The Situation As It Stands

Ok, first The Bad News: Our planet, according to our brightest and best, is getting warmer at a disturbing rate. Apparently, scientists are calling this "Global Warming." Who knew?

The Good News: Sting is on the case! And not just Sting! Depressed Nineties Guy has joined the fight, as well as that funny-smelling guy who sat behind you in English class's favorite band, not to mention Bon Jovi, a woman old enough to be your mom (not to be confused with Jon Bon Jovi), Snoop Dizzle (f'shizzle), that one dude who sang that one song that all the girls liked last year, and thank the gods, Metallica!

WE'RE SAVED!!!!!!

Yes, after having successfully defeated global poverty in 2005 (that happened, right?), the Recording Industry is once again banding together (yuk yuk) to defeat Earth's most fearsome foe yet: Carbon Dioxide Emissions!

Bless you, Recording Industry! Bless you, Sting! Bling!

Dear World,

Thank you for your constant efforts to keep me informed of Paris Hilton's whereabouts, what she is drinking, driving, wearing, eating, and fornicating with. Thank you for making sure that I can't turn on a radio, television, or internet browser without receiving an up-to-the-minute account of what exactly Ms. Hilton is doing, in any possible sense of the word. However, it pains me to inform you that I have no interest whatsoever in Miss Hilton's activities, nor can I conceive of any future situation where I might become interested in such information, unless it turns out that she is some sort of alien invader bent on the destruction of Earth. So, unless she suddenly becomes 20 stories tall and starts eating city dwellers by the bus load, don't bother telling me.

Also, and I don't want to seem ungrateful for your years of hard work, but I feel compelled to tell you before you expend any more energy on this that I have never cared about Princess Diana, God rest her soul. I still don't care what her children are doing, or how they feel about her, now that she's gone. Don't get me wrong, I hope that she is now in heaven, and I bear no ill will towards her bereaved family and friends, if famous people can have friends (I have my doubts). Nonetheless, I feel no need whatsoever to hear or see anything about her at all. I don't care. I have never cared. She died when I was 13 years old, and before she died, I had no idea that she had ever existed. Ten years later, I still just think of her (on the rare occasion that I think of her at all) as the dead broad with the bad haircut. A more interesting monarch would have had her coiffeur beheaded.

So, there you have it. Thanks for keeping me informed, but no thanks.

Ok, whew. Sorry everybody for the self-indulgent rant. I realize that both of my readers probably share some portion of my sentiments.

Icky Thump (Hot Dog, A New White Stripes Album)!

After ten years, six albums and one cliche introductory sentence to a blog post by yours truly, The White Stripes still rock. If you've never liked them, you probably aren't about to start now. If you've always liked them, you'll either love this album, or you're crazy. One of the two. You could call this album a return to form after their 2005 album Get Behind Me Satan, there are no songs played on a marimba on this album, no piano-driven songs whatsoever, and very few (but still some) lyrics which could be construed as pining for a deceased Rita Hayworth (I'm not kidding, there were lots of these on Get Behind Me Satan). Yup, the main component of Icky Thump is the Stripes' distinctive brand of heavy blues-rock, with odd pieces of Country and Cabaret stylings thrown into the mix. Here's a song-by-song breakdown of some of the album's hightlights, in which I shall attempt to be brief:

1. Icky Thump: The first single and title track includes a great, late-Zeppelin-esque riff, Jack trading solos with himself on guitar and what I believe is a vintage synthesizer, and great fast-rhyming lyrics such as: "Redhead senorita lookin' dead came to, said "need a bed?" en espanol..." Ok, maybe you'd need to hear it to get what I'm talking about. It's cool, trust me.

4. Conquest: This song is great. It appears to be a cover of someone named Corky Robbins, who I am not cultured enough to be familiar with. I imagine that in its original form, it was a latin-sounding jazzy thing, and in some sense it still is, except that it's played by The White Stripes. It's got some great trumpet work on it (by a rarity on a White Stripes album, a session musician), and one of Jack's best vocal performances to date.

8. Little Cream Soda: I wouldn't have guessed that a song with such a silly name could rock so hard. The vocals are something like early Dylan talkin' blues, and the guitar is something like Randy Rhoads heavy metal, though there's no 5-minute fretboard-tapping solo.

9. Rag and Bone: This may be my favorite song on the album, though I probably wouldn't call it the best song on the album, if the distinction makes any sense to you. The verses are a mix of Jack and Meg talking to each other and Jack in song imploring the listener to give them a bunch of junk, which they can find a use for. I can't explain it any better than that. It's hilarious.

13. Effect and Cause: Part of the Stripes' appeal are the simple yet often very clever lyrics of their songs, and this song is loaded with them. It's very fun.

Anyhoo, that's almost all I've got to say about that. It's an awesome album, and if you're the sort of person who likes the White Stripes, you'll like it. Two more side notes before we're done:
First, the White Stripes are weirdos. From their obsession with the number 3 to their color-coordination to their pretending to be brother and sister to writing large pieces of an album about being in love with Rita Hayworth, notwithstanding that a lot of this is probably shtick, they are odd people. They are also awesome. They make cool music that is very fun to listen to, and they're very good performers if you ever get to see them live. Neil and I saw them in Detroit some years back, and for most of the show Jack pretended to think that they were in Toledo ("Thank you, Toledo! It's great to be here!"). Maybe you'd have to be there, but it was funny.
Second, and this is about the comments: I love it when people comment on my blog. It doesn't validate my existence, really, but it does validate the small part of my existence which I spend writing this blog. Please, comment on my posts if you have something to say, or even if you haven't (Lord knows, I haven't). However, before you comment, if you think that you have something witty and clever to say about Meg White's drumming, you're probably wrong. Can't say I didn't warn you.

"She wrote upon it..."

Rather frequently at work we get mail for either the building's previous occupants or for someone who, to the best of my knowledge, has never lived or worked here. Consequently, a few times per week when I get the mail, I have to write "RETURN TO SENDER" across the front of one or two envelopes, and put them back into the mailbox. This is normal. I'm sure this happens to lots of people the world over every day. The trouble is that every single time I do this, I find that the Elvis Presley hit "Return to Sender" is stuck in my head for at least the next hour. Now, I love this song. It's a great song. But such frequent mental exposure to it is beginning to drive me a little batty. Even when I deliberately think of another catchy song while writing on the envelopes and re-depositing them in the mailbox, a few minutes later I'll catch myself humming

I gave a letter to the pooooooostman,
He put it in his sack
(Duh dun duh dun duh dun duh dun - I also hum the bass line)
Bright and early next mooooooooornin'
He brought my letter back
(She wrote upon it)

RETURN TO SENDER!
ADDRESS UNKNOWN!
NO SUCH NUMBER!
NO SUCH ZONE!
WE HAD A QUARREL
A LOVER'S SPAT
I write I'm sorry, but my letter keeps coming back
(Duh dun duh dun duh dun duh dun....)

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH! Somebody help me. Please.

If Only For The Sake Of Updating

Most of the other bloggers I read seem to be on some sort of hiatus of late, so I guess that's my excuse to anyone who says that I should be more on top of things. Of course, perhaps they've also taken a break from reading blogs, and so my excuse will fall on deaf ears. Either way, I'm updating now, and have managed to spend two, wait--three whole sentences talking about nothing but updating, or not updating. Sweet. It's June now, for those of you who don't own calendars, Memorial day already seems like a distant memory, which in my book means that it's officially Summer. Our softball team is still whatever the opposite of undefeated is (repeatedly defeated, if explanation is needed), but I for one am still having a great time with it. I've been playing infield all season, which might have something to do with the team's woes (not to be confused with "whoas"), but I prefer not to think of it that way. I even played shortstop for a few innings a couple of weeks ago. I tried to protest with strains of "isn't that where the best defensive player is supposed to play?" but time was short (no pun intended), and to the infield I did go. Sigh. For no reason whatsoever, I'm going to spend the rest of the post talking about some of the media I've consumed of late:

Music:
I've been on something of a Band kick for the past week or so (capital B), after putting my seldom-used copy of The Basement Tapes in my car's CD player on a whim. It's one of the few Bob Dylan-related things I've bought that I didn't really like, in fact I don't think I'd played it more than once since purchasing it some years ago, before college. I hadn't even ripped it onto my computer. Since then, I'd become something of a fan of The Band, since checking The Last Waltz out of the college library a few years back, and purchasing their first two albums shortly thereafter. I can still hear what initially turned me off of The Basement Tapes when I first heard the two-CD set: Bob Dylan barely sings on the whole album, but he does speak on quite a few tracks, and many (perhaps most) of the lyrics on the thing are less coherent even than Dylan's previous three albums, which were filled mostly with psychedelic imagery and twangy Fender country blues, with some beat-poet aesthetic thrown in for good measure. Suffice to say that while The Basement Tapes were made between two of Dylan's best (and very different) albums (Blonde On Blonde and John Wesley Harding), they really don't represent him at his best, and I bought the CDs because I was a fan of Bob Dylan. Also, while it has been claimed that some of the recordings were doctored with overdubs later (neither here nor there as far as I'm concerned), the "album" is still essentially six guys goofing off in a basement with musical instruments and home recording equipment in 1967, so the sound quality is far from (shall we say) pristine. What surprised me was how much of the album (primarily The Band's numbers, and a few Dylan gems) I really really liked this time around. There's a reason that this thing was one of the very first (and almost certainly the most famous) bootleg recordings for years before it was officially released by Columbia. Anyways, I'm not going to tell you to run out and buy the thing as quickly as you can. The Band's music isn't (or wasn't for me) all that accessible on your first listen on nearly any level. There really aren't catchy pop hooks, polished (or, for that matter, Polish) vocals, or anything of the kind to draw you in at first. I just really like it, that's all.

Book:
At the request of my friend John, who now has a blog about baseball (and, specifically, Sabermetrics), I finally got around to finishing Moneyball , the only book I've ever read about baseball (or for that matter, sport). While I'm not about to move into my mom's basement and start a blog about baseball (or even get more books about it), I have to admit that I actually enjoyed the book. This may be because the Michael Lewis (the author) is a storyteller more than a baseball guy, and so the book is rather accessible to someone who probably watches less than ten whole baseball games in a year, and that's counting an extraordinary two trips to the ballpark, and in a year when the Tigers go to the World Series (I do like baseball, but I'm no die-hard by any stretch of the imagination). Perhaps what makes the book so likable is that for a book about baseball, very little print is spent talking about the events of a baseball game. Almost none, actually. What makes the book interesting is that it's basically about the Economics of putting together a baseball team, written by someone who is not an economist, nor does he work in baseball (this is a good thing: constituents of both groups tend to alienate and/or bore those outside of them). He just likes the story, which is basically the age-old sports underdog story, but this time it's about financial and strategic savvy. Rather than the "Little Team With The Big Heart That Won Against All Odds" story, you get the "Little Team With the Small Payroll That Won Lots Of Games By Hiring Good Players That Nobody Else Thought Were Valuable For Relatively Small Amounts Of Money" story. Doesn't sound quite as catchy as a made-for-tv-movie title, but it makes a far less over-told story. Along the way it allows one to chuckle at some of the conventional wisdom clichés that dominate pro sports and their commentators (one of the reasons for my limited interest in televised sport is the idiots they always get to comment on the games). One of my favorite parts of the book is how Billy Beane (General Manager of the Oakland Athletics, and the book's protagonist) has to keep reminding his scouting staff that when hiring ball players, The A's are trying to win games, rather than sell blue jeans (the book suggests that guys who look good playing baseball tend to be paid more than those who don't, because people tend to think that they play better, even when this is verifiably not the case). Anyways, the book is fun and pretty easy to read if you're into that sort of thing (or, in my case, even if you're not). My only cautionary remark is that it is still about professional sport, and therefore occasionally contains the kind of language which you would expect from such a testosterone-fueled environment.

I've gone on too long to continue, I'll write about the rest of my doings and media consumption later...