Stupidfool.org

Is it a crime?

via www.youtube.com

New York Dolls, "Frankenstein": probably my favorite ever New York Dolls song.

And also, you know, monsters, Halloween, &c.

Dead Man's Bones: "My Body's a Zombie for You"

I'm still not sure how I feel about the rest of the Dead Man's Bones album, but I absolutely love this song; and they--despite this being an incomplete performance of the song--look like they'd put on a good show.

Plus, Halloween.

Sleigh Bells: "Crown on the Ground"

I like this. (also: more noise!)

Ares I-X

The Big Picture collects some lovely photos of the recent Ares I-X launch, including this one:

Also: there's a NASA Railroad! Neat! I wish this were a thing, instead of, you know, that Thomas the train.

I love mushrooms...

... and this makes me want to cook them and eat them:

Cooking them well is all it takes. Eric Ripert still remembers the oyster mushrooms when he was a young cook at Robuchon's 3-star Jamin. He had to cook each one individually to get that perfect sear. That's what it takes, that's what makes the difference.

via blog.ruhlman.com

I usually cook a handful of mushrooms along with some butter, salt, pepper, and thyme; but I might need to try this one-at-a-time method to get them just right, because a perfectly-cooked mushroom sounds delicious.

Gainsbourg

Merlin's Melody Nelson post this past weekend got me on a Gainsbourg kick.

Histoire de Melody Nelson is, indeed, one of my favorite albums of all time, but this weekend I spent some time with some of my other favorite Gainsbourg--and Gainsbourg-related--albums, any of which would be perfect for someone who loves Melody:

• L'Homme à Tête de Chou: a mid-70s sort of rock opera about murdering a shampoo girl with a fire extinguisher.
• Anna (soundtrack): a late-60s soundtrack for a musical with Anna Karina; it's a lovely bridge between Gainsbourg's 60s pop and 70s rock.
• Jean-Claude Vannier, L'Enfant Assasin des Mouches: I wrote about this back in 2005 when it was re-released. Vannier collaborated with Gainsbourg on Melody Nelson, and this early-70s album has a really similar sound, but it's even more bizarre.

All highly recommended.

Somebody yelling at somebody else

"Cuban Linx II" sounds like an old Wu-Tang record: scraggly samples from soul records and rapid, gnomic bundles of rhymes about drug-selling and agitated encounters. Almost every skit involving Raekwon or his partner, Ghostface Killah, involves somebody yelling at somebody else.

via www.newyorker.com

That's Sasha Frere-Jones on the recent Raekwon album. It's true!

Here's "The New Wu":

Glorious noise

It's been a while since I've listened to My Bloody Valentine. Too long: "Only Shallow", from Loveless, is one of the noisiest, loveliest album openers I can imagine.

Why I'm loving Plack and PSGI

Tatsuhiko Miyagawa's PSGI/Plack have been on my mind a lot, lately, as a great example of taking a common problem and solving it in the simplest possible way.

I used Plack today, actually; here was my use case:

• I'd written a 15-line Perl script that, run from the command line, produced JSON output with the coordinates of some photos.
• I wanted to plot those photos on a Google map, and in fact had already written the Javascript to do so, given a copy/paste JSON dump of the output of my script.
• I wanted to connect the Perl script and the Javascript using something other than copy/paste of the JSON output.

Here's what I did: I converted my Perl script into a PSGI app by adding around, oh, 4 lines of Perl code. I then ran that script as a webserver using plackup, and converted my Javascript to pull the JSON data via Ajax (using jQuery) from that webserver.

This was something like 10x easier than writing a CGI script, and probably 100x easier than writing an Apache/mod_perl app. And here's the amazing part: by writing it with PSGI, I wrote both a CGI and Apache/mod_perl app, as well as an app that'd run cleanly in a non-blocking server like Perlbal, since it does no I/O.

This is really good.

Canabalt high scores!

Matt built a Canabalt High Scores site, which makes me very happy (I love Canabalt)! Now all he needs to add is pagination past the top 25, so that my high score can be on the list.