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the day my albums said "all your space are belong to us"

Listening to:	Hang On Mike, the Candy Butchers
Reading:	?
Weather:	12! Sunny

It's both sad and freeing. I got rid of my vinyl record collection. I had around 300 albums or so. I really cherished those things for a long time. I walked literally miles in the snow to get The Wall when Pink Floyd released it. It was one of my cool few that had album graffiti (just outside the label in the vinyl virtually all LP's had numbers etched in, and the occasional few had a little message, a few words, or a symbol also etched in). For some artists I had more than a dozen albums, for many just one or two. I had a few rarities, the It's A Beautiful Day album with White Bird, for example. Every year at midnight on February 8 I got up and put the needle on Yer Birthday from the white album super loud to wake up Livi (she was born at 12:01 am on Feb 9, 1991). Till last year when I double-clicked it in my iTunes library (my computer is hooked up to my home stereo, so it stil was cranked, though the mp3 was sadly missing the cracks and pops as well as some of the bass and lower-mids).

But since I moved my huge teak stereo case to the other wall a couple of years ago, I never got around to hooking up the turntable again. That giant thing had to go (the weight of the records had actually damaged one of the shelves), so getting rid of the stereo case it made sense to me to say goodbye to the records, too. I'll really miss the large-scale cover art that CD's can't have. I'll miss a bunch of the music that'll never come out on CD, or that I'll never end up buying in that format (BTW, don't bother ever getting the Wall on CD, it's digitally remastered, and sounds like shit cuz they remixed it, too). Many of my favorites are in their 3rd incarnation in this house -- I had about 200 cassette tapes from the 80's, many were albums I owned on vinyl, and now I've replaced scads of those yet again in the hundreds of CD's I'm trying to find room for.

As much as I love the idea of no media at all, just 1's and 0's on a harddrive, I can't quite afford the harddrive space because I'm not willing to only own compressed versions of my favorites. No matter how high the sampling rate, mp3 is a highly compressed format, and there's a huge difference when you're listening on the good speakers. Though I have to say, on my computer speakers or through headphones, mp3's are just fine, most of the time. Not Steely Dan, though.

Speaking of the Dan, I'm totally hooked on the Candy Butchers! Shades of the best classic britpop like the Beatles, Queen, Elton John, a little wavy hint of Squeeze, plus a touch of Billy Joel and some others. But it sounds fresh! How does Mike Viola do it? Here's the thing, it's refined quality vocal pop, my absolute favorite flavor. Plus he's got the very interesting and non-formulaic harmonic structures of Difford and Tilbrook or Elvis Costello. Soaring phat stuff. And lyrics, too! Bravo. If you don't like "What To Do With Michael," I'll buy your CD back from you. Go get it on Amazon, used for $5 plus shipping. So worth it. Sorry for the hard sell, but this record really rules. Even if you don't like Adam Curry, (G!) he deserves 2 thumbs up for turning me on to the Candy Butchers by playing that song. I had already ordered the album and he played it on a second show just a couple days later.

Yeah, I still listen to Adam's DSC, almost every episode, almost. It and TWiT are the only two podcasts I regularly listen to. I occasionally stream something from IT Conversations when I'm housecleaning or something, and they're hit or miss for my taste, but the hits are great. I've tried so many other podcasts, and they just don't hold my attention. Frequently the audio quality is just unbearable, but just as often the shows are Winer-style ramblings that bore the shit out of me. Don't get me wrong, I love Dave Winer's interesting insights, but when he just leaves the mic open on a noisy room of his breakfast conversation, come on, dude, you ain't Elvis. And many of his meandering stream-of-consciousness rants could be edited down to about 10% of their length and be brilliant.

So I was listening to TWiT 30 (live from the Podcast Expo) yesterday on my way home from Stonewall Jackson resort and conf center, and they started talking about geocaching. What the? I never heard of it. So I turn it up a bit and listen on. Apparently GPS geeks hide little stashes of silly shit with logbooks and tiny pencils in them, and then log the coordinates and some instructions on this website. The rules are take something, leave something, sign the logbook. Then you get on the website and put in a little entry about your success (or failure). It reminds me of Where's George? which I continue to add to, even though no one ever has found any of my bills. OK, you're thinking, yeah, but there aren't any geocaches out here in the boondocks of WV. You couldn't be more wrong. There are shitloads of them right here in little old Preston County, even. Along rail trails, in mini-marts and old coke ovens, up trees. It's just nuts. Put it your zip code and see if I'm lying.

I haven't had a chance to get back to tweaking my cool mouse-over Hungry Mutha picture page, so hopefully that'll prioritize itself sometime this weekend. My pantry should take priority, though, since I did the demolition like 6 weeks ago. That temporary shelving unit I put up in the kitchen is getting dusty, not boding well for it's actual temporariness, yo.

A'ight, have a groovalicious weekend!

permalink posted by cat 7:33 AM

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