Nutritious Blue Spray

Magakrampi and Blanda have a new video for a track they recorded about a year ago. It's called Festival of Light.

( Watch video... )

My daughter is getting to be more fun as she gets older.  She's nearly 8 months old now.  Let's see... she's doing pretty much everything at this point: sitting up, wanting to stand, cruising, eating "solid" food, babbling, and waving "hi" :)  She still loves our long walks/hikes.  Oh, and swimming.  We're going to try to continue doing that over the fall, winter, & spring until outdoor pools are open again.

The fall has brought us some new television shows.  "Doctor Who" series 3 and "Torchwood" are stand-outs.  The subject I used for this post as well as the music I'm listening to are from Doctor Who.  In the episode "The Sound of Drums", the Master gleefully unleashes the Troclafane on Earth with "Voodoo Child" by the Rough Traders playing.  Very nicely done.  Too bad we can't get either of these shows in high-def yet; both the Sci Fi Channel and BBC America are only in standard definition.

The series premier of the "Bionic Woman" remake was marred by some kind of glitch in the way our cable system was retransmitting local HD channels.  They were all experiencing enough drop-outs to make viewing difficult.

Last week Heather got more pool time in--both at her paternal grandparents' place (twice!) and once more at the Highland Park pool. She really wants to be a little fish.

My 20th high school reunion was over the weekend--and it was better than I expected. We did not go to the informal Friday event, but there were some people who attended that whom I would have liked to see. We went a little late to the formal event on Sunday because we needed that pool time with Heather :) It was nice seeing folks I had kept in touch with but who live far away. And there were some folks I hadn't seen since high school that it was nice to see as well.

( See videos from 20 years ago... )
Anyway, Heather & I have been on our own for a couple of days again this week and things have gone well. She's had her first taste of (cow's milk) formula and we went through the drive-through car wash. Both fairly uneventful :)

Are you ready for a bonanza of video?  I hope so...

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Let me know what you think!  Maybe the files are too big, or the background music is too loud.  Any feedback is good feedback!

Colin & Mingo (sometimes known as Magakrampi & Blanda) had a new podcast last week.  (That link is the address you would use to setup iTunes to retrieve the podcast automagically.)  We had some requests for a holiday editon, but it is unknown at this time whether that will occur.

( Read more... )
Enjoy!

Nearly 19.5 years ago (!) Colin & Mingo stunned our High School audience with a rollicking live performance of We Have Mutated. Now, through the magic of YouTube, you too can witness the mayhem in this nostalgiac look at our heroes as they were in 1987...



The wobbly look is due to the amateur videographer who apparently didn't realize that the tripod should have been adjusted so that the edge of the stage was roughly horizontal when seen straight on...

Magakrampi & Blanda (sometimes known as Colin & Mingo) have another new podcast. And this time it's longer than 1.5 minutes :)
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One of the instrumental tracks on Electrosmog is called "al-Kitab al-mukhtasar fi hisab al-jabr wa'l-muqabala" ("The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing"), which is the name of the book that gave us the word "algebra". I was originally going to name the track using Arabic characters, but have since decided that the (English-speaking) world may not quite be ready for that...
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Colin & Mingo made a slight return (as Magakrampi & Blanda) last year, but now we're poised to make a full comeback with the release of Electrosmog.
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The favorite gifts I received this year (in no particular order) were:

• professional house history of our house from my wife


• 60-GByte iPod from my wife's family


• 1611 King James Bible reproduction from droopydog500 (thanks!)


• Serenity DVD from my wife


• pumpkin pie from my mother-in-law

I really have received more than I expected.

I was happy that I got my wife's presents in advance and that she liked them. The biggest thing though was a portable amp with speakers for her iPod (that I gave her last year for Christmas). Hmm... now it's just as useful for me as it is for her :)

Recently I started buying songs on iTunes. Normally I like to own the entire album, but that doesn't always work out as well as I would hope. And I seem to be interested in recreating times and places that I associate with some of this music.
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I searched for (the year) "1970" in "Popular Music" on Amazon.com tonight and received a list of search results along with this "helpful" correction:

    Did you mean: 1972

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I am the troll under the stairs.

I listen to Bruce Springsteen records over and over again: dubs, and mixes, and alternate versions. I use headphones to avoid bothering the house guests.
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Today is the first day of three where I'm not working and have nothing planned other than catching up on things I have neglected too long.

Well... that was the plan, anyway.

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A couple of weeks ago I learned that Vangelis had composed the soundtrack to Alexander, and furthermore that the German edition of the soundtrack would contain an extra track...

So I logged in on the German version of amazon.com and entered my order. Amazon seems to share its account database with its international locations, so ordering was easy.

The disc was supposed to ship on 2004-11-29 when it was to be released. On Thursday and Friday of the prior week, I received "Wichtige Nachrichten" in my email inbox from amazon.de, but I was too busy to translate them. I assumed that perhaps the release had been delayed.

I finally translated the third one on Monday (the day it was supposed to be released):

Falls Ihre * Kreditkarte * abgelehnt wurde, bitten wir um Angabe einer alternativen Kreditkarte oder einer ktuellen Bankverbindung (deutsches Konto oder bei Lieferung nach Oesterreich auch oesterreichisches Konto). Die Umstellung auf die Zahlungsweise Rechnung ist nicht moeglich. Eventuell waere auch die Ruecksprache mit Ihrem ank- oder Kreditkarteninstitut aufschlussreich. Vielleicht liegt der Grund fuer die Ablehnung aber auch am Ablaufdatum oder an einem Leitungsstau.

I checked my order details and found that amazon.de had the wrong credit card number listed. I fixed it and received notice two days later that the disc had shipped.:

unser Logistikzentrum hat den unten stehenden Artikel soeben verschickt!

So now I'm listening to the soundtrack for the first time. So far track 4 ("The Drums of Gaugamela") has been the best; perhaps I'll see the movie now after all :-)
Well, actually, I'm up to track 9 now since LiveJournal didn't accept my journal update the first time due to database maintenance so I had to reconstruct it...

Yesterday I was reading Pulp magazine (pretty much the equivalent of "In Pittsburgh" in case you know that defunct publication better) at my local coffee shop. When I got to the film reviews, I realized that it had been quite some time since I had seen an independent/foreign film, so I paid particular attention to those types of films in this particular instance.

The one that caught my attention the most was Games People Play: New York by independent filmmaker James Ronald Whitney. Honestly, I had never heard of him before, but I'm definitely interested in checking out the rest of his work now. Anyway, the review was certainly not overwhelmingly positive, but after I looked further at the movie site, I began wondering whether this was just going to be another jackass the movie with a bit of emotional drama or something more entirely. The thing that got me especially enthused was that the filmmaker would hold a questions-and-answer session following each showing of the film, which would be run only this weekend and today at the Oaks Theatre and then would be gone.

So the big problem was that there was a showing Sunday at 22:00 then another one today at 19:30 (both EDT, or "-0400")... The Sunday show was a bit late, but I had a conflict for the Monday one. I wish I had learned about the film earlier so I could have gone to the Saturday show.

Anyway, Amy was intrigued, but not enough to stay up late on a Sunday night... So I went alone. This was my first time to the Oaks, and it really is a nice theatre, and they have some interesting films scheduled for the rest of the summer--I think we'll be back again :-)

The film was interesting and definitely based in reality TV. The filmmaker actually spoke before the showing to provide a little context for the film and to clarify that everything we see was done by real people and once you've seen the end of the film, you know all there is to know about the 72 hours that it took to shoot the film. If you're not a fan of reality TV (and I'm not, BTW!) or of Jackass-style stunts (uh... I guess I am!) this may not be the film for you. But there's definitely a lot more to it than it seems at first. So if you're even a little intrigued by any of this, then you should definitely see the film.

The Q-A session afterward was enlightening, but unfortunately just added to the too-late-on-Sunday-night problem...

The weather at the time I left the theatre was warm & humid with a couple of distant lightning flashes. The lightning was so distant that there was no perceptible thunder, but the flashes illuminated the clouds in an oddly soothing way.

I opened the windows in the car and the sunroof and headed down Allegheny River Boulevard toward the City. It's a bit strange that the road seems much more like a country road than one so close to the city. There was little other traffic around, so I had the road to myself (but didn't take the opportunity to speed :-) So playing music at a comfortable volume and driving down the country-ish road late at night with no one around with pleasant pre-storm weather all combined to make the ride home very enjoyable. I don't think I can describe it any better. It would have been nice for Amy to be there too to share the experience, but I'm sure she's still happy that she opted for sleep instead :-)