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Pop Rocks!

So, where to begin? The week-long outage has really put me off my game, I’m afraid, and I’m not quite sure which pieces to pick up first. Oh, let’s see, maybe… this one:

A few years ago, The Girlfriend and I had a semi-heated discussion over mash-ups, those songs in which two or more well-known tunes are digitally blended together to produce something new. Her favorite radio station had recently begun a new drive-time feature, the mash-up of the day, and she was pretty enchanted with them for a while. Anne argued that the ones that worked, worked very well, and on their own terms as actual songs, not merely as interesting or amusing novelties. She was impressed by the artistry behind picking just the right elements to combine in order to achieve a certain effect. While I didn’t (and still don’t) dispute that there is a certain skill involved in a successful mash-up, I was (and am) pretty uncomfortable with the basic concept of it, i.e., using pieces of someone else’s work to “create” one for yourself. Anne (and other friends I’ve discussed this with) have asked me how this is any different than George Lucas borrowing much of the plot of Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress for Star Wars, or why I enjoy those YouTube videos that put scenes from well-known movies to theme songs from ’80s detective shows. I don’t have a good answer to that, except that the examples feel different. In the latter case, the end result is obviously intended to be nothing more than a joke, while in the former case, Lucas wasn’t splicing together actual footage from The Hidden Fortress with clips from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Being inspired by someone else’s story while creating your own similar-but-different story feels more legitimate to me than mashing up (or whatever the verb form is) bits of existing media. And YouTube gags seem harmless to me in a way that mash-up songs do not.

(For the record, I don’t care for sampling, either; I remember being infuriated by the popularity of “Ice Ice Baby” and “U Can’t Touch This” because no one seemed to realize — or care — that the backing instrumentals were from Queen’s “Under Pressure” and Rick James’ “Super Freak,” respectively.)

If you’ll notice, though, my hang-up seems to be with the use of existing recordings. I’m not nearly as troubled by the idea of someone re-arranging other people’s music if they record the final result themselves. Which is the loophole that enables me to think the following is a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of total awesome:

An insanely unlikely melding of ’80s pop and ’80s hair metal, done so skillfully that if you didn’t know the source material, you’d swear it was an original song? Oh, hell yeah! I’ve already ordered the CD. Yes, actual physical media. Because I’m old, and the website didn’t offer a download option anyhow.

I thought at first that Rock Sugar must be a cover band that came up with a clever marketing gimmick, but a little digging reveals that lead singer Jess Harnell is the voice-over artist who played Wacko on the early-90s TV series Animaniacs, among many, many other things. This leads me to believe that there was a bit more calculation involved in the birth of Rock Sugar than just “hey, wouldn’t it be funny if we started playing a Metallica song, but you started singing Journey lyrics instead?” However Harnell came up with this idea, though, I think it’s bloody brilliant. And they’re playing it to the hilt, too — check out the band’s website, read their insane story and member bios, and listen to the rest of their music. If you like the ’80s the way I like the ’80s — or even if you hate the ’80s and just like to snigger at the excess and schmaltz of that decade — you ought to be amused.

Via Scalzi, who may have just made up for all the snarky shit he’s said about Night Ranger over the past year.

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Back on the Air

Testing one, two, three…

Is anyone there? Hello?

I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve all given up and gone home for dinner by now. I hope you haven’t, but Simple Tricks has been out of commission a long time, and attention spans are short these days. I get it.

Still, if somebody is hanging around out there in the darkness, patiently waiting for my return, you’re in luck, because we’re back in black, five by five and ready to boogie. I’ll spare you the technical details of what happened — to be honest, I don’t really know them myself — suffice it to say the outage was caused by a mechanical problem with the rather elderly server on which these premises are constructed. Parts had to be ordered, shipping delays occurred. You know how it is.

Being blogless for a week proved to be a very odd experience. As I said in a comment over at Brian Greenberg’s blog, it was almost like a vacation to be free of the thing for a while, an unexpectedly welcome break from the pressure of having to produce and the frustration of not having the time to keep up with it as well as I’d like. But on the other hand, I really missed my soap box — all week long, I was spotting things on the ‘net that I would’ve liked to post, or comment on, or rant about, and the sensation of being unable to reach out to my audience was… well, not painful or anything so melodramatic as that, but I certainly didn’t enjoy being silenced. And I also missed whatever tiny community action I have going on here. Facebook offered some compensation, but it’s different over there… much more superficial-feeling, I guess. Facebook is all about the pithy comment, the “hi” as you pass someone in the virtual hall. This place feels like a conversation to me. Or at least that’s what I’d like it to be.

The strangest part of the past week was remembering how, when my buddy Jack first told me he’d built me a blog as a Christmas present, my initial reaction had been, “what in the hell am I going to do with that?” When he told me last Monday that it would take him a few days to fix the server problem, my reaction was, “what the hell am going to do without it?” I guess I hadn’t realized just how big a part of my routine, my identity, really, this silly little time-waster has become. And I don’t know if that’s cool or kind of lame…

The usual irregular posting will resume shortly. In the meantime, here’s a video that’s been going around and which everybody has probably already seen, but hey, I’ve been out of the loop for a week, remember? Besides, it cracks me up enough that I think it’s worth another look…

For a few years after Jim Henson’s death, I thought The Muppets had become irrelevant and unfunny, and ought to be retired. Whoever is running the brand these days is proving me wrong each and every time one of these virals is released. I think they’re hysterical. Jim would be proud, guys…

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Is Blogging Over?

Lileks made the following observation this morning:

Was amused to read that Kids Today have stopped blogging, more or less; they’ve moved the blurtage over to Facebook, which makes much more sense. The web is the Great Heaving Sea; Facebook is an auditorium. Tumblr is a flea-market. Blogs will either be for writers, or communities gathered around a particular ideology or subject, or ace aggregators who can spit out 30 unique links a day.

I’m not sure what he was reading, and I must admit I’m not very aware of what’s hip and happening these days, so I’m wondering… is this true? Has blogging been revealed as just another fad that’s nearly run its course? I have noticed that many of the personal blogs I visit seem to be petering out, and I’m painfully aware that my own output has fallen in recent years. Also (and this is possibly unrelated), I’ve noticed I don’t get near as many comments as I used to. But I’ve attributed that to people’s circumstances, i.e., I assumed everyone was busy, not that they’re losing interest in blogs. Certainly my interest isn’t waning. This silly little virtual kingdom seems to fill a genuine psychological need for me, and I get pretty cranky when I can’t find enough time in my day to keep up with it to my satisfaction.

I have become pretty active over on Facebook, but that’s hardly an adequate substitute, at least for me. Facebook is like sending a postcard to let someone know your latest port-of-call on that big road trip; it’s a form of contact, maybe it’s even a little revelatory, but it’s hardly a conversation.

I don’t know what Tumblr is.

And despite the best efforts of my friend Gillilan, I simply have no interest in Twitter. The 140-character limit strikes me as arbitrary and too constraining, and I don’t see how it could allow anything but the most superficial of observations. (Hmm, there I go talking like one of those mythical “writers” again.) I hate the text message-style abbreviations that seem obligatory in that medium (again, it’s the 140-character limit). Hell, I don’t even like the terminology associated with Twitter. The name itself, and the verb “tweeting” are so cutesy-poo, and I hate cutesy-poo. If anything, Twitter is what strikes me as faddish, not blogging. But then, the arbiters of cool never seem to consult with me on these things, and I know I’m almost always the last one clinging to things that everyone else has long since abandoned.

So tell me, Loyal Readers, is blogging on the way out, aside from a handful of specialized sites and a few long-winded die-hards like myself?

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First Look at Jeff Bridges in Tron: Legacy

Everybody’s probably seen this by now, but just in case, here’s something that’s had the online fanboys buzzing for a couple days, namely a glimpse of Jeff Bridges in the upcoming sequel to TRON:

tron-legacy_flynn.jpg

As usual, click for the full-size treatment.

Disney released this image Tuesday, possibly hoping to take advantage of Bridges’ Oscar nomination for Crazy Heart to start building some hype for Tron: Legacy. As my Loyal Readers can probably imagine, given my usual feelings about reimaginings, revisitings, and other such tampering with the pop-cultural landmarks of my youth, I am deeply ambivalent about this project. TRON holds a big place in my heart, and I always worry that returning to a much-loved universe will somehow lessen the original. (I’m sure you can think of plenty of high-profile examples of this phenomenon if you just put your minds to it.) Plus there’s also the question of why a sequel to a nicely self-contained story, and why now, after so much time — 28 years — has passed? If it’s just to apply some updated special effects to a familiar landscape, then I’m not interested. I’m probably one of the few Gen-X nerds on the planet who didn’t find himself drooling and making incoherent pleasure-sounds after seeing that teaser trailer that debuted at ComicCon a couple years ago. And the rumored storyline — that Legacy will be a sort of science-fiction Apocalypse Now, with Bridges’ character Kevin Flynn in the Col. Kurtz role, i.e., the macguffin at the end of another character’s quest — doesn’t do much for me, either.

Still…. I have to admit it made me smile to see The Dude wearing that glowing Frisbee on his back again. The fact that Bridges is involved gives me some hope that there might be something worthwhile about this movie, because he’s not the sort who takes on a job just to earn a mortgage payment. Also, I see on IMDB that Bruce Boxleitner, who played the title role in the original film, is on board as well. Granted, both men’s screentime may not amount to anything more than glorified cameos, especially if the Apocalypse Now scenario is for real, but as I said in defense of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, it may be enough for me just to see what a couple of my old friends — Flynn and Tron — have been up to since I last encountered them.

Tron: Legacy is set to premiere in December. This pic is popping up all over; for the record, I first saw it here.

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Proofreader Humor

Another busy cycle at the office, with frustratingly little time or energy left over for blogging. Or much of anything else, for that matter. Grrrrrr. No matter how old I get, I don’t think I’ll ever manage to resign myself to the wildly uneven ratio of hours consumed by my day job versus how much time I’m able to spend on my “real life.”

Be that as it may, I have to quickly share something I ran across this afternoon. For some bizarre reason, my most heated professional disputes tend to revolve around the lowly comma. Who knew such a tiny little squiggle of ink could provoke such great passion in people? The serial comma, in particular, seems to make creative directors, account managers, clients, and legal teams absolutely crazy. For the record, I’m a fan of the serial. It banishes ambiguity to the dark, frigid hell where it belongs, and anyway the AP Style is obsolete, as far as I’m concerned. It consists largely of shortcuts that were conceived back in the days when metal type was set by hand, and character counts and column width actually mattered. Now that creating more space on a page is as easy as shrinking the font size or shifting a graphic around on a screen, why continue using an imperfect technique that invites misreading?

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve made this argument, usually to no avail. But now I’ve got one that’s even better, one that simply cannot be countered… commas save lives. Observe:

Commas Save Lives

Yep, nuthin’ more to be said after that…
(Source, via.)

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Leia’s Summer Job?

Leia gets a job at Hot Dog on a Stick

I have no idea what the heck this image is all about, or why I find it so weirdly appealing. And yet… I cannot look away. And it brings a mystified smile to my face. And I think I’m suddenly craving a corn dog.

You gotta wonder how Carrie Fisher feels about being the focal point for a whole mess of bizarro nerd fetishes. Do you suppose if she had the chance to do it all again, she’d tell Uncle George she didn’t want to be in his movies after all, because she just couldn’t face the long decades ahead knowing that one day there would be a photoshopped pin-up of her in a Hot Dog on a Stick uniform?
(Via.)

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Scalzi on the SOTU

I don’t find myself nodding in agreement with John Scalzi nearly as often as I used to. A definite air of belligerent self-satisfaction seems to have crept into his blogging, and I’ve gotten mightily tired of him hacking on stuff I happen to like — this entry, in particular, managed to piss me off at least three times before I reached the end; people who know me well can probably guess which parts pressed my buttons — but I’ve got to hand it to him, he really knocked the ball out of the park with this:

Obama’s real problem is that in Congress, his allies are incompetent cowards and his adversaries are smug dicks. I find it genuinely appalling a Democratic president has to prod his party members in the Senate, with a 59-seat majority, to stop acting like spooked children. The lot of them need to have a stick jammed up their ass, because it’s clear they don’t have much in the way of a spine. As for the Republicans, a recent reader was distressed when I said they were “hopped-up ignorant nihilists,” but you know what, when your Senate operating strategy is “filibuster everything and let Fox News do the rest,” and the party as a whole gives it a thumbs up, guess what, you’re goddamned nihilists. There’s no actual political strategy in GOP anymore other than taking joy in defeating the Democrats.

Which is more or less exactly what I’ve been saying lately, but expressed so much more colorfully… Kudos, John, kudos.

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I Can’t Breath…

t’s been a while since I got on my high horse about the routine maiming of the English language by non-English majors whose job descriptions don’t require an in-depth knowledge of the Chicago Manual of Style. (People who aren’t me, in other words.) That’s because these proofreading pet-peeve entries are largely dependent on what I’ve been encountering out there in the wild, and it just hasn’t seemed worth my time or yours to call out yet another example of incorrect apostrophe usage. (Good God, I see that everywhere; what’s the matter with our schools these days, anyhow?)

In the last few days, however, I’ve noticed several examples of something a little more substantive: the frequent misuse of the word “breath” when the writer obviously means “breathe,” as in, “I can’t breath because the air pollution is so bad.” Specifically, I’ve seen this popping up on Facebook and also in the comments on the Salt Lake Tribune website, which leads me to wonder if this is perhaps a Utah-ism, like our preternatural affection for Jell-O. (That’s not a myth, incidentally; we eat a hell of a lot of Jell-O in these parts.) Even if it isn’t unique to this state, though, it certainly is prevalent here. Interestingly, this tic doesn’t seem to cross over to verbal speech; people don’t say “I can’t breath” when they’re talking, only when they’re writing. But writing, of course, is my professional purview, and it’s what drives me crazy when it’s done incorrectly.

So, let’s run through it, shall we?

Breath is a noun. It is the parcel of air that you inhale or exhale, as in, “I took a deep breath.”

Breathe is a verb. It is the act of inhaling and exhaling, as in “I breathe deeply.”

See? Easy, isn’t it?

You know, this actually reminds me of another Utah thing I may have written about before, the confusion between “loose” and “lose.” I repeatedly see people writing that they are “loosing their minds” or that they “feel like a looser.” Nope, sorry, kids. You lose your keys; that guy over there is a loser. However, your pants are loose because your diet is working. Get it?

And we have time for just one more thing, a funny typo that I caught at work this morning: someone wrote “protocol” as “proto-call.” As in the evolutionary precursor of a call, I guess, like smoke signals.

Well, I thought it was funny.

Today’s episode of The Bloody Red Pen has been brought to you by the number 1138…

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I Still Believe a Man Can Fly

An LA billboard featuring Christopher Reeve as Superman, circa 1978

I don’t have a whole lot to say about this; I just thought it was an awesome photo, and it’s one I’ve never seen before.
I took it from the Facebook page of the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation. Here’s the information that was posted along with the picture:

Robert Landau, Native Guy And Photographer, Interview

 

Q-What is your favorite photo you’ve taken and why?

 

A-“Back in the 1980s I had a book published on the Sunset Strip billboards, called Billboard Art [Chronicle Books]. I was living near Tower records and every week there would be new hand painted pop art masterpieces promoting the latest Rock and Roll and movie stars. I took a photo of a street scene with a woman carrying a grocery bag walking under a billboard depicting an image of Christopher Reeve in Superman costume streaking across the landscape. It epitomized for me the surreal nature of Los Angeles with all its dimensions of overblown Hollywood pretense versus the reality of ordinary daily life.”

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Shaving by Candlelight

My power went out this morning at 7 a.m.

I was awake at the time, more or less — my alarm had sounded 15 minutes earlier and I was indulging in my usual routine of bashing the snooze button half a dozen times before I finally get up, wishing all the while that the idiots who design these things would give me a full five minutes in between bashings instead of only three — and I heard the ceiling fan and the furnace fall silent.

Now, the power used to go out all the time when I was a kid. My hometown was pretty far out in the sticks back then, before the suburban sprawl creeping outward from metro Salt Lake finally caught up to us, and I guess we only had a single set of transmission lines coming into town across the far and wide desert, or some damn thing, because any time the wind blew, something would short out somewhere and we’d be in the dark for a few hours. I used to think it was fun, actually. I can’t remember ever being afraid of the dark, and having to use candles struck me as a neat change from the usual routine.

To be honest, I still don’t mind the occasional outage, although given how much of my work and entertainment now revolves around electronic gadgets, I tend to get bored more quickly than I did when I was a kid. Even so, I was completely unprepared for just how truly, alarmingly inconvenient it is to lack electricity during the hour when I’m getting ready for work.

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