Do you by chance remember that game where
you make your thumb and pointer finger into a sort of pseudo-circle and
hold your hand below waist level, and if someone looks, you get to sock
them in the arm? I was trying to explain this to two people yesterday
and they had never heard of it, and thought I was insane. I vaguely remember there being a word
you were supposed to say as you were punching their shoulder. Anyone?

     I, like many Americans, have seen ads for the Karaoke Revolution video game on television. What I want to know is – does it actually measure pitch with that microphone? That would be really, really great and actually useful if it measured pitch. For some reason I suspect that it doesn’t. My guess is that it just measures when you start and stop a word, and matches it up to the lyrics. Otherwise it would be way too frustrating for the tone-deaf children of America. Has anyone played it? Do I need to do some investigative journalism and RENT it?

     Everytime I stumble across something in another language, someone tells me to ‘babelfish it,’ implying that this should be an easy thing to do, like ‘googling it.’ I always go to babelfish.com, and they always ask me for money to perform their translation services. This leaves me feeling dumb. Today I ‘googled’ babelfish and realized that I AM a moron, and should have been using babelfish.ORG all along. Unfortunately, the thing I was trying to translate today was in Polish, and babelfish.org doesn’t appear to offer polish. If you were, say, researching an obscure dance 12″ that was released in poland in the 80’s and needed to translate a few key newsgroup postings from polish into english, then HAVE I GOT THE SITE FOR YOU! Here it is: Poltran!

     I finally listened to that New Trans-Am
record (‘Liberation‘) that everyone is being all opinionated about, and
was amazed that I haven’t read a single article that calls them out on
‘biting’ from Warp records’ ‘Bushwacked’ mp3’s. The links on the Warp site are dead now, but the mp3’s can
still be found here and here. The
second is the better of the two. Compare to ‘Uninvited guest’ from
Liberation, which consists of the same idea over a bad midi track.
Good times. I’ve never been a big fan of Trans Am – their presentation
has always seemed like gimmicky posturing to me – but that doesn’t
mean the album is without inspired moments – the tuned speech of an
anonymous weatherman on ‘White Rhino’ is pretty well executed. I could
have, however, done without the spoken ‘Fuck This, My White Rhino’
refrain.

     Back before the Shins’ ‘Chutes
Too Narrow‘ came out, I remember hearing that they were working on a documentary on
the making of the album. Anyone know what happened to this? I see
there was once an ~ 8 Mb video file on their official site called ‘Recording
in the basement,’ but the link is dead now.

     Also: I decided that if I ever start a restaurant it will be called ‘St. Dinner.’ Not sure why, I just like that.