UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

I admit it: I watch American Idol. And it was always pretty clear that Kellie Pickler was perhaps less than a genius, but her charity appearance on Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? is still shocking. At least it answers the question. Decisively.

Let’s see:

• Europe is a country.
• France is not a country.
• She’s never heard of Budapest, but she’s pretty sure they speak French there.

Did I miss anything?

It doesn’t really help that Jeff Foxworthy repeatedly calls Hungary “hungry,” but I have a hunch that he did at least know it existed, even without the assistance of his notecards. Is our educational system really this bad?

I’ve already made my opinion of the RIAA known, but this latest development is truly unbelievable.

Apparently, the RIAA now feels that CDs you’ve ripped for your own personal use are unauthorized. What ever happened to the long-standing clause in copyright law that allows the holder of content to make up to five copies for personal use? What of the fact that it’s built right into the stupid DRM that the RIAA has forced Apple to implement on iTunes that you can put purchased music on up to five computers (and, implicitly at least, an unlimited number of iPods synced to those computers)?

It is patently absurd that any kind of legal case to this effect could be made in the current technological climate. According to the RIAA, just about everyone who owns an iPod (or a similar device) is a thief, even if they’ve paid for every single song on the device.

Well guess what: fuck you, RIAA. We are not thieves, we are your customers. But maybe we shouldn’t be.

Endure it if you dare.

Things were just different back in 1971. And if you don’t believe me, consider this: a very successful rock album from that year was Fragile by Yes.

This album contained not only three tracks near or longer than eight minutes each, but five brief tracks that were the individual creations of each member of the band. Some members were not so enthusiastic about this approach, most notably drummer Bill Bruford, whose contribution was an awkward, 37-second noodlefest for drums, guitar, bass, and organ entitled “Five Per Cent for Nothing” [sic, although apparently that’s how they spell it in Britain].

Only 37 seconds, you say? Or more to the point, only five percent, you say? I have now attempted to rectify that shortcoming.

The piece as it originally appears consists of a complex rhythmic pattern, played through twice by the band. Well, if twice through constitutes five percent, simple arithmetic tells us that 40 times through will yield the full 100%. (It also clocks in at a pleasing 11:11.)

So here you go…

If you like/can tolerate this, I encourage you to consider purchasing the full album. (For what it’s worth, I myself have purchased it in one form or another no less than seven times.) It features some outstanding playing and great songs, including my favorite piece of music in the history of human civilization, “Heart of the Sunrise.”

But if you’re in the market for something a little more current… a little more seasonally-appropriate… a little more ridiculously titled, then I would steer you no further than to Chris Squire’s Swiss Choir, a drunken joke new Christmas album featuring Yes bassist Chris Squire, drummer Jeremy Stacey (formerly of Sheryl Crow’s touring band and more recently of the briefly-reformed-and-now-once-again-defunct lineup of Squire’s pre-Yes band, The Syn), and ’70s-era Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett.

Normally I would look at something like this and think, “Mannheim Steamroller, but somehow, incomprehensibly worse.” And yet, from the samples I checked out online, it’s surprisingly not complete shit! “Complete” being the operative word. When I emailed a friend about this album, with the subject line “Holy crap,” he replied “I think you have just come up with the perfect two word review for this album.”

If by any chance you do choose to purchase it, I would implore you to consider doing so via this link to the iTunes store, so they’ll know who recommended it! (OK, they won’t. But at least I’ll get a tiny piece of the action.)

Most of the time, at least, I try not to judge myself in comparison to others, but sometimes when I get down on myself for certain personality traits, such as passive-aggressiveness, it’s helpful to find evidence that there are others who are far worse than myself.

And to that end, I need look no further than to passiveaggressivenotes.com.

I will admit that, my own impolite behaviors notwithstanding, it requires a great deal of restraint to keep myself from printing and posting notes in certain situations (especially where unflushed office toilets are concerned), so it’s not that I couldn’t relate to the pent-up frustrations being vented on some of these notes. Indeed, bad spelling and inscrutable grammar aside, a lot of these notes seem almost exactly like something I might have produced myself.

But then there are the others. The frothing, raving blather of those teetering on the edge of insanity. Not that the circumstances they were placed in by disliked roommates, coworkers, or proximate strangers didn’t warrant it most of the time. In the end, however, I’d rather be the culprit than the chump whose incoherent rants get photographed and posted on a blog for the purpose of global mockery.

Whatever. I just spent the last hour and a half poring over it all. Enjoy.

On a related, but less spiteful note (but only slightly so), you may also enjoy these similar sites (lazily copied from the passiveaggressivenotes.com blogroll). I am beyond pleased to see that there are others out there who share my same pet peeves, namely: apostrophe abuse, lowercase L, and unnecessary quotation marks.

Boy, this kind of puts my Catalog of Annoying Grammatical and Spelling Errors to shame.

The other day, for reasons I’d best not get into, I was listening to the Steven Wright tracks from the Reservoir Dogs soundtrack. If you’ve seen the movie, you know that the soundtrack is interspersed with segments of deadpan comic Steven Wright‘s voice as a DJ on “KBILLY’s Super Sounds of the ’70s Weekend.” Listening to those tracks in sequence with absolutely no music in between them is a surreal experience.

In addition to the long-buried ’70s gems that made it onto the soundtrack, a slew of other songs did not appear, but did however get a mention from Steven Wright, tantalizingly conjuring a world beyond the details of the film, where a radio station that actually plays all of this crazy stuff exists! (Granted, this film predates the Jack FM phenomenon by a solid decade, but Jack rarely plays stuff this obscure.)

One of the titles Steven Wright mentions caught my attention: “Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)” by Edison Lighthouse. (Anyone who knows me personally will know why that got my attention.) So I listened to a bit of it on iTunes, and it jogged a vague memory of this one-hit wonder from 1970. Then I headed over to YouTube, where I was delighted to find the music video:

Now many people of my generation or younger — or older for that matter — may not realize that they made music videos back in 1970 (and even earlier). I still have no idea where these things actually got played in a pre-MTV world. Of course, I don’t know where today’s music videos get played either, given that they sure as hell aren’t on MTV anymore.

Groovy.