Caraccioli

I need to edit my last - there is quite a bit of new stuff, it's just very well integrated into the old stuff. After several listens, I agree with Bess that At Wit's End is one of the standout tracks with the new theme intermixed with the old themes. I also really like the jolly Up is Down which contains a new theme that is similar to the old soundtracks. Even the stone crabs (heh) get their own theme in Multiple Jacks (which is pretty cool). My favorite is probably I Don't Think Now is the Best Time which is a mix of everything from everywhere including the old and new stuff, the hammer struck chime/martial sort of stuff Zimmer used in Backdraft and touches of that Morricone influence which was so baldly ripped off in Parlay. But then, I've always been a sucker for action music. Singapore is fine (and new), but it's basically a flavor of what I call James Bond traveling music; in many of the Bond soundtracks, they pick a musical style that is similar to the location and give it to us strong, gradually segueing into a traditional Bond motif of some form. Same thing here. From the Oriental sound to the traditional POTC stuff. It's decent enough, though. Something particularly cool, I think, are the drums in Hoist the Colors. After seeing the movie (saw it last night despite myself ), I understand what this is supposed to be, but if you toss out your knowledge of the scene, it sounds like waves crashing on the shore. I might sample that and cut out the vocals just to play with it a little. It's pretty neat. The more I listen, the more I like it. Just like the first soundtrack, actually.

Well, I like it after the first listen. Nothing really fresh or original in there, but it's a nice collection of stuff for the most part. It uses Jack's theme and Crossed Swords quite a bit as well. In fact, every track that sounds like a fight song has smatterings of Crossed Swords in it. So good on them for that. It does seem to steal rather shamelessly from the Good, the Bad and the Ugly in both Parlay and, to a lesser degree, I Don't Think Now is the Best Time (the strident building stuff reminds me some of the ending of Morricone's music for GBU.) Actually, that last track borrows from all over the place, including, if I'm not mistaken, Zimmer's own Backdraft. But that's another pretty good place to steal from. Lots of choral in this one. I guess we're supposed to see meaning and fate in everything, eh? (Haven't seen it yet. May not until next week or weekend.) Some nice humorous turns in the music as well, particularly with Jack's theme. A lot of Jack's theme scattered around, actually. Not bad. I might like it even better after I see the flick. It beats all hell out of the last one IMO.

Actually, I had the first verse created, although I can only remember bits of it... It's a world of horror, a world of fears, Where there is no laughter, but only tears (So we're definitely thinking alike. ) I had something in mind that alternated between actual lyrical music and that sort of DM low volume screaming thing they so love. My thought is to make this a really cheerful looking room with bits of dayglow skull parts all over the place and these singing skull flowers that I'm playing around with. I actually made some concept sketches of the floor plan up for some of the other haunters I work with to view. The room plans are kind of hard to see, however. Still, if you're curious: http://www.markck.com/images/Haunted%20Hou...ull%20World.htm The green parts are walls we have to build, the white is a white picket fence with skull filials (the round white things - still working on them too) and the oddly skewed multi-walled green thing is a small room that will have two flying reapers inside. The moldings will be made of foam bones I picked up for cheap last year. The purple line is the path of the patrons through the room. They walk right through the little room with the flying reapers. (Inside, I want to have Sinatra's Come Fly With Me playing. The walls are so thick because I'm going to foam insulate them so the outside music is dampened inside the room.) The whole thing is supposed to have a sort of kitschy-garden feel to it. The skull flowers will be around the outside. I have boxes of these battery-powered talking skull things with moving eyes that I'm going to place on bone "stems" from disassembled skeleton with cardboard flower petals with veins in them (see small concept flower link on the page I reference above.) I'm going to disconnect their speakers so the mouths move, but they don't say anything...see, the skull flowers are supposed to be singing the song... I may even tape up my full-sized skeletons and have them hanging cheerfully (like a kid would, not with a noose or anything) from trees. Still pondering that one concept. Gee, now I'm getting excited about doing it again.

I was wondering what they'd do with It's a Small World. This year, if all goes well, I am creating a haunted house room called "It's a Skull World" with all that portends. I wanted to get a friend, who was a Death Metal garage band frontsman, to do a song for me but that fell through when he moved to CA. Alas. (3 hours straight of some 3-5 minute DM ditty about skull world on repeat would probably have driven every worker in the haunt straight to the asylum anyhow.) "The sequel to Matterhorn will be titled Anti-Matterhorn."

The Force! Kenner would have made a mint on that one. When I used to post regularly in the collector's section at TF.N, I actually suggested Vader from the Force tree in Empire, Beru and Owen skeletons and choking Motti and someone called me morbid and told me I was completely failing to understand the market. http://www.rebelscum.com/potf2ctmotti.asp http://www.rebelscum.com/potjdagvader.asp (With removable head, as predicted!) So half of them have been made since then...

I once wrote an article on nano-tech for a magazine. Of course, NT as it was originally conceived was a bit different than what you hear about now. Putting minuscule holes in a drug capsule for better timed release of the drug is now called nano-tech. What I was writing about were actually tiny machines. The trouble with NT is that when you get on the molecular scale, the laws of physics change. Well, that's not fair, they don't actually change, but forces that have little or no impact in the "normal" scale world start to affect things at a molecular scale. We haven't really got a good enough grasp on it all to create wee tiny machines yet. (And my article was written in the late 80s, so it was really pie-in-the-sky and theoretical back then!) Actually, I suspect the fabric would be black since this color seems best for collecting solar radiation. Look at all the solar panels. I believe that black absorbs heat, silver reflects it.

Wow! What a cool idea! A flexible, light-weight solar network...it would even be portable then. Of course the real trick will be figuring how to transport the energy from the collection point (the fabric) to a central power accumulation/generation device. (Let's use all the contemporary gee-whiz sci-fi stuff and incorporate nano-tech energy conversion devices into the fabric. )

Huh. Couldn't see it - it wouldn't load for me. I've suspect I know what it shows, though. I remember seeing a special showing rows and rows of EV1s sitting in a field or some such and accusing GM of being the culprit behind the death of the electric vehicle. While I've no doubt that the automotives and the gas companies work against adoption of such technology in small and piecemeal sort of way, I don't think it's the organized conspiracy that some people suggest. (There are lots of reasons one could come up with for having a parking lot full of EV1s sitting around. Some don't play as well as others on the tele.) The automotives just aren't that well organized and fast moving. (In fact, they're nothing like fast moving. That's why Japan has such a foothold and is toppling the once mighty GM.) Besides, this is just more worrying about the past IMO. If you look closely, you'll notice that conspiracy theorists are all hung up on the past. The past is dead, leave it be. The retail future of automobiles probably won't come from the current automobile companies just as the digital watch didn't come from the Swiss watchmakers (who, ironically, invented it and dismissed it as a curio.) I recently saw a special on a new electric car that looked like a sports car. I can't remember what it was called, but the company president or some such noted that the problem with electric cars in the past was that they looked so odd. He suggested that the only people who want such an odd looking car are those who are screaming "I am adopting electric technology because I care about the environment..." and so forth. Most people don't want them. So he made an electric car that looks pretty typical and sporty. Personally, I have doubts that that concept is even correct. I don't think most people have been ready for short-distance, plug dependent cars. It's sort of a step backwards from one point of view. Plus you're just trading one form of pollution for another, possibly worse, form. It doesn't make complete sense, even to many environmentalists. At the core of it, I think most people want the same benefits they get from the gasoline engine and there hasn't been a cost-effective way to provide that so far. (I used to work for a natural gas distributer years ago and they were pushing NG vehicles. I thought it was a phenomenally stupid idea at the time. Still do, actually.) It all reminds of a favorite quote I heard a long time ago, which I believe is from a late 19th century rail magnate..."When it's time to railroad, you railroad." I think it's almost time to railroad for a real alternative to the gasoline engine - and when it is, that's when you'll actually see it happen. Even the current crop of automotives and the gasoline companies won't be able to stop it - they'll be sitting there entrenched like some of the vinyl record manufacturers were 25 years ago unless they embrace change. To borrow another cliched quote: "You can't stop an idea who's time has come."

As gas moves onerously toward $4 per in the States, I expect solar power will be subject to all kinds of wondrous transformations and improvements. This is the history of technology and innovation, really. A problem occurs, the worriers get all a-jumble and mentally a-tumble over it, the prices rise alarmingly and then business steps in with something nobody agonizing over what's happened in the recent past (which is just damned silly for the most part) even thought of. If such alarmists would only invest 1/10th the energy into useful idea generation that they do into ultimately pointless fear and fear-mongering there would be no problem. This is why I like looking toward what can be rather than what was. What was produces limitations, rationing and regulation. What will be produces freedom, possibility and improvement. (Now watch - when and if solar power takes a decent foothold and industry gets involved and starts profiting from it, the worriers will be inciting panic over the fact that so much of the ground is covered with solar panels or the sand used to build the panels takes too much work or energy to refine or some such twaddle. Some things never seem to change. Alas. )

Your post does seem to beg the question, Patrick.

On the other hand, using solar power on ships seems sort of intriguing. I suppose it would depend on the amount of solar radiation that falls in the area in which a given ship travels. The amount and direction of the sunlight plays a big role in how useful solar power currently is on land. However, a ship might just be able to have the solar panels flat on the deck without as much concern for where to mount the things so as to gather the most sunlight. There are few obstacles to the sunlight on the open sea...a very interesting idea. Personally, I expect we're going to see some radical advances in the efficiency of solar power in the next ten or fifteen years, myself. It has already improved in efficiency in the last 10 or 20 years. And once an idea gains momentum in this country... Battery weight and size is another important consideration, but that, too, has been improving somewhat. I have been looking into solar power for myself, but the cost is currently somewhat prohibitive, even with the government incentives. Still, I forsee a day when we'll be able to buy replacement solar panels at Home Depot and Lowes...

Harold Ramis.

Isn't transport by sea already slow enough? I just got quoted 4-6 weeks on a job shipping to United Arab Emirates. Becalming, slower transport (Except during hurricanes, of course - but reducing the carbon footprint will end all of those, right?), the vicissitudes of nature, etc... Eh. Did you know that ninety some percent of the Global Warming gasses are nothing more than water vapor? Everything else (including CO2) is less than 5%. The impact of water vapor is 10 times as great as CO2. And guess what...it's mostly naturally created. Trees and plants create it. The ocean creates it. Global warming...watershed for politicians to limit our freedoms.

There's a new poster with the ID Jack an Apes, which I happened to know was wordplay, but I didn't know the actual meaning of the word. So I thought I'd enlightened everyone else with me: jackanapes n. A conceited or impudent person. A mischievous child. Archaic. A monkey or an ape. [From Middle English Jack Napis, nickname of.] What a great moniker! My hat's off to him/her. In a completely unrelated word matter, I came across a phrase this morning in Investor's Business Daily on a company that processes corn (Corn Products International - CPO) and I liked it so much that I have to repeat it. "It will be disastrous for refiners if the summer's corn crop flops." Corn crop flops! (The world is really so amusing. I bet they wrote that that way on purpose.)

I finished with Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid awhile back, ripped through Chin Ning Chu's Do Less, Achieve More: Discover the Hidden Powers Giving In and am now reading Don't Sweat the Small Stuff--and it's all small stuff by Richard Carlson. (Thanks to Jacky Tar, who sent this to me in the plunder exchange.) I may actually start Master and Commander soon. It's been sitting on my bookshelf for several years... (I really like the character of Dr. Maturin in the movie and am hoping for more of same in the books. I am sort of patterning my character after parts of him - with a pirate twist. With perhaps a bit of Captain Misson's ol' ex-priest pal Caraccioli thrown in for good measure.)

I'm looking forward to it myself. I recently borrowed Master and Commander to remind myself what a proper doctor around the era (ok, a little later) would do and then to thought project him as being a shanghai'd doctor - and what he might do.

Well at least Zimmer used good source material. While I have the GBU soundtrack (bought it primarily for the title track, kept listening to it because I liked the track "The Desert"), I don't own Once Upon a Time in the West. I've never felt compelled to purchase much of Morricone's music for reasons I don't myself understand. However, that eerie harmonica tune in West is so striking and memorable, that I'm surprised I don't own it. Perhaps I should consider that one for my collection.

Maybe not... This is a reprint of something I posted in one of the random topics a week or so ago. (I should have put it here, but I forgot about this topic at that moment, I guess. Perhaps I should get a blog or establish a myspace account and blog there or something so's to stop torturing you folks with whatever random topic pops into my head to essay on...or maybe not.) Dear Ladonna Dalton" <mpqbust@adelphia.com> aka Mrs. and/or possibly Mr. Email Spammer, I am writing you to whinge (sorry, not in the market for Viagra just now). So let's not mince worlds and let me proceed with the whinging: If you're going to send me spam emails, at least try to pretend that your email is something I might be interested in. Is that really too much to ask? Take this last thing I received from you. It was entitled: "It whichever combinatoric." What the hell is that?! "combinatoric" doesn't even sound like a valid word! (Although, in fact, it is. The exercise is left to the reader - presuming you read any of your email.) The sentence structure...or rather phrase structure...is utter nonsense! What about this email is there to tempt me to open it? I already know that it's some flagrant attempt to get me to buy Canadian drugs, the stock pick du Jour or something to increase my performance (or length or financial standing or any number of other insecurities you believe I have.) The only reason to open it is to determine whether Schroedinger's cat is, indeed, dead or alive. (No doubt you'll have to look that up too, you wizard of a spammer, you.) I know, I know, you've probably got some random word generation thing that comes up with such tripe and you've got to get your money's worth out of it. Let me tell ya,' pal (or gal); it was a bad investment. It works against the very desire you have, which is to get me to open this unsolicited piece of electronic media and then proceed, dazed and starstruck, to take whatever action you propose in your purple phrase. I hope you bought it from an email your received entitled, "Wonk sipid space jeebers." That would at least hint that universal justice was at work. Love, Caraccioli PS: Wallaby (ROO) is expected to grow by 3500% in the next 10 minutes. I'd buy some if I were you.

Not me. I now know something no one else on the soundtrack site where I post knows.

Well, there is something to be said for having practically the entire nursery delivered to your doorstep. Shopping for all that stuff can be kind of hard on the feet when you're in that condition. (Wedding showers, on the other hand... see previous comment.) Amazon.com, baby! It's often cheaper anyhow (even with shipping).

Does it use any of the themes from the previous album? I would miss the Crossed Swords and Jack Sparrow themes.

You can pre-order it at Amazon for $12.99. Go here. I am starting this separate from the merch. thread because I expect I will have much to say about this one way or the other once I get it and give it a few listens. While I am a soundtrack collector in general, I rarely buy them in advance...here's hoping for a soundtrack full of good music.

This morning I found two spam messages in one of my email accounts: From..........Subject Buddy.........It is not over yet Theresa......Think this is it I hope they work it out!

Tell him you have "porcelain skin." That always sounds good in the novels.

Me? Start a topic on showering? That's like thinking my commentary on 5 dating tips (in WTaPH forum) would have anything whatsoever to do with 5 actual dating tips. (Lemme' tell ya' boys and girls...if you're looking for dating tips from me, you're in trouble. ) I originally started this in response to a situation that come up in "real" land (as opposed to virtual land). (Although I find both contain large swaths of fiction.) It amazes me that few (if any) women actually like showers, yet most feel compelled to participate. I say just send money to each other and avoid the whole thing. And I say that with a remarkable lack of guile or cynicism. (At least, I'm trying to...) As for people questioning your marital and child situation...eh. Don't worry about what other people think. (Of course, I'm apparently a freak when it comes to this sort of stuff, so taking advice here is as bad as taking dating advice. )