warning. Large numbers of links ahead.

it was awful today.
my mom was asking me what singers we have today that compare to the Beatles--what bands we'll be singing to in 40 years. and I have plenty of bands that I sing along with on my MP3 player and in my CD collection and all that, and I couldn't think of a single thing.

I mean, I have CDs that I made specifically for the purpose of being able to sing along with them very loudly. I just couldn't remember them. ANd then, of course, I'm sitting here, and a CD sales pitch comes up on MTV and it's all the songs I couldn't remember--Better than Ezra "Good", Semisonic "CLosing Time", Gin Blossoms "Hey Jealousy". I just opened up my CD burner program and futzed around with it, looking for the one I made once that's all songs I sing along with, but even if I could find it to quote directly, the problem is I don't sing along with normal songs. So my CD has, among other things, Fairport Convention (Slip jigs and Reels, Travelling by Steam), Kate and Anne McGarrigle (The Swimming Song), Dar Williams (Alleluia, The Babysitter's Here), along with plenty of others I can't even think of now.

And I'm really wishing I labeled my CDs, since I really want the one labeled "car trip" in this thing: Competition Smile, Not only Numb, Hold me Down, Pieces of the Night (all Gin Blossoms), Singular Girl (Old 97s), Plug in Baby (Muse), [which will also go on my robot love CD, along with Electric Barbarella by Duran Duran], Go to Sleep (Roxette), Am I a fool, Love Song (Sense field) [no relation to the cure song now covered by 311], Burn baby burn (ash), Two (Slack Jaw, so you can't hear it, sorry), Driftwood, Why does it always rain on me (Travis), Polichinelle (the Prayer Boat), The Background (Third Eye Blind), Settle Down (Unbelievable Truth), Killer Cars (semi-legal Radiohead B-side) and Revolution (semi-legal UT b-side)

Man. I wonder where those CDs are. I need to go through my stash, preferably with a permanent marker for labeling all the ripped ones. I'm missing the Remy Zero CDs and the Old 97s CD case, so I suspect they're off somewhere together. And I've got the case for Ash, but again, no CD. I don't even think the collection needs defragged, I think I put the ones I'm missing some where special, possibly for a trip, and haven't found them since.

And I want so many new CDs. I've started flipping to MTV in the afternoon, and when they play music videos, they sometimes manage to play good ones--I still remember the Dashboard Confessional CD I really want, and now I can add Maroon 5, and probably Jason Mraz as well. Hmm. and there's another band out there, the ones that I got the Yellowstone video from. Unwritten Law. (rest of my life. So pretty). And according to Amazon, it is not surprising that I like all of these singers.

(no subject)

From M'ris:
Series of questions, actually, about your schooling (at whatever levels). What were the biggest lies you were told in school? What were the biggest omissions from the curricula you were taught? And what were the biggest mistakes your teachers made?


What were the biggest lies you were told in school?

Hmm. I don't know lies. I tend to forget them. I think the closest thing that comes to my mind would be the idea that the teachers were right. or, rather, were automatically right. I caught on rather quickly that they weren't always right, but it took me longer to catch on to the fact that not everyone likes to be corrected, even if they are wrong. :)


What were the biggest omissions from the curricula you were taught?

We learned little to no European history in HS. We also learned no history past the end of World War II. Which means I have huge gaps in my history knowledge, and what I do know was mostly figured out on my own. I didn't realize that the Vietnam War was in 1972 until after high school. I have no clue what happened in other countries after world war two as well--you think I'm bad in the US, at least I've got a general timeline figured out. The rest of the world can fend for itself. Oh, except for "Eastern Europe between 1945 and 1989" which was my modern history course in college, which means I know all about 8 soviet bloc type countries for that time period, and probably better than my US history knowledge, though I do tend to get the different countries mixed up when I'm working with the details. (And to be really cool, that was sophomore year, and the speaker at graduation that year was my mother's college boyfriend who had been in Czechoslovakia for the spring of 1968, the Prague Spring, that which got ended by soviet tanks.)

We were all good and multi-cultural, but it annoyed the heck out of me. I wanted in depth European, not surface non-western. Now, to some extent the lack of European stuff was a personal issue, but I am very bothered about the lack of more recent history, especially as I never cared about it later on, so I never got more than a very basic timeline of history. On the other hand, for a while in HS thanks to independent interest, I used to be able to list all french kings. And I can still get chunks of English kings in order. :)


And what were the biggest mistakes your teachers made?

Again, I don't remember these things. Mine are all like, silly things. Some teachers made the mistake of assuming I couldn't read a book and follow the class at the same time. A lot made mistakes in how they taught *me*, but I don't think it was a problem for other people. Some corrected me when they were wrong. :)

Oh, there was pre-calc in college. That was amazingly bad. This teacher made the mistake of teaching the course as though people were going to be continuing in Math, so we were taught basically the whole back ground to the proofs. like, instead of just giving us, oh, A^2+ B^2 = C^2, he would explain where the formula comes from. Which is fine if you tell people you're doing that, or if the people are ever in their lives going to need to know how to get that. Instead of just filling a math requirement. I think there were maybe a handful of freshmen, of whom one or two were going on in math. Everyone else was just getting their Quantitative Reasoning out of the way. (in my case, in my senior year, but bite me.) We'd sit patiently, watching him write incomprehensible things on the board for most of the period, and at the end of the class, I'd look at them and say, "Oh, it's X" where X equaled the proof as I'd been taught it the first time I took the class in HS, the one that actually made sense and could be used to solve things (and was in the book, for example), and when I wrote it down, the boy next to me (who was in my major and who I had a crush on for most of college and still loff) and his friend would copy it down, and likewise the people sitting by them and so on and so forth. I found it hysterical--it's not like I actually knew what I was talking about, but no one else there could even remotely translate him into anything useable. I think I slaughtered him on his class review. :)