Irving Mills & His Hotsy-Totsy Gang – Strut Miss Lizzy

February 8, 2010

Bix Beiderbecke is one of my favorite musicians and he works magic on the cornet in this number. It’s set in Chicago and I get most of the references. Why, I’ve been on every street named!

This song might be from the ’20s but it’s extremely good fun!

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George Orwell.org

February 7, 2010

The complete works of George Orwell are online and free at George-Orwell.org. Right now I’m slowly turning The Road to Wigan Pier into an ebook. I’ve never read this work of his, but I have read 1984, Animal Farm, and Burmese Days. Perhaps something else.

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Sick

February 4, 2010

I have spent the last four days in a bed-ridden febrile weakened state, hacking up and honking out enough solid gold mucus that I could probably provide K-Tel with one more album.

My wife did go through the H1N1 symptom checklist, but I’m already on the road to recovery.

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S.O.D. – Douche Crew

February 1, 2010

A short song with offensive content and offensive refrain, but if you can hang in until 0:58, you can get what I consider the heaviest chord progression on Earth. If you go for speed metal, you need this album.

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Some Looks at Japan

January 30, 2010

From a recent outing:

• a sumo wrestler in kimono with a young woman (on a date?) in a shiny new McDonald’s
• a bronzed homeless guy perhaps in his 50s with no teeth but a full head of Einstein-like hair, standing upright against a wall in a full business suit, just a thoroughly dirty one
• in the science section of a large bookstore, a book of nothing but π to one million places (a thin book, but there were six copies) and a number of manga (comics) explaining physics and thermodynamics in a high school or college setting
• many a young woman, each probably a hostess, with a massive shock of brown-dyed hair and going to work in a heavy peacoat, mini skirt, purse big enough to hold a lipstick, black sunglasses of massive size, bare thighs, and stiletto-heeled skin-tight knee-high black patent leather boots. Yes, I did notice them to get all those details.
• an increasing number of “For Rent” signs in shuttered business fronts, even in the main shopping arcade
• an old male dog with a red collar to which was attached a gold bell and gold tag. He was walking through a crowded urban area and nobody paid any heed.
• finding the same dog about 8 blocks later in Chinatown, where I ended up sharing a dumpling and a sesame paste sweet with him, to the laughter and natter of three young Chinese women touting restaurants and glad for the diversion
• a roofed shopping arcade multiple blocks in length, three or even four stories high in places, with the occasional second or third story bridge crossing overhead
• getting the stinkeye from two Caucasian teen males who perhaps resented my breaking their “exotic adventure” in Chinatown with my presence
• meeting an Indonesian woman, not wearing a headscarf, who speaks Japanese but essentially no English and works at a hotel here because Garuda Indonesia has increased the number of flights from nearby and houses its crew in the hotel

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Card Skimming

January 29, 2010

At check out from a hotel the other day, the card I used to check in wouldn’t process. I called the card company and found they’d frozen the number because some asshole had gotten the data and run up $6,000 of charges on January 26th at restaurants in Spain starting at 9:51 p.m. and then ringing a new one every 2–3 minutes. The card company automatically froze payments at the 7th but at least one more was attempted.

Now come the hassles of rearranging regular payments made with the stolen card and whenever the new card arrives.

What angers me most is that someone got $6K of stuff. The card company said that because they accepted those first 7 charges, they have to pay them. That $6,000 some asshole fraudulently spent means higher charges for everyone, including my annual card membership fee and my card company’s insurance rates for just such problems.

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Public Enemy – She Watch Channel Zero

January 25, 2010

I am not a rap fan, but I absolutely love this song. Not only is the Slayer guitar riff a bonus, the lyrics are pretty entertaining. If you find TV repellant, you’ll be down with Flavor Flav.

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WordSmith Dead

January 24, 2010

Under the late Palm OS, one of the best programs around was WordSmith, an amazingly powerful word processor that created RTF files and could even handle footnotes and endnotes. It ran circles around DocumentsToGo and was much faster with big text files that DragonEdit. It had a built-in spellchecker and could synchronize with Mac OS and Windows through its conduit. Unfortunately, Blue Nomad quit developing the program years ago and the conduit, under Mac OS X, apparently doesn’t work on Intel Macs. Its default RTF documents aren’t actual RTF but PDB versions and thus apparently useless without the conduit, which doesn’t work. Argh!

So long, WordSmith, you were a wonderful tool.

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The War against Suburbia

January 22, 2010

From Instapundit I followed a link to “The War Against Suburbia,” a long but thoughtful piece on urban, suburban, and exurban environments. The article notes the current administration is staffed almost exclusively with urbanites who seem to disdain alternative lifestyles, if not actively legislating against them. A good read.

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Helpful Japanese

January 21, 2010

At Daiei while waiting on my wife, the line of four bikes at the end of which I stood was blown over four times in a row: The wind was blowing about 23 mph. Three times I helped pick them up and three times passing women helped, nobody an owner of a fallen bike. This is something I like about Japanese.

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Nazareth – Hair of the Dog

January 18, 2010

This song got my two Colombian roommates and me through AIT.

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Amish Exemption

January 16, 2010

If this article is correct, the Amish will be exempt from the looming national health insurance plan.

Congressional aides said the exemption is based on a carve-out the Amish have had from Social Security and Medicare taxes since the 1960s. Whether Amish businesses, however, would fall under the bill’s mandates is still an open question.

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The Sinking Ship

January 15, 2010

Stumbled across this video, the second half of which is some scary talk about Japan’s sovereign debt status. The main talking head, who got the US housing collapse downside right, says Japan’s looking bad. He cites the history of the last two heads of the MInistry of Finance (dead, current one hospitalized), the shrinking population, the massive debt, notification the national pension fund will change from being a net buyer of national debt to a seller to meet obligations.

This does not make me feel warm and fuzzy; however, it does make me feel better about owning certain dividend-paying stocks and earning cash. People relying on national pensions are going to hurt especially bad.

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