I have had this (::shudder::) Nickelback song squirming around in my ear all day. I almost went and looked up the song’s name so that I could tell you, but what’s the point? There is only one Nickelback song, really, and I need to get it out of there before it bores into my brain and lays eggs or something.
Must! Listen! To! Something! Else!
First off, I am digging this Peter and the Wolf dealie right here, which is kind of vaguely Violent Femmes-ish:
Next up (video only, sorry) I have never liked Death Cab for Cutie much, which leaves me free to enjoy this single from their most recent album, which is like, waaay too mainstream for the sooper-hipsters who used to like the band back when they were cool; you can, like, pick up a copy of the new one right there in the Hot Topic, gross!
Also, these weirdos are always good for a listen. Daphne likes the “parade” song, especially the part about the teeth breaking all to pieces.
And now I am going to go listen to all of the free kids’ music available as part of Salon’s story on indie rock for kids. You know you are a parent if you recognize all of these names (Dan Zanes, Justin Roberts, etc.). They are great, though (sshhh! it’s a secret) I don’t actually mind Raffi all that much, especially the francophone songs.
::phew::
I feel much better now. What were we talking about again?
Daphne is helping me write this. She is dictating. Ok, here goes.
Hi. To everybody. I want to say Hi to everybody. What I dooded today is goded to the library. Um and I haved some pictures and walked through the water tunnel. Do you know the water tunnels? And I got books and cards and a library card and library books about dinosoars and robots and fish birthday.
Hey, I want to tell something to everybody! I want to say to everybody one kid, two kid, three kid, four kid, five kid, six kid, seven kid, eight kid, nine kid, ten kid, and two zero kids! I want to tell it to everyonebody. I want to tell it to ten ten kids. I want to tell it to ten everybody and ten big kids, big big kids, who have colored shirts.
Where is everybody?
Ok, she’s lost interest. I actually sat down to relate something else that Daphne had said recently, but she decided that I needed some assistance.
Anyway — Daphne has been coming back with some pretty sharp rejoinders whenever we speak to her in an angry tone of voice. She is in no mood to accept rebukes from the likes of us.
Example:
You guys. You are not supposed to make me mad! Because then I am sad and then I be bad and that makes you sad and mad again. You! Don’t! Do that!
Also, after receiving a time-out in the car because she ran off by herself in a parking garage:
President Bush, not wanting to blurt any “mission-accomplished”-style guffaw lines, was careful to point out that the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi doesn’t mean the war is over:
“Removing Zarqawi is a major blow to al Qaeda. It’s not going to end the war, it’s certainly not going to end the violence, but it’s going to help a lot,” Bush said.
He’s quite right to lowball expectations. Eliminating the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, or even eliminating all of al-Qaeda in Iraq, could hardly curb the violence emanating from the Sunni insurgency and the ongoing tit-for-tat murder sprees involving both Sunni and Shiite vigilantes, nor is it likely to ease the tensions of the several competing Shiite power structures currently pointing loaded guns at one another in a reservoir-dogs style standoff.
I’m as happy as can be to bid al-Zarqawi adieu. Kudos to the soldiers who pulled it off. But once the celebration ends, one has to remember that this only represents a step toward breaking even in Iraq. Before the invasion, al Qaeda only operated freely in the lawless parts of Iraq, those northern and southern extremeties not directly controlled by Saddam Hussein. (We even had the opportunity to take out those camps and outposts before the war, but we held back and let them go — and that includes al-Zarqawi — reportedly for political reasons.)
But once we sent in our troops over there to field test Don Rumsfeld’s pet theories on force deployment and “agility”, al Qaeda began operating all over the damned place. The citizens of Iraq became less secure, and the U.S.A. arguably did as well (more al Qaeda recruits, more training opportunities for jihadists planning to attack America…)
We’ve got a long, hard slog ahead of us if we want to get the region back to the standard of security and stability it had before we got there. Presumably, once we’ve got that part taken care of, it’ll only be a few more years before Iraqis are finally “better off” than they were under Saddam.
So I updated the blogging engine used to run this site, as I have done a couple of times before. Each time I do this, I spend a little less time customizing the new engine and/or template to make it “mine” or do extra-special things I want it to do. For instance, this new theme (which is to say the layout, the look and feel) was certainly not my doing.
Eventually I’ll give up on maintaining my own system at all, and just get a Blogger account or something. Then I’ll get too lazy even for Blogger and I’ll switch to LJ. This will be followed by a Geocities page containing many animated GIFs of dancing babies and such, updated twice per year.
Anyway.
To keep this from being purely a blog post about blogs:
I’ve lost the link, but some wags (in the UK?) came up with the idea of using a very-high-frequency noise to drive away the teenagers loitering in front of their shops. The sound, up near 20 kHz, is supposed to be audible to young people only; most people lose their ability to hear that high by 25 or so.
Or so it’s claimed. It turns out I can hear the noise just fine, although I am over 25. It is very similar to the noise I used to hear from certain television sets, even from several rooms away or from outside of someone’s front door. I never had the impression that anyone else was hearing this noise, but then I never really said anything about it either. I’m pretty sure I remember reading that the noise was from some fairly standard transistor or capacitor or other electronics term.
But can you hear it? Take a listen, and please leave your results (with an over/under age 25 indication) in the comments.
