It occurred to me tonight, while reading a post on outsidedown, that I know of two sources on the planet of encyclopedic knowledge of progressive rock: YouTube and my own brain. And YouTube is catching up.
With that in mind, I have started a new blog: Hall of Prog: A Curated Exhibit of Progressive Rock on YouTube. The idea is simple: there are tons of videos of obscure 1970s progressive rock bands on YouTube. All you have to do is search for them. But you have to know what to search for. That’s where I come in.
The plan is to post a link a day (or more) to interesting progressive rock performances available on YouTube, with a small side dish of my own commentary. Though not usually known for brevity (a trait I share with most prog rockers), I will keep my writing to a minimum, and let the music speak (ad infinitum) for itself.
No Comments
I’ve never really thought anything about weddings was “cool.” Sure, our wedding was fun… at least the reception was, especially the 6-piece jazz combo. That was the part I insisted on (and I sat in with them, demonstrating that I had reached the limit of my abilities as a saxophonist).
But “cool?” Well, no, not really.
Then I saw the invitations (and everything else) from Cabel Sasser’s wedding.
I was already impressed with Cabel just for the greatness that is Transmit. Plus, when I lose my registration code (which seems to happen always), the message I get back from Panic at least appears to be sent personally by Cabel himself. Nice touch.
Anyway, back to the wedding. I consider myself a creative person (after all, it is my job, at least to some extent!) but I don’t think in a million years I’d have come up with something this creative and, well, cool for wedding invitations. Then again, maybe if we hadn’t gotten married straight out of college we’d have had more time to come up with something. Still, this would be hard to top. I love the invitations. The combination of the techie pixel-style art and the tactile, “old world” feel of the letterpress printing is brilliant.
No Comments
Last week I was excited by the prospect of increased traffic here when I discovered that a New York Times blog had linked to a 2-year-old post on this site.
I eagerly watched my hit count go up. The post received over 500 hits in the 5 hours immediately following the appearance of the NYT link. But wow, did the traffic drop off fast. I’m still getting a trickle of hits on that 2-year-old post each day, but my overall site traffic is back down to pre-NYT levels. Here’s a chart of hits on my site over the past month. Can you tell when the NYT link appeared?
For what it’s worth, I think the earlier jump in activity from late October occurred because that was right around the time I worked with my hosting provider to reinstate some third-level domains (such as coltrane.room34.com) for links to subsections of my site. I had used these third-level domains several years ago but they had been “turned off” for at least 3 or 4 years. I can only assume from the increase in traffic that there are still sites out there that have been linking to these URLs for all of that time, even though they didn’t work.
No Comments
As I flipped to “Talk of the Town” in the latest issue of the New Yorker, I was immediately taken aback by the full-page ad on the facing page.
The first thing I noticed was John Hodgman, (probably) better known as “The PC” in the recent Apple ads. Here he was not playing the straight man to Justin Long’s cool, laid-back Mac, but rather hawking his own book, The Areas of My Expertise. But what really got me was the ad itself. It was a perfect send-up of the old George Plimpton ads for Intellivision in the early ’80s, wherein he compared Atari’s Home Run against Mattel’s Major League Baseball.
Here, Hodgman’s spoof pits Intellivision against “Complete World Knowledge.”
It’s a fairly obscure ad to parody, but I’m glad to see that I’m not the only person who caught the reference. John Hodgman’s own blog explains a bit more here and here.
And, since I understand the ephemeral nature of the Internet (better than I understand the definition of “ephemeral,” in fact), I’ve grabbed the two images from Flickr just so this post doesn’t become incomprehensible in a month. (Yes, I think my blog entries have more staying power than Flickr.)
1 Comment
You may (or may not) notice that there’s now a calendar on the left side of all of the blog pages. Go ahead… use it! It works like most blog calendars work. (At least I assume so; I admit that I spend more time looking at my own blog than at all other blogs combined.) I’ve also added a few new “34″ photos in the top area. Refresh the page 1,000 times and maybe you’ll see a new one.
No Comments
I swear it’s not a blog, but I guess really it is. Anyway, I figured the inaugural entry in my blog-not-blog should be true to blog (not blog) form, and feature “the super cool new link I just found that all y’all’s got to check out.”
I have been a loyal Homestar Runner fan for about a year now, but today’s offering, New Boots (“Powered by The Cheat!!” [sic on the exclamation points, BTW]) deserves special attention.
I was laughing to wake the baby… I thought it was over… and then… and then…
“Gimme a chance ta do a hip-hop dance!”
What are you waiting for? Go! Now!
No Comments
