change of clothes and my music library and I’m good to go. Having the music library (which fits on a portable hard drive these days) wherever I go helps me stay centred no matter where I am, and I’ve got a playlist of songs specifically for travelling. The Wombats’ Jump into the Fog is on that playlist.

Every time I hear the guitar riff from MuteMath’s Blood Pressure, I want to start singing “Stop wastin’ my time / You know what I want” and launch into Spinal Tap’s Gimme Some Money. It’s a great tune for driving down the highway.

My phone is my alarm clock, and it’s currently set to wake me up with the St. Lucia remix of Don’t Stop by Foster the People. If this doesn’t get me out of bed, nothing will.

(Along with M83’s Midnight City, this song seems to be part of the conspiracy to bring the saxophone back into pop music. Remember when songs had to have a sax solo?)

I think more grocery stores should do this.

Photo found via Jakob Wallinger.

Back in the seventies and eighties, there were a number of shows featuring competitions between casts of different TV shows from the major networks, which were then limited to ABC, CBS and NBC. This was well before the internet as we know it today and just at the start of the age of the VCR (its existence was threatened by lawsuits from the movie studios until 1984), so it was much easier to turn television shows into events. The most notable of these shows was Battle of the Network Stars, which featured casts from all three networks competing in unstaged, unrehearsed physical competitions.

Also notable: the All-Star editions of Family Feud – the original one, with Richard Dawson as host (a role he parodied as “Killian” in The Running Man). The video above features the casts of The Love Boat and WKRP in Cincinnati facing off against one another, and it was a pretty amusing episode.

Click to see at full size.

I’m not quite tired of these “What People Think [People from some category] Do” posters just yet. Send this to your favourite civil servant!

Here’s a handy chart showing you who thinks what of His Worship (an honorific I have trouble applying to David Miller, never mind this joke in office.)

Here are nine minutes and ten seconds of the videos that people shared like crazy during the month of January. There’s a little swearing in a couple of the videos, largely because they depict scenes that would make us, as observing third parties, say “How did they ever expect that would end well?”

My favourite of the videos in this digest is Ceiling Fan Trick, shown below:

Pure comedy gold.

Here’s a short film by Brent Hoff (editor of the DVD magazine Wholphin) showing a competition to see who can produce the most love, as determined by MRI scans of their brains. Each of the competitors was given five minutes in an fMRI machine, during which time they had to think of someone they loved and “love them as hard as they could”.

The MRI would be used to monitor those areas of the brain involved in producing the neurochemicals associated with love – dopamine, serotonin, ocytocin and vasopressin – and measure their output. These pathways converge in a spot called the nucleus accumbens, which is one of the parts of the brains that would be watched closely. The winner, at least by the objective standard of this competition, would be the person who generated the most activity in those brain parts.

The competition took place at Stanford’s Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging with the help of research director Bob Dougherty and scientific director Melina Uncapher.

Among the people in the competition: a 75-year-old man who was happily married for 50 years, the young woman with a new sweetheart, a student who’s never been in love but likes to think about it in abstract terms, a ten-year-old boy thinking of his newborn cousin and a guy trying to get over his ex (my heart went out to this poor fella). What was just as interesting as the results were how the people in the competition reacted to the whole experience.

I’m going to leave it up to the neuroscientists and philosophers to debate whether or not you can actually measure love with an MRI and delve into the “Do we really have souls, or its it just chemicals?” debate, and they’re free to do so in the comments.