A reply to Merlin.
I loves me some Superchunk.
Archive for the 'General' CategoryPage 2 of 13
I’ve become a “scrobbling” addict lately. I’m especially concerned with my last.fm profile accurately demonstrating my overall musical tastes, so I’ll tailor my day-to-day listening to try and balance out any temporary flights of fancy I might have (Like the Monkees binge I’m on right now, thanks to Merlin.).
Nothing feeds into this obsession more than this Mainstream-o-meter, which compares your top 30 artists with everyone else. My results are skewed due to a couple audiobooks and a few artists that really shouldn’t be ranked as high on my list as they actually are currently.
Interesting observations that illustrate an obvious “last.fm users vs. the rest of the real world” bias:
- Elliot Smith and Sufjan Stevens are more “mainstream” than The Beach Boys.
- The Beatles and Radiohead are both above 100%, they are so mainstream.
- Tom Waits, Van Morrison, Elvis Costello and Tori Amos all seem surprisingly low.
(via Brandon’s del.icio.us)
When I read about this my first thought was “Hell yeah!” But that’s just how I am. I get excited about the new alterna-burlesque and roller girls and stuff like that. Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School is right up that same alley.
Then I read their “start your own” page and actually started to consider it. Of course, the truth is I would have ended up buying the coloring book and that would have been that.
Lucky for me and everyone else of my ilk in and around Denver, someone beat me to it. It should be no surprise that RMRG’s scariest roller girl, Pinky 500, is involved.
Fantastic, I say.
So, Matty… You free on the 3rd Monday next month? 
Psst! Hey, did you know that Brozovich and I (along with some other friends) are talking sports over at SportsDumpster.com.
Check it, yo.
My first post covers the baseball bat attack on three BU hockey players.
This month’s issue of Wired (to which I have recently (re)subscribed for almost entirely different reasons than I did in the 90s) has a cover story by Gary Wolf called Battle of the New Atheism. The so-called “New Atheism” is, in particular, the brand of atheism espoused by Richard Dawkins whose latest book is called The God Delusion. Dawkins is extremem in his atheism — to the point of anti-theism. He thinks tolerating the good that religion does is as evil as tolerating the evil religion does. It’s an extreme view, but one many people are adopting, it seems.
“I’m quite keen on the politics of persuading people of the virtues of atheism,” Dawkins says, after we get settled in one of the high-ceilinged, ground-floor rooms. He asks me to keep an eye on his bike, which sits just behind him, on the other side of a window overlooking the street. “The number of nonreligious people in the U.S. is something nearer to 30 million than 20 million,” he says. “That’s more than all the Jews in the world put together. I think we’re in the same position the gay movement was in a few decades ago. There was a need for people to come out. The more people who came out, the more people had the courage to come out. I think that’s the case with atheists. They are more numerous than anybody realizes.”
Dawkins looks forward to the day when the first U.S. politician is honest about being an atheist. “Highly intelligent people are mostly atheists,” he says. “Not a single member of either house of Congress admits to being an atheist. It just doesn’t add up. Either they’re stupid, or they’re lying. And have they got a motive for lying? Of course they’ve got a motive! Everybody knows that an atheist can’t get elected.”
That “Smart people are atheists, and I’m wicked smart, so I hate your ‘God’!” attitude is largely what turns me off when I read or hear something from Dawkins.
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