Consonants and vowels all together, equally

New Crowded House came out in the US today! Pre-ordered, obtained, listened to a lot. I swear, if I ever met Karl Urban, the first question out of my mouth would be, "So do you love Neil Finn only sort of, or oh my god so much?" I'm so pleased that I have new music for the plane (this, plus the new National and Erykah Badu).

Another thing that came out in the US this week is the recent adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express and I found it strange. I had to go back to the book to double check what I remembered.

( Spoilers behind the cut for the book, the 1974 movie, and the recent BBC adaptation. )

I love David Suchet as Poirot, but I think I'll stick to the 1974 movie for this title. Bringing out the inner life of a character is one thing, but changing up the book this much in order to make a point feels like a bit much.

And now White Collar is back! YAY!

First, there are three songs no one has gotten yet, so I'll give you more lyrics. Which makes one of them a SUPER gimme.

#3:
Say your prayers little one
Don't forget my son
To include everyone
#8:
One, two, three and to the fo'
Snoop Doggy Dogg and Dr. Dre is at the do'
#10
At home
Drawing pictures
Of mountain tops
With him on top
Lemon yellow sun
Arms raised in a V
Dead lay in pools of maroon below

Second, sangueuk asked me three questions. I did the meme back in January so comment there (LJ/DW) if you'd like me to ask you questions!

1. In the movie of your life, who would you cast as yourself? your love interest? Who would direct it?

I'd probably end up being played by Angelina Jolie in blackface since that's what happens to mixed people in the movies. Maybe a young Rae Dawn Chong?

I don't have a love interest so I can't do that casting at this time. As for the director, I'd adore George Cukor, but he has a bad case of the dead. So maybe Drew Barrymore would be interested? Or perhaps Amy Heckerling?

2. What was your dream going up?

To live in New York city, and to be a professor. I'm doing the first, and working on the second!

3. Favourite fandom pairing and why?

I'm so bad with favorites. I love them all for different reasons. Like, HP: Seamus/Dean is the horse that brung me, and HP: Harry/Hermione is very high highs and very low lows, and AI: Ryan/Simon is my RPF that mysteriously has none of the problems of RPF, and HP: Draco/Ginny is just incredibly sexy, and ST: Jim/Bones was deeply healing in a way I could go on about at length if you like, and ST: Chapel/Rand is cool competence wrapped up in Hitchcock blonde, and HP: Parvati/Pansy is a really well-tailored pair of trousers, and ST: Spock/Uhura is this unexpected treasure and AI: Amanda/Carly is tragic present and hopeful hidden past, and JH: Cameron/Duckie is the one I didn't realize I always shipped, and AI: Kris/Adam is too adorable for words, and AI: Blake/Chris was that fun time in the bubble, and HP: Ron/Padma is that ship I made up one day that worked even better than I ever thought, and AI: Kat/Elliott is so classic it should be 1952, and HP: Percy/Oliver is so classic it probably is 1952, and HP: Remus/Sirius is sad and then happy and then sad again, and I know there's a lot because I like pairing everyone up at the end but so did Shakespeare so I don't have a problem with that.

Because you know you need to watch Elton, Bruce, Sting, Gaga, Debbie Harry and Shirley Bassey sing "Don't Stop Believin'" at Carnegie Hall accompanied by a dance line of nearly naked men:

In order to explain and justify my decision, I need to take you back in time a bit.

( short version: I know it's plebey, but I really like iTunes )

Somehow being tech-practical or tech-individual fifteen years ago was comfortable, but being so now feels seriously uncool, naive and subject to ridicule. I'm not sure if it's because I've aged into the dreaded and much hated by internet geeks middle-aged-mom demographic—which probably means I should just lump it and trade in the ibook for an ipad—or if it's that I know more people who are critical of how others use devices. Likely treating my iPhone as an iPod that has a phone in it, or caring about carrying one device, rather than appropriately thinking of it as a tiny computer in my pocket, is making all of you wince right now. But I really love music!

Welcome all who answered the call of team_jones or who have floated by from other places! I recently reformatted my profile page so it's a really good introduction to me and the things that go on around here. If you want to follow me on twitter please do, but send an @reply so I know who you are and can follow you back. I am going to do that 30 posts/30 days meme because it sounds fun.

The other thing I mean to say today is, in two weeks we'll be at the semifinals for American Idol, which means I'll be posting about Idol twice a week, recaps and polls and thoughts on results. I've trained as a singer so the recaps are pretty singerly, but I also ship Ryan and Simon and since it's the last year of Idol Rymon there will probably be more overt references to them.

I reward you with a playlist of the six awesome songs that played on shuffle when I braved the unshoveled sidewalks earlier to mail a check and get some canned tomatoes. (I had a pita pizza craving.) Yay music!

Now that the Momentous Occasion is over, back to our regularly scheduled ridiculousness.

I adore the Genius function in iTunes. I love putting in a new song and having it spit out some kind of seriously awesome mix. I'm so used to listening to entire albums that I find it hard to negotiate some of the playlists I've downloaded or the mix/soundtrack albums I've bought, and this pulls up songs I just don't listen to enough.

Yesterday I put in "Howl" by Florence & the Machine and the mix I got was so awesome, I have to share the beauty of this playlist with you all.

( 100 awesome songs, seriously. )

It's like this festival of awesome. I am writing as I listen to it, and it's a cozy cold Saturday, and I'm meeting sistermagpie later for dinner, and all is well.

So I got a tumblr: http://clio-jlh.tumblr.com/ If you're there, let me know, and definitely tell me who I should be following! I'm all at sea. So far I'm following some HIMYM thing, rawles, bhanesidhe, and Maura Johnston who was lamely fired as editor of the originally Gawker-owned music blog Idolator when she was the only thing that made it worth reading.

I'm going to move all posting that I make about music over to Tumblr because you can actually upload music to it, which you can't do here. Doing the whole Grooveshark thing is tedious and makes everything load slowly and blah blah blah. On top of that, Tumblr has a "like" feature which might make me feel a little better about posting, as people don't have to comment. I'm excited to re-start that 50 Perfect Songs project I abandoned earlier this year.

Speaking of which, RIP Imeem. These are the times when we cling ever more tightly to DW and AO3, man. I've worked out my crossposting issues and will be doing much more of it in future!

This is the post I should have made last week, but I got a bit distracted. Monday I was on the train coming back from a trip to DC while many of you were having a snow day. I'd spent the weekend with a college friend, and I was feeling contemplative, a combination which brings me to REM, and thence to "Maps and Legends."

( Maps and Legends )

Let's see if I can make it that far!

1. The more I look at Ryan's new hair, the more I love it.
   
2. Speaking of Ryan, classy of E! not to run the Rhianna photo. Not classy of the NY Post to put it on the damn front page so it was unavoidable in the city on Friday.
   
3. Speaking of the Post not being classy, here's my favorite comment on the cartoon, from a commenter at Wonkette:

   i don’t know what genius thought a joke about being shot or monkeys within a hundred miles of anything having to do with obama’s left pinky, would go over well with the pajama wearing liberal bloggers. while it’s probably the least racist thing rupert’s ever been associated with, it also missed the whole point about cartoons being funny.

4. Because the thing is, Sean Delonas is so consistently unfunny and offensive that when I heard he was the one behind the monkey cartoon I was seriously unsurprised.
   
5. But that doesn't excuse the Post; a friend said to me that they expected no more of the tab but I'm not wiling to allow a major newspaper to be so overtly racist.
   
6. I don't expect much more from TMZ, either—though at $62.5M, the price for the Rhianna pic was cheap—but that doesn't mean their actions were "okay."
   
7. Someone may or may not have leaked the Oscar winners. I don't consider this spoilery because the last time something like this happened they were totally bogus. While I'll definitely be checking the winners against this list, like the website I wouldn't recommend using it to place a big bet in Vegas. (Also, knowing the oddsmakers there, they'd take this leak into consideration.)
   
8. The new U2 album got five stars from Rolling Stone. Huh.
   
9. I went to karaoke the other night. No U2 songs sung, but a lot of anime theme songs were sung. I was annoyed because NONE of my songs had videos, just lame chyron screens with the lyrics.
   
10. Have you noticed that the female Cylons have the same body type?
    
11. I'm sad that all the fashion blogs trashed MIA's Grammy outfits. I thought she looked adorable! So often these fashion blogs bitch about the samey-ness of the red carpets, but they only have themselves to blame. I watch Ryan and Giuliana on the red carpet because fun things happen, but I've stopped watching any kind of fashion police coverage. It's like the difference between Trinny and Susannah's approach and Stacy and Clinton's—Trinny and Susannah live the person's life, and that results in different looks; Stacy and Clinton make everyone look like Stacy, in black trousers and pointy high-heeled boots, no matter what their lives are like.
    
12. jenncho made manips for the AU! I'll make a post about them on Monday so everyone can see them.
    
13. Ricardo Montalban played a Japanese man in the movie Sayonara (1957). Oh Hollywood and your making everyone who wasn't Anglo the same, like black actors playing native americans in cowboy movies, or Paul Henreid, who was Austrian, playing a Czech, a Frenchman, a German, a Spaniard, an Arab sheik and an Iraqi. Or Omar Sharif, an Egyptian, who played everybody including a Russian doctor and an American gambler.
    
14. I'm up through BSG 3.13, and if not for the mythology, Chief and the fact that I've set up BSG as a sort of endurance test for myself, I would have ditched the show for the events of 3.12. I'm really looking forward to this show being over.
    
15. When it is, I'm going to treat myself to a marathon of the Mary Tyler Moore show before I go once more unto the breech, dear friends, to watch Firefly (the show Joss didn't have an opportunity to frack up).
    
16. See what I did there?
    
17. I'm not watching Dollhouse. I don't like Joss. wordplay thinks I'll be missing interesting things, but one thing BSG has taught me is that I can't watch a show that compartmentally; if I'm not interested in the main thrust of the show, little side issues won't be enough to keep me from wanting to reach through the screen and kill someone every time I watch it.
    
18. I may also have learned this from Heroes, which I was trying to watch for the race issues, and ended up finding a trial that must be endured. I'm thinking that television shows should not be a trial to be endured.

Later: liveblogging the Oscars!

So it's a day late but definitely not a dollar short, and I'm sort of glad I waited because I watched and listened to a bunch of post-Grammys stuff since then, and it's always good, I think, to rewatch before posting.

( Radiohead! MIA! You know you wanted it! )

10 awards, people. 10. That was a special concert, not an awards show but you know, that's really fine. I wish that we could have had one jazz performance, or one gospel performance, but the ratings were a lot better and that's what counts.