BillyStyle

I figured I’d post this just in case some poor soul out on the INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY comes across the same mind boggler that I heard today. I decided it was time to try to get into some Sufjan Stevens tunes, so I put on the Seven Swans album, and the first song seems familiar to me. Specifically, at 1:05 into the song, the melody during the lines “And I am joining all my thoughts to you” and “And I’m preparing every part for you” really sounded like some other song.

This was about 6:30 pm. I stopped the song and played that melody over and over in my head, but couldn’t figure out the song. Game two of the NBA Finals was starting, so I tried focusing on that, but that blasted melody kept repeating in my head. I figured that months would pass til one day I’d hear the mystery song and go “That’s it!” I lucked out.

I recalled the voice was a woman’s voice, and later, that it was probably Stevie Nicks. So I searched my computer for any of her songs, I only had a few Fleetwood Mac songs. I then went to Amazon and Last.fm to try to figure out what the song was by listening to 30 second previews.

After a half hour or so of this, I looked up Stevie Nicks in the Wikipedia and looked at her hit songs. She had way more than I realized, good job Stevie. I found Leather and Lace, and it sounded like that may have been the one I was looking for, but the song ended, leaving me hanging.

I finally went back to Amazon and played through some previews from Fleetwood Mac albums while I watched the game. I was into the game pretty good, then I actually got like a hot flash or something when I heard that melody again! That was weird, I think it was my body releasing tension knowing that it would now be able to sleep tonight. I went on to obtain the song somehow (yay INTARNET) and compared the two, sure enough, it is somewhat similar.

The two songs are these:

Sufjan Stevens: All The Trees Of The Fields Will Clap Their Hands
and
Fleetwood Mac: Landslide

The melody I’m referring to is 1:05 into the Sufjan song and 1:11 into the Fleetwood Mac song. Ah, thank you INTERNET!

I say that from the handful of geeks with whom I associate. Most of the geeks I’ve worked with or lived with rarely break out of their daily pattern. I had a roommate (still a good friend) who was so consistent with his food selections at restaurants, that I had his order memorized at most fast food joints in town. I was talking to another friend tonight about smoothies (I bet my one reader knows who this is!) because I know he has made a smoothie every day for at least the past two years. I recently bought me a cheap blender, so I figured I’d get good mixtures ideas from him. Turns out he has the same smoothie every day. I couldn’t do that, I get bored with the same old stuff.

I don’t know what it is, but I think there is some kind of tie with geekdom and fear of change. The geeks completely embrace change in the gaming and computing world, but in the real world, they like to feel safe by holding to the same pattern…or something. I’m pretty much just throwing out random ideas, but I think there’s definitely something going on here.

I’m a convert to geekdom, so I don’t naturally follow the flow of true geeks. Certain aspects I stick to easily, like fear of hot girls, the ability to sit and do nothing for hours as long as I’m staring at a monitor, and the love of shameless witty shows like Family Guy and The Office. But there are other things that I can’t quite grasp yet, like eating the same thing every day, thinking that PCs are superior to Macs or vice versa, and the fear of sunlight.

Anyhow, I’m tired, goodnight INTERNET!

Of late, I have noticed more and more of one certain problem many people have developed when using punctuation. I find the problem pretty annoying and really, I can’t think of any reason for it coming about. The problem is that people are inserting a space between the final word of a sentence and the corresponding punctuation mark to close the sentence.

For a good example of this horrible problem, here is a link to Mark Cuban’s fine example of my complaint:

Mark Cuban: Sure Makes you wonder how rumors get started…

Just twice today I have noticed the problem. The first time I recall seeing it was in a letter of appreciation from a customer that my employer received a few years back. The letter did quite the brutal hacking of the English language. I’m not sure there was one rule it didn’t break, so I didn’t worry that it would catch on. Unfortunately, in this world of instant messaging, text messaging, and following the mindless trends of pop culture, it has.

Stephen A. Smith is a fool. I’ll save a rant on him for another time. I just have a quick note to make about him.

Tonight while watching NBA Shootaround on ESPN, he made a remark which is rather typical of what he usually says. “Ron Artest got a lot of dog in him, literally and figuratively.” This reminded me of a funny story, but first I’ll wind this one up. John Saunders, the host of the show, replied a minute later, “Literally?” With some hesitation, Smith shamefully admitted “Well, not literally.” Saunders resolved “I was going to say, we might have to get some doctors involved here.”

Okay, now for my memory. I first learned the word literally when I was ten years old, in the fifth grade. A girl I knew said something that made me angry and I remember saying to her “You’re a pig, literally!” Later that day, I realized I was an idiot and decided to never misuse that word again, because it just abused the integrity of the word. Using it in that sense means there is no use for the word literal at all. Again, I was ten years old when I did what Stephen A. Smith did tonight on national television. We live in great times.

I’m weird. I realized around a year ago that I just don’t get offended by people. I am oft offended by their ignorance, stupidity, lack of tact, and other things along that line. The offended feeling I’m talking about is the kind that makes one harbor up feelings of personal sorrow or angst toward somebody due to something that person has said or done to you. I’m not too sure why that is the case. It isn’t something I’ve worked at and finally achieved. In fact, I can’t remember if I have ever been offended by someone. My best guess is because of my religious and family background. I am LDS and have a great family with great parents. One principle I was taught, but never thought too much about is to love my neighbor. Part of that was to be forgiving, realizing that everybody makes mistakes. I also never remember my parents outwardly displaying that they had been offended by anybody. I don’t know if these are the whole reasons, but they’re my best guesses at this moment.

Now, never being offended in this sense has its ups and downs. Ups, of course, are never having those feelings, being able to remain friends with anyone despite petty differences, and easily brushing aside differences that may have arisen just for a moment or short amount of time. The main down side is that I tend to expect others to act like me and take no personal offense to what I say or do. As you may notice in this blog, I am a very observant person. I like to pay close attention to how people react to certain things or situations, then discuss it with them. I do this more from a psychological standpoint than anything, but most people seem to think that I’m being very judgemental.

If I do something stupid, or something embarrassing, I’m usually the first person to talk about what in the world I was thinking and why I’m like that, I find it very interesting. Most people, I’ve found, are quite different than me. They like to avoid confronting any unusual things about themselves and just hope they go unnoticed. It’s something I have a hard time comprehending. This may go hand in hand with my indifference toward people’s opinion of me. I do care about what some people think about me, but for the majority of the masses, I really couldn’t care less about how they see me. I’ve heard other people proclaim to have the same outlook on life, but I seem to get in trouble for that attitude more than others I’ve seen.

Since I don’t care what most people think about me, I will say whatever is on my mind in many cases. Plenty of times this offends people, and I don’t really care that they are offended. I say I don’t care, because that is another of my weaknesses. I figure since I’ve never had a problem with being offended, others ought not as well. I obviously have some work to do on all this, I just thought it was an interesting trait, and have never met anyone else who shares the same attribute.

The past two days here in St. George, Utah have been pretty bizarre for this area. It has snowed for about half of yesterday and today. I’ve lived here for over five years and have seen it snow for probably a total of three hours in that time.

Anyway, I just looked out my window to see something very strange. I saw two standard balloons falling from the sky pretty rapidly. I’d never really thought of it before, but that’s just something you don’t see. It’s not uncommon to see balloons float up and out of sight. I imagine those come down somewhere, but I’ve never seen it happen, maybe they go into space and to some far galaxy, who knows.

So yeah, two balloons, falling fast. They both hit the ground so I went outside and looked up and saw probably 20 more balloons that go thousands of feet into the sky, probably going on past what is visible, all of them are falling toward the ground at a good rate, with a little breeze from the south. I figure they must have all escaped from a car dealership when it was a little warmer outside, gotten up pretty high, then cooled down significantly and started their decent.

I stayed outside for a while longer, just watching the balloons fall and bounce off of buildings and streets, parking lots, just rolling around. It was kind of a surreal moment.

This week I bought a new mattress/box spring set. I realized that this is the first time I’ve ever had a brand new mattress set. I’m 27 years old, pretty interesting I thought. I have spent most of my life on a twin sized mattress. The most recent was a twin from Deseret Industries thrift store that I got used from a roommate about four years back. It was getting pretty bad, if I sat on the mattress, the springs bottomed out.

I had a plan to get a king sized mattress soon, but a sweet deal came up. I work at a large furniture store. Recently, the mattress buyer for the store got a slew of mattresses from a new company to see if the store would begin carrying the brand. He decided not to carry the brand and sell the new unused mattresses to employees at a very good price, although still making $100 – $200 profit per mattress…naturally. I put my name on the list to get one of these, and last night I slept on it for the first time.

Now, this being the first time on a new mattress that I bought, I actually didn’t sleep too well. I feel great this morning, so I think the mattress is great, so here’s my theory. I think I didn’t sleep well because subconsciously, I was paying too much attention to how comfortable the mattress was, and didn’t let myself fall deeply asleep. Pretty interesting. I imagine over the next week or so, the novelty will wear thin and then I’ll get back into the normal swing of things.