Rants and raves

So I've been good and have been biting my tongue, not joining in the feeding frenzy over the band Geese for a whole week.  Actually, for a while longer than that. But I can't resist anymore.  I'm reasonably plugged in to new music (as you might have figured out by the fact that this is not my first rant about such things) and it was hard to miss Geese so yeah, I've been listening to them and trying them out for quite a while. It took a while but they grew on me (it was not love at first sight, it was also not eww-skip). You can detect some DNA from The Strokes, White Stripes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and so on. There's a bit of a Black Country New Road vibe, which I loved when Isaac Wood was still the lead singer, bless his heart. But it's pretty original, and it is most definitely real music, not AI-generated or assembly-line-produced drivel, which is becoming something in itself. But I also have this kind-of snobby affectation that I like to know about bands before ev...

I am a regular list maker, including song- and playlists. Want to create a false sense of productivity? Feel anxious? Bored? Stuck? Stressed? Make a list. You'll feel better. I started making mix tapes as soon as I had access to my first cassette player with a record button. I make an  annual playlist  of mostly new music, which I share much more widely than it needs to be, not just to music-loving friends, but sort of in lieu of holiday cards. I also have a  Classic Hits mix  that started as a playlist for a birthday party and now has 590 songs on it, good enough for a 41-hour party. And many more.  I have by now accepted that my list-making has a limited audience. A couple of my cousins and a few friends actually like and listen to my annual playlist (thank you). A few other musically obsessed friends appreciate the enormous effort I put into them and actually listen and give feedback: " We have pretty different tastes." "Interesting to see how our m...

So a few months ago, a new band released some music on Spotify (and elsewhere) and gave people something new to get upset about. The band, Velvet Sundown , "is a synthetic music project guided by human creative direction, and composed, voiced, and visualized with the support of artificial intelligence."  In other words, the band does not exist, and the music is AI-generated. The music is not horrible, it's insipid 70s-inspired folk rock and is somewhat pleasing to the ear. In June 2025 they rapidly gained over a million streams on Spotify, and four months later they still have 250,000 monthly listeners.  And the world exploded. First it was "wow a mysterious new band, but they're kind of weird" but it quickly turned into a consensus that this was the beginning of the apocalypse. Everyone from the New York Post to Rolling Stone to the Washington Post to the BBC to the Guardian to NPR weighed in. Reddit and X blew up. It attracted a hoaxer who falsely...

Michele and I were having a good time people-watching while waiting for a concert to start at the Greek in Berkeley last Saturday, and we were testing various hypotheses. One of the standard items is what kind of crowd it is, usually starting with how old and how diverse the crowd is. You would think that there would not be great variance in this, us being "upper middle aged" (for some versions of middle and upper) and therefore expected to attend "see them before they die" nostalgia-acts, but we have eclectic tastes so there really is. In the last three weeks, we've probably seen a 3x range in average age at shows, from college to middle-boomer. We were having a debate about Why Most Men Look Like Shit (there, I capitalized it, that makes it true). My expertise is largely based on watching Queer Eye, where season after season the leads try to fix someone in a week. Wardrobe and grooming are a big part of it. Standard question on the show: "Why are you wear...

The saying goes, You are what you drive. Many car and lifestyle magazines attest to the claim that the vehicle a person chooses may reflect their personality. I must admit I tend to act as though I believe this, albeit only in anonymity, of course — none of this applies to my friends who make unfortunate choices when acquiring a vehicle. So for the sake of the rest of this rant, let's take as the context that it applies only to people I observe randomly on the road.  Let me get the yada-yada-yada disclaimer out of the way. I am fully aware that it is important to remember that "this is a generalization and not everyone who drives a certain type of car fits the stereotype. Most people choose cars because of practical needs, cost, or simply because they like the way a model looks or drives" (that was Gemini's gentle way of scolding me for my judgmental attitude).  Like you live in Alaska and you want your car to start when it's 40 below. You don't have to f...

I felt creative this morning. This happens occasionally, but what was unusual about this morning was that it happened after a short night, while walking the dog, and as I was mildly pressed for time to get to San Jose for a meeting. And during all that, several coherent ideas started to form in my head.  Sometimes such random ideas are grand unification theories that are trite and untrue, like a stoner who starts to see atoms and molecules as possible planets and stars. Luckily, I have a reasonably good internal BS detector to shoot those down before they become embarrassing (more about my negative talents later). Sometimes they are correct (or sort-of-ballpark correct) rediscoveries of insights found long before by others. I once re-derived a whole bunch of logarithm math from first principles and felt very smart, even though John Napier had done the same thing in 1614. Same for figuring out some clever stuff about π and sines and cosines and the lot, only 300 years after William ...