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Showing posts from February, 2011

Album Cover Album: Redesigned

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  I recently bought a new, redesigned copy of the Album Cover Album by Storm Thorgersen and Roger Dean because my original 1977 edition was coming apart from it's glued-in spine and I found a new, hardcover copy on Amazon for $0.99. First, The Cons: For all it's touted redesign this book suffers slightly from it. The axiom "If it ain't broke don't fix it." applies aptly here as the original has larger images on pages with more than one cover displayed. The new editions images may seem sharper and the colors look to have been corrected (though a little too much contrast in some) but I'm at a loss as to why they were reduced in size by about 10%. The type redesign is "prettier" but less legible as the font is too light to stand out on the neutral gray background. It also baffles me that, as a book on design by designers, all the individual design credits are set so small and in an even lighter font as to render them insignificant. A...

Bachelor Father

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Sunday afternoon I go out to buy some food and find a kitten just chillin' on the stairs.It doesn't seem to be afraid of me so I pet it because TheGuy likes the kitties a lot. When i come home it's still there and the kids from next door say she's been there all day. I suggest to DJ (the youngest kid of the group who lives across the courtyard from me) he take her home since Chico (the oldest of the three next door kids is afraid of cats) but he says his mom doesn't like cats either. So, after they go out to play, i go back to my apartment and the kitten follows me in. Okay, so what to do now? I guess i could make a flyer to say i found her. Later. I figure that she might be hungry because i vaguely remember that kittens (she looks to be about 4 or 5 months old) are sorta like puppies in that they need to eat a lot like the growing things they are. I gave her a little bowl of water and a fairly good sized piece of fried catfish. Not only did she eat 3 pieces of fis...

Pather Ke Log: M.Aziz v/s M. Rafi

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This is a compilation of songs, from different Hindi films, performed by "playback" artists (singers that dub the songs for the actors in Bollywood films) Mohammed Rafi and Mohammad Aziz . I guess the idea behind this cassette was to show how Mohammad Aziz 's reverence for Mohammed Rafi made him a shoo-in as his successor in pop music after M. Rafi's death in 1980. Both of them are excellent singers with very pleasant voices so it would be hard to say which I liked better than the other. Admittedly, M. Aziz' songs have better sound and production than some of the older tracks by M. Rafi and I can't comment on the quality of the material they worked with but the whole thing is an entertaining listen. A curious thing about this album is that, apparently, it's the 4th part of a series and it has spoken vignettes between each song with a man and woman talking. It sounds like they're shilling for the films related to the songs or for other ...