Author: chrisbenson

Please read this… Why Buffy Kicked Ass: The deep meaning of TV’s favorite vampire slayer.

Hey! Survivor’s about to start… check it out: Survivor 7.

One of the strange things that I think about from time to time is, ‘What if there was some horrible cataclysm, and I were one of the few people who survived. How much of human culture could I be relied on to carry single-handedly into the future, and would it be enough to prevent a new dark age?’ A slight variant on this thought is, ‘If I were abducted by aliens as a representative homo sapiens sapiens, what picture of our species would they get from downloading my brain?’

I think the bottom line is that I do know enough to keep us from falling into a dark age, but it really makes me realize how much I (or any one person) comes up short. I mean, arithmetic and algebra would carry on, but calculus might be a bit spotty, and if it depends on me, Euler substitutions are not going to be around anymore. All languages other than English would be lost. I’d be sure to tell them that everything is made of atoms. A lot of music stuff would be saved, even if I were the only person in the world who could still tune a guitar. Of course, there’s a lot of other areas that I could at least describe or interpret, so maybe we’d be OK. Sure is interesting to think about, though.

I have been really frustrated because my current ISP is limiting me to 10 MB total space, and I’ve wanted to upload a buttload of my music, and I realized awhile ago that even though my old ISP has been out of business for years, my old, more or less unlimited server space is still accessible through FTP. Long story short, I’ve uploaded several megabytes of my original songs to my old FTP, and I’m linking to them in the table below. Enjoy while you can!

I Don’t Love You No More	A lighthearted country ditty.
Why Are We All So Afraid?	Really cool guitar – good lyrics & good atmosphere provided by my brother Kevin.
All I Ever Wanna Do	Good song – the girl I wrote it for was unimpressed, but that’s OK – I like it. Not a very good recording, though.
Couples & Money	Very nice, bouncy little Beatlesque thing. Actually appears on a commercial audiobook by the same name, in a slightly different studio recording that’s not as good.
Go with the Flow	Major Lennon-ish production number.
For Chaaya	Very real sounding classical guitar piece, but it ain’t live – it’s Memorex. Even when I actually played this many years ago, I used several tracks.
Sometimes It’s Hard	This may well be the best thing I’ve ever come up with.
Levi’s 501 Ad	This was back in the days when Sasson jeans was running an ad where Elton John sang ‘Sassons mean so much.’ I actually sent it to Levi’s via Foote, Cone & Belding, and they sent it back registered mail with a copy of their unsolicited ideas policy.
Look Around	Another Lennon song I tried to write.
No Woman Blues	What it says.
Out in the Rain	This is my first big piano number from when we got my mother-in-law’s old piano a few years ago.
Separation	20-something angst about a long-distance romance. Nice pseudo-classical acoustic solo piece played live.
I’m So in Love with You	This may be my most elaborate production number to date.
Ton of Pain	Another light-hearted country piece.

J-walk has a link today to a site that has a museum of old AOL disks, and he notes with some amusement that they used to offer only 10 Free Hours. When I had to put my foot down was when they very first started saying ‘Get 750 Free Hours for the 1st Month!’ and I wrote them an impassioned e-mail imploring them to please include the disclaimer ‘*excluding February.’ You do the math.

I’m not generally a conspiracy theorist, but I’ve been thinking about this whole Al Franken vs. Bill O’Reilly/Fox News thing, and it’s occurred to me that these guys are both bright enough marketers and self-promoters that they may just have agreed with each other up front to put on this big show for us to promote both of their books and Fox might even be in on it. I mean, if you’ll stoop to showing Alien Autopsy, where do you draw the line?

(And coming up next on Celebrity Boxing…)

Must blog… too ill… can’t think… sick as dog. Still feeling pretty out of it, so I’ll be brief. I went to the doctor last Thursday and got some antibiotic eyedrops that are close to having the pink out of my eyes, but my other symptoms (headache, cough, sore throat, body aches, fatigue) have all pretty much gotten worse.

I was so dumb when I saw the doctor that when he asked me if I wanted anything else, like cough medicine, I said, “No, I don’t think my cough is that bad.” So then the next morning, after spending the whole night CMAO, a cloudy thought bubble floated up over my cartoon head and I realized I had passed up codeine. Well, I fixed that yesterday – I called the medical center, got the prescription phoned in, drove back down to Roseville, and got my meds. Trouble is, I’m so sick that I’m not even enjoying lounging around in bed with codeine cough syrup. Of course, my lovely wife is also feeling all sicklyfied, and the kid is bouncing off the walls, so Mommy and Daddy have to take turns and negotiate nap time for each other.

(Note to self: Does blogging turn me into a whiner?)

I’ve been having an interesting week. I’m responsible for our company’s phone system, and we just changed long distance carriers. This always seems like a good idea until we actually try to do it. You see, we have something like 38 phones like the one shown here hooked up to two PBXs at two different locations, connected by a T1 line. Regular calls come into each of them via their own set of Centrex phone lines. But outbound long distance and inbound toll free calls are handled by a dedicated long distance T1 that provides 16 inbound and 8 outbound voice channels over two pairs of wire.

When we hooked up the new T1 Monday night, it seemed to be working perfectly, but all day yesterday and today, we’ve been losing calls, and being the call center for a mail order catalog, that is not good.

So now I’m caught in the middle between a phone vendor who says it must be the carrier and a carrier that says it must be our equipment, and I don’t have the knowledge or skills to determine whether the rock’s right or the hard place.

But the icing on the cake? Yesterday I came down with a fairly serious case of pink eye, and I feel like crap, and I’m sitting here picking boogers out of my eyes while I wait for one of the phone guys to show up… wish me luck!

Ever had an earworm? That’s just a slightly gross Americanized Germanism for “that damn song that I can’t get out my head.” It’s the bane of my existence – really – I have a non-stop soundtrack that goes on even when I’m asleep, and it’s not uncommon for a coworker to overhear me singing or whistling and say, “It’s a Small World After All?” or “Puff the Magic Dragon… really?”

According to the article, it’s much more prevalent in musicians, and since I consider myself a songwriter, and I did a year-and-a-half as a Music Theory & Composition major at Arizona State, I guess it kinda makes sense.

Hey! This seems like a good time to impose a song or two on my faithful readers. Hope you enjoy!

Update:

Boy, I’m beginning to rethink this whole “pee” thing – two of my more recent hits were doing Googles on “pee garden -gee -dee -wee -tee -cat -“pee pee”” and “pee pee in my mouth” – I hope they found what they were looking for (?), because they sure didn’t find it here!

Update 2:

Speaking of Al Franken, one of the high points of my life, in the “brush with greatness” sense, happened when I was a freshman at Iowa State back in 1980 (or early 1981). Franken and Davis, the great comedy team that was, even then, writing for SNL, played our little auditorium at ISU. A friend and I were in the habit of going to these things on our ISU student passes, which I think got us in at $5 a pop for everything from Franken & Davis to the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, which at the time was conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas – we were in the middle of the front row, and I have this super-clear picture of him leaning into the violins going ‘Tss. Tss. Tss.’ to get to pianissimo.

Anywho, the only line of F&D’s that I can clearly remember was something like, “he was one of those guys who would come to the orgy, but he’d always put sand in the Vaseline.”

After the show, my fratmate Scott and I went to a local Denny’s to play backgammon and drink coffee from a bottomless Thermos-thingy, and Franken & Davis walked in around midnight. Now this was in the days when he was still talking about the “Al Franken” decade, and how “everyone should take a moment to ask themselves, ‘Now what can I do for you, Al Franken?'”

So we’re sitting in this Denny’s in Ames, Iowa, playing backgammon when Al Franken and Tom Davis walk in, and someone says, “Hey, it’s you, Bob Hope!” and Al Franken says, “Sure, whatever.” and sings “Thanks for the memories.”

You’ll note that I’ve joined the bloggers’ grass-roots movement to include the phrase “Fair and Balanced” on as many sites as possible. You should know that this is a reaction to the lawsuit that Fox News has brought against Al Franken’s book Lies and the Lying Liars That Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, so I won’t bore you with another link.

This week the Carnival of the Vanities #47 is over at this site: Right We Are! – a conservative, pro-US, Republican blog by two chicks on the Right side! Check it out.

For some strange reason, several blogs have had links the past few days to unique toilets, so I’d like to share my ‘Swiss Toilets’ Story. Several years ago, my wife and I did a European Vacation that started in London and eventually took us through France, Switzerland, and Italy. When we checked into the Hotel Opera in Zurich, we were fascinated by the strange toilet in our room called a Closomat, which name we learned from the thoughtfully provided owners manual. These things have the exhaust fan in the bowl, which makes a lot of sense to me. They also have a bidet style rinse cycle with warm water, and a warm air dry.

So then we go out to dinner, and when I go into the men’s room, the toilet seat has a little squeegee on it and the whole seat turns around under the blade so that it wipes away all the overspray – as the oval of the seat rotates over the stationary oval of the toilet bowl, it’s quite an interesting spectacle, so much so, that when Janet checked and there wasn’t one in the ladies room (which makes sense), I snuck her into the mens room for a peek.

Bottom line: the Swiss are thinking too much about their toilets.