Residing on residuals

NPR has a fascinating update about the awesome Kimberley Rew and the other members of Katrina and the Waves, who’ve basically been able to live off the money from “Walking on Sunshine” for the past 25 years (although Katrina no longer gets her share because of some dustup a few years back).

Rew, who wrote “Sunshine” (he also wrote the B-side, “Going Down To Liverpool,” which was a minor hit for the Bangles), got his start in the Soft Boys, with bandmate named Robyn Hitchcock who’s had quite a bit of success in his own right.

Put it this way: If  you love Robyn Hitchcock, but also think “Sunshine” is just a great song (or even if you just hate me because now you can’t get it out of your head), you should check out Rew’s work — it’s got a twinge of that Hitchcockian weirdness, and lots of the melodic craftsmanship so evident in “Liverpool” and “Sunshine.”

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Don’t mean a thing

“The Swinger” is a nice bit of Python code that takes music in “straight eighths” time and converts it to swing time.

Also a great tool for understanding what “swing” means as a technical term, if you don’t want to get into technical terms like 6/8 time or dotted eighths or all that, um, jazz.

(Count Basie pic via JazzTimes.com)

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Baby it’s Burt

Just in case I ever forget how utterly awesome Burt Bacharach is, there’s always something there to remind me.

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Marching to a different ‘toon

Slate has a nice, affectionate review of “Daria” (now on DVD) by someone who says he was one of the popular kids in school — precisely the opposite of the target demographic of the show and its geeky anti-hero (thus, of course, totally my hero).

It’s almost cute (and almost makes me feel sympathetic) to see his observation that the show was mean to the popular kids when it first started out. Makes me want to get out my tiny animated violin.

(pic via SelectSpecs)

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Tech overload

Best, most awesomest, tech article ever The Onion does it again: “While millions of young, tech-savvy professionals already use services like Facebook and Twitter to keep in constant touch with friends, a new social networking platform called Foursquare has recently taken the oh, fucking hell, can’t some other desperate news outlet cover this crap instead?”

Also the most accurate: “As you’ve no doubt guessed from reading a dozen similar articles in The Washington Post, now’s the part of our “trend piece” where we quote an industry expert …“

(pic via  Moneyizor)

P.S. Happy Towel Day tomorrow!

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“Fletch”‘s fortunes

If you enjoyed either the movie “Fletch” or the books by Gregory McDonald, you’re sure to enjoy this article about the quest for a decent sequel.

Apparently a long-planned follow-up has been getting the “Moon River” treatment (as illustrated above) as it gets shuffled around from a never-ending parade of potential actors, writers and directors (including Kevin Smith!).

I liked the first movie OK, but its main significance to me is that it introduced me to the books, which are wonderful (lots more Fletch stuff here).

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Taco Talk

Taco Night conversation:

HER: I’m going to get some more lettuce.

ME: You know what you should do?

HER: What?

ME: You should take strips of lettuce and weave them together, basket style. Then you’d have … a lettuce lattice.

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Newspapers feeling lucky?

James Fallows’ Atlantic piece on “How To Save The News” is absolutely required reading for anyone who has any interest in an article with such a title.

Lots of journalists distrust or resent Google, whose aggregation engines have sucked up a lot of Web traffic from newspaper websites. But it’s not Google’s fault that it understands how the Internet works — and how the world works — better than the ink-stained wretches do.

And those who care about newspapers, and understand the Internet, should take heart in the knowledge that Google is on the case. Here’s the money quote:

“I am convinced that there is a larger vision for news coming out of Google; that it is not simply a charity effort to buy off critics; and that it has been pushed hard enough by people at the top of the company, especially (CEO Eric) Schmidt, to become an internalized part of the culture in what is arguably the world’s most important media organization.”

(pic via the accompanying slideshow)

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The road not taken

Maybe I should have had kids. Given what kind of parent I’d be — extrapolating from my experience with pets and houseplants — I’m pretty sure that if I’d had kids 10 or 15 years ago they’d be dead by now anyway, so it’s pretty much a wash. (pic via Autographed Letter Signed)

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A future without Facebook

Wired has a really nice article on how Facebook really should be replaced with something less nasty: “Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative.”

But the article might have a bit more moral weight if it weren’t for the solicitation (down the page on the right) to “Like Wired” on Facebook.

And is it a coincidence that on the version of the ad that appeared when I viewed the article, I actually know one of the guys in that group of 10 people?

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