After reading The New Yorker for a while, Tape Op is like a children's book. The former takes several protracted sessions, usually over slightly more than a week, if I'm going to read all the big nonfiction articles, which I try hard to do; the latter I'm now stretching to make it take more than a couple days' worth of dull moments. In the current issue they recommend four old little keyboards that supposedly have really cool sounds or abilities and are available really cheap. Of course it being in Tape Op means the prices of these keyboards will now rise significantly. It always gets depressing when I'm forced to realize that my interests, while they might seem obscure to some, are still shared by a large number of people, way more than enough to crowd an auction.

When I first obtained Belle and Sebastian's "Dear Catastrophe Waitress" I listened to it once and then put it aside. A lot of the songs didn't sound at all the way I had expected them to from their titles, and titles are important to me. I also find their unbelievable technical precision in playing their instruments, along with the highly produced sound they now employ in recordings, to be almost off-putting. But I gave it another chance recently, perhaps needing some happy music to balance my Daniel Johnston listening, and I've found plenty to like. My most joyous moment came when after falling for the song "I'm a Cuckoo," I suddenly understood the last line of the refrain, "I'd rather be in Tokyo/I'd rather listen to Thin Lizzie-oh/and watch the Sunday gang in Harajuku." This caused me to laugh like a madman, surely in part because I had just woken up and was a bit delirious. Okay, so the gathering of goth teenagers in crazy costumes every Sunday at some locus in that Tokyo neighborhood is not exactly a secret; I'm pretty sure it was in the Lonely Planet that I skimmed before deciding it was useless. But he did a fine job of constructing the lyric to make it sound like a pastime rather than a curiosity. Plus, as I've said, Harajuku is among my favorite place-names in the world, and hearing Stuart Murdoch pronounce anything makes it even better.

If you google for "++ =" (yes, in quotes), you'll find that not only does it not return any results, it doesn't return anything at all, not even the "Web" bar that tells you you're looking at that type of results. I was looking for this because of some weirdo statements in some C code that I was working with, that it turned out were somehow incrementing a double pointer and then assigning the single pointer part of it a value within the same statement. I figured the cause was something to do with the Google calculator that lets you type in basic equations, trying to solve an equation that would be mysterious indeed. Plenty of other stuff works too, like + = not in quotes, or ^ %, #, $, ~, (), everything else above the numbers but not *, or &. Hard to understand why this would be. It felt a little odd then doing google searches for strange google results, and that came up empty anyway.