Miss Piggy Lunchbox

Better to have loved and died then to have loved and lived.

Is Bill O’Reilly now threatening people who do or might call his show with a dissenting opinion?

Check it.

That may be the best four-game World Series ever. And I don’t mean that to damn with faint praise…these were four very good, very close games, all of which were just a hit or two away from going the other way. We could be 2-2, or even 4-0 Houston at this point without changing much.

Helluva Series.

Told ya Houston didn’t have a chance.

This is why it’s important.

Because the families in these pictures have lost somebody. Forever.

That’s why it’s important that we know how involved senior administration officials were in attempts to discredit Joseph Wilson. If anybody tells you that perjury isn’t a serious crime, remind them that they committed perjury in an investigation to determine to what extent the government attempted to knowingly deceive the American public and Congress into supporting a war…a war that was started under false pretenses and now has left 2,000 American soldiers and (many say) over 25,000 Iraqis dead.

Somewhere in the last 30 years, America forgot how horrible war is. I don’t know if it was when returning soldiers from Vietnam were spit upon and called baby-killers. I don’t know if it was the light Dan Rather shone on the glory of winning a just war along with his praise of America’s sacrifice in his The Greatest Generation. Maybe it was all the cinematic and gaming glorification of World War II that slowly eroded our horror and de-sensitized us to the death of our young soldiers. I know personally that the emphasis on the World Wars and complete ignorance of Vietnam in my high school classes led to a feeling of American rightness and invincibility. Maybe the widening income gap means that those with wealth (and thus power) see less death next door. I couldn’t tell you for sure why, when, or how it happened, but a large swath of the American public, including a much larger (percentage wise) swath of people inside the Beltway, have completely forgotten just how awful war is.

Bush talks a lot about honoring the sacrifices of these soldiers. He wants us to do it by “staying the course.” I want us to do it by internalizing and always remembering how horrible war is.

I’ve been doing this CD reviewing thing here for almost a year now, and I think I’ve figured out a recipe for enjoying a CD. My Baby thinks that if somebody else likes something, I’m bound to hate it. I now think that, in order to like something, I apparently have to write a scathing review of it, not publish the review, and continue to listen to the CD over the weekend.

Since I’ve still got dozens of CDs unlistened to, as well as two new birthday gifts, I’d like to get on with it. So let’s see how much of this I can salvage….

Worst. Cover art. Ever.

What do you think of when you think of Natalie Merchant? It’s her voice, right? In particular, it’s the fact that she has a distinctive nasality that she can activate to add emotional power to the climaxes of her songs. Well, I’m not that big a fan of it. It’s definitely musical, it just doesn’t do it for me.

[my longest paragraph used to be here]

So I was surprised to like this CD as much as I did. I mean, I hate 10,000 Maniacs, and I did not like “Jealousy” from Tigerlily when it was on radio, so I had very low expectations about this. To be more specific, I was surprised to find three songs here that I loved and a handful of songs that I enjoy listening to while doing my Probability homework.

“San Andreas Fault” is a beautiful tune with a lilting rhythm that shows Merchant can push a tune along by something other than her unique vocal qualities when she needs to. Merchant does what she does best emotionally on “Beloved Wife,” sung from the perspective of somebody who has lost their wife to illness after 50 years of marriage, and “Seven Years,” also sung in the first-person but this time about betrayal. Both of these tunes knock you over with a tidal wave of powerful feelings of love, sorrow, and anger.

My first review of this disc was basically the above with more negative comments about the eight non-mix CD candidates. I don’t really have a lot of interest in taking my new opinion and forming it into some overarching review. It’s my blog and I can get away with that. So let me just say the following.

I went through a similar opinion transformation with Sarah McLachlan this summer. It’s not surprising I would go through that again with Merchant. Show me a Natalie Merchant fan and I’ll show you a Sarah McLachlan fan.

Let me put it in probabilistic terms.
A – event a random CD collection has a Sarah McLachlan CD in it.
B – event a random CD collection has a Natalie Merchant CD in it.
P(B|A) ~ 1. Given event A, event B is highly probable. A and B have a high correlation. A and B are definitely not independent events.

Here’s to a CD jumping two lunchboxes in a weekend.

Rating:
Mix CD Candidates: “San Andreas Fault,” “Beloved Wife,” “Seven Years,” though the lyrical content of the last two will likely limit these to mixes of particular themes.