Never Clever

You never see a good personalized plate on a hearse. Sure you’ll see the occasional plate with the company name and a number, keeping you apprised of how many cars they have in their death fleet, but you never see something like “CU L8R”. Just give me the driver’s nickname or something. “FUZZY”. I’d like that.

That the words above Jesus’ cross did not indicate the incident took place in Rhode Island. I’m not sure why I thought this would have been a plus.

I’ve been playing around with MusicIP Mixer based on Chris’ recommendation. After getting through the “Oh my word, this is sucking up all the processing power of this monstrous computer” while it indexes and “validates” your music, it does a really interesting job, finding similar songs across all sorts of genres, albums, artists. In trying to share this wonderful news with the world, I exported one of the playlists, but iTunes just dumps it out as a tab-delimited text file. There’s not much I can do with a file like that on this machine; because Google Docs has gotten so good, I haven’t bothered to dig out a copy of MS Office. So I threw it into Google Spreadsheets to see what would happen. Bastards auto-magically imported it into a perfectly formatted spreadsheet without that interim Excel step where you do the machine’s job and say what it’s delineated with, if there are headings, etc.

Unlike Google, MusicIP isn’t perfect yet. It brings in more of the exact same artist/ album than I’d like. It has a slight case of feature-itis: I don’t need to play the songs in it, I don’t need another MP3 tagging solution (and I’m guessing most of the target audience already has an incredibly anal tagging plan* in place). And I’d like to be able to pass it multiple songs from different artists, but that’s just me thinking as a person. How the hell does the machine know what x songs have it common? That’s what it’s supposed to be doing for me. Watch it take over my sonic life.

* Apologies to anyone with a non-music incredible anal tagging plan.

you don’t know me as well as you think.

It doesn’t bubble up to consciousness very often, but Christ I worry I’m forgetting something. Every day I’m going to forget the permission slip and have to slog through a phonics workbook while everyone else goes to the Museum of Science. It probably drives being anal retentive; if everything’s put away, no way to miss what needs doing. I mention this because the driveway’s threatening to wash away and there must have been a Saturday in June I could have prevented this but sat on the porch drinking beer instead.

To future self: continue to buy high-quality beer to justify this sort of thing.

Beyond the obvious, investing, the sports betting and a bit of comic collecting, one thing I’d like to do with a time machine is go back to right before Einstein’s Eureka! moment about the Theory of Relativity, hang behind his shoulder, wait for it and shout, “A-Duh!” Just for laffs.

Michelle is just putting the finishing touches on Joyce Carol Oates’ The GraveDigger’s Daughter, and I, for one, am ecstatic. The back-cover, the side that faces me when reading in bed unfortunately, features a large photo of the author’s corpse, inexplicably standing upright while wearing a plum hat and OMIGOD SHE’S STILL ALIVE! Call the paramedics, stat! There’s a pulse. Faint, but a pulse.

“I was on iTunes the other night—and you know, alcohol and iTunes don’t mix. I have every one of Hitler’s speeches now.”

“Your [gas] is horrible.”

“No, no it’s not. It’s like someone made you a peanut butter sandwich and you didn’t even know you brought lunch.”