Books, Movies, Music

Cliff introduced me to the wonder of the Songify app. Here are some tips to making the best of it:

1. Longer text makes for better songs.
2. Repetition makes for better songs, don’t be ashamed of repeating yourself.
3. Speak in a monotone voice, let the app handle the tune.
4. Speak nonsense. No sense in trying to make sense, it doesn’t make for a better song.
5. If you insist on trying to make sense, then just pick a single sentence and repeat it several times with slight variations.
6. Rules are meant to be broken and this app if for silliness, why are you reading this far?

Here are some example songs demonstrating the above:

• Hot sweet wings
• My wife is annoyed

Mick Jagger to BBC:

[P]eople only made money out of records for a very, very small time […] if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25 year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn’t.

Via.

duckett‘s Wired But Disconnected on ccMixter is actually ironic: the whole song is the result of an online collaboration.

Listen

I love remixes, mashups, and covers. I love it when bad songs get good covers, I love it more when it’s a bad cover. I’m a fan of Coverville and I get excited every time I find yet another version of Smells Like Teen Spirit (hey, this is just a sampling: lullaby version, Patti Smith, The Bad Plus, another jazz version, and another jazz version, a string version, no, two string versions, a tango, a damn chant version, some lounge thing, and one for the opium lounge).

But I think I have yet to hear a decent cover or remix of a track from a rock opera. Take One Night In Bangkok: sexing it up doesn’t help. You just can’t out rock a rock opera. (Really, look for yourself.) It might help that Chess featured a character loosely based on eccentric chess master Bobby Fischer, but rock operas just might be too weird for remixing.

Though…I’d like to be surprised. Perhaps a folk version?

I can, however, appreciate the irony in a sex-laden video for a song that had criticized moral decay. Video may be NSFW.

Not every song Johnny Cash has covered turned to gold (see Personal jesus), but Hurt is magic.

Have you ever argued with a member of the Flat Earth Society? It’s futile, because fundamentally they don’t car if something is true or false. To them, the measure of truth is how important it makes them feel. If telling the truth makes them feel important, then it’s true. If telling the truth makes them feel ashamed and small, then it’s false.

–from Louis Theroux‘s The Call of the Weird

If this doesn’t warm your heart, check to see that it’s not made of stone.

Netflix for audio books: Simply Audiobooks. Though it makes me wonder why we don’t say “like a library for audiobooks where they send you the stuff you want.”

I guess the criticism is that it’s one thing for somebody to open up their music for remixing, but an entirely different thing to do the same with a movie. Or is it? Is it (click re-fragmented)?

Via Ryan: Brian Dettmer: Book Autopsies at Centripetal Notion.

Story: Timbuk2 develops a new line of messenger bags that features fabric made of <a href=;http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/06/dont_shoot_the.php">recycled material (engineered by RootPhi). Some of the fabric contains a symbol that Target lawyers say is their logo. Target lawyers cease and desist Timbuk2.

Thing is, the trademarked Target logo is a roundel, commonly used around the world (easily recognized in British aircraft of WWII). The particular design Target has chosen appears to be a copy of Peru’s official insignia.

Trademark law isn’t my thing, but I wonder if the roundel is trademarkable. “Most jurisdictions totally exclude certain types of terms and symbols from registration as trademarks, including the emblems, insignia and flags of nations….”

Our intention is to feature “a series of books that challenge our beliefs and test our commitment to free speech,” but on this post about Holocaust denial I found myself unwilling (and unable) to link to the free, online PDF full text of David Irving‘s Hitler’s War. And when we discovered it wasn’t in our collection (though it may have been lost/stolen, not replaced, and the record deleted), we decided not to purchase it.

Sometimes books are challenged. Sometimes they’re just not purchased.

Hey, I’m a fan of that old book smell too, can I get some scratch-n-sniff stickers?