Baton Ruse

May 16th, 2005

What is a musical baton?

I don’t know, but my beard idol Rob Weychert and my Google-juice idol Keith Robinson just passed me one. I will now waive it over my head and tell you all sorts of things you never asked about!

Total volume of music files on my computer:

18.05 GB… Mostly from actual pressed CDs

The last CD I bought was:

“The Runaway Found” by The Veils

Song playing right now:

“Mojo Pin” by Jeff Buckley

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me:

Ten Years Gone by Led Zeppelin
Best group ever. Any suggestions to the contrary will be deleted.
Chloe Dancer/Crown of Thorns by Mother Love Bone
If you live in Seattle and you’re in your 20s or 30s, this is your anthem.
The Pink Life by Mike Doughty
This pick is currently in ridiculously heavy rotation. Over 50 plays in the last few months I’m sure. And I’m seeing Doughty live tomorrow night. Bam!
Salvation by Citizen Cope
Unclassifiable music is the most impressive music of all. Citizen Cope and Calexico are two of the least classifiable bands I know.
Bonnie and Clyde by Serge Gainsbourg
The all-time winner for song most ahead of its time. Sounds like it was composed in 2005. Was actually composed in 1968.

* Honorable mention: Any of Inman’s favorites from the “Video Game Beeping” genre.

Five people to whom Iâ€™m passing the baton:

Andrei Herasimchuk (as a last gasp attempt to revive Design By Fire)
Jeff Croft
John Gruber
Matt May
Stephen Lodefink

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20 Responses:

Adam Bouskila says:

Mike Doughty seems like a popular singer among many.

#1 - May 16th, 2005 at 11:23 pm
Steve Hubbard says:

This musical baton thing is like a Friendster for web designers.

#2 - May 16th, 2005 at 11:30 pm
Jack says:

Is Andrei ever coming back?

#3 - May 16th, 2005 at 11:45 pm
Matthew Pennell says:

And there was me thinking that I was the only person in the world who had heard of Mother Love Bone – good call!

#4 - May 17th, 2005 at 1:16 am
Steve says:

At the risk of getting deleted I would have to nominate Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon as the greatest rock album ever. Zeppelin is no far behind though.

#5 - May 17th, 2005 at 2:17 am
Jeff Croft says:

Thanks for the baton, Mike. I’ll get my meme on later today…

#6 - May 17th, 2005 at 7:47 am
brian says:

mother love bone rules. how about a little holy rollers!? =)

#7 - May 18th, 2005 at 6:03 pm
Juna Duncan says:

18 Gb that’s pretty descent.

#8 - May 19th, 2005 at 5:04 am
Trent says:

Love Zep. “In My Time of Dying” rocks.

#9 - May 19th, 2005 at 5:44 am
J. J. says:

Noticed Meyer’s mention of Zeppelin, although I was a little sad that he disagreed about their greatness.

#10 - May 19th, 2005 at 11:24 am
Rodrigo says:

As someone who has been spiritually in Seattle for at least ten years now (go Sonics tonight!), but for some strange reason is still living in Brazil I have to say that Mother Love Bone has fans south of the Equator as well.

And Zepellin would be the best band ever if such a thing really existed. It doesn’t. And they’d have to fight R.E.M. for it if it did.

OK, you can delete me now.

#11 - May 19th, 2005 at 11:31 am
seth says:

wow. you must have known this would start a flame war.

@Rodrigo – R.E.M. is the crusty stuff that John Bohnam used to have to scrape off his thang after a night out. When’s that last time Michael Stipe put a fish in a groupie’s hoo-ha? Case closed.

#12 - May 19th, 2005 at 12:03 pm
Rodrigo says:

No, really. I thought I’d be deleted.

R.E.M. is just always on my mind. Someone else could just as easily have mentioned U2, or Radiohead. Or Pink Floyd.

A fish? Really?

#13 - May 20th, 2005 at 12:49 pm
Kevin says:

“A fish? Really?”

Red Snapper, to be exact. The band was in a seaside hotel and were fishing out of their rooms. It’s all in the Led Zeppelin biography. If you love Zep, you got to read it.

(Editor’s Note: Yep, I’m aware of this story. One of the greatest of all time. And you know what? I can see that hotel from my house. The Edgewater.)

#14 - May 22nd, 2005 at 4:22 am
Ray Dickman says:

Listen to “Whole Lotta Love” and then listen to the song “You Need Loving” by the Small Faces and you’ll hear where Robert Plant stole much of his vocal style (and even some words in this case). The person he ripped off is Steve Marriott (not to mention Wilson Pickett – who sued Led Zepplin for the song). Steve Marriott was the voice behind the Small Faces and Humble Pie and without him, little Percy Plant wouldn’t be the Robert Plant that we all know.

Robert Plant is a hack and Steve Marriott is the greatest rock singer ever!!!!

#15 - June 3rd, 2005 at 12:54 pm
joe ducca says:

i must agree, best song of mother love bones. I have a question that someone onhere may be abel to answer. i heard a (what i think) cover of it done by veder (again i think) in londen in 91-93. it sounded like veder. i know it was not wood’s doing vocels. so i am trying to find it. Anyone?

#16 - February 7th, 2006 at 5:19 pm
zoe furndeaux says:

Led Zeppelin,was sued by Willie Dixon who wrote songs for Muddy Waters “you need love” which was used for the song “whole lotta love”.To this date Robert Plant saying” we made it our own” It’s stealing.

#17 - August 15th, 2007 at 9:36 pm
JeffCroft.com Journal says:

Getting my meme on (a.k.a. musical baton)

Well, it seems that Mike D. and Ryan Brill have passed me the proverbial baton. Thanks to them. Hooray for memes. So, here goes: Total volume of music on my computer: 42.68GB This represents 22 genres (I keep my genres…

#18 - May 17th, 2005 at 11:50 am
DElyMyth - /dev/null says:

Staffetta Musicale

Con un certo ritardo, rispondo all’appello anche io!

…

#19 - May 19th, 2005 at 1:39 pm
Pandemia says:

Il meme musicale del momento, la staffetta

Matteo mi passa il testimone del meme del momento, cinque domande tra musica e tecnologia. Procedo immediatamente. Volume totale dei File musicali sul mio pc: La cartella musica segnala 19 Gb. Aggiungendo i file stoccati sull’hard disk esterno po…

#20 - May 22nd, 2005 at 5:28 am

Shared

Hundreds of headlines wash over us every day. And part of why many of us engage in this flow is because we have faith that over time, this torrent of episodic knowledge is going to cohere into something more significant: a framework for genuinely understanding an issue. And we live with it ’cause it sort of works. Eventually you hear enough buzzwords like “single-payer” and “public option” and you start to feel like you can play along.

But mounting evidence indicates that this approach to information is actually totally debilitating. Faced with a flood of headlines on an ever-increasing variety of topics, we shut off. We turn to news that doesn’t require much understanding – crime, traffic, weather – or we turn off the news altogether.

- Matt Thompson on why the way we report and consume news is precisely wrong. Matt is, of course, precisely right. If you’re at SXSW next week, I don’t know how you could justify missing this talk.

Cameron’s Colosseo letterpress poster is now available: The only question is, black or white? The black is oh so tempting!

Jon Stewart Skewers Media’s Obsession with Chat Roulette: Funniest Wii Craps reference ever, as well. It’s really interesting to me that Chat Roulette is getting this much “attention” when TinyChat has been around so much longer, essentially does the same thing and more, and is much more useful to the average person. Just goes to show how viral public sex acts can be.

"Add features and customers forever and rake in the dough.":

The 2005 email that spawned Picnik, Google’s latest buy. If you’re thinking about launching a startup, you should study this e-mail carefully. It’s a perfect example of exactly how a crazy little thought becomes a big idea, and even on its own, it’s better than most “official company business plans” people present to VCs. I gave a talk at Webstock in New Zealand a couple of weeks ago about creating a startup and I wish I had this to dissect at the time. Really good stuff.

50 Useful Coding Techniques (CSS Layouts, Visual Effects and Forms):

(via doug)

Tumblr Finally Rolls Out Comments. Sort Of. Trolls Not Welcome. :

I actually really like how clubby it is. Unfortunately it means I won’t be commenting on any Tumblrs since I don’t officially “follow” anyone besides via RSS, but that’s probably ok. Maybe the answer to the world’s wide-open commenting problem is something like this.

Episode 2 of Dan Benjamin's "The Conversation" is Live:

I was a guest on Dan Benjamin’s new weekly radio show last week, along with Merlin Mann, Christina Warren, Adam Keys, and Dave Nanian. Subjects discussed include Newsvine, keeping your own identity after becoming part of a big company, and the RADICAL concept of only publishing stuff to your readers and followers that is actually true.

LESS - Leaner CSS:

Given that pre-compiling CSS is an official “best practice” these days, why not use that compile step to extend CSS in powerful ways? LESS lets you use variables, nested rules, and other niceties at author-time to clean up your rules and keep everything tidy. I believe The Wolf made something like this a few years ago, but I haven’t heard about it since.

How 3D works, and why it's back:

Great article on the ins and outs of three dimensional imagery. Still doesn’t change my opinion that well-shot conventional cinematography is more impressive than the novelty that is Avatar.

The Importance of Removing Features:

This is one of the most useful articles I’ve read in a long time. As we work on focusing, strengthening, and simplifying Newsvine, the concepts discussed by Lukas ring true. “Saying no” has never been a strong suit of mine. It’s very helpful to remember how important of a quality it is. (via fullstopinteractive)

Newly released video of the space shuttle Challenger disaster: It was 24 years ago, I was in 5th grade, but I remember it like it was yesterday. School was stopped immediately and they wheeled out televisions in every classroom for us to watch the news footage. It’s great that this video has been released, but holy crap, how do you tuck something that away for two decades???

A nicely done british parody of 60 Minutes style video journalism. It’s easy to miss how formulaic our news is sometimes. (via B-Tizzle, originally via E-Chizzle)

Colosseo: This is why Cameron is a king and we are all just pawns in his world. I can’t wait to get my hands on this poster. I will point out, however, that the outro credits on the video need some kerning. Someone is going to lose their right hand for that.

Spezify:

New ways of searching are almost never as useful as old ways of searching. Spezify is pretty awesome though. It’s a visually interesting, never-ending, horizontally and vertically scrollable, topic explorer. I don’t think I’d use it for digging deep on anything, but to get a quick visually rich sampling of a topic, it’s quite fun (via tiff, a long time ago actually, over email).

Realism in UI Design:

Reminds me of my favorite logo design advice: “Never waste a stroke”. (via gruber)

Overshared

This Kindle ad is cute and Applelike but misses the mark. Advertise what you do well: price and battery life http://bit.ly/cFBw70