Laura Gibson – “Hands In Pockets”

This song came out last year, but I just heard the new version with all-cello accompaniment, courtesy of the Portland Cello Project.

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Amazon fumbles Lich King release

So, not wanting to drive all over the LA basin looking for a collector’s edition of the World of Warcraft expansion like I did two years ago when the last expansion came out, I ordered a collector’s edition and a regular edition from Amazon last week. The collector’s edition sold out later that same day.

Yesterday, Amazon sends me an e-mail saying that they will guarantee I’ll get the Wrath of the Lich King expansion on release day, for a small up-charge of a few dollars. But there’s a catch: You have to cancel the existing order and place a new one for it to qualify. OK, but the collector’s edition is sold out, guys. I don’t want to cancel that order and not get it.

So I e-mailed customer service, and initially was told “oh, no worries, we haven’t sent it out yet.” Thanks for actually reading the e-mail, guys. So I sent a follow-up, explaining the situation again. This time, the customer service person switched my non-collector’s edition copy (the one that I could cancel and reorder without worry) to the faster delivery method. Swell, but not what I wanted. The collector’s edition is still going to ship out later and require canceling and crossing my fingers to get same day shipping on it.

It’s amazing that Amazon was able to handle shipping out the Harry Potter books without trouble, but this year’s predictably millions-selling release is proving so difficult for them to get their arms around.

I’m considering just canceling the whole kit and kaboodle and driving all over the LA basin again on November 13.

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Yes, Virginia, I will be going to Blizzcon

I got the notification that a media pass will be waiting for me to go to Blizzcon in October. I will be taking a geek’s holiday from the local political races that Friday (and maybe sneaking out early on Thursday to pick up my ticket and goody bag, if I have everything done) and just forgetting about it all for one weekend. I will have put the final city council and school board candidate interviews to bed at that point, for publication in the October 14 edition of the Star, so the timing works out well.

And yes, I fully expect to be a huge target in PvP riding my Big Blizzard Bear mount around, and justly so, but that’ll be OK, too. Heck, by that point in the campaign season, getting stunlocked by a pair of undead rogues will feel like butterfly kisses.

I’ll be posting the usual reports on each of the panels here and elsewhere during Blizzcon weekend.

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“Pirate Jenny”

When I was a kid, my parents would take us on car trips. During daylight hours, the tape deck was playing Paul Simon’s “Still Crazy after All These Years” and Carole King’s “Tapestry.”

At night, though, they’d pop in other tapes, when Joel and I were asleep. (Nothing dirty, although that would have been amusing in retrospect.) It seemed, though, that whenever I woke up in the dark, groggy and disoriented, there was always one song playing: Judy Collins’ cover of “Pirate Jenny” from the Three Penny Opera.

And yes, I know. Judy Collins did songs with whale songs as accompaniment. She sang “Both Sides Now.” She is the opposite of scary. But this song, boy, it would keep me paralyzed in silent terror as a little kid.

Here then, in honor of International Talk Like a Pirate Day, is a song featuring very uncuddly pirates. (YouTube doesn’t have the Judy Collins version — too scary.)

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Google to put newspaper archives online

If you’ve ever tried to look up a news article written before 1996, it’s as though those events never happened — my few articles from prior to the Web exploding onto the scene posted here are my only early articles online … for now.

Following in the footsteps of its earlier moves to digitize book content (but hopefully avoiding some of the missteps that attracted the ire of some publishers and authors), Google is digitizing older newspapers and putting them online. The goal, of course, is yet more content they can put ads alongside, although some newspapers are looking forward to selling people reprints of classic issues.

Although Google is starting with the largest newspapers, the company says it plans to reprint smaller newspapers as well, and is working with microfilm companies to accomplish that.

I don’t know if we’ll ever see my old work from the News Messenger or Dear Newspapers online (and I’m not entirely sure if I want to see all those articles again — I had a bumpy first few years as a writer and as a reporter), but I can certainly see the value to an informed citizenry whose digital memory, at the moment, only extends back a maximum of 13 years.