A few follow-ups from this month’s posts.
Creepy Chicken
The Babylon Bee weighed in on Chick-fil-A’s invasion of NYC.
Chick-fil-A themselves, and the NYC store, seem to be muddling through in the aftermath. (PSA: videos are horizontal, people. Horizontal. You’ve never a portrait screen in a theater for a reason.)
Private Parts
I mentioned password managers in this post, and the question has come up a time or three on which one. I personally use 1Password, but that’s a piece of information, not a recommendation. 1Password has changed their model since I bought it, and now they 1) are subscription-only, and 2) sync your data by storing it on their computers.
I’m not a fan of either on of those, so if were buying today, I’m not sure what I would do. (Unfortunately, the other players in this space all do the same thing.)
Here are a few of the choices.
There are others, e.g. LastPass, etc., but I would choose from one of the above three, for reasons too technical (and boring) to get into here.
If you’re a pure Apple product user (Macs and/or iPhone/iPad), you can use iCloud Keychain and not have to buy anything at all. Here are a couple of third-party guides if the Apple one isn’t enough for you.
If you haven’t done the Bare Minimum from this post yet, do it right now.
Spaghetti Symphony
It turns out “Ecstasy of Gold” is a thing.
- Metallica has been playing it at concerts for years. This is apparently a well-known thing among the thrashers, but news to me. Listen for the crowd performing the soprano part (in decidedly non-soprano manner).
- There’s something called the Spaghetti Western Orchestra performing it. They’re not an orchestra; they’re a half-dozen guys in weird outfits and weirder make-up. One of them whistles the soprano part. The interwebs is a really, really strange place. (There’s not enough after the band introductions to worry about. There’s not much before, either, come to think of it.)
- There’s a woman performing it on a theramin. I can’t even …
- There’s a video of the Bellagio fountains “dancing” to the theme. The audio isn’t great since it was recorded from the in-room TV, but kudos to whoever programmed the fountains on that one. Watch it full-screen.
- There are several versions out there of Morricone himself conducting it. Here’s one of both the title theme and Ecstasy. I didn’t really care for the title theme at all; I thought the Danish orchestra did a far better job. On Ecstasy, though, Morricone gets a lot right that the Danish orchestra missed, especially the transition to the bridge. On the other hand, I don’t like the soprano here as well (I’m judging this one song; I know nothing about of either of them), the choir isn’t strong enough after the first soprano section, and it doesn’t have the driving force of the original. In the movie, the music is almost literally propelling Tuco through the cemetery.
- Nothing beats the original, though. Preferably while watching the movie.