I grew up with the Bond films.
We used to go watch Bond movies as groups of friends in the back of someone's parent's SUV with Quiet Riot blaring...what a cool parent we had in our group.
I was thinking about my favorite Bond theme songs. Of course there is the unforgettable Monty Norman theme with the "Dum di-di dum dum". Here are my top 5 Bond themes of all time:
5 "Live and Let Die" Sir Paul McCartney (iTunes) (yewchube)
No, Guns and Roses didn't write it, though they did a solid cover of it.
4 "A View to a Kill" Duran Duran (iTunes)(yewchube)
Once the epitome of hip and mod, now a little cheesy...still a great Bond song. The video is amusing if not for the originally intended reasons.
3 "Nobody Does it Better" Carly Simon (iTunes)(yewchube)
Many have sung this one, and I still think nobody does it better.
2 "For Your Eyes Only" Sheena Easton (yewchube)
Where is the official iTunes version Sheena? I love this song.
1 "The World is Not Enough" Garbage (iTunes)(yewchube)
What an achievement, they wrote a new rock song with the classic bond feel and all the Garbage trademarks. Brilliant. The music video is amazing.
Have a happy monday!
=sw
Monday, July 30, 2007
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
It's a Jungle
I am into my second year in a new city. I am slowly making good friends, which are hard to come by really. I feel I need a good social circle as a step on the way to having a relationship again. Since my last 2 year relationship ended in January of 2005, I have been a complete mess.
I know why I don't jump right in to another relationship, doing that led to how I feel now: miserable, detached, guts torn out etc. I don't feel that way every second, though the recurrence of such feelings seems to go away very slowly after a relationship.
Didn't I try to fire off a few quick and easy bangs the way she did to get over things? In my way, I did. It takes me more time to get the big easy. It took me about a year and a half to get to where the ex was in 3 weeks. What can I say?
Now I am in a long drawn our depressed funk...like the drought in the Western U.S. Not every day is awful, people survive...though there are big long term questions. Will this ever end? Will we survive? And rolling right out of my analogy...will I love again?
I am not getting hotter really...the struggle to look sexy is getting slightly more challenging actually. I exercise, walk around, ride my mountain bike and try to stay fit, though in my heart there's a Joy Division concert blaring loudly. If you don't know what that means, it's a reference to a post-punk band known for deep melancholly whose lead singer met a sad self-inflicted end. Not exactly uplifting...sometimes comforting in misery. My bio-feed-back graph looks something like this about now:
I am comforted that I can complain about life on my blog and not have it read by very many people, hahah.
I like to make music so I am working on preserving all I have created into a collection. I am not trying to modernize or update the sound of some of these songs, just keep them for what they were. If I don't go to the trouble to record and mix them properly they will not be accessible even to me. I used a lot of old dying 80's computer gear to make some of my electronic sound and I never recorded the songs properly even once. I just made some tape demos. I will be singing them a-new and maybe taking some mixing liberties. I also will have the full freedom and flexibility to remix them and update them if I choose.
I keep myself busy, try not to think of the ex too much...(so pathetic as I am sure she has done too many drugs and dudes to even remember much about me). I continue to guard my heart. It loves deeply and fully and if it doesn't work out, It's a slow and painful extraction process. For all my loneliness I am not eager to jump right into this kind of result again.
My sister always says you should give yourself a good solid 15 minutes of misery, self-pity and woe then let it go, stand up and go live victoriously. So here I go...If I can just get out of the chair...
=sw
I know why I don't jump right in to another relationship, doing that led to how I feel now: miserable, detached, guts torn out etc. I don't feel that way every second, though the recurrence of such feelings seems to go away very slowly after a relationship.
Didn't I try to fire off a few quick and easy bangs the way she did to get over things? In my way, I did. It takes me more time to get the big easy. It took me about a year and a half to get to where the ex was in 3 weeks. What can I say?
Now I am in a long drawn our depressed funk...like the drought in the Western U.S. Not every day is awful, people survive...though there are big long term questions. Will this ever end? Will we survive? And rolling right out of my analogy...will I love again?
I am not getting hotter really...the struggle to look sexy is getting slightly more challenging actually. I exercise, walk around, ride my mountain bike and try to stay fit, though in my heart there's a Joy Division concert blaring loudly. If you don't know what that means, it's a reference to a post-punk band known for deep melancholly whose lead singer met a sad self-inflicted end. Not exactly uplifting...sometimes comforting in misery. My bio-feed-back graph looks something like this about now:
I am comforted that I can complain about life on my blog and not have it read by very many people, hahah.
I like to make music so I am working on preserving all I have created into a collection. I am not trying to modernize or update the sound of some of these songs, just keep them for what they were. If I don't go to the trouble to record and mix them properly they will not be accessible even to me. I used a lot of old dying 80's computer gear to make some of my electronic sound and I never recorded the songs properly even once. I just made some tape demos. I will be singing them a-new and maybe taking some mixing liberties. I also will have the full freedom and flexibility to remix them and update them if I choose.
I keep myself busy, try not to think of the ex too much...(so pathetic as I am sure she has done too many drugs and dudes to even remember much about me). I continue to guard my heart. It loves deeply and fully and if it doesn't work out, It's a slow and painful extraction process. For all my loneliness I am not eager to jump right into this kind of result again.
My sister always says you should give yourself a good solid 15 minutes of misery, self-pity and woe then let it go, stand up and go live victoriously. So here I go...If I can just get out of the chair...
=sw
Monday, July 09, 2007
Country Justice
I went on a river float trip with a group that rented part of a private camp ground. We were 50 or more in number and single, married, older, younger, men and women. A good balance of people who had planned ahead and prepared to reserve a large area far in advance of the trip. It was as close as you can get to a church-like group, like I experienced growing up, without religion playing any defining role in the grouping at all. Most enjoyed some drinking, some didn't and so forth.
This was out in the Virginia country side along the Shenandoah river. I think that "Country Roads" song by John Denver is really about Virginia, just "West Virginia" fit a little better in the meter. West Virginia is not far off in any case and I think a part of the river flows through the upper arm of that state.
There were some fireworks, some whoops and hollers could be heard across the river valley. I daren't say "redneck" but by the end of the float, even one of our friends who is originally from India had a sun burn, so you definitely get a little sun on the summer river float.
A few times I heard, from outside our area of camp, the "Dukes of Hazard" style Dixie car horn "Oh..I wished I lived in the land of cotton..." Seriously, someone had that horn. It sounds kind of bigoted to me, though I suspect the highly represented vacationers of Mexican origin probably thought it sounded a little more like Mariachi music with sloppy timing.
For some reason, some people beseech me for my judgment on things. It's like I have that..."tell me your story and I'll absolve you of all your sins" like "approachable" demeanor. As I have blogged before, sometimes it's a woman at a dance club confessing her 3 secret boyfriends...affectionately named Monday, Wednesday and Friday. "what are doing Saturday" would be my response.
This time, it was two fairly young men. I was standing under a shade tree in the hot day about 50 feet away from the restrooms (which haven't been updated since the 60's). I was waiting for a couple of the ladies before we headed back to our camp to have dinner. These guys had some river float gear and asked me politely if I planned to be there a little while and could I watch their belongings while they took a quick restroom break.
I said sure and asked their names.
They were about 17 or 18, both way taller and bigger as in buffer than I am. They were polite and respectful and I shook their hands as I got their names. One kid kind of pulled back a bit and said "woah" from the handshake. He showed me scars all up and down his arm where they couldn't be seen from the top with the reach of a handshake.
He was torn up big time with scabs and scars maybe a few days to a week old. I said "oh, yah, that's pretty serious". He proceeded to tell me how it happened.
Apparently this guy had been at a big high school "schools out" party and witnessed a guy he knew hit a girl in the face and break her front teeth out. The girl is his good friend and so he went out after the guy (we'll call him the perp...like perpetrator of the punch to the girl) who had run out of the house. The perp jumped into a car which was being driven by another girl. My new acquaintance with the scabbed arms, call him Johnny, slapped the passenger side 1/4 size triangular window a couple of times, yelled at the perp to get out. He eventually pounded on the window then grabbed a stick to bolster his punch and punched in the window, grabbed the perp and pulled his face into the smashed 1/4 window glass repeatedly.
Then the cops showed up.
I said, "and you both got assault charges right?" and so it was. He asked me what I thought of that. I told him "assault is assault" and even though hitting girls is socially egregious and against the law, under the law what he (Johnny) did was also assault and not regarded as justified by another assault. Morally perhaps country justice was in order, I am not sure, though I agree any assault should be what it is. It is not up to Johnny to charge, convict and mete out punishments. I also felt the overwhelming sense of offense at the perp hitting a girl. She was, in this case, essentially defenseless against the attack and I don't beleive such a thing could ever be justified by anything she might do.
Yet, I also have a strong moral sense that right and wrong should not be emotionally applied nor distributed via 'roid rage. No victim is worth more than another. Perhaps it can be shown, circumstantially, that ones suffering is especially great under ones unique circumstances. Still...
Country Justice troubles me. It is an affront to Equal Justice Under Law so highly prized by our nation. I am stingingly disgusted that a man would hit his girlfriend. It is very offensive and horrible. Yet, my personal emotional reaction is subjective and does not comport with an equitable legal system.
I guess I am not too worried about these kids. They talk of violence with wonder and fascination, but I think getting glass in your arm might tend to teach you you are not indestructible. Too bad he had to go the hard way. On the other hand, what a friend when you need one.
Oh, the float trip was relaxing and fun, only a few sunburns.
=sw
This was out in the Virginia country side along the Shenandoah river. I think that "Country Roads" song by John Denver is really about Virginia, just "West Virginia" fit a little better in the meter. West Virginia is not far off in any case and I think a part of the river flows through the upper arm of that state.
There were some fireworks, some whoops and hollers could be heard across the river valley. I daren't say "redneck" but by the end of the float, even one of our friends who is originally from India had a sun burn, so you definitely get a little sun on the summer river float.
A few times I heard, from outside our area of camp, the "Dukes of Hazard" style Dixie car horn "Oh..I wished I lived in the land of cotton..." Seriously, someone had that horn. It sounds kind of bigoted to me, though I suspect the highly represented vacationers of Mexican origin probably thought it sounded a little more like Mariachi music with sloppy timing.
For some reason, some people beseech me for my judgment on things. It's like I have that..."tell me your story and I'll absolve you of all your sins" like "approachable" demeanor. As I have blogged before, sometimes it's a woman at a dance club confessing her 3 secret boyfriends...affectionately named Monday, Wednesday and Friday. "what are doing Saturday" would be my response.
This time, it was two fairly young men. I was standing under a shade tree in the hot day about 50 feet away from the restrooms (which haven't been updated since the 60's). I was waiting for a couple of the ladies before we headed back to our camp to have dinner. These guys had some river float gear and asked me politely if I planned to be there a little while and could I watch their belongings while they took a quick restroom break.
I said sure and asked their names.
They were about 17 or 18, both way taller and bigger as in buffer than I am. They were polite and respectful and I shook their hands as I got their names. One kid kind of pulled back a bit and said "woah" from the handshake. He showed me scars all up and down his arm where they couldn't be seen from the top with the reach of a handshake.
He was torn up big time with scabs and scars maybe a few days to a week old. I said "oh, yah, that's pretty serious". He proceeded to tell me how it happened.
Apparently this guy had been at a big high school "schools out" party and witnessed a guy he knew hit a girl in the face and break her front teeth out. The girl is his good friend and so he went out after the guy (we'll call him the perp...like perpetrator of the punch to the girl) who had run out of the house. The perp jumped into a car which was being driven by another girl. My new acquaintance with the scabbed arms, call him Johnny, slapped the passenger side 1/4 size triangular window a couple of times, yelled at the perp to get out. He eventually pounded on the window then grabbed a stick to bolster his punch and punched in the window, grabbed the perp and pulled his face into the smashed 1/4 window glass repeatedly.
Then the cops showed up.
I said, "and you both got assault charges right?" and so it was. He asked me what I thought of that. I told him "assault is assault" and even though hitting girls is socially egregious and against the law, under the law what he (Johnny) did was also assault and not regarded as justified by another assault. Morally perhaps country justice was in order, I am not sure, though I agree any assault should be what it is. It is not up to Johnny to charge, convict and mete out punishments. I also felt the overwhelming sense of offense at the perp hitting a girl. She was, in this case, essentially defenseless against the attack and I don't beleive such a thing could ever be justified by anything she might do.
Yet, I also have a strong moral sense that right and wrong should not be emotionally applied nor distributed via 'roid rage. No victim is worth more than another. Perhaps it can be shown, circumstantially, that ones suffering is especially great under ones unique circumstances. Still...
Country Justice troubles me. It is an affront to Equal Justice Under Law so highly prized by our nation. I am stingingly disgusted that a man would hit his girlfriend. It is very offensive and horrible. Yet, my personal emotional reaction is subjective and does not comport with an equitable legal system.
I guess I am not too worried about these kids. They talk of violence with wonder and fascination, but I think getting glass in your arm might tend to teach you you are not indestructible. Too bad he had to go the hard way. On the other hand, what a friend when you need one.
Oh, the float trip was relaxing and fun, only a few sunburns.
=sw
Thursday, July 05, 2007
Wimbledon on Streaming Radio
If ever there was a bad idea it is the live streaming radio feed of Wimbledon tennis.
I happen to tune into the BBC streaming radio from time to time throughout the day. Today they were streaming live audio from the Women's tennis matches at Tennis' big event.
I cannot listen to Wimbledon on streaming radio. It is two women grunting and screaming with all their might in desperate exertions...then applause.
At least there is that spongy "thock" of the ball on the grass courts to give some idea of a context to the other sounds.
The best part is...desperate grunting female exertions...then...the whoaaa....of the shocked and disappointed crowd.
It is so laughably amusing to hear. If only the lady players would yell at the judges more.
=sw
I happen to tune into the BBC streaming radio from time to time throughout the day. Today they were streaming live audio from the Women's tennis matches at Tennis' big event.
I cannot listen to Wimbledon on streaming radio. It is two women grunting and screaming with all their might in desperate exertions...then applause.
At least there is that spongy "thock" of the ball on the grass courts to give some idea of a context to the other sounds.
The best part is...desperate grunting female exertions...then...the whoaaa....of the shocked and disappointed crowd.
It is so laughably amusing to hear. If only the lady players would yell at the judges more.
=sw
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