Category: arts and entertainment
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Katamari Damacy – Why is the music so hard to find?!
Updated Mar 2024 to note that album is now on streaming services! Well, hell hath frozen over! More than 15 years after writing my lament here, the Katamari Fortissimo Damacy is now available online; enjoy! This morning at work I was chatting with a colleague about my morning commute, and I don’t know what got…
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[Music] Instrumental Jazz Soloists – If you can’t sing it, don’t play it
I’m guessing most of you probably just think of me as an Internet geek, but I used to be a classical pianist geek, choir geek, and jazz pianist geek. I have performed over 200 times, won a bunch of Bach festivals, and studied under jazz greats Ashley Alexander, Frank Mantooth, and others. This does not…
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Fair use, mashups, and profits – why hasn’t anyone figured this out yet?
Lots of us love music and we love to share it; I think that’s even more powerful than simply “grab lots of music for free”—it’s the sharing that excites us, motivates us. Music is a shared experience! Why, then, hasn’t anyone made it easy to share music snippets legally from a simple iframe, a simple…
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Blippet: [Video] Avenue Q + Fiddler on the Roof — oy vey, so gay!
Love Avenue Q? Appreciate Jewish humor? Watch what happens when the cast of Avenue Q mashes up with the cast of Fiddler on the Roof! P.S.—I’d like to hat-tip a fellow blogger, but I can’t remember exactly where I first saw this (I just re-found it via a YouTube search). Much apologies. Next time, I’ll…
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Don’t Download This Song! (listen to another gem by Weird Al Yankovic)
Unless you’re a fan of the RIAA or a bitter, clueless artist… I urge you to run, er, click, not walk to go hear Weird Al’s new ditty: “Don’t Download This Song.” [warning: music autoplays]. I’m looking forward to the music video promised for this evening, but in the meantime, you can hear the song…
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Brave Combo rocks in countless ways. Here’s why you will love them, too
Brave Combo is 26-year-old (!) “hot jazz quintet, a rollicking rock’n’roll bar band, a Tex-Mex conjunto, a sizzling blues band, a saucy cocktail combo, a deadly serious novelty act, a Latin orchestra, and one of America’s dance bands par excellence.” [see their bio page] But they kick ass for many other reasons, too. For those…
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Why Snakes on a Plane makes me sad
I grew up with snakes. A Burmese Python named, appropriately enough, “Julius Squeezer.” Lots of harmless king snakes and gopher snakes and more. You see, my dad (a biology teacher) was friends with a herpetologist, and the two of them would often conduct hands-on educational seminars around the area to help people understand that snakes…
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Trying out online database services (see my movie list!)
Microsoft Access is for masochists. It’s expensive, a pain to learn, and—frankly—quite overkill for nearly any home application. So, for too long, folks like myself have kept lists in Excel. This works… sort of. But it’s a pain to share, and it lacks a lot of the usefully-database’y features that make working with data multidimensionally…
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Yet more awesome a cappella & an affordable music studio
First, a quick note to those SEOs who are still reading my blog hoping for detailed Google search-related tidbits. It’s still unlikely. If I ever do post nuggets of search wisdom here, I’m sure you’ll hear about it :-D. With that said, Google is moving ahead to improve communications, both internally and externally; I recently…
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Brief Da Vinci code review
I got a free ticket to go see the movie Da Vinci Code and while it won’t say it was worth what I paid for it… well, it wasn’t worth a lot more than that, either. The movie in a word: Joyless. I can count the number of times the characters smiled on one hand.I…