Tuneage ~ You Bred Raptors?

You Bred Raptors? pump up the Poe-jam.

Folks, for this "Tuneage" blog post, I'm not asking y'all a question, but telling you about these terrific New York City instrumentalists whose name is already appropriately phrased to pose the question to a Jeopardy answer. (OK, you'd have to preface it with, "Who are..." but the upspeak inflection's already there, which was generous of them to provide.)

You Bred Raptors? are a trio of modern-day minstrels and dinosaur aficionados, with a long-standing tradition of playing in NYC's finest subway stations. Jamming on drums, cello, and an electric 8-string bass (woof! ), these guys compel large groups of cynical and tired New Yorkers to slow down on their treks from one train to the next so they can bathe in YBR's funky goodness. (Um...you know what I mean.) More impressively, they manage to charm us out of our hard-earned coin, which is no mean feat when it comes to all us jaded straphangers.

I told the story of how I "discovered" You Bred Raptors? on my friend Ja's online radio show back in April - you can listen to that broadcast for free and snicker at my dorky voice by clicking here and selecting the play button, comme ça:

I felt a bit awkward during my portion of the interview because I was having some phone issues that night and missed bits and pieces of what was said (and wound up repeating some of Mr. Andlu's words, at one point). BUT, on the bright side, I did manage to coherently give props to the Blogging from A to Z Challenge, in which I was engaged at the time, so YAY, ME! Again, click here to listen to the interview with Epileptic Peat (founder of the band and ass-kicking bass player) and my own fine self, but be advised the interview happened on 4/20, a huge day for fans of the MaryJane (or so I'm told). Pot references, as well as other adult themes and language, abound. (Some of the naughtiness escaped from my own lips, but 'twas elegantly uttered, if I do say so myself.)

If the above isn't your bag, here's a summary of how I "met" YBR?: last November, I went to see a charitable production by The Bedlam Ensemble. They staged and choreographed dances to some stories and poems by one of my favorite authors, Edgar A. Poe. You Bred Raptors? were the band for the show (I took that pic up top on my craptastic cellphone-camera that night). With their masks (which they regularly use when they play), they perfectly accompanied the enactment of The Cask of Amontillado (during which the actors made us audience members get up and dance, so as to be part of the Carnival feel). It was a fantastic show and, thanks to the talented ensemble and music by YBR, a gorgeous night.

So if you're yearning for some new tunes to boogie, think, or just bob your head to, do check out the You Bred Raptors? Web site - it's totally worth the click! (Plus, I think you save a baby Velociraptor if you do. Won't someone please think of the baby Velociraptors???.)

Explicit language/themes in video, below. Just sayin'.

Reflections on the Blogging from A to Z Challenge, April 2012...

Click here to read others' reflections.

...how do you like that for a clunky title? ;-)

Man, did April 2012 kick my ass. My full-time gig demanded all of my energy and head-space (and then some). My Kid's college hunt hit the fever pitch of acceptances and rejections, financial aid worries, and Admitted Students' Dayz Days to attend. And then there was the Blogging from A to Z Challenge.

Dudes - I'm beat.

I first learned about the Challenge in February and, in my reckless way, signed up almost immediately. I posited in another post that I must be crazy, insane. But maybe a bit of lunacy (OK, a LOT of lunacy) is required to survive the Challenge.

I knew I'd never make it through posting a blog nearly every day in the month of April without a plan. So I first settled on the "Dark Romance of Music" theme. Then I spent the few free moments I had in March picking songs/bands/albums for each letter. I'd hoped to write/schedule some blogs in what was left of of the month by the time I'd selected all the songs, but wound up having just Saturday, March 31 to work with. That weekend, and every other in April, I wrote the following week's blog posts.

I thought writing shorter (for me) posts would be a cinch, but nuh-uh, honey; digging up info on the songs/bands, writing, formatting, and uploading videos took from 45 minutes to an hour, for each post. And then, of course, there was the other part of the Challenge - clicking through the linky-list to visit/read/comment/and sometimes follow other participants' blogs, at least five a day. I did enjoy this part and averaged 15 to 30 blogs a night (I didn't comment on all, but did read at least one post from each). Also, as much as I could, I replied to all the kind comments visitors left on my blog and aimed to visit them all in return.

Did I mention that I was beat?

My Final Thoughts on the Blogging from  A to Z Challenge

Pros

• I learned a lot about self-discipline and sticking to a schedule, both of which aided in increasing my creative output.
• I've made some new blog buddies, with whom I had a great time (and look forward to hanging with in the Blogosphere in future).
• My bloggy-blog got WAY more hits than it had previously, and picked up a slew of followers! (Huzzah!)

Cons

• I averaged about 4 - 5 hours of sleep every week night (but, to be fair, that's not just the Challenge's fault).
• I lost a lot of time visiting folks who weren't doing their part of the A to Z Challenge and yet left their blogs' URLs active on the linky-list. (There; I said it.) (OK, I wrote it, gimme a break.)

Overall impression: I loved it. I'm proud of myself for seeing it through when so much in my life conspired against me (and I'm proud of my fellow bloggers who went through their own crap and still completed the Challenge - kudos, y'all!). I'm stoked about all of my new pals and I'm really glad I did this nutty thing. Will I do it again next year? Well, that depends on whether:

1. The Mayans (and/or their interpreters) were right, and
2. I'm still out of my mind.

Which means chances are good that I'll do it again - but I make no promises!

MEANWHILE, because my day job has me on the verge of acute alcoholism, I'd like to propose an official Blogging From A to Z Drinking Game®! (DISCLAIMER: this is NOT a real game. Readers are STRONGLY DISCOURAGED from actually doing this. Please drink responsibly, for heaven's sake!!!!!)

Anyway, as I made my way through the linky-list, I noticed some trends which, I felt, would have been more entertaining with a bit of booze to accompany them. (Or, at least, more tolerable.)

The rules of the Blogging From A to Z Drinking Game® (which is totally NOT a real game) are simple; as you make your way through the linky-list, take a shot of your preferred liquor every time you come across:

• A blog that’s got Random, Rants, Ramblings, or Musings in its title (or subtitle). (Titles/subtitles with more than one of those words are worth 2 shots. If, God help you, you find one with all four, just keep drinking.)
• A blogger still requesting word verification of commenters. (For the record, I coulda sworn I’d turned mine off, but…ooops! As soon as I saw it was still on, I axed it. Sorry, y'all. Have a shot on me.)
• A C entry that’s for Cats, D entry that’s Dogs, X entry that's Xylophone, and/or Z entry that's Zoo.
• Every H entry that’s for Haiku, only the blogger totally got the basic haiku form wrong.
• A blogger goes days without posting (or forgets the event’s begun and chimes in well into the alphabet, OR stops posting mid-stream and returns, OR just craps out altogether), saying it's 'cause s/he “got super busy,” BUT TOOK NO STEPS TO REMOVE HIS/HER BLOG LINK FROM THE LIST. (Also worth 2 shots.)

More seriously, folks; I respect the bloggers who simply apologized for being unable to get through the Challenge without reciting a litany of reasons why - they just couldn't do it, and that's that. Fair enough. I know the Challenge hosts were hella busy and made heroic efforts to clean up the linky-list, for which I thank them. The only suggestion I have is to maybe deputize trusted past-Challenge participants and let them aid in the clean up. (Not me!)  ;-)

My 2012 Blogging From A to Z Soundtrack...

Not  being completely stressed out of my head by the rigors of participating in the Blogging from A to Z Challenge the past few days has felt weird. So I decided to stress myself out some more (because, as has already been noted by me, I am crazy, insane) by building a complete playlist of all the tuneage I blogged about for the Challenge last month on Grooveshark.com, as they've got a nifty embedding tool that would make it easy to plop! a player here on mah bloggy-blog. Only as I built the playlist I realized not all of the tunes were uploaded, which I figured I could resolve by uploading whatever was missing. But when I tried to upload a tune, I couldn't, which was le suck...

So then I built a playlist on YouTube. Only I wasn't able to build a complete playlist as some folks don't cotton to having their vids as part of a playlist.

Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.

SO, I'm embedding both the Grooveshark and YouTube playlists, hoping that if one doesn't have a tune, the other will. (Most annoyingly, I couldn't get Danzig's "Killer Wolf" on either. Gah!)

NB: Some videos/songs contain explicit lyrics and images and may not be safe for work.

The Dark Romance of N...

Red text below = linked text. Click to check stuff out!

Need You Tonight ~ INXS
This is another song I absolutely fell in love with in late 1987. It froze me in place the first time I heard it, and I remember thinking then, at that very moment of immobility, that a) the thing that first attracts me to a man is his voice, and b) it would be a spectacular hit. And it was.

Natural One ~ Folk Implosion
Now, this tune came off the soundtrack for an incredibly disturbing film called Kids, which I haven't watched in its entirety because I simply can't make myself do it - not because it's bad, but because I can't stomach the subject matter. Nonetheless, the song's lush, insistent bass line works its mojo on me (as any sultry bass line will) and I can't help digging this tune. Curiously, whenever I hear it I think of British actor Jeremy Northam, who, I am sure, would disavow any connection to the song and, perhaps, carefully back away from me whilst discreetly reaching for his mobile phone and dialing 911 (or 999, if this were to go down in the UK). There's no reasonable explanation for this association, so you'll have to make do with an unreasonable one - I believe that this song was getting a lot of airplay on my beloved local alt rock radio station, WLIR (now defunct but still available online, thank GOD!), around the time Emma came out (which starred the very man himself as the dreamy Mr. Knightley). Anyway, I'm linking a trippy fan video, below, because the official one's kinda gross and I want nothing to detract from the woof! factor of the song.

Nothing Lasts Forever ~ Specimen
A horrifying realization struck me over the weekend: namely that, for a self-proclaimed Goth Mom, I'd included precious little in the way of proper Goth Rock in these Blogging from A to Z Challenge posts. Next came an existential crisis in which I questioned whether I was more Goth or Rock Mom and how, if I'd been wrong about my Goth-nicity, I could carry on living. I took a bad turn and, a few shots of Godiva Chocolate Liqueur later, resolved my cognitive dissonance with the conclusion that, though my taste in music runs more toward the Rock, my sensibilities are more Goth, so I'm good. Mental breakdown averted, I fished through my memory banks for a Goth tune, so as to even out the scales a bit, that would be in keeping with my A to Z theme. Unfortunately, the ones that came to mind were for letters already done - HOWEVER, this song growled at me from the depths of my poor tortured psyche. I'm not 100% sure what it's about (and I can't find lyrics for it anywheres), though it's got a line about "...flying like a moth into the flame...", so that's hot, right? (Like, literally?) Plus, the guitar and bass are all le rawr rawr, which satisfies me.

The song itself does not run as long as the video clip.

Rising up to the challenge...

...not of my rivals, but of Blogging A to Z for April 2012!

I told y'all I was gonna do it, a while back, and now I'm poised to make good on my threat promise. Beginning this Sunday, April 1 (no foolin') I'll blog on subjects spanning the alphabet, in order, one day at a time (skipping all Sundays but the first, 'cause even us lunatics bloggers need a day of rest).

Blog posts during the A to Z challenge could be themed or not, but I do enjoy the coherence of a good theme, so I've chosen to blog along the lines of something ever near and dear to my heart - music.

I mentioned in my last post that I've got the dream of rock stardom simmering away on my mental/emotional back burner, and it's true. Since I was knee-high to a fire hydrant (no, fire hydrants don't have knees, but I'm suburban girl, work with me, here) I've loved to sing and perform for an audience. I was a music major in college and work in a somewhat related field now, but haven't performed (or even sung seriously) in ages. I miss it terribly.

My as-yet-unfulfilled-dreams aside, music, along with writing, is my passion. And, speaking of passion, that's more or less how I've themed my A to Z blogs - around songs that I find to be some combination of passionate/darkly romantic/simply romantic/just plain dark/sexy woof!  (That last bit's a technical term.)

Every day of this April's challenge I'll blog about three tunes which start with that day's letter and that have touched me on one of the above levels, though not all songs will necessarily be about love/romance/sex. For instance, the lyrics of a particular tune may not be hot but some aspect of the music rocks my internal casbah, if you will. (Your casbah-rocking mileage may vary.) But all songs have resounded with me, at one time or another, and I hope some will grab you viscerally as well.

Of course, some letters proved deucedly difficult for satisfying my theme, so I reserve the right to use band, and even album names, to meet my goals for the Challenge. Also, I called upon some of my dear friends for song ideas when I got stuck on a letter (curse you, Q!!!!!) and will be sure to give them credit when their suggestions appear. (PS: Dear Friends Upon Whom I Relied - I heart y'all!)

Thus, if you want to get into the groove, please check back on April 1 and be prepared to shake it right along with me. (Just not at me, 'cause I'm fundamentally a very shy and modest goth gal.) (No, really.)

My First Bloggy-Blog Award!!!!!

OMG! My new friend Mark K over at The DM's Screen nominated me for "The Versatile Blogger" award!

And, apparently, a nomination equals a win, which is super groovy as I don't like to have to work too hard for things. (If you're a regular reader, you may have noticed.)

When I first saw his note about the nomination I was all, "Quelle surprise!" 'cause I like to pretend I can speak French, even if no one's around to hear me. I've been blogging for just about four months, give or take, so I'm still a n00b but I do try to vary my goofery so, my congenital sluggishness notwithstanding, I think I've earned this thing. So YAY, ME! And cheers, Mark!

But alas, with great honor comes great responsibility - "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown," and whatnot. This award comes with some RULES.

Here's what a newly coronated Versatile Blogger's gotta do:

1. Nominate 15 fellow bloggers for the Versatile Blogger Award.
2. In the same post, add the Versatile Blogger Award.
3. In the same post, thank the blogger who nominated you in a post with a link back to their blog.
4. In the same post, share 7 completely random pieces of information about yourself.
5. In the same post, include this set of rules.
6. Inform each nominated blogger of their nominations by posting a comment on each of their blogs.

OK, so I've knocked out numbers 2, 3, and 5. (PS: On the side I'm posting the nifty award badge devised by Mark K, as I just like it more betterer than the original green one.) (I totally use "more betterer" ironically.) (The more I do this, the more I have to remind myself that it's actually incorrect.)

Now as for Rule # 1...Dudes, I'm sorry, I'm not hep to every versatile blogger there is in Creation, so I can't possibly nominate 15, but here are the ones I do know*:

As the Crowe Flies

Life in the PNW

Mithril Wisdom Fantasy Reviews

Suburban Vampire

Geeky Tendencies

No Natural Mama

and everything else too

*Um...some of y'all have already been nominated for this award, and I totally geddit if you're not up to going through the whole rigmarole again, just wanted to give you props.  :-)  ALSO - if I didn't nominate a particular blog it's either because:

• I've got Momnesia (mothers' amnesia, where exhaustion and stress make you forget, like, super important stuff), OR

• Your blog is themed around one particular subject and I wasn't sure it fit the "versatile" aspect of this award-whatsit. No offense intended, honest. (I saved that for Random Fact #3, below.)

I'm fairly confident that, after I've gone through my fellow bloggers' Blogging A to Z Challenge posts this April, I will know PLENTY of versatile cats and kittens. Uh, bloggers. C'mon, you know what I mean.

And NOW for...

Seven Completely Random Facts About Moi

1. I developed vitiligo after an ill-advised marathon tanning stint in my parents' native Portugal when I was 16. Since then I've had white splotches on the backs of my hands and some white eyelashes on my right eyelid. (I know; that's so HOT, right?????)
2. I prefer to do/buy things in 3s, or, at the very least, in odd numbers. (I nearly had a panic attack when I could come up with only 6 nominees earlier...thank God I thought of a 7th!)
3. I'm extremely prejudiced. No, really. I'm deeply suspicious of folks who exclusively prefer: a) Pepsi to Coke; b) white wine to red and; c) Cheese Doodles to Cheetos. It's not that I hate y'all, I just don't trust y'all, and I may feel compelled to cross the street, should we ever chance upon one another in our daily travels.
4. My very first career aspiration was to be one of Charlie's Angels.
5. After that, I settled on the more mature and realistic vocation of Rock Star. (Still haven't given up that dream.) ('Cause it's so common for rockers to embark on their careers when they're middle-aged, you know.)
6. Since I quit taking sugar in my coffee (though I won't give up cream), I've become an insufferable coffee snob. (Some might say I was insufferable long before that.)
7. According to my Kid, I'm the only person in the world who actually goes, "ah-CHOO!" when she sneezes. (Though I can't confirm this to be a true statistic.)

Woo, that was a LOT of unanticipated writing I just did there! And I still gotta tell them 7 folks above that I done tagged them for awards! Gah! Je suis fatiguée, y'all!

Tagged By Pearson Report - A to Z Co-Host

***This is a game of blog tag that I'm attempting to play; the text below is pasted from elsewhere and my answers to the questions are in red. Lord only knows if I'd doing this right, and if I'm not, please forgive - I'm largely clueless.***

Have you ever wondered what would happen if we played TAG out here in Bloggerville?

TAG = The Answer Game

You'll be asked the following questions and you answer them on your blog! (A simple copy and paste event - no biggie.)

Then you pose the same questions to your Followers and so on, and so on…

If you play the game...I’ll add your blog to my TAGGED BY PEARSON REPORT Blog List - where everyone will know you are a team player who's kickin' it with me and the A to Z team. Our goal is to see 1,000 participants, on the sign-up list, by March 1st...so here’s your chance to pitch in and show your support by playing TAG.

HERE ARE THE QUESTIONS:

Are you signed up for the A to Z Challenge?
As I noted in my previous blog post, I completely lost my mind and did, in fact, sign up for the Challenge. God help us all.

What is your sign-up number?

Edited to note: as of March 17, I'm #635.

I'm #637, Some Dark Romantic, at the moment (I was #638 just the other day...someone saner than I must've dropped out).

Are you ready? If yes...explain yourself.
I'm getting there. Came up with a theme ('cause I heart me some themes, y'all) and plugged in some ideas for a number of letters. I'm deliberating over exactly how to execute the theme and need to peg stuff to the other letters (whatever fills those blank spaces may guide me in the theme's execution). So I reckon I'd say I'm a third of the way along, more or less.

If you’re not ready...what’s your excuse?
Geez, take a chill pill - what are you, like, my mother? (She's never satisfied.)

Just copy and paste these questions in your post and have at ‘er! Let’s see what makes you a Blogging from A to Z participant!

Tell Pearson Report when you post your answers and you will be added to the TAGGED BY PEARSON REPORT Blog List which is on the side of the page just under the list of A to Z Co-Hosts.

The spotlight’s on you…all you have to do is play The Answer Game (TAG).

So what are you waiting for...you’ve just been TAGGED!

And a little perk for Pearson Reports' Followers of Note - if you participate I will enter your sign-up number into a draw basket for an original artistic creation from my daughter, Courtney, a designer in Animation. The piece I have selected is called Life and is a series of four prints - they can be seen HERE

***OK, fellow Bloggers - and you know who you are - Don't just stand there, let's get to it! Play the game, there's nothin' to it - TAG!!!***