The eight other songs Seth and I recorded at my homebrew studio setup right here in Arlington. All in all I think it’s his best yet, and my best recording/producing effort to date (though still pretty lo-fi).

I recorded his last albums too, you might remember.

Anyway here it is, right click + save as to keep the .mp3s forever:

1. Turn Off Your Radio
2. Pacific Ocean
3. The One that I Held in my Hand
4. River is Wide
5. Blood From a Stone
6. See Me Fall
7. Remember My Name
8. Bridges
9. Crab Apple Cider Blues

John 3:14 Sign

Check out that photo. That’s one of the best jokes I’ve seen in a long time. It’s weird, it’s simple, and it’s extremely oblique. I love it.

It’s from Kids in the Hall, season 3. A skit about Exhibition Shirling. Take a minute to watch it:

Shirling, the ‘exciting Gaelic/Italian tradition,’ is a ridiculous sport where teams try to dodge the poisonous spit of a scared cobra-type snake (you watched the video right? It’s a good sport too). It’s great and it’s absurd, and then comes our joke (above).

Ah yeah I’ve seen those signs before at sporting events. You could (like me) have seen this flash and just think that it’s funny that even at an event with hardly any people in attendance someone has the ubiquitous sign.

Or, you might realize that the sign we normally see references John 3:16. They got it wrong! A little funnier than before.

Actually, though, the Kids in the Hall are too smart for that. Watching this skit the other day Tim idly wondered, “What’s John 3:14?” I had a computer on my lap so I checked it out:

Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up

How’s that for serendipity! And just two verses away from the stadium staple John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

Bravo KITH.

“They play like, songs about dwarves and hobbits. And they’re crazy on the guitar.”

By little brothers looked at each other, and one asked me, “Yeah, but have you heard of Dragonforce?”

I hadn’t, so Daniel lent me a few of their albums.  I can’t say they’ve grown on me as much as Rhapsody, I will say that they’re one of the shreddingest bands I’ve ever heard.

But why’d they name their most recent album Ultra Beatdown? Listen to guitarist Herman Li explain:

“Since the second album, Sonic Firestorm, and the last album, Inhuman Rampage, we always had titles that are supposed to be original and no one used it before. So there isn’t a band, there isn’t a video game, there isn’t a song called Sonic Firestorm or Inhuman Rampage. Same for Ultra Beatdown as far as I know. Yeah? So we’re always trying to find an original title. There’s a reason that everyone hates the title when they first heard it, because they’s not familiar with the combination of those words.

“But it means basically the album is there to kick your ass, ultra kick your ass.”

Check them out, if just for the craft and the pageantry.

Of course, if overwrought European geek metal is too much for you, R. Kelly put out a new video today (but it’s lacking in ridiculous metaphor).

Sage Spätzle, Thirsty Bernie. Living in Germany as a boy, I fell in love with a lot of the local dishes. The US doesn’t yet have the technology to make a passable brötchen, and I’ve never had a jäger schnitzel here that lives up to my memory. But Thirsty Bernie has a bunch of Bavarian dishes in a laid-back bar atmosphere. I wouldn’t call any of them perfectly authentic or traditional, but most of them are better than any German-style fare I’ve had elsewhere. But the spätzle. Ahh the spätzle. It rivals what I remember. Get it as a side with their Austrian Chicken Sandwich.

Pork Sausage NZ Style, Cassatt’s Cafe. Cassatt’s specializes in food from New Zealand. Everything I know about New Zealand  I learned in the LOTR commentary, so I wouldn’t know if they’re making it all up, but they serve a lot of small animals like pigs and lambs and chickens, which seems plausible to me. Anyway, the tomato chutney makes this dish. I’ve never had it during dinner or lunch, but the pork sausage is my go to brunch choice.

Carolina Fried Chicken, Iota. This is the best fried chicken I’ve eaten. I’m craving it right now, actually. May be too salty for some tastes, but it’s not greasy at all and breaded perfectly. The greens that come with it are also good, but I try to switch out the macaroni and cheese for a big piece of cornbread if they have it. Not that it’s bad mac & cheese, but southern-style mac & cheese was never something I really was into (heresy, I know). I think they recently updated their menu, so it may not be right on their website.

In any case, they’ve come up twice in some cool stuff I’ve been looking at lately. Firstly, I caught this PBS special on colony collapse disorder one night by chance. Colony collapse disorder has apiologists (bee researchers) scared, as it (whatever it is) is killing whole colonies of bees in the US and increasingly throughout the world.

Scientists don’t know yet exactly what’s happening to the bees yet either. They just don’t come back to the hive and die.

Silence of the Bees, though, shown in full on PBS.org, explains a lot about what’s happening and where research is now on it. It’s not as dry as some PBS specials, I recommend giving it a look.

Secondly, Newsweek has a pretty interesting, short article on Parisian bees and all the cool pollen they come up with.

Testers have been surprised to find equatorial pollens from palm trees in [Paris beekeper] Darné’s honey pots. There’s evidence of a pollen that looks to be from the family of the baobab tree, the whimsical African colossus. “There aren’t any baobabs in the Greater Paris area, that’s for sure,” Darné says. Some pollens linger unidentified while researchers trade pollen photos over the Internet with colleagues in New Zealand and Madagascar. Olive tree, eucalyptus, the South African gazania flower, even cannabis is traceable in Seine-St-Denis hives, according to Yves Loublier, a pollen specialist with the French National Center for Scientific Research.

How does a reporter get a scoop? Nurturing contacts, wearing out shoe leather, poring over documents. And for some, the toolkit may include phone hacking, honeytraps and covert recording.

I remember hearing once that tabloids like the National Enquirer have some of the most robust fact-checking infrastructures, because the stakes and the likelihood of getting sued are so high. I don’t know how the British libel rules compare to the US, but check out what some of these reporters have done:

The exciting:

In 2003, Daily Mirror reporter Ryan Parry used false references to get a job as a footman in Buckingham Palace. His aim was to uncover security lapses at the Palace in the run-up to President George W Bush’s visit.

He revealed details of the President’s bedroom as well as the Queen’s breakfast habits. Eventually the Queen won a court order preventing the Mirror from revealing any more.

The worrying:

Tessa Mayes, who has worked as an investigative journalist for newspapers and TV shows, said… ‘If I had said no, I wouldn’t have got to work on those stories. It’s not unknown for journalists to sleep with their sources in order to meet a deadline. As it happens I haven’t needed or wanted to do that.’

The silly:

And it is widely claimed that in 1994 Rebekah Wade – then a News of the World reporter, now editor of the Sun – dressed as a cleaner and hid in a toilet for two hours in order to nab an early copy of the Sunday Times.

The Sunday Times, housed in the same building as the News of the World, was serialising a biography of Prince Charles, and NoTW editor Piers Morgan wanted to know what it said. John Witherow, editor of the Sunday Times, is alleged to have shouted at Morgan: ‘Theft isn’t journalism.’

Read the whole thing.

Isle quickly finds, though, that he may not be the only one new to the modern world, and his counterpart may be willing to go to greater extremes to get home.

How is this all connected? What happens to Isle? Does he ever get back home? Why Missouri?

Having recently finished the Journeys of Isle, I know all this. I recommend reading it and finding out for yourself.

Actually, though, it is a really cool book. A fun adventure/fantasy book that I thought was really well-plotted. Definitely a great read.

Go buy yourself a copy, or go check out the website to learn more about the book.

I probably should talk about this too much, but I have it on good authority that a pseudo-sequel is in the works and may be out in the next few months. From what I’ve seen of it, it’s even better than this, but I’d definitely read Journeys if you want to be on top of the next one.