#42

Q: Before MLB retired Jackie Robinson's #42 for the entire league, who was the last Philadelphia Phillie to wear it?

A: Toby Borland

See more fun facts about #42 in baseball over at Craig Robinson's Flip Flip Fly Ball.

Christmas Lights

Icicle lights. Clearly a game changer in Christmas decorating.

Anyway, the following article is completely worth the read: Gizmodo's Brief and Strangely Interesting History of Christmas Lights

Tetris God

Since my cell phone's touch screen no longer functions correctly, tetris is the only game it will play. So for me, this video from Collegehumor.com is all the more funny since I experience this at least once a week.

This was posted on a few popular websites yesterday. If you skipped over it, I'm sure the official Cubsicle seal of approval will make you re-think your choice.

Grooveshark

You may have noticed this site's liberal use of Grooveshark as a means of posting streaming songs to blog entries. Unlike Skreemr which seems hardly legal to use, Grooveshark is at least somewhat legitimate having somehow turned a lawsuit by EMI into a licensing agreement earlier this year. Presumably this means that artists representing EMI will be seeing a share of the revenue generated by Grooveshark's (surprisingly not annoying) ad supported model. The only problem? EMI licensed music represents only about a quarter of Grooveshark's entire user-submitted library.

This is both unsettling and a cool aspect of the EMI licensing agreement since their agreement basically just says "we know EMI music has been uploaded to your site by users illegally, but we won't sue you." Finally one of the big 4 music giants starting to understand the way this is going to work in the 21st century. The other 75% of user-uploaded copyrighted material can be removed by the copyright owner at anytime by mechanisms of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.

The site is great for all kinds of things including building and saving playlists as well as "following" friends and even a Pandora-like music recommendation engine. Definitely a great place to hear a track on demand.

Old Dogs

Perhaps the best part of my Thanksgiving Eve so far has been reading all of the many scathing reviews of Old Dogs over at Rotten Tomatoes. What an awful movie idea! And although Robin Williams doesn't make very many good films, I think it's fair to say that Seth Green may be an even more potent source of movie ruining acting. Great idea, Hollywood.

So far Old Dogs is rated at a whopping 8%.

1000 Awesome Things

1000 Awesome Things is just a time-ticking list of 1000 awesome things updated once a day every weekday until it reaches 1000. It can be cheesy, but it can also be spot on. It may even make you appreciate some of the little things that you never realized were so awesome.

NLCS Game 4

Get some, heavy B.

Photo compliments of Drunk Athlete

Flip Flop Flyball

Craig Robinson is an English artist and designer who has made a career out of miniature pixel art like that which you see here. He hosts a career's worth of creativity at his website Flip Flop Flyin'.

Recently he started to apply his other, non-pixel related talents to the world of sports (mostly baseball), by making various charts and other visual aids to help explain fun sports facts. Above is a picture, also available here, that visually explores how often the regular season's best baseball team actually goes on to become world champion.

The website, Flip Flop Fly Ball, is full of a lot of other cool stuff, too. Check it out.

Beatles Rock Band: Easter Eggs

Well I've made my 45 song iTunes playlist so I can practice singing, and I am this close to making every post on this blog about the new Beatles Rock Band game until it comes out next Wednesday. And yes, I'm taking at least one day off of work to play it all day. But don't worry, I'll spare you the more boring, technical details about the game should I follow through on this threat.

Today, a contributor to McSweeney's wrote this funny piece called The Beatles Rock Band: Easter Eggs. "Easter Eggs," by the way, are like hidden secrets inside a video game that require codes or certain button pressing combinations to unlock. Here's an example from the writing so you can see what I mean, and to get you interested.

If you press the B button just before "Ticket to Ride," the band will admit that they were high for seventy percent of the filming of Help!

Passive Agressive Notes

Passive Agressive Notes is a website devoted mostly to notes left by someone to others who have wronged them in some way, usually in a public place such as the office bathroom. The site describes its content as "painfully polite and hilariously hostile writings from shared spaces the world over."

This one came to me via the latest round of co-worker link sharing for boring work days. Enjoy.

Album Spotter

Album Spotter is a website that tells you which albums of a particular artist your collection is missing. Simply go to the site, upload your iTunes xml file, and decide which artist you want to check up on.

Seems like an interesting use of coding, though I'm not exactly sure who the target audience might be. If you like a band enough you'll probably already know which albums you're missing. Still, the website is free to use should you need it.

TuneUp Media

The product being sold at this website claims to clean up all of the information and album artwork in your iTunes library.

I doubt I'd ever pay for something like that, as I'm pretty obsessive with doing these things myself for my own collection, but I'd recommend it to everyone else whose mangled collections I have to witness. There's a trial version you should check out first if you're thinking about it. TuneUp supports both Mac and Windows.

There may me free alternatives, all listed at this website. I can't vouch for any of em'.

Randy

There's a bit of viral internet marketing going on for the new Adam Sandler movie Funny People. Different characters from the movie each have their own website depicting the fictional work that they do.

Of those sites, none is funnier than Aziz Ansari's character, Randy, a stand-up comedian with his own stage DJ. View that site, here.

WARNING: You'll probably be able tell as soon as you check out the page URL, but Randy's site is extremely dirty, and NSFW to say the least.

Pick R Set

PickRSet.com is an interesting website worth mentioning. I like the idea of letting the audience vote democratically to determine a band's set list for a concert. It's an especially cool idea when applied to bands whose set lists are bland and predictable.

It occurs to me, though, that at every show there are always assholes who like to call loudly for rare songs just to prove their pretentious worth as fans, and I see this website as a forum for those people to be heard. That may just be cynicism, I'm not sure.

Doesn't matter, though. PickRSet is probably just a clever way for bands to interact with their fans without having to actually give anything back in return. Of the PickRSet shows I've been to, the final Top 10 songs have never actually been played. Seems bands like to see the results and choose a few of the songs that might normally have not been played. I guess they have to try and sell their new stuff or something.

Phillies Uni-Watch

On Saturday I finally realized my dream of having my writing published on someone else's blog that nobody I know reads when I became the unofficial uniform tracker of the Philadelphia Phillies. Click THIS LINK and scroll down until you see the Phillies logo to get a better understanding.

The website is Uniwatchblog.com, which we linked to back on April 29th.

Awkward Family Photos

"Never before has birthday cake photography been so chilling."

I'm linking to the website Awkward Family Photos because 4 people have now suggested I check it out. So now it's my turn to spread the love. The site is predictably hilarious and apparently updated with new pictures every day. I'm sure this site gives us all a reason to keep our photos as far away from a scanner as possible.

Cover Songs: Green Day

Somehow Green Day managed to slip an album of b-sides and cover songs by me a few years ago which I am just discovering now. The album, Shenanigans, includes two great covers. "Outsider," by the Ramones, and "Tired of Waiting for You," by The Kinks. Both are fantastic as far as cover songs go, but then Green Day has always been smart about choosing which cover songs to actually record. Here for your listening pleasure are all of Green Day's cover songs.

Also, a great website to check out is COVERSPROJECT, which lets you choose any band you'd like to find out if they've covered or been covered. Don't bother looking at the Ramones page or Bob Dylan's page unless you have all day.

SeeqPod - Playable Search

*The final track is "Don't Want to Know if You Are Lonely," by Hüsker Dü.

Seeqpod

Seeqpod to me is like the wacky Uncle of Skreemr. The user interface is nuanced and busy, even though it seems to have more capabilities. The gist of Seeqpod is the same, just simply a search engine for tracks of music which pulls its searches from websites all over the globe. There may be a difference in the algorithms used to search the web, but that shouldn't bother the untrained user, as to my knowledge there's really no way of being sure. Whereas Skreemr (supposedly) allows you to download the tracks you find, Seeqpod just lets you save them to a playlist of your choice which can be saved for later, sent to a friend, or embedded into the boring blog of your choice.

Behold, as modern technology allows me to showcase the final song from Conan O'Brien's Late Night, along with two other random, strange tracks put together to form what some refer to as a playlist.


SeeqPod - Playable Search

SkreemR

You may have noticed that I like to back up my music blogging with sample tracks embedded into the blog. Although I can't really comment on the legality of this, I do know who I can blame if I'm in the wrong. Skreemr,is essentially the Google (which we've established is a genius) of mp3s and just individual song tracks in general. You simply enter what you're looking for into the search field and the resulting tracks (if available) will populate in order by their audio quality. From there you may play the track through skreemr's site, embed the track in a blog, or supposedly download the track to your computer. I've surprisingly not yet tried that.

Skreemr can do all of this because they don't host any of the music through their service. They simply scour the web for freely available mp3s hosted on various music blogs and websites. You'll find that it has a very user friendly interface, and I especially love how it positions itself as a search engine for rare songs and single tracks rather than a competitor to other peer to peer file sharing networks. That should at least keep it afloat for a few years before the RIAA comes knocking.

Today's track comes simply as a testament to Skreemr as an indicator of how far we've come since the days of Napster. It comes also in defiance of God's will, so far as Lars Ulrich is concerned. Here's a rare good, new Metallica song, the new single The Day That Never Comes (let yourself listen at least to the dueling guitars starting at around 5:40):

	Metallica - The Day That Never Comes
	Found at skreemr.com

Scrobbling

Last.fm is a music service owned by CBS that acts as a one stop shop for all things music. You can find band bios, listen to clips, use the radio function, and purchase (or listen to for free) songs from an enormous catalog of songs by most of the "Big 4" recording companies. But since the site only allows you to listen to a full song 3 times before limiting future plays to 30 second clips, the site has little use for me, except for one small thing. Instead, the function of last.fm I find most fascinating is called Audioscrobbler, which is a tool you can download from the site to be used with most audio programs (iTunes, Windows media, winamp), which essentially collects data about the music you listen to and converts it into graphical form. They call it "audioscrobbling," or just plain "scrobbling." Whether you listen to the song from the confines of the last.fm site itself or just listen to your own library on iTunes,etc, Audioscrobbler sees that you've listened and sends the information to the last.fm database. The same is true if you listen mostly on an iPod or other mp3 player. All you do is plug in the iPod, and audioscrobbler automatically (if you want) scrobbles every song you've listened to since the last time you were online. It can be interesting, for sure. Here's my all-time chart (I've only been a member for a little less than a year.

Of course the system has its flaws. Certainly it can't scrobble everything you listen to, specifically if you listen to CDs (who listens to Cds??), but it paints a fairly accurate picture of use. Another problem is that on last.fm people seem to derive pleasure from having listened to a band more times than someone else. So I'd say if using audioscrobbler is going to dictate what you listen to for bragging purposes, it becomes both a complete waste of an otherwise interesting program, and an inaccurate picture of your true listening habits over time.