It's all about where you draw the line

At the ripe old age of 35, I received for Christmas, for the first time in at least 20 years…

… a genuine bona fide toy.

I am now the proud owner of a real (*ahem*) Sonic Screwdriver.

(Reprinted from last year, with some editing)

I’ve got a lot of music in my ol’ iTunes Library — well approaching 3,000 songs — and in the spirit of Halloween, I have assembled a short playlist of the very, very best creepy songs I’ve ever come across (but you probably haven’t).

First off, we have “Lover’s Last Chance”, by a little-known Celtic group from New Orleans called The Poor Clares. It starts off sounding just a bit cheesy, as the singer goes on about Halloween night and “werewolves a-howlin’”, but it quickly takes a turn for the dark, moving to a haunting ghost story and… well, give it a listen and tell me if it doesn’t give you the creeps.

The album is called Resurrected Lover, and though it may be a bit hard to find, it seems they pop up on eBay and the like from time to time. Get going in time for next year! If you like good Celtic music, one of the singers, Beth Patterson, has released some other albums that are available as well.

Note: The Poor Clares’ rendition isn’t available online that I could find, but another singer’s version is on iTunes. I like the Clares’ version much better, as the haunting background vocals really make the song.

Next off is I Am Stretched On Your Grave, as performed by Kate Rusby.

Creepiest. Song. Evar.

No, really. If Edgar Allan Poe had been a songwriter, this would have topped his greatest hits. It’s a traditional Celtic song (what is it with those Irish makin’ wit’ the creepy, anyway?), and it has been performed by others before, but this rendition really takes the cake, with a minimal rhythmic drive carrying you along down a very dark road. The only thing a bit odd about this song is that it is a woman singing what is lyrically clearly a man’s “role” in the story, but that’s easily ignored. it’s from her album Hourglass. Go get it! (link is above)

Third in the list is yet another Celtic tune (funny, when I started this post I hadn’t realized the common source of these three songs — the sound of them is different enough that they are far from sounding alike!) called “She Moved Thro The Fair”. This one is performed by Finbar Wright (former member of Irish Tenors) on his album A Tribute to John McCormack. There are several versions of this song out there, but again, rendition means a lot when looking for the truly creepy song. The interesting thing about this one is that it can sneak up on you. It’s entirely possible to hear this one several times before it suddenly hits you what happens in it — the lyrics are clear but subtle, in a way sure to appeal to fans of ghost stories.

Let us not forget Sting’s “Moon Over Bourbon Street“. A song written by Sting, inspired by Interview With The Vampire. ‘Nuff Said.

Okay, okay, okay I’ve got a bonus song for you. You’ve all heard this one, you just didn’t realize how creepy it is.

First, it’s story time:

A man comes home late one night to find his wife murdered, lying in a spreading pool of her own blood. He actually catches the killer in the act! There is a struggle, during which he clearly sees the man’s face, but the man overpowers him and escapes into the night. The police never catch him.

Years pass. The man never really recovers from his wife’s horrible death, or the thought that he was so close to catching the bastard who did it. That face — those eyes — are seared into his memory.

Late one cold winter evening he is walking at night when he hears faint cries for help in the distance. He follows the voice, and comes to a frozen lake, where someone has broken through a thin patch in the ice. The man runs toward the lake, grabbing a fallen branch along the way that he can use to help the man trapped in the icy waters. He gets to the edge of the ice, and slowly starts to work his way out closer to the man struggling desperately for purchase on the slippery edge of the hole. Suddenly he stops.

He knows that face.

He knows intimately the face of the man in the water. He has seen it exactly once before and will never forget it. After standing there for a moment, watching the man reach out to him from the freezing water, he turns and makes his way back to the shore and drops the branch, then turns and sits down.

..and watches.

Now go listen to Phil Collin’s In the Air Tonight. It will never be the same song again.

Happy Halloween.

The following headline caught my eye in the Chicago Tribune this morning:

House Fails to Foil Health Care Veto

It took me a couple seconds to figure out if the bill passed or not!

Two items:

• Saturday morning I spent about an hour posting corrections and additions to the Wikipedia entry for Doctor Who. I didn’t have to look anything up.
• Later the same day my wife wanted to test if you could write on a tile with marker and clean it off later. The test message she wrote was, and I quote:
  “Hello World! ”

Obviously she’s learning.

So, we bought a house a while back. It’s a 1950s ranch — a good solid house that was well-designed. There’s no wasted space, unlike a lot of ranches we looked at, it has a good half-finished basement, and we like the location on the curve of a tree-lined residential street. The only thing it really needed before move-in was some cosmetic updating. We signed on the line and started making plans: mainly paint some rooms, and remodel the upstairs bathroom.

That was five months ago. We still haven’t moved.

Things have been slow to one extent because we’ve never done this type of work before. Every time we get geared up to get something done, we discover (generally at the last minute) that there is some other thing that we have to arrange/learn/do first. Before I can tile I have to get the walls skimcoated. Before I can skimcoat the walls I have to have the electrician in. Before I can get the electrician in I have to have in my possession all of the fixtures that will be installed (sink, medicine cabinet, etc.) so we can know exactly where the light is going on the wall. Before we can get that stuff we have to fully decide exactly what’s going into the bathroom. Same thing for painting the bedroom. First I have to prime and tape. First I have to patch the crack. First I have to get the wallpaper off. There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza.

Also, I’ve had to “find out” everything for the first time, from how to patch a cracked ceiling to how to level a floor, to the important distinction between latex and oil-based primers¹. We’ve been bleeding money like it’s going out of style, but the new furnace is all paid off (well.. as of a couple days from now…), the supplies for the tiling are bought, the handyman is come and gone, and I’m finally all set to tile the bathroom this weekend and finish this thing.

Well, I was until yesterday. There was a tiling seminar scheduled for last evening (Thursday) — I was planning on going to it as a refresher before getting down to business this weekend. By chance I was at the house yesterday during the day. I had to be there in the morning for a delivery, and afterwards was doing some “do anywhere” computer work for my Mom. That’s when the storm hit my house. Literally.

You could see the sky darkening to the west, and soon a good head of thunder and lightning got going. The sirens started going off in town warning that this was going to be a big one. As it came closer it just kept getting louder, and suddenly the wind slammed into the house with a ferocity I haven’t seen ever before. I looked out the window and saw the rain coming in sideways in solid white sheets. The trees were waving wildly in the torrent. I find it funny that talking to the neighbor later, I discovered that about the time I was opening the blinds to get a better look, she and her husband were fleeing to the basement!

As best I can tell what we experienced was a microburst. What I saw was extremely high winds and extremely hard rain, with thunder crashing down like a physical blow to the house. It came and went roughly within the span of a minute. The storm continued, but the powerful gusts died down to a more normal strength, and fairly quickly it all but stopped raining.

I looked out the side window and saw some good-sized branches down in from of my garage. I had fortunately put my car inside earlier, but would have to do some lifting and dragging before I could leave. The power was out in the house, and I moved through the twilight of an unlit house on a dark day. I moved through the house, looking out windows to see what else might have come down. Out the other side of the house I saw some long branches propped up against the trunk of a different tree against which they had fallen. But… wait a moment…. What the heck tree did those come from?

Then I got the the bedroom at the corner of the front of the house. I opened up the shades and at the right edge of the window saw clusters of leaves that didn’t belong. There was something… large… in front of the house. I went quickly to the front room and its large plate-glass window. There at the left edge, similar clusters of branch and leaf. The worrisome part was that the branches in front of my house looked a whole lot like the large tree that’s behind my house. Uh-ohhh…. shit. I went to the back of the house, and went outside. The rain had subsided more or less, and I looked up at the tree right behind the house. Actually, I looked at the roof first, and the first thing I noticed was that the large TV antenna at the end of the house was no longer present. Then I looked up at the tree, more or less directly over my head, and decided that maybe that wasn’t the best place for me to be standing just then. I quickly got to the front of the house to take a look from a bit more of a distance.

Okay, I want you to imagine a big old oak tree. That large, roughly round, roughly symmetrical mass of green atop a strong brown trunk. In your mind, divide that into thirds — the bottom third, upper right, and upper left. Got it? Okay, now remove the upper right part. That’s what was still standing in my back yard. The missing third was leaning up against the front of my house, along with branches of other trees it took out along the way, and the wreckage of the old TV antenna.

I actually started laughing. In fact, when I called my wife minutes later to break the news to her, that’s how I began the conversation: “Just so you know: when I realized the extent of what’s happened, I literally started laughing.”

From left to right, this is what makes up the from of my house. !) The front door. 2) a large plate-glass window. 3) a stretch of flat brick wall. 4) two bedroom windows in the far corner. The large mass of tree had made a perfect three-point landing against the bare brick wall, just barely reaching, but not quite hitting, the windows on either side. As far as I can tell, the branches would have landed hard on the peak of my roof, but instead hit the outstretched vanes of the antenna, which served to “pole vault” them up and over to the house from back to front.

On sudden inspiration, I ran back into the house and pulled the attic hatch, and went up for a look. Not totally unscathed — the tree had punched a single hole in the roof, about the size of two doughnut holes. A quick mopup and a strategically-placed bucket took care of that for the time being. (Later I patched it with duct tape, which has held until this morning when I went back to check it.) It’s a good thing I caught it, as it was directly above the bedroom ceiling I spent so long patching, priming, and painting.

So… the short version is that It Could Have Been Worse. The tree is looking a bit forlorn following its major branchectomy. There’s still a large broken-off branch suspended in space over my house, which the tree service will have to repair when they get to me at the end of a long list of people all over the area with similar issues. I’m going to try to track down the company that originally put in the roof so they will know how to match the shingles. And, if I’m not too bogged down with cleanup this weekend, and assuming that the power comes back on, I might just get some tiling done.

1: My wife discovered this the hard way when she attempted to clean the brushes in the sink.

Shortly after the iTunes program was released (1998?), I started the long process of transferring my music to my computer. I lived in an apartment at the time, and my computer and stereo were situated right next to each other in the smallish front room; the potential for my computer to act as jukebox was too good to pass up, and I quickly had the two connected so that my trusty Mac was pumping tunes straight through my amplifier. When the stereo’s CD player stopped working some time later, I barely noticed — as by that time I was already pretty exclusively playing music from the computer.

This of course significantly changed my music listening habits. I saw the “shuffle” effect, as rather than listening to a few favored CDs over and over again, I was hearing a lot of forgotten favorites — especially a lot of songs that were the one or two good songs on an otherwise lesser album.

The flipside of this is that I very quickly stopped listening to whole albums all that much. In my CD listening days I would get a new album, and if it was a good one, I would listen to that album over and over again several times, getting to know the music and the lyrics — learning the subtle licks, backgrounds, and vocalizations that distinguish a great album from a good one. Post-iTunes, I buy a new album and it gets a listen or two, then goes into the mix.

Until now.

I haven’t written a lot of reviews on this website — just a few book reviews in the early days. A couple weeks ago I purchased an album from iTunes that has already become my favorite. A few weeks ago Apple released a single from the album as the free Song of the Week, as a preview of an upcoming album. Unlike many of the (generally pretty good) free songs from Apple, I found myself listening to this one over and over again. When I saw that the album was out, I picked it up.

The album in question, Sara Bareilles’ Little Voice, has quickly become my favorite new album in at least ten years. It would be easier, actually, to tell you which are the least of the songs on this outstanding mix — featuring a range of song styles from funky pianos to slow plaintive ballads, with powerful, fluid vocals, catchy tunes, and intelligent lyrics. The arrangements are simple enough to be catchy, but complex enough to have levels worth listening for; and her voice is a smoky amalgam of power and sweetness somewhere between Sheryl Crow and Sarah McLachlan. (Her voice itself leans toward the latter, while her style frequently evokes the former.) [Update: Corrected the previous sentence. I had the two switched!]

The first thing that catches you is the bouncy piano rhythm throughout the first track, Love Song. The arrangements are extremely listenable — and that’s before the singer’s voice kicks in and grabs you. It wasn’t long before I really started listening to the lyrics — and discovering a poetic strength that evokes the originality (if not the quirkiness) of early Crash Test Dummies albums.

It’s also worth mentioning the background vocals — which are arranged with the same skill as the instrumentation. They slip in from time to time and buoy the main vocal without overwhelming, appearing only when necessary and falling away as soon as they’re not — leaving us able to enjoy Bareilles’ clean tones and soulful articulation.

There are no songs on this album that I do not like — something I’m not sure I can claim about any other album. Love on the Rocks is probably the most formulaic — with a pattern of refrain and verse that primarily acts as a vehicle for repeating the titular catchphrase over and over again, but even that is a very listenable song. Fairy Tale builds off a clever conceit of using fairy tale characters and lamenting their problems with men — with verses for Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Rapunzel, and others. City is a beautiful reflection on longing — echoing, in a totally different style, the earlier Vegas. The aforementioned Love Song — the free single that first drew my attention — is cleverly written and catchy. Morningside is a energetic funk jam — showing some of the most prominent backgrounds on the album. Winding it all up is the slow, mournful “Gravity” — the most beautiful song on the album, and perhaps my favorite.

“Little Voice” is a strong mix of moods and modes, with something for just about every mood. I can’t think of any album in years that I would recommend more highly than this — it’s an outstanding work.

Update: I saw the calendar on her website. She played a local gig just this Saturday and I missed it! AARRRGGGGGHHHHH!!!!!

Went to see the fireworks Tuesday evening with my wife. We walked several blocks to the park in town, and when we got to the right area, the spare bits of lawn and sittable ground were pretty well filled up already. After a few minutes we found a convenient tree to sit under, which was handy because we didn’t have chairs and it gave us something to sit up against.

The fireworks started out with a big spray of gold shooting up from the ground. Herself thought it was a misfire, but judging from later parts of the show, I think that’s a new type of firework — basically the Bellaggio fountain done in light….

Then the rockets started going. Some of these were arching so far up that they were basically going off right over our heads. It was only a few moments in when the first of the “boomers” went off — you know, the ones that make such a loud bang that you can practically feel the shockwave hit you? One. Another. Again.

Something hit my shoulder.

I saw the… whatever it was out of the corner of my eye an instant before it struck my shoulder and bounced away. What they heck? Are bits of spent firework raining down on me? There was a small dark mark on my brand new shirt — I reached up to see if it was hot, or if it was recognizably soot or something.

My hand came back wet. What the hell?

The sky had been threatening rain for an hour or so, so wetness didn’t seem too bizarre, except in the conjunction with something falling on me. I looked a little closer. There was a small (maybe a centimeter in diameter) brown spot on the shoulder of my shirt. I still haven’t positively identified it (I’ll have to send it to my buddies in the CSI lab…) but I have a working theory:

…I think the “boomers”, literally, scared the shit out of some squirrel.

Brand new shirt, too. Damnit.

The view out my window this morning:

(click for larger size)

Happy (almost) Fourth of July!

Gahrie grumbles…

I’m driving home from work today, listening to… the radio, (contemporary pop) and all of a sudden I am “treated” to a commercial for HIV drugs. Have we truly gone that far? Are drug companies now competing for profits by selling HIV drugs? How sad is that?…

Is HIV nothing more than a bad case of hemorrhoids now?

That’s nothing, G. A few years ago there was a large billboard on the tollway as you came into Chicago — captioned:

WHO’S THE FATHER?

It was an ad for paternity tests. Apparently there is a large enough market of women who have no idea who the father(s) of their child(ren) is/are that that expensive billboard was worth advertising to them.

All these years at the hands of the anointed who are going to bring us to a golden age by demanding that nobody is allowed to judge anybody else, and here we are. The more I think about it, the more I believe we are living in a diseased culture.

I’ve been working at the same office for a bit over ten years now. In that time I have never, once, spilled a drink on my desk. Until now.

In fact, it seems that all these years…. I was just saving up for the big one.

I suspect I could have made less of a mess if I’d simply opted to drop a water balloon in the middle of my desk, but nooooooo… I had to slip while picking up a full bottle of Starbucks Vanilla Frappuccino. In the mad scrabble to not actually drop it, I managed to give it a good shake instead, and launched one part coffee, one part sugar in a spray across A) my desk, and B) my self.

Cleanup became a sort of game, wherein every time I thought I was pretty much done, I somehow, somewhere found some more. The next time the phone rang I picked it up and gave myself an earful of sticky liquid. The splash had somehow made its way up the wall a ways. It got behind books, and under the base of the desk lamp.

By some miracle it seemed to have made a perfect nothing-but-net field goal (yeah, I know. shut up.) trajectory between my laptop and the brand spanking new document scanner, as neither was significantly soaked, though they could have, and either one would have made of a very expensive accident.

But I did, as I mentioned before, get myself. My shirt (fortunately dark in color) was covered, my pants got it pretty good in front, my glasses were flecked, and about ten minuted into cleanup I discovered that a good portion of the front of my hair was, in fact, newly crunchy.

There’s a reason I spill only rarely — when I spill a drink, I don’t kid around.