Category: Pop Culture

Sopapillas and Pita Bread

~ riggledo ~ 2 Comments

I was going to write a riveting, brilliant, startling revelation of a post, today, about my improved emotional well-being and something that I’ve been giving a lot of though to recently.  It was going to be a amazing and you were going to love it.

But now I’m just pissed off and it’s all your fault.  Yours and yours and…  well, not yours.  You didn’t do it.

It’s all this bullshit I’m seeing everywhere I turn about the bills before the house and congress about censorship of the internet.  I’m just sick of it.

No!  You know what I’m sick of?  I’m sick of vigilante activism.  That’s what I’m sick of.  Occupy this.  Black out that.  Come on!  You want to educate people, then educate people, but this is ridiculous.

Last night I watched a really weird LGBT movie called “The Lost Coast”.  The movie was strange, but it had some really good moments in it.  Early on one of the characters picks up a photograph in another characters apartment and says, “Is this the lost coast?”  I didn’t even know the lost coast was a real place.  (Turns out it’s somewhere north of where I live, here in California.)  I did what I always do when I don’t know something.  I Googled it.  This was last night; about 9:00.  The first result, as is so often the case, was Wikipedia.  So I clicked on the link and the page loaded, and then just as I was starting to read about the lost coast, the screen went black and an annoying message popped up, whining at me about internet censorship and “Imagine a World
Without Free Knowledge”.  There was no way to acknowledge the message and move on.  Just, “nah-neh-nah-neh-nah-nah.  You can’t read my pages.”  Last night.  It annoyed me, but I found what I wanted to know elsewhere.

Today, as I’m reading through the blogs in my reader, I find post after post about these bills and how wretched and horrible and awful the bills are.  Now, I usually open the blogs and read them on people’s sites.  I’m not at all sure that reading in Google Reader counts toward people’s page views on their blog stats and while we like to pretend we’re cool and don’t care about such things, we’re lying.  We all care.  So I like to make sure it counts.  (This, by the way, is the reason you have to come to my blog to read the entire post… just in case you were wondering.)  Anyway, half of these posts have come through just fine in my reader and I could read the entire thing if I wanted, but when I clicked on the blogs themselves the blogs are blacked out “in protest”.  So, I can read teh whole damn post on Google Reader, but I can’t read it on your blogs and show you I’ve been there.  Vigilante Activism Fail!!!

It’s not that you wrote blog posts about it.  They’re your blogs.  You can write what you want.  Personally, I’m annoyed by the glut of posts on the subject, but at least by writing about the bills you’re making an effort to educate me.  It’s the “blacking out” of the pages “in protest” that’s got me pissed.  By the way, I haven’t read any of your anti-sopapilla bill blog posts.  I’ve even dropped a couple anti-pita bread bloggers from my line up.  Enough is enough!

I sent a link to a particularly funny lolcat to K this afternoon.  The lolcats did it right.  There’s a screen that pops up in front of the page and tells you to beware the bogey monster and then at the bottom it asks you  if you’d like to learn more.  You can click a “learn more” button and, imagine that, learn more.  Or you can click on the “no thanks” button and get on with your life.  K wouldn’t look at the lolcat because she wasn’t willing to click the “no thanks” button.  Her loss.

Look.  I get it.  Censorship is bad.  We don’t want these bills to pass and if someone presents me with an unoffensive petition to sign, I’ll sign it.  I sent the e-mails to my representatives.  I’ve done my part.  And the truth is, I don’t really understand what these bills are about.  What is internet piracy?  How are these bills supposed to make things better?  I. Don’t. Know.  What I do know is, blacking out or otherwise inconveniencing half of the internet, isn’t serving any purpose.  I guarantee you the talking heads in Washington, do not care that I couldn’t look up the lost coast last night.  The vast majority of them have not looked for a single website that happened to be part of this ridiculous protest.

IT.  DOES.  NOT.  WORK.

Stumped

~ riggledo ~ 2 Comments

What do the following songs have in common?

 

Lose Your Way, Sophie B Hawkins, Bounce motion picture soundtrack

Just Another Day, John Secada, No. 1 hit Mix

We’ll Be Together, Sting featuring Annie Lennox, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason motion picture soundtrack

You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling, The Righteous Brothers, Top Gun motion picture soundtrack

Dancing on the Ceiling, Lionel Richie, Dancing on the Ceiling

What Kind Of Man Would I Be? (Remix), Chicago, Chicago – Greatest Hits 1982-1989

Until You Come Back to Me (That’s What I’m Gonna Do), Basia, London Warsaw New York

Love Is, Brian McKnight & Vanessa Williams, Beverly Hills, 90210 – The Soundtrack

When The Heartache is Over, Tina Turner, Ally McBeal:  For Once in My Life

Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover, Sophie B Hawkins, The Best of Sophie B Hawkins

Cruisin’, Gwyneth Paltrow & Huey Lewis, Duets motion picture soundtrack

All Night Long (All Night), Lionel Richie, 20th Century Masters – The Millennium Collection: The Best of Lionel Richie

Unchained Melody, Righteous Brothers, The Very Best of the Righteous Brothers

White Christmas, Robert Downy Jr. And Vonda Shepard, Ally McBeal:  A Very Ally Christmas

What’s Love Got to Do With It, Tina Turner, Tina Turner:  The Collected Recordings

Georgetown, David Foster, St. Elmo’s Fire (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

We Can Last Forever, Chicago, Chicago – Greatest Hits 1982-1989

Bette Davis Eyes, Gwyneth Paltrow, Duets motion picture soundtrack

Love Theme from St. Elmo’s Fire (Instrumental), St. Elmo’s Fire, St. Elmo’s Fire (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Lonely Teardrops, Huey Lewis, Duets motion picture soundtrack

 

I don’t know either, but my iPod seems to think they belong together in the Genius Playlist I just listened to, based on Lose Your Way by Sophie B Hawkins.  Sometimes the genius confuses me.

For those of you really in the know, and paying attention, you’ll notice there are only 20 tracks and not the usual 25.  What’s that about?

Sunday Fluff

~ riggledo ~ Leave a comment

I’ve had a busy week-end and had no time to write anything today.  Maybe I should just let the day pass, but it’s the 15th day of the year and I’ve posted something every day so far.  It’s kind of fun to be able to say that and would like to keep the streak going if I can.

So since I didn’t have time to write anything of substance, and “today” ends in 38 minutes, instead I bring you this fluff.  I saw this somewhere the other day and thought it was pretty fun so I’m sharing it here with you.  Enjoy.

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/AijEQN6AuRs&#8221; frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen>

Sing a New Song

~ riggledo ~ 2 Comments

It may be somewhat surprising to learn that, despite having grown up in Oklahoma, I was not a fan of country music.  All that twang and depressing subject matter just wasn’t of interest to me.  One of my favorite jokes was always, “What happens when you play a country music song backwards?  He get’s his wife back, his dog back and his truck back.”  This was only made that much better when I once saw a country music video showing an overhead shot of a cowboy lying in the back of his truck with his girl and a dog lying on the ground next to the truck.  As the video progressed the woman disappeared and then the dog disappeared and I burst out laughing thinking, “what happens if you play this video backwards…”

I was forced to listen to, and then eventually came to like, what was then modern country music, in the mid-90’s, when I was dating a girl who I thought I was going to marry and who decided that she was going to become a country music fan and always had it on in the car.  I listened to country music pretty regularly for a while after that and it was only after I moved to the bay area where there is no country music station that I quit.  I had a number of country music albums by that time though and most of them have made their way into my iTunes and therefore, fairly regular rotation in my music listening routine.

Michelle doesn’t dislike country music though it is a LOOOONG way from being her preference.  Our tastes overlap fairly well, though she does like some of the more… urban?  R&B?  stuff.  I’m not even sure what you’d call it.  Let’s just be really tacky and say that her tastes are more ethnically correct…

Michelle also doesn’t like anyone to hear her sing.  She thinks she has a bad voice.  Truth is, she sings fine.  She may not be recording any albums anytime soon, but she shouldn’t be embarrassed for anyone to hear her singing.

On the way to Cache Creek Wednesday afternoon my iPod in my car was, as always, on random and there wasn’t anything that she might object to that came on.  At one point I even heard her singing.  I started to say something, only, every time I tell her I can hear her singing she stops  and I didn’t want to embarrass her or have her stop singing, so I didn’t say anything.  I was surprised at first at the song she was singing, because it was, shall we say, more ethnically appropriate for me…  Also, it was from October, 1994 and it surprised me that she’d be familiar with it.  But she does have a couple of years on me and she was actually far less sheltered than I (I didn’t really come to know the song until about five years ago, so…)

As we were driving through the parking garage at Cache Creek, a song by Terri Clark came on.  The song is called Cure for the Common Heartache.  If you have iTunes (and who doesn’t these days) do me a favor and go listen to the preview.  I tried to find a way to post a sample here, but I’m just not that technologically savvy…  Anyway, the song is quite twangy:  “This mornin’ I’m achin’ all over.  Cain’t eat.  Cain’t sleep.  Cain’t rest….  Is there a cuuuuuure for the common heart ache.  An unknown prescriptiooooooooon, any loser can take…”

(By the way, for the record, there has only been one Terri Clark song, ever, that I didn’t really like a lot, so I’m not saying anything bad about her!)

I turned to Michelle, right before I turned off the ignition and said, “This is a country music song… In case you were wondering…”  I was making a joke, because the song is the epitome of country twang (though I still like it,) but she thought I was apologizing, or in some way making a joke that suggests she doesn’t like country music.

“I was singing that other song,” she said somewhat defensively.

“Which song?” I asked.

“You know.  The one about the cowboy and the horse.”

Now this is not much of a description to know which song she was talking about, except that I immediately thought of the song I heard her singing earlier and had a feeling that’s the one she meant.  I sang a few bars, “I’m a cowboy.  On a steel horse I ride…?”

“Yeah, that one,” she said as I was unable to keep from laughing.

“Honey,” I said a little more condescending than I meant to, “that wasn’t country.  That was Bon Jovi!”

(Also?  Heh.  The clothes!  My Goodness!!!)