#21: Big Voting Day, Celebrity Lookalikes(?), New Radio Dept.

Yesterday was a huge voting day--our total number of votes broke the 20,000 ballot barrier (and the 21,000 one, too) and in one day the total tally increased by nearly 1/3! It was the largest single-day increase to date and our thanks go out to everyone who voted... we're 2.1% of the way there!

Interestingly enough, it was the first day we experienced a 'push-back' in the votes. Portland, Maine went up a lot (over 1,200 votes) as expected due to the article there, but it didn't own the voting. Indeed, the big winners yesterday were two cities that began the day in the #1 and #2 spots respectively: Jacksonville, Florida picked up over 900 votes but Fort Collins, Colorado went to town with nearly 1,500 votes! Honorable mentions go to Denver for surging into the top 7 with nearly 500 votes and Fort Wayne, Indiana, which had a nice gain thanks to this mention in Fort Wayne Observed.

We hope that by now you have also stumbled across the free web-based Facial Recognition software over at My Heritage--if not, you're in for a time-wasting treat. You visit the site, upload a photo of yourself, and the software scans your face searching for recognizable attributes. When it's done, it provides you with a collage of the celebrities whom you most resemble. Nina and I have both done this and I'm not quite sure what to think of the results except that there usually is a faint glimmer of resemblance. Still, why does she get 80% Keira Knightley and I get 72% ('Lil) Bow Wow? I smell a conspiracy...and take offense at the Conor Oberst connection (low blow!):

Previously-mentioned Swedish faves The Radio Dept. have a new MP3-only single out called "We Made the Team." If you're interested, you can pick it up here or go to their MySpace page and give it a listen free of charge. While you're at it, why not download Devolve's unofficially officially sanctioned "Marble House Edit" of "I Wanted You To Feel the Same," off their latest record--my favorite of 2006--Pet Grief.

xoxox
Danny

#60: New LCD Soundsystem MP3 & Eden Prarie Tosses in the Towel.

It seems as though certain people never sleep. We've blogged about James Murphy once before; the multi- instrumentalist and producer is half of DFA and all of LCD Soundsystem. Having already released two compilations of DFA remixes this year as well as the amazing 45 minute workout anthem 45:33 he's already eyeing 2007.

In late March, LCD Soundsystem will release his sophomore full-length, The Sound of Silver. Even Amazon doesn't have this up for pre-order yet, but we thought we'd whet your appetite with the second track, "Time to Get Away." Enjoy the download and let us know what you think--we're definitely loving it.

Meanwhile in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, some folks and even the local newspaper are lamenting the fact that their town is effectively out of the running in the voting. Things are getting very interesting as of late, with Plano, Texas having been dethroned not once but twice--first by South Bend, Indiana and this morning by Denver, Colorado. I wonder if this has something to do with the disenfranchised Fort Collins voters who held a big lead for so long in the early stages of the vote. Looks like we're in for a nice finish!

xoxox
Danny

#26: A Crazy Weekend.

So a couple crazy things happened this past weekend. First off, we experienced some insane voting. If you happened to read the comments from Nina's last post, you saw that there are the beginnings of a grassroots movement in Fort Collins, CO to bring us to that town. However, the folks in Jacksonville, FL are not easily deterred. The result? An insane voting binge this weekend. Around midnight on Thursday, there were 29, 609 votes. By the same time Saturday--48 hours later--the vote tally was up to 62,178. One day later--last night--the number of votes had nearly doubled yet again to 106,611. Wow.

Perhaps this will illustrate the point a little more easily:

Needless to say, we've been pretty floored by the voting rate. You can also view the astronomic rise of the current Top Seven towns here.

If you've read the Who We Are section of our site, you know that I'm a big UM football fan. On Saturday, for the first time this season, I decided not to head out to the Orange Bowl to watch them play in person. Go figure, it's the night they choose to bury what has been a very underwhelming season by having a half-hour melee during the third quarter. At least they're playing wiht some passion, I guess. This is what I missed:



Maybe a bench clearing brawl is a nice segue for "Fist in the Pockets" by Comet Gain off last year's City Fallen Leaves. Comet Gain has been putting out music for (can this be true?) thirteen years now, and this was one of those surprisingly stellar records that nobody seemed to pay much attention to. Note that this song doesn't really kick in until about twenty seconds in, so don't crank the volume up prematurely.



xoxox
Danny

#25: 45,000 Votes and the Radness of La Casa Azul.

To say that yesterday was a huge voting day seems like an understatement--it was our biggest day ever by far, with over 10,000 ballots cast. The the big winner was Fort Collins, CO, who wound up with (drumroll please) over 15,000 votes. Wow! Did something happen there we missed? That was a new milestone for us, vote 40,000.

The even crazier news is what's happening today--before noon, we'd already received over 6,000 votes, most of which were for Jacksonville, FL, catapulting it back into a competitive second place spot.

A little while ago I mentioned my love for Milky Way chocolates, but there is another Milkyway my heart goes out to. His name is Guille Milkyway and he is essentially the Spanish indie-pop group La Casa Azul. The band's music is amazing, some of the happiest, most rump shaking songs you'll ever hear with shades of everything from bossa nova to soft rock to disco--Beach Boys via ELO and Camera Obscura, but that description doesn't do it justice.

Just as interesting is the fact that the co-ed "band" featured in their press photos, television appearances, and music videos is just a fictitious construction designed to reinforce the idea of the band's happy-go-lucky music. The band in the video is actually fake (project mastermind Milkyway writes, performs, and records all the songs by himself) but they are completely cute anyway. I am drooling over that pink dress in the photo.

Although I don't speak Spanish like Danny, I find myself singing along to his songs anyway. I'm sure it mostly sounds like gibberish when I do it, but the songs are so catchy and fun I can't help myself. The tracks exude happiness and cuteness. It's impossible to still be in a bad mood after watching their videos, in which Milkyway makes brief appearances.

Our favorite song of his is "Superguay" (which translates roughly as "supercool"). Despite the bright and cheery colors of the video, the song is actually about an ex-girlfriend who leaves the narrator for a hotshot scenester guy, only to be rendered "insubstantial" by his relative supercoolness. She seems so inconsequential by his side that the former "queen of disco-parties" now "cannot be seen without a microscope."

La casa Azul is seriously the number one reason I want to learn Spanish. Warning: extreme cuteness below!

Do you ever pick up the phone to call somebody and it rings in your hand just as you're about to dial and it just so happens it's the person you were trying to call? This happens to me sometimes and I get super excited about the stars aligning. Something similar just happened. As I was writing this entry about my love of La Casa Azul, Danny emailed me with the following video link. And in case you're thinking, well you both probably saw that video not too long ago and hence it's not too surprising you'd be talking about it now, the answer is no. I haven't watched it for quite a long time. It was just a crazy coincidence and I'm loving it.

I'm curious to know what other people think of La Casa Azul. Do you love it? Is it too cheesy for you? Does it feel like a glorified Gap ad or do you wish you could be shimmying in balloons?

Heart,
Nina

#22: Vote Graphs, People of the World & Pelle Carlberg.

I've got a secret crush on line graphs. It's true. I think my old co-workers were onto my addiction, but they never tried to intervene. When Nina wisely suggested the other night that I start keeping daily records of each day's vote tallies, my eyes glazed over. "Yes," I thought to myself, "then I can turn the data into graphs. Bwahaha!"

The one up top shows how quickly our vote count has risen since last Tuesday, 10/3. If you look at the past two days, you can see that the total votes have risen by almost 10,000 in 48 hours. That's a nice exponential-ish looking curve.

This other one to the right (click to magnify) shows how the current top seven towns have performed over the past two days. A few of the interesting observations to be had: Jacksonville seems to be intensifying its gains (picking up about 2,500 votes) compared to towns like Birmingham, which are practically dormant. Denver has experienced a meteoric rise the past two days, as has Fort Collins, which has added nearly 2,000 votes that span. Something in the water in Colorado, I guess.

Not so long ago, I wrote about the world's shrinking population and the United States' imminent 300,000,000 population milestone, so I thought it only fair that I pass along this cool site I discovered yesterday. Breathing Earth is a simulation that uses birth and death rate data along with CO2 emissions statistics to show you in 'real-time' where and how often people are being born and dying across the world. It uses a simple, attractive map of the planet to pinpoint where these events are happening and the result is truly mesmerizing. Breathing Earth also illustrates how much carbon dioxide pollution each country is releasing, again in 'real-time' so you can see who the biggest culprits are (gee, I wonder). Miniature Earth, on the other hand, takes the old "what if the world's population was only 100 people" premise and turns it into a flash presentation that is interesting, if also a bit of a bummer.

By now you know about my Swedish indie-pop fetish. Well, it turns out that one of my favorite imports of 2006 is going to be released domestically in the U.S. on Twentyseven Records: Pelle Carlberg's Everything. Now!

Mr. Carlberg was the former frontman for a lovely band called Edson and this is his debut solo record. You should visit his MySpace page (because he's sorely lacking friends), download an MP3 of "Riverbank", and watch the video for it:



xoxox
Danny