Haven’t listened to it (crappy speakers on work computer), don’t know if it’s good… but when the first single off of your first album is called “Clint Eastwood”, then why not name the first single off of your second album “Dirty Harry”?

Download “Dirty Harry” (the song, not the movie) now.

It’s that time of year again - when we’ve had about a month to digest the year that was, and bring you our top 12 in various categories. First up - albums.

Of all of our pop culture, we acquire new music the most slowly. Part of this is because we have much less exposure to new music than to movies, TV, or games, and part of it is that we both have an ’80s-new-wave-and-’90s-alternative-plus-some-dance-music-and-a-few-random-other-things ecclecticism going on.

This explains why our “top 12″ list is actually only 10, but that’s still better than last year’s 7. To the charts:

Favorite Albums (2004) | 2003 | 2002

10. Uh Huh Her, PJ Harvey
09. Medulla, Bjork
08. Final Straw, Snow Patrol
07. Good News For People Who Love Bad News, Modest Mouse
06. Runt, Jeffrey Altergott
05. Hot Fuss, The Killers
04. Fallen, Evanescence
03. Between Darkness and Wonder, Lamb
02. Franz Ferdinand, Franz Ferdinand
01. You Are the Quarry, Morrissey

I’m not a Luddite by any means (and I certainly don’t think of myself as the cranky old man who doesn’t “get it”). Still, I’m amazed by not only the rate of technology adoption, but also - and somewhat more impressively - how deeply ingrained technology has become imbedded into younger markets’ lifestyle.

Case in point: this morning I found myself watching MTV for some reason. (I haven’t really been a fan of MTV since the early ’90s, but just go with me on this.) Confirming my “unhip” status, I’d never heard of the show that was on called Video Clash. While the videos were annoying - except for “Mr. Brightside” by The Killers, which I rather enjoyed - I was intrigued by the concept of a video show where viewers could vote on which of two videos gets played next, either via a web browser or by texting their vote in via mobile phone. I amused myself by imagining what kind of server and network infrastructure I’d design to support an application that tabulates and reports on votes from multiple protocol gateways, how “real-time” the vote percentages on screen were and what the tolerance for error was, and as one vote was narrowly decided after a come-from-behind win and another bounced from 51%-49% to 49%-51% and back again, what MTV might do to the numbers (including complete fabrication) to make each contest seem like a close race. After all, reality TV is “edited for hightened drama” or whatever the standard disclaimer is these days, so why not a video voting contest? TV shows where producers claim text messaging can determine the outcome are already old hat in Europe, so is this a small piece of what interactive TV is going to be like? Is interactivity what will get people to stop TiVoing and start sitting through the commercials again?

I was in the midst of contemplating these questions when it happened - a commercial came on that told you where to send a text message if you wanted to get the Hamster Dance as a ringtone for your mobile. Yes, that Hamster Dance.

I’m tied to a computer all day, so I haven’t really had a need to learn how to send text messages from my mobile. So the first thing that struck me about this were the instructions “text ABCXYZ to get this ringtone!” I’m sure it would only take me a few minutes and a couple tries to figure it out, but the fact that a 30-second TV commercial is giving me technology instructions I don’t immediately know how to follow is a bit disconcerting to me. This was quickly superceded by the abject horror I felt when I realized that there were a sufficient amount of kids of MTV-watching age who knew what the Hamster Dance was (and wanted it as their ringtone enough to pay for it) to justify airing a commercial on MTV.

Taking a step back, I put this commercial in the context of the show I was watching, and I thought about what it meant that people were online or using their mobile phones to vote for the next video. This show airs at 7am Eastern time - that’s 6am where I’m at. Yet there were people already watching TV and enhancing their experience with Internet connectivity. What does it say about the younger market that they can laugh at me for just flipping on the TV but not having the wireless laptop or phone nearby to play along with the show… at 6am!

In a world where overly-cutesy 5+-year-old Internet memes become rigtones for mobile phones which are used to select content on major cable channels before most people want to be awake, technology and technnology/Internet culture are becoming even more a part of our 24x7x365 lives. While I have a hard time getting my head around the idea that my mobile phone might one day be my Internet access appliance of choice, it’s hard to reconcile my bizzare early-morning MTV experience with anything but optimism about the long-term market prospects for technology - especially Internet-capable consumer electronics. Ubiquitous computing - it’s come out of the MIT media lab and into the MTV multimedia lifestyle.

The terrible weather in this part of the world made listening to my XMRadio on the way to work this morning impossible.

So I dug around in my glovebox, found a very old cassette, threw it in and chanced upon on of my all-time favorite songs. It got me thinking about favorite songs and I thought I might jumpstart our poor little blog with a listing of what I believe are my top 5. Feel free to join me.

(These are in no order, but I will start with the song I heard this morning)

Washing of the Water - Peter Gabriel
I Burn For You - The Police
Radio Radio - Elvis Costello
Now My Heart is Full - Morrissey
The Obvious Child (or maybe Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes, or maybe I Know What I Know) - Paul Simon

Ok, maybe five was too few. I missed Vincent by Don Mclean, Find the River by REM, Satellite by DMB, Too Pieces by Yaz, and many others. Ah well, I tried.

Although now nearly 3 weeks old (yes, I have been working that much), there’s a great interview with Morrissey in The Guardian.

My favorite quotes:

• “I’m not really that hot on the human race to be honest. Very few people have anything to offer.”

• “Despite massive discouragement, I remain myself.”

Because I’m an idiot and/or working too hard, I somehow missed the 29 March announcement that Morrissey will be headlining Lollapalooza 2004.

Wierd, but oddly cool too.

Dan…get those tickets ordered for England…

First he signed to a label, then he named his album. Now we have a definitive release date (not to mention a spiffy Kray-inspired photo) for Morrissey’s latest effort, You Are the Quarry - May 18th in the U.S.

I can’t wait!

About a month into 2003, we made top 12 lists of our favorite things from 2002. We liked the idea so much that we decided to make it an annual habit.

This year’s pickings in music were not very good in the extrasonic household… we weren’t even able to come up with a full dozen, so making it on to our “favorite albums” list this year wasn’t much of an honor. But here’s the list, such as it is:

Favorite albums (2003) | Last year’s list

7. Sacred Love, Sting
6. Think Tank, Blur
5. Elephant, The White Stripes
4. Hail to the Thief, Radiohead
3. Vulnerable, Tricky
2. 100th Window, Massive Attack
1. Dear Catastrophe Waitress, Belle & Sebastian

Especially when pulled into a work scenario that I can only use the term “goat rodeo” to describe - as has been the case since late last week - my drive in to work each day is the closest thing I get to zen time. This is not because suburban Chicago traffic is so pleasant to navigate, but it is instead because of the 20GB mp3 player installed in the trunk of my car.

Today’s theme, though, would strike me as a bad omen (if I was the sort of person that believed that an mp3 player was trying to tell me something):

• Jeane, The Smiths
(”I don’t know what happiness means/But I look in your eyes and I know/That it isn’t there”)
• Only Happy When it Rains, Garbage
(”You can keep me company as long as you don’t care”)
• Lose That Girl, St. Etienne
(”She said ‘cancel everything’/And like a fool/You never know what’s happening”)
• Here’s Where the Story Ends, The Sundays
(”And whoever would have thought/That the books that you wrote/Were all I loved you for?”)
• Roads, Portishead
(”I got nobody on my side/And surely that ain’t right”)
• I Know It’s Over, The Smiths
(”I know it’s over/And yet it never really began/But in my heart/It was so REAL”)

My interpretation of my mp3 player’s subliminal message? It’s a toss up between the fortune cookie-esque “You are about to be unlucky in love” to the slightly more pragmatic “You were very angst-y in the late ’80s and early ’90s”.