...if it's worth savin' me

Hmm, two posts in one week (hmm, TWO posts in one week!) about Canadian bands. What's up with that? But unlike the previous post I'm not necessarily saying anything nice about Nickelback per se.

But I stumbled on one of their videos fairly recently--for a song called "Savin' Me"--and while I don't see many videos (who sees many videos these days?), this one is great. [Hopefully the link works, if not it's available legally from AOL Music, probably illegally in lots of other places.] I won't say too much about it, except that it's about a guy who gets to see something that no one else does.

And it's a really excellent example of extreme short form narrative...a really well told and very Joe-friendly happy/sad, slightly fantastical story told in the space of 4 minutes. Watching it again I wonder if it's not maybe slightly overly didactic--hitting you a little too hard with the punchline--but mostly I'm very pleased with it. I was looking around online for the director, and couldn't find out who did it. Kudos to whoever it was.

If you've already seen the video, and you've read other recent posts, you may be thinking, have I been obsessing a bit about mortality lately? You bet I have.

life: spam on wry

I received an intriguing spam message in my work e-mail a month or two ago, so much so that it has hung out there all this time as I've periodically contemplated it. Never even looked at the content of the message, but someone named "dejuan monica" sent me a message with the subject line:

life, n.: a whim of several billion cells to be you for a while.

I'd never seen that quote before, though if you google it it turns out to be fairly not uncommon. Leaving aside that it's several orders of magnitude too low an estimate (unless, I suppose, it's just contemplating the cells in the brain, not the body), I found the idea profound, even though I couldn't immediately put my finger on why.

Then last night I was thinking about it again, and the punchline hit me. I'd like to ask several billion cells, "what in the HELL were you THINKING?!"

better disasters

I'm finishing Simon Winchester's A Crack in the Edge of the World, about the 1906 SF earthquake (happy 100th anniversary, btw). He's a fine, amusing writer but I strongly disagree with his main conclusion. He kind of thinks there shouldn't be a San Francisco; I think that if you only put cities where there's no chance of any kind of disaster ever striking them, you end up, particularly in this day and age, with no cities whatsoever.

At any rate, in his epilogue, he talks briefly about the 1964 Alaska earthquake, which was the second biggest ever recorded. And he mentions that "...throughout the region tsunamis -- one in particular topped with blazing oil from a Texaco tank farm that it had destroyed en route -- came roaring up narrow creeks..." etc.

And it struck me. A flaming tsunami. A wave on fire. Okay, it's an awful terrible thing, but at the same time, that's (if you'll pardon an enthused vulgarism) about the coolest fucking disaster imaginable.

And it made me think about how much more interesting disasters could be if they were more creative. Like, how about a tornado made of lava? Or a flash flood made of molassas (this one's real--Boston (yeah, it would be Boston), 1919, killed 21 people). Or a waterspout laced with a school of bird flu-infected piranhas.

Okay, that's maybe too creative.

If Mother Nature or Gaia or whatever does want to wipe us out, and I hope she does, I also hope she's courteous enough to make it interesting.

the birthday massacre

Some future fine mid-May day this may well be headline of news reports in conjunction with yours truly. But not this year. I came close though.

Actually, last week at some point the iTunes music store recommended this obscure pop-gothy Canadian band as something I might enjoy. And, in one of those small happinesses that mean so much in my life, I definitely do.



Violet turns out to be an album I have been kind of wanting to hear for a long time without even knowing it. It's not as edgy as Rasputina, or as exotic as Collide, and it falls somewhere between them and folks like the Cure. Hmm, this is turning into a review, which it can't be, since all my reviews are haiku.

So I'll just say, yay, new music. Though I have mixed feelings about liking a band with a myspace (does that make me feel old? or young? or some awful in-between mix of the two, which is fairly accurate?), at least it lets me embed a strange and somewhat disturbing video right here...


Get this video and more at MySpace.com

It's getting late
It all just wanes and pales and
Fades away
If we just want it too much
And what a shame
If all there is is all that's
Gone away
There's nothing left here for us
--"Holiday," The Birthday Massacre

brain age 3

I was going to brag that my brain age was nicely down to 23 as of the fourth of July. But I took the test this evening and I can't brag about that. Because I'm pleased to say that according to the disembodied head of Dr. Kawashima, my brain is a perfect 20 years old.

And no, it's not just because I constantly obsess about all the sex I'm not having. See this post for more. And check out my Jupiter (work) blog for more on this great and obviously perfectly perfectly accurate Nintendo game.

city of crime

Freaky news from my neighborhood early this morning--just a mere 5 hours before I was at that station on my way to work, some crazy guy grabbed some power saws being used for maintenance and went after the passengers at 110th and Broadway.

Quoting:

The suspect sliced open the chest of a 64-year-old rider before fleeing on foot, police said.

The suspect was described by witnesses as a thin man in his 30s, who had earrings in both ears and was possibly carrying a teddy bear. A man fitting that description was apprehended after allegedly punching a pedestrian later in the day.

Of course, an old friend has already instant messaged me to ask "You, uh, haven't pierced your ears or anything, have you? ... Because thin, 30s, teddy bear fixation, suppressed rage exploding in a blizzard of power tool abuse - that's all you."

Nicest thing anyone's said to me in ages, actually.