DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I was disappointed to see Jason Kottke abandon his goal for the year. He writes that what initially sounded like a fun project became more like a second job, and lost its appeal thereby.

Oh, do I know what he means. I set several aggressive goals for the year. Now half the year is up, and I’ve accomplished only one.

But, it was the best one.

The goal was to perform on stage, preferably with a few other musicians around me to distract the audience somewhat. (In all my music career, I believe I’ve played two drum solos, and only one of them was intentional. The other one happened at my wedding — I got talked into playing Wipeout without realizing that everybody would naturally conclude I was really enjoying performing a monotonous, cliched drum feature at my own reception.) So it’s a good thing I managed to join a band before the deadline on this goal came up.

We played at an open-mic night last month — a 25-minute set, including an unexpected encore.

Speaking of unexpected encores, I’ll be doubling up on this goal in a few more weeks. My band will be performing two sets in the square, downtown Sebastopol, on Thursday August 6, part of the summer concert series. Bring a blanket, a burrito, and a beer for the drummer. I promise I won’t play Wipeout.

This made the rounds in April, but I missed out because I read other websites about as often as I listen to the radio. Fortunately my friend Chuck is a big Nickelback fan. (Heh, just kidding, Chuck. Now put down that knife.)

I’ll leave the explanation to Brandon from nintendorks.com:

It’s probably no surprise that I don’t enjoy “popular” or “Top 40” music. It’s corporate, bland, overplayed, unoriginal, boring, bland, and boring, It’s also dumb. But just because I don’t enjoy it doesn’t mean I don’t listen to it. I mean, how can you not when radio and TV is infested with this crap. Lately, one of the bands that I love to hate is Nickelback, slowly climbing the ranks and placing themselves up at the top with Creed, Matchbox 20, and countless others as “worst bands in the history of music.”

So I received tremendous joy when I found the following file over on the SA Forums. Some internet genius took Nickelback’s first horrible “hit,” and mixed it with Nickelback’s newest awful “hit.” By “mixed” I mean one shitty song plays in the left speaker, and the other ear-bleeding excuse for rock plays in the right speaker. What a surprise, they are almost EXACTLY THE SAME. It’s uncanny, sad, and hilarious at the same time.

Here’s the combined song: You Remind Me of Someday

I was honestly shocked at how good these songs sounded together. Both songs hit the chorus at the same time. The tempos are the same. Even the second chorus comes at the same time. It’s formula rock at its best! Or worst, depending.

I dug deeper. I needed to know if the person behind this mix altered the sources. Maybe he’s a Creed fanboy trying to discredit Nickelback?

I found that the songs were altered slightly. “Someday” is slower, about 82 bpm, whereas “Remind Me” taps out at about 89 bpm. The combination sits somewhere in the middle.

But in the end it doesn’t affect the conclusion that is immediately apparent to anybody with ears. A tempo change is irrelevant; the arrangements are identical. Even the cliches are repeated. Here’s what I found, comparing the originals:

*I guess I’d better pull that prechorus build out of Ode to Soup!

For more analysis and discussion of other bands that either suck or are comprised entirely of visionaries and geniuses, see the MetaFilter thread.

My RealAge is 29.3. (Link to realage.com removed; see warning below.)

I wish my real age, by which I mean my, err, real age, were only 29.3. I haven’t been that young for about eight years.

The RealAge.com site offers an extensive questionnaire that attempts to calculate a person’s life expectancy based on health and lifestyle choices. Years of “RealAge” are added or subtracted to one’s calendar age based on factors such as smoking, exercise, and diet.

For example, taking antioxidant vitamins like C and E daily is worth one year of RealAge, presumably because vitamin-takers live a bit longer than non-vitamin takers.

Curiously, the “annual family income” question appears to have no bearing on one’s RealAge. I guess they’ve snuck a few marketing-research / customer qualification items into the health questionnaire.

Another quirk of the tool is that there’s no apparent penalty for habitually lying about the state of one’s health. (Really, I drink cod liver oil every day!)

The site provides a personalized plan for improving one’s health, based on the questionnaire responses where one comes up a bit shorter than ideal. There is also a nice set of 12 common-sense tips for living longer, for people who don’t take the time for the full analysis because they’re too stressed out about some damn arbitrary deadline or other, itself worth minus multiple years of one’s life.

Warning! On December 3, 2004, I began receiving multiple spam emails per day to the email address I submitted to RealAge. The evidence suggests that RealAge sold or rented its mailing list to bulk-mail-house asandox.com. I can no longer promote nor recommend RealAge’s service. It’s possible, but unlikely, that I knowingly opted in to any sort of promotional program; the sudden appearance of unsolicited marketing materials suggests that RealAge has changed my contact preferences without my consent.

Mount Shasta, Siskiyou County, California, as seen from I-5.

Wired covers TV “superchef” Alton Brown in The Thermochemical Joy of Cooking. The subtitle sums up Brown’s appeal: “Food Network superchef Alton Brown is part MacGyver, part mad scientist. Welcome to his lab.”

On the topic of kitchen science, the article relates an odd story from the history of oven design:

In the late 1700s, Benjamin Thompson, aka Count Rumford, repurposed tombstones from a Long Island graveyard to build an enclosed camp stove. His invention had the dubious distinction of producing bread crusts that bore the names of the deceased.