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Some quick things before I have to get back to the music (just 1 more day to go!):

I’m using the clover bullet point in anticipation of the Irish Festival this weekend!

I promised a shout to the fine folks at Hurricane Glass and Mirror, with whom I had an interview today. It probably won’t amount to anything, since I’m vastly overqualified for this particular job (I’m hearing that a lot), but on the other hand, they’ll be expanding their operations soon, and my skills can come in handy.

Anyway, it was a good interview, and the main reason I tried out is because the office is 2.5 miles from my house.

After almost 13 years of driving 27 miles to toil on the corporate minefield, it would feel like a paid vacation to work in a small office right here in my own town, even if I would be vastly underemployed.

In other news, I’ve been meaning to mention that William F. Buckley Jr. died this week.

Buckley was what you call a classic intellectual consevative — as opposed to what we have now.

RPM Challenge (my music project) progress report: With just one day left, desperate times call for wacky measures, thus the book you see at right.

Seriously, though, I saw this at the library and couldn’t resist; I posted a picture on the RPM message boards and got a laugh from some of my similarly desperate fellow challengees.

Hey Spook, tell your mom Happy Birthday for me tomorrow!

And Now For Something Completely Different: Tron footage remixed with the sounds of nerdcore master YTCracker.

(Click the picture for the original size.)

(UPDATE: Greetings to the visitors from Pamibe’s Carnival of the Canines! I guess at this point I should explain, since some of y’all don’t know us as well, that this is Bristol, trying to finish the job of tearing up my houseshoe, like he’s torn up half the other stuff in our house …)

Here’s how caught up I’ve been in the RPM Challenge: It’s only 3 days until the North Texas Irish Festival, and this is the first time I’ve mentioned it!

I had started to not go to it this year, since I’m still out of a job, but my wife insisted that I go, because it’s the only thing I look forward to all year, and I had to miss it year before last because I was freshly missing half a lung.

Isn’t she wonderful? (As if we needed further proof …)

I’ll probably go on Sunday this year, since I still haven’t finished my 10 songs (and since I’m not smart like Yay Kim, pacing herself last November when she did a similar musical project). I have to get my album postmarked by noon on Saturday, so Friday could be a late night for me if I don’t progress remarkably in the next couple of days.

Plus, there’s alot of peer pressure on the RPM message boards to do cover art for our albums.

Yes, I know I should resist, but it’s going to be bad enough that playing instruments and writing lyrics and singing on their albums (and some have even recorded in professional studios!), and now many of them have professionally designed album covers.

I had no idea the standards would be so high.

Anyway, I’m going to go back to working on the music thing now and try to leave some time for my usual psyching-up for the festival …

Can you believe it? I’ve been so busy doing the RPM challenge that I haven’t said one word about this year’s Oscars, and now they’re over.

Anyway, we both entered our local video store’s Oscar guessing contest, and here are our ballots below:

Click the picture for a larger view, so you can see how we voted.

Yeah, I know she got more right than me, shut up.

Posting 2 days in a row! Actually, I’m still working on music, so here’s a video, via Attack of the Show, suggesting that drugs were an important motif for the first Star Trek series.

Bonus points: It’s set to “White Rabbit”:

I especially like the very last shot, of Dr. McCoy; very effective …

Anyway, enjoy, I’ve got to get back to my sequencer …

Yes, it’s been almost a week since I’ve posted. Music is a cruel taskmistress, and even crueler when she’s in the employ of a limited-time project, like the RPM Challenge that I talk about so much. If I didn’t have my headphones off so I could watch Lost right now, I probably wouldn’t even be posting now.

No, it’s not that I’m composing that much music, but actually avoiding doing the work is very time-consuming in itself.

Also, there are auxiliary tasks associated with the challenge that are very tempting too. There’s the message boards, and the challenge profile blogs, the whole community thing. Plus, everybody’s posting pictures of their equipment and their bandmates and their album covers — seriously — so, you know how peer pressure is …

And then the system periodically puts random pictures in a horizontal scroll along the bottoms of certain pages, and here’s a scroll with the first one I posted:

Mine’s the one of the far right, with the musical animatronic dolls on top of my wife’s mixer.

The joke’s on them: I’m not actually using the mixer, nor the Boss BR900CD (I think that’s the right model number) that I’ve shown here previously.

Anyway: It’s a wonderful thing being a part of this one-month community. There’s a certain panicky kind of camaradarie when 3000 people under a time crunch face almost certain public embarassment.

But enough of this idle, nonproductive nonmusical chitchat; Lost is almost over, and I’ve got to get back to punching squares into a grid and calling it music.

I haven’t uploaded anything in a couple of days, but this last one, the third one, kind of rocks, as best I can remember at this point.

Yes, yes, it’s only the third song, with 8 days left to go. But I’ve got more material simmering on the back burner, I just have to get it in the boat and knock it on the head, then get it across the finish line.

Hey, what do you want, consistent metaphors, or MUSIC??

And yes, this is another song heavy on the Hammond Soul organ, plus it’s yet another instrumental. But this time there’s an “acid guitar” solo to mix things up.

It’s kind of an old, old, old skool rock, early 60’s, sort of Wild Weekend meets Green Onions meets Telstar meets none of those things.

Aw crap, JUST GO LISTEN TO THE DAMN THING.

Oh wait, you can’t, because I’m not posting the link yet.

Just let me know if you want the link, either in comments or email.

Meanwhile, I have to get back to my stuff on the stove.

You know, the stove on the boat, down by the track meet.

Except that we didn’t do very much … she was tired after work, and we hate fighting the Valentine’s night crowds, so I just went out and got some food from Mi Casa Tex-Mex …

The important thing is that Valentine’s Day always signals the beginning of …

The St. Patrick’s Day season! Woo-hoo!

So, listen to some nice Irish music, and let’s all start getting into the Blarney spirit!

We’ve only got another 32 days to get ready, ya know!

Again, I’m busy doing other things, like scanning in old writing samples because I’m in talks with a marketing company that might hire me, and I’m also of course working on the RPM music thing.

So here’s an interesting commercial, from the Super Bowl: It’s got a cool song, it’s got a hilarious cameo appearance in the last 5 seconds, and the first half of the commercial gives you an idea of what meetings were like where I used to work:

That oughta hold ya — see you tomorrow!

They’ve been showing this stuff on Attack of the Show lately: CringeVideo has taken some video tapes that were originally on Dallas public access TV and posted them to YouTube — and the ones they posted are pretty bad, like for instance:

The reason I bring this up is because I’m wondering when these shows were originally done — or, more importantly, what date range do these Cringe Video guys have access to?

This matters to me personally because exactly ten years ago, I was doing a segment on a show at that same public access station, and now I’m scared to death that some of those segments will reach the worldwide Internet audience.

Don’t worry, it’s nothing scandalous that would sink a Supreme Court nomination (hey, I have to keep my options open), but I know I was nervous and having to read a lot of my material, because sometimes we didn’t get much notice on what they wanted us to talk about, so there’s plenty for people to make fun of.

Hey, our only thought was that it was good enough for public access, since “nobody would see us”. And it worked for a while: I’ve only personally known one person who actually saw me. A guy that I barely knew, who worked in our production department and had seen me around, stopped me one day and asked me if I had a brother (I don’t), because he had seen either me or my brother on TV.

Ha! That was a truly bizarre, uplifting moment for me, being recognized that went out over the airwaves.

That was, of course, back before I had a blog that was being read in places as remote as Egypt and the Philippines; having my work “out in the wild” was new for me then.

And this same work might soon be “in the wild” once more.

Oh well, at least I wasn’t singing the Numa Numa song …

Too busy tonight making music for the RPM Challenge (and composing a follow-up email to the fine folks I interviewed with on Friday), so here’s a couple of quick things:

From Fark.com, film footage of Nixon goofing around in the moments before the resignation speech:

I’ve seen it before, but it’s always fun to see again.

Next, that I also read on Fark, Roy Scheider, Actor in ‘Jaws,’ Dies at 75.

“You’re gonna need a bigger boat. “

And finally, speaking of the recently departed and Republican Presidential scandals of the 70s, I just found out this morning that Earl Butz died this past week.

Butz (ha! Butts!) was Ford’s Agriculture Secretary, forced to step down during the Bicentennial year due to telling a dirty racial joke to a Rolling Stone reporter (!) and Pat Boone (!) during a plane flight.

Not the smartest move.

Anyway, that oughta hold ya, I’ll try to post more on Monday …