Chicago: Become Familiar with its Distinctive Neighborhoods

I don't understand the concept behind giving gifts to your boss. But then I only shop for four people each year: mom, dad, brother, girlfriend. Kr was talking about an uncle who always gets her fancy gadgets like a digital camera. I haven't gotten a present from a relative outside my immediate family since I was a kid, and it always just like a sweater or something.

jesse, that gift is hilarious.

i just found out my bosses are taking me for a festive lunch. i'm not supposed to have bought them a gift, am i?

In my case I only have 3 co-workers, so it would be kind of weird not to get them a little something. I got the partners (bosses) a bottle of wine (Cuvee Le Bec) for him, and a paper-white kit for her, and a bottle of wine for the associate. Now I wish I had gone with one of those candles with the wooden wick that crackles when it burns.

Instead of the plant, I mean. Considering how much these folks smoke, they need scent-masking candles.

I got presents for:
mom
dad
middle sis
youngest sis
nick's dad
nick's mom
nick's sister
Nick!
my friend Sarah
Ben
Sister's bf
step-mom
Nick's grandma
candy supplies for friends I saw that weekend
and then my dad and nick's mom have bdays right around then too

there's only three of us in our office as well, me and my two bosses. i guess i've only worked here a little while, so hopefully it's not expected (the lunch invitation was unexpected to me)

sarah, that's a lot of shopping!

I don't bother giving the bosses presents, because their presents section looks quite a bit like the boss's in Christmas vacation. Sometimes I wonder if they even get around to opening all of them.

Some of my coworkers exchange gifts aside from the secret santa, but I'm fine with not being a part of it. They don't expect anything from me and vice versa. There is one higher up that I do alot of work for though who always gets me something special.

It is alot of shopping, Colette! And this is the first year I kept track of how much I spent and didn't put anything on cards.

Thankfully, alot of those are joint presents from Nick and I.

i got presents for my dad, stepmom, and mom. i was going to get something for a girl, but figured she's not getting me anything so i don't want to make her feel like she has to. actually i did get her a cheap spatula, because she does not have one, but that doesn't really count.

well done for not having to charge anything, that's a big deal!

Thanks!!

Jordan, did you go to SPATULA CITY??

jordan, well done for knowing that while the spatula was a thoughtful gesture and reflects well on you, it is not an acceptable holiday gift. my dad is still working on that kind of understanding...

Jesse, I misread your post as saying that you are giving a bottle of wine to one of your bosses and a paper hat to the other.

Have you guys seen TechnoViking?

I just sent off my ballots to Idolator and Pazz & Jop. Gah. I'm going to stop beating myself up over whether "Umbrella" was better than "No Cars Go" or whether the Shins were better than Air and just fucking forget about it all.

that technoviking is silly

i tried to make a best of 2007 mix cd for friends and family but i couldn't edit it down shorter than 2 hours so now it's a two-cd best-of. kind of silly but i listened to a lot of new music this year.

I'd like to see a tracklisting on that, Nick. My 2007 best-of mix is somewhere around 105 songs, and I'm trying to figure out whether I should whittle that down to 100 for the sake of roundness or not. I mean, I've got segues that could vanish.

Although already there is no Dan Deacon among those 105 tracks. CONTROVERSIAL.

I might cut Interpol, too. Fuck those guys.

Haha, I couldn't even come up with a top 10 this year, it was a top 9. Although now I'm being convinced to check out a bunch of albums that I couldn't get excited about when they came out, like LCD Soundsystem, M.I.A., etc..

Hi Kenan. Where have you been lately?

I'm right here. Always on AIM and GChat, if you wanna say something witty and insightful. Been spending a lot of time doing computer geek things -- last week it was dumping windows altogether and getting on linux in a real, dedicated fashion. Right now it's setting up (and playing with) the web server space I just bought myself as kind of a christmas gift. Some of you got my silly little podcast link, and next i'll have a wordpress installation and a wiki installation and... whatever else I can think of. It's probably not going to be a premium destination on the internet. Just a place to play with things and break things and see if I can fix them. I don't remember how much php I've already forgotten.

Anyway.

I don't know if I heard much new music this year that I'd list as favorites. The Innocence Mission's We Walked In Song. Regina Spektor's "On The Radio". Stevie Wonder doing "Superstition" on Sesame Street. Lavender Diamond LP was a big disappointment after their EP, which I still love. This Guy Clark song, "In The Parking Lot". Heard John Cooper Clarke's "Evidently Chickentown" for the first time and loved that.

Haha awesome... on my other workstation, I've got iTunes open and am occasionally sliding the chair over to edit my "Best of 2007" playlist. It's been reworked so so many times, but damnit, it's time to SETTLE.

And there is Dan Deacon. Oh yes, there is.

Btw I stayed up until almost 1:00 last night finishing the Wire (well, I didn't get off work until after 7:00). I'm sure season 5 will be great, but I really enjoyed the non-status quo of s4, what with major crimes being scattered and almost zero McNulty etc..

I watched a couple minutes of the extras and hearing McNulty talk with his real accent fucking freaks me out.

M.I.A.'s appearance on all these year-end lists doesn't surprise me, but I still think that album is really weak. An intriguing persona doesn't trump half-assed tunes.

Actually, the thing about Dan Deacon is if "Wham City" were like half as long, I'd probably find room for it. That's the only song on the album I'll go to bat for.

My Idolator poll is short reissues this time. Every time I clicked on either 'Hold Ballot' or 'Lock Ballot', those forms disappeared.

From what I've heard the production and ideas are great, but her voice and hooks are starting to get on my nerves.

What's Dan Deacon like?

Controversial.

best of 2007, in alphabetical order by song

"atlas" battles
"axis mundi" magik markers
"brainy" the national
"can't tell me nothing" kanye west
"candy castle" glass candy
"EMG" el-p
"the equestrian" les savy fav
"fantasy world" pissed jeans
"geremia" bonde do role
"get it on" grinderman
"grapefruit" marnie stern
"gronlandic edit" of montreal
"honest james" thurston moore
"a house is not a home" field music
"kanske ar jag kar..." jens lekman
"manchasm" future of the left
"sailing to byzantium" liars
"shining path" trans am
"spaetes licht" september collective
"spring and by summer fall" blonde redhead
"strange lights" deerhunter
"sycamore" bill callahan
"take me to the riot" stars
"take pills" panda bear
"waters of nazareth" justice
"what's a girl to do" bat for lashes
"wucan" black mountain
"you are never alone" vic chesnutt

it's kind of a weird list in that some songs are individual songs that i really liked from albums that i didn't really like that much (like bat for lashes, kanye, stars, etc) while others are representative or not-so-representative songs from albums that i liked a lot but had trouble picking one song in particular (ie liars, deerhunter and others). also it's just a pared-down version of all of my quarterly mixes and i didn't feel like going back and reevaluating my choices so that's why it's all songs from my quarterly mixes

dan deacon was a fun show but i never downloaded the album

i thought the mia album sucked

Good man.

I enjoyed the MIA album.

Yeah, me too, but I was more enthused about it during the first couple weeks than after that. It's still very good, just not as good as I assumed at first.

I keep almost getting the Burial record, but I have a love/hate thing with his beats, and also I think "don't I have enough melancholy atmospheric/background music at this point? am i really going to listen to this much?"

Yeah, me too, but I was more enthused about it during the first couple weeks than after that. It's still very good, just not as good as I assumed at first.

I felt that way about the first one. The second one never did much for me at all.

LA Times xword, I'm callin you out - SCHLEPPY is a terrible answer for "like a frump". I thought it had to be SCHLUBBY. Schleppy is like Larry David saying "Eh, I don't wanna go skiing, it's too schleppy".

Tausig had a couple of clunkers this week, too.

Frumpiness (out of shape) can be a cause of schleppiness (moving at a slow/dawdling pace), but they aren't the same thing.

Agreed, but the theme was pretty damn clever.

Yeah, I was about to object to ILLROMEO until I realized it was part of the theme.

I hated Kala at first, but its really grown on me lately.

I learned last night that "oh snap!" was coined by Biz Markie in "Just a Friend." I didn't know that. I was telling Kr that I associate it with kids on the bus in 7th grade. She thought it was a recent coinage. I was trying to figure out whether this had to do with the four-year age discrepancy or the fact that I went to school with black people.

http://www.randomimage.us/files/ohsnap.gif

I learned last night that "oh snap!" was coined by Biz Markie in "Just a Friend."

support this statement with evidence. i bet he popularized it, but i doubt he made it up

You're probably right. I can't find it now, but whatever I was reading said that the "earliest recorded usage" was in "Just a Friend" -- but of course that doesn't mean that it wasn't already in use in schoolyards or whatnot.

I had a burrito for lunch that tasted like it had olives on it, but there were no olives on it. EXPLAIN ME.