Triscuit, one, two...Triscuit...

Friday, December 01, 2006 • 02:34:11 AM EST

Yes, it's another exciting installment of "Testing A New CWOBber Feature." When last we left our plucky adventurers, they were unwilling to let well enough alone: the software was working, and somehow, his rankled. There was only one thing to do: start screwing around with it, under the shaky premise of "adding a new feature."

Is this bravery, or foolhardiness? Only Fate knows which word is written upon the scroll of Eternity...and even now, a bony hand tugs at the ribbon.

Push the button, Frank…

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Rock, Rock On!

Friday, December 01, 2006 • 04:34:44 AM EST

Okey-doke…that actually worked 90% ok. All of the Complicated AppleScript Stuff(tm) worked just fine; it duly assembled the HTML code that I described. The 10% that didn't work was simply due to my not describing the HTML properly.

So: indulge me with one last live-fire test.

I'll explain what I'm up to later. Though, um, this is probably one of those tests that sort of explains itself.

Frank…if you would? Thanks ever so.

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Helen Keller, AppleScript Guru

Friday, December 01, 2006 • 10:22:24 PM EST

The winner of yesterday's big "What Brand-New CWOBber Feature Is Andy Debugging?" contest was Mr. Ed Culney of Hattsboro, Delaware. Ed was the only reader to submit the correct response before the 6 PM deadline: "The ability to automatically blog the currently-playing iTunes track."

"It was a bit of a stumper," Ed writes, "But when I saw that each of your latest two blog entries contained a graphical card depicting both a song and the album it's off of…well, I was reluctant, but my wife convinced me to take a flutter."

Congratulations, Ed! Your local Chrysler dealer will be in touch shortly to arrange for the delivery of your new 2007 Sebring convertible. I reckon that if that little wife of yours ever asks to borrow it, you won't hesitate to toss over the keys, right, Ed?

To the rest of you, remember…you've got to be in it to win it!

This particular feature was pulled from the "Really, it's not terribly important" list. There are more useful and important features I'd like to add, but it just so happens that I was in an iTunes-Scriptey sort of mood last night, not an iCal-Scriptey mood or an SQL-ey one.

As is always the case with AppleScript, the project was mostly completed via the Braille method. No matter how long you've been scripting, you ultimately wind up feeling your way through things. Writing some stuff to pop out the track info text took about five minutes. But I wanted to get the album art, too, and that proved to be a minor stumper.

I examined iTunes' scripting dictionary for clues. "Artwork" is an element of "Track." Artwork contains "Data" and "Format" properties, as well as a couple of other things I don't care about. So: to save the artwork, all you need to do is grab the Data (the actual album art), check the Format (which tells you whether it's a JPEG, a PNG, or whatever), and then squirt it to a file.

Annnnd then over the course of an entire evening, you wind up emptying the kitchen of anything with alcohol in it — including the bottle of hand sanitizer that was next to the kitchen sink — while you work out the subtle bastardries of the simple phrase "squirt it to a file."

Once again I reminded myself that the official candy of AppleScript is Fudge. I tried to do all the file-handling myself. Alas, I am an imperfect vessel for the Universe's wisdom and I was forced to turn to AppleScript's Image Events suite.

The conversation went like this:

"Hi. I've no idea what sort of data this is. "Format" says it's a JPEG, but no matter how I write the file, my web browser says No Way. But I'm pretty sure that it represents the cover to Black Sabbath's Reunion: Live album. Could you do -- well, whatever it is that you do -- to transmogrify this into a proper JPEG file?"

There was a brief but significant pause before Image Events replied.

"Why didn't you come to me right away?" it finally said. "I'm one of several scripting suites that exist specifically to take dopey, fiddly scripting tasks like this one out of your hands and help you to finish your script quickly."

(Yes, indeed: it was just like the scene from the start of "The Godfather" when Bonasera comes to Don Corleone seeking vengeance for his daughter. Bless you for noticing.)

I fiddled with my hat for a bit before replying.

"The sin of Pride, Image Events. I thought I could just write the data out to a file, and then use a shell command or something to set the file type."

"I understand. You're a hardworking geek. You had faith in your documentation, and in your own skills. And when this faith failed you, you came to me for assistance. But when was the last time you invited me or my wife to your home for a cup of coffee?"

"Do you even drink coffee, Image Events?"

"Well, no. But don't you think I like being asked?"

I had to admit it: Image Events had a point. And the fact that I was conceding the moral high ground to an abstract concept underscores that I was more than a little bit punchy at this point, having stayed up so very late and drunk nearly half a bottle of Purell.

I also found time to fix a little bug in the Post code that had occasionally brought the whole thing to a screeching halt. Answer me this: you've fixed a really annoying problem quickly and neatly, but only because the source of the problem was a mackerel-slappingly stupid error that you made. Does the satisfaction of finally having a Working Thing exceed the depression that settles over you when you realize that the phrase "No, that couldn't be it…I'm not that stupid" is never applicable?

Well, anyway…it works. I wish I could wire in a link to the track's listing in the iTunes Store, but there's really no way to get the URL without scripting iTunes' user interface directly. If you want the current track's name via AppleScript, you simply ask iTunes "What's the name of the currently-playing track?" If you want the track's iTMS URL, you have to fake a mouseclick to open the iTMS, then fake a control-click to pull up the contextual menu and put the URL into the clipboard…it's a big deal. It would be an act of pure hypocracy to put in all that work and then continue to tell all of my friends that despite their raptic recommendations, I just don't have enough free time to start watching "Heroes."

All the same, I might wire up a couple of other new feaures before the end of the year. It's time to salt CWOBber's mines a little.

I'll be showing it off during a Macworld panel on blog software next month and I don't need to tell you what a huge opportunity this is. Yes, we're all floating within the shimmery rainbowy film of Dot-Com Bubble 2.0. It's a precious second chance to receive millions of dollars of real venture capital based on nothing but a semi-functional proof-of-concept, a six-slide PowerPoint preso that includes the words "Social" and "AJAX," and the information that you've a Ruby developer on staff who walks barefoot to work every day.

A web developer who refuses to wear shoes is to the current bubble what "we have a ping-pong table in our conference room" was to the previous one. It represents instant, ironclad credibility to the twitchy investor who's desperately pulling out of the real estate market and who knows nothing about the tech industry. He doesn't understand why any grown man would treat shoelessness as some sort of badge of honor, but then again he doesn't understand how his Blackberry knows which emails are his, either, and just look at how popular those things have become.

Take my advice: all you have to do is make a "Whoo-Whoooooo!!!" sound and pantomime waving at a train as it's pulling away from the station, and the check's as good as written. It's like shooting fish in a breadbox. Your investor won't understand that either, but if you convince him that it's a buzzphrase that was made popular by MotleyFool.com, he'll probably add another zero to the check.

Suffice to say that when it's raining pennies, I'm prepared to run outside with a washtub.

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iTunes Advent Calendar

Friday, December 01, 2006 • 11:40:47 PM EST

How typical: I got so tied up in building the tool that I never actually got around to doing the actual thing that the tool was meant to help me do.

Why make an iTunes linky-linky tool? I'm glad you asked: because my fellow MacNotables are a bunch of weak-willed ferns with no vision. At least they are when it comes to immediately acknowledging that every idea I come up with is sheer, unvarnished brilliance, indeed, a glittering dewdrop splishing straight from the Tree of Wisdom itself.

See, last year, a few weeks before Adam Engst's birthday, his wife Tonya approached me and a bunch of his other pals with a cool and very sweet request: recommend one track from the iTMS. Tonya would buy a whole playlist of these recommendations, burn it to a disc, and present it to him along with (I imagine) a card and some sort of cake.

It was a terrific idea (one which anyone would be wise to steal) and, unexpectedly, a fantastic challenge. One song. One! "Andy, I'm keen on funeral masses; could you recommend a few tracks that would set me hip to the concept?" That's easy. I'd start you off with Cherubini, then Mozart (you have to keep it off of Track 1, because every movement is too well-known), then straight to the Mahler. And once the local had taken effect, you dig right into the Prime Rib of funeral masses: Liszt.

But one? One?

Worse…just one song with no guidelines or restrictions?

I won't say that I put more effort into my song selection than I did with any column I've ever written. But, well, I will tell you that I spent more time on it than I did on some of the things I've published, definitely. It's not easy! You don't want to choose a song that someone's already heard a million times, but at the other extreme do you really want to bank your entire reputation on an obscure 11-minute Miles Davis confection in which moment by moment, he can't seem to decide whether he wants to score some more drugs, tell Winton Marsalis to go **** himself, or maybe consider playing another note?

It was such a fun exercise that I suggested we do a whole MacNotables on the subject. Each of us would choose one and only one track and we'd explain why we picked it. No reason why we couldn't include 30-second iTunes clips on the show (I said, confident that as one of the few MacNotables who doesn't own real estate, the lawyers would probably come for me last, if at all), and we'd publish an iMix with all the links and everything.

The group's enthusiasm for this idea was powered by a single AAA battery and within hours, all forward momentum withered and died.

So I suppose there's nothing for it but for me to do this all by myself. Let's get crackin'.

Genius in France

"Weird Al" Yankovic & Dweezil Zappa

Poodle Hat

Genre: Comedy

Blah, Blah, Blah: "Weird Al" doesn't get proper credit. He really is a talented musician, and you probably don't know that if you've never bought any of his CDs. His albums contain the two or three parodies that you saw on MTV, but the real treasures are his original "style parodies," like this one.

You play it through once, and you think "Man, that's a terrific Frank Zappa parody…but which song is it?" And then you check the credits in the CD booklet and discover that holy crap: it's a completely-original tune.

Sometimes I wonder how certain careers would have gone if the person had been around during an earlier era. If Phil Hartman and John Lovitz had been around during the Thirties and Forties, they would have been two of those MGM contract players whom you see in every damned movie. If Al had been around back then, he'd be working for Warner Brothers, scoring cartoons alongside — hell, maybe even instead of — Carl Stalling. He has an uncanny ability to tap into the DNA of a piece of music and make it do exactly what he wants it to.

Of course, as-is, there aren't a great many musicians who've had bigger careers than Al's. After twenty years in the biz, his publishers can still be reasonably-certain that a new "Weird Al" album will go gold. The Hit Single from his latest album ("White And Nerdy") is actually his biggest hit yet. Who would have guessed back in his "Eat It" days that by the 21st century, Al's career would be soaring and Michael Jackson's would be buried in a lead-lined coffin with a stake through its rhinestone-encrusted heart?

But part of me hopes that some day, he'll take a break from recording albums and score a whole movie. I'd just like to see what would happen if he were given an entire screenplay to interpret. I'm reasonably sure that he'd do things with the medium that haven't really been done before…and I'm not talking about accordian-driven takeoffs on "Stairway To Heaven."

Why I Bought This Track: Because I heard "Hardware Store" on my car's satellite radio one afternoon on the way to the mall. I couldn't find a CD of "Poodle Hat" at the record store, so I bought it off the iTunes Store when I got home, instead. When I looked through the rest of the tracklist and spotted a 9-minute track for just a buck…well, that's just shrewd investing, isn't it?

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iTunes Advent Calendar #2

Saturday, December 02, 2006 • 04:29:21 PM EST

God Give Me Strength

Elvis Costello

My Flame Burns Blue (Live with the Metropole Orkest)

Genre: Jazz

Blah, Blah, Blah: This sounds like an old Sixties song because it was intended to; it was written for a movie called "Grace Of My Heart," loosely based on the life of Carole King. Specifically her early career, when the Singer-Songwriter was having plenty of success as the latter but little with the former.

Costello is shamelessly ripping off Burt Bacharach here. But when he's pushing the button this hard it's clearly a tribute, not a swipe…particularly when you know that he's a lifelong BB fan. [Many (many) emails inform me that it was actually a collaboration-by-fax. Noted, manfully. - A.] Which is enough to give any mature music fan pause. There are so many artists that you never give a first listen to because, come on…it's Burt Bacharach, for God's sake. But then a song like this sort of urges you to give the catalog a listen, and hey, whaddyaknow; back in the day, the old guy really could throw some heat.

It's enough to make me marginally interested in hearing what David Hasselhoff is up to these days.

I love this tune. In the movie, it was sung by the lead character and it's been covered almost exclusively by women ever since. But it's one of the best breakup songs ever, and when it's sung by a man, it just has that extra bit of punch. You can't handle this one with kid gloves; you gotta start it off slightly mournful and sad, but you need to build up to a release of real anger and frustration by the end of it. To me, this would indicate a need for a powerful, slightly-smokey tenor instead of a birdlike, fresh-from-the-nest soprano.

Why I Bought It In The First Place: I already owned a version of this track via the (very very fab) "Live At Letterman" CD. But I was checking out Costello's new album online while mulling a CD purchase and happened across this concert version. It's twice as long, so it must be twice as good, right?

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In The Red

Sunday, December 03, 2006 • 04:38:18 PM EST

I encountered a small family as I walked out of my local Red Cross Donor Center this afteroon. As I drew near, the mother yanked her kids into a crushing, two-armed embrace while the dad kept his body interposed between me and his family at all times, shooting fire at me from his eyes. Hell, I'd barely even left the building when a man dressed in tatters leaped out of the bushes and started walking ahead of me, ringing a bronze bell and shouting "Unclean…unclean!!!" to all who would listen until I got into my car and drove off.

You can imagine how all this made me feel. Really, it seemed needlessly rude.

And what had I done to deserve such treatment? All I did was take a weeklong cruise and spend some time walking around Belize and Guatemala. Apparently, Society frowns on this behavior. Well, definitely the Red Cross, that's for sure. I was sent away from the Donor Center not with the usual trifecta of a fresh, bandaged wound, a couple of free packets of Lorna Doone cookies, and a vague sense of smug pride, but with a green sheet of paper and a one-year suspension on donating blood, plasma or platelets.

But the worst part was that they'd already done the finger-prick...and that's the only bit of the whole two-hour platelet donation procedure that I actively dislike. Typical. Typical!

I sure wasn't expecting bannination. But I was expecting the pre-screening to get a bit more difficult this time around, thanks to October's Geek Cruise. Before they let you give blood, they take your temperature (98.4) and your blood pressure (117 over 70), and put a drop of your blood in a centrifuge. While it's spinning, the nurse runs you through a longish computerized interview to work out if you might have unknowingly had a chestburster alien implanted anytime recently, or if you've been involved in any other sort of activity that might lead them to conclude that your blood shouldn't even be allowed to circulate through your own body, let alone anybody else's.

The inquisition begins with the Three P's (Prison, Piercings, and Prostitution) and then, if you answer affirmatively to the question "Have you traveled outside the United States in the past (X) months?" you have to come up with a detailed list. Not just countries, but specific cities and towns. The Red Cross checks your answers against a detailed and up-to-date list of where all of the fashionable diseases are lurking this season. The fact that you were never more than ten yards away from a flush toilet and a Starbucks doesn't necessarily mean that you weren't exposed to something nasty and communicable.

The thing is, this latest cruise made three stops in Central America. So as you can guess, I budgeted extra time and attention for this part of the questionnaire.

I ran through all of the ports on the February cruise…Puerto Vallarta, Mazatlan, and, er, Acapulco, I think. Each was duly queried to the database without incident. Then I moved on to last month's cruise. I started with sunny Costa Rica, and here, my troubles began. You know you're in trouble when they give you a big International Malaria Atlas to peer through.

"The ship docked…here-ish, I think," I said, tentatively. "Then, a couple of friends and I hired a cab to drive us around. We drove for a couple of hours, so (Where's the scale? Ah!) Okay, I guess it's reasonable to say that we traveled within this radius, here."

Being exposed to malaria is like opening a successful shoe store: it all comes down to location, location, location. Some bits of the Red Cross Chestburster Atlas Of The World are colored Yellow (meaning: there's a vague threat of exposure, but it's not necessarily a dealbreaker). Other areas are pink (slap a scarlet "M" on the dude's chest and send him home; then, evacuate the building and nuke the whole facility from orbit. It's the only way to be sure, right?)

The nurse and I spent nearly fifteen minutes trying to work out if I'd been in any of Guatemala's sensitive pink areas. It had gotten to the point where I was working my Smartphone's web browser to try to pull up a list of ports from Norwegian Cruise Lines' site, when I discovered a shortcut.

"Oh, actually, there's an easy away around this," I said to the nurse, pointing at the map. "I went to Belize, too...and that country's completely pink. Problem solved!"

She agreed with me that the fact that I might have been exposed to airborne malaria was indeed fantastic news.

So she entered an official Ix-Nay into the database and gave me a green sheet of paper, which I could take home and proudly display on my fridge. The paper explains how important it is that I not donate blood before the date written on the form, and lists the reason why I was rejected.

She'd checked the box representing the rather wimpy one of having vacationed in a malaria zone. I frowned. "At least you could make me look cool," I said. "Could you maybe say that I got a tattoo while in prison?"

Of course I'm in no real danger of contracting malaria. But malaria is one of those things the Red Cross can't (or don't) test blood components for. Apparently, they can weed the risk out more effectively by asking the donor where they've traveled, and matching the locations to an up-to-date disease database.

Ultimately, I accepted both the green paper and the nurse's apology. "Better safe than sorry," I assured her. "But I'm still going to help myself to plenty of free snacks."

And so I did.

Bummer: twelve months without being hooked up to a platelet machine for two hours on every seven or eighth Sunday. Whatever shall I do with the time? I must distract myself from my sorrow by becoming twice as annoying on the subject of donating blood.

May folks are squeamish about it, and it's not hard to understand why. Try this: reach into your upper forearm and give yourself a quick pinch. If you can deal with that sort of sensation, then you can certainly deal with what you'll experience while donating a pint of blood. Blood donation takes twenty minutes, tops, and it'll help folks with problems that far exceed a half-second of pain and twenty minutes of inconvenience.

Someone you love is still alive because someone just like you donated blood. That's what it comes down to. You can't write that donor a thank-you note, but you can show your gratitude by making a trip to your local donor center. Visit the Red Cross' website to find one nearby.

And if you can't donate for one reason or another, do what I do: badger other people into doing it. As quick and painless as blood donation is, being the Annoying Voice of Conscience is even less-demanding. I'm disappointed that I can't donate for a full year -- and I mean that sincerely -- but all in all, I've got a pretty sweet deal here.

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iTunes Advent Calendar: Day 3

Sunday, December 03, 2006 • 10:29:52 PM EST

Punk Rock Girl

The Dead Milkmen

Death Rides a Pale Cow (The Ultimate Collection)

Genre: Alternative

Blah, Blah, Blah: Nearly any Dead Milkmen track has much to recommend it.

First: In the category of Awesome Band Names, "Dead Milkmen" has to be placed at or near the top of the list. It achieves the added luster of being the name of an actual band, instead of just three random words you became taken with when you saw them illuminated on a Wendy's drive-thru menu.

Second: if I were one of those 6,000-word-a-day rock bloggers, I could probably whip out the technical term for "Punk Rock Girl"'s snappy dip-THAPPA-dip-THAPPA-dip drumbeat. But if I really were one of those 6,000-word-a-day rock bloggers, I'd give you the technical term and then blorf out my personal picks for the beat's very best practictioners. This would inevitably trigger an endless and violently navel-gazing polemic about…well, something, certainly.

So maybe it's for the best that I am who I am, and can simply say "That drumbeat's real snappy, don't you think?" This way, we all get to move on with our (very rich and fulfilling) lives.

Third: it's probably the true acme of Nerd Rock.

Sure, today's socially-retrograded kids might dress up like a rock band for Halloween…but come November 1, they're back to fixing a munged SQL database behind a Fortune 100 intranet. But back in the Eighties, they could have just went right on pretending, straight on through the following August and two successful regional tours. The Milkmen, DEVO, the Cars, Talking Heads…all of those bands got their start on some Thursday morning when their bandmembers all finished their AP Calculus exams twenty minutes ahead of the rest of the class. They spent the rest of the period coming up with the sort of characters they'd portray if they ever put together a group and thus, a dairy-rock legend was born.

Fourth: The Punk Rock Girl. A delectable archetype of female mystique, the PRG was to boys of the Eighties what I suppose The French Maid was to boys of the Fifties. Motorcycle boots. Torn stockings. Plaid skirt. Humorous ripped tee shirt worn over sensible shirt, under thrift-store jacket. Hair dyed in interesting colors and bent at interesting angles. Cat-eye glasses very desirable, but optional.

But the world-beater is the following set of lyrics:

We went to the Philly Pizza Company
And we ordered some hot tea
The waitress said "Well no,
We only have it iced."
So we jumped up on the table
And shouted "Anarchy!"
And someone played a Beach Boys Song
On the juke box
It was California Dreamin'
So we started screamin'
"On such a winter's day..."

True tee-shirt anarchy isn't about railing against a goverment that's foresworn its obligations to the working classes. It's about getting upset because your beverage is too cold. It's about overreacting, making a big scene, and then being quickly and easily distracted by something shiny in the room. These aren't just cool lyrics: they're a valuable and precise cultural document.

This exact chunk of the song has been selected (wisely) as the iTMS preview. So you don't need to just take my word on this.

Why I Bought It In The First Place: I'm not sure if I actually ever owned a Dead Milkmen album. As I recall, I was bumming tapes off my friend and roommate, Dominus. I bought this track while trying to figure out if I could satisfy my Dead Milkmen meattooth with just a Greatest Hits CD. Indeed I could. All the same, I needed to download some Milkmen right now to tide me over until my Amazon delivery arrived.

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iTunes Advent Calendar: Day 4

Monday, December 04, 2006 • 11:46:15 PM EST

Playing With Pink Noise

Kaki King

Legs to Make Us Longer

Genre: Rock

Blah, Blah, Blah: As you listen, keep in mind that this is just one woman and one guitar, recorded (apparently) in one take...even the percussion bit. Alas, no: she wasn't wearing one of those ultracool one-man-band-style drums on her back. You know, the kind that's operated by knocking your knees together or wiggling a mallet attached to your butt on a spring. So the percussion earns minimal points for showmanship.

But crimeny, it gets ten out of ten for technique. The drumming is yet another responsibility that's been heaped upon Kaki's already stressed-out right hand. In addition to strumming the rhythm and tapping out the melody, any fingers that aren't otherwise occupied at any given moment are expected to be knocking out a rhythm on the wood of the guitar.

This is precisely like that sucky job you had in high school. You'd put in a basket of raw fries and take out a basket of "done" fries and you had every reason to expect that the 200 seconds in between would be a period of quiet, self-improving contemplation. Instead, your boss handed you a long list of three-minute jobs that you had to take care of while waiting for the machine to beep again.

How does one respond to this sort of bullying attitude? Back at McDonalds, you occasionally used a french fry as a Q-Tip (or worse) before sending it out. I bet Kaki King's fingers intentionally misdial numbers and stuff. She keeps blaming her RAZR phone's cheap keypad when the true root of the problem is her management style.

But that's beside the point. Like a one-man-band, like a glass harmonica, like the washtub/broomstick/string combo so favored by discriminating cartoon bear jugband members, there's something eerily compelling about terrific music produced via an unlikely technique. It's not supposed to make a difference, but it does.

And thank God the producers didn't interfere with Kaki's performance. It's a brilliant solo. If you added a drumkit and a keyboard, you'd wind up with far less than what you started with.

For a cautionary tale, look no further than Jake Shimabukuro's solo-uke arrangemet of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." Hundreds of thousands of people watched the viral video. Countless right-thinking people (like me) immediately decided that their music libraries would be pale, tawdry things without this track, and ordered Jake's independently-produced CD. We giddily skipped straight to Track 10 the moment it arrived. But intead of a pure, powerful and flawless solo, we heard a sappy over-instrumentalized studio recording instead. It was sort of like the day we heard that Lennon had been shot; it seemed like part of our innocence had been lost forever.

I mean, countless people introduced the YouTube version to their friends by saying "Dude, you gotta hear this!" But Track 10 from "Walking Down Rainhill" would most appropriately be introduced with the phrase "And now, for all you business travelers, here's tomorrow's weather in major cities all across the country."

Why I Bought It In The First Place: Kaki King was on the Letterman show one night. Even before Dave strolled across the stage to shake her hand and throw to the next commercial, I had located the track on the iTMS and begun downloading it.

See? This is precisely why the CEO of Universal hates iPod users. Three minutes earlier, I had no idea that Kaki King even existed, and yet there I was, flagrantly sending royalties to the performer and her publishers. I can just imagine how galling that must be to…to…

Wait, that makes no sense. Why does Doug Morris hate iPod owners, again?

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iTunes Advent Calendar: Day 5

Tuesday, December 05, 2006 • 11:59:53 PM EST

Life Has Been Good to Me

Randy Newman

Faust

Genre: Rock

Blah, Blah, Blah: "Life Has Been Good To Me" is my reward for being tenacious, having friends with good taste, and realizing that when you conclude "Man alive…this guy's music sucks" you're saying something that's only nearly always true.

I write a big, obsessive Academy Awards package every year. Randy Newman gets nominated often enough that I've more or less assigned my standard assessment of his work to a Word macro: "I have two problems with Randy Newman," I write, via an Option-F12. "First, every Randy Newman song sounds exactly like every other Randy Newman song. And second, every Randy Newman song sounds like a toilet paper jingle."

This consistently horrifies certain friends of mine. They call me ignorant. They say I have no taste. They remind me that I have not one, but two Barry Manilow tracks in my iTunes library; that the last concert I attended in a venue that held more than 200 people was a Monkees Reunion show back in college…well, suffice to say that they're big Randy Newman fans.

But they're also very highly-valued friends, so I simply nod indulgently until their gun starts clicking on empty chambers. Then I clear my throat and start singing "You've Got A Friend In Me." I transition seamlessly to "I Love To See You Smile" and then finish with the last third of "If I Didn't Have You" — yes, Newman's legendary "You" Cycle — without needing to deviate from the first song's melody or rhythm by one jot.

I feel that this pretty much defends my thesis, so I usually leave it at that. If I'm in a bitchy mood, I'll also mime Newman's usual keyboard style: you just hold a jumbo clown hammer in each hand and pound LEFT-right-LEFT-right-LEFT-right on the piano until either the fade-out or the morning the Oscar nominations are announced, whichever comes first.

All the same, I respect their opinions. Plus, I've had tremendous success with this whole "Don't assume that you know everything about everything" algorithm that I came up with a while back. When you try to prove yourself wrong, only two outcomes are possible: either you're wrong, and you learn something new, or you're right, and you've earned the right to go ahead and redouble your arrogance. A true win-win.

So "find some Randy Newman tracks that I like" has been an ongoing background process. "Life Has Been Good To Me" is the one clear winner so far. True, it still has Newman's trademark piano style (Randy, I don't care if you do have a workout scheduled for right after the recording session: take the boxing gloves off before you start playing, okay?). But it has a lively, jaunty feel about it.

It's also an exceptionally well-constructed tune. On those precious days when things are going so well that I can't help but think the Vincente Minnelli of the Universe is filming me with an intricately-choreographed crane shot, this is the song I hear on the soundtrack.

Of course, this is a selection from a proposed musical entitled "Faust." So things can't possibly work out well for whoever's supposed to be singing this.

Well, screw it. Randy Newman never got this show on a stage. Clearly, I know the true purpose of this tune far better than he does.

Why I Bought It In The First Place: I spotted this title while stumbling through the Newman catalogue yet again. Cool...I remembered this one. "Third Rock From The Sun" did a big two-part episode that was a series of short films strung together, each one featuring a single castmember. Harry Solomon (the goofball among goofballs) sings this tune in a rather nifty music video.

The song was illuminating: it reminds me that often, it's not the band or the composer that I can't stand...it's the performance. Every Randy Newman song I like is sung by someone other than Randy Newman. That's probably not a coincidence.

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iTunes Advent Calendar: Day 6

Wednesday, December 06, 2006 • 11:57:43 PM EST

Blame It on My Youth

Sammy Davis, Jr.

The Wham of Sam

Genre: Vocal

Blah, Blah, Blah: At some point in his career, Sammy Davis Jr. stopped being a massively talented vocalist and turned into (shudder) an Entertainer. You know, one of those people who became better known for being Famous than for being talented, despite the thrilling scale of their abilities or past accomplishments.

Becoming downgraded to a mere Entertainer in the public's consciousness is a process of steady erosion. Each trivial TV appearance and movie cameo nudges aside their powerful early recordings by a centimeter or two in the public's memory. It's a tragic, deadly disease. And a highly-communicable one...particularly among singers, it seems.

"Hey, can you sub for me Thursday night?"

"Which gig is that, again?"

"The 1 AM show at the Sticky Paneled Lounge in Omaha."

"What's the audience like?"

"Mostly middle-aged salesmen who are there to cheat on their wives. Oh, and the club manager will probably try to pay you in frozen meat he stole from the restaurant next door. He's got mob ties, so the smart move would be to just try to get home before it all thaws on you."

"I can't imagine why you're trying to get out of this job."

"It ain't the job…I gotta head out to LA that day."

"An acting thing?"

"Kinnnnd of. I'm going to jump out of a closet during an episode of 'Love, American Style' and say 'Now that's what I call a Boeing!'."

"Really."

"No, it makes sense. The whole thing takes place on a 747. Just before my line, a passenger opens a window in mid-flight and the stewardess loses her top."

"Dude. You once recorded a hit record with the Harry James Orchestra."

"Dude…they're paying me $8,000 for three hours' work."

"…"

"And they're paying me in money, not veal."

"I'll do it on one condition: give the producer my headshot."

So who can blame these people for getting distracted? It's a potent cocktail of peer-pressure, positive reinforcement, and gradual desensitization. "Love, American Style" leads to "Laugh-In" and then to a regular slot on "Hollywood Squares." And before you know it, a man who might have redefined jazz and made it relevant to a whole new generation is instead being teamed up with Jamie Farr in a made-for-TV movie about a safecracking chimp.

It's a mortgaging of one's legacy. We remember the Rat Pack Sammy, the Cannonball Run Sammy, the guy who banters with Jerry Lewis during the telethon. As time goes on, it becomes harder and harder to recall the remarkably evocative club singer who could inspire you to do something very smart or very foolish with one song.

"Blame It On My Youth" is indeed such a song. It's probably a bad idea to listen to this tune if you're in a melancholy mood and you still have the numbers of old girlfriends in your cellphone.

Why I Bought It In The First Place: Okay, it had to do with this girl. I was already a fan of Sammy Davis but I hadn't spent a lot of time exploring his catalogue. Then I had a spectacularly good date with a spectacularly good woman in which the topic of Mr. Davis came up. It became very, very important to me that I fill in any and all gaps in my Sammy Davis Junior education.

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iTunes Advent Calendar: Day 7

Thursday, December 07, 2006 • 10:09:14 PM EST

Tom Traubert's Blues

Tom Waits

Small Change

Genre: Rock

Blah, Blah, Blah: When you're listening to a Tom Waits track, you're in a perennial state of standing on a wet sidewalk at 1 AM and bumming a cigarette off of some stranger who was already waiting at the bus stop when you got there. And even when the song paints the bleakest, loneliest possible picture of alcoholism, you still can't help but feel a little guilty for drinking as little as you do. I mean, the last time I consumed any alcohol was about six weeks ago, when I broke a sixth-month drought with a single gin-and-tonic.

And in the Tom Waits universe, that doesn't even really count. It was made with Beefeater gin, not a no-name brand located on the I Was Just Released From Court-Ordered Rehab An Hour Ago rack at the liquor store. Plus, it was consumed at the piano bar of a cruise ship. Your drinking only qualifies for Tom Waits Elite Gold points if it takes place in a backroom speakeasy at a pool hall, next to a priest who's Done Near Given Up, on an evening when you're both supposed to be at the hospital sitting up with your dying mother.

Yeah, that's sort of the problem with Tom Waits songs: there's a certain "barfly by osmosis" effect. And it's not Waits' fault; I'm certain that he'd rather you just sit back and enjoy his music without rethinking your lifestyle choices. Who cares if you're playing it on a $250 iPod hooked up to a $1500 sound system, in a comfortable house paid for by a steady paycheck? But somehow, overexposure to Tom Waits will turn even the most sensible person into a lame William S. Burroughs wannabe.

I was made to reflect upon this phenomenon earlier today, when I Googled for the lyrics to this song and came across page after page of people's poems and short stories and personal musings, all inspired by Tom Waits tunes. Each one of these authors claims that his personal anthem is (say) "Rain Dogs," when it's pretty clear that it's actually "White And Nerdy."

I had to look up the lyrics because no matter how many times I listen to "Tom Traubert's Blues" (29, as of the last time I rebuilt my iTunes library), the only lines I can ever clearly parse are the snippets from "Waltzing Matilda." A sample:

I'll level with you: I look at these lyrics and it's like when I'm reading the Magnetic Poetry on someone's fridge. I don't know if she simply did the best she could with the limited words that came in the kit, or if she might have a Masters degree in poetry from a college that's since lost its accreditation.

Still, that's not a slam against Tom Waits. I don't understand French, German or Italian either, and yet I'm capable of putting on an opera CD and enjoying the raw telemetry. That's what I do with some of Waits' best songs. The truly timeless composers have a way of communicating their message without having to fall back on anything as trite as mere language.

Incidentally, I wrote this up yesterday. But when I went to see if Wikipedia had any explanation for those lyrics, I learned that (hey, cool!) today's Tom Waits' birthday. According to Wikipedia. Which, of course, means that there's at least a 1 in 365 chance. So Happy Birthday, Tom. I've purchased a porkpie hat, smeared it with cranberry sauce and Sterno, and buried it in the yard. In six years' time I'll dig it up and send it to you, ready-to-wear.

Why I Bought It In The First Place: I'm drawing a blank. I think it was Just One Of Those Things.

Waits is definitely one of those artists who make you appreciate online music stores. He's always growing and challenging himself as an artist, which is terrific, but it also means that he tends to go through creative puberty from time to time.

It's sort of like that thing on "Star Trek" where Spock goes nuts every seven years. You don't want to crack the seal on an $18 non-returnable CD and discover that it was recorded while Waits was going through P'onn Farr again.

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The iTunes Advent Calendar

Friday, December 08, 2006 • 11:26:39 PM EST

"Truly, has Ihnatko gone mad?"

No, I'm not offended by this reaction. I just need you to narrow the question down a little, that's all. What was it that knocked you off your lobster? Was it my clothing and/or physical appearance? My behavior? Something I've recently said or written? The fact that I occasionally come up with phrases like "knocked you off your lobster," and that I simply assume that this makes sense to you? After all, not everybody's blessed with regular access to the Blue Toaster, as I am.

There's no mystery as to why there's been a huge surge in this sort of question, however. So far this month, I've posted something about music every single day. I've never really shown much interest in writing about music. And God knows, I've never shown the slightest interest in regular updates.

You deserve an explanation. Well, when you've bought a brand-new chainsaw, no tree on your property is safe. It wants to be used. I mean, you certainly paid enough for the thing. Every day that it's not converting gasoline into sawdust, you're practically flushing money down the toilet.

(Besides…the sofa was just sitting there. Sweetheart? C'mon, don't get all…honey?)

And this same sane, careful logic was in effect when I finished writing a new feature for my blogging app. I select an iTunes track, click "Blog This," and then after the trained mice that live inside my computer have slipped into their little Cossack uniforms and spent a few moments scurring around in there grabbing album artwork and track data, it's all formatted and inserted into a blog post, ready to go.

For the first few days of December, I was just enjoying and over-exploiting my new toy, with no ulterior motive in mind. But by the Fourth, I'd decided to turn this Song A Day thing into an iTunes Advent Calendar. I got the idea from Emma Kennedy's blog. She wrote a December 1 blog entry that made me think about Advent calendars for the first time since I was a kid.

An Advent calendar is a wonderful thing. It's a calendar with 25 little doors, each one representing a day before Christmas and concealing some small secret known only to Time (and the South Korean printing company that manufactured the calendar). You get a delightful little surprise each and every morning. Sure, it's usually along the lines of a picture of an elf dressed like Chuck Yeager, test-flying a toy R/C airplane. But daily life tends to settle into a rut of predictable routine and any morning surprise that doesn't involve either a smoke alarm or a foreign object in a jelly donut is a welcome addition.

So throughout most of December, I present the iTunes equivalent: a different song each and every day, building up to The Very Best Christmas Song Ever on the big day.

I can already sense that you have some concerns. Not to worry: this won't be a three-week barrage of overplayed tunes like Adam Sandler's "The Chanukah Song" (or, as it's more popularly known, "That ****ing Adam Sandler holiday song") and its siblings. They won't even all necessarily be holiday songs.

And (also) not to worry: I will most definitely get to "Christmas Baby, Please Come Home."

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iTunes Advent Calendar Day 8

Friday, December 08, 2006 • 11:47:26 PM EST

I'm Afraid the Masquerade Is Over

Herb Ellis, Monty Alexander & Ray Brown

Ray Brown - The Best of the Concord Years

Genre: Jazz

Blah, Blah, Blah: It's the start of the second week of December, so I wanted to kick it off with the iTunes Advent Calendar's first warm, jolly Holiday-related song. Just take a look at that album cover. You drink in a hazy, monochromatic image of a lonely jazzman and before you know it, you feel like you're up to your ass in figgy pudding. Am I right, folks?

No, really: this has something to do with Christmas, I swear. Last year, I was watching a Christmas episode of "Sanford and Son" that I'd TiVOed. After a two-act riff on "A Christmas Carol," grumpy but gold-hearted junkman Fred Sanford decides to attend flinty Aunt Esther's Christmas party after all. Seated at stage-right was a white-haired white guy with a guitar. I was instantly suspicious: in all my years of Sanford And Son scholarship, I'd never seen this guy before. He was assaying the role of Aunt Esther's landlord, though he had no lines and the camera seemed to be ignoring him.

Fred favors the group with "The Christmas Song." But who can pay attention to the vocals? The landlord is ripping it up, trilling over and under and through the whole tune like an Olympic slalom skier on a gold-medal run. No actor he…this was clearly a skilled musician, mingling among the extras like a trained assassin, attracting no notice until it was time to unleash hell.

I leaped straight up from my chair and shouted "Ringer...Ringer!!!" in such a startling volume that my goldfish dropped their Soduku puzzles.

Single-framing through the end credits, I learned that the landlord was played by Herb Ellis. And when I punched that name into iTunes, well, it was instantly clear that the man had built one hell of a career. He'd recorded with Oscar Peterson, Tommy Dorsey, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong…the man got around.

People like Ellis, who led remarkable lives without becoming household names or faces, are like Superman or Batman. Whether they stand in line at a Starbucks or they monopolize the only photocopier at Kinko's that can handle tabloid-sized originals, they mingle among us freely, neither desiring nor attracting attention. There's never any outward hint that there's a yellow-and-crimson "S" lurking underneath their Barracuda jacket and cheap wool sweater.

You're oblivious. "Don't you understand that there are other people waiting behind you?!?" you ask, earning no response other than a fractional turn of the head. You had absolutely no idea that you'd missed a golden opportunity. The question you should have asked was

"So, despite his skill as a drummer, was Buddy Rich really as much of a bastard as everyone says?"

or

"Did George Lucas give you a lot of personal guidance, or were you left to design R2-D2 pretty much on your own?"

or

"But if you hadn't gotten the lunar module's landing radar working again, NASA's mission rules demanded that you abort the landing and re-dock with the CSM. You were less than 200 feet from the lunar surface…come on, wouldn't you have tried to land the LEM blind? I mean, you knew that Apollo 14 was going to be your last spaceflight, anyway…"

Why I Bought It In The First Place: I had a serious Jazz allergy that lasted until about ten years ago. That's was when I finally started to find records that were within my skill level and hadn't already been overplayed to death.

I'm still not an intense aficionado, but I'm a sucker for a good jazz trio like this one. I love the relentless velocity and the in-your-face skills on display. I also like the fact that everybody gets a turn to solo.

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iTunes Advent Calendar: Day 9

Saturday, December 09, 2006 • 11:58:21 PM EST

Enzymes

Steroid Maximus

Ectopia

Genre: Rock

Blah, Blah, Blah: Chances are excellent that you'll recognize this track.

It's from that Chinese martial-arts film that did very well in limited release a few years ago. The retired general-turned-farmer makes a long, determined journey to the provincial capital, garbed and armed as he was when he fought the Great Wars thirty years ago. His face is a mask of grim determination and manifest danger. The music pulses as he penetrates the outskirts of Lord Udo's compound and casually dispatches layer after layer of increasingly well-trained security. His eyes never leave the broad windows of the main palace. For these are mere preliminaries…

No, wait…that wasn't it.

It's from a sci-fi thriller from the early Nineties. The Argine, a light-explorer ship, has finally located the source of the mysterious U-band transmission that they'd been tracking for months. Though utterly alien in origin, it's clearly attempting to mimic the form and structure of human language. After spirited bidding, Argine won the contract to make the deep-space run. It sure seemed like a lot of money back when the ship was in the safety of Alleluia Port. But now, as the ragged magenta features of a dead planetoid loom larger and larger in the forward viewscreen, and a yawning cavern beckons the captain to ignore the advice of her navigational officer, Pauline Heller (USDCS), wonders if she and her crew will live to collect it…

Wait. I'm thinking of that police procedural that was on TV last month. You know? Where the detective with both a reputation for unstable behavior and an uncanny sixth sense for breaking impossible cases has all of the evidence materials from eleven separate homicides strewn across the floor of his warehouse apartment. A leopard-print cloth. A photo of a smiling kid in a bathtub. A box of copper nails, half-empty. Dozens of photos detailing scenes of abject horror and cruelty. His eyes flick from the nails to the hotel ashtray to the coffee-stained parking ticket. What's the connection? Is there a connection?

"Ectopia" is an album of incidental and theme music for movies and TV shows that never existed. Each track has an emphatic feel of place and purpose, without any actual place or purpose to pin them up to. Which means that you're free to co-opt any or all of these for your own. To play this track while answering email, or researching cheap hotels in Montreal, or even doing a little light housekeeping around the office is to live in the exciting and pivotal Act Three twist in a cracking-good movie.

Incidentally, "Steroid Maximus" is actually one of the many working personalities of a guy named J.G. Thirlwell. What a nifty way to run a career. If you want to do a whole album of instrumental soundtrack music, but you don't want your existing fans to feel misled by such a gear-grinding departure, then just create a new personality and a new fan base.

Why I Bought It In The First Place: I'm a huge fan of the Dr. Venture show on Cartoon Network. Everything about this show is damned-near spot-on perfect…but that's a discussion for another time.

The show started doing positive things with my pleasure receptors right with the opening credits: it's a montage of flashy snippets of action, set to a brassy, vintage-sounding instrumental that suggests that the SPECTRE agents chasing James Bond along a twisty mountain road are (a) moments away from sending 007's car over the side of a cliff, and (b) unaware that the "No Fat Chicks" bumper sticker on the back of the MG flips down to release a full battery of surface-to-surface missiles.

I read an interview with the show's creator that praised Thirlwell's involvement. From there, some iTunes purchases were the work of but a moment.

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iTunes Advent Calendar: Day 10

Sunday, December 10, 2006 • 08:34:38 PM EST

Santa Claus Is Coming to Town

Bill Evans

Bill Evans: The Best of Verve

Genre: Jazz

Blah, Blah, Blah: There are plenty of (wonderful) holiday songs that truly represent Christmas With A Capital "X"…but I won't be introducing any of 'em until we get closer to Zero Hour. Still, it's never — never — the wrong time to insert a little Bill Evans into the proceedings.

"Everybody Digs Bill Evans." That's the actual name of one of his biggest albums. "How arrogant!" you sneer. "Shocking," your girlfriend agrees. As for that friend of yours whose entire upper body features an ambitious tattoo of the cover art to "Master Of Puppets" with portraits of Metallica, Anthrax, and Megadeth lurking among the headstones…well, he was so stunned that his monocle popped out of his eye and dropped right in his martini glass.

And then you spin the CD. Well, damn; the title doesn't lie. Some nit-picky part of you points out that the title should probably be "Everybody who's had a chance to hear his music Digs Bill Evans," but you certainly can't claim that it's an idle boast.

Bill Evans sits in the butter zone of jazz, combining fundamental comprehensibility with a spirit of adventure. He's a supremely-talented pianist and is gifted with an ungodly ability to wander ahead of and behind and all around a melody without ever losing it. When Evans improvises, it's like taking a long walk with a dog who can be trusted without a leash. And yet, as newbie-friendly as his music is, it hasn't been played to death. Every track is a new adventure.

Alas, my favorite Bill Evans album isn't in the iTunes store: "Together Again," a collaboration with Tony Bennett. When I say it's the best Tony Bennett album ever recorded, well, that statement should provoke an involuntary "whoosh!" of respect. If it didn't, then clearly your Whoosh-o-meter is overdue for its periodic maintenance. But this take on "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town" — like every Bill Evans track, actually — demonstrates all the reasons why a Bill Evans needed to be created.

Suffice to say that if a lifetime of hearing "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town" in shopping malls and middle-school cafeterigymatoriums has caused you to lose your taste for this classic, Bill Evans will find it for you. An added bonus: when folks hear this track coming out of your office stereo, they'll reflexively say "Hey, that's from A Charlie Brown Christmas, right? Gee, I've never heard it before!" And then you'll tell them about Bill Evans, and you'll sound like some sort of jazz egghead.

Why I Bought It In The First Place: I bought "Together Again" solely because I wanted to become a Tony Bennett completist; one play turned me into a Bill Evans completist.

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iTunes Advent Calendar: Day 11

Monday, December 11, 2006 • 11:04:49 PM EST

A Christmas Carol

Charles Dickens

A Christmas Carol (Abridged Fiction)

Genre: Classics

Blah, Blah, Blah: You people have no idea what kind of a bullet you just dodged. I had a totally different selection all loaded up and ready to go. But I got off on a pleasant tangent today, which led me to make a wonderful discovery. And y'all are the beneficiaries. Because the original track was, well…this one's better.

(I'll explain later.)

I think one of the reasons why so many folks are let down by the holiday season is that they feel obligated to adopt other people's traditions, instead of cultivating and enjoying their own. For example, I've been caroling, and I've been caroled. Whether you're standing on the front lawn wondering if the family gives a damn or you're standing on the front stoop wondering how long you have to smile and nod before you can go back inside and watch "Jeopardy!", it never ever ever works out as well as you'd hoped.

Decorating the tree with strings of popcorn is way more trouble than it's worth. It must have been invented before child labor became such a dirty concept. What better way to prepare a starving six-year-old orphan for ten years of hand-beading purses for upper-class women than to force her to meticulously string together yard after yard after yard of perfectly edible food?

And roasting chestnuts is way more expensive and time-consuming than just buying them in ready-roasted cellophane bags at the supermarket. Doubly-so when you consider that the store doesn't even sell ready-roasted cellophane bags of chestnuts. Why would they? McNuggets are cheap and plentiful, and probably far more relevant to a modern Christmas reveler. One of the dipping sauces is red, right? There you go: with one or two strategic bites, you can turn them into McNugget Clauses.

No, when you set out to parrot the activities you've seen on TV and in magazines, you're setting yourself up for some pretty meaningless experiences. The most important traditions — the ones that truly make the month of December into something special — are the ones that you sort of fall into, through year after year of simply doing things that make you happy.

Year After Year, I visit my Area Hallmark Store and buy the new spaceship ornaments. YAY, I look forward to the night when Paul Shaffer does his impression of Cher singing "O Holy Night" on a Sonny & Cher Christmas special. YAY, I go to the same tree lot on Route 1, buy a tree for my parents and a half-gallon of fresh-pressed cider for myself, and spend the day at my folks' house decorating the former and drinking the latter. YAY, I spend Christmas Day putting a couple of hundred miles on the odometer, visiting a half-dozen different friends and relatives, dropping off gifts and cadging at least three or four Christmas dinners in the process.

Next Sunday, I'll charge up the batteries on my camera and I'll talk a lonnng walk from downtown Boston through the Common, strolling across the Smoot Bridge all the way into Cambridge. I'll enjoy the lights and the people, and the sensation of New England winter in that all-important first month when the temps are still high enough that it's possible to feel sensations. YAY.

And just as I've done year after year, I will listen to my tape of Patrick Stewart's audiobook of "A Christmas Carol." In the car, almost certainly.

This is a remarkable recording. Stewart doesn't simply read the book; he performs it as a one-man show, gamely shifting his voice up and down through all available gears and temperaments as Scrooge, Marley, Mrs. Cratchit, Tiny Tim, everybody…with each line honed to perfection. And no wonder. He used to perform this book live on Broadway to sellout crowds.

At an hour and forty-seven minutes, it's slightly abridged, but Stewart doesn't omit anything important. He serves the work flawlessly. It's hard to hear this thing from start to finish and not think that you've received a fantastic gift. Every modern, fluffy retelling (starring, for example, a former castmember of "The OC" as Scrooge) dilutes the power of Dickens' story by another order of magnitude. This audiobook is the antidote.

I have another holiday tradition, one that I'm not terribly proud of: I mock "The Christmas Shoes." But trust me: it's a book (and a song, and a Hallmark Made For TV Movie) that begs for — no, requires — passionate, aerobic mockery. Because just like all evil, Christmas stories as awful as this one can only flourish if good men and women stand by and do nothing.

And it is indeed evil. The writers threw a terminally-ill woman, a teary-eyed moppet, a hunky, cold-hearted-but-redeemable lawyer, and (Lord help us all) Jesus Christ into a blender. Then they dumped in about five pounds of artificial sweetener and stabbed down the "Liquefy" button. After the resulting goo was left outside in the snow all night to ensure that it had lost every last degree of true warmth, they clamped the audience's mouth and nose shut, waited until it reflexively gasped for air, and then they poured the whole pitcher down its throat. "Have your heartstrings and spirit touched by this classic Holiday miracle," they soothed, while they clamped the audience's air passages closed again to ensure that it swallowed the whole thing. "Or else we'll file an anonymous complaint with Child Protective Services and have all of your kids thrown into foster care. Because clearly, you must be some sort of soulless bastard."

It's porn, folks…only without a pizza-delivery guy. The FCC should have done something about it. I swear, Janet Jackson's right nipple didn't do one-thousandth the damage to the youth of America as this smutfest.

But "A Christmas Carol" — the original book, not the modern retellings involving Delta Burke or Sharon Gless — is the real deal. It's genuinely moving and compelling. It's a universal tale of redemption. It doesn't matter if you don't observe Christmas. Hell, it doesn't even matter if it's July.

When the little kid in "The Christmas Shoes" starts bawling because he can't afford to buy his Dyin' Momma a pair of shoes so she'll look nice when she meets Jesus, I'm laughing and laughing and laughing. But there are several points during "A Christmas Carol" when…well, I'm far too much of a he-manly manly man of men to get a bit teary-eyed while reading a freaking book. So let's just agree that December is apparently the height of ragweed season here in New England.

The reason for the both reactions: I can't help it. It's natural. It's a testament to the sincerity and skill of the work. No abridged edition can have quite the same impact as the original. But Patrick Stewart's audiobook stands alone in second place.

Friends and relatives read my blog, so I suppose I should cover my butt and say that my single favorite holiday tradition is the thing with driving all around New England visiting people on Christmas Day. But damn, if I didn't get to read "A Christmas Carol" or hear this audiobook…well, that'd be a dirty shame.

Why I Bought It In The First Place: So here's the deal. I had another track in mind (something you would have disliked intensely), but when I started talking about my Patrick Stewart tradition, I recalled that my tapes are more than ten years old. I wondered: is it possible that the audiobook has made it onto the iTunes store?

Oh, YAY.

If one of these Advent Calendar picks is truly a don't-miss…it's this one.

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iTunes Advent Calendar: Day 12

Tuesday, December 12, 2006 • 11:59:35 PM EST

War Pigs (Live)

Black Sabbath

Reunion (Live)

Genre: Rock

Blah, Blah, Blah: This is actually a holiday-related song. It's one of the tunes included in "Guitar Hero II," which I saw and played for the first time in a Best Buy on the day after Thanksgiving. Hence, it's garlanded with mistletoe.

I simply mustn't buy "Guitar Hero II." I mustn't.

Is it possible that you haven't heard about this game yet? It's utterly brilliant: it's air-guitar with a points system. You have this special guitar-shaped game controller with three or four colored buttons on the neck and a strum bar in place of the strings. Onscreen, you see a rock band playing the backing parts to a gen-yew-wine rock classic, and your purpose is to fill in the the lead guitar bit by keeping up with a steady stream of strumming and fingering cues. You get points for accuracy; blow enough notes, and the band drops their instruments in disgust.

Natcherly, the songs get harder and furiouser as you progress. I understand that Spinal Tap's "Tonight I'm Gonna Rock U" is lurking there as a bonus level. And if you make it all the way to the end…the drummer explodes and everything.

I'm not at all certain that the word "Awesome" comes anywhere close to covering it. In fact, I'm pretty sure that the reason why the Universe caused this game to be created was because it wanted us to invent a word that was as superior to "Awesome" as "Awesome" was to "Nifty-Keen" when it was first invented.

Alan Ginsberg got it all wrong. He should have written "I have seen the finest minds of my generation destroyed by Guitar Hero II." Surely he did enough LSD to see thirty or forty years into the future, didn't he? And it's completely true. This game has made steady viral progress through my address book, claiming the sanity and free time of more and more of my friends with each passing day.

But they all seem so…happy.

...I must have it.

And yet, truly, suddenly, passionately: I mustn't buy "Guitar Hero II."

Actually, buying Guitar Hero II would probably be a pretty safe move. I don't own a game console. I could just strum the controller. What would be the harm?

I'll tell you what the harm would be: because the Playstation 2 is now selling for less than $150. I have $150. And I don't want to brag, but look: I happen to know that I can make another $150 with very little time or trouble. Thus, the sole obstacle defending my home from PS2 ownership is my own powers of self-control.

Folks, there are more computers in my office than there are houses on my street. My Powers of Self-Control are handily exceeded by my powers of telekinesis.

I know that I buy this game, I will do nothing but play this game. Which will do wonders for my (admittedly pitiful) ability to play a Primus tune on a fake plastic guitar, but it'll do nothing to bring me closer to my goal of healing and uniting the planet with a work of perfect truth, beauty and wisdom sometime before I turn 40. Or perhaps the lesser goal of getting my next column written. And the column after that. Before long, my career would be at an end and I'd have all the time in the world to make it to the Suicidal Tendencies level...but my fairy-tale life of earning an endless series of $150's (and, dare I say, much tastier cheques) would be over and done with.

Which, come to think of it, I could probably get away with. Here's where being a massive packrat pays off: I have no end of books and magazines and papers to burn for heat. So I'm good through spring, no problem.

Also, if I can get my editors hooked on Guitar Hero II, maybe they'll become so preoccupied with making it all the way through "Free Bird" that they'll forget to fire me.

No. No! I mustn't buy "Guitar Hero II."

Why I Bought It In The First Place: As fantabulous as the gameplay is, it's made even better by the fact that they went and licensed actual classics, instead of commissioning a batch of fakey rock-ish tunes. They should put out a soundtrack CD, really.

When I got home from Best Buy I headed to Wikipedia, confident that there'd be a complete tracklist. Then I realized that this was stupid, because surely someone would have put together an iMix of all the available iTunes tracks and posted it to the store. Indeed they did.

Say what you will about Ozzy Osbourne…the man knows how to put on a ****ing rock show. I stopped going to big concerts a long time ago. I don't really like to spend three hours driving to a venue, only to be squeezed into a dense-pack of humanity for three hours more, and then when it's finally all over with and I'm free to leave, I have to fight my way out of the parking lot competing against 12,000 toad-twistingly insane people who are now three hours more drunk and high than they were when they parked. But man alive, this track makes it all seem like fun, wot?

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iTunes Advent Calendar: Day 13

Wednesday, December 13, 2006 • 10:56:22 PM EST

Here To Go

Devo

Greatest Hits

Genre: Alternative & Punk

Blah, Blah, Blah: My titanic genius is a colossal burden and a regular source of frustration.

All my life, I've been forced to actually explain why I'm right about things, to walk people through my reasoning, and to at least pretend to — oh, it turns my stomach even just typing this — entertain alternative ideas and opinions.

I mean, Good Lord: there have even been plenty of times when I've had no alternative but to manipulate people into thinking that my own (flawless) ideas were theirs to begin with, just so we could cut to the chase and put The Obviously Correct Course Of Action into play and hustle onward to inevitable glory.

I can sense that you're confused by the apparent contradiction. On the one hand, my opening statement suggests a titanic ego to match the scale of my intellect. On the other, my easy willingness to allow other people to take full credit for my genius (cf. Salieri taking musical dictation from Mozart in "Amadeus") demonstrates that I'm all about the results, not the glory.

It's just another demonstration of my stunning perfection. "Brilliant…yet selfless," absolutely. I have my own line of scented hand soaps, which will start appearing in Crabtree & Evelyn stores nationwide in April; that legend is printed on every label, in Latin, along with the names of each of my enemies and my predicted fate for each.

"Here To Go" is a good example of precisely the sort of thing I'm talking about. A smart company (a smart company) needs to license this song for use in a commercial for some sort of portable device. An iPod? An iBook? Absolutely. A pocket-sized satellite radio? A rechargable 12-volt motorcycle battery with a built-in DC inverter that allows you to carry a working AC outlet everywhere you go? The possibilities are limitless.

Even the unmitigated, squishy disaster known as Zune could have been blunted somewhat if they'd used this Devo song in the commercials. Remember when Microsoft licensed "Ring Of Fire" to promote Windows gaming? Remember how ashamed you felt, as a Mac user? We make all kinds of big talk about Apple being soooo much more clever than anybody else…but did they see the obvious? No, they did not.

Which is not to say that the Zune wouldn't have totally completely sucked anyway. But at least it would have been a disaster on the scale of, say, mixing a pair of red underpants in with your white laundry. Embarrassing, but still, you move on. As opposed to what actually happened, which was the sort of tragedy that would have caused Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides to spend an entire afternoon exchanging wordless, soul-deep shudders and shots of ouzo.

The commercial potential of "Here To Go" is absolutely as clear as day to me. But to date, I've had no success in getting engineers, CEOs, and product managers to pluck this ripe, low-hanging fruit from the tree.

Well, by now, I've sort of stopped bringing it up. I've said it before: I'm really pulling for you people, and I sincerely hope that when I make my final report in 288 years, your planet is one of the few that are deemed worthy of special preservation.

But look, I refuse to run your lives for you. I'm sick of having my heart broken. In 1977, I gave you people everything you needed — everything — to bring the Baiji dolphin population back from the brink…and just look at what the hell happened.

Why I Bought It In The First Place: I think this particular iTMS track predates The Big Rip…the five weeks I spent ripping each and every track of each and every one of my 600+ CDs.

I wanted to use it in an iMovie project and the time I would have wasted looking for my Devo CDs was far more valuable to me than the ninety-nine cents that it cost me to just click into iTunes and buy a new copy.

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iTunes Advent Calendar: Day 14

Thursday, December 14, 2006 • 11:49:32 PM EST

Words Cannot Describe

Mirah

You Think It's Like This, But Really It's Like This

Genre: Rock

Blah, Blah, Blah: I say this without a trace of irony: this is the sweetest song in my entire iTunes library.

You know what I'm saying? It plays like a first crush, innocent and well-intentioned. It also sports some of the most delightful lyrics ever:

This is a masterpiece, plain and simple. When is the last time you heard anything so playful and intricate? Or a songwriter taking such obvious joy in her craftsmanship? These syllables flow along and click together like Tetris tiles (assuming you're playing the game very well).

And the words are coupled to a cheerful, swingy melody. This has been a five-star, Most Played selection since the day I bought it a year ago but only just now did it occur to me to check on who wrote it. Well, blow me down: it's a modern original. I always assumed that it was a cover of a vintage tune. It's truly one of those songs for which the phrase "They don't write 'em like that anymore" was coined, which is a shame because it also demonstrates that this durable and useful cliché is almost 100% full of crap.

Mirah's an interesting performer. I've never pulled the trigger on Amazon-ing the full CD because it's so hard to lock down just what sort of artist she is. Sampling the two dozen or so iTMS tracks and buying a few seems to show that she's a bit of a wanderer…which absolutely isn't a bad thing. It's just that most artists seem to do their wandering one album at a time, not on a track-by-track basis.

Aw, the hell with it. As it happens, I've got most of my Christmas shopping loaded up in my Amazon cart, ready for checkout. If I'm getting $23 worth of free shipping, then that means a Mirah CD would be, like, free…right?

Why I Bought It In The First Place: Mmm…I think I happened across it during a random walk through a bunch of iMixes.

Hey, awesome: I note that I was actually bought it on Christmas last year. So clearly, I was spending someone else's money, here. Plus, that technically makes this a Christmas song.

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Like The Biblical Job, only With A Kick-Ass SLR

Friday, December 15, 2006 • 05:20:46 AM EST

You have shown pity for me in the past. This was a shrewd instinct and I applaud you for it. Although honestly, I'd prefer that you drop the word "pity" and replace it with "tremendous respect for my steely, Abraham Lincoln-like resolve in the face of great challenge," but it's not like I'm going to insist or anything.

Pity, respect, a $60 gift card to Bugaboo Creek Steakhouse…whatever you're offering, I truly deserve it. I know true hardship. For instance, companies regularly loan me expensive, wicked cool equipment.

And as wretched as that might sound just in the abstract, I assure you that the reality is even worse. Remember, a $2000 laptop has to be signed for, which means that on most weekdays, FedEx and UPS drivers won't let me sleep much past 11 AM. Ever since I got a TiVO, I lost the need to be awake before "The Price Is Right," so this is truly nothing but downside.

Plus, when it's time to return these things, do the rightful owners of the hardware have the simple courtesy to send somebody over to my house to help me round up all of the accessories and the original packing materials? Oh, no. It's allll on me.

But there's a truly subtle and insidious risk involved as well. Y'see, sometimes the item in question is far, far too cool. After using This Expensive Thing for two to eight weeks, I might conclude that there was a This Expensive Thing-shaped hole in my life, one that only This Expensive Thing can possibly spackle. And so I have to go send them a big check instead of their hardware.

Today was one such day. Because after two months with Nikon's new D80 SLR, including some spectacular shooting in Central America, I've fallen into triple-heart-love. Papa, don't preach: I'm gonna keep my baby.

Sure, I gave the decision loads and loads of thought before requesting a formal invoice. Tons!

"The most modern camera that I actually own is almost three years old," I argued. "No RAW mode, only 5 piddling megapixels, a single fixed lens…cripes, if it were any more out-of-date, I'd have to duck under a big black cape before tripping the shutter. How can I properly serve the needs of my readers if I don't have a modern camera in my permanent arsenal?"

Sounds good, doesn't it? But in truth, the debate over whether or not to buy the D80 was about as spirited and lively as a debate over whether or not to hire the mayor's nephew before bidding on the contract to repaint all of the city's bridges.

What finally tipped the scales (over on its side, and then all the way down into a ravine) was the obvious Humanitarian angle. Belize is such a hotzone of deadly airborne malaria that the American Red Cross has banned me from donating blood for a full year. As a highly-moral individual, should I send a (potentially) malaria-ridden SLR back to Nikon? Or should I do the (dare I say) brave thing, and quarantine myself with this delicious prosumer camera?

I remind you that my strength is as the strength of ten men, because my heart is pure.

As if this weren't enough trauma for one day, some company also sent me two pounds of chocolate truffles. As you can imagine, I'm still pretty shook up. I don't think I can adequately articulate my thoughts about that just yet.

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iTunes Advent Calendar: Day 15

Friday, December 15, 2006 • 11:48:42 PM EST

Help Me

Johnny Cash

American V: A Hundred Highways

Genre: Country

Blah, Blah, Blah: Is the context of a creative work important? If a painting appears to be a complete random mess until you read the little explanatory booklet for which the museum shop charged you $11, which reaction should "count"? Your original confusion when the piece stood alone, or the satisfying experience you had when you were able to look at again, armed with all of the proper background?

I keep flip-flopping on this question. I've usually thought that the true test of Art is timelessness. It doesn't really matter how silly we all think Britney Spears is. If, a hundred years from now, her albums are enjoyed by people who have no idea who she was, what she represented to pop culture, or the weird times that allowed her to become a superstar…well, that's game, set and match, isn't it? You don't need to know that Mozart's "The Magic Flute" was designed as populist entertainment, or anything about the people and social conventions that it was set up to mock. It works, even when freed of all ties to its time and place and authorship. And that's what makes it Art, right?

Then I listen to a track like this one. And I just don't know any more.

Johnny Cash believed in God the same way that I believe in the sofa that I'm sitting on right now. It wasn't a question of faith; it was a matter of direct, tactile knowledge. Cash believed — no, he knew — that when he was at his very lowest ebb and was very much ready to die, God personally intervened and saved him…and this knowledge stuck with him every day for the rest of his life. He would remain a dark and dangerous man; he would relapse into drug addiction at least once after being born again; and when he sang about drugs and murder and seriously bad things, he slung more fire into the microphone than he did when he sang about religion; regardless, once he turned to God, he never turned away.

That's the man who sings "Help Me." And when Johnny Cash recorded it, he was in steadily-declining health, suffering from multiple incurable and progressive diseases. He knew that he was nearing the end of his road.

If you had never heard of Johnny Cash before, or if you were somehow under the impression that he wasn't particularly religious and pretty much just cranked out whatever song was shoved in front of him, it'd still be a powerful song.

But. When you click "Play" and close your eyes and picture a man who was humbly reaching out to his lifelong friend and protector, fully expecting solace and intervention in a time of great uncertainty and fear…the listening experience almost becomes unbearable.

Cash couldn't imagine a universe without God. I can't imagine a song like this without picturing a gray head bowed low, in a studio darkened like a chapel in the deep woods.

Why I Bought It In The First Place: It was Johnny Cash, and I have more than an ounce of common sense and good taste.

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iTunes Advent Calendar: Day 16

Wednesday, December 20, 2006 • 12:07:21 AM EST

Difficult to Cure (Beethoven's Ninth)

Rainbow

Difficult to Cure

Genre: Rock

Blah, Blah, Blah: An hour ago, I set out with a simple, unambitious goal: pick an "Ode To Joy" as today's Advent Calendar Song. I might have inadvertently convinced myself that all classical music is, in fact, quite doomed.

Sorry to bum you out so close to Christmas. Particularly if you're an oboe player or something.

Let's handle the compusories first. I'm sure I don't need to explain why I chose this piece. Yes, December 16th is Beethoven's birthday. Had he lived, he'd have been 236 years old today. I urge you to take a moment to think about all of the masterpieces he could have composed during that span, had he not stumbled down the same dark path of mainline chemical addiction that also took Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin from us far, far before their time.

Lady Heroin doesn't love you, kids. Take the lesson to heart, I beg you.

Onward to the Freestyle part of the competition. I knew that I wanted to choose a bit of the ol' Ludwig Van, but I quickly found myself knocking my head against the concept of choosing just one track. One work is hard enough; but even if you've finally commited yourself a specific composer and a specific concerto…which movement should you choose?

Classical music completely short-circuits all of the advantages of an online music store. The motor driving the iTMS' success is its ability to let you sample and nibble. If you want to explore the world of Stax southern soul, the minimum unit of experimentation is just ninety-nine cents. It's not much of a risk; not only will a buck buy you an entire Booker T and the MG's track, but the 30-second sample represents a hefty chunk of the full product. It'll give you a pretty good handle on whether or not this song's your cuppa.

But how can a thirty-second snippet of "E lucevan le stelle" give you the slightest taste of "Tosca"? That's a three-act opera. It's like sampling one page of Moby Dick, or trying to get a taste for the entire "Lord Of The Rings" movie trilogy based on a Gollum PEZ dispenser.

On top of all that, the 64K/64K bitrate of an iTMS track isn't wide enough for a classical piece. It's fine for anything from the Ramones' catalogue. Honestly, with just three chords, I think you could just write the numbers down on a sheet of notebook paper and mail it to the purchaser, couldn't you? But a classical piece has too much loud, too much soft, too much high and low, and a much too intricate a relationship between the performance and the space it's performed in.

Maybe the Ultimate Solution is for classical music to become intractibly associated with digital streams, like satellite radio or high-resolution netradio. My big complaint about terrestrial classical radio is the same com