Eh, I almost deleted this

Do you know what I was thinking about earlier? Snow White and how the Wicked Queen had the worst motivation ever. She was jealous of her step-daughter's physical beauty, so she tried to kill her. What?

Cinderella's step-mother wanted her dead husband's money. Maleficent had some grudge against the king. Ursula wanted to rule Atlantica.

The Wicked Queen didn't want anyone to be prettier than her. WHAT THE FUCK?

Thus concludes this issue of bitching about things I love*.

*I hate Snow White, though. But I love Disney.

Weekly mix tape 16

I haven't done one of these in many weeks, so I thought I would showcase my playlist-creating brilliance here. Also, I make digital copies of these things for cute girls or people who ask nicely. (Let me pretend anyone still reads this, dammit.)

1. That's How You Know - Amy Adams
2. Never Had Nobody Like You - M. Ward with Zooey Deschanel
3. Mahna Mahna - Cake
4. Modern Girls & Old Fashion Men - The Strokes & Regina Spektor
5. And Your Bird Can Sing - The Beatles
6. People Got a Lotta Nerve - Neko Case
7. Wantin' Her Again - Ben Kweller
8. My Name Is Jonas - Weezer
9. Taper Jean Girl - Kings of Leon
10. On a Plain - Nirvana
11. Creep - Radiohead
12. We Get On - Kate Nash
13. Add It Up - Guster
14. Paper Bag - Fiona Apple
15. Vibrate - Rufus Wainwright
16. Fuck Was I - Jenny Owen Youngs
17. If There Was No You - Brandi Carlile
18. I Am Trying to Break Your Heart - Wilco
19. Turn to Stone - Ingrid Michaelson
20. Maps - Yeah Yeah Yeahs
21. Explain It to Me - Liz Phair

Oh the things that set me off

Last night I was watching Veronica Mars with Allison, and some rando on there said, "Frak!" and then had to explain to Veronica and whomever else that frak is from Battlestar Galactica and is "the swear of the future," and I got all het up and said, "Actually, it's the swear of the past!" foamed at the mouth, and fell into the hole between my bed and the wall. As I disobeyed Allison's advice not to get mad.

I am still mad. So mad I haven't even illegally downloaded Caprica, because Netflix says there's a very long wait for it. Eff you, Caprica, with your creepy Eric Stoltz.

ETA: I'm so glad I didn't let Ryan ruin Veronica Mars for me. He tried, but by that point in our relationship, I was really good at only pretending to listen to him.

She didn't shudder at my paw

In honor of my trip to Disney World on Saturday, I have compiled a playlist of all the Disney songs in my iTunes library. I have called it "Disney Explosion!" and I am posting it here just in case any of you had any lingering feelings that I might be considered, as the kids say, "cool."

Disney Explosion!
1. Belle
2. Belle (Reprise)
3. Gaston
4. Gaston (Reprise)
5. Be Our Guest
6. Something There
7. The Mob Song
8. Beauty and the Beast
9. Circle of Life
10. I Just Can't Wait to Be King
11. Be Prepared
12. Hakuna Matata
13. Can You Feel the Love Tonight
14. Cruella de Vil
15. Arabian Nights
16. One Jump Ahead
17. Friend Like Me
18. Prince Ali
19. A Whole New World
20. Prince Ali (Reprise)
21. Yo Ho! (A Pirate's Life for Me)
22. Long Ago... (Hercules intro)
23. The Gospel Truth I/Main Titles
24. The Gospel Truth II
25. The Gospel Truth III
26. Go the Distance
27. Go the Distance (reprise)
28. One Last Hope
29. Zero to Hero
30. I Won't Say (I'm in Love)
31. A Star Is Born
32. He's a Tramp
33. Sister Suffragette
34. The Life I Lead
35. The Perfect Nanny
36. A Spoonful of Sugar
37. Pavement Artist
38. Jolly Holiday
39. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
40. Stay Awake
41. I Love to Laugh
42. A British Bank (The Life I Lead)
43. Feed the Birds (Tuppence a Bag)
44. Fidelity Fiduciary Bank
45. Chim Chim Cher-ee
46. Step in Time
47. A Man Has Dreams
48. Let's Go Fly a Kite
49. Honor to Us All
50. Reflection
51. I'll Make a Man Out of You
52. A Girl Worth Fighting For
53. Prologue
54. Carrying the Banner
55. Santa Fe
56. The World Will Know
57. Seize the Day
58. King of New York
59. High Times, Hard Times
60. Seize the Day (Chorale)
61. Santa Fe (Reprise)
62. Once and for All
63. The World Will Know (Reprise)
64. Carrying the Banner (Finale)
65. I'll Try
66. Fathoms Below
67. Daughters of Triton
68. Part of Your World
69. Under the Sea
70. Part of Your World (Reprise)
71. Poor Unfortunate Souls
72. Les Poissons
73. Kiss the Girl
74. This Is Halloween
75. Jack's Lament
76. What's This?
77. Town Meeting Song
78. Jack's Obsession
79. Kidnap the Sandy Claws
80. Making Christmas
81. Oogie Boogie's Song
82. Sally's Song
83. Poor Jack
84. Finale/Reprise
85. When She Loved Me
86. The Bells of Notre Dame
87. Out There
88. Topsy Turvy
89. God Help the Outcasts
90. Heaven's Light/Hellfire
91. A Guy Like You
92. The Court of Miracles
93. The Belles of Notre Dame (Reprise)
94. Once Upon a Dream

1-8 from Beauty and the Beast, 9-13 from The Lion King, 14 from 101 Dalmatians, 15-20 from Aladdin, 21 from Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean ride, 22-31 from Hercules, 32 from Lady and the Tramp, 33-48 from Mary Poppins, 49-52 from Mulan, 53-64 from Newsies, 65 from Return to Neverland, 66-73 from The Little Mermaid, 74-84 from The Nightmare Before Christmas, 85 from Toy Story 2, 86-93 from The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 94 from Sleeping Beauty

I know I've already said this before

For some reason, the line "O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?" is, like, the most famous line from Romeo and Juliet. I guess cuz it's from the balcony scene, and that's the most famous scene? And I'm sure we're all familiar with various modern allusions to it, in which people always seem to be looking for someone when they say that. But let me show you something. The line is:

O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?

NOT

O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou, Romeo?

Do you see what I did there? Fucking everyone, when they say "wherefore art thou," uses it as a direct address. But it's not. Juliet is bemoaning the fact that she and Romeo are children of feuding houses--"wherefore art thou Romeo" means, "Why the fuck is your name Romeo Montague, you unfortunate son of a bitch? If it weren't we could be together!" Roughly.

Yes, he's spying on her while she says this, but she's not looking for him. She's moping. Here's the whole thing she says:

O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name!
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love
and I'll no longer be a Capulet.

She might as well be saying, "Wherefore am I Juliet?" But that's not very poetic, is it?

Even aside from all of this, I just don't understand how you would see this word, wherefore, and just assume it's, what, like some archaic version of where. Use your brains.

Cranky

Instead of Hera being, like, I don't know, the first us, she should have been the symbol of learning to live with the robots, instead of depending on them and growing complacent and having it all blow up in our faces. That way, when they start over again on the place where humanity first frakked up big time, all this will not happen again.

Having the Fleet populate this planet is still the dumbest god damn thing I've ever heard.

Hate
Hate
HATE.

I'd have joined your mutiny, Felix, if I'd known this is what it was coming to.

Frak Earth

I could frakkin' let loose about my extreme disappointment with the finale of Battlestar Galactica, but I really want to just say this:

From the beginning, I'd been hoping and hoping and hoping that this wouldn't be how it ended. That they wouldn't find our Earth and basically be the first humans there. Because that is the dumbest god damn thing I've ever heard. When they got to Earth at the end of the first half of the last season, and it was all bombed out, I was like, "Oh! Yay!" But then they were like, "All these remains are Cylons," and I was like, "Whuh? That's not Earth, then, huh?"

And then they ended up here, on Africa, and they just... Ugh! Aside from being cheesy and stupid, it doesn't make any anthropological sense, but I don't even know enough about anthropology to tell you why, so I'll just skip that.

What I wanted to happen, ever since we found out Earth wasn't this planet we're living on, was that they would eventually find this ball of rock, and they would find the ruins of humanity's first try at civilization. And it would be enough thousands of years for the planet to be recovering from whatever kind of bombs and crap would have destroyed humanity in the first place. They could find humanity's real origins, not some place called Kobol where the Earthlings would have gone to start over and forget the disaster of Earth ever happened.

Instead they landed here before anything got going, and the whole series turned into a warning for us, the latest modern incarnation of humanity, not to frak too much with technology, because the robots will turn on you and blow your entire world to pieces.

In retrospect, "All this has happened before, and all this will happen again," is fucking depressing. I mean, it has been demonstrated that humanity is slow to learn from its mistakes, but the way the fleet decided to settle on Earth meant that they didn't even want to try. Because, you know, we modern-day Earthlings are entirely unaware of this civilization that went before us, so everything those 38,000 people may have learned was lost--literally hurled into the frakking sun.

And then there's all the things that came from this Earth that have appeared throughout the series. We'll ignore the most obvious, "All Along the Watchtower," and the Greek gods and the zodiac for now. What I want to talk about is the words--the words that Baltar and Roslin and Sam used that came from English writers. Baltar and Roslin both quoted Shakespeare. When Sam was all brain-broken, he babbled words from Milton, from Paradise Lost. Now. The way I was hoping things had happened, that literature had made it from Earth to Kobol to the Colonies, maybe in tattered form and not well-documented or something, but still, it had been written before, and it had been able to last through the years, because it was that pervasive throughout human civilization. Shakespeare, especially, has that gift.

But the way it seems to have happened now, after the finale, is that artists are just being divinely inspired to say the same things over and over again. Sam, Kara's dad, and Bob Dylan all wrote the same song. Sam and John Milton have the same exact words to say about existence and God and whatever.

The Shakespeare stuff, I guess I could overlook, because he is so pervasive it might be the writers didn't even realize they were quoting, but "shuffle off this mortal coil"? That just occurred to Gaius Baltar the way it occurred to William Shakespeare?

You know me. I think divine inspiration is absolute bullshit. So this is what bugs more than anything else. That there's no explanation for why Sam knows the words to Paradise Lost or why Laura Roslin would use the specific phrase "pound of flesh" in some kind of political situation. Damn, I can't remember why she used that--it was way back in the first season, I think--but I jumped on it right away as being the entire point of the play The Merchant of Venice. And since Roslin was using it metaphorically--you know, no one was asking for a literal pound of flesh, like in the play--where did she get it from???

Argh. I don't even care anymore about the lame thing they did with Starbuck: angel, demon, messiah, whatever the fuck. The language thing is such an issue. Like, the fleet arrived before homo sapiens sapiens even developed, because the people on the planet didn't even have language, and all the foreign humans spoke the same language, and yet, all these bazillions of different languages developed? And went through various stages of development? I'm sure no one on the staff thought about that, but oh my god, it is bugging the shit out of me.

And then the Greek gods, who have the same names as the Lords of Kobol. Did the Geminese (they were the fanatic planet, right?) end up in the Mediterranean and immediately establish their religion? I don't understand. It makes so much more sense to me if the humans who got to Kobol set up a new religion, a new civilization with the alleged best pieces of all the old ones from Earth, and over the years the story of how civilization on Kobol all started got lost, because I don't know, maybe it's because of the limited scope of the story, but it seems to me that all the people from the colonies speak the exact same language and have the exact same history/religion, and each colony has a variant take on aspects of this culture, but they have the same core. That seems to me more like what would happen after humanity's first collapse--they'd rebuild with bits and pieces of what they knew before. But here, on this Earth, a whole bunch of different cultures and religions and histories and languages developed, basically independently of each other. They all share certain similarities, certain myth patterns, because there are certainly shared aspects of humanity, but they're not similar enough to have the same core story as their base.

It was the easy way to go: to have the Kobol as the birthplace of humanity story be literal and to have the fleet be the first human inhabitants of Earth. They should have turned that story around, explored what Kobol meant, but I guess they didn't want to do another season, so they came up with this predictable-ass ending. Science fiction television has been doing this preachy "don't fuck with robots" ending over and over and over again. And that was what I liked most about Battlestar Galactica: it went beyond standard sci-fi tropes, like Ray Bradbury can do, like I thought the first season of Roswell did, and it was about the people, not about some message. But it ended up in a cliche sci-fi place: technology is fucking dangerous. The end. I mean, that was the actual end: fake Six and Baltar arguing about whether or not humanity would repeat its doomed relationship with technology.

And so I hated it. Hated it, hated it, hated it.

Venting my digital spleen

There are some things I would like to know about Front Row, which I almost want to marry, but I can't quite make the commitment because it has some serious flaws.

On the real, I would really like to know where it's grabbing the files--does it go through iTunes at all, or does it just take the folders and files in the Music and Movies folders and vomit them onto its interface? I mean, it would seem to bypass parts of the iTunes library, because no matter what I do, I can't get Front Row to look like my iTunes library, particularly in the area of television shows.

So I get that Apple thought it was a brilliant idea to list the episodes of each show in reverse order, keeping the most recent on top for easy viewing after iTunes has downloaded the latest episode of the show. Fine. And I know there are dicey legal issues about ripping DVDs, even for personal use, so they just ignored that and organized based on episodes bought from the iTunes store, but come on. Plenty of OCD nerds want the episodes displayed in the correct order. So why can't Apple create user preferences for Front Row, so it displays content the way you, the OCD nerd, would prefer? Doesn't Apple understand about OCD nerds?!

Basically, my real problem is that Front Row will not display seasons of television shows in the proper order. Some of them are listed 1,2,3, etc. Some are listed 4,3,2,1 (for example). And some are listed ridiculously 7,6,1,2,3,4,5 (Gilmore Girls) or 11,5,10,6,4,3,2,1 (South Park). Friday Night Lights goes 2,3,1, and Grey's Anatomy goes 3,2,1,4. How does this happen??? I've tried organizing the files into folders named by season, and that worked on Popular and Xena, but that's it. So what is the deal? I feel like I should tell Apple that this is a big problem, but would they even listen? And then do I want to get into the fact that I've ripped hundreds of DVDs onto an external hard drive so I can watch them on my iMac because, maybe you missed this, but I am a(n OCD) nerd?

Really, I would just like to know how Front Row works, because this is driving me bananas. Also, why can't you play video playlists in Front Row? Come on, Apple. This interface could be totally awesome, and yet it's stuck at almost awesome but simultaneously fucking frustrating. Let's develop this, please. I give you the input; your OCD nerd engineers write the updates. This could be a beautiful partnership. And then you could give me a free Apple TV as thanks for my invaluable insight.

Yes, I know Blake Sennett also sings

So I enjoy Rilo Kiley quite a bit, so their songs often make appearances on the Weekly Mix Tapes, which I play in the car, and Mike has asked me "who is this?" at least twice during a Rilo Kiley song, and every time I tell him, he goes, "I like her." He has heard of Rilo Kiley before, I know, but he doesn't seem aware that they're a band. This drives me crazy, that he thinks Rilo Kiley is the name of the singer (it's Jenny Lewis, nerds), and I corrected him once a million years ago, and he got all defensive and brought up, like, No Doubt and Gwen Stefani to defend his use of "her" instead of "them," but who ever listened to a No Doubt song and only referred to "her"? So I haven't brought it up since, but both subsequent times I have wanted to say, "Rilo Kiley is a band, you know," but I keep fighting this snobbish urge.

I guess I'm growing or some shit.

This reminds me of the time Carlos and I made fun of Jess for thinking Led Zeppelin was a guy, not a band, but apparently it wasn't Jess who thought that. I was sure this happened, and now I'm hoping it did, except Lauren was the maroon who thought Led Zeppelin was a guy, but she's that smart. Or maybe it was Martha! Oh, god, it could have been any one of our friends, huh.

(As an utter aside, I wikipedia'd Rilo Kiley to look up Blake's last name, and dude. He was Ronnie Pinsky on Salute Your Shorts. Bangarang.)

A collection of things I thought yesterday

So I was lookin' up Brandi tickets at the Portsmouth Music Hall for April Fools' Day, and they had this whole paragraph about her, and it ended with this: "Come find out why one critic said, 'When she took the stage, you'd think the crowd was welcoming Jim Morrison, circa 1965.'" Which just made me snort, because, yeah, we lesbians can be pretty effin' enthusiastic. And then I was like, hey! Even Brandi Carlile is a better song-writer than effin' Jim Morrison. What was the deal with that douche, anyway? Have you listened to the lyrics to "Light My Fire"? "Wallow in the mire"? Is he an actual, literal pig? Someone abused that rhyming dictionary!

Anyway, yeah, I am so over my crazed Brandi Carlile obsession, but she's gonna be in NH, and her live shows are always awesome, so I'm gonna take my mom, since I have no friends, and I'm broke, and she'll pay!
Then I read something somewhere on the internet about someone studying for "the dbq," and my body went rigid, and I was like, "How do I know that acronym?" Then I fell down dead. DBQ stands for "Document-Based Question," and I experienced its wrath during the AP U.S. history exam. And I spent most of AP U.S. history practicing for that mess. And Mrs. Deblasio hated me. But it was cool--I hated her narrow-minded, preachy ass right back! God damn, I was in her class the year Bush stole the election from Al Gore, and that Wednesday in November was just odious. The only reason I took the class was that, clearly, I had to take as many AP classes as possible, and since the maths and sciences were so far out of the question, and AP Spanish wasn't even offered (!!!), I had to go with U.S. history, both Englishes, and U.S. government.

Sorry, that story was boring, but I had to exorcise those high school demons.
So I caved and watched two minutes of last week's Grey's on youtube, because I'm sorry, but I love to see Sara Ramirez kiss a lady, and then I was going to write this whole rant about how the Grey's people clearly just replaced Brooke Smith with a younger, "hotter" model (no offense to Jessica Capshaw--she's lovely in her own right, but I would pick Brooke Smith over her any day of the week), but I just don't have the energy. Mostly, that kiss was kinda lame. The elevator kiss was way hotter, and Callie was being taken by surprise there too! Boo! Brooke Smith 4-EVA!

I guess Callie has a rather specific type, huh?
In conclusion, I bought Ingrid Michaelson's iTunes Live E.P. today, and she does a cover of "Creep" with a ukulele, which is quite interesting indeed. Mostly, I love this album for another live version of "The Chain." That song hits me right were it counts--the hearthole.

Ingrid Michaelson is a talented and pretty lady who wears glasses, and every time she comes to Boston, she sells out her show before I even know about it. I need to be more on top of these things.

Wednesday afternoon answers!

1. Who Will Save Your Soul? - Jewel
2. Building a Mystery - Sarah McLachlan
3. Every Day Is a Winding Road - Sheryl Crow
4. No Rain - Blind Melon
5. Fast Car - Tracy Chapman
6. Why Can't I? - Liz Phair
7. Everybody Hurts - R.E.M.
8. Something to Talk About - Bonnie Raitt
9. The Weight - The Band
10. Touch of Grey - Grateful Dead
11. Spiderwebs - No Doubt
12. The World Has Turned and Left Me Here - Weezer
13. Sleep to Dream - Fiona Apple
14. Don't Bother - Shakira
15. Stand - R.E.M.
16. Sunny Came Home - Shawn Colvin
17. Closing Time - Semisonic
18. Two Princes - Spin Doctors
19. Hand in My Pocket - Alanis Morissette
20. The Remedy (I Won't Worry) - Jason Mraz
21. Breakfast at Tiffany's - Deep Blue Something
22. Why - Annie Lennox (I skipped the "whyyyyyyyyyy" at the beginning, is that cheating?)
23. Me and Bobby McGee - Janis Joplin (aka Janet Jopler)
24. Til I Hear It from You - Gin Blossoms
25. Why Georgia - John Mayer
26. A Long December - Counting Crows
27. Babylon - David Gray
28. Ants Marching - Dave Matthews Band
29. Celebrity Skin - Hole
30. Found Out About You - Gin Blossoms

iTunes had a serious '90s thing going on. And two Gin Blossoms songs! Those are, like, the only two Gin Blossoms songs I have. I'll rework the shufflable pool again next time and see what spits out. This sure is fun for me.

An observation or two

One day, when I was twitter surfing, I read on some rando's feed something like, "If Jack Kerouac were alive, twenty-three [I think? I don't know if Tegan and Sara were 23 when this song came about, but that's what the twit said], and a pair of gay Canadian twins, he would have written the song 'Nineteen.'" iTunes played me that song this morning, and the line "I felt you in my legs before I ever met you" totally made me remember that random twit I read. I don't know about the rest of the song being Kerouac-esque, but I've read four Kerouac books, and that first line totally jolted me for being like his writing. Also, I love the iTunes Live version of that song. The end!

I've been hard-up for mix tape inspiration these days, and even though the mix tapes are just for my own personal enjoyment, and no one notices when I don't update the sidebar, I love making them and listening to them in the car, and two weeks listening to the same one is too long, and then Sunday night my iPod got mad at me and only accepted 4 or 5 songs from each playlist, which of course I didn't realize until Monday morning in the car, trying to decide what to listen to on the way to work. I don't know what that mess was supposed to reveal to you, except that I need new mixes! And I really like calling them mix tapes, even though no one has tapes anymore, and I don't even put these mixes on compact discs--they exist entirely digitally--but whatever. So, anyway, for this week I decided to cheat with Genius. I picked a song (in this case, "She'll Come Back to Me" by Cake) and let Genius fly. I deleted the extra songs from the same artist, added four or five myself, and voila! Mix tape. So I don't hate Genius anymore, because it does dig up songs I would sometimes tend to overlook, but for making complete mixes, it's still lacking. I tried to do a Ditty Bops song, and it only gave me ten songs, even though it's supposed to do 25 at minium. Lacking!

Tuesday morning blog fun!

Because this amuses me and possibly one other person, I wanted to do this again. I modified the shuffle settings a little bit, by which I mean I shrunk my library pool with the hope of eliminating the obscure songs and the Muppets soundtracks, so hopefully this one should be more entertaining. (The way I play this game for myself is that I try to write out the first line before it's actually sung. Just so you know what I get out of this.)

1. People live their lives for you on tv
2. You come out at night
3. I hitched a ride with a vending machine repairman
4. All I can say is that my life is pretty plain
5. You got a fast car
6. Get a load of me, get a load of you
7. When the day is long, and the night, the night is yours alone
8. People are talkin', talkin' 'bout people
9. I pulled into Nazareth, was feelin' about half-past dead
10. Must be getting early, clocks are running late
11. You think that we connect
12. The world has turned and left me here
13. I tell you how I feel, but you don't care
14. She's got the kind of look that defies gravity
15. Stand in the place where you live
16. Sunny came home to her favorite room
17. Closing time, open all the doors and let you out into the world
18. One, two princes lived before you
19. I'm broke but I'm happy
20. Well I saw fireworks from the freeway
21. You'll say that we've got nothing in common
22. How many times do I have to try to tell you that I'm sorry for the things I've done
23. Busted a flat in Baton Rouge, waitin' for a train
24. I didn't ask--you shouldn't have told me
25. I am driving up 85 in the kind of morning that lasts all afternoon
26. A long December, and there's reason to believe
27. Friday night, I'm going nowhere
28. He wakes up in the morning
29. Oh make me over
30. All last summer, in case you don't recall

Answers tomorrow afternoon! Guess away, anyone. Full disclosure: I got 25 of these, so they're definitely easier.

iPod tweaks

I wrote this a few years ago, when I still had a PC, long before everyone was using Vista (or maybe even before Vista had been released), but it might still come in handy to someone, so I decided to transfer it over here. Hopefully, these instructions work for Vista. If not, I can tweak them as I learn about Vista.

To transfer music from your iPod to your computer:

1. Connect the iPod to the computer. If iTunes opens and gives you bullshit about different libraries or whatever, tell it to cram it, then close iTunes.

2. Open My Computer.

3. Double click the icon for your iPod (should be Drive E: or F:).

4. Select Folder Options from the Tools menu in the iPod window.

5. Click the View tab.

6. In the Advanced Settings pane, select Show hidden files and folders. Click OK.

7. You should see a folder in the iPod window called iPod_control. Double click it.

8. Double click the Music folder. You should see a bunch of folders labeled F00, F01, F02, etc. All of your music files are in these folders.

9. Choose Select All from the Edit menu to highlight all the folders.

10. Choose Copy to Folder from the Edit menu.

11. Choose the folder to which you'd like to copy your music files, and then click Copy. It may take a while, but eventually, all your music files will be transferred to the designated folder on your computer.

12. Once the file transfer is complete, you can import these songs into iTunes--just choose Add folder to library from the File menu and select the folder in which your F00, F01, F02, etc. folders are now located (I would recommend the My Music folder).

*Your music files themselves will have shortened names, but as long as you have the track/artist/album info entered in the tags, all of that should be preserved once you add them to iTunes. And if you have iTunes set up to do so, it will rename the files and reorganize them into folders by artist and album name. Any troubles, let me know.

Unintelligible squealing

If I were ranking my imaginary girlfriends again, Kelly Clarkson would once again be at the top. I can't believe I almost kicked her off. She is the loveliest woman on the planet, and she sings, and I LOVE her. Last night, I watched the video for "My Life Would Suck Without You," which is just so...cute!

Oh my god, and then, internet, I actually wrote a review of the single for iTunes, just cuz. I don't write reviews of things! At least not anywhere other than here! It was an unintelligible bunch of baloney, but I really wanted to give the song five stars, and then they had this whole box for words, and I like words, so I wrote some. (Also, iTunes has a list of helpful suggestions for review writing, and one of them is "Take the time to copy edit your work so that you avoid embarrassing typos or grammatical errors." I LOVE YOU iTunes.)

Also, there's this brief part in the video where she's wearing a man shirt and boxers as, like, pjs, and oh man. So cute. I have to find her and pledge my love.

(I included both of these screen grabs cuz I couldn't decide which was better. Deal with it.)

I don't know. I can't take it. I love her so bad, and apparently her album is coming out on March 10 now instead of March 17, which, yay! But that's still too far away. I would like it now. And I would like iTunes to sell it with bonus tracks if you pre-order it like they did with the last one. Chip chop chip, iTunes.

I think I forgot how to write a blog post

Hello, internet, how are you? I haven't felt much like blogging lately. I've been very busy lately outgaying myself by watching all seven trillion episodes of Xena: Warrior Princess, and gosh, Lucy Lawless is hot. And gosh, that show is gayer than I'd ever imagined. It was good times. But now that's done, and so what do I do with myself?

Well, internet, I am moving. My best boy Mike and I finally got our act together and leased an apartment. We move in on Saturday. I cannot effing wait. As nice as it is to live rent-free in my mother's basement, I am so sick of living with my brothers. They are giant pains. Also, I am sick of living in my mother's basement, just on principle. I'm twenty-four, and I'm employed. Time to bail. Apartments aren't cheap in this stupid area, but Mike and I found a good one we can afford. It's huge, too, and I have my own half of a bathroom! So sensitive Mike won't have to deal with the horrors of feminine hygiene.

Also, I bought a Wii as a housewarming gift to us, and soon we will purchase the Rock Band version of Guitar Hero. (World Tour or something? Whatever.) And then there will be a lot of bad fake instrument playing and off-key wailing in our house. The cats! They will love it! And the neighbors as well, I'm sure. Our next purchase, hopefully, will be a new widescreen tv, and then I will finally realize my dream of owning an Apple TV. Oh, joys. Then I won't need my DVDs at all! Anyone wanna buy some DVDs?

Several of our friends have already informed us that they will be hanging out at our swinging new bachelor pad all the time, and I, though I quite enjoy my privacy, am thrilled. I love having the hangout house. I did junior year of college, when four of us lived in a giant six-person suite, and now it will be happening again. We have a lot of second-hand furniture from our families, so there will be couches to sleep on and everything! So come on over, internet. Mike and I know how to party.

I read an article, then forgot where it came from

Okay, so I'd heard vaguely of this "iPod concierge" service before, like, a year or two after the iPod was first introduced, and basically some nerd offers to fill up your iPod for you, either importing your CD collection or just going to town on the iTunes store with a list or selecting songs herself based on any preferences you may have. I was like, "Oh please, who on earth would bother paying for that?" Because I was as yet mostly unaware of how little extra rich people care for money. Also, I just could not understand why anyone wouldn't want to do this for himself.

Anyway, I totally want that job, but here's the thing. I would do it for free. Yes. I love messing with iTunes and iPods and organizing music libraries and even the mostly tedious process of importing CDs so much that I would volunteer to load up people's iPods for them. I could also do DVDs, but that would take a lot of extra time. So, you know, if anyone out there wants help with iPods/iTunes at no cost email me. Seriously, you'll be doing me a favor.

Nerdier by the hour

So a friend of mine who is still in school (suckah!) is taking a Shakespeare class this semester, and this has caused me to think about Shakespeare things. I did a tally, and I have read 22 out of 38 plays, which sounds impressive at first glance (if you're into that sort of thing, anyway), but it's really only a little more than half of them. Now I must read the rest. Clearly.

Secondly, I was thinking about all the ways Shakespeare shows up in modern works. For one, NBC did a TV version of The Tempest some time ago, when Katherine Heigl was turning me gay--she was Miranda. And it took place in the Louisiana bayou during (or just after) the American Civil War, and like, it was terrible. I can't remember if I've seen a recorded staging of The Tempest. Stephen had us watch recorded stagings of some of the plays we read in class, but they were usually so dull that I turned them off after the first act.

For two, in the fourth pants book, Carmen gets a part in some theater company's summer production of The Winter's Tale--she's Perdita, in fact, and she has this strange flirtation with some mildly famous British actor who is also in the cast, but he's, like, older than she is, and he's allegedly playing Mamillius, but, uh, Mamillius dies when he's, like, five, from grief because he thinks his mother is dead, and he has about two lines. I hate that! When the author apparently just looked a list of parts in the play and picked one. In the pants movie, this fellow plays Florizel, who is Perdita's love interest, which, for Christ's sake, makes so much more sense. At least whoever was in charge of the movie was familiar with Shakespeare. Ugh.

Uh, okay, that's it, I guess. Viva Shakespeare! And down with Ann Brashares!

Outnerding myself again (this time by request!)

Things I have noticed on Battlestar Galactica that are unquestionably earthling in origin:

1. Laura Roslin uses the phrase "pound of flesh" (and I totally forget why--but it was apt), which is from Shakespeare's play The Merchant of Venice.
2. Dr. Cottle, astonished to learn Dr. Robert is refusing to give the Sagittarons medicine, demands to know what happened to "First, do no harm" which is widely thought to be part of the Hippocratic Oath, but is not. It is, however, attributed to Hippocrates, who came from Earth.
3. The Cylon siren song is "All Along the Watchtower"! That is even more unmistakably from Earth than the other two! (Unless Bob Dylan is a Cylon. Then all bets are off!)
   
4. Baltar uses the phrase "shuffle off this mortal coil" in one of his wireless broadcasts. That is from Hamlet.
   

Anyway, I mostly figure that all the signposts they find and interpret as the 13th tribe's path from Kobol to Earth are actually signposts of the Earthlings leaving Earth for Kobol--leaving markers along the way in case anyone needs to go back.

Did I say dorking out yesterday? Today is so much worse.

Some days ago, Allison and I were fantasizing about having millions of dollars, and she said something about me buying an iPod for every day of the week, and even though she was totally making fun of me, ever since then I haven't been able to get the idea out of my head.

Mind you, I am fully aware of how stupid, useless, and wasteful that would be. If I had millions, I would certainly use them for my own enjoyment, but I also hope I would avoid the five cars, overly large house pitfall and use good portions of my riches to help others. By which I mean, I would hopefully not buy a bunch of expensive things I clearly don't need just because I can.

However. Sometimes I still selfishly fantasize about the fun of having eight different iPods--seven nanos for each day of the week and one classic to hold music and videos. Okay, the only reason this occupies my nerdiest fantasies is that Apple released the nanos in all these pretty colors. I could use the red one on Mondays, and it could be full of certain kinds of Monday-ish songs, and then the blue one on Tuesdays, etc. (Awesomely enough, there are nine different colors of nanos, so I wouldn't even have to buy a pink one to carry out this plan.) I would totally color-coordinate/day-coordinate my music library too, which is, um, ridiculous, but oh, the joy it would bring to my nerdy little heart.

So I'm sad to say that if I had millions, I would probably buy seven iPod nanos and then start obsessively going through my library, making lists of which songs to put on which color for which day. Maybe I will do that anyway, for the phantom iPod nanos I will never buy, because I will never have millions.

What I should buy instead of seven iPods I don't need (really, what is wrong with me?) is an Apple TV. That would be rather awesome. However, we have this whole fancy home theater thing set up now, and I could not add an Apple TV to that mess myself, because I am, sadly, not that geeky, so I would have to go to Tweeter and buy the Apple TV and then ask nicely if they can come over and hook it up for me. Which they would do. For extra dough, most likely. But! Worth it. Plus, I could buy the cheaper one, because I'd have all my media on my computer and wouldn't need to store it locally on the box itself, thus saving myself the money I will have to spend on an installation. Oh, boo.

Told you it was dorkier today.