Doing my part to keep up a post a week....

Posted by Matt

Miscellaneous things of interest:

• There's an amusing thread over at Crooked Timber on favorite first lines of books, to which I added perhaps a bit too much Nabokoviana. As well as a Borges quote. The musical equivalent of that discussion is at Opiniatrety.

• Cross-posting from myself: There's a small chance you're wondering whether to pick up the new Clinic album Winchester Cathedral. I did the other day. It might be better than Walking With Thee -- which I don't own and have only heard in its entirety once -- but mostly it feels like old material being rehashed. "Falstaff" strikes me as a good song. Which might be related to how I really like the softer songs "Distortions" and "Goodnight Georgie" and "Porno" from the early albums, except that I don't feel like this is directly repeating them. Other songs here feel like slight variations on old themes. I wouldn't say the album is bad by any means. But I'm not sure it's worth owning, really. Buy Internal Wrangler, and buy the collection of EPs. They're good stuff. If you like them enough, try the newer albums. But I'm not convinced they add anything.

  (I don't remember if I ever mentioned going to see Clinic in concert last spring here, so if I didn't: it was cool. Of course they're known for playing in surgical scrubs, which is a nice gimmick. But it was a good show, if very short. Really disappointingly short, from my point of view, but keeping in mind that their songs are very short, they did play a fair number of them. And, wow, that bassist sings high for being such a large guy.)
  

• This collection of 80's TV show theme songs (including those of many cartoons) seems particularly entertaining for people near my age who watched too many cartoons as kids. (I also had the comic book versions of many of those. Still do, boxed up somewhere, I think. Even M.A.S.K. and Air Raiders and Visionaries. And of course Thundercats and G.I. Joe and Transformers. Imagine, such a dorky child growing up to be me.)
• If you're not reading Small Shelly Fauna, you're missing out on fascinating information about Godzilla. Really.
• Apple's Airport Express with AirTunes is very cool. I'm streaming music to my living room speakers wirelessly from iTunes on my laptop. No more choosing between wearing headphones or going to the trouble of getting up to put CDs in the CD player. Mabe I'm just lazy.

To follow: a post on research and possibly other academic things I've been thinking about.