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Hey, listen to this song:

Listening to the first 15 seconds, I didn't think I was going to like it. The reasons I like this song are interesting enough to write about at length, but... oh, just hit the button.

J. writes a song

The handwriting is our babysitter's.

Poorboy Legacy

My friend Reuben Torrey just released a CD! Check it out: Poorboy Legacy. The title track has a sort of folk-blues-meets-indie-rock thing going on—fantastic.

Oh my angel mother

help me up the hill

I'm goin' to meet the good Lord

and I didn't write no will

'cause all I got

is a poor boy's legacy

I'm gonna leave to my son

everything my daddy left for me

$8 for the CD, free shipping, free MP3 download once you buy.

A discovery

This happened last year. I never heard about it.

A reviewer on amazon.com writes:

With so many things going wrong in the world, it's nice to see one important thing going right—a certain Mr. Applebaum stumbles onto the recordings at the Library of Congress in January, a crack team spends the better part of the year restoring and remastering, and Blue Note and Thelonious Records put out the CD in September.

It's a true and lovely story. National Public Radio tells it here (ignore the text and click the “Listen” button near the top). The disc is Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall.

I blog parts of speech

There's a part of speech in English that I didn't know about before about a week ago. It's called the determiner. Some examples (quoting Wikipedia):

• Articles: a, an, the
• Demonstratives: this, that, these, those...
• Possessive determiners: her, his, its, my, our, their, your
• Quantifiers: all, few, many, several, some, every...
• Numbers: one, two, fifty...
• Ordinals: first, second, last, next...

I always figured they were just adjectives. But in English, determiners appear at the very start of a noun phrase, before any adjectives. Here's a quote; some noun phrases are in bold. The words in red are the determiners.

What are man and woman if not members of two very different and warring tribes? Yet decade after decade, century after century, they attempt in marriage to reconcile and forge a union. Why? I don't know. Biological imperative? Divine law? Or just a desire to connect to that mysterious other? In any case, it's always struck me as a hopeful thing.

—Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider, writing for the TV show Northern Exposure

This has implications for programming languages, but I'll skip it. Olivia and I are rewatching Northern Exposure show by show, courtesy of Netflix. Great stuff.

Pandora

I've been listening to Pandora internet radio. The product is a preferences engine and a web-based radio. You make your own radio stations. Pandora plays songs; you train it to play stuff you like. (I have no idea what the company is trying to be. I doubt they're making a good living off the ads.)

Today it just “clicked” and started playing song after song after song that I liked. Mostly stuff I had never heard of before.

It has been a little frustrating, in part because you can't just tell Pandora what musical qualities you're interested in. Instead you have to list musicians or songs that you like, and fine-tune it by giving a thumbs-up or -down on individual songs. For me, this is much harder. Trying to teach it what I want on my "Jazz" station (mostly piano instrumentals, some artsy orchestra pieces, and a few songs by Billie Holiday) has so far been futile. Perhaps Pandora can't model my preferences. Or maybe it just needs more time.