odds & ends

Nice article on Colin Meloy of The Decemberists fame (reg req). I wrote about their last album here. Probably my second favorite album last year.

In the last few years he has quickly established himself as one of the premier new songwriters in rock, charming critics and ever-growing crowds with songs set in a fantastical world of Victorian chimney sweeps and dockside prostitutes, infant ghosts and exotic royal parades. His lyrics giddily engage a Scrabble master's vocabulary; one song on the Decemberists' latest album, "Picaresque," rhymes folderol, chaparral and coronal.

Nice article on VHS/Beta wars and implications for HD-DVD/Blu-Ray (sub req). There's some more here at Wikipedia. I think I've always heard the 'porn' argument for VHS beating Beta and never believed it. Neither article mentions this as a driver for VHS's eventual success. In fact the main driver is that VHS could store more hours of video. Beta couldn't hold all movies on a single tape.

While I'm here. Cool word of the day: Locuna - gap or missing part. As in Locuna Mattata. I keed, I keed.