Rubbish, With Occasional Music

As I pedaled my way through North Loop and Lamar someone in a stopped car yelled “Castroooooo!” at me. I found that much preferable to “bike asshole”, “loser”, or “faggot”.

originally uploaded by giantrobotsf.

Sometimes fandom results in The Best Thing Ever™. This is one of those times.

Last friday evening I discovered one of the more entertaining things to ever grace Austin’s airwaves, an off-schedule performance of These Aren’t The Droids Your Looking For. TATDYLF, as I now know, is a weekly show on KVRX devoted to Star Wars. Prior to May 19th, 1999 I would have proclaimed it the best thing ever, but I’m no longer so easily swayed. While KOOP was off the air, KVRX DJ’s had been filling in, and TATDYLF took advantage of the situation to perform an Empire Strikes Back radio drama. I have no idea what the show’s normal format is, but what was broadcast that evening was pure gold. Unfortunately the show was nearly over by the time I got home, but here’s all of what I was able to record:

Dr. Scissors and Friends - The Empire Strikes Back

The episode features Obi-Wan without a British accent, a more than passable Chewbacca, the poutiest Lando ever (@ 00:30), and a remarkably unenthusiastic Leia. If you like what you hear, the show airs every Monday from 8:30 to 9:00 on KVRX.

Just as an aside, you’ll probably notice a change in quality half way through the recording. That would be because I chose the worst possible method to record the first 5 minutes of the show. Using Windows Sound Recorder, I recorded the broadcast one minute at a time at an embarassingly low sampling rate. The remainder of the show was recorded using the Record .WAV functionality in Exact Audio Copy that I didn’t even know existed until that evening.

I was later browsing through sourceforge and shortly stumbled upon Audacity, which was a real treat. As far as I can tell, the software is just as capable the last version of Cool Edit Pro (aka Audition) I had used, and a much improved interface. While I was playing around in Audacity and stitching the one minute blocks together it struck me just how much I miss the work I used to do for the hockey team back in Amarillo.

Reading “Underground “, one particular aspect of many of the stories has stuck with me, in the back of my mind. Nearly everyone that recounted what they experienced on March 20th knew exactly which rail car they sat in, which door of that car they entered through, and in some cases, where they sat. Not because of the magnitude of the events of that day, although that would be understandable, but because that’s what they do every morning. Day in, day out.

The reasons given ran the gamut from practical “that puts me right by the exit closest to my office“, to whimsical “you get the best view from the Yotsuya Station platform. Looking out past the roof line you can see the Sophia University soccer field, it’s like a breath of fresh air!”

At first this struck me as incredibly odd, but the more I thought about it, and the more I paid attention to my own behavior, the more routine every day became. Every morning I take the same route to work simply because it’s the fastest I’ve found. When I go downtown, I always take the same route and always attempt to park in the same lot, for no fathomable reason. The more I ponder on it, the more I realize I need to find my own breath of fresh air.