8 Ways to Sunday

I’ve been looking for documentation on WordPress’s user permission system for awhile now. Once you understand how it works, it really makes a lot of sense.

Whether you call them ghost tracks, bonus tracks, or easter eggs the unlisted songs appearing on compact discs are one of the many small pleasures of music listening. The problem is just finding all of them.

Enter The Hidden Song Archive, a new web site that aims to be “a comprehensive listing of hidden and unlisted tracks from albums by all types of artists.” Handy, but it does kind of seem like cheating.

Some people are cynical about love. Some people are cynical about politics. Some are cynical about work or the economy. No matter the variety of cynic, however, one thing is universally true: Within every cynic lives a disappointed idealist. Scratch that hard surface, and the big heart underneath starts to show through.

Some cynics may need to be scratched harder than others. While they might never admit it, I think many cynics would appreciate the reminder of who they are inside and what’s important to them.

So, have you scratched a cynic today?

Ah, Valentines Day. From your humble beginnings as a blood-and-guts fertility ritual in ancient Rome — young maidens lining the streets to get smacked around with pieces of flayed goat skin — you’ve become an ultra-modern $12 billion annual corporate juggernaut: young lovers lining up at florists and gift shops to get smacked around with cartoonishly blood-red hype, hearts, and marketing schlock. You’ve come a long way, baby.

This is for my fellow single people who must suffer through today’s crock of a holiday. If you’re sick of the cards, the hearts, the teddy bears and balloons, the fucking red everything everywhere, and all those commercials trying to convince you that you’re somehow defective for not happening to have a romance going in the month of February, then you may find these links a welcome respite from the insanity: (more…)

Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean are continuing their long collaboration with a new motion picture.

“MirrorMask” — written by Gaiman, directed by McKean, and produced by the Jim Henson Company — tells the story of 15 year-old girl raised by a family of circus performers who must struggle through a bizarre dreamworld one night in order to save her ailing mother. The Independent Film Channel’s web site described it thusly: “Think ‘Alice in Wonderland’ meets ‘Time Bandits’ on an upside down street in a parallel universe.”

The film premiered at the Sundance festival, and should make its way to theaters soon.

Neil has more on “MirrorMask,” including links to IGN Filmforce interviews with himself and McKean, in his online journal. The movie’s official site has a preview trailer.