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Found in an AP news story today:
Katrina Report Lambastes White House
WASHINGTON - A Senate inquiry into the government's Hurricane Katrina failures ripped the Bush administration anew...
Jerad posted this in Nuttin Much | Comments (0)
In my rear view mirror, on I-93, I spy a BMW 645 convertible, a vehicle very high on my auto lust-meter. I speed up just a bit as he passes me so that I have maximum gawking time. As he finally pulls past me, I glance at his license plate. It's simply "BMW 645." I guess I should expect the kind of people who have this car to have a certain level of vanity, but the car-model-name-on-the-plate-right-below-the-badge-already-firmly-affixed-to-the-car type of vanity always hits me the wrong way. We already noticed, you don't need to remind us. I let him speed ahead. I can't stand to see him rub it in my face any longer.
Jerad posted this in Complaints | Comments (0)
I've spent too much time today guessing Flickr tags playing this game. If you check it out, I'll be the player who is beating you. (Thanks to Insignificant Thoughts for pointing me to this)
Arrested Development may really be dead, but at least now we have a kick-ass movie poster. It kinda reminds me of some other film. (thanks to A Whole Lotta Nothing)
Now playing: Morrissey - Ringleader of the Tormentors
Jerad posted this in Nuttin Much | Comments (0)
One of the special guests on tonight's episode of The West Wing was the Foo Fighters, who were playing at Matt Santos' (Jimmy Smits) election night party. On the first shot of Dave Grohl, I noticed that there was a violinist playing behind him and quickly recognized her as none other than my voice-crush, Petra Haden. In the past year, I've found her playing with the Decemberists (I discovered her when she sang Kate Bush's "Wuthering Heights" with them in Boston), Beck, Bill Frisell, and past recordings of The Rentals, Weezer, and of course her crazy solo stuff. Some light searching tonight indicated that she also played on the Foo's latest acoustic album and is touring with them, hence her being on the set of the The West Wing. I really just love her voice, although I have some trouble convincing my fiancee that's all I love about her.
She has a couple of recordings avaiable to download and/or stream at her site. They're from her series of all-Petra a capella recordings of famous songs. She got a lot of attention last year when she covered the whole of The Who Sell Out using nothing but her voice. Now, you can check out her versions of "Thriller" and "God Only Knows," which are of course both excellent. I'll also put the song that made me fall for her, here. As good as the Decemberists are live on their own, they really need to let her sing more.
"Wuthering Heights" - The Decemberists featuring Petra Haden [removed]
Finally, back to The West Wing. R.I.P. Leo McGarry. Jon Spencer was one of the highlights of this show for 6 1/2 seasons. It's a bit spooky how much his real life echoed that of his character on the show. I think that the show's writers have done quite a good job with writing this tragedy into the show. For everyone who's asked whether his death screws up the continuity, NO, Leo was not in that opening scene of episode one of this season. It was my guess for months that he was current president getting out of the car three years in the future, but I guess we know that's not true now. Congratulations to Matt Santos on a well-won election.
Jerad posted this in Music | Comments (2)
Fortunately, the present was for me. Yes, that picture below shows my MacBook Pro running Windows XP. The Boot Camp installation was pretty easy and everything has run very smoothly. The biggest problem so far has been making sure I'm hitting the right ctrl/option/cmd keys on the Mac keyboard and remembering that I can't use the two-fingered scroll on the touch pad. I'm not really sure how often I'll boot into Windows, but it's good to know that Apple will be supporting it.
Hmmm...the computer seems to be running a bit warm in Windows mode, so maybe I'll jump back to OSX for the night.
Update: Okay, so it wasn't all happy in re-boot land. After not being able to boot back into OSX, and probably a little panicing, I was able to run the Mac disk utility to restore the OSX partition. I don't know what went wrong - I followed Apple's instructions to the letter - but I know that I'm not the only one who had this problem. Oh well, it is a beta release. I had just hoped that there wouldn't be a glaring error like this on my first reboot. For the record, it all seems to work fine now.
Jerad posted this in Mac | Comments (2)
This one's not a belated April Fool's joke. On April 1 at the Georgia Theater in Athens, GA, the original four members of R.E.M. got on stage together to play "Country Feedback." It was near the end of the Minus 5 show there, so I'm sure that there was plenty of buzz on the floor about who might end up joining Scott McCaughey and co. on stage. Instead of taking the drumsticks, Bill Berry picked up the bass for the song, while Mike Mills had keyboard duties. There's already a torrent of the recording seeded at Murmurs and you can view some good pictures of the band, as well.
I think that this makes it twice in the last year that Bill has joined the other three for some old-tyme R.E.M. playing. As cool as I think it would be if he re-joined the band, I don't see that happening. It's actually quite nice to see him pop up here and there. Contrary to what most people have had to say about the band lately, I think they're doing alright without him (not that he isn't missed).
It was actually Bill leaving the band that secured Murmurs as one of the websites that I check every day. I think that it was my sophomore year at PSU, and I hadn't looked at it in a while. I surfed over to it one evening and saw the sad news that Bill had decided to leave the band. I couldn't believe that I almost missed that, so I've been reading the site religiously since then. Yeah, it's probably going a bit overboard, but I don't want to let anything slip by me. Finally, I want to wish Ethan and Murmurs a congratulations on hitting the 10-year mark. It was one of the first R.E.M. sites that I found and it's been great to see it grow into being the R.E.M. site. I think that recent changes have improved it even more, so I'm excited to see things continue there.
Jerad posted this in Live | Comments (0)
I've mentioned before how Kula Shaker are more than just a guilty indulgence to me. Those guys are seriously underrated and are definitely one of my favorite bands to come out of the 90s. Until recently, it didn't look like they'd survived that decade, but they're really back now with some new songs and a small UK tour. Currently, they're playing with three of the original four members. As they mention in the interview on their site, "Jay [keyboards] sort of disappeared," although he's been sighted most recently jamming with the Gallaghers.
Yesterday they released a new iTunes-only EP, entitled Revenge of the King. They songs sound like classic Kula and are worth your $4. They're promising a new full-length album later this year, although that time frame may be optimistic since they still don't have any label stuff worked out. To celebrate the return of Crispian and Co, Drive Blind is posting it's first MP3 today. In the Kula madness these past couple of days, I found out that they covered one of my favorite Dylan songs, "Ballad of a Thin Man," on their pre-emptive posthumous best-of Kollected. It took a while to track it down, but I found a copy of the song and will post it here so you don't have to do the same mad searching. Rock out.
Kula Shaker - "Ballad of a Thin Man" [removed]
While I'm at it, I might as well let you sample the new EP, as well. So far, my favorite is the title track, but that might just be because it's the first. Still, it's worth seeking out the whole thing.
Kula Shaker - "Revenge of the King" [removed]
Jerad posted this in Albums | Comments (1)
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