Redzilla's recent posting about her lawn had me thinking about my lawn, which is a mess, despite my tearing it up last summer and starting from scratch. It looked good for about a month but now it is merely a mud patch with tufts of grass. Not that I'm a perfectionist, or even believe in the monoculture of a "good" lawn, but I'd like my kids to be able to play on it!

Anyway, a little humor to take my mind off the pain:

GOD: Francis, you know all about gardens and nature. What in The world is going on down there in the USA? What happened to the Dandelions, violets, thistle and stuff I started eons ago? I had a Perfect, no-maintenance garden plan. Those plants grow in any type of soil, Withstand drought and multiply with abandon. The nectar from the long lasting blossoms attracts butterflies, honey bees and flocks of Songbirds.

I expected to see a vast garden of colors by now. But all I see are These green rectangles.

ST. FRANCIS: It's the tribes that settled there, Lord. The Suburbanites. They started calling your flowers "weeds" and went to great lengths to kill them and replace them with grass.

GOD: Grass? But it's so boring. It's not colorful. It doesn't attract butterflies, birds and bees, only grubs and sod worms. It's Temperamental with temperatures. Do these Suburbanites really want all that grass Growing there?

ST. FRANCIS: Apparently so, Lord. They go to great pains to grow it and keep it green. They begin each spring by fertilizing grass and Poisoning any other plant that crops up in the lawn.

GOD: The spring rains and warm weather probably make grass grow Really fast. That must make the Suburbanites happy.

ST. FRANCIS: Apparently not, Lord. As soon as it grows a little, they cut it, sometimes twice a week.

GOD: They cut it? Do they then bale it like hay?

ST. FRANCIS: Not exactly Lord. Most of them rake it up and put it in bags.

GOD: They bag it? Why? Is it a cash crop? Do they sell it?

ST. FRANCIS: No, sir -- just the opposite. They pay to throw it away.

GOD: Now, let me get this straight. They fertilize grass so it will Grow. And when it does grow, they cut it off and pay to throw it away?

ST. FRANCIS: Yes, sir.

GOD: These Suburbanites must be relieved in the summer when we cut back on the rain and turn up the heat. That surely slows the growth and Saves them a lot of work.

ST. FRANCIS: You aren't going to believe this, Lord. When the grass stops growing so fast, they drag out hoses and pay more money to water it so they can continue to mow it and pay to get rid of it.

GOD: What nonsense. At least they kept some of the trees. That was a sheer stoke of genius, if I do say so myself. The trees grow leaves in The spring to provide beauty and shade in the summer. In the autumn they fall to the ground and form a natural blanket to keep moisture in the soil and Protect the trees and bushes. Plus, as they rot, the leaves form compost to Enhance the soil. It's a natural circle of life.

ST. FRANCIS: You'd better sit down, Lord. The Suburbanites have drawn a new circle. As soon as the leaves fall, they rake them into great Piles and pay to have them hauled away.

GOD: No. What do they do to protect the shrub and tree roots in the Winter and to keep the soil moist and loose?

ST. FRANCIS: After throwing away the leaves, they go out and buy Something which they call mulch. They haul it home and spread it around in Place of the leaves.

GOD: And where do they get this mulch?

ST. FRANCIS: They cut down trees and grind them up to make the Mulch.

GOD: Enough! I don't want to think about this anymore. St. Catherine, you're in charge of the arts. What movie have you scheduled for us Tonight?

ST. CATHERINE: "Dumb and Dumber," Lord. It's a real stupid movie about -

GOD: Never mind, I think I just heard the whole story from St. Francis.

6	1		El Perro del Mar	11
	2		Dead Can Dance	5
	3		The La's	4
	3		Johnny Cash	4
	5		J.J. Cale	3
	5		Mike Oldfield	3
	7		Lissa Schneckenburger	2
	7		Faces	2
	7		John Cale	2
	7		Massive Attack	2

Hoping to make the El Perro show next month. Read a DcD refrence on Twitter and so got into them again. And you can't listen to "There She Goes" just once! Lissa is going to be at Passim's tomorrow night and showed up in the Globe Entertainment section. Downloaded an Ommadawn remaster, so Oldfield is back on the list.

According to Joshua Allen, the "perfect pop song" is two minutes and forty two seconds long. And he uses one of my all time favorite songs, one I consider a serious contender for Perfect Pop Song, "There She Goes" by the La's. I loved the line about the song:

When “There She Goes” is over, I guarantee absolutely no one in the room goes: “Jesus, finally.”

So I checked my ripped collection in Amarok to see what I had. Given some small variation in ripping (my "There She Goes" clocked in at 2:43), I searched in my Collection tab of Amarok using "length:>160 length:<164" for the search terms, and I came up with:

Three of my favorite songs from the 4 CD "Children of Nuggets":

One of my favorite Cure songs:

An excellent Gram Parsons song, covered by Sheryl Crow and Emmylou Harris:
One of The Boss' best love songs:
One of the best of an incredible collection of songs from The Clean's Anthology:
Solid rocker from Goodbye Yellow Brick Road:
The best movie song, bar none, of all time:
Not surprising to find one from the CD I've been playing over and over recently, Demon Days:
Another slice of pure rootsy pop heaven from Sleepy:

All in all, a filter that turns out pretty well, I'd say.

I declare shenanigans on the wild turkey that was trying to cross the road in front of me this morning. Listen, you may be one of the dumbest creatures on God's Green Earth, but that's no excuse for lollygagging across the road, while there are people who need to get home and/or work. If my cell phone camera wasn't the worst one ever invented, I would have gotten your mugshot to broadcast around the world!

Quote for your day:

The very existence of flamethrowers proves that sometime, somewhere,
someone said to themselves, “You know, I want to set those people over
there on fire, but I’m just not close enough to get the job done.” -- George Carlin

clipped from www.brianflemming.org Motivational posters

clipped from www.ironicsans.com Video Store Clerk Game: A Crowd Wisdom Experiment On-line movie recommendation systems (such as those at Amazon, Netflix, etc) are pretty good at guessing what movies you might like based on your movie history. Improvements to these systems are constantly being made, using ever more sophisticated algorithms. But how good are they compared to the wisdom of actual people? That’s what my friends Jay and Andy are trying to figure out. And they need your help. Jay and Andy have created a game called Video Store Clerk in which you play a video store clerk. You are told how a real customer has rated previous movie rentals, and then you are shown another movie title that the person also rented. Can you guess how the customer rated that movie?

Things I Loathe

• Having to call all the parents of my soccer team to tell them the practice field has moved yet again, as I can't trust them to check their email every couple of days.
• Interminable soccer board meetings, where we argue incessantly over minutia.
• Sore knees
• Finding eleven months of tax records, but desperately needing that twelfth month
• Watching hockey in standard definition. I guess I shouldn't complain too much, as at least they televised the NCAA finals, but once you watch hockey in hi-def, you don't want to go back.
• Listening to the US Presidential candidates prostrate themselves before the electorate, trying to prove they believe in imaginary fairies more than the other ones. Obama's "clinging to guns and religion" comment is one of the most rational thing any of them have said all campaign season, yet he can't scramble away from it fast enough.
  

Things I Love

• Coaching my girls in soccer. Last season was the first season one of them played without me, and while it was an interesting change in point of view, I'm glad to be back in the saddle again.
• Those first beautiful days of Spring. I've always said those are the hardest ones to stay focused when you are working from home.
• Playoff hockey
• Overtime Playoff hockey
• A sweet one timer from the faceoff dot that wins an overtime playoff hockey game for your underdog Black & Golds. That feeling is why I'm glad I am a sports fan.
• Watching one of your local Division One hockey teams finally win the championship game, after losing the previous two years. The Boston College Eagles made it easy to watch this year, as they just rolled in both games they played in the Frozen Four.
• The Car Talk Credits; "Head of Working Mother Support Group - Erasmus B. Dragon" indeed!
• Following Web bread crumbs to discover gold:
• Listening to Bess Rogers, hoping to get to see her next week
• Finding about her and Jen's crazy insane podcast, Once More with Feeling. "Cheese And Despair" - great potential band name
• Noticing the podcast comes from Gcast.com, a free  Podcasting hosting site. Look for my "Cheese and Despair" podcast soon!
• Seeing they are affiliated with GarageBand.com, so begin prowling around there
• Checking out the folk section and finding a sort-of local artist named Llissa Schneckenburger, a fiddler and folksinger who, as my friend says, must be good with a name like that! And is! And she has a new CD available today!
  

 

A couple Shenanigans from my lunch time errands, in the blessed spring sunshine:

• To the doofus who banged a U-ey right in front of me, in order to cut into the middle of a clearly marked funeral procession.
• To all those pedestrians who refuse to walk the extra 10 feet to get to a crosswalk, preferring instead to dart out from between two parked cars

I've been a sporadic user of Twitter for a while now but I really didn't get into it. I would go through some phases of using it, but they were fairly short bursts, and prone to long lapses of quiet.

But lately I've been using it more. I installed TwitterFox (although I don't remember when!) and happened to notice it in my status bar. And it works very nicely, giving me an interface that I can understand (the Twitter home page had me a little confused - what can I say, I'm easily confused). Although lately it has been giving me trouble, as the popup window is appearing underneath web content on some pages, which is annoying.

So I've started "tweeting" a bit more. And it has actually paid off over the past couple of days, with some great information appearing.

First up was the notice from jamiei about Google App Engine, which is a way to leverage Google technological muscle to create web apps. Very nice looking, even if I can't crack the beta team. You can download the SDK and play with it locally until they open it up a little more. Here's an excellent hands on quickie tutorial for using it.

Then I tweet-complained earlier this morning that my Amarok had stopped downloading cover images. I figured it was my fault, because I had recently gone through "version hell" trying to get a libCurl update to work. libCurl is often used by programs to get web information, and I just figured I broke Amarok solving my update problem.

But nightrose came to my rescue just a few minutes later, pointing out a blog post by Seb, an Amarok developer, explaining that an Amazon API change broke Amarok's album cover download and it will be fixed in the next upgrade. Yay for instant help!

So maybe Twitter can actually be useful, rather than just another distraction. But I will not turn on audio notification of new tweets. Nope, I just won't do that...