Crap crap crap crap crap

So, it’s late again. Also, the whole “chronicling the beard” thing has clearly fallen through the cracks. I lost all inspiration after seeing, and subsequently posting, that first dreadful picture of myself. The attempts weren’t improved by the lack of having someone around to snap the picture every day, and my own complete inability to take pictures of myself with my own stupid camera.

On the other hand, at least I’m getting around to doing the Random 10 before more than a week has gone by, which is significant considering how little blogging I’ve done lately (in spite of the absence of a play in my schedule.

0. Mike Oldfield – Resolution – From the “Shade” side of his recent “Light + Shade” release. It’s taken me awhile to warm up to the album, but I’m actually quite fond of it now, though I think I favour the “Shade” side. This is, at least for the moment, my favourite track of both discs.

1. Offspring – Falling – You know, I never actually feel like I’m in the mood for Offspring, but as soon as they pop on, I can’t help but grin and bounce a little bit. Don’t tell anyone, okay?

2. Linkin Park – By Myslf – Whole albums downloaded because I kind of liked one of their songs for about a week. Good Lord, my MP3 folder needs a cleaning. If I had a dollar for every song on my hard drive I’d never listen to, I’d have a whole lot of dollars, let me tell you.

3. The Offspring – Pretty Fly (For a White Guy) – Okay, some Offspring I’m just never really in the mood for. This is one of those songs.

4. Lisa Stansfield – All Woman – And this song’s presence on my hard drive is a completely, bizarre mystery to me. Planted by a virus, maybe.

5. Tori Amos – China – Lovely song, from her first, and arguably, best album.

6. Oingo Boing – War Again – The songs from this album always make a me a little sad, as it was the last album they recorded before making the decision to retire the band. The material on this last release was just different enough that I always think it a bit of a tragedy that we’ll never know where they would have gone musically. Curse you, Danny Elfman!

7. U2 – Sweetest Thing (The Single Mix) – I’ve never been able to warm up to newer U2 stuff – anything past, say, “Achtung Baby” has always just seemed kind of wrong to me somehow. It’s not bad, exactly. And listenable, certainly. But it’s just…I don’t know. It’s like eating at McDonald’s. You know it’s food, but somehow it just seems a little bit like plastic too.

8. They Might Be Giants – New York City (Acoustic) Apparently this is a cover of a song by…well, someone else. Also, apparently, they had to figure out the lyrics themselves from hearing the song on the radio, so their version actually has a wrong lyric in it. Which is kind of weird. Which is also kind of appropriate for TMBG. It’s worth mentioning that the acoustic version contains an accordion, which I think is criminally underused in modern music.

9. Nirvana – Where Did You Sleep Last Night? – I was never a big Nirvana fan, but I have a huge fondness for their Unplugged album, and this is certainly one of the best songs from it, with a really great intensity crescendo.

10. Madonna – You’ll See – I think this is off her greatest hits album, which I downloaded because there are actually a few of her songs that I enjoy, but it doesn’t sound even remotely familiar. Either I completely slept through a Madonna phase – which is far from impossible – or they were really stretching to flesh out the latter half of the hits.

And that’s it for this week. Next week we try, yet again, to get the Random 10 done on time. Anyone placing bets yet?