Been spending the week getting over a sore throat (lots o' soup and tea), and revamping my image display and analysis code at work. Perhaps soon to be published and released as open source. Veronica and Naomi hit Popscene with Jenz on Thursday night, i stayed home and played some more Sniper Elite. I also got in some further practice on Winning Eleven 8 International, although it looks like i'm going to get my clock cleaned at the upcoming SMFA tournament.

Friday night was Depeche Mode at the HP Pavilion/Shark Tank in San Jose. V rushed home from work so we could head down, but unfortunately we still missed openers the Raveonettes. DM were pretty good. We had good seats off the left side of the stage. Good enough to see Dave Gahan preen shirtless, watch the ancient-looking Martin Gore and his bizarre black sherpa outfit, and laugh at the hopelessly dorky Andy Fletcher. The set was mostly post-Violator ("new DM", in my estimation). The new song "John the Revelator" was kickin'.

Saturday night was the Leisure one year anniversary at 330 Ritch. We were supposed to get in early for free food and drinks (knowing people is great!), but some last minute organization snafus at the club prevented that. We did get in before the horde of people there to see the latest UK indie buzz act Arctic Monkeys started swarming through the doors. I had four pints of Boddington's and was singing Smiths songs and doing my Ian Curtis dance before long. We cut out early on the mediocre Monkeys set and ended the evening eating late night Del Taco and driving Jenz to work at 1am (eek).

Sunday was a lot of things. Lunch with my parents in Fremont at Panera, followed by a look at the local Honda dealer. I finally saw the new Civic (not a hybrid, but the bodies are the same), which is ... okay. Not fabulous. I seem to have swung back into the Prius camp. Returning home, i graded some midterms and got ready for our two day radiation oncology retreat in Sonoma. With houseguests Naomi and Geoff, we also caught an evening showing of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. It was okay. My affection for the first movie was largely derived from the whole "poor kid's fortunes suddenly change" thing (à la Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory), and that sense of wonder is long gone now. But i'll spare you the gripes, the movie was ... okay. We also got in some time with recent PS2 acquisition Guitar Hero, a friggin rad rhythm game featuring a full guitar controller. We thought it was brilliant, and then we discovered the whammy bar. And now it's the greatest game ever made.

Tomorrow morning i'm off to Sonoma for two days, followed by a day running errands on Wednesday (centering on getting the Jetta serviced in Fremont). Then it's on to the long Thanksgiving weekend. No sign of a new car yet. I've gotten several calls from Honda dealers informing me they've got the Civic hybrid i wanted. So far none has gotten my nav system request right, and just today i got one saying they had the car, the price is $2000 over MSRP. No thank you, and take me off your list you money-sucking leeches.

Listening to the new Gorillaz record Demon Days, as well as some classic Damon Blur in "Tracy Jacks" (the song that washed me away into anglophilia), i'm reminded of the one morsel of wisdom that ever passed Noel Oasis's lips:

"That c*nt is like, 'Is there a bandwagon passing? Park it outside my house.' He'll be in a heavy metal band next year when it's fashionable. He's nothing. And it's fitting that he ended up as a cartoon. He always was a cartoon."

Something about the most recent Nine Inch Nails single "Only" had been bothering me, until i realized i could play it on top of Pretty Hate Machine's "Down In It" in my head and the two lined up perfectly. Seriously, when i try to think of one or the other now they end up as one garbled mass in my head. But the funny thing is that it's not really garbled, the two sync perfectly. It seems Trent is now plagiarizing himself, throwing in a bit of synth noise à la the Faint to make it sound fresh. It's a mash-up waiting to happen. Which reminds me, one of these days i need to sit down and write my treatise on why mash-ups are the lowest form of art in modern society, marginally below ribbon dancing in gymnastics.

i'm becoming less defined, as days go by

kinda like a cloud i was up, way up in the sky

fading away, well you might say i'm losing focus

and i was feeling some feelings you wouldn't believe

kind of drifting into the abstract in terms of how i see myself

just then a tiny little dot caught my eye, it was just about too small to see

there is no you

i was up above it

there is only me

now i'm down in it

Speaking of plagiarism, Veronica hit the nail on the head recently in her assessment of indie up-and-comers She Wants Revenge. Their single "Tear Me Apart", getting significant airplay on Live 105, is Bauhaus's "Bela Lugosi's Dead" sung by Ian Curtis. I had previously mentioned the Joy Division similarities, but V correctly pinned down the instrumental relationship to Daniel Ash, David J, and Kevin Haskins. So in response to my previous dilemma, i think we've established that their self-titled record is in fact the ultimate in poseurdom.

A sore throat kept me sidelined for most of the weekend, perfecting my technique in FIFA 06 and Sniper Elite, revisiting Winning Eleven 8 International, picking up a bunch of Goldfrapp records, and watching the excellent four-hour documentary The Crusades: The Crescent and the Cross on the History Channel. Naomi spent much of the weekend with us, hitting New Wave City with Veronica on Saturday night. My state of health prevented a reenactment of the previous weekend's events, particularly our foray into karaoke with the PS2's Karaoke Revolution. I gave everyone a good laugh with my rendition of "Flashdance", as well as a more respectable offering of Simple Minds' "Don't You Forget About Me". Geoff and Naomi each tried to sing the impossibly difficult "ABC" by the Jackson 5, while Veronica gave a respectable version of Britney Spears's "Oops! I Did It Again". Pure hilarity. V is trying to get her hands on the newly released Guitar Hero, another musical video distraction, this one featuring a full-size guitar controller for use in rocking out to a selection of current and classic tracks. Another Samba de Amigo, perhaps? We'll see.

I had one of those "you're past it, Ted" moments yesterday evening. On the way to pick up Veronica yesterday to have dinner with our friend Lucy, i was driving up the 101 listening to Live 105. Madden was djing, not someone i'm particularly enamored of but he generally has good taste (he does "5 minutes of Radiohead" every show so he can't be all bad). He starts talking about how he saw one of the top five shows of the year last night. I'm thinking, "Really? I don't remember a good show happening last night". He goes on to say they're a band from Canada. "Uh oh. What the hell did i miss?" It's a huge collective of between 10 and 15 people. "Oh shit." Broken Social Scene played at the Grand Ballroom. "F@#$!" I had no clue. One of my favorite bands, and i'm oblivious. Let's all say it together: "you're past it, Ted".

i met ferdinand de saussure on a night like this on love, he said "i'm not so sure i even know what it is no understanding, no closure, it is a nemesis you can't use a bulldozer to study orchids", he said so "we don't know anything you don't know anything i don't know anything about love but we are nothing you are nothing i am nothing without love" i'm just a great composer, and not a violent man but i lost my composure, and i shot ferdinand crying "it's well and kosher to say you don't understand but this is for holland-dozier-holland", his last words were "we don't know anything you don't know anything i don't know anything about love but we are nothing you are nothing i am nothing without love"

Today is V's birthday. I got her her present yesterday at Kenneth Cole, some swank zebra loafers and a matching handbag that she'd had her eye on. Tonight we're heading to Platanos in the Mission for some Latin American grub with Naomi, Jenz, Donald, and Marcus. V's birthday romp actually began over the weekend, as i took her to the A. Rafanelli winery in Healdsburg on Sunday afternoon to buy some of the great wines we'd sampled at Louie and Becky's house a few months back. They're a small-scale operation that gets lots of praise, and don't sell in retail outlets. So we put our names on the waiting list to get on their wine buyers mailing list, and walked out with two bottles of their Zinfandel and another two of their special reserve Cabernet. At their recommendation, we had lunch in downtown Healdsburg at the yummy Willi's Seafood, featuring a lobster roll, clam and garlic flatbread, and a hanger steak skewer (Veronica had to eat something!). Unfortunately, it seems the meal did a number on my stomach, and in conjunction with the long drive home and my ongoing bout of congestion (it seems either our new couch, our recent increased use of the heater, or Tara's bountiful shed hair are doing a number on my sinuses) i quickly felt downright crappy. My poor state of health forced us to cancel our evening trip to Fremont for dinner with my family, including Em back from Texas for the weekend. Doh.

Still no word from the one Toyota and two Honda dealers regarding the Civic Hybrids and Priuses i have deposits on. I have a feeling that when i do hear from them, it's not going to be "your car has arrived at our lot, come and get it", but "we have the VIN for your car, it'll be here in a month". I was hoping to have it this week so i don't have to drive our seminar speaker to dinner in the pathetic Tercel again next week, but that's looking unlikely. Will it be here in time for me to drive it to the upcoming radiation biology retreat in Sonoma on the 21st? Your guess is as good as mine.

Chelsea may be in the midst of the dip in form our rivals waited impatiently for last season and early this one. We're 1-3-1 in our last five matches, beating only Blackburn in the Premiership, drawing with Everton, and losing to Real Betis, Charlton, and Manchester United in the Champions League, Carling Cup, and Premiership respectively. Granted our three losses came at a combined score of 3-1 (how is that possible? Well, although the masses record our penalty-kick loss to Charlton after ending 1-1 in extra time as a draw, i'm a realist and say we lost). We're conceding weak goals that we didn't last season, and our offense seems to have hit a wall. Arjen Robben is not playing like the Robben of last season (he's only 21, i guess i should give him a break), and our striker situation has really not improved from last season. Lampard is scoring the majority of our goals, but we shouldn't be relying on him for that. I trust the boys to pick it up, but in keeping with the approach of winter, the forecast is gray.

I have to admit, i totally passed on Sigur Rós when i first heard them. Next great shoegazing band my ass, i said. Now i'm eating serious crow. Takk is the most beautiful thing i've heard this year. If not ever. "Glósóli" sends shivers down my spine. It's the kind of song that brings tears to your eyes and has you air drumming like there's no tomorrow during its apocalyptic climax. Yet more proof that it doesn't matter what lyrics you're singing (SR frontman Jon Thor Birgisson sings alternately in Icelandic and Hopelandic, a made-up language), as long as you can resonate. And Sigur Rós does that in spades.

Yesterday evening i got home from work around 5:30pm to the typically ecstatic Tara. I settled in to play some more Sniper Elite, a game that's growing on me like a weed. I've always been a sucker for stealth-type games, getting totally engrossed in sneaking around to find the perfect hole from which to snipe (while boring the pants off anyone who might be so unfortunate as to watch me play). Sniper Elite doesn't have the best graphics or gameplay mechanics, but it succeeds in capturing the sniper experience. This of course coming from someone who would barely know which way to point a sniper rifle should he ever come across one. Anyhoo, the physics of picking off targets from hundreds of yards away are well represented, and the game gives you a multitude of opportunities to pick your perch and strategy. Lots o' fun. I'm usually the one in Halo who runs in all guns blazing, but as evidenced by my fascination with Splinter Cell, i've got a furtive side too.

G and N arrived while i was trying to figure out the best way to off a German official, and were kind enough to put up with me until i did. G is off to Europe tomorrow for two weeks, one in the Ukraine followed by a hopefully more stimulating one in London. Once V got home, we had a Brick Oven dinner and watched the Apprentice. At this point i can barely keep the Donald Trump and Martha Stewart versions straight. They're both populated with self-righteous glory hounds who all think they're god's gift to corporate society. Anyway. Originally N and G had planned on coming to Popscene with us, but they were pretty worked by 10:30pm, so V and i headed off alone to pick up Jenz and swing over to 330 Ritch. To be honest i was pretty faded myself, and had a 9am Friday meeting looming, but i had agreed to go and kept my word. The reason for my atypical Popscene attendance was that night's performance by UK indie pop darlings the Magic Numbers. We arrived one song into their set, and i found a spot next to the bathrooms with a reasonable view of Romeo and Michele. I was apparently in the midst of the band's UK following, a very vocal bunch but in general nice show neighbors. By the time i settled into my niche, the band launched into my personal favorite, "Forever Lost". Wow. First of all, they were incredibly tight ... all competent on their instruments, and all perfectly in time and in tune with each other. Second, they all could sing. So many times you hear a great vocal melody on an album, then see the artist live only to learn there must've been some NASA-esque studio magic in use when they recorded the song because they can't come anywhere near those notes on stage. Not in this case. TMN's music didn't appeal to Jenz and V, but i was entranced. The girls then danced the evening away while i had a few Boddington's and stood around in my Holland kit and white Pradas and looked disaffected.

Amazingly, i've been mostly functional all day today. Abstracts for next year's Academy of Molecular Imaging meeting are due Tuesday, and my group are finalizing between 3 and 5. We'll see how many are in working order by Tuesday afternoon. I'm mostly ready for the weekend. V and i are heading north to wine country on Sunday for a tasting at the A. Rafanelli Winery in Healdsburg. Becky and Louie opened one of their bottles when we visited their house a while back, and V has been keen on checking out the operation since. My sister Emily is in town this weekend also so we'll be having dinner with her that night. Otherwise, i long for a low-key weekend with Tara doggie and my PSP and Xbox.

It's a fundamental contradiction, one that i don't pretend to have an answer for. I merrily write away on this site, offering reviews of everything from video games to books to, of course, music. This latter subject, i find more than any other, opens up a whole can of worms about personal preference. Case in point: i went to Pitchfork Media today to see if they could help me keep up with the indie release slate. While there, i ended up on the album review page and began scrolling through the archive of recordings reviewed this year. Before long i found some that i too have offered comments on, including the Most Serene Republic and the Orange Peels. And to my horror i read reviews laden with smarmy dismissive comments and holier-than-thou judgements.

Now, to be fair i make my fair share of smarmy potshots. And holier-than-thou is an outlook i've been (rightly) accused of harboring on more than one occasion. But for some reason i just can't bring myself to give a fair read to Pitchfork's ramblings. The word "butthead" came to mind several times while attempting it. How dare someone say that TMSR's "Content Was Always My Favourite Colour" fails because it's a nonsensical jumble of tempos and melodies? That jumble works just fine for me!

Many years ago i got into a protracted debate about bias with one of my longtime nemeses on a mailing list. I had complained that a critic who hates a genre should not be reviewing it. I was lambasted for apparently denying the right of critics to deliver a negative review. Not my point at all ... what i was getting at was that if someone hates shoegazing, then they may not offer the most informative review of the latest Ride album. Likewise, a dyed-in-the-wool punk rocker probably won't have anything useful to say about indie acoustic stuff like Iron & Wine. If the point of a review is to encourage or discourage a potential listener, then such reviews aren't really giving any helpful insight to someone who doesn't share the critic's bias.

You can make the analogy to politics ... in America today, you've got half the country who thinks that Bush is our saviour and can do no wrong, and the other half who thinks he's a bumbling retard who lies and distorts to further his conservative agenda. Every time the President does something, you get comments from both sides that i find have increasingly little to do with the actual occurrence, and more with the commentators' own politics. In fact, i think the biggest failure of the Democratic party in recent years is their attempt to fight the Republicans in this sort of spin arena, but that's a topic for another post.

You'll notice that my reviews on the music page tend to dwell on my personal experiences. I make no secrets about why certain bands appeal to me largely because of sentimental or nostalgic reasons. Pitchfork takes the approach of referencing a thousand acts the reviewer knows damn well no one in his audience has ever heard of (let alone heard, making him seem all the wiser), in an attempt to appear impartial and scientific. I however think the bias is the thing ... there's no getting around it, the best you can do is admit what yours is and move on. To quote Steven Martin in My Blue Heaven, "That's my philosophy". If you think i'm full of baloney, feel free to comment.

Geoff and Naomi were kind enough to head down from the north to look after Tara on Halloween night. I stocked them up with lots of candy for trick-or-treaters, and took off for the city in the rickety Tercel around 6:45pm. Amazingly i ran into no traffic and picked Veronica up at work at 7:30. We made it over to the Fillmore at 7:45pm, first popping into the KFC on the corner for a quick dinner. My slightly off-kilter stomach wasn't too thrilled, but it managed. We were inside the Fillmore at 8 sharp, and set for the evening's Bauhaus show.

Unfortunately, apparently Bauhaus were not ready at 8, so we were forced to stand and wait until almost 9pm. Being Halloween, there were a number of nice costumes on display, but the crowd was rather odd for a Bauhaus show. I got the impression Live 105 or someone else had given away tons of tickets. There was a group in front of us that featured three or four frat boy-looking idiots, predictably groping another three or four drunken and blissfully carefree girls. When at last the lights went down and three mask-wearing women in black gowns took the stage, playing the opening chords of "Bela Lugosi's Dead" on violin and cello, our drunken and noisy friends continued their party, now including bizarre hand-waving dances by several of the girls. Did they even know what band they were seeing? Who knows.

The show however was great, once i managed to block out the actions of my neighbors in the crowd. The orchestrated version of the goth standard that opened the show set the mood perfectly. For some reason Ticketmaster uses a picture of Peter Murphy and David J that makes them look 120 years old, so i was relieved to find both of them looking very dashing. Daniel Ash came out in wrap-around sunglasses that looked reminiscent of Arnold Schwarzenegger's Gargoyles in the Terminator, but once he took those off i found he retained his usual cool-as-f@#% visage. The set raced through "In the Flat Field", personal favorite "In Fear of Fear" featuring Daniel Ash on saxophone, "Swing the Heartache", "Silent Hedges", "Stigmata Martyr", a version of "Hair of the Dog" on which something went seriously wrong because it sounded like absolute crap, followed by a fantastic set closer in "Dark Entries". The boys returned for three more songs, Daniel Ash's "Slice of Life", followed by "Telegram Sam" and "Ziggy Stardust" on which the band was accompanied by a tambourine player with huge wild sideburns/chops. On closer inspection, it seemed he was the guy who bought Geoff's cds at Amoeba last Saturday. Crazy. Veronica speculates that he's one of the nuts from the Brian Jonestown Massacre, and i think she's right.

As we'd purchased the Instant Live cds of the show, V went to wait in line to collect it while i headed outside to ensure we got our Fillmore show poster. I'm listening to the show cds now ... they're not quite of the same quality as the Pixies one we got in Davis, but i like it just the same. We made it back home shortly before midnight. As it turned out, G and N only had to accomodate four costumed young'ns. Tara keeping watch on the porch may have dissuaded the less stout-of-heart merrymakers from approaching our door, however. Geoff had made some progress on Sniper Elite during the evening, but we closed the night with a few rounds of Halo online. The newest maps are pretty good, although most of them seem to devolve into a bloody free-for-all in central portions of the arenas. No crime there ... it tends to level the playing field a bit, despite drastically shortening your average lifespan.