"The masses are asses and need Look People Glasses"

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.

iTunes recommender

Here is a small application (for OSX and Windows) that will take your iTunes music ratings and return suggestions based on other users' ratings' overlap with yours. Two problems:

1) There are very few users so far, so the ratings are "laughable", as they say.
2) There are suddenly a lot of new users, so the server is extremely backlogged—I have a wait of 31 hours until my recommendations come back.

Both of these should get better with time.