The Isle of Marm

The best part about having had the recurring Richard Preston dream is that I’ll be humming this all day.

It’s tough sometimes to always be in the position of educator on matters of American culture.  Luckily, I spent an impressive amount of youth-time with the television and consequently my receptiveness to screen-based pedagogy means that I remain adept at explaining both “Jammin’ on the One” and “Droppin’ on the Deuce.”

~3 Things:

1.  “My thoughts, I confess, verge on dirty” is one of my favorite lyrics.

2. It is irksome to me that I still can’t pick out banjo bits with any …fluidity.

3.  4 months ago in Tokyo, I found myself singing this in a karaoke bar.  (For this to happen meant that everyone around me was more than sufficiently drunk to make up for my shyness/sobriety.)  It was not my finest moment.  It was, however, followed by getting wrangled into an odd Guns N’ Roses duet with a friend of my little brother’s whom I’ve known for years.  That I remembered GNR with the fidelity that I did was much closer to something to be labeled “finest moment” because I can’t even hazard how long it had been since I’d heard Don’t You Cry before that night.

3a. Special Place in my Heart (and Head):  One of the first music videos I ever saw was for November Rain, on the fancy cable at the house of my best friend—female category—1982-1994, with whom I speak in THE FINEST RECORDING OF MY VOICE OF ALL TIME.  (Possibly.) 

When she says “What if my diarrhea comes back?” I lose it (now) because on whatever level I am still that little kid.  She’s gonna be a mom soon.  Jeez.

“[M] is filthy for what comes out of her mouth, not what goes into it.”

—It was the best of backhanded compliments
(, it was the blurst of backhanded compliments.)

Confession:  I occasionally (read: constantly) make terrible statements relying on the lexical ambiguities of American English just to see if my ESL buddy will pick up on it.  He’s getting a little better.

“Are you shitting on me?”

As someone with often terrible posture (…it’s a work in progress*), the idea of Nick Lowe being the only person in the room really acknowledging a little person took a while to cross my mind.  But eventually it got there.  And it won’t leave.  Ever.

201201071335.: …Not like a baby or a child.  Clearly, there is an impish person of restricted growth who perhaps ONLY Mr. NL can see.  

* “Soon you’ll have a mighty hump”

You hear “Back in Black” in the morning and it sets a tone for the day.  An awesome tone.   While I believe this power is inherent to the music itself, I am open to the idea that it may be due to things associated with it, which include:

• The memory of a mixtape I made for someone I was ass-over-teakettle in love with back in 2001.  Said tape opened with “Big Balls” which may not have been the clearest way to say “yes, we’re friends, but there is a distinctly non-platonic thing that I would be curious about exploring with you.“  AND YET IT TOTALLY SAYS THAT, RIGHT?  I think it may have ended with “Back in Black”.  Or it was in there elsewhere.   It was, to say the least, an “uneven” tape.
• The phenomena of off-white whiteness, i.e., there is maybe only one song that makes me feel quite white/American as this song and that is Billy Squire’s “Stroke”. This is not Mexican music.  This is not Arabic music.  This is not something that would play in the family mini-van  (i.e., this is not my parents’ music.)  This is music I weirdly gravitated toward once let loose to roam the airwaves of upstate New York.  Ithaca’s choices were primarily College Radio/Prog Rock (or as I thought for an unfortunately long time, “Prague Rock”, as in “what do you mean this isn’t Czech”)  or “Classic Rock”; basically, stations with Metal Mondays.  Boom.  Or Clang.  Whatever.
• Lewis Black. (And Dennis Miller, but maybe that is just a playlist proximity based hold-over.)  Every time I see him, I am just gladdened by the fact that one can be so angry and not die from stress related complications.  His continued existence is like a tiny triumph. 
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• etc.

I just got a grumbley stepper motor working (after a long phone conversation with an Eastern European about controllers and baud rates).  That is a bigger triumph, so I listen to this now before being back in data.  Then back to TCB’ing.  Minus the BTO.  Okay.

This was a failure in terms of what I wanted it to be*, but the moment I heard the the light reflecting off the water is actually captured perfectly.  Because, though the soundtrack was dropped in afterwards, it was exactly what it sounded like.  In my head. I think about it all the time.

* 2006:  I’d wanted to make a never-ending airport conveyor belt screensaver. The second I stepped on it, that was what I envisioned.  I really like both airports and conveyor belts, and not just because of all the intimate contact with security agents and lazy-motion, respectively.

[In the 40’s,] within the boom town of Oak Ridge itself, a house—sometimes loosely defined—was being constructed every 30 minutes. The bus system in the secret city would be the nation’s sixth largest; electricity consumption (largely because of the gargantuan uranium-enrichment plants called Y-12 and K-25) would be 20 percent greater than New York City’s.

I’d been trying to explain to my officemate how it is bizarrely bright on the other side of the ridge when driving home after midnight.  I figured visual confirmation would be the way to go, but the limited dynamic range of my camera could not quite capture how it actually looks. However, it did capture the fact that if ever you need low-velocity space-travel or sex pyramid background music, “Cars” is the way to go.  
//The More You Know~