wildyams

Last night I acquired one of the few soundtracks that I really want but do not have. That's right, the ever elusive soundtrack to Teen Wolf. If you've ever seen the movie you should know that two things really stand out from it: the basketball coach and the wonderfully shitty soundtrack. Now that I've got the soundtrack, here's a collection of all the great scenes in the movie with the coach, Coach Finstock:

I'm sitting here rather annoyed that I missed the Daft Punk show at the LA Sports Arena a few weeks ago. I saw probably 6 months ago that they were going to be playing there but when I went to Ticketbastard tickets weren't on sale. Since I'm signed up with Ticketbastard and Tourfilter to email me when tickets for various bands (Daft Punk being one) go on sale, I assumed that I'd get an email at some point and would go buy tickets. Well that never happened and next thing I knew I was being asked if I was going to the show. At that point I went to Ticketbastard to look for tickets and they only had ones in the upper reaches of the theater, so I passed on going. In retrospect I should have gone even if it meant sitting in the rafters. Apparently their current tour is being hailed as one of the best tours by anyone in years, and from the video/pictures/audio I've seen online, it's easy to believe that.

When their last album, 2005's "Human After All", came out, I picked it up despite hearing some negative things about it. Turns out the negative reviews were just from people who liked their previous album, "Discovery", and who weren't really too familiar with their incredible debut album, "Homework" (one of the greatest electronic albums of all time, IMO). I found "Human After All" to be a sort of return to their roots and couldn't have been happier with the robotic-sounding, stripped down "repetitive" sound which apparently turned off all the newcomers. "Steam Machine" may be my favorite Daft Punk song of all time in fact.

Around the time I bought "Human After All", I also picked up their live CD from their 1997 tour for "Homework", "Alive 1997", and I daresay it's one of the most incredible live albums I've ever heard. Daft Punk is clearly the antithesis of The Crystal Method when it comes to performing live, in that what you hear live is entirely different than what you get on the albums (The Crystal Method by comparison sound as if they put in their CD and hit 'play', and with electronic music this just does not work live). On "Alive 1997" Daft Punk never actually plays any one song that you can distinguish from the album and it is really impossible to tell if and where any one song begins or ends. Instead it sounds like they took all the music from "Homework" and unmixed it down to it's individual samples, hooks and beats and reassembled it back into an hour long set of everything mixed together in a completely new way. Having never seen them live, but having heard from people that saw them on that tour that the show was incredible, I was very interested in checking them out, and now it seems like I was right to be so eager to see them, and should have been willing to sit in the rafters to go.

Daft Punk is rather impressively and surprisingly turning themselves into a band with a lot of credibility, especially live, having recently headlined Lollapalooza in Chicago and now being set to headline the Vegoose show in October, despite the fact that their last album came out over 2 years ago and was not a big mainstream hit (and as I said was even considered a disappointment by many). Luckily there have been reports from the band that they're planning to release a live DVD and CD from their tour this summer, but I can't help but feel like I really missed something special by not going when they were here in LA. I feel so much so that I am actually considering making the drive to Vegas to see them in October when they play the Vegoose show.

After yesterday's entry about Daft Punk's live show and the incredible press it's getting (they co-headlined Lollapalooza with Pearl Jam so that should tell you something), I looked into tickets for the Vegoose Festival and was bummed to see that tickets are $75 apiece. In other electronic music news the Chemical Brothers are coming to the US for three shows and the one here in LA has tickets ranging from $50-$100. The Chemical Brothers remain the best electronic act I've ever seen, with BT and Moby close behind, although it sounds like Daft Punk is even better. Anyway, according to Billboard.com from yesterday, Daft Punk is going to put out a 2-disc live CD from their Paris show back in June of this year (there are bootleg torrents of it available online, although it's recorded by someone in the audience, but it is still incredible), and because Daft Punk was so blown away by the response they got on their tour this year they are considering more dates next year. There were rumors of a live DVD, but nothing official yet, but I'm guessing that after all the buzz about how incredible their visuals were on this tour one would think it's inevitable. Nevertheless I'm very happy to hear that there is in fact going to be an Alive 2007 CD out in November. In the meantime I'm appeasing myself by listening to the aforementioned Paris show and the now legendary show they put on at Coachella last year (high quality audio of that show is readily available online, do a Google search or check my music if you know where to look).

Anyway, here's a pretty decent video of Daft Punk at Coachella last year doing "Television Rules The Nation" mixed with "Around The World":

There's a guy in my office at work who every day has really incredibly bad B.O. Even though I share an office with 5 or 6 other guys, I know exactly who is it. We all do. I don't even sit right next to him, and it's a relatively large office, but the B.O. is so bad that it can be easily smelled throughout the room. As soon as you come in the room, it smacks you right in your nose holes and embeds itself on your olfactory lobe. The worst is when I leave the room for something and then come back, cause see, you can't smell the B.O. in the hallway, and if you're in the room you start to get kinda used to it; but when you leave to where it is relatively odorless and then you return to the Stank Room of Death, the smell is overpowering. And naturally it gets worse throughout the day as the guy gets stinkier and stinkier. The B.O. Guy seriously needs to shower and apply some pit stick for the good of mankind.

This is one of the best explanations of gender differences and how men and women are neither better nor worse than each other but are simply different in various ways (while exploring the positive and negative aspects of those differences). If you've got a while, check it out, it's quite fascinating and compelling.

I had a long conversation with a couple friends last night in which I learned that they have parents that have both been misdiagnosed with MS and both have then further been possibly diagnosed with brain tumors, and this of course is depressing and a little scary. After having this conversation I watched a movie I'd Netflixed called Sweet Misery: A Poisoned World which is a documentary about the malicious side effects of the artificial sweetener Aspartame, and a lot of what I saw in that documentary really sounded a lot like what my friends' parents were going through (in particular the appearance of brain tumors and shaky misdiagnoses of MS), so the documentary really hit home for me.

For those who are not familiar with Aspartame, it is the main ingredient in NutraSweet, and as such it is basically in every diet drink, and in Equal and Sweet N'Low and things like that. Fortunately for me I have never been a fan of products that contain NutraSweet because I've always thought it tasted awful, and I thankfully don't have the hugely allergic reaction to Aspartame that some people have (in some people their reaction to it can be so severe as to kill them after few exposures to it). However, I am a big gum-chewer, and I had learned a while back that the gum I preferred contained Aspartame (I became aware of it after reading about how Diet Coke was possibly killing some people); but I'm the kind of person who doesn't spend much time worrying about much of anything, so I just blew it off with a "what doesn't give you cancer nowadays?" type approach, and kept chewing the gum. However, I did see there was that documentary about it, so I put it on my Netflix queue and sort of forgot about it until it showed up yesterday. Well after watching that, I'm done chewing the gum I've been chewing (Orbit and Eclipse), because one of the long-term side-effects of repeated ingestions of Aspartame is a build up of formaldehyde in your system, and that's a poison your body can't get rid of (which is why it's used as embalming fluid).

Well this left me with a quandary as I still love to chew gum (I must be orally-fixated, so it's a good thing I don't smoke). I am not a fan of sugared gums either though because to me they feel like they start to hurt my teeth after I chew them for a while, and I've also read that many gums with sugar are now also using Aspartame in addition so that the flavor will last longer, so I figured it's best to avoid those just to be sure. So I searched around and I came across a brand of gum that is sugar and Aspartame-free called Elimitaste, which sounds like the perfect solution. Instead of using Aspartame or sugar it uses Xylitol to sweeten the gum. Xylitol is a naturally occurring sweetener found in the fibers of many fruits and vegetables which apparently has many good properties, some of which are that it can actually repair some tooth decay and it helps prevent ear and upper respiratory infections. So it sounds good all around, right? As a result, I went ahead and ordered myself a bunch from their website (they don't market it or sell it in stores instead relying on word of mouth to promote it), and if it tastes OK then I'll be truly happy I found it. To be honest, even if it's flavorless I'll still be happy as it'll just give me something to absentmindedly chew on throughout the day (which is good cause I've found that if I don't have something to chew on I'm much more likely to just eat a bunch of stuff instead).

I've got a bunch of empty bottles of obscure root beers lined up on top of my fridge and when the fridge's compressor kicks on all the bottles rattle together. It's kinda cool.

Well my Elimitaste Zapp gum arrived today while I was at lunch so I'm now chewing my first piece to get the Baja Fresh off my breath and I have to say I'm quite pleased. First, it is in the pellet gum form that I prefer (like Eclipse and Orbit) and comes in blister packs just like many gums nowadays do. Second, and more important, it tastes quite good, and after chewing it for a half hour or more it still tastes pretty minty to me. The last test of the gum will be how well it holds up over long hours of chewing as I've found many gums tend to start to break down and disintegrate if you chew them for long periods of time like I do. So far so good though, and I can't tell you how happy I am to be chewing something that I know isn't going to poison me. If you're a gum chewer, I definitely recommend getting yourself some Elimitaste gum and getting away from products that contain Aspartame.

Anyone who knows me will tell you that I'm not a healthy eater at all. I've never been on a diet in my life and have always just decided what to eat based on how I think the food is going to taste. Obviously this is not a smart strategy to have as far as health goes, and part of why I'm that way is most definitely just laziness on my part in not wanting to go shopping for healthy stuff and preparing it myself (so instead I go with takeout and fast food most of the time or stuff I can microwave), but that's the only reason I'm so apathetic about what I eat.

A big part of my apathy derives from my overwhelming pessimism about all food that's available to us nowadays. I see a lot about the "obesity epidemic" in this country and I can't help but feel like a large part of that is due to the fact that all the food that we get is processed and tainted and just in general bad for us. Even if you go to Whole Foods and "buy organic" how do you really know what you're getting is good? If it arrives on a truck from some unknown destination, and especially if it ends up in a grocery chain that succeeds by cutting corners to raise profits (that's capitalism, after all), I can't help but be extremely skeptical about any claims made by the corporations about their "food products". Because of this, John Titor's predictions about the US returning to being a largely agrarian society of small communities that do their own farming didn't really sound so bad to me (the rest of his predictions were pretty depressing, however).

So today I came across a pair of great articles on Reddit about a grassroots effort to return farming from the domains of the huge corporations Eric Schlosser wrote about in Fast Food Nation to the local farmer/farming communities. The first article was written by one of these "local farmers" in Virginia named Joel Salatin and is about how hard our government has made it just for a local farmer to raise his own crops and livestock to sell locally amongst his neighbors. It's a fantastic article which I think goes right to the heart of the "obesity epidemic" and what is really wrong with food and with government interference in this country. The second article is written by a guy who made a trip to Mr. Salatin's farm to buy some chicken because Mr. Salatin refuses to ship his products due to the fact that he thinks it runs contrary to the whole idea of local farming. The second article paints such a pretty picture of what it is like on the Salatin's farm that it makes me extremely envious that I don't live within driving distance so I too could go get my food there.