Labels: Christmas, holidays, Internet, obsession

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Labels: cars, computers, kids, obsession, photography, work

Labels: collection, mp3, obsession, u2

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An excerpt from Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. It's an acerbic, very British book about people being snarky about proper punctuation... and it's about as witty and funny as a grammar book could ever be (and of course was written by a British lady).

This is the passage that completely sold me on the book:

Churchill said hyphens were "a blemish, to be avoided wherever possible". Yet there will always be a problem about getting rid of the hyphen: if it's not extra-marital sex (with a hyphen), it is perhaps extra marital sex, which is quite a different bunch of coconuts. ... The two hundred odd members of the Conservative Party would be lost without it.

There you go. Indulging in my grammar nerdiness. I also helped proof a bunch of my colleagues' descriptions of their term projects. Just wait a few years and I'll be a mad crusader online, or running around my school after class demanding to see that my students' text messages are grammatically correct...

Labels: books, grammar, joke, obsession, school

That said, I've been trying to complete my U2 MP3 collection. This ... is hard. Most people don't know just how prolific that band is. I already own all the albums on CD - that's easy. Oh, no, the U2 discography is much deeper than that. There's 125 songs on their 10 albums, there's more than 200 b-sides from the singles, 100 or so from various compilations and such, and I'm not even including any live b-sides or concerts or anything like that. If you include all that, these guys' discography includes about 700 songs, all told. I'm at 470. I need another 96 to feel like I've gotten the stuff I'm really anxious for - primarily it's the studio recordings, edits and remixes.

I can hear you think: "Why would I want the five different mixes of Please?"

To me, it's really interesting to hear all these different versions of the same song. It shows, if you look carefully, how the band felt about all of the different parts of the song. In the case of Please, which is from the 1997 album POP, there were different edits for the U.S. and European markets. The album version was quite different from both, and there was another 'regular' single version as well. Also, the live version was different from the other four studio versions. I think it's well worth my time, as a musician, to study how these very successful musicians make their decisions about editing, and that's how I do it.

Unfortunately, most of the remainder is out of print and/or hard to find. Up until today, I was looking for a remix of MoFo (also from POP) called the Matthew Roberts' Explicit Mix. The LP itself sells for over $100 It was a one-sided black vinyl promo-only single pressed in very limited quantities. Hell, I was lucky to get the vinyl 12" single when it came out. And that was an easy one.

Still, I think it's worth it for the above reason. And I don't feel too guilty looking this stuff up in Mp3 simply because I can't buy it from the band (not even in the 'complete' U2 from iTunes, which has a 'mere' 398 songs). And I'm a fan. That has something to do with it, too.

Currently listening : Mofo Remixes By U2

Labels: mp3, music, obsession, u2