Gang of Four US tour, 2005: May 6, Seattle, at the Showbox, TSA permitting.

For the uncertain, the first two records by the Gang of Four are at the root of the punk sound that can be heard in the work of Mission of Burma and to an extent the Minutemen. Later work by the band was very “dance-oriented” and therefore not nearly as interesting to me.

There’s a well-developed Wikipedia article on the band which may shed light on my excitement.

Man, I love Entertainment and Solid Gold more than nearly any of the other old stuff I have from back then, for what it sounds like and for how rare it was. I suppose that some of the band’s aggressively atonal political polemics must have inspired Crass, among others, but I just never really got into Crass in a musical sense, while I can still sing the words to several GoF songs. Really, no-one else ever sounded like this band, not even themselves.

Apparently Rhino is reissuing Entertainment on May 17, although CD Universe claims a one-day ship for an EMI ’95 reissue. I am wholly unsurprised to find that there is no GoF music available via the iTunes store.

However, a bandmember has made some killer tracks available here, including Anthrax, Not Great Men, and Return The Gift, although, sadly, they appear to be abbreviated samples.

I thought Sleeve had retired his bloggy self, but I was wrong. Say, daddy-o, there’s talk of a crawl up the Willamette with an Ozymandian stop at the Spruce Goose, how’s school treating you this summer?

bmg://theMike.blogs.here – Why use Gmail? notes that you can use infixed email aliases like “username+foo@gmail.com” to provide tracking on inbound email filtered at the email address.

…And we are off to the Apple store to drop the box off. The new brain arrived safe and sound. I have backed up the Users folder and, although I hesitate to swear to it, I beleive no additional data has entered the directory structure since last night – all my data interaction on the machine has been thin-client, blogging and reading Gmail.

Gmail! Man, what an amazing thing! Bill Gates is surely sleeping badly these days.

I review on ATC of Ian McEwan’s Saturday reminded me I had read either an engrossing excerpt or a review of the book several months ago. Whichever it was, I was sold at the time.

How, I wonder, might one go about excavating linkable URLs from within AvantGo?

Today, I came across two stories I’d like to blog, the Beeb on Google’s videoblogging announcement, and the P-I’s story on the upcoming Silver Cloud Hotel near Safeco Field. A story about the addition of satellite imagery to Google maps on the NYT also caught my eye, but proved too horkulated a pain in the ass to link to, even in-browser and online.

I think I have bitched about this before. It’s an unserved need which is generated by my position in the unlikely intersection of three sets: the cheap, the wired, and the bloggy. You might dignify (or ridicule) this absurd self-diagnosis by casting me as a member of the “cheapgnoscenti,” but of course I would never stoop to such a callow coinage. To that subprognothean depth of verbal flimflammery and obfuscatory pyrotechnics, I stoutly rejoin: no sir!

I suspect the answer is within spitting distance. The method is to replace the AG feeds with RSS feeds of the same data (and here’s the tricky bit), rendered within AG via a multi-format aggregator such as Newsmob. This leaves the problem of getting to the links unsolved, as they resulting feeds are still rendered by AG.

In addition, Newsmob appears to be unfunded. In my experience, the service is spotty (although that may be the fault of feed providers) and has a terrible admin UI that more-or-less guarantees each new user will create a new feed with the desired content rather than locating the extant one.

Mind you, this is all groundless speculation. But it describes my experience to date.

Please note: moblogged sans links, fixed in post.

The House of the Rising Sun may have been found, I learned from this MetaFilter post.

Eric reminds me about the beautifully-designed ebooks site, ManyBooks. I enjoyed a few works by Robert Louis Stevenson last year, and there are many more, including a nearly forgotten childhood favorite, A Child’s Garden of Verse.