Jonathan Coulton

Len and Nora at Jawbone have started a fund raising campaign to send them to the Portable Media Expo in September. They’re offering an original drawing from Len’s Thing a Week images to the first person who donates $200. This is a piece of history people. You will be the envy of every Jonathan Coulton fan on your block and all it will cost you is two hundred tiny dollars.

I went trolling for some interesting audio this week over at the Internet Archive – frankly, I’m a little sick of writing songs, and I wanted to flush out the system with a found audio thingie. I found this treasure trove, a collection of kids on cassette in the public domain (if you’ve never been to the Internet Archive, you should check it out – it’s non-profit with an enormous library of, like, everything). It brought back fond memories of yelling nonsense into the grill of a 40-pound tape recorder with a record button you had to lean on and mash down with your whole hand. And I was blown away by six-year-old Justin’s “Rock and Roll Boy,” which begins with the most fantastic opening lines in the history of rock and roll.

So I wrote a song around Justin’s vocals. He wasn’t thoughtful enough to provide a third verse or a bridge, and he wandered a bit in terms of key, so I had to improvise. But I really think he had an actual song in his head. Which is more than I can say for myself some weeks…

Rock and Roll Boy

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Kerrin has sent in a video for Over There using images from Flickr – it looks as though he’s planning on creating a few of these, since he’s gone to the trouble of setting up a whole web page and everything called The Jonathan Coulton Project, (or JoCoPro for short – awesome). All of this makes me feel very important, almost as important as someone like Alan Parsons.

Alex sends links to some videos taken at the last show (which was very weird – did I mention it was in a dance studio?). For those of you who haven’t seen me before, you should know that normally these things happen at actual music venues with booze and crowds and sound systems and everything. As I say, weird. But I guess if you’re desperate to know what it looks like when I do what I do, these will give you a good idea. I myself cannot watch them, but then again, I am a self-loathing giant squid. Thanks Alex for taking the time to do this.
Code Monkey
Baby Got Back
The Future Soon
The Town Crotch
Kenesaw Mountain Landis
Skullcrusher Mountain

Here’s a recording (if that link’s swamped, here’s a mirror) of a guy trying to cancel his AOL account. Now THAT is funny. Thanks Dr. Smith…