Cover song!!

oooh. shameless self promotion!!

i just recorded this over the past two days, partially just do cover it (love the song, finally figured out how to play it, in particular the trumpet solo as guitar solo) and also to play around with garage band and such before i try and do real recording of my own stuff.

not terribly thrilled with the vocals, though that may owe slightly to using the built in mic on my macbook and not a regular one (not in the best space for recording with a fuller setup so...)

anyway, of course this is not my song, music and lyrics by Stuart Murdoch, Richard Colburn, Michael Cook, Christopher Geddes, Stephen Jackson, and Isobel Campbell, from the album Tigermilk. i don't even remotely claim to own this and will happily take it down if anyone complains (i know that's not the right way to do this, nor does it get me around copyright law... i should know better since i'll be going to law school to study that stuff too...)

anyway, here it is...

note

So I have decided that I am going to do a few more personal entries to this blog. Nothing spleen venting or gut wrenching, though I might talk a bit about middle and high school... ech.

just so you know. if you're reading i mean.

so...

So I haven't posted since 2010, before I was even married? hmmph...

A few blog ideas forming, one basically ready to go.

more soon. i promise...

just checkin in. more blogging soon....

a few things:

1. my fiance and I have started a food/cooking blog here. check it out!

2. I currently live in new jersey.

3. Robert plant has a new album coming out. normally this wouldn't matter much to me, but he's covering Low. And this is sort of amazing....

4. I'm way behind on my comics... I know there's only a couple i need to check up on (buffy and amazing spiderman... maybe whatever's going on in the batman books, or at least the return of bruce wayne) but... it's funny, I originally envisioned this as sort of a comics blog but have maybe only posted 4 or 5 entries about comics... so we'll see how that goes...

posting from my droid

yep

so this might mean I will blog more, since I can prettymuch just get to this on my phone whenever...

dangerous.

this guy at this open mic sounds like he could be playing guitar parts of explosions in the sky songs....

should I also twitter?

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iron man 2 review

iron man 2.

the good:

- robert downey jr. incredible. seriously. again, i have to give major credit to the people who cast him as stark/iron man. he was perfect note for note from beginning to end.

- sam rockwell as justin hammer. despite the lack of real development of the rivalry, sam rockwell also proves that he really is as good an actor as he always seems to be.

- visually. like the first one, a stunning movie. some overdone (the scene where black widow breaks into Hammer's offices felt too showy, as if to say "hey teenage boys, here's a hot woman in a cat suit kicking ass") but mostly fantastic.

- the nods. mostly the captain america shield. agent coulson's reaction was pretty much priceless.

the bad:

- lack of development, plot and character wise. even of the characters you knew from the first one, it felt like there was a lot just sort of thrown at you.

- shoehorned together plot. too many story lines put together with various levels of success - tying Whiplash to Hammer was good and made sense. black widow being tied to shield, eh (yes, she should be, but i think a major point was missed in both her and the villain were Russian). the whole war machine plot, while it did work, felt a little rushed as well.

anyway. so was it as good as the first one, which was completely brilliant and amazing? no. and i don't think it really could have expected to be. it really felt like, in some respects, they were saying "this movie is a stop-gap between the first one and the entire future of the marvel film universe - we're not positive if we're going to get another movie out of iron man alone, so we need to hit you with this, this, and this." it will be interesting to see where this leads once the rest of the avengers are put into place. how it SHOULD go is something like this:

at the end of the captain america movie - maybe after the credits, where we know he has been frozen in ice, we see a block of ice with a vaguely human form in it on a table, surrounded by tony stark (in or out of costume), thor, bruce banner (or hulk), and maybe some others that we will not have seen yet (wasp? pym? maybe we only vaguely identify them in this scene, just to set people up for the avengers movie, which this will then lead into). of course, i don't write for marvel studios so...

-

it's a blogapalooza

- back to the ramona books, for a second. i know her family was supposed to be relatively poor (after her dad lost his job, especially) but it always bothered me how they would talk about going out for fast food like it was going out for a gourmet meal. i do get how, to some kids, even those with money, it is. but that just always bothered me.

- henry huggins. still the bomb. paper drives and all of that. really, i love me some beverly cleary. she rarely talked about that puberty stuff that judy blume threw into everything she wrote, even stuff like Freckle Juice.

- wednesday = comics. comics = sometimes good. sometimes frustrating.

- the good. the boys. seriously. the boys, is just a great book. sometimes too dirty, but i'd expect that from anything Garth Ennis writes. his satiric take on super heroes is just... brutal. and... yeah.

- Also good: Batman and Robin #12. the reveal at the end, very unexpected. Morrison still wins.

- the frustrating. Brightest Day. after Blackest Night, i would want a really strong follow up (ie 52 following up the mostly readable Infinite Crisis). brightest day, so far, is a lot of navel gazing. more setup than necessary. it's great that these characters are back from the dead and conflicted about it. where's it going to go? (the only really good bits were the Aquaman calling dead fish part and the return of Black Manta).

- also good. but even better because it was a buck. I Zombie. mike allred's art can pretty much make me like anything. and hey, a book whose plot revolves a zombie (who has to eat the brains of the recently dead once a month to keep from becoming "totally night of the living dead") whose best friends are a ghost, a vampire, and a werewolf? how can that be bad?? (seriously, check out the prequel!)

- also, they killed nightcrawler in x-men. for what? who knows. is x-men going to do that thing to me where it makes me really not want to read them for a while?? best bit: beast yelling at cyclops at nightcrawler's funeral. kind of brilliant, really.

- my blog lacks focus. just random thoughts. i hope people don't mind.