The Birds! The Birds!

Baby Seagulls - precious...but deadly

My office has had a ton of visitors lately. Due to the presence of some baby Seagulls, their parents, extended family, friends, enemies, and pretty much any other Seagull in Anchorage is now hanging out around my office. What do they do?

They spend their days amusing my boss by dive bombing any person who walks within 50 feet of their babies.

One time I was around for it, and it was pretty much the most hysterical thing I've ever seen. This guy I'd never seen was walking out wearing a full suit and carrying a briefcase (non-traditional apparel for the office, if I do say so myself) minding his own business, when two Seagulls begin alternately dive bombing him. At first he was laughing because it was bizarre, and then they got fairly close. At that point he brought out his game face and started doing some sort of variation of the Thriller dance while hissing at them as they flew by. Hilarious to my boss and I, but in no way effective. He was hounded every step of the way out to his car, probably never once understanding why this was happening to him.

However, this amusing tale has a sad ending as today one of the baby Gulls was run over by a car in our parking lot. Seriously people, keep your eyes on the prize! I hope to god that you're paying enough attention in the parking lot to be aware of your surroundings. I know they aren't exactly giants, but some basic awareness is not that much to ask for. It made me feel terrible, and really brought me down from the previous highs of the great Gull adventure of 2008. No less, there are two left so if you're ever around the Bush Company in Anchorage, Alaska may I please ask you to mind your surroundings. You never know if a baby Seagull is nearby.

The new Last.FM

Recently, Last.FM went through some serious changes. If you haven't heard of Last.FM (which I highly doubt if you're trolling the internet for things of this sort) it is a music social networking site of sorts, but at its heart it is a tool for the music aficionado in everyone. What you do is sign up, download the scrobbling plug-in for your audio program of your choice, and from there it tracks what you listen to by artist, track, and album. Once it gets enough information, it can make cool little widgets for you, gives you recommendations, and even builds radio stations of those recommendations and your very own music.

In short...it rocks.

As I said though, it went through some serious changes that are pretty incredible. Before you could only view charts off one static date (weekly was monday to sunday, monthly was based off the last four weeks starting the previous monday, etc.) and now it updates pretty much instantly. For example, today I was on a Beatles kick at work and it already has my chart updated to have them as the second most popular band of my last week. As a person who is strangely intrigued by charting and by tracking listening habits, this pretty much makes my day/week/month/year.

Not only are there cool changes in their charting, but the actual interface is far more intuitive, much more attractive, and laid out far more intelligently. You can take tracks that you listened to and build libraries of music out of them on the site. Simply plugging in your ipod now automatically scrobbles tracks you listened to (before you had to download a second plug-in that was not exactly "user friendly").

In short, it's everything a music nut could ask for out of a site. It's shiny, it's easy to use, and it's functional as all hell, all now for the low, low price of free. What are you waiting for? Join up, and make sure you add fluke182 to be your friend.

Again?! We just did it!

Kay Kay and His Weathered Underground, musical wunderkinds and the only reason it's acceptable that Gatsby's American Dream broke up, are up to something. Today they released a new track called "Diggin'" (it rocks) on their Myspace and they announced that they are already half way through production on a new album. A newer album I should say, considering their last album came out in February.

The album is apparently titled Introducing Kay Kay and His Weathered Underground and it went from not even known to being my most anticipated album of 2008 or 2009 (depending on when it comes out I suppose). Cannot wait for this release.

Also, you'd be a fool if you passed up a chance to catch them touring right now with Portugal. The Man and headliner RX Bandits, as you'd be hard pressed to find a better show than that. Extremely talented trio of bands, and very entertaining ones as well. Get on that, and see that show for me, your lowly Alaskan friend.

The Weekend Edition

Well, back to our regularly scheduled postings. I'll be getting back to my regular posts this week, starting with the weekend and a quick breakdown of what went down for myself this past weekend in an attempt to make it seem like I have a life outside of my computer. Anything to make that seem true.

So what went down this weekend?

• Dinner with my mom at Villa Nova (crazy delicious Italian restaurant in Anchorage)
• Going through Sasquatch and Sobo's wedding week pics with her after words
• Boston's and the Office Lounge with Colver, Lorna, Kim, and Hannah (tons of fun!)
• Snow City with my sister
• Hitting up the 5th Avenue mall and the downtown area afterwards with my sister as well (awesome new shoes - booyah!)
• Buying a pair of jeans and horribly regretting it - the ability to bend in jeans is a very underrated attribute to a good pair of jeans
• Shooting a negative two at Kincaid and getting my first eagle in frisbee golf
• Bizarre late lunch with Amy, Blake, Cate, Darren, and Eric at the Millennium Hotel
• Walking to the downtown bars with the same crew on a nice night
• Bar hopping with Cate, Darren, Eric, and Nick
• Denny's at 4:30 AM with Nick and four girls (fun!)
• Free french toast and coffee from Amy (is there anything better?)
• Negative three and a ridiculously long birdie make at Westchester with Sharpe and Nick
• Starting to reread Watchmen at Kaladi's

So yeah, as per usual it was a really awesome time with a lot going down. Nothing really stood out amongst everything else as something I really need to write about. The primary discovery of the weekend was how much fun it is to go out on the town with Cate and her crew, and also how great Amy's friend Blake is. He's visiting for the week and it's been great getting to know him.

These non-traditional weekend folk definitely helped the weekend have a unique feel, and the fact that it was the first weekend in seemingly forever with sunshine and blue skies definitely helped as well. Now if we could just keep that up and avoid gray days and rain for a while, I'd be very pleased. Ok Alaska?

Language

I am not a great writer.

By no means, am I one.

However, I feel as if I'm the type of person who can recognize high quality writing and moreso, I feel as if I can identify very low quality writing. In my mind, you can treat an average sentence like a mathematical equation. Each word has an intrinsic value based off of two different things: quality of word and quality of fit. When I say quality of fit, I mean "how well does this word fit into the sentence?"

I think the latter quality is even more important than the former, as any person can grab a thesaurus and use large and stuffy sounding words to sound smart, but a person's ability to properly place the correct one makes them sound intelligent. If you don't place the word correctly the sentence is going to be worth less than the sum of its parts. That's where writing goes from good to bad, and that is where you lose readers.

It's ironic really. In a desperate ploy to pass themselves off as writers with high IQ's, the average writer will toss out scrabble worthy words right and left and hope that they stick. This just leads them to sounding fake and like they are trying too hard. It ends up being incredibly frustrating to read and quite often very laughable, and it causes a person to openly wonder "why there is no self-editing in the world today?"

I spent most of my day reading and even though what I read had no issues of this sort (I started rereading Watchmen and Alan Moore isn't exactly the type of guy who does that), I did have other examples that led to this thought process. Blogs are a primary source for this as they are the DIY flagship for aspiring writers these days. Even sources like the Anchorage Daily News and the stellar articles they run these days reek of what I'm speaking of and even more often a complete lack of all things resembling common sense.

There is a commonly said acronym that fits in all facets of life, but it is frustratingly ignored in the world of writing. KISS: keep it simple stupid. Why write with horribly overdramatic flair and maddeningly poor sentence structure by choice, when you could put your thoughts into concise and logical sentences that are pleasing to both you as a writer and your readers. Is that so much to ask really?

Of course, this is all coming from someone who just rambled for five paragraphs needlessly, so make sure you take what I say with a grain of salt. I at least have my fall back argument of "I just woke up from a nap so my brain isn't operating at 100%" to use. What's your excuse?

The Dark Knight Returns

And the winner is...

So I just got out of the 12:01 AM showing of the Dark Knight and I wanted to do a quick review of the movie. I might get into it more later, but I figured I'd jot some things down while they were fresh. In short, it was incredible, however it was still not without its flaws. My initial instinct is I still prefer the life affirming glory of Wall-E to it so far this year, but dear god, this little guy pretty much takes the cake for all things comic book related to date.

Pros

• Heath Ledger gives one of the best performances I've ever seen - he was the Joker (tragedy we can never see him do it again)
• Cast was nearly uniformly excellent, especially Gary Oldman and Michael Caine
• Christopher Nolan transcended from genius to filmmaking god - his juggling of the storylines, brilliant handle on the characters, and near flawless shot angle/type choice were moviemaking at its best
• Hans Zimmer brought it
• Christian Bale continues to provide both the best Batman and the best Bruce Wayne ever, his grip on the character is unparalleled
• The Nolan boys writing of Dent, Gordon, and Batman's relationship is the best representation of it this side of Batman: the Long Halloween (the parallels to that story were very interesting - a clear influence to the layout)
• Did I mention Heath Ledger was good?

Cons

• Aaron Eckhart felt somewhat stale as Harvey Dent - perhaps because of those around him moreso than his performance
• Maggie Gyllenhaal replacing Katie Holmes didn't upgrade the Rachel Dawes role enough to justify the distraction caused by the actual replacement
• Cell phone sonar? Seriously?
• Nitpick from a comic guy here, but Ramirez was pretty obviously Renee Montoya and Wuertz was pretty clearly Harvey Bullock
• It ran really long and its three fake endings before the real ending were mildly distracting (this may be actually because of my conditioning as a movie goer though)

So like I said, there are flaws to it. Sure, not huge flaws and one that are fairly easy to explain. Definitely not deal breakers either in any way. But flaws no less. I loved it to pieces, it's every bit of a worthy successor to Batman Begins and even is superior in many ways. I just love the universe Nolan is creating and the sense of real power he is providing to this rendition of Batman. As much as I love the comics and the animated series, Nolan's vision is rapidly surpassing them as the definitive vision of the character.

There is definitely something to be said about that.

Grade: A (if Wall-E was a 97%, I'll give this guy a 95%)