engine engine #9

PODCAST: DJ Shakes_2009-11-03 (Tuff Goin' Soul)

2009-11-03T23:58:00.002-05:00

PODCAST ME:
Simply drag the orange podcast icon on the left column of this page 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 52 min)
http://hbshakes.blogspot.com
theme: Reggae, Soul, and more

[0:00] Intro - Me
[0:54] Flying Lotus - Auntie's Lock
[1:11] Althea & Donna - No More Fighting
[4:37] Slightly Stoopid - 2am
[9:10] Junior Byles - Weeping
[11:40] Raphael Saadiq - Just One Kiss (feat Joss Stone)
[14:01] Mayer Hawthorne - Just Ain't Gonna Work Out
[16:30] Ghostface Killah - Gotta Hold On
[19:21] New Jack Hustle - Inglewood
[22:24] Richie Havens - Here Comes The Sun
[25:10] My Morning Jacket - Golden
[29:30] TV on the Radio - Hours
[33:19] Passion Pit - To Kingdom Come
[37:23] Miike Snow - Song for No One
[41:13] Orchestra Baobab - Ray Mbele
[43:07] Y Society - This Is An Introduction
[45:58] Desmond Dekker & The Aces - Israelites
[48:27] Gregory Isaacs - Confirm Reservation
.

Okay this mix started off as being a soul mix and then I could shake some old reggae songs and well... add some My Morning Jacket and Ghostface Killah and there you go..

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things Indian people do

2009-11-01T14:54:00.001-05:00

Steal hundred of packets of mirchi from Pizza Hut and other fine pizza establishments like there's no tomorrow.

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stupid people at concerts

2009-10-31T14:18:00.004-04:00

While at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 25th Anniversary concert at the Garden on Friday (U2! Metallica! Aretha Franklin! Mick Jagger! Sting! Bruuuuce!) I was reminded that sometimes I hate people

So at the very beginning of the show Jerry Lee Lewis comes out and sings "Great Balls of Fire" to kick things off.... good stuff for a guy who I thought periodically over the past 10-15 years dead.

Well I looked over into the boisterous row in front of me where the drunk guy (he looked like a total S-Block) was singing with his Indian girlfriend and saw that she had her iPhone raised and pointed towards the stage.

Was she taking a picture? No
Wash she videotaping the performance? No.

SHE WAS SHAZAM-ING it so that she could find out what song he was singing! I'm like are you serious? You don't know who Jerry Lee Lewis and you CAN'T RECOGNIZE THE SONG? What is wrong with you people. I wanted to slap Priya right there and then. I mean why are you at a rock hall of fame show if you don't know basic things?

It's sorta like going to the Super Bowl and being like "what is this grass field they're playing on?" It's like going to an art museum and asking aloud "what was the Mona Lisa?" It's like wearing brown shoes with a black belt.

You just don't do such things.

ALSO if she doesn't recognize "Great Balls of Fire" it means that she's never seen Top Gun. What kind of person hasn't seen Top Gun? I shudder at the thought of meeting someone who upon hearing word "Maverick" can only muster up some memory of a weird Mel Gibson movie. And what about Goose? Goooooose. Did he die in vain?!?! Did he?!

A travesty. A real travesty.

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Tetris, people's personalities, and Halloween

2009-10-27T23:10:00.000-04:00

A friend mentioned at work the other day that for Halloween some of her friends were going to be Tetris pieces. So I got to thinking, how do you determine who gets to be each piece? In my mind your personality has to match the piece....and each piece most certainly has a personality

For example, I don't think I could ever be The Line in the group. It's a bit too presumptuous. EVERYONE loves The Line. No one in the history of Tetris has played the game, seen The Line start scrolling down and said "Oh fuck, it's The Line." NO! People LOVE The Line. It goes well with everything. It's sorta like bacon and goat cheese. Now, as agreeable as I think I am, I can't pull off The Line.

Personally I'm more of The Hat fellow. The Hat is generally agreeable and you can rotate it to fit most situations. Now truth be told sometimes it comes at the wrong time and jacks up your game. Oh well.

Be that as it may, I'm definitely not The Block. The Block is fine, I mean I have no complaints, but it's not exactly someone you always want to hang out with. It's sorta like when you goto a party and are looking for someone, anyone to talk to.... it's alwaaaaays A Block person. Someone who is good enough to have a drink with, discuss weather, perhaps old current events (e.g. the war, health care, great AFC football games from years past). BUT you don't want to get stuck with The Block all-night. Oh good god no.

The Hook meanwhile tends to be a pretty helpful piece, and it is quite underrated. The only problem is that extra nub at the end. When it fits into your Tetris pile it is magical. Like a glittered glove fitting Michael's hand. But when it doesn 't work...you're just like "dude, you stupid muthah@#$ah, why now?" The nub can throw you a real curveball once in a while. The Hook. Suave. Dashing. Bold. It's like a cologne, but only it's a Tetris piece.

Now we can go back and forth on which piece I maaay or maaay not be, and the merits behind each one....but one piece you do not want to be is the S-Block. The S-Block is the absolute worst. No one ever prays for an S-Block to scroll down their screens. If the S-Block were a person it would be a real dick. Like just a guy that no one wants and when he arrives he just fucks up everything around him. Even when he sorta fits it makes the next layer on top of him awkward.

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Spot the Desi: fluorescent tube lights, Indians, & hatred

2009-10-24T02:10:00.007-04:00

When I was a little kid and my family used to go to India there was one thing I used to hate above all else.... it wasn't the humidity, it wasn't the mosquitoes*, it wasn't even the lack of normal sit-down toilets in some houses... it was fluorescent tube lights

I fucking hate that shit. They are bright and it give every room the ambiance of a hospital. Plus every time you sorta look at one it's as if your retinas are burning off.

But for some reason it seemed like 97% of all Indian households had at least one room illuminated by as tube light. No other ethnicity has embraced a form of light in a similar fashion to Indians and tube lights. It's to the point that when I look at the surrounding buildings around where I live, I can spot which apartments Indians live in just by the tube lights.

The apartments are unmistakable based upon the piercing blue-ish white light erupting from their windows. Most normal homes have a nice warm yellow light. Not desis. We need fluorescent because it makes the text from math book just jump out and shine!

See you can just count that at least 5 of the apartments are filled with desis (those windows circled in green).

Now I know what a lot of you are saying, "aren't there like a lot of Indian people in your 'hood?" Well that's besides the point. The ones with fluorescent tube lights are definitely Indian.

* Okay I'll admit, mosquitoes were by far THE worst. If I wasn't writing this dramatic piece of prose there's no doubt that mosquitoes would be tops of my hate list. There was nothing worst then waking up to having bites between your fingers and toes and generally feeling swollen. However my aunts used to make me feel better by making some bogus claim that I had "sweet blood" and hence attracted all the bloodsucking night crawlers.

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ketchup

2009-10-23T23:56:00.000-04:00

Why doesn't Burger King and McDonalds put ketchup in the little dipping sauce boxes that they reserve for BBQ Sauce and Zesty! (tm) Sauce? It's 1000 times more practical than the stupid ketchup packets that they give where you're left wondering where you're supposed to squirt the ketchup.

the Al-Khair University Badgers

2009-10-22T20:56:00.003-04:00

I was reading about some student unrest in some Pakistani universities and one thought immediately came to my mind: do their colleges have nicknames like colleges here?

For example I went to the handy dandy list-o-Pakistani universities and looking up schools like:

Aga Khan University
Al-Khair University
Bahauddin Zakariya University
Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering and Technology
Habib Public School
Isra University
Karachi University
Khyber Medical College
Liaquat University
Quaid-e-Azam University
University of Karachi

The colleges read like a South East Asian version of the Big 10. The pomp. The circumstance. The pageantry. Pakistani higher education (and yes to all my friends that went to Karachi Grammar School I understand it was a good school...)

I mean who hasn't seen the rivalry of the Habib Public School Wolverines versus the Quaid-e-Azam Golden Gophers. It's a storied rivalry that spans the ages. And who of course can forget the laughingstock that the Liquat University Fighting Falcons cricket team became last year?!?

And that ends my thoughts on that.

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c'mon ride the train

2009-10-12T14:03:00.001-04:00

The other day I was walking through the Hoboken train terminal and I saw a train conductor kissing one of the passengers next to the platform. This was scandalous! For sure they must have some sorta code-o-conduct laws prohibiting such sophomoric behavior. But then I realized that it was just a train person.... unless of course the "passenger" the train person's intern...in which case it would still just be a train person.

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Hindu traditions, water guns, & me

2009-10-07T22:16:00.009-04:00

Karva Chauth is a ritual celebrated by married women mainly from northern Indian women from Punjab.

Basically women in their first year of marriage fast all day in a ritual which shows how the wife loves her husband since she's willing to suffer (fast) for him. After sunset, and upon seeing the moon, the women dress in the best clothing and offer prayers. They then receive their first bite of food from the beloved hubbies.

Touching stuff. Really.

As can be expected from my little waterside neighborhood is that scores of brown people are lining up along the water and performing their husband & wife rituals.

Now on one hand it's pretty cool to see people maintaining their culture by performing such rituals. On the otherhand the idea of a ton of Indian people sitting outside my window is too much of a temptation to resist any sane person with a water gun. Namely me.

So with Indian women wearing their finest clothes I made it rain. Oh I made it rain. The best part is that people couldn't run away because they had to finish their rituals. God comes first you know.

Now to be clear I asked my mom if I'll goto hell for spraying people with my Super Soaker (tm) while they're praying and she said no. So I'd say this is her way of saying "Go spray them my son." And you know what?... I'm not wanton to disobey my mom. Especially on Hindu-ritual days.

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notes from my cabbie

2009-10-03T22:01:00.003-04:00

"It's a real pity Chicago didn't get the Olympics. But I mean where would you want to spend two weeks? Chicago or Rio? Of course Rio with all them beaches and shit. They need to change some of the events. Instead of throwing the javelin they should make an event of catching the javelin"

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PODCAST: DJ Shakes_2009-09-25 (92-96, Rock and Roll High School)

2009-09-25T23:59:00.002-04:00

PODCAST ME:
Simply drag the orange podcast icon on the left column of this page 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 72 min)
http://hbshakes.blogspot.com
theme: 1992-96, My High School Song

[0:00] Intro - Me
[0:48] Pornos for Pyros - Pets
[3:38] Cracker - Low
[8:04] Pavement - Cut Your Hair
[11:00] The Toadies - Possum Kingdom
[16:02] Breeders - Cannonball
[18:59] L7 - Pretend That We're Dead
[22:32] Sonic Youth - Bull In The Heather
[25:11] Collective Soul - December
[29:47] Pearl Jam - I Got ID
[33:53] Smashing Pumpkins - Drown
[38:15] Bad Religion - Infected
[41:57] Pennywise - Bro Hymm
[44:47] Green Day - She
[47:00] Soul Asylum - Black Gold
[48:53] Red Hot Chili Peppers - Breaking The Girl
[53:32] Nirvana - Dumb
[55:58] Stone Temple Pilots - Interstate Love Song
[58:48] James - Low Low Low
[61:31] Bush - Little Things
[64:18] Midnight Oil - Earth and Sun and Moon
[68:48] Crash Test Dummies - Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmmm

.
Well these are the songs I love in high school...which was from 1992-96. Based on that time frame you can tell that I'm now...well...older.

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2009-09-24T20:34:00.003-04:00

When I grow up I'm going to make a new college and it will be called New Miss. And it will be the greatest college in Mississippi and it will be better than even the elder Ole Miss because it will be newer.

It will be better than all of the Misses. It will be better than Swiss Miss and her monopoly of cocoa powder. And Mrs. Zeller my 5th grade elementary school teacher who punished me once for swearing, but I didn't even swear. I just said "Jesus Christ!" when I saw a bug in the classroom and that shouldn't count as swearing when there are animals/insects/nature involved in life.

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the boys play rock and roll

2009-09-23T23:59:00.000-04:00

U2 at Giants Stadium (Night 1, opener: Muse)

The night's biggest highlight (aside from being so close to the front): patting Matt Damon on the back while exiting. He was wearing an incognito hat to which I say "Hey Matt" and he said "Hey what's up"

I left it at that.

Honorable mention: The girl behind me who felt the need to grab my hand during Sunday Bloody Sunday and than grab my belt loop. I love rock and roll. I felt like I was in "Almost Famous" following the music of legendary group Stillwater and we were sharing a moment while they were playing "Fever Dog"...

...or something like that.

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Cheerios, zeros, and why India is great

2009-09-17T23:12:00.003-04:00

When I was a kid I used to eat Cheerios. That was the cereal of choice in our homey home. I think it was because each Cheerio looked like a zero, to remind young and impressionable Indian kids that India was the inventor of the number zero until the Arabs "borrowed it."

This is a good fact to know and my parents taught me of this fact. Growing up I tended to think of how India had a history of watching its great jewels stolen by others, allow me to list a few:

The Hope Diamond - the British
Freddie Mercury - also the British
Zero - Arabs, the founders of Arabic numerals

Now ordinarily the Zero Issue would not be one that I'd think about on a daily basis, but as of a year ago everyday at 2pm I do. As a matter of fact I think about a lot of reasons for why India is great at 2pm.

The reason: Everyday at 2pm my mom sends me 10-12 chain emails that have the following subject lines :

FW: INDIA IS GREAT!!! 17 REASONS WHY!
7 WONDERS OF THE WORLD...FROM INDIA!!!!
FW: SITAR THE TRUE ROCK INSTRUMENT
FW: KASHMIR BELONGS TO INDIA!!!!
WHY SHAH RUKH KHAN IS MORE POPULAR THAN GEORGE CLOONEY
FW: DHARMENDRA!!!
FW: INDIA NUMBER 1, forward to 10 people for GOOD LUCK!!!

And so on and so forth. Everyday.

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another year

2009-09-11T21:37:00.000-04:00

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Jackson Diner

2009-09-08T00:16:00.003-04:00

Some people sophisticated "S-I-L-V-E-R C-H-I-N-A S-E-T", while others spell it "C-O-R-D-U-R-O-Y P-A-N-T-S & H-U-G-O B-O-S-S W-H-I-T-E S-H-I-R-T"

Well those are good attempts, but for the other 99% of the world we spell it "JACKSON DINER"
in York's 3rd best borough

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15th & Union Square West

2009-09-06T23:39:00.000-04:00

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OverheardInTheEastVillage.com

2009-09-04T23:44:00.003-04:00

Quotes/awkward convo from the guy sitting behind me at an outdoor cafe (picture to the right). Now this pic was taken before his blind date from Facebook arrived.

How do I know this? Well he was speaking sorta loud on his cell to one of his "boys" about this "girl he was runnin' up in"

He had a few gems, but this was my fave after the girl came:

WAITER: Hello
JERK GUY trying to impress girl: Hi yes, do you have a mango lassi?
WAITER: Um, we don't have any mango lassi
JERK GUY: Wait is that orange-y drink that everyone is drinking in a tall glass that looks so refreshing
WAITER: The orange drink?
JERK GUY: Yes
WAITER: That is orange juice.

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OverHeard@Target.com

2009-09-03T19:30:00.003-04:00

"Chile' I will club that tub of blubber like the seal she is!"
- Aisle 4, hair products

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Yelp, Shaadi.com, & Augmented Reality

2009-09-02T19:55:00.002-04:00

So the other day I stumbled upon one of the greatest things ever. Using services like Yelp have been ...how you say...manual. You have to input where you are and figure out how far things are from you...it's really quite a pain since it takes more than 10 seconds for my A.D.D. brain to compute all these things.

What if you could just point your camera at the world around and have you restaurant ratings, phone numbers, etc. just appear automatically. Kinda like a Heads Up Display. Well that's exactly what the new iPhone Yelp app does.

If you get the new download and shake the phone 3 times - I'm not making this up - a hidden feature called Monocle gets unleashed.

Monocle enables you to simply point the camera around you and you can see the ratings for bars, restaurants, and stores. Pretty nifty stuff.

Now truth be told I've heard about these Augmented Reality apps before in like Europe-land but I've never seen it with my own eyes....

...then I got to thinking... this is where danger usually occurs...

Why should Augmented Reality be confined to just food and shopping places? Why can't it be matched up to people. How rad would be that be to go to a train station and just point your camera at people and you could see what their ratings are?

Life would look like this:

(How genius is that picture? How about a nice big round of applause for my Friday evening. Me, paintbrush, and the internet. The sky is the limit.)

NOW, what if they went one step further and hooked up this PeopleYelp with like Facebook or like Shaadi.com (or J-Date or IndianDating.com or....). That would be nutso. You could basically walk around town and tell who is single, who isn't looking, and whether their friends give them one star or five.

Pretty soon the ultimate goal of humanity could be achieved whereby we don't have to talk or directly communicate with people to know everything about them.

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The Barclays, Steve Marino

2009-08-30T23:54:00.000-04:00

Going to golf tournaments is sorta like attending a funeral. A large group of people gets together to be deathly quiet, with an occasional smattering of claps.

The PGA Tour took a local stop this week in Jersey for The Barclay's Golf tourney. While proximity was a key reason for making sure I made the trip (literally 20 minutes away) the other was Steve Marino. Steve was the leader after 3 rounds and he was also one co-captain of the UVA golf team (back in the day) along with one of my best friends. My buddy knew Steve well and his folks too
This created a cool moment where I basically walked the course with his parents. It's weird watching an event where a guy's successes or failures are in plain view of the whole world....and you're next to the people who made him.

Imagine if everyone in the world knew whether you were having a good or bad day at work. And then to top if off your parents knew right away and perhaps a TV crew asked your mom about how she felt about your day. Aside from some mom-chatter about the weather the whole thing could be quite nerve wracking.

While Steve didn't win (had a tough 15th hole) his parents seemed very sweet and made for another good sports moment in my books.

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note to self

2009-08-29T10:18:00.002-04:00

If you're going to get a mohawk, make sure you don't have a bald spot first.

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Bel Biv DeVoe, Blackberry's, and non-magnetically shielded speakers

2009-08-28T18:13:00.002-04:00

If I ever played the game "Name That Tune" I would be a fucking champ. I've prided myself in being able to name songs after less than 2 or 3 seconds of hearing the opening. Sadly this skill has few tangible benefits...

So on a related note one of the annoying things about Blackberry's, IPhones, and things that generate electromagnetic waves in general is that they jack up speakers and cause tend to cause interference in them (yes yes I know some speakers are magnetically shielded, but just shut up about that).

Well one of the odd things is that the interaction between blackberry's and the intercoms at work is that it the series of blips and noises is pretty constant. It literally makes the same beat , kinda like a machine gun staccato that sounds like "TICK, TICK-A-TICK, TICK-A-TICK, TICK, TICK"

Now for whatever reason after hearing this a few times the beat sounded reaaalllly familiar. So familar that it bothered me because I couldn't put my finger on it. And then it hit me.

...NAME THAT TUNE....

The Blackberry-speaker interaction makes a beat that sounds EXACTLY like the beginning of Bel Biv DeVoe's epic "Poison." New Jack Swing is alive and well and it's been thriving on our marketing floor.

So on a quiet Tuesday morning someone's Blackberry went off and I proudly explained my hypothesis to my boss who thought I was crazy. Fast forward 30 seconds and through the magic of YouTube the desk was listening to Poison...

Let's just people changed their opinions of me quickly. From "that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard" people said "You know Shakes, you're a real hero. An American Hero." Well they didn't really say that part, but you get the drift.

What was more amazing is that when you watch the video it's pretty clear that they don't make videos of that class and caliber anymore. The choreography, the puffy jackets, the images of guys dancing in front of a giant green screen which imposes images of a zoomed in girl walking (1:21). It makes you long for the days when you could watch videos on MTV. Or BET. Or anywhere.

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Save Ferris

2009-08-27T22:58:00.003-04:00

So in honor of Ferris Bueller taking a much celebrated day off, I decided to do the same and go to my first weekday day game ever. And despite train delays and the Yanks getting blown out, it was a lovely day.

Now back to work...

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a stroke of genius

2009-08-26T23:28:00.006-04:00

I think this year I'm gonna change things up a bit. I'm so tired of my birthday being on the same day of the same month, year after year. But alas what can I do? I'm sorta stuck with my birthday being the anniversary of....well.... the day of my birth. So there I was stuck in a rut.

Well this past weekend I went to the temple (Ganpathi Bapa Moriya!) and it hit me. Hindu gods don't use the Gregorian Calendar...they say nay. They go for something truer. Higher. Literally.

We're going to the moon, bitches.

Starting this year I'm going to start celebrating my birthday according to the lunar calendar. Which means if I'm calculating things correctly my birthday will no longer be at the end of January. No, no, no. It will now occur somewhere between the months of January and March, depending on the year. Now I can call my parents on random days like February 19th and start complaining to my folks that they totally missed my birthday.

Ingenious. Ingenious I say. And it will always keep people guessing.

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