PixlBit

Happy Friday Pixlpeeps! It is a breezy and cool Southern California day and this is weekend number three of music festivals in my little piece of So Cal. The past two weeks were all Coachella Music and Arts Festival and this week it is the country music version, Stagecoach. We always joke that the first two weeks its camping in tents and the third week is camping in RV’s. I might spend some time out at the local mom & pop music store today just to get away from the folks and who knows maybe find some new stuff to add to the library.

Last night I tried my best to stay up and listen to the final Loveline on the radio. I used to listen to Loveline because of my roommate in college and some (by some I mean 90%) of the questions were hilarious. This is where I started listening to Adam Carolla, and then followed to The Man Show. Anyways Adam left Loveline, and I stopped listening to Loveline but I causally went back once Adam and Dr. Drew started their podcast. I stopped that because my podcast playlist was filled so I made some cuts. Anyways flash forward to last night and I tried to stay up to listen to the final show and I fell asleep. The iPad was running throughout and around 2:30am I woke up turned it off and then proceeded to be wide awake. Hopefully someone recorded it and put it on the internet so I can check out the hour and a half I missed.

Last week I was at 12,569 unplayed tracks on my iTunes library. Well this week I am at

 

Now it seems like I didn’t make much progress but to be fair I added a bunch of new CDs and I listened to I think all but maybe two, but we’ll go more into that later on. I got to listen to a lot of stuff on the weekend because I had a couple of day trips where I got to use my camera and enjoy the scenery.

On Saturday the first trip was back to the city of Oceanside just to spend the day by the water, grab some lunch and play tourist.

 

This is a view of the beach while on the pier. I believe last summer I shared some pics of this place during a surf competition.

 

The pier I was on. At the end of the pier there is a Ruby’s Diner where we ate lunch and enjoyed watching people in the water.

 

We saw this guy as we left Ruby’s. He really didn’t care about the folks around him taking pictures.

 

Before we left, we saw got a special treat and saw a whale roaming around doing whale stuff.

After this little trip we decided to hit the local Mission on the way out of town. We were a little late because we didn’t have time to check out the museum so we instead visited the church. The thing about churches is that they have a calming feeling for me. I didn’t want to take a lot of pictures because there was a woman inside praying but it was amazing to see the detail and work put into this church. Next time I visit I’d like to check out more of the mission compound itself.

The next day we took a day trip in the opposite direction to Los Angeles to check out the Getty Museum. I love this place because it has so many interesting pieces and just to be able to look at a painting that is older than the country it currently lives in is bizarre yet fascinating. Since the museum sits on top of a hill you enter at the base of the facility which is an underground parking lot, and then you go back up to street level to ride a tram that gives you views of Bell Air and UCLA. The 3 minute trip on the tram has the Disneyland vibe with the announcements over the loud speaker and then once you get to the main section you are greeted with the main entrance

 

 Once inside the museum is setup with a main courtyard surrounded by buildings. If you have ever played Grand Theft Auto V, this is the museum the one in the game was modeled after. They had a kiosk where you could rent iPods and as you walked around you could play audio about the pieces. Of course they don’t tell you that they also offer an app that gives you some background on the more famous pieces

 

I didn’t realize this until a couple of days later. Their big exhibit while we were there was for the Maplethorpe photographs. I really wasn’t interested in that exhibit and I really wanted to just look at their current collection. The thing I don’t get about people is that there is two sections where you’re not allowed to take photographs, yet people try and sneak pictures. There’s a reason you’re not supposed to take pictures, and that is because it is harmful to the items. Anyways in the areas where you could take photos I snapped a bunch but I wanted to share a couple

 

This is a painting done by Titian. While roaming around I read the description and I believe I said “Oh Sh*t this is a Titian” which got a small laugh from the security guard.

In the another room there were a bunch of awesome statues including this one by Bernini

 

Again I said “Oh Sh*t this is a Bernini” but thankfully nobody was in earshot for this.

Here are a couple of other pieces I wanted to share with you folks. The religious stuff is amazing to look at up close. It was a fun day of just roaming around taking pictures, enjoying the pieces and when I took a food break, I did some people watching while eating overpriced hot dog and Sprite. The brownie however wasn’t bad. In a couple of weeks there might be a trip back to LA to check out the museum where one of the Space Shuttle’s now calls home.

 

Pickups!

Games

I need to start visiting the thrift stores again because I think I found some good stuff for cheap.

 

I found this Chess game in the CDs. If I can only figure out how to get it to play nice with Windows 10 I can continue to get my lunch handed to me by the computer (I need a lot of practice to be a decent chess player) Behind some random box sets of religious music I found this game

 

I don’t think I’ll hook up my Genesis anytime soon, but its nice knowing I have another game from the classic plastic era.

From Steam, I used $1.50 of my remaining $2+ of credit and bought this bundle

 

Originally I just wanted Polarity because I thought it was worth giving a try for .21 cents, but there was a bundle so for a little more than an iTunes single I bought four games.

 

Music

First the new CDs. From Barnes & Noble I found a couple of albums

 

I found the Bebel Gilberto album Tudo. In previous blogs I talked about her father, and last week I talked about one of his ex-wives Astrud. I listened to this album on the way to the Getty Museum and I wasn’t a big fan of it. Instead of the whole album being in Portuguese, a couple of the songs were in English and were not my favorite. The next album was an interesting team up between Big Boi from Outkast and the duo Phantogram. They created a group named Big Grams (hahaha I just got the name while typing this) and this is their debut self-titled EP. After listening to this EP I can say that I became a bigger fan of Phantogram. Their music outshined the lyrics of Big Boi. Because I enjoyed their music so much, while sitting in some traffic I went ahead and ordered this album from Amazon

 

This had the single Fall in Love that I really liked and since it came from Amazon they had that instant rip feature where the .mp3s were sent to the Amazon music application on my computer so I copied over the tracks to iTunes.

The next eight CDs came from the local mom and pop in their buy 5 get 3 free section

 

There’s only a handful of songs from Limp Bizkit I like and this CD had I think three songs. Everything else is not good. During a playthrough of The Mama’s and The Papa’s I didn’t realize how many songs they sang that I knew. I can’t remember the name of the song but the lyric is “And no one’s getting fat except Mama Cass” This lyric had me dyin’ and you know the today’s PC Police wouldn’t let that fly. Anyways that CD is easily one of my favorites.

 

I’m slowly getting into Rick Ross’ music and this is the second time where I didn’t care for the first couple of tracks or the last couple of tracks on his album but I really liked the middle. Olivia Newton-John’s Greatest Hits was bought because of a couple of songs, plus I wanted to listen to the original version of Have You Ever Been Mellow. I learned about that song because of the original Dance Dance Revolution.

 

The 5^th Dimension is a Greatest Hits CD and another group where I said “they sang that song?” It was another enjoyable CD. Bullworth wasn’t that great. I wasn’t expecting much especially since I bought it for Ghetto Superstar by Pras (The Fugees), Mya and Old Dirty Bastard. It would have been a bonus if I found another song. Turns out the single Joints & Jam by the Black Eyed Peas was that bonus song for me.

 

K-Ci & JoJo was purchased because of the song Crazy. That song was everywhere when it was released. The album itself isn’t bad and is nice to have another CD of theirs in the library. I never saw Southpaw so this CD was a blind buy. I found a couple of songs I want to listen to again and overall there isn’t really a bad track on the CD.

The next couple of CDs I bought from a couple of thrifts. Each CD was .50

 

I enjoyed most of this Charlie Daniels Band CD especially the Zydeco like song. I thought I found a new Corrs CD I didn’t have until I tried to import it to my iTunes library. This is what happens when you don’t check your CD list beforehand.

 

I haven’t listened to all of Lawrence Welk’s CD. If you ever watched the reruns of his television program on PBS, you know what kind of music is on this album. I like it because it reminds me of what my grandparents used to play, and some songs remind me of Main Street at Disneyland. I think I had a burn CD of Mikey Bubbles from a girl I was dating. I liked a couple of songs so now I have the CD. I liked the middle songs of the album but I wasn’t too crazy about his version of the Eagles’ Heartache Tonight.

 

Another Mikey Bubbles CD. This one was still sealed and apparently was a Hallmark compilation of covers. I only listened to the first three tracks. Uncle Tupelo I purchased because I bought their Greatest Hits CD a couple of years ago and really enjoyed it. I only listened to a couple of tracks so far.

 

Yeah I guess I’m building a Mikey Bubbles discography. I haven’t listened to this copy but the first time I heard about this album was because of the song Home that he sang on a David Foster special. His version is good, but Blake Shelton absolutely killed it in his version. I found a random Na Leo CD. They’re a Hawaiian group. They have an awesome version of Baby Mine which is in English and Hawaiian.

The final CD I bought is a marching band CD

 

Little bit of Marching Band, and a little bit of Bagpipes.

 

Lego

I bought five more Disney blind bag figures

 

I got two new figures and three copies. At least I got Ariel and Aladdin. I really don’t want to stand in the toy aisle and feel the bags. You get weird looks.

Alright Pixlbit, this latest entry went a little long so I will cut it off here. Have a good weekend!

That’s all for now, more later!

-Chris

 

So for my song of the day I went with the song that sold me on buying the Big Grams EP (I listened to this track on YouTube while in Barnes & Noble before buying the EP) and it turns out its in the game MLB The Show 16. Have a good weekend