Red Roses and Dead Things: an album review

Disclosure: I game with Seanan and consider her a friend.

Seanan McGuire's new CD (signed #147/300) landed in my Mac's optical drive last night.

My initial reaction after one listen-through: O.M.F.G.W.T.F.B.B.Q.

This album is an exploration of mad science, romance and horror, both real and fictional. From rockers like the (totally!) NC-17 rated "You Get The Tickets" and "Maybe it's Crazy" to the Schoolhouse Rock style tune "The Black Death" (a nice Leslie Fish-esque teaching song) and "Another Mad Science Love Song" a duet with Filk Hall o' Famer Tom Smith, Red Roses and Dead Things delivers. Every song simply shines with Seanan's love of mad science (or is that MAD SCIENCE!), mind-blasting horror, and sweet sweet romance. RR&DT definitely puts the "romance" back in Necromancy!

And all of this just in time for St. Valentine's Day (as in the massacre . . .) for a mere $16 USD.

Musical details such as Seanan's vocals, the arrangements, insturmentals and general production values are much improved over her debut studio album, 2007's Stars Fall Home. On some of the songs on SFH, the insturmentals almost overpowered the vocals at times -- my favorite song from SFH, "Still Catch the Tide," suffered badly from this -- but there was a much better balance on RR&DT. Seanan's strongest musical virtue is her lyrics. Poetic, playful, sensual, evocative and at times downright randy -- Seanan's lyrics are, to paraphrase the words of another friend about cooking, an alchemy of phrase, word and rhyme. The front cover art -- a sexy drawing of Teh Blonde dual-wielding a deer rifle and pump shotgun, ready for action in the a zombie apocalypse and a hot date -- and the illustration on the back are quite nice, but the song list and printing of the lyric booklet need a bit of work. The type on the inside of the lyric booklet is small, and the song list on the inside and back covers are a very low contrast hard to read black-on-brown. Fortunately the song list lyrics to almost all of the songs are available online (thank Loki for text-scaling web browsers!), so this is but a quibble.

On balance, you owe it to yourself to get this CD. Even if you're not not mad about Science!
Or dead things.

Earworms for the New Year....

New songs that got stuck in my head this week. Some do not have lyrics. Some are iTunes finds, some are not.

1. Tom Smith, "I Fought the Troll"
2. Tom Smith & Leslie Fish, "Hope Eyre"
3. Mindi Abair, "Smile"
4. Michelle and Tony, "Rich Fantasy Lives" (better than Tom and Rob's original)
5. Tom Smith, "Superman Sex Life Boogie"

Red Roses and Dead Things...

You know you want it.

"It" being one of my favorite "Full-of-WIN" people, newest album. Seanan Mcguire has more raw singing and songwriting talent in her toenail clippings than 99.95% of the human race has in an entire body. You owe it to your CD player, your iPod, and yes yourself to go hither RIGHT NOW!! to her site on teh innerweb and order a copy of this awesomeness.

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Listening to: Seanan McGuire - Evil Laugh
via FoxyTunes

Pre-Helliday Thoughts, etc

Happy Fscking Hellidays!
Current annoyances:

1. Watching people who get more than ample time off the phones at work to do their required training beg like dogs for more because they have not spent the ample time they do have to complete training THEN whine to be "early-outed" -- sent home early to be with kith and kin -- because it is a holiday . . . while people like me who complete their training on time and within spec are "rewarded" by getting the opportunity to carry these no-load slugs' dead weight. Boy, do I feel incentivized!

2. I'm taking Saturday off. Friday's double time and I'm not missing that. Saturdays piss me off even more.

3. People who do not check the system requirements for software before installing it.

4. People who will not go to http://www.seananmcguire.com RIGHT THE HELL NOW and order her forthcoming album. Hanging's too damned good for 'em. You know who you are. From your IP I'll figure out where you live.

Just to prove I'm not a total sourpuss, there are some things I'm thankful for:

1. Looking for something for months, and finally finding it.
2. Gaining a cyber-stalker in WoW I *like* and does not creep me out.
3. The collective sense of the American people in electing the best of two very good candidates (Barack Hussein Obama) to be our 44th President.
4. Good healthcare.
5. Good work to do, albeit sometimes it annoys me.
6. Friends like mine -- Michelle, David, Matt, Seanan, Richard, Ralph, Sam, Duncan, Tim, Iz, Kate, Keegan, Mira, Brian, Rain, Equal and the rest of the gang in [Zealous] on Draka.

Tom Smith Fundraiser

We interrupt this blog for an urgent fund raising appeal.

I found out today that filker extraordinaire Tom Smith has suffered an injury and is facing a cubic metric butt load of medical bills.

A donation will get you download access to a whole lot of filkers singing many of Tom's songs.

We now return you to your irregularly scheduled insanity.
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Now playing: Tom Smith - Domino Death
via FoxyTunes

Cheers and Jeers: O:M edition

So sue me, Bill in Portland Maine, over on Daily Kos. Remember who writes your performance reviews . . .

1. Cheers to Blizzard Entertainment. WoW patch 2.4 is out; Blizz dedicated it to the late, great Gary Gygax. Without EGG, WoW and Diablo would not exist. This patch is nowhere as massive in impact as 2.3 was; at least they fixed several annoyances.

1a. Jeers to breaking my damned UI mods, as usual. I guess you can't make an omlet without breaking UI mods . . . bastards.

2. Cheers to Seanan McGuire. Her Bardic Blondeness is coming to town this weekend. I haven't seen her in more than a decade, and I'm looking forward to paying my respects in person to one of my favorite multi-talented artists. She should be your favorite too. Check out her LJ, website and music for reasons why.

3. Cheers to over a century of fearless journalism. My new favorite political magazine is The Nation. I've been on their mailing list since forever, when ex#2 and I used to subscribe to the dead-tree edition of this august journal of liberal opinion. These guys have been around since the 1860s fighting for the abolition of slavery and continue to cover Stuff That Matters (sorry, Slashdot) like elections campaigns and ongoing corruption without accepting a single dime of corporate money.

4. Cheers to filkerTom-foolery: I thought I was hallucinating when I read that Tom Smith, aka the world's fastest filker, is going to be part of the entertainment for Eschacon'08, the lefty blogger con organized by the influential Atrios in Philadelphia this weekend. I'd love to see his set list for his performance . . . .

5. Jeers to sports memes as workplace motivation. Every company seekd competitive advantage through incentivizing its workforce through a variety of means. I have no problems with most of the ways Management motivate us worker bees. I don't even mind those STUPID motivation posters. However, few things this side of the Veil-between-Worlds piss me off more than big time sports. I was raised in a sports-saturated household. There was always sports on TV or the damned radio, and to hell with me if I wanted to watch something mind-streching like Star Trek or listen to music. To this day, I cannot stand sports or TV. This time, it's March Madness, the 63-game marathon men's college basketball tournament. Pick one of the 64 teams (preferably one that stands a chance of winning) as an identity and rank those corporate metrics against them. Frankly, I couldn't care less weather Gonzanga (sounds a stripper's stage name) or UConn or Louisville wins the damned thing. Please. Make Them Stop!

6. Cheers to the Nurses of Kaiser South Sacramento. My wound care issues brings me in contact with a lot of nurses. When I moved south last year I figured I'd have to move my care (which I did) and I worried about continuity and quality of care. Pam, Connie and Valarie, the triumvirate that change the dressings and track the progress of my wounds throughly impress me.

There and Back Again . . .

There's a good reason for the gap in my posting: I was in the hosptial for swelling and infected wounds in my legs. While I had my MB with me, I had no way to connect it to the Internet --I guess we're still a few years from what EarthLink founder Sky Dayton called "packetspace."

Ten days of almost no Internet (I had the browser on my cellphone, and that's it), coffee or TeeVee did not quite leave me a gibbering idiot. I was a near-run thing, though.

The most noteworthy aspect of this stay was that they (Kaiser) transferred me to a Kaiser-run skilled nursing facility (KPPACC) in San Leandro, about 100 miles from my current digs in South Sacramento.

I was not amused.

Highlight of my hospital visit: I successfully suppressed the urge to throttle by roommate at KPPACC. Idjit would have the remote for the one TV set the room had and play the most mind-destroying teevee other than political campaign ads or Fox News Channel: soap opeas and sports. Not only that, he'd read the damned paper with the fscking teevee on!

Whotta asshat. I wanted to stuff that remote down his throat, I was so pissed. I chose instead to employ my iPod -- stuffed with tunage from Leslie Fish, The Elders, Seanan McGuire and Flogging Molly -- and headphones to block out the sound; fortunately I had Civilization 3 loaded on the MB, a perfect non-Internet game for whiling away large blocks of time.

I also had The Sims 2 on my phone, another very good game. I'd never had the chance to play the game much until this trip to the hospital, and I got my money's worth from it during the ambulance ride to San Leandro.

M&D also brought me some spare underwear and Guinness pajama bottoms before I was shipped off to KPPACC. I wore the PJs for most of my stay at KPPACC. The tangerines helped stave off the hungries from the notoriously small (and utterly flavor-free) portions of Hospital Food® and the sugarless Jelly Bellies and Gummi Bears were treats I savored.

I managed to read William Gibson's Idoru as well -- I wouldn't say it was better than Neuromancer but it was better than Count Zero or Virtual Light.

At Kaiser South I encountered some utterly awesome nurses and a wonderful doc.

My daughter, bless her, came to pick me up and bring me home. Our first stop on the way home: Starbucks.


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Listening to: Sun Green & The Imitators with Neil Young & Crazy Horse & The Greendale Chamber of Commerce - Be the Rain
via FoxyTunes

Ever look for something for a long time . . .

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Listening to: Emerald Rose - Four Jacks
via FoxyTunes . . . and suddenly realize that you had it all along?

Case in point: the "Listening to . . " in this post.

A bit of background: I am utterly addicted to David Weber's Honor Harrington novel series. The Honorverse has been described as "space opera as if CS Forrester had written it." It's got exploding spaceships, Byzantine politics, Tech That Makes Sense, Sound Tactics (too much sf/f military fiction does not, sadly), historical allusions, action, adventure, telepathic cats with prehensile tails and opposable thumbs and characters to both admire and revile.

Anyway, back in 2000 or so, Baen Books, publisher of the series, put the whole series onto CD-ROM and distributed a copy of the disc with each hardcover of War of Honor. Anyway, I got that book and the disc, and gleefully synced the entire series' pdb files to three PDAs since then.

Also on the disc was the three Echo's Children filksongs set in the Honorverse. And until yesterday, I did not know it. I've been all over the web looking for "No Quarter!" -- I saw the lyrics on some random filk site last year, and as soon as I realize it was a Honorverse song, I had to have it!

Now I do . . . and it was worth the wait! I just hope the upcoming Honorverse books (three next year, pray to Sharon)

Many SF series get worse for wear as time goes on; this one gets better. I also recommend the books that are not part of the main sequence of the series, like Crown of Slaves and (most especially) The Shadow of Saganami. Also, unlike many series, reading them in publication order is best. My favorite of the whole series? The Shadow of Saganami, without a doubt. Followed closely by Honor Among Enemies, In Enemy Hands, and Echoes of Honor (which is something of a trilogy in terms of the ongoing story).

The song concerns what could well have been a scene in Echoes . . . but in Echoes the actual wording was "To all Grayson ships, the order is: Lady Harrington, and No Mercy!"

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Listening to: Echo's Children - No Quarter
via FoxyTunes