| Rare update |
[Mar. 31st, 2009|01:11 pm] |
Sitting in the office with no work - and I mean legitimately no work, not that there could be work if only I would apply myself more - so I am going to catch up this LJ with recent events. Quickly, before the headache from squinting at the screen with just one contact lens on sets in! (Will be picking up a new pair of glasses on my way home from work today. Thick black plastic-framed hipster glasses, very exciting!)
First thing is that I was out of town last weekend - Portland/Portsmouth/Boston/NYC. In Portland (the one in Maine) on Friday my mother and I did the arts district in the morning, port district in the afternoon. We had lunch at a pub where we were the only women - sort of funny, the "commercial street pub" sign outside was right next to one that said "no drinking at any time" - getting into the spirit of the place we drank beer, and my mother told me about the summer she'd worked as a waitress at a Maine resort in the seventies. (What am I going to be able to tell my hypothetical children?!)
Art district: really decent work at the Maine College of Art - acronym MECA - plastic flamingos dressed up in regional costumes. Also a nice antique fabric gallery across the street whose minder, who was about 25 and very friendly, said he'd gone to NYU and hadn't liked it because everyone was off doing their own thing, "like in high school" (which made me wonder what kind of high school he'd gone to). Port district: lots of lobster-flavored souvenirs and some old houses with plaques on 'em, including one called "Victoria House" that had Greek doric columns, Victorian woodwork around the doors and windows, Moorish geometric patterns along one roof, Chinese-style eaves along the other, and even a tower with one of those round nautical windows. All executed in brownstone. It was Special. *g*
...that paragraph could have been accomplished much more easily with pictures! Oh well.
Dinner in Portsmouth, which turns out to be a really trendy, upscale place. (Who knew?) We went to three breweries in a row that each had a 45 minute wait, then finally scored at an older, smaller one where the staff said the wait was only 15 minutes...though this turned out to also be 45 minutes. XD; Proof that you shouldn't always settle for the first decent, easy thing?
Did Boston Saturday. Met up with my cousin and her boyfriend, who have an apartment in Cambridge halfway between Harvard and MIT. Was nice to ditch the parents! We walked around Harvard Square, had lunch in a cafe where the waitress snootily informed us that they didn't serve those kinds of sodas (ie, Diet Coke - I suppose they had Italian sodas). Very good food though. Walked down to the Charles river, the weather was gorgeous, the people were wearing a variety of things - unlike New Yorkers, Bostonians don't tend to follow a style code. Boyfriend pointed out the building where he has a day job creating spreadsheets calculating the economic advantages of green technologies, on those rare days when his advisor is actually around to advise him. Discussed, with cousin, the way that office work trains you to approach every problem with "I can put that in a spreadsheet for you".
Then tea in a coffee house where my cousin had work up (she paints), then MIT where we saw the building that might collapse. A bit dizzying, actually, to behold. According to cousin's bf the more architecturally complicated, the higher the costs of repairs. And the roof leaks, also. *g* Proceeded to browse at the MIT bookstore where every book is a ground-breaking study with good cover design - just skimming the titles made me feel smarter.
Caught a train at 4:30 to NYC so I'd be back in time for Glasvegas, who were...not very good, actually. XD; Sort of boring? When your aesthetic ideal is a Phil Spectre-esque Wall of Sound, you'd better have the sound production to back it up, and they just didn't. Closed with what felt like the the entire audience singing along to this song, though, so that was a highlight. If I ever go to see this band again, I am definitely standing front and center - I'm not letting myself be taken aside after two drinks by a 40 year-old Morrissey fan who offers to buy me a third. (Seriously, what was I thinking? Though this did answer the question, who likes Glasvegas? As dude was way up on his British indie rock canon as determined by weekly British music magazines.) (Another nice thing about the show is that the audience was actually pretty mixed - old folk, young folk, black folk, white folk, Asian folk. Even some South Asian folk, who I have never before seen at an indie show.) |
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| 24! Just like the tv show. |
[Jan. 14th, 2009|01:13 am] |
Katie Yin and Steve, thanks for the birthday wishes!
...oh my god, I haven't posted here since August. *fails* *repeatedly* Things have been happening -- mostly band-obsession-related things that I am not sober enough to go into right now, but also some job-related things that may or may not pan out. I suppose I'll just say, travel might be involved.
I posted a few things to the other journal that really should have gone here:
Car accident!
New Year's Resolutions!
Where has my blogging mojo gone recently? ...into instant messenger, probably. It's like all of a sudden I can see the appeal of something everyone else has been enjoying since middle school.
(Actually, this is pretty good metaphor for everything in my life recently. It's like being fourteen all over again, only this time I'm not reading a fantasy novel a day!) (Still breaking out once a month, though.) |
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| Marcie Mix |
[Sep. 4th, 2006|01:17 am] |
For her twenty-first. ^_^ Happy Birthday (Again) Marcie!
I thought I would finish this on the actual day, before hitting the bars -- and even better, that it would all danceable music, so we'd have something ready for the inevitable drunken house party afterwards -- but alas no. Instead you get it one day late, with both danceable and undanceable songs.
Marcie listens to the radio. She likes current music and accessible techno. She doesn't like country; otherwise she's pretty open to different genres. When I started this mix I wanted to use mostly "smart" songs I'd heard on the radio this summer, but I am not l33t in the ways of mp3s so I quickly ran out of these, and the mix ended up half that and half whatever was lying around my harddrive as per usual.
( Marcie Mix )
Previous entries in this series
Marie Mix
Melinda Mix
Next up will probably be batch of war ballads for Steve, since I know he likes them (I do too). |
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| Marie Mix (Free Music) |
[Sep. 23rd, 2005|05:01 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | music | ] |
| [ | music |
| | guess what? | ] |
To go with last year's positively schizo Melinda Mix, hahaha. This time (mostly) in English!
Marie's taste in music is pretty close to mine, I think. The basic criteria were:
Tenor Voices paired with
Mid-Range Guitars and
Clever Lyrics sung by
Really Ernest Frontmen or else
People Who Sound Like They're Falling Asleep.
It's not mello, just harmonious. Every kind of rock but Angry Alternative, mixed techno and rock. I took a few songs off the CD I gave Marie so that everything'd fit as an audio CD, but here's the full track list:
( Cut )
Happy late birthday Marie!
P.S.
Yin, you'd like this one, it's Moscow lite --> Michaelo Trueno - Helsinki City Boy
P.P.S.
For Katie, who's on a perpetual nostalgia trip --> Zenon - Supernova Girl |
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| AHHH! Finals. |
[Apr. 20th, 2005|11:06 pm] |
Taking a break from French (by which I mean I'll get around to studying for Friday's final any second now no really). In hindsight, using babelfish on the papers was a really bad idea. Aside from the dubiousness of the translation, I've lost my ability to conjugate simple verbs. I weep!
Finished Love in the Time of Cholera, and it only took a year! I can't really add anything to decades of critical praise; just, the author is really really good. Consider: he spent 300 pages proving that love is more complicated than what you read in romance novels and *still* got me to buy into the happy ending. And maybe Hardy was the first author with an absolutely selfish female character, but you know what? Marquez is the first whose selfish female I liked and identified with (and still wanted to strangle, but I suspect this is a natural reaction to realistic character motivation ARG I'VE BEEN STUFFED FULL OF FAKE ALTRUISTIC PSYCHOLOGY TOO MANY BAD FANTASY NOVELS end parenthtical).
In conclusion, here is a fun meme proving that bablefish is full of stupid.
Rules:
1. Pick five songs that most people would know.
2. Select lyrics of up to but not surpassing 150 words from each one.
3. Go to http://babelfish.altavista.com/tr
4. Enter the lyrics thus:
English to German
German to French
French to Portugeuse
Portugeuse to English
5. Post the resultant gobbledegook and ask people to figure out what the songs are.
( These are the easiest songs I could think of, so someone better get them. )
I still don't have an appartment for the summer. This is bad? |
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| Because Everyone Likes Free Music |
[Sep. 28th, 2004|11:07 pm] |
Originally this was up at ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) sub_divided, but *points to subject*.
Ever heard of Fan Soundtracks? Basically they're playlists that fit the mood/characters/plot/etc of whatever you're a fan of. There's a large community for them (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) fst) you can join for occasionally excellent alternative music even if you've never heard of the series involved. Not that I'm, like, suggesting outright leeching with no knowledge of the greater plan behind the track selections, because why else would djs rake in the big bucks? Because selecting music is an art form, that's why. Word (to your mother).
So! My Death Note fst, because I am obsessed. This is a japanese comic, btw. See? There is actually already a fan soundtrack for it, but that one had Evanescence songs in it and I thought, surely I could do better?
( DN FST (FREE MUSIC UNDER THE CUT) )
Also. Because a few people very kindly left suggestions for L, who I'll admit has me beat.
-Bonus1. Red Tape by Agent Provacateur.
Somehow fits for L? Um. Actually just an awesome song in general.
-Bonus2. Caring is Creepy by The Shins.
In which we give L one last shot... such a hard character to fst. |
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