Oct
16
2006
Magnolia Electric Co. released
Fading Trails this year, and I picked it up a week or so ago. I liked
Songs: Ohia, but the transition to Magnolia Electric has really been… well, it isn’t that there was anything wrong with Songs, but let’s just say that Magnolia Electric resonates with me more. Fading Trails is as good as or better than the other studio album,
What Comes After the Blues, and will probably be one of the most frequently played albums of the next three or four months for me, unless
The Wrens manage to get their next album out in that time, which I do not expect.
The record is only 9 songs and 28 minutes long, both of which surprised me when I looked them up just a second ago, because it certainly feels like an entire album to me. My two immediate favorites are the leading track Don’t Fade On Me and the number three track, Lonesome Valley, and then I find the timbre change as one recording session gives way to another a little disconcerting, but the songs in the middle and on the back half of the record are good too.
Pick it up.
Oct
13
2006
Two interesting books to share with you today:
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
Edward R. Tufte
Is a book all about charts and graphs, when they work, when they don't work, when they lie, and how to present data most effectively. The book is full of a lot of simple tricks that I've never come across as a math major, but I have to admit that he ends up with some information-dense graphs.
Unlike most non-fiction books, I read this one cover-to-cover, in one sitting. The book itself is also very attractive, printed on very nice paper. The cloud-chamber experiment on the cover is actually a railroad timetable. This is sometimes described as the Strunk and White of chart design.
How to Good-bye Depression: If you constrict anus 100 times every day. Malarky? or Effective Way?
Hiroyuki Nishigaki
It is the result of unchecked machine translation from Japanese to English, and that is the primary draw of the book. A self-help book for dealing with depression (and cancer?) in an unusual format–Hiroyuki's advice was first posted to a usenet group for dealing with depression, and he has chosen to reprint those conversations in full, including usenet headers and inline quotes, as the first half of the book–the book promotes healthy living (vegetarianism, pelvic floor exercises, fasting), and attempts to teach you how to deal with petty tyrants.
Maybe it even works. The advice itself isn't ridiculous, but the language makes it impossible to take seriously. Also, maybe the entire thing is a send-up. I don't know, and honestly, I only care a little. It's funny either way.
