Reverend Horton Heat - "In Your Wildest Deams"

Love this band!
Supposedly almost as famous as the Cramps, with fantastic psychobilly songs.

Rickie Lee Jones - "Have You Had Enough" (Have You Had Enough (Radio Single))

Jazzy, swinging.

In her biography she is compared to Joni Mitchell, which seems a bit strange to me.

It also says she did a lot of Beat-influenced spoken word monologues. And worked with James Newton Howard "for her slickets, most synth-driven outing to date."

Mad Caddies - "Tired Bones" (Keep It Going)

Ska-madness from Santa Barbara. Gogogogogo!

Kid Beyond - "Wandering Star" (Amplivate)

Strange, ska-ish version of Portishead. Intriguing enough

Wax Tailer - "Our Dance" (Tales Of The Forgotten Melodies)

Haunting high-pitched girl voice and triphop beats

The King's Speech

Loved it.

Yes, a crowdpleaser, but still.

Some good lines, not too corny.

I think I wanted to like it as well.

Pachelbel - "Canon in D Major"

Slow, classical, organ-ish, ... in major! and yet beautiful.

Mary Roach - "Stiff: the curious lives of human cadavers"

[practising surgery on dead bodies] "For me, hands are hard. [...] Because you're holding this disconnected hand, and it's holding you back."

"To gibbet is to dip a corpse in tar and suspend it in a flat iron cage (the gibbet) in plain view of townsfolk while it rots and gets pecked apart by crows."

[after being shot] "Whether or not you collapse depends on your state of mind. Animals don't know what it means to be shot, and, accordingly, rarely exhibit the instant stop-and-drop. MacPherson points ou that deer shot through the heart often run off for forty or fifty yards before collapsing. 'The deer doesn't know anything about what's going on, so he just does his deer thing for ten seconds or so and then he can't do it anymore. An animal with a meaner disposition will use that ten seconds to come at you.'"

"A male heart, [...] is in fact slightly different from a female heart. A heart surgeon can tell one from the other by looking at the ECG, because the intervals are slightly different. When you put a femlae heart into a man, it will continue to beat like a female heart. And vice versa."

(China) Tai Bao capsules: made from abortus (fetuses) and placenta, and it is very good for the skin

mellified man: ... In Arabia there are men 70 to 80 years old who are willing to give their bodies to save others. The subject does not eat food, he only bathes and partakes of honey. After a month he only excretes honey (the urine and feces are entirely honey) and death follows. His fellow men place him in a stone coffin full of honey in which he macerates. The date is put upon the coffin giving the year and month. After a hundred years the seals are removed. A confection is formed which is used for the treatment of broken and wounded limbs. A small amount taken internally will immediatly cure the complaint.

[China] "Children, most often daughters-in-law, were obliged to demonstrate filial piety to ailing parents, most often mothers-in-law, by hacking off a piece of themselves and preparing it as a restorative elixer. The practise began in earnest during the Sung Dynasty (960-1126) and continued through the Ming Dynasty, and up to the early 1900s

David Eagleman - "Sum: forty stories about the afterlife"

Beautiful vignettes about possible afterlives.

Though some are not very afterlife-related, reading most them makes you wonder about your actions, your feelings and your thoughts right now.

An impressive feat.

Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann

From living undergound, Simon and his 'bro' Kamina escape their world by drilling. Joining other humans in their fight against beastmen, the ultime battle is between Spiral (evolution) and Anti-Spiral, using their Spiral-power to create larger and lager mecha's.

"Who the hell do you think we are?!!!"

According to Anti-Spiral, the Spiral way of life will ultimately end the Universe: literally spiralling out of contol.

"To defeat rationality, to do the impossible to make the possible come true, that is the Team Gurren way!"

The idea, bigger and bigger fights, first "practical", then more and more abstract (Spiral vs Anti-Spiral) isn't new, but again, here it works. Somehow you aren't put off by the ever-increasing power of their minds and mecha's.

Is it because basically the fight is between mentalities (only taken to the extreme?) Hard to say, but a great watch.

Though those Japanese and their bouncy D-cup cleavages... one keeps wondering.

Amy Hempel - "reasons to live"

Beautiful short stories, in which seldom eveything is made clear. Yet no pretence is made about what it means. There is a meaning. There is a thought. And it is yours.

If I am not mistaken, she belongs to a school of writes who abhor the (over)usage of adjectives, and their usage is minimal.

Stories to read over and over again.

Wumpscut - "Hang Him Higher (Instrumental)" (Preferential Tribe)

Catchy. Not as hard as "Wreath of Barbs"

But nice.

Clare Fader - "The Wine" (The Elephant's Baby)

hoompa-hoompa wine, old-fashioned, and about alcohol!

Grimy Styles - "Jr. Kong Pt. 1" (Rewind)

Instrumental sky, violins, trippy... very good

Hrsta - "Une Infinite De Trous En Forme D'Hommes" (Stem Stem In Electro)

Long-stretched violin-based soundscapes.

Good for writing.

Tanita Tikaram - "Play Me Again" (Sentimental)

Soft, sad.