Month: March 2004

papa say he no fi foolish like he never been to school at all

Posted on by Lisa Linn Allen

lemme see if i can get the chronology straight.

early high school, i get bored with commercial radio and go digging around at the left end of the dial. i hear, through static, the strains of an exotic sounding beat. i think to myself, “i think this might be _reggae.”_ i mark the place on the dial with a red china marker. it later turns out to be “wxyc.”:http://wxyc.org/

the summer after sophomore year of high school, i attend the young writer’s camp at UVA. one night, they take us to see a reggae band playing on campus. i think this was my first live show at a small venue. it was definitely one of the most intense musical experiences of my young life.

somewhere around this time, madness had their big american hit, “our house”. (that would have been 1983.) i was totally hooked on the bouncy brit ska sound; i remember buying the record at record bar in cameron village, and immediately crushing on the band member i thought the cutest.

senior year of high school. i think. we hung out on hillsborough street after school all the time. mike connell from the connells was manning schoolkids records most afternoons (though we had no idea til later that we were buying all our wax from a big rock star!) in the cutout bin i found a most intriguing looking record… it looked to be ska, but ska from jamaica! from the 60’s! who ever heard of such a thing? i could just tell from the cover that it was gonna be cool and i bought it. it was called _intensified_ and that about described it. it was one of the coolest things i’d ever heard, lo-fi and dripping with exotic authenticity.

off to college and i meet my pal martha. she’d spent a year living in the virgin islands with her lover, a man named ishmael who was born and lived his whole life on the island. she had _real_ mighty sparrow tapes– you know, the versions with the really dirty lyrics that they don’t sell to americans. she turned me on to that, and african music, “river deep, mountain high” by ike and tina turner (amazing song– if you’ve never heard it, ask me to play it the next time you’re visiting), and al green. around this time i found a copy of the soundtrack to “the harder they come”:http://imdb.com/title/tt0070155/ and played the crap out of it.

so tonight, some 16 or 17 years later, i got a chance to see that i still know by heart all the lyrics to the songs on that soundtrack. i noticed that screen/society was showing “the harder they come” over at griffith, and at the last minute decided to go on over. hank, the guy who runs these screenings, got up in front of the room and said, “i’ve been waiting a long time to see this movie…” and i thought, yeah, me too.

jimmy cliff’s character isn’t the most endearing in the world; in fact, i think even “anti-hero” is a slightly glossy term for this guy. for me, the recording sessions were definitely the highlight, especially seeing (presumably) the maytals doing “sweet and dandy”. it was probably good that i went alone, because i found myself singing along to that one 🙂

i was hoping for more music, but still it was good to finally see it after all these years.

time between hearing those first strains of a reggae beat through the static til the day i finally saw ‘the harder they come’: approximately 22 years.

so glenda is actually kinda dead

Posted on by Lisa Linn Allen

from what i can tell, there’s a bad sector on the hard drive. i’m just guessing here, but that’s what it seems like. the net effect is, the ipod isn’t currently usable.

i believe the 1 year warranty has _just_ expired.

i did read about a guy who had the same problem and was able to hide the bad sector using a disk utility, but the disk utility that comes with osx doesn’t seem to offer this level of specificity. so, option one is to hunt for better software.

option two is to replace it. i’m finding that i really do _not_ want to live without it.

* apple’s “repair” fee (which really means they replace it) is $255. that’s for a 10gb ipod.

* an ipod mini is $250 + tax– but is only 4gb, and i already have more than 4gb of music, and my current iTrip won’t work with it, so that would be another $30.

* a refurbished 10gb ipod is $250 + tax and shipping, but it’s the newer model and i wouldn’t be able to use my iTrip with it, either, so add $30.

* new, larger models cost $300 and up i believe, and again, there’s sales tax plus the cost of a new iTrip.

while i’d love to have a little pink ipod, i even more don’t want to be squished and constantly trying to delete music or deselect things i don’t want on the ipod. so the “repair” is the best deal, or else i’ll upgrade to a new, larger one.

crock pot!

Posted on by Lisa Linn Allen

i finally used my crock pot today. i got it for free from a co-worker, thinking that it would be a good way to get some healthy food going for dinner with little effort– or with the effort concentrated in the parts of the day when i have more energy for it, rather than right after work.

i have to say that the maiden crock pot voyage met with success! i made “crock pot sticky chicken;”:http://www.recipegoldmine.com/crockpotpoul/crockpot556.html instead of a whole chicken i used a huge package of chicken thighs from costco.

i’m amazed by the amount of juice produced by the chicken; i think i may use it along with the package of red, yellow, and orange peppers i also got at costco, to make a pepper stew.

another collector… or not?

Posted on by Lisa Linn Allen

“Vermont probes man with 70 goats in house.”:http://salon.com/mwt/wire/2004/03/29/goats/index.html

at first i thought this guy showed signs of being an animal collector, and thought the religion angle might be an interesting variance on the usual. however, after reading the article, i’m not so sure that he is a collector in the same sense as other collectors. collectors usually seem to start with stuff, then escalate to animals. if he’d started with a houseful of stuff, they would likely have mentioned that in the article, and it would also be fairly difficult to get 70 goats into the house.

also, he admits that he cannot care for the animals, and wishes to find someone who can. that’s very uncharacteristic of animal collectors, who usually live in deep denial about their ability to care for their animals.

this instead sounds like a case of someone who has become a victim of their own belief system.

getting out of the house

Posted on by Lisa Linn Allen

so my campaign to get out of the house has been going fairly well lately, and involved shopping, a play, and a movie. which doesn’t sound very impressive when i list it all out– maybe that explains my lingering feeling of restlessness tonight.

but i awoke saturday and immediately realized that i leave for roswell in just over two months, which means that it’s serious crunch time. i don’t want to skimp my way through doing the web site for the last time. how to lead a balanced life and still get everything done? how to work up the level of motivation and enthusiasm that i need for this project? i don’t know. i really don’t. it’s spring, and i want nothing more than to be hanging out with my friends, making new ones, and chasing boys. but that’s what i did last spring, and i feel that the site suffered.

the task at hand is a three column layout with header and footer, done all in standards-compliant code– no tables for layout. i have to do the exact same thing for work this week, so that meshes nicely. but it’s damned tricky, and i’m actually trying to work my way through “relevant sections”:http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/visuren.html of the “CSS2 spec.”:http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/ ugh.

the three ring circus of my mind

Posted on by Lisa Linn Allen

i dreamed this morning that i was at dbt’s house. he was there with a bunch of guys with him, and he didn’t look like himself.

he revealed an elaborate pattern stamped in concrete squares that covered his yard. then, he began sliding the whole sheet of concrete into position– a sheet of concrete the size of a yard.

he told me that he was preparing the house to sell, and he was also moving, and asked me if i could start helping get loads of stuff to his new place. i knew i had plans at 1, so i asked him what time it was. then suddenly there were _so_ many people arriving at his place, lots of kids among them, and he said they were also shooting a film. he wouldn’t answer my question about the time.

then karen cirillo arrived. i was really happy to see her because i haven’t in so long, but she was wearing strange blue sunglasses that completely hid her eyes, and when i said ‘hi’, she acted unfriendly and walked into another room. i decided she must be mad at me for not keeping in touch since she’s left.

i was about to tell dave that i couldn’t cope with all these kids and people and all the stuff going on, but then i woke up.

cheap trick

Posted on by Lisa Linn Allen

i dreamed this morning that i was hanging out with cheap trick. the lead singer was actually Matthew McConaughey. he got very drunk and started throwing up, but in this really innocuous way.

i also dreamed that a male friend of mine was a physician and all of our female friends were going to see him, supposedly for professional reasons, but actually for prurient reasons. i wasn’t one of his patients because i thought it would be kind of weird. but i thought maybe i should encourage pinky to go see him, because he’s a very compassionate person, and she could use some compassion from a medical professional right about now.

glenda lives!

Posted on by Lisa Linn Allen

glenda is the name of my ipod, and she’s happy and healthy again. repair then erase with the apple disk utility did the trick. i probably didn’t need to do both, but decided to be thorough.

yay! while having an excuse to buy a pink ipod mini would be fun, in a way, my internal budget miser is allowing no such purchases since the acquisition of this here newfangled powerbook, and really a mini isn’t big enough anyway.

so i’m glad glenda is back in the game.