Mole Attack/Neutrals

I mentioned Neutrals' "Personal Computing" a while back. Great song, right? What I didn't know is that there is a preposterous and delightful video, also in maximum nuclear blast burnt orange throughout, in which ray-traced* versions of the band themselves perform music. 

There are also millisecond ray-traced blips of various computer activities, one of which is pretty clearly "Mole Attack" for the Commodore Vic-20, a deeply silly computerized version of Whack-a-Mole in which you earn points for striking mole heads as they emerge from the ground - BUT you lose points and create computerized flatus noise if you strike their rear ends as they wiggle out of the same holes. 

DEEP CUT! I can only hope that this ridiculous game on a ridiculous machine, both of which I'm sure my folks purchased in deep discount bins at Pamida stores well after the machine was obsolete, meant something to someone in Scotland at the same time that I was making computer fart sounds on the plowed-over prairies of the American Midwest. 

*Probably not the correct adjective - please watch the video and imagine yourself correcting me if I am incorrect

Summer Regret/Charles Schulz

It still blows my mind to think that Charles Schulz did a daily comic strip for nearly 50 years. By the time he drew this strip for August 10, 1991, he had been doing it for 41 years!

Hey, Marcie! It's a beautiful summer day!
C'mon out, and we'll waste it away doing nothing.. Then we can look back upon it, and regret it for the rest of our lives!
This was a good idea, sir.

We are finally getting some non-gloomy weather here in the rainy Northwest. I'm upstairs doing endless work and this strip is looming large. 

Speaking of listening to the same song over and over

My boy and I like to look through the Births section of the Wikipedia entry for, say, June 17, since it changes up our handwashing routine to sing "Happy birthday, Igor Stravinsky" rather than just singing it to no one in particular.

Today in birthdays is comedian Will Forte. Sure, I'll sing happy birthday to him. His Wikipedia entry mentions this:

Forte has discussed and joked about his OCD tendencies.^[46][4] He recounted listening to only one song in his office at SNL for an entire year because he wanted to challenge himself.^[47] 

I'm glad that no source on the internet mentions which song this is, unless it's in the podcast being cited, in which case forget it, since there is no circumstance in this life in which listening to a podcast seems like an appropriate activity for me. If you find out, let me know. 

In the meantime, we'll just assume that he was listening to Disco Inferno's "D.I. Go Pop." 

Disco Inferno

 

That kind of day where you just want to listen to the Disco Inferno song "D.I. Go Pop" over and over again because it's the only thing that makes sense

Acceptable Ubu

Which Pere Ubu is acceptable Pere Ubu? I love their early stuff (how many times have you heard that?) but I had long been a member of the extremist nothing-past-New Picnic Time club. Recently I had a moment where I realized I was being ridiculous and The Art of Walking and Song of the Bailing Man are actually pretty good, and actually The Tenement Year and Cloudland are pretty good too. 

Those last two albums fall into the weird era where things aren't available on YouChoob Musik except for a few sketchy and incomplete gray-market playlists. Their Bandqlamp only has an abridged version of Cloudland and a limited-to-500 LP of The Tenement Year that apparently I missed the boat on.

When taking my kid to daycare recently I've been blasting "Small Was Fast" while he sits in the back of the car or in the bike trailer, reading his way through the library's juvenile graphic novel section. He is unperturbed.

Give me another decade or so and I'll expand to enjoy their material from the aughts, I'm sure.

Lethologica

One of the nice things about no one reading this blog is that I can make posts like this.

Lethologica is apparently the fancy-schmancy term for "tip-of-the-tongue syndrome," the inability to recall a specific word. It probably has a more specific fancier-schmancier definition in the literature, but let's go with the pop-psych listicle version for now.

It's a word that I frequently have use for, as a person who always prefers the fancy-schmancy word to the non-schmancy. But I 100% can never remember it.

Short of getting a $150* tattoo of some $1.50 word, probably the easiest way to remember this is to blog about it. Make an index card. Make it a password (note: I will not do this).

Lethologica lethologica lethologica. 

*Note: I have no idea what tattoos cost

Rebe "Marisol"

 

I didn't sleep well the other night and so I sleepwalked through yesterday listening to this crazy song over and over again. Somehow it made sense.

Sales pitches: "Guy Maddin directing a hard 'R' live-action Bratz remake"
"An AI trained on Jan Svankmajer and scrambled late-night Skinemax"

Needless to say, great, and also something that I'm a little embarrassed to watch.

Past stuff of hers has had the same Lisa Frank in a funhouse mirror vibe - her aesthetic appears to be completely consistent - but this is the next level.