Finding Nemo? A very good, very cute movie. When I watch kids’ movies now, I can see the evidence that they are made by adults, even if they are for kids. I have to wonder what a kids’ movie made by kids would be like. Probably very little different, as kids here take what is “cool” or entertaining from what they see on movies, which are currently made by adults, etc. But Finding Nemo was well worth my six bucks (as was The Italian Job, in my opinion, although it lacked originality, not suprisingly).

Our school had no running water in any of the buildings today. That is not a pleasant experience, and I’m sure it breaks a law or two to have over a thousand people in a place for seven to eight hours where there is no water to drink and the toilets do not flush. There is probably similar reasoning behind closing school when there is no electricity, ya know? Maybe I’m completely mistaken, as they didn’t send us home, but by the end of the day, the entire lower floor of one of the buildings smelled like feces. Bleh, to say the least. The administrators just kept hoping someone was coming to fix the problem…

I am currently in the process of copying my entire collection of CDs onto a drive in WMA format (I acquired an 80GB Maxtor 1394 drive), so I will probably use this area to reminisce about rare artists I find in my kinda large (200+ CD) collection. Some I’ll be listening to for the fist time, others are old favorites. On that note…

Everything But the Girl is probably known nowadays for their moderately popular song “Mystery”“Missing”, and maybe “Flipside”, which has appeared on a couple of soundtracks, but a tiny few of us, even one so young as myself, will remember a hit from 1990 called “Driving” (perhaps your father played it over, and over, and over on seventeen hour trips to Kentucky…? No? Guess that’s just me, then…). Their sound then was smooth, kinda jazzy, and not unlike a more upbeat Sade or Lisa Stansfield. More recently, they’ve picked up a definite techno/dance/whateveryoucallit beat; the first album of theirs of this type I picked up was Walking Wounded on cassette back in the day when CD players were damned expensive and fragile. That was a damn good tape that I wore out from repeated listenings, and later bought on CD. Although that driving, core, base beat was remarkably similar on several of the songs, it still sounded good. When just listening to the music, without trying to nitpick, everything flowed and sounded good. There really wasn’t a bad song the album. The CD that followed that one (probably not directly), Temperamental, was more noticeably repetitive, although the title track in particular kicked ass (although it was this song, of course, that began to skip first on my CD…). In picking up my first randomized stack of CDs to convert (actually, I dropped about 150 of them in attempting to walk across my bedroom to my computer, so when I put them into smaller stacks, they were effectively, if unintentionally, “randomized”), the very first CD was Everything But the Girl’s The Language of Life, the 1990 album containing “Driving”. I’ve had this CD for a year, and have never listened to anything but that one song… until now. There are some good gems on this CD, if you don’t expect a sound like their more modern music. It’s worth, at the very least, a download, followed by a purchase. Or am I just a dork for liking to support artists that I like?

Anita Baker’s Rhythm of Love is copying to the drive now. That’s another CD I’ve only listened to a single song on (“Body and Soul”… it always makes me want to cry).