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I’ve mentioned several times here and in podcasts about the music club I’m in at work.  If not, or as a memory refresher, a bunch of us get together once a month with a copy of an 8-12 (or so) song mix.  I’ve gotten a lot of really kick butt music and they’re all a blast to hang with.

We don’t usually have a theme, but this month one of the folks threw out the idea of a Guilty Pleasure mix.  Everyone jumped on it.

For me, I don’t feel guilty about my music so I called my mix:

Songs For Whom I Have Had To, At One Time Or Another, Mount A Defense To Justify My Affection For Them.

Read the rest of this entry and then (everyone!) liberally post the songs that (paraphrasing another member of the club) make you keep your car windows up, sunglasses on, and your volume carefully controlled.

Post anonymously if your digital Celine Dion catalog is that humiliating. 

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The new Tori Amos album is out.

Wah who.

I was not particularly geeked about it. The previous album, Beekeeper, sucked like a Hoover hooked up to a nuke so this new one wasn’t really on my radar. However, I heard the single ‘Big Wheel’ on 89.1 a couple weeks ago and it was awful. Awful.

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A couple of tidbits from our Little Man.

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A rough trancription of a dream he had:  I was at duh History Museum seeing duh World Serious trophy the Cardinals won when the stormtroopers [from Star Wars] came out of the walls.  I was upstairs, but Popsicle Guy appeared to scare them off with Spider Man.

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Trish called me a week or so ago to ask me if I was at the wedding. 

“What wedding?”
“Porter married his lucky frog [stuffed toy] and their babies are living at home.”

She handed the cell phone over to a very excited Porter (which he holds quite well).

“Hi Daddy!  I got married at duh same place as you and Mommy did.  To my lucky frog!”
“You did!  Good for you partner”
“Was I at your wedding”
(Trish) “No, you weren’t born yet.”
“Oh.  I came down from heaven on a hot parachute.  I cleaned it up afterwards.

Call Bullfinch and get ‘hot parachute from heaven’ added to the list of creation myths.

Later that day in a separate train of thought he told Trish that the overflow hole in the bathroom sink is where the bees come from, but they only come out at midnight.

To amuse myself I summed up all of our bills for when Jessie was born last July. That’s about 10 months ago if you can believe it. We sure as heck can’t.

The total is/was $20,913 but you can see a detailed list for more amusement, particularly the cost of a Tylenol at The Baby Factory. Insurance covered all but about 4% of the cost, more than I thought they would.

In 25 years I’ll do another post comparing the cost of her birth to her college, wedding (should she choose such an institution), and all the other incidentals that will come up between now and then.

Wilco’s new album came out Tuesday and thought this would be a good opportunity to post a few of their songs in a way I haven’t done before. This started as a little practice with some new audio software and I like how it turned out so you get to dig it. It’s still a good ol’ mp3, but instead of a podcast or individual tracks there’s one big file. In addition to songs from the 2002 album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot there is commentary by David Fricke from the documentary ‘I Am Trying To Break Your Heart’.

In 2001, Rolling Stone (the only music magazine I was reading around then) had an article about Wilco being dropped from their record label. That didn’t really flutter my tummy but thought it odd that it made news. Bands get canned all the time. The reason it made news is that they got canned from Reprise Records because they were a big band and didn’t want to change their album to make it radio-friendly. Bands get publicly dropped when sales crash, but not because they publicly say, “I’m not changing a single thing. Deal with it.” So, Wilco was without a label to distribute their newly recorded and ready to go cd.

Here’s where it got really interesting for me.

The band did a tour of some sort and, completely unheard of in 2001, started streaming the unreleased album from their website after copies of it leaked out. Napster was in full gear and the out of touch monarchs at the RIAA were tooling the greatest PR campaign they ever cooked up*. My compulsion to download brought me to a single mp3 with the album in it’s entirety. It was grand.

I wasn’t the only one who thought so. Streaming the album brought in a whole cadre of folks who otherwise might not have given it a chance, myself included. As a result, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot got close to Billboard’s Top 10 album list, higher than any of their other albums. This whole thing was filmed for a documentary called ‘I Am Trying To Break Your Heart’. Put it in your Netflix cue, it’s spectacular.

The film talks about the band, making the album, being dropped, the whole nine yards and scattered throughout there are comments from various people about why such a great album had such a hard time being released. One of my favourite music journalists, David Fricke, senior editor at Rolling Stone, contributes some very insightful remarks about that topic and how it relates to our cultural need for instant gratification while keeping it in the context of music and this album.

So, hear’s the meat of this post. Four songs (listed below) with commentary from Fricke that I ripped from the DVD. Go to Wikipedia for more info. You can view Wilco’s stuff at I-Tunes.

I think it makes a nice listen. Enjoy.

1. I’m The Man Who Loves You
2. I Am Trying To Break Your Heart
3. Ashes of American Flags
4. Heavy Metal Drummer

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I keep forgetting to put up the pics we took after the ice storm in January.

Album Cover

Ice covered grass

Ice covered stick

Ice covered little tree

It was pretty amazing, but more amazing was that we had power.

The 4 of us went to Chicago last weekend and had a blast.  Trish had meetings at the Chicago Ethical Society all day Saturday with her religious education colleagues.  Jake and I took Porter and Jessie to the Shedd Aquarium.  A good time was had by all.  Porter about pulled Jake’s arm out of his socket running around looking at stuff while I wheeled Jessie around in her limo/stroller.  He had a blast with the penguins and jumped whenever the dolphins did.  There was a lizard he really liked that had a fat tail and shimmery back.  He was very tired.

Here’s the real juice though.

When we got off the bus and got situated on the sidewalk I realized that I left the diaper bag on the bus.  So, my man Jake chased down a bus (#146 to be precise) in an effort retrieve it.  He got it, nary a breath lost, commenting that it felt good to do a sprint.  He caught a bus people.  Dang.  That Uncle Jake is a bad mutha…Shut yo mouth…I’m just talkin’ about Uncle Jake.

Here’s some stuff about our shorties.

• Porter likes to pretend to fall down and act like he’s stepped on banana peel.
• Jessie get’s really excited when she sees a balloon.  Starts kicking her legs and spastically vocalizing.
• Little man is doing really really great with his potty training.  Since my last post about it he had a severe backslide but has bounced back most stellarly.
• Baby girl is really starting to talk a lot.  She babbles all the time and we’re steadily trying to figure out what she means when she says ‘Hah Tah!’. 
• Bedtime stories for Porter lately have been involving the ever popular Popsicle Guy, Dr. Octopus, our friend Megan, and Baxter Acres Park (where we go frequently).  The subject can be just about anything, depending on the bad guy (most often Mr. Hit, who hits people) but we usually inject a bit of morality into it. 
• We had forgotten how much fun it was when Porter would sit up and start to bounce.  Jessie does that now and it’s a riot all over again.  She responds to music pretty well (seems to like The Beatles), and she absolutely loves to watch someone dance.  At Ella’s birthday party recently there was a part where all the kids were dancing around and she almost knocked herself over kicking and bouncing because she was so excited.
• Porter is starting to jump a bit.  He can get a little clearance on the vertical and generates much force when leaping onto my back from the couch.
• This morning when I was feeding Jessie I noticed that she was staring at her hand, wiggling her fingers.  It seems that she became aware that she has some sort of influence over their movement.  Nevermind they’ve been scooping Cheerios into her mouth for a couple months now.  That was simple survival instinct, now were close to premeditated eye poking.
• We can look at pictures of Porter when he was 9 months old and see who he is now.  When I look at Jessie I try to see who she’s going to look in a couple of years.  She’s really filling out and looks so big.

Those are a few notes.  I had some swank pictures laid out to accompany but the card in our camera decided it was ready to perform an unauthorized (and frankly unnecessary) reformatting.  Oh well.  We didn’t really need the past 2 or so months of our kids lives recorded anywhere.  A disadvantage to gobs of memory is that we tend to leave pics on there for a while.  Used to anyway.

Porter hasn’t done any interviews lately, and the only sounds you get from Jessie are her 2 teeth on the mic.  Soon though.

Take care y’all.