Pipe wrench fight

This made me laugh (you will want to stick with it until the lyrics):



Thanks to Wil Wheaton's blog.

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Music for superheroes

"Well, a gathering is brie, mellow song stylings. Shindig: dip, less mellow song stylings, perhaps a large amount of malt beverage. And hootenanny, well, it's chock full of hoot, just a little bit of nanny."--Oz, "Dead Man's Party," Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season Three

My awesome wife is throwing me a party to celebrate the launch of Devil's Cape. I'm very, very excited and looking forward to it a lot. For some reason, I'm focusing on what type of music to play that night. Music from Louisiana would certainly be appropriate (hey, Joe, if you make it, can you bring that zydeco CD you played at your book party?), since the book's set in Louisiana. And I'll probably put on a pirate track or two (since the city of Devil's Cape was founded by pirates).

But I'm thinking that it might be fun to have superhero-related tunes. Here are a few that come to mind:

• Theme from Superman. Duh.
• "Believe It or Not"--yeah, it's cheesy as all get-out, but so am I, and I was a fan of The Greatest American Hero back in the day.
• "You Don't Mess Around with Jim"--shout-outs to Superman and the Lone Ranger? Oh, yeah.
• Maybe that new Heroes soundtrack that's coming out. I love Heroes.
• Those cool theme songs from the 60s-era Marvel cartoons ("Doc Bruce Banner, belted by gamma rays..."). Not sure where I can find those, but that would be cool.
• Other superhero movie scores (not sure how many I really dig).

Here's where you, my readers, come in. What am I missing? What songs should I be playing here? Thanks!

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Thriller turns 25

They're releasing a 25th anniversary edition of Michael Jackson's Thriller this week.

Damn, I feel old.

I wasn't much into music when I was younger. Thriller was the first tape I ever bought for myself.

A quarter of a century ago.

Sheesh.

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Strangeness in the Proportion: concept album meme

I picked this one up from Jeff's Gameblog. The idea is to come up with a concept album cover based on certain pretty strict parameters. Mine is above. I kind of dug how it turned out, but I was lucky enough to draw a decent quote ("strangeness in the proportion" comes from Sir Francis Bacon, by the way: "There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion").

The meme rules are after the jump.

01. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first article title on the page is the name of your band.
02. http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.
03. http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/ The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
04. Use your graphics program of choice to throw them together, and post the result as a comment in this post. Also, pass it along in your own journal because it's more amusing that way.

So would you buy the album? What tracks would be on it?

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Currently...

I thought I'd start a new feature here where I can list some of the things I'm reading, watching, etc. and say a few words about them. Assuming I like or approve ofe them, they'll wind up in the handy dandy new Amazon store I've set up with things I'd recommend to others without reservation (at least, when those things are actually sold on Amazon).

So here goes:

Currently reading:

The Crime Writer, by Gregg Hurwitz. Very impressive so far. I'm not sure where I read about this first, but I put it on my Amazon wish list, got it as a Christmas present, and have really been enjoying it. The premise is that the narrator is, himself, a hardboiled crime writer in modern Los Angeles. He wakes up in a hospital on the first page to find out that he's had some kind of major incident and that he's the primary suspect in a murdr.

The real trick here is that as he begins to find out what's happened to him and to attempt to regain memories of a lost, traumatic night, he does what he knows: He writes about it. It plays around with metafiction in interesting ways. I'm not to the end yet, but am thoroughly enjoying the ride so far.

I'm also reading Pulp Hero and boy is it getting me jazzed to run some pulp adventures. The Hero System really set the stage for great pulp gaming materials with Justice, Inc., years ago, and the latest incarnation, Pulp Hero, seems very meaty. It's hard to go wrong with a book that has a section header reading "Add More Yaks."

Steve Long is sometimes a bit long-winded and a little dry (I miss the zestier writing he used back in the days of Watchers of the Dragon), but the pulp background details and genre concepts are well-researched and interesting.

There's a lot to this book. Some of it (biographies, timelines, etc.) is more general historical reference that feels kind of like extra weight, but on the other hand, it's all very useful information for anyone role-playing in the genre and it's pulled together with an eye for what is going to be most interesting and relevant for gamers.

If you're interested in Pulp Hero, check out the Hero Games store (I could give you an Amazon link so that you could pick up a used copy and I'd get a small kickback from Amazon, but I'd rather that Hero Games got the money here). Some of my best gaming moments ever were at GenCon at the Justice, Inc. events. This is firing me up to play some pulp adventures. Big time.

I also picked up The Best of the Spirit from the library not too long ago. Wow. Will Eisner is a legend in the comic book industry, but not one whose work I'd explored in any depth. These stories date back to the first appearance of the Spirit back in 1940 and advance beyond. They feel particularly advanced and sophisticated for that era and laid the groundwork for a lot of stories that followed.

It's just a fun, fun read, and makes me wish I'd started exploring the Spirit earlier in my comic book reading life. On the other hand, the fact that I haven't read the Spirit up until now means that I have a lot of very good stories in front of me to discover, something else I'm excited about. I haven't delved too deeply into the book yet, but I look forward to doing that, and maybe picking up a copy for my home library.

Currently watching:

Through a combination of working on my book, a conflict with a show that Dina and I watched together, and timing, I ended up missing Lost season three, deciding to wait for the DVD instead. It was a long wait--I'd expected it to be released in September or so like the previous season, but when they decided to delay the season four premiere, they delayed the release of this DVD set, too.

I got a set for Christmas, though (thanks, Mom!) and have been trying to plow my way through them before the show returns at the end of the month. I'm not likely to make it (I've watched eight episodes so far), but I should be close enough that I won't fill up my TiVo with season four episodes before I can start watching them.

It had been more than a year since I'd seen my last episode of Lost, so there was a bit of a learning curve there (I wish that the DVD set had included one of those "everything that happened in season one and two in an hour" episodes), but boy howdy, I've been enjoying it. The characters, the setting, and the mythology are all just enjoyable as all get-out and I've really had fun with each episode so far. I've heard enough about the season to know that it ended with a creative flourish, so I'm looking forward to that. And I know it got some flack for being slow at times, but so far I'm not having any problems with it. Makes me want to pop an episode in right now and watch it...

Currently listening to:

Sophie Milman's jazzy, eclectic, velvet-toned new CD, Make Someone Happy, lives up to its name. I smile when I listen to it and it's just got some very nice tunes. I always enjoy "Fever" and her take on it strikes me just fine. I also like the title track and "People Will Say We're in Love"--the whole CD, really.

I heard Milman first in a profile on NPR and was intrigued enough to drop the CD onto my wish list. She's a Russian-born, Canadian, Jewish jazz singer. And she's awesome.

I highly recommend this one. It's good for quiet contemplation and for adding a little romance.

I'm a sucker. My buddy and I went to see I Am Legend and I was enjoying the music and Will Smith held up a CD and said that it was the best CD of all time and of course I had to have it.

The CD is Legend: The Best of Bob Marley and the Wailers. Its use in the movie was a good, unusual fit and a good riff on the the names of the movie and the CD.

Of course, it is a pretty damn good CD. Can't complain about Bob Marley and this is a good overview of his greatest songs, perfect for someone like me who is buying his first Bob Marley album. I particularly like "Three Little Birds," but the whole thing is solid and good to listen to in a variety of moods.

That's it for today. Like the feature? Hate the feature? Let me know.

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Idol musings

We watched and enjoyed American Idol tonight. It was about half an hour too long and spent too much time indulging a few wackos (the glittery woman who Simon said looked liked Willem Dafoe, the guy in the Princess Leia slave girl outfit, etc.). But it was fun and we didn't fast forward through much. I'm simultaneously looking forward to and dreading the Dallas auditions, wondering what kind of picture they'll paint of the Big D.

Dina and I didn't start watching the show until toward the middle of season five (the one with Daughtry, Katharine McPhee, Taylor Hicks, Elliott Yamin, etc.), so I'm probably not quite as jaded as other viewers (I also missed big chunks of last season because I was working on revisions on Devil's Cape). Anyway, as a fan of the season and a particular fan of McPhee and Hicks, I picked up their CDs when they debuted, and recently got Yamin's CD for Christmas. As much as I liked McPhee and Hicks, their CDs were... not very good. A few good tracks on each (and "good" is pretty generous). Yamin's was even worse. I think I like maybe one song on it. And recent Idol winners and near-winners are getting dropped quickly by record labels.

So what's the deal? They're enjoyable on the show. We root for them. They're solid entertainers. Why are their CDs mediocre?

I guess it's kind of obvious, at least to me, but the songs are just bad. Yamin's CD even has a track ("A Song for You") with a line that says "I've sung a lot of songs and I've made some bad rhymes." Buddy, if your CD contains a slew of bad rhymes, and yours does, you sure as hell don't want to bring additional scrutiny to that fact.

I'm not sure how much of the blame goes on the singers (I'd guess a little) and how much on the producers (I'd guess an awful lot--the buck should stop there), but the musical choices are just awful. Let's think about American Idol a bit. It showcases talented singers (at least by the time you get to the end of the process) singing familiar songs. Good songs. We get used to Katharine McPhee or Blake Lewis or whoever lending a personal voice and vision to songs that are generally familiar to us. So why make their CDs so different. Why make Katharine McPhee's first album be filled with a bunch of crappy songs we've never heard before that don't showcase her talents particularly well?

Keep in mind that I don't know anything about the contracts these singers end up with or what the rules are for licensing songs. But if I were producing a CD for an American Idol winner, I'd pick maybe a couple of new songs, if there was something that really showcased the winner's style. But I'd fill the album with music more like what the American Idol fans are used to hearing from the show. Katharine McPhee's "Over the Rainbow" is great. I downloaded the MP3 from iTunes. But it's not on her album. Why not? Why not have her sing some standards? Why not track down some songs that she didn't sing on the show, but that are available and known and that work for her voice?

I'd look for songs that lended themselves to interpretation by the singer, rather than just straight reproduction of how earlier singers had done the songs. If my star had a country style, I'd look for some decent rock songs and make slightly country versions of them. And vice versa.

I'd take good songs that you don't hear very often anymore and have our star make them new again (I'd love to hear "Dumb Things" more often).

New songs are fine, but they're not what we're used to hearing from the Idol contestants and they have to be catchy and good if the singer is going to succeed. What bugs me is that these very talented and charismatic singers end up getting reps as failures when the fault really lies with the people making the song choices for their albums.

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