Beatles on the shuffle

Sometimes, I think my music shuffle is messing with my head.

My entire music library is on disk now, and my computer randomly shuffles through the tunes. I don't categorize anything other than by artist name. So, I assume the computer does not know that, say, John Lennon has any connection with the Beatles.

The last four songs have been:

• The Beatles / Magical Mystery Tour
• Paul McCartney / Coming up (live version, from All the Best)
• John Lennon / Well well well (rehearsal version from a bootleg)
• The Beatles / You really got a hold on me (live from Stockholm, from Anthology 1

I'm going to have to look into the Python random routine, which the moosic player uses.

Sydney, Australia

We're here.

I'm sending this via an internet kiosk in the hotel, so I'll write more when I get home.

Ira Tucker

It's a common belief that deaths that affect you "come in threes". Now, here's my third obituary post in a row.

Ira Tucker, lead singer of the Dixie Hummingbirds, died on June 24th. He joined the gospel group in 1938, when he was 13. Think about this -- he was with the same singing group for sixty years. The Dixie Hummingbirds were a very important influence on American music. Even if you know very little about gospel, you've heard this man's voice, probably due to this song:

Tucker's obituary in the New York Times

George Carlin

Back in the day, we used to listen to comedy albums. Really. In the pre-videotape days, we'd gather together at someone's house and just listen to Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby, Bob Newhart, Cheech and Chong, or the incomparable George Carlin. Toledo Window Box was one of my favorites.

You got 24 odds and ends, on a table. 23 of them fall off. Whaddaya got, an odd or an end?

Thanks for the laughs, George.

The beat

Rest in peace, Bo.

Roger Waters: It just came up on shuffle

I have most of my music collection digitized. From the vinyl LP's I purchased at Two Guys in the '70s to my latest CD's, they're all residing on /alt/media/music on my main server. So, I naturally randomly shuffle through the whole lot while I'm working/playing on the computer. What just came up was Roger Waters / "Who needs information", from the "Radio KAOS" album. I was forced by some subconscious process to turn the speakers up to 11.

"Radio KAOS" was probably considered a failure. I don't care. This is one of those albums that connected to my brain through some back-door direct connection, and I always consider it one of the most important albums of all time. (That, and Badfinger's "Say No More". Another commercial flop, by the way.)

No particular reason for posting this, other than the fact that it came up on my shuffle. I guess that if someone googles "Radio KAOS", that someone might end up here. Which would be cool.

Unread Books meme

I picked up this meme from Manamania. This is a list of the top 106 books marked as "unread" by LibraryThing users. Your task, if you pick up the meme, is to bold the ones you've read, italicize the ones you only read because you had to for school, and underline the ones you started but didn't finish.

• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
• Anna Karenina
• Crime and Punishment
• Catch-22
• One Hundred Years of Solitude
• Wuthering Heights
• The Silmarillion
• Life of Pi : a novel
• The Name of the Rose
• Don Quixote
• Moby Dick
• Ulysses
• Madame Bovary
• The Odyssey
• Pride and Prejudice
• Jane Eyre
• The Tale of Two Cities
• The Brothers Karamazov
• Guns, Germs, and Steel
• War and Peace
• Vanity Fair
• The Time Traveler’s Wife
• The Iliad
• Emma
• The Blind Assassin
• The Kite Runner
• Mrs. Dalloway
• Great Expectations
• American Gods
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
• Atlas Shrugged
• Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
• Memoirs of a Geisha
• Middlesex
• Quicksilver
• Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
• The Canterbury Tales
• The Historian : a novel
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Love in the Time of Cholera
• Brave New World
• The Fountainhead
• Foucault’s Pendulum
• Middlemarch
• Frankenstein
• The Count of Monte Cristo
• Dracula
• A Clockwork Orange
• Anansi Boys
• The Once and Future King
• The Grapes of Wrath
• The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
• 1984
• Angels & Demons
• Inferno
• The Satanic Verses
• Sense and Sensibility
• The Picture of Dorian Gray
• Mansfield Park
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
• To the Lighthouse
• Tess of the D'Urbervilles
• Oliver Twist
• Gulliver’s Travels
• Les Misérables
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
• Dune
• The Prince
• The Sound and the Fury
• Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
• The God of Small Things
• A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
• Cryptonomicon
• Neverwhere
• A Confederacy of Dunces
• A Short History of Nearly Everything
• Dubliners
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being
• Beloved
• Slaughterhouse-five
• The Scarlet Letter
• Eats, Shoots & Leaves
• The Mists of Avalon
• Oryx and Crake
• Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
• Cloud Atlas
• The Confusion
• Lolita
• Persuasion
• Northanger Abbey
• The Catcher in the Rye
• On the Road
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame
• Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
• The Aeneid
• Watership Down
• Gravity’s Rainbow
• The Hobbit
• In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
• White Teeth
• Treasure Island
• David Copperfield

Note: At least two of those bolded books came from my subscriptions at dailylit.com. It's never too late.