When things go (almost) according to plan

This weekend went nearly to plan, which was good. Friday was the most not-to-plan bit as Pygment came down suddenly ill on Friday night. Best guess is that her body has once again stopped coping with dairy and failed to send proper notice. Unless you consider the intestinal equivalent of an atomic explosion to be "proper notice." I was afraid we'd have to cancel plans on Sat but things were mostly better by mid-afternoon.

I had a plan to get the kids out of the house at a certain time and arrive at the first party at a certain time and damned if we didn't make it. That was fun, including froufy drink and being first to arrive meant we had an actual chance to talk to our hosts whom we hadn't seen in months. I also had a plan to leave at a specific time and lo we mostly managed that.

Getting to party #2 was complicated by my forgetting the hostess had warned me that Google maps thinks a certain street goes through when it most definitely does not. Fortunately Pygment spotted the error and we navigated around. A broken pool at the second party was compensated for by a sprinkler and water guns with which the kids amused themselves mightily, right up to the point where L cut his foot on a random rock or stick. Luckily it was only one of those surface cuts that bleeds mightily and looks much worse than it is. Once we got him cleaned up it was clear things were OK.

Sunday was lazing around and shopping until gamers showed up. Despite my D&D encounters almost never going to plan this one went approximately as intended. Despite the party being buffed out the wazoo the bad guys managed to present something of a challenge. Much hack was slashed.

When things go (almost) according to plan

This weekend went nearly to plan, which was good. Friday was the most not-to-plan bit as Pygment came down suddenly ill on Friday night. Best guess is that her body has once again stopped coping with dairy and failed to send proper notice. Unless you consider the intestinal equivalent of an atomic explosion to be "proper notice." I was afraid we'd have to cancel plans on Sat but things were mostly better by mid-afternoon.

I had a plan to get the kids out of the house at a certain time and arrive at the first party at a certain time and damned if we didn't make it. That was fun, including froufy drink and being first to arrive meant we had an actual chance to talk to our hosts whom we hadn't seen in months. I also had a plan to leave at a specific time and lo we mostly managed that.

Getting to party #2 was complicated by my forgetting the hostess had warned me that Google maps thinks a certain street goes through when it most definitely does not. Fortunately Pygment spotted the error and we navigated around. A broken pool at the second party was compensated for by a sprinkler and water guns with which the kids amused themselves mightily, right up to the point where L cut his foot on a random rock or stick. Luckily it was only one of those surface cuts that bleeds mightily and looks much worse than it is. Once we got him cleaned up it was clear things were OK.

Sunday was lazing around and shopping until gamers showed up. Despite my D&D encounters almost never going to plan this one went approximately as intended. Despite the party being buffed out the wazoo the bad guys managed to present something of a challenge. Much hack was slashed.

A music selection of awesome, and a short story

It's been a while since I posted any music so I've got a bucket of open tabs. What follows is a sampling of the most awesome stuff in a while.

http://soundcloud.com/kleptones/a-night-at-the-hip-hopera
This is an hour and eighteen minutes of concentrated AWESOME. It's a huge flashback to things that were popular - and being remixed - in 2004 when the set was put together. There's a heavy helping of 90s and 80s favorites and some of the best hip-hop from the first part of the decade. The Kleptones have been brilliant for longer than I realized.

http://audioporncentral.com/2010/07/divide-kreate-tarzan-gurls.html
There's this notion of a "summer song" that's hard to define, but you know it when you hear it. Generally it's up-tempo, not too fast, and just bouncy enough you won't get in trouble blaring it out speakers next to your beach towel. Here Divide and Kreate (http://divideandkreate.com/) give us one such tune by mashing up Katy Perry's "California Gurls" with Baltimora's "Tarzan Boy". Katy Perry's tune was already listed on Billboard's "Songs of the Summer" chart (http://www.mtv.com/videos/katy-perry/527631/california-gurls.jhtml) and what Divide & Kreate has done is keep the essential female vocal from Perry and laid it over the electronica and boy-band backing sounds of Baltimora's one-hit wonder (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_r0n9Dv6XnY).

http://audioporncentral.com/2010/07/dj-fresh-gold-dust.html
Also in the summer-sound category, but in a very different way, is DJ Fresh's "Gold Dust." Where the first one was very white and beach, this one is black and inner-city playground. You absolutely MUST watch the video for this - it features some of the most amazing double-dutch I've seen in a long time. How Fresh (http://www.myspace.com/freshbadcompany) who is himself a white boy from the UK, managed to put this together is beyond me.

http://audioporncentral.com/2010/07/superiddol-superman-simon-iddol.html
At last something new from Simon Iddol himself. Well, it's not precisely new - all the tracks in this mix are ones I've heard before. Iddol and a friend who DJs as Superman put this five-track sampler together as a promo for their July shows. It's a blast!

http://www.rhythmscholar.com/
Once upon a time the legendary Fatboy Slim teamed up with Christopher Walken to make a video for "Weapon of Choice." The video showed off Walken's dancing skills - he's no Fred Astaire but he was pretty damned good. Recently someone pointed me to a remix not just of the song, but of the accompanying video. The video was done by someone calling himself gfxdave99 (http://www.youtube.com/user/gfxdave99) to match a mix of the song done by Rhythm Scholar - a Chicago-area DJ. Well, if you're looking at the Scholar's page in another tab (as you should be) you can see he's got six different mixes of just this one tune. All the mixes are good, provided you don't object strenuously to scratch-dub.

And below that, my kind of music heaven. A dozen funky mixes of old favorites. Everything from Tom Tom Club to (gods help us) Billy Squier, with side trips into The Fixx, Red Hot Chili Peppers and, of course, Queen. The mix style tends to be somewhat similar from mix to mix - scratch/stutter, some beat-shifting, lots of sampling, and some very clever layering. Plus phat horns and funky extra bonus bits.

I particularly fell in love with his Art of Noise remix. I'm a long-time AoN fan(*) to begin with, and nobody remixes AoN. They've remixed themselves several times, but their sound is generally too odd and experimental for most folk. Rhythm Scholar does an amazing job blending together at least 8 different AoN tunes that I could identify, sampling stuff from their very early days to more recent pieces.

(*) Back in the days when music came on things called "records" that were made of "vinyl" I used to be an impoverished college student. Which meant I couldn't afford new records. I used to ride my bike down to Philly two or three times a month and pick over the really cheap offerings in the used record stores down there. The place was on South Street, near Zipperhead, back when that part of town was punk and slightly edgy, which it most certainly is not these days. I once saw Siouxsie and the Banshees doing promo songs from the back of a stripped down flatbed trailer truck down there. But I digress...

Anyway, one of those days I'm pawing through the bins and I realize that there's something different playing from the store's speakers. It's nohow like the usual 80s pop. It's kind of oddly clashing... and it appears to feature chainsaws. But it's got a beat. Ah yes, that beat. I abandon any of my usual youthful pretense of being hip and hurry up to the counter. What the heck is that? It's The Art of Noise, "Beatbox" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCyGdk23KNU). The clerk, who doesn't have to pretend to be hip, motions me to be quiet and just listen. Which I do. And then I buy out every AoN record he has in the store, undergrad student budget be damned.

Once upon a time, record stores had clerks who Knew Things. Their jobs let them listen to music all day long and pass judgment on the good, the bad, and the things that were so good everyone ought to know about them but nobody did. When I blog about music I feel like I'm paying back a little of what I got from people like that unnamed clerk in that South Street record store.

A music selection of awesome, and a short story

It's been a while since I posted any music so I've got a bucket of open tabs. What follows is a sampling of the most awesome stuff in a while.

http://soundcloud.com/kleptones/a-night-at-the-hip-hopera
This is an hour and eighteen minutes of concentrated AWESOME. It's a huge flashback to things that were popular - and being remixed - in 2004 when the set was put together. There's a heavy helping of 90s and 80s favorites and some of the best hip-hop from the first part of the decade. The Kleptones have been brilliant for longer than I realized.

http://audioporncentral.com/2010/07/divide-kreate-tarzan-gurls.html
There's this notion of a "summer song" that's hard to define, but you know it when you hear it. Generally it's up-tempo, not too fast, and just bouncy enough you won't get in trouble blaring it out speakers next to your beach towel. Here Divide and Kreate (http://divideandkreate.com/) give us one such tune by mashing up Katy Perry's "California Gurls" with Baltimora's "Tarzan Boy". Katy Perry's tune was already listed on Billboard's "Songs of the Summer" chart (http://www.mtv.com/videos/katy-perry/527631/california-gurls.jhtml) and what Divide & Kreate has done is keep the essential female vocal from Perry and laid it over the electronica and boy-band backing sounds of Baltimora's one-hit wonder (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_r0n9Dv6XnY).

http://audioporncentral.com/2010/07/dj-fresh-gold-dust.html
Also in the summer-sound category, but in a very different way, is DJ Fresh's "Gold Dust." Where the first one was very white and beach, this one is black and inner-city playground. You absolutely MUST watch the video for this - it features some of the most amazing double-dutch I've seen in a long time. How Fresh (http://www.myspace.com/freshbadcompany) who is himself a white boy from the UK, managed to put this together is beyond me.

http://audioporncentral.com/2010/07/superiddol-superman-simon-iddol.html
At last something new from Simon Iddol himself. Well, it's not precisely new - all the tracks in this mix are ones I've heard before. Iddol and a friend who DJs as Superman put this five-track sampler together as a promo for their July shows. It's a blast!

http://www.rhythmscholar.com/
Once upon a time the legendary Fatboy Slim teamed up with Christopher Walken to make a video for "Weapon of Choice." The video showed off Walken's dancing skills - he's no Fred Astaire but he was pretty damned good. Recently someone pointed me to a remix not just of the song, but of the accompanying video. The video was done by someone calling himself gfxdave99 (http://www.youtube.com/user/gfxdave99) to match a mix of the song done by Rhythm Scholar - a Chicago-area DJ. Well, if you're looking at the Scholar's page in another tab (as you should be) you can see he's got six different mixes of just this one tune. All the mixes are good, provided you don't object strenuously to scratch-dub.

And below that, my kind of music heaven. A dozen funky mixes of old favorites. Everything from Tom Tom Club to (gods help us) Billy Squier, with side trips into The Fixx, Red Hot Chili Peppers and, of course, Queen. The mix style tends to be somewhat similar from mix to mix - scratch/stutter, some beat-shifting, lots of sampling, and some very clever layering. Plus phat horns and funky extra bonus bits.

I particularly fell in love with his Art of Noise remix. I'm a long-time AoN fan(*) to begin with, and nobody remixes AoN. They've remixed themselves several times, but their sound is generally too odd and experimental for most folk. Rhythm Scholar does an amazing job blending together at least 8 different AoN tunes that I could identify, sampling stuff from their very early days to more recent pieces.

(*) Back in the days when music came on things called "records" that were made of "vinyl" I used to be an impoverished college student. Which meant I couldn't afford new records. I used to ride my bike down to Philly two or three times a month and pick over the really cheap offerings in the used record stores down there. The place was on South Street, near Zipperhead, back when that part of town was punk and slightly edgy, which it most certainly is not these days. I once saw Siouxsie and the Banshees doing promo songs from the back of a stripped down flatbed trailer truck down there. But I digress...

Anyway, one of those days I'm pawing through the bins and I realize that there's something different playing from the store's speakers. It's nohow like the usual 80s pop. It's kind of oddly clashing... and it appears to feature chainsaws. But it's got a beat. Ah yes, that beat. I abandon any of my usual youthful pretense of being hip and hurry up to the counter. What the heck is that? It's The Art of Noise, "Beatbox" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCyGdk23KNU). The clerk, who doesn't have to pretend to be hip, motions me to be quiet and just listen. Which I do. And then I buy out every AoN record he has in the store, undergrad student budget be damned.

Once upon a time, record stores had clerks who Knew Things. Their jobs let them listen to music all day long and pass judgment on the good, the bad, and the things that were so good everyone ought to know about them but nobody did. When I blog about music I feel like I'm paying back a little of what I got from people like that unnamed clerk in that South Street record store.