This past Memorial Day weekend I was out of town (as per the American tradition), but on the Friday before the holiday I spent a few minutes walking through Arlington Cemetery, thinking about sad topics like the perpetual wars we continue to fight and all the good-hearted Americans who are so loyal to the military but so strangely unwilling to criticize the wars that endanger said military or the government that sends young people halfway around the world to kill other young people. But the ceme…

Winter has returned here. It’s not shockingly cold, but after weeks of warm weather (January is turning into DC’s most pleasant month) it’s hard to adjust. I am not ecstatic about the winter weather, but I have endured far worse, so I don’t really mind a few days or weeks of temperatures below freezing. It is February. Tonight I was waiting for the bus, feeling cold and reflective. I snapped some self-portraits with my cell phone to keep myself preoccupied, but mentally I was already adrift. On …

I have been discussing Christmas lately and I have some mixed feelings about it. I guess, overall, I think it is kind of a mixed-up holiday that awkwardly combines the celebration of the birth of Christ, sort-of-cute traditions for kids, and unsettling consumerist madness. I’m not sure that any of these things belong together and for years now, Christmas has never quite sat right with me. I like seeing my family and I like our family traditions, but I think that, unless I have kids of my own, I …

On Sunday I sat around for a while listening to old records, mostly ones that belonged to my parents. So my main discovery? Stevie Nicks — yowza! There is a picture of the whole band on the back of Rumours where she is smoldering hot. I was really only familiar with the Stevie Nicks image from the ’90s when they re-emerged into the spotlight, and “Don’t Stop” was the Clinton election-party theme or whatever. I’m not saying Ms. Nicks looks bad for her age, but who knew she was once so gorgeous? I…

I don’t believe in any supernatural mumbo-jumbo like astrology or fortune telling, but, perhaps out of sheer capriciousness, I’ve long been fan of the website Facade . Facade allows you to perform all kinds of superstitious readings and introduced me to terms like stichomancy and bibliomancy long before you could look up pseudoscience on wikipedia. I find a lot of this quackery to be pretty entertaining, but if I needed proof that the Facade readings are inaccurate, I found it yesterday. I have …

I didn’t really celebrate my birthday but I decided to go all clich� and get some new ink. The guy who did it was curious about what the design was, and guessed that maybe it was a section of the Metro map. Other people have thought it was some sort of chemistry thing, but actually it is (supposedly) a medieval symbol for “constellation” — my variation on your typical star tattoo. Of course it might not really mean anything, it is just something I pulled off the internet a long time ago. Anyway …

My niece Brighid interviewed me for school and then integrated some of the results into a poem for my birthday. I hope she won’t mind that I share it here. It’s so interesting to see what my niece and nephew know about me! A lot of it is stuff they picked up from my sister, who of course has known me my whole life, but only really spent a lot of time with me when I was a youngster, so her kids know all these funny stories from when I was really little. I am impressed by this poem — it is mostly …

table.lastfmWidget td {margin:0 !important;padding:0 !important;border:0 !important;}tr.lastfmHead a:hover {background-position:0 0 !important;}tr.lastfmEmbed object {float:left;}tr.lastfmFoot td.config a:hover {background-position:0 0 !important;}tr.lastfmFoot td.view a:hover {background-position:-85px 0 !important;}tr.lastfmFoot td.popup a:hover {background-position:-159px 0 !important;} I’m playing with last.fm during my brief stop in the office today. They have these playlists that you can m…

Like Axl Rose, I ain’t got time to reminisce on novelties. On the other hand, I am gearing up to turn thirty this week. Yikes! So a little bit of reminiscing is probably in order. I have had various ideas for how to commemorate these three decades of life. Sometimes for birthdays in the past I have embarked upon personal projects to recap my life: wandering around DC looking at all the different places I have lived; sitting for a few days and trying to make a list of all the songs I’ve ever writ…

R.I.P. Kurt Vonnegut. It may not be obvious, but this blog is technically named “Harmless Untruths” (a part of my larger monodrone.org website). This term, “harmless untruths,” comes from Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle , one of my favorite books. In Cat’s Cradle , a strange religion called Bokononism admits that it is mostly made up of lies — called foma , or “harmless untruths.” Still, people take comfort in these lies and find them meaningful. I don’t claim to totally understand the concept, but on t…

So craziest thing last night. I was sitting at home, minding my own business, playing around on my computer like the dork that I am. And slowly it penetrated my consciousness that there was a buzzing sound near me, rather loud, but I didn’t really pay attention until suddenly this humongous bumblebee flew onto the lamp right next to me. Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here . You also need to have JavaScript enab…

Sick. Ugh. I have been fighting a cold for a week, and today it really knocked me for a loop. I even went and got some medicine, something which I almost never do. And I turned down multiple invitations to go out and be social tonight, opting instead to curl up and cough the night away. Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here . You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. (Boss Hog : Sick) There are lo…

So there are trillions of songs about Christmas, but I can only think of two pop/rock songs about New Year’s, the famous one being U2’s “New Year’s Day” and the not-so-famous one being the Dismemberment Plan’s “The Ice of Boston”. (Apparently, there is a song by Death Cab for Cutie called “The New Year”, but I don’t have much interest in it, as seeking it out would be a violation of my irrational scorn for Death Cab and Bright Eyes and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. I’ll explain this later.) In my lo…

Though sometimes I am a little dismayed at the online/digital environment for music, it has occurred to me lately that I have been using the internet to learn about music for a long time, basically for the past 11 years or so. I am actually reasonably well-qualified to offer a historical perspective on music on the web. My current methods of learning about music (among other things, you’ve got your pitchfork and your last.fm and your long list of favorite mp3 blogs ) are the direct descendents o…

Much like the second Death Star, this website looks rough but is, in fact, fully operational . However, big chunks of it are missing, and it is highly vulnerable to attack, foolishly storing its shield generator on a nearby forest moon. The last post is from something like six months ago, so you know this is not a priority. Yesterday I did some recording with my pseudo-band, and today, as I skipped work to do some writing for school, I felt that a smart thing to do would be to record some more. …

Why oh why am I feeling this urge to write little commentaries about music when I am supposed to be writing a massive essay on serious issues that I am even actually interested in? It makes no sense. “70’s Manual Worker” · Hood · Structured Disasters , 1997 Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here . You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. Available at this excellent Hood website . I discovered Hood…

“You mean because a lot of people are standing around glassy-eyed listening to something mumbling in their ear that it’s a good thing?” — “Gussy” Gusterson in “The Creature from Cleveland Depths” by Fritz Leiber Lately I’ve been thinking about getting an iPod. I’m shuddering a little as I type those words, and I’ve decided against it for the moment anyway. But I know it is just a matter of time until I have one, and in a lot of ways, I’m not looking forward to it. I’ve played with iPods now, and…

Hey there. So if people are gonna start stumbling upon this page, unfinished though it be, I guess I should at least introduce myself and give a little introduction as to what I am trying to do here. I have tried to come up with personal website designs before (go check out this one ), never for any real reason, but because I like the web and web design. This time around, I had a couple of actual ideas of things that I would like to do. First off, I wanted to do a more interesting design, and tr…