l-dopa

• Russian Circles, “Enter”: Following in the proud and heavy tradition of math-rock guitar bands like Slint, Don Caballero, King Crimson, Mogwai, and yes, Rush, Russian Circles play heavy, fully instrumental, capital-R Rawk. It’s ludicrously energetic music, overstuffed with interlocking patterns and off-time beats, fun to listen to while driving or working out. At six tracks, it’s a little short, but I bet these guys would be completely awesome to see play live. BONUS: no Geddy Lee.
• Islands, “Return to the Sea”: “Return to the Sea” maddeningly alternates between sounding like a lost Ween album and sounding like a bunch of indie kids and an oompah band falling down the stairs. The unfortunately titled third track (“Don’t Call Me Whitney, Bobby”) is insanely catchy, and could have come off of Paul Simon’s “Graceland”; but one good track does not an album make, and ultimately I found myself finding reasons not to listen.
• Danger Doom, “The Occult Hymn”: “The Occult Swim” is a free EP available from adultswim.com, but it’s the musical equivalent of a commemorative plastic cup from Burger King filled with warm, flat soda. These charmless remixes manage to ditch everything that was moderately interesting about the original tracks from “The Mouse and the Mask” — they even ditch the insanely catchy loop from “Sofa King”, a personal favorite — and replace them with grating skits from the lamer cartoons from the Adult Swim fare. MF Doom is as skilled as ever, but Danger Mouse seems preoccupied with something else, probably the “Gnarls Barkley” album.
• Gnarls Barkley, “Gnarls Barkey”: Like the owners of “Butternuts” on Route 9, I wish these guys thought for about five more minutes before settling on a name. No matter — surely the single “Crazy” is a contender for 2006 song of the summer, as I’ve heard it pretty much everywhere I’ve gone for the past couple of weeks. Nothing else on the album comes close, but they deserve props for the Violent Femmes cover (“Gone Daddy Gone”) alone.
• Phoenix, “Never Been Like That”: French pop group Phoenix ditches a few of their synthesizers in favor of Stokes-style guitars in an attempt to rough up their image; this is roughly equivalent to Mike Seaver putting on a Operation Ivy hoodie and a clip-on earring. I enjoyed their old sound far more, as only a few tracks here come close to the highs reached by tracks on their excellent previous albums “Alphbetical” and “United”.
• Grandaddy, “Just Like The Fambly Cat”: While Jack Johnson rode his douchebag barefoot pro-surfer cred straight to the top of the Adult Contemporary charts, Grandaddy frontman Jason Lytle rode his former amateur-skateboarder cred straight into a ditch — and after several decent yet commercially unsuccessful albums (and one outright masterpiece, 2003’s “Sumday”), Lytle is finally calling it quits on this album. Sadly, this means Grandaddy is ending on a low point; none of Lytle’s future-folk songs have the same pop as the older tunes, and it seems like everyone involved knew it. Here’s hoping Lytle goes on to better things.
• Ellen Allien & Apparat, “Orchestra of Bubbles”: For years, techno has been drifting into two seperate camps — there’s the floaty, hazy, gauzily electronic type pioneered by Brian Eno and innovated upon by surprisingly non-Canadian groups such as Boards of Canada. It’s the pleasant and dreamy kind of techno you hear in your more upscale coffeeshops. Then there’s the other kind of techno, phone cards which is typified by harsh 4/4 kick-drum beats, sawtooth synths, and repetitive samples; it’s the type of techno you hear in video games in which you shoot people. This album is of the second type, and unless you’re coked up and clubbing, I would avoid it. Even then I would avoid it.
• Mike Patton, “Peeping Tom”: If you have a neck tattoo, you’ll probably enjoy this album.
• Sonic Youth, “Rather Ripped”: Disparaging Sonic Youth in their (adopted) hometown of Northampton, MA feels kind of like badmouthing Tony Soprano down at the Bada Bing, but I didn’t love this album. It sounds great — I don’t think they’ve ever sounded more in control of their clean guitar textures, and early highlights like “Incinerate” and “Rats” are instant crowd-pleasers; but nothing on this album connected with me the way that 2002’s “Murray Street” did, start to finish. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve been invited on a short car ride with Thurston and Sil.

~jeff

1. Post some music for free. Pick your three or four best songs, and encode them in mp3 format so they’ll work on whatever computer or device your visitor wants to put them on. But, don’t have your music play automatically when the visitor enters the site, as many people — I have heard — use the Internet to occasionally goof off at their day jobs, and if they go to your website during work hours and you start blaring your music out of their computer they will hate you, and they will be right to do so.
2. Don’t make an “intro” to your site using Flash. Nobody genuinely watches them, and visitors will simply skip over it. They also damage the ability of search engines (like Google) to find and index your site
3. Get a real domain name for your site; don’t be known as homepage.earthlink.com/users/jimmyandtheastronauts, be known as www.jimmyandtheastronauts.com. Domain names used to be fairly expensive, but these days, you should only have to pay around $10-$15 a year.
4. Sell your music online, and you can reach a lot more people than you could with a couple CD-Rs at Turn it Up! For example, you can use a service like CDbaby.com to make your music available on the iTunes Music Store and the like for a paltry $35.
5. Finally: please, please, do not use MySpace for your main website. MySpace is ostensibly “cool” for bands right now — but trust me, in a year from now the fickle finger of Internet zeitgeist will have moved on to florp-dot-floop.com or whatever, and you will look wicked lame.

~jeff

Remember that cool terminal in Quake that dropped from the top of the screen? Yeah, that was cool. Thanks to a thread at Ars Technica, the maker of Quicksilver has whipped up a quickie drop-down terminal app for Mac OS X: Visor. Follow the directions on the wiki (keeping in mind that once Visor is installed, it’ll show up in your menu items — that threw me for a couple seconds); and for extra style points, use one of these fantastic Quartz Composer graphics as a terminal background courtesy of zugakousaku.com.

~jeff

Holy God — this is the company that was big enough to buy Time Warner a couple years ago? And they’re reduced to harassing their customers one by one?

~jeff

All the new Apple ads have been pretty good — but the new one, “Work vs. Home“, made me laugh out loud. John Hodgman is awesome. I’ve really been enjoying his stint on the Daily Show as “Resident Expert”, and his new-ish book “The Areas of my Expertise” can be picked up used on Amazon for $7, which would be the best $7 you’ve ever spent, my friend. The chapter on hobos is worth it alone.

~jeff

1. Open Preview.
2. Open a picture file.
3. Close the picture file.
4. Throw it away.
5. Try to empty the trash. You can’t. Preview still thinks it’s open. Doy.

Drives me nuts, this one does, and without exaggeration it makes me want to shoot myself in the face. It’s been a problem since Mac OS X 10.0, and I’ve reported it a bunch of times; oh well, there’s always 10.5.

UPDATE: I might be crazy, as no one else seems to have this going on in their system. That’s always a real possibility, me being crazy, I mean.

~jeff

A word about my movie-laden Saturday:

I went to a showing of “A Prairie Home Companion.” The reviews (I admit it. I like to read movie reviews.) were mixed at best. People seemed to knock it just for being a Robert Altman film, and for on top of that, capturing the feel of a radio program displaced in the modern world.
The way I see it, the reviewers are faulting the movie for doing what it does best. No, it doesn’t have a clear, driven plot-line; rather it is a series of interactions, that broadly captures the Prairie Home experience.

It’s pretty simple. If you like Prairie Home Companion, you’ll like the movie. If you don’t (or haven’t heard of it), you’re missing out. My recommendation: go listen to Prairie Home Companion right now. Then go see the movie. You’ll be better for it.

Oh, and Cars: It’s good. It’s Pixar. The Car Talk boys are in it (it was an NPR kind of day) ‘nuff said.

I’ve always liked the abstract desktop backgrounds that have come with Mac OS X — I find photo desktop backgrounds distracting — but the choice of just bright Aqua Blue or muted Aqua Graphite is a little stingy. For the sake of variety, I’ve fired up Photoshop and made myself a couple different highly fashionable Aqua backgrounds based on the original “Aqua Blue” desktop in Mac OS X 10.4:

• Aqua Turquoise, a darker greenish tint (my favorite). Looks great with Aluminum PowerBooks/MacBookPros.
• Aqua Fresh, a variant of Aqua Turquoise, bright like toothpaste.
• Aqua Ubuntu Orange, a orange/brown desktop tinted to match the “Human” theme introduced in Ubuntu 6.06 “Dapper Drake”.
• Aqua Lime, a bright green desktop which should look adorable on the white iBooks/MacBooks.
• Aqua Negative, a dark desktop that should look pretty cool on the new black MacBooks.

~jeff

Thanks to the enthusiastic urgings of my friend Ben, I took an important step towards adulthood today: I bought my first new vacuum cleaner.

Pros:

• Thanks to Dyson, all vacuum cleaners now look like Tonka trucks. Not to say the vacuum is attractive — it’s not — but there is a certain Transformers toy-like quality to it. I guess vacuum cleaner manufacturers finally found out who was buying the vacuum cleaners (men) vs. who was more likely to want a vacuum cleaner bought (women).
• It’s quite powerful. By then end of our first vacuuming run, I had half a grocery bag full of dirty hair. It should be noted that I haven’t actually vacuumed in about a year, and roomba can only do so much.
• It’s bagless, which for me is a key point, as I refuse to give any more money in my lifetime to the shiftless vacuum cleaner bag impresarios, with their annoying and constantly unavailable unneccesary permutations of Size B, Size L, Size MM bags. Fuck them.

Cons:

• …and this is a big one: you have to buy it ($128.88) from Walmart. Walmart sucks — with apologies to our two readers from Utah, it’s a “red state” store, just like CompUSA — and what’s worse is after I bought the vacuum, the greeter wanted to check my receipt on the way out. Thanks to what what I’ve learned from the Consumerist, though, I didn’t let Flo the Walmart Greeter have her way. She shouted “I’ll call a manager!” at us as we left, but that was weak, and that was about all she apparently had.
• The cord doesn’t roll back in. I like when they do that.
• Headlight is not of the blinding, blue Xenon type.
• Vacuum is an annoying word to type.

I was also disappointed by the lack of integration between the Hoover Fusion and my beloved Gilette Fusion razor. I bought into both in hopes of creating a “Fusion of Fusions” — a quad-fusion if you will* — but my early efforts to integrate the razor onto the handle of the vacuum was met with skepticism and derision. Worse, early prototypes cut my face deeply and profoundly — sure, combining a razor and a vacuum is attractive from an efficiency standpoint, but I’m not sure that this is “the way”:

(click to enlarge detail)

Back to the drawing board.

~jeff

* and you will!

Josh asked me a while back if it was possible to make a .swf with an alpha (transparency) channel — I said I didn’t think so, but I was wrong, although it’s a feature often being used for evil and not good. Por ejemplo, on this page, there’s an iTunes ad which often appears on the left hand side which actually extends into the text in the center*. In a disconcerting intrusion, at some point the ad actually smashes a guitar and whips a headphone cord over the text; cool, technically, but from a readers’ perspective, godawful horrid.

(link fixed, thanks Trevor!)

~jeff

*probably using the z-index feature of css, although I haven’t actually checked the code.

Are you writing a story set in 1811 featuring scalawags, ne’rdowells, and hooligans? You are? Wow, that’s odd. Good luck, and this is really going to help you out — it’s a dictionary of slang from almost 200 years ago:

RIDING SKIMMINGTON. A ludicrous cavalcade, in ridicule of a man beaten by his wife. It consists of a man riding behind a woman, with his face to the horse’s tail, holding a distaff in his hand, at which he seems to work, the woman all the while beating him with a ladle; a smock displayed on a staff is carried before them as an emblematical standard, denoting female superiority: they are accompanied by what is called the ROUGH MUSIC, that is, frying-pans, bulls horns, marrow-bones and cleavers.

~jeff

Max Design has a logical, methodical, pleasingly lucid breakdown of how to lay out a web page using CSS — I wish every step-by-step technical walkthrough on the internet was half as well-written and copiously illustrated as this.

~jeff

This video gives an interesting if monotone history of the “Amen Brother” break, more or less the cornerstone of jungle and a vital hip-hop staple.

~tgp

For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, or god forbid have social lives and more important things to do, Slashdot.org has gone live with their pretty new CSS design. It’s shiny.

How did they come to this design? They asked the Slashdot horde to do it for free, and they complied. This gave me an idea.

A drunken friend of mine recently attempted to use my glovebox to turn my iPod headphones into a cubist dissection of iPod headphones. He succeeded, and shaved off the stupid third-dimension I didn’t really want them to have anyway. Wait for it…… they sound flat!! Ha! *wipes tear from corner of eye*

But now I’m in need of replacing headphones I never really liked anyway. I’m thinking inner ear headphones, and I have a $100 coupon for J & R burning a hole in my pocket. So, loyal ldopa.net readers, what should I get?

Behold: The non-awaited return of my crittercam. Witness the wacky antics of my two guinea pigs, Shaun and Danny (the boys), or my two rabbits, Sparks and Nutley (the girls). When in a cage together, Shaun and Danny will run around in circles and try to hump each other. I plan to videotape this and set it to the Benny Hill theme. For now you can see them pine for each other behind their respective bars, hoping to join each other for homoerotic pig love.

The Crittercam

P.S. My iSight has a lot of red/green fuzzies in dim light… is that normal or is this thing messed up?