Sunday, July 31, 2011

WFMU DJ whose show you shouldn’t sleep on

There are a lot of WFMU DJs I listen to regularly (some so much that I kind of wish they would branch out from their already branched-out styles). One I have just started to follow is Monica, who currently has the 7-9 p.m. slot on Sundays (hey, that’s tonight!). I never hear it live; in fact I tried it once and it made me feel kind of weird and a little weepy. It’s great late at night on headphones, though. Sometimes the first song seems to be chosen to impress, or maybe it’s just my pedestrian tastes, but I find if I skip ahead I come in with something more accessible to me and then I’m usually along for the ride. Her programming is all over the place in a great way, so you get to hear things you wouldn’t bring into your life on your own but that you might like, and if you’re time-shifting, if something isn’t working for you, you can skip it and it’s like you weren’t listening to the radio in the first place. One other thing I notice is her show, more than some other WFMU DJs, focuses on how the music sounds, as in, damn, listen to the bass line on this. When she does play music that’s squarely in a genre I like (commodity urban blues, for instance) it sounds different to me (cause of what it’s in a sandwich with).

Here’s a real good Monica show: Monica, on WFMU, July 24, 2011. If that first song doesn’t blow your mind skip ahead—I started with that great James Brown track around nineteen minutes in. This is great radio. Love the Tune Wranglers’ western weirdness around forty minutes in. You won’t hear that anywhere else. Also check out the Sam Baker track, “Why Does A Woman Treat A Man So Bad?” a little after 1:09; man, it’s great! Give it a minute to get going.)

Saturday, July 30, 2011

fine, have fun

Seems like everybody I know went to the Girl Groups show (“She’s Got The Power!”: A Girl Group Extravaganza) at Lincoln Center today. I heard some of it and it was pretty good (big Maxine Brown fan!) but any event whose highlight is the god-awful Lesley Gore singing that god-awful song “It’s My Party” is a tough sell for me, especially if it involves sitting in the sun. At Lincoln Center (I went to law school, briefly, right across the street—not a favorite special place). And no BYOB.
So I worked on my current piece of freelance work and played with the cat and made potato salad and grilled some corn and some chicken thighs.

Friday, July 29, 2011

beardo

Thursday, July 28, 2011

Google Chrome suddenly got sneaky menus

Google Chrome added an interesting feature where the “chrome” (the part of the window with the tabs you have open, the URL locator bar, your bookmarks bar, and the (important) Back and (very important for developers) Reload button) slide out of sight when you’re not using them. To see them, al you need to do is mouse up there and the bar slides back down….over whatever was at the top of the window.
So, if you were trying to mouse up to a login/logout menu on your Bandcamp page (like I was), as soon as you do, the google chrome slides down over it, obscuring it. It’s a little funny, in a Benny Hill style, or maybe if you think peek-a-boo is funny.
I might get used to it, but for now, something I took for granted is something I have to think about. I can’t just look at the screen to know my status—I have to move the mouse.
If I want to use a button or link near the top of my current screen, I have to move the mouse very carefully.

Bushwick to beach by bike, continued

I made it to Coney Island a little after 7 a.m: one hour, or an hour and a half. I rode slowly after that, taking pictures, and I stopped for breakfast (at a deli near Kingsborough Community College called Pizza Boulevard, if you’re curious, the coffee was good).
I landed on the beach at Fort Tilden right at 9 a.m. There was next to no one on the beach. So it was left to me to deal with some of the hazards.
For instance, this deadly jellyish:

And that wasn’t all.