media

A perfect t-shirt for the cool kids in the music industry …

Let’s say you want to create a smart playlist in iTunes that will contain the 25 highest-rated Beatles or Bob Dylan songs that you haven’t heard in a while. That would be pretty cool, right? It’s not that simple, but it can be done. I’ll show you how.

The main roadblock you’re facing is that iTunes only gives you two ways of restricting / selecting songs. You can build a smart playlist based on songs that meet all of your criteria or one based on songs that meet any of your criteria. This any / all option really puts you in a corner. First I’ll explain why, and then I’ll show you how to fix it.

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With the demise of the Sopranos, West Wing, and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and with the interminably long hiatus of Friday Night Lights, the best show on television right now is Rescue Me. It has been months since the last episode aired and I had been anxiously awaiting the season premiere last night. Black billboards featuring only a Pink-Floyd-esque, stretched-neck-and-screaming Denis Leary profile started appearing in LA a few weeks ago, captioned with a very simple “rescue me” and “06-13-07″. All day yesterday I was excited to see what was going to happen. (Last season, of course, ended with a dramatic cliff-hanger.)

Now understand this: I have three televisions, two TiVo boxes, and a DirecTV HD DVR. These three machines have yet to fail me in 3+ years. Any time a show was missed, it was always entirely my fault for not double-checking the priorities. I knew that “Rescue Me” was set to ultra-high priority on the two TiVos and I — incorrectly — thought that I had told the DirecTV DVR to record it as well. But it was not to be. I forgot that the (absolutely horrible) software on the DirecTV DVR wouldn’t let me schedule a season pass for the show when I tried a few weeks ago. There wasn’t a new episode set to air in the near future so I couldn’t program it. So that system recorded Mythbusters and Modern Marvels instead. The two TiVo boxes were set to record Rescue Me on the FXP (the Pacific feed of the FXNetwork) channel at 10pm Pacific time. Unfortunately DirecTV dropped FXP and replaced it with the regular, East-coast feed of FX, so not only was the show airing at 7pm Pacific instead of 10pm, but it was now on channel 248 instead of channel 78. So one TiVo recorded Girls Next Door and the other one recorded what was probably its 3000th episode of Law & Order.

So now I have to wait for FX to replay the premiere on Friday night. All three DVRs are set to record it. Damn.

Are you wondering what media I consumed this weekend? I knew you were. And so I shall tell you.

• Heat ****
• Sopranos *****
• Oh the Glory of It All, by Sean Wilsey ****½
• Oceans 13 ***½
• John from Cincinnati ***½
• A Prairie Home Companion, featuring Martin Sheen, Randy Newman, and Paula Poundstone (live at The Greek) ******
• Saturday Night Live (rerun) ***½
• SNL Tribute: Chris Farley ****

Warning: Post Contains Spoilers

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Y‘know what song holds up well? Dire Straits’ Money for Nothing. You realize the song is frickin’ 22 years old? We got to move these refrigerators. We got to move these color TVs.

A week or two ago I linked to a video clip my friend made: Casino Royale with Cheese, a seriously funny film about how James Bond would handle being paired with a really annoying partner. It’s a great little piece of web satire that’s now been nominated at the MTV Movie Awards! Go vote for it!

It’s hard to believe that it’s been over a year since I read Krakatoa — The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883, by Simon Winchester. Because I loved that book so much, at some point around Christmas I bought A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906. I was not disappointed. Winchester managed again to make plate tectonics quite thrilling. It’s a fabulous book and — like Krakatoa — it’s amazing to learn how much of today’s political, religious, and socio-economic landscape has been influenced by monumental shifts (literally) in the planet’s physical landscape.

I finished the tale of San Francisco’s epic disaster late Sunday night and was pleasantly surprised to find that my fiancée had another of Winchester’s works sitting on one of our bookshelves. I read The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary on Memorial Day. I forgive the author his predilection for obscenely long titles because his writing is so brilliant. This third book was as awesome as the first two I read and I’ve added everything else he’s written to my Amazon wishlist.

Great quote in an article at Gizmodo on the futility of enforcing copyright law:

According to blueprints from the Acme Company, the MPAA will next attempt to mount a large red rocket and light its fuse while aiming it at the place where the Malaysian movie pirates are eating strategically placed birdseed.

My Five Eight Favorite NPR Names

1. Cokie Roberts
2. Nina Totenberg
3. Mandalit del Barco
4. Korva Coleman
5. Nora Raum
6. Corey Flintoff
7. Liane Hansen
8. Sylvia Poggioli

Casino Royale with Cheese

100 Movies, 100 Quotes, 100 Numbers — This is a really, really terrific example of YouTubery.

Somehow I managed to forget to write about this wonderful book. I read Miles Harvey’s The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime over a year ago and it is brilliant. I’ve been thinking about it lately because of the awesome song “Maps” by the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs. You see, I have been in love with this song for months and I just can’t make any sense out of it. Let’s ignore the fact that I had heard the song a dozen times — and loved it — before I (a) knew the title and (b) realized that what she is singing in the chorus is “Maps / They don’t love you like I love you.” Maps? MAPS? What the hell does that mean?

So I’ve decided that she’s madly in love with this guy. She found a bunch of maps in his possession and now assumes he is going to leave her for someone else far away. The “they” in the song refers to the people at his destination. The “maps” is just an anguished exclamation. It works.

But a few days ago I started thinking that maybe she’d read this book. Maybe that’s what this song is. She’s madly in love with the main character in the book and is desperately trying to convince him to stop stealing maps and (re)turn his attention to her. The maps don’t love him. (He’s a little bit twisted.) Either way: Great song. Great book. I recommend them both.

She told me she worked in the morning and started to laugh. Funny. Very funny. Keep laughing, sweetheart. You just go to sleep giggling your pretty little head off while I am stuck in the freaking bathtub. How is that fair?