Play That Funky Music, White Girl

I went out last night with friends and had a great time. There was sushi and sake, beer and darts; it could hardly have been better. During the course of the evening, the idea of going dancing sometime in the future came up. Half of us were in favor of it, half of us weren't. I fell into the "not in favor" camp.

It's not that I hate dancing, it's just that I'm not all that good at it, I don't enjoy it much and it's not something I look forward to doing. Weddings are pretty much it, and I haven't been to one of those in years. I do, however, really enjoy a lot of dance music. Someone pointed out a few years ago that the songs I turn up on the car radio are almost all dance tunes, yet I don't want to go dancing. True. I'm also that person at a concert who's pissed when the person(s) in front of me to stand and dance the ENTIRE time the musicians are performing. I am paying to see the musicians and hear their music, not watch someone's lame-ass dancing in three feet of space. There, I said it. If you're that person, I'm sorry, but that's how I (and some other people, I know for a fact) feel.

But I digress. When this week's list came up, "List your favorite dance songs," I had to really think about it. I think of songs as just ones I love, in general; I don't necessarily divide them into categories like that. So here, for your ridiculing pleasure, is my latest list, in no particular order.


List 4: My Favorite Dance Songs

• Crazy in Love - Beyoncé
• Push It - Salt-N-Pepa
• Let's Go Crazy - Prince
• Hips Don't Lie - Shakira
• Boom Boom Pow - Black Eyed Peas
• Vogue - Madonna
• Brick House - Commodores
• Fergalicious - Fergie
• Promiscuous - Nelly Furtado
• Love Shack - The B-52s

Clearly I skew toward female artists for my dance tunes, and I have an affinity for 80s music. Feel free to tell me what yours are (or why mine suck *sniff*) in the comments.

A Blogoversary Giveaway!

One Ping Only turns six today! Sometimes it feel like it has been forever, but other times it feels like it has been no time at all. I'm not going to wax poetic about it, I'll just say thanks to those of you who have been a part of it during some or all of that time. It means a lot to me, especially your comments (yes, Ben, I do put a lot of stock in the commenting!) and the fact that you are supportive even when I'm spotty on regular posting. OK, on to the fun part!

To celebrate the blogoversary, I'm doing a little giveaway. I'll be sending to one winner the following:

• A copy of My Life. My Loves. My Lists. (For you to do your own lists this year)
• A $20 Starbucks card (Or Peet's or the like, if you'd prefer)
• The new Norah Jones CD, The Fall (I'm loving listening to it right now.)
• Two single-serve packets of Nutella (In honor of my friends who are big Nutella fans)
• A six-pack of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups (Don't need to explain those, do I?)
• A donation in your honor to the UNICEF Haiti Emergency Fund (Keep reading for info on that one)

Here's the deal: It's a simple affair, no requirement to tweet about it (though if you wish to, you're certainly welcome to); subscribe (again, unless you'd like to), write an essay or otherwise turn cartwheels. All you have to do is submit a guess in the comments, in the form of a dollar amount, as to how much money you think is in this bank:

Though he looks like a hippo, the fine people of Target said he's a donkey. So, it's a donkey bank.

I love banks and I have probably too many of them. I put all my change in them -- my rule is that if any coin makes it to my room in my pants pockets at the end of the day, it goes in a bank -- with one for just pennies and one for silver coins. Mr. Donkey there is the one with silver coins. Usually when he fills up, I take them all out and wrap them up and bring them to the bank for a little mad money.

He's almost full and instead of saving the money, I'm going to take Mr. Donkey to a Coinstar machine when the entry time is over and his contents will be tallied up and donated to the UNICEF Haiti Emergency Fund in honor of the person who can guess how much he holds. To give you some perspective on the size of the bank, here he is posing in front of my laptop next to a soda can. (That is not an ad for Dell, by the way, I just needed a clean background!)

What I'm looking for is a guess of the total that will appear when his contents are emptied into the Coinstar machine. Because there's only silver coins inside, the total will be to the nearest nickel. The person whose guess in the comments is closest to that total wins -- that's it! If two guesses are the same distance away from the correct amount, the person with the guess under the total will win. I was going to limit it to North America, but what the hell, it's only postage, right? (However, I don't think the Starbucks card can be used outside the U.S. so I'd have to leave that out. That would go to the next-closest person in the U.S.) Comments with a guess must be submitted by 11:59pm PST on January 29, 2010 to be eligible.

Let me be clear: This money is getting donated to this cause even if no one enters. I just don't like random number generators all that much and picking names from a hat is a lot of work -- I did it once and that was enough. I thought this would at least be a different way of picking a winner! Also, I have no idea how much is in there; I'll find out when the total shows up on the screen, which I'll take a picture of to share here.

So help me celebrate my blog's anniversary with a little fun and a little giving; two things I believe in greatly.

Does Anybody Do It Better?

So, of course, when I finally come across something I feel like talking about, it's on a night when my hand is bugging me and I really should just get off the computer and give it a rest. But then, I have a finely honed sense of poor timing, so why should it be any different for this?

Let's see if I can just write this quickly and without obsessing about perfection, m'kay?

On the drive home from work, I heard a "new" song on the radio, Free Fallin' as done by John Mayer. You may recognize the title as a song by Tom Petty. I enjoyed the Mayer rendition, even though I'm a Tom Petty fan, and it brought to mind a ongoing and eternal debate between me and a friend: Is the original always better?

He says yes, I say no, and I'd like to get your opinion. The Mayer song isn't one I would necessarily use as an example of better than the original, but I also don't think it's not worthy simply because it's a remake. It's interesting on its own merits because we hear the lyrics in a way other than how our minds are, more or less, "trained" to hear them after years of radio play.

There are some songs that are remakes that I like better than the originals, such as Van Halen's version of the Kinks' song, You Really Got Me, Sting's version of Jimi Hendrix's Little Wing, and the Fleetwood Mac song Black Magic Woman as done by Santana, to name a few. I think Mad World by Tears for Fears, as recorded by Gary Jules for the movie Donnie Darko is the best example, since even Roland Orzabal said that it showed him how the song should be played, and Tears For Fears changed their performance of it when they reunited not long ago.

Don't get me wrong, there are a ton of really, really crappy remakes, and we could spend about a week listing all the ones that we hate -- I'm not saying that all of them are better, not even most of them, just that SOME of them are actually better than the original.

Are there any remakes that you like better than the original? Make your case in the comments.