Favorite songs of ar-kay-es

I recently bought an iPod and really enjoy iTunes. I especially like going through people's iMix lists and finding new music or finding old favorites that I had long since forgotten about. So, I decided to put together a list of some of the songs that really make me tick, with a brief explanation of what I find so appealing about them. For your visual pleasure, I give you Favorite Songs of ar-kay-es (in no particular order)...

Starry Eyed Surprise (Paul Oakenfold)
I can't remember where I first heard this song, but I fell in love with it immediately and it can bring me right out of a crappy mood. I got the album a year or so ago, but have since lost it. Thank goodness for iTunes!

Toxic (Britney Spears)
I know, I know. She's a pop tart, but I find this song really great. It's definitely good to move your butt to when you're at the gym or in the club.

You Got the Love (Candi Staton)
They played this when Carrie Bradshaw is walking down the streets of NYC in the final episode of Sex & the City. I found it to be quite an empowering song, so I finally obtained a copy of the CD from a special import company after failing at several eBay auctions and striking out on amazon.com.

Untitled (How Does It Feel) (D'Angelo)
If you want to spice up your romantic music mix, just put this on. It pretty much does the same thing for me that "Let's Get It On" does.

At Last (Etta James)
What a voice!!! This song just makes me ache.

Yeah! (Usher)
This song is just fun all around. You can't help but dance to it, and I especially love Lil' John (can he say anything other than "yeah", "what", or "okay"?). On a side note, there's a really funny Chappelle's Show with a sketch about Lil' John.

Feel Good Inc (Gorillaz)
This is one of my newer favorite songs. Shake ya booty!

Mockingbirds (Grant Lee Buffalo)
Don't worry; this isn't a cover of that awful Carly Simon/James Taylor song. I heard this several years ago and really fell in love with the part that starts, "One day this ground will break, and open up for me; I hope it will...". I know that feeling.

Good Day (Ice Cube)
I actually really like a remix of this song, which I call the "flowery" remix and can't find on an independent download site anywhere (take note iTunes!). They put the song over a kind of old school tune and used to play it on the radio when I was in Junior high. I hadn't heard it for years until I was in Germany and it came on the radio there while driving on the famous autobahn...nothing like driving really fast in a rental BMW while listening to such a cool song.

Video (India Arie)
I play this song when I start getting down on myself about various things - pimples, weight issues, etc. It reminds me that I'm always a lady no matter what I decide to do (or not do) to my exterior.

Touch Me Fall (Indigo Girls)
I used to listen to this song with my friend, Tesia, in high school and it was one of the only Indigo Girls songs that I liked at the time. There's something very hauntingly beautiful about the part where they sing, "touch me, I'm so beautiful".

Galileo (Indigo Girls)
Later in life, I've really come to like this song, especially the lyrics "how long 'til my soul gets it right; can any human being ever reach that kind of light..."

Sparkling Diamonds (from the Moulin Rouge Soundtrack)
I love to sing this one. It's great how they merged "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend" with "Material Girl".

Je ne veux qu'elle (Marc Lavoine)
My lovely Parisian friend turned me on to this song. It just sounds like home.

La Belle Et Le Bad Boy (MC Solaar)
This is another song that I heard first on Sex & the City, and just had to find the album.

Temptation (Moby)
A simply beautiful song from Moby's newest album.

Dramamine (Modest Mouse)
This is the song that turned me on to Modest Mouse back when they were playing house parties around Washington state. Props for their big success, but I still prefer this to their newer stuff.

Friend or Foe (Bugs in Amber)
I once dated a guy who used to be in this band and remember the summer that they cut this song. It was so much fun when they actually played it on 107.7 The End one night...and then hearing it later on at a couple of parties loud and live.

These Words (Natasha Bedingfield)
This is a newer song that I found on iTunes and I'm addicted to it now. Turn it up loud in the car and sing along!

99 Luftballoons (Nena)
I can actually sing most of the German version of this song, even after losing most of my German proficiency. It's just too fun to pass up!

Rape Me (Nirvana)
Yeah, I still love "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and remember how revolutionary that song was. But, this is my favorite Nirvana song. "You Know You're Right" was a close second.

Cemeteries (Waxwing)
The drummer from this band is the same as in Bugs in Amber. This song just really touches me and appeals to me when I'm in a thoughtful mood.

Simple Kind of Life (No Doubt)
I actually hated this song when it first came out, but after listening to it a few times, it really grew on me. The lyrics reminded me of how I felt when I was a lot younger.

Hey Ya (Outkast)
This song is so fun and makes you move without you even realizing it. I always laugh when I hear it b/c a friend-of-a-friend once seriously said something to the effect of, "but really, you should never shake a polaroid picture"...yes, she's a photographer, but still...

La Nuit Est Mauve (Patricia Kass)
Patricia Kass has a really fabulous voice, and this is just such a haunting song. Even without knowing any French, you can feel what she's singing about.

Ignition Remix (R. Kelly)
Funnily enough, I ended up really liking this song after watching the parody on Chappelle's Show.

Time of My Life (Macy Gray)
I ended up buying the whole "8 Mile" soundtrack just for this song. Yeah, there were a few other good songs on the album, but this is what got me to hit the "buy" button.

Dry Your Eyes (The Streets)
I love it when rappers can turn around a good, touching song like this. There are other great songs on the "A Grand Don't Come For Free" album, but this one is my favorite.

Soma (The Smashing Pumpkins)
Simply put, this is the musical equivalent of an orgasm, and one of my favorite songs of all time.

She's a Jar (Wilco)
This is a newer find for me. Someone had it on an iMix and I really took to it.

Any Other Day (Astaire)
I found this on someone's iMix as well. Now I have several songs from them, all of which I like intensely, but this one is the tops for me. The lead singer has this sort of airy but grounded quality...no, I'm not sure that makes sense either, but it's about all I could come up with.

Sleeps with Butterflies (Tori Amos)
I love songs by Tori Amos. Her lyrics are so moving and poetic, and this song is certainly no exception. I recently bought a live version from iTunes that is really lovely.

Pyramid Song (Radiohead)
I was fairly disappointed with the album this song was on (which was surprising b/c I LOVE Radiohead), but this song made it worth the purchase.

Grave Digger (Dave Matthews)
It was hard to pick one song from Dave Matthews, since I love most all of his solo work and work with the Dave Matthew's Band. But, I chose this one because I love the play on "ring around the rosies". Also, it's just a great song.

One Million Miles Away (J. Ralph)
I first heard this on a car commercial. What's with car commercials that they get such great songs? Anyway, in this particular song a hot guy is driving a hot car trying to get to the wedding of his beloved before it's too late. The look on the bride's face when the doors fly open is priceless. It's one of the best commercials I've ever seen. I mean, this ad came out in like 2001 and it still gets me just thinking about it. I absolutely hate Volkswagen for removing it from their Web site though. After some googling of the ad title, "Big Day", I can't find it anywhere. So, you'll just have to check out this fabulous story of it instead and imagine it for yourself.

Why reading the Bible literally is impossible

I'm always amazed at people who claim to read the Bible literally. My first thought is, "wow, it's great that you know all about the life and times of that era as well as Hebrew." Inevitably, these people are neither historians nor linguists, but they don't let that stop them from believing that what they've read is completely true.

When I was very young, I asked my mom a lot of questions about the stories I read in the Bible. I had trouble believing that everything actually happened as it was written, and I was beginning to think that the whole thing was a complete farce. My mom then told me that she learned to analyze what she was reading rather than take everything at face value. She explained that a lot of the stories were parables, and that they were meant to teach people to understand the end rather than the means.

Over time, I learned a few things that basically made me think the same way:

• The Bible was written by many different people, all of whom had individual biases that affected what and how they wrote.


• The Bible was translated into many different languages along the way, causing a loss of meaning and again introducing biases from translators.


• There are many different versions of the Bible, which were subject to outside influences such as political leaders (such as the King James Bible).


• The Bible was written in a different political climate and culture that we don't understand today without additional information.


• The Bible is made up of both actual events as well as stories intended to illustrate how we should act and treat one another.

However, it wasn't until I was reading the book Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss that I added one more reason to my arsenal. In ancient languages, punctuation was used far less and in a much different way than it is today. Punctuation was used to indicate pauses in literature for actors, chanters, and those who read aloud. She says, "Perhaps the key thing one needs to realize about the early history of punctuation is that, in a literary culture based entirely on the slavish copying of venerated texts, it would be highly presumptuous of a mere scribe to insert helpful marks where he thought they ought to go."

She points to the following two (differently punctuated) phrases from the Bible:

"Verily, I say unto thee, This day thou shalt be with me in Paradise."

or

"Verily I say unto thee this day, Thou shalt be with me in Paradise."

The placement of the comma in the second passage indicates the existence of Purgatory (the Catholic view), while the placement of the comma in the first passage indicates that one would go directly to heaven to be with God (the Protestant view). Truss points out a few other passages that leave us with similar questions all because of missing or ambiguous punctuation.

So, this just gives me one more reason to look at the Bible and say that we need to look deeper into what was written instead of taking everything literally. I just wish that other people would do the same and stop imposing their "moral values" on our country when we supposedly have freedom of religion, and my version of religion may have a different interpretation than another due to differing punctuation.

Maybe we'll be OK afterall

Check out this really good article in The Stranger: Victory is Ours by Ted Rall.

First, I love the comparison of the Nixon administration to the shrub jr. administration. In fact, I saw a fabulous bumper sticker the other day with a picture of "president" shrub jr. that read, "Nixon was re-elected too."

Second, I love that people are starting to come around to realize how awful this administration is. Granted, as Rall states, it's too friggin' late since the election is over and we're stuck with this administration for the next 3 1/2 years, but at least we can say that we knew it all along.

Now we need to work on the educational system in this country and reverse years of budget cuts at the hands of republicans. At least that way, the next several generations wouldn't end up so easily brainwashed into voting for people who actually work against the common good.

Tom pops the question at the Eiffel Tower

Well, it's official - Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are engaged. I guess a couple of months of brainwashing - errr, dating - can really sweep a girl off her feet.

Katie has mentioned that when she was a little girl, she used to dream of marrying Tom Cruise. I wonder if that dream included her conversion to a cult, which I'm sure that Tom, Mr. "if-they-don't-like-Scientology-well-then-f***-you" was very objective about. Oh well...she's not the first woman in history to do something like that for her man.

On a related note, how much freakier can Tom get? He's suddenly this over-the-top, wacko kinda guy instead of the cool, handsome leading man. I'm not sure that this recent development has been a good career move, but I suppose he has plenty of money to retire on.

All around, it's just kinda weird - like Flava Flav and Brigitte Nielson kinda weird. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

Why aren't we impeaching president shrub?

Of course, I know why - we have a very imbalanced government in the U.S. right now. But when I read articles about the inadequacies of bush jr. (such as this one of the Downing Street Memo), I just can't seem to figure out how half of the population still supports him. Why, oh why?

People were in an uproar over Clinton getting it on with Lewinsky in the Oval Office, which I might point out did not involve anyone but the two of them (and Hillary unknowingly) until it was blown up into a huge scandal by the republicans.

But somehow people don't care that our tax dollars are wasted on all kinds of ridiculous things, such as imaginary threats of a washed up dictator. They don't care that legislation passed to protect us from pollution in our air and water are now being defeated; and they don't care that programs that help people, such as adults who need job training due to layoffs, are being cut by the bush administration by 74%. These, of course, are merely a few things among a myriad of other detrimental policies.

Listen, if you support this guy and his crooked administration, don't come complaining to us (democrats) about the terrible illnesses your family and friends get due to increased pollution and environmental causes. And don't tell me about how difficult it is to get a job because you can't get retraining when the programs are cut. You brought it on yourself by supporting bush jr. and "moral" agenda, which is nothing more than a thinly veiled code name for increasing the gap between the middle class and the rich.

But, I still say that we should impeach the @$$hole, and make him and his wealthy friends pay off the national debt they've caused us to incur.

Awful Web sites

So, I'm in the market for a couple of toy poodles. I've been googling to come up with some breeders in my area, and I've also got some recommendations from various sources.

In all of the sites I've seen, I have yet to come across one that I think is well done. Most have ridiculous backgrounds, hideous colors, poor navigation, awful grammar and spelling, and some even play horrible MIDI tunes. There's little worse than having to wade through all of that crap just to figure out if you have a litter of puppies, especially when you're charging hundreds of dollars for each dog.

If you are the owner of one of these sites, please do all of us a favor and think about the design of your site. This advice is really for anyone designing a site, but I've come to notice the dog sites in particular due to my recent search activities.

If you need some help, check out Vincent Flanders' Web site for some tips.

Street ass

So, I absolutely love my sister-in-law, Kati. Today, we headed out to IKEA to do some random shopping. Along the way, we drove past a guy with half his ass exposed on the street. No, I'm not kidding. It wasn't even like he was overly huge or anything, but nonetheless, there was his big ol' ass hanging out. It was far worse than regular plumber butt. He was chatting it up with the neighbor next door, without a care in the world (obviously).

It could almost go without saying that Kati and I busted up laughing. It just wasn't something that you see every day (thankfully, I might add). I'm not sure why the guy didn't notice his ass hanging out of his pants, but maybe it's just an every day kind of thing for him or maybe he has no nerve endings in this butt. Perhaps it's like Tara Reid, whose breast popped out on the red carpet one day and she had no clue. In any case, it was an alarming sight and I can only hope that one day someone will buy him the proper size of pants to cover up his ass.

Bad news

So, one of my sisters was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis this week. It's a very helpless feeling knowing that I live several hours from her and because of that I can do relatively little to help her out.