PODCAST: DJ Shakes_2012-02-28 (the Return)

Download by right-clicking HERE or...

...PODCAST ME: Simply drag the orange podcast icon on the left column of this page (under "Podcast Me!") into your iTunes. Or:
1. goto iTunes
2. click on Advanced
3. click on Subscribe to Podcast
4. paste this URL http://feeds.feedburner.com/EngineEngine9

T R A C K L IS T I N G (approx 50 min)
http://hbshakes.blogspot.com
theme: The Return
[0:00] Intro
[2:25] Chemical Brothers - Private Psychedelic Reel
[5:36] CJ Bolland - Sugar Is Sweeter (Armand's Drum 'n' Bass Mix)
[9:34] Synergy - Hello Strings
[12:30] Rainbow Arabia - Mechanical
[16:14] Black Moon - Crooklyn Dodgers
[19:19] Common - Invocation
[20:55] Ready for the World - Oh Sheila
[24:01] George McCrae - Rock You Baby
[27:08] Kavinsky - Nightcall (feat Lovefoxxx)
[30:17] Rick Ross - B.M.F.
[32:33] Fleetwood Mac - Albatross
[34:00] Silent Dust - 1959 (Calibre Remix)
[36:48] Debbie Gibson - Only In My Dreams
[39:11] Adrian Lux - Teenage Crime
[43:01] Phil Collins - Easy Lover
[46:32] Dan Black - Symphonies

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web comment of the day

One of the greatest things ever isn't the fact that news can be shared instantaneously via the internet, it's the fact that websites think its a good idea to add a comments section under all their new articles. In the hopes of getting people to interact and further discuss a topic, comment sections usually spiral horribly downward and become a virtual public restroom bathroom door wall. It's awesome.


Here's my favorite for the day on ESPN, a seemingly sweet article about the rejuvenated Buffalo Sabres having players and the owner hand deliver tickets to season ticket holders. Instead in this excerpt you can see poor A.J. Burnett gets slandered for no good reason:

Ricardo Roman: "how about the Steinbrener family come to my home and deliver me some Yankee tickets"
TML954: "Maybe AJ Burnett can deliver them for you"
Sabrefan6248: "Burnett would deliver the first 4 just fine and then blow up and deliver the rest to the wrong houses"
MattSiF: "That's just messed up, and I don't even like the guy"

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PODCAST: DJ Shakes_2011-09-12 (Japan)

Download by right-clicking HERE or...

PODCAST ME:
Simply drag the orange podcast icon on the left column of this page (under "Podcast Me!") into your iTunes. Or:

1. goto iTunes
2. click on Advanced
3. click on Subscribe to Podcast:
4. paste this URL http://feeds.feedburner.com/EngineEngine9

T R A C K L IS T I N G (approx 57 min)
http://hbshakes.blogspot.com
theme: songs I listened to in Japan (for whatever reason)

[0:00] 地球の歩き方 - The Collectors

[2:17] Jail La La - Dum Dum Girls

[4:33] Always Forever Now - U2

[8:00] Billie Holiday - Warpaint

[11:08] Subterranean Homesick Alien - Radiohead

[15:16] Shelter (John Talabot Feel It Too Remix) - The XX

[21:20] I Want Freedom - Chris Joss

[23:16] Yoshio & the Guitar - DJ Yoshio

[24:26] Eye Know - De La Soul

[28:14] The World (Interlude) - Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi

[28:53] Dog Days Are Over - Florence + The Machine

[32:45] Pumped Up Kicks - Foster the People

[36:36] Beautiful - Yura Yura Teikoku

[40:17] Floating Vibes - Surfer Blood

[44:05] Act Like We Do - National Skyline

[46:50] Halcyon (Tom Middleton Re-model) - Orbital

[53:33] Symphonies - Dan Black

[57:01] Ok - Talvin Singh

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Desis Overheard

Location: Kyoto, Japan. On a tour of Nijo Castle, the Golden Temple, and the Imperial Palace
This family of three was on my tour, when I heard this gem of a conversation:

Auntie: This is a lovely garden
Uncle: Yes, it really is. You know Sonia used to be a gardener
Auntie: She was not. She was a landscaper. That is very different
Little boy: [silent]
Uncle: But what she did was still quite good, right?
Auntie: You would know.

Late on the little boy claimed he had tried beer once ("as a little kid") because the dad gave it to him. The dad then told him not to tell lies as the boy proceeded to describe a very plausible scenario of being able to have a sip while the dad had been watching TV. The dad then told him to lower his voice even though it was already low and that it was actually root beer and the boy was very wrong. Given the earlier "Sonia Incident" the dad seemed leery of his wife.

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Tokyo, I can see Russian from here, & Koji

So after a year I’ve finally decided to take a holiday. Well I was told to take one by both the folks who work with me (“you’re always here, you should go away”) and by my vacation days left this year… counting days not taken from years past I had 39 days this year… I’ve only taken 2 of them. So in the hopes of using 37 days (or at least 10-15) by year end I pulled the trigger. So here I am on a flight to Tokyo where a rainy, muggy, foreign land await. At least I’m avoiding the that’s going to flood my home. We’re currently over Alaska somewhere in our grand Mercator-projector-looping flight path

On the way to the airport I felt this urge to email my desk, joke around with them, and generally see how they’re doing. I struggle between feeling like I shouldn’t always be around and wanting to be the person that I normally am and that those above me when I was younger rarely were. Maybe there’s a reason for why they seemed distant at times and seemingly went out of their way to be friends. Maybe. Or maybe there just were incapable of being normal.

My plan upon boarding the flight was to grab my entire side of row 24. I of course am parked at 24L, the window seat, an aesthetically pleasing seat for the takeoffs and landing but strategically terrible for the intermittent 14hrs. namely I’d have to ask someone to wake-up/get-up/stop eating in order to use the bathroom.

But that’s a risk I was am (was) willing to take because there wasn’t anyone sitting in the seats next to me. Bingo. 3 seats which would be perfect for laying out and sleeping on. Who needs first class when you can pull out a stunning economy maneuver. If I was a great literally character this would be on par with the Lepellier Maneuver (from John Knowles “A Separate Peace”), a cunning patented move. But I’m not and it isn’t.

Enter Koji. Koji is the 8yr old who’s parents decided to hop on this flight and fuck up my plan. So much for a whole row, now I have my crummy window seat. That being said the kid is damn cute, waves at me every 10 minutes and over the course of the last 8 hours generally likes to know what I’m doing, why I’m sleeping, and what I’m watching. It’s because of Koji that it’s taken me about 30 minutes to write the last 3 sentences.

Koji: “What are you watching now?”
Me: “Nothing really, just some weird comedy (ThankYouMoreYes – quite good actually). You?”
Koji: “I’m watching Up, it’s one of my favorite kid movies.”
Me: “What’s your favorite non-kids movie?”
Koji: “I dunno, I don’t watch too many of them”

He may win the award for the best stranger I’ve ever sat next to in a flight… he basically knows about every player in baseball and hockey. He was able to name 5 players off the LA Kings roster (so you know he’s a good kid) and seemed to generally think my idea of putting a seatbelt on his teddy bear and playing the “The Fantastic Mr. Fox” (he synchronized the bears movie with his viewing, so they could watch it at the same time) for the bear’s entertainment was a somewhat funny.

Koji and his family (mom, dad, and little brother Yuki) are traveling to Japan because his grandfather has cancer. I’m not sure if he fully understands what that means because 1) he didn’t seem too fazed by it while telling me and 2) I’m 4 times his age and I barely understand what it means. Sweet kid. He wants to be a goalie.
4 hours until we land.

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Mike Fratello = Lt. Harris?

Is NBA analyst, and anointed czar of the telestrator Mike Fratello really Lt. Harris from Police Academy?




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is Gulshan Grover the brown Nicholas Cage?

The funny thing is that only one of them has a fake tan...and I'll give you a hint, it's not the dude on the left.

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Genres

One of the things that I take great pride in is being anal about organization...and there's no place better to demonstrate it than organizing music. It baffles me to no end when I look how my friends organize their iTunes library and see everything put about in a slipshod manner.

I mean people have music under genres like "rock," "alternative," and "hard rock." This is terrible! How the hell do you find anything? Worst yet, how can people tolerate it when the same artist has music falling in different genres? Look I think U2 has changed its sound over the years, but that doesn't mean it's not all still the same genre.

I spent a while thinking about the most efficient way to break up music in the categories that I care about....while preserving the ability to add new genres that may pop-up (e.g. mashups)

So with that I give you the breakdown in the picture on the right... broadly speaking it's filed as follows:

1) White music
2) Brown music
3) Black music
4) Dancey dance
5) Instrumental type stuff
6) World music (French pop and French hip-hop should never be confused with actually being pop or hip-hop music)
7) Movie related stuff
8) Stuff I made
9) Comedy

Blammo.

And then under each category you can put your numerous subcategories.

There, and that's how you make a blog post that's aimed to be informative but in actuality masks an unhealthy amount of analness.

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the cricket world cup, my dad, & the Indian victory

I don't like to write personal things on this blog, but I sorta felt compelled to after this past weekend...

***

The last time India won the World Cup (as literally every Indian knows) was in 1983 when it was held in England. At the time my dad, a lifelong cricket fan living in Minneapolis with his wife and two young sons, was given the serendipitous opportunity to go on a prolonged business trip to London.

The stars were aligning for dad.

He'd been living in America since the late 1960s and in the pre-internet days his only means for staying in touch with cricket team he loved were international newspapers in public libraries, word of mouth from fleeting phone calls, hours pouring over the the Wisden Cricket Almanac (which always just seemed like a boring fat yellow book that would only make cameo appearances in random boxes whenever we moved). Can you imagine being in England at exactly the same time the cricket World Cup was taking place? Sometimes work and your personal life can intersect in a positive way.

Dad declined the offer.

He felt that the opportunity was unfairly given to him because there was a colleague who was overlooked by his seniors because of internal politics. Dad stayed in the US, the other guy went to England.

Fast forward 28 years and dad and I were watching the cricket final in my cousin's apartment with a dozen or so friends. We were streaming the game through the internet and had it linked up to a nice big TV where everyone could watch in relative comfort. With the exception of the video stream having buffering issues throughout the 8 hour match (oh Willow TV...) there really wasn't much more you could ask for (the mid-match dosa run was also helpful). Heck this beat past World Cups where my friends and I would gather in cramped Manhattan bars, sitting on painful stools, while people walked in your way. The difference was like between flying Air India economy class and Kingfisher Airline’s first class.... or well...any class not on Air India.

Dad pretty much sat in one chair throughout the match and was in anguish for a good deal of it. A strong Sri Lankan finish to their innings coupled by a poor Indian start made our festive 5am party seem like a dour 9am funeral procession. My perpetually optimistic and religious dad seemed to be losing faith. It looked one more chapter was being written in the book of disappointing Indian sports, politics, and cinema events.

But slowly the tide started turning. From the depths of despair the Indian team moved us to cautious optimism, then to pained delight, and finally the brink of euphoria. And through all that I was sitting right in front of my dad.

Through thick and thin my dad had tried to find a ways to follow his team throughout the years. The internet of course was huge towards his cause. When I was in high school we had dial-up connected to the house computer, located in the bedroom I shared with my brother. Dad would sit on the computer all night to follow the text bowl-by-bowl summaries. It's one thing if you're following last few minutes of an important European soccer game that's not on TV by reading one line summaries of play. I still do that today on occasion. But it's a little bit different when you're following the 2nd day of the 3rd Test of some random cricket tour. For 8 hours. In the middle of the night. That’s a bit nuts. This dedication of course was of little consolation to my brother and me. We hated the whole thing because the pitter patter of the keyboard and the small desk light made it a difficult to sleep.

In 1983 my dad couldn't even see the matches, let alone read the play-by-play, let alone really know what's happening on a daily basis. I mean yeah he followed the improbable championship run, but he literally didn’t get to see it. And now in 2011 he was watching everything happen again. For the first time.

You know the rest, through some brave and steady batting, the Indians finally won on an emphatic sixer by captain M.S. Dhoni. The apartment with about a dozen of us viewers exploded, players on TV were crying...and... well amidst all that I was starting to feel this weird saline stream on my cheek.

It's a funny thing to cry during sports. I've cried before during games, so it's certainly not my first time. When dad and I attended a 2006 world cup soccer match between the US and Italy in Germany I started tearing up during the US national anthem. During the 2010 Summer Olympics I started tearing up when Michael Phelps won his 7th gold medal. I'm pretty sure I cried during the LA Kings hockey team's playoff run in 2010. I know I teared up at old Yankee Stadium when the Yanks beat the Red Sox in the 10th inning of game 7 on a walk-off homerun in the 2003 ALCS. And here I was crying again.

Unanimously each Indian cricketer said they had won this match for Sachin, but I was tearing for dad.

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