71 Weeks Later ...

... and thanks, Live Journal, for keeping track of that ....

Twittering has now become my favorite avenue for surrealist entertainment: you take a diverse group of entertaining tweeters, and watch the resulting conversation ensue. You also quickly learn who cannot be trusted to tweet intelligibly, and who is absolutely riveting. Right now, my surreal chatter party guests (i.e., the winners of my own personal "Intelligible and Interesting Twitter...ers" competition) are Anderson Cooper, Michael Ian Black and Stephen Bowman of Blake ... i.e., Bowman: "Being a stuffy Brit, I didn't know you needed ID for non-private parties" ... Cooper: "Yes, but are security scans invading your privacy?" ... Black: "Speaking of invading your privacy, do you know what the name for spontaneous bleeding under a foreskin is? Smegmata!" ... Cooper: "Do we trust medical advice?" -- and on it goes. Twitter: the new Salvador Dali of surreal communication entertainment.

In the midst of that was Ivan Lins posting a playlist. And you open that link up, to read: a playlist. Nothing you can DO with this playlist, except read it. (Reading Playlists: the 2010 version of "watching grass grow") Now, merely reading a playlist and getting anything out of it requires a certain skill set, namely: having every song recorded since the dawn of recording history embedded in your brain and retrievable on a whim ... at which point you can share the emotional ambiance of the collection and croon, "Ooooh, nice playlist dude" (or however one compliments playlisters), but without that skill set ... what are you going to do with it?

If B&N or Amazon can include a :30 second song preview with every CD they sell ... you'd think someone, somewhere would have said, "Hey, this would work on the "Playlist Competition" website! ... or whatever that was ... but it appears no one has ever thought of that.

Originally published:  Jan. 2nd, 2010 at 12:37 AM