A Top Ten List for People Who Read Top Ten Lists

The goal, if there was one, was to prove that every "Top Ten Greatest Albums of All Time" list was comprised largely by the Beatles and Bob Dylan. In researching, close to sixteen top ten lists were analyzed and half of those were discarded because, well, really, there's something fishy about a top ten list that puts three Pink Floyd records in a row right under Nirvana's Nevermind or a list that incorporates two Linkin Park records at the #9 and #10 slots. While I don't want to discriminate too harshly, it's pretty evident that the creators of those lists were simply publishing their own personal top tens. The lists that were used in the end are the results of teams of editors, critics and readers polls, and/or some sort of scientific formula (which is laughable, but at least there's a method there as opposed to straight opinion). Here are the results of the eight polls used.

Please note the records in bold face; you'll see that they occur multiple times across each list. If we remove the records that do not appear more than once, we see only eighteen individual records.

I'm sure you'll note that the list from Best Ever Albums is the only list to not have a single record eliminated. The task at hand now, is to calculate how all of these records rank. If were to use a simple method of counting how many times a record is listed, we would surely wind up with multiple records in the same ranking multiple times.
For example:

Record	Instances	Rank
Revolver	6	1
Sgt. Pepper	5	2
Dark Side of the Moon	4	3
Abbey Road	3	4
Blonde on Blonde	3	4
Highway 61	3	4
Led Zeppelin IV	3	4
London Calling	3	4
Pet Sounds	3	4
The Queen is Dead	3	4
The Velvet Undergound & Nico	3	4
White Album	3	4
Exile on Main St	2	5
Marquee Moon	2	5
Nevermind	2	5
OK Computer	2	5
Rubber Soul	2	5
Stone Roses	2	5

This is one way of doing it, but how do we get definite answers? Easy. Let's use a point system, with points awarded inversely to ranking from the original lists, that is to say Ranking #1 = 10 points and Ranking #10 = 1 point.

Record	Points	Rank
Revolver	48	1
Sgt. Pepper	41	2
Dark Side of the Moon	24	3
Pet Sounds	23	4
Abbey Road	20	5
Blonde on Blonde	19	6
Highway 61	18	7
OK Computer	17	8
The Stone Roses	14	9
Marquee Moon	12	10
The Queen is Dead	12	10
White Album	11	12
Led Zeppelin IV	9	12
Nevermind	9	12
Rubber Soul	9	12
London Calling	8	13
Exile on Main St	6	14
Velvet Underground & Nico	4	15

Using these eight charts as our sample and setting it against our chart of instances, we can further calculate the likelihood of seeing each of these records on any given chart.

Record	Likelihood you'll see it (based on % of instances)	Points (total X likelihood)	Likely Rank
Revolver	75	36	1
Sgt. Pepper	63	25.83	2
Dark Side of the Moon	50	12	3
Pet Sounds	38	8.74	4
Abbey Road	38	7.6	5
Blonde on Blonde	38	7.22	6
Highway 61	38	6.84	7
The Queen is Dead	38	4.56	8
OK Computer	25	4.25	9
White Album	38	4.18	10
The Stone Roses	25	3.5	11
Led Zeppelin IV	38	3.42	12
London Calling	38	3.04	13
Marquee Moon	25	3	14
Nevermind	25	2.25	15
Rubber Soul	25	2.25	15
Velvet Underground & Nico	38	1.52	16
Exile on Main St	25	1.5	17

I'm sure you've noted already that Radiohead's OK Computer is the wild card; while you're not as likely to see it appear on a list, when you do see it, it will on average rank higher than many others; proven by consistently showing in the top 5 when it does appear on our sample. Also note that it appears as though Revolver will rank higher than Sgt. Pepper, despite that in the instances where they appear on the same list, Sgt. Pepper outranks Revolver in 3 out of 5 instances, or 60% of the time. In fact, they rank next to each other only once, or 20% of the time. We should also expect to see Dark Side of the Moon in the #3 slot, though on the lists where it appears, it breaks the top 5 only twice, 50% of the time. These figures also show that we should expect to consistently see the same four records in the same four slots:

1. Revolver
2. Sgt. Pepper
3. Dark Side of the Moon
4. Pet Sounds

Also note that, apparently, Nirvana's Nevermind and the Beatles' Rubber Soul are the exact same fucking record. They have to be. It's been scientifically proven by magazines and you should always believe magazines.

It's Friday: Let's Piss Off Marvel Comics. Again.

I was fifteen when FOX aired Generation X, a TV movie based on the Marvel Comics spin off of the same name. At fifteen, I had pretty much fallen out of touch with the comic book world; three years earlier was the 30th anniversary of the X-Men (which I was rabid for) and the Avengers (which I never read) and Marvel decided they wanted to shake things up with their titles. At some point, and I'm not sure when this was, they decided to just kill all of the X-Men and reincarnate them all in alternate universes, resulting in (I think) six new titles and I didn't know which one to follow. Besides, I was getting more into X-Factor. X-Factor was tight. Still, though, at fifteen, I armed the VCR with a tape and recorded the Generation X TV movie. I had nothing to go on with it so, unlike most folks who grouse about it, I thought it was alright. It didn't bother me.
I bring it up because the lead character, or one of them, anyway, in this flick, was Jubilee. Most people took issue with the fact that Jubilee is Asian and the actress who played her in this incarnation was not.

In fact, in this video that starts automatically at 6:35, she looks kind of Jewish.
Please also note Matt Frewer briefly reprising his role as Max Headroom.

I still have the tape somewhere and if I recall correctly it also has some episodes of Tales From the Crypt on it and I think there was an episode of Unsolved Mysteries that covered either Brandon Lee's or Kurt Cobain's death.
ANYhoo, I bring it up because last night, and I don't know how this happened, Jubilee came to mind and I realized, "She's really lame." Her outfit and her back story are a little too reminiscent of Robin, in that she's an orphan gymnast (Robin was an orphan acrobat) turned vigilante (like Robin) who wears green short shorts (like Robin) and a red top (like Robin) with a yellow trenchcoat (like Robin's yellow cape) alongside a square-jawed stoic father figure with extensive martial arts training and a checkered past who wears a horned cowl as part of his outfit (Wolverine, like Robin's Batman). She speaks an invented slang that makes her sound brain-damaged (like the Robin featured in Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns).

Possible captions include: Don't tell me you're not seeing it. Really? Honestly, I understand, after the sixty third X-Men character, I'd be out of original ideas, too. What happens when Marvel writers pick up a fifth of vodka and some DC titles the night before the big meeting. My brother and I would call this the "Pauken Shuffle". You pick.

Finally, and the one thing that sets her apart from Robin, is her superpower (Robin has none), which purists and experts describe as "plasma bursts" or some such bullshit when we all know what it really is: She shoots fireworks out of her fingers. This makes her only slightly more useful than Dazzler but still not as useful as Speedball. Remember Speedball? No? There's a reason for that, you know.^{Scroll down to #1.}
So I was laying there in bed, staring at the blurry red lights that were my alarm clock (I've mentioned before that I'm blind as a bat) trying to figure out, "OK, I guess I've got tomorrow's subject. Where do I go with it?" Because the more I think about it, the more I realize that pointing out that Jubilee is a straight up rip-off of Robin is nothing that hasn't been floating around the comics community for decades. (Check it.) Nowadays, at least, Jubilee is known as Wondra, Marvel's attempt at saying "our bad" to DC. She's dressed in black, has no superpowers anymore, and has to use (according to Wikipedia) "tech devices" for superhuman strength and flight. Gone are the fireworks, which couldn't do a goddamned thing for her when she had them, anyhow, when you consider some powerless pipsqueak handed her ass to her without even landing a punch.
At least she's grown up a bit, I guess; found her own identity and whatnot. Doesn't keep her from being completely fucking lame.

Hey, remember when Dave Chappelle played Rick James and then he punched Charlie Murphy and he sang, "UNITY!"? This is nothing like that.

♩ ♪	♫	♩ ♪
Coffee,	I like	coffee.

Well, I was all set to go off on a tangent accusing some l337 haxxors from 4Chan (Because who doesn't blame 4Chan's l337 haxxors nowadays?) of changing Unicode since the last time I used it, but I found out what the problem is. Then I completely forgot what I was going to gripe about.
Oh, don't act like you don't know what I'm talking about. Well, some of you may not. Unicode, as far as I can tell, is like binary code except it's cuter while still being just as confusing. In the html world, from what I can figure, there are three components to a Unicode character.

1. & # x (without the spaces)
   This tells the program you're using that you're about to start entering a unicode character. "Ampersand Pound X" kicks off each unicode character because, for some reason, the standard "U+" used everywhere else was too easy to use, so for html users (like bloggers) "U+" is changed "& # x" for what I'm sure computer programmers see as a self-explanatory reason.
2. A Combination of Numbers and Letters
   Sometimes it's a wee bit of 'em, sometimes it's a boatload of them, but the combination of numbers and letters used determines the character. For example, as I often use musical notes, I know that "2669" = quarter note, "266A" = eighth note, and "266B" = beamed pair of eighth notes.
3. ;
   The semicolon tells your computer, "Hey, I'm done making a unicode character, now." That's about it.

OH! hey, yeah, I remember what I was going to gripe about. Say "goodbye" again to my days off. I'm sure I had a real good one about that but fuck it.

This week's Not Safe For Wednesday is below this post.

Is it at all possible that Ashanti's "Foolish" is the worst song ever? I think it is.
For four minutes twenty six seconds, we're treated to Ashanti's incessant caterwauling as she bounces from one melody to the next (meaning sort of the same one) in an attempt to berate Terrence Howard, the guy who played Jim Rhodes in the first Iron-Man movie, better known to some as "the pimp guy from Hustle & Flow", the movie about some pimp guy who tries to become a rap superstar with the aid of Teddy from Hang Time and "that white kid they always put in movies where there has to be a fragile little white kid put into uncomfortable situations with big black guys".
Anyway, Ashanti spends the aforementioned four minutes twenty six seconds trying to cram in as many similar sounding melodies as possible over a sample from the 1983 DeBarge song "Stay With Me". The mind reels in horror as it tries to find out exactly which part of the song is the verse, which is the chorus, or if there's any organization to any of it at all. Sometimes she pitches her voice up for a length of time, sometimes she pitches her voice down for a length of time, most of the time it stays monotone, and she rreeaallllyy likes to drag out vowels. A lot. And the entire time, it seems like there are nine other Ashanties in the background making "ooohhh"s and "aaahhh"s or otherwise parroting the last three or four words of each phrase. I mean, in terms of nothingness, this song ranks as a flat and sterile ceaseless exercise in monotony.
So filled with hatred for this song am I, that I will not embed the video or link to it. You're going to have to Google it yourself if you really want to hear the most bland song ever written.

Not Safe For Wednesday

I'm sure some of you are familiar with that clip of pterodactyl porn that's been out there since time immemorial and, really, that's what I was going to go with today. There's also the really disturbing to see E.T. porn that hopefully less people have seen as it doesn't really turn anybody on, it exists solely to prove that the internet itself exists as an exhibition for the talents of folks who like to do nothing besides destroying one fond childhood memory after another. My generation had E.T. and Care Bears and Smurfs, that kind of shit. My brother, being 6²/₃ years younger (yes, we count it like that), had shit like the Power Rangers. That porn exists, too. Chances are that if you ever liked anything at all ever at any time in your life, somebody's made a porn of it, because internet service providers don't do background checks for things like, "Is this person a sick fuck? They can have a clean criminal record, a perfectly sane psych profile, and good credit, sure, but are they a sick fuck?"
Here, let me pick something I like, right off the top of my head.
Lancelot Link.
There, I liked that show as a kid. Now let's see what happens when I type in "Lancelot Link porn" into Google.
Nothing. Good. That's probably because of some bestiality laws, though.
Let me pick something else. Cactus. Let's see what happens when I type "cactus porn" into Google.
Oh, come on! Really!?!?
How about "high fructose corn syrup porn"?
You gotta be fucking kidding me. I mean, we're not dealing with things I like anymore, I'm just pulling words out of thin air and putting "porn" on the end.
Ford Fiesta.
Timberland.
Jaywalk.
The House That Jack Built.
Marigold.
Times New Roman.
Post-It Note.
Etc...
Anyhow, I was looking for the pterodactyl porn and in my search I found instead something more intriguing that I'd like to share with you, my little illiterati: The World's Most Awesome Flame Thrower.

This is what I got.

Going through the help wanted ads as Mitzy keeps a keen eye on a lady bug she found on the window. Been practicing loudly the past few days, only a few things coming out that I'm even happy with. Keep trying to think of ways to get around the issue of this computer's speed so I can do some recording. Keep thinking of how I should start packing a little this Friday since I have some big boxes from the supply shipments at the hostel. Laundry yesterday; the powder detergent I got from the hostel clumped up and didn't rinse away properly so, when I pulled my laundry out of the drier, every single article of clothing looked as though I had used it as a jizz rag, so I had to do my laundry a second time using Dave & Laura's detergent. (One of them accidentally ate my last three eggs, so I figure we're even.) (No need to replace the eggs, Dave.) Georgie's all over me about how many résumés I send out per day, like she's my mother, claiming that "nobody knows what's going on" with me, "nobody" meaning her as I've gotten only the irregular question from Dave and Laura never asks; I figure it's none of Georgie's damned business. I don't hang out with her much anymore, anyway, and, when I do, I feel forced and awkward which sucks because when I don't hang out with her, I feel lonely and resentful. Wow, that last part looked like a diary entry. I better go find something to do before this gets weird.

Can we all agree on something?

Nothing. I got it.

A Tribute to Bucket

Tom and Maran came by to pick up Bucket last night. Bucket started freaking out and hiding while Tom took a seat on the stairs, apparently he fucked up his knee. I had the dubious honor of loading the big squeaker into the cat carrier. I'm still not happy about it.
Here are a bunch of pics of Bucket from back in July when Mitzy was still a baby.

Here he is showing Mitzy how to look out a window.

The infamous "open the tuna your-damned-self" shot.

Im in yr camra, makin yr shot cute.

God speed, you ginormous squeaker.

So, nobody told me we went back to standard time.

As a result, I was at work an hour early this morning. I didn't find out until I was making dinner earlier and I saw that the clock on the range didn't match the one on my phone or this 'puter. No wonder today felt like a long-assed shift. I place the blame squarely on you, my little illiterati.

How do we begin November? By going back to work!

And what do we do at work? No, besides that. That's right, we kill time. Get ready for a link happy post as I take you on a marvelous journey to some of my time killers! Yeah, I got nothin'.

BallDroppings: Maddening, absolutely maddening. Download the downloadable version after spending some with the online javascript one to avoid issues with freezing up after you successfully trap all the balls into making your cacophonous symphony. Because, c'mon, you're going to want to trap the balls before it ever dawns on you to construct a tune out of those things.

Tinydrum3.0: Looks like Q*Bert, sounds like the first three little notes to the Star Trek theme, and somehow, when I play with it, I feel magically whisked away to a time of samurais and shamisens. There are three ways to interface with the dmf tinydrum: You can click on the blocks as the wave goes by, you can click on the little grid above that, or you can enter coordinates in the text box at the top, try these: 4369-34952-8738-17476-17476-4369

Grotrian Pianos: Do you ever find yourself just kind of sitting around after that rerun of that episode of Reno 911 that you didn't laugh at the first time is over, you're kind of gin drunk, and you think to yourself, "You know what would sound awesome if it were fucking horrifying? Beethoven's 'Fur Elise'." If you think that way, well, you're not fucking normal. Even I don't think that way and I'm two steps away from being classified as a frotteur so, baby, when I call the kettle "black", I have particular qualifications.

Because it's "pot", get it? No? I got nothin'.

Fear not, though, because the brains behind Grotrian Pianos aren't normal either, they're German. So while you're clearly not in your right mind, neither are the developers behind this toy, who clearly wanted to take beautiful classical music and turn it into a complete mind-fuck.

Virtual 909: aM labaoratory has a ton of stuff to sort through, including our aforelinked 909 drum machine clone. There's also a 303 bass machine clone ^Here, a pulse-width tutor ^Here, something called a wavepole synth ^Here, a cutesy toy called Tonewheels ^Here, and a Tone Matrix ^Here which was incorporated into the Hobnox Audio Tool.
16650,0,16400,0,4104,0,1056,0,16908,0,1088,0,2056,0,4224,0

If you don't like music, you might like cats. If you don't like cats, you can get the fuck out and not come back.

To your left, you should see a big blank space. Right click and select "Play".