a shot in the arm

man. i needed this past break. it felt so good not to go anywhere or spend all night studying. wednesday, my buddy and i went and rampaged this ping-pong table. that was incredible. ping-pongs wars ensued. thursday was nothing but food covered in gravy, which is the way it was intended to be. and friday we saw my friend's little boys and played with them. and saturday and sunday, we took it easy. so nice.

does anyone really believe that if you listen to a repetitive phrase, or several repetitive phrases while you sleep, that you can actually memorize them in your sleep? i wonder. it's actually called "hypnopaedia" which translates to sleep teaching.

greatest avclub inventory ever. 17 peculiar beach boys songs! i have them all. my favorite on the list is probably johnny carson. that is a brilliant album.

great article by niall ferguson regarding the possible debt implosion and how the great superpowers have fallen because of it.

be thankful you have a job right now. seriously.

end the fed

i can't believe i missed this:

ron paul in houston, part 1.

ron paul in houston, part 2.

middle of the road

so i took time out of my life last night to watch the texans play on monday night football. my wife and i got some hamburgers, some chips and some beers. she watched about half of the game. i watched about 3/4. we made a bet on the game too. she doesn't like to do money bets, because it all comes from the same pot. so we made a dinner bet. whoever lost would have to cook dinner for the other person. the dinner doesn't have to be 4 star michelin, but it has to have thought, planning and preparedness.

i bet on the texans to win. so what should i cook? i'm thinking some sort of pork dish maybe. like a pecan crusted pork loin. or maybe something more exotic, like buffalo or maybe something from the sea, like scallops or chilean sea bass. i have to do it before 30 days have passed, so i have time to think and prepare and plan.

i should also think about not betting on the texans next game or ever again.

i'll be waking up early tomorrow to take BEC, another portion of the CPA test. if i fail this one, i think i might have to take drastic measures in my studying habits. like tape myself reading the material and listening to it while i'm sleeping. or take stuff to the inside of my eyelids. i don't know.

whatupwiththat

i watched a bit of snl on saturday night. mostly, i don't think the skits are very funny, but every once in a while, you'll get a good show. this one was hit and miss, but this skit in particular is still making me laugh and i'm not sure exactly why. it's not that original or witty, but it's catchy and man i want those dance moves.

what up with that?


ooooooooooooooeeeeeeeeee!

it's got to be the glasses

the motown sound. we know it. we grew up with it. and the consensus is marvin gaye. he was the maestro. and you won't get an argument from me. the man was soul personified. he wrote and produced his shit. he ached every note and believed every pause and silent fixture.

but that's not the whole story. david ruffin. if you listen to david ruffin's vocals with the temptations, you'll hear a man with tread on his voice. a man who didn't force nothing. double negative. i love those.

i wish it would rain. i'm losing you. my girl. the man couldn't control his urges, but what man can? his demons destroyed him. but sadly, that's what made his performance so great. he was desparate. every note was the last.

when i started writing this i was listening to i'm losing you. but now, the cd player has shifted and admiral halsey, uncle albert is playing. what a great song. the perfect paul song. it means nothing, but man is it gorgeous. the melody is so sweet. the melody is perfect and so are the harmonies. i wish brian wilson had decided to get out of bed and do his little tunes. i'm sure he would have made songs so seemingly insignificant, but yet, so deep in their brief existence.

i take BEC on wednesday. i wish i was smarter.

this guy is probably a total douche, but i'm digging this first song off his solo album.

singalong/junk

i didn't pass the audit section of the cpa test. am i bummed? yes. but, i know i can do it. i have confidence and faith in myself. the worst part is that it was probably one of the easiest sections. it's only going to get harder. that is daunting. but if you ask out 100 women, two will say yes and one will be easy. that's the approach i have to take. i'll keep taking the exam and keep studying and eventually, i'll pass.

all four sections.

eventually.

jeeze.

my city was gone

i just made out big time on a used cd website. i bought six albums and used a promotional code to save $13.00. ultimately, i got six albums for next to nothing. they are:

the pretenders- learning how to crawl
lou reed- coney island baby
elvis costello- armed forces
talking heads- talking heads '77
marshall crenshaw- marshall crenshaw
paul mccartney- band on the run

this is a great day in america.

head full of doubt, road full of promise

reality sucks. the reality of cheeseburgers and football and beer is great. but the reality of this economy sucks. you might notice the dow jones ticking up every day and say, "well there's some good news." but really? step back. no, really. get up and step back. now, ask yourself: what is this good news based on? why is the dow jones going up? do you in your everyday life see anything changing?

i do. i see more houses for sale. i see more foreclosures. i see more empty commercial real estate. and i hear about more people i know losing their jobs. is that what drives up the dow jones? evidently.

most people out there believe it's going to get worse.

here are the 15 biggest congressional recipients of wall street campaign cash.

the china-america relationship is more like a booty-call relationship to me.

here is the 2008 acfe report to the nation on occupational fraud and abuse.

"i bless the rains down in africa."

africa

i was making toto jokes all day today. so much so, that people stopped talking to me because everything that came out of my mouth was about toto. so i'm driving home from the gym tonight and what do i hear on the radio?

"i bless the rains down in africa!"

oh yeah! you never hear that song on the radio. toto you made my night.

in other news, it is being reported that robot insurance is on the raise....

would you believe

vacation is over. work is back. traffic is back. getting up early is back. i miss the bags of chips. i miss watching gilmore girls. i miss bike rides. i miss the complete lack of direction i woke up with every day. ahhh.

vacation was incredible. actually my wife and i took off for about four days and just got away. i had a big party last year for my birthday, lots of people, lots of drinks. no more. i don't want a party like that again. it's weak. it's lame. this was special. thursday we went to new bruenfels and my wife made reservations at this amazing bed and breakfast. i sound totally gay sounding that, but whatever, it was freakin' sweet. we went to wurstfest the whole night. we drank. we ate. we sang. we danced. she bought me an astros hat that lights up. it's the greatest hat ever. and we got a caricature made. apparently the guy who drew it had something against asians because we look totally asian.

the next day we went to fredericksburg and went to several wineries with my dad and his wife. seeing my dad was great. we tasted a lot of wines and hung out. he also gave me this carving of a bear for my birthday. i couldn't even bring to describe how awesome it is. my great uncle made it. i have a buffalo he made too.

saturday was my real birthday and we went to enchanted rock and climbed that sucker. we took along lunch and ate lunch on the side of the rock. once we got to the top, we took pictures and walked around. there's a lot of room on the top. my wife saw this little patch of vegetation and bent down to take a picture of it. when she did, she sat on a cactus and i had to pull about 30 needles out of her pants and her thigh. she dropped her pants so i could get the ones in her leg. it was an enchanted rock trip i'll never forget.

sunday. we woke up. came home. drove in the rain. the whole way. vacations. they all have to end.

now i'm studying. i take the BEC section of the CPA test the wednesday before thanksgiving.

man i had a blast though. i wish we were back in fredericksburg drinking wine and looking at tourist crap.

vacation, all i ever wanted

that's right. i'm on vacation. for the whole week. i turn 30 on saturday. am i getting better with age? most would say yes. others would say no. and some would even say yes and no. those people don't count. the no people don't count either. so by a landslide, yes wins.

the only real drawback of the positioning of my birthday, is that someone, usually me gets sick. it's positioned right between the hot and the cold, and the body has no idea what to do with the variations of temperature. but i'm not sick, yet. my wife is sick however. that's what happens when you marry old. hopefully she'll be better soon. if not, i think i might get a jump on my mid-life crisis and find me a 19 year-old with a car.

convinced of the hex

within the first seconds of the new flaming lips album "embryonic," you know this is a different flaming lips. their last album "at war with the mystics" was a great disappointment to me. it was a thin attempt at keeping a sound that they seemed to have little interest in continuing. it was an album that was disconnected. it wasn't where they wanted to go, but they were already there so why not do it again. the lyrics were callow and sophomoric. the music was banal and uninteresting. and i felt like the band that made the symphonic pop masterpiece "the soft bulletin" had run out of steam.

and i was right. they had run out of steam/ideas of that sound. they needed a change in direction. embryonic is that change in direction. it's menacing. it's lyrics are simple, but direct. each track grooves along and bleeds into the next. it's sprawling. it's a series of riffs. the first track, convinced of the hex, says all you need to know about the rest of the album. it will make your arm hair stand up. i highly recommend this album. this was the change they needed.

as you (who?) have noticed, my postings about banks and government has been sparce. i'm growing disillusioned with government and people's apathy towards their situation. i sent out an email declaring the city of houston was bankrupt, and one person responded. nobody cares. nobody has time. i'll continue to post articles that i find interesting and relative. but it's hard to keep the passion when you can't find any anywhere else. anyway, i'll step down from my soapbox. it's not anybody elses' fault but my own. i need to get involved and find people who will engage me.

one red thread

last night i saw the low anthem and blind pilot, two bands that it is impossible to be a casual fan of. why? because they are not well known, not played on the radio and don't appear in an apple commercial or have a song on a vampire themed movie soundtrack. so it was amazing to me to witness the kind of inconsiderate and indifferent crowd that gathered at the house of blues last night. the crowd was loud, rude and completely not there to see the bands. at one point, a guy in the crowd yelled, "freebird!" at that point, i just shook my head. give credit to both bands. they soldiered on and played a tremendous couple of sets. my appreciate for both bands went way up after seeing them live.

the most amazing moment of the night came during the last song. blind pilot closed with one red thread and the crowd that talked all night, not paid attention and was there to stand and check their cell phones, sang the song in unison. it was a strange twist to the end of the evening. for that one song, everybody moved their heads, clapped and sang. no idea how they knew it or why all of sudden they realized where they were. but i counted myself lucky to see those two bands play. amazing lyrics for both, amazing musicianship, amazing harmonies. just amazing.

charlie darwin

i'm going to see the low anthem tonight and blind pilot. and i'm super excited to see both of these bands.

the low anthem have a video for charlie darwin right here. they also had a hearya session here.

blind pilot did a hearya session too. that's right here.

man i'm excited. i don't think i've been to a show that featured an opening band that's as good and talented as the headliner in a long time.

let me roll it

i'm going through a mini-mccartney obsession as of late. i can't stop listening to ram. it is not a flushed out piece of pop symphony by any means. it's an album consisting of little ideas, snap-shots of melodies and lyrically, it's just scatter-shot. but, as a whole, it flows so well. it's such a sweet album, and by sweet i mean soft-hearted. the fact that this is paul and his wife recording and singing these songs like "eat at home" and "long haired lady" and "the back seat of my car" is very comforting. it's greatly undervalued and i wished he would have made a few more albums like this.


his debut album, just called mccartney, was a particular obsession of mine back when i was in college at huntsville. mccartney consists of mere sketches of ideas of melodies and lyrical approaches. i mean, it is an album that sounds like an album of outtakes and demos. it really does. but at the time, i was intrigued by brian wilson's modular approach to recording, which he utilized on good vibrations and smile. and i thought, what if instead of taking these little recorded track sections and putting them together to form a cohesive album, instead you record little track sections and never put them together, but combine them into an album of little ideas. and that's what appealed to me so much with paul mccartney's debut album. it was an album of little ideas. and it was impressive that such a pillar of the music industry at the time would release such an album. you could argue that the beach boys did it first with smiley smile, but i wouldn't agree with that argument considering smiley smile only existed because smile was too complex and complicated for the beach boys and smiley smile was just a collection of tracks recorded for smile that they re-recorded and released subsequently.

you would think finding paul mccartney albums is easy. it's not. go to a record store and you won't find a lot of his 70's albums besides the debut, ram and band on the run. you'll find some of his more recent recordings, which i understand are pretty good.

but i'm interested in finding red rose speedway. (which strangely enough, i used to listen to on vinyl because my dad owned it. i listened to it when i was a kid, not because i liked the music, but because the insleeve contained photos of naked women in pseudo s&m poses. for a ten year old kid, that was like finding the lost city of gold).

i would also like to explore some of his early '80s stuff like mccartney II, and tug of war.

but back to ram, i'm not sure of a modern artist who's recorded an album such as this. i'm sure i know of one, but at the moment, i'm at a loss. but there are brilliant moments of exhilaration on that album and distinct beauty. i hear it in my head right now. great album.

brilliant

elizabeth warren for president.

not in 2016. in 2012. this is a great idea. i love elizabeth warren.

this matt taibbi guy is onto some good stuff.

the roust-a-bouts

here are some clips from some pretty rockin' dudes:

legs against arms- the applicant recording session

leatherbag- acl

legs against arms- at the mohawk

leatherbag- on down the line

legs against arms- at the mohawk, pt. 2

leatherbag- pro j insider interview

let's burn down the cornfield

the committee to save the world. rubin. greenspan. summers. this committee to save the world nearly brought about the end of the world. the financial world at least. these guys worked with democratic president clinton and a republican controlled congress to deregulate the financial market. so the next time someone tells you the republicans or the democrats did this, look them right in the eye and tell them, they all did it. they're all responsible.

there was one lady trying to regulate the derivatives market. brooksley born. pbs frontline ran a show on her last night. she was simply trying to pull the market from the dark. but this committee to save the world wouldn't have it. they knew better. markets are better left alone. she didn't agree. and she wrote a concept release regarding the matter. you can read it here. eventually, she was marginalized and she resigned.

the pbs frontline can be seen here.

here is a playground analogy regarding the financial mess.

greenspan has retired as head of the fed. rubin went on the help make citibank one of the biggest receivers of federal bailout money. and summers is back in government with our current president. apparently he is now in favor of more regulation.

but there are people in the administration calling for more regulation. paul volcker is. but does he go far enough? that is a question raised here at naked capitalism.

and more importantly: does he have the president's ear? the new york times discusses that question.

there's a line a broken social scene song that goes, "don't get high on what you create." and that is applicable here. these problems existed before. these problems helped stir up the beginnings of the great depression. but we created a better, more fluid financial system, right? those problems won't be our problems again, right? we're smarter now. information is abundant. it won't happen again, right?

don't get high on what you create.

periodically double or triple

time doesn't really seem to exist much these days. whether it's a monday or a thursday or a sunday doesn't have too much relevance, besides football games and such. but ultimately, the days are somewhat connected. and i'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. it's nice to not focus on certain days or fret about other days or what's coming up. you can kind of just take it all in. the change in weather certainly helps. i'm actually really enjoying this life of tempered behavior. i started late to the race and i'm glad i did. but i'm also glad i finally joined the race. and it's not the race for material possessions or fancy things. it's probably not even a race. it's more of an awareness. i was late to the awareness. and i think people who are late to the awareness fair better down the road. it's the people who wake up suddenly when they're 35 or 40 and become aware that can be dangerous. i don't really know what i'm saying, but i do.

there's a new sec prosecutor and his name is robert khuzami. yes. go after them robert khuzami! i suppose one bernie madoff is enough for the sec to be completely and forever embarrassed.

here's a few guys you can start with. these dudes is corrupt.

i've been saving my money a lot lately. partly because i don't want anything and partly because i want to provide a cushion when my wife and i get old and broken down. so it really pisses me off to read stuff like this because i know it's out there and i have a bad feeling it's going to get worse.

the dollar is crashing. what's that all about?

paying off your credit card on time might soon cost you some money. remember to use these things sparingly. they are not your friend.

flight of the conchords have a new album out.