Trilobite

I am really looking forward to the new Sufjan Stevens Songs For Christmas box set. I’d ask for it for Christmas, but I think I will buy it for myself before then. It’s going to be released on November 21st.

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately solving my Rubik’s Cube over and over again. I find it very relaxing, in the same sort of way that I imagine people who like knitting find knitting relaxing. My best time so far is 1:46, but I think I can get a lot faster than that. Here’s a video I made.

It seems that Technocrati has started indexing my blog. I don’t really know anything about Technocrati, but I guess this must mean I’ve been sucked in the blogosphere. And now I get 20 or 30 spammy comments per day. I’m getting tired of deleting them all so from now on you’ll have to register before you can post comments. Sorry.

In case you haven’t heard, we only have 8 planets in our solar system now. I drew a cartoon. The three “speaking characters” are Pluto, 2003 UB₃₁₃ (aka Xena), and Ceres.

Until last week Xena was considered to be our tenth planet. Ceres was the first asteroid discovered and was classified as a planet for about 50 years until astronomers realized there were lots of other asteroids in the asteroid belt. Pluto and Xena are both in the Kuiper belt. I guess it’s the same thing.

I still remember the mnemonic I used to remember the order of the nine planets. My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas.

Thank you everybody for being nice to me. I think I was just having a bad day on Sunday. I’m not really going to stop blogging.

Random news: Sarah Harmer tickets are going on sale Friday morning! I finally got some movie editing software working on my computer (thanks, Peter) and I finished making a short video. I bought a rice cooker and a big jar of sambal today.

I’m going to stop posting stuff here for a while. Sorry, but I’m just not enjoying it right now.

I bought a few Sufjan Stevens CDs today, but I couldn’t find one that I really wanted. I’ll look for it in the States (where I am going tomorrow). Here are some more links: wikipedia, nine live songs, farm video, night zombies (great song, it’s better on the cd), helicopter footage (20MB h264 QuickTime video).

Today I went to the Sound Works to buy a tuning fork or a pitch pipe or something. I didn’t really know what I wanted, but I was sick of booting up my computer and playing the cd that came with my lesson book every time I wanted to tune my guitar. They were sold out of everything but electronic tuners, and for some reason I didn’t want to buy one of those. Maybe I’m just being a Luddite, but I figured after 10 years of playing musical instruments when I was a kid I shouldn’t need a machine to tell me I was a bit flat. Now that I think of it, maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.

Anyway, I ended up buying a harmonica. It’s a diatonic harmonica in the key of E, and blowing into the first hole plays the same E as the lowest guitar string, so I am very happy with it. It only cost $9 and has a couple of air leaks in it, but at least it plays the one note I want! Maybe I will try doing a Neil Young impersonation with it one day…

By the way, harmonicas are insane instruments.

Wow. Somebody on MySpace just told me about Sufjan Stevens, and I am amazed at how much I like his music. I just downloaded 10 or so songs from the Gnutella Network and love them all. Listen to this one. I’m going to have to buy all of his CD’s now.

Here’s a video of me playing Ode To Joy on the guitar. That was a couple days ago, and I’m better than that now. I’ve learned the notes on the E, B, G, and D strings so far and I’ll get started on my first chords later tonight or tomorrow. Note: Gustavo Guerra cut his hair to look like me. 😉