Some state-of-the-blog notes:

1) I'm about to leave for a trip to the UK. I will leave at midnight Friday and get back Wednesday evening, probably. So if anyone in Oxford (Sat & Sun) or London (Mon-Wed) wants to get together, drop me a line before I leave and we can try and work something out. (No Belgium this trip, sorry Mwanji!)

2) I would love to get some guest-bloggers in here in the meantime, so if you're interested, let me know in the comment box or via e-mail and we'll see what's up. Anyone interested? Jesse? Jason? Dad? Chris? Tim? Brooks? Casper? Beau? (har.) Gooblar? Hunter? Someone else? The blog currently gets over 200 visitors a day, so this could be a good opportunity. Or a crappy one, who's to say. Posts welcome on whatever.

3) You have perhaps noticed that the posting volume has gone down lately. For once, this is not due to my own laziness, but to external factors that have made it very difficult to post here. Combined with the various things I need to do to get ready to leave on vacation, I think I'm going to put a hold on the ol' blog for the time being. This is very frustrating, as I have three fairly major posts to make in addition to any Blueberry Boat posts, but that's how it's gotta be for now. Hopefully everything will ease up in a bit, and I promise the BB series will come to completion, but this is going to have to take a backseat for a week or so. I will still get a few posts up on guestblogger week at Fluxblog, though.

posted by Mike B. at 11:22 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, August 03, 2004

Two little things about two of the usual suspects:

- The Scissor Sisters album was released last week, and for some reason it doesn't have any bonus tracks, which is really annoying. Rapture-syndrome ahoy, I worry. It's nice to pretend like we all didn't get the album off Soulseek a friggin' year ago, but seriously record company, give me the slightest impetus to buy it and I will. This, however, is not doing it.

- The new Fiery Furnaces single seems to have made its way to the US now, and can be picked up in Virgin for $4 (and less elsewhere I'm sure). It's also on a new comp entitled The Rough Trade Field Guide to Music, which title may or may not be a deliberate ILM reference. The comp also includes the single version of "Tropical Ice-Land" as well as tracks by the decent Art Brut, some Pete-from-the-Libertines side/main project called Wolfman, Hal, Eastern Lane, Aberfeldy, and "Cornershop presents Bubbley Kaur." Having not read the NME much lately, I'm a little mystified to who some of these folks are. At any rate, it's $9, and has been good so far.

posted by Mike B. at 3:17 PM 0 comments

Monday, August 02, 2004

Krist Novoselic has written a book. It is called Of Grunge & Government: Let's Fix This Broken Democracy! It is described as follows: "One part memoir, one part political platform." This is kind of exciting. You can read the first chapter here.

posted by Mike B. at 6:20 PM 0 comments

I was just on hold at a fairly major music publishing company and the music was, swear to god, the audio portion of what sounded like an Arnold Schwarzenegger workout tape. And I think the background music was Styx. I was on hold for about 2 minutes and when they finally got back to me I was sort of shell-shocked.

posted by Mike B. at 2:19 PM 0 comments

Sunday, August 01, 2004

Do you need a Ghostface History Lesson? Clicky clicky little ricky.

Do you want a Spider Man Guitar with real animal sounds such as Frog, Duck, and Horse? Also clicky.

posted by Mike B. at 10:46 AM 0 comments