Songs I Wish Were In Rock Band

Now, please keep in mind that I don't listen to a lot of rock music. This list is going to be heavily weighted to the paltry number of groups that I enjoy, but here goes.

(No whining that the songs would be "too hard" to sing. Not everything should be able to be sung and five starred by everyone on Hard or Expert. Singing is hard, dammit, and a few of the songs in the game should be for the Big Kids who can do them.)

First, let's get the Queen out of the way. That there is a game called "Rock Band" that DOESN'T have a Queen song in it is pure madness. Here's my wish list for Queen songs for Rock Band. (Thank you, Wikipedia, for the handy list to jog my memory.)

1. Another One Bites the Dust (c'mon, EVERYONE would fight to play bass on this)
2. Bicycle Race (for the WIN)
3. Bohemian Rhapsody (stop laughing, everyone loves to sing along to this, and the keyboard solos on a song already in the game...you all know the one I mean, BOSTON...are at least as long)
4. Crazy Little Thing Called Love
5. Don't Stop Me Now
6. Fat Bottomed Girls (a two pack with Bicycle Race!!)
7. Flash (if only for the comedy value, and yes, this one's a bit of a joke and I don't really want it)
8. Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy (how anyone ever listened to this and didn't suss out that Freddie was gay is BEYOND ME)
9. I Want to Break Free
10. One Vision (thrown in here for my husband)
11. Play the Game
12. Save Me
13. Stone Cold Crazy
    
14. The Miracle
15. These are the Days of our Lives
16. Tie Your Mother Down
17. Under Pressure
    
18. We Are the Champions/We Will Rock You (two-pack!)
19. Who Wants to Live Forever
    
20. You're My Best Friend

Okay, I forgot two songs originally, but I just added 'em. Anyone who gets this on a feed reader can see the edit. For everyone else, I'm not tellin'.

Styx songs:

1. Too Much Time on My Hands
2. Don't Let it End
3. Heavy Metal Poisoning
4. (Heck, I'd be pro-"Mr. Roboto", but I don't think many people are with me on that.)
5. Why Me

Other Blondie songs:

1. Heart of Glass
2. One Way or Another
3. Rapture (if I have to rap through Sabotage, you bastards have to rap with Blondie)
4. The Tide is High

Misc:

1. I Wanna Be Sedated - The Ramones (hey, we've got Blitzkrieg Bop already, right?)
2. One Week - Barenaked Ladies (heck, ANYTHING by BNL would be okay by me)

So, what else do we want?

Help Me, William H. Macy, You're My Only Hope

I'm going to wager that the next bit of information that I type in is going to be something that no one who is likely to read this will already know.

William H. Macy provided the voice of the Narrator on the first season of the current PBS Kids show Curious George. It shouldn't be surprising that he was really, really good at it. It helps that the writing on that show, especially for the narrator, includes the occasional bit of irony, wry humor, and absurdity, but a great deal of the "hey, this is better than I thought it would be, and GREAT for preschool television" impression the first season episodes leave you with was due to William H. Macy's delivery of the lines.

For whatever reason, there was a new narrator at the beginning of the second season. Now, I don't have anything AGAINST the guy, but the whole show just doesn't have the same snap that it had before. The writing doesn't even seem as snappy (again, for a preschool-aged children's show) without him delivering it.

I don't know if he got busy with other projects, if they wouldn't pay him enough, or if it was something else, but I honestly wish he would come back. The hijinx of a monkey and his man with a yellow hat just aren't the same without him.

R.I.P. George

I've just stumbled onto the news that George Carlin died yesterday at age 71. We'll miss you, you hilariously foul-mouthed, deliciously controversial guy.

There's some hour-long Carlin vids on Google Video. Here is a link to one of them if you want to reminisce.

Rock Band Online Play, Plus One Funny Link

First, the link. Halloween is only months away, so if you have a 5-6 year old, consider these costumes when your child is trying to talk you into letting them be a firefighter or a princess AGAIN.

("Trick or treat" sounds a LITTLE like "exterminate", doesn't it?)

Also, I've been playing some Rock Band online multiplayer. When you can 95%+ songs as a singer on Expert, I've found that's pretty much like being a healer in an MMO. There's no chat (come on, PS3, even Mario Kart Wii lets me choose phrases from a rotating menu so that we can have some sort of rudimentary communication system) so it's hard to tell, but I do get a fair amount of friend adds after playing as a singer.

There are some fairly well-established proto-communication techniques at work in PS3 Rock Band, though. One of them was told to me by the good Dr. Heimlich, which is the idea that you waggle up and down on the difficulty setting menu when you don't want to do the song the leader has chosen. It's also interesting to watch (or be involved in) the delicate negotiations that occur between the two people using the guitar to see who plays guitar and who plays bass. That's usually a pause-move to the one you want-wait to see if the other guy moves there too sort of affair. I actually prefer most of the bass lines so most of the time I would imagine the other person relieved at 'getting' to play guitar when I indicated that I wanted bass, although I did get overruled a couple of times. Frankly, if you can play on Expert on the guitar, I'm fine with you taking whichever one you want and I'll play the other one on Medium.

But still, frustrating to play and have no way to communicate other than by waggling on menus, just out-and-out leaving the group, or adding someone as a friend if you enjoyed playing with them. Seriously, how hard is it to add a menu of prefab phrases? Please? Otherwise, it's pretty fun, especially when you get to watch someone kill songs on Expert, which I normally only get to see when I play with the aforementioned Dr. Heimlich.

And yeah, though there are a lot of power players there playing on Hard or Expert, there are a lot of people who play on Medium, too, which makes it less embarrassing when I want to play guitar or bass and have to play on Medium if it's anything higher than the first two difficulty categories.

It's a good time, really. As soon as we get our drum pad replacement (It broke on day 60 of its 60 day warranty, which EA is now enforcing! Yikes, that was close!) I might give them a go, though I still find the placement of the first two drums disorienting. But that's the subject for another whiny post.

If You Haven't Seen This Man, Watch Him Now

This is Bryan Gaynor. He auditioned for the third season of So You Think You Can Dance, and he also happens to have a very pronounced case of scoliosis. Not that it seems to matter once the music starts. I dare you to watch him and not be affected.

Wii Fit Loses One Customer (Me): Cue Rending of Garments at Nintendo HQ (Not Really)

I learned this morning that the sophisticated calculations of fitness and overall health done by the Wii Fit and its balance board include, nay, depend heavily on BMI, or the "Body Mass Index".

See, now that's where they lost me. WiiFit has apparently already started telling little children that they're "fat" based nearly solely on BMI.

Let me just tell you right now that BMI is a deeply-flawed measurement. Muscle weighs far more than fat, and most, if not all, professional athletes would probably come up as "overweight" when measured by the BMI stick. That probably includes even sports like cycling, where no one in their right minds could look at those riders and say they were overweight by any stretch of the imagination.

See, when I was riding and racing before I had the baby, I was wearing a size 4 or 6. I would challenge anyone outside of Project Runway and America's Next Top Model land to call anyone who can legitimately fit into a 4 or 6 of just about any clothing brand "overweight", but my BMI at the time nudged me just out of "healthy" and into "slightly overweight".

It's just a flawed measurement, and it's bullshit to use it anymore. Especially when there's software out there spinning in a Wii with little girls standing on a glorified scale in front of it, already bombarded by retouched and 'shopped images of impossible women in the media, and they're being called "fat" when they could just as easily merely be committing the sin of being athletic. Lord forbid. I'm just as concerned about childhood obesity as everyone else, but name-calling kids who are playing a video game is probably not the most productive way to combat it.

And I really was going to buy that game, too. I think I'll buy a USB converter for my DDR pad instead and start playing that again. At least when DDR makes fun of me, it's because I legitimately missed steps, not because I failed against an inherently flawed measurement system. Tsugaru heavy, here I come.

You May Have Played Too Much Rock Band Around Your Toddler When...

...she looks at you, says, "Sing...Maps?"

And then sings, "MaaaAAAaaaa--aaaAAAaaa--aaaAAAaaaps!"