I’ll continue the “5 great” list with these 12″ gems from the 1980s. They may not necessarily be my favorite 12″ tracks of the 1980s, but these are instances where the remix of the song improves markedly on the original version. And this also means it excludes tracks that were issued on 12″ first, or 12″ only (like Pump Up The Volume, for example).

What makes a great remix? Well, that depends on what type of remix it is. In this case, the criteria is remixes that don’t stray so far from the original as to be essentially a completely different song, but which alter the original enough that it really adds depth, or goes in a new direction

When I was in high school in the 1980s, remixing was what I really dreamed of doing, although I never pursued that path. Consider this my homage to some good engineers.

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I’m endeavoring to attempt something never before achieved in the history of mankind: make a New Year’s resolution, and stick to it. Given my desire, it’s apropos that I write this on the first day of the lunar new year, since the resolution for 2009 was: learn Chinese, like for real.

“For real” means expanding beyond the lazy, expat-level of everyday, common Chinese I’ve been stuck at, for a while now, being one of a plethora of lazy Americans living in Beijing or Shanghai. It means actually having a damned vocabulary, for one, and it means taking more than a token a swipe at learning some lingo, and some words that don’t appear in the everyday Chinese dictionary.

In order to learn something, to really learn something, it takes commitment, it takes repetition, and it takes curiosity. The intellectual curiosity is not the problem for me; it’s the commitment and repetition I’ve had trouble with. Also, you absolutely have to make it fun. Well, technically, you don’t. You can sit there and force – no, torture – yourself by having your head buried in books, but you’ll have two undesired end results: (1) you’ll be bored; and (2) it’ll be less efficient. So, I’ve decided to make it fun. When things are fun, the learning just comes.

So, I’ve started out by learning a word a day and putting it on Twitter, with a twist: I’m going to create a narrative out of it by re-using the previous words en route to learning new ones. Along the way, I’ve found that Twitter is not enough, because of its paltry character limit, and that I need to introduce some new words and sentence structures at the same time. It’s a fun challenge, and of course, this being me, the sentences will be absurd. (But therein lies the “fun” for me. If I have to learn how to say “Where is the pharmacy” one more time I’ll shoot myself.) This whole artificial construct should create enough repetition for me to actually learn the concepts I set out to learn.

And, given that it’s so public, maybe it’ll give my friends some entertainment, so they can laugh at my pathetic progress as time goes along. Laughing at people is always fun, after all…

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My last post got me thinking about posting some top 10 lists on my blog, just for fun.

But then I thought, “10″? Do I really have that much to say about that many songs? I suppose I could endlessly fill the space with tired music critic clichés, but we should all be spared that much bullshit.

And then I thought, “Top”? It’s impossible. I haven’t heard every song in existence, and even if that were somehow possible, I haven’t heard all of them them enough to develop strong feelings for them.

So that’s how this “5 Great” list came about. I’ll post one every now and then, and I’ll link to either iTunes or free downloads to the tracks, if possible, so you can get them yourself. I tried to use iTunes’ iMix thing to just link to the whole list, but the way the iMix feature works is stupid: have a song from a compilation that iTunes has on a different album? Then it doesn’t recognize it, or even make suggestions so you can map it properly.

Anyway, onto the fucking list already…consider it my tribute to the most versatile word in the English language. No, these are not (necessarily) great songs to listen to while fucking. Nor are these great Songs About Fucking (well, not exclusively anyway). Rather, they are great songs that have everyone’s favorite word somewhere in the title.

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I am a closet music historian, and a not-so-closeted music geek. Anyone who bothers to get to know me finds this out sooner or later. On that “Rock & Roll Jeopardy!” show that VH1 used to run, they used to ask a lot of questions about ’80s pop, and I found out watching that show that, basically, I would never have lost.

It’s not really anything to be proud of though, and I’ll tell you why. When you have this affliction, you do things like spend hours of time hunting down obscure artwork of 12″ singles from crappy “blue-eyed soul” bands so that the extended remix of some obscure 80s song you got on a compilation has the proper cover art when it pops up on your TV screen via Apple TV. You make sure the song has the right name (was that Loving or Lovin’?). You make sure it’s classified in the right year, which can involve quite a bit of reasearch for, say, old soul music that was only released on 7″ singles.

All in all, I’m not sure this is really the best way to spend your time.

iTunes (and tools like it, though I use iTunes) have been a godsend for music-loving OCD-types like me. If you properly tag your music, you can do something like listen to music of a particular genre from 1973, or you can easily make a playlist of every song you have with “fuck” in the title (57 songs long at the moment if you care). Yes, the possibilities are fucking endless.

Well, almost endless.

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OK, not literally. But I thought I’d write a few words about Obama after the election, and then I ended up so busy that it sort of never happened. I could wait until the inauguration to write about this, in that most apropos of moments, but now is just as well, while the President-elect goes about the business of choosing cabinet members and managing “the transition”, as the robotic American news anchors keep regurgitating from the teleprompter.

It’s funny, I am extremely politically active, in that I engage in political debate and discourse with my friends almost constantly, although I would never work on someone’s campaign. I’m sitting in half a world away from my home country, but thanks to VoIP, talking to my friends back home costs very little, and we were burning through minutes and hours talking about McCain’s head-scratching tactics, about the Barbie doll vice presidential candidate, about the brawl between Hillary and Barack in the primary, etc. and so on.

Though those close friends who sat through my endless wind-baggery know full well my seemingly contradictory political beliefs (which are really only contradictory when viewed through the idiotic prism of American political theater), more casual acquaintances or business associates really don’t have a feel for my politics, because I usually play those cards close to my vest, so to speak. Therefore, it may surprise some that I am not a progressive.

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You know, for all our pontification and theorizing and building, the fact remains, we’re all just a bunch of gunk stuck onto a skeletal foundation. All of us from kings to the unemployed, from skinny super models to obese computer technicians to beefy bodybuilders…we’re all just skin and bones.

Some of us, though, are more skin and bones than others. I don’t mean this in the normal sense of the term: not in a skinny way; rather, it’s more like a quality of construction way. Most of us, our bones, our skin, our fat and muscle; it all synthesizes into a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. We look at them and we see a person, not mere skin and bone.

But then there are others that when you look at them, if you look closely, you can really see the skin hanging off the bone. You can see the shape of the skull, the face clinging on like a person clinging for dear life on the edge of a cliff. You can immediately see through them, dissecting without the need of a knife, neatly separating them into their component parts, in your mind.

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To you non Web developers, there’s a special tag we use when we want to make text pop up as your mouse hovers over something. It’s called a tool tip, and if I’m not mistaken, the practice originated in Microsoft software years ago.

Now, to you Web developers, if you’re using a single header graphic spanning the entire page, here’s a tip: be careful what tool tip you use, or else you might create results like the one I inadvertantly found when my mouse traveled to the top of the contact page for United States Senator for Maine Olympia Snowe:

Now that’s one handsome woman!

Thorbjörn Holmlund kicks ass. He is working on a truly amazing project that cannot possibly be overlooked for its contribution to human civilization. Echoing Chares of Lindos, the Greek sculptor charged with constructing the colossus on the island of Rhodes, Holmlund’s legacy will be a modern day Great Wonder: a colossal moose.

The moose is apparently being built not to commemorate a Swedish victory over some invading force. But when you think about it, what reason does there need to be to build the world’s largest moose? This should be a monument to celebrate mooseness, and there need be no other reason, for there can be no reason more appropriate than that anyway.

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Sometimes you read something that just utterly depresses you. I have been sick lately, and I didn’t especially need more depression, but today I read this story at Wired, and it made me sink even lower. To summarize, researchers have studied some supposed dinosaur flesh that was recovered with some fossils and concluded that it is in fact bacterial slime that formed on the bones in the ground.

The reason I am so distraught is that I have been harboring a fantasy, for nearly all my life, that one day I would see a dinosaur in real life. The aforementioned dino-flesh held the best possibility of DNA extraction, and then we’d be on our way to a real-life Jurassic Park.

This also means that the rest of my fantasy won’t come true. You know, the part where scientists vastly underestimate the intelligence and breeding frequency of said reconstituted dinosaurs, and then the dinosaurs overbreed and eventually break out of their containment facility.

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Just returned to Beijing after a little mini-visit to Chongqing and Shanghai. The trip was good; Chongqing is probably the #1 up-and-coming city in China, and Shanghai, it turns out, is much better when you have friends there. (Go figure.)

This being my second visit to Shanghai, I wasn’t as concerned with traipsing around gawking at touristy schlock as I was with things like drinking beer and eating food and pontificating with other beer-drinking food-eaters about the state of life in China, but I did reserve one touristy thing for my last day.

Upon arrival, I had a ride into town, so the opportunity wasn’t there, but I made my way back to Pudong Airport all by my lonesome, which meant I could feel free to go and do one of those nerdy things that often seems to entertain me more than the poor people who get stuck with me: I rode the Shanghai maglev train.

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