Bad Beatles Renaissance: Beatles For Sale

Beatles For Sale isn't just a self-deprecating title, it's widely considered the worst thing they'd recorded up to that point in their careers. We get more covers, more under-written pop, and a real sense of fatigue from the group. There are really only a few songs of note on it: Every Little Thing, I'll Follow The Sun, and Eight Days a Week. Arguably I'm a Loser and What You're Doing are decent, although I would say they're more "solidly mediocre" than "good".

Everything else is pretty skippable.

Some of the covers are staples from their live show: Chuck Berry's Rock and Roll Music is where the biopic Backbeat (about the pre-Ringo group playing in Germany) ultimately gets its title, and their recorded rendition of it is lively and bouncing. Others are a little flat, like Mr. Moonlight, which can only be described as dreary.

George and Ringo sing some Carl Perkins tunes, the least interesting of which is Ringo's Honey Don't, in which he tells George to "rock out one time for Ringo". Under normal circumstances, this would only be vaguely cheesy, but the song has not one but two guitar breaks, and Ringo calls out for George to play "one time" both times. So it's weird and anachronistic as well. George's take on Everybody's Trying To Be My Baby is a weird closer with a laughable slap-echo.

We get a medley of covers sung by Paul: Kansas City/Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey!, two blues numbers which are so indistinguishable that it's hard to tell where one song ends and the next begins. This only goes to reinforce my long-held theory: the blues is a very boring genre.

Beatles aficionados will point out that songs like I'm a Loser, while not good, show some progression for the band, notably Bob Dylan's influence on John Lennon. And we can't fault the band too much, it was their fourth album to be recorded in 21 months. I suppose that's interesting/all-well-and-good, but on the whole For Sale sits pretty low, especially because it sits between two albums that are substantially better.

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Concrete Method: Good Lord

In keeping with my tendency to blaspheme on Sundays, here's a link to a post about an actual conversation that really happened between my friend Evan and a 7th Day Adventist minister.

Enjoy,

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Even More Left 4 Dead 2 Impression

So I've been paying particular attention to the differences between Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2.

For starters, 2 has much more varied gameplay. At launch, the first L4D had four campaigns that were more or less identical--they all played out the same way but they took place on different maps. The five campaigns in the sequel all have their own unique flavors. Dead Center goes for the zombie-slasher-flick vibe full-bore. It has the most plot-centric progression, it has none-too-subtle nods to other zombie movies (the last half of the campaign takes place in a mall).

Dark Carnival feels like a pretty straight-forward L4D experience, but Swamp Fever has a much more open-world vibe. Hard Rain is probably the most survival-horror of them, and the go-there-and-come-back nature of the level makes it stand out. The Parish in many ways feel like the epitome of what a L4D2 campaign is. The panic events are nearly all in the new gauntlet style, and it has the only gauntlet-style finale, in which you run across a bridge against a head-on cavalcade of infected.

The other substantial difference between this game and its predecessor is that the maps feel much more open--the maps in the original game had plenty of areas to explore, but the areas were tighter-quartered. The openness of the sequel means that the special infected can't sneak up on you as easily and are easier to defend against. They counteract this by throwing even more of them at you. Just this evening I came to a safe room only to be set upon by a Jockey and two Hunters.

Still enjoying it very much, though.

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Turkey's Don't, However

Time flies. Thanksgiving is over and now we start Christmas shopping season which will take us at a dead run through the end of the year. Then the '00's are over, and we move on to the teen years of the decade.

Happy Black Friday everyone,
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Try The Veal

It's Thanksgiving, the day of the year when we all get together and remember what we're thankful for. And what, you may ask, am I thankful for?

A goddam four-day weekend.

Happy Holidays!

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A.M.O.M.Y., R.: Thanksgiving Edition

And now it's time for another awkward moment of my youth, remembered.

When I was in elementary school, we went around the class saying what we were thankful for. (I'm thankful for dangling prepositions.) I've always fancied myself something of a comedian, and this was no exception--although my sense of humor had not yet developed into the twisted delight that it is today. (Just ask my wife, she thinks I'm hilarious. No, really.)

So when it came around to me, I went for the joke, and I told the class that I was "thankful for nothing".

And I got in trouble.

...b'der...

This has been another awkward moment of my youth, remembered.

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Um, Blogless?

Guess what I forgot to do last night. Write an entry for this morning.

This might be an indicator that I'm running out of things to say.

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Crowe Watch: Made Up Holiday Edition

Happy Fibonacci Day everyone (but not too happy--the real party will be in 2058).

Also, yesterday a random stranger at the grocery store told me that I look like Russel Crowe. This hasn't happened in a while, since I've been wearing glasses and longer hair lately, but it's nice to know that I've still got it.

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Dammit, Jim

Re-watched Star Trek. The more I watch it, the less it stands up to scrutiny, but it's still a damn fun flick.

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It Doesn't Help That "Binging" Mean Drinking To Excess

So apparently Microsoft's new re-branded search engine Bing has 10% of the market share for internet searches. This seems pretty remarkable until you think about how they did it.

You see, they've re-programmed their entire line to use Bing. It's the default search on IE. In fact, on XP the other day, I did a search for a file from the start bar and that popped up a Bing search. In short, Microsoft has dedicated the most popular operating system in the world to using Bing, and after all that effort, they only have 10% of the market.

Pretty pathetic, I'd say.

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Things That Are True: Guns, Abortions, 2012...

The debate on gun control is over. The Republicans won. The Democrats are not going to take your guns away. You're still hearing about it because there are a number of people who make money by keeping you afraid of losing your guns. Stop being manipulated.

The abortion debate is also over. Roe v. Wade will not be overturned in the foreseeable future. There is still some discussion in the peripheral cases (being able to get an abortion without parental consent, late-term abortions, etc), but that's not to be confused with the legality of abortion still being in question. That said, the billboards all along the highway are totally changing my heart and mind and not making pro-lifers look like assholes at all.

It's not worth watching the Super Bowl for the commercials. There will be two or three gems and the rest will suck. Every year you tell your friends how underwhelming they were and conveniently forget how disappointed you were. You're warned. Speaking of warnings...

The world is not going to end anytime soon. It didn't end in the year 2000, it won't end in 2012. After it hasn't ended in 2012, it won't end whenever they say it will next. People have been prophesying the end of the world for centuries. Have they been right yet? Why should they start now? When the world ends, we won't see it coming.

Also, when the world ends, you won't survive. You will be taken out with the first wave of casualties. As will I, and everyone you know. And we'll be lucky for it.

These are all things that are true.

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Vienna Teng and Alex Wong

There weren't many males in the audience at this show (like, could count on two hands), and few of those were under fifty. That said, there were two in the front row: myself and some blond guy. Both of us were at the front of the line to get in, both of us sang along with almost every song, and both of us were utter fanboys.

I've been following Vienna Teng for longer than I've known my wife (and Abby and I started dating almost five and a half years ago). Her music is rich with atmosphere, has wonderfully inventive and intelligent lyrics, and and draws from a broad swath of varied musical influences, wrapping it all around solid pop sensibilities. So you get songs like Antebellum, which uses the Civil War as a metaphor for lovers growing apart, or No Gringo, a song about Americans trying to illegally emigrate to Mexico after some unnamed disaster had left the U.S. in ruins.

I've seen her play three times now, and this time I managed to bring four other people--two of whom had never heard of her prior to my intervention. I could run down highlights, but I don't think anyone would know any of the songs I'm talking about, so I will pause to mention that the Star Wars "cantina" theme found its way into the bridge of In Another Life eliciting some laughter from myself and others. That prompted Vienna to point out that some of her fellow nerds had been "outed". I also inadvertently started a series of awful "Is that a Vienna Teng CD in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?" jokes (answer: both).

But the real take-away from the show was Alex Wong. I've seen him as part of her backing band and heard his production influence on her albums (which gives her latest--Inland Territory--some of its wonderful weirdness), and I knew him to be a competent percussionist, but good lord. He is an incredible musician. He usually played two or three instruments at a time, a typical example being Harbor, in which he played a xylophone with his left hand, a two-piece drum kit with his right hand, a kjone with his foot, and sang backup all at the same time. He would switch instruments or sticks without missing a beat, sometimes flipping sticks around in the air to use different ends during different parts of the same measure. He would grab two mallets in one hand to do a cymbal swell and then discard them for a shaker faster than I was able to keep track. Awed, I am.

And will definitely be seeing him/them/her again the next time they're through St. Louis.

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Left 4 Dead 2 Impressions

My expectations for Left 4 Dead 2 were pretty high, but having played through most half of it now, I have to say that the game has so far met or exceeded them all.

The original Left 4 Dead worked with the conceit that you were actually a character in a movie about a zombie apocalypse. The characters from that game were cardboard cut-outs, the stuff of slasher fiction: a grizzled veteran without a war to fight, an energetic yuppie who has been ripped from his life of urban familiarity, a dimwitted thug with a heart of gold, and a hot chick. The quartet fights their way through a city that has already fallen to pieces. The tone of the game was highly stylized, but the panic events and finales had a certain realism to them.

If Left 4 Dead was a slasher, Left 4 Dead 2 is a grindhouse flick. Valve has turned everything up: larger maps, more zombies, more outrageous events in a bleaker and crazier setting. The second campaign of the game takes place in an amusement park where you're chased around by zombie clowns. It ends when you take the stage that had been set up for the band Midnight Riders and set off pyrotechnics to attract a passing helicopter, all while beating zombies to hell with the band's guitars. Bye-bye realism.

For example, in the first campaign, an NPC (non-playable character, for those of you playing along at home) agrees to clear a path for you, which he does by setting off an explosion. He does this under the condition that you go across the street to the store and get him some cola--which will set off an alarm and summon the horde. Before you go, he lets you raid his gun shop, providing a nice kid-in-a-candy store moment. None of this makes any sense if you look at them through a lens of reality, but it works.

In part, Valve gets away with this by giving us more grounded characters. Our heroes have a bit more personality and depth than their predecessors, and there's a level of storytelling layered into the campaigns that deepens the game without interrupting it, all using character dialog and scenery. In many ways, the storytelling elements of this game are dramatically influenced by Portal--with setting and character interactions driving the story rather than plot. Not surprisingly, the game is pretty immersing: the levels are still linear, but they don't feel linear. You're still being led around by the nose, but you don't feel like you are. You feel lost without actually being lost. The background plot is there if you want to find it, but the real story comes from the characters.

In short, Left 4 Dead 2 is what a sequel is supposed to be: a better game. It builds on all the strengths of the original and improves upon the weaknesses. And through all of this, it never takes itself too seriously. There's kind of a push these days to make games "cinematic", but these games often fall pretty flat. It's amusing to me that Left 4 Dead and it's sequel are games that pretend to be cinematic, but focus on being quality gaming experiences. In fact, if they ever made a movie of the campaigns in the L4D franchise, it'd probably be a pretty horrible movie, but it'd be a movie that looked like it had been blast to make.

Missing: A Kurt

As I write this, it is 1 hour and 45 minutes to the release of Left 4 Dead 2. So, if I don't answer the phone, that's why, you know.

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Good Music

Thought I'd take a break from all this Beatles talk to about plain old ordinary good music. Of course, when I say "good", I'm referring to the songs from my iTunes list whose titles start with the word "Good".

• Better Than Ezra - Good
• The Dresden Dolls - Good Day
• The Beatles - Good Day Sunshine

And it only took us three songs to get to a Beatles title. Let's see if we can avoid that again.

• Sarah McLachlan - Good Enough
• Violent Femmes - Good Feeling
• Third Eye Blind - Good For You (I effing love this song, by the way)
• Foo Fighters - Good Grief
• OK Go - A Good Idea At The Time
• Weezer - The Good Life
• The Beatles - Good Morning Good Morning

More Beatles? Seriously? Damn.

• Good Morning Starshine (from the Hair soundtrack)
• The Beatles - Good Night

Well, shit. Okay, but Ringo sings that one, it hardly counts.

• "Weird Al" Yankovic - Good Old Days
• Green Day - Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life)
  
• Nine Inch Nails - The Good Soldier
  
• Chic - Good Times
• DJ Rap - Good To Be Alive (man, has anyone even heard of these songs?)
• The Beach Boys - Good Vibrations
• Marky Mark And The Funky Bunch - Good Vibrations

Okay, not Beatles, but really freaking funny. To me, anyway.

• Pink Floyd - Goodbye Blue Sky
• Pink Floyd - Goodbye Cruel World
• Elton John - Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
• Imogen Heap - Goodnight And Go
• Seatbelts - Goodnight Julia
• Paul McCartney - Goodnight Tonight (doesn't count, doesn't count!!!)
• Collective Soul - Goodnight, Good Guy

Whew.

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R.I.P.: Dollhouse

So Dollhouse is canceled, and I'm about to give up on FlashForward, which has decided it's not worth living up to its potential. We haven't tried V yet, but I haven't heard anything spectacular about it. Oh well, this means we'll have plenty of time to watch Burn Notice when it starts up in January.

I'm a little sad about Dollhouse, but I understand why it got canceled. It just doesn't have the draw for that Timeslot--I think a show like that could have killed on Syfy, but then, Syfy would never produce a show like that.

Seriously, though, I'm starting to think that Joss Whedon needs to just independently produce TV shows and distribute them on Hulu. He got a tremendous response for Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog, and that was short and silly.

Just a thought. Must consider this more later.

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God Is On The iTunes List

My musical traipsing, upheld somewhat by The Beatles, has brought me to God. Well, to songs that start with the word "God" anyway.

We get:

• Tori Amos - God
• Alice In Chains - God Am
• The Wallflowers - God Don't Make Lonely Girls
• Nine Inch Nails - God Given
• Queens Of The Stone Age - God Is On The Radio
• Cowboy Mouth - God Makes The Rain
• Moby - God Moving Over The Face Of The Waters
• Third Eye Blind - God Of Wine
• Coldplay - God Put A Smile Upon Your Face
• Alice In Chains - God Smack (originally title God Smash... I kid)
  
• Metallica - The God That Failed

Not too many. Not nearly as many as there are "Goods".

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Seriously, Though, Let's Get Away From The 'B' Names

I've had occasion to re-watch both of Rian Johnson's films lately, those being Brick and The Brothers Bloom. Apart from a love of the letter 'B', the movies have almost nothing in common.

Brick is a 40's-style hard-boiled noir detective story set in a modern day California high school. It's smart, funny, daring, well-crafted, made on the cheap, and is one of my favorite movies to come out in the last few years.

The Brothers Bloom, I must admit, disappointed me at first. I was expecting something... a little more like Brick, and what I got instead was a screwball comedy fairy-tale disguised as a con movie. And don't get me wrong, I still enjoyed watching it, but I found the ending a bit anti-climactic for a con-movie. That said, upon repeated viewings, it has endeared itself to me and revealed more of its character to me.

And in this way, it's very much like Brick, which I have seen probably a dozen times now, and in which I can still find new nuances and layers to the depth of the story. I'm reminded a little bit of Kubrick, whose films you watched once to see the story and then again to just look at the visuals and admire the craft. Unlike Kubrick, however, Johnson's films don't have the same artistic flare that permeated Kubrick's and often got in the way of the storytelling.

Anyway, I've ranted far longer than I intended to in this post, but I'll close by saying that I'm deeply interested in whatever Rian Johnson is directing next. His first two films are not for everyone, but they're smart, well-made, and singularly unique, so check them out anyway.

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What Is An Arcadium, Anyway?

Over the weekend I had a chance to listen to Red Hot Chili Pepper's Stadium Arcadium from start to finish for the first time in a while--and it's a double-album, twenty-eight tracks altogether. And while the RHCP sound is certainly dominated by Flea's bass insanity and Anthony's raps about sex and geography, this time around I was most impressed by John Fruciante's guitar work. Particularly, listen to Charlie and Turn it Again, in which the guitar layering is most evident. Both songs devolve into guitar breaks for their endings and feature some fantastic melodic hooks.

Of course, the whole album is pretty kick-ass. I think you could have picked four songs at random and called them singles (I love the opener, Dani California, but I couldn't say that it's any stronger than Death of a Martian, which closes the album). I'm also amused by the random trumpet lines that show up in songs (e.g., Turn it Again or Hump De Bump) because Flea, in addition to being one of the most prominent bassists in the world, is an equally skilled trumpet player.

Anyway, nothing profound to say. Just that this record makes me happy.

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Social Media's Accidental Usefulness

So Evan and I have had an ongoing discussion about what we can do with Google Wave, now that we both have it. The suggested uses are document collaboration and event planning. This spawned a thread of the discussion that most of us use Facebook for event planning, even though that's not why we joined it. We all joined because everyone was doing it and it was a way to keep in touch with friends and share photos (another purported use for Wave) and play stupid games with each other. And then it turns out to be a fairly useful event planning tool (and a much more user-friendly one than MySpace).

Or look at Twitter, people get on because it's trendy, you get to talk about yourself, it works with your cell phone, etc, etc, etc. All of this is pretty vapid and meaningless, but Twitter has become a way to get news quickly. Remember when Captain Sully landed a plane in the Hudson river all those months ago? Twitter broke the story well before any of the news outlets.

So you have things like Facebook and Twitter which are, on their... ahem... faces, pretty shallow, but turn out to be real tools with real uses in the real world. But if you had started a service like Twitter with the idea of getting news to people quickly, nobody would care. If you started Facebook as the ultimate event-planning app, no one would go for it, and apps like these are only useful if you have lots and lots of people using them.

So if we want to get Wave off the ground, we need to come up with some piddly, insignificant shit that it can do that will attract users. Then you can actually start using it as a tool.

Any ideas?

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Steam Powered Fail

Argh, my install of Steam got corrupted and couldn't be repaired, meaning I've lost most of the games I have installed on this computer.

Of course, the beauty of Steam is that I could just uninstall the client and then reinstall it and I've got everything back. But that means I have to reinstall, well, every game I feel like playing that was purchased through Steam.

Which takes a while.

Ugh. No L4D for Kurt tonight.

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Bad Beatles Renaissance: The White Album

Purists will point out that the actual title of this album is The Beatles, but since it has gained such renown as The White Album, and since that's what the band refers to it as, henceforth so shall it be called. Without that title, we would never have had Metallica's The Black Album, Jay-Z's The Black Album, the Simpson's collection The Yellow Album, or half of Weezer's catalog (The Blue Album, The Green Album, and The Red Album).

This is one of those albums that it's worth picking up the remasters for. You can pick out whole instruments that weren't apparent in previous releases. The clarity and definition in the new masters is incredible, and the complex arrangements in these songs really benefits from it.

So this album was supposed to be the follow-up to the legacy-defining Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. In the time since SPLHCB, the group had lost their manager, made a truly awful movie (Magical Mystery Tour) that had spawned a memorable soundtrack, and gone to India to find spirituality. While in India, they wrote a whole bunch of music on acoustic guitar and came back pissed off and disillusioned, and began writing and recording. The new technology allowed them to track individually, and they put together a whole lot of music, so much so that The White Album feels almost more like a collection of four individual efforts than an actual double-album. Indeed, the only song that all four played on at the same time was Happiness is a Warm Gun.

The songs range from the simply-crafted I Will and Julia to the cacophonous Helter Skelter, to the jaunty complexity of Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da to the subtle political wiles of Back in the U.S.S.R. to the we're-not-sure-why-they-wrote-this-song-at-all-ness of Birthday and Goodnight.

Also included on the album is Don't Pass Me By, Ringo's first creative contribution. His first of two. Ringo was a fabulous drummer, but I'm glad he didn't write too many songs. Our "What the fuck, George?" moment comes from the song Piggies, which is played on a harpsichord and would go on to be a big influence on Charles Manson. Wild Honey Pie gets the "Nice effort, there, Paul", narrowly edging out Can You Take Me Back because it gets its own track (Can You Take Me Back is appended to the end of Cry Baby Cry, almost as an afterthought).

As for "John being a dick," there are too many moments to choose from. There's Glass Onion in which he deliberately feeds disinformation to fans vis-a-vis Paul, the walrus, et al. (Also, I have a particular dislike of artists referencing previous songs in new songs.) Or there's Sexy Sadie, which was a none-too-complimentary song about the Maharishi. Or we could talk about how he managed to get Yoko a lead vocal part (if only for a single, incomprehensible line) on The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill.

And then there's Revolution 9, the only must-skip song in the Beatles' catalog, a song which Paul and producer George Martin tried very hard to block, because it's 8 and a half minutes of noise. Don't get me wrong, it's interesting noise, but it's still noise. Also, I may have mentioned that it goes on for over eight minutes!!!! I have a cousin who swears its exactly what an acid trip sounds like, so I guess that's kind of cool, but on the whole it is an artistic experiment that fails miserably, but that John put on the album anyway.

The songwriting is generally pretty solid, but the recordings are decidedly unpolished--and this may or may not have been intentional. The album is riddled with lo-fi moments from botched takes (a la Revolution 1) to studio chatter (a la... well, most of them actually) to abrupt and noticeable edits. A particularly vexing incident of the latter happens at the end of Yer Blues in which the beginning of a different take was spliced on as an outro--John's vocal was muted but can still be heard bleeding into other microphones.

Still, the album is pretty remarkable, especially in songs like Mother Nature's Son where a simple guitar ballad is beautifully supported by George Martin's score. Despite how constructed it was, it captured the sort of live-and-by-the-seat-of-our-pants vibe that I think Paul was going for with the Get Back sessions (that would eventually become Let It Be). The White Album contains several of the group's most enduring compositions, and it shows a foursome that is experimenting wildly but is still, at heart, a rock and roll band.

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There's Also A "Leggy-Blonde"

I love the fact that I can walk into the office and say "Dude, Leather-Boots is Kitten-Liver" and at least one or two people will know what I'm talking about.

This comes from working in an office where we only know people in the building by their physical appearance or vehicles (for those of you playing at home, "Kitten-Liver" comes from a license plate: KTNLVR).

So there's corporate culture for you. And, for the record, Leather-Boots did, in fact, turn out to be the same person as Kitten-Liver.

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Some "Random" Entries Are More Random Than Others

Dude, I totally forgot to celebrate Guy Fawkes day. I was gonna, like, blow up some shit... and stuff.

I'll be in Kansas City for the weekend, my only computer an underpowered EEEPC with an uncomfortably small keyboard. So, if I don't respond to comments, that's why.

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Don't Tell Me "Rise of Cobra" Isn't Sexual

So Abby and I rented G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra to see if it is as truly awful as everyone says. And the verdict is: yes, it's pretty bad. Thankfully, it's not unwatchably bad. I didn't want to gouge my eyes out or just turn it off and walk away (like we did with Shrink earlier this week). But it hinges on some pretty stupid ideas.

And I blame the director for all of it. The film is a study in poor execution. It hits all the right beats, but it stumbles over itself. There's a grace and poise to some of the action sequences, but there's a whole lot of senseless chaos as well. There are huge special effects sequences, but they all look really, really fake. Every single plot twist was telegraphed; every plot point was overstated. Really, for me the unintentional laughs started with the fancy Hasbro production logo.

Main themes of the script include: becoming evil means dying your hair black and donning glasses. Or burning your face and wearing some kind of mask. What else... oh yeah, science is evil. And intelligent women don't believe in emotions. It's basically an affront against nerds, and who do they think is going to see this movie if not nerds? On a storytelling level, there were no fewer than seven unnecessary flashback sequences (eight if you count Baroness's frequent flitting remembrances of a better time with Duke). Cobra Commander controls the world by brainwashing all of his minions with nano-technology (seriously...). He's the only real bad-guy in the movie. Well, Destro started out bad, then he became a pawn... and Storm Shadow was bad, because his rivalry with Snake Eyes needed to be a plot point for some reason... something to do with honor and swordplay and being Japanese. Seriously...

The film was horribly miscast--Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a fine actor, but he's not menacing. His character was a blatant rip-off of Darth Vader. Channing Tatum looked the part for Duke, but he didn't do anything outside the typical grizzled soldier routine. Baroness was okay--Sienna Miller is not exactly a powerhouse of acting prowess, but she filled her bustier... erm, role well enough (she did quite well when you look at the script--during a terrorist attack she stopped to tell a woman "nice shoes"... seriously...). But Marlon Wayans as Ripcord? Really? You made an action movie and your first instinct was "we need us a Wayans"? That was bad, but not egregious. Brendan Fraser as Sgt. Slaughter was egregious. Jonathan Price (British accent and all) as the President of the United States was egregious.

The design was over-the-top to the point of laughable, like the rest of it. And without any sense of coordination--at the end we have Cobra Commander and Destro and from a distance they looked exactly alike.

I'm sad at the potential--there were lots of little moments that I thought could have had some weight if done correctly. Such as the Baroness's redemption at the end: she's in prison (oh yeah, spoiler alert) and says she'll never get out because of all the horrible things she's done, but Duke says it wasn't really her, they kiss, yay! It could have been a little darker, a little heavier if she had said something instead that all the horrible things she had done really were her--she might not have started out as the kind of person who would kill people, but she is now, and she's not going back. You know, character arc, that kind of thing.

But what should I really expect from a Hasbro production?

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Potential alternate title: "Hasbro, Will Travel"

The Aesthetics of Politics (In North Carolina, Anyway)

I'm torn. The worst campaign website in the world went up recently, for George Hutchins in 2010. It's laughably awful. A coworker described it as "clawing up from the depths of Hell to stab him in the eyes".

Part of me feels so bad for the guy. I just want to point out all the horrible, horrible flaws in design and, you know, sentence structure. Clue him in on little things: "Pot Smoking" is not a noun and should not be used as a subject. Use the gerund phrase "Smoking pot" instead. Shy away from the comma key a bit. Believe me, when I'm telling you that you use too many commas, you use way too many freaking commas.

I want to leave comments in his forums, telling him that the poster linking to efowl.com is fucking with him! And basic web stuff--backgrounds should not be stark red. Words should usually be the same color when they appear in the same sentence. Rather than listing your sentences sequentially, organize them into paragraphs. You know.

And I particularly like this (which I've reproduced sans formatting for the ease of all our eyes):

"America is a Great Nation, due to our Diversity; but ONLY WHEN, This Diversity is VOLUNTARY."

Okay, you clearly do not know how to properly use a semi-colon, a comma, or capital letters. And really, is diversity what makes America great? When did America become a university?

I just want to clutch the poor misguided web-designer to my bosom and tell him "There there, it'll be all right" and outline the various ways that this site is an abomination to the eyes. And at the same time, I'd hate for Mr. Hutchins to take my advice and suddenly seem, you know, like a serious politician.

So, like I said. I'm torn.

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Wave Hello (I Hope)

I did finally get my Google Wave invite the other day (I don't remember if I mentioned it here or not). And now I'm stuck with the task of trying to contrive a use for it.

Yeah.

Don't get me wrong, it's really cool, and it's really powerful. Watching the Google demos makes it look really, truly exciting. But watching the Google employees show how they use Wave brings to light a major, major flaw with Wave.

It's designed to be used by smart people. Google's developers and product managers are pretty smart. Most internet users. Not so much.

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Of Course, I Do Know Several Robs

So I got a comment on this post in which someone named Rob provided a genuine answer to a rather sarcastic question.

I'm not chiding "Rob" for the info, I'm actually rather glad he responded. First of all, he provided information, rather than simply trolling.

Also, it leads me to believe that every now and then someone actually reads this thing.

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Bad Beatles Renaissance: A Hard Day's Night

If you only buy one album from the Beatles' early career (and by "early" I mean "pre-Rubber Soul"), buy Help! But if you buy two albums, you could do a lot worse than A Hard Day's Night. aHDN depicts a Fab-Four creeping farther out of the Brit-pop box that they had created with their first two albums. The eponymous single and it's follow-up, Can't Buy Me Love, are pretty decent tunes, and the album features several important firsts for the group.

It's the first album (the only one from their early years) to not have a single cover song on it. It's the first to use song titles based on Ringo's malapropisms (the song A Hard Day's Night would later be joined by Eight Days a Week and Tomorrow Never Knows in the drawer of "things named after stupid shit Ringo said"). Paul's bass is audible for the first time ever on I'll Cry Instead (slight exaggeration, but it's sort of featured in a couple of spots on this song). Ringo doesn't sing on the album (another first--he sang on all of their albums except three). This album is also the first of five film soundtracks--that's right, of the Beatles' 14-album catalog, a full third of the records are soundtracks to movies about and (usually) starring the Beatles. Go fig.

And thankfully, the stereo mixes on this album are actual stereo mixes. It's early stereo, so you still only have three channels (left, center, and right) and things are thrown into weird places by modern standards. Nobody these days will pan an entire drumkit hard left. But again, this is more of a product of the time in which the album was produced, so we can't chide it too hard for that.

The albums lags more due to mediocrity than true "suck". I Should Have Known Better and I'm Happy Just To Dance With You could have fit perfectly on With The Beatles. It's standard John-wrote-this-and-played-harmonica fare. Ditto When I Get Home. The penultimate song on the album, You Can't Do That doesn't offend musically so much as lyrically, as its perhaps the most misogynist song in The Beatles' catalog, in which John threatens to leave the listener because she's been talking to another boy.

The only truly bad song on the disc is Tell Me Why, which suffers from being unimaginatively written and badly recorded. The vocals are thin and perhaps even a bit overloaded at times. And at 1:32, there's a laughable falsetto line that, if you've been ignoring the song until then, will reach out and grab you. (For another fun should-have-been-fixed moment, check out 1:45 into If I Fell, where you can hear Paul--I think--run out of breath mid note.)

For me, the big disappointment is the potential that shows up in songs like And I Love Her, Any Time At All, and I'll Be Back. They're good songs, and while they show the group experimenting with the innovative technique called "Writing songs in a minor key"everything still manages to resolve to a major chord. Le sigh. Nice Effort, boys.

And if I can just make a brief critique here about the over-reliance on run-on-sentences. Take a look at the McCartney-written If I Fell with line breaks in it:

So I hope you see
That I
Would love to love you
And that she
Will cry
When she learns we are two
'Cause I couldn't stand the pain
And I
Would be sad if our new love
Was in vain

That was a single sentence, (almost Palin-esque) if you're playing along at home. Also, not exactly the most profound lyrics in the world--they're still writing nothing but love songs without a whole lot of depth. That said, aHDN is leaps and bounds ahead of the albums that proceeded it or, as we'll soon discover, the album that directly followed it.

And did anyone else notice a distinct The-Mamas-and-The-Papas vibe from I'll Be Back and Thing We Said Today?

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Incidentally, I'm not in any way implying that The Beatles ripped off The Mamas and The Papas. That would be impossible, since aHDN came out in late 1964, TMaTP didn't release anything until 1965. I'm just amused by the similarity in the two sounds.

Introducing Google Blank!

Anybody else notice the weirdness with Google lately? How they're not showing anything except the logo and search bar until you actually move around the mouse and such.

I don't think there's a joke to it--I think they've taken their philosophy of minimalism and taken it to the next logical step. It's just a matter of time before Google's home page is nothing but a blank screen where you type and magic happens.

Oddly enough, that's more or less the way opening a new tab in Chrome works.

There may be nothing to "get", but that said, I still don't get it.

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