Along with Soft Cell
Ugh! I hated Tainted Love back in grade school and I still can't stand it today.
What! It's haunting and pure.
Where did the strike through Bluth go??
I just looked at a cached version of the page on my phone and the strike was in fact gone! And then I refreshed and it appeared!
This actually used to happen all the time, in the first few years blogging here. If I went back and edited the post, the edit would show up for a while, and then it would revert, and I'd have to re-edit.
Sometimes it happens that when I reload the page my joke isn't funny anymore.
That usually means I've been tampering behind the scenes again.
Wouldn't that be amazing if I launched a covert, multi-year operation to rewrite the archives and give myself all the funniest lines? I could turn the person who made the joke into the straightman, and then hit 'em with the punchline? Archaeologists would think I was super fun.
I appreciate you making sure that this post received some comments.
I wonder what happened to the other guy in Wham? But not enough to actually look it up.
Look me up, before you go go.
George Michael was famous before he went solo.
He went back to his old job as a fayum mummy portrait.
6: OBVIOUSLY IT'S TOO CLOSE TO HOME AND TOO NEAR THE BONE.
Life well lived, the video set in context is fabulous.
I really loved George Michael. I remember (with mild embarrassment) full-on dancing down the street on the way to school, with Faith playing in my Walkman. It's still one of the best pop albums of all time.
"Faith" is a great song to bop along to, and "Father Figure" deeply connected with me as I set down the lonely early teenage road of a long string of inadvisable, mostly illegal, sometimes abusive relationships. But it wasn't George Michael's fault.
12. really is uncanny. I'm too old to have really given a shit about GM one way or the other, but even I can see that Ridgeley was a waste of space in Wham and ever after.
17: Isn't it. The guy is of partly Egyptian (Coptic?) descent, so it makes some sense. (Before consulting Wikipedia, I always assumed that he made no real contribution to Wham!, but now I gather that he co-wrote Careless Whisper, which I hated as a kid but is clearly a masterpiece of cheese.)
Should have known better than to cheat a friend. A careless muenster's got no peeling.
We used to have debates in jr high on whether George Michael was gay, based mostly on his earring choices. Never mind the way the camera lovingly caresses his bedenimed ass at the beginning of the "Faith" video -- that was outside our frame of reference.
20 I guess no one was watching Scorpio Rising at your HS.
I can remember the debate about which ear was the gay ear as far as earrings go.
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Random YouTube story: I was just looking up the Warren Zevon song, "They Moved The Moon" and the video has two comments which are (in full):
There are times when this song (and the album in general) really hit hard.
+ Yep. My wife is leaving me after 37 years together and, unfortunately, I love her desperately. So it goes, I guess.
It feels like an oddly personal thing to run across unexpectedly, and the fact that there are so few comments (and so few views) makes it feel weirdly intimate for a youtube comment.
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I've found that comments on music in YouTube are the exception to the YouTube comment rule. Music brings forth memories and poignancy.
I'm just relieved to know it isn't all racism.
"I've found that comments on music in YouTube are the exception to the YouTube comment rule. Music brings forth memories and poignancy. "
there are a bunch of them here:
27 Some of those. Wow. I never expected to tear up a bit at the mention of a Styx song. Thanks.
"I've found that comments on music in YouTube are the exception to the YouTube comment rule. Music brings forth memories and poignancy. "
Quite true (particularly true in my experience when looking for older and semi-obscure songs). Another one I remember: "Ode To A Half A Pound Of Ground Round"
When i was younger, i worked at a sawmill, i was broke and hungry, i thought i would starve to death before payday, in 2 days
When I got out of the Navy way way back when. I was hired by a company clear across the country. I ate cans of spaghetti because I needed all my money for gas. Slept in the truck. Finally made it along with some other guys, who had also traveled cross country. Second day on the job a man who had started work the same time I did. Passed out right there on the shop floor. It seems he hadn't eaten in a few days because he had spent everything on gas to get there. The company gave him some money so that he could get some food.
Having read 28, I have no idea why I made a point of reading the Styx one. Jesus.
Speaking of nostalgia, the other day someone made a random, offhand comment about I don't even know what, and it sent me instantly to a particular stretch of road in NJ and my HS GF and a whole suite of memories. What was weird was that it wasn't a direct connection (the other person wasn't reminiscing, or describing a drive, or anything that simple), the memory wasn't a particular time but felt very specific, and it wasn't a road/scene/time that I associate with her at all. That is, there are certain songs/moods that will reliably make me feel nostalgic for her, but this was none of those. And yet it was super vivid and left me a touch melancholy.
And since this is a music-ish thread:
I finally signed up for Apple Music (at my Bday Sonos was having a deal with a discount on their speakers and an Apple Music gift card), and I have to say that I'm loving it. The ease of diving deep on an artist I know more or less well, of exploring something unfamiliar in a better format than YouTube, and of listening to their playlists, which tend to be excellent... it's great.
It seems so obvious to say that "all the world's music at your fingertips" is good, but I was always a touch ambivalent, partly because it seemed like a lot of choice: when I listen to my music, I know what I'm in the mood for, but if I'm picking from everything... who knows? Is today the day to explore psychedelic soul, or should I finally listen to the new album everyone's talking about? But in practice, it's working well, and at least some of it is Apple's curated playlists; they're not algorithmic, so they're less random than a Pandora station (I only have one Pandora station I can trust, of 3-4 I've spent some significant time on), but there's usually some pleasing variety (although the Greatest X Music of 19xx tend to be too on-the-nose). Right now about 3/4 of the way through a 99-song psych mix that bounces through the decades pleasingly.
How are you finding the Sonos speakers? Thinking of getting some.
Music is nice enough, really a bit overrated.
34: for me they meet the "sound decent" and "easy enough" bar. They're a little overpriced but not ridiculous.
IME bluetooth speakers pretty universally suck in multi-room setups, these are much better if you care about that.
It is a little annoying that you have sonos specific versions of some service front ends, but it hasn't caused me much grief.
I was lukewarm on the Sonos for a long time: I started with just one speaker to test the ease of use, and for a long time it was a bit of a fail: constantly fighting to load songs from the library, and for awhile I couldn't get it to load the library at all. But they've vastly improved things, including the interface, and in 5-6 weeks of heavy usage, I've only have one major snafu (when I accidentally tried to play songs off a shut-down computer, and it took for-fucking ever for Sonos to find the music again, even as I'm on the machine, looking at the "unavailable" files).
Sound-wise, I have 3 Play:1s, because I'm all about the multi-room setup, so the sound is limited but also distinctly better than anything else I've owned (which excludes anything remotely audiophile). The Play:5s are supposed to sound excellent full-stop. There's also a room-tuning function that supposedly helps, but I didn't do a before-and-after test to see.
Overall, I'm incredibly happy, mostly because the multi-room accommodation is so very, very good. If that's not your #1 priority, I don't know how I'd rate them.
Sadyoutube is amazing (even if I keep parsing it as Sady Outube). Reading through it, after a page or two the comments start to blur together but then I'll hit one that's just heartbreaking.
follow on for Sonos: For what it's worth I play almost everything from a cloud somewhere, including ~1000 albums i have on an apple service. I've got decent bandwidth and it's just simpler. I have little experience with local inputs but what I have done works well.
In my experience the sound quality is nothing like audiophile quality, but better than a lot of consumer stuff in the same rough class.
37/39. Yes, multi-room is where I'm coming from, so that's very helpful. I would probably use a local server, because I don't trust apple/google not to just delete everything one day because they can.
On Sonos: the gf has the 1, 3, 5 and the sub, and the system is generally fantastic if a come-down for an obsessive audiophile. Easy to use, easy to place, sounds plenty fine most of the time.
re: 40 I would never *only* have cloud sources for those albums, but I've found them reliable enough that I typically go there first from the Sonos because it's been reliable.