Is This Real
I tend to be one of those people with not much more than a tenuous grip on reality at times. I don't generally need much help wondering if things are really real (for this reason I've always thought that Zen Buddhism would come exceptionally naturally to me, compared to most, but that's not exactly the best reason to choose a religion in my opinion).
Seeking a CD to throw in the car for the drive to work yesterday morning, I grabbed the Light 'em Up, Blow 'em Out album by Up, Bustle and Out (yes, that missing comma drives me nuts, in case you were wondering), a great disc I hadn't listened to in a while, one of the songs from which I put into rotation on my radio broadcast every so often.
I'd always felt something wasn't quite right about the album, but never could put my finger on it. Until today. For the first time I actually paid attention to the track list on the back of the CD jewel case as I listened (probably not the best activity while driving, but Central Expressway was a parking lot [literally, as there were cars parked on the shoulder about every 100 yards in addition to the stopped traffic], so it wasn't detracting from much).
Just enough of the songs have lyrics or noticeable instrumentation (when compared to the "tablas by Mike Ford" credits, and so on) that I'm now truly sure that the tracks on my disc are in the wrong order. What's more weird is that, up arriving home this evening, in a determined search to figure out what the real order is, I can find almost no evidence that other discs have the mixed up song order like mine does.
There's one exception — whoever it was that uploaded the FreeDB track list that populated when I put the disc in also had a similar disc, or it wouldn't have matched. The bad part, though, is that he didn't catch the error, so the song titles match the order on the jewel case, not the actual order of the songs, so it didn't help me out any.
To make a long story short (and because the rest of the incident isn't very interesting), I was able to get it all figured out based on the song samples on RollingStone.com (who seemed quite pleased with the album, incidentally).
It made me wonder, however, how easily this little thing could have gone unnoticed. I mean, sure, this time it's only some Up, Bustle and Out songs, but if you were the band and realized that the whole world knew your songs with the names all switched around, wouldn't that be a little disturbing? And if it's that easy to mix up songs, then what about things which are far more similar, like prescription medications, or cremation ashes (this actually happened in the book I'm reading right now), or babies in a nursery, or something?
How much of what we take for granted as the standard identities of things is actually a strange variation of the infants switched at birth paradigm, where even if people caught the mistake, they figured it wasn't worth the chaos to try to switch it back later?
It sets a mind to thinking, for sure.
Seeking a CD to throw in the car for the drive to work yesterday morning, I grabbed the Light 'em Up, Blow 'em Out album by Up, Bustle and Out (yes, that missing comma drives me nuts, in case you were wondering), a great disc I hadn't listened to in a while, one of the songs from which I put into rotation on my radio broadcast every so often.
I'd always felt something wasn't quite right about the album, but never could put my finger on it. Until today. For the first time I actually paid attention to the track list on the back of the CD jewel case as I listened (probably not the best activity while driving, but Central Expressway was a parking lot [literally, as there were cars parked on the shoulder about every 100 yards in addition to the stopped traffic], so it wasn't detracting from much).
Just enough of the songs have lyrics or noticeable instrumentation (when compared to the "tablas by Mike Ford" credits, and so on) that I'm now truly sure that the tracks on my disc are in the wrong order. What's more weird is that, up arriving home this evening, in a determined search to figure out what the real order is, I can find almost no evidence that other discs have the mixed up song order like mine does.
There's one exception — whoever it was that uploaded the FreeDB track list that populated when I put the disc in also had a similar disc, or it wouldn't have matched. The bad part, though, is that he didn't catch the error, so the song titles match the order on the jewel case, not the actual order of the songs, so it didn't help me out any.
To make a long story short (and because the rest of the incident isn't very interesting), I was able to get it all figured out based on the song samples on RollingStone.com (who seemed quite pleased with the album, incidentally).
It made me wonder, however, how easily this little thing could have gone unnoticed. I mean, sure, this time it's only some Up, Bustle and Out songs, but if you were the band and realized that the whole world knew your songs with the names all switched around, wouldn't that be a little disturbing? And if it's that easy to mix up songs, then what about things which are far more similar, like prescription medications, or cremation ashes (this actually happened in the book I'm reading right now), or babies in a nursery, or something?
How much of what we take for granted as the standard identities of things is actually a strange variation of the infants switched at birth paradigm, where even if people caught the mistake, they figured it wasn't worth the chaos to try to switch it back later?
It sets a mind to thinking, for sure.