Why I don't care for Andrea Bocelli

I try not to be too opinionated, but I can't sit still and take this anymore. I don't care for Andrea Bocelli. Who is Andrea Bocelli, you ask? Well you are obviously not a woman, and you aren't dating.

This is him:



From now on, I will try to recreate an image from the Internet, rather than outright stealing it. It also lets me take more freedom with how I see things. This, by the way, is how I see Mr. Bocelli:



Already someone is crying fowl, I am sure of it. "You can't say anything bad about Andrea Bocelli, he sings so beautifully and he is blind!" I have to admit that in that statement lies part of my problem. When I first started hearing about him a few years ago, I kept hearing the familiar tagline "and did you know that he's blind?" I don't understand why that matters anyway. It would be a real statement if it went something like this: "Andrea Bocelli paints such beautiful pictures, can you believe he is blind?" See? That would really *be* something.

But his visual skills have no bearing on my assessment of him. It's just something that bugs me about his followers. My problem with Bocelli is that he really is not that outstanding of a vocalist. I could walk over to the fine arts building on campus, swing a dead cat, and hit a few vocal music majors that could match (and exceed) his capability.

What's worse is that he seems to get the same popular respect that Plácido Domingo or José Carreras gets. He is no where near these guys. Want to know how to figure this out? One word: microphone. A true vocalist doesn't need one of these in every venue. I know that microphones are a staple of recording, and are nearly ubiquitous in performance entertainment. However, I have never seen this guy singing without a microphone two inches from his face.

Simply put, he does not have a big enough voice. Axl Rose can outsing this guy (or at least he could between 1987 and 1992).

I cannot sing better, though - so I will hand him that. Next time I hear something about him, it better be "Andrea Bocelli is such a wonderful singer, he sings much better than Greg." Yeah, that sounds more appropriate.

--gh

My weakness

I have a major weakness to confess. Is it just me, or is Women's Billiards about the freakin' hottest thing on television. What is it about these athletes?

ESPN had a semi-final on this evening between Allison Fisher and Jeanette Lee at the Mohegan Sun casino in Connecticut. You only have to do a Google Image search for Ms. Fisher or the Black Widow to know what I am talking about.


I was a little worried about just posting copyrighted photos, so I took two of them and worked them into one piece here.

I think it must be their arms. I have always been an arm-man. I am feeling filthy...

--gh

LASIK@Home... uh.... UHHHHH......

Is this a joke? Surely a web page called LASIK@Home is meant to provide some kind of social commentary. I mean, it does have a funny picture and all:

However, usually the joke pages are obviously written to provide humor. I see nothing funny on Lasik at Home that makes me think it is a spoof or anything.

I think I will try it out on the dog first.

--gh

Squared Circle

I was trying to find the relationship between the circumference and area of a circle for a maps exercise utilizing Miller's C. This is the ratio of a shape to a circle who's circumference equals the perimeter of said shape. I never could find out how to calculate the area of a circle given it's circumference, and had to work it out on my own:

It took me 28 seconds to derrive this simple relationship (equation) based on Pi-R^2. But I spent about 20 minutes idly searching for it. The first search I found , however, led me to proof that Jesus did indeed create everything, which works out good enough. I think I need to read the links from that page, they look interesting...

--gh

Further proof that I are sucked

I saw a great one-time only blog entry idea on Livejournal. What you do is enter your birthday (no year) in Wikipedia and share three events, three other births, and three deaths that happened on your birthday. Not a bad idea for filling the web with more links to useless information.

Except nothing really happens on my birthday. I have to limit my event-birth-death to just one each:

Event: 1887 - Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show opens in London.
Birth: 1949 - Billy Joel, American musician
Death: 1903 - Paul Gauguin, French painter (b. 1848)

Not really much to comment on. Sorry. Under deaths, Schiller was the only other name I even recognized. I don't read poetry in German, so I thought it would be pretentious to even include that. I did notice that an Afghani singer, one year younger than me, died last year on my birthday. Wait, I just looked him up and the wiki entry says he died a day earlier. (Errors on Wiki? No way!)

--gh

To being, or not to being.

--gh

Woulda-coulda-shoulda...

Oh man, my amp would have turned out much better if I used these knobs for my volume and tone controls. Lets see, I have 5 knobs on my amp, so that would be... $2,425.



Yes, in case you think there is more to it, it is just beech wood, with a nice lacquer. And no, it is not a joke. And if you can afford components like that, then you may be interested in some $30,000 speaker cables.

--gh