I borrowed these for a session this week...

And now I want them.

Bad.

This is a pair of vintage (WWII era) German microphones called Neumann KM-84's. They belong to my friend Curt Nickisch. Neumann is generally considered the best name in microphones. They're still a company and they still build some of the best microphones available. But I can state emphatically, without reservation, that vintage ones consistently kick the ruddy pants off new models.

Haha

marriedtothesea.com

Frenchies.

This image is of an absurd aspect ratio and you'll probably need to click it to read the whole thing...



I saw this on an ebay auction just now. Not sure why, but it made me chuckle, and remember the US Swim Relay team's interview after their stunning comeback win. The Americans said something to the effect of, "We heard the Frenchies talkin' some stuff... and decided we needed to show them what's up." Why we seem to constantly hate on the French is beyond me, but I have to say, the term "Frenchy" is definitely the funniest slur of all time.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox

Is funny. Not necessarily funny for comedic value, but funny the way all Wes Anderson films are funny...

The utter randomness that makes you snicker about something like a full minute after it happened.

The use of silence.

The mastery of awkward timing.

The way he makes the most dysfunctional relationships kinda brazenly so.

Above all, I think it's funny how that can make something funny.

Soooo....

Dollhouse Season Two is dark.

I kinda love it.

The honk that launched a thousand snorts...

Some of you who knew me in my first 2 years at BYU know that I had some level of weird-romantic involvement with 4 girls in a row who were all named Melissa. You'll also know I refer to them respectively as Melissa I, Melissa II, Melissa III, and Melissa IV. Melissa 1 was just cruel, while Melissas 2-4 were all crazy. While you might guess the funniest stories are about the crazy ones (and you'd mostly be right), my lamentable relationship with Melissa I produced at least one exceptionally funny moment...

On our first date (which involved an ill-fated canoe launch in Utah Lake), I asked Melissa to tell me something funny about herself. She answered by telling me that it had only happened two times before in her life, but that when caught in a truly awful fit of laughter, she had honked. "You mean like a goose?!!!", I asked, to which she said, "Yeah, kinda... it's really loud and horribly embarrassing, but it's really only happened in front of family and they can only tease you so much." I had two immediate thoughts:

1. Her family was obviously nothing like mine, cause I guarantee if one of us ever honked, the others would never let them live it down. If we can tease you for it once, we'll tease you for it for the rest of your life.

2. It is now my foremost aspiration in LIFE to make this girl honk.

After a couple months of hanging out, we were alone in her living room. I can't even remember what we started laughing about, but it was one of those times when you think you're gonna die from the pain in your sides. I didn't even think about the honk, it was just really funny and I loved her normal, everyday laugh, a ton. Then out of nowhere I heard this huge rapid inhale and the loudest, most ungodly HAAAAWWWWNNNNKKKK you can possibly imagine. It caught me so off guard I immediately snorted super loud. Then she honked again and I snorted again. Honk, snort, honk snort, like a goose and a pig getting jiggy with each other.

We were already in pain, but this brought on another 15 minutes at least of uncontrollable, rolling-on-the-floor laughter. When we finally calmed to silence and tears of joyous pain, she just pounced on me and we made out on her floor for like an hour... which was awesome. Sometimes still, when I get in an uncontrollable spell of laughter with someone, I'll hear the honk like a ghost sound effect in my brain and nearly pee myself all over again.

My day in great detail...

Ok, so I decided I was gonna just tickle my fancy for the rest of these "in great detail" posts, cause to describe more than one day in great detail would be (a) arduous and (b) boring. Seriously, my whole year? Nobody wants to read that crap. I sure as hell don't want to write it. But I figure I could tell you about my Easter Sunday in fair detail without boring you. I think.

I woke up at 7:45am, showered and dressed in my new suit (I just bought it the other day at an incredibly bizarre store with purple velour and blue leather suits in the windows... I was very hesitant at first, but it turns out they have normal-people suits too) and picked up Danielle in Newton. We drove to an area of downtown Boston called Copley Square. We found parking quickly (and free on Sunday) had a quick breakfast and waited outside the beautiful Trinity Chapel to be let in for their Easter Mass. The service was beautiful, and the music was fantastic. Trinity has a spectacular organist and an instrument to match. It has antiphonal (at the back of the hall) pipes for the organ music equivalent of surround sound. I've always tried since my mission to take part in Holy Week with the larger Christian community in some way. Especially when we Mormons have General Conference on Easter, I feel like we tend to miss out on the tradition that most of Christianity has, of remembering the last week of Jesus mortal life, and proclaiming the joyous news of the Lord's Resurrection with our fellow Christians. After the mass we drove back to my house where my roommates had general conference up on the projector, and several friends over for a bbq. We ate good food and enjoyed the morning session. I took a nice nap between sessions, played a little guitar, then watched the afternoon session. Danielle and I then headed to an Easter dinner with the raspberry cheesecake brownies we made last night (when I say we, I mean, I bought the ingredients and Danielle did all the cooking). Dinner was great, dessert was too, and I even ended up telling the Melissa-One honking story to the sister missionaries.

Don't worry, if you're unfamiliar with that story, I'll tell it tomorrow...

Anyway, then Danielle and I finished Season One of Dollhouse... so addicting. And that was my Easter Sunday. How was yours?

Another tickler of the fancies...

A youtube video... well 4 of them.

Warning... 16th Century Adult Language.

A website...

If I'm ever a Billionaire, THIS is what I'll buy...

A recipe...

I think it's mostly a problem of people over-thinking it, but there’s a serious lack of good biscuits and gravy out there. This is how they do it down in the Bible Belt. Not for the faint of heart. Stroke-inducing cuisine, here.

Da Biscuits

2 cups self-rising flour, 1/4 cup butter or lard, 1 cup buttermilk.

Preheat oven to 500. In a mixing bowl, make coarse crumbs of the butter and flour. Add the buttermilk blending with a fork just until the dough comes together. Very sticky. Spread the dough on a lightly floured surface. Knead gently, folding the dough 8 to 10 times. Press into a circle that's pretty thick. A full inch thick is good! Cut out biscuits with a 2-inch cutter. Place the biscuits on baking sheet so that they barely touch. Bake until they look and smell amazing (roughly 10 minutes).

Da Gravy

1 lb. fresh sausage, roughly 3 tablespoons of bacon drippings, 1/4 cup regular flour, 3 cups whole milk, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper.

In a large cast-iron skillet (required), brown the sausage at a medium-high heat. Keep all the fat in the pan. Add more fat... Better fat... Bacon fat. Also add the flour, salt, and pepper. Cook, stirring constantly until flour browns. Slowly add milk. Keep stirring. Bring to a boil, then simmer for one minute stirring occasionally. The gravy thickens as it cools. Pour da gravy all over dem biscuits.

This is, my girlfriend will testify, the only kind of gravy I should ever try to make.

A hobby of mine...

In the last several months my vinyl collection has grown a lot, and while I doubt I'll ever be a real vinyl collector, I am very proud of my little library of analoguey goodness. The truly funny part is my turntable died before I bought like half of these, and I haven't bought a new one yet.

A talent of mine...

I actually wondered for a long time if recording music was something I was actually good at, or something I just liked to do. I of course, love audio and I had found a confidence in my skills at least when focused on film sound. But frankly, for much of the time I've been interested in making records, I've been surrounded by people who were better at it than me. (Jason, Ryan, uh, everyone I worked at Avatar with) My passion for music is similarly pretty strong, so I've thought a lot about whether I'm good enough at music to "masquerade" as a recording engineer.

When I thought about it a little more I realized I was from a bit of a different background. I began in recording at MCC where my first class was entirely on analog tape. In my second semester we "got to move up to digital" tape. Only just before my mission did I ever really experience using a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) in software form. After my mission, I went to BYU. It was actually incidental that I got a Pro Tools job on campus. I wasn't even applying for it. I was applying to be a TA for Comms 101 and my teacher asked me out of nowhere if I knew Pro Tools. Well, then I started at KBYU where I met Jason. I got better at ProTools, but the couple projects I recorded in school, I was ultimately not that happy with.

I've realized more over time that I actually just kinda suck at mixing in the computer environment. I've always been capable of getting good recorded sounds. In fact, I've become a bit of a tone freak (complete tweaker). I just wasn't great at mixing, at least absent a console. As fortune would have it, I'm unexpectedly on my own at Dirty for the next few months, and I'm hoping that as I've been forced more heavily into mixing music in Pro Tools, I'll get better at it. I already notice some progress on day one.

Tickled yet another time...

It tickles my fancy to let you know about a blog I contribute to with my friend Luke. It highlights awesome things that we find on Netflix' Instant Watch.

It's called GuessWhatTotallyBadassThingIJustFoundOnInstantWatch.com

You kids with Netflix should check it out.

An art piece...

How very Mormon of me, I know, but possibly my favorite painting of all time is Arnold Freiburg's (Book of Mormon paintings) depiction of George Washington called "The Prayer at Valley Forge". It's a beautiful rendition of a beautiful moment in history and a reminder of the faith of the General of the Army of the Potomac.

And yes, there were 4 prepositional phrases in a row there.

A song that makes me cry or nearly...

I pretty nearly cried the first time I listened to "What Sarah Said".


What Sarah Said (Directions DVD)

Death Cab for Cutie | MySpace Music Videos

I'm emotionally unstable and there are a handful of songs that can get tears out of me if the timing is right.

A fanfic...

I've always heard there's awful fanfic out there that makes your favorite stories, well...

Sexy.

Well, it's even more awful in reality than it sounds in theory. This is the first Transformers fanfic I found...


World's Worst is accurate.

A nonfiction book...

Ha, at least in a manner of speaking...

"The Mixerman Diaries" as they were called when being published monthly in an industry periodical called Tape-Op, are about a freelance recording engineer who gets "chosen" to record the debut album for a major label bidding-war* band. The label insists the band work with a big name producer, and the band consents but insists that our hero be their engineer... Two members of the band know him and they expect him to act as sort of their ally in the recording process.

He essentially documents the daily nightmare that it was to work on this record with the band and the label, and shows along the way just why so much of popular music is total crap. The band is a nightmare. They hate each other's guts and they haven't even toured yet. "The singer is vain and pretentious. The guitarist is a chronic depressive. The drummer is 'dumb as cotton' and the bassist is merely mean and petty, making him the only one that Mixerman can stand."

While it's uber-entertaining to a recording engineer it's widely readable and a fascinating behind the scenes of the bad, the worse, and the ugly of the record industry.

*= In the days when the labels ruled the record industry (with an iron fist), top prospects were often fought over by different labels. Ironically, the lion's share of the bidding was actually the size of the loan the band was to be fronted upon signing. Which is actually to say, the biggest dollar amount was actually what the band had to recoup in sales before they made even a dime. Musician's were courted with debt... Amazing.

A fiction book...

Currently reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Danielle lent me it and is certain I'll love it. It's really good so far. While it's not a sci-fi book, but the main character's affinity for genre literature has made me want to read a bunch of sci-fi... most immediately to read the rest of the Dune books.

Tickling my fancy again...

I just barely saw the video for this song long loved...