Crushing Krisis

The Newest Oldest Blog In New Zealand

Archives for August 2007

Getting Regular: OCD moms, Suck flashback, pop economics, APOD, and other think-provoking links.

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In case you haven’t caught on, I have lit a bit of a fire under myself on the topic of Year 8 of Crushing Krisis, and part of that flame had extended to reading other blogs.

Blogs don’t exist in a vacuum, but if you pretend that yours does then its reality will conform to your whim. That’s been one of my biggest problems – I have plenty of regular reads, but beyond Rabi, Amanda, Jett, and Alison I don’t make much of a point of regularly reading, commenting and – most importantly – linking to my favorite compatriots.

I’m trying to surmount the first two difficulties by using Google Reader to aggregate my favorite RSS feeds. The reader has a handy “starred” feature to let me highlight my favorite posts, which will hopefully lead to many bounties of links such as the one you’re about to experience.

Okay, so I lied a little – I read more than just those four blogs on a regular basis. Like every other blogger on the face of the internet, I regularly read Dooce, ostensibly so I can chat about it with Lindsay over lunch, but more and more often because I love how she weaves in her OCD with her toddler stories.

(ps: Linds, I know you’re reading. Check out this post about photocamp. Spin any gears in your brain?)

On that same topic (the one before the parens), Whoopee is one of my favorite blogs from NaBloPoMo, as is Flotsam, with the terrifically statistically improbable phrase, “our embryos are the most beautiful embryos that ever underwent meiosis.”

I’m also a long time reader of Acerbia, which tricked me into thinking it was telling the truth for the first time in a while. And, I’m a devotee of Things That Make You Go Hmm, though TDavid often blogs faster than I can read, offering an embarrassment of rich links.

My favorite Hmm-link of the week was a brief feature on Whateverlife, a flashy-as-hell free MySpace layout website run by Ashley Qualls, a 17 year old girl living in Detroit. Oh, did I mention it gets roughly 60 million page views a month? For more interesting background, check out “Girl Power,” an article from FastCompany.

Not only is Ashley amazing, she’s saving us all from having to dumb down our web design skills just to satiate the beast that is MySpace.

God bless her.

Mlarson is another terrific blog for useful and/or thought-inducing links … without never ending commentary of TDavid or, say, yours truly. My favorite of his this week was a link to a diagram illustrating the difference between generalist and specialist approaches to problem-solving. That’s via Communication Nation and how could I not like a blog named that?

Speaking of things you can’t help but like, did you ever read Suck? Back in it’s late-90s heyday it was an utter addiction of mine – a daily dose of irreverence from a snarky group of anonymous writers.

Whether you recall it or not eZine Keep Going featured an amazing article about what they rightfully deem the first great website.

(What I love the most about the article is that it’s a whopping 15,000+ words. I love a piece of journalism that you can really sink into.)

That link was gleaned from Karl @ Paradox1x, proprietor of Philly Future, who has been reading CK a long-ass time. We’re talking early Year 2. This week he made an absolutely essential post (partially) about the problem with Facebook which I later commented upon. Also good: the power of tagging is as a byproduct, not a feature.

Jumping back one topic, another weighty article you might enjoy is The New Economics of Pop Music (via Smokler‘s del.icio.us). Oh, also, while you’re enjoying thing please enjoy my two favorite photos of the week, via Ugly Green Chair and Dooce.

Finally, randomly, the top ten most amazing pictures taken by Hubble. Trivial note: every desktop I work on has a background from Nasa’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, which draw endless complements. At home it’s stars, dust, and nebula, at work it’s blue lagoon. So, clearly I am a nebula fan, but, really, there are so many good ones that it’s very hard to choose.

One Astronomy shot i glanced at while compiling that sentence wasan illustration of the relative size of Earth, which is coincidental, as I had pegged this Debbie Millman post on planetary proportions as a must-link because it’s the first time I’ve ever truly been impacted by such a visual representation (probably because it shows depth).

As a rule of thumb, that’s roughly a fifth of the amount of great reading I’ve been missing out on in the past year just because I didn’t have an RSS reader. Scary.

And it’s mucked up that I can’t decide… ?

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Gina and I just came from a rehearsal with the Melange Theatre house band for our appearance at the September 20th show. The band rocks, and thus we will rock mightily. I hope you’ve bought your ticket.

During the course of said rehearsal I received my first ever request to censor a lyric. The lyric in question is in “Wait,” and goes as follows:

You call me on the phone
and I wish I pretended I wasn’t home,
’cause every time I hear your voice
I let you get too close.
You twist my guts up baby,
and it’s fucked up how we can’t deny
these feelings for long enough
to avoid climbing on for another ride

They asked very nicely, yet I still went into fight or flight mode. Why take out the “fuck” when the song has other gems in it like “next thing I know you’ll come over and stain the sheets”? Is the use of fuck, not even referring to fucking, any more explicit than that line?

The real issue is not that I want to say fuck so bad, but that “fucked up” maintains the assonance on the line, and the device is not satisfied by “effed up,” “messed up,” or “screwed up,” which were so helpfully suggested by others at the rehearsal.

Also, it provides an emphatic point for me to rejoin Gina on harmony, which was one of the reasons we split up the vocals the way we did in the first place.

(At the time I snapped defensively at the change I didn’t realize that I had all of those reasons running through my head, but now that I’m sitting down to write they’re all plain as day, which is exactly the problem with censorship – sometimes content is only part of the intent, and changing one piece of it to a soothing alternate often has a bigger impact than intended.)

If it was a song other than “Wait” I think I’d probably cut it from the set rather than change the line, because I don’t like the precedent it sets for further artistic direction. However, we really like to play “Wait,” and the band liked to play “Wait,” and we don’t really have another tune that fills the same sort of sonic space. So, I’m probably going to change it.

What to, I’m not sure. Suggestions welcomed.

Under the Chalk

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I am so very behind the times when I need Rolling Stone to tell me that a tune from PJ Harvey’s forthcoming piano-based record Under The Chalk has leaked onto the internet a month ago.

What the hell?

Luckily, the internet forgives and provides. Check out a rather transfixing YouTube performance of “When Under Ether” and/or stream the leaked track below, and then head to Philly-based mp3 blog Some Velvet Blog to check out the cover and tracklist of Chalk.

I really like it. I’m looking forward to the huge, inevitable number of Tori comparisons PJ’s record draws, as if she is suddenly professing to be a pianist; the entire point of her is that every album is completely different.

(Also discovered in my mad PJ hunt – The Yellow Stereo. Very good music writing, and taste.)

I so did not violate any confidentiality agreements by writing this post.

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How to write this post and not get fired? It’ll be tricky.

You all know by now I work in communications for a major Philadelphia company, and I love it. I get paid to do things I would probably be doing at home by myself anyway, as frightening as that concept is.

What you might not know (because I haven’t mentioned it in about seven years) is that I had a childhood obsession with the Price Is Right. I loved the One Bid, I loved the Showcase Showdown.

But, I loved nothing more than I loved Plinko.

I was obsessed with the way the penny slid into the board and plunked back and forth and to and fro down the pegs before it finally wound up in a prize slot.

You might not understand how those two facts are connected to each other. Here’s a hint:

Right now, somewhere in Philadelphia, there is a fully functional Plinko board.

I can’t tell you why there is a Plinko board, or where the Plinko board is, because it’s … well, it might be a trade secret? Like, if I were to reveal the purpose and location of the Plinko board, the reason behind my termination would be “dissemination of trade secrets on the internet.” I think.

What I can reveal is that within the last month my co-workers’ “duties as assigned” meant they had to acquire said Plinko board, and that when I walked one of said co-workers to the parking lot today I came within one hot second of climbing onto the roof of her mini-van like a fucking ninja and riding that sucker through rush hour to the location of the Plinko board.

I have been promised photos, and possibly even a video demo, of the Plinko board in action. Yet, pester, plead, and outright beg as I might I could not obtain permission to play, touch, or even view the Plinko board at its secret location. And, after tomorrow, it will be gone, whisked away by the cruel whims of fate (and/or the decrepit liver-spotted claws of nigh unknown game show dieties).

However, though I may be barred from visiting the Plinko mecca, or enlisting you to help me gain entry to it by some nefarious means, I have taken away one important thing from this experience:

I now know that there is a life-sized, fully-functional Plinko board that can be delivered to the Philadelphia metro area.

And, I’m pretty sure I have a high enough credit limit to rent it for the weekend…

An Itch That I Could Only Scratch

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I can say with some amount of certainty based on years of life experience that I am a sound sleeper. When I’m ready for sleep, I sleep well, with the exception of ticking watches, rogue hamsters, and urban roosters.

So, when I tell you that last Sunday I awoke from a dead sleep at 2:41 a.m. because my hands were itching, you have to understand that they were really itching.

To put it in perspective, last summer a dozen of our friends attended a wedding just outside St. Louis, and we spent the night in revelry on the banks of the Mississippi, and when we returned to Philadelphia we discovered that our feet were covered with angry red bits, up to the ankle.

We never discovered what the source of the bites was, but I had 103 of them, and the heat from the itching was bad enough that I took my shoes off while riding the Broad Street Subway.

Contemplate that for a minute. And then understand when I tell you that the itching that awoke me was worse. Much, much worse.

Actually, strike my last, it wasn’t even the itching that awoke me. It was the scratching. I was scratching my hands in my sleep. That’s how bad the itching was.

The worst part about it was that there was no discernible source – not bumps, scratches, or rashes to hint at my malady. I tried a dab of aloe on one hand and an Afterbite stick on the other, to no avail.

I tried to be rational and methodical. I made a list of foods I had eaten that day. I walked downstairs to check that we were using our normal laundry detergent. I pulled the pillows off of the bed and examined them closely. I checked my head for lice.

Nothing.

I visited Web M.D., but after extensively listing my symptoms the best it could suggest was an allergic reaction (or a drug addiction).

The day before Gina and I had wandered through the city for our first photo shoot as a band, taking pictures in front of abandoned shop fronts and dessicated alleyways. Had I got a splinter from one of the boarded up windows? Had I brushed against an urban sprout of poison oak?

The itching hadn’t resolved an hour later, at which point I was soaking my hands in ice water to take the edge off. At this point I sent an urgent email to Gina and Lindsay to see if they were experiencing the same symptoms, as well a very curious email to my boss which concluded:

This is much later than I’ve ever taken Benadryl on a work night, so there is a distinct chance I will be late in the morning due to my resulting stupor.