Sean Daily is an English major from New Jersey now living in Las Vegas, the Other City of Lights. "I consider 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' to be comfort reading, I like the al pastor tacos at Tacos Mexico and I count among my literary influences the Chainsaw from 'Doom'. 'RRRRRR! You don't like that, do you, Mr. Undead Marine! RRRRRR!'"
Shanoah Alkire is our Discordian at large. "Born in Santa Cruz, I grew up in Grass Valley and the Bay Area, and now lurk in Las Vegas. My literary influences include Ray Bradbury,
Lewis Carroll, and Douglas Adams. I also program as a hobby,
and currently maintain the Gtk port of Angband. You can find
a rather old bio of me here."
In this case, I’m switching over to Pink Floyd, though. This song is titled Goodbye, Blue Sky, and the video is from the movie of The Wall. I thought the imagery on this was, well, disturbing, really. But in a very well done way. Bombers and the flag of England into crosses. It wins lots of disturbing points from me.
And since I’m a day or two late on posting, I probably ought to at least throw another song in. I was interested to see that Queen has written a song about Jesus, and since I just posted a video with a bunch of crosses in it, this seems an appropriate time to post it.
This keeps with two recent themes. This is another song being sung by Joan Baez, but I really wish I’d found it when I was posting about Mary Travers death, because this is a duet with Mary, and is appropriate to the topic.
Walk That Lonesome Valley is a traditional, but it’s well sung. And, no, I’m not intentionally playing a bunch of songs that are depressing or about death. It just seems to work out that way.
(And remember, Sean, if you’re reading this, you can post and change the theme at any time. )
Sometimes I have no idea how I got to a video. Or even if I do, it’s from a strange enough route that I have to wonder anyways.
This is a case in point. However bizarre it was, earlier I was looking at a Japanese cast singing “Jesus Christ Superstar” (and that was very cool. Too bad it didn’t allow embedding.). And later, I was watching parts of Andrew Lloyd Webers “CATS” in Japanese.
None of that explains how I got to this odd fan made video, titled Overdrive, by IOSYS. After watching a purely Japanese version, I grabbed a version with subtitles. It didn’t help, though I’m assured this features Reisen Udongein Inaba, the Moon Rabbit.
Warning: this video may cause insanity in laboratory rabbits in clinical studies. And it’s not worksafe, besides that.
This isn’t related to the last post either, except, perhaps, in that it isn’t related.
Don’t really have much time for posting today, but here’s a song by XTC I found. This one is called Dear God, and basically consists of the ranting and raving people of a highly Christian background tend to do when they rub more then two brain cells together.
Of course, in my opinion, the fact that there is suffering in the world doesn’t mean god doesn’t exist. It just generally means that there is something wrong with the model of god given, or that there are constraints that you don’t know about.
Besides, if bad things didn’t happen, we’d still be in the stone age. And, frankly, good and evil are too sides of a coin; you can’t really have one without the other.
Still, I like songs like this. It shakes people out of complacency…
Oh, I know what route I go down when I experience too much kawaii, too, Sean.
Admittedly, it first involves porting it here, where everyone can see it. But afterward, there are antidotes. In this case, I got together with a friend from work after work and played a board game he has with him called Arkham Horror.
Cthulhu won the first game, but we managed to beat an elder god the second time, though we house ruled one or two things. (Mainly because of only having two players.)
In honor of that, I thought I’d play a short creepy animation called A Lovecraft Dream. I think it speaks for itself.
That’s all right, Sean. I was only there long enough to hear 4 bands or so play, anyways, so we don’t necessarily need to keep Worldfest going as a theme.
And it’s lacking in the requisite number of explosions for this blog, in any case. To rectify this, I thought I’d play a song by a band called Xploding Plastix titled Joy Comes In The Morning. It has a lovely animation featuring a rabbit, robots, rockets, and other goodness. And the overall song is pretty good, too.
Well, no new deaths today that I know of, though I haven’t really checked too closely. It’d be pretty eerie if a new celebrity started dying each day for a blog theme, after all. Like Michael Jackson, who is now confirmed to have died of a heart attack. (The default method of dying from having your name written in the notebook from Death Note, as I recall.)
Don’t think we had a firm established theme before that, so I’ll fall back on what I had been doing: posting Frank Zappa songs.
This one’s a rather nice rundown of televangelists and other religious groups, Jesus Thinks You’re A Jerk. Includes jabs at Jim & Tammy, and the Ku Klux Klan, among others. Pity the lyrics shown are occassionally misspelled, or incorrect. (Bush for Pat was one noticed, for example.)
It’s a fun song lambasting various people and groups that need it, anyways. And no, not work safe.
Didn’t John mention UFO’s in conjunction with Yoko Ono in Out The Blue, too? Interesting when there are recurring themes.
To give todays John Lennon song proper perspective, I’m going to do something rather unusual for this blog lately; play a song not by John Lennon. Here’s Bob Dylan with Gotta Serve Somebody.
All right, got it? Well, John Lennon heard this song. Apparently it upset him a bit, so he wrote this song, Serve Yourself, sung in psuedo-Dylan style. Rated not work safe for bad language, and stuff offensive to closeminded people of most major religions.
Theres a 8 minute version with less bad language, and without him trying to imitate Bob Dylans voice, too.
I always liked that song, actually, Sean. Though, you know, the video you posted of it cut off the opening lyrics. Which is a pity, because they were probably the most relevant ones to your post.
"God is a concept by which we measure our pain.
I'll say it again:
God is a concept by which we measure our pain."
Since we’re on the topic, here are a few other things John Lennon’s said:
I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It’s just that the translations have gone wrong.
I believe in everything until it’s disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind. Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now?
I’m not going to change the way I look or the way I feel to conform to anything. I’ve always been a freak. So I’ve been a freak all my life and I have to live with that, you know. I’m one of those people.
I echo the sentiment. On all three quotes, really, to differing degrees. And given that last, I thought it appropriate to play John Lennon’s Working Class Hero. We play a lot of songs about heros here, don’t we, Sean? Hadn’t noticed that. Surprised Joni Minstrel isn’t in the list…
You may recall, with The Exorcist, that I’d been posting house dj music. I thought I’d continue the theme by playing DHS’s The House of God. I rather enjoy the animation on this, anyways.
And as long as I’m at it, there certainly are hooligans in the house of god, so why don’t I play The Ragga TwinsHooligan 69? I always did like the audio from the opening of Prince’s Let’s Go Crazy…
