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"Some days it's dark. Some days I work. ..." [1]

Is January 24 still the most depressing day of the year in 2006? Seems that it must be, according to news stories.

Now, granted, I realize that the formula for Most Depressing Day isn't particularly scientific [2], but I find it quite suspicious that it's chosen the same day at least two years in a row, now.

But for those who're looking for a little Tuesday depression, here are some suggestions on how to prove the scientists right:

Listen...

to one or more of the following:

1. The Clientele, "K"
2. Dios, "Just Another Girl"
3. Dusty Springfield, "Breakfast in Bed"
4. ABBA, "The Winner Takes It All"
5. Jane Birkin, "Fuir le Bonheur"
6. The Go-Betweens, "I'm Allright"
7. The Beach Boys, "You Still Believe In Me"
8. The The, "Love is Stronger Than Death"
9. The Afghan Whigs, "When We Two Parted"
10. Willie Nelson, "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain"

Watch...

The Godfather: Part II. Or, maybe, watch it more than once! It gets more uplifting the second & third times round—I promise. [3]

Happy Sad Day!

[1] Best song ever.

[2] This is the frighteningly new-agey, feel-bad formula, btw:

The model is:

[W + (D-d)] x TQ
M x NA

The equation is broken down into seven variables: (W) weather, (D) debt, (d) monthly salary, (T) time since Christmas, (Q) time since failed quit attempt, (M) low motivational levels and (NA) the need to take action.

Of course, it leaves quite a few questions unanswered:

• What about the southern hemisphere, where the temperature in January can be above 100 degrees Fahrenheit?
• What about people who celebrate another holiday (or none at all) instead of Christmas?
• What if I have no motivation whatsoever, which would cause M to be (presumably) 0, which would cause a division by 0 condition, leading to an infinite amount of... something?
• & most importantly: What is the final unit of measurement? Days? Weeks? Minutes? Number of depressed people?

&c.

[3] Not really. But it does tend to numb you after a while, which can be helpful.

"You can't say no in December..."

2005 == the year where I had a blog! As in, for real! [1]

And so I actually posted a lot this year, starting in around August or so. 72 posts this year (again, all but 3 of them since August), as compared to 7 in 2004, 14 in 2003, &c. [2]

But if there's ever been a type of post that I'm consistent about, it's the year-end wrap-up/favorites post (c.f. 2004, & 2003). I love reading them (I've already read a bunch this year, on other people's blogs—in fact, I feel like I'm reading more this year than usual). And I even like writing them, because I love that combined feeling of sadness & hope that the EOY always brings.

So, to the favorites of 2005!

Favorite Songs

I've spent way too much time on creating this list—much more than you'd think by looking at it—& its size has varied greatly, from about 28 songs now down to half that size. Not all of the songs have "listen" links alongside, because some artists just don't want you to hear even samples of their music without paying for it. Or, at least, they seem to want to make it prohibitively difficult. [3]

So then, in no order other than alphabetical, & without any useful commentary alongside [4]:

• The Ark, "This Piece of Poetry is Meant to Do Harm" (listen)
• The Clientele, "Since K Got Over Me" (listen)
• Dios Malos, "Feels Good Being Somebody" (listen)
• The Fiery Furnaces, "Evergreen"
• Fiona Apple, "Red Red Red"
• Girls Aloud, "Models"
• Hey Willpower, "Hundredaire" (listen)
• Jamie Lidell, "When I Come Back Around" (listen)
• Maxi Geil! & Playcolt, "Making Love in the Sunshine" (listen)
• M.I.A., "10 Dollar"
• Spoon, "The Beast and Dragon, Adored" (listen)
• Sufjan Stevens, "Chicago" (listen)
• Sugababes, "Push the Button"

Favorite Awesomely Amazing Song Cycle!

R. Kelly, Trapped in the Closet (more)

Favorite Unexpected Reissue

Jean Claude Vannier, L'Enfant Assassin Des Mouches (more)

Favorite Thing about 2005

Friends, having such & spending time with, which it seems like we did more of this year. [5]

Favorite Search Terms that led people to my blog

These are from just one day last week, when I chanced to look at my stats!

I'm unashamedly proud of this list, mostly because they're like a reward for me: I've always wanted the sort of blog that would lead to search terms like this. I've helpfully linked each of the search terms to the post that they lead to.

• cat glover
• clinton kelly gay
• criss angel
• mindfreak
• songs on degrassi tng
• anti clay aiken boards
• selena and chris
• alan partridge abba medley
• crack den

---

[1] Well, hopefully, the first of many such.

[2] One of the greatest things about having a blog, I'm now finding, is that I actually have posts to refer to in this post. Which is just so meta, really, but to me it's all new & amazing, because I have actually produced content this year (i.e., written content, as opposed to just code).

[3] Of course, it doesn't escape my notice that it's the indie bands, generally, who've got the best (official) arrangements for fans to listen to their music.

& the reason I've not linked to the Fiery Furnaces site is that it's so fucking inscrutable that I can't even figure out where the songs are. But I have to say, these videos are just so relentlessly charming that it makes me forget about their frustrating web site, & love them once again.

[4] I actually tried writing something about each of these songs, because personally I like reading commentary. I started by aiming for a couple of sentences, which didn't really work, partly because I've just gotten over the work involved in writing such treatises in my set of holiday mix posts. I must say, I've really got a huge amount of respect for music bloggers who can write about music every day. It's fucking exhausting.

So anyway, I then tried describing each song w/ just a single adverb-adjective combination. I even loosened the rules here rather severely, such that neither the adverb nor the adjective needed to be real words. E.g. "authentically timberlake-esque".

But that was even more difficult, because it seems it's even more difficult for me to be succinct—I suppose I'm naturally discursive, though you'd not know it to talk with me. So, I gave up on the commentary.

[5] Yes, I'm a sentimental & sappy fucker, but you must've known that by now.

Math Quiz!

Via Jason I read & took this math quiz, which is a sample of a math test for 8th graders from the Illinois State Board of Education [1].

I scored only 8 out of 10, because I forgot the formula for the length of the diagonal of a triangle, and two of the questions were dependent upon that knowledge.

Stupid triangles!

[1] Note the smooth transition from my previous post!

Onwards from 2004

I didn't do a wrapup post for 2004, and if there's one post you can count on me for per year, it's a wrapup post. So here is a semblance of such a post.

The past couple of years, I've made my sisters mix CDs at Christmas. Yes, we get them other presents, but I like making mix CDs, so I do that as well. This year, I even went all out and made covers & track listings, because I'd gone to the trouble of loading CD artwork into iTunes, and I finally had a chance to take advantage of it.

So anyway, I also made a CD for my dad, this year, which I hadn't done before. But what I realized a couple of days after giving him the CD is that the songs have a lot of, erm, fairly "inappropriate" language on them--specifically, language that shouldn't be a CD that you're giving to your dad. For Christmas.

But, listening to a lot of music, and being around my foul-mouthed wife, I didn't even think twice about it--and the worst part is that my dad doesn't notice lyrics at all, so he'll happily pass along the CD to my 12-year-old brother. Who does notice lyrics.

But hey! I didn't include "Fuck It (I Don't Want You Back)".

---

Here's a little montage of the some of the music I've listened to most myself this year, courtesy of Tatsuhiko Miyagawa's What you've listened to this year script.

Of course, that only includes stuff on Amazon or where I've listened to a lot of the album, so in addition:

• Maxi Geil & Playcolt, "Here Comes Maxi"
• Gwen Stefani, "Luxurious"
• Kylie Minogue, "I Believe in You"
• Destiny's Child, "Lose My Breath"
• Portobella, "Covered in Punk"
• J.C. Chasez, "All Day Long I Dream About Sex"
• !!!, "Hello? Is This Thing On?"

Amazing things:

• Seeing the Pixies in concert
• Seeing Jane Birkin in concert

---

Anyway, I enjoyed 2004. It was very filled with work and work-related things. And for that, I think my previous post sums that up best.

And for 2005... well, I think it's going to be an exciting year. It already is!

Start to Move

Reading Mie's post today really touched a nerve in me, particularly combined with our office move to San Francisco.

Mena's packed-up boxes.

It's been 18 months now that we've been in the San Mateo office(s), and it's incredible how much the company has grown, both mentally and physically. From 3 people scattered in a largely empty 1400 square-foot office with phone cables strung all over; to 4, then 5; and then as we started growing more quickly, what seemed like a new person or 2 every week, until we had to spill out into a 4000 square-foot office just so we weren't all on top of each other.

And remembering all of the late nights around the Movable Type 3.0 launch, and then the all-night push to actually make the launch, and all of the drama that erupted the following morning. That was not a pleasant morning. Anil and I were fretting both about website glitches and the, um, responses to the licensing changes. And then I remember Maile arriving in the morning, and somehow that made things more manageable, having someone who hadn't been through that night, and who could see things from a slightly less deranged perspective.

Anyway, it's just sort of sad reminiscing about things that now seem so long ago and surreal, and tonight driving home from this office for the last time, I got all like a maudlin old fuck in the car thinking about it. It's just sentimentality, of course, and I recognize it for that, but that doesn't help.

It's just that there are few things that I actually get emotional about, and one of the few is this company, and all of the amazing people that have come to work here. I'm so proud of what this company has done, and in the end, it's exciting that we're all moving together into a new space and a new phase.

EOY 2003

It's been a hugely interesting year, if a very stressful one. And fast.

Now, at the end of it, and in looking back, and in looking forward to another, my mood is probably best illustrated by what I've been listening to the last couple of days:

Scritti Politti, First Goodbye - A first-rate Green Gartside ballad from the 1999 record Anomie & Bonhomie. Somewhat sappy, I guess, but that's fine.

Pulp, Wickerman - While I don't like to resort to X meets Y comparisons, this is sort of "Cargo Culte"-era Serge Gainsbourg meets "Mercy Seat"-era Nick Cave, with a huge orchestra build and a generally depressed industrial thing going on. It's very good.

The Darkness, Love on the Rocks with no Ice - Apparently a huge crowd-pleaser at live shows, and I could see why--multiple stop-and-starts, a huge guitar break and outro, and that ever-present Justin Hawkins falsetto.

All somewhat melancholy, perhaps at the passing of this interesting year, or perhaps just at ever-advancing age, or perhaps because I'm posting this on New Year's Eve instead of doing something enjoyable, etc.

But that's 2003.

But enough whining--some favorite things from 2003:

• Launching TypePad, seeing Movable Type growing in popularity, and building up Six Apart to its current size.
• Meeting Claire, Phil, and Amelia.
• Return of the King. I could not have been happier with the entire trilogy.
• Traveling to Japan, Chicago, New York, and Washington DC, and meeting people and seeing friends in all of those places.
• Spending more time listening to music. In no particular order, favorites from 2003:
  • !!!, Me and Giuliani Down By the Schoolyard
  • Beyoncé, Crazy in Love
  • Electric Six, Danger! High Voltage
  • Killer Mike, A.D.I.D.A.S.
  • Kylie Minogue, Slow
  • Outkast, Hey Ya!
  • The Raveonettes, That Great Love Sound
  • Scooter, Weekend
  • Sugababes, Hole in the Head
  • The White Stripes, Seven Nation Army
  • A.R.E. Weapons, Street Gang
  • Justin Timberlake, Love Don't Love Me
  • The Rapture, House Of Jealous Lovers
  • The Postal Service, Such Great Heights
  • Basement Jaxx, Plug It In
  • The Darkness, Love Is Only A Feeling
  • Frank Black, My Favorite Kiss
  • Scissor Sisters, Laura
  • Ms. Dynamite, Dy-Na-Mi-Tee
  • Kelis, Milkshake