Something 4 The Weekend # 35

The Au Pairs have kinda been lost in the fog of time...Where the comparable Gang Of Four have entered some sort of rarified air of historical importance and outright cool, The Au Pairs, well...You either had their Playing With A Different Sex LP in yr collection, and you still remember it fondly, or you probably never heard 'em, even if ya heard of 'em...They only made two albums, and well, you never really see 'em mentioned very often, not like their contemporaries...Castle Music put those two albums on one shiny disc last year, and so there was some minor hubbub that week, then everybody went back to blogging The Cold War Kids and whatever...

The Au Pairs: "Headache For Michelle": 128k mp3

This isn't to say that The Au Pairs are absolutely obscure, and I'm some sort of sage here...I was just scouring my hard drives for something to stream on HOT POOP, and I was glad when I happened across the Au Pairs folder...It reminded me that I still have the vinyl after 25 years, and the music still has plenty of juice...

Hotcha! Hank

Wot's...Uh the Deal

Apologies to any of my regular HOT POOP readers, as I haven't been posting at all the past couple of weeks, not that I was ever prolific before...

Excuses...Excuses?

The weather's been pretty fine around Southcentral Wisconsin lately...Temps in the 70's and 80's, mild humidity, plenty of sun...So I've been doing stuff like sipping lemonade and reading music critic Nick Kent's selected writings, The Dark Stuff, out in the back yard...Stuff like mowing said yard...Taking clandestine pictures of the neighborhood squirrels and attempting to compile a dossier on 'em...(It's a long story, the one about me and the squirrels, and I won't recount it here and now.)...

Taking naps...

Drinking beer at the Union Terrace...

Drinking coffee at Ground Zero...

Shuffling around State Street, browsing book stores and CD racks, but especially the air-conditioned basement of The Exclusive, where their impressively extensive catalog of classical and jazz CDs are housed...

Recording music (Hat Creep stuff, mostly)...

Writing EVERYTHINGATHON! scripts...Compiling set lists for upcoming podcasts...Photoshopping potential podcast "cover art"...Basically trying to stay ahead of the game...

On that front, I've been toying with the idea of moving EVERYTHINGATHON! to it's very own website...If yr a fan of the monthly "show", any opinions/suggestions on that?

Also, at my regular 8-5 job, I've been incredibly busy...We're releasing 60 new localized (French, German, Spanish, Japanese) consumer software titles by the end of August, and I'm responsible for all of 'em as a Material Manager...This mostly involves Oracle and Excel, and endless streams of caffeine and music...Stuff like creating part numbers, UPC codes, creating bills of materials, costing all the components that go into each title, purchasing those components, scheduling the production of all that software, overseeing shipping, and so on, and so forth...It's good honest work, and I'm good at it, but you can bet yr ass that I'm not living the dream...Not really anyways...

I mean, alot of us ask ourselves how we ended up in the occupations that we, um, occupy, and is it fate, or free will?

I never became an astronaut, or a truck driver, or a radio disc jockey, or a rock star, and I haven't written a great American novel as my mom predicted I would, but I hope there's still enough time for any and/or all of that, including the astronaut dealio...In the meantime, I'll continue my dilettante ways, recording unreleased music, writing unfinished screenplays, creating half-assed comic strips, producing mildly entertaining monthly "podcasts", and taking naps...

I'm not sure where blogging falls into my grand scheme, but I will disappear for a week or three at a time, and if that annoys you, apologies in advance...The thing about blogs is this - I still don't know how I truly feel about 'em...99% of 'em are poorly written, unfocused, and mostly regurgitate other blogs...I realize this is the nature of blogs, which is why it's so rare (to me, anyways) to find truly good or great ones...HOT POOP is not a great blog, and not even a good blog, if for no other reason than I'm not prolific with it, and blogs should be nothing if not prolific...

I would also say that HOT POOP lacks focus, and related to that, I'm not so sure I have a unique "voice"...So in essence, I don't really like my own blog, except that it's my quaint opinions and fictions, and not somebody else's...But really, I'm still not sure what HOT POOP is actually about...Random songs and YouTube clips, mixed with my useless ramblings? Who DOESN'T have a blog like this?

Hotcha!
Hank

EVERYTHINGATHON! MAY 2007

This month's EVERYTHINGATHON! podcast is entitled "The Modern Day Bachelor Continues To Lounge", and features the music of Steely Dan, The Style Council and Stereolab...

I won't say much about it here, but I've blurbed a little bit about the episode on the homepage linked above...Ultimately, the episode's title pretty much says it all...

Enjoy - ya got about two weeks before next month's exciting episode is up and streaming...

Hotcha! Hank