I'm a doucher

I realize that posting this makes me a huge doucher, but I can't resist. This "achievement" needs to be recorded for posterity: I just hit a mother-fucking thousand facebook "friends".

True Story...

I actually did do this to an old girlfriend. I loved her, too...just couldn't get past her dubious taste in music. Bummer.



On the bright side, 27 "likes" in 5 minutes of posting counts as...you guessed it, an internet win.

Sometimes it hurts to be so right all the time...

Once again, dear reader, I have beaten the venerable pitchfork.com to the proverbial punch. Just today, pitchfork placed the new and still-unreleased Arcade Fire track "Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)" on its Best New Music list:



A worthy addition to Pitchfork's BNM list, indeed; but as any of my devoted Twitter followers would already know, I had already tweeted a 140 character-long load of glowing praise onto the track last weekend:



Once again...I called it. And Pitchfork can suck it.

Well, I Scooped Pitchfork Again...

Yesterday, Pitchfork placed The Tallest Man on Earth's new album, "The Wild Hunt", on its venerable best new music list. As you'll see in the picture below, however, I lauded the album with the same fervor, oh...about a month ago.



Once again, this proves that I have, like, the best taste in music evar. I win.

The blog "Fuck Yeah Tattoos" just featured my Lord of the Rings armband. Apparently 170 people already have commented positively: 128 'likes,' 40 re-blogs, and 2 offers of marriage = mega internet WIN!

Adam Schefter is a Dimpled, Dapper Dude.

For those who don't know, Adam Schefter is the new NFL "insider"/reporter on ESPN's NFL coverage. He used to work on the NFL Network, and has a fairly large following on the internets for his ability to break stories and confirm or disprove hot NFL personnel rumors. Anyway, he's one of my favorite sports reporters.

Watching Schefter's analysis of the Redskins' preseason game late last evening, I remarked to Yale how damn impressive his tie knots always are. I mean, they are consistently, consistently excellent. I follow Schefter on Twitter, so I decided to go straight to the source. I had to find out:



At 7:30 this morning, I woke up and found that Schefter sent me a direct message in reply:



So there you have it. Emmitt Smith taught Adam Schefter how to tie a tie. Were he not a former Dallas Cowboy, I'd hire Emmitt Smith to teach me the same, 'cause those are some excellent fucking dimples.

Levi's Schmevi's

No big deal or anything, but you know that new Levi's commercial where the group of hipster kids uses duct tape and helium (and Levi's jeans!) to turn one of their members into a blimp?

The song playing is "Yadnus" by !!!, and it just happens to be track 7 from my #1 album. Of last year.

And yes, I'm hard at work sifting through all 76 albums from '08 in my collection to produce a year-end list. It's gonna be epic...

New And Improved!

Howdy folks, just wanted to chime in real quick with a list of things new and improved 'round this way:

• One, obviously, is my beard. Now, even though I might be tooting my own horn, I still don't want to count any unhatched chickens yet, but--I shit you not--I got a short email reply last week from Chris Cooley's blog regarding his beard contest, and I quote:

  This is fantastic growth. We are still giving away some tickets. I will let you know but you are definitely int the running. Thanks

• The right sidebar (it's a little farther this way------> )
  has a few new improvements as well:
  
  
• In the "I didn't even know you could do that until just now" department of A Lonely Ghost, I have finally added post-labels to all my old posts. Now stuff I write here is searchable by category or topic, a few of which I'll translate here:
  
  
• Youtube = net video from sites that aren't necessarily youtube.com, but often are. Saturday mix series = any music mix I post, which sometimes happens on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays too. FSE = any song I deem to be a "favorite song ever" of mine, usually accompanied by its lyrics, but not always. PPP = Points, Lines & Polygons and the rest is self-explanatory.
  
  
• Wanted to give a few shout outs to some of the newest members of the ALG blogroll, the first of which is Appetite For Equal Rights, a blog for the modern feminist. As a human being who doesn't believe people deserve to be treated better or worse than others based on factors outside of their control, like whether or not they have an X chromosome or a Y chromosome, I found a lot to like on this website. Further, as someone who enjoys bashing Rush Limbaugh's assholery whenever possible, which is often, their post on his reaction to the Edwards scandal a couple days ago was particularly enraging. Right on...
  
  
• Keep It On The B-Side is, yes, you guessed it, a music blog. It's run by a fellow South Lakes High grad and current resident of the city of angels, Ethan Z. He's writes insightful stuff and you can tell he's got a real, deep love for music. Especially liked his take on Okkervil River's last album, and not simply because I adore the band myself.
  
  
• The Stone's Colossal Dream is a blog I found randomly while searching for Robley Wilson's "I Wish In The City Of Your Heart" so I could re-post it about a month back. So obviously, the lady--her name's Tania Rochelle--likes poetry, so I kept going back. Tania's interested in a wide variety of topics, turns out, so that's a bonus too. Couple weeks ago she had a running couple of fascinating posts about the nature and origins of the yellow ribbon symbol and what else, besides war of course, it means or has meant in our American lexicon of symbols.

Check out the links, lemme know what ya thinks.

I'm so awesome, I scooped pitchfork twice

(For those who don't know, pitchforkmedia.com is a website that publishes music reviews of the uber-snobby/"indie"/hipster variety. They're rather well-respected and well-hated in equal measure by hipster ilk; they are, for better or worse, pretty much the gold standard in online music criticism.)


I just read Pitchfork's "Overlooked Records 2008" feature, which came out today, and felt a twinge of music-nerd pride when I saw that I had already glowingly praised a couple of their selections--in one case, lonnnnng--before they did:


Umm, Pitchfork... I'm not overlooking Paavoharju's "Laulu Laakson Kukista." It made #5 on my mid-year best-of '08 list, like, three weeks ago.

Annnnd...

Black Mountain's "In The Future" is definitely a great record. But I knew that when I put it at #13 on my best-of-the-whole-year list... last year.

BUUUUUURN!

Streeter Seidel Wants You To Comment On My Blog!

After 2 iPhone-related whine rejections, I finally made it onto whitewhine:



I'm very pleased with myself at the moment, but I'd be even more pleased if you--yes, you--would try to remedy your non-comment-leaving ways. Then I could move on to more important things, like whining about Hillary Clinton...

More from the douches at work department...

Dear Guy Whose Non-Resident Indoor Tennis Bubble Membership Query I Just Fielded,

Guy, I'm sure you really didn't really mean any harm--at least, not to me--when you said it...

But when you compared the injustice of having to pay $4 more per hour than our Resident members for the privilege of reserving an indoor tennis court to, as you called it, "slavery-status"...

The only thing that kept me from reaching across the front desk and breaking your fucking nose was the fact that I kinda like this job.

Love,

Adam

Pearls before swine...

OK.

So I'm well aware that my reputation as a "music snob" precedes me in certain circles. And I used to have a problem with people perceiving me in such a way; but have you ever noticed that the people who throw around the term "music snob" as pejorative are the same folks who get their jollies to Avril, Nickelback and the like?

Isn't that kinda like the pot calling the kettle...spoon?

At the gym where I work, we have a corporate policy which limits the satellite radio stations we're allowed to play over the P.A. to essentially 3 stations whose names consist of various combinations of the words 'hot', 'hits', 'contemporary', and/or 'new'. Imagine a consistent, bi-hourly dose of "Hey There Delilah" for about 5 straight months of workdays and you're pretty close to an accurate rendering of the purgatory this grudgingly self-avowed "music snob" is forced to endure. Day in. And day out. And so on...

So in the interest of staying sane (see quotation in blog header), I began three Sundays ago to deviate from the 3-stations-only policy and to play instead the station labelled "College Rock." If I were in charge of satellite radio station naming, I'd have called it "Indie Rock." A minor semantic difference, but I digress. You catch my drift: the station plays a pleasant mix of Spoon, CYHSY, Rilo Kiley, BSS, Rogue Wave, Feist, etc. Granted, this doesn't match my musical tastes perfectly, but it's as close as I can get with the limited options at hand; and--hey! "College Rock" hasn't played a single Nickelback song in a month! Several Sunday regulars have even thanked me for breaking up the monotonous dirge to which they've no doubt become accustomed. But not every one's been so appreciative...

I'm sitting here at my desk in the back office. Guy walks up to the front desk and I overhear him requesting that Janie, our lovely and awesome front desk attendant, please change the station. Guy complains that the music sounds like--and I quote--"Something a snobby 19-year old college freshman would listen to while sitting in a coffee shop."

I bite my tongue.

Janie in her syrupy, Southern lilt: "Well, you know what, sir? It says here that this one's called College Rock..."

He, interupting: "See! See! What'd I tell you!?"

And I'm thinking: OK, so douche correctly identified (A): that college students--at least, the snobby ones--happen to enjoy the Rogue Wave, whose song "Every Moment" happened to be playing at the time, and (B): some satellite radio focus group somewhere decided to connote this type of music with the word 'college'. Brilliant work, Brother Seamus. Just brilliant.

Alas, the customer is indeed always right. Janie asks the man what he'd prefer to hear instead, and he says, "Oh, you know. Whatever the stuff is you all usually play..."

Janie: "Allllllright sir. I'll go ahead with Hot Hits Sweep." Immediately the strains of--you guessed it!--"Hey There Delilah" filled the air, and our douche, sated, was on his way after a parting Ahhh, that's better. This is a great song.

So whatev. Different strokes, I guess. Call me "snob". Call me "elitist". Call me "pretentious", even. I don't give, as they say, a damn.

In this instance, at least, I'd rather be on the side of the 19-year-old coffee-house-dwelling college freshman than on the side of 14-year-old bedroom-pining, TRL-swilling girls everywhere. As I write this, "Holland 1945" by Neutral Milk Hotel is playing on College Rock and my nipples are hard.

LONG LIVE THE SNOBBERY!