Suitedjustice's Ongoing Mid-life Crisis

Rolling Stone's 474th Greatest Album of All Time: #1 Record by Big Star (1972)

Big Star is the 27th band or artist I've covered so far in this Rolling Stone Top 500 project, and from that list they are the 7th band or artist with whom I wasn't initially familiar, which does a lot to affirm that I'm not a professional music critic. I'm just a guy who's working on a fun project.

Here is the track listing from the first non-children's album that I owned. It was called K-Tel Presents: Music Express. My parents gave it to me on my 6th birthday, along with my first record player.

K-Tel was a record company who bought the rights to both standard and novelty hits soon after they'd fallen off the charts, making them into compilation records, which they then advertised via infomercials, and sold through the mail. They also sold "as seen on TV" type consumer products like the Veg-O-Matic.

The songs on K-Tel albums were usually hits but not the top tier hits. I imagine that price was a factor in their selection. The songs were catchy but mostly not for the ages. The company still exists and owns the rights to a great number of songs, which they license on digital platforms.

I mention this because I feel that most of the songs from Big Star's debut: #1 Record, could probably fit nicely on a 1970s K-Tel album, meaning that the songs were groovy enough in their own time, but weren't for the ages.

A number of real music critics disagree with my opinion. They know that many reviewers at the time loved the album when it came out, and they feel that #1 Record deserved to live up to its name, and that Big Star should have been a band whose name everybody knew. They know that Big Star's label, Stax Records, completely dropped the ball on #1 Record's distribution, and the album did not hit the shelves in any real numbers, and thus it died an untimely and tragic death.

To all this I say eh, I didn't really love #1 Record. To me, it's very much of its time—very 70s—like Partridge Family 70s.

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If you're not an old coot like me, then I'll tell you that the Partridge Family was a TV show featuring a fictional family of travelling musicians who played catchy pop tunes that mostly sound dated nowadays. Their show aired right after another family show called The Brady Bunch, and they likely inspired the writers for the Bradys to explore their own musical storylines.

Back to #1 Album: It turns out that I did recognize one of the songs on the LP, and it's somewhat of a piece with this review.

If you watched television in the 00's, you'll likely know that this song was used as the intro to a hit show about the 70s.

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Watch The Sunrise is another track that I liked. It has some fine guitar strumming, and it could sit on virtually any 90s grunge album as "the soft, soulful, tuneful number."

If that doesn't mesh with my assertion that Big Star is stuck in the 70s, you should remember that a lot of grunge bands had a [strike]hardon[/strike] wistful nostalgia for that decade.

I struggled to find a third song on the album that I liked enough to post. None of the songs on the album are bad, they're just not outstanding, in my opinion. As always, your mileage may vary.

Rolling Stone Says

Alex Chilton and Chris Bell were the Memphis whiz kids at the heart of Big Star. They mixed British Invasion pop finesse with all-American hard rock, from the surging “Feel” to the acoustic heartbreaker “Thirteen.” Big Star didn’t sell many records but did become a crucial inspiration to underdogs like R.E.M., the Replacements, and Elliott Smith. As Chilton said later, “If you only press up a hundred copies of a record, then eventually it will find its way to the hundred people in the world who want it the most.”

I like a few songs from R.E.M., but you might have noticed that they sort of disappeared off the cultural radar 10 or 15 years ago, after being one of the biggest bands in the world during their heyday. I don't even know if I like the Replacements or Elliot Smith yet. I know that they're in the Cool Kids category, so we'll see...

I forgot how funky and cool this song is.

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I remember K-Tel, especially their novelty records.

There was an 80s Austin soul band whose name I loved: Ernie Sky and the K-Tels.

Several songs for the ages on this list imho. "Long Train Runnin'", "Mandy" (a guilty pleasure of mine 😊), "Get Down Tonight"...

...and this one, apparently. I love it!

I love that one! Never heard it before. My parents did get me a K-Tel novelty album that year as well. I remember that it had Chuck Berry's My Ding A Ling on it.

At age 6, I sort of understood the Ding A Ling reference, but it would be a few years before I grasped—so to speak—the playing with it aspect.

That's a great band name. Damn.

My favorite band name is a 4-dimensional joke. Back in the 90s, they were Young Neil and the Vipers. They're still around today, but now they're just Neil and the Vipers.

My guilty pleasure is Neil Diamond. Kentucky Woman was apparently a favorite of mine back when I was a toddler. I was told that I would bust out dancing whenever it came on the radio.

If anyone has the Malwarebytes Browser Guard Extension for Chrome, it's developed a bug recently where it autoplays all of the embedded YouTube videos on any page. I do 100 posts per page and had a hell of a cacophony on my hands before I tracked down the bug.

Let's talk about poker. I haven't been playing. 5 hours in the last two weeks is a big problem, especially because they were losing hours.

Starting Sunday, I'm doing a 40 hour weekly challenge. 8 hours a day, poker and/or slots, on Sun, Mon, Wed, Fri and Sat. I will check in here at the end of each work day. I'm having trouble being my own boss; that's what caused my failure in Las Vegas. You, gentle reader, may help with that role here in this thread; if you wish, but I'll tell you in advance that the pay is lousy.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 5.5 hours
(-$625.00)
MGM Springfield Slots: 2 hours
+$3.78

2024 Running Poker Total: 72 hours, +$423.00
2024 Running Slot Total: 50 hours, +$2933.08

2024 Grand Total: 122 hours, +$3356.08

Do you still poker?

We shall see, boss.

One of my friends from my midwest days was a huge Neil Young fan. When his daughter was little, Angie would refer to him as, "Young Neil".

I think "The Mojito Muddlers" would be an excellent band name. Especially if they were Caribbean and/or Buffett influenced.

Give me a cut of the profits.

I've somehow managed to post that while you were posting your poker update. smh.

That's what I figured, and why I didn't write something like 'scroll up.'

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Thanks CowboyCold! That is a truthful performance review right there, and I appreciate the time and work spent running down the data.

All I can do is head to work today, and continue my booze-free 2024 today, and worry about tomorrow when it becomes a today.

I was talking with my buddy Gambelina yesterday and she suggested that I prioritize going to the casino as a first step. Nothing else can happen until I walk out of the door of my place.

Her advice made me think about the Stephen King schedule for writing. He makes sure that his ass is in the seat from 8AM to noon every workday. He doesn't have to be tapping the keys while he's on the clock; he can be sitting there woolgathering or doodling or what have you, but his butt is in the seat, and he's usually writing or otherwise working on the story, because it's boring just to sit there.

Given Mr. King's output over the years, this seems to be a winning play. So today I'm going to spend 8 hours in the casino. If I ragequit and get up from the poker table before then, I can't leave the property. I'll have to check the slots, or sit and watch harness racing or something equally as boring (for the non-bettor) in the sports book, it being fortunate that I don't like playing any of the -EV games on the floor. We'll see what happens in that case.

I'm playing the night shift today, as the high hand bonus is $600 instead of $400 after 6pm.

Love the name, but I can't stand Mojitos. A friend of mine made one for me once, and it tasted like straight gin; which is strange, because it's made with rum. Maybe he made it too strong.

GL Mr. Suited. The problem with Stephen King's schedule is at these times there tend to be lousy poker games. Also I think (IMO) you might be still too fixated on promos. Sitting in a good game is worth much more than any promo and often promos even tend to attract the types you don't want in the game. Anyway just my unimportant thoughts take it FWIW.
And rather than sitting around pointlessly at the casino maybe make a deal if you ragequit a session, you'll have to do another session at another day in the week or next week.
I still think 8hr days at the poker room are too much, the vast majority of peeps can only do around 5hrs of creative work a day, ofc mechanically playing your B game that might still be +EV is an option. Or the slots ofc.
Just some thoughts. Congrats on staying dry that year so far.

Thanks Fire!

The plan is for 6 hours of poker and 2 hours of slots, or thereabouts. I'd like to break the poker up into 2 sessions, 4 hours and 2 hours, interspersed with slot-checking and a dinner break. Seems doable. We shall see.

The promo hours are currently running from noon to 10PM, which is a big chunk of the poker day in a locals place like Springfield. I haven't noticed an actionable influx of punters from 10PM-2AM, though I will be working some of those hours in order to get some early AM slot checking done afterwards for as long as the latter gig continues to be profitable.

Up until around 11PM, I was convinced that yesterday was Sunday, when it was in fact Saturday. I was surprised by the number of players still at the casino late last night, and I checked my phone to see if Monday was a holiday—it is not—and that's when I could have deduced that it was Saturday, but I did not. I remained ignorant until I got into a debate with a dealer about when the food court closed (Midnight on Sunday, 2AM on Saturday), and that tipped me off.

So, I did today's planned shift yesterday. I did finish up at 2:30AM today, so some of it counts as a Sunday, damn it. I'm taking today off in lieu of yesterday's work and counting those work hours towards this week. Anyone who has a problem with that can pound sand.

I got my ass kicked at the poker table. I wasn't playing poorly; I just lost. I started by running AA<44 for $150 all-in preflop vs a punter, then I made AQ 6 or 7 times and lost every hand with it postflop. On most of them, I made top pair top kicker on the flop and value owned myself over 2 or 3 safe-looking streets when no one raised me.

Twice, against the same Villain, I made TPTK on a 3 flush flop, and twice I bet 2 streets after he checked to me and the 4th flush card didn't drop, because flushes are hard to flop; but not for Villain, he had one both times. He checked the river on both hands and I checked back both times, saving some money, but those hands were still not cheap.

I lost most of it in the first two hours, and I made myself sit there and play well for the rest of the session, and into the second session. The thought of sitting in the sports book for 6 boring hours playing on my phone in between slot runs kept my ass at the poker table, so I might have my early ragequit habit addressed with the No Going Home Early rule. We'll see.

Once again, the slots bailed me out to some extent. The slot grinder whom I've seen checking machines every 4 hours wasn't there yesterday, so I found some nice plays. I think it might actually be two guys who look similar doing that, but in any case, I didn't see them.

I'll be back tomorrow for another full shift.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 6 hours
(-$639.00)
MGM Springfield Slots: 3 hours
+$473.64

2024 Running Poker Total: 78 hours, (-$216.00)
2024 Running Slot Total: 53 hours, +$3406.72

2024 Grand Total: 131 hours, +$3190.72

I booked another 8-hour day at the chance factory. Not much to report; just another work day. I didn't mention here that last week I saw a regular slot grinder sitting on the steps near the casino entrance and filling out a form while a security guy hovered over him.

I was tempted to walk over and ask the grinder what was going on, but I didn't want to be associated with him if it was something bad. It's been a week since that incident, and I haven't seen the grinder back on the floor.

My antennae are always scanning for signs of a purge of slot hustlers, but the Asian Slot Syndicate is still around in force and appears to have added a couple of new players, so I'm not worried just yet.

I'll be back at it tomorrow.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 5 hours
+$130.00
MGM Springfield Slots: 3 hours
+$22.01

2024 Running Poker Total: 83 hours, (-$86.00)
2024 Running Slot Total: 56 hours, +$3428.73

2024 Grand Total: 139 hours, +$3342.73

Rolling Stone's 473rd Greatest Album of All Time: Barrio Fino by Daddy Yankee (2004)

Daddy Yankee is a recently retired artist from Puerto Rico named Ramón Luis Ayala Rodríguez. Barrio Fino, his third album, was the top selling Latin music album of the 00's.

Daddy Yankee is known as the "King of Reggaeton", a Caribbean based musical genre that combines rap, reggae and electronic music. His big hit on the album is Gasollna, and it's fairly representative of the songs to be found on Barrio Fina.

I have already expressed my liking for two albums with lyrics that were mostly in Spanish: one by Shakira, and one by Selena; however, I feel that I'm less qualified to review Barrio Fino by Daddy Yankee, given the language barrier issues related to this particular genre.

I really liked the music on Shakira's and Selena's albums. I liked the guitars, the bass lines, the banjos, the accordions, the real drum beats, and the intricate synth melodies.

The music on Daddy Yankee's Barrio Fino is minimalist in comparison; it rarely aspires to reach beyond simple electronic loops and reggae and Afro-Caribbean drum machine tracks. But the thing is: rap music doesn't need to have intricate tracks behind it to be superb at what it does.

The idea of a backing track on a rap song is that it can be used as a plain peg on which to hang the superlative wordplay and cadence of great lyrics. So if I said that I didn't enjoy some of Daddy Yankee's more basic, repetitive music tracks, I'd be barking up the wrong tree, because it's a rap album, and it's not necessarily about the music.

To be fair: Daddy Yankee has a fine singing voice, but it's not for the ages. His singing often serves as a counterpoint to his rapping, neither of which I can parse out in any way due to the language barrier.

The difference between singing and rapping lies in how I see the spectrum of artistic human sounds as it flows from pure music to plain prose:

Instrumental Music----->Singing----->Rapping----->Poetry----->Verse----->Prose, verse being the poetic prose found in the works of Shakespeare, Milton, Homer and the like. We can talk about whether or not rapping and poetry need to swap places on the spectrum, but I hope you get the general idea.

I believe that the further to the right one goes on the spectrum, the more essential it becomes for the listener to understand the language. Singing in a different language can be appreciated solely for its musicality, but rapping in another language is a notch (or two) over to the right, so I feel that I couldn't make a judgement on its quality, especially given that Daddy Yankee's raps cover a wide range of topics, from sex to self-improvement to political corruption to condemning violence against women.

Barrio Fino has one lone track in English called Like You, but to me it's a pretty standard-sounding R&B love song, and nothing special, so I'll hold off on posting it, as I feel that the album has better stuff than that.

For example, I was nodding my head and tapping my feet to the great cadences on Tu Principe.

And Lo que Pasó Pasó has enough good singing on it for me to appreciate it from a musical perspective.

Rolling Stone Says:
Just when Latin pop radio was hitting a ballad-heavy plateau, Puerto Rican MC Daddy Yankee set the industry aflame with his 2004 reggaeton opus, Barrio Fino. Crowned by the hydraulic bounce of Yankee’s first international hit, “Gasolina,” the record marked a colossal breakthrough, not just for the rapper himself, but for the entire genre known as reggaeton.

I was trying to riff off of reggaeton with either funkyton or flavorton, but I couldn't stick the landing on either.

The slot grinder who was filling out a form while casino security hovered over him last week was back on the floor today, so it appears that they're still not eighty-sixing advantage players.

One of the grinders who checks the Ultimate X machines every few hours was also present when I arrived, but I could tell that he was at the beginning of his run from having previously studied his floor coverage pattern, so I quickly jumped to the end of his planned run and sniped half of the machines for myself.

After my poker session, I was going to stay and do one more slot run, but all the machines on the floor were glitching and printing but not accepting paper vouchers. A large number of advantage titles demand that you put money or a voucher into them before they will reveal their EV secrets to you.

You don't have to play the the machines in order to check them; just feed them temporarily, and you can cash right out after you check each machine and not be a penny the poorer for it if it's not a +EV play, but when the machines print but don't accept vouchers, that forces the grinder to put cash in every machine and get a paper voucher back every time, and so that leaves him or her with many, many uncashed vouchers to take to the cage at the end of the run.

Rather than put up with that, I left. I worked 9 hours on the first day of this week, therefore I could get away with 7 hours tonight. I'll be back on Friday, when I start my first real grind in a long time, with scheduled 8 hour days on Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 5 hours
+$218.00
MGM Springfield Slots: 2 hours
(-$24.00)

2024 Running Poker Total: 88 hours, +$132.00
2024 Running Slot Total: 58 hours, +$3404.73

2024 Grand Total: 146 hours, +$3536.73

The Dry 2024 Challenge Update

January: ✓
February: ✓
March: UNLOCKED

So far, so easy.

A few years back, not long before I started this thread, I had quit the booze for a 14 month stretch, and it had been an unrelenting slog for that entire period. The AA folks advise their adherents to take it one day at a time; well, I had wanted a drink every day, one day at a time, for the full 14 months, and things did not get noticeably easier as time went on.

The difference between the former and the current wagon rides is the difference between telling myself that I can never have a certain beloved thing again for as long as I live, and telling myself that I can have that beloved thing again eventually, if I just exhibit a moderately impressive show of patience.

Now, I quit meth 18 years ago, but I never really quit it. My dealer died and I couldn't be arsed to try to find a new one. My laziness and introversion are profound things, and they teamed up to save my life in this instance.

Alcohol, on the other hand; there are five stores that sell some form of it within easy walking distance of my apartment, and I am also encouraged to imbibe free drinks every day that I'm at my workplace.

And if you've been following this thread, you'll know that I've been watching a lot of TV lately. On that medium I can't help but notice that a high percentage of TV characters drink enough to be alcoholics. They drink like fish on Archer, on The Orville, on Better Call Saul, and even the Christofascists from the Republic of Gilead in the Handmaid's Tale are consistent knockers back of hard booze. So yeah, forever gone is too long for me to contemplate, given the omnipresence of alcohol in my society.

What about cigarettes? I've been forever-committed quit of those for 10 years now. Cigarettes were not the beloved things. They started out that way, but they became the thing that stopped me from feeling bad due to not having a cigarette. It took a year for that bad feeling to go away, but once it was gone, there was no trace left. This was not the case with alcohol after 14 months. If, however, this time around a year passes and I find that there is no love left in me for the booze, then I will contemplate a permanent extension.

Congrats on the two months.

Congrats SJ.