What is Best in Life

A month with 5 Mondays is like a year with 13 moons or a man with 6 fingers upon his right hand…it means trouble.  Well, not really, but I figured I’d use that as an excuse to talk my favorite “troubling” musical interval, the diminished fifth (AKA, Diabolus in Musica, Devil’s Tritone, Satan’s chord or Lord Naughtypant’s Harmony). (more…)

Welcome back to everyone’s favorite www.isleyunruh.com Monday feature!  Middle Earth being the place of enchantment and wonder that it is, each month I will use my love of fictional cartography to transport you to another time and place.  So why not take a moment to fill your head full of knowledge that will have no bearing  at all on the real world?

This month I’ll be looking at the desolate valley of The Withered Heath in the Grey Mountains to the North of Mirkwood. (more…)

Here we are with yet another new www.isleyunruh.com feature!  This time I will be discussing a different classic Thrash, Death, Black or just plain “Heavy” metal album on the 15th of each month.  Of course, I’m an old school fellow, so don’t expect to see a lot of stuff post-1996 or so.  Each installment will be accompanied by several short sound clips illustrating important sections of the album.  Anyway, it was either this or a new Daily Metal Reviews section.  Consider yourselves lucky I chose the path of moderation.

This month we discuss one of the all time great Death Metal releases: Morbid Angel’s third album, Covenant, released in 1993. (more…)

I always have to stop myself when I say I like “all kinds of music”.  Because, honestly, that just isn’t true, there is really only one kind of music I like.  No, not [just] Black Metal, I’m talking about music in a minor key.  I mean, I’m a pretty happy guy, but there is something about sad, sad songs that just does it for me.  I don’t dislike Vivaldi’s “Spring” and “Fall”, but I far prefer “Summer” and “Winter” (guess which seasons he writes in a minor key).  “Satisfaction” is a fine song, but I’d rather listen to “Paint it Black” any day…you get the idea.  Basically, it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t go that sting [of soul crushing sorrow and sadness].

This month on Minor Key Monday I’ll discuss why Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater is a perfect example of the old saying: ”if it’s Baroque it don’t need fixin’!” (Ok…sorry about that, no more puns for the rest of the post, I promise!): (more…)

Welcome back to Internet Meme Monday!  What is a meme you say?  Well, as I understand it, a meme is similar to a gene, except instead of passing on genetic information it passes on cultural ideas.  A meme can take many forms, from a catch phrase to a hand gesture, but the type of memes I’ll be looking at every second Monday of the month are “internet memes”.

On the agenda this month?  I phonetically subtitle a Latin song to sound dirty in English! (more…)

I thought I learned my lesson last year after enduring The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, but I guess not, because even though they doubled the number of nominees this year, I still decided to watch all the 2009 Oscar nominations.  I mean, everyone knows that an actual academy award win doesn’t mean shit, but it doesn’t stop us from bitching about how laughable the awards are anyway.  And I figured it wasn’t fair to bitch about something like Fargo not winning if I’d never even seen The English Patient.  Though, I might just be a glutton for cinematic punishment: after all, one time I watched Barbie Fairytopia all the way through just to write a funny review.

And honestly, the 2009 list of nominations isn’t that bad.  There were a few great movies and a few more entertaining but flawed movies, and only a couple that I wouldn’t want to watch again (you know, if I had to).  For all the shit I talk on the Oscar nominations, I’d be hard pressed to find many wide release American movies from 2009 that are better than the top 3 (after that it is pretty much just a wash of flawed films of varying quality anyway).  I’m sure there are plenty of semi-wide release “independent” films out there that I haven’t seen that are probably ”as good as” something like An Education, but I have a feeling they would leave me equally non-plussed.

Anyway, this isn’t my list of Oscar “predictions”, and I’m not offering better alternatives (though I’m pretty sure I could find a better choice than The Blind Side at least), this is simply what I thought of the films that did get nominated.  Of course, I also put them in an ordered list based on quality, because, well, that’s just the way I roll. (more…)

Hello dear readers, it’s MAILBAG MONDAY again!  On this special day I will search through my mountain of reader mail and answer the five most pressing questions!

What’s that you say?  Do I really get that much mail?  Well, I’ll admit…the contact sectionof this website doesn’t get used that often, but, one of the perks of wordpress stats is that I can see the google search terms that people use to find my site.  And I’m going to go ahead and pretend that these search terms will count as reader mail, since they are often entered in the form of a question.  So as you read these, remember that each “question” was something that someone actually typed into google that brought up my site as a hit which they then clicked on thus letting wordpress stats report to me the search they used to find my site.  I could make up the questions myself, but it turns out the actual google searches are far better than anything I could come up with!

After last month’s “Does Isley look fart in these pants” query there was a massive influx of fart related questions, so many that I decided to make a very special GIANT SIZED “All Flatulence” edition of Mailbag Monday! (more…)

Here are some two sentence reviews of the movies I watched in January.

Stats

• Movies watched – 30
• Movies that were new to me – 23
• Movies from my guilty pleasure bucket list watched and enjoyed – 2
• Monthly Masterpieces - Wages of Fear, Blade Runner (more…)