Irrelevance Glorified

Over the past weekend, I caught this video up on Fark’s video page. I had never seen it before, and I have to say, I find it positively entrancing. I watch once a day, often more. It’s Italian entertainer Adriano Celentano’s Prisencolinensinainciusol , this video is from roundabouts 1973, and there are few things I don’t love about it. I love the beat and the growl of the guitar. I love the choreography and the outfits. I love the disco-dancing blonde (Should I have been a child of the 70’s? Perhaps. Without the internet, I probably would get a lot more done) Heck, I even like the horns, and in general I hate horn flourishes in songs (you can thank the ska fad of the late 90’s and early 00’s for that). It’s like something Tarantino would put in his movies.

However, the most fascinating thing about this video, in my mind, is that fact that it’s gibberish. He isn’t speaking Italian (except at the very beginning of the video). He isn’t speaking any language. But it’s not unreasonable to think that it’s supposed to sound like English, with its bluesy edge and faux-American accent. And because of this, your mind starts to try and make sense of and form intelligible words (as has been done with great success in some Bollywood videos). The Japanese have a word for it : Soramimi : mishearing words in one language (or in this case, no language) for another language. The intralingual equivalent is mondegreening, like all those people who thought Jimi Hendrix was saying “Excuse Me While I Kiss This Guy.” Since Adriano is singing in something close to an American accent, it also makes me wonder if non-English speakers hear their own language or just assume that it’s English.

I am an ignorant American; while I know a bit of German and a slight amount of French, I couldn’t really carry a conversation in anything other than English. But I’ve always thought that if you had me listen to people talking in Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, and Hungarian for one minute, I would identify 6 out of 6 at least 90% of the time, just based on what I know about the languages. What this video makes me wonder is that if I had each of those people pretend to be speaking in one of the other languages (Assuming it doesn’t just devolve into racist stereotyping), would I do just as well?

Sometimes, I see things like this, and then I realize that I have wasted my entire life.

For the record, that guy is using something called MidiHero to play a legendarily difficult Guitar Hero song using drums instead of a guitar.

[I actually wrote most of this about 3 1/2 - 4 weeks ago, but my browser lost it's sign-in information, and so when I went to save it, it punted me to an error message and I lost my hours worth of work. Whenever that happens, it takes me a lot of time to work up the courage to rewrite it all]

One of the things that I do miss about Champaign is the radio station, WPGU. A few years before I left, they switched over from a Clear Channel – like format to a more open, independent format. It was great! Instead of samey, cookie cutter corporate rock, they played a lot of indie stuff that you wouldn’t normally hear. I didn’t always like it, but I appreciated the diversity and enjoyed the respite from having focus-group-tested crap rock forced down my throat.

I haven’t had quite the same amount of luck in the Bay Area, surprisingly enough. For the most part, I’m listening to the local NPR station or Live 105, an corporate alternative rock station in the area. It tends to play a little bit too much nu metal for my taste and lots of commercials, but it has a suitably stupid and wacky morning show and plays some cross section of music that I like. When I first arrived, I spent a lot of time seeking on the radio dial, trying to find a good radio station. And one day, I found one! It was playing a bunch of generic indie stuff, which doesn’t really sound like a compliment, but I was happy to find a station playing interesting stuff that I hadn’t heard before. I could tell it was a low powered station, because it barely lasted during my commute in to work. But stupidly, I changed the station before setting it to memory, and when I tried to find it again all I got was static.

About a week later, I managed to find it again, and I quickly set it to memory, where it’s become a nice listen for my commute. The thing is, I couldn’t quite tell where it was coming from, because (a) there were never any commercials or DJ’s, and (b) there were no ‘official’ radio stations playing at that frequency, and more than one ‘unofficial’ radio station playing near that portion of the dial. I began to wonder, what sort of cool people ran this radio station, that their musical interests were so varied and interesting. And eventually, I found out. Teenagers. High school kids, to be specific. Saint Francis Prep School students, to be even more specific. On the way home from work, the music ended and the DJ’s came on…and they were two kids talking about prom. Of course, these were indie hipster kids, so they were talking about going to prom in a sort of detached ironic way, rather than being excited about it, but still. High schoolers.

This is sort of embarrassing. You might say that taste in music is age independent, but it’s sort of jarring to find out that I am head bobbing in unison with kids half my age. It’s like suddenly noticing that all the commercials for your favorite television show are aimed at tweens. Or heading out to the theater for the movie you’ve been waiting the whole year for, and finding out that you’re in line with a bunch of 9th graders. There’s a cultural divide, damnit, and one of our generations is crossing the line here!

However, this rant is not even the point of this post. The other day, I was driving to work, listening to KSFH, and I hear a song come on that really caught my ear, partially because it was good, partially because I could recognize neither the song nor the artist. A moment of action was needed. There were no commercials and no breaks, so I couldn’t wait for the DJ to come back on and tell me what songs they played. This wasn’t Clear Channel, so I couldn’t count on them playing the song again anytime soon. I could tell the song was winding down, so I couldn’t try and pull out my phone and start up Shazam (which worked, by the way, when I played it later). So, I was down to my last option — remembering choice lyrics and using Google as soon as I could, before I could forget them. The important part of such actions is that you have to think of something memorable and exactly right. Luckily, the start and the end of the song are both quiet, musically, and have a memorable line. I was coming up on a red light, so I quickly thumbed the line into Google on my phone and got a response. Maximo Park’s ‘Going Missing’. I love The Internet.

Later in the day, I tried to hit up Rhapsody to hear the song again. To my dismay, Rhapsody doesn’t carry that song, which is pretty much a rarity these days. I was forced to use YouTube to listen to the song. Now, there is a lot of music out on YouTube, but I feel wrong using YouTube to listen to music….it’s like cleaning the earwax out of your ears with a pencil. Sure, it works, but that’s not its intended purpose. Which brings me to my other realization — I am so used to an on-demand world, I’m actually annoyed when I can’t get information or media immediately, preferably streaming. I can only imagine what it will be like in the future, when things like MIT’s Sixth Sense come to fruition — how will people act when the Hive Mind goes down?

Does this post have a point? Not really. That’s why it’s got the random tag. Basically, if I think about any one subject for more than some threshold amount of brain cycles, there’s a decent chance that it will end up on the web page. But anyways, here’s the song. One other reason I don’t like using YouTube to listen to music by watching music videos is that it’s harder to separate the music from the slickly-produced image of the band, so my impression gets clouded. Which sorta happens here…the lead singer looks like he’s trying a little bit too hard. But whatever, here’s the video:

For the first time ever, I’ve voted for the winning president.

This is political capital, and I intend to spend it.

I opened up iGoogle this morning and this is what confronted me….

Rain!! It hasn’t rained since I got here, over six months ago. And rain is the predominant forecast for Saturday. Will I know what to do when I see rain? Will I find out that my apartment isn’t waterproof? I’m used to Midwestern rain….is Northern California rain totally different? Does it taste like vanilla? The possibilities are truly endless.

You know, this has been passed along the internets for a little while, but in light of the recent news, I thought it would be good to pass along for people who haven’t seen it.

Here is a link to a Google Presentation Document explaining how we got into the Sub-Prime mess. It’s a bit simplistic, obviously, but also very funny and very direct. It would probably be rated PG-13 for language.

I’ve been using G-mail for a number of years as my primary non-work e-mail address. Although I first signed up for the nerd cred of having an invite only e-mail address from Google (thanks Rob!), I’ve always been impressed with its features. In particular, it seems to have a really good spam filter. There are rare false positives and, uh, true negatives. But I still check the spam list every day or so, just to make sure. Most of the items in there have subjects that are intended to seduce me into opening the message, and following whatever nefarious links are within. They might tell me how to, uh, enhance myself, or tell me that there is an important message from my bank, or maybe even convince me that a hot girl has sent me a message and wants to talk to me. Fortunately, I am not so easily fooled. Wait, what’s this?

Oh, it’s on! No one tells me that I have a stupid face here except for my closest friends. They tell me that all the time, I don’t need to hear it from Anonymous Internet Bully. You know what? I’m gonna reply to this Ivar guy and give him a piece of my mind. He’ll know he can’t just push me around. Let’s see…well, in order to prove that I’m the person that he claimed had a stupid face, I better include my social security number and bank account information. I wouldn’t want him to think I’m some random person on the internet. I’ll let you guys know how it turns out.

Every once in a while I remember that I’m signed up with Google Analytics, which compiles the stats for visiting on my website, and I check it out. I haven’t updated this thing in a long while, so its not like I’m expecting lots of hits or anything. But I’m intrigued at the things that I find….
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A short, inexhaustive list of things I am somewhat ashamed to like.

Well, probably not as as good as other secrets, but whatever.

If you spend much time with me you might think that I’m gadget obsessed. That I’m the person who camps out to get products on opening day, that I replace my computer every 3 months, that I’m liveblogging my life through Twitter via updates from my cell phone. That I’m a member of all the social networking sites and have a vibrant MySpace page. That I live my life on the cusp of technology.
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