SONGS THAT CAN JUST GO AWAY, part II

The second entry for this series will be Dave Matthews Band's "Ants Marching." Another song, while nothing wrong with it technically, I'm simply tired of. And yes, it's another one of those songs which has found homes on multiple channels of our store's MUZAK player. Please go away.


"Ants Marching" by Dave Matthews Band

Enjoy...or not...because I certainly won't be.

A MAN RESPONDS...

      This profile was recommended to me by another OKCupid user. The man's answer to the WTF female profile I posted back in September? You decide :-)

      While I don't agree with everything he's saying, I feel where he is coming from...that anger.

My self-summary

I'm tired of American women, their quest for perfection and their appraising me as if I were some piece of meat, or a sperm donor with a fat wallet. I'm tired of woman in their mid- to late-thirties thinking they will find a guy their age or younger to have kids with them.

DARK QUESTION...

      We were having one of those "fun" conversations at work and this moral dilemma was proposed: It's a widely known fact that people feel especially guilty about their first kill. They remember the face more, the details, etc. As time goes on and more kills are racked up, this guilt mostly goes away as they have become routinized. So the question posed was, "Since you know you're going to feel guilty over the first person you kill, would you rather that first person be an innocent or someone who truly deserved it?"

      I chose the innocent because, as a member of some sort of death squad (the scenario that precipitated this question), I know I'm gonna be doing a lot of killing and I'd much rather have nightmares about having killed someone who was an innocent than feel guilty about murdering a molester, rapist, thug, whatever. By the time you've killed hundreds of people or more, you'll stop feeling guilt at all but that first one will remain so I said I'd rather be able to justify the guilt than to feel bad that I feel bad for doing something which could almost be rationalized as just.

      How about you? :-)

SECRECY TRUMPS PUBLICITY...at least here

      I never liked the publicity behind coin collectors dropping valuable coins deliberately into circulation. Scott Travers is one of those people and even though he has never found out the fate of any of his drops, it bugs me nonetheless because of the timing of the publicity. I remember reading about this in a coin magazine too...he's surrounded by photographers watching him make those purchases. Now, he sets up a ruse that those picture takers are there for something else, but that's too much publicity at the time of the drop making it all too likely that this coin will not be spent around before being located but instead, will end up in the pocket of the vendor who received it. Certainly that would happen with me.

      I'm not against these drops, but I don't think people should be in on them until after they happen. If you need "proof", then watch the guy roll up the coins in question and deposit them (without suspicious photographers and videographers about) in a local bank. Who knows where they'll go and how long it will take them to be found. It's more interesting to me that way and it allows for a more realistic chance that this coin could be found by anyone rather than the vendor who received it right there and then. Hell, deposit them into a soulless CoinStar. Who knows where those coins get shipped? It really opens up possibilities.

      I used to seed coin rolls thusly as a kind of karmic thank you whenever I found something valuable to me in my till. Someone, somewhere has received some steel cents, wheat cents from 1909-1934, Indian Head cents, Buffalo nickels, Liberty nickels, and some Barber dimes and quarters. All well-worn, of course, but identifiable. I don't have the means to seed coins with considerable value. I've never seen them again nor have I ever expected to. Still, it's a nice thought wondering who opened a quarter roll and found a 1906 Barber quarter staring back at them. With the introduction of coin sorters in my banks, this has been very difficult to continue doing since these coins tend to get rejected as they are now underweight from being so worn.

      I just figure you're wasting everyone's time to purposefully spend valuable coins so obviously. Do it clandestinely and I think you'll achieve better results.

LINE OF THE DAY, part XX

From whatisbrain in this article on Gawker:

I feel like rather than using Schroedinger's cat to illustrate the principle of wavefunction collapse in quantum mechanics, we should update the example to "American retail store manager." While unobserved, the manager has the potential to be both simultaneously working and on break. When his boss goes to observe him, it is no longer possible for the manager to be in either of the two states, he must be in one or the other. He's either on break, meaning he is not attending to his duties, or he is working, meaning he is violating company policies. Either way, due to this act of outside observation, the manager is fired, just as a quantum system ceases to be a superposition of states when looked on by an outside observer. 

That is just beautiful :-)

SONGS THAT CAN JUST GO AWAY...

This might be a weekly post for a little while before devolving into a now-and-again one. Since the MUZAK player at work never goes off and the stations get changed frequently throughout the week, I hear a lot of different songs. There's a few songs I really like listening to (and trust me, it's a benefit to be working overnights - a time when the store is quiet and the music can be heard without difficulty) as well as some which I wouldn't normally listen to but can tolerate in the workplace setting thus expanding my musical horizons. And while the vast majority of the songs played I simply don't mind, there's a few which can simply go away. I might hate the song, but ideally, what I want this list to be is of songs which I know are technically good compositionally and maybe also lyrically but have (long since) become tired or otherwise frustrating to listen to from overplay. That's not to say songs I despise won't make this list, but I will try to keep them out.

The first entry I have for this list is "Shiny Happy People", a song which gets played on several MUZAK stations so it's hard to avoid. I think it appears on at least four of the stations played in the regular rotation our managers use. I don't think it's a bad song musically, but if I never heard it ever again, I would not feel as if my life were missing something. Embedding of the video has been disabled so click on the link below the one posted if you'd rather watch what R.E.M. released instead.

"Shiny Happy People" by R.E.M.

ODDS & ENDS

      I have a growing pile of discarded Facebook status updates that are no longer postable as the time for them has passed or they weren't funny enough or because I try to only post one depressing status update when I'm sad rather than like ten in-a-row over the course of a day so I don't worry my friends both real and Facebook-only.

      Here goes...