Make Mine Music

Too much musical information.

Well it’s that time of year again, the voting has opened for the Triple J Hottest 100. Naturally I’ve jumped straight in and voted for my favourite 10 songs of the last year and shall present them here for the ridicule of all – but before I do I have to comment on the website they’ve thrown together to take the votes.

I ain’t impressed.

OK, I’ll qualify that. Overall the site is good, but it has a couple of critical bugs that made my voting a bit of a trial.

(For the record I’m using Firefox version 3.6.13)

Firstly, they appear to be using AJAX to add songs to the shortlist. This is fine – except they appear to be using the same XMLHttpRequest object each time you click a song, rather than spawning a new one.

What this means is that if you click to select a song, then click on another song before the result of the first click has been returned, the first click is effectively cancelled, and only the second song is added to the list. So you need to click, wait, click, wait, and so on, which kind of defeats the purpose of using AJAX in the first place.

The second bug is on the submission form you go to once your songs have been selected. I use an extension called CookieSafe to control the cookies on my machine. This allows me to block or modify cookies on a site-by-site basis. On the Triple J site I allow cookies, but have them all rewritten to be session only (ie: they evaporate when I close the browser).

Voting for the hottest 100 appears to require a long term cookie to be set – which is fair enough, I guess they’re using it to stop people voting multiple times. If this cookie is tampered with (or blocked) the form won’t submit. Also fair enough. But – what does the form tell you if this situation occurs?

It tells you that you haven’t filled out all of the fields.

Even when you have.

That’s bad. Really bad. An inappropriate error message is worse than no error message at all. I’m net savvy enough to figure out what’s going on and adjust my cookie settings appropriately, but plenty of other people aren’t, and could easily get so frustrated that they’d give up on voting altogether.

So, the ABC’s web department seriously needs to raise their game.

But, on to the fun stuff. The songs.

Whittling down my list to just 10 songs was a real challenge this year, especially once I realised that I was forgetting a bunch of really good tracks. But I laboured mightily and ended up with the following list, which I present in no particular order (apart from alphabetically by artist).

(Note: Helen and Ali, a bunch of these songs are on a mix-cd that shall shortly be winging your ways, so if you want to be surprised, stop reading – or at least clicking “play”- from this point on :))

The Bedroom Philosopher – Northcote (So Hungover)

The puntastic tale of a pretentious Emo riding around on the number 86 tram. I particularly like the concept of Sad Sanderson performing at the Fitzroy Anti-Social Club.

Cee Lo Green – Fuck You!

I don’t mind profanity in a song, as long as it serves a purpose. In this case the purpose is to form an integral part of a seamless, catchy, funky, brilliant motown track consummately performed by Mr Green. This is my confident tip for the number one spot. Those who find the lyrics offensive may prefer this bowdlerised version performed by the cast of Glee and (for some reason) Gwyneth Paltrow.

Chiddy Bang – The Opposite of Adults

A remix/reworking of MGMT’s Kids. And what a remix/reworking. Just as good as the original, although wildly different.

Grinderman – Palaces Of Montezuma

Ah, Nick Cave! Scary, growly Nick Cave who can make a song about JFK’s spinal cord sound like a visitation from the heavens. OK, it’s not exclusively about JFK’s spinal cord, but believe me, it’s in there, and it’s romantic as all get out.

Gypsy and the Cat – Jona Vark

Gypsy and the Cat were discovered by Triple J Unearthed, and you can just imagine them sitting around giggling saying “we’ll call our song Jona Vark, and everyone will think it’s Joan of Arc, and get all confused! Hurrah”. Normally this kind of tomfoolery would condemn one to a life of complete obscurity, but Gypsy and the Cat seemed to have made it work.

Kate Nash – Do Wah Doo

A few years ago I listed one of Kate Nash’s songs as the worst of the year. Possibly she heard about it, because she’s now come up with a 50’s inspired track that I’m totally in love with. It sounds like something put together by Phil Spector before he went mad and started killing people. Fantastic.

Marina and the Diamonds – Shampain

How to describe Shampain. Like falling into the pit of hell accompanied by a herd of rabid synthesizers? Perhaps, except that it’s awesome.

Philadelphia Grand Jury – Save Our Town

Some good, old fashioned Aussie rock/pop, without which no Hottest 100 list would be complete. Put your money down people!

Sia – Bring Night

Catchy and astronomically accurate! If you travel in the direction of your shadow the sun will go down a little sooner.

Yeasayer – Ambling Alp

A song about boxers from the 1930s. Or something. Certainly they get mentioned in there. I don’t really know, or really care, because it’s energetic, catchy, fun and puts the boot into fascists.

So that’s my ten. Here’s some others that only just missed out on making the cut…

So there we go. Roll on Australia Day!

Hearts and Parks, Bows and Crows

Vale

Two great losses this week with the passing of author Ruth Park and musical-oddity extraordinaire Captain Beefheart.

Playing Beatie Bow was on the year nine syllabus when I was at school, so I read and studied the crap out of it. A lot of books suffer when you’re forced to do that to them, but Beatie Bow stood up. I haven’t read it for the better part of twenty years but I still recall vast swathes of it – it’s one of those books that gets into your head and changes it a bit so you’re never quite the same person after reading it.

More recently I obtained a copy of Ruth Park’s Sydney which provides a brilliantly written (if it wasn’t so pretentious I’d even say “sparkling”) history of the city via a series of walking tours. It’s clear that she had an incomparable love and knowledge of Sydney, and the book is going to be the first thing going into my case when I pack for my (Sydney departing) cruise in early 2012.

Captain Beefheart – well, what can you say about Captain Beefheart? A musical genius and provocateur without compare (unless it’s to his buddy Frank Zappa). I’ll let him speak for himself with the 1982 video clip of Ice Cream for Crow – a film so weird that a terrified MTV refused to play it, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York rushed to add it to their permenent collection.

Vale Ruth Park and Don Van Vliet. We’ll miss you both.

A New Word

From the Latin

I came up with a new word today – Sterculient.  It’s an adjective that means “not very good” 😉

I’m having a rather rough time of it at the moment with the old depression and anxiety – hence the lack of updates. In fact I ended up at the emergency department the other night getting my heart checked out (as I suspected my heart is as strong as ever and the sudden burst of agonising chest pains I experienced was nothing but stress – but I figured I should get it checked out because I wouldn’t be able to sleep otherwise from wondering if I was actually going to wake up).

Only a few working days left until Christmas though, and then a glorious two weeks off, so I should be OK. Eventually.

Angst

My parents are dead, my life sucks, I can’t hold down a girlfriend, and I’m surrounded by f****** goblins and s*** all the time!

Feeling burnt out, tired and antisocial, and wishing the world would just go away (hmmm, self censoring there – to be truly accurate I wish the world would f-off) (hmmm, self censoring self censoring – I’m in a bad way…) for a few days. Unfortunately I have to go to work.

I shall try and restrain myself from stabbing people until the weekend. No promises though.

Skype Must Die!

Doing some good for the world

Actually, Skype is a pretty cool program, it’s just that bloody browser plugin that turns everything that even looks like a phone number into a puke-inducing, flag-bearing button that needs to be eliminated with prejudice as extreme as a very extreme thing having a particularly extreme day.

Until that noble goal is achieved, this might be useful. I’ve chopped the horrible beast that is the plugin apart and come up with the following code to undo some of the evil it perpetrates on innocent web pages. Simply drop this CSS code into your page, and (theoretically) Skype will crawl away, weeping, leaving your innocent number strings unmolested.

/* kill skype plugin */
html body  span.skype_pnh_container {display:none !important;}
html body  span.skype_pnh_print_container {display:inline !important;}

Please note that this is code that seems to work for me, and for the version of the plugin on my computer. It may not work for you, or with whatever version you’re plagued with. Also, I’m not a bloody tech support desk, so if you can’t get this code working, or aren’t sure where to put it – well, it’s tough biscuits for you sailor!

Back to work…

Damned Impertinence!

Hrumph!

This morning at work I got a call from a client wanting an update on his project. As might be expected on a Monday morning he asked if I’d had a good weekend. I answered in the non-committal affirmative. He then asked “Do anything interesting?”

Well. Call me a socially inept Aspie but to me that’s stepping over the line. We’re not friends, we’re business associates. As I see it, he has no right (social or otherwise) to request information about my personal life, and to do so was frankly impertinent.

What was I going to do? Fill him in on all the details of my weekend? Tell him how I went to an old friend’s wedding lunch at the Rose in Crown at Guildford? And how it wasn’t the actual wedding because the actual wedding was in Japan and Switzerland, and explain how that was actually possible? And say that I had the barramundi but wished I’d had the steak because although the barramundi was fantastic the steak the other people were having looked even better and came with chips? And that a good time was had by all and then on the way home I saw a house flying the state flag of Wyoming for some reason? That information is mine, not to be handed out over the phone to someone I barely know.

I mean I didn’t want to know what he’d done over the weekend. Why would I? He’s a client – one among many. As far as I’m concerned he could have spent his weekend morris dancing, pin collecting or hunting the most dangerous prey of all. It makes no difference. He could be the goddamn Batman as long as he gets information to me in a timely manner so I can get his work done.

My clients are not my friends. And’s that the way it should be.

Hrumph!

(Yes, I understand the irony of saying I don’t want a client knowing details about my weekend and then posting all about it on a publicly accessible blog, but if you’re reading this then you’re either a personal friend of mine, or a complete stranger I’ll probably never meet, so it’s not the same thing :P)

Lagerphone Fever

Sports. Bah.

So, Australia didn’t get the 2022 World Cup. Big deal. I mean it’s not like it’s quidditch. I suppose it would have been nice to get more than a single vote though.

At least it solves the problem of us having to come up with an instrument as annoying as the vuvuzella. Personally I was going to nominate the lagerphone.

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