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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Author: Karel Kerezman

  • They Grew On Me

    As I listen to Midnight Oil’s Redneck Wonderland album through (chosen to be the background music while I work on a software upgrade… yes, at 9:30pm…) I realize that back when I first picked up the CD, I didn’t actually like it very much. I thought it was too rough, too hard, too different from the Oils’ sound of the previous several albums.

    Now, however, I think of it as among their strongest work. It’s still as musically dense as I like things, but it has more vim and vigor than the softer, twangier material they’d been putting out for a while there. Really, if Diesel and Dust is the only Midnight Oil album you own and you’re wondering what else to pick up, you could do far worse than RW. (Uh, avoid Capricornia, though. Subsequent listening sessions have not endeared that record to my ears.)

    What other albums sound better now than when I first listened to them?

    Duran Duran’s Astronaut, most assuredly. I wrote a pretentious, faint-praise lump of a review back when the album came out (and there’s a reason I don’t do those anymore), and after those initial few full-record sessions I determined that the first four tracks were all that was worthwhile, there.

    Oh, how wrong! “Nice,” “Finest Hour,” “Taste the Summer.” I’d put those up against anything Duran Duran have done before or since, never mind those first four cuts (which I still love). Even “Chains” is a fairly decent little piece. Mind you, I’m still not overly fond of “Bedroom Toys” or “Still Breathing,” but to have written off the entire back two-thirds of the album? What the hell was I thinking? What was wrong with my head? Wow.

    I only have the one album from Filter but somehow, some time over the last few years Title Of Record went from being “that record with ‘Take A Picture’ on it” to “this is one of the best rock albums I’ve ever heard.” No, I’m not kidding. I don’t love every song unreservedly, but there’s not a track on there that I’ll skip under any circumstances (random playlist action, playing the album through, whatever). “It’s Gonna Kill Me,” “I Will Lead You,” “Skinny,” the nearly eight minutes of “Welcome To The Fold” to start things off… yeah. Great damned album.

    So, if anyone’s still with me after all this time: What albums started out “meh” and grew on you to the point of being all-time favorites now?

  • Junk Reshuffled

    Yesterday, my contribution to the improvement of my living space consisted almost entirely of replacing the old tub mat with a handful of rubber duck-styled mini-mats. Yes, now there are duck eyes watching me bathe. C’est la vie. At least that mildewed old ugly mat is in the trash, finally. (Turns out that the bottom of the tub isn’t all that slippery normally… I just like having some extra insurance on that front. I nearly made a mess of things during one of my first showers here, owing to my complete lack of physical grace.)

    Today I rearranged a bunch of junk… hard drives into a drawer, computer parts into the container set aside for that purpose, cards-and-letters into the newly-assembled Ikea cardboard drawer thingy, and so on. Also, a fair bit o’ junk’s been just plain thrown out. Hooray, me.

    I didn’t get any comics done. I have one pending for Monday already so I’m not really hurting on that front, though. I’d have liked having a couple more in the buffer but I think the tidying up in my living space was a better use of my time overall.

    And that nearly concludes my three days of vacation time from work. Am I ready for Monday? Of course not, but I’m at least a bit more rested and relaxed than usual…

  • Sprucing Up The Living Quarters

    I spent a bit more than I originally intended (thus, my “spending” budget for January is already shot the day I get paid) but…

    • I have a standing lamp, complete with “reading” lamp off the side, filled with those “Reveal” branded CF bulbs. I can now offer lighting options between “puny, dim touch lamp” and “ZOMG the room overheads are bright, man.” It’d be outright unbearable in here if I turned on the standing lamp, the overheads and the gooseneck “webcomic lighting” lamps, but at least I have options.
    • After many long years of devoted service, the rubber-duck shower curtain has seen its last bathing. In its place goes a proper liner-and-curtain combo, the curtain in a very stylish black fabric with narrow vertical stripes.
    • Nothing to do with home decor, but I finally replaced the cutting heads in my electric shaver. Less sandpaper-face = Good.

    If I can work up a bit more energy then I’ll see about hauling away a bit of the unused, pointless clutter in here with an eye toward picking up another bookshelf (or two?) next month… if nothing else, I need shelves for the growing flock of rubber ducks!

  • Just What I Needed!

    After back-to-back nights with dreams ranging from “mildly disturbing” to “outright nightmarish” (including a rare appearance by the “wake up before you hit the ground water” trope), you know what I really needed?

    A night of insomnia! Yeah! Awesome! Woo-hoo!

    …Thud.

  • A Tale Of Two Commutes

    It was the worst of commutes, it was the even-worse of commutes.

    Mine: Trudged (through five more inches’ worth of snow than any forecast had predicted) for twenty minutes to reach a MAX station at which dozens of people had already been waiting for quite some time, only to wait another twenty minutes for a train to arrive. (Note that three outbound trains’ operators made a point of assuring us that an inbound train would arrive “in a few minutes.” Few. Right.) Train arrived, it’s SRO of course, the floors were slick with snowmelt, it’s dark, the windows were fogged, but hey at least we were moving, right? Wrong. Each of the first six stops after I boarded involved a wait of some sort… including one which lasted twenty minutes… during which the operator left the train for about ten of those minutes. Eventually the train chugged its way to downtown Portland, through which the going was dreadfully slow due to a combination of problems on the Steel Bridge and idiot drivers who thought nothing of blocking a train’s path so they could sit partway through an intersection.

    Transit time totals? Twenty minutes’ walk plus twenty minutes’ wait plus ninety minutes on the train itself (boarded at 5:40, disembarked at 7:10) plus the rest of the walk home equals two hours thirty minutes.

    Which is nothing. Because…

    Kylanath’s: Get off work at 3:40-ish. Arrive at bus stop to find people already waiting for a bus… any bus of several… to arrive. These people have phones with which they check Tri-Met’s transit tracking system, and with which they call Tri-Met, only to hear nothing about problems with any of the scheduled lines which service that stop. Lather, rinse, repeat… for four solid hours. Finally a bus, any bus, arrives. At 8:00pm. Driven by the driver who normally shows up at 4:00. After an unusual route through ugly-as-hell traffic, arrive downtown after 9pm and choose not to race for a #9 which might have serviced Broadway but probably was going to whip around at Union Station and head out Powell again. Instead, board a Green Line MAX train… which switches to being a Blue Line train at Union Station! (I imagine several passengers were a smidgen… annoyed.) A slow slog across the river and a massive delay at Rose Quarter later, and finally get off the train around 10:00.

    Transit time totals: Let’s call it a quarter hour of getting to the bus stop, four hours waiting for a bus, another couple of hours actually riding vehicles, and another quarter hour walking home from the train station for a grand total of six hours thirty minutes.

    In short: Way to go, Tri-Met! You were so very prepared, weren’t you?

    (No, seriously, how do you not service a stop for four hours? Without adding any of the routes which service that stop on your so-called “service alerts” page, even? THE HELL.)

    So, that was our Snowpocalypse 2009 experience. What about you?

  • Where’s my trophy?

    Angling for “Best Dad Of 2009,” I just spent half an hour or so setting up a Gallery2 installation for my daughter’s use. Presumably she’ll be uploading scanned and digitally-created original artwork there. At least, that’s the idea…

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