submarines and dinosaurs

Happy Bastille Day! I've always had a fondness for Bastille Day since it's the day before my birthday. How considerate of you, France, to overthrow the monarchy one day and hundreds of years before my birth! I appropriate your fireworks as I'm sure they spill over into the 15th. This reminds me:::wavy lines of reminiscence::: of a thing from french class my freshman year of college. I was taking french 101 (since I was too embarrassed to continue studying spanish -- my high-school spanish teacher had a very heavy tennessee accent, I was in a new state and a new school and feeling unsteady enough as it was). Anyway, we were doing that beginning language thing where you learn months and numbers and years. Our instructor went on and on and on with many vocabulary words about le quatorze juillet and all the public drunken merriment that accompanies it, and how NOTHING (RIEN!) happens on le quinze juillet because everyone is sleeping it off. Then we went around the room and had to state our birthdays. I was first and took a certain amount of perverse pleasure in le quinze juillet, because that's just the way I am sometimes. :::wavy lines of returning to the present:::

Here's some good summertime stuff:

Beck having a rambly, charming, Irrelevant Topics conversation with Tom Waits about many things including, but not limited to: playing music, the oscar meyer wiener mobile, amateur submarines in echo lake park, the tyranny of 'best of' lists, and the probable last song standing. (bad news for my friend David who hates that song with the white hot heat of a thousand suns. "it's a DIRGE! I don't know why anyone would sing it to celebrate anything.")

Carrie Brownstein is learning to love Phish. I love the as it happens quality of this series of posts and am eagerly following along even though I have little to no interest in Phish as a band. (I fall into the category of people who are somewhat Phishophobic for no reason other than a vague sense that they are a hippie jam band that my brain associates with Jimmy Fallon's Jarrett's Room sketches -- you know, the ones with the webcam and Horatio Sanz's stoner character always worried that "Phish broke up?!")

The link above explains the project, and these link to the updates so far: update 1, update 2, update 3, update 4

And here are some videos that have a very summertime feel to them -- both for the band Mika Miko:



I love the energy and simplicity of this video. (via I can't really remember who, probably stereogum)



... and this one --- dinosaurs, asteroids, apple juice -- need I say more? (via We Love You So)