Gender Studies

1 - Am I the only one who finds it tacky when singers change the gender in songs? For example, when a woman sings "The Boy from Ipanema," or Yngwie Malmsteen's cover of "Gimme Gimme Gimme (a Man After Midnight)" where the parenthetical becomes "(Your Love After Midnight)"? I don't generally mind when song lyrics are given minor touch-ups - you can't listen to or play folk music without this element - but this particular sort gets my goat somehow. Maybe I'm being unreasonable. I don't know. Just a thought.

2 - It is wholly ridiculous that in Olympic beach volleyball, men wear shorts and t-shirts and women wear bikinis.

I'm back

That was rad.

Somehow I had thought that by the end of my two weeks in Killarney, I would be the slightest bit sick of Irish music. Suffice it to say, on the plane ride back to Chicago, I listened to the Dubliners.

This would be such great satire if it were satire. (Many thanks to Sadly, No!!)

Also, fuck BoA. Go here.

Land of Ire!

I'm staying in Killarney right now. It is fantastic. I've been seeing castles and cottages and horses and of course a great variety of beers and whiskeys.

It's very hard to find a tenor banjo in Seattle. In Killarney, not so much. I shouldn't buy one. I really shouldn't. We'll see.

Side note: Kissing the Blarney Stone is supposed to give on the Gift of Gab. I do not find myself particularly more gabby today. Again, we'll see.

Airport, USA

The following is the travel status of my vacation so far: Saturday night, I flew out of Seattle into Chicago via the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. I have been in Chicago, or at least the suburbs thereof, since, and tonight I and a part of my family (my sister, aunt, uncle, and three cousins) leave for Shannon Ireland.

One thing the trip has made me think about is airports. Airports are a strange place. In being in one for an hour or two while you transfer, you may be visiting a place you have never been to before. At the same time, you are not really seeing that place, but rather a large hub airport, a sort of culture into itself that exists outside of the local region, and indeed exists more in a series of remote locations. So while individual airports might contain some hints of the civilization just beyond its FAA-run borders - a locally themed gift shop, ads for local businesses, what have you - they all (at least within a given country, and to an extent outside of it) are basically the same place. It's as if one big city were split into a thousand pieces and distributed throughout the US and abroad.

Given that, the list of place I've been doesn't tend to include places where I've only been to the airport. So while I had been to Chicago O'Hare years before now, I hadn't actually been to Chicago until the other day; I had just been to the ORD district of the international airport continuum.

The other parts of the continuum I have visited where I have not visited the surrounding non-airport regions:

AMS (Amsterdam)
DTW (Detroit)
BOS (Boston Logan)
MSP (Minneapolis-St. Paul)
IAH (Houston)

The Unmitigated GAAHL

Gaahl from Gorgoroth: Total Queerbo?

Excusing the fact that commenters on sites like Blabbermouth are the reason I usually can't stand metalheads, I think this is the most fantastic thing that I have ever heard ever.

HOLY GOSH!

How have I not heard of this before!?

Must see soon.

Oh, also I'm going to Ireland next week. You probably knew that. I'll tell you all about it, I promise.