Recent passings

1) The incredible Ahmet Ertegun died two weeks ago, leaving behind a huge legacy of great music he helped bring to the world with a modicum of exploitation of the artists.

2) James Brown was finally kept from playing a gig without the law being involved. A great memorial to him is at WFMU's blog and pure mp3s are at bag of songs; you will find even more music at the Hype Machine. What disturbed me a bit about all the obits is that I didn't see any of them mention one of his greatest contributions to today's music, the song Funky Drummer, perhaps the most sampled song ever (it's amongst those at bag of songs).

Double goat update, 12/23/06

1) When in Sweden, be sure and say hello to the Giant Christmas Goat.

2) I was pleased to see that the goat-drawn chariot (3rd pic down) will come to the screen in next summer's adaptation of Stardust by Neil Gaiman, a fine book I read this year.

Prog sells cars

A fellow prog-loving friend passed this along: a Cadillac commercial is using Yes' song Wonderous Stories in a couple of commercials. The first commercial makes fun of prog but the second supports the idea that chicks dig prog, which I won't argue with. For those of you who want to enjoy the full song, YouTube has the video.

First end-of-year list

First, I've seen, at least: Media Matters' Most outrageous comments of 2006. Good for laughs or quick outrage, whatever your mood may be.

Free music - Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown?

It's the holiday season and this is a holiday song I like a lot but most people haven't heard. It's from On Her Majesty's Secret Service, the only James Bond movie to take place during the Christmas season. Ms Goat doesn't care for it but I enjoy the chord changes so much that I can stand the corny children's chorus la-la-ing along in the background. Tell me, Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown? (3.1 M mp3).

2/17 Update: File has been taken down. Maybe you can find it elsewhere.

Free video: Full Metal Christmas

Full Metal Christmas, a fun little video mashup just in time for the holiday season.

Great deals, Mr. Bond

Yesterday I completed my James Bond DVD collection for the 2nd time. Thanks to the fine people at Circuit City and Best Buy, both of whom offered each pair of the new box sets for reduced prices, I got all 20 movies for about $200. Of course I already had the DVDs in their previous release; they had so many great features that I had to get them back in 2002. But the great thing is that even though I paid more for them last time, I was able to resell all the DVDs thru Amazon's Marketplace for well more than the $200 I just finished spending! I almost felt bad selling some of them for more than the price of the new releases (which have all the features that the previous version had, a rarity for double-dipping), but I do have a baby goat to support...

Exploitative genius

Perusing some of T-Shirt Hell's fine offerings this evening I took a look at their page of baby whores with hopes of seeing my own babygoat on there one day. While all the pictures there are great examples of exploitation, the best is the one that exploits a group of girls as well as the baby, which is appropriate for a baby wearing a shirt that says "Playground Pimp".

"[It's a] drag, isn't it?"

John Lennon died 26 years ago this past Friday. Have you ever seen Paul McCartney's response to the tragedy? The commenters at YouTube are arguing that Paul was shocked that his former songwriting partner had been killed but I have a tough time seeing it as anything but glib; your mileage may vary.

Movie ratings

Y-Llama posted asking for film suggestions and included a link to his IMDB ratings page. Annoyed at some of his whack-ass ratings (Undercover Brother and Legally Blonde rated higher than Airplane!????), I decided that the only way to combat this would be to do my own list. I'll keep a link to it in the sidebar as it's obviously a work in progress. So far I'm enjoying this as it feels good to give turds like Corpse Bride the low rating they deserve. I'll just rate movies I've seen recently unless they're movies I've seen a whole buncha times...

Goat report, 12/7/06

We need better holiday traditions in this country. Like the one in Sweden, where they set fire to a goat made out of straw.

Presidential math

This came up in one of my classes for math teachers... James Garfield holds a novel distinction of being the only US President who has authored a proof to the Pythagorean Theorem (you know, square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the legs of a right triangle). What's even cooler is that the proof isn't that tough to understand, it's high-school level geometry. Why isn't this a requirement for the office?

[reading Garfield's bio, I just have to quote this: Garfield was the first ambidextrous president. He could simultaneously write in Latin with one hand, and Ancient Greek with the other. What, were there others?]