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Yesterday we had a holiday gathering for my family at our house. My dad and step-mom, my step-sister and her family, my sister and her family, and one of my brothers attended. A fun time was had by all. We gorged ourselves on ham, mashed potatoes, green beans, bread, cheese, shrimp, coleslaw, orange Jello with mandarin oranges, and mini eclairs and cream puffs.
We also played the dice game, wherein the lot of us sat in a circle and passed around three cake pans, each with a pair of dice. Each of us shook the dice trying to get matching numbers so that we could take a random package out of the center of the circle. Once all the packages were distributed, we opened them and then set a timer for 10 minutes. Again the dice went around, only this time, when someone rolled a match, he or she was allowed to steal a gift from someone else in the circle. It can get to be pretty wild when a particular gift is coveted by all the participants. There was a little of that going on with the Reese’s Pieces and a heart-shaped baking pan, but it wasn’t bad this year.
My brother, who we affectionately call Knuckles (not because he drags them on the ground, in case you’re wondering), brought two Richard Cheese CDs for us to listen to. I hadn’t heard either one before, so it was a treat. There was Dick’s Christmas album, “Silent Nightclub,” which has a swanky version of one of my personal favorites, Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus.” Knuckles also brought “Dick at Nite,” Cheese’s newest album, which contains lounge-y versions of TV’s classic theme songs, including the shows SpongeBob Square Pants, The Brady Bunch, Friends, Bonanza, South Park and Spiderman. There’s even a commercial break. (Why am I suddenly feeling swankified myself?)
While the songs are a gas-riot, the CD covers are worth their weight in bling. The Christmas album has an email Richard received from Santa. (Santa’s now busy polishing his sleigh, if you know what I mean.) The back of “Dick at Nite” is designed to mimic the listings in an old TV Guide. It’s all good in the hood, too hip to trip, waaaay coolio, daddy-o.
If you want to catch Dick, he’s going to be singing to Anderson Cooper on CNN tonight – somewhere between 11 pm and midnight east coast time, which would make it 10 – 11 pm central standard time. West coasters can expect the performance between 8 and 9 pm. Richard Cheese is worth waiting up for.
I came across an article of clichés that were overused during the past year. It comes from MSNBC. Take a look and see if you don’t agree. There were far too many perfect storms in our post 9/11 pink-is-the-new-gray surge of wordsmiths throwing language under the bus. Enough with the sweet organic webinars and celebrities who tout their success by giving back to the world. What we need are new words and phrases that pop. Bring on the clichés for 2008.
Oh, and can we finally get rid of the word ‘utilize’? It’s just a fancy-pants way of saying ‘use’. It doesn’t make those who use it sound any smarter. They’re just wasting letters.
It’s New Year’s Eve in the western world and therefore, it’s supposedly time to make resolutions for the coming year. I always forget about the notion of making resolutions until somebody reminds me of it. This year, the local newspaper gave me the nudge. Here’s what I think about making resolutions. Why relegate it to one day of the year? There are 364 other perfectly useful days for making resolutions and I sure as heck am not going to think of everything I want to do in one day. What if something new comes along in August or October that I’d like to resolve to do? Am I supposed to hold it until the new year? Fooey on that!
I am a list maker – a rather anal list maker, writing out a new list of tasks to accomplish every day. Today’s list includes taking my mom to see my grandma, doing laundry, blogging, and knitting. There’s something satisfying about crossing things off my list as I accomplish them. While I realize that resolutions are about larger goals, every large goal is comprised of many smaller tasks. Whenever I’m in the mood, usually when I’m feeling directionless, I write out my larger goals in list form. Once I see them this way, I can figure out where to go next, what smaller tasks will allow me to get to the larger goal. Then I put these smaller tasks on my daily ‘to do’ lists. (I told you I was anal.) My resolutions become an organic part of my life with this process and every day becomes New Year’s Day.
I watched an interview of singer Michael Bublé on Glenn Beck tonight. Normally, I can’t tolerate Beck’s show. It’s too politically cranky and right-leaning for me, but it was good tonight – not for Beck, who I felt was injecting himself into the interview too much, but for Bublé, who is so good-natured and quick-witted that he had me laughing and laughing. Beck paid $1,200 so that he and his wife could attend a Bublé concert. (Excuse me while I choke on that figure. Even Bublé had trouble with it.) Beck was obviously enamored of Bublé, who teasingly kept Beck on his toes. It was a delight to see and makes me even more appreciative of Bublé. (You do know that I’m going to reincarnate with his voice, don’t you?)
Have you ever had this happen? You get interested in something and suddenly it is everywhere. For example, when I first started learning French in high school, all things French popped up everywhere I went. When my husband bought his motorcycle and we started riding, I began seeing motorcycles everywhere, along with motorcycle paraphernalia.
Well, it’s happened again. This time with Nine Inch Nails (NIN). Honestly, I was going to give this a rest, but NIN is showing up in places where I’m not even looking for it. I got the newest Wired magazine about a week ago, but didn’t have time to read it. There it sat, still in its wrapper on the floor beside my bed, waiting for me to crack it open. On my way to work yesterday morning, I grabbed it because magazine articles make good lunchtime reading material.
Over my PB&J and yogurt, I flipped it open and saw that there was an article about Radiohead’s price-less digital download of the album “In Rainbows.” The article was written by Talking Head’s David Byrne and I mentally marked this as a must-read article while I continued to flip pages. Flip, flip, whoa! Who is this I see? Look again to be sure. Why, it’s none other than Trent Reznor of NIN, with a look on his face that says, “You wanna piece of me?”
I had secretly hoped Wired would ask him about his stance on copyright, but that’s not what the article was about. Instead, it covered NIN’s alternate reality game (ARG), which was developed for the release of the album “Year Zero.” The ARG had people figuring out clues from concert t-shirts, going online, answering strange phone calls, picking up flash drives in bathroom stalls, even meeting at particular spots for more clues. All of the subterfuge was a prelude to the theme of the album, which Wired described as “a grimly futuristic suite evoking an America beset by terrorism, ravaged by climate change, and ruled by a Christian military dictatorship.” Sounds a lot like real life, doesn’t it?
I love this idea of pulling people into a creative work by making them a part of it. Bring on the mystery! Bring on the conspiracy theories! I’ve had some notions along these lines that I’d like to develop – some just for the fun of it, some to accompany the publication of my Greenville series. After reading the article on NIN’s experience with ARG, I realize I’ve got quite a bit of planning to do in order to execute something like this. I can tell you, though, my ARGs won’t involve cell phones or vans that spirit people away into the night.
Btw, the Wired magazine article linked above has its own little ARG. There are two spots in the article that have blank orange boxes. You’ve got to fill them in to get the “Go” button to work. I won’t tell you what you have to fill them in with, so you have a chance to give it a whirl. If you’re really dying to know, leave a comment and I’ll get back to you. I’ve done the first one and I’ll do the next momentarily. Over and out.
I’m going to admit it right up front. This is a pouf-da post. Pure fluff. Easy to write. I’ve got some catching up to do online now that I’ve been away for a day and it’s getting late and I don’t want to be up all night, so I want to make this quick.
Yesterday morning, Hubby and I enjoyed watching our children open their gifts. They liked what we got them, so all is well. This year, Hubby and I decided to get gifts for each other with the help of our children. In the almost twenty years we’ve been married, we’ve exchanged Christmas gifts maybe four or five times. Typically, we are so strapped for cash that we like to concentrate on the children. Plus, there are about a billion December birthdays we have to get gifts for, along with Christmas presents for other family members. Keeping track of it all is overwhelming, so it’s been easier not to get each other gifts. Well, I’m tired of it because who knows me better than my husband does? He has excellent taste and I’m always surprised by and pleased with what he gets me. On the flip side, I like to surprise him, too. It’s fun to buy him gifts.
The children and I got Hubby some Chuck Taylor knockoff tennies and a t-shirt from the Universal Church Triumphant of the Apathetic Agnostic*, both of which he’d been longing for. We also got him a shower scrubbie and a carton of Whoppers. Hubby and the children got me accoutrements for my iPod, including a black leather case to protect the baby in style, a set of earphones that hooks over my ears (the ear buds kept popping out), and an iTunes card. I’m thrilled at my gifts and couldn’t be happier. Hubby knows the way to my heart.
If you celebrated Christmas and got gifts, what gift are you especially appreciative of and why? (Your turn for a small essay!)
*The slogan for the Universal Church Triumphant of the Apathetic Agnostic is “We don’t know and we don’t care.” The church only exists online.
I got so confused yesterday that my head hurt. I think I’ve sorted the confusion out. At least I hope I have.
I had pretty much given up hope of ever finding a blog archive for Nine Inch Nails (NIN). Yesterday, while looking at my WordPress blog stats (God bless WordPress blog stats!), I saw that someone had found my blog through a Trent Reznor tag. When I clicked on the tag link, I came to a page that listed other blogs with the same tag. WordPress’s tag pages feature the avatar pictures of those who have them.
On the Trent Reznor tag page was an avatar of a good-looking woman with long, feathered hair against a background of blue. She has quite a number of NIN and Trent Reznor posts listed. Hers was the featured blog and the post was called “Wish.” (A featured blog is one that is offset at the top of a tag page and is labeled, get this, “Featured Blog.” Featured blogs change, so don’t count on it being the one I’ve written about here.) When I followed the link, I found . . . drumroll, please! The Nine Inch Nails blog archive.
Here’s where I got confused. The NIN blog archive shows all the posts that I’ve seen in the past on the NIN official website and those I’ve seen through my Bloglines subscription, yet the blog is a WordPress blog, not the Blogger blog that NIN has. The NIN blog archive is styled very much the same as the NIN website – almost all black with an NIN logo – but there are nowhere near the number of comments I see on the blog posts on the official NIN website. Curiouser and curiouser.
After analyzing the situation, I’ve come to the conclusion that the NIN blog archive is actually the work of a fan, one who is using the woman on the blue background avatar. (This may be what she really looks like, but you never can be sure with avatars.) Her (online/real?) name is Dori Doreau and she has a second blog, which also heavily features NIN. It’s called Chaos Cantina and it’s in German. If you can’t read German (like me!), you can google the site and have Google translate it for you. The translation isn’t perfect (what translation is?), but it’s good enough for you to get the gist of what’s going on.
The conclusions I’ve come to in all this are 1) Dori is one dedicated fan to put together a NIN blog archive, 2) I’m not the only one looking for a NIN blog archive, and 3) NIN needs to get its online act together and host its own blog archive. While it might be nice to have a fan fill the void, it shouldn’t be necessary for a fan to do so.
Between the night of the day of the longest night and today, I have been a virtual house monkey. So has Hubby. So has Young Son, who came down with a fever Friday that eventually spiked to 103.1 degrees Fahrenheit. Puttering, puttering, we house monkeys have been puttering all weekend. And now it’s snowing and some parts of Minnesota are in for a nasty, windy, snowstorm. Not bad here right now. Light, randomly falling flakes. And the blogging and the ‘net surfing and the TV watching and the puttering continue.
We are house monkeys waiting for Christmas.
Eldest Son and Daughter, however, have been active monkeys this weekend. Surely they will liven up the house when they return.
‘Twas the week of gift wrapping. For some reason, I am the default holiday gift wrapper in the family, even though I completely suck at it. When I use wrapping paper, the result is a shlumpy looking package with wrinkles and crooked corners. My hubby, on the other hand, could wrap packages for a living. The result of his gift wrapping is precise, well-creased, and orderly, with all of the patterns on the paper lining up perfectly. Of course, he takes more care in measuring and cutting the paper, while I’m all slap-dash and let’s get this thing done, so that could be the problem.
Whoever invented reusable gift bags has answered my prayers in the gift wrapping department in more ways than one. No cutting and folding required. Just slip the gift in, stuff some tissue on top, and the gift instantly looks great. No muss, no fuss. That the bags are reusable is a further bonus because I hate throwing wrapping paper in the trash. (Not good for our overburdened landfills.) I’m also notoriously cheap and reusing gift bags saves me money.
We’re good on all accounts, except one, which leads me to a gift wrapping tip. If you are going to use a reusable gift bag, do not, I repeat, do not stick a sticky label on the face of the bag. You know, the label that identifies “to” and “from.” It took me two U2 songs, a friendly visit from the local police, and a Matchbox Twenty song worth of time this morning to remove a sticky label from the face of a bag and I wasn’t completely successful, only mostly successful. What’s the point of using a reusable bag if you’re going to deface the thing? (Unless you snatch the bag away from the receiver of your gift and you reuse if for every gift to that person on into eternity, which is kind of rude because the receiver might want to take his gift home in the bag and then reuse the bag to give you a gift later. Got it?)
Get ready, ’cause here’s the tip: If you want to put a label on your gift bag, attach it to one of the handles on the bag. This works for either a sticky label or a traditional label with tape. For a sticky label, just fold it in half around the handle. For a traditional, non-sticky label, use a piece of tape to attach it to the handle. In either case, it is a simple matter to remove the label, thus saving your bag for future use.
Oh, and about that local police incident. He wasn’t here to help me remove a label, but rather to take a report. Someone smashed the driver’s side rear-view mirror on our good car last night. This kind of stuff always happens to the good car. The officer was very nice and left me one of his business cards. I didn’t know the police carried business cards.
After checking out some of Nine Inch Nails’ (NIN) videos on YouTube, I started wondering, as I am wont to do, about which musical artist I’d pair with Trent Reznor in a tour de force Frankensteining the Talent Pool. I couldn’t think of anyone at first. I’d mull over a possibility and then think, “Nope, not gonna work.” While I admittedly don’t know the guy, somehow I get the feeling that he likes to have control, which means one of two things. He’s got to work with musicians that aren’t as strong-willed as he is, or he’s got to work with someone feisty, but sly – someone who will let him think he’s getting his way, someone completely charming, so he’ll want to let them have their way.
It came to me after watching the NIN video for the song “The Perfect Drug.” It wasn’t the music that gave me the idea, but Trent’s flowing cloak, which made me think of Enya. Yes, they are polar opposites – she with her sweetness and light; he with his darkness and angst. But think about the term ‘polar opposite’ for a moment. Of course, the poles are on opposite ends of the earth, separated by distance, yet they also share similarities. Brrr! The polars aren’t as opposite as they might first appear to be.
So I think it would be if Trent Reznor and Enya collaborated. Both are trail blazers within their genres, both work with heavily synthesized music, both have dark hair and both like cloaks and dramatic imagery. If you still aren’t convinced, take a look at Enya’s video for the song “Only Time” and see if you don’t think its imagery is a complement to that found in “The Perfect Drug.”
