New and Improved: with more Earliness, Darkness, and Wetness!

Monday, with a bucket. Like many unnecessary products lining the shelves of our stores, it practically shouts out that it is New and Improved: with more Earliness, Darkness, and Wetness! Like some foul-tasting medicine advertising it now contains more nasty-tastingness. A real convergence of all the things that make Monday so unpopular with us working-folk. With the roll-out of daylight savings time this weekend the alarm clock went off at 4:30 this morning, no matter what the numbers on its face say. That means I'm back to getting up in the velvet of night, just when I was starting to get used to having the first shards of daylight to wake with.  And then it rained a bit this weekend.  Ok, really, it rained a whole lot.  At times the rain has come down so fast and hard that even working storm drains were simply not able to take it all in. This morning has been one of those times.  Nothing says roll over and go back to sleep like getting woken up by an alarm clock in the deep of darkness with the sound of torrential rain being wind-slammed into the side of your bedroom walls and window.

Daylight savings time (DST).  One of the stranger conventions of capitalism, it amounts to a collective agreement to reset all our clocks one hour later than real time in order, supposedly, to enjoy an extra hour of daylight in the evening. A few years back Congress extended the reach of DST earlier into winter/spring and later into summer/fall. This was in response to extensive lobbying by corporate interests who have found that more hours of daylight translate into more hours of commerce.  This, then, is another symptom of having traded a democracy for a corporatacracy. Oh, it's far less detrimental (many folks actually like DSTs, and I'd be fine with it if we didn't switch back each fall) than, say, the hold three or four global agribusinesses hold over our entire food and food regulatory system, but at its root is the same story. Corporate money buys the policies it wants and population shuffles dutifully along.

I found out this morning that Web browsers can hold a grudge all weekend.  Just as I was wrapping up last Friday afternoon, my browser locked up and refused to budge.  I finally had to force-quit it.  This morning it reminded me of that little spat, but held out the olive branch by offering to restore my session from Friday afternoon.  Please no - by all means, let's start this week off fresh!

A very varied commute soundtrack today.  I think the iPod was trying to take my mind off the weather, earliness, and darkness, and it (mostly) worked.  Stafrænn Hákon is another Icelandic musician I found a while back, and before I had ever heard of Sigur Rós.  Similar ambient style.  When I first found his music it wasn't available here in the US, so I had to content myself with the MP3 tracks he graciously made available through his Web site.  Now, quite a bit of the catalog is available through Amazon, iTunes, et al.. Just as I was pulling in the BMW Band started warming up.  It took me back to the living room that particular recording was made in, and the track is mostly an open recording of tuning up, talking, and taking a couple different stabs at the tune we eventually managed to pull together.  Fun stuff on a really wet Monday morning.

The full playlist:

 - Stafrænn Hákon: Tætir rækju

 - Bobby "Blue" Band:  Kiss Me to the Music

 - Medeski, Martin And Wood: Where Have You Been?

 - John Barry: Chaplin

 - Ron Carter: Komm Susser Tod, Komm Sel'ge Ruh'

 - BMW Band: Tuning, Talking, and Good News