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music
Wednesday various
- I know Terry Gilliam’s been having trouble getting films made, but has it come to this: he’s directing webcasts?
But I kid. It looks like an interesting if unusual idea for a concert series, pairing directors and bands, and I might just check next Thursday’s webcast out if I have a chance.
- E-books article drinking game. [via]
- It’s actually been months since I’ve played Plants vs. Zombies, but I thought this was interesting: Michael Jackson Estate Forces ‘Plants vs. Zombies’ Update. Yeah, I can see how an undead Jackson might not sit so well with them. [via]
- Speaking of zombies, Night of the Living Wonks [via]
Looking at the state of international relations theory, one quickly realizes the absence of consensus about the best way to think about global politics. There are multiple paradigms that attempt to explain international relations, and each has a different take on how political actors can be expected to respond to the living dead.
- And finally, baby moose in a sprinkler. Honestly, too cute for words. [via]
Wednesday various
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Wednesday various
- It’s as I always suspected: Twilight will kill you.
- Heaven knows Kaleidotrope contributor Genevieve Valentine isn’t a fan:
The good news is that if you are seeing a Twilight movie to mock it, you’ll feast every time.
- The Fab Faux’s live cover of Abbey Road raises a really interesting question: what is the difference between a really great cover band and a classical orchestra? [via]
- Meanwhile, Janis Ian covers herself (with a few tweaks) for this year’s Nebula Awards. [via]
- And finally, also meanwhile, all those covers on Glee would probably get the school in a lot of trouble [via]:
These worlds don’t match. Both Glee and the RIAA can’t be right. It’s hard to imagine glee club coach Will Schuester giving his students a tough speech on how they can’t do mash-ups anymore because of copyright law (but if he did, it might make people rethink the law). Instead, copyright violations are rewarded in Glee — after Sue’s Physical video goes viral, Olivia Newton-John contacts Sue so they can film a new, improved video together.
Our muttons
Friday’s page from my Forgotten English calendar was “our muttons” meaning…well:
The farming community has given us another useful expression in our muttons. When we speak of something being our muttons, we mean that we like it especially well.
This according to Sydney Baker’s 1941 New Zealand Slang: A Dictionary of Colloquialisms, and if you can’t trust that, what can you trust?
I had a pretty our muttons-y sort of weekend, all things considered; a pretty late night of it yesterday meant I didn’t get a chance to post about it until now, but overall I liked the weekend quite a lot.
I got a haircut, went to the library, and saw my second Broadway show of the week. Not too shabby, eh?
Back on Mother’s Day, we bought my mom tickets to see Mary Chapin Carpenter, since she’s long been a fan but never seen the singer in concert. The show was this weekend in Manhattan, and so to coincide with that (and last week’s Father’s Day), my sister and her husband drove to New York from Maryland. They brought their dog Chloe with them, which was an interesting experience, I think mostly for Chloe and for our much older — and much less interested in rambunctiousness — dog Tucker. We left the dogs at home (Chloe in her crate, Tucker in his pen) and drove into the city for a very nice dinner out. Then we split up, my father and mother off to see Carpenter at the New York School of Ethical Culture, and the other three of us to see American Idiot on Broadway.
I was a little worried about not liking the show. I like some Green Day songs well enough, and even have a few from the album on which the Broadway show is based in my iTunes catalog, but I’m not exactly what you’d call a huge fan. But the show was quite entertaining. It’s very loud and very bright, and if you blink you could miss the story, but the cast is undeniably talented and there’s a kind of pulse-pounding poetry to the whole thing. It’s a little like being inside a music video, with all the good and the bad that that suggests. It’s a breakneck ninety minutes, and it’s not without its faults, but it was hard not to be impressed by the end.
Since our show was over around 9:30, the three of us caught a train home instead of meeting back uptown with my parents. It’s maybe good that we didn’t stay in Manhattan, like we originally thought we might, since when we got home we discovered that Chloe had soiled her crate, her bedding, and herself while we were gone. Wet food and too much water earlier in the day had apparently not agreed with her. Catherine and Brian spent the next hour or so giving Chloe a bath on the front lawn — thank goodness it’s summer — and cleaning up the mess, while I tried to offer whatever help I could and look after Tucker. It was well after midnight before everyone was settled down — Chloe bathed, Tucker calmed, and my parents home.
Today was relatively calm and uneventful by comparison. I watched this week’s season finale of Doctor Who and thoroughly enjoyed it. As Betty says:
I’m not sure how much sense the finale actually made, but, oh, what wonderful, wonderful nonsense it was.
And I went for a short walk, despite the pretty oppressive heat. I worked on some fake horoscopes for Kaleidotrope‘s next issue — it’s a continuing feature, and the issue comes out next month — and on the Sunday crossword puzzle, which I have yet to finish.
Now I think I’m just going to watch a little TV and retire for the evening. Hopefully there will be more our muttons in the week to come.