A return to normalcy

I would like to take this moment to welcome Beth the Laptop to the staff of Battling the Current. Yes, I took the time this weekend to go out and buy a new machine to replace Natalie, who best I can gather suffered a video card failure made worse by the fact that the video card is integrated into the motherboard. I still might try to perform some surgery on her but in terms of efficiency it was simply easier for me to buy a new laptop. Beth is basically a newer version of Natalie in terms of make and design but she already seems nicer and more serene than Natalie (much in the same way that Beth Orton is compared to Natalie Portman.)

I will have to offer my apologies for the abundance of typos over the next few weeks as I begin to adjust to a new keyboard. While I am a forty words a minute typist I’ve never had any training so my typing style is abysmal and dependent on muscle memory so any change in keybpard size makes my typing just bad until I relearn the system. This doesn’t look to be too bad but I’ll just warn everyone up front that my posts may make less sense than normal.

(And yes, this means that I am going to have to rerip my entire CD collection to my laptop once again. Well, I guess I really don’t as I did it the first time to load my Zune and I’ve done that but it was very nice to have all of my music at my fingertips no matter what room I was in. At least when I did it the first time I was unemployed and could easily take care of fifty discs at a time while I was submitting resumes to the infinite void online. Now I will have to do it while I legitimately have better things to do with my time.)

Also for those wondering I finally broke down and put Delaware plates on my car today. Yes, as of this evening I no longer drive a car that is from the state of Missouri. I held off for as long as I could but at some point I just had to admit that I had moved. It is not that I have an incredibly strong attachment to Missouri (great friends from there but no real connection to the geography) but there is some strange reaction I get whenever I begin to realize that I am a resident of Delaware. Mainly because I can’t think of anyone else who lives in Delaware besides Joe Biden. I’m serious about this. I’ve been living here for month and I don’t know who else lives here. I assume that there are at least a dozen or so people in the state but to be honest I have no proof of that fact.

The good news is that now that I have that and my laptop situation salted away I can get back to my usual writing schedule. That means that we will have the 15 Influential Television Shows this week as well as the 15 Influential Pop Culture Moments. Also, a return of the music videos, posts written while I am still awake and all of the other fun parts of the blog. Again, apologies for the randomness of the last week or so. When I am sans computer and high speed internet I tend to lose my ability to write.

Best of 120 Minutes: In honor of Beth I find that it is only fitting that I feature a video from her namesake. If someone can explain to me why Velma from Scooby Doo appears halfway through the video I would greatly appreciate it.



The five random CDs for the week:
1) Ben Folds Five “Ben Folds Five”
2) Damien Rice “Live from Union Chappel”
3) Tift Merritt “Tambourine”
4) Tift Merritt “Another Country”
5) Tori Amos “Under the Pink”