Well, what can I do?

If you haven't yet seen this, then you need to watch it. It is pure genius.

An Aural Assemblage

Here's a quick, off-the-cuff list of music I've been enjoying recently:

Parc Avenue by Plants and Animals

Really fun, melodic, folksy rock. I especially appreciate their rustic, wild tinge — which makes sense, given the band's name. Both the lyrics and the music are contemplative and tender.

For Emma, Forever Ago by Bon Iver

Mellow and enchanting. I especially love "Re: Stacks" — sad, yet sweet and hopeful.

Noble Beast by Andrew Bird

Another great album by the loquacious Mr. Bird. I love when musicians manage give dimension to both their music and their words; whistling is a bonus.

The Trials of Van Occupanther by Midlake

I've been listening to this album nearly nonstop; I love it. The music is complex and layered, and the lyrics transport me back a few centuries. Simplicity and yearning.

All We Could Do Was Sing by Port O'Brien

I love the nautical theme, and I love the chaotic swing between raw energy and somber meditation. It's like the Arcade Fire moved to Alaska, got depressed, and read Herman Melville. "Put me on a boat and cut the line..."

That is all; I must away to the land of forgetting to post to my blog regularly.

Phases of iPhone Death

I dropped my iPhone this morning — into the toilet. Don't worry: the water was clean. Well, as clean as toilet water can be. I pulled it out immediately, and tried in vain to turn it off.

1. The water made it impossible to use the touchscreen. I pawed at the "Slide to power off" bar for a few frantic seconds before giving up.
2. The screen quickly donned some pixelated version of the multicolored empty-TV-station livery. Not good.
3. The colored pixels all went black, and rather slowly. It was like watching the phone's soul extricate itself from its metal chassis and sojourn back to the great Jobs In The Sky.
4. I laid the phone on top of a baseboard heater to encourage evaporation. The screen was still backlit, but showed only black. I went away dejected.
5. Roughly ten minutes later I came back, and the phone had booted up. I attempted to open Safari, but the touchscreen freaked out: Instead of loading Safari, I wound up calling my friend Paul. I hard reset the phone before the call could complete.
6. The phone rebooted and asked me to plug it into iTunes, or "Slide for emergency". Fearing the caprices of a sporadic touchscreen, I attempted to power down (again) by holding Home and the Power key. I don't mind calling Paul on an early Sunday, but I'd rather not have to explain my situation to EMS.
7. After powering down for a moment, the phone booted spontaneously. It told me that it had been freshly activated, and started like normal. The touchscreen failed to respond.
8. I turned it off, and it began a cyclic binge of rebooting and dying — all on its own. I went away dejected, again.
9. After church, I came back to a phone that appeared to be fully functional — with the glaring exception that the touchscreen didn't work.

And thus my phone sits, encased in the dysfunctional ice of the 9^th circle of iPhone Hell. Lame.

Daily Dose of Infixes

In some of today's random Facebook correspondence, I was struck by the following singular-to-plural conversion:

passerby becomes passersby

Aha - an English infix! Most people are familiar with prefixes and suffixes, but the infix is a rare construction in English (and presumably rare in most of the languages English-speaking students study, since so few English speakers seem to know about them).

30 seconds of Google use uncovered "spoonsful" and "cupsful" as companions of "passersby" — can anyone think of others?

Election Thoughts

Not mine, but one of my close associates:

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Dignity

Another gem from Bob Dylan's Tell Tale Signs:

Fat man looking in a shining steel
Thin man looking at his last meal
Hollow man looking in a cotton field
For dignity

Wise man looking at a blade of grass
Young man looking in the shadows that pass
Poor man looking through painted glass
For dignity

Somebody got murdered on new year's eve
Somebody said dignity was the last to leave
Went into the cities, went into the towns
In the land of the midnight sun

Searching high, searching low
Searching everywhere I know
Asking the cops wherever I go,
"Have you seen dignity?"

Blind man breaking out of a trance
Puts both his hands into the pockets of chance
Hoping to find the one circumstance
Of dignity

Stranger stares down into the light
From a platinum window in the Mexican night
Searching every blood-sucking thing in sight
For dignity

I went down where the vultures feed
Would have gone deeper, but there wasn't any need
Heard the tongues of the angels and the tongues of men
It all sounded no different to me

Soul of a nation is under the knife
Death is standing in the doorway of life
In the next room, a man fighting with his wife
Over dignity

This alternate version speaks more to me than its two companions. It sets down the foundation of many major issues, placing as book-ends two powerfully linked verses. All of the yearning and hopelessness of the middle verses pale in comparison to the last four lines, yet each situation describes people searching for that quintessential thing which they lack. These are the fatherless, the widow, the sojourner; these we dare not neglect.

Death is standing in the doorway of life.

Tell Tale Truths

I just received Bob Dylan's Tell Tale Signs in the mail.

It's a delightful collection of rare and unreleased tracks from recent years.  The most rewarding gem so far is an expanded version of one of my favorite songs: Can't Wait.

Contemplate these words — only a snippet of the full lyrics, mind you — and think on how true they are to the human experience.

Skies are grey, I'm looking for anything that will bring a happy glow
Night or day, it doesn't matter where I go anymore; I just go
If I ever saw you coming I don't know what I would do
I'd like to think I could control myself, but it isn't true
That's how it is when things disintegrate
And I don't know how much longer I can wait

What do you run after to find a "happy glow"?