Top10-Jan2023
- I’ve had “Two Tickets to Paradise” (Eddie Money, 1977) stuck in my head for weeks now. The reasons are clear: rock anthem combined with yacht rock-ish interludes and the promise of a better place. Everyone wins. If you would ask me where these tickets might get me, it would, depending on the day, either look like a Guns n Roses video, a beach with a pile of booze or a mountain top alone with not a care in the world. All of it at once is where this song will take you. Listen to it now. Listen to it tomorrow and the day after. Pack your bags, we’ll leave tonight.
- Tim Tams - One might think it a tad extreme to suggest one could love a sumptuous, chocolate, cookie-based, Australian snack more than their very own children, but if you had one and if your kids were acting the way mine have, you might not be wrong. This is especially the case if the little bastards ate two damn packs that travelled from three continents.
- King Buffalo “Regenerator” - on the prog side of later Elder, but never boring and almost addictive of a heavy psychedelic space rock listen. My one issue is with the name, as they are named after a city an hour away from their native Rochester which is just sort of weird.
- “God: A Human History” (Reza Aslan) - One of the most fascinating books I’ve read in a damn long time. An extensive treatise covering the early development of our species as much as our psychology as humans since we became the trouser wearing apes we are. Well, way before trousers. If you’ve even vaguely wondering why you believe what you do or don’t, and how the world of belief even formed, please read this. If anyone could pick it apart, it would be Reza Aslan, a biblical scholar among other things who was born in Iran, grew up in a non-religious Shia family in the US, at some point went to Catholic school I think, then became an evangelical born-again Christian, then went back to Islam where he now ended on the mellow, Sufi side of things.
- CodePen - Remember when you would wake up in the morning, mosey over to Praystation or some other site way back when that just had things you clicked and then a little thing happened? Remember when interactions were just little things to enjoy for their own sake? CodePen points to these innocent times, with just heaps of CSS and Javascript experiments, like, look there’s a cube you can rotate that has stripes that just looks nice. That’s it. It looks nice. It doesn’t need to be anything more, and neither does that SVG animation of circles.
- History Maps is great if you’re even vaguely as big of a history nerd as I am. Oh and there goes about an hour on the First Ottoman-Venetian War. You’re welcome.
- I’ve not been asked by many municipal authorities to name a park. I’ll be honest. But if I was, I would just hope to the heavens that I could come up with something as good as Dude Chilling Park (Vancouver, Canada).
- We need to admit it, we love when the tech industry fails. The Museum of Failure catalogues it for our enjoyment and our collective consumer comeuppance.
- That moment when you’re driving somewhere pointless and the equally flaccid, local rock channel somehow knows your pain, your mid-afternoon despondency and then blasts you with Journey’s “Separate Ways” or “Don’t Stop Believin’” and then you are suddenly cast on your own epic, heroes journey to victory.
- Finally, someone has gotten over the whole Norse pagan thing and then gone all Roman while actually being from Rome. The band Dyrnwyn, while having a pseudo-Norse name and having some fitness issues to be the legionnaires they wish they were, and having the lyrics in Italian rather than the Latin they should be, well, it’s interesting at least if you’re super into being pagan and trying to keep it local and bored with the usual Viking stuff and Halloween trappings.