Top of the charts

Willow from Buffy: “Hello beautiful. Oh wait, that’s just me reflected in your shirt. It’s shiny”
Doogie Howser: “Which is item # 8 on my list of the twenty three ways that women are like fish: they are both attracted to shiny objects. You really must start reading my blog.”

Yes, “How I Met Your Mother”, once again stealing something from my own life. Including hitting on coat check girls. If you’re not watching this show and it ends up getting canceled I am going to hunt each and every one of you down and well, give you the biggest guilt trip ever. (Sorry, I’m not good at physical threats). I’m telling you, there are very few shows about Gen X but this is a great one.

Ok, I’m not one to toot my own horn but I found out something today that is just astounding. While messing around with my cel phone I decided to see if I could call up the blog. Which I can, meaning that no matter where you are, you can always read my ramblings. But that isn’t the coolest part. I discovered that if you type “battling the current” into Yahoo this site shows up #1 out of over four million possibilities. That was the best news I could get on a Monday. I have created a site where if you type a phrase, and not an entirely uncommon one at that, into a search engine it states that my site is the most appropriate out of the entire internet. How awesome is that? I guess I have at least one accomplishment this year.

Completely changing subjects. For those of you with VH1 Classic you may have heard about the fact that they were allowing you the viewer (for a charitable donation to hurricane relief efforts) to pick the videos that they would air. This has turned out to be an awesome programming decision culminating in the showing of the Y Kant Tori Read video. Yes, the video from the incredibly bad rock band that Tori Amos was in before she was known. I didn’t even know a tape of this existed and man, you haven’t lived until you’ve seen an incredibly young Tori Amos rocking out. I am so pissed that I didn’t record it.

I do feel like explaining why I have no problem with having a number of Tori Amos discs in my collection while the fact that I own a Paula Cole CD fills me with shame and disbelief. First of all, Tori did make my original top 10 perfect mate list so that explains a lot of it. But more than anything, she was groundbreaking in the early 90’s. When I first saw the video for “Silent All These Years” as a freshmen in college I went, “Whoa, that is different.” At a time where Nirvana was just breaking and MTV still had Def Leppard and Aerosmith in heavy rotation here was this girl playing piano with lyrics that could best be described as stark and direct. In my eighteen year old mind, there was no reference point for that type of music and I certainly couldn’t imagine it getting major airplay. In retrospect, it wasn’t as earth shattering as I thought (Tori is basically a much more easily accessible version of Ani DiFranco) but I was definitely made a fan by the fact that I’ve seen very few artists go to the edge without blinking like she did.

Paula Cole on the other hand… That was just a mistake. I must have bought it for my Canadian girlfriend and forgotten to give it to her. Or maybe I was just really drunk one night while ordering music on Amazon. That certainly wasn’t a decision made by someone of sound mind and body.