As I mentioned earlier, most of the gifts AngelA and I got for each other this Christmas were things that we both could use. One of the items exchanged was a record player, or “turntable” for those of you who insist on saying “vinyl”. I’ve never had a record player before, but I now have a way to play the three records I bought in 1992 as part of some weird plan. I’m sitting back with the sounds of Talking Heads’ Speaking in Tongues, and it’s all good.
Earlier I played half of a George Carlin comedy album from 1975. It’s still very funny, but every once in awhile I get caught with a time zone issue. He was talking about radios, and how large radios show the full frequencies (600, 700 AM etc), but small radios just show 6, 7, 8… He was halfway through the material before I remembered that they didn’t have digital radios back then, and that became funnier than the joke for a bit.
I also saw Rock Star a few days ago, where Mark Wahlberg plays the lead singer in a “tribute band” who gets recruited to be the frontman for the band he’s covering. To tie this back to the last paragraph, why aren’t there any tribute comedians? The performances probably wouldn’t be as funny as the acts that they copy, but the whole idea would be at least a little amusing, or at least it might make musicians rethink covering songs.
Back from music to movies: just saw Die Hard 3: We’re Still Here on TV. As I’m a lousy reviewer (see previous reviews on this site such as “it was good”, “I liked this”, and the ever popular “this was really good”), I’ll just make two comments: 1) “edited for television” can make an action movie a little hard to follow, but it brings new phrases into my vocabulary such as “melon farmer”, and 2) After seeing the previews for Joe Millionaire, I’m really glad I’m cancelling cable in a week or so.
Well, I just had to flip the record (“vinyl”, sorry), which does make it a little less convenient than the 300 disc CD player that the turntable is sitting on, but I’m still suspecting the CD player of scratching all my CDs, so they’re still even. If nothing else, it’s another thing to collect and obsess over, and goodness knows I’m in need of more of those.
Music, as mentioned: All of Talking Heads’ Speaking in Tongues.