"The masses are asses and need Look People Glasses"

[jere7my]

That's a quote from Mark Mothersbaugh (of Devo), referring to the defunct band Look People. Old-school Botticelli fans will remember their "Ow, ow, lookie here lookie, never shoulda ate that Oreo cookie" and "Stop making cheese!" Here's a fun fact: Kevin Hearn of Look People became Kevin Hearn of Barenaked Ladies, starting with Born on a Pirate Ship. Another: Look People came about when the band Chinook merged with Bee People and the bandleader misheard the suggestion "Chinook People" across a crowded bar. He liked it because of the many meanings the phrase could have (imperative? descriptive?).

So Kendra is at Oberlin now; she should just about be starting her talk, having met with the dean and eaten lunch with faculty and seen the campus with students. I hope, deeply, that it is going well; I haven't heard anything from her yet. I bought a small porcupine puppet yesterday, and snuck out to her car to leave him on the seat with a note saying he wanted to come along "for luck." Since I wasn't going to be up and about at 8:30am, I thought it might be a nice way to send her off. Keep your fingers crossed.

Yesterday's weather was simply beautiful, sunny and warm and breezy. Snapshots: a tiny old woman walking into town, so tiny I thought she was somewhat farther away than she turned out to be. She wore a thin green sweater, buttoned up tight around her ribcage (only as wide as some men's thighs), and oversized bright white sneakers, and she used a polished wooden cane. Later, through the window of Borders, four ponytails jogging by: four college girls, all the same height, all with the same hairstyle, positioned such that all I could see of them was their ponytails flopping and bouncing into view.

Kendra and I bought dessert at the bakery down the road (Big City Small World, it's called), specifically a lemon bar and a "Chocolate Whopper", which is to say a giant chocolate cookie with chunks of chocolate and nuts. We each ate half of each after dinner (Kendra's delicious thai chicken with rice noodles and fresh mint), watched a Sopranos episode, and read the end of a Harry Potter chapter to try to settle her jangling nerves. She finished preparing her talk—the map looks lovely, and I defy anyone to tell the difference between the word PHYRGIA that I inserted and the words that were actually printed on the map.

Unfortunately, I got caught on the horns of a Project after she went to bed—I spent most of the night finding album cover art for about half (~250) of my albums in iTunes, mostly on Amazon. *hangs head* Not how I planned to spend my night. Sometimes I'm a tad obsessive, particularly when faced with a simple, repetitive, time-consuming task. I also stripped off the annoying dialogue from the (otherwise perfectly good) songs on the Friends soundtrack. (Btw, I was wrong: it is possible to edit iTunes-purchased songs in SoundStudio. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's possible to edit out the copy protection, just by importing it and re-saving as an AIFF. The sound quality will take a little hit if you recompress it, though.)

The talk should be ending; are the Oberliners (Ojelly doughnuts?) fascinated by heresy? I certainly hope so; they certainly should be.

Comments

[tirerim.livejournal.com]

Have you heard of Clutter? It's good at finding album art on Amazon, and lets you put little copies of the covers on your desktop that you can drag around and double-click to play the album in iTunes.

[zorblak.livejournal.com]

I saw an item yesterday on MacInTouch about a free tool called PlayFair, which could strip the DRM from iTunes AAC files and leave them in AAC format at the same quality. I went back to look at it now, and it's already gone. Going to the project site on Sourceforge yields a 404.