electric relaxation

Baseless and unfounded speculation: the true cause for the decline in consumer spending is the Hollywood writers’ strike. People are watching less TV, and therefore they’re seeing less commercials, and therefore they’re less induced to buy goods and services.

Armchair economics is fun.

 From Wikipedia:

The Man Who Sold the World is a song by David Bowie. It is the title track of his third album, released in the U.S. in November 1970 and in the UK in April 1971. It was later re-popularised and introduced to a new generation by Nirvana’s cover on their MTV Unplugged in New York album. In the wake of this cover, Bowie bemoaned the fact that when he performed the number himself he would encounter “kids that come up afterwards and say, ‘It’s cool you’re doing a Nirvana song.’ And I think, ‘Fuck you, you little tosser!’”^[1]

I shamefully admit that I had no idea this was a Bowie song, though in my defense I’ve never been a huge Nirvana fan in the first place and I like to think that if I was, I would’ve done my homework.

I knew that David Bowie was fairly prolific, but I had no idea he had 36 full-length albums and sold 136 million records. Anyway, I’ve got ahold of all 36 of them and I queued ‘em up in a shuffled playlist.

I undertook basically the same exercise about a week ago with Led Zeppelin, and with Barrington Levy the week before that… The sad thing is that I think I end up spending more time reading the Wikipedia entries than actually listening to the music itself.

Shuffle mode is the key – otherwise one quickly overdoses before even putting a dent in the catalogue. So far, Bowie’s holding up well though; seems like perfect coding music. Or maybe I’m just in the mood for it.