The One with the Thoughts of Frans

This post is recycled, and was originally published on my former weblog on Saturday 2005-02-26 at 11:40:12 UTC. I tweaked some grammar and spelling here and there, but I resisted the urge to rewrite this entry almost entirely. I did not, however, refrain from commenting on myself. Sensitive souls beware: I added some brand new explicit content.

Yesterday, I received my reissues of “Deaf Dumb Blind” (1993) and “Use Your Brain” (1995): two classic, quintessential Clawfinger albums. In addition to the original tracks, they both feature three bonus tracks and the video clips of the released singles of the original CD in SVCD quality. Let me go through both of the albums by my favorite songs. [Use Your Brain will be reviewed in a later post: no, that's not because I split this post in two for this special occasion or some such.] My less favorite songs are a little less good, but that doesn’t mean they’re bad. But you’ll probably have to be more of a fan to appreciate them. [I added links to YouTube so you can actually listen to the songs.]

• Deaf Dumb Blind
  1. Nigger (3:47)
  2. The Truth (4:12)
  3. Rosegrove (4:02)
  4. Don’t Get Me Wrong (3:12)
  5. I Need You (4:58)
  6. Catch Me (4:39)
  7. Warfair (3:48)
  8. Wonderful World (2:40)
  9. Sad to See Your Sorrow (5:18)
  10. I Don’t Care (3:11)
  11. Get it* (4:43)
  12. Profit Preacher * (5:55)
  13. Stars & Stripes * (3:52)

* Bonus Track + Videos:
Nigger, The Truth, Warfair

The first track of Deaf Dumb Blind is Nigger. Nigger is a song which immediately steps out of the gray of bad songs out there because of the power it contains. [I understand what I was trying to say here, but steps out of the gray of bad songs? The gray what?] Some people might think it’s a racist song when they first hear it, but it is all but that. [I've all but finished this book, and it was anything but boring.] It is to be said that the chorus (repeating the word nigger a couple of times) is very easy to catch up with and some stupid racists might even like to sing along with it(!) Luckily that was all but the intention behind the song.

I would consider “Rosegrove”, the third song, sort of a ballad, although it doesn’t really sound like one, neither in lyrics nor in melody. It’s one of the more melodic sounds on the album and one of my favorite on the album. [Boy, I can sure eloquently express myself about one of my favorite songs on the album! Maybe you should have tried it in Dutch, just 19-year old self.]

Track 5 is “I need you”. It’s quite easy to play really, but it sounds just great and I did once meet a bitch this song perfectly applied to. [I did? I rather doubt that. Teenagers, eh?] So when you are in a sort of love/hate mood situation problem thing, just put this up loud. Very very loud. [I can't comment on that (anymore?), but it is nice while working out.]

“Catch me,” the sixth track of the album, is one of the more interesting songs lyrical wise [I think you mean lyrically.] (and considering the general level of Clawfinger lyrics, that means a lot [Fanboy much?]). When I listen to one of my current favorite songs (Horse With No Name by America), I can almost imagine being in one by listening to the music. [One what? A desert? Are you talking about a freaking desert?] My personal fantasy is quite alright and I have no problem imaging deserts [No trouble imagining the vastness, at any rate. You don't quite comprehend just how hot they are. And no, I still don't.], but that song captures the spirit and puts you in one if you listen, disregarding your own imagination. [Are you on crack!?] The same applies to “Catch me”: it’s like Metallica’s “Fade to black” on steroids. [Whatever you say.] It just seems to come from deeper within, or maybe Zak, Clawfinger’s vocalist and lyrics writer, is just more on one line of thoughts with me, I don’t know. Zak said the following on the song:

Well Catch me is pretty much a direct translation from a Swedish punk song which I wrote an additional third verse for so the idea was already there! In other words it’s not a personal song even if there have been times when I have felt those feelings!

My other favorite song on the album is one of the bonus tracks, “Profit Preacher”. I will just quote Zak on the bonus tracks.

Profit preacher is about the American TV evangelists who preach faith, love & beauty, the more money you give them, the more blessed you will be! Obviously they are vultures profiting on peoples need for something or someone to believe in! I got the idea from Frank Zappa who has made a few songs on the same topic!

Stars & stripes, damn I hardly even remember the fucking song, I guess it was just an excuse to throw some shit at the United States for how they choose to angle their news reports and sedate their people into believing they are being told the truth! I’ll read it sometime soon and get back to you with a more detailed answer!

In conclusion, despite this being their debut album and the Clawz having so much less experience than they have now, this album will still rock your house away. [Rock your house away? Whatever it will rock, it will most certainly not do that. Then again, I was probably just making up something as random as rock your socks off. Perhaps that's a better way to finish this entry. "Deaf Dumb Blind" will not merely rock your socks off, it will rock your fucking house away!]

This post is recycled, and was originally published on my former weblog on Wednesday 2005-03-16 at 10:13:36. I tweaked some grammar and spelling here and there, but I resisted the urge to rewrite this entry almost entirely. I did not, however, refrain from commenting on myself. Sensitive souls beware: I added some brand new explicit content.

Oh yeah, throw open those doors and windows and let the fresh air dwirl through your house. [Oh yeah! By the way, dwirl is not a word. Twirl is, although I'm not sure if fresh air can twirl. For poetic consistency, I'm going to suggest Allow the spring breeze to enter your house and twirl your papers.] Plants growing leaves, flowers coming up; all those scents and colors, it’s just wonderful. [I wish I was two puppies, so I could play together.] The same applies to autumn, but summer? That’s boring and often too hot. [Word on the hot. Boring depends mostly on what you do with it.] It’s not bad at all, but boring in a way, that’s all. [Bravo! Excellent repetition.] But it’s about the summer nights after all… [Ew! Gross. Don't tell me that, keep it to yourself. Dirtbag. Also, just so we're clear on this: you're saying that summer days are boring because they are too hot, but summer nights aren't because they are…hot?]

This reminds me that I want a digital camera someday. [I've got two, sucker. One compact and one DSLR. No, you can't play with them.] I hate (too) limited budgets like mine. [Boo–fucking–hoo. You've got bloody 100 Mbit Internet while I'm stuck with a theoretical 8 Mbit which amounts to 6 Mbit in practice. Keep on saving, spend your money responsibly, and perhaps you will own a nice camera or two in 4 years.]

It’s time to finally get in touch with the local library and read some fucking cool books outside! [Fuck that shit. We're living in the future.]

Lately, I’ve been sorting out some old digital junk. Not because I’m short on space—I’ve got plenty—, but because some of it simply isn’t worth keeping. Most of the posts on my former weblog fall in this category, but about half a dozen of them I just couldn’t delete. I decided to integrate them with my current weblog.

Initially, I was thinking of just slipping them in at the temporal beginning of the weblog, so they would silently appear in the year 2005. However, while I was investigating how I could make the WordPress 1.5 database compatible with the current WordPress 2.8 database, I changed my mind.

It would be much easier to repost the entries on my current weblog, but that wouldn’t be right if I didn’t do it with a twist. While I was rereading some of the entries, I was thinking things like Were you on fucking crack!? Wouldn’t it be amusing to make fun of the things I wrote back then by actually adding these thoughts to the entries themselves? Additionally, this would justify reposting them as entirely new entries. If nothing else, at least it will be amusing to me. You can expect the first three recycled entries this week, and a few more may follow, but I’m not promising anything.

I don’t know how people managed to end up on my most popular post (visited 358 times last month), but neither walla nor voila were in the terms people apparently used to reach this site. People did use some puzzling phrases and terms, however, such as my quickfires screen is all wavy and i didn t do anything whats wrong, and swedish babes.

Another “interesting” statistic is the number of spam comments Akismet stopped since I first started using it.

Akismet has protected your site from 47,749 spam comments already, but there’s nothing in your spam queue at the moment.

A few minutes ago I upgraded my WordPress installation to the latest version with the help of a relatively new automatic upgrade plugin. As you can see everything worked splendidly and I can recommend it to any WordPress owner out there.

It’s totally consuming my bandwith all of a sudden, disabled comments except for registered users for the time being. O_o

As an anti-spam measure, the forced comment preview in combination with Akishmet anti-spam helped to single out virtually any spam comment I received. But the forced comment preview started to annoy me personally, so I decided to switch to Challenge in combination with Akishmet instead. I trust it is a lot easier than those stupid image validation mechanisms, but just as troublesome for spambots. And even if it’s not, Akishmet will still stop them anyway.

I will blend it in a little better with my layout later.

If you register and login when registered, you won’t have to fill out any challenge.

Apperently multiple people searched for funny tree frans in Google, which resulted in their arrival on this weblog. Sadly I did not offer a funny picture of me with a tree yet, so they probably left shortly. However, I have one and it’s requested according to the big G, so here it is.

Am I funny under that tree or what?

I hope they realized that they should have been searching for happy tree friends; or at least that’s what I think they were trying to reach.

The quick quote I basically copied (as an idea) from the MyOpera community forums wasn’t really using its full potential. After trying a while I gave up and used a workaround to point to the comment it quoted from. I decided to check out how they had done it over at Opera. Turns out they did the same. Ah well, at least it works reassuring to my own skills.

Further I had implemented the sidenotes already, but the stylesheet lacked a bit (basically one position:relative).

Last, but not least, I removed a bug from the blockquote source-link script which linked to null if not right. It’s not perfect yet though, as I do want it to show if it’s not a link, but I’ll get to that later. I’ll also extend it to the Q element.

Tell me what you think about the image hover effects as demonstrated on my post about my music collection. I don’t really like it, but I’m not sure what else to do. I’ll probably write a behaviour which removes the CSS hover effect and inserts a clickable source link below the downsized image, leaving the CSS hover for people without Javascript. People with Opera, Javascript disabled and drag=255 will probably be annoyed though. You can’t have everything.

I also added a line to my stylesheet for code as displayed in the user stylesheet I posted recently. I think it’s fine, but feel free to drop suggestions (smaller font perhaps) if you please. This is nothing new, I just forgot to add it to my “final” version of the stylesheet before.

I just updated to the latest WordPress version. The uploading took a while, despite multiple threads and my fast connection. Perhaps I should simply have put it to 50 simultaneous connections or so for this operation. Luckily not much has changed so that my custom Atom file (for 1.0 rather than 0.3) still functions fine. I noticed that the (in my eyes useless) TinyMCE editor took up most of the time however. I just thought deleting the files involved from my planned uploads would be harder than to wait a little longer while doing other things.

I thought I’d inform people who don’t know me a little better about the fact that I use valid HTML (and CSS etcetera). When I had done that I thought it would actually be much more important to give credit to a few people. Thanks Ethan and Tom, you’re mentioned on my about page now.