For any intelligence officer who has to spend any amount of time determining whether there's valuable information on any of my various blogs.
Some panel and conference participants, because of their profession, could not be identified. But another who could is Robert Steele, another blog booster. The former U.S. intelligence officer said "absolutely" that blogs are valid sources of intelligence and news, though he said authenticating the information in blogs "leaves a lot to be desired."
Many years ago, a former girlfriend of mine who was obsessed with the Indigo Girls (and by extension did not understand my own mild obsession with REM) told me, in all seriousness, that when they recorded "Kid Fears," they'd had to put Michael Stipe's voice through a harmonizer because he couldn't hit the right notes.
This never made any sense to me. Sure, I can see having to fix his voice; I love Michael Stipe, but he's no Caruso. But it seemed like if you were going to fix his voice to fit into a harmony, it wouldn't be to send it up or down uniformly, but rather to bring every individual note into the right place separately, and that seemed like a lot of work, when you could just find somebody else to sing the part in the first place. You don't ask Michael Stipe to sing a trio with you when you want absolute perfection.
I can see multiple takes. Hell, I can see them sitting there and sounding out every note with him to make sure he hit it right, for days and days on end. Except that he doesn't appear to be faltering at all in the song, and I've heard him sing many times when he was feeling insecure about his voice, so I know what that sounds like.
I asked Noel about it, he scoffed. That's not what harmonizers are for. Harmonizers are used to bring an entire part up or down to fit into a harmony, not to fix an inability to hit notes.
But it still bothers me. Where would this rumour come from, and why? Did she make it up just to hurt my feelings? If so, why bother trying to insult me via my musical choices. It's not like I like REM because of the incredible qualities of Michael Stipe's voice. I mean, I like his voice, but it's the rawness of it that I like.
There's nothing about it on the web, which leads me to believe it's not a terribly common rumour, because at the very least one person would have mentioned it (of course, now I have, so I'm that one person).
For a long time, when we first found out about David Hasslehof's German music career, the phrase "popular in Germany" was used in my group of friends to mean, basically, utter shit. So imagine my surprise when I find that my web site (not just this blog) is incredibly popular in Germany.
For some reason, the #3 referrer on my site is this page of unrelated links. I can only think that somebody has a bad web browser that gives the last page visited as the referrer, whether a link was followed or not, but even so, 122 hits came via that page in the last three weeks. That's a lot. Even leaving aside all the German-based Google searches.
(#1, by the way, is by far and away The Knot, on account of my detailed explanation of the making of tissue packets for one's wedding. This is my legacy.)
(#2 is Google.)
So there you have it. I'm inexplicably popular in Germany. Should my popular but schlocky talking-car series get cancelled in the US, I'll just go over there and sing for a few years until they come up with a series where I watch barely dressed boobies jogging on the beach all day. Except I have to land that talking-car series first, and there's this small matter of my not being an actor. Not that David Hasselhof is an actor, but he at least pretends to be one.
It's not the first time that somebody has tried to predict an earthquake, but this seems like more media coverage than the quacks usually get. I'm torn between being really excited about the possibility that earthquakes can be predicted with such accuracy, and not entirely convinced that they will be right this time.
Also, we were already planning a foundation replacement. You can't get much more hardcore interested in earthquake safety than that.
In the newsletter from our gym, this paragraph:
"I have always worked out," Roberto said. "You've just got to keep going. Don't stop. That's what I want as my epithet: 'Athlete.'"
