Yup…

The “every form of witchcraft is what we rebuke” part is the only thing that he seems to have prayed over her. Is he telling us something about the VP candidate we need to know?

Seriously, wtf?

NoMethodError (You have a nil object when you didn’t expect it!
You might have expected an instance of Array.
The error occurred while evaluating nil.collect)

My friend, via IM:

Can you imagine if John Mayer and Shakira had a kid? It would sing like fuckin’ Chewbacca

I’ve been enjoying the Failblog quite a bit. It’s fun to see lots of pictures of human stupidity and ironic juxtapositions, especially stuff like this, this, this, this, or even this.

While some of them are obviously fake (you can tell that it’s poorly photoshopped ’cause of phone cord bits on his tie), overall they’re pretty darn funny. My #1 favorite though is this one (which I just submitted):

(h/t to Brendon Wilson for tweeting about Failblog.)

In reference to my dealings with a truly mentally unbalanced person on the internet today, my friend said:

Don’t argue with state-funded projects.

I have awesome friends!

It’s stuff like this that makes me proud to live in the Bay Area:

I simply can’t resist passing this on - an article on a proposal, naturally hatched in a bar, to change the name of a prize-winning water treatment plant on the shoreline of San Francisco to the George W. Bush Sewage Plant. This is a memorial you can contribute to from your bathroom. The proposal has enough signatures to qualify it as an initiative on the November ballot.

I had a great day today up in the City (can’t really elaborate, sorry) to come home and find that one of my Australian friends had sent me some TimTam (Original AND “Love Potions”), Cherry Ripe, and some REAL Turkish Delight!

What a fucking awesome day!

My life needs to be more consistently like this, so I’m posting this to remind myself.

Of course, I don’t know that I should actually have posted this… or even taken the dopey quiz in the first place, but so it goes.

I noticed this today while I was gawking at blogs using Bloglines:

Personally, I’d love for one of my projects to have a double-digit of readers/subscribers via Bloglines, so I’m flat-out in awe that Dilbert currently has 96,724 users. Dilbert’s come a long way since I first saw it in the newspaper where I worked (where only the Editor-in-Chief and I “got it”).

I like the fact that Todd Snider is on the side of folks who love brilliant music.

Does anybody actually wonder why Americans are so unwelcome in other parts of the world?

If I were from somewhere else and saw stuff like this regularly I’m pretty sure that I’d firmly believe that Americans, on the whole, are morons:

Oh, no… is it really this bad:

Dear George Lucas, (CC: Steven Spielberg)

Please stop ruining movie characters from my childhood. It was bad enough when you turned Darth Vader into a snot-nosed, annoying, midi-chlorian soaked nine-year-old brat who made protocol druids in his spare time and who matures into a wooden actor for the next two films who shouldn’t even be cast in a car commercial.

… (Cynical-C)

David Lee Roth talkin’ to the gorgeous Martha Quinn in 1982:

It’s time for Diamond Dave to reclaim his throne.

Ok, so I think I finally “get” Twitter… it’s not like blogging, it’s like eavesdropping on other people’s instant messenger conversations.

Here’s my feed, if’n you give two shakes… (and if it works!)

http://twitter.com/totdt

Genius.

I can’t believe anybody thought they could come up with something lamer than Guitar Hero, but Microsoft’s research folks have hit one out of the park. I looked to check to see if this was posted on “April Jackasses Who Pretend They’re Funny Day,” but it appears to be a real research project, and one which almost conclusively proves two things:

1. Regardless of how great the software is, nobody in the video can sing an entire verse in the same key.
2. Computers will never replace real musicians.

MySong: Automatic Accompaniment for Vocal Melodies (emphasis and snark added)

Like to Write Music?

Most folks never get a chance to answer this question, since writing music takes years of experience… if you don’t play an instrument or spend lots of time around music, you’ll probably never get to write a song.

MySong, introduced in our CHI 2008 paper, automatically chooses chords to accompany a vocal melody, allowing a user with no musical training [or taste!] to rapidly create accompanied music. MySong is a creative tool for folks who like to sing but would never get a chance to experiment with creating real original music. Come on, you know who you are… you sing in the car, or in the shower, or you go to karaoke clubs, or you just once in a while find yourself singing along with catchy commercial jingles.

“You would never get a chance to experiment with creating real original music” only if you’re too fucking lame to spend five minutes plunking on a real instrument. At least you’d actually be trying to make music if you picked up an instrument. This is exactly the sort of lame bullshit that makes me immediately want to shoot down candidates I’m interviewing… (fictionalized version below)*

Me: “Have you used Tech. X?”

Lameass Candidate: “I haven’t had the opportunity to use it.”

Me: “Really? Because you don’t have a computer or access to the internet?”

Lameass Candidate: “No, I have those.”

Me: “Oh, so you haven’t had any opportunity to download free open source software and run it on your machine?”

Lameass Candidate: “No, any time I try to download it men in black suits break into my house and beat me repeatedly.”

This software really is kinda interesting even if the current incarnation produces accompaniments which basically sound the same (tink, tink, tinka, tink) and have the performance quality of a 1st grade piano teacher’s recital. (Click the link, watch the short video, and you’ll see what I mean… tink, tink, tinka, tink)

I think they’re overlooking a market which would absolutely adore this… Christians. Consider the following compositions:

Jesus!  You are Awesome  (tink tink tinka tink )
I'm sorry that I inflict pain on you  (tink tink tinka tink )
through time and space and that I  (tink tink tinka tink )
greaten your suffering on the cross  (tink tink tinka tink )
when I masturbate and think impure thoughts (tink tink tinka tink )

Or the other soon-to-be gospel hit: Jesus!

Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!   (tink tink tinka tink )
Your name is Jesus, Jesus!   (tink tink tinka tink )
Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!   (tink tink tinka tink )
Your name is Jesus, Jesus!   (tink tink tinka tink )
	
Hallelujah Jesus!  (A capella part)
	
Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!   (tink tink tinka tink )
Your name is Jesus, Jesus!   (tink tink tinka tink )
Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!   (tink tink tinka tink )
Jesus, I wish you could remember your own fucking name 'cause I'm tired
of having to sing it all the damn time to remind you!   (tink tink tinka tink )

Microwaves, televisions, the intertubes… and now automatic accompaniments for people who have no sense of rhythm, pitch, or style!

I’m still digging around on the site to see if I can find their MyOperatingSystem(tm), MyInstantBestsellingNovel(tm), MyGlamourMagazinePhotoshoot(tm), MyPainting(tm), MyMeaningfulLongtermRelationship(tm), and MyHomeSurgeon(tm) software projects. Why waste all that time and effort developing actual skills and an actual appreciation of music when you can buy a shitty piece of software?**

* My point here is that “I haven’t had the opportunity” is a lame, lame, lame answer and clearly indicates that the candidate has little-to-no actual interest in personal growth/development and is unwilling to take initiative… aka somebody I do not want to work with. The specific technology is irrelevant.

** Doesn’t look like you can actually buy this yet. Not like that’s a *bad* thing.

Hey, remember that song from Shrek?*

This is an interesting (and at times, wayward) analysis of the Leonard Cohen song “Hallelujah” and its apparent rise in popularity after it was “simplified and saddened” by John Cale and later Jeff Buckley.

Let me take you back to the long-ago time of mid-February, 2007. Popular emo band Fall Out Boy had the number one album in the country and, being a responsible music critic, I of course illegally downloaded it. As my train crossed the Manhattan Bridge, I reached track five on the album. And I heard this:

What they’re singing there, aside from what I believe professionals call “twaddle,” is the chorus of a Leonard Cohen song. This is mildly incredible. Twenty-five years ago, a character on the TV show The Young Ones named Neal–the hippie–said, “I’m beginning to feel like a Leonard Cohen record, cause nobody ever listens to me.” Today, in contrast, one particular Leonard Cohen song is featured prominently in no less than three separate episodes of teen uberdrama The OC, and can be heard in at least twenty-four separate movies and TV episodes, almost always as the soundtrack to a montage of people being sad.

What I hope to show today is how, exactly, that happened to a song called “Hallelujah.”

What’s now considered the definitive version of this song is by dreamy, dead troubadour Jeff Buckley. (Some people are even under the impression that Buckley’s cover is the original version.)

It’s an almost unbearably sad song in this incarnation—slow, keening, and heartbroken. But originally it was something different.

This is more like your uncle’s band playing in a warehouse, assuming your uncle was weird and labored under the impression that he was a crooner. It passed into the public realm almost unnoticed, and remained that way for some time; in the major Cohen biography, published in 1996, there’s no entry for the song in the index, despite the fact that the book’s name is the same as the album on which “Hallelujah” originally appears.

The article is pretty interesting and also contains clips/samples of numerous artists’ versions of the song.

If you have any love for the song and don’t want to hear the worst version that I could find then do not click on the video below*.

Since I’m on the subject of this song, I should point out that while I used to really like it I’ve overplayed it enough now that I absolutely loathe playing it and won’t, ever again. You’re welcome, Leonard… there’s now one less idiot doing a shit cover of your song.

* Sorry, but I couldn’t resist starting this post that way.

** I confess that I like Bon Jovi and that this isn’t the worst version of Hallelujah that I’ve ever heard (I have performances of myself playing it y’know?), but omfg Bon Jovi’s whispering-voice on this is some of the most overwrought and maudlin shit I’ve heard in a while.