This Is Not A Post

Summer Softball has begun, but although it is as enjoyable as it has ever been, I don’t think this post will relate my experiences with it. One such experience that I will not talk about is that I actually got the chance to play a position besides pitcher. That’s right, after two full seasons of viewing the field from no other spot than that lonely perch, the pitchers mound, I was given the opportunity to view the play from just behind and slightly to the right of first base. This is because there are no less than three members of our team who wanted to directly face down batters in fierce competition, and since we are an equal-opportunity employer, the fact that one of these pitchers happens to be an all-star does not prevent the others from throwing their fair share of innings. Now, I say that not to degrade either of the others pitcher’s skills, because they both can throw a mean six-foot arch, but just to inform you, my dear readers that ‘ol 99 (me) has moved to another post. But I’m not going to talk about it.

As for facebook, I’m not going to talk about that either. It has become very clear that Theresa has many more friends than me and I will never be able to catch up. Especially if I keep rejecting friend requests, like I have been doing. I don’t know, when you get a request from someone that you do not even recognize even a little bit, and then you ask them how we know each other, and she says ‘from 7th grade shop class,’ and I still have absolutely no clue who she is, that is where I draw the line. Facebook is about keeping in touch with friends, not random people who you saw once over 10 years ago any have not heard a whisper about in any time since then. So this means that I will probably never win any popularity contests. But I’m not talking about that either.

So, what am I going to talk about? Nothing really, I guess. I could say how much I am disappointed by Pandora. You know, that internet radio station where you put in your favorite artist, and it plays songs similar to them based one a set of “musical genes” that it gives the songs. Well, much like real genetics, I think the musical genome project is having some trouble with emergent properties. For example, when I started a station based on Sunset Rubdown, it listed the bands qualities as “Acoustic rhythm piano, mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation, major key tonality, and emotional male lead vocal performance.” Then it went ahead and played a bunch of whiney emo songs from bands like Reliant K. You see, the real appeal of Sunset Rubdown are Spencer Krug’s yelpy, Bowiesque vocals, complex song structure and its existentialist undertones, which are completely missed when you are breaking down the song into unhelpful categories like “mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation.” If Pandora’s creators had looked at real genetics a little, they might have realized that person’s true characteristics cannot be simply described by listing a small set of genes. And by analogy, they might have realized the futility of describing a musician’s true characteristics with a set of uninformative ‘musical genes.’ Oh well.