Author: RTOlson

Worst 111: Round One

The first round of the “Worst 111” karaoke countdown was launched at Madison Bear Garden on Monday night. I think it got a pretty good reception from the crowd although some of the songs were truely awful.

Some of the songs weren’t in the karaoke book, but I’ll try to catch up with part of the list on Wednesday at the Maltese.

111 – Rock Lobster — The B-52’s classic (but not as classic as “Love Shack”) was a little hard to master.
108 – Mambo No. 5 — I can understand why Lou Bega sold out on this song. The chorus makes the song. The melody? Not so much.
106 – Let Her Cry — It took a while for me to get into the song, but this Hootie and the Blowfish song really has some legs.
103 – Jenny From the Block — Kelly helped me with this song, but neither of us could capture the “magic” of J. Lo.
102 – Born to be Wild — I think I captured the Steppenwolf original better than Ozzy and Miss Piggy (whose version earned this place on the list). Maybe it was the two dancing women who helped.

That’s five down, 106 to go — minus the ones that aren’t in the books.

Counting down the worst

Starting tonight at Bear-e-oke, we’ll be singing as many songs as possible from the Top 111 Worst Songs. My colleagues and I dispute many of the songs’ placement on the list. While not the greatest, they’re still pretty good songs.

They were apparently voted on by the users of AOL Music. I kinda question their taste — some of the songs were probably picked because they were overplayed (like “One Week” from Bearnaked Ladies). I also don’t know how many people voted for the list — I can’t use AOL’s service because they want a Windows machine.

Alas, it still should be a lot of fun to go through the list. It starts with “Rock Lobster” by the B-52s and ends with “Who Let the Dogs Out” by the Baha Men. Good times.

LostUP: ‘Pure Michigan’

One of the blogs on the Detroit Free Press is asking what “Pure Michigan” means to its readers. Apparently, the state of Michigan is looking to boost tourism to its beautiful state and is working on the “Pure Michigan” angle. Here’s my take on what Michigan means to me.

“As a former Upper Peninsula resident, I’ll always remember those cool summer nights in Houghton sitting on a wooden deck watching as cars make their way over the mechanical majesty of the Portage Lake Lift Bridge. Aside from the cars, most of the area is silent as the thin strand of Lake Superior that forms the Portage Lake Shipping Canal slowly floats by. I would enjoy the view with my friends as we drank Bell’s Oberon and marvelled at the connections in the world.

These connections — bridges, waterways and friendships — seem to be vital to Michiganians. They are definitely things I would consider to be ‘Pure Michigan.'”

I don’t know if it’s meaningful or anything, but that’s what I think about when I miss Michigan.

I’m like Jack Bauer …

… if he worked a 14-hour day in an office and had a more mundane deadline that didn’t involve, you know, death and terrorism.

Well, aside from my puffery, it’s been a hectic past couple of days from top to bottom. Most of it has dealt with my work on ChicoER.com. We’ve done a lot in the past couple of days and we’re working on a whole lot more in the months to come.

I’d write more, but this isn’t the place for it. My rarely updated pro blog would work well if I stay away from too much “inside baseball.”

Time to reset and begin again tomorrow.

Reflection on vlog Rocketboom

There’s a ton of articles about the vlog Rocketboom. It’s a five-days-a-week take on technology, Internet culture, viral video and pretty much anything else that catches the fancy of the small staff.

Anywho, there’s a lot of articles about the meteoric rise of the video blog and its host Amanda Congdon. Some articles, including one in a national journalism magazine, are pretty interesting to read. Some writers speculate that thousands of these blogs may overwhelm national broadcast news.

I certainly see that being possible given how fragmented our media landscape has become with increasing diversity in both the high-price mass media and the other venues (such as the Internet). I’m simultaneously elated and sad because as it becomes easier to disseminate a message, the mass audience grows more diffuse.

The whole point is this — with all the questions about the importance of Rocketboom, it seems that not even its partner TiVo knows how to describe the program. In its “Now Playing” section on my TiVo box, Rocketboom is listed as having “Quality: Unknown”. It refers to the image quality, but it might open a box of other questions too.

Random MySpace muse – 2 June

There’s been a little pestering thought in the back of my mind as I browse through MySpace profiles. It’s nice to see what people are “here” for, but Tom only gives us four options. It’s not nearly enough.

We can be here for “dating,” “serious relationships,” “friends” and “networking.” I’m certainly here for more reasons that the four stated. I sometimes use MySpace for work, there’s not really an entry for that (although I suppose “networking” would qualify).

Tom — How hard would it be to include a box for people who are “here for the party.” 😉

Good night, folks. Try the veal.

MySpace musing – 14 May

Animated greatnessAfter a brief hiatus, my animated profile image is back. It was down briefly because I wanted to look respectable. However, what’s more elegant than the inflated Garlic Dude from the Gilroy Garlic Festival? Nothing!

It’s interesting, but some people are impressed about how I animated the graphic. There’s nothing much to it — it’s an animated GIF. Somehow it adds an extra touch to the page without a lot of loud noises or videos.

Speaking of loud noises, how is everyone enjoying No Luck Club? I first heard them on the CBC Radio 3 podcast. They’re pretty good, but they’re no Dick Dale and His Deltones.

At the same time, No Luck Club hasn’t prompted my friends to say “Change the godawful music.” I guess that’s a good thing.

BTW, do you want to see the most information-rich MySpace profile I’ve ever seen? Check this guy out. For some reason he’s tracking my blog and I wanted to learn more about him. There’s a lot to learn about him it seems.

The cool thing is that he puts all the information together in a classy way. It’s a ton of information and photos, but it’s as readable as things get on this site. I do miss the animated fish that follows my mouse cursor, though.

Well, I guess that’s enough of the classic stream of consciousness writing that keeps so many people coming back to this blog.

Tears in my eyes

The gray skies of winter have lifted, but not before planting the seeds of spring’s sorrow — allergies. It’s actually not too bad, but my eyes are having the worst of it. They were extremely watery and strands of gooey stuff built up. They didn’t react well to whatever pollen or dust quafted through the air.

I guess it looked worse than it felt because a lot of people were commenting about it.

Things seem to be better now, I hope it’s because the pollen has settled down. I’ve armed myself with the usual medicines and treatments.

I must invent this word

Here’s a new portmanteau word:

“carnarcade”

It’s the excitement of a carnival and the lights and sounds of an arcade smushed together. It’s the best of both really.

I’ve searched for the word on Google with no hits so … Copyright 2006, Ryan Olson. 😉

A lightning bolt

My 10-year high school reunion is in August. I don’t know why I’m getting excited about the event, but for some reason I’m eager to see my classmates and learn what’s happened.

Of course, I went to two high schools (Roswell then Poway) and would like to know what happened at both of them. I might have to resign myself to going to just the one in San Diego, but hope springs eternal.

Since I’m a reporter — a seeker of knowledge and storyteller — I want to start the experience now. With the Internet, there are plenty of tools to do it (MySpace, e-mails, Web pages, etc.). With the rise of podcasting, there’s a terrific tool to relay conversations and photos to a scalable audience. “Scalable” is a word I’ve learned in the past 10 years. 😀

Anyway, here’s a letter that I wrote to my classmates. It refers to a previous letter where I encourage a classmate on the fence to come and share his experiences with others in August.

As I said in the other e-mail, I’m a writer and I love hearing good stories. Hopefully in August, we’ll be able to meet in person and share our experiences.

However, that’s months away. What do we do now?

I say we should do something now to start sharing our stories and recalling growing up in suburban San Diego in the mid-1990s. This Yahoo! Group is a start, but one of the first graduating classes with the Internet should be able to do better.

Let’s do a weekly podcast.

There’s so much ground we can cover each week. These are our experiences, and who would be better equipped to help share them than us?

We can catch up with old classmates and our favorite teachers. Whatever happened to Most Likely to Succeed or Best Dressed? Let’s track them and others down and hear what their recollections and what’s happened since then.

We can do a segment remembering what was big 10 years ago. TV, radio, computers and more — there’s so much ground to cover.

We can keep it relatively short, but we can reach out to so many people before August.

So who would be interested in helping out?

I’m willing to do a lot of work to pull this together. But perhaps I’m not the best person to do it — I’m a bit out of the loop in Northern California. I also readily admit I was a bit of a loner dork in high school and don’t know my class as well as I would like.

I don’t think the podcast has to be overly involved or over-produced. I hope each week will be an interesting chat about the people and our times building up to the actual reunion itself.

Cordially,
Ryan Olson
Chico, Calif.
my.rtomedia.com
530-321-4114 (cell)
poway -at- rtomedia.com