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Three bands you should know
Three bands that I love and have been listening to a lot lately just recently released some stripped down acoustic versions of songs that I really love and thought I would share because you might not have heard of these three awesome bands.
First up is Punchline. I have blogged about them in the past before. I saw them play in 2004, and have been hooked ever since. I am surprised they haven’t gotten bigger yet. This song, “Whatever I Want, Whenever I Want”, is off their newest album that came out last year called Delightfully Pleased. Great song, great album, but a little too much background noise in the video, but it’s still good shit.
Next up is We Are the in Crowd. They are a relatively new band. They only have one album out, but it’s great. I predict they will be a household name soon. This video is a well produced acoustic version of “Never Be What You Want”, off of their album Guaranteed to Disagree.
The third band is Mixtapes. They have one album out and two EPs—all are fucking great. This song, “You’d Better Bring More Dudes”, is off their newest EP that came out earlier this year, Hope is for People. You can also check out more songs from this set here.
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Organic food myths
One of my biggest pet peeves is the thought that products that are “natural” or organic are better for you. I struggle with the word “natural” all the time. What does it mean? I see it on products like cheese all the time. How is any kind of cheese products “natural”? Doesn’t cheese have to be made and processed? So processed food is natural? Or does natural mean all the the chemical compounds are from living organisms? Natural is a pretty generic term used mostly for marketing, and doesn’t mean much. Anything on the planet could be natural, or not depending on your definition of natural, if you trace it back to it’s elemental form. And just the fallacy that natural is good for you is just wrong. Arsenic, mercury, poison ivy and even lightning are all natural, and defiantly not good for you.
Then there is the whole organic thing. There is little difference between organic and non-organic products. In reality, organic products probably contain more pesticides and fertilizers than non-organic products do because they have to use less efficient, organic pesticides and fertilizers. Brian Dunning’s latest InFact video explains the difference between organic and non-organic products, and he explains it way better than I can.
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Houseguests update
So this weekend I thought we were going to be able to finally get rid of our houseguests and three extra dogs. Now, they will probably be here until July. When my Wife’s Aunt was finally able to get to her house, her loser, homeless, drug addicted ex was squatting there. See tried to get him out, but since he is on the mortgage, she can’t really do anything. He insists he wants the house now. She has been wanting out of the house for a while now. Her credit is already shot, so she is going to let him have the house and all the bills that he won’t be able to pay. It’s only a matter of time before the bank comes after the house.
So this weekend we are helping moving all her stuff to storage until she can get into her apartment on July 1st. It’s going to be a long month and a half, but at least she will finally be out of an area that floods every year.
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Flashback Friday: Belly – “Feed the Trees”
Another of my favorite songs from the 90s.
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New album from Farewell Continental out today
Today the new album from Farewell Continental, ¡Hey, Hey Pioneers! comes out. If you don’t know who Farewell Continental are, they are the side project of Justin Pierre, the lead singer of my favorite band Motion City Soundtrack. You can buy it here or here, and read all about it here, and watch their first video off the album below. You know you wanna buy it. All the cool kids are doing it, so you should too.
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Who knew I was so OCD?
I don’t think I have blogged about our house guests yet, mostly because I don’t like to bitch and moan over things that are pretty petty in the long run. It’s been about five weeks now that my Wife’s Aunt and Cousin and three dogs have been staying with us. The road to their house has been under water that long. Their house is pretty safe. The overland flooding just gets wider and wider, but never really gets deep enough to reach their house, they just can’t get to it because the road is washed out. The water is finally starting to go down now, and as soon as they get the road fixed, they should be able to head back home. It’s been a little inconvenient for us, mostly because of the dogs, but what do you do? You have to help out for family when something like this happens.
Having the guests really brings out the OCD in me. Everything has it’s place, and when it’s not it it’s proper place it drives me crazy. After five weeks I am starting to get use to the mess. I hate stuff laying all over the place, but I am also not going to clean up after adults. For the most part it’s not that bad, I am just a little OCD about clutter.
They do a few other things that drive me crazy. They don’t shut lights off when the leave the room. Every light in the house is left on all the time. They also leave the TV on all the time. I like the house to be peaceful and quiet, but they leave the TV on all day, and all night. This first thing I do in the mornings is shut the TV off because it doesn’t need to be on when everybody is sleeping. Then there is the toilet seat always being left up. Well, they leave the seat down, but the lid up. When you are done with the fridge you shut the door, so when you are don’t with the toilet, you should shut the lid. The toilet paper being put on wrong bugs me too, but not as bad as these other things.
The worst is the weekends that I have had to work. During the week everybody goes to bed at a decent time, but weekends everybody stays up late, keeping me up. I bet I got two hours of sleep Saturday night. The last time I looked at the clock it was 2:00 AM and I hadn’t slept yet, and I had to get up at 4:30. I can’t fall asleep when there is a bunch of noise around. Once I am asleep, the noise doesn’t wake me though, so that’s good, it’s just been hard to get to sleep on weekends.
Thankfully this will probably be their last week here, and buy the weekend I should be able to get our house back is order. I didn’t realize how OCD I am about things, and how much they bug me.
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Flashback Friday: Bjork – “Human Behaviour”
I was never much of a Bjork fan, but this video takes me right back to the early 90s. It got some major MTV play, probably too much back then. -
New music from The Swellers and The Wonder Years
Since I’ve been blogging about music lately I thought I would share some new music I am looking forward to. In my world everybody knows who The Wonder Years and The Swellers are, but they might not be as popular in the real world. I’m a big fan of both of these bands, and they both have a new album coming out June 14th.
First up is The Swellers’ song “The Best I Ever Had”, from the upcoming album Good For Me.
Next is The Wonder Years’ song “Don’t Let Me Cave In”, from the upcoming album Suburbia I’ve Given You All And Now I’m Nothing.
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Miley Cyrus covers “Smells Like Teen Spirit”
via youtube.comI couldn’t tell you what Miley Cyrus sings, but I hope it’s better than this. If Kurt Cobain hadn’t been cremated, he would be rolling in his grave now.
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Osama, dead at last
So last night was one of those nights that we will all remember forever. I was in bed reading when an alert popped up from one of my news apps informing me of the news that Osama bin Laden had been killed. I then switched from reading Wil Wheaton’s The Day After and other stories, to the Al Jazeera app—because most American news organizations suck—on my iPad. I then opened of Twitter to see what everybody had to say. It was a pretty memorable hour of news without ever turning the TV on.
Then in the morning I head he was buried at sea already, so I checked out on Wikipedia what Islamic law would have thought of that, and it seemed they did the right thing. Islam prefers burial on land, but in cases where the body might be dug up and mutilated, burial at sea is fine. They also did it within 24 hours which is also what Islam prefers. Why do I care? I think everybody should be treated with respect after their death. I don’t care how evil he was, he is still a human being and deserves to be treated how his religion would treat him.
All the people happy and cheering gave me a funny feeling. How can someone cheer for the death of a human being? Sure, he was an evil evil man, and deserved everything he got, but he was still a human being. He was still someone’s son, and someone’s father. I was glad they caught him and finally put a closure to at least part of the war, but I wasn’t cheering for his death at all.
Then I heard they were debating about releasing the photos of the dead body. I don’t know how I feel about this. Releasing photos of the dead body doesn’t sound very respectful. Sure we actually saw the hanging of Saddam Hussein, but that wasn’t us. That’s kind of what they do in the Middle East. I really don’t care either way if they release the photos or not. Some people might say it will quiet the people that will doubt the actual death of Osama, but I don’t think it would help. There will still be conspiracy nuts that won’t believe the the death even with actual pictures. Showing facts to people who ignore facts doesn’t really do anything.
Lets just hope this can be the beginning of the end of these stupid wars, and we can start bringing our troops back, that would be a huge help at getting our debit under control.