Music and Memory

For me music and memory have always gone hand and hand. I'll randomly hear songs like "Spiderwebs" by No Doubt or "Tonight, Tonight" by the Smashing Pumpkins and I'll instantly be transported back to my neighbor's bedroom sitting at the edge of the bed playing video games and listening to the music blaring out of the stereo that was much larger than his small bedroom needed. The really interesting thing about it is that there are certain memories that I don't even know that I've saved, that will be suddenly knocked free by a song.
There are also certain albums that will always remind me of particular times in my life, specifically vacations. I associate every vacation I've been on in the last six years with an album, or at least a particular song. In 2004 when I went to Florida it was the album "So Long, Astoria" by The Ataris. In 2005 when I went to England with my Grandpa I listened to the album "Almost Here" by The Academy Is..., In 2006 when I went to Hawaii I listened to a compilation of unreleased demos by a band called Brand New. At first I didn't try to create such a close association between vacations and music, but after a while I began to notice that if I listened to the same album the whole vacation it helped me remember my vacation better, especially when I listened to the music. Now I'm glad that I have these close associations. It is nice because occasionally I'll get sick of the Minnesota cold and will miss Hawaii, or I'll get nostalgic and miss the time I spent with my Grandpa in England, if I'm ever feeling down, or in one of these bad moods, I can simply throw on Brand New's demos or "Almost Here", and it is easy for me to remember happier times and shake my bad mood quickly.
I've got to admit that my memory through music has tempted me to pull a John Cusack from "High Fidelity" and sort my music collection autobiographically, but haven't had the courage to attempt it yet.

Local News

While searching Kare 11's video vault for some worthwhile news to analyze I became frustrated. The first handful of videos I came across didn't qualify as news, in my opinion at least, the stories ranged from two brothers who taught a two minute cooking class, to a goose that had imprinted on to a human, and now flew beside him while he drove his boat. While the cooking class may have been informative on some level, I don't think a salsa recipe really warrants time on a news broadcast, they have the Food Network and daytime TV for a reason, that is the time to show cooking, not during the few precious moments when busy people are trying to gather information that is relevant and important to their lives. After sifting through more puff piece videos I thought I had finally found a few worthwhile videos put they all turned out to be more or less about the same thing. One video had the heading of "Bus Stop Drop a big success", the video then went on to say that the Toys for Tots charity had seen a 40% drop in the amount of donations when compared to 2008's numbers. In the story the reporter interviewed a Marine who was working for the charity. The Marine gave ideas for donations, then told a story about when he had given a GI Joe to a young boy through the Toys for Tots program. The next video that came on was nearly the exact same story, it talked about donations being down 40%, this time they interviewed volunteers working at the donation tent who again shared stories about how Toys for Tots has helped others. The obvious reason for these reports was to raise awareness that charities are effected by hard times economically. For each of the stories they interviewed volunteers to give viewers a sense of who is helping these organization and how both the volunteers and the children have been positively impacted by the Toys for Tots.

My experience on the Kare 11 website is exactly why I don't watch local news. The only real news I ever watch is CNN when I'm getting ready in the mornings, or occasionally the Colbert Report and The Daily Show, but I don't watch any of these with any real consistency. Instead I get my news from my Blackberry through an application I downloaded from the Associated Press. I love the application because it has sixteen different categories for news, including showbiz news and wacky news, I'm glad they include these as categories because for the most part I don't care about the news in either of these categories, but unfortunately 90% of the news on the would qualify for one of these two categories. Another nice thing about the AP application is that it has a local news section as well, so if I feel that none of the stories in the other categories relate to me I can switch to the local section and read articles from the Pioneer Press. The final real highlight of the application is that it updates constantly and the application updates itself as new stories come in. After having this application for a few months it has been hard to watch television news because of the reasons I mentioned before, either the stories are non-relevant, or they are the same story over and over again.