Black Metallic - Catherine Wheel

[link] There really is no substitute for some excellent shoegaze. This song is a big, good-feeling throb.

Beethoven (I Love to Listen to) - Eurythmics

[link] Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart were amazing. They did more innovative pop than just about anybody and Lennox really played with image and gender and roles.  The video for this song is a great example.  This is one of their hits that I only hear on college radio.  I don't think it did much on the pop charts in the US.  It's a really good dance song.  The use of the narrated audio samples is terrific.

805

[link to some of their recent live stuff] Sorry I never saw these guys during my formative years back in the 80s.  But one of my bandmates was then into them and I would occasionally hear them and about them on album rock radio, since they were relatively local.  Looks like they have been active in recent years. This 80s proggy sound is so "of its time". The first of these songs in in 7.  Takes some skill to pull that off but in many ways it limits the narrative ability of the song, in my opinion. All 7/4 rock songs kind of say the same thing to me.  Still, when you hear it with the synth heavy treatment like it is here, it can only be from that time. And it's a sound I'm a bit nostalgic about...

Night Shift - Quarterflash

From 1982. Came out in between their splasn "Harden My Heart" and their later hits, including "Take Me to Heart".  Kind of clean and low key. Still has their swingy beat of HMH. The instrumentation and production are definitely early 80s US mainstream Pop pieces.  A smooth little pop jaunt.

One Piece Manga

I got the first three volumes of the English language manga of One Piece in order to help me translate the Taiwanese versions that I have.  It's been a fun read so far, but it is a bit of a mystery how it got so popular because, at least for me, a lot of the attraction to the series is the quite literally the color art, which the manga does not have (except for the cover art and various posters). The manga was hugely popular in Japan before the anime.

Actually

Fields of Gold was pretty easy to pick up.  I may not have the chords exactly but since his chords are funky to begin with, my fudging of a few of the chords is just an eclectic take on an already eclectically scored song.  Memorizing the lyrics, as always, will be the hard part...

Sight of You - Pale Saints

From 1990. One of the original Shoegaze bands.  This one evokes Jesus and Mary Chain a bit in the chord changes. There are sort of two phases of the Shoegaze sound.  One is the noisy guitar sound itself and the next phase is the wall of sound made by one or several guitars playing that way.

Fields of Gold - Sting

[link] This was the last song at my brother's wedding reception.  I might try to learn it.  Has a simple-sounding melody but the actual underlying chords are more complex, which is not surprising given Sting's jazz background.

CHiPs

Another of the shows we watched every week.  This was in the later 70s during the disco era.  The intro credits are very memorable.  There were a lot of car chases and the music became sort of definitive for that type of scene.

Emergency!

This was one of the TV shows that we watched every week when I was a kid.  I remember the characters and settings, but the music in the intro credits is no longer familiar.  Maybe because it's too generic.

Gu Qin

[link] Listened to gu qin music while studying Chinese in my office today.  This music is really great.  It's great to watch the players. It would be really fun to play this instrument.  The cheap ones (probably not well made and hard to tune and keep in tun) are over $1000.  So I may never be able to get my hands on one...

One Piece Opening 5

[link] I'm just past the point of this one.  The music is getting a bit more polished. This is not a bad song.  The bass line moving against the melody in the 2nd line of the verse is a nice touch.

One Piece Opening 4

[link] This one's not bad.  I'm almost at episode 300 of about 600 (and it is still being produced in Japan) and am just past the time when this was used.

Turn Me Loose - Loverboy

[link] Loverboy, like Journey, gets slammed as clichish, but they could play their instruments, Mike Reno could sing.  They are a great example of mainstream hard rock that integrates guitar and keyboards.  This was one of their hits and is a very simple song.  It still sounds great. 1981 was a great year for vanguard hard rock that crossed over into the pop charts (Foreigner, Journey, and quite a few others were also right there at this time). Songs like this were great anthems for teen high school angst, driving around, summer, ...

One Piece Opening 3

[link] Didn't like this one at first but it grew on me like a lot of things do.  They always sound good when I've watched 50 or so episides with the next iteration of the intro.

One Piece Opening 2 (English)

[link] I've never seen the English versions of this theme song before.  It's not half bad.  Would be fun to learn.  It's a little fast.  A folk version would be slower.

It's really a mystery

why I have fatty liver.  I am not obese and don't have type II diabetes, which are the two factors most associated with this disorder.  Both times I was diagnosed with it, my diet was horrible. The first time I cleaned things up and the biomarkers righted themselves (that may have happened this time; the next set will tell) but the condition was worse this time, according to the ultrasound.  It's a form of inflammation and it predated my ankle tendon inflammation and kidney/lung involvement that led to the Wegners diagnosis.  It kind of makes me wonder if fatty liver might have been the first manifestation of the disease.  I'll have to look around the web to see what I can find.

Dream Girl - Pierres Pfantasy Club

[link] An iconic acid house track from the late 80s (couldn't find the specific date). This genre of house is defined by the sequenced bass sound produced by the Roland TB-303 synthesizer. It becomes very abstract and mesmerizing (trancy, but trance is a different subgenre).  Very different from the original house music.

One Piece - English Opening

[link] This is the English language opening for the short-lived, highly edited, and highly unpopular 4Kids version of One Piece that ran on Cartoon Network's Toonami, late Saturday night set of anime shows.  I really grew to like this opening although the real aficionados hate it. Since then I've gotten into the Funimation English subtitled version which closely tracks the original Japanese TV episodes.  I'm still less then half way through the >500 episode run (which is still ongoing).  This is a great series and I'm enjoying it hugely (first four seasons on hulu and now in season 5 on a web site).

Duel - Swervedriver

[link] One of the great shoegaze songs of all time. Multiple hooks, yet these are not pop hooks.  They are achieved within the instrumental miasma. The mood progression that this song goes through is remarkable.  It starts very intense and then goes in to a mostly major, slightly sing songy section, gets lost in that for a while (in a good way), then quiets down and then launches back into the first part, redrawing all of the blood a second time around.  Very intense instrumentals both times through.  Then back into the B part and then the quiet part, I guess the C part, heads out to a fade. Almost two different songs except that the transitions between them really meld them together

Slit Skirts - Pete Townshend

[link] I never really understood this song but it doesn't matter.  It's a genius piece of rock music.  And the live video really shows how good Townshend is on stage.  Great songwriting and really good at pulling off a difficult song (although he skipped a line in the 2nd verse section).  Townshend is serious about getting across complex messages with rock songs.

Gemini Dream - The Moody Blues

[link] Always liked this 1981 song, even though I am not a fan of their work as a whole.  It has a good late disco-ish beat.  It's very similar to E.L.O. of the same time period, a little of which goes a long way. But I really like the verse and the transitions, which do some pretty cool things, especially the one back into the verse from the bridge.  The chorus has that classical pop/rock songwriting that goes back through Meatloaf and glam back to the Beatles. The very end rally (there are two of them in the linked version) is also pretty cool.  Just puts a lot of interesting things into one song.

Fat and diet

The state of knowledge on the various types of fatty acids and health is a bit of a mess, even though some things appear to have been established.  Here is my understanding of the current knowledge/conventional wisdom. Saturated fat = good. Unsaturated fat = bad.  HDL cholesterol = good, LDL = bad. However, within unsaturated fat, there's still a lot of uncertainty.  Omega-3 = good because it's anti-inflammatory (I won't get into the pathway here because I don't yet fully understand it) and Omega 6 = bad because it's pro-inflammatory.  So the ratio of Omega-6/Omega-3 is important because if it gets too high then one is at risk for all kinds of inflammation throughout the body (and many disorders are inflammatory). There is a now pretty widely accepted hypothesis (I don't know if I would call it a theory) that the ancestral human diet was rich in omega-3 and that is what we are adapted to and the modern grain-based diet is more rich in omega-6 (from most vegetable oils).  Processed food is of course usually rich in omega-6 even if it is not rich (any more) in saturated fat.  Within omega-3, there are three main kinds: ALA from plant sources and DHA and EPA from animal sources (primarily fish oil and krill oil).  DHA and EPA can be immediately used by the human body (i.e. incorporated into cell membranes) wherease ALA needs to be processed by several enzymes into usable sources.  These enzyme reactions are slow and not very efficient.  So it is currently unclear whether ALA is as beneficial as DHA and EPA.  A lot of foods that have been enriched omega-3 (e.g. eggs, margarine) are enriched with ALA, not the other two.  ALA is probably better than either saturated fat or omega-6, but it's not clear how actually beneficial it is.  More science is needed...

Pictures of Bernadette - Talk Talk

[link] The Colour of Spring (1986) era of Talk Talk saw them reach the prime of their merging of their early pop work and their more atmospheric and textural "post rock" sound that they came to mine later on.  This is one of the songs right at the interface between the two concepts.  A lot of the rhythm and solo section instrumentation is from the atmospheric vein but the song itself has a conventional pop structure and is a very melodic pop song.  The overall feeling is rich but, not dark, but I would say maudlin, given a bit of intensity by the vocal.

I Knew the Bride When She Used to Rock and Roll - Nick Lowe

[link] Don't know why I'm thinking of this just now except that Ru-Jun and I will be flying out to my brother's wedding in Cali in a few weeks.  This is a really fun wedding reception song.

Master of Crime - Colin James Hay

[link] This is a really great (but strange and awkward in a lot of ways) song off Hay's first solo album, which apparently did not sell well and has been out of print for a long time.  It definitely harks back lyrically and in other ways to the later Men at Work material. I loved M@W and a lot of the songs off this album (Looking for Jacks) and I listened to it a lot back in the late 80s. The bridge part really makes the song.  Haven't heard it in a very long time.  Great to find it on youtube.  Still sounds good.

Pump up the Jam - Technotronic

From 1989. This is from the rap house genre.  I went for the song in a big way.  The literal pumping of the drum machine line and the chord sequence really work.  I always thought the vocal was by a male, but it turns out is a woman (Manuela "Ya Kid K" Kamosi). These guys are from Belgium and this sound took over the dance floors of the world for a while.  This was always a money song when I was DJing.

Away - The Bolshoi

[link] Really great song. From 1987 (I think; it was also called A Way in some versions).  Trevor Tanner's vocal (and its production) are goth-pop.  The simple chord progression really sounds like it should be more complicated (I just learned it on the uke) but what makes it complex is the shifting bass line which hits unconventional on-root notes (this is a great technique of a lot of post-punk).  We have here most of the goth of say The Sisters of Mercy but in a cleaner, more poppy package.

Freedom of Choice - Devo

[link] Devo making a serious point about conformity but also with a great musical statement.  A deceptively simple chord structure underlies a driving bass line.  The intensity of the vocal burns above the whole thing, especially in the B part.  The chorus is simple and contains the take home message.  The instrumental brings a very beautiful high synth voice in.  These guys knew how to craft a message into the building blocks of pop/rock.  Great stuff.

inchworms

It's a pretty good year for (what I think are) spring cankerworm (Paleacrata vernata) inchworms.  Ru-Jun has collected some into a couple of containers and we have been feeding them leaves. One appears to have pupated.  Problem is I think they need to go through winter to emerge and the pupae are probably vulnerable to viruses.  But it's been really fun for Ru-Jun.