The weather outside is frightful

And, while it’s warm inside, I’d hesitate to say it’s delightful. Actually, the weather looks a lot better now than it did about ten minutes ago. It’s still snowing and cold — but at least it’s acting a little seasonal. I’m a big fan of the whole “not snowing” thing, but recently, the weather has indeed been kind of frightful, in a “The Day After Tomorrow (2004)” kind of way. Luckily, it’s not a “The Day After (1983)” kind of day, as that would mean some kind of nuclear war just started. I actually saw this on DVD at Future Shop the other day. I didn’t buy it for much the same reason as I didn’t “buy” it when it first came out on TV — namely, it wasn’t a very convincing movie. It was more like a long Twilight Zone episode, and had little plot, poor acting, and wasn’t nearly as scary as it should have been. Nuclear war is a pretty final solution, and every documentary I’ve seen about it has been really scary. This film might scare a 13 year old, but it’s certainly not the representation of fear that a cold-war era film should be. Essentially, the entire film is about a small American town in central Kansas, during the start of a nuclear war. There’s nothing after the day after, so to speak, and while that’s a little nihilistic, and one would think that works in a film like this, it doesn’t really work. Besides, as time passes, I’m beginning to think that maybe a nuclear holocaust did hit Kansas, what with all the nuttiness there. People tend to get creepily religious near the end of things, so maybe Kansas knows more about this than the rest of the world. I’ll say one thing: I will be pissed off to no end if the world gets destroyed and the last headlines are “The Cartoon Jihad”, and “Cartoon protests a growing global crisis”.
I’m probably being unduly harsh on that little film, perhaps on Kansas, also. If I am, it’s because I didn’t get much sleep last night. I was up late, rebooting a couple of servers for a customer, and simultaneously working on the Radio Zuckervati site. I changed the layout to three columns, and am seriously considering making another blog — I like dynamic pages, especially now that I have a decent blog software supporting the site. I reworked the ShoutCast server, and it’s streaming again. It’s a little choppy if I get too many people on it, but it appears to be stabilized for the time being. I’ve been getting a lot of submissions from MusicSUBMIT, and now I’m even getting emails from artists and agents, who, without actually looking at my site, think that I’m some kind of music guru. Imagine, having people wanting me to add them to my playlist? Sending me MP3s and saying it’s OK to broadcast them? It lends a strange air of legitimacy to what is essentially a pirate radio station — albeit one that’s analagous to playing music in your car with the windows down. That’s about the limit of my listenership — me, and maybe one or two others who happen by.
So, I’ve enlisted a couple of friends, and plan on having some music reviews posted on my site. This gives small, unknown artists some needed publicity, and I get some free stuff, including MP3s I can play on my site *with their permission*. Who knew? Kind of makes the music blog a good idea.