Listening and Reading

The following sentence will probably make rock fans cringe and shudder or nod in delight. I discovered Radiohead's Creep just today. I looked it up on CDnow.com and found it was released back in 1993. But hey, I was 12 years old for most of '93 so cut me a little slack, eh? Better 11 years late than never. Oh...incidentally, it's a damn good song.

I was able to get the Creep mp3 because my computer whiz cousin in Central America introduced me to BearShare (you know, a Gnutella/Napster kinda thing). Let me say now that I feel it's wrong to download music. That said, I picked up about 30 songs this morning. I'm sure you know how it is...gotta get all those songs you think about every once in a blue moon but for some reason never acquired a recording of. Beck, Tyrese, Jeff Buckley, Cake, Cypress Hill, Fatboy Slim. But my favorite so far is some DJ's creation: a track called Rick Astley vs. Michael Jackson. Who even thought of that? Whose brilliant, artistic, creative mind imagined splicing parts of Smooth Criminal and Together Forever? I'm serious, you all...people deserve awards for things like this.

In other news, I've just finished reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix...all 870 pages of it. I think that puts to rest the notion that Harry Potter is strictly for children. Like all the HP books it was pretty entertaining. And what's more, it has awakened the reader in me once again (just in time for school, no less). Today I found myself in the library waiting in line at the copy center and reading the display on contemporary political books. Maureen Dowd's Bushworld and Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America seem as if they'll be illuminating reads. I think I'll try Ehrenreich first. Seriously, isn't that what Harry Potter was meant to do? Get people back into reading? If you've read my profile you know that I believe Reading is FUN-damental, so I thank you, J.K. Rowling, for reminding me of that.