Scary streets, kind hosts

It's all third-hand to me, but still scary. I skipped the Minnstf meeting, spending most of the day either at the gym or puttering around with my iTunes collection. I was still at the latter activity at midnight or so when I got a call from Thorin and Richard. They were trying to drive home from the Minnstf meeting (which is maybe 4 miles from our house). After some indefinitely long interval of sliding into curbs and spinning their wheels trying to get up little hills they had only made it to 50th and Washburn (a little over a mile from the meeting) and had concluded that they simply could not progress. A layer of thin but tough ice had descended from the sky to completely coat the streets, and whatever you call the stuff that was continuing to fall was keeping the ice layer constantly lubricated with water. The result was apparently as close to a zero-friction environment as it is possible to maintain on a city street.

They were driving the Mazda, which is not a great ice and snow car but definitely better than the van sitting in front of our house. So there was no way I could come and rescue them. Since they couldn't get up the hill in front of them, I suggested that they go back to the Minnstf meeting and throw themselves on the mercy of the hosts. About a half hour later (!) Thorin called back to say that they had finally made it back to the safe house and would probably spend the night there. They arrived home this morning at about 11am, reporting that the roads are still treacherous but are now drivable. *shudder* It's funny that with all the dramatic weather that this state is capable of providing, the most paralyzing seems to be a dinky little drizzle of freezing rain.

Thanks to fmsv and cowfan for providing shelter for some unexpected house guests. I certainly hope that everybody else made it home okay.

The dangers of opening the mail

I opened my property tax statement for 2011. Our taxes are going up $50/month! That's 17% in one year.

BPM project moves into new phase - I have almost achieved a playlist!

Okay, I have generally cleaned up my iTunes directories, converted a large portion of the music files to mp3 format, and used MixMeister to tag the converted files with its best approximation of Beats per Minute. While this was going on I created a new playlist folder and have started populating it with likely workout songs. I started by dragging in all my Grateful Dead, Paul Simon, Dylan and PP&M tracks, and then manually removing the slow songs. Same for Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, and any albums that looked like Celtic or bluegrass. Then I added all the vintage rock and roll (mid-60's or earlier) and quickly removed the mournful songs about dead teenagers. Oh, look - I have a smart playlist for Jam Band songs. I dragged all those in too. Then I remembered how much fun it is to exercise to songs involving alcohol, so I pulled in the entire folder of playlists that resulted from the Drinking Song Mix Swap.

< Long interim period where I fix all the broken links to Missing Songs. That's what happens when you clean up your iTunes folders.>

Okay, now that I've fixed most of the mess I made, let's take one bowl of this soup and work with that. I create one big Alcoholic Workout playlist and see what happens if I sort it by BPM. After several critical passes through the list, I've got it down to 53 songs that have a good strong beat. I have to manually correct some of the BPM calculations at the high end and low end, but on the mass of songs in the middle of the curve, Mixmeister seems to have done a decent job.

Okay, now to the fun part - sorting them various ways: the two most useful being by rating and by BPM. This is an interesting playlist to start with, since it includes songs from 7 individually assembled mix CDs on the theme of Drinking. Not surprisingly, most of my FAVORITE songs are the ones from my own mix CD, the 5-star exceptions being "Our Station" from Karen's collection and the 3 hysterical Tracy Bird songs from Emily's. (There were other songs I liked a lot from other people's CDs, but not all of them made the cut as exercise tracks).

Now we sort them by BPM in descending order. What will be my fastest drinking song? And the winner is... Send Me No Wine by the Moody Blues at 188 BPM! (Congratulations, Karen). The next 3 are all from Emily's astoundingly eclectic collection: Pour Me by Trick Pony, Beer for Breakfast by The Replacements, and Tequila by Champs). Then we have a very odd song called Clint Eastwood by Gorrilaz from my work-friend Andrew with the kind of driving beat I don't usually favor, but a great choice for exercising. And finally, way down at #6, one from my collection: Alabama Song by the Doors. This is where I see the advantage of sampling other people's musical tastes: most of my music choices fall in the middle of the tempo spectrum.

Well, now that I have all this information, maybe I'll put together a 30-minute treadmill tape with songs arranged in some sort of BPM bell curve and try it out. This just might work!