Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Regarding my standards:

Firstly, let me say that yogurt plus granola plus banana slices equals a culinary masterpiece. This almost counts as "cooking" for me. Isn't that sad?


Secondly, Miley-the-drama-queen was itching for a walk at 1:30 after I took her at 9:30, so in order to tide her over until her 4pm walk, I took her up the street to the pond. The reason any of this is worthy of note is that there were frog eggs in the water. Pretty awesome. They weren't placed extremely well--clumped around a random stick that was/is stuck into the muck* at the bottom--but still. Awesome. Miley splashed past it and disturbed a frog, actually. I don't think that amphibians particularly guard their eggs, so maybe it was just a random little guy/girl hanging around, but still. Cool.




EDIT: My BestBuy stuff came in the mail! NEW CDS FTW. I haven't bought an album in ages, so it's pretty exciting. It's pretty exciting especially because of the new OkGo cd chillin in the mailer envelope. Want to know what's in the liner notes? Graphs. They did an analysis of the cd and another of the book after which it is named, and presented graphs on comparative sentence length, syllables, parts of speech, and words in common, in that order. From a latter page of the notes:

"The diagrams on pages 2-7 compare the album's lyrics to an excerpt of the book it is named after, General A.J. Pleasonton's The Influence of the Blue Ray of the Sunlight and of the Blue Color of the Sky, published in 1876 by Claxton, Remsen & Haffelfinger, Philadelphia. The graphs on page 8 compare the lyrics with the entirety of Pleasonton's text."

Have I mentioned that this band is great?


Even more intense:

"The front cover displays themes common to the book and the album. Each line represents a sentence, with the album's lyrics (not including the bonus tracks) fanning to the left and the text of the book fanning to the right. Each theme is represented by a color. For sentences dealing with multiple themes, the colors are added together as light is...such that each theme's color both lightens and tints the resultant line."

Themes:
1. Unfounded or Wildly Broad Claims
2. Wonderment
3. Causality/Unavoidable Consequences/ Compelled Behavior
4. Reference to an Individual, or Direct Address to/from One
5. Anecdotal or Expository Context
6. Figuring It All Out
7. Unanswerable/Impossible/Rhetorical Questions
8.  Light/Optics/Color
9. Fire/Combustion/Chemical/Physical Reactions
10. Attraction/Repulsion
11. Things That, in Retrospect, Proved to be Wrong
12. Plants and Animals/Animal Behavior
13. The Sky or Things Falling From It [As I typed this, I heard "and now the sky is falling" play through my speakers. Ha.]
14. Women
15. Optimism/Hope
16. Dissatisfaction
17. Bodies/Body Parts/Bodily Function
18. God/Faith
19. Corruscation
20. Death
21. Magic
22. Global Mechanics
23. Confusion/Curiosity
24. Pride
25. Prescriptions for a Better World

Theme visualization:





























*That "stick stuck muck" thing was entirely unintentional. I just couldn't find a more satisfactory way to word it.

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