Category: Uncategorized

Music Heard in the Men’s Bathroom of the Hyatt Place Salt Lake City, February 27, 2014

I heard some really great music today in the men’s bathroom of the Hyatt Place Salt Lake City conference room, which I utilized several times as I attended an all-day Microsoft Innovative Educators training being hosted there.  The music was so stellar I was tempted to cut class just to stay there and absorb those golden tones.

The first time I went in, in the morning, I heard the dramatic close of Simon & Garfunkel’s “America.”  But that was just a taste of the vintage AM Gold to come. It was followed by the incredibly emotional country pop ballad, “Please Come to Boston” by Dave Loggins:

I was very pleased to come across this song; It is probably the best of its kind I’ve heard since Michael Martin Murphy’s “Wildfire,” which I have little doubt in my mind must have endowed that men’s bathroom with its haunting and mysterious tale of snowstorms paranormal horses at some other point during the day, though I did have the opportunity to hear it myself. Here is video for that song with lots of pictures of horses:

On my second visit to the restroom, I was pleasantly surprised to find the the Hyatt Place DJ (they no doubt have one on staff, an automated service could never have curated such a powerful playlist) not only embraces 1970s Country Pop crossover, but they soft and easy disco pop of Bee Gees younger brother Andy Gibb’s “I Just Want To Be Your Everything:”

But it was my final visit to the men’s room, at the close of the day, that brought the true musical revelation, a track so incredible and incredulous that I wouldn’t believe if I hadn’t heard it myself echoing from the tiles and the stalls.  It began innocuously enough, an instrumental track with extensive saxophone soloing in a rather conventional smooth jazz style. However, the track had two distinctive elements that stood apart from typical smooth jazz: a stuttering bass drum beat and a unique but incessant flute refrain. A unique and incessant flute refrain that sounded uncannily like the flute refrain in Jay-Z’s 2000 Timbaland-produced single, “Big Pimpin.'” Could it be possible that muzak versions of Jay Z songs have actually been synthesized and recorded? Could it be possible that such muzak could be viably played alongside classic 70s pop, and in such an institution as the Hyatt Place Salt Lake City?

Yes. It is real, and it is happening. If the YouTube video isn’t enough for you, please refer to the album Smooth Jazz Tribute to Jay-Z by the Smooth Jazz All Stars on Spotify. Thank you to the Internet, thank you to the Smooth Jazz All Stars for this incredible tribute, and thank you most of all to the Hyatt Place Salt Lake City for pumping such wonderful music into your conference room restrooms. I can’t wait to hear what is playing there tomorrow.

Chocolate Coca-Cola Float

The Recipe:

1. Place 2-3 scoops of chocolate ice cream in a tall glass.
2. Pour Coca-Cola into glass.
3. Serve with straw and long spoon.
4. Enjoy.

Additional options:

Cherry Coke
Top with whipped cream, cherry

No picture necessary.

via Tumblr http://froztfreez.tumblr.com/post/57349909751

What I Learned at UELMA

As you may or may not know, I am a wanna-be school librarian. As such, Friday I had the opportunity through my work to attend the UELMA conference (Utah Educational Library Media Association) at Mountain View High School in Orem (“Family City U.S.A.”), Utah.  This was my first time attending such a conference, and I actually enjoyed it.  My boss won an award based on a nomination letter that I drafted (well, and maybe partly based on all the great things he’s done for libraries in our school district that made it easy to draft said letter).  Plus, I got paid to be there and I got a free lunch out of the deal.

Examples of things I learned

  • All kinds of great and wacky ideas for programs and events to do with students in a library, which got me all excited, until I remembered I don’t have a library to do them in or students and teachers to do them with.  This plethora of ideas came courtesy of Lanell Rabner, librarian at Springville High School and also the current president of UELMA.
  • It turns out that Dickens’ Great Expectations and the beginning novel in Stine’s Goosebumps series are basically the same book.  Seriously though, I learned a bunch of cool ideas about archetypes and the universality of narrative, and the importance of libraries/librarians refraining from putting up any impediments to a child’s choosing a book to read, even (and perhaps especially) if it is something lame like Goosebumps.  This came from a session by Clint Johnson, a writer and writing teacher at Salt Lake Community College.
  • Not every session you attend in a conference is great.  This realization helped me begin to understand why a few conference-goers seemed so jaded about the whole thing.  I am still a rookie and I mostly drank up the kool-aid  the whole time.
  • Perhaps most importantly for my current job, I learned  how to steal MARC records from the Canadians.  (Thank you, Summer Cornelius of Hurricane High School.)

So that was basically my freshman UELMA experience.  Stay tuned for my next post, in which I reveal to the web some exciting information to which only I and a few hundred others were privy as attendees of the conference.

Froz-T-Freez Favorite Albums of 2009

So, this was going to be the year when I finally got my act together and published a nice bunch of reviews of my favorite albums of the year by the end of the year. Turns out it’s not going to happen, as I got dumped on this December with snow, work, family stuff, and, most recently, preparing to move.  So, no plethora of album reviews for you, but I will try to do better next year. I figured the least I could do is put together some lists of favorites, even if I can’t provide much of any context, description, or justification for my choices.  Here are my favorite albums of 2009, arranged in an arbitrary manner most convenient to my purposes.

 

Fifteen Favorites:

  1. Animal Collective: Merriweather Post Pavilion
  2. Grizzly Bear: Veckatimest
  3. Holiday Shores: Columbus’d the Whim
  4. M. Ward: Hold Time
  5. Andrew Bird: Noble Beast
  6. Woods: Songs of Shame
  7. Dirty Projectors: Bitte Orca
  8. The Flaming Lips: Embryonic
  9. Passion Pit: Manners
  10. Caetano Veloso: Zii e Zie
  11. Mormon Tabernacle Choir: Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing
  12. Kurt Vile: Childish Prodigy
  13. Girls: Album
  14. Atlas Sound: Logos
  15. Ganglians: Monster Head Room

 

Five EPs:

  1. Neon Indian: Psychic Chasms
  2. Abe Vigoda: Reviver
  3. Deerhunter: Rainwater Cassette Exchange
  4. Animal Collective: Fall Be Kind
  5. Bon Iver: Blood Bank

 

A Trio of Great Rock Albums:

  1. The Dead Weather: Horehound
  2. Dinosaur Jr.: Farm
  3. Sonic Youth: The Eternal

 

Two Magic Albums:

  1. Here We Go Magic: Here We Go Magic
  2. Memory Tapes: Seek Magic

 

A few other albums I feel are worth mentioning:
(alphabetical by artist)

  • Crystal Antlers: Tentacles
  • Dan Deacon: Bromst
  • Bob Dylan: Together Through Life
  • Harlem Shakes: Technicolor Health
  • Heartless Bastards: The Mountain
  • Little Dragon: Machine Dreams
  • Mos Def: The Ecstatic
  • Small Black: Small Black
  • Wavves: Wavves
  • Wilco: Wilco (the album)

 

Enjoy.

Disclaimer: Of course, these lists are only a frozen instance of my musical taste at this moment in time.  I reserve the right to add to or take away from them at any moment in the future, as I discover new music that came out in the past year, or discover upon repeated listens that an album is much better than I thought it was, or much inferior to what it initially sounded to me.

Tip: A great place to listen to virtually any album for free (completely legal, too) is lala.com.  They will let you stream a song or an entire album all the way through one time to try it.  I’m not bothering to link all these up there, and there are of course many other ways to check out new music, but I just suggest it as a great way to test out music.  You can buy perpetual streaming rights there for super cheap, as well ($ 0.10 a song, or $ 0.80-1.00 an album).  I don’t receive any compensation from lala.com, I just think it’s a great web site.  I hope that Apple/iTunes doesn’t ruin the things I like about them.