Pilot's Log

Amazon: Popular Among Facebook Friends (that is, MY friends!)

1) Star Wars Trilogy DVD set
2) The Beatles Stereo Box Set
3) Holy Bible King James Version
4) Watchmen (Blu-Ray)
5) Dark Side Of The Moon ~ Pink Floyd
6) Lord of the Rings box set (paperback)
7) District 9 (Blu-Ray)
8) A Reality Tour ~ David Bowie
9) Harry Potter box set (paperback)
10) Monty Python & the Holy Grail DVD
11) Very Best of Enya
12) Finger Lickin' Fifteen by Evanovich
13) Ponyo (two-disc edition) DVD
14) I Dreamed A Dream ~ Susan Boyle
15) The Nasty Bits by Bourdain
16) Fight Club (Blu-Ray)
17) No Line On The Horizon ~ U2
18) Aetheric Mechanics by Ellis
19) Blade Runner (five-disc edition, Blu-Ray)
20) Dolly box set ~ Dolly Parton
21) Ideas & Opinions by Einstein
22) Where The Wild Things Are DVD
23) The Police (2 CD anthology)
24) Ghostbusters Double Feature DVD set
25) Buffett Hotel ~ Jimmy Buffett
26) Charlie & The Great Glass Elevator by Dahl
27) Every Great Motown Hit of Marvin Gaye
28) Lost Japan by Kerr
29) Galaxy Quest DVD
30) Greatest Hits ~ The Cure
31) The Stand by King
32) Toy Story DVD
33) Winter Rose ~ Winter Rose
34) Charlie & The Chocolate Factory by Dahl
35) Iron Man DVD
36) Celebration ~ Madonna
37) Neuromancer by Gibson
38) Spirited Away DVD
39) Number Ones ~ Michael Jackson
40) Lost Sunday by Nix
41) The Wolf Man DVD
42) The Best of Ray Stevens
43) A Quick Bite by Sands
44) A Christmas Story DVD
45) Q: Are We Not Men ~ Devo
46) Richness of Life by Gould
47) Labyrinth DVD
48) Serenade Schizophrena ~ Danny Elfman
49) State Fair by Fowler
50) Star Trek (2009) DVD
51) Fallen ~ Evanescence
52) Crazy Love: Overwhelmed By A Relentless God by Chan
53) Saving Private Ryan DVD
54) Dead Man's Party ~ Oingo Boingo
55) Lindbergh by Berg
56) Toxie Blood Bank DVD set
57) Back To Basics ~ Christina Aguilera
58) Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis, Tertius by Borges
59) Starship Troopers DVD
60) Sounds of the Universe ~ Depeche Mode

( It's Not What You Wear Over Your Eyes, It's How You Wear 'Em )

Vended in honor of the freebie sunglasses that came as a premium with a Rock CD I bought at a tourist-trap store in Sevierville this evening. The CD does Rock, just not to the extreme that Los Tres Hombres do.

Sagittarius Horoscope for week of April 8, 2010

This would be an excellent time for you to take inventory of what brings you pleasure. According to my reading of the astrological omens, you're due for an update and upgrade. Some of your tried-and-true strategies for generating joys and thrills are fraying at the edges. You should consider refurbishing them, even as you also think about going in quest of fresh sources of delight. For extra credit, see if you can gain access to an experience that could accurately be described as "a blessed state of bliss."

Inner Child wants a bawoon. Writer wants to finish the latest Reviewer Corps article. Muse wants to finish ripping bootleg rock CDs. All-Seeing Eye is angry because digital camera was sent to wrong repair shop and will have to return to sender. At least Sweet Tooth just had a Pop-Tart.

(I think theidolhands might want to hear about this little "space oddity".)

Today, my buddy Paul gave me an audio CD copy of content he acquired though his Disney contacts...

...Soundtracks from the Moonliner and Mission To Mars attractions at the Disney theme parks.

Listening to them threw me back thirty-one years to the first time I visited Florida and Walt Disney World. Mission To Mars was my favorite of the attractions then. The concept was a flight-simulation theater that took the crowd on a semi-realistic journey to the Red Planet, with rudimentary motion seating and panoramic projection screens of the spacecraft's external views. Before entering the theater itself, the crowd would go through a "Mission Control Brief" led by an audio-anamatronic character, who stood in front of banks of NASA-variety high-tech consoles "manned" by other robotic mannekins. The far wall of the room had large screen video and movie projectors. Going through that was, to a twelve-year-old kid, like living the future.

This disk had all fifteen minutes of audio from that attraction, and now my imagination can flit back there and remember it all. Three other tracks were from the earlier Moonliner incarnation of the ride, with public address chatter of a ("transistor-punk"?) aerospace passenger terminal, engine noise from a George Pal-era spaceship, and overture music from when it was 100% acoustic orchestral hardware. No better evidence of how much the world has changed...and also, how much the world's future avoided what we thought we wanted, back in those decades after WW2.

I'll go back to Florida, but I'm not sure I'll go back to Walt Disney World. Mission To Mars was replaced before I finished my flight training around 1990, and space tourism is either alive and well, or about to be swept aside by history, depending on who you ask. In the meantime, I'm the Dork Who Fell To Earth, looking for the next hyperspace portal and saving up for a ticket to Anthea. Hope you'll be on the flight with me. I could always use a travelling companion.

PS: Thanks to www.lunar.org...some visuals of what space tourism looked like to Disney from the outside: ( Read more... )

And from www.davelandweb.com...Mission Control: ( Read more... )

--And wound up buying. I suppose that means the economy might actually rebound.

THERE is a stall at the Kodak Flea Market, one that trades in comic books, action figures and other such memorabilia. What I brought to sell is unimportant.

What I bought is two anime soundtrack CDs: Idol Defense Force Hummingbird and the third part of Legends of the Galactic Heroes TV series. In the process of uploading the content to my computer. It'll take a while; the LOGH soundtrack set is three disks!

The seller has a couple milk crates worth of anime CDs for cheap. Initial D, Ex-Driver, Urusei*Yatsura, Orange Road, Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, game soundtracks...

And they're cheap because, as I noticed when I opened the packaging, they're Taiwanese bootlegs. I suppose I get what I pay for.

FP

PS: On the LOGH content...as those of you who are hard-core otaku may know, the overwhelming majority of the music for the show is symphonic classical, which means my decades of listening to local NPR stations' afternoon programs is "paying off"--somewhat. (What do you mean we don't have any Shostakovich in our CD collection?--Guess I have to look it up in the Encyclopedia if I have any hope of spelling that correctly.) I can read kana...but figuring out classical catalog notion when it's rendered in kanji is a challenge. At least all the numbers are "Arabic" Numerals.

Last night on the TV news (CBS, I think) there was a segment about the closing of the Virgin Megastores music retail chain, and to my thinking the problem wasn't the downloading of music illegally...it was the fact that pop music has been failing as a cultural institution.

When was the last time you quoted a CURRENT pop song in conversation or as the punchline to a joke? When was the last time you tuned into a Top 40 radio station and wanted to boost the volume on your speakers or headset? When was the last time you really got excited about a concert by someone you hadn't seen before? Pop music is just not RELEVANT any more as a cultural force, like it had been in previous generations.

The music industry is just so entrenched and self-absorbed too these days. I took a quick peek at this week's Hot 100 over at Billboard's website and saw that Jason Mraz has kept a single on the chart for MORE THAN A YEAR. This would have been impossible when I was a teenager. There was a lot more competition in music then, and there was always something or somebody new coming. Nowadays there are too many established "artists" and the game is rigged for their benefit.

And the music business continues to be disconnected from the rest of mass media--even the rest of the entertainment media. There is no synergy to generate excitement among the audiences.

What's weird is, I think the culture needs a strong pop scene right now, and it's a shame that we don't have one. We need somebody to come in out of nowhere and shake everything up. And American Idol is the wrong way to find that somebody.

FP

How appropriate is it that I buy Steely Dan's Aja CD the same weekend the Vols play Alabama?

Only two slots left in my travel wallet!

FP

Hey.

On Tuesday, I bought one of the Madacy "Ultimate 16" compilation CDs (60s Garage Bands) and it's pretty good. So tonight I did a websearch to figure out if any of the other disks in the series are any good. "Good" in that I'd like the songs and there'd be enough of them on a disk for me to want to buy it.

What are they smoking over there? Some of these disks are pure garbage. Others have really weird groupings.

Chances are I could do better with other companies' products. But where I shop, Madacy is the main supplier. Perhaps half my current collection is Madacy disks.

I know. I get what I pay for. :/

FP

PS: Producers Are Money-Grubbing Scum.

I just joined last.fm. Whatever that means. So now what?

FP

PS: Producers Are Money-Grubbing Scum.

PPS: Dial-up is too slow for last.fm's streaming audio. I'll hear one or two notes of a song and then have to wait five seconds for the next one or two notes. Forget it!

Today is the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Elvis Presley, a fact that all the TV and radio stations will probably make a note of. His birthday doesn't get much notice as it's in the middle of January (I do believe).

Of course, I was born at the wrong time and place to be an Elvis fan. My mother was already one, as an article she wrote for my sister's short-lived newspaper has since proven. When I was born, Elvis was giving up on Hollywood and beginning to go Vegas, for career number four or five (depending on how you counted). I don't think I saw his Hawaiian concert for TV when it happened...tho' I saw some of it on Public TV a while back and it struck some long-forgotten nerves, I guess. I don't think we owned any Elvis records either.

His song's didn't come on the radio often in my childhood. In our household, we listened to AM stations till the end of the Seventies--which meant censored but low-brow selections from the pop charts, weighted towards bubblegum and novelty songs. Even with the turn to Fifties nostalgia in the wake of American Graffiti and Happy Days, the music of the time was not really getting through to where I was.

What I'm trying to say is that I didn't recognize any relevance Elvis or his work had to my life before he died. My appreciation of him has grown over the years since, though.

Cindi Lauper mentioned having fantasies and dreams about meeting Elvis...and I guess I have too (tho' they are fictitious characters, not me specifically).

And today I'll have to visit a Cadillac graveyard. What symbolism there.

FP