adrian is rad

Here’s my radio show’s playlist.

Also, I got it started late and my show went on late as well (Wednesday Night Live ran late) so it’s a bit short this week, but I have the, as I’m calling it, NEWSPECIALFUN:

11 29 06 – I Once Was Canadian (KZSU) (mp3)

I’m fascinated by little perculiarities in our world. There’s a country, which is soverign over a city, which is only 0.2 square miles in size. That’s 108 acres, much smaller than a large urban park. (Also of note with the Holy See/ Vatican is that there are various Vacitan enclaves on separated from the Vatican and surrounded by Italy, including Castel Gandolfo and Patricrchal Basilicas, but they’re sort of like embassies with extraterritorial status.)

People also seem to be fascinated that Lesotho (formerly Basutoland), where my mom spent much of her youth, is completely surrounded by South Africa. Well that makes a lot more sense to me than Büsingen which is a German town completely separated from Germany and surrounded by Switzerland. It is separated by about 1km from the rest of Germany.

It’d be kind of cool to live there though. You get alternate addresses and telephone numbers if you want people to call or write to you in Germany or Switzerland. You also get to live and work in Switzerland without a visa after living there for ten years.

That Beirut show that I went to has has popped up at the Internet Archive.

It’s a really good show, even in repeat. There’s a woman screaming like an idiot next to the guy recording it for the first song and a bit of the next couple, but once you get past that, it’s a worthwhile listen. It’s available in a number of formats, too (mp3, ogg, FLAC). And it’s free.

and it’s warm in here. I don’t want to leave.

I’m getting ready to leave the Phoenix airport and, appropriately, I’m listening to “Goodbye Sky Harbor“.

In the middle of a stream of bittersweet nostalgia, I took a bunch of photos this weekend.

They’re here.

I did a bunch of fun stuff, today, some of which I may write about later, but, for now, it’s all about Paul’s Compact Discs in Bloomfield. Dave and I made the trek over to Bloomfield after a Primanti’s sandwhich this afternoon.

It’s a smallish record store, not giant by any means, but also not shoebox and very navigable. The way it’s laid out and the way things are organized made it easy to look through things. They had a good selection among indie music, including the classic stuff (they had 3 of the 4 Seam albums in stock). They also have a good vinyl (7″ and LPs) selection. Their used CD selection is small and flat-priced (all $8) so that’s not the greatest. The people behind seemed knowledgable (one geeky clerk informed me of a Girl Talk show tonight after I bought the album).

I’d say it’s perhaps on par with Aquarius or slightly lower on my list for small record stores, but that’s saying a lot: Aquarius is pretty amazing and I like Paul’s a lot too.

I got:

• Girl Talk Night Ripper
• Ida Will You Find Me [used]
• Sigur Ros Saeglopur

I was familiar with the Ida and the Sigur Ros sounds good from first listen. I had heard little snippets of the Girl Talk and had read the rave reviews and I figured I should buy it in Pittsburgh if I was going to buy it, given that he’s a Pittsburgh local. I listened to it in the car a few times while driving around today and, I must say, I’m impressed. He takes tiny samples of pop songs, often dozens for each song of his and mashes them together (quite different from a “mash up” in most ways) to make another song. The samples he mixes and the smothness with which he does it, for the most part, are pretty amazing. It’s good music and it’s fun to try to pick out the samples he’s using. Today I definitely heard, among others, Neutral Milk Hotel, the Pixies, Verve (itself a sample), Kanye West, Gwen Stefani, and Elton John. No one’s sacred.

I also found out today that Unwed Sailor has cancelled their tour, including tomorrow night’s stop at the Brillobox, so that’s sad. I was looking forward to that. If I’d know that it was cancelled (I just found out), I would probably have made more of an effort to catch Girl Talk tonight at Belvedere’s. Oh well.

I’m back in Pittsburgh for the Thanksgiving holiday. Today I went up to New Brighton in Beaver County to grab lunch with my friend Chris Atwell. He’s been working at his uncle’s business, Ceramic Color and Chemical Manufacturing Co. They take metals (inorganic chemicals), grind them and combine them in various ways to make pigments, which are largely used in tiles and other ceramics. He gave me a tour of the plant, which is mostly within a very cool 200 year old building and it was a bunch of industrial equipment. Man, I love factory tours. Giant mechanical equipment is my thing.

(Unfortunately, I wasn’t allowed to take any photos of the giant mechanical equipment inside.)

I also think it’s cool that they’re doing what they’re doing: growing slowly, competing on the global market with a family business using local labor. That seems increasingly rare these days.

We ended up grabbing lunch at the Backdoor Tavern up there. (I must admit, I winced after I hit enter in google with the search terms ‘backdoor’ and ‘beaver’ (it’s in Beaver county) thinking I’d get a bunch of dirty results but I was actually able to find the place I wanted.) I got a really solid meatball sandwhich and a Penn Pilsner. The total for the two? $7. In Palo Alto, I might get a mediocre sandwhich for seven bucks…

After lunch, the following sign caught my eye and I had to check out the Rosalind Candy Castle:

That 3ft tall chocolate Santa was like a little person but jolly and made of chocolate. mmmmmm three foot tall chocolate Santa…. (give me a minute here.) I ended up getting a Santa chocolate lollipop and some dark chocolate covered pretzels which my family agreed were excellent when we had them for dessert tonight.

Then I walked through downtown Beaver before coming home.

I put more photos from today online

(How is something so simple like going to the same place and getting a pizza so awesome? Wish you were there, Andy.)

why don’t they just make everyone get naked to go through security at the airports. I’m already taking off my belt and shoes here!

I was delayed there a bit, but here’s the November mix tape. Hopefully there’s enough time for you to download it and get it on to your favorite digital audio player for your Thanksgiving travels.

You can download the zip file with the following:
1. mp3s of the songs
2. liner notes
3. playlist files (iTunes txt file and an m3u file)

(for the iTunes file, simply import all the songs to your library and then go to file->import and then select the song list. you should now have the 2006sept playlist in your iTunes with all the songs in the correct order).

If you want to read the liner notes before downloading the whole thing, they’re here. It starts out with a chunk of great, not super common oldies stuff and then goes into the indie rock. Bishop Allen, Polyphonic Spree, Mogwai and Phil Spector are all represented.

Adrian’s November 2006 mix tape [zip file] (moved to password protected folder)

This’ll be up for a limited time (~1 week) before being moved to a password protected folder.

If you like the artists or songs, I suggest supporting them by buying their music, going to a show, buying merchandise from them or at least telling other people about them.

I started this thing two years ago today.

The blog stats: 691 posts (0.945 posts/ day on average) and 1,056 comments (1.53 comments/ post; 1.44 comments/ day on average) in 32 categories (21.59 posts/ category on average). At last count, the comment leaders (besides me) were Jesse (130 comments) and Milkshake (125 coments). If you don’t count general (613 posts) or the overall music category (278 posts), the most posts are in music (recorded) (114 posts), sports (97 posts) and music (radio) (84 posts). The fewest posts are in music (photography) (2 posts, a new category) and arts (3 posts).

There are 691 posts and I don’t remember them all, but I think some of my favorite posts are in the list category. Lists like

• 4 things I will be pissed off if my mom throws out
• 2 ways I use senses in interesting ways for personal interaction
• 3 habits I have that probably annoy my friends
• 4 songs that Jesse and I played repeatedly in room 42 and are therefore candidates for the room 42 mix tape
• how to celebrate valentines day right

(that’s right, a list of lists! METALIST!)

I also like posts like how to wash and dry your socks and underwear if your crap airline strands you in Las Vegas when you’re trying to get home for Christmas and a couple of the posts where I wrote about my adolescent or past expieriences, like this one about Roald Dahl’s Omnibus and my fifth trip to Germany. The covers contest has come and gone, but now I have online mixtapes to impose on you.

It’s been an interesting experience. Sometimes I’ll start talking to someone (this happens particularly with dug) about something that happened and he’ll just say “I know, I read it on your blog”. I don’t think I’m a particularly good writer, but I enjoy writing here to some extent and I think my writing’s probably gotten better. I try not to take this place too seriously. After all, it’s just me writing about some crap on the web. There are probably a couple people who read this that I don’t know, but I don’t get an delusions of grandeur here.

So, any thoughts? Any of your favorite posts that I missed? Any particularly good or embarrassingly bad adrianisrad moments?