when shallow people make "greatest _____ of _____" lists

Upfront, this is a stupid link.
I'm linking it because I want to mock it, not because it's inherently any good.

I see the subject: Greatest 100 Movie Posters of All Time
I get excited! I expect greatness! Of all time? There will probably be stuff I'm not familiar with...neato!

Then I click it.

Feshhhhhhhughn.

A better title: "Best Movie Posters of my experience, which is limited to the past 15 years or so, with a couple of old ones thrown in to make people shallower than me think I spent more than five minutes on this list".

Sure, a mouthful, but accurate.

I was already bored and annoyed by the list when I came across this entry for the film Descent:

A very clever nod to the hidden image on the moth in the "Silence of the Lambs" poster - The skull is made up of the six girls

WTF.
It's a rip off of one of the great surrealist illustrations of the 20th century, not the poster for Silence of the Lambs.

I understand we live in a culture and a time where shamelessly overstating your case is part and parcel of getting heard, but this really takes the cake.

I could have my three-year old niece throw darts at my copy of 1001 Movie Posters and come up with a better, more accurate and more representative list than this juvenile twaddle.

music: Wolf Parade

Ok, found a clean version of I'll Believe in Anything on the Tube.

Watching the Arcade Fire clip and this one back to back the reason AF pulls off Wake Up so much better live is obvious- they have the on-stage manpower to generate the same dense sonic texture as the studio version, but with live energy.

Wolf Parade just needs five more cats lending a hand....

books: the scientific method

A woman is checking out two competing books on Balthus, one $29.95 new & the other a $16.95 remainder.

Woman:
I'm not sure which one to get.
Me:
they're both good publishers, I don't think you can go wrong either way.
Woman:
Hmm.
leafs through them both, picks up the new one
This one's longer, I'll take it.
Me:
A fine choice.

music : Arcade Fire

I'm giving a retroactive 2004 Song of the Year award to Wake Up by the Arcade Fire. I was a little late to the AF party, arriving via their Toronto buddies Wolf Parade and their fabulous album Apologies to the Queen Mary.

James tried turning me on to them when they were still au courant with the hipsterati, but at the time I eyed his recommendations with profound suspicion (I still have a hangover from his enthusiastic low-fi indy garage rock period, when his only criteria for greatness seemed to be off-key vocals and Radio Shack portable cassette recorder fidelity).

Well, he was right, they're great.
I hereby officially forgive him for making me listen to Sparklehorse.

And they're great in a way you don't see very often in modern music. They manage the neat trick of wearing their hearts on their sleeves without coming off as corny saps, and their best songs simultaneously convey the tragedy, wonder and majesty of life without collapsing beneath the immense load, or even seeming to take the responsibility all that seriously. There wasn't any great conscious struggle to form it just so, that's just how the song turned out.

Wake Up is different from most other songs I'm mad for because I listened to Funeral several times before I noticed how fantastic it was.

Usually a song that moves me and gives me chills does it right off the bat- the first five seconds of Wolf Parade's I'll Believe In Anything made my hair stand on end the first time I heard it (and every listen since).

I think it's because the album version of Wake Up is a bit vocally muted. But I loved the album and as is my habit with bands I love I tracked down all the live performances I could find- I got wonderful copy of a show they did for a public radio station in Minnesota.

That performance of Wake Up absolutely set me on fire. It was ragged and gorgeous and had a depth of feeling that's almost never captured in a recording. I'm lucky I wasn't in that audience, it likely would have killed me.

(oddly, the studio recording of I'll Believe in Anything is much superior to any others I've heard...I have a couple of live verisions & it loses much of it's relentlessly epic quality. Kudos to their producer for nailing the soul of the song in the studio.)

Anyway, here's a good live version of Wake Up I found on Youtube, with David Bowie lending a hand (which is sure to send the wife into conniptions when I show it to her.)

check it.

/edit
ok got home and checked out the clip with speakers- really good, nice to see the industry crowd get swept away.

but this one is better. Better mix (strings to the front), and as much as I love Bowie nobody else does these lyrics justice.

protect yourself from your own government

Free cryptography course offered by the University of Washington.

Coolio!

culture shock

Was walking downtown with the wife yesterday and as we took a shortcut throuth the park a scruffy skateboarding youth brought me up short by asking "you got a phone I can borrow?"

His bad luck I'm the only person I know still clinging obstinantely to his land-line.

But at first it struck me as a question a crazy person would ask you- you're in the middle of a playground and someone asks you for a phone. It took a little mental reset on my part to catch up to his meaning- "oh, that's right everyone has cell phones now, that's what he's talking about."

The original vision the question called up was the bulky baby blue rotary-dial job that was the telephone of my youth (exactly like this one save for the color).

Is this what getting old is?
People ask you simple questions and you have to pause and sort through the mental landfill of outdated junk in your head until you sift out their meaning?

I'm certainly going to be more open hearted to the aged from now on, no matter how confused they seem. Someday I'll be one of them, endlessly trying to catch up to a reality in constant and increasing flux.

Goatse Sticker Set!

safe for work, except for a picture of a toilet with a log in it.

I may have to get myself a few sheets....

Holy Mother of God

the ultimate Windows Vista preview.

500 hours of testing, 40 pages of results, courtesy of the wild-eyed loons at Tom's Hardware.

I didn't actually read it, I just had to recognize the sheer mass of the project.