adrian is rad

Amrys, don’t think I didn’t notice the drop in my name in your “blog roll” from second behind mole to 13th behind, among other things, Scott’s fake and infrequently updated blog.

Anyway, I hope things are good for you. Are you doing anything for halloween? Decide on a costume yet? Classes treating you alright?

starting a few days ago, you can get a free trial of the Smithsonian Global Sound website. The promotion runs from Oct. 24 to November 23. Smithsonian Global Sound has something like 35,000 songs, most of which are field recordings from around the world. You can sort by type of music and instrument and make playlists on the site. I could make a playlist of all the bagpipe music they have from Europe, for instance.

You can’t download the files but you can stream all the music you want.

A guide to/ for Nice Guys. I found this pretty funny and I didn’t at all think it was something I could relate to.

It’s a bit crass; avoid if you dislike such things.

This has probably been up for a while but Hirishikesh Hirway’s The One Am Radio has made a video for “Witness.” In a way it’s one of the best video’s I’ve seen. I like the song more because of the video and it has a story I really like too. It’s about kickball and love. Hrishikesh can be seen a few times during the video, most notably as the first baserunner. Anyway, it’s worth watching.

Don’t forget to listen to the Lunch Special today at noon PST. Prof. Tim Stearns of Biological Sciences and Genetics is on today. Should be quite interesting.

I prerecorded a show with Mehran Sahami last night. It went pretty well. That show will air probably December 13.

Strangely, I’ve bought lots of things in the last 24 hours. First I got a call from African Hut to say that the goods I had ordered in mid-August had come in and they were sending them. Then, later in the day I decided to pick up that Mark Kozelek/ Sun Kil Moon Modest Mouse covers record from Insound at which point I found that you could answer a stupid quiz and get 25% off your whole order, so I got a few things there. Then, this morning, I read that there’s a new 7″ Half-Handed Cloud/ Sufjan Stevens EP out today so I decided to pick that up and noticed something else while I was at the Asthmatic Kitty website.

So, the full haul:

• a case of Savanna Dry Cider, originally meant to be consumed with Jon Werberg, but that will do just fine now.
• 1/2 lb of biltong
• 1 can of guava halfs (or as I call it, 1 can of pure heaven)
• If You’re Feeling Sinister by Belle & Sebastian. I’m finally picking up a CD copy of this. ($8.99 minus 25%!) I now have all the B&S albums on CD.
• The Exquisite Death of Saxon Shore by Saxon Shore. I liked their previous album and decided to give this one a try.
• Summer in the Southeast by Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. The first time I heard Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy in any form was live at Club Laga. I’ve wanted a live recording ever since and now he’s coming out with one. Pre-order for November 15.
• Bodies and Minds by Great Lake Swimmers. I liked GLS’s debut when it came through the station. This effort is apparently good, so I thought I’d pick it up. (What was I thinking last night? I never buy this many “gamble” albums at one time.)
• Tiny Cities by Sun Kil Moon. Aforementioned Modest Mouse covers album. Pre-order for Nov. 1 though I think I’ve heard they’ve started shipping them.
• What’s the Remedy by Half Handed Cloud. Aforementioned collaborative effort with Sufjan Stevens. Vinyl 7″.
• Sufjan Stevens Illinois shirt. They didn’t have them when the concert tour came through here in July but they wore them on stage and boy were they hot.

So yeah, that’s me going crazy. I’ll be getting piles of stuff over the next few weeks though!

Worst piece of writing in today’s Palo Alto Daily News, from the front page:

In the months since Caltrain launched the popular express trains a year and a half ago, it report nearly a 20 percent increase in ridership as commuters embraced the new, faster trains.

When we have parties we have music playing just about everywhere, including the bathroom. Up until now, we’ve had Motown in the bathroom, the playlist for which I’ve written about before.

This time we decided to change it up a bit. Indie rock was the thought. I made a pretty awesome playlist of songs people might know along with some they’re guarenteed to not know. Not too hard, not too soft. Some old, some new. I stayed (mostly) away from the depressing songs I sometimes play on my radio show. This is a party after all! I think this is sort of what my radio show would sound like on the best day if I decided to not play any depressing music and wasn’t worried about over-playing songs that you can hear on commercial radio.

Well here it is:

• Man-Revolutionary! by Rogue Wave
• Evil by Interpol
• Hard to Find by American Analog Set
• Peacocks in the Video Rain by John Vanderslice
• Scenic Pastures by Archers of Loaf
• Marching Bands of Manhattan by Death Cab for Cutie
• The Party by Matt Pond PA
• All of November, Most of October by P:ano
• Penelope by Pinback

(more…)

Patbird just changed domains on his blog and even though he didn’t take any of my suggestions for a blog name, (what’s wrong with nastydonkeyporn.com I ask you??), he’s got a new domain name. Nevermind that I didn’t know of his blog before, but, I present to you urbansaddle.com. Patbird is really rockin’ out over there. I read just about all of the posts so far last night.

Here are my favorites:

• In this post a link to a set of two TV commercials, both in their original versions and their redone-Pittsburgh-backyard-camcorder versions. Very funny stuff.
• Andy went to the Mountain Goats at the Warhol Museum on Friday. Pat couldn’t go to his first Mountain Goats show there because it was sold out, but he went to the Uptown Theater in Little Washinton and writes about it here.
• Pat writes about running into and talking to a Pittsburgh mayoral candidate on the street.

I’ll be keeping an eye on your blog there, Pat. I’ll also put it on my blogroll over on the right side there at some point.

Another thing that I’ve been meaning to add to the links on the right is largeheartedboy.com. He writes a lot about music and books. His daily “shorties” are just links to about 10-15 articles or blog posts. I usually find a couple interesting articles in there everyday. Some of his longer articles are pretty good too.

I’ve been swimming pretty regularly for a couple years now and never quite saw what I saw tonight.

A number of factors played into this. I was swimming outdoors; they had one half of the pool open without any lane dividers; it was dark out; I recently got prescription goggles.

Looking up at the surface of the water was just surreal. It looked somewhere between molten metal or molten glass. The lights in the pool reflected off of the surface of the water so it looked like these artificial suns setting on a molten metal lake.

I was so distracted I didn’t really count my laps.

I was reminded of this today. Human Clock is a pretty sweet site where they have have pictures of the time for every minute of the day. The pictures aren’t of clocks (usually), but rather people holding up the numbers or the numbers occuring in scenes around the world. That’s a dumb description, so just go see for yourself!

Also, there’s a new thing which is the time song database which is trying to collect all the songs with times mentioned in the lyrics. That’s pretty cool. I’m trying to think; there must be some Mountain Goats songs with the time. John Vanderslice maybe?

I did two radio shows today. man am I tired. blah!

Today’s Lunch Special with Mayor Jim Burch turned out to be really interesting. He’s led a facinating life.

Then I did a sub for an indie rock guitar show from 9-midnight, with a playlist here.