Author: paladin1787

The List

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The band Hellogoodbye—the apparent winner of my months-long Pandora search for new favorite bands—poses to support Oxfam America. (Creative Commons-licensed photo from the Flickr page of Oxfam America)

When I discovered Pandora my life changed forever. From that point on, I’ve come to realize, there’s a backlog of wicked music which I want but don’t yet have.

Enter my list. I’ve pasted it below and cleaned it up for your consumption. It’s all the songs and albums I want but—most of which—I don’t yet have. (Even though I’ve obtained a few of these, I’ve left them all on here, just for your edification.) Most of them are single songs, reflecting the trend of today, which seems to be purchasing songs rather than albums. Not that I don’t like albums. Just that Pandora doesn’t play albums. It’s shaping our music habits more than we realize.

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Now I know why I loved Sonic 3’s music

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Because Michael Jackson lent creative direction.

Several inside sources have confirmed that MJ in fact played a big part in composing the music for the game, even though most of his music was removed a couple months before the game’s release. (Rumor has it Michael’s scandalous ways infuriated Sega execs.)

This isn’t really new news, but it’s new to me. I’ll let you in on a little secret: when the Sonic games came out, I took my most prized possession—my cassette tape recorder—and recorded the music from every level. I’d then play it back constantly. I’m sure my mom would recognize this music from the credits of Sonic 3 as being from the franchise…

But wait… Doesn’t that sound like…

Woah!

As it turns out, Sega left in this one track of Michael’s, which he later used as a base for the song “Stranger in Moscow.”

In case you’re confused, the second video takes the Sonic music and puts it to Stranger in Moscow‘s vocals and some of its beats. It’s essentially the same song.

Blog stats

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A graph of traffic to this site by month, starting in April 2009. I switched domains from greenletters.wordpress.com to brandonsmith.com in late October, which seems to have helped marginally. The monthly peak was November, with 456 hits.

Was reviewing the statistics on this site today, and thought I’d quickly share my findings with you.

  • While “smokestacks” is the search term that’s brought the most viewers to my site, “springerlies” is a close second. Who would have thought I’d have the number four Google spot for the name of the cookie my grandmother makes? (I wrote them into a menu of mine.)
  • My theory that this domain would launch me out of the sea of other Brandon Smiths (all likely great guys, of course) has been proven correct in a couple ways. Yesterday’s post featured a woman who found me more or less by accident. And if you Google “Brandon Smith Chicago” (with or without the quotes) you find my ChicagoNow profile and two links to this website in the top 10.

Comments from an outsider

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Remember my post complaining about American education? Someone wrote me back about it, and gave me permission to post her response here. What a wonderful surprise!

Yiuka Leung grew up on the outskirts of Hong Kong, and moved to the U.S. for college, so she’s experienced education from both sides. Here’s what she had to say:

“I don’t disagree with what you said, but I wanted to point out that ‘freedom for creativity’ is relative. To me, someone who grew up in Asia and received Asian-style education, education in the U.S. gave me a lot more room to develop my own personal interests than I would ever hope for in Asia.

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Jensen nonviolent, after all

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Art I made for the large open wall of my apartment. The metal numbers were someone else’s garbage. (My Dad’s, in fact.)

This month Derrick Jensen took a step back from his usual extreme tone in his Orion Magazine column. (Orion represents the literary and philosophical side of the environmental movement.) Normally he advocates a revolution in order to address environmental problems. With this most recent column, he (finally) clarified that he doesn’t mean violent revolution. At least necessarily.

A little background: Jensen doesn’t think the status quo can fix our problems, and I agree with him. The current system of the world’s governments, the massive corporate influence, the wealthy nations’ addiction to consumerism and the poor nations’ inability to climb out of poverty will more or less continue as-is, because those who could change things are too invested in the system to substantially change it.

But I’m also staunchly non-violent. So while Jensen may have softened up a bit from his normal tone, expressed in great pieces here and here, he still means business. I’m sure he’s enraged as much as I am that there weren’t enough limousines in Denmark to accommodate the climate conference at Copenhagen. The conference campus was fairly walkable, I heard.

The limo thing is but a humorous representation of the leaders being invested in the current system. Like a Ponzi scheme, they continue playing the dangerous game because to try to fix things is to admit your own stupidity. I highly recommend this piece, which compares the global economy with a Ponzi scheme.