End of the year lists are marbles

That said, here's mine, in this particular order.

Girl Talk - Feed the Animals. Soundtrack of the summer. Go CWRU.








The Walkmen - You & Me. The album I can never remember anything about until I listen to it again. But while I'm listening I'm convinced it's the best of the year.





M83 - Saturdays=Youth. The '80s did not sound this good.









Bon Iver - For Emma Forever Ago. Technically came out last year, but I don't feel terribly constrained by technicalities. Yeah, his voice sounds like the guy from TV on the Radio, but the absence of their record from this list should tell you how much I care about that.


Cut Copy - In Ghost Colours. This one sounds like a number of other things I already like, but, again, that doesn't matter if it's also damn good.





Others that I don't feel like putting up pictures for - both Los Campesinos albums, Street Horrrsing by Fuck Buttons, and Alopecia by Why?

I should note that I listen to maybe 5% of the "talked about" releases each year. Maybe. So I have no business compiling this. But I don't think the internet will crack under the weight of another ill-conceived end of year best albums list.

Missing your true calling is marbles

If only I had lived in the 1830's, I could have been a Poulterer.

This was taken in Dickens Village, at Macy's. It features animatronic recreations of scenes from A Christmas Carol, set in a miniature Victorian village. So creepy.

Priests who make pedophilia jokes are marbles

Welcome to a very special Christmas edition. At my yearly church visit yesterday, I'm pretty sure the priest made a joke about pedophilia.

It went down, er, happened like this - the service began with a singing of Christmas carols accompanied by a procession of children dressed up as Magi, sheep, etc. When all of the kids got to the front of the church, they apparently became a little unruly, and the priest made an offhand comment to the effect of "Hey, anyone want any kids, ages 5-10?"

After a brief pause to allow everyone a chuckle, he added "I know better." Whoa. Now as far as I know, priests ain't got no kids, so it's not like he meant "I know better because I have six of my own." What could he possibly have meant, besides the obvious? Regardless, way to blow, er, botch your biggest night of the year, dude.

Treadmills are marbles

It sounds like a good idea. I mean, there's TV, how bad can it be?

For maybe the third time in my life, I attempted to run on a treadmill this morning, hoping to counteract some of the heroic gluttony of the past few days. My God, what a horrible experience. I only ran two miles, but it felt like twelve. I turned on CNN, but it's amazing how time slows down when you're running in place - those freecreditreport.com commercials somehow get worse and seem to last for days. So instead I ended up watching the red LEDs slowly light up around the track I was supposed to imagine myself running around, impatiently waiting for each like miniature Santa Clauses. Next time I think I'll just risk the hypothermia and run outside.

Drunk eDialing is marbles

Along the lines of the last post...

You've been there - it's 3:14 AM Saturday night, you've had seven too many Manhattans and you type out a horrific email to the ex-girlfriend, unrequited love, or hated boss. If you're lucky you were so drunk that the email was completely unintelligible. If not you end up on somebody's blog.

Google is here to help you out with Mail Goggles. Short version: this app forces you to do a math quiz if you're sending an email out during your pre-defined danger times. The bad news is that most of the nerds who would install this can probably do complex calc problems while getting their stomach pumped. Still a good idea, though I suppose the next step is to invent a breathalyzer to turn on your computer or exit the screensaver a la the "One For The Road" ignition tester...

Scrawling messages to your ex in red lipstick on a storefront window is so emo, so marbles

When posting Bright Eyes lyrics on your Myspace page just won't cut it, I guess. And I'm pretty sure the letters at the bottom are initials - would hate for an innocent bystander to get confused and think the message was for him.

Philadelphia's billboards are marbles

via Philebrity

Goldman Sachs paying a 1% tax rate is marbles

Granted, it wouldn't make sense if they had to give their $10B bailout gift right back to Uncle Sam come April, but for Goldman to go from paying $6B in taxes last year to $14M this year (that's a drop in tax rate from 34% to 1%, for those keeping score at home) is a little suspicious. Hell, even tax lawyers think so.

Playing 1004 games of Freecell in a year and a half is marbles

Going back to school sure has kept me busy.

Losing the Heisman because a freshman safety dropped an interception in early November is marbles

It sure must suck to be Colt McCoy. First to be shut out of both the conference and national championships, and now the Heisman trophy, solely because a bozo teammate dropped an easy interception. Even worse is that the drive before that fateful error, Colt McCoy led a made-for-Heisman-highlight-reel comeback. But he's always got that sweet-ass name to fall back on. Colt McCoy.

Note: I might have written FAIL or the like over the photo above (courtesy InsideTexas.com), but I didn't want to obscure the guy in the background's premature celebration.

Everything Tom Friedman says is marbles

While I agree with some of the general points in his otherwise moronic op-ed from Tuesday (e.g., Green good, Detroit bad), Tom Friedman's typical carelessness with facts and reality in order to make some hey-man-you-gotta-see-the-Big-Picture point really grates on me.

In the article he touts an overseas plan to vertically integrate electric cars with electricity generation and distribution, and admonishes Detroit for not doing the same:

The Better Place electric car charging system involves generating electrons from as much renewable energy — such as wind and solar — as possible and then feeding those clean electrons into a national electric car charging infrastructure. This consists of electricity charging spots with plug-in outlets — the first pilots were opened in Israel this week — plus battery-exchange stations all over the respective country. The whole system is then coordinated by a service control center that integrates and does the billing.

Great, just let me know when you get that "national electric car charging infrastructure" done here. Not to mention the cars that would plug into it (and charge themselves in a reasonable amount of time).

Of course there's nothing inherently stupid about big ideas. Sometimes they work. But what is stupid is to compare this zany startup to freaking Apple:

It just takes the right kind of auto battery — the iPod in this story — and the right kind of national plug-in network — the iTunes store — to make the business model work for electric cars at six cents a mile.

Might be a fair comparison if Apple also built the internet.

Using a huge box to send me hard candy and a packing slip is marbles

Running out into the rain this morning to rescue my UPS shipment, I was surprised to see two boxes waiting for me. Some assembly required, I thought. No, what I ordered was fully assembled, in one box, and in the other was this:

Thanks, Shoplet, for killing however many trees and burning however many fossil fuels to send me a bag of strawberry and creme candy that I didn't want.

Listening to ESPN verbally fellate Stephen Curry for two hours is marbles

Congratulations, Davidson, you barely beat a mediocre Big East team that had its two best players sitting on the bench. My sour grapes aside, the two hour flashback to last year's NCAA tournament in which every move Stephen Curry makes is exalted as the greatest in the history of history was a little more than I could handle this early in the season. Every dribble he took was declared brilliant and every play that he had nothing to do with was nonetheless attributed to his greatness. At one commercial break, they even showed a slow-mo clip of him missing a layup - not to underscore some missed opportunity, but simply because it was the last time he had touched the ball. And when they weren't talking about Stephen Curry, they were filming the stands to show his NBA father, Dell, wondering giddily what he might be thinking and feeling.

Serves me right for watching basketball before the New Year.

The guy from Tool making wine in Arizona is marbles

I guess this is old news, but I keep up with neither Tool nor Arizona wine. Here he is on the WLTV:

Complaining about not getting free money is marbles

This article was dugg as a top story today, and to me it perfectly captures a certain annoying trait that I come across a lot on the internets. The crux of the author's complaint is that he had his AdSense account suspended because of "invalid clicks" that weren't his own, thereby depriving him of 106 hard-earned dollars.

Since AdSense pays based on clicks, Google gets suspicious if the same IP address clicks an ad too many times, fearing that the site owner is behind it. According to the author's theory, somebody sabotaged him by clicking his ads over and over, causing the big G to suspend his account. Funny stuff. But this guy doesn't see it that way:

Reflecting back on my experience, it’s actually quite sickening, thinking that I gave Google 5 months of FREE advertising on my site, only to get my account deactivated due to someone else who didn’t want me to get paid.

Um, you didn't so much give Google anything as enter an agreement with them whose terms, if you had read them, were written to protect Google. And rightfully so, given that they only, what, solicited the advertisers, negotiated agreements with them, and provided the mechanism to target and deliver the ads, all the while assuming the risk on behalf of those advertisers that this delivery system might be abused. So Google in turn allocated some of that risk to you, and you break into tears when it turns out you can't get free money from your anime site. A real cybertragedy.

Calling O.J. a "first-time offender" is marbles

Via Reuters:

"Simpson has never previously been convicted of a crime. Thus, he now stands before the court as a first-time offender," defence attorney Gabriel Grasso told the judge in court papers filed in advance of Friday's sentencing hearing.

Freaking lawyers.

Not being able to remember anything else is also marbles

In my previous post I blamed my poor memory on a lack of reminders. Well, I've now proved myself wrong. I got home tonight and found this note in my pocket, and I have no idea what it means:


The worst part is that I actually remember myself writing it this morning. But for the life of me I can't remember why I did it. Is there some incriminating evidence I need to destroy? Did I photograph a UFO, but the government erased my memory? And what kind of jerk uses the word "photos"?

Now if you're wondering what the scratched out portion is, it was because I initially tried to write "photos" without an "h." And you can kinda see that I tried to do it again on the second attempt. Yeah.

Update, 9:41pm - Mystery solved!

Click here for the exciting details...

As usual, my idiocy in one arena is offset by non-idiocy in another. Turns out, this morning I came up with an interesting solution to my iPod-related memory problems - take a screenshot of the "Recently Added" window in iTunes, crop it so it looks nice, and sync it to the "Photos" section of the iPod. Behold:


So, my note (and its word choice) wasn't so strange after all. I'm as surprised as anyone. Of course, this screenshot gimmick will be a bit cumbersome to update (honestly I'll probably never bother to do it again), but the concept is solid. Steve Jobs, go make me an "app" or something.

Not being able to remember what music you buy is marbles

This fall I finally made the transition to an all-digital music lifestyle, ripping every stupid CD I never listen to anymore and uploading them to my shiny new iPod. The biggest change in all this has been limiting myself to downloads (for the most part) and laying off buying new CDs (for the most part). But in doing so I've discovered a big advantage of having a physical CD/LP, which I never realized before - it reminds you that you bought the damn thing.

At any given time I'd say I'm "listening to" 5 to 10 new (or new to me) albums. In the old days those 5 to 10 albums would be sitting in a pile on my desk, available as a constant reminder of what I'm supposed to be listening to. But now when I reach for music, I'm faced with a massive digital directory of everything I've ever listened to in my entire life. Consequently, I completely forget what new hits I just downloaded from emusic and end up picking an album I've had since 1993. And stupid Apple is no help with their "Recently Added" playlist, which instead of being viewable by album (or cover flowed) gives me a list of 576 recently added songs. Thanks.

So here's my proposed solution: I'll burn a shit-ton of CDs, print out covers for them, stack them on my desk, and retreat back into the 1990s where I belong.