Meme time 3: Musical navel gazing

Posted & filed under Lists, Meme Time, Music.

Since I’m way too lazy to do some real blogging, I stole this from the internets. Deal with it. ;-)

The instructions for this one are simple: open up your favorite music player (in my case, foobar 2000) and answer the following questions truthfully.

  • How many songs total: 12,291
  • How many hours or days of music: 6 weeks, 3 days, 6 hours, 50 minutes and change.
  • Most recently played: Circle II Circle — “Burden of Truth” (acoustically enhanced)
  • Most played: Jim Steinman — “(Vespers) The Song of Gotham City / The Graveyard Shift” (40 plays according to Last.fm)
  • Most recently added: Meat Loaf — 3 Bats Live
  • Sort by song title:
    • First Song: Metallica — “- Human” (pronounced m?’n?s hy?’m?n)
    • Last Song: Acda en De Munnik — “Zwerver met een Wekker”
  • Sort by time:
    • Shortest Song: Dream Theater — “John Thinks He’s Randy Song” (0:10)
    • Longest Song: Dream Theater — “Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence” (41:33)
  • Sort by album:
    • First album: Meat Loaf — (Give Me the Future with A) Modern Girl
    • Last album: Zwerfhond — Zingend de Kerk in (not counting a title-less bootleg recorded in Zurich)
  • First song that comes up on shuffle: Bløf — Mooie Dag (live)
  • Search the following and state how many songs come up:
    • Death: 124 (including Iron Maiden’s Live after Death, Dance of Death, Death on the Road and A Matter of Life and Death albums)
    • Life: 195 (including 26 versions of “Life is a Lemon and I Want My Money Back”, and 11 versions of “Bring Me to Life” by Evanescence)
    • Love: 491 (“I’d Do Anything for ~” — 43, “Dead Ringer for ~” — 27)
    • Hate: 13
    • You: 675 (excluding ‘young’, ‘Youp’ and ‘your’, including 38 versions of “You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth”)
    • Sex: 35 (including a Meat Loaf bootleg called Sex Muffin)

This one’s for you

Posted & filed under Music.

As a Springsteen fan and someone who has a soft spot for tastefully played organs in rock music, it saddened me to learn that E Street Band keyboardist Danny Federici died yesterday.

Here’s two songs to celebrate his life and music.

  • Bruce Springsteen – Give the Girl a Kiss (1977 Darkness on the Edge of Town outtake, with some tasty keyboards)
  • Bruce Springsteen – Racing in the Street (live) (from Live 1975–1985, with loads of tasty keyboards)

Who’s the man?

Posted & filed under Life.

Once, I came across a list of things every man should be able to do. Strangely enough, Google isn’t helping me find it. Sure, it lists all sorts of similar lists, but not the one I had in mind. So, instead of backing it up with some empirical evidence, I’ll have to invoke the (my) First Law of the Internets again, and just say it: knowing how to clean a fresh pineapple is something every man should be able to do.

Spring cleaning

Posted & filed under Dutch only, First Lines, Life, Music, Seen live.

While not caring about this website for a while is fine with me, but invariably, stuff keeps piling up. So without further ado, tonight’s business.

Nightwish in Amsterdam

For years, I’ve had the idea that it would be great to go to a concert in the goth-scene (think Within Temptation, After Forever, Nightwish, et al) in a salmon pink shirt with a corn blue (or whatever totally gay color scheme) legend saying “I’m too gothic for my shirt”. This year, I finally had the right opportunity: Nightwish was coming to Amsterdam, and I was going. For my birthday, I got a very suitable shirt.

So there I was in the Heineken Music Hall on March 21st, donning my “I’m to[o] Gothic for this shirt” shirt. It didn’t gather a lot of attention. For one, we showed up when the support act (Pain) was about to start, thus missing all the die hard Goth-heads who were reportedly stood in line for several hours before the doors opened. Secondly, we were standing way in the back, near the bar, with all the other people who were not totally into this whole goththing. Like the fortysomething year old guy who was there with his son, and gave me an appreciative nod when he saw the shirt.

For me, one of the reasons to go and see Nightwish (even though I wasn’t exactly thrilled by their performance on their latest DVD) was to see how their new singer holds up in a live setting. Just like on the album, she did alright. On the new stuff. On the old songs, all four or five of them, not so much. For the rest, all the things that bothered me while watching the DVD — like not knowing exactly what was coming from tape or what was played by mr. Holopainen — still applied. Only this time, they added some pyrotechnics. Cheesy pyrotechnics. The worst part was when there were a series of orchestra hits: chord on keyboards – flames – chord – flames. Ad infinitum.

It wasn’t that it was a bad gig, it’s just that I couldn’t get past the cheese and over my initial skepticism. Next time, I’ll probably pass and listen to the album instead.

First Lines: Het zijn net mensen: Verhalen uit het Midden-Oosten

This book deserves more attention than I’m going to give it. Joris Luyendijk was a correspondent in the Middle-East, and in this book, he shows how the media only tells a miniscule (but heavily coloured and manipulated) slice of what is really happening.

Basically, this book was an eyeopener on how the media works, even though I don’t exactly know how much of this book I have to believe. Which of course follows from criticizing the media for not bringing the objective truth.

Joris Luyendijk — Het zijn net mensen: Beelden uit het Midden-Oosten
Nog eentje?

“Goedemoggel”

Speciaal voor die mensen die vandaag de dag het nog steeds nodig vinden om de term “goedemoggel” te gebruiken: komopnouzeghé! We zijn ondertussen bijna een half jaar verder, en het was na drie weken al te afgezaagd voor woorden.

An inconvenient day for respect

Posted & filed under Life, You can call me faithless.

Our prime-minister, in a reaction on Geert Wilders’ film, Fitna:

Muslims, Christians and people of other convictions can easily live together in peace. The problem is not religion, but misuse of religion to sow hatred and intolerance. That is why we are calling for respect for everyone’s deepest convictions.

This year, Dodenherdenking (May 4th, the annual remembrance of all Dutch casualties during World War 2) falls on Sunday. Almost all ceremonies include two minutes of silence. Reason enough for Staphorst, a city in our very own Bible Belt, to move the whole damn thing to the 3rd. Mayor Joop Alssema explains their reasons:

We willen zoveel mogelijk mensen bij de plechtigheid betrekken en mensen vanwege de zondagsrust niet voor het hoofd stoten

They move it a day, in order not to inconvenience those who want to observe the sabbath. In their own heretical way (Let’s be honest here: declaring the sunday a day of rest was nothing but an PR-stunt anno 321 AD).

For some people, who take their moral guidance from some old book, observing two minutes of silence to remember the victims of World War 2 is too much to ask on a Sunday. And according to our prime-minister, I have to respect that.

How about a nice cup of shut the fuck up and some respect for those who died instead?