Mashings and ramblings of a nerd
Music
Tool of the Week: U2
Jan 29th
Author’s Note: Typically I will be running this out every Friday, but I wanted to make sure I had a photo to accompany this post, it was a day late. I’ll be on the ball more next week!
While I was at work the other day, I was taking a break to catch up on some fresh baseball news. Anybody that knows me well, will know that I’m up-to-date on my baseball news year round. When the NFL is in full swing, I’m eye deep in Winter Meeting articles. Anyway, so today, I see a series between the Marlins and Mariners that was to take place in Miami June 23-26 has now been moved to Seattle. The Marlins will remain the home team and bat second, if that matters at all. It matters about as much Carlos Zambrano threw a no-hitter vs the Astros in an “away” game in Miller Park aka “Wrigley Field North”. On the upside, the game will be played under national league rules too! Wait, because that makes it all better.
Why was it moved you ask? U2 will have a concert at Sun Life Stadium on June 29, and due to “advanced setup commitments” the Marlins can’t play there. So June 27th and 28th isn’t enough time to set up for it? Make sure that the third game in the series is an afternoon game, giving them some more hours to work. Perhaps Mr. Bono is the one to blame due to exorbitant demands artists make these days? “THERE WILL BE NO MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL GAMES PLAYED AT MY VENUE WITHIN 128 HOURS BEFORE I GO ON”. Now if the Marlins owned the stadium where they played it wouldn’t be an issue because they would have the jurisdiction to give the Marlins the ball so to speak, but they don’t and they got overran by Bono.
I’ll put it right out there: I don’t like U2 as a band nor do I like Bono. He’s a complete egomaniac. Egoism is one of my biggest pet peeves in the world. He won’t shut up about world peace, donating money to charity and feeding starving kids in Africa. Apparently, rumor has it even though he’s rich bastard, he’s hardly donated much of his own money. He’s moved his business funds from Ireland to Holland to avoid paying taxes in a change that HE proposed to help in foreign aid. Thumbs up buddy! Way to be a hypocrite, pet peeve number two!
Take. Off. The. Sunglasses. Is your name Corey Hart and you wear your sunglasses at night? NO! *sings* “I wear my sunglasses at night so I can so I can watch you weave then breath your story lines”. I don’t care if you say your eyes are extra sensitive to light and all the flashes from the cameras bothers them. He acts like he’s messiah to saving the world. Lighten up dude. You’re a musician, and a bad one at that. The Edge, you’re an amazing guitarist and you rock; however, U2 as a whole, suck the big one. Every time I hear “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”, “Sunday Bloody Sunday” or “Beautiful Day” part of me dies inside because of how much I can’t stand Bono. “One” is good, but only sung by Joe Cocker; whenever the U2 version comes on, whether it be TV or a crappy radio station that I’m obviously not in control of, I’ will immediately start looking for a samurai sword to commit hari kari.
Even if this direct event isn’t directly to U2, I personally think it makes them look bad. Congratulations, Bono. You’re the inaugural winner of “Tool of the Week” on my blog. You’re probably going to be the benchmark for finding my Tools. You’re not going to save the world, sorry. I know you mean well, but I still don’t like you or your music. If you followed on my pure baseball blog (Baseball Whammy), then you remember I did this weekly there too. I’m still working out my “ground rules” so to speak. I’ll typically try to stay in the sports world, but if anybody else is deserving of such title, I won’t hesitate to give it to them. I follow mostly sports news, so I’m pretty sure more often than not, I’ll have somebody/thing related to sports winning.
Last.fm Scrobbling Trending
Dec 29th
I use my Droid about 95% of the time as an mp3 player. I was lucky enough to have a 16 GB micro sd card come with my phone. This has allowed me to dump over 2,000 songs on it at a time. I’ve been rotating songs on and off typically every month or every other. I listen to music the entire time I’m at my desk coding at work, on my drives to and from work, and sometimes at home when I get a crazy idea to do some free lance development at home.
Last.fm has some software for the android OS (as well as IOS I’m sure), that will allow you to track what you listen to, known as scrobbling. You can also do this by using their own streaming service they have. It’s much like Pandora, where you like artists and songs and it will play music accordingly. It will also play music based on what you scrobble back to them. I’ve been scrobbling on and off since 2006, but since I got my Droid just over a year ago, I’ve been scrobbling pretty much everything that I listen to.
Anyway, there are some nice charts [http://www.last.fm/user/documof/charts] you can look at to see what songs, albums and artist you listen to most frequently based on a lifetime, year, six months, three months, and a single week. I’ll be the first to admit, that I’m a severe “flavor of the week” listener. In high school, I had a Jimi Hendrix phase. In college, it was Trance. Post college, Heavy Metal. Recently, I posted what my top ten all-time favorite bands were. If you look at my lifetime listening artist chart, there’s a pretty good correlation between the artist rank and my list; however, if you check out my last 12 months, it differs a lot from my list.
This is probably due to my smaller storage size on my phone. Within the last few months, I’ve dropped the KISS and Iron Maiden catalog on it. If you move to my last three month, I’m much closer to my list again, but there is one artist sticking out. That is Mr. Jon Bon Jovi. In talking to my brother-in-law during Christmas, he suggested that I revisit my list on a regular basis to see if things change around at all. Jeff Scott Soto is also high on that list, but he was on my short list of honorable mentions, so I figure that’s fine. I do have Bon Jovi’s catalog on my phone, and I listen to mostly his newer albums (Have a Nice Day and newer) more than his older stuff. I have a feeling he might actually crack the list.
It’s nice to see something like this… and I can’t help but laugh at some of the choices I make musically. Taylor Hicks, Andrea Bocelli, Joe Cocker, Saxon, Josh Grobin, In Flames, Savatage, Arch Enemy, Boston, Dream Theater, Black Label Societ, Zakk Wylde, Steelheart, and Slaughter are all in my top 25. Talk about a diverse group!
Top 10 Favorite Bands
Dec 16th
If any of you out there know me, you’ll know that I have an extremely broad spectrum in tastes of music. Currently the rotation of music on my android phone contain the following bands: Arch Enemy (Swedish death metal), Firehouse (hair metal), Black Label Society (I like to refer to this as “biker metal”), Josh Groban, Andrea Bocelli, Dishwalla, Iron Maiden, Dream Theater, and The Sword (what Black Sabbath would be if they were a modernly founded band) to name a few.
Basically, I listen to Black Metal, Death Metal, Thrash Metal, Opera, Musicals, Hair Metal, Alternative Rock, Guitar Virtuosos, New Wave British Metal, Classic Rock, Blues and even certain Techno genres! This basically means that I’ll listen to pretty much anything that doesn’t verge into Pop or Country, although you might catch me listening to Zac Brown Band from time to time!
When I listen to music, I listen to it for the music, and music only. An old employer of mine referred to Death Metal as “puppy kicking music”. They can be talking about kicking puppies in the lyrics for all I care as long as my face is being melted by the guitar work in the song. He was also frustrated that he couldn’t figure out my “algorithm” of listening habits.
Anyway here is a top 10 list of my favorite bands / solo artists. As you can imagine, this is quite difficult to narrow it down to 10 when I listen to such a large variety of music. Without further ado, here’s my list: More >
