All the of the fall pollen and mold are all coming over to my sinus cavities to visit this week; They’re not exactly the callers I’d prefer. Maybe a few tunes off the hard drive will improve the mood. Maybe:

1. 100,000 Years – KISS
2. Down By The River (live) – Phish
3. Hell Hole – Spinal Tap
4. If I Can’t Have You (live) – The Clarks
5. Polly Come Home – Robert Plant & Alison Krauss
6. She – Edie Brickell & The New Bohemians
7. Disco Heaven – Lady Gaga
8. So Long – Bad Lee White
9. All Fired Up – Pat Benetar
10. Sister Jack – Spoon

Last Friday morning while taking care of a few errands, I stopped at Target to check out the electronics clearance rack, where over the years I’ve found many great deals on video games and computer storage media. While poking around amongst the marked down ipad cases and wii shovelware, I found one of these:

This is the Pandora radio by Livio, an internet-enabled device that connects to your home network and streams the Pandora internet music service, as well as thousands of internet feeds of radio stations from around the world.

It was marked at about 95.5% off of regular retail price; roughly the value of the loose change rattling around in the average upper-middle class sofa. So of course I bought it.

I use Pandora quite a bit, both through my Android phone and via my Roku streaming media player. It’s a neat service, which generally delivers on its promise of generating a taste-pleasing listening experience based on your expressed preferences. It generally gets it right, too, even if its algorithms tend to think I really ought to listen to more Eminem. The most fun I have with Pandora, though, is trying to predict how the logic works – set up preferences for say Madonna, The Go-Gos, and the Hooters, and then see how long it takes for it to play a song by Cyndi Lauper. Trust me, it’s more fun than it probably sounds.

The real selling point of this little box, however, is the access to radio stations from around the world. I was listening to the news in Welsh within a few minutes, and have plans to start exploring the dial in eastern europe to see if metal is still as big there as everyone says. Also, I found I can listen to my beloved WXPN easily, as well as WFMU, so I can finally find out what this “The Best Show” business people keep mentioning is all about.

Mostly, though, this weekend we found ourselves listening to 98FM from Dublin, Ireland. It’s really just a top 40-pop station, but it’s playlist is just different enough from what you hear in the states that it’s noticeable, and the change is pleasant.

With this piece of equipment in hand (or, rather, plugged in in my kitchen), I’m now equipped to enable my latest obsession and hear all the various localized versions of Gaga’s “Yoü and I” in their various local habitats.

…a joke was lost:

I kind of wanted to just leave yesterday be, but in the end, I figured that it was probably best to counter all of the blindly patriotic tackiness and/or resurgences of anger from so many other people with my little piece of ten years after.

Where I was when things went down doesn’t really matter. I don’t even remember, really. I was at work. What I do remember, though, is feeling sadness at the loss, but mostly worry – not so much about another attack or fearing for my own safety, but more about how the country would respond, and the many, many ways such a response could be screwed up.

From this point a decade hence, I can say it probably could have been handled better. My kids have never known a time when their country wasn’t at war; a time when the number of troops deployed to war zones wasn’t larger than the population of some US states; a time when so much of the social and political structure of the country wasn’t based on the idea of fear.

I remember a time when Americans weren’t afraid. When we were mostly optimistic about things, and were focused on trying to make things better for the future. I hope that in the next ten years, we can get a little closer to that.

A couple of weeks back, I learned with some sadness that my regular Monday night RPG session was coming to an end, due to both GM work schedules and the encroaching profitability of Magic: The Gathering tournaments.

However, within the last 72 hours, I have managed to find myself invited two join TWO different intermittent floating weekend games.

This makes me happy, because I love rolling some dice with fun and interesting people, and that the two groups present two very different demographics. This afternoon, I spent a couple of hours playing a very Pratchett-esque Witchfinder cleric in a GURPS game with a very experienced group of convention friends – it’s a very silly, but educational and creative environment, and I think I’ll learn quite a bit.

If the other group gets off the ground, I’ll be almost certainly the most experienced player at the table, which is fun in it’s own way, because I get to share this hobby of mine with new folks, and watch them exercise their creative muscles and start to let go and really inhabit the characters they’ve built and revel in creating a shared story with a bunch of other people.

I can tell you, I am really looking forward to it.

for she is mighty.

To any reading in eastern PA, stay safe.

I don’t pay a lot of attention to celebrity gossip, but I do occasionally listen to top 40 radio in the car to get a sense of “what the kids are listening to” (and it amuses me somewhat to hear my oldest daughter choke and gag on songs that her trend-chasing friends are obsessed with…she generally has pretty good taste, her friends often don’t). A couple of weeks ago, I was rather delighted to hear that the new Lady Gaga single making the rounds is “Yoü and I,” as I really liked it on the record. It actually keeps growing on me, largely because it’s such an interesting alchemy of musical elements. It’s a country song, produced by rock legend “Mutt” Lange (the guy who made Def Leppard and Shania Twain sound like Def Leppard), written and performed by a dance diva/performance artist, built from a sample of Queen’s “We Will Rock You” and featuring Dr. Brian May (also of Queen) on guitar. Also, totally metal ümlaüts.

As I said when I did a little review of Born This Way, “Yoü and I” is probably one of the better country songs released in recent years. What I’d really love to see is for the cross-over road to stop being one-way for once and have GaGa get some play on country radio with it. Not that such things will ever happen, as country as a genre is very insular and traditional; if you don’t conform to a very specific public standard, you’re shunned (just ask the Dixie Chicks or Chely Wright). I don’t see country programmers giving Gaga a shot on their stage, even if top 40 and HotAC invite Lady Antebellum and Taylor Swift over to play all the damned time.

But that’s not really the topic I wanted to get into. This weekend, I heard “Yoü and I” spin up, and noticed something was off. When it invariably came up again in 30 or 40 minutes, I listened more closely. The lyrics had changed – all instances of the word “Nebraska” had been replaced with “Virginia.” Weird. Not that it didn’t scan, but it was just different and odd enough to throw me.

So, as you do in these situations, I ran to the internet. Yes, it seems that the other week, Gaga started trickling out regionalized versions of the song to various radio stations. Along with Virginia, other geographical locations immortalized (as immortal as one can get in the world of pop radio) include New York, New Jersey, Minnesota, and Cleveland (wonder how that scans?) and various others, with apparently more to come.

It’s simultaneously exactly the kind of thing Gaga, a pop star who’s pretty responsive to fans, would do, and a pandering marketing move that feels a little too “on the nose” for her enigmatic image, but it’s probably going to get her some (more, mostly positive) attention. I’m also sure this is far from the first time someone’s tried this successfully.

The internet’s kind of quiet on generalized chronicling of this (as opposed to other musical tropes like the trucker’s gear change), but I know I’ve heard localized versions of songs from mid-tier artists on top 40 radio before. Usually, it’s just a bit of ♫ Uh…Richmond…Yeah! ♫ sloppily wedged in an intro or a rap breakdown, but not always. The only other instance I can find specifically mentioned out there is LFMAO’s “I’m in Miami Your City, Bitch Trick” or whatever it’s called from a couple of years ago. I’ve probably heard this dozens of times, but it honestly made no impression beyond planting the idea of the local shout-out in my brain.

I can’t help but figure that this is a reasonably common enough occurrence that it has a name that cynical disc jockeys (do those still exist? Do DJs still exist?) refer to with disdain, but I can’t find any particular references, even on tv tropes, which is usually all over this sort of thing. They’ve got lyric swap and listing cities, but nothing describing this particular phenomenon.

This is becoming the new memorial car decals for me…can anybody point me to anything on this?

So, I think, in the end, a long weekend was most of what I needed. Mostly.

As you might have figured, the last few weeks have been pretty stressful. Too many reasons to list at this point, really, and honestly, I just want to get past them. I think I’m mostly done with them, now that I’ve caught up with the last of the meatspace friends who might care. I’m going to try to look forward a bit now.

At least I will after I comment a bit on the weekend.

We did some things. For example, on Friday, we spent an afternoon/evening at the county fair. Sure, we do it every year, but this year we spent a little more time because the other option was to sit at home in the dark. It wasn’t all bad. We pet chickens and pigeons and a baby bison. We watched the dog show, the alligator show, and the pig races. We ate carnival food. We all got airbrushed temporary tattoos. Mine washed off, but everyone else still has theirs (and I kind of like @fairiemom’s – I wouldn’t complain if she decided she wanted to go more permanent in a similar fashion – honestly? kinda sexy). It didn’t rain, but it looked like it.

Power came back a couple of hours after we got home. If the cheers inside the house didn’t wake me up, the whoops of triumph from the rest of the neighborhood would have.

Saturday, my lovely wife took me to a wine festival on the other side of town as a belated birthday gift. There, we tasted all sorts of excellent wines, petted (but did not bring home) some cute six week old puppies, and only bought four bottles (two from here, “Pow Wow” comes highly recommended). Rain threatened further.

Sunday: laundry day. Also, I started to get over my fear that the power would go out again, so I went shopping and put things back in the fridge.

On Monday, we attended a party at the home of some friends and spent time engaging in interesting conversation with people who are much cooler and much more creative than I am. It was fun, and I think I mostly held my own in the company of professional writers and performers. Then we walked to the river with a subset of that crowd, and I didn’t mangle my back quite as much as last time. Plus, all our stuff got wet due to a random downpour.

And finally, Tuesday, I stretched my weekend an extra day so as to see the kids off for the first day of school. My ability to prepare scrambled eggs was questioned. After the kids were installed on buses, the rest of us went for a little shopping trip, where we ate lunch at my favorite funky diner, bought a few things, and got rained on. Again. After that, I sat down with a book and/or pre-schooler while my wife played Dragon Age II.

I’m tired of being wet, but the idea of returning to the usual labors isn’t quite as scary. This may change once I actually get there.

Just sayin’

Total time out? about seven and a half days.

So, did anyone else notice the brouhaha over that article over at gizmodo about one woman’s experience dating a Magic: The Gathering champion, which some folks claimed read kind of mean? The essential thesis was that the guy probably ought to have mentioned his MTG affiliation in his online dating profile, given that he’s so involved in the hobby that he’s got his picture on one of the cards (he’s also a big time WSOP player who’s won millions, which I suppose applies many of the same gaming skills); and that for the author, the guy’s geek affiliation was a deal-breaker.

Some folks got pretty upset about this, largely geeky folks jumping to the conclusion that this was some kind of anti-geek prejudice at work. To be fair, as the pandagon response points out, a lot of the whining is coming from part of the Venn Diagram where “geeky” crosses with “NiceGuy™”, an area where years of resentment, low self esteem, and social awkwardness combine to form an uncomfortable level of sexism and male privilege. I know for geeks: this happens. Most of us grow out of it, but some of us don’t.

What I see here is essentially a story of two people who went on a date or two, and didn’t click. No harm, no foul, it happens all the time. If anything, the article read with the tone of “OMG you guys, I went on a date…with a NERD! How weird is that?” which, I can imagine, re-ignite memories of high school social strata and persecution in certain folks. Tone aside, though, at the heart of things, the idea is that she knows that a geeky type wouldn’t be a good fit for her, and she, being largely mundane, wouldn’t be a good fit for a geek. Incompatible personalities are a fact of life; it’s probably best to up front about who you are if you’re looking for compatible matches on an online dating service.

It’s probably more complicated than that, since this theory depends on people actually knowing what they want, which doesn’t happen at least as often as it does.

In a subsequent piece this morning, Amanda proposes the development of a geek scale, along the lines of the Kinsey Scale. If that takes, you could easily just drop your number into a dating service profile, and be good to go. A 0 or 1 would indicate complete mainstream-ness – your average one would enjoy, on a totally superficial surface level, entertainments like Two and A Half Men, read nothing but James Patterson or whatever Oprah suggests, and enjoy the song stylings of former American Idol contestants. A 6 would be a full-on LARPing neckbeard with a home (usually his parents’ basement) full of evidence of major obessions, like Magic Cards, comic books, threadbare black t-shirts and dreams of building the perfect robotic girlfriend, because he’s too afraid to talk to a girl in real life (at least out of character).

Most of us would fall somewhere in the middle.

At least that’s the theory.