What happens when you combine a cartoon series that I loved watching in the early ‘90s (yes, while I was still in high school) with one of my wife’s most recent passions?  Why, Yakko Warner’s geography lesson, of course!  Some of the countries he mentions are no longer there, and they misspell “Israel”, but still, a nice little whimsical treat.

“People should not be ‘fraid of cookie.  Cookie should be ‘fraid of people.”  Prepare yourselves for an uncompromising vision of snack time.  Prepare yourselves for… C For Cookie.

Sooooo… looks like the Nintendo Revolution is now called the Wii (pronounced “We”, rhymes with “pee”).  Sometimes I wish I’d used my advertising degree to get a job making bajillions of dollars coming up with misspellings and imaginary words… I mean… creative marketing solutions and unique brand identities.

Pitchfork has a review of “Dear Mr. Supercomputer”, one of the tracks from Sufjan Stevens’ forthcoming The Avalanche LP (which compiles all of the tracks that didn’t make it onto Illinois).  But more importantly, they’ve put up an MP3 of the track for your downloading enjoyment.  I’m listening to it right now, and it seems to exist in that magical space between Stereolab and Stevens’ overlooked Enjoy Your Rabbit.

A preview of Neverwinter Nights 2.  I’m not nearly as much of a gamer as I’d like to be—I just don’t have enough time—but my curiosity’s been piqued by this title.  Here’s hoping they release a Universal Binary.

The small Belgian label Stilll initially leaped onto my radar because they released Off The Sky’s excellent It Is Impossible To Say Just What I Mean last year.  The label has recently announced their latest releases, Immune‘s Sound Inside (SCD004) and Holiday For Strings’ CD (SCD005).

Instead of simply offering MP3 downloads from the albums (though they have those as well), Stilll offers audio montages of each album, with short segments from selected tracks fading together.  It’s an interesting way to get a nice overview of the album, which can sometimes be difficult when you listen to just one track.

Listening to Sound Inside‘s audio montage, it’s obvious that the album is a rather dreary affair, and I mean that in the nicest way possible.  The band’s website describes it as something akin to a melding of Hood jamming with Mark Hollis, the thought of which just sets my little heart a-twitter.  The album’s sound is certainly inline with Hood’s pastoral meanderings circa Rustic Houses, Forlorn Valleys (a disc I’ve been meaning to review for quite some time, by the way), with sparse guitars, layered vocals, and sad piano and string arrangements, with just a hint of electronic glitch n’ fuzz.

The audio montage for CD, on the other hand, is quite a bit different than what I was expecting.  It’s far more rhythmic and stripped down, and rather funky — if you could ever consider Sonic Youth funky, that is.

Andy Whitman on “American Idol”: I have this problem. Yes, another one. And I’m not being facetious; it really is a problem. Deep in my heart of hearts, I want to love people, be tolerant of diversity, celebrate our differences. I liked old Jesse Colin Young, and I still have a soft spot for his sixties anthem about smiling on my brother and getting together and loving one another, right now. Then I encounter people who love the television show American Idol, and it’s all shot to hell. Amen, my brother.  Amen.

I wrote about “A Line You Can Cross”, the lead-off single from Lansing-Dreiden’s new album, The Dividing Island, a couple weeks ago.  Now, a clip from the music video is now available on the band/collective’s labyrinthine website.  And it’s just what you’d expect from Lansing-Dreiden, full of dolled up models wrestling and playing tug-of-war while a mime/clown serves as referee.