Happy Mardi Gras/Carneval/National Pancake Day
I almost forgot: today is Fat Tuesday (literal meaning of Mardi Gras), but as I’m no longer a practicing Catholic, I shan’t be bidding meat farewell (Carne-val) for 40 days.
In yet another stroke of cosmic convergence, or marketing savvy, today is also National Pancake Day. Free short stack at IHOP, ye gluttons!
Too much, too much.
I’m trying to ration out my posts – I don’t want to have what Kenny Fischer might call a “premature evacuation” of my blogging material. I know the excitement of a new blog will eventually, inevitably, inexorably, wear out, but I may as well jot some stuff down before these thoughts dissipate into the ether. Here are some tidbits that I may expand later:
- new Rhett Miller album, The Believer, out today. Immediate reaction: poppier, less alt-country, less rockin’ than usual 97’s stuff, but good ear candy nonetheless.
- relatedly, I want to subscribe to The Believer, the McSweeney’s literary spin-off mag. I also want to order pretty much all of the McSweeney’s back catalog.
- new Built to Spill album leaked – my copy has clips of “Who is Mike Jones?” comically sprinkled throughout, as if Doug Martsch and Mike Jones have come to some sort of kooky cosmic convergence
- last three books read: Harry Potter: Half-blood Prince (no linkage necessary), Blink (thanks Phil!), Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life (definitely more on this later)
- right now, as I’m typing, Kevin & Bean (morning radio show here in L.A.) are interviewing a Mexican guy who has developed a FULLY FUNCTIONAL JETPACK.
Hello future, you are now. Courtesy of Mexico. - new Amazing Race tonight on CBS. Best of the reality/game show sub-genre.
- watched MTV True Life: I’m a Competitive Eater over the weekend. Two words, one man, no peers: Takeru. Kobayashi.
- Yes, keen reader, that was a Can’t Hardly Wait reference up there. Get over it, it won’t be the last.
Lingo: Bingo for word nerds
I’m quite fond of words, especially in clever combinations, i.e. wordplay, but I also appreciate the well-turned phrase. I guess it’s only natural that I gravitate towards word games, such as Scrabble and Boggle, although I don’t play online through the Internet Scrabble Club (ISC) like Hazel does. Yeah. I know.
Chimpanzee that: Ricky Gervais & Co. podcast/radio show
Every so often I discover something that I fancy something fierce. This may not be groundbreaking, but Ricky Gervais (ye of The Office UK fame) tickles my proverbial funny bone. (You know, from that old proverb about the funny bone being the way to a man’s heart and the window to his soul. I may have confused/invented that.) I just started downloading podcasts of the Ricky Gervais show a few weeks ago, halfway through its 12-episode run on Guardian UK, and it’s effin’ brilliant. Brilliant in its simplicity and laugh-out-loudness (don’t even think about shortening that to LOLness). Maybe not so brilliant: the use of the word brilliant as a catch-all exclamation is damn near infectious.
The show actually centers around Ricky’s friend, and ex-producer, Karl Pilkington, with Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant mercilessly making fun of Karl for a half hour at a time. That’s pretty much it. Detractors would probably label it as mean-spirited, mindless drivel, with the added annoyance of Ricky Gervais’s hyena-like cackling, but for me it falls under the category of “things I cannot get enough of.” Subtitled, things for which I’m willing to forgo common English grammar and end sentences with a proposition. Unfortunately, the second run of the podcast won’t be a freebie, but thanks to the unnatural wonders of the Internet, you can find tons of older stuff, including the entire first run. I’ve done you a solid by compiling some links after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »
Hellooooooo, dear reader.
I was going to go with dear readers (plural), but that seemed a little premature, to assume that multiple sets of eyeballs would be led astray and accidentally read this blog.* Anyway, as this is my first post here, I feel somewhat compelled to offer up a kind of mission statement to orient you as to what this blog purports to be. (Not Mission Statement, uppercase, italicized, which seems even more full [fuller?] of itself than a mission statement for a blog would seem to indicate, and consequently leading to the probably-not-too-far-off-the-mark impression that I’m full of myself as well.)
Anyway, ”to write more” was a vague, ill-defined New Year’s resolution of mine, and as I find myself spending the majority of my day on the computer, it seemed only appropriate and convenient to throw these ramblings somewhere up on the web. I decided to start this blog specifically to capture my off-the-cuff (and sometimes more focused) thoughts on the various media I consume: what I watch, listen to, and read. Hence, Mixed Media Junkie. I’ll try to leave personal musings for other avenues (i.e. myspace, livejournal, tear-stained diaries) but there may be cross-postings and linkages here and there.
*Permit me a brief aside here. As you can probably already tell, my writing’s a little unfocused, with the occasional (okay, frequent) parenthetical aside and footnote. Maybe my writing will evolve, but things like brevity, cohesion, getting your point across… you know, the characteristics of good writing, those things will probably only be making cameos here. Anyway, to illustrate my point, it’s taken two sentences to get to the point of this footnote, which is that I used to hate the word ‘blog’ when it first started cropping up. Hazel (you might as well get used to her name, she’ll be alluded to often) pointed this out the other day, and I think it’s because it’s not a very fun word. Blog. It’s short, squat, unpretty. It has no allure, and definitely does not roll off the tongue, possibly due to the fact that it’s a weird cropping of a conjoined word – weblog. By its sheer ubiquity though, it’s gained acceptance in the mainstream lexicon. It’s like a shrill crying baby that no longer registers in your immediate consciousness because it’s been shrieking for so long. Similarly, I will no longer fight the existence of the word ‘blog.’ There’s just no way to shut that fucking baby up. So here it is: my music/television/movie/book/internet blog, with a good smattering of tangents and digressions into who knows what. Welcome. Enjoy. Discuss.
