I dreamed Michael Jackson died Category: Dreams and the Supernatural News junkie me, I was cruising the internet and the breaking news was the death of Michael Jackson by an apparent suicide overdose. I quickly told some friends who were shocked at the news. "Hmmm", I said, "what a rash of high visibility celebrity deaths we're having, hmmm? James Brown, Anna Nicole Smith, and now Michael Jackson!" The news was so new and immediate, we awaited the follow-up details of Jacko's death. We speculated. Probably a suicide death by overdose. The usual.

It's a New Year, and time to reflect back on the best of the old one. Here's my Top Ten Albums of 2008. These are the albums released in 2008 that I listened to the most. I actually checked my iTunes library and only listed the albums that received the most plays.

If you would like to hear the best 3 songs from each album, I made a 30 song compilation on 2 CD's to give to friends. Also available for long distance friends to download upon request. Just send me your regular email address and request the Top 30 songs of 2008 as mp3's.

Click on the image to read a description and review of each album courtesy of ALLMUSIC:

The Dream - The Orb

Out There - The Heliocentrics

Miles From India - Various Artists

Heaven's Door - Plaid

O Soundtrack My Heart - Pivot

Treated Timber Resists Rot - Xploding Plastix

Mutiny In The Kitchen With Knives - Russian Spy Camera

Ringer - Four Tet

Land For Renegades - Zombie Zombie

Radio Retaliation - Thievery Corporation

What color are numbers? You know, if you had to designate each numeral as a color, what would each one be?
This very question popped into my mind this evening on the way home from work. I had never before thought of what color numbers were, and as I started going through numerals 0 through 10, the colors came almost instantly and seem set in stone to me. The only number whose color didn't come immediately was the numeral 8. At first it seemed red, then blue, but neither would do. Then I decided on purple, which is, of course, a mix of the two.

Here's what color each numeral is to me (to avoid any influence, I have made the colors hidden. So first make your decision and then click and hold your mouse cursor on the space after the "=" to reveal the color I think each number is):

0 = black
1 = white
2 = red
3 = yellow
4 = green
5 = blue
6 = orange
7 = green (but a slightly bluer shade of green than 4)
8 = purple
9 = gray
10 = black

Leave a comment with what color YOU think each number should be. Tell me why I am right or wrong with my choices....

With a crescendo or a death-descending silence, the truth remains apposite despite the ineptitude of loan insurances and/or credit card issuers privy to this girl I had met only once before. It was Tuesday before last after the Master Charge warning of disclosure arrived on schedule as pre-perceived before I saw her.

She only semi-criticized my overt sense of overboard frantic nonsense; And that's exactly how she said it too, and she forgot it just as quickly. I shall half-heartedly refer to her as "she" to avoid a dissuasive violent temperament which lay hidden beneath her foreign lisp.

"Meet me there at..." (interrupted, this was the last I ever heard from her. It was during last Monday's mild laser shock storm, which generated solar winds in excess of 115 kph. The salvo knocked out the power, as well as the paint off the hinges, but we made do with home-made-ice-in-milk carton candles and WD-40).

I saw her the following day handing out Dixie® cups of coffee to the survivors, but chose not to speak to her anticipating another one of her actualization demonstrations.

Inside the abandoned suburban ranch (recently foreclosed, undoubtedly), personal belongings lay scattered in piles from room to room. Hastily boxed and never unpacked crap too shitty for even a yard sale lay in cluttered ruins, unwanted plastic talismans of current disposable culture.

The rooms were dank and musty, spores of mold taking root throughout. A perfect place to set up a new game of Water Ball! Leaky troughs were quickly lined from room to room, like a shoddy polystyrene log-flume. The garden hose had been brought in to keep the balls afloat, and the object of the game was to get one's clear inflatable beach ball to the end of the makeshift flumes. The whole neighborhood had showed up for the match, and the balls tended to pile up and bobble at broken points in the waterway.

I tried in vain to advance my ball past the bottleneck, only to be accosted by Mr. Z. who insisted I take a look at his latest art project: Rat Boxes.

Mr. Z I had known for many years, and his "projects" were more like shenanigans, which ceased to impress even this cloyed observer. Besides, I was in the middle of a competitive game of water ball!

But he showed me a Rat Box. Then another. Very disturbing, indeed, as I swung back in forth from advancing my ball, focusing on the game, to his insistence at showing his creations. I didn't want to see them, but the bizarre concept and vulgarity and repulsion was too much for my curiosity: Mr. Z had invaded an abandoned warehouse which had long since been infested with rats. He had collected the droppings, carcasses and debris left behind by a teeming rat colony and installed them in neatly plastered and uniform diorama boxes, the details enhanced.

Each box was approximately 9 by 12 by 6 inches in size, and painted drab and disgusting colors. Rat browns and grays. Highlighted in each box were the actual dried rat parts: Hairy orifices in relief, set in plaster painted the same as the box frames. Murine teeth and bones, skin shards and reproductive organs offset in a frame of flat plaster, coarse bristles protruding in rodent nastiness.

Mr. Z was planning a one man show of his Rat Boxes, and I was getting a proud preview. I refused to look too long at his many pieces, and instead concentrated on completing the Water Ball tournament. I looked up in time to watch a neighboring kid win, the transparent inflatable balls bobbing in the current, and shouts of victory dampened by the soggy surroundings.

Nicely evolved secrets harboring my innermost thoughts proclaimed vicissitude upon her frequently hidden facets of reasoning that foremost, if not hitherto, relinquished forgotten passageways regarding channels of input within the nebulous nerve endings of my Medulla Oblongata. Subreption had surpassed even my adherence to the rules of thumb-sized concealment pulsating beneath the flocculent curvature of her neck epidermis, located slightly higher, still.

Similarly wetted fabrications of truant manifestations instigating five tribulations of guilt within the systemic phantasmagory, substituting faith for hire, and involving recent antecedents of pleasure foundations, there seemed no room for trial heist maneuvers to follow toast subjugation. Increasing malevolent hindrances forced me to reallocate the foreign bob jesters to another quadrant reticent with flooded perspiration globules, suspended diligently upon the forehead of Mather Monger, who was asleep at the time, but cognisant of furlong material stripping the immediate locale of it’s measured and ripened ambience.

Jungian nightmares relegated to individuals underlining their own recent findings of liars netting torsos flings upward towards the tangent hate zone cherubs. Without a net, youthful discretion advises freezing the subject twice-fold, belying advances in Yeti ether-eating fornicators ambuscading in the bush. Footprints found imbedded and subdued suggested no upswing in voluminous retread abandonments cued posthumously and fore-mostly into treason mounts.

Kool-aid reasoning forgets the gargantuan noon moon until helipad quilts of freedom covered magma-enriched lock tides and pre-selected friendly fire engulf the die-hard soldiers of foreplay.

Was this a sign of God’s Golden shore rife with cornucopiac imbalance and solicitude? Alone forever and traipsing headfirst, upstarts heralding Bourgeoisie gifts headed nonchalantly in our direction, shifting slightly opposite the ring-hired rain limiter.

It made no difference, lateness overtakes, passing fungal alabaster ineptitude in our path, obstructing and inhibiting forecaster shade upbringings to within an inch of our prohibitory filigrees, halting monolithic breath and surreptitious beats.....at least temporarily.

Ladies and gentlemen, dogs and cats, cross-eyed mosquitoes and bowlegged rats:
I come before you, to stand behind you, to tell you something I know nothing about.
Next Thursday (which is Good Friday), a meeting will be held at the Women's Club for men only.
Admission is free, pay at the door, pull up a chair, and sit on the floor.
The show is over, but before you go, I'll tell you a story I don't really know:
One bright day in the middle of the night, two dead boys got up to fight.
Back to back, they faced each other, drew their swords and shot each other.
A deaf policeman heard the noise, and came and shot the two dead boys.
If you don't believe my story is true, ask the blind man, he saw it too.

That's how I learned it, courtesy of my First Cousin Pam, who recited it into my new portable cassette recorder I had just received on Christmas Day, 1970.




There are many variations on this children's exercise in oxymorons. Leave the version you know here as a comment.

Okay, in this highly volatile election year of 2008, where anything can happen in the wacky world of political campaigns, I am going out on a limb to predict the outcome of the Presidential election eleven months from now, including running mates for both parties:

For the Republicans:

John McCain / Fred Thompson

And for the Democrats:

Either Hillary Clinton / Bill Richardson

or

Barrack Obama / Bill Richardson

(too close to call yet, but probably Clinton/Richardson)

Running as an independent:

Ron Paul / (it dosesn't matter who his running mate is)

with the election handily going to the Democrats!

So, a year from now we'll be welcoming a new President Clinton, or President Obama.

So, What's YOUR prediction? Leave it here as a blog comment.

My, My how time flies! End of the year again, and I have my Top Ten Albums of 2007 ready. : Click on the image to read a description and review of each album courtesy of ALLMUSIC:

Spare Time Machine - Pepe Deluxe

In Rainbows - Radiohead

Orbsessions Volume Two - The Orb

Sound of Silver - LCD Soundsystem

Art Pop - Githead

The Black and White Album - The Hives

100 Years of Silence - So A.D.D.

Against the Beat - The Color Green

This is the compilation of the year from the fine label ROIR:

Essential Dub - Various Artists

This album came out in 2006, but I missed it until this year:

Bill Laswell Meets Roots Tonic - Bill Laswell / Roots Tonic

I have to add my favorite album I discovered this year, but which was released at an earlier time: This phenomenal album was released in 2005, but was recorded in 1957. The tapes went unmarked and undiscovered for 48 years, and thank goodness; what a masterpiece!:

At Carnegie Hall - Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane