best albums of '07.

I'll put together my top ten fave albums from '07. as always, not all of these albums were RELEASED in '07... I'm usually doing pretty good if I find the bandwagon within eighteen months of everyone else, so cut me some slack.

20. silversun pickups - carnavas
19. gnarls barkley - st elsewhere
18. iron & wine - the shepherd's dog
17. hellogoodbye - zombies! aliens! vampires! dinosaurs!
16. the kaiser chiefs - yours truly, angry mob
15. band of horses - cease to begin
14. tegan & sara - the con
13. lily allen - alright, still
12. muse - black holes and revelations
11. feist - the reminder
10. the arctic monkeys - favourite worst nightmare
9. rilo kiley - under the black light
8. the thrills - teenager
7. bloc party - weekend in the city
6. the weakerthans - reunion tour
5. modest mouse - we were dead before the ship even sank
4. the arcade fire - neon bible
3. the shins - wincing the night away
2. peter bjorn & john - writer's blocks
1. the fratellis - costello music

honorable mentions - albums downloaded but not purchased (yet):
battles - mirrored
rogue wave - asleep at heaven's gate
wilco - sky blue sky

albums I plan to look into based on hype (ie, check next year's list):
lcd sound system - sound of silver
of montreal - hissing fauna, are you the destroyer?

I really didn't see enough movies this year to make a comprehensive list, even a top ten. and seeing as there were gaping holes in what I managed to see, a top five would probably be insulting... so that just won't happen this year.

shitty customer service, redux.

we dediced to use some of our xmas monies to buy a new digital camera. our old one is crap, and it's quite bulky. miyuki wanted something she could keep in her purse. I did some research, asked some friends, and decided to get a canon powershot.

the initial reviews I'd read lead me to think I wanted the G9. it has a ton of professional quality features and was supposed to be sturdily built. it was also in our price range, albeit at the high end of it. the only place local that had it was circuit shitty in lynnwood. so I drove up there last night. their website said they had it in stock (as well as several other powershots). I stood around for fifteen minutes waiting for someone to help me. during that time, I noticed how HUGE the G9 was, and called miyuki to ask about the alternatives. the SD950IS is a sexy camera, with a sleek titanium body, but the performance wasn't as good as the SD870IS. given that shutter speed and lag was my primary concern, I opted for the SD870. it's not as durable or pretty, but it's supposed to perform better. I told them I wanted one. and I wanted it at the website price of $300, not the sticker price of $350 (the G9 was $430 on the website, $500 in the store). I asked them why they charged more online, when they offered in-store pickup, and they couldn't tell me other than "the website is corporate, and they don't update it as often"... turns out the website also lied. the only powershot they had in stock was the SD750, which didn't have image stabilization. when I asked why I just drove half an hour based on their website's false information, I got the same "corporate" line of bullshit...

so I drove across the street to best buy. within thirty seconds, someone asked if they could help me. I picked up the display SD870IS and was amzed that it had a charged battery and I was able to take some practice shots (none of the displays at circuit shitty worked). I asked about availability, they had one left after selling two that day. I asked about the $350 price tag, and mentioned the aforementioned $300 price on their competitor's website. they said they couldn't match web deals, but she asked her boss and they agreed to knock 10% off. I asked for $50 off, they gave me $35 off. for five seconds of haggling. I'll take it. they didn't give me a bunch of crap about not buying the warranty or accessories, either. I gotta say, for an evil box store chain, best buy ain't bad. and these seems awfully similar to my record store experiences the night before... I used to shop exclusively at circuit city, often blowing as much as $100 a month on CDs and gadgets there when I was living at my parents and had disposable income. I probably bought 200 CDs there in a two year span. I haven't bought anything there in years. I've been in several times, and always walked out empty handed. yet best buy gets a lot of my business. sure, their inventory can't rival amazon or other online stores for the obscure and foreign stuff, but they've got great stock of current and new release type stuff. I don't mind popping in there to grab a DVD I want immediately.

we also stopped at easy street last night. dropped about $75 there, money I had planned to drop at sonic boom. they had at least fifteen copies of the new band of horses. arctic monkeys was $14, not $17. I picked up that lily allen cd (I have a weak spot for eurotrash, okay?) and saw that the mighty mighty bosstones had a new album, grabbed it since it was only $9. miyuki picked ip via audio and jens lekman. we're now one purchase away from another free CD. and when the cashier asked if I found everything okay, I gave him the nutshell blog rant from yesterday and complimented his store on always having what I was looking for, mentioning it was worth the extra effort of getting there. he was gracious about it, and even apologetic for sonic boom which was surprising. knowing how rarely we get those kind of comments at my work, I thought it was important to pass along the feedback, even if it didn't go any higher than him. I'd certainly hope he mentions it to his superiors tho.

so now we have plenty of new music for our trip to canada this weekend, and we have a nice new digital camera to take some pictures at that hockey game tonight. yay! consumerism!

I don't know why I even bother...

I wanted to pick up a couple cds tonight. I've heard both arctic monkeys and band of horses on the radio lately, liked what I've heard and have read tons of praise for both bands as well, so I thought I'd check them out. better late than never, right?

there's a record store about three blocks from our apartment called sonic boom. over the past five years, I've probably dropped $500 there. hell, my first trip into the store cost me about two hundred, but that was my first volley towards replenishing a divorce depleted music library. I don't think we've bought anything there in at least a year. and it's not for lack of trying. they just suck ass.

see, there's this other record store called easy street that's about ten minutes from here. we drive home from it every day from work. it's a semi-regular tuesday tradition for the two of us to stop in there, pick up some new releases and a slice of pie at pagliacci across the street. easy street is amazing. it has everything. it's generally cheaper than sonic boom (usually by $1-$4 per cd), they have 10x the used selection, and they offer a frequent buyer card (buy fifteen, get one free). we've redeemed at least four free cds in the past couple years... hell, they even have free parking, which is a premium on queen anne. my biggest beef with them is they don't count dvds on their frequent buyer stamp cards, but that's fairly minor.

but most importantly, they actually stock the music their target demographic is shopping for. sure, they have a small amount of pop40 crap at ridiculous prices (does anyone actually pay $18 for britney spears?), but most of their indie stuff is under $14, and it's ALWAYS in stock. there has literally been ONE time I've gone in there and been turned away (tv on the radio - return to cookie mountian). but when I asked, they were very apologetic and gave me a $2 off voucher for my next trip in, when they had it in stock.

I have NEVER received that courtesy from sonic boom. and I don't really care. 95% of my business goes to easy street anyway, so I figure I just try to throw sonic boom a bone every now and then. we stopped in there for the juno soundtrack after seeing the movie, but were turned away because it hadn't been released yet, fair enough. but we've tried at least a half dozen times and always been turned away. they didn't have band of horses tonight, despite it being #2 on their best sellers for last week. in fact, about 60% of their "top sellers" rack was empty. maybe they didn't get their shipment because of the holiday... but it's REALLY shitty business practice to allow yourself to run out of your best selling product, especially around the holidays. right now, their target demographic is looking to spend ill-gotten xmas monies on hipster music, and they can't find it. that kind of shit will drive customers away like you wouldn't believe. they did have arctic monkeys, but it was $17. I bet it's $14 at easy street. I nearly picked up a lily allen cd for $12, but decided against it.

I'm going to punish sonic boom for their poor business practices. and if they go out of business, I won't feel bad. I'm not going to even bother trying to give them my money anymore. they obviously don't want it very badly.

xmas loot.

so my family does things a bit weird. we did our xmas stuff on xmas eve. had a nice ham, got the family together and then we opened all of our gifts. this is partially because of various custody issues with the nephew(s), partly the logistics of getting everyone together, and mostly just because we're horrible people. it started when I was a kid as a means of insuring everyone slept in til a reasonable hour (I used to make the argument that 2am was technically xmas morning, etc), the the idea of opening at least some gifts xmas eve dates back to my mom's childhood.

for the past several years, the loot has consisted of books and movies, thanks to my mom's employment at barnes and noble. this year was no different. it was a nice little haul.

the dvds...

studio 60 - complete series
red dwarf VII
red dwarf VIII (finally completing my set on dvd, making the vhs obsolete)
slither
the office - season 2
the office - season 3
elizabethtown (I think I'm the only person on earth who liked this flick)
300

and the books...

non campus mentis - world history according to college students (both the funniest and most depressing read I've ever had - simultaneously)
world war z by max brooks (follow up to zombie survival guide)
made in america - an informal history of the english language in the US) by bill bryson
only revolutions by mark z danielewski (poe's brother, author of "house of leaves")
lamb - the gospel according to biff, christ's childhood pal by christopher moore

I'm happy. I have several days worth of entertainment in both mediums. it'll keep me busy. I just need to make time to read more often, I've been really awful the past few years.

this is disturbing...

Uninsured cancer patients more likely to die

am I the only one who thinks this is a ridiculous thing to study? cancer is exactly something that you can cure with bedrest and a bowl of chicken noodle soup. chemo and radiation therapy, to say nothing of invasive surgeries to remove tumours, are incredibly expensive. odds are pretty good if you don't have insurance, you don't have fat stacks of cash lying around either.

so gee, if you don't have insurance and can't pay for treatment, you mean you're more likely to die of cancer? I'd be curious to see how strong the correlation is between "not getting treatment" and "not surviving" is...

jesus christ, people are stupid... where do I sign up to get in on that government grant to study whether or not water is wet?

it seems to me that fixing the health care system could be better suited by spending money on things that aren't blatantly obvious. I still contend that insurance companies are WHY the health care industry is so fucked up. if they weren't constantly fucking with the prices, maybe people could actually afford to pay for procedures themselves. or heaven forbid our government actually subsidise health care, like they do in civilised countries...

but hey, at least c-89 is playing "tarzan boy" for the second time this morning.

I love bizarre love thursday.

thursday mornings are my fave morning of the week. every thursday from 7-9, c-89 plays the "save the wave" mix, formally known as bizarre love thursday (a much better name). you can stream this anywhere in the world, as I do every thursday morning (we get crap reception in our concrete prison here at work).

so far, I've heard the following:

the icicle works - birds fly (whisper to a scream)
new order - blue monday
baltimora - tarzan boy
thomas dolby - she blinded me with science
men without hats - the safety dance
depeche mode - route 66

seriously, it doesn't get any better than this.I wish c-89 did this 24/7...

newsflash: redneck teen pregnant! father is unknown, cousins being questioned...

it's a sad state of affairs when this is a top news story on yahoo.

those spearseses must be kicking themselves about now. they just watched their SECOND meal ticket fuck up its life and likely derail a lucrative career in the entertainent industry. most families don't get ONE meal ticket child to take advantage of, and they've managed to fuck up two of them.

it's a sad day when billy ray cyrus seems like a swell example of how to raise a kid.

I guess I just have to wonder why, when you have a teenage daughter who is raking in millions of dollars in tv, music, movies, etc, you let her go out and get knocked up. wouldn't you recognise that her value is pretty much optimal when she appears pure and chaste and therefore can be looked up to by stupid little girls everywhere? y'know, something like a role model.

not to say juno wasn't an awesome movie or anything. I'm just saying that's not exactly the role model most parents look to for their young daughters. if I was those spearses, and I recognised the cash cow I had in that little tramp, I would totally lock her away in a dungeon when she wasn't acting on tv. and build a moat.

it's not like she's going to have a "normal" life in showbiz anyway. look at big sis, after all! but I guess she's going to be "normal" after all... and unwed teen mother in the deep south... yeah, that sounds pretty typical. especially if it turns out the father is also a not-so-distant relation...

I promise to only use my powers for truth and justice...

sometimes I wish I could turn off my survival instinct. right after I dropped you off, I nearly got into a car accident. as I was turning from stewart onto fifth (that little triangle @ westlake), there were two lanes turning. there was a bus in the center lane, so I got in the far left lane. there was a brand new silver maserati behind the bus, and I could just tell he was going to cut me off.

he did. sort of. problem was, he wasn't in FRONT of me at the time. he was beside me. I had to slam on my brakes and lay on the horn. fucker didn't even flinch, he just kept going.

I'm really wishing I would have just let him plow into me. our car is a piece of shit anyway, and the pleasure of knowing he fucked up his cherry italian sports car, AND he would have been 100% in the wrong, likely would have offset the pain in the ass of getting my car fixed.

stupid survival instinct. I was even doing the calculations in my head right before it happened, too. I knew it was going to happen, and I chose to prevent it. and the fucker goes off scot-free without any consequences for being a complete douchebag.

this is why I need the power to give people brain cancer.

I don't get it...

we were in canada over the weekend, and as we were driving home, I tried to get a traffic report to know what we were in for at the border. it can vary, seemingly randomly, from ten minutes to several hours on a sunday night. I generally like to know how pissed off I'll be before I actually get there.

problem was, there was no traffic report. the news station was supposed to do it every ten minutes, but there was non-stop coverage of a verdict in the robert pickton case. I had heard about this earlier in the day, as it was all over the news.

for those unaware, pickton is a pig farmer and serial killer rivaling washington's green river killer. he focused mainly on prostitutes, probably believing they wouldn't be missed or something. he's most known in canada for disposing of the bodies by putting them through a meat grinder and allegedly into sausages he then served to neighbours. it's a notorious case in canada, and the investigation has gone on for years. he was on trial for the first six murders, with twenty more charges queued up, and possibly twice as many unsolved murders with charges yet to be filed.

so as I'm waiting for the damn traffic report, I'm stuck listening to a really boring press release, in both english and french, as they recount just how hard they've worked and how much evidence they've collected. if you stack the boxes on top of each other, it's taller than the space needle. if you lined up the paperwork end to end, it would reach from vancouver to revelstoke. why the police have been spending time quantifying their efforts in such ridiculous means is beyond me... but then they cut to public reactions, including victims families, to the guilty verdicts in the first six cases.

one woman mentioned how it was good for the families of those six victims, but the rest of them still had to wait for justice.

what?

the guy is in jail. he's going to stay there for a long time (and likely get killed there, as serial killers often do). there will likely be years of further trials as they proceed with more charges. the guy is probably never going to get out of jail.

so why does it matter that he's in jail right now because he killed someone OTHER than YOUR daughter? the dude is in jail. he's being punished. they'll get to the rest of the counts eventually. do we really need to divide up his time served based on some arbitrary victim assignment? "these first ten years are for tiffany, the next ten are for susan, etc"... what about those who get tried last? surely the guy isn't going to live to be 300, he's going to be dead long before THOSE sentences come into play. does that mean those women's families won't get to feel justice has been served for them, since he didn't rot in jail for THEIR sentences?

it just seems like a really stupid, almost selfish way of looking at the case. the guy is in jail. you have your closure. even if another charge is never laid, he'll never see life outside those bars ever again. no parole board would ever let him out, and he's already facing six 10-year terms for second degree murder.

I really don't understand people.

I can't help but appreciate the irony...

as pretty much everyone in north america has likely heard by now, a good chunk of western washington has been underwater for the past week or so. it's so bad that a twenty mile stretch of interstate-5 (the main thoroughfare between the canadian and mexican borders along the west coast) is closed south of olympia. this is really the ONLY way to get between seattle and portland, short of a 300 mile detour through eastern washington. it's some serious shit.

this stretch of highway is used by tens of thousands of vehicles each day, and I think I read somewhere that it's costing the local economy four million dollars a day in lost revenues, to say nothing of all of the damage to homes, buildings and infrastructure...

the good news is, they're getting close to re-opening the freeway. the flooding is down to four feet (it crested around twenty feet!) and they hope to have it opened up again by tomorrow. the governor (christine gregoire) has been onhand to oversee the repairs and all that poop, but has been hesitant to dip into the budget surplus to cover the repairs. I saw this in a seattle-pi article and had to chuckle...

At the briefing, Gregoire said she hopes to do any needed work without touching the state's rainy day fund, which currently holds about $450 million.

"I'd like to keep the rainy day fund there and intact," she said.

if this isn't the very definition of need for a RAINY DAY FUND, I don't know what the hell is...

I'm famous on the interwebs!

my fifteen seconds of fame

a first-name only mention in a news post on a fairly popular webcomic... unless I go out of my way to tell people that "good buddy christian" in seattle is ME, no one would ever know.

hence, I'm telling both of my readers. woot!

all for scanning a comic out of the PI and emailing it off... seems kinda weird that mr. rstevens didn't know for sure that his work was being used in a newspaper, but what do I know?

this is retarded.

Sperm donor liable for child support, judge rules

this has got to be about the stupidest thing I've seen in a long time. I don't even know where to begin.

the kid has two parents, a lesbian couple. the kid was raised with two moms. he knew he had a father, and had even had contact over the years. the guy was nice enough to send birthday cards and crap like that. he was doing what he thought was right. it could be argued the kid is better off knowing who his father was, even if he didn't know the guy personally. a sense of familial history, knowing where you came from and all that, to say nothing of having an accurate genetic background when it comes to medical problems down the road.

but now that he's eighteen, and ready for college, evidently his moms didn't want to pony up the bill? that's a fucking joke. it flies in the face of gay rights when it comes to rearing children, it flies in the face of feminism by showing that these two women DO need a man for something, and it just flies in the face of common sense.

the guy donated sperm. he had nothing to do with the kid otherwise. he didn't get to make decisions on how the kid was raised, probably didn't get a say in the kid moving across the country, and essentially had no rights as a parent for the first eighteen years of the kid's life. so why should he have to fork over tens of thousands of dollars to pay for this kid's college education? that's utter horseshit. the relationship between father and son consisted of a damn zygote.

the women that are perpetuating this strongarm tactic, this blatant robbery, should have their damn kid taken away. they're horrible human beings, and don't deserve the privilege of warping a young mind.

pinched nerves, snow and idiots.

somehow I woke up friday morning and couldn't move my head. my neck had seized up on the left side, I wouldn't turn my head or anything. I tried going to work, but only made it through half a day before I had to some home and try to sleep it off. I took a bunch of muscle relaxers left over from the last time my back went out, and they helped a bit. I even went into the chiropractor, but he didn't have any witch doctor trips to fix it. he adjusted in a couple times and said I'd feel "about 75% tomorrow"... we even missed out on a friend's birthday party because I couldn't go out...

turns out he was right. it still hurt like hell yesterday, but at least it had stretched enough that I could turn y head, albeit in pain. since we were driving to canada, it's generally a good thing when you can turn to check your blind spots. unfortunately, we didn't make it to canada.

mother nature can be a cruel bitch. it started snowing around burlington. no worries, I slowed down to about forty mph and kept going. unfortunately, other people in washington don't know how to drive in the snow. we watched a big stupid looking SUV (chevy avalanche, I think) spin about 540 degrees and end up with its back wheels in the ditch. it was going about twenty mph at the time, and was on a straightaway. I'm still not sure about the physics of that. another ten minutes of driving resulted in six more cars in ditches. mind you, this was with less than an inch of snow on the ground. at that point, I decided it wasn't worth the trip. at the rate we going, it would take another four to five hours to get there (we were an hour away at normal speeds) and I didn't want to risk some moron crashing into me. we turned around and came home. I spent three hours at les schwab getting my snow tires put on, so we'll be prepared for the trip next weekend v2.0, and for our trip south at xmas. of course the snow is all gone today. it's not supposed to snow again for while... but paying $50 to put the snow tires on seemed like a worthy investment, just in case.

my neck still hurts today, but it's better than yesterday, and the pain is pretty much bearable. I'm hoping by tomorrow it's completely healed itself.

now we just need to decide what to do today. I think miyuki just plans to play super mario galaxy all day.