Yeaaaaaaaah!

anyways one of terminology we have coined to talk about music is "Knee Music" which is derived from the fact that album covers that show a person's knees tend to sound the same as each other. It's kind of a sleepy, grungy indie folk pop sound with youthful-sounding, vocals that affect a candid and vulnerable feeling.

or anyway we found multiple album covers with knees in quick succession, and they all sounded the same, hence "Knee Music"

For a while, his method was slightly different, instead choosing a random genre and listening to it until he found a song from that genre that he liked.

The challenge in this is that even if a song isn't particularly pleasant to listen to, novelty will increase the rating, because it's something interesting we haven't heard before. So, it's incredibly difficult for a song to get the lowest rating, because a song that is outstandingly bad has something different about it to make it bad, which paradoxically makes it good.

We had a very hard time rating this song, Burial Etiquette- Ivy Staircase in Ruin. We both disliked it, but we had never disliked a song in this way. The harsh vocals are so far to the background and relatively quiet that it's like, a kind of generic song but there's a guy screaming incoherently somewhere in the next room

The genre is Funk, so we looked into funk some more, but it turns out that funk is not very popular anymore and it was popular mostly in the 1970s.

Only one other random song we rated with a 7, which is Thrailkill- Cattywampus.

Benny Bleu- Five Miles from Town

(Regarding the song Burial Etiquette- Ivy Staircase in Ruin)

MR. SPIRO: Do you give these lectures at all of your depositions? MR. BANKSTON: I do, and you can watch them.

is ESPECIALLY hilarious to me having listened to multiple depositions Mark has had to take in the Sandy Hook case, where he has needed to lecture EVERY. SINGLE. ATTORNEY. at some point in the case about how they're violating Texas Rule XYZ, because they all, to a one, did something seriously ethically questionable during the deposition.

For personal context, before I went to the '98 Burning Man festival, one of the things I'd read from a couple different journalists was that "everybody" runs around naked. Which, fine by me, I'd already spent a lot of time in clothing-optional spaces, I'm not fanatic about it but it's nice.

So I got there early and set up a public shade structure on one of Black Rock City's main roads and spent most of each afternoon just watching the crowds go by. I don't remember seeing more than one actually naked person the whole week. I think a topless woman passed by my intersection maybe every half an hour, sometimes once an hour. So why in the hell were people, normally pretty smart and observant writers, coming away with the impression that everybody was naked?

Then I remembered an unrelated passage from Joel Garreau's great book about the history of the outer-ring suburbs, Edge City. Mall developers told him flat-out that they tried to keep the crowds in their malls less than 5% black. Not because they themselves were racist, but because they had determined, experimentally, that if more than 5% of the people in the mall are black, the median white shopper will wrongly describe the mall as at least half black, as mostly black. And not a few of them would describe it, at 6% black, as a mall where "only black people go." Why?

Because, emotionally, they were still upset over the last one when the next one came into view.