musings

… software you’ve been using happily for eons goes out of date? I’d been using a little program called Recent Tunes to update my blog with the song that was playing in iTunes, and using the WP iTunes plugin to update the little Tunes section on the sidebar. It seems that something in Tiger has trashed Recent Tunes ; it only works for the run in which the preferences are created ; on subsequent runs it acts as if iTunes isn’t running at all. Worse yet, it appears to be abandoned. So I’ve switched over to AudioScrobbler, which has the mixed benefit of hooking me up with music that’s similar to stuff I like. I say it’s a mixed benefit because, as I’ve documented here in the past, I’m a music junkie. Knowing about more music that suits my tastes will only inspire me to buy more music. My shelves and my drive space are collapsing under the weight of my music collection, yet I can’t stop buying more. Not that I regret it at all. I can’t imagine my life without my tunes.

Paula and I went to see George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead last night. Like all of George Romero‘s zombie movies, this one is a bit (and I emphasize bit) of social commentary wrapped in a zombie thriller. Where Dawn of the Dead was an allegory for mass consumerism, Land of the Dead embodies the Marxist class struggle. Like the other Dead movies, however, the social commentary really amounts to “Hey, look!”. It’s not deep by any means. Land of the Dead is nothing at all like scary. There are a whole lot of cheap startles, but there’s no real tension. There is, however, an unholy amount of gore. And now that Romero has a real budget, the gore is incredibly visceral. Zombie fans, rejoice, this is the first good zombie movie since the not-zombies-at-all 28 Days Later….