I’m feeling a bit like a peevish chuff at work, frustrated at technical issues beyond my control, annoyed at a certain lack of respect I feel I deserve. Oh, and this happened again. So I’m actually looking forward to leaving it all behind and going on vacation for the next week with Susan on Hilton Head Island, SC. I can’t say I’m looking forward to melting in hot humid weather, but I’ll be more than compensated with southern food, antebellum architecture (if you were there when I saw Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil you’ll know what I mean), and I’ve been told that looking for gators on closed golf courses is a source of amusement.

As I’m taking some effort to load music onto the iPod for the trip, and because I haven’t commented on music in ages, here’s a sample of recent acquisitions for listening on the plane:

• Verdi: Rigoletto - Sutherland, Pavarotti, et al. - any impression you form of Luciano Pavarotti from the Three Tenors dreck of the 90s will change after listening to him in his prime, swaggering through this role. Just listen to the preview of track three, Disc one (”Questa o quella..”) on Amazon. He’s here along with Joan Sutherland, who is slightly past her prime, but still has her amazing voice. And it’s just a good opera to boot; the ensembles are great, and as for the plot, there’s a lecher, a hunchback, and people get murdered, what more do you need? Seattle Opera is putting this on next season, I can’t wait.
• Get Away From Me, Nellie McKay - because damn it, I wake up in the morning with her music stuck in my head, it’s that catchy. I can sort of see how the “Doris Day meets Eminem” comparison got started, although I think the album is just amusingly fluffy and yet disarming at the same time. And she sings everything and plays all the keyboards and she’s nineteen.
• Chrono Trigger: Original Sound Version, Yasunori Mitsuda - yes, it’s music produced by the sound chip of a 16 bit game console, not even reorchestrated. Yep, I’m a geek, but it’s the best RPG ever made, dammit.
• Happenstance, Rachael Yamigata - not sure what to think of this. iTunes lured me in with one really good track, and it’s easy to compare her to a scaled back Tori Amos (which is both good and bad), but her voice does this throaty thing which is kind of annoying at times, and it’s really chick music that apparently I’m not supposed to be listening to.
• St. Anger, Metallica - \m/  enough said

Reading: Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (which judging by the first chapter looks suitably breezy despite being some post apocalyptic Orwellian fable) has been acquired for the beach, along with a new translation of Beowulf, so I get to practice my Icelandic: Hwæt we Gar-Dena in gear-dagum Þeodcyninga Þrym
gefrunon, hu ða æÞelingas ellen fremedon. Gesundheit.

On a final note, it’s sometimes amusing what people do with the images deep linked off my site.