So, yeah, last week, my wife gave birth to our son Ramsey. He’s doing well and we’re adjusting to having a second child in the house. It helps a lot having family members providing extra coverage over the next month or so.
Now that Ramsey’s a week old, I thought I’d share the most important lesson I’ve learned as the father to a baby boy:
Point it down.
(Longer version: For heaven’s sake, if you want to avoid a drenched onesie, when you’re diapering your son: POINT IT DOWN.)
5 1/2 months since vol. 1. Off to a good start with this “series,” eh?
Welcome back, sir! And thanks for the inspirational opening video. No, really. I’m filing this one alongside Jay Smooth’s Little Hater and Merlin Mann’s Courageous Sucking as part of the eternal battle to get over the f’ing fear.
BADBADNOTGOOD
This non-drinking age crew got their initial notice thanks to their jazz treatment of Odd Future tunes last year and has since gone on to release two albums and two more live albums. I was shocked to hear kids this young (those whippersnappers!) could making such innovative, interesting music. It’s dark, it’s complex, it’s the next logical step after nu jazz (or, at least, a parallel step). All their material is available for free via their site or Bandcamp.
Here’s a video of a recent track of them, which features the group eating cereal. And that’s it.
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
My friend Alex turned me onto Murakami a number of years ago and I’ve been slowly working my way through his back catalog. I was especially excited when the English translation of 1Q84 hit the shelves late last year. It was originally released as three separate books in Japan, but the Knopf version combines all three volumes and weighs in at a hefty 944 pages. I’m about a third of the way through the book, which means that at this pace, I’ll finish the book at about the one-year mark.
True to his previous work, 1Q84 presents a hazy, dreamlike tale in a such a fashion that it seems completely plausible that a women would descend a latter beside a highway and find herself in a slightly alternate version of 1984.
I’m definitely enjoying this one so far and look forward to continuing to savor it throughout the rest of the year.
This was a topic I explored back in the Attic Beats days, but decided to revisit by way of an 8tracks mix. All songs sample or reference Sesame Street in some way. Most of the samples are pretty obvious, but there are one or two tracks with barely a passing reference (like the Dr. Dooom cut that refers to Snuffleupagus a single time). This mix is NSFW thanks to naughty words.
The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us
by James W. Pennebaker
Really interesting book so far. Just learned that:
For Valentine’s Day, I’ve updated my 8tracks.com mix, “Absolutely Awful Hip-Hop Love Songs.” Now, instead of ten terrible tracks, there are 15. If you make it through the entire mix, I’ll send you an e-mail certificate of achievement. Enjoy. Or, rather, “enjoy.”
In the 1979 book Future Cities: Homes and Living into the 21st Century, these two pages outlined the “Living Room of the Future,” featuring a number of prescient technological predictions, including e-mail and flat-screen TVs. Among the less likely of the predictions was that there would be a “domestic robot [that] rolls in with drinks,” along with an interesting sidenote:
One robot, the Quasar, is already on sale in the USA. Reports indicate that it may be little more than a toy however, so it will be a few years before ‘Star Wars’ robots tramp through our homes.
Turns out, unsurprisingly, that this “robot” (actually named Klatu by its creator, Quasar Industries) was little more than a marketing gimmick that could “supposedly vacuum, dust, cook meals, walk the dog, and do the laundry,” despite the fact the technology to do any of these things wasn’t even close to existing:
After some research, I found that one of the division managers at Quasar had decided that they were going to sell a robot, dammit, and it didn’t matter that none of the technology they needed even existed at the time. That was a simple matter for the engineers to worry about. The robots that appeared in the media, in the meantime, were apparently radio-controlled by humans who just happened to be hanging around when the robot made an appearance. I even suspect that they might have had a guy in a suit for some of the things it did, although I’ve never seen that confirmed. After successfully scamming not only the public, but also his managers at Quasar, for many months, the guy apparently confessed that he pulled the whole idea out of his ass and then slunk off in humiliation, never to be heard from again.
A man named Tony Reichelt was the marketing push behind Klatu, described by an ex-Quasar Industries employee as “a lovable con-man – who really did love robots.” (This link also has a whole series of fascinating pictures of Klatu and other similar “promotional androids” of the time.)
I suspect Reichelt, wherever he wound up, probably looked at the Roomba when it debuted a decade ago and thought, “Klatu could do that.”
I was listening this morning to the excellent Genocide & Juice, a 1994 album from The Coup. Shortly after this album, member E-Roc left the group and not much was heard about him. I did a quick Google search and saw a passing mention that he might be “a dockworker.” I wondered if this might tie in at all with Boots’ involvement with the Occupy movement in the Bay Area port shutdowns last month.
My curiosity remained, so I took to Twitter and asked Boots if he knew what was up with E-Roc these days:
@bootsriley Do you know what E-Roc’s up to these days? Listening to “Genocide & Juice” this morning and got to wondering…
Ryan MacMichael
supalaze
Before long, he replied:
E-roc is a Longshoreman in Oakland. We consulted w him right b4 1st port shutdown. RT @supalaze
Do you know what E-Roc’s up to these days?
Boots Riley
BootsRiley
It’s cool to see two former music partners collaborating again years later in this way.
Once delicious started their downward spiral, I looked around a bit for alternatives. For months, I was in social bookmarking limbo, trying to live with delicious, then switching to Diigo but setting up all sorts of crazy mirroring to delicious because I wasn’t confident enough in the service to switch full force. Lastly, I signed up with Pinboard and threw yet another service into the mix and continued to try and bookmark links everywhere which ended up being really messy. Eventually, I decided, “Screw it. I’m going with Pinboard.”
When I was in my post-delicious-pre-Pinboard stage I was doing all sorts of crazy nonsense with my links. I was posting some things to twitter, some to Facebook, some to Delicious. The links were all directed at different audiences, so having different links on different services wasn’t the problem, but when I wanted to find something I’d linked to, I sometimes couldn’t remember where it was.
Using a combination of Pinboard’s built-in tools and ifttt, I now pull everything into Pinboard:
The end result is something beautiful and simple: one place where anything I save to read or link to is archived and searchable (right now, I’m also paying the premium so that Pinboard saves the content of what I link to). Combine this with the unofficial Pindroid app and apps like Send to Instapaper, and whether I’m at my PC or on a mobile device, I can be ensured I’ll find what I need.
(Someday, I hope to be able to pull any links I “like” or “+1″ and save those as well. That’d be the topper.)
Having all these links in one accessible place also has the benefit of having a nice stream of links that represent what I’m looking at and consuming at any given period in time. I have a “Linkstream” page on the site that gives a current view and, of course, there’s my Pinboard page for a deeper archive (which, incidentally, includes all my old links from delicious).
Pinboard has a nice (and kind of random) feature: it can save your tweets separate from your bookmarks. Why is this a big deal? Because just try and find something you tweeted a year ago. Twitter search isn’t worth using for anything older than three seconds and I’ve never had luck with third-party tools like Snapbird. But Pinboard’s dead simple twitter search option? Beautiful and fast.
Pinboard also has read/unread and read later functionality, but I haven’t even messed with that. I suspect that could be pretty great, too.
You can just tell. Follow Pinboard on twitter and what you’ll see is a single developer that’s taking his time, building a service that works well, serving his users with features they want while hiding ones they don’t need (prime example: his impressive support for fanfic writers without turning Pinboard into a fanfic service), and leaving the bullshit aside. It comes down to this: I trust the guy to make the right decisions about the service, something I can’t say for 95% of the apps and services I use, no matter how much I like them.
Go ahead and sign up. It’s still less than $10 (the price goes up by $0.001 with each user that signs up) and would be worth it if that were a yearly subscription fee and not a one-time charge.
For the past five years, I’ve really enjoyed putting together these year-end personal “best-of” lists. I don’t do much in the way of music journalism anymore, so this scratches my yearly “write a bunch about music” itch.
2011 was another amazing year for music. I think I have more in my “best of” category this year (29) than any previous year. With so much music getting released (and, really, so much of it being so good), it can be easy for great albums to get overlooked. It’s impossible to be 100% complete, so here’s this year’s completely subjective rundown on my favorite music of the year.
(See also: 2010, 2009, 2008, and 2007.)
Everything’s sorted in alphabetical order.
Here’s a 30-minute playlist of Nostalgia 77′s videos, acoustic versions, and interviews from this year:
My daughter, now five, has developed an interesting taste in music. Here are her favorite tracks this year (not limited to songs from this year), loaded up in a MOG playlist that we often spin when we’re on the road.
Here are two mixes I put together at 8tracks.com covering my favorite tracks of the year. I tried to stick to one track per artist and per album. The first mix was put together midway through the year and the second mix I just finished up. Total listening time: 2 hours, 18 minutes, 37 seconds.
2011 was a pretty chill and mostly uneventful year. (Well, aside from finding out we’ve got a son on the way in 2012. That’s pretty big.)
I actually don’t have much in the way of commentary to share, so let’s just get into the series of lists that do a surprisingly good job of capturing the year at a glance.
2012 will be the year I finally get done most of the stuff I vowed to do in 2009.
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
This year I had the opportunity to try a lot of new teas, like some Hawaii-Grown White Tea that I bought directly from the farmer. Or some Royal Purple Tea from Kenya (their “Moonlight White” was also a very nice surprise). I also tried the best Japanese Gyokuro that I’ve ever had this year. Plus, I rediscovered some old classics, like Bi Luo Chun, Wenshan Baozhong Formosa oolong, and a good Da Hong Pao Wuyi oolong.
Based solely on the folks I RIP’ed on Twitter. People I knew personally in bold. Dates are when I tweeted, not the actual death date.
In order finished.
Total number of books finished: 24 (one more than 2010)
Long/challenging books: 8
Books in progress at the end of the year: 3 (plus the second book of Oz with Rasine)
In order watched.
Average year: 1994
Average rating: 3.39
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