“When I’m alone, in my phones…” Well I can relate to that (thanks St. Etienne) and even say my new headphones are a life saver. Bolted down to a chair in the middle of a bustling software development department, perfectly positioned for the acoustics to amplify the sounds of programming babble and nasal snot sucking, it’s hard to block out the noise and concentrate on my own work. I usually just plug in dangly cheap earbuds, but unless I really crank it I can’t hear much detail from the music, and I get a ton of detail from all the chatter outside of the music. I know the clunky headphones are great for getting deep into the atmosphere, opening up nuances, and blocking out the outside. But I must have geothermal earlobes because they start to bake like a pan of hot fudge brownies after a few minutes. Has anyone invented liquid nitrogen cooled head cans yet? Continue reading →

I’ve been out for a round of vacuous movies to kick off the Summer season. It’s not like it was under duress, strapped into a chair with hooks holding my eyelids open. I just realized I didn’t have a higher cause to champion than to endure my failed suspension of disbelief, and I do it every May after a long, dreary Winter (still underway in Utah). Just so I won’t offend anyone who likes shameless merchandising and tastelessly showy CGI spectacles I won’t mention any names (it’s all of them anyway). I went to see one of these movies at Thanksgiving Point, the same place I saw Morrissey and the goat petting zoo. Once the movie got to be too much, and I couldn’t sneak out because I was with a friend, I began to focus on the sound system and on the quality of the projection on the screen. It was a remarkable revelation to me that the “cigarette burn” marks for celluloid reels were absent. The color white looked like it was projecting sharply from the screen instead of diffusely reflecting, and the sound was pristine and clean. Who knew a movie theater next to a barn would have made the leap to digital projection and sound? The next movie I went to was doubly unbearable because the picture and sound were as muddy as the story telling. Continue reading →

If I were a kid today I’d probably be wearing bell bottoms and singing “Tom Sawyer”. The shameful truth is that’s what I did when I was about 13. Too bad I was about 5 years behind that trend, so I’m pretty much ruined to this day. There’s still the chance for me to be cool today if I step out on the streets of Provo confounding all the kids with dyed and ratted black hair, skinny jeans, and tickets to see Hannah Montana. One day I realized all we do in pop culture is rebel against whatever gets passed on to us. There are only so many (3 or 4) wild departures we can take, so in effect we cycle through a pretty limited set of variations: long hair, skinny ties, kempt, unkempt, smelly, hygienic. I hold my breath waiting for the foul trends to phase into the decent ones. Continue reading →