I don’t imagine I’ve eaten a twinkie in twenty years, but it’s absolutely certain that I never will again after watching this fantastic music video extolling the reforms Mikhail Gorbachev brought to the Soviet Union, including twinkies, blue jeans, popsicles, and NO ZOMBIES.
I was taken by surprise by the technique ol’ Gorby used for dispatching the final batch of zombies.
I swapped some books (research related) at the library today and noticed a pretty sizable concrete structure taking place in the South Quad of the University of Illinois. It turns out that they’re building a 185-foot tall bell tower to serve the South Campus. There’s already a carillon bell tower in Altgeld Hall at the north end of the main quadrangle that’s been in use since 1920. The bells were a gift to the University from the classes of 1914 – 1921.
The bells are played during the noon hour by student volunteers while classes are in session. Usually the school fight song is played, but occasionally you’ll hear other songs. I’m pretty sure once I heard someone trying to bang out the Super Mario Bros. song on it. There used to be a video on the campus website showing a tour of the bell controls, but the website is going a massive upgrade and domain name change, so here’s a clip of a very talented dude playing a carillon.
According to this, the new bells and tower were largely donated from a private individual in memory of his wife, who must have loved these bells while she studied here. The new ones won’t have the traditional controls, but will be controlled digitally—either by pre-programming them with a firing sequence or using an electric piano keyboard.
Worked all day, played softball (went 2-5, lined into a DP, struck out to end the first game of the doubleheader), finished my vegetable garden very, very late in the season, and sang some tunes:
Danzig: Mother
Blues Image: Ride Captain Ride
Joy Division: Love Will Tear Us Apart
I’m On Fire The Boss
Come a Little Bit Closer Jay and the Americans
What a Wonderful World Louis Armstrong
Magic Moments Perry Como
Dancin’ in the Dark The Boss
Proud to see the Rose Bowl committee saw fit to invite Illinois to the Rose Bowl where they’ll face USC.
Some new songs I’ll be nailing on Wednesday night:
I ended up at a bar with karaoke last night and did my Louis Armstrong impression to “What a Wonderful World.” Got a really good response.
Karaoke night and Halloween collided at the Embassy last night and a massively good time resulted.
I started off with Psycho Killer by the Talking Heads, then absolutely nailed a spooky rendition of Bobby Pickett’s Monster Mash. Later on, I performed my gravelly Louis Armstrong impression of La Vie en Rose. By request, I closed with Radar Love from Golden Earring. It was a pretty packed house, so I didn’t manage to get “Used to Love Her” in there. Just a great time.
My costume was pretty funny but hard to wash off. I’ll see if I can get a picture.
A non-me highlight: a bunch of undergrad regulars dressed up as Abe Lincoln in his underwear and performed a group rendition of Gay Bar by the Electric Six. I hadn’t seen the video linked there until today (yipes), but it was still a funny sight.
Thought I’d come up with some songs to sing ahead of time for Wednesday, when I’ll get to celebrate a really long four days. I was at the office until 2:30 last night, losing my temper at a room full of uncooperative equipment. Three hours of sleep, and I was heading back out the door. Fortunately, my recording session today went shorter than expected and I got to leave at 6:15pm.
So anyways, here’s what I’ve got in mind:
Sara — Jefferson Starship: Ridiculous song. Was used to good comedic effect in Groove Fighters (which wasn’t as funny as AssassinZ that did a whole lot right.)
La Bamba — Los Lobos: Guaranteed to get laughs. There’s a bunch of extra syllables tossed in there that’ll make it difficult to keep up with the lyrics.
It’s Not Unusual — Tom Jones: Easy, easy laughs. Watching that video, I figured out why women are so attracted to Tom Jones. Any guy who can perform that manual percussion routine while acting like it’s not an asinine thing to do would have no trouble holding a woman’s purse while she tries on an armload of clothes at a department store. Face it, ladies—I can practically read your minds at this point. If I do any dancing though, it’ll be more in this style. See? I know what women want.
Final Countdown — Europe: Short and sweet. Probably a waste of time, though, considering how little singing there is, and how uninteresting that little bit is.
Maybe I’ll bring back a few songs that I’ve had fun with once before, Everybody Wants to Rule the World — Tears for Fears or Arthur’s Theme — Christopher Cross.
I know how engrossing this material is. If you know any really, really stupid songs, leave me a comment.
I brought reading with me to this Wednesday’s Karaoke session and made more progress in the first two hours on a section of the proposal than I’d made in the past 36 hours. Excellent.
I also nailed three songs.
I Just Died in Your Arms Tonight, by the Cutting Crew. I was well-prepared for it after watching the video earlier in the day thanks to Boxcar. Used the “it must’ve been something I aaaaaate” bit that I thought were the real lyrics when I was wee. Got laughs. Also had a little fun with the “followed my hands, not my head” line.
Since today was Talk Like a Pirate Day, I did the closest thing to a shanty I know: The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald by Gordon Lightfoot. A beautiful song. I did it meager justice.
Then I rocked Pour Some Sugar on Me and finished up with a tried and true classic: Werewolves of London.
But most importantly, I worked out what to do for the literature review for the formal semantics section of my dissertation proposal. It’d been killing me for days.
I made my now-annual trip to the Lou this weekend for all three games of the home series against the Braves. This year’s trip was even better than last year’s, although with tamer weather. (Unrelated, but I found this Contra/guitar video while digging up that link to last year’s recap.) We got off to a late start as I needed to spend about an hour talking to sundry ticket office employees about why I wasn’t able to print up the tickets for this weekend, so by the time we got to St. Louis, we only had time to pound a few beers at the Majestic before taking the Metro down to the stadium. Friday’s game was an unpleasant tilt in which Kip Wells struggled in front of a porous defense. Afterwards, the sole Braves fan who made the trip after the other two moved off to Colorado Springs this summer joked that he regrets forgetting the broom he’d bought last year in misplaced anticipation of a sweep (the Braves were up 2-0 on the series with Carpenter starting game 3).
We went to Grant’s Farm fairly early on Saturday and had a great time looking at widespread tree damage caused by a violent Friday afternoon storm with gusting winds at 60 mph, exotic animals, and drinking free beer. Shockingly, I’d never been to Grant’s Farm before then, in spite of having gone to the Affton ice center across Gravois at least a hundred times for practices and games over my youth hockey career. Grant’s Farm is definitely a good time and the weather cooperated beautifully. After that, we drove down Gravois and had a few drinks and some tasty skewers in the Venice Cafe biergarten. Chris met up with us for Saturday night’s game, an exciting game that had us on the edges of our seats all night. All five of the Cardinals runs were scored during a smoke break. It took that long to walk down from the upper decks to the smokers-aren’t-welcome-here patio outside the open air fence. At least I got to hear some of it on the audio feed they reluctantly piped outside for us scum and peeked in through gates on the climb back up to see some more. Due to some undersized sneakers, my feet were causing me some pain by the time we got back to our seats—more on that later. The Cardinals ended up scratching out a close win, 5-4, and I went home happy with the series split and to be decided by an Adam Wainwright vs. King Jo-Jo Sunday matchup.
After the game, we met up with the crew at Majestic for some drinks and then were invited to play a demo of EA’s Rock Band for the XBox. Review here, pre-order for the low price of $200 here. My friends had set it up on a hi-def LCD projector, running through several hundred watts of JBL goodness. Incidentally, Rush was drinking some beers at a bar down the street after playing St. Louis Friday night and a friend of mine conjured up the moxie to invite them to join us for the game—I swear that happened and yes, they declined immediately.
If you haven’t heard of Rock Band, like I hadn’t before this weekend, it’s something like Guitar Hero except with a drum kit and vocals. (Two guitars, the drum kit, and a microphone are included in that $200 price.) I played all four instruments: lead guitar, bass, drums, and vocals. The lead guitar and bass are pretty much exactly like guitar hero with the exception that parts of the songs allow the band to jam out and go into improvised solos. I was having too much fun to do a scientific inquiry, but I’m pretty sure the software employs some sort of scoring algorithm to rate how well the players’ solos worked with one another. I know of people who’ve made AI agents that try to make those kinds of subjective judgments, and it would’ve made sense to include one.
The drum kit is four round synth drum surfaces on the same level and a floor kick. I had a hard time my first try because I’m a little color blind and had a hard time telling green from yellow. The second time through, I took the advice to just go with the positioning, where the columns on the screen are analogous to the drums on the kit, left to right. My shins are too long to work the kick and whip over to the drums on the left very well, but I think I got the hang of it. It was hella fun, to say the least. Drums solos are a blast.
Including vocals seemed pretty ambitious of EA, but they did a very good job. The original vocals are included and do a good job of making a chorus effect with your own crooning to make a decent sound for the spectators. How well you sing was measured, as far as I could tell, in two dimensions: in frequency and duration. They may have used a Hidden Markov Model on a drastically filtered waveform, but I’d guess they just sampled F0 and gave you a window (sized on difficulty level from Easy to Expert) in which to match the target frequency and another window on how close your transitions to stop and frequency changes match up to the targets. As I said, it worked pretty well. Jeff tried singing “Creep” by Radiohead on Expert and the margin of error was very, very small.
That’s an incredibly fun game and at $200 is going to sell to every dorm room on every campus this Winter when it’s released.
Sunday, we met up with Boxcar Fritz and HLF for Wainwright’s dominant start and Isringhausen’s 200
Two-day weekends don’t get much better than that.
Van Halen: Hot for Teacher. Best rendition yet.
Christopher Cross: Arthur’s Theme. Very difficult song. Did it on a dare from Jeff and think I acquitted myself well.
Neil Diamond: Love on the Rocks. My dad loves this song. My friends didn’t. One drew a picture of a sad face crying while I sang it. I nailed it, though. I would’ve cried had my tear ducts not atrophied during puberty.
Had time not run out, I would’ve sang Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On. Next week…
Guns n’ Roses: Used to Love Her
Van Halen: Hot for Teacher
Tears for Fears: Everybody Wants to Rule the World
Thompson Twins: Hold Me Now
I may not be able to sing as well as all them, but I do have a much more sensible haircut.
If that’s not amusing enough, here’s a video of an elephant shoving his trunk up another elephant’s deuce-hole. Many thanks to C-Bot for passing that one along.
I pretty much nailed Warren Zevon’s Werewolves of London last night. Also did a fine job on Come a Little Bit Closer by Jay and the Americans. If the night had lasted another ten minutes, I would’ve gotten to do Mother by Danzig. By that point in the evening, it would have been really freaking sweet.
Just thought everyone would be keen to hear this update instead of discussion of last night’s disappointing collapse.
If I ever find myself in the Philippines, I intend to very carefully obey every law.
How do you think the dude playing the girl part got picked?
I stopped seeking out new music to listen to after high school. I didn’t have the time or will to listen to all the crap that’s churned out from the record labels and the late nineties was a time of great crap churning. Besides, I’ve had friends like Jeff, C-Bot, and Bobovski to sift the wheat from the chaff for me all along. I’d estimate that every year, maybe four or five truly great new songs come out. One would think that rate was higher back in the sixties and seventies, but there were two separate movements creating the high volume of quality tunes back then. One was the creative competition between the Beatles and the Beach Boys to make use of new electronics to make wholly new sounds that inspired a log of other musicians. “Good Vibrations” will always be underrated, no matter that it’s generally a celebrated song. The other was all the old folk and blues songs that artists back then recorded and claimed to have written for themselves. (If you’ve never heard Kansas Joe’s “When the Levee Breaks,” go listen to it now and enjoy.) I don’t really care about music all that much, so if you don’t like my history of post-war music, I won’t mind being chastised for over-simplification.
A bartender friend of mine told me recently about a Finnish band called Lordi (don’t click that link if you don’t like loud noises) that takes the theatrics of KISS and Gwar and turns them to eleven, with some middling talent added in. Their videos are hilarious. The drummer gives Neil Peart, Bonzo, Pete Sandoval, and Godzilla runs for their money. (Although Asylum Street Spanker‘s Wammo is the most enjoyable percussionist I’ve seen in the past decade.)
Check out these videos:
Who’s Your Daddy?
How did nobody tell me of this brilliant outfit? I’d like to find a horror-movie makeup artist, a few more tall people, and learn a couple power chords so as to form a Lordi cover band.
As a side note, I can relate to this guy more than I’d like.
You can see his stripes but you know he’s clean…
Don’t you see what I mean?
It occurred to me that I’d only heard Dio’s “Holy Diver” in karaoke or Pat Boone form. Fortunately, perhaps, the original video is out there in the tubes.
So the question is, which band was carrying more cocaine around in their sinuses while writing these songs: Dio with “Holy Diver” or the Doobie Brothers with “Jesus is Just Alright”?
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