A little while back, somebody on the Hold Steady fan message board put out a request for people’s all-time Top Ten songs. This is a really hard question, but a fun one, so of course I couldn’t resist. And since the overlap between there and here is pretty minimal, I’ll recycle the message I sent […]
Category: Music
Eureka: The Soundtrack
So, you’ve picked up your copy of the just-released Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist— you have bought a copy, right?– and now you’re thinking “I’d love to curl up and read this, but what should I listen to while I do that?” Well, never fear, I’m here to help. Also, I’m really tired, and this […]
The Afghan Whigs at the Beacon Theater
Saturday afternoon, I drove down to the city to see the reunited Afghan Whigs play the Beacon Theater on the Upper West Side. I saw them years and years ago in DC, around 1996 or so on the tour for Black Love, and that was a great show. They’ve always been one of my favorite […]
Entrance Music
The AV Club had a Q&A last week asking “What would be your entrance music?” As a music fan and a sports junkie this is, of course, a nearly irresistable question, though a lot of other things got in the way before I could get around to typing up an answer. I’ve always kind of […]
The Hold Steady at The Hollow, Albany
This was kind of a dispiriting week in a lot of ways, but as mentioned in yesterday’s links dump, Kate and I had tickets for the Hold Steady in Albany last night. And since schools are closed next week, we packed SteelyKid and The Pip off to Grandma and Grandpa’s, and went to a rock […]
Music Writing and Science Writing
No, this isn’t another blog post lamenting the fact that music writing gets far more attention than science writing. If anything, it’s a bit of an argument that science writing ought to be less like popular music writing. On Twitter this past weekend Jim Henley, one of the few bloggers I consider “old school” (the […]
The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down to the River to Pray
I’ve just emerged from a week in the Incredible College Simulator(*), first spending a week at DAMOP and then the weekend at my 20th college reunion at Williams, so while I have physics stuff I ought to write about, my brain has temporarily turned to goo. Also, I have a week’s worth of administrative crap […]
In Which I Struggle With Popular Music
The kids are off at Grandma and Grandpa’s, so Kate and I went out for a nice dinner Thursday night, and I found myself with a bit of time to blog… but no particular substantive ideas. The whole “publishers behaving badly” theme of last week seems to have run its course, between Random House re-thinking […]
The Psychology and Improbability of Shuffle Play
Kate and I went down to New York City (sans kids, as my parents were good enough to take SteelyKid and The Pip for the weekend) this weekend, because Kate had a case to argue this morning, and I needed a getaway before the start of classes today. We hit the Rubin Museum of Art, […]
She Said Songs
In which I list some pop song lyrics for you to guess, because it’s Friday and I’m tired. ———— The other night, on Twitter, Patrick Nielsen Hayden posted a snippet of song lyrics with the hashtag “#greatestalbumsofalltime.” I was bored and looking to kill time, so I followed up with a couple of my own, […]