A couple of days ago on the radio I heard a mysterious cover of Linkin Park’s
“One Step Closer”. Instead of an angry young man screaming at the top of his
lungs, this version involved a pleasant sounding woman with an acoustic guitar.
Disorienting, to say the least.
So I strained to hear who the artist was, but all I heard the DJ say was,
“Dean and Naroyan”. Ok, type that into Google… nope. Hmmmm, maybe he
said “Deena Naroyan”? No dice there either… but Google asks, “Did you mean
‘Deena Noroian‘”? Why, yes, as it turns out, I did.
And there she was! And if you
send her an email, she’ll even send you a free mp3 of her cover of “One Step Closer”.
Now, I’m not quite sure who her target audience is — besides possibly me
— since how many Linkin Park fans are also into Lilith Fair guitar music?
And vice versa? But maybe her new album will sell like hotcakes. What do I know?
Speaking of mp3s, I’ve been having a lot of fun ripping all my CDs onto my computer. This
was all accidental. I was just playing around, trying to get my sound card
to work properly. The install CD included a supremely crappy media player.
I got distracted with it… ripped a couple of CDs… and realized, “Hey,
this is pretty neat. I can store all my music in one place… organize my
collection… make my own playlists…” Welcome to 1999.
It’s like when that kid called from Harvey Mudd,
trolling for alumni donations. Well, after I coughed up the money we started
chatting, about NPR of all things. I mentioned
This American Life, and he said,
“Oh, I love that show. I listen to it all the time when I do my homework.”
Hmmmm, I thought. Maybe things have changed a bit since the Dark Ages when I
went to school, but I don’t recall noon on Saturdays being prime time for
doing E&M problem sets.
“No,” he said patiently. “I go to the website
and listen to the archived shows whenever I want.” Like, duh, Grandpa.
Am I turning into Abe Simpson?
I used to be with it, but then they changed what “it” was. Now, what I’m with isn’t
“it,” and what’s “it” seems weird and scary to me.
I can at least console myself with the fact that I never was with it. So I don’t
feel like I’ve lost any ground.
Finally, today happens to be the tenth anniversary of the
first
web page in the United States, at SLAC. I think there were a couple of
websites up before then, but they were
Swiss or
something, so who cares?