Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

media consumption

Music

Fate Is the Hunter by Kate Earl - I first heard Kate Earl’s music last week on a back-episode of the KCRW Morning Becomes Eclectic podcast. I liked what I heard, so a week or two ago I bought her album on iTunes. She has a Fiona Apple quality about her, sans the husky voice and tortured lyrics. I’m a big fan of the Morning Becomes Eclectic version of her jaunty song “Officer.”

Several Arrows Later by Matt Pond PA - This band first appeared on my radar a year or two ago when their song “Grave’s Disease” was featured on Salon’s Audiofile MP3 blog. I liked the song, but otherwise the band fell off my radar until their new album came out a couple months ago. I’d been toying with buying it, and hearing “Halloween” on the All Songs Considered podcast finally convinced me to take the plunge. And I wasn’t disappointed — It’s a really good album, in the vein of Death Cab for Cutie (or a more rocked-up Postal Service).

I’m a big fan of the Coverville podcast, and last Thursday’s edition, “Six Degrees of Coveration,” was excellent. It gets especially good about halfway through, featuring a Social Distortion cover of Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” a Johnny Cash cover of Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down,” a Tom Petty cover of The Byrds’ “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better” and a Byrds cover of Bob Dylan’s “My Back Pages.” The Petty and Byrds tracks are standouts; I’ve had those two in heavy rotation since I picked them up off iTunes last night.

Movies

Rob and I went to see the new Harry Potter movie on Sunday night. The third film, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, remains my favorite of the series thus far, but this latest entry was still quite good — and much better than the first two.

Television

Doing some rare channel-surfing on Saturday morning, Rob and I came across a very strange cooking show on WHUT, in which a man, sitting on the banks of an ice fishing pond, proceeds to season, cook and garnish his catch with a conveniently placed table stocked with oranges, curry, green onions and a rather large pepper mill. He follows it up by heading over to a ski slope and assembling a work surface on which to prepare and cook an orange-flavored chicken as skiiers glide down the hill directly behind him. While the chicken roasts, he makes three servings of an orange, ice cream and meringue dessert, then sets them in the snow to keep cold. “If you don’t have any snow available,” he offers, “you can use a freezer to keep them cool.”

I honestly thought the show was a joke, but it’s a real program from Norway: New Scandinavian Cooking, now in its third season.

Books

I recently finished reading The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific, a travel memoir by J. Maarten Troost. It’s a fun, lightweight read. The author tries too hard to be clever and witty, I think, but the book is pretty enjoyable. (On a side note, I heard a while back that a former coworker actually went to college with the author. What a tiny world. But then, at the beginning of the book, the author talks about living in D.C. and finishing grad school here, so it’s not that much of a stretch.)

Next up: A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland Indiana by Haven Kimmel, which I received as a Christmas present last year from Alejandra.