October 12, 2005

By Sheila Lennon / The Providence (R.I.) Journal

1:23 p.m. Wednesday (Blogroll)

The title single of Sinead O'Connor's new reggae record, Throw Down Your Arms is downloadable.

It's not heavy dub, for sure, but it's a new rhythm and a new sound for her.

Chicago Sun-Times notes that O'Connor has become a Rastafarian, and decides,

Though she makes no attempt to mask her Irish accent or hide the fact that her roots lay in a completely different culture, O'Connor's bell-like soprano and passionate delivery allow her to claim these reggae jams as her own as thoroughly as she claimed the traditional Irish folk songs on her last covers album, "Sean-Nos Nua" (2002). Meanwhile, the Riddim Twins Sly and Robbie wisely keep the arrangements and slinky grooves stripped down and simple, the better to maintain the spotlight on that voice.

It's MP3 of the week at A VC, the blog of NYC venture capitalist Fred Wilson, who co-founded Flatiron Partners.

Carly Simon is 60: The Independent (UK):

We're in a building just round the corner from where Simon grew up, in a tiny, leafy street that makes sense of the "village" part of Greenwich Village. It's two floors of boho chic, with creaky stairs, heavy curtains, four-poster beds and a piano in the bathroom next to an antique free-standing bath. The place is spick and span and the air is heavy with scented candles. It's apparently more or less a drop-in centre for her children, their partners, the partners' mates... the sort of place you'd love to be on a rainy afternoon, with an old film on the huge, flatscreen TV - the latter being the only thing to indicate that this isn't a late-1960s hippie pad, albeit a very plush one. And Simon herself is in keeping with the whole bohemian vibe, in skinny jeans; a white gypsyish tunic with little mirrors glinting away; tiny, peepy granny glasses; and her honey-blonde hair in a messy - and very this-season - chignon. She's just turned 60 and is beautiful.

Unfortunately, struck by the same Sinatra vibe that suckered Rod Stewart and Robbie Williams, she's released Moonlight Serenade, an album of standards. I was looking forward to cool old-lady songs from these folks with a lot of road behind them, not their daddy's I Only Have Eyes For You.

Memry: Play 'Concentration' with Flickr images. Simple fun. You're supposed to be able to open the thumbnails at the end to go to the full-size images, but I couldn't. (Ah, I've blocked pop-ups, and the full-sized images pop up. I'd have to unblock for this site to see them.) (It's Flash.)

Too bad: My home computer has been acting weird again — blue screens of death, fatal errors, invalid page faults, always something different that caused me to lose a lot of potential posts this weekend.

I finally figured it out: The wonderful world of homemade Firefox extensions were having a battle royale on my PC. I uninstalled all but those I've become dependent on, and peace returned. I hate having to report this, because Firefox extensions give me most of the tools a browser could want.

In the collaborative that is is mozilla.org, could someone work out instructions for coding them so they'll play well together?

Posted by Sheila  at 1:23 PM | Permalink | Comments: 2