Acou-tas-tic

I've been looking for some new music lately, particularly for acoustic type music. I have all kinds of alt-rock and other non-mellow stuff on my iPod and sometimes I need the yellowish tunes to de-stringify my state of mind. So here's a couple things, nothing too ground breaking in that you're probably familiar with everything I'm tacking onto my blog here.

Note: Its not about the video, its about the music.

Alexi Murdoch - Orange Sky
Love his voice.




Sufjan Stevens - Casimir Pulaski day
So sad, so serenely beautiful.




Jose Gonzales - Heartbeats
This is actually an acoustic cover of this really strange 80's type indie band called The Knife. You can find the cracked out video of the original on youtube.
I love the motion and reserved feel of this song.




Tegan and Sara - The Con
I know this isn't acoustic, but I love the weird harmonization. When I heard their stuff intially I wasn't into it but I might be changing my mind.




Now I'm asking for viewer participation. Let me know about acoustic or interesting music I need to check out. Its time for a serious trip to the big ol' HMV on St Catherine street where they have some of the more obscure stuff as well as the main stream albums. And they have fracophone music, so we're not limited to English.

A-dorable

My nephew turned one last week. Mmmm, we should all enjoy cake so much.

Doorknob

Something you didn't know about me: I hate using cash at the grocery store.

I will let you laugh at me. I've been sitting on my bed with my laptop doing work and procrastinating at intervals. My phone rang, and for some reason I usually jump with surprise at the vibration of the phone, I have no idea why. So I get off my bed to answer the phone sitting on my desk only to fall sideways. I try to get up again and fall to the floor again. It took me a second to realize my leg was a little asleep, so there was a crawling motion over to the phone and a conversation from the floor.

Forget forgotton

I felt like I should post.

Oh busy busy life, I'm trying to wait for it to let up, hold on just until the end. Then I should by all reasonable guesses explode at some excruciating point in the future in the painful slow death kind of way. I exaggerate, I have been much busier in the past and so much more stressed out. I feel like I'm not doing as well as I should, I got an A- on my Semantics assignment -- this must be remedied immediately before the D's start rolling my way. You laugh, you think me ridiculous but a fail is a C in grad school and I just cannot explain to you in a way you will find rational my expectations of myself. I realize I'm hard on myself, but if I'm not hard on myself, who will be? That's a misfortune I'm not going to take my chances with. Are these even grammatical English sentences? Reminder: I am not an English major, I am not obsessed with prescriptive grammar -- as far as I care, if people can say it then its grammatical. Its called descriptivism. See how I did that? A little switch from prescribe to describe. Subtle, I know, but what a difference.

I have a conference next weekend at York, which is good in terms of spending a few days in Toronto. I will miss my friends who have moved away from Toronto (I'm looking at you, Dinah) and it will be like a hole shot through the memory of my former life, but I will hold on. I will let those who remain in our province's capital (province = Ontario) spread inwards from the edges of that gaping hold like fibres in around the torn knee hole of a much loved pair of jeans. Maybe I'll have a big face tattoo when you see me, maybe I will have jet black hair. Maybe I will speak with an eastern Australian accent. How could you yet know? You haven't seen me in a while. Perhaps I have taken to wearing really long t-shirts with a belt around the waist. They go well with my knee high alligator skin hooker boots with that lovely rosy tinge that makes you think of a guy who has been punched in the face and has spit out his bloody saliva on the sidewalk for you to step around the next morning.

My phonology homework awaits. I am attempting to break wide open the wonders of feature licensing in a couple of Bantu dialects. The phonological world won't know what hit them when I come along, with my predetermined data set, and fully answer the questions I am obliged to answer for my mandatory course work.

Have you had enough yet?

Good-bye prime factors 11 and 2, Hello prime factor 23

That's right, today is the last day of my youth. Mock me if you will, point out the fine lines around my eyes and the graying hair on my head. (Actually, I do have some white hair, but that is not age related, who can tell with the blonde anyway?) I'm not planning on anything special happening this year, but perhaps this is the point people stop caring about your birthday. Actually I'm just not in the mood right now, I shouldn't pawn it off on other people. There is some consolation in my brother turning even older a few days later (he always was older than me....).

And I felt like playing around with the blog template. I know its still blue, but I just don't like other colours as much. My eyes are blue so when I see blue things they are compatible with the iris filter while other things get morphed into pukey colours, so can you blame me for liking blue? I have to respect it, my eyes provide the only discernible colour on my face.

I became very upset with Linguistics this week. I heard some work from various people that just reminds me of all the bad Linguistics out there. People who only take into account one construction in one language and ignore generalizations made for other reasons thereby creating completely useless analyses. Its because of these people that the field is still Arts everywhere and hasn't been able to even break into the soft sciences (I mean, if psychologists can get science degrees its ridiculous that linguists don't). I want to do real Linguistics that actually means something, that actually gets insight on NATURAL language, and if anyone else asks me if I study Esperanto or Tolkien's elven language again then I just might freak out and give a drop kick followed by the sonic elbow.