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too much beer in the fridge
Saturday, December 6 2008
I'm such a fan of Ira Glass and This American Life that I actually sent Chicago Public Radio some money a year ago. I'll also listen to anything Ira recommends, and I've never been disappointed in doing so. This was how I came to discover Radiolab, a well-produced sciencey talk show that seems to have petered out. [Wait! It lives!] More recently Ira turned me on to another Chicago Public Radio show called Sound Opinions, a rock and roll talk show. Much of their back catalog is available as a podcast download, and it's become the soundtrack of my greenhouse project. They cover rock and roll and plenty of music in its penumbra. Heavy metal comes up often, and our hosts aren't afraid to bring up Slayer in an interview with Oliver Sacks. My favorite snippet of banter so far was about the latest AC/DC CD. "With those same chords played, again, the same way. And the same drum beat," they say at one point. Then later, after playing part of another song, one of the hosts talked about how when a band is "so devoted to a formula" that the latest CD is "exactly like the last one," it's not worth buying, with two exceptions: the Ramones and AC/DC. "It's like having too much beer in your 'fridge!" he explains. That's a highly-accessible rock and roll simile.
At some point today I went over to our neighbor Andrea's house to install some memory and a brand new LCD display, a 20 inch digital wide-format to replace a 17 inch analog golden rectangle. I tried to convince her to set up her workstation as a dual-monitor rig, but that lay beyond her notions of a proper computer setup. It was a good thing my convincing failed, because she gave me her old monitor (actually, my lobbying weakened the moment this became a possibility). As with AC/DC CDs and cold beer in the 'fridge, one can never have too many LCD monitors. Andrea also loaned me her copy of Malcom Gladwell's latest book, Outliers, though it wasn't in book form, it was a stack of audio CDs. Instead of, say, listening to them immediately in that awkward format (as copyright law would have had me do), I ripped them all to MP3 so I could have them to enjoy later.
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