Digital Sextant

On the last day of class in my courses we:

• Turn in final projects.  I usually ask students to do some kind of show and tell or show off.
• Hear extra credit presentations, sometimes.
• Have a chat about how the course went.  It’s usually a love fest, but I still think it’s useful.
• Eat donuts or some other food I bring.  This year my New Media course is going to adjourn to a local eatery to have our chat.

What do you do?

• 2: Creedence Clearwater Revival: I have the “best of” two disc set, which is really all a casual fan needs. I have fond memories of the basement of Marian’s house (my babysitter until I was eight or so), singing or listening to “Down on the corner.” Also, I heard somewhere that the lead singer of CCR got sued by his record company from the CCR days because his post-CCR songs sounded too much like his CCR songs. He got sued for plagiarizing himself.
• 3: Dave Matthews Band: I have very little to say about these albums, except that they go by like Crystal Light Iced Tea. They do about what you’d expect, reasonably well enough, but there’s no reason to get very excited about them.
• 2: David Grey: Is great.
• 1: The Dead Milkmen: I’ve commented before that I love Punk Rock Girl, but I’m inclined here to write about the song “Stuart,” which reminds me of a grad-school chum, J. Perry Lamson, whose current whereabouts do not appear on Google. Perry was one of three grads who joined me in a trip to Albuquerque one year, and he brought along this CD and introduced me to it.
• 1: Death Cab for Cutie: I was a bit hesitant to listen to this band, since the first place I heard of it was as something “Dawson” liked, I think. Nonetheless, it’s pretty good.
• 1: Deep Blue Something: I said, “What about Breakfast at Tiffanys?” She said, “I think I remember the film.” Well, that’s one thing we got.
• 1: Dennis Leary: I think Dennis Leary missed out on a career as the angry Weird Al. His “Traditional Irish Folk Song” is not to be missed. (Clip)
• .2 Derek and the Dominos: (from the Cream of Clapton album mentioned last week). Another copy of Layla. I must have fifty versions of that song. Give it a rest, beardy.
• 1: Dervish: A traditional Irish band with lots of good songs and reels. You gotta love it.
• 3: Dinosaur Jr.: I have always said I thought J. Mascis would have gone very far if not for his whiny singing style. His song writing is great. I particularly like his acoustic work (which we’ll see when we get to his solo album in the Js.)

What is wrong with audio book manufacturers?

Why can’t they understand ID3 tags?

Are they difficult?  Are they confusing?

Every frickafrackin time I get audiobooks from the library, I have to wrestle with the ID3 tags as I import the books into my iPod.  Here are the three most common problems:

1. No tags at all.  What the fuck?
2. Nonstandard tags.  The first disc will have no tags.  The second disc will be “The Innocent Man (disc 2)”.  The third disc will be “John Grisham - The Innocent Man (03 of 10)” or some cockamamie mess.
3. Wrong tags.  I’m not kidding.  In ripping The Last Detective by Robert Crais, I had the first three or four discs appear tag-less, only to find disc 5 labeled like it was disc 8 of a Clive Cussler novel.

What in Amarok’s name is going on?

Two theories, now that I’ve got that out of my system:

1. .WAV files, which these are, don’t have an easy-to-use native format for tags.  I think this is crap, but these are unresearched, unfounded guesses.
2. Somewhere, Amarok or Sound Juicer is going online and looking for CDs with similar track listings and profiles and, when it finds them, is downloading the ID3 info.  This would explain the WRONG data, perhaps.

All that said, I still like me the audio books.

Jenny and I got this party game for the Wii last week and have been playing it.  It’s a pretty fun goof, with lots of mini games and silly Wii controller stuff.  The animations are silly and the Rock-Band-like game at the end of each level is amusing.

The game features a vast amount of unlockable content, mostly clothes for your rabbids, that I presume you get by playing the games over and over again.  I am both annoyed by the idea that they would want/need me to do this AND tempted to try for it.

My favorite game that we played this evening took place in a movie theatre.  The rabbids wanted to talk on their phones, so players held their Wii’s upright when the lights were off, and the rabbids chattered away, making the people around them angrier and angrier.  When the manager showed up and turned on the house lights, you had to swing the wiimote down to hide your phone, otherwise you got smacked with a big statue and you lost points.

In other news, having taken a two week hiatus from Wii Sports, when I played one round of bowling and one round of tennis, I did so poorly on each that my rating went down.

I just had an “old moment.”  I saw a book in my list of books I’d given away on Bookmooch that looked really intriguing.  It was called Take-Down, and was about the pursuit and capture of Kevin Mitnick, a famous cyber criminal.  I found myself thinking, “Man, that sounds like a good book.  I should have read that before I gave it away.”

Then, in looking into the matter a bit more, I found that I DID read that book.  Not even two years ago.

Sigh.

by Rudyard Kipling; read by Mark L. Smith

A delightful book, full of action and pomp, rife with detailed explanation of fishing on George’s Bank (which wasn’t much different, it seems, than current methods for doing so). The characters are well-crafted and interesting, and the events of the summer aboard the boat work well. You know a book did its job when you want to pursue its aims: the book makes me want to join a fishing trawler, at least for a couple months. Okay, just ponder what it would be like to join one.

• One section of the book hit me with a surprising intensity. The fishing trawler is doodling along, minding its own business, when a steamship comes out of the fog and nearly runs her down. Moments later, a resounding CRACK echoes over the water and the crew of the We’re Here realizes another boat has been hit. They go to the dorries and try to help, but are only able to find one survivor, the captain of the boat. The scene is pretty intense, with corpses floating by in the water and such, but shifts to heartbreaking when you learn that the man’s only son was also on the boat, and is drowned with the rest of the crew. Heartbreak and mourning ensues. Another boat pulls up to talk about the crash, and this follows:
  

  Clip from Captain’s Courageous, Chapter 7

  The son is found! Here I am, listening to this story as I walk along with my dogs, and my mouth literally dropped open, my heart pounding with all the suspense the crew felt. Masterful.

• The plot seems to have been the impetus for the movie Cabin Boy, which veers into mythical Sinbad-type stories in its latter sections, but starts off with an irritating, spoiled boy who ends up on a fishing trawler. The difference, of course, is that Chris Elliott’s Nathaniel is stupid, so can’t learn to be a good fisherman like Harvey of Captains Courageous does.
• Mark L. Smith does a great job with the reading. His subdued voice fits the narrative perfectly, and he crafts his voices well.

1939.  Bulldog Drummond is back in another gripping adventure.  This time, just one day before his wedding, an absent-minded professor (so absent minded he wears winter clothes in August because his calendar says January) shows up at the Drummond house to explain that there are millions of pounds hidden in the catacombs below the castle.  Adventure ensues.  Among the highlights:

• Algy, the Watson to Drummond’s Holmes, gets his robe tangled in a suit of armor and then falls down the stairs.  When he lands at the bottom, the helmet has landed on his head like in a Scooby Doo cartoon.  Later, Algy bends down to peer into a hole in the wall and narrowly avoids being decapitated because Bulldog is about to chop down that very wall with his axe.
• ‘Tenny,’ Bulldog’s butler kicks ass.  At one point, to mollify his fiance, Bulldog ostentatiously instructs Tenny to burn a code book–thus ensuring that Bulldog won’t pursue the mystery instead of attending to his wedding.  The butler, who clearly knows which side his bread is buttered on, burns a phonebook instead and slips the code book back to Bulldog, who stays up all night working on the cipher.
• Phyllis’ aunt Blanche is particularly funny, with a feathered hat and a deep abiding hatred for Bulldog, who consistently misses being married by one mystery after another.
• How come professors are always depicted as absent-minded?  It seems a pretty rude stereotype.  On the other hand, come to think of it, I AM absent minded.  Maybe next time Jenny scowls when I admit that I’ve forgotten to put the laundry in the dryer or some such error, I should just plead “deep thoughts.”

Worth my thirty-eight cents:

This is a seventy-four cent movie, certainly.  I have two moments that are both so great I can’t decide.  The first comes from the very beginning of the movie.  Bulldog is driving with Phyllis and Aunt Blanche, arguing about how he certainly will marry Phyllis the next day (he doesn’t, by the way), when he starts playing chicken with a train.  When he reaches the crossing, he jumps the tracks with no room to spare.  In the two screenshots here, the first shows the moment just after the train roars by, and the second shows a moment or two later.  Can you guess which person Aunt Blanche is?  And check out the grin on Bulldog’s face: what an asshole!

The second moment from the movie that’s just awesome comes at the denouement, where the underground catacombs turn out to contain a secret room of spikes with a locking door.  Check out these stills, and I’ll narrate at the bottom.

The cool iron door slams shut behind them.  In the window above looms the villain and Phyllis who, of course, has been captured and fights valiantly to save Bulldog and pals.

The spikes begin to lower.  Check out the lighting and mist.  The creaking sound of the spike chains menaces.

This looks like something out of Anne Frank — listening to the sounds of Germans tromping around near the stairs below.  It’s got a holy aspect that far exceeds the B-movie quality of the narrative.

Look at the terror on Algy’s face.  Awesome.

The spikes creak lower, the iron portcullis opening occasionally as Phyllis manages to ratchet it open while the villain fights her off and begins lowering the spikes again.  The people inside cower in terror, piling up a pitiful stack of rocks to hold back the spikes, only to see the rocks shatter without slowing the spikes at all.  And the best part, just as the spikes start to drop, Terry says to Bulldog:

Pardon me, sir, but we’re in for a spot of trouble.

When I updated, I lost some of my widgets and had to reconstruct them. That’s what I did this morning. You’ll notice that my sidebar is back to full strength, with Netflix and Goodreads queues rocking the image bar, and my audio clips once again play using the little triangle play icon.

Two troubles:

1. I’ve now figured out how to display more than one netflix queue, but I can’t get the text from the description to show. The plugin has a ‘raw’ option, but it just yields the title, as far as I can tell.
2. I had to reinstall the 1bit audio player, as the “auto update” option in wordpress broke it by renaming the plugin directory from “1bit” to “1bit-audioplayer”.

Enjoy.

As part of my effort to stay involved on campus, and out of my affection for college radio stations, I listen to WCRX at least one day a week when I’m working. Today, during the “90’s at 9″ show, I decided I had a hankerin’ to hear the Rednex’s single hit, “Cotton Eye Joe.” And confirmed that I have no shame.

My call to WCRX

And, in case that got you hankerin’ to hear the song too, here it is:

An update of the audio book narrators I’ve read since the last On Voices post.

• Ellen Archer - Unhooked
• Alys Attewater - Ragged Dick
• Michael Beck - My Life (Bill Clinton)
• David Birney - Ponzi’s Scheme
• *Lawrence Block - Hit Parade
• Scott Brick - Foundation; In Cold Blood; The Book of Fate; The Great Influenza; Mystic River; Sea of Glory
  
• Stephen Briggs - Thud!
• Tony Britton - Rumpole Rests His Case
• *Bill Bryson - Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
• *George Carlin - When Will Jesus Bring the Porkchops
• Martin Clifton - Crome Yellow
• Richard M. Davidson - The Perfect Storm
• Jeffrey DeMunn - Nothing Like It in the World
• Sibella Denton - Dyke Darrel the Railroad Detective
• Margot Dionne - The Blind Assassin
• Cory Doctorow - The Hacker Crackdown; Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
• *Bob Edwards - Edward R. Murrow and the Birth of Broadcast Journalism
• Kimberly Farr - The Devil’s Teeth
• Emilia Fox - The Man in the Brown Suit
• Paul Giamatti - Through a Scanner Darkly
• John Gonzales - The Picture of Dorian Gray
• Holter Graham - City of Falling Angels
• George Guidall - Bearing an Hourglass; Mayflower
  
• Kirby Heyborne - The Interpretation of Murder
• Dick Hill - The Scarlet Letter
• Richmond Hoxie - Emporers and Idiots
• Peter Francis James - Invisible Man
• *Garrison Keillor - The Adventures of Guy Noir
• *David McCullough - 1776
• Andy Minter - Max Carrados, the Blind Detective;
• Mark Nelson - My Man Jeeves; Right Ho, Jeeves; Love Among the Chickens
  
• *Bob Newhart - I Shouldn’t Even Be Doing This
• John Nicholson - King Solomon’s Mines
• Michael Page - No Graves As Yet
• Sean Penn - Chronicles, Vol 1
• *Sidney Poitier - The Measure of a Man
• Simon Prebble - The Bounty
• Michael Prichard - Chasing the Devil; Shadow Divers
• *David Rakoff - Don’t Get Too Comfortable
• Karen Savage - The Scarlet Pimpernel
• Campbell Scott - Oryx and Crake
• Adam Sim - Panic
• Richard Thomas - Team of Rivals
• *Simon Winchester - A Crack in the Edge of the World

* Books narrated by their authors;
boldface entries are books whose narrators I’ve encountered more than once;
underlined entries are public domain books from Librivox.

Last time, I noticed that another version of one book I’d read was narrated by Campbell Scott, whom I’ve since heard as the narrator of Oryx and Crake. Scott Brick continues his blistering pace as both my favorite and my most prolific reader, up to six books. The next closest is the Librivox workhorse Mark Nelson.

Or, The Crime of the Midnight Express
by Frank Pinkerton; read by Sibella Denton (via Librivox)

A moderately entertaining old mystery recommended to me by a friend from the PCA Mystery section.  The book has all the hallmarks of early hard-boiled stories (though was written well before those would have been popular), including friends who are villains and villains who are friends, disguises, and plenty of people bonking the detective on the head.  His life is saved by other people no fewer than three times, and he doesn’t really do much of anything except speak in very overwrought ways.

As always, thanks go to Librivox and Ms. Denton for making this audiobook available for free.

by Lewis Carroll; read by Cory Doctorow

I downloaded this reading from CD’s website when I was listening to Hacker Crackdown, and enjoyed both the book and Doctorow’s reading of it quite a bit. I hadn’t ever read the book in its entirety, and was amused at some of the stuff I didn’t remember, particularly the duchess, her pepper-spewing cook, and the pig-baby. You’ll remember that the cook throws all manner of stuff (even a frying pan) at the Duchess and her baby. Yikes!

A nice little 3 hour romp through wonderland while I worked on the gosh-darn crown molding.

America’s Voyage of Discovery, the U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842
by Nathaniel Philbrick; narrated by Scott Brick

This is a book about a four-year expedition mounted by the United States in the late 1830s. The expedition sailed deep into the southern waters and was the first to prove that Antarctica was a continent. They also charted a huge part of the South Pacific, particularly the Fiji Islands, before sailing to the west coast of the U.S. to chart the Columbia river (apparently a very dangerous place) as well as San Francisco bay and Puget Sound. And they brought back enough stuff that the government had to build a place to house the collection: the Smithsonian.

The adventures of the expedition would have been riveting to read by themselves, but on top of encounters with cannibals in Fiji and iceberg fields in the Antarctic, the Captain was an insecure, vain man who rode his lieutenants quite unreasonably–firing many and generally making himself hated. As a result, the findings of the expedition were bogged down by gossip, charges, and counter-charges that ended in five courts-martial after the expedition ended.

Philbrick does a great job weaving the narrative and the biographies of the men on the expedition together, and teasing out the implications of their actions and adventures with nuance. I liked this book better than Mayflower, but mostly because the seafaring stuff captures my attention more, rather than due to any problem with the Mayflower book. Scott Brick narrated, which is great because by now he feels like an old friend in my ear. Good one, Scott.

How the Travels of a Single Handgun Expose the Roots of America’s Gun Crisis
by Erik Larson

Larson is one of my favorite nonfiction writers.  This book tends to be a bit more about an issue than a historical moment, but it’s still very interesting.  I probably like it most because I’m in agreement with his views, which tend to be that responsible gun ownership is a good thing, but our current rules allow for WAY too much irresponsible gun ownership.

Some of the main points I pull away from this:

• The “enforce the laws we have” argument is both dead on and a nonstarter.  The reason there are so many guns in criminals’ hands is that the laws we have were swiss-cheesed by the NRA during their production.  Then the NRA crows that these laws don’t work.
• It’s FAR more difficult to get a driver’s license than to get a gun dealer’s permit, much less license to get a gun.

The bureau responsible for gun law enforcement is so under-funded and staffed that it has virtually no chance of making significant difference.

There’s one passage that I enjoyed for entirely linguistic reasons.  Namely, that apparently toothpaste is really dangerous:

Yet gun dealers sell guns in America the way Rite-Aid sells toothpaste, denying at every step of the way the true nature of the products they sell and absolving themselves of any and all responsibility for their role in the resulting mayhem. (87)

I can’t help but wonder what toothpaste-fueled mayhem looks like.

• 1: Course of Empire - “Infested” is a pretty great song that my buddies and I all got interested in for about a month in my sophomore year of high school.  It’s weird to still have a CD that had so little importance, but is still pretty enjoyable.
• 2: Cracker - I got my first Cracker CD, Pavement, when it came out and got serious radio play.  I first really enjoyed Cracker, however, when I got to college and found their older CD, with the song that includes the lyric What the world needs now / is another folk singer / like I need a hole in my head.
• 3: The Cranberries - like the Thanksgiving staple, I enjoy this band in short bursts with long gaps in between.
• 5: Crash Test Dummies - I suppose I should be glad that “MMmmm” got so much airplay, as I wouldn’t have found this band without that song, but that song is terrible, and they’re so enjoyable that it makes me sad to have most people know them only for that.  When I’m shower-singing, it’s Brad Roberts I channel.
• .5: Cream - I have a CD with the “Cream of Clapton” that includes 6 tracks from Cream.  To be honest, these went by in the player while I was wrestling with the LocalSettings file of one of my wikis, and I didn’t even hear them.