Tom Kim

Good Weather for Airstrikes has gotten around to posting his annual list of favorite music videos. Clog your bandwidth you gluttons.

And then give back. Soul Sides has posted a tutorial on digitizing songs from vinyl.

I have a fascination with magic and illusion. No, I don’t know any tricks — I just love watching a good performance.

One of the more charming personalities on YouTube is Mad V, an amateur magician who posted up several short videos of his magic illusions which started building a cult-following. Enough of a cult-following to embolden him to retire his YouTube career and pursue a professional career in magic. Several others have tried to imitate his shtick, but none have captured the deftness of his body language and the smart pairing of music to his silent routines.

This post provides a bit more background and includes an embedded video that was Mad V’s farewell to his YouTube fans — a compilation of several tricks. You can see also see all of Mad V’s videos here.

Yeah, yeah, you’ve already heard Of Montreal’s cover of David Bowie’s “Moonage Daydream”. But now you want to hear what else they’ve covered. Go to Cable & Tweed for a sample.

Ha ha made you look.

Dana made bubble tea for me. She loves me, you know.

Pop Matters has a pretty entertaining article anatomizing the “Hoots, Hollers, and Barbaric Yawps” found in pop music.

So entertaining, in fact, that Fuel for Friends has decided to post some songs featuring her favorite yelps.

Sorry, Ink, but I had to post this e-mail from you:

hey -

i just found a huge glass jar of kimchi in the back of my fridge!!!! is it from you guys? it’s glass, has a white screw top on it, and is filled with cabbage kimchi on top, and has these dense tuber-like things at the bottom that are hard and crunchy.

for some reason — i don’t remember it. but it must be mine as i doubt my roommate would have a huge jar of kimchi in there. is it from you guys? since i’m not sure how long it’s been there for — does kimchi ever go bad? can i still eat it?

p.s. it may be a bit late for this email as i’ve already had a few bites of it.

Okay, what’s the deal? Winter is usually when I pack on the pounds, but the scale is staying the same these days. Last night I ate marshmallows stuffed with chocolate and raspberries, and it seems I actually lost weight overnight! Normally I don’t obsess over my fluctuations in weight, but I’ve been weighing myself every morning just to witness this strange phenomenon.

I bet it’s because my muscles are atrophying.

This sounds like fun (?)

Here’s the idea: 12 local bands. 12 songs. 1 CD of Philadelphia music. So if you’re a guitar-picking, drum-beating, ivory-tickling, record-scratching, horn-blowing musician in the greater Philadelphia area, click here and submit up to two songs between December 1st and January 31st. We’ll select 12 tracks for a compilation CD to be distributed all over Philadelphia! We’ll also pick the best 6 bands to battle it out at the Philly Sound Clash at World Café Live on February 22nd, 2007. The best band wins the Grand Prize! So, for all of you non-musician types, this is where you come in. Rock out to Philly’s best local music, have some fun and enjoy the show.

I dunno. Sounds cool. Did they have to do it through MySpace though?

A good showing at the WordPress/Blogger Meetup yesterday. It even seems Colin sent a proxy (cough cough).

Good conversation overall, but I managed to mine a few golden tips for my blog-implementation efforts at my school.

• Feedburner, by purchasing BlogBeat stats, has a blog statistics service that’s both robust and easy to use. A good choice for most over Google Analytics.
• Viddler is a new video upload and sharing site that allows bigger uploads and time frame commenting. It’s cleaner, it’s more open, and it’s gearing to be mash-able.
• Some of the most influential members of the WordPress community are starting over with a next-generation blog software project called Habari. I’m happy here with this blog at WordPress.com, but I can see how I’ll want to consider this to replace WordPress MU at my school. Can’t wait for the first formal release.

Here’s one for you 20/20 folks at PC. The Leonard Lopate show at WNYC has just aired a pretty interesting water-themed show that you can download. The Puget Sound tastes like cinnamon? Purell is polluting our water? New York expatriates buy bottled New York tap water? Alarming.