Albums

January 31, 2007

By decade:

Cannonball Adderley - Somethin' ElseClifford Brown - Brown and Roach, Inc.The Modern Jazz Quartet - Django
The Beatles - Rubber SoulHorace Silver - Song For My FatherThe Rolling Stones - Let It Bleed
Pink Floyd - Wish You Were HereThe Stooges - Fun HouseNeil Young - Harvest
Dissidenten - Sahara ElectricViolent Femmes - Violent FemmesGeorge Harrison - Cloud Nine
Radiohead - The BendsManu Chao - ClandestinoCake - Fashion Nugget
Menomena - I Am The Fun Blame MonsterKashmir - ZitilitesCMX - Dinosaurus Stereophonicus

Edit: Updated, since I’d inconsiderately left a decade out originally.

Atmospheric conditions

January 21, 2007

It’s snowing outside, and the snow appears to be sticking. Snow in January—what a shocker, right? This really shouldn’t be noteworthy, but I’m just happy that the weather has finally caught up to where it should be this time of year. I mean, it was 65° outside a week ago. That ain’t right.

Winston Hightower

January 21, 2007

In the past few weeks, I’ve been to my local clinic twice: the first time, as it turned out, was to be diagnosed with right middle lobe pneumonia; the second time was a follow-up to make sure I was healing properly. Anyway, both times I was sitting in the waiting room—the first time coughing incessantly and having what was later discovered to be a 103.6° fever—the little TV on the wall was looping through videos of a moderately famous black actor talking about a variety of health conditions, with a special emphasis on those—glaucoma, hepatitis C, &c.—that disproportionately affect the African American community.

I haven’t seen Police Academy or Ghostbusters in a while, so I couldn’t for the life of me remember whether the mustachioed black actor from a prominent 1980s movie comedy franchise was Hightower or Winston.

Bubba Smith, a.k.a. Hightower Ernie Hudson, a.k.a. Winston

Places I’ve been

January 14, 2007
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Legend:

  • Places I've lived
  • Places I've visited
  • Places I've had a layover or changed flights

Head in the sand

January 14, 2007
  • Mew’s And the Glass Handed Kites is one of my favorite albums from 2005, and due to its long-delayed American release, it’s one of my favorite albums from 2006 as well.
  • One song, “The Zookeeper’s Boy”, has the word ‘ostrich’ in the lyrics, but it’s pronounced as three syllables: ‘os-ter-rich’.
  • To me, that sounds an awful lot like Österreich. I wonder if there’s any relation there?
  • Well, I know that ost- can mean ‘bone’ or the like, as in osteoporosis; and that öst- can mean ‘east’, as in Austria. I wonder what the etymology of ‘ostrich’ is.
  • Apparently I was wrong on both guesses: ostrich c.1225, from O.Fr. ostruce (Fr. autruche), from V.L. avis struthio, from L. avis “bird” (from PIE *awi- “bird”) + L.L. struthio “ostrich,” from Gk. strouthion “ostrich,” from strouthos melage “big sparrow.”
  • Incidentally, Austria shouldn’t be confused with austr-, meaning ‘south’, as in Austral, the opposite of Boreal.
  • Interesting that Boreas, the Greek north wind, is the root of one word, and that Auster, the Roman south wind, is the root of the other. Is consistency in wind use too much to ask for?
  • Of course, astr- (astral, astronomy, etc.) is yet another completely different root. Damn you, Greeks.

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