The Last Candle

If threads of life woven by the Fates were variable length-wise according to not only length of life but also quality of life, then following my thread along to my current little sliver of life-slice would reveal fraying, bits missing, and a slight curling, as if the thread wanted to induce itself into knots.

The first and massive problem with the usual schedule is the onslaught of work. Busy season is always expected — the season is a month elapsed now, and has three months to go — but the what part of how we toiling tax workers is kept busy varies. Last season, a single product kept me occupied for several hours of overtime a week. This year, that product’s back, toned and trimmed to cause trouble on a scale magnitudes larger than last year’s struggle, and he’s brought four friends.

And that’s not really the killer. The problem is that the items don’t seem to disappear; keeping sanity on a stressed workload relies somewhat on a foreseeable end of the journey, a pinnacle atop the scaled mountain. This season, the bugs (it’s a bug hunt!) just keep on comin’. I spend all of the lit hours of the day and a couple of the dim ones dropping hot oil, arrows fletched with little quail feathers, and big jaggy rocks on top of my attackers’ crudely-armored heads; by nightfall, when the various camps are retiring until the following day, the base of the fortress is littered with the corpses of the dead, but a new opposing army is seen pitching campfires just over the crest of a nearby hill.

My vacation for February, after the end of the busy season where us programmers on the team only tend to Jack and Squat, is already scheduled. And it is out of the state.

In the meantime, plenty of lovely things exist in a day (outside of work, natch). Such as:

Porcupine Tree released this year both a studio record and EP, Fear of a Blank Planet and Nil Recurring, respectively. The length of Fear of a Blank Planet is 50 minutes, 52 seconds; Nil Recurring is only four songs but cuts a sizeable dish of an EP at 28 minutes and 44 seconds.

While enjoying the EP on the juke’ one evenin’, I wondered if I could burn both albums onto a single 80-minute CDR, combining two of my favorite releases of the year into a single mega-uber-terrific cut that would fear no contenders.

The combined length of the albums? 79 minutes and 36 seconds, just 24 seconds shy of the limit. Beautiful! Also beautiful was how the full track listing appeared in iTunes after the disc was finished burning — another Tree fan out there previously had not only the idea to combine the albums onto one disc, but to also put the combined track listing into the Gracenote database. Double beautiful, just like the lovely vocal phrases towards the end of Nil Recurring’s Normal.

When I get home from work at 7:30 PM, I’m usually too tired to put together any special kind of dinner, even when “special” usually means that I open a bag of spinach instead of toasting bread or pouring milk onto cereal. Lately I’ve been getting back into what I call the “sandwich diet,” which is part misnomer (it’s not a diet — duh) and all delicious.

A favorite sandwich that’s made a comeback: rye bread, blue cheese, apple slices and a whole bunch of bacon. Combine sandwich-like. Feast. I found the recipe on a foodie blog months back; after the initial discovery, I ate rye-blue-apple-bacon ‘wiches every night for a week. Now I just eat them every other night. The other nights are for cereal.

The Wii’s Classic Controller has turned out to being a nice compliment to the Virtual Console games, the only games I’m playing on the otherwise potential-rich, content-low console these days. I bought the cute controller to ease the playing of the original Metroid, purchased from the Virtual Console, because turning the Wii-mote sideways like an original NES controller was not only extremely uncomfortable, but the middle Start and Select buttons were nearly out of reach for my small hands. And it was twenty bucks, besides.

In fact, the controller itself, just as a thing, is much more fun than Metroid. The controller is attractive, comfortable and functional, and the game sucks.

The plan was to play through all of the “big” games in the Metroid series, beginning with the original and following up with Super Metroid and the three Metroid Prime games. That plan has since been jettisoned into deep, empty, soul-suffocating space since I actually started playing the first game, an activity that has revealed it to be more similar to pulling out one’s teeth than the challenging, skill-based 2D-shooter I was expecting it to be.

The fun of discovering new areas is diluted to the point of worthlessness by the constant backtracking and repetitive monsters and graphic tilesets. The music is boring, and the game map itself is not fun or interesting to traverse. I have no interest in fighting monsters, whether they be the irritating little edge-walkers, or the frustrating ceiling-hoppers, or the three bosses that await somewhere in the uninspired bowels of the pixilated planet of Zebes.

I printed out a map of the game to try and speed up progress, which it did, but the thrill of grabbing the Varia suit (1/2 damage!), Screw Attack (flip-jump to kill!) and Wave Beam (nice gun!) within ten minutes was lost when I discovered that there was nothing else interesting in the game to find.

But I beat this game way back on the original NES sometime in the 80’s, back when I had a lot more patience and much more time. So, what the hell — on to Super Metroid.

This week’s episode of TWiT was actually quite good, upending a many-month-long streak of consistently mediocre episodes. Since about a year ago the podcast has been both mostly information and entertainment free, but the TWiT panel was fairly snappy and brightly opinionated this week, sealing up the entertainment bit. I don’t think TWiT will ever be informative again (was it ever? Does it intend to be?), but John C. Dvorak’s crankiness and the show’s aloof windbaggery is appreciated in this otherwise-dreary week.

Okay — let’s talk Phoenix Wright: Trials and Tribulations. Okay? Okay.

Actually, I’d rather play than talk, so I’ll cut right to my statement. So far I’ve only played the first trial, and if it’s any indication of what’s to come, Trials and Tribulations will be the best game in this, my favorite bunch of adventure gaming.

In the previous two games, the initial trial was used to ease the player into the courtroom adventures — no examination and evidence collection takes place, and the story is generally set outside of the arcing plotline, avoiding character development and using a plot that’s more like a regular investigation instead of the usual out-of-control antics exhibited by subsequent trials.

The opening trial of Trials and Tribulations, while still avoiding evidence collection (which don’t compare to the courtroom sequences anyway), has substantially more punch and theatrics compared to any case in the disappointing second game, Justice For All, and is on par with the decent-to-good cases of the original game. Trials and Tribulations has yet to show if it can match the second case from the original, let alone the excellent fourth or fifth trials, but the courtroom is gettin’ mighty, mighty hot — and the new prosecutor hasn’t even shown himself yet.

The translation is much, much better in Trials, too. Where Justice For All’s overall limp, typo-ridden script dragged the game down many times, Trials’ writing is not only grammar-tastic but — once again, like the original in the series — hilarious, compelling and irresistibly exciting.

The first turnabout’s proceedings had me slapping my thigh in zeal at several points due to the comical banter. One humorous courtroom exchange began when the Judge happily proclaimed that he “changed his mind several times a case!” earning him the unofficial title of “Judge Fickle.” Shortly after the lead character’s mentor remarks that the Judge, even with his turbulent opinion, always seems to get the trial’s outcome correct (wink, wink), earning him the alternative moniker of “The Great Judgini.” (It’s damn funny in-game, trust me.)

Trials and Tribulations music’s pretty darn good, too, another facet that Justice For All didn’t capture about the original game. The tentative Cross Examination themes are particularly nice.

Man, do I ever love it. So much fun, or in other words very much the opposite of Metroid.

I’d usually reserve a post of this length (shortish, like a Corgi puppy) for the tumblelog, but the message is important enough that it needs to be broadcast out on the main wire, the real blog.

So here goes.

Dear road-worthy vehicle drivers in the US: when you enter an onramp, please, for the love of Thor, accelerate up to the speed of highway traffic by the time you embed yourself into the flow.

This is not an issue if you are driving by yourself at 3 AM, or if you are so lucky that during the morning rush your merging lane is empty of respectible fellow car-driving citizenry. This is a problem when you are merging into a lane at 25 miles-per-hour lower than the highway speed limit, a limit which is probably still less that most drivers — like me — choose as our commuting velocity.

If you drive a vehicle that under your own volition behaves in such a dangerous manner, realize that your behavior, ignorant of the brushstrokes left behind, stretches as far back as the last car, reducing the amount of control subsequent motorists have pertaining to their own safety.

Please be thoughtful — accelerate on the damn onramp.

I mean, Jesus, people. This is simple: just put the hammer down after you cross the onramp’s threshold and delta-V your way to not dying. Following these simple suggestions will greatly increase the possibility that your own car as well as — and this is the part I’m really hoping to get across — trailing vehicles will not have to throw dice with the Reaper as a result of your tortoise-shelled, pokey-toed ass.

Thank you. I didn’t get into an accident or anything of the sort, but an event opposite to what I suggest here in this post did occur earlier during a drive: some antagonist attempted a highway merge at thirty miles-per-hour less than the rest of the traffic. Argh. Having to work several hours on a Sunday was bad enough, but I’d like to avoid any potential death or dismemberment opportunities as is possible, like most reasonable people would choose.

But for the the rest of the drivers who aren’t reasonable and considerate: choke on your own tire iron.

The Battle of Hastings of the year 1066 is the only historical event that I possess an above-average knowledge of, besides that one night where I was nearly arrested for trying to put a newspaper kiosk on top of an outdoors bathroom. The Battle took place in an early October nine-hundred forty years ago, and every year I anticipate the anniversary by planning to put together a special page filled with a timeline, important figures, and detailed breakdown of the great battle that occurred on top of Senlac Hill so many years ago.

Like every year so far, October 14th — the day of the battle in 1066 — blows by me like a horse-mounted Norman charging downhill, and every year my plans for Hastings bear no fruit at all. This leaves me a little grouchy, but I get it over it by mulling over the prospect of the following year’s opportunity chased down by a couple heavy stouts.

So, yes, I did miss the Battle of Hastings’ anniversary once again. Belated festivities would only bring make my perennial neglect more apparent, but I’ve decided to forge ahead through the shield wall anyway, presenting a reduced, but no less handy primer to the Battle of Hastings.

Thus I present the Cliff Notes version of The Battle of Hastings. Use the following factoids and details to impress your drinking pals when the topic is post-naught-millennium medieval battles.

The Battle of Hastings: The Cheat Sheet

• The Battle of Hastings took place on October 14th, 1066. I’m starting you off easy.


• The two major players in the battle were Harold the II (or Harold Godwinson), son of Godwin and recently-throned (in January 1066) king of England, and William of Normandy, Duke and protector of the Norman duchy. A third player, Harald Hardr�da of Norway, was a minor player in various skirmishes and troublemaking but applied no great force to who ruled England itself.


• William and his Norman army invaded Harold’s England on the pretense that Harold had unfairly taken the crown for himself, the latter having cast aside an oath years earlier to hand over the throne to William after the previous king, Edward the Confessor, died.


• Harold, evidently a terrific opportunist or a great fool (or both), was coroneted within a day of Edward’s funeral. The coronation was legally approved by the Witenagemot, a congress of political king-makers, which also makes them either opportunists or great fools.


• William famously said, “I was schooled in war since childhood.” Being born in 1027 out of wedlock and made Duke of Normandy just three years later after his father Robert died returning from a pilgrimage, he might have well said that he was schooled since infancy. Though Normandy was in a sad and torrid state of affairs when William ascended to dukeship, with uprisings common and attempts at his duchy on account of his bastard birth or by plain force, William had the state firmly under his control by 1047, when he was just 20 years old.


• Months after Harold’s coronation, Halley’s Comet appeared in the sky above England (as shown by the Bayeux Tapestry). The appearance of the celestial body was regarded as a bad omen for the new king.


• Leading to the day of battle in 1066, William received the Pope’s blessing to siege England for its throne. Meanwhile, Harold was busy defending his northern coast from the marauding Hardr�da, who was sowing his Viking oats with constant sacking and pillaging.


• Hardr�da and Godwinson came to a final head at the Battle of Stamford Bridge on September 25th. Tostig Godwinson, Harold’s turncoat troublemaker brother, was present at the battle, fighting for the Norwegians. The Anglo-Saxon’s decisively routed the invaders, killing Hardr�da and Tostig.


• A single Norwegian axe-bearer is purported to have protected the bridge single-handedly for a significant amount of time before he was stabbed from an Anglo-Saxon spearman from the water. This act of courage and strength allowed Hardr�da additional time to move his army, but the Anglo-Saxon’s superior army overcame the invaders. Nice historical anecdote, though, even if it is of questionable authenticity.


• Immediately after the Battle of Stamford Bridge, Harold drove his army from the upper-left corner of England to the extreme lower-right corner, to Hastings, to meet William and his Norman army. The cross-country trek was accomplished in less than a week.


• Upon standing on the shores of England, William literally felt on his face, kissing the sandy beach to the dismay of his surrounding army. Another bad omen for the time, and probably more than a little embarassing.


• At the morning of the Battle of Hastings, a Norman recruit, said to be Ivo Taillefer, a bard and knight, asked the privilege to be the first Norman fighter. William agreed, and while Taillefer was slain, either after theatrics or just by charging the Saxon shield wall, the Norman cavalry was energized by the minstrel’s courage and charged the shield wall in a fit of rage for their lost comrade.


• The Anglo-Saxon shield wall was Godwinson’s army best defense: five-foot tower shields held tightly side-to-side kept the wall from breaking, and any man or beast that crashed against the wall would be cut down easily by long sword or the dreaded four-foot long Danish battle axe. The Norman cavalry, riding horses up Senlac Hill that had to carry 250-pounds of equipment in addition to their armored rider, crashed against the shield wall until late in the evening.


• William was dismounted from his horse several times, but he regained his steed after every fall, much to the benefit of his army’s morale.


• William’s goal was to defeat Godwinson’s army by nightfall. If Godwinson’s army stood after the Sun set, then battle would cease, and Anglo-Saxon reinforcements would arrive by morning. William, understanding that he had little hope of a victory against a refreshed and larger Anglo-Saxon force, made a final cavalry rush against the left side of the shield wall.
• On the Normans’s final rush, the Anglo-Saxon shield wall broke. As incredibly strong as the shield wall was, once it broke the army’s defenses plummeted. Once the Norman cavalry was behind the now-shattered wall, Godwinson’s men were easily cut down by the practiced Norman knights.
• Harold was killed atop Senlac Hill, chopped apart by four prestigious Norman knights, but after he was shot in the eye by an arrow. (The arrow shot is told as a matter of tradition but is not historically supported by any written accounts. Both gruesome events are depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry.) Godwinson’s Housecarls, an elite collection of protectors for the king, fought to the last man against the Normans.
• William slept in the field of battle among the slain that night. The following day, Harold’s parts were collected and wrapped in a robe for a special burial. Harold’s remains were ultimately placed on the Northern Sea’s shoreline, against a cliff under a pile of rocks. The top gravestone had the inscription, “By the duke’s command, Harold, you rest her, to guard the sea and the shore.”
• William the Conqueror continued his fight into London and the rest of England, and eventually into kingship.

References

Okay, so I didn’t cite any references in the Cheat Sheet. That’ll all be up on October 14th, 2008. Trust me.

But if you really want to do some extra reading, try the Wikipedia articles, which are very well fleshed-out for the Battle’s proceedings.

• The Battle of Hastings
• The Battle of Stamford Bridge
• William the Conqueror
• Harold Godwinson
• The Bayeux Tapestry, a Norman tapestry made in 1476 showing graphical timeline of the Norman invasion and conquest of England
• And finally, the Italian power metal band that wrote a concept album about the Battle of Hastings and sparked my initial interest in the year 1066, Thy Majestie. The band’s follow-up album to the concept Hastings 1066 was a Joan of Arc concept in 2005. Following several departures in the line-up, including that of the lead vocals for Hastings 1066, Thy Majestie has not put out a new album or songs since the previous album.

See you again, Harold, in 2008!

LucasArts recently announced a Wii version of Force Unleashed. Before the announcement, Force Unleashed was yet another Star Wars game featuring lightsabers and blasters and weird furry alien folk, but now it’s a Star Wars game with lightsabers controllable using the Wii controllers to emulate hot lightsaber-swinging action along with the blasters and weird furry alien folk.

All versions of the game will probably use the same soundtrack featured in any Star Wars product since John Williams first pressed his quill against a empty score for A New Hope.

Motion-controlled lightsabers sounds like every Wii owner’s dream (not including me, because I don’t own a Wii) but there will be plenty of ways to botch the production, surely. But giving the benefit of the doubt that the development studio won’t churn out yet another Wii-mote demo, Force Unleashed might feature some pretty exciting tactile and immersive combat.

I don’t really have much faith in Force Unleashed being a triple-A game, aside from the ubiquitous Star Wars property it employs. The fact that the game is a port is trouble in itself, as ports across platforms tend to be fairly blah due to the attempt at wide market appeal; second, the game is being ported from consoles (PS2, and the Xbox 360) that are using standardized controllers, meaning that gameplay is designed around fairly simple push-button actions; and finally, implementing true Wii-mote sensibilities into the game might be too high of a mountain for the development team to climb in the face of a impending release date.

My guess at a resultant Wii control scheme is that simply moving the Wii remote in a horizontal or vertical direction will result in a predesigned motion, e.g., moving the remote horizontally across your chest will always perform the same cross-cutting lightsaber swipe on-screen — the Unleashed character will do the same actions as he does on the Xbox 360, but you’ll get more exercise doing them on the Wii.

But maybe the game’ll turn out pretty good. After all, the Wii is selling like hotcakes: more Nintendo Wiis have been sold to date than Xbox 360s, even tho’ 360 had a one-year headstart. Publishers are certainly paying attention to the market, meaning that new and more Wii-oriented games are coming to the console. Hopefully Force Unleashed will be a game worthy of the system’s abilities.

There’s another question: has a game been released on the Wii that really takes the motion control past the mini-game demo abilities? I mean, games like WarioWare, which allow the user to make slashing motions to cut pies and the like are common (as they were on the Nintendo DS to accommodate its touchscreen), but all of those games have little lasting appeal and don’t supplement the technology very well. (I owned a copy of WarioWare: Touched!. I beat the full game in about two days, played with all of the touchscreen toys for a couple more days, and then forgot about the game until I gave it away. Actually, I did pull it out now and then to show off the DS’s capabilities, so the product was probably a winner to Nintendo in that sense.)

Metroid Prime 3: Corruption is said to have some more immersive uses of the remote, such as extending the remote in front and then whipping it back, which translates on-screen to pulling shields out of enemies’ hands. From the Shacknews review of Corruption:

Crucially, interactions with the world are now handled primarily with motion-based gestures rather than scanning, and they are directly mapped to your hand motions rather than simply executing canned animations. The aiming and movement advantages of the remote are obvious, but these interactivity elements are probably the best nonessential demonstrations of the Wii remote to date. They extend into the combat arena as well, with Samus able to rip enemies shields’ out of their hands with her grapple beam, or pull protective plating off of a large, imposing boss.

Unlike with button presses, you actually become physically better and quicker at performing these actions as the game progresses. Though it may sound silly, by halfway through the game you have become an expert at manipulating levers, retrieving energy canisters, and throwing switches—and, believe it or not, it feels great.

Now that sounds like a good supplement.

Here’s my suggestion: a straight-up port of Die By the Sword, a PC game that featured nearly one-to-one translation of mouse movement to the character’s sword arm, including speed of movement.

I haven’t played the demo for DBtS in years, but I remember whipping the mouse around, resulting in dismembering entire bodies as they stood. Hallmark gaming, in other words. The player could move the mouse slowly in a circle, causing the player character to make slow, graceful straight-armed rotations with sword in hand. Hitting a baddie while moving the mouse slowly would just give the monster a good bonk, but wouldn’t draw any blood. Use a little more velocity in the mouse movement, however — or whip the mouse around wildly — and the PC would could remove heads, limbs — y’know, the works. I don’t remember fighting any pig-headed bipeds, but it would’ve been a good time.

The Wii really needs a game like where all movements of the controller are replicated in some fashion on screen. Force Unleashed might be an answer to that need, but Die By the Sword would be an answer and a blessing.

Blues master Albert King shared a wink and some advice to his protege, one Stevie Ray, when he mused, “the better you get, the harder you work,” as both stood on the set of In Session.

And boy, just over a year into my guitar lessons, and I’m just beginning to fathom how true that is, even at my very early level of education and skill.

Here’s a recent example, one from the past week. The song from last Thursday’s lesson is The Ventures’ Pipeline^*, a classic guitar tune from a classic band. The tune does not feature any blistering solos, tricky chord changes or require technical mastery or even adequate skill with pinch harmonics or sweep-picking. Pipeline is, by all indications, a very straight-forward guitar rocker, but a great one — it’s both fun to play and hear.

Usually when I get a new song to play through a lesson, Al, the guitar hero and professor, writes out the tab in my fond and fuzzy tabulature book. He shows me the tricky parts, a few hints about technique, and we step through the song a couple times. After that, the show is all mine — I have seven nights to fix up the piece for the next lesson.

Someone the rendition turns out surprisingly well, as was the case with The Beatles’ Blackbird. Others, like Los Lobos’s Evangeline, are not, say, going to hit the live setlist any time soon. But most of the time I can punch through a piece with some difficulty — the challenge is what keeps it interesting most of the time, after all — and ultimately get the part within the week to a point that is worthy of the original work. Al has typically not been disappointed (although he is a very laidback guy, not the sort to crack the whip at a mis-fretted note), and I have generally been proud of my efforts.

Back to Pipeline. Pipeline sounds like a fairly simple song, and all in all, it’s not too bad. But the more I play it, the more the intricacies and required technique to play the part correctly become apparent…and necessary.

During this year of lessons I’ve decided that mastering a song occurs in three parts: memorization, becoming comfortable with the necessary technique, and then finally smoothing out the rough parts to equal the original music.

Memorization isn’t tough at all, unless you’ve chosen some madhouse etude (see also: this one). Picking out what notes to play and what tempo to use where and where to put that goddamn pinky is just a matter of a few hours. I know a bit of the beginning to Stevie Ray’s Pride and Joy, about up to the part where Stevie begins to sing. When Al scribbled out the tab from memory into my book (he’s played it live! For an audience!), the song look like something that’d take me months to get into my head. But once I actually sat down and slowly — really slowly — began playing through the bits, I had the notes in my head after just a couple of hours.

Working on technique, the second part of learning the music, seems to be where I usually end up, mostly because I don’t have enough time before the next lesson and song to apply the final polish (the third stage — more on that in a bit). Once the music is memorized, that’s when I load up the tune in an audio player and hum and strum along, trying to match my notes to the recorded notes more closely. The middle section is also where I can identify the tricky measures, the measures that I’ll later stack up against the steady beat of a metronome, playing the measure a hundred times or so until the wrinkles are mostly eliminated.

I tend to prefer that middle, second section of learning: it’s not busy-ness like the memorization part is, and the sense of progress is noticable. My fondness for stage two might be out of familiarity, however, since it’s the third and final part of learning a piece that’s the absurdly tricky stage, the one I don’t visit often.

The line dividing the second and third sections of learning a bit is something like this. If it sounds good to me, but if I record it and it doesn’t sound much like the original song — that is, it’s sloppy — then I’m still working on the second stage. I wouldn’t want to play anything live that’s still in the second stage of practice, because it just sounds bad.

But if I hear myself playing a part that closely resembles the original tune, then that’s third stage business — the remainder of practice is down to making sure I can hit everything correctly and consistently. I might play a part in the third stage for friends or family, but I still wouldn’t take it on the road — songs for live performances in front of total strangers must have completed all three stages, unless the crowd is rowdy or mostly drunk (or both, in which case stage two will suffice).

A few of the tunes under my hat are at the stage three level, and it is by far the most difficult of the bunch. Playing a particular phrase or solo two or three times out of four? No problem. But being able to hit the correct notes in the correct spots over and over again without fail? That is extremely tricky, but the real indication of mastery. I can’t honestly say I’ve got control over a tune unless I can play it several times correctly. Anything else is a shadow of the original work and requires more practice.

So, back to Pipeline again. I’m a little behind this week, so I’m straddling the first-second stage line, having learned most of the rhythm guitar, which is the really cool stuff in my opinion. But as I dig into the technique, I realize that I don’t quite have the skill at this point in my guitar career to play this piece to the fullest. For example, Pipeline features a 12-measure slide-riff-thing several times in the song. The slide occurs on the sixth string, the fatty E-string, and to play it at the tempo of the song has turned out to be a real bear. Quick repeated notes on the slim and flexible first string is pretty do-able — emulating the same motion on the sixth string while doing a slide at the same time is magnitudes more difficult due to the extra strength required to rock that fatty string. I’m beginning to think the slide is the most difficult bit in the song (and one of the best bits, too).

But even the familiar ostinado that forms the base and ripples in the background of Pipeline is trickier than it sounds. The notes are simple, but upon listening to a recording of myself playing the part, I realized that my played notes were just a hair off, but by a perceptible amount. Even something as simple as a repeated strain has to be just right, and in this particular case has proven to be a much greater test than previously thought. It’s a small bit o’ skill, playin’ those same two or three notes for measure after measure, but the precision makes a big difference. Fixing up playing the ostinado will just take some time — a half-hour with my good friend, the metronome, ought to smooth it out nicely — but geez, The Ventures make it sound so easy.

I guess playing guitar wouldn’t be worth it if the journey was simple. But I don’t even mind if that third, hand-over-hand uphill, gasping for air stage of perfecting a song is so tough, because the result is so rewarding. Maybe even a year from now I’ll be able to play Pipeline in front of a crowd of rowdy, drunken strangers.

* I don’t really like outsourcing samples of songs, but it’s all too convenient with my current blogging setup. When the new CMS arrives — and that is a when, not if — I intend to have all clips embedded right in the page. And won’t that be a dandy thing?