wjsullivan.net

A rainy week off running round the Davis corner
slowly attack the muggy escalator such feet
bear a prince in mist an upstart among
stares his look dropping headlong
into the crowd of words
so short with fog
and breath

(Hit shuffle on your music player, list the first 25 songs.)

I don't have an MP3 PLAYER so I used my laptop. I hope that's okay. I'm surprised at how representative this turned out to be given the amount of crap that lives in the corners of my hard drive. We've got primarily jazz, some rap, some blues, some rock, some comedy, some electronica-ish stuff, some... whatever 311 is.

1. Monty Alexander - Steaming Hot - Pure Imagination

What got me into Monty Alexander was hearing some tracks on KUVO in Boulder from an album of his that I still don't have — a collection of jazz covers of Bob Marley tunes. Great stuff, but every time I go to get it, it's not there (note to self, it's called Concrete Jungle, since I'm also always forgetting the title). This track, though, also good.

2. Rush - Chronicles (disk 1) - Closer To the Heart

I'm pretty sure this is the track on this list that I've had for the longest, since Rush goes all the way back to middle school. Since I had been struggling to collect all of the Rush albums so I could be cool like my older BBS friends, I was really excited when this collection came out. I could pretend like I knew all the old ones.

3. Tori Amos - Under the Pink - The Waitress

Fast forward to the end of high school. Michele got me into Tori Amos with Little Earthquakes. Few songs play less nice with your volume knob than this one. It's kind of like, if I just decided to RANDOMLY CAPITALIZE words in this POST. Katy and I went to the State Theater in Detroit to see her on this tour.

4. Astrud Gilberto - The Girl From Ipanema - Meu Piao

I obtained this as part of my exploration of the other Gilbertos. I like Bebel better — she got me through a lot of bus shifts at Vic's. This is also the part where I admit that I'm really unfamiliar with a lot of the music in my collection — downloading 50ish tracks a month from emusic for a few years has pretty much buried me, so this is probably the second time I've ever listened to this track. Dusty.

5. Jimi Hendrix - Band Of Gypsies - Who Knows

If I weren't doing this shuffle meme thing, I'd stop and listen to this whole album. It was either Al or Steve from the ACME Jam Company who told me about it — finally got me listening to something other than the Ultimate Experience, and made me realize there was a whole lot more to Hendrix. If you were a bass player and started playing Cox's line here I'm not sure why you'd ever stop.

6. Miles Davis - Steamin' With The Miles Davis Quintet - Salt Peanuts

"Salt Peanuts" is the most irritating jazz standard ever, but this version of it is as awesome as most irritating can get.

7. Eric Pierre feat. Lady Gattica - Saint-Germain des Prés Café III - Channel Zero (Shade Of Soul Remix)

I don't remember why Simone picked up this album, but I'm happy she did and that I kept a copy. I should probably get the other volumes in this series, eletronica-ish jazz hits the spot sometimes. Interesting if you want to listen to it attentively, not disruptive if you don't.

8. Outkast - The Love Below - Spread

Outkast, getting directly to the point. 0 to offensive in about 5 syllables.

9. Roy Buchanan - Deluxe Edition - Whiplash

I don't remember how I found Roy Buchanan — I think on a blues radio show in Lansing — but the two-disc set I had of his got many a listen, until that punk debate camp student of mine stole the better disc. This album is a more recent acquisition which doesn't have near the pull, but it's still a good pick for a hard-driving blues talky talky guitar craving.

10. Eddie Izzard - Unrepeatable - Bunch Of Flowers

Joe Z introduced me to Eddie Izzard. A real history major's comic.

11. The Doobie Brothers - Sounds of the Seventies - 1979 - What a Fool Believes

I love the seventies. I can hit those high notes. We bought his collection because of the infomercial. How could you not?

12. Outkast - Aquemini - Return of the "G"

Steve D and I really thought this song was hilarious. Constant snickering whenever it came on. "I thought I was your boy!" I'm glad something from Aquemini came up at least.

13. Brad Mehldau - Art of the Trio, Vol. 3 Songs 1998 - At a Loss

His music has been the soundtrack for my life since around 2000 when Al introduced me to Art of the Trio, Vol. 4, and shows no signs of losing that status. I'm such a fanboi that I even sent Mehldau the pamphlet of poems I self-published in grad school inspired by his music. He did not reply. Maybe he objected to Larry Goldings also being mentioned. To my credit I did not attempt to ask him about it when I saw him play a few months ago in Cambridge.

14. Mitch Hedberg - Do You Believe in Gosh? - The Improv Fairy Tale

I can thank Blair for the introduction to Hedberg. This album ("new" last year) is not so great. But this track is funny in that WTF are you on about Mitch kind of way. "I had a bad set here last night, and they added an E to the end of the sign." ("here" being the Improv.)

15. Aesop Rock - None Shall Pass - No City

Strangely, I can also thank Blair for this one. I haven't had this album long and don't know it well at all. If Blair says it's good it probably is.

16. Tom Petty - Wildflowers - Crawling Back to You

I don't think anyone who knows me would describe my musical tastes without mentioning Tom Petty, so it's good that he's here. I'll still be listening to this album when I'm a hundred. I had a burning desire around 1999 to play this song on the piano, so I listened to it about a million times.

17. Howlin' Wolf - The Chess Box (Disc 1, 1951 -1955) - Howlin' Wolf Boogie (1951)

The bluest. This was a gift; I think I asked for it around the time when I was "serious" about learning to play the harmonica.

18. Binary Star - Masters Of The Universe - Glen Close

These guys have been a great new find for me this year. I have a half-finished review of the whole album. It's good. This isn't one of the stronger tracks though — story rap meh.

19. Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin III - Friends

Might be my favorite Zeppelin album. I'm sure that'll offend someone. I think it's the one I had first, courtesy of signing up for BMG, and it has "Tangerine," "Out on the Tiles"...

20. Red Hot Chili Peppers - What Hits!? - If You Want Me To Stay

Always did like this version. Kiedis is surprisingly understated. He threatens to break into the Chili Pepper "rap" mode, but never quite does. Before the Internet, this was the only version of the song I had, so it got a lot of play.

21. Jarrett, Keith - Bye Bye Blackbird - I Thought About You

I saw him play at Symphony Hall. He was grumpy, but incredible. Also known for his weird vocalizations, chronic fatigue syndrome, and wife — who invented MimicCreme, for which I started a Wikipedia article.

This, though, is one sleepy tune.

22. Thelonious Monk - Alone in San Francisco - There's Danger in Your Eyes, Cherie - take 2

One of the best things about being a jazz musician must be being able to release multiple takes of the same song on the same album, and have people be glad that you did it.

23. 311 - Grassroots - Six

It's fitting to hear this so soon after the heartbreaking Stanley Cup loss on Friday, since I first heard this album while playing NHL 95 in an MSU dorm room. This was on my short list for Jerrell's best cruising album challenge, but did not win. This song is part of the reason it didn't win.

24. Eddie Izzard - Glorious - Fill Me With the Gobi Desert

Eddie again, finding comedy where there shouldn't be any. "You can't just fall into taxidermy." Indeed.

25. Django Reinhardt - The Classic Early Recordings[disc1]1934-1935 - I've Had My Moments

Came from the CD gifted to me at Nikki and Dave's wedding. I like to think I've had my moments, too.

Increasingly, states are requiring restaurants to post more information about what's in the food they serve, so customers can know what they are eating.

However, apparently states are not requiring businesses to tell you what lethal chemical pesticide cocktail they just blasted you in the face with. French fries are one thing, but this is a trade secret.

A North Carolina woman out walking her dog last month was sprayed in the face with a gypsy moth pesticide, and subsequently developed "a severe rash and other flu-like symptoms, breathing complications, and nausea for several days." Unfortunately, her doctor can't treat her properly because the company that makes the spray won't tell him what's in it.

It amuses me way too much that one of the most famous haters of this kind of tab also rails against this kind of tab.

Also, Safari? Really?

A lot of people I know eat at the Olive Garden, so I figure I should probably pass this on.

You can get a $9 voucher if you paid for a meal at the Olive Garden with a credit or debit card between December 4, 2006 and August 10, 2007. Basically, they failed to truncate credit card numbers on receipts.

An article I've been working on the last couple of weeks as part of my work at the Free Software Foundation was published on TorrentFreak today:

The War on Sharing: Why the FSF cares about RIAA lawsuits

For anyone interested, I'll be publishing my hacking on yrk's rt-liberation.el at http://git.wjsullivan.net/rt-liberation.git, browseable at http://wjsullivan.net/git.

Right now I'm most interested in working on the CLI module, so I can do things like assign tickets and update their status.

The future still looks very still.

Mitch Hedburg was wrong. Escalators do break.

I've put up some pictures from last weekend's beautiful Ohanami along the Charles River. The weather was awesome and the cherry blossoms were gorgeous. The photos don't do it justice.

As part of this I finally got around to setting up my own Gallery 2 install, so I don't have to rely on Flickr and Facebook as the canonical locations for my photos.

Today I learned that in Debian, all of those nifty xkboptions like "ctrl:nocaps" are listed in files in /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules.

However, none of them have helped me get my left Alt key to stop behaving like an AltGr key. xev even says that the key is Alt_L, but that's not how it's acting. The right Alt key — the one actually labeled AltGr — also behaves like AltGr. Not having an Alt key is seriously cramping my Emacs usage.

On the upside, I now have the X server starting on the Gdium, though only by using fbdev. The siliconmotion driver segfaults. But hey, progress.

retriever smile
pile pawprints
on subway floor
memorize shoes
lick fingers
for bacon
fluff tail
for words
find eyes
to comb
"take it easy"

having heart attacks
  is no longer so sexy
    fly pigs down West Nile

rain in the red room
drink tea ran
to cut hair light
a candle cook dried
red lentils and
chili powder.

(From a prompt.)

backwards he has a cadence
coughed of crystalline
a specimen
so hardscrabble he's
wicked impossible —
no leaking,
just granite scratches
and specks of lunacy
lining his pockets,
veins jingling like
pennies nascent in
piggybanks.

(From another prompt.)

Having a netbook where the X server doesn't start at the moment has given me a chance to get familiar again with the Debian console setup. Not having X doesn't affect my workflow much (which is part of why my workflow is what it is), but it's been a while since I've spent time tuning things.

I use the dvorak keymap, but this Gdium has an AZERTY keyboard. Despite the fact that I was selecting dvorak as the keymap with dpkg-reconfigure console-data, the keymap was reverting to AZERTY on each boot. I'm still not sure why that was the case, but gravityboy was helpful in pointing me toward the new, unified way.

All I had to do was edit the /etc/default/console-setup file, and put the right keymap in XKBLAYOUT="dvorak". I also added "ctrl:nocaps" to XKBOPTIONS, to turn Caps Lock into another Control key. That's a lot prettier than the old way that I was doing that, which involved putting (echo `dumpkeys | grep -i keymaps`; echo keycode 58 = Control) | loadkeys - in /etc/rc.local.

I've now removed the console-data and console-common packages entirely, and everything still seems to work. I do wish that the default level of dpkg-reconfigure console-setup asked about the keymap, because then I would have figured this out on my own. As it was, I did not make the connection to see that options beginning with XKB might also affect keys in the console.

Maybe this isn't actually that new, but it's new to me :). And I shouldn't say that the X server "doesn't start" on the Gdium -- it certainly starts on the version of GNU/Linux that they ship with. It's just not working yet in the Debian installation I'm working on.

Inspired by this prompt, to the tune of "What Was Told, That"

What was said to the spider plant that made it wither was said
to me here in my armpit.

What was told the taco that made it weak
and soggy, what was

slurred the PBR so it is what it is, whatever made
HFCS natural, whatever

was said to the inhabitants of the city of Emporia in
Kansas that makes their noses

so tolerant, whatever lets the cherry blossom fall
like a discarded tissue, that is

being said to me now. I sneer. Whatever put blisters in the sun, that's bursting here.
The massive dumpster lid drops; I overflow with excess,
picking old spinach from my teeth,

uncertain about the one to whom every that belongs!

Let me sing
I wish I could
crank out a cool head
draw it down
under any circumstance
described every week
surviving in the wild
no supplies
just the one I want
in the photographs
I took while I played
Blue in Green beautifully
swaying on the bass
so skilled I could paint it
on the piano keys
while I tell you
all about what I just read
I remember it
and everything
perfectly.

a place to discuss
elevator love letter
helicopter spin

spring Tuesday morning
  empty wet recycling bins
    everything returns

Disclose a sentence then
yield to the fragment —
  once you get that
    everything else
    is coarse correction.